Misadventures in the Land of Fables, #4
Many Aesopic fables are little more than a description of a situation or an action; to call them stories would be to stretch the definition. The situation does not develop, there is no turning point, sometimes there’s no conflict at all. A character makes an observation, a comment aimed at another and this all that is required to articulate the lesson. I love fable, but these are the fables I tend to pass over.
Yet if you stay a moment longer, peer at them up close, it’s possible to find something of value. (Or to put it another way, if you think about them, they’ll have given you something to think about!)
The Oxen and the Axle-trees
Take the fable of the Oxen and the Axle-trees, for example.
A HEAVY WAGON was being dragged along a country lane by a team of Oxen. The Axle-trees groaned and creaked terribly; whereupon the Oxen, turning round, thus addressed the wheels: ‘Hullo there! Why do you make so much noise? We bear all the labor, and we, not you, ought to cry out.’
Those who suffer most cry out the least.
It’s one of the more evocative of Aesop’s fables, conjuring images of mud and hedgerows and the dogged weariness of farm labour.
Two long-established versions (the Townsend and the Vernon Jones) are nearly identical and clearly derive from the same source (Babrius). Yet the epimythium—the last line stating the moral of the story—is different in each. Townsend points to the stoicism of the oxen; Jones denounces the complainant:
“Those who suffer most cry out the least” versus “They complain most who suffer least.”
Two sides of the same incident perhaps, but a significant shift of emphasis. I prefer Townsend. The stoicism in his version lends nobility to the oxen in their suffering, while there is something mean-spirited in dismissing the complaints of the cart.
And besides, you have to wonder if the axle might be grieving for the lost of the forest: cut down, branches lopped, worked and shaved, before being fashioned into the undercarriage of a cart. Who has greater cause to lament?
UP-DATE: I developed the idea of the axle’s lament into a new version of the fable here.
The Boy and the Filberts
‘The Boy and the Filberts’ appears in only some collections of Aesop. (It’s attributed to the stoic philosopher Epictetus.) Mundane and commonplace, and featuring human protagonists rather than an animal, it’s a fable I have disregarded until recently.
A BOY put his hand into a jar of filberts and grasped as many as his fist could possibly hold. But when he tried to pull it out again, he found he couldn’t do so, for the neck of the jar was too small to allow of the passage of so large a handful. Unwilling to lose his nuts but unable to withdraw his hand, he burst into tears.
A bystander, who saw where the trouble lay, said to him, “Come, my boy, don’t be so greedy. Be content with half the amount, and you’ll be able to get your hand out without difficulty.”
Do not attempt too much at once.
Hard to argue with that advice, but wouldn’t all but the youngest child already have understood what needed to be done. It’s not unusual for the bystander to be replaced by a parental figure, the mother, in particular, making the fable more of a lesson for the nursery. As a result, if or when applied to adult situations, the tone becomes patronizing and loses its powers of persuasion.
The problem I think is that the action ends too soon. We are supposed to assume the boy merely wipes his eyes and follows the adult’s advice. It’s all too obvious and too easy. There should be a reaction to the bystander’s intervention. What if the boy does not like the solution offered? What if he already knows how to free his hand? Perhaps he is crying because he is frustrated with the state of the world, not because his hand is stuck in a jar. In that case, he decides to ignore the advice and comes up with another solution, albeit with its own problems.
This is my version: ‘The Girl and the Jar of Nuts’. I think you’ll find it more interesting.
