Misadventures in the Land of Fables #61

‘The Ant and the Grasshopper.’ This fable has always bugged me, if you’ll forgive the pun. I don’t know exactly when I first heard it, at school no doubt, but I do know I have always had objections. I probably don’t need to recite the story here, but I will, in its most blunt form, just so we know where we stand. [Other versions here.)

“A grasshopper having spent the summer singing and dancing finds itself hungry when winter approaches. He begs some food from an ant, who has accumulated a store of grain after a summer of constant toil. The ant denies the request, rebuking the grasshopper for its improvidence.”

First, let me concede the ant has a point. It is good to plan ahead. It is prudent to put something aside for the proverbial rainy day, for times of scarcity, for old age. It is sensible and pragmatic, and not to do so is indeed improvident. The point is inarguable. But to deny someone in need in order to insist on that point is harsh, mean, literally uncharitable. It is not a good look.

Ants like bees are emblems of work, of busyness and industry. They set an example. But the lack of generosity demonstrated in the fable punctures that inflated image of virtue. ‘Go to the ant’ says the Book of Proverbs. Well, we’ve gone and we’ve looked and we’re not sure it is something we want to emulate. The ant we find in the fable is an asshole.

The more you think about it, the less his way of being appeals. A life of constant toil appears to have hollowed him out, if there was anything there in the first place. It prompts the question: why? what is it all for, this work? what does it achieve, beyond self-perpetuation? did you ever stop to think?

Now the appeal of the ant’s position was not helped in my eyes by the association of the grasshopper with the artist. The grasshopper’s most notable characteristic, stridulation—Yes, I looked it up—the drone-like ‘singing’ which fills the background of summer nights in southern Europe, makes him emblematic of the musician. What started as a simple contrast of work versus idleness, over time, and translation, took on this colour and a shift of emphasis. By the time the fable reached the twentieth century, it had become a contrast of lifestyles, work versus art.

Is the grasshopper a hedonist, an idle dreamer, or an artist, dedicate to his craft? From outside the distinction may be blurred because art, and especially music-making appears to be pleasurable. (If the outcome is entertaining the process must also be.) The grasshopper passes the summer making music. If we characterise this as a trade, what manner of remuneration should there be?

The fable raises the question of the artist’s role in society. Who, you ask, benefits from this music-making? Does it have value? Should we all be toiling in the fields gathering in the harvest? Is that life enhanced by music and those that compose it and perform it?

Evidently, the ant saw no benefit. Whereas I do.

Another aspect that annoyed me about ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ was the anthropomorphism. A strange thing to complain of in fables, but this one seems particularly egregious. Illustrations often made the creatures stand upright or place them in a specifically human setting. Farms, terraced houses, city streets. The beggar at the door. The ant as homeowner, the grasshopper as itinerant. But ants don’t live as married couples in houses of their own, they live in nests, their domestic arrangements are collective. Like bees, they are eusocial, they do not work for their own survival but for the endurance of the colony. The ant as emblem of righteous toil maps better with the communitarian rather than the family unit.

Further research revealed that ants consume the food gathered through summer and autumn before resting close together and preserving their energy in the colder months. If it isn’t hibernation it is somethign similar. They are not relaxing and enjoying the fruits of their labour through the winter. They are munching roast dinners and flaking out in front of the TV. They are not moving to the seaseid, or taking up pottery. They work, eat, sleep, and then they do it all again. Grasshoppers, meanwhile, die off in winter. Only their eggs survive.

The two species live very different lives.

And a new version of the fable began to shape around this theme: ‘The Ants and the Grasshoppers’