Misadventures in the Land of Fables #66
‘The Fox and the Crow’ is one of the classics. La Fontaine places it second in his collection; it pops up early in both Jacobs and L’Estrange, and in the Penguin (Handford) edition too. The image of a fox sitting at the foot of a tree looking up at a crow is one of the most popular illustrations of Aesop (see above for a Japanese version).
A crow has found a piece of cheese and settles in a tree to enjoy it. A fox attempts to steal it. He uses flattery to get the crow to open its beak and let the cheese drop to the ground. He overwhelms the bird with exaggerated praise, but also questions the quality of its voice—is it sweet? does it reach the level of its other virtues? The crow opens its beak to prove itself and the cheese is gone. (The crow is a fool to forget that its voice is not its most attractive feature. Crows are not blessed with song and I imagine this is what gave the original writer (‘Aesop’) the idea.)
It’s not a fable in need of any alteration. The action nails the moral and the moral is hard to dispute: do not listen to flatterers. There have been a few tweaks made. La Fontaine version has the fox suggest that the cheese is reward for teaching the crow a valuable lesson—like a hacker demonstrating the security flaws in computer systems, while German writer G E Lessing swapped poisoned meat for the cheese and thus delivered an unhappy ending for the trickster.
JAKATA TALES
A similar scenario appears in the Jakata Tales, a Buddhist collection of fables, some dating back to C4th BC. Instead of the fox, we have a jackal and in place of cheese, we have fruit, probably rose-apples. Curiously the crow in this story willingly shares the plentiful fruit and flatters the jackal in return to show his gratification. It’s very much not a zero-sum game, they scratch each others backs, though the Bodhisattva in the form of the tree-spirit disapproves of this egotism and chases them away.
I liked this generosity. And it gave me an idea. What if the crow shared his bounty with the fox? What then?
The fox I feel would have been more invested in the trick than in the nourishment. His motivation not appetite but dominance. The crow’s generosity would wrankle. And if the subtext of that gesture is that the crow has seen through the fox’s strategy, he would have failed to established dominance. He would reject the cheese and retreat. I imagine he might dismiss it as not worth having after all, a response similar to the sour grapes.
You can read the new fable here: ‘The Fox and the Crow’
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