Misadventures in the Land of Fables #73
James Thurber, ‘Fables For Our Times’
A few weeks ago I picked up a two volume collection of works by James Thurber, ‘Vintage Thurber.’ Among these works were the ‘Fables For Our Times.’ These were very nice. Fantastic, in the superlative if not the ‘wildly imaginative’ sense of the word. Where Ambrose Bierce is cynical and disenchanted, Thurber is tuned to human foibles with a wry sense of humour and a delightful turn of phrase.
There are some witty riffs on the classics: the versions of ‘The Country Mouse and the City Mouse,’ ‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are flippant, but ‘The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing’ is a reversal with a point. The originals are better and these make up most of the collection. I’ll do no more than cite a few of my favourites.
‘The Very Proper Gander’ is a tale of pernicious Chinese whispers, which charts the path to social exclusion through the misapprehension of ‘proper gander’ as ‘propaganda’ and so on. A fable almost for our social media times.
‘The Lion Who Wanted to Zoom’—no, not that kind of ‘zoom’—displays the raw brutality of Aesop in its critique of ill-advised ambition.
‘The Birds and the Foxes’ is very very droll. You hardly notice just how dark it is. For obvious reasons the foxes object to the high fence erected to create a sanctuary for Baltimore orioles and when dismantling it they argue they are only setting them free.
‘The Moth and the Star’ is perhaps the one most aligned to the ‘head in the clouds’ characters of ‘a boy in a park.’ A young moth sets his heart on a star and clings tenaciously to that goal despite his parents’ more realistic recommendations of bridge lamps and street lamps. In so doing, and never reaching his goal, he never gets scorched and outlives everyone.
Recommended.
~~~
