Misadventures on the border of the Land of Fables #33
When is a fable not a fable? — When it doesn’t have a clear moral, or does not appear to be constructed as if it had a such a moral.
How is the moral constructed? — There are numerous ways. The protagonists can get punished for an act of presumption, or for their vanity and folly, as in ‘The Fox and the Crow‘. They can receive a lesson in the reality of power and brute force, as in ‘The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass‘. Boastfulness can get undermined, as in ‘The Oak and the Reed‘. Or an action can be rebuked by another character—the laziest and most annoying model, as in ‘The Oxen and the Axle-tree‘.
It can on occasion be more subtle. ‘The Fox and the Grapes‘ is a slim narrative describing how the creature reacts to its failure to reach some overhanging grapes. It does this by way of a lie: claiming the goal was not worth having in the first place. As dishonesty, it is deserving of rebuke, but there is no punishment, or consequence.
THE FARMER AND THE SNAKE
My version of Aesop’s ‘The Farmer and the Snake‘ retains the core actions, the barest bones, including the ‘punishment,’ but lets the moral fall through the gaps. Is it therefore no longer a fable?
In the original, a farmer finds a half-frozen snake and tries to revive it by holding it close to his breast. When the snake comes back to life, it bites him. (Understandable, when you think about it.) The bite, of course, is a consequence, a punishment for compassion wasted on an unredeemable ‘evil’ creature, and an example of ingratitude, which ought to have been expected. This offers a pessimistic message too often used to bolster a general withholding of care and benevolence.
A while back, as a response, I wrote and shelved a version in which the farmer’s son treats the frozen snake with contempt rather than compassion; believing it to be dead he uses it as a stick for his dog to fetch, but the game revives the snake and it bites the boy’s dog: thus delivering a punishment for his callous attitude. [As I write, this seems quite a good idea to me and I wonder why I shelved it.]
The latest version, on the other hand, omits the punishable attitude, whether misplaced compassion or callousness. In its place, there is only curiosity. And symbolism. The incident describes a loss of innocence, a tremor on the threshold of passage into adolescent. Could this be where the land of fable meets ‘a boy in a park’? Have I crossed the border into plain fiction?
You can read it here: ‘The Boy and the Snake‘
