Misadventures in the Land of Fables #39

‘The Cat who Served the Lion’ (from Hitopadesha book II) is a tale of an enforcer who gets their comeuppance. A lion hires a cat to deal with a mouse who seems intent on irritating him. He rewards the cat with tasty morsels from his table, but the cat does its job too well. Confined to its hole, the mouse begins to starve and when it emerges, desperate for food, the cat kills it, and in so doing loses its job.

Cynicism & Corruption

The fable makes a familiar point, a satirical one, alluding to the political cynicism of exploiting an issue to gain votes and then neglecting to effect a definitive solution once in power. Well, actually, I suppose the fable argues that’s what you should do: it is a mistake to solve the issue. The cat was onto a good thing and he blew it.

But you can have only limited sympathy for this character, a killer who does the dirty work of rich and powerful—in the land of fables, lions are either noble royalty or dominant brutes. It may lose its job but the mouse loses its life.

The detail of the tasty meals reminds me of the choice we are tempted to make in favour of our comfort and the suffering of others. Modern life is loaded with these wilful compartmentalizations, e.g. sweat shops and cheap branded fashion, but at its core this is the essence of ordinary corruption. Doing the dirty work of an unjust master in return for creature comforts, or as in Martin Amis’ ‘The Zone of Interest’, forging an idyllic life for your family throughe the successful administration of the Nazi gas chambers.

All this from a hindoo [sic] fable about a lion and the mouse that irritated him.

Peculiarities of Motivation

There were aspects of the fable that puzzled me, some wrinkles, peculiarities of motivation. Why, for example, did the mouse seek to irritate the lion, for example? What was its fascination with chewing the lion’s mane?—is that a known behaviour, or a fancy on the part of the author? The mouse seemed not to have imagined the terror its little games would bring upon itself.

And the climax, brief, blunt and brutal: starvation, killing, instant unemployment!

It occurred to me the message of the fable could be put into the mouth of a caught mouse begging for its life, a common device in fables. I thought ‘what if the cat made a deal with the mouse? What would that look like?’ and so I took up the proverbial pen and began to write.

And as I wrote, I thought some more.

You can read the outcome here: ‘The Lion, the Cat, and the Mice‘