metaphor

A frog plays banjo by the light of the moon.

I can’t find the exact image that inspired the latest fable, ‘The Frog and the Moon,’ but in my search I discovered the sub-genre of ‘frogs making music by moonlight’ and I hate it. Regardless of tasteful composition and colour palette, as seen above, the idea is whimsical and the result pure kitsch. The genre was popular in the Victorian era and probably has its origin in the frog-obsessed work of late C18th Japanese artist, Matsumoto Hoji—he of the ‘sad’ frog illustration. If Hoji came up with this banjo affair, he was scraping the barrel.

What then could have inspired me?

Glad you asked. It was the moon. The creature’s relationship with the moon. The banjo/guitar signified music-making. Music and the moon. That is what I saw, that was the starting point. Frogs don’t play instruments, but they do vocalize at night—they can make a hell of a racket. So I kept the music, but dropped the banjo early on. Does this change overcome the whimsicality of the image? (It helped, I think, that the image I saw was pen and ink, the kitsch was tempered by the absence of colour.)

I’ve been told that the stories in the ‘a boy in a park‘ collection are whimsical, so too the Wasp Tales. They depict fanciful events, things that can’t happen, they are fantasies. That is one part of it, the lack of realism, the departure from reality. And perhaps this accounts for the mixed reaction because there is an expectation that such things must delight and amuse rather than investigate and explore: they should be light not heavy, provide escape and not rub your face in it—the boy in the park is nothing if not abject, vulnerable and up to his elbows in dirt.

As you can see, I am ambivalent about whimsicality. For me, the whimsical has no depth or savour. It tickles the tongue and then it’s gone. It is something to be enjoyed in the moment, passing the time, goofing around. On the other hand, the lack of realism allows for concentration on the shaping of the idea; free of the weight of resemblance, the idea emerges, rises, and condenses again as metaphor. The lightness of fables is not frivolity but agility and all of my work is fable: the current project, the Misadventures in the Land of Fables, obviously, but also every story in ‘the park’ and every adventure of the Angry Wasp. Their intent is the development of an idea, a lesson, even if that a lesson folded around itself and pulled into a knot for the reader to unpick.

Whimsicality with a purpose, if you like, if that is possible.

Read ‘The Frog and the Moon’ here.

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