The Mouse, the Lion, and the Fabulous Feminist
I recently came across an interview with the fabulist, Suniti Namjoshi, conducted as part of a project entitled ‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis.’ This grabbed my attention for obvious reasons, rethinking fables is what I do, though admittedly not in any particular context, beyond literature, philosophy, and the imagination.
The interview quotes the entire text of one of Namjoshi’s fables, a version of Aesop’s ‘The Lion and The Mouse’ (you can read numerous iterations of the original here), which she recasts as ‘The Mouse and the Lion‘. I read it and thought ‘huh? that doesn’t make sense’ and, with a frown, continued with the interview. Later I started to think about the fable again. It was subtle, almost too subtle, but there was something I liked about. It didn’t complete the action or make its moral explicit and was arguably more effective as a result.
In the story a mouse who has been caught by a lion persuades it to let it go with the promise that it might do him a favour further down the line. In several versions, including Namjoshi’s, this argument amuses the sceptical lion, but the mouse is proved right. The lion is caught in a man-made trap and the mouse comes to his rescue, gnawing the ropes in order to relase the powerful creature. The mouse stops mid-chew, however, and announces that in fact it had already done the lion the favour owed. How? By not killing it.
The lion’s reaction was the same as mine: huh? what? Nowhere in the text is this capability demonstrated, no such opportunity arose, and it goes without saying the lion is the more lethal of the two creatures; in a match-up, there would be no contest, and you’d be hard pressed to imagine a mouse killing anything, apart from a worm or spider or a grasshopper.
What is going on here? Is the mouse merely trolling the lion? Possibly. It cannot really believe what it says—can it? The claim seems like a gesture of defiance, a refusal to conform to existing power relations, to discharge its obligations, the favour it had promised. But it’s more than a gesture, it’s a challenge.
The lion caught the mouse but was persuaded to be merciful and let the creature go. When the tables are turned and the lion is caught, the mouse adopts the same attitude, even though it neither caught the lion nor has the power to kill it; it only has the power to help it escape. The lion feels entitled to the mouse’s favour, while the mouse, for its part, we must remember, had to beg for its life and was not entitled to the lion’s mercy, which was freely given and expressed its wisdom and virtue. The mouse then is claiming this freedom too.
If the lion doesn’t think it should be grateful for not being killed, why should the mouse have been grateful. What right did the lion have to threaten the mouse in the first place? It is as if the government wanted credit for releasing an innocent citizen it has falsely detained, deported, tortured. What is lacking more than gratitude here is an apology.
It is significant that Namjoshi’s version begins in media res with the lion catching the mouse. Aesop’s fable and all the versions thereof provide a reason for the detention. The mouse disrupts the lion’s sleep, invades its privacy, and the lion by virtue of its dominant status has the right to execute it. Really? Does it? Namjoshi’s fable suggests not.
The fable was originally published in Namjoshi’s collection ‘Feminist Fables‘ (1981) and may also be found in this reader, ‘The Fabulous Feminist.’
