Fable

7 Key excerpts on "Fable"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

  • Peter Childs, Roger Fowler, Peter Childs, Roger Fowler(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  F

  Fable A short moral tale, in verse or prose, in which human situations and behaviour are depicted through (chiefly) beasts and birds, or gods or inanimate objects. Human qualities are projected onto animals, according to certain conventions (e.g. malicious craftiness for the fox). Fables are ironic and realistic in tone, often satirical, their themes usually reflecting on the commonsense ethics of ordinary life: they dramatize the futility of relinquishing a small profit for the sake of larger (but hypothetical) future gains, of the weak attempting to take on the powerful on equal terms, the irony of falling into one’s own traps, etc. Such themes are close to the advice of proverbs, and the moral point of a Fable is usually announced epigrammatically by one of the characters at the end.

  The beast Fable is extremely ancient, evidenced from Egypt, Greece, India and presumably cognate with the development of a self-conscious folklore in primitive cultures. The Western tradition derives largely from the Fables of Aesop, a Greek slave who lived in Asia Minor in the sixth century BC. His work is not known directly, but has been transmitted through elaborations by such writers as Phaedrus and Babrius. Collections were extensively read in medieval schools; the tone of the genre became more frankly humorous. The most famous medieval example is Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’. The Fable achieved greater sophistication in the hands of Jean de la Fontaine (1621–95), whose verse Fables revived the fashion throughout the Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. England’s representative in this mode was John Gay (1685–1732). In Germany, G. E. Lessing (1729–81) preferred the simpler model of Aesop to the refined modern version.

  The Fable had twentieth-century practitioners, too. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), sometimes seen as an allegory, employed the beast Fable as the vehicle for an extended SATIRE on the totalitarian state. In America, James Thurber contributed Fables for our Time (1940). See Niklas Holsberg, The Ancient Fable: An Introduction (2003); Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740

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  Imperial Beast Fables

  Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

  • Kaori Nagai(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  21

  By the end of the eighteenth century, the Fable had lost its status as a high literary genre and vehicle of didactic messages, but this hardly meant the death of the genre. Instead, it reinvented itself in three significant ways. Firstly, it established itself as children’s literature : as newly appointed children’s entertainers and companions, animal Fables or talking animals came to define childhood, and the field of the family.22 Secondly, as Laura Brown points out, the animal Fable in this period ‘[began] to dissolve into natural history and realist description, blending materials from contemporary experience and observation with the symbolic depiction that made it a core component of the emblematic worldview’.23 This mixing of naturalist/realist perspectives and symbolic/fabular ones made the genre a meeting point between humans and animals, science and fiction, reality and imagination. Thirdly, there emerged a new appreciation of the genre as ‘folklore ’, as philological inquiries began to explore the origins of language and civilisation.24 This last point, in fact, closely correlated with the other two. Folklore is also children’s literature, in the sense that it can be seen to deal with the childhood of humanity, which one looks back upon nostalgically. Moreover, Fables as folklore

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  Medieval Literature for Children

  • Daniel T. Kline, Daniel T. Kline(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Fables that serve the latter purpose, he continues, “draw the reader’s attention to certain kinds of virtue” (1.2.9). This didactic aim most often comes to mind when we think of Fable as genre. As suggested by Hesiod’s hawk and the nightingale, the Fable is typically a brief narrative in verse or prose that either implicitly or explicitly offers a moral or pithy message. Characters are usually animals, inanimate objects, or personifications that behave like humans, or they are human types, such as the Old Man or the Youth. Medieval Fable collections, in both Latin and various vernaculars, are rooted in the Greek tradition of Fable stretching back at least to the eighth century B.C. and Hesiod’s Fable of the hawk and the nightingale. The better-known fabulist of early Greek culture, however, is Aesop, who as legend has it was a freed slave from Samos living in the sixth century B.C. (Blackham, 5; Handford, xiv–xv). While Aesop, if he was indeed an actual person, probably never wrote down his stories, several later Greek writers published Fable collections that purported to be from him. In particular, Demetrius of Phalerum, writing in the fourth century B.C., composed a collection of Fables in Greek prose that, according to H. J. Blackham, “seems to have been Aesop for the classical world” (7). With their interest in things Greek, the Romans, of course, also picked up on the Fable. Horace, for instance, alludes to Fables in several Satires and Epistles and, like Hesiod, incorporates a Fable in a poem when he tells the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse (Satires, 2.6.77–117). In this Fable, a city mouse visits a country mouse and, after seeing its poor den and eating its simple food, invites the country mouse to dine in the city. The latter accepts and is initially impressed with a sumptuous meal at a palace; soon, however, ferocious dogs chase them from the hall

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  Camus' Literary Ethics

  Between Form and Content

  • Grace Whistler(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  symbol’ in this chapter—that is, an individual object or element used to represent something more profound and conceptual, such as wedding band used to represent commitment. As will be seen over the course of the following chapter, each of these terms has a place in Camus scholarship, but regrettably their distinctions and implications are yet to be fully delineated. This is what I hope to rectify here.

  Accordingly, Sect. 2 will lay out a theoretical framework for the chapter. Here I draw on Lacoue-Labarthe’s conception of ‘Fable’, proposing that the enclosed analysis of philosophical method is similar to the one which I suggest informs Camus’ own. Following on from this (in Sect. 3 ), I examine the difference between the aims of political allegories (such as those of George Orwell ) and Camus’ own endeavours in

  La Peste

  , responding to Roland Barthes’ famous critique of the novel by drawing on the aforementioned distinctions between Fable and allegory. The subsequent section (Sect. 4 ) consists in an analysis of the relationship between

  Le Mythe de Sisyphe

  and

  L’Etranger

  which goes beyond the stylistic analysis from the previous chapter; here I suggest that we read

  L’Etranger

  as a parable for the absurd and that his deployment of myth in

  Le Mythe de Sisyphe

  aims towards a metaphysical truth worthy of the Greeks’ original conception of the term. In Sect. 5 I look at Harry Slochower’s 1948 essay, ‘The Function of Myth in Existentialism’, bringing it into dialogue with Camus’ own critique of existentialism as manifested in the short story,

  Le Renégat

  .

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  The Fairy Tale

  • Steven Swann Jones(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  fairy tales depict magical or marvelous events or phenomena as a valid part of human experience. The very name of the genre is drawn from this essential characteristic: they are fairy tales because they depict the wondrous magic of the fairy realm. We should not, however, interpret the name too literally. Even if they have no fairies in them, stories that depict the world of magical fantasy are still referred to as fairy tales. Since, in the English folk tradition, the fairy realm is the embodiment of the magical aspect of the world, its name is used metonymically to refer to all folktales that incorporate the magical and the marvelous. In England they are also referred to as wonder tales, a term that more generically references the tale’s essential focus on fantastic events and characters.

  Two other genres of folktale are also apparently nonrealistic in their presentation—animal Fables and tall tales. Animal Fables, however, such as the well-known Bre’r Rabbit, use personified animals to depict otherwise realistic human behavior. The personification is seen purely as a literary device for isolating and portraying human foibles, not as an ontologically or philosophically accurate representation of the phenomenal world.

  Similarly, in the tall tale, the marvelous events are considered artistic exaggerations, storytelling “lies” for the entertainment of the audience, and part of the point of the story is to stretch credibility beyond the breaking point for humorous effect. In a tall tale such as “The Lucky Shot” (AT 1890), where a single shot kills an unbelievable amount of game, the fantastic phenomena are not ultimately to be believed, whereas in the fairy tale we are expected to accept these magical elements in the narratives at face value, as truly and legitimately occurring in the stories. The attitude of the fairy tale toward this fairy magic is one of awe and supernatural acceptance of powers greater than ourselves. Unlike the tall tale, which foregrounds human rationality and treats the wondrous phenomena described by the storyteller as whimsical artifice, the fairy tale suggests that magic of the fairy realm is not to be taken lightly, but rather to be regarded with respect and even some trepidation.

  Thus, just as we can differentiate folktales from other forms of folk narrative by their use of ordinary protagonists, we can differentiate the genre of the fairy tale from other forms of the folktale by its incorporation of and attitude toward magic and fantasy. Scholars such as Axel Olrik, Max Lüthi, and Bruno Bettelheim concur with the designation of fantasy as one of the essential characteristics of the fairy tale.9

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  Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

  Representation, Hybridity, Ethics

  • Frank Palmeri, Frank Palmeri(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 The Autocritique of Fables Frank Palmeri      

  Writing about animals, Jacques Derrida exhorts himself to avoid Fables, because “fabulation remains an anthropomorphic taming.”1 In his attempt to understand dogs and their relation to humans, Emmanuel Levinas similarly observes, “We have read too many Fables and we are still taking the name of a dog in the figurative sense … [Tin Exodus 22:31, the dog is a dog. Literally a dog!”2 As Derrida and Levinas remind us, animal Fables are not about animals, but rather transpose human social relations onto the animal world in order to narrate and comment on human behavior. In this and in other kinds of allegory, the literal, ostensible subject fades in importance in the process of reading and interpretation. As a result, Fables have been criticized for not providing information about or reflection on the condition of animals themselves. But if interpretation renders invisible the animal subjects who initially seem so vivid, certain Fables — by Aesop, Jean de La Fontaine, John Gay, and Jonathan Swift — critique such a tendency from within the form itself. Such critical Fables remain a minority in most collections, and they do not direct attention solely to animals and their behavior; instead, they examine the form from within usually by focusing on relations between humans and animals. In these anti-allegorical narratives, a wolf does not represent a brutal human being; a lion does not represent a king; a monkey does not represent a fop; rather, each stands for its own species. Such Fables do not escape representation (the animals remain verbal constructs); neither do they elude rhetorical figuration (representing others of their kind, the animals function as synecdoches). Nor do the animals here serve as the objects of scientific observation and classification (although La Fontaine’s Fables show awareness of the activities of early natural historians). Fabular animals have articulate language that the other animals and we humans can understand, but in the anti-allegorical Fables, they do not speak as human beings might in a comparable human situation; rather, they express what might be the moral judgments of the animals about their treatment by humans. The animals in these self-critical Fables speak from the subject position of their species. Such Fables thus can offer a critique of human behavior and attitudes toward animals, including anthropomorphism, from within the anthropomorphic form of the Fable itself.3 Most often, the animals in these autocritical Fables overtly criticize humans’ brutal, hypocritical, and ungrateful treatment of other animals.4

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  A Critical History of French Children's Literature

  Volume One: 1600–1830

  • Penelope E. Brown(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11 The often extreme mishaps that occur because of their misjudgements or failings perform a useful monitory function for young readers, allowing them to experience vicariously, through negative examples, the disasters that lie in wait for the ignorant, rash, or unwary, thus foreshadowing the cautionary tales of succeeding centuries. As in fairy tales, however, the animal protagonists distance the character from the reader, permitting the degree of identification to go only so far in that the reader can sympathise with, but also laugh at, their fates (a technique still familiar to us today through the frequently bizarre but humorous violence depicted in cartoons). In this respect, the Fables generate awareness but are less unsettling or frightening than many nineteenth-century moral tales.

  This discussion can only offer a brief glance at some of the Fables to suggest the extent to which the morals may be seen as appropriate for and applicable to the young. Although some clearly also have a very contemporary political resonance and seem directed at a socially aware adult audience (for example, those Fables concerned with the abuse of power, or with the folly of unwarranted social climbing), La Fontaine is mostly concerned with fundamental aspects of human behaviour and the relationships of human beings with each other and the world. Honesty, fairness, prudence, and moderation are approved while not only greed, ambition, pride, faithlessness, and self-interest but also naivety, gullibility, and lack of self-knowledge are satirised. The endorsement of the regulation of the appetites and passions and of a clear-eyed awareness of the pitfalls of life and the effects of ignorance point, in effect, to the most common themes in later moral, didactic literature for children. The Fable of ‘Le Rat et l’huître’ (bk. 8, no. 9) encapsulates the idea that ignorance in the young is dangerous: the young rat who sets out to explore the world has little education and less understanding, though he thinks he knows it all, and, mistaking molehills for mountains and oysters on the riverbank as a fleet of vessels, is trapped by an oyster as he tries to take hold of the enticing meal displayed inside the shell. Thus, the dangers of confronting the world without adequate knowledge is highlighted and the acquisition of such knowledge through reading and the exercise of personal judgement are seen as essential to happiness and, indeed, survival. Innocence and naïveté are deconstructed in a more ambiguous and troubling way in ‘Le Loup et l’agneau’ (bk. 1, no. 10), in which the lamb, trusting naïvely in the power of reason and the truth to protect him against the sophistry of the wolf, is eaten by the cynical predator. La Fontaine’s ironic opening statement, ‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure,’ was frequently criticised as too subtle for child readers and hence a dangerous notion to implant, but the Fable still promotes the need for awareness of the ways of the world.12

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