Novels in Nutshells

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The New York Sun

Aesop’s “Fables” is one of the most puzzling books in the history of the world. First, there are those annoying morals, usually shrewd, often quite cynical, with which Aesop peppers his anecdotes. “Greed grows wealthy while honesty goes unrewarded” runs one, or “A discerning person is made wise by the misfortunes of his neighbors.” True enough, but the gloating tone offends. Worse, while the morals are by and large irrefutable, nobody lives by them, or ever has. These are rueful truths, their force recognized only in retrospect. I’ve played the stork at many a fox’s dinner, but the recollection of Aesop on such occasions only made my hunger sharper.What’s the use of such rear-view wisdom?


The worldly wisdom of the “Fables” is both sweetened and complicated by their magic, largely embodied in those articulate critters whose follies reflect our own. We easily imagine that if a fox could speak, he might coin a perfectly vulpine phrase like “sour grapes.” Or that frogs, so squat and anarchic in their bogs, might, like the ancient Israelites, clamor for a king to rule over them, with the same disastrous consequences. The magic doesn’t lie solely in the age-old human propensity for attributing specific moral traits to certain animals: the fox’s cunning, the lion’s vanity, the hare’s fearfulness. Aesop’s animals have a stubborn spring in their step; they escape the confinement of their pages. Even so, the fables unfurl with an implacable precision from their fatal traits. Each tale seems to witness the inflexible destiny of a foible; the crow’s vanity undoes her as surely as Achilles is undone by wrath.


Herodotus tells us that Aesop was a slave. If so, there has never been a more prolific bondsman. These tiny stories, many of which might be spun out into full-length novels, engendered countless imitators and elaborators over the centuries, from Phaedrus and Babrius, who cast them in verse, down to La Fontaine and Franz Kafka. Horace inserted the story of the city mouse and the country mouse into one of his satires. And farther east, there are parallels and even outright snippets of Aesop in the beast fables of the ancient Indian “Panchatantra,” as well as in the vast “Masnavi” of Rumi. The fables slipped past borders, infiltrated languages, leapfrogged epochs.


This gnarly old compendium seems never to go out of print. I’ve been rereading it in the Barnes & Noble Classics series, in the translation by V.S. Vernon Jones (269 pages, $5.95), but there are excellent editions in the Oxford World Classics and in Penguin Classics. This Vernon Jones edition has the merit of sporting the period illustrations of Arthur Rackham. Aesop unillustrated just isn’t Aesop, and Rackham’s storks in Paisley shawls and foxes in Edwardian waistcoats provide a suave and sometimes mischievous running commentary on the stark verities of the tales.


Aesop puzzles as well because no matter how stubbornly you try to shake him off, he sticks. On one of those endless rainy afternoons of childhood, I was leafing through my dog-eared copy, an edifying gift from some distant aunt, and came across the fable of “The Stag with One Eye.”The story filled me with indignation.A half-blind stag grazes on a cliff side with his one good eye alert for hunters by land. Unhappily for the cautious beast, the cliff overlooked the sea. Some passing sailors shot him from their boat and “as he lay dying, he said to himself, ‘Wretch that I am! I bethought me of the dangers of the land, whence none assailed me; but I feared no peril from the sea, yet thence has come my ruin.” Aesop or his early editor appends the distinctly unhelpful moral: “Misfortune often assails us from an unexpected quarter.”


The dying stag’s archaic diction had a noble ring, and this added to my outrage. The hapless creature had taken precautions; he wasn’t some bragging donkey or presumptuous rat. The fable reeked of injustice. And there seemed a nasty smugness in Aesop’s telling; his moral hid a self-righteous sneer. Life isn’t like that, I wanted to protest, but even then I knew I was wrong. The stag’s fate still rankles,but am I protesting against Aesop or against the unfairness of life itself?


Whether or not Aesop was really a slave, his morality reflects a slave’s forced stratagems. Nietzsche attacked Christianity for promoting what he called a “slave morality,” but Aesop was groveling his way through life six centuries before Christ. Wary, mistrustful, and calculating, the successful Aesopian respects only cunning and luck. There are moments in the “Fables” when some loftier sentiment prevails, as when the animals all decide to live in harmony, predator peacefully with prey, but these are scarce.


Happily, Aesop knew how to tell a story and to do so with supreme concision. His fables are novels in nutshells. Children imbibe the stories through filters of innocence and ignore the pesky morals, however sugared by whimsy. The cruelty of the fables doesn’t mystify them; in a fabulous world, a world where not only animals but cooking pots talk, the bad and the good appear magically transmutable, as by the touch of a wand. But later, when we’ve outgrown the fabled trappings, those morals, like little delayed-action stings, resurface to buzz and itch. All our follies are on record here, as well as most of our mishaps, but by the time the lessons of the “Fables” can help us, if they ever could, we’ve misplaced the magic they once came wrapped in, and only their residue of bitter wisdom remains. By that time, of course, we’ve long since learned the futility of all wands.


The New York Sun

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