Selected Fables [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION'Diversité c'est ma devise' ('diversity is my motto') vibróte La Fontaine in one of his more scabrous Contes, 'Pâté d'anguille'. And although admittedly in the context 'diversity' simply means the freedom to bed whichever wench one pleases, the motto is certainly an appropriate one for the poet's ouvre as a whole. For La Fontaine is a poet of contradictions. With him, everything goes by opposites. His Fables are catchy rhymes with a lively story-line: the 'children's stories' of Book 2 fable i.' But they also contain some of the most complex philosophical poetry ever written. His poems are animal stories set in antiquity; but they are also biting satires of his own time. His wit and humour shine through every page; but his world is a grim, pessimistic wilderness in which the strong are merciless and the weak helpless. How can this diversity and duality be explained.?It has been argued that they correspond to a temperamental instability in their author. La Fontaine described himself as 'le papillon du Parnasse' ('the butterfly of Parnassus'), flitting from topic to topic and from mood to mood as the fancy took him. He was a legend in his own lifetime for his short attention span and his tendency to be easily distracted.^ The many glaring inconsistencies between the different fables seem like reflections of shifting, even conflicting moods in the poet. He is bitter when composing i/io 'The Wolf and the Lamb', in which the death of the lamb seems unfair and cruel. Yet death is treated with the utmost flippancy in other poems, like 3/16 'The Drowned Woman', which ends on the remark that women are so contradictory that this one is likely to have floated upstream. The fact that this witticism is inflicted on a bereaved husband searching for his drowned wife's body is not allowed to darken the atmosphere.The inconsistency in the poet's attitude to his material is well Throughout, we refer first to the Book, then the fable number: 2/1.Duchene (see Bibliography) quotes many anecdotes, such as his failure to recognize his own son on a chance meeting. j s ' I 1il,' . 1. , 1II . !: .1J!Sit', w