The Fabulists French [antikvár]

Prologue J. HE VERSE FABLE is a persistent little genre. Inherited from Antiquity, with its cast of animal heroes, villains, and victims, it has known periods of robust good health and seemingly imminent demise, never quite willing to gasp its last, however. Persistent, but all too unrealistic, I'm afraid, and much too ambitious. It has purported to exist in order to do its bit in correcting Hiamankind's flaws, and has been at it for ages, changing its aspect here and there with the changing times. A casual glance at the state of the race will reveal its success. Obviously the fable is no guarantor of moral correction. Nor would I, realistically, expect it to be one. After all, I must have read a few thousand of these apologues myself over the years, all offering incontrovertible proof of their individual theses and holding out the tacit promise of mini-salvation in this or that area of behavior; and, frankly, I'm quite as imperfect now as I was when I began. Not that I fail to recognize the moral truths the fable preaches; only that, like all of us I imagine, I always recognize those truths as valid for somebody else. Still, through its ups and downs of greater and lesser vogue, the fable, even in France alone, has flourished for many centuries, spreading its recipes for moral rectitude to appreciative and admiring audiences.' But audiences imregenerated nonetheless. How come! I suppose because, for the most part, the very quality intended to coat the moral pill—the artistry of the individual fabulist, his (and rarely her) skill in dramatizing the scenario, in crafting the self-contained little opus with an eye toward colorful description and an ear toward colorful soimd—has tended to get in the way and call more attention to the coating than to the pill itself The "how" has won out over the 'Svhy": the mediiun has subverted the message. Naked Truth—especially the moral truth of the fable—may be, in the words of the chevalier de Boufflers, "la seule vierge, en ce vaste univers, / Qu'on aime a voir un peu vetue"; but her dress, necessary to attract us to her in the first place, can distract us from her just as easily.' Personally, I find no fault at all with that. For my own tastes, didactic literature is, by its very nature, more often than not a bore. And the most agreeable literary didacts are not those who use their art as a pretext for their preachments, but those, vice versa, whose ethical truisms serve as an excuse to fashion a work of art. Persistent, the fable is also a modest genre. Perhaps therein lies its charm and its tenacious longevity. It is undemanding. It does not ask to be deconstructed, psychoanalyzed, or otherwise dismembered to death in order to be "appreciated." Not, of course, that it cannot be. The ingenuity of critics and theoreticians is boundless; and even the straightforward and unassuming little fable has. of course, been subjected to its scrutinizing light.' Whether to wither under it or to flower is a matter fc)r the individual reader to decide, and for personal predilection. As for the fable itself, it simply says—and, at its best, says simply—what it has to say; usually tells us why, or at least hints broadly; then finishes almost as quickly as it began and goes away. That is not to imply that all fables are brief, lapidary of form (in the best Ba-brian tradition), and crystal clear of message. Some—not usually the most aesthetically attractive—have erred on the side of long-winded complexity, entangling their supposed moral raison d'etre in excessive and convoluted verbiage, often dragging in a panoply of Olympian gods, goddesses, and assorted Abstractions to drive their point home, or making not-so-veiled allusions to contemporaneous personalities and political events. Few of such intellectually interesting but aesthetically ponderous fables will be found in these pages. Still, the reader should be aware that they do, indeed, exist; that not every French verse fable over the last nine centuries is under two pages long; that some fabulists, even the best, seem to forget at times that their genre had its beginnings as, essentially, a brief oral medium intended to make a quick point with an unsophisticated (but not artistically obtuse) listener, in whom protracted excess might provoke only a coimterproductive yawn. Fables, perhaps more than any other verse form, are still best read aloud."* I think that La Fontaine, the often imitated but inimitable, must have realized that fundamentally oral nature of the fable when he opted, in writing his, for the so-called vers libres, the closest that the seventeenth-century French poet could come to the naturalness of prose speech while still writing in recognizably measured and rhyming verse. Especially in his earh-est books, where the fables are disarmingly simple; before he too would let himself be carried away, on occasion, into the headier realms of philosophical and moral speculation. La Fontaine The name has become virtually synonymous with the verse fable in the Western world, French and otherwise, second only to the prototypic and probably mythic Aesop himself He is the reference point of every fabulist who comes after; the standard by which all his followers are measured, and by which, indeed, they usually measure themselves. Even when they try not to. For even those who pretend to ignore him utterly— not an easy task—call attention, ironically, to his presence by his very absence. Most, however, will acknowledge his preeminence by attempting to copy that typical easygoing La Fontaine gait: his leisurely digressions and casual asides, his intimacy with the reader.' And those who do not will pay him frequent homage in their