Aesop's Life: Fathering the Fable

It happed that the wulf dranke above & the lambe dranke bynethe. And as the wulf sawe and perceyved the lambe he sayd with a hyghe voys Ha knave why hast thou troubled and fowled my water Which I shold now drynke. Alias my Lord sauf your grace [said the lamb] For the water cometh fro yow toward me. Thenne sayd the wulf to the lambe Hast thow no shame ne drede to curse me. And the lambe sayd My lord with your leve. And the Wulf sayd ageyne Hit is not syxe monethes passyd that thy fader dyd to me as moche. And the lambe ansuerd Yet was not I at that tyme born. And the wulf said ageyne to hym Thou hast ete my fader. And the lambe ansuerd I have no teeth. Thenne said the wulf thou art wel lyke thy fader and for his synne & mysdede thow shalt deye. The wulf thenne toke the lambe and ete hym. This fable sheweth that the evylle man retcheth not by what maner he may robbe & destroye the good & innocent man.

—William Caxton: Fables of Esope

Discussing the impact of Mikhail Bakhtin on contemporary theories of fiction, Paul de Man cited Hegel's dictum on the ancient fable: "Im Sklaven fangt die Prosa an"; roughly translated, "Prose originates in a slave culture." Hegel hereby granted at least the status of an aphorism to the ancient life of Aesop, father of the fable, and traditionally a hunchbacked slave of the sixth century B.C. De Man's citation, however, is not without historical irony; for Hegel's remark on the causal connection between riddling form and slavery as an institution, which De Man found valuable to connect to the ventriloquist strategies for evading censorship employed in our own century by Bakhtin, was originally, in the Aesthetics, merely contemptuous; and the maxim that prose began with slavery, far from anticipating the birth of the novel (as De Man implied) actually served an equation between the prosaic and the artistically primitive.

What Hegel argued was the remoteness of a fabulist mode of representation—an arbitrary and explicit comparison between an intended signified and some natural phenomenon—from the unconscious, unpremeditated union between symbol and transcendental signified he required for true art. For Hegel, the fabulist deals in mere wit, rather than depth of insight, and he restricts himself to observing such trivialities as animal habits, "because he dare not speak his teaching openly, and can only make it intelligible in a kind of riddle which is at the same time always being solved." And even Aesop's legendary place of residence, Phrygia, Hegel defined as "the very land ... which marks the passage from the immediately symbolic and existence in bondage to Nature, to a land in which man begins to take hold of the spiritual and of [the spirit] in himself."

I begin with this misalliance between Hegel and De Man to initiate a theoretical reconsideration of the Aesopian tradition and its place in contemporary culture. If, as seems evident, the cultural value of the fable as a genre at any historical moment depends on the reigning aesthetic, and how hospitable it may be to the sociopolitical dimensions of literature, the end of the twentieth century is surely a time in which we could benefit from fabulist thinking, past and present. De Man's genial perspective, colored by the then new enthusiasm for Bakhtin, was only at the beginning of a cultural shift that has rendered again respectable "political" conceptions of literature; while the ironic relations between Soviet glasnost and Muslim censorship are but the most striking signs of a new international concern with the power of the literary, never more evident than when it is most threatened.

To this truth the fable bears an unusual, if not a unique relationship, thematized in several fables, but most transparently in The Wolf and the Lamb, which stands, in Caxton's English prose translation from the late fifteenth century, as this chapter's epigraph. As England's first printer and a highly influential translator, Caxton's selection of texts for transmission in the vernacular was undoubtedly governed by the needs and special circumstances of his largely aristocratic audience. In this instance his translation carries a strong flavor of genealogical determination, ("thou art wel lyke thy fader and for his synne & mysdede thow shalt deye") that was surely appropriate for a culture struggling to understand the family feuds of the Wars of the Roses. But what that fable also tells us, perhaps more clearly today than it did for Caxton's readers, is that the declared "Moral" of unequal power relations is felt with especial poignance when language itself is seen to be helpless against that inequality, when right wins the argument but might wins the day.

Although this tragic message can obviously be countered by others from the fabulist tradition, for instance, when Chauntecleer, Chaucer's heroic cock in the Nun's Priest's Tale, literally talks himself out of the fox's mouth, the darker message of the Aesopian canon is also thematized in the figure of the Father. I refer to the tradition of the fable's origin in a slave culture, that is to say, the legendary Life of Aesop that typically preceded collections of fables in the late middle ages and the Renaissance. By Hegel's time that legend had already been rendered apocryphal, known to have derived from an Egyptian text of the first century A.D., to have passed through an eleventh-century Byzantine version, and to have been disseminated in two textual traditions, the first represented by the Greek Life attributed to Maximus Planudes, the second by the Latin translation of Rinuccio da Castiglione. Modern textual scholarship regards both strains of this tradition as having accreted the defects and lies of later periods. Yet it was convenient to Hegel (and De Man) to assume that the myth still stood; and I recuperate it now as one of those rare myths of origin whose own structure implies a coherent philosophy of literature larger than itself. For the Life of Aesop offers us, if we read its narrative episodes thoughtfully, a set of propositions that explain what the Aesopian fable can do best, though it does not control these functions exclusively:

1. literature, in its most basic form, has always spoken to unequal power relations;

2. those without power in those relations, if they wish to comment upon them, must encode their commentary;

3. writing is authorized by authorship, texts needing a name to cling to if they are to acquire cultural resonance;

4. wit (literary ingenuity) can emancipate;

5. basic issues require basic metaphors; when, as in the fable, the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body.

The ancient Life of Aesop was itself a complex fable whose "moral" subsumes all of these insights about itself and the genre to which it traditionally served as introduction. At first sight it might easily appear...