Fable

That's it. Illustration in the Nuremberg Chronicles.

A fable is a short narrative literary composition, usually in prose or verse, in which the main characters are usually animals or inanimate things that speak and act like humans. Each fable tells, in plain style, a single, short story or anecdote with a sobering consequence. Possesses "an intention and wording didactic of an ethical and universal nature" that almost always appears at the end and more rarely at the beginning, generally called moral or adfabulation. In the Dictionary of Rhetoric and Poetics by Helena Beristáin it is indicated that "it is a didactic genre through which criticism is usually made of local or national customs and vices, but also of the characteristics universals of human nature in general.

Features

As a literary genre, it has a mixed narrative and didactic character, which La Fontaine already noted when dividing it, in the prologue to his Fables (1667), into a fable proper or "body& #3. 4; and moral or "soul". Because of its practical nature, which exempts it from philosophical or transcendental intentions, it has come to be called "the poor relative of myth". It must also contain these properties:

• Elements of narration: Generally in the fables there is a narrator who narrates the events that occurred in third person, in chronological order. It also tells what happens to the main characters in an undetermined time and place.
• Structure: The fables are usually written in prose or in verse and are usually short and didactic stories, in plain style. Most of these begin with the presentation of an initial situation in which, in general, a moral problem or dilemma is raised that can be resolved or not. Finally, it ends with a teaching, morale or afabulation that can be useful for the reader. More rarely appears at first or does not appear explicitly.
• The characters: Most of the characters are usually animals or objects inanimate to which they are given with human passions such as greed, pride or envy. These are often involved in problematic situations that should be resolved. These animal characters are usually prototypes: the nobility and strength are represented by the lion; the cunning by the fox, etc.
• Items: Generally the topics that are addressed in the fables are human vices such as arrogance, lying, etc.; since behind each of these is an intention to criticize the behaviors and attitudes that are being developed within history.
• His exposure of vices and virtues is malicious, ironic. The contrast between force and cunning and the idea of the pagan world is common, that it is impossible to change the very nature of each one.

The classic fable rests on a double structure; From the very title there is an opposition between two characters with different subjective positions. But these two characters are always in social inequality: one in a high position and the other in a low and unfavorable position. Thanks to an unforeseen narrative event or survenant, the one who was in a high position is in a lower position and vice versa. This scheme is called by Christian Vandendorpe as "double forwarding" in Apprendre à lire des fables, Montreal, 1989 and it is found in dozens of them, especially in the popular ones, and allows establishing understanding and conveying a clear morality. As Hegel says, "The fable is like a riddle that will always be accompanied by its solution" (Aesthetics, II) Even if the fable is no longer popular, the scheme that the form is rediscovered in the diverse fact (Christian Vandendorpe, De la fable au fait divers) and in the urban legend (Jean-Bruno Renard, Rumeurs et légendes urbaines, Paris: Coll. Que sais-je?, 3445). These situations are essential in a fable, because regardless of the author, the social or political context, these are the ones that identify it and mark a limit between it and other similar genres with which it could be confused due to the allegorical form they contain.

Literary genre

It should not be confused with the parable or symbolic story or with the parenetic speech or sermon, whose intention is to exhort to follow an ethical conduct and for this reason it frequently resorts to this type of procedure.

They differ from apologists in that these are more general and in them men and both animated and inanimate characters can also intervene. They can be written in prose or verse. In the Index motifs, catalog of motifs from folk tales by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (Aarne-Thompson), fables are classified as animal tales.

Despite being a literary genre subject to oral transmission from generation to generation, the fable still retains these characteristics that differentiate it from other more mutable narrative genres such as the short story, the story or the novel, to which time it has brought numerous changes, new subgenres and trends.

It is convenient to clearly distinguish the fable as a literary genre, from the plot fable or argument: Aristotle spoke of the latter when he wrote that the fable is one of the six elements that make up the tragedy together with the characters, the song, the elocution, thought and spectacle. (Poetics, chap. VI, 1450a). Thus, the tragic fable is its argument or the chain of actions and facts exposed that forms the narrative or, in another way, in cinematographic language, the synopsis.

An example of a prose fable is the "Cat and Mouse" where its characteristics can be identified.

The Cat and the Mouse

Once upon a time there was a little mouse who lived in the house of an old woman. The lady, who was afraid of these creatures, set many traps to kill him. The mouse, frightened, asks the woman's cat for help.

- Could you help me, cute kitten?

- Yes, in what?

- Just remove the traps from the house - said the mouse.

-Hmmm... And what do you give me in return?

-Finjo before the lady that I am dead, for you have killed me; she will believe that you are a hero - answered the mouse.

"You convinced me," the cat said.

The cat took the traps out of the house, but the mouse never kept his end of the bargain. One day, the lady found out that it was the cat who pulled the traps. She, very angry, decides to leave the cat in the street.

The following is an example of a fable in verse, it is a text by Tomás de Iriarte:

The frog and the chicken

The one who works something, can be dissociated from the pregone; the one who does nothing should shut up.

From her puddle, a frog parlera

He heard a chicken shit.

"Wow!" he said, "Don't believe, sister,

That you were so uncomfortable next door.

And with all that noise, what is there again?"

"Nothing but announcing that I put an egg."

"A single egg? And trouble so much!"

"An egg alone, yes, my lady.

Are you scared of that, when I'm not scared

to hear you how funny night and day?

I, because I serve something, publish it;

You, who are of no use, keep your mouth shut."

History

The fable was already cultivated in Mesopotamia, two thousand years before our era. Clay tablets from school libraries of the time briefly tell stories of cunning foxes, wretched dogs and presumptuous elephants. Many of these texts show a great affinity with proverbs due to their antithetical construction, but they do not have an explicit moral.

In ancient Greece, the first fable, known as the "fable of the nightingale," was told by Hesiod at the turn of the century VII a. C. in Works and days , and he already has the intention of making people reflect on justice. Although in Homer there are no fables, his comparisons with animals already possess in nuce the germ of the genre. In classical times, Socrates spent his last days putting the fables of the legendary Aesop into verse. Demetrius of Falero published the first historically attested collection of fables, which has been lost, but which gave rise to countless versions. One of them, a fusion of several manuscripts, probably from the I century d. C., and it is called Augustana. It is to this collection that we refer when we speak of the so-called Aesop's Fables or Aesopics. This was a semi-legendary slave from Asia Minor from whose biographical circumstances little can be learned, except that he was sold as a slave in Samos to the philosopher Xanthus, who repeatedly promised him freedom and finally obtained it thanks to popular intervention. Nicostratus made a collection of fables for educational purposes in the century, and also other sophists. From Greece the fable passed to Rome; Horacio wrote in Satires, II, 6, a memorable one, that of the country mouse and the city mouse; Phaedrus, following that precedent, transformed the prose genre into a poetic genre in verse. At the end of the century I d. C. Babrio also wrote some, and in the prologue to the second book of his collection he mentioned the Libyan fabulist Cybissos; he also wrote the cilician Connis. In the IV century, the Roman poet Flavius Avianus wrote about forty, mostly adaptations of Phaedrus, but others not. attested by no tradition and perhaps elaborated by himself; Aviano's fables were widely circulated in the Middle Ages, because unlike those of Phaedrus they are never licentious and their metric, in which the leonine hexameter abounds, makes it easy to remember. From the same century is the Greek fabulist Aftonio.

In the Middle Ages, the fable continued to be transmitted under the names of authors or collections that seem to be pseudonyms: Romulus, Syntipas, pseudo-Dositheus, the Isopete... It was a very useful genre for priests that they tried to edify the illiterate people morally and with simplicity when sermons were allowed to be made in the vulgar language; This need forced the first compilations of this type of material to be made. The theme expands considerably to the satirical field through the Roman de Renart, a collection of narratives composed by anonymous clerics in the XII. In the stories of Ysengrinus, a Latin work by the Flemish poet Nivard de Gand, the fight of the fox against the wolf serves as a pretext for a vigorous social critique of feudal society and its injustices. The fable is transformed here into an animal comedy. In the 12th century, the poetess Marie of France published a collection of 63 fables.

On the other hand, numerous collections of other fables belonging to a different autonomous tradition of Indian origin circulated throughout Europe (Hitopadesa, Pancatantra), disseminated through Arabic translations or Spanish or Sicilian Judaicas. Many of them went on to become exemplaries or example books for sermons. The most famous and widespread was undoubtedly the Disciplina clericalis of the Spanish Jewish convert Pedro Alfonso, among many others.

Jean de La Fontaine.

During the Renaissance, fables enjoyed the interest of humanists; Leonardo da Vinci, for example, composed a book of fables. The emblem genre, which came into fashion in the 16th century and XVII, frequently resorted to the fable in written commentary and graphic engraving in imitation of the Italian humanist Alciato, like those of Guillaume Guéroult, who seems to have specialized in this genre with Le Blason des Oyseaux (1551), Les Hymnes du Temps et de ses parties (1560) and Les Figures de la Bible (1564), composed under the same model of an engraving accompanied by a short piece in verse. In Portugal cultivates the fable Sá de Miranda. The Jesuit François-Joseph Desbillons, professor, produced 560. Boisard published a collection with a thousand and one. Jean-Pons-Guillaume Viennet published in 1843 fables that he wrote throughout his entire life. Even Napoleon, before being consecrated emperor, composed a pretty good court in his time.

However, almost all of these authors have fallen into oblivion, except for Jean de La Fontaine, whose classic fables, from extremely rich sources, even began to be illustrated or stamped on various objects (screens, tables) based on paintings and nicknames. In France, those of the eighteenth-century writer Jean-Pierre de Claris de Florian (1755-1794) were also famous. The latter composed a collection of a hundred public or private moral fables, many of them inspired by those of Tomás de Iriarte from Tenerife (Literary Fables). Florian in turn inspired the Englishman John Gay and the Spanish Félix María Samaniego. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing illustrated the genre in Germany and Ignacy Krasicki in Poland.

In the 19th century the fable was also vigorously cultivated in the rest of the world, although not in France; only specialized collections on specific subjects were successful; in Russia they cultivated the genre Iván Krylov, in Spain Cristóbal de Beña (Political Fables) and Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, in Chile Daniel Barros Grez (Original Fables) and in Mexico José Rosas Dark. Ambrose Bierce used the fable for political satire in the United States (with his Fantastic Fables and his Aesop Amended), but Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was more conventional in Britain.

In Spain, and already in the XX century, Ramón has written a New fabulario de Basterra, who, following some Hartzenbusch precedents, makes dehumanized elements the protagonists of his compositions, such as machines, crankshafts, pistons, cables and cranes, instead of lions, foxes, ravens or wolves; With this, he incorporates the Industrial Revolution and the Vanguards into this ancient tradition. In 1961, French playwright Jean Anouilh published a best-selling collection of 43 fables that reinvigorated the genre. Jean Chollet has also written in the XX century many fables inspired by today's world.

Fables and apologists have been used since Greco-Roman Antiquity by pedagogical slaves to teach ethical behavior to the children they educated. The moral deduced from these examples was that of paganism: it is impossible to change the natural condition of things, including the human condition and the character of people. Over time, Christianity replaced this conception of the world with another that presupposed in man the possibility of changing his nature, with a moral judgment included. Aesop and Babrio, among the authors of Greek expression, and Fedro and Aviano among the Romans, have been the most famous authors of fables and have served as an example to others. With the revitalization of classical Antiquity in the XVIII and its didactic and educational desire, fables began to be written; In the XXI century, the fable was one of the most popular genres, but its themes began to expand and specialized collections were made. In the XX century the genre was cultivated very little.

At the beginning of the XXI century, unexpectedly, the fable suffered a literary revolution thanks to the work of the Neapolitan writer Sabatino Scia, author of more than two hundred fables, which he called "western protest fables"; Like the same Aesop and Phaedrus, he has chosen the fable genre which is the main genre and at the same time genre-spokesperson of the same creative activity. The fable, now, thanks to Sabatino Scia's renovation work, is no longer simply a means to narrate life, an instrument to stage the vices of man, the vices of society and the problems of nature itself, but it is the very theater in which vices manifest themselves in a completely spontaneous way. &#3. 4; And it is known that in fables, you send mail to protest, everything moves, laughs, cries, gets angry, talks, plays. Sabatino Scia's fables have a frank and direct dialogical form and the animals talk among themselves using the cunning of men and always trying to get out of tangled situations. They are animals that think, and therefore act like the animals in Aesop's fables. There is a difference: they do not intend to make a moral, they accept events with a form of wisdom and seek their life in the forest, which is their space, the most comfortable possible. They too, like men, must learn to procure food for themselves and not become food for men themselves. They know their abilities, the degree of intelligence, and among themselves as among men, the smartest have the best.

Similarly, on the other side of the world, in Latin America, the twins Juan and Víctor Ataucuri García have contributed to the revival of the fable in the 19th century XXI with a novel idea: to use the fable as an element to disseminate national identity, making use of the vast traditional literature of this continent. For this purpose, in his book"Fábulas Peruanas" Archived 2015-09-23 at the Wayback Machine., published in 2003, they have carried out their thesis collecting myths, legends, andean and amazonian beliefs from Peru, and then, from this, create beautiful fables, a fact that has become a very interesting way of disseminating the rich traditional literature of his country. The result has been an extraordinary work rich in regional nuances, where one discovers the relationship of man with his origin, with nature, with his history, with his customs and beliefs that will later become norms and values.. Even more so when the world requires the rescue of values, so run down, for the search for a peaceful and just coexistence, the Ataucuri García brothers propose the use of the fable for this purpose.^{[ citation required]}

Fable and moral

Throughout history, the fable has been considered more than a playful element or a literary genre. Different thinkers have given the fable a tint of exemplary element that throughout history has served as more than fantastic stories with animals.

One of the first philosophers who gave his opinion regarding the problem of teaching through fables was Plato, who attacked it for the preponderance he gave to logic over aesthetics; However, Plato was opposed not only to the use of fables in teaching but to all use of art, since art distanced the soul from the truth, of which it possessed by nature the seed and the disposition for knowledge. (Nervi, 1965)

Aristotle defines a fable as one of the many elements that an orator uses to persuade. Therefore it is one more element of rhetoric and not a literary genre. Traits of his society were already reflected in Greek fables; each society has sought to transmit certain values implicitly in these nevertheless fantastic narratives.

On the other hand, Rousseau, in his novel Emilio, strongly criticizes the use of fables in the educational environment and calls them cruel and deforming the innocent character of children. For Rousseau, fables are stories that are difficult for a child to understand and instill equivocal moral messages, because they show that he is the strongest and most cunning who wins and has advantages over those who lack sagacity.

However, although there were staunch critics of fables, there were also those who from a more neutral position defended that they could be beneficial in certain learning processes. Karl Vossler (1947, p. 70) purposely said that a fable can serve as an aid in learning, but not for children, since a correct understanding of them requires at least the experience of someone who is at least 40 years old. years.

More benevolent are authors such as Alfonso Francia (1992, p. 8), who highlights the importance of gender in promoting cautious attitudes and behaviors in children and adolescents; Furthermore, he affirms that a large number of techniques and resources make the fable a first-class pedagogical medium that can be used to improve the educational process.