SOURCE: "A Genre Renewed: Formal Reflections on the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine," in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Vol. X, No. 19, 1983, pp. 747-55.

[In the following essay, Rubin clarifies the definition of the term 'fable" and asserts that La Fontaine employs the fable genre not in its traditional rhetorical or instructional format—not to persuade or please—but as a means to provoke thought in its readers In footnote¹, Rubin writes: "This article is a slightly revised and expanded version of a paper presented before the 17th-century French Literature Division of the Modern Language Association of America on 28 December 1982. I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for supporting the research from which these observations have been extracted"]

Those great out-of-order dictionaries of received ideas, the literary manuals, never fail to assert two quarter-truths in their sections on La Fontaine: first, that the French poet did nothing more or less than prettify his Aesopic or Indic models; and that these, like the seventeenth-century French versions, consist of animal stories with morals tacked on. Now, under very special circumstances, two quarter-truths may add up to one half-truth, but I am reluctant to bet on these. Instead, I would like to reopen the question of fable as a genre concept and that of the genre's history as it pertains to La Fontaine's achievement. These problems are not merely tangential; neither can be resolved without reference to the other.

Returning for a moment to the much-abused manuals, I concede that none is better than its sources, and on the question of fable as genre, even the authoritative reference works have been somewhat less than helpful. The OED identifies fable with "myth, legend, edifying short fiction, and … nonsense"; the Robert considers it a "récit en prose ou en vers illustrant un precepte", despite a wealth of counterexamples characterized by an inductive relationship between principal and secondary parts, or by the use of proverb, command, or other assertional devices; and B.E. Perry, truly the master of those who know in matters Aesopic, argues that fable is "fiction that contains a truth"², thus lumping it with other kinds from Pilgrim's Progress to Babbitt. And so it goes: opinion after vulnerable opinion, but precious little clarity.

Obviously, though, the lexicographers and philologists are not completely benighted. First of all, everyone seems agreed that fable is not primarily mimetic; that is, the formal structure of fable chiefly furnishes grounds for something other than—or beyond—a set of purely emotional responses. If emotional responses are solicited, they subserve the fable's fundamental purpose, which is didactic. Immediately, however, a problem arises, for the standard notion of didacticism does not correspond with the features of all works supposedly belonging to that class of poetic products. We are taught in school that didacticism is the inculcation of values, or the incitement to action, or the teaching of lessons; and nobody can deny that many non-mimetic works do all or some of these things. But there are so many exceptions that the formula seems not only less than thorough but even presents the danger of confusing didacticism with deliberative or forensic rhetoric. Consider the Essais of Montaigne, Le Lutrin, or Cyrano's science fiction. None is mimetic, yet none moves to action or judgment of nonaesthetic values. Instead, we find debate, indirection, ellipsis, allusion, paradox, and irony: in other words, abundant stimulus for thought on the issues preoccupying the authors at or below the surface of the text. And—as Jules Brody, Joan DeJean, and Gordon Pocock have shown—the outcome of that reflective process—whether it be affirmation or denial, commitment or refusal, agreement or disagreement—is less important than the process itself.³ Thus, for didacticism I contend that there are at least two subvariables or modalities: the rhetorical and the problematic. Whether any fable is truly problematic remains to be seen; but if it is, then the little scheme I am working here may prevent its reduction to something else—not something lesser, but something so different in nature that it demands a different critical response.

To the diversity of possible ends corresponds an even greater diversity of means, of which the most important is form. Formally, the fable is regarded as an action and that action is supposed to feature animals which in moral disposition, passion, or thought resemble humans. The inductive formal analysis of texts from Aesop to Thurber suggests otherwise, however. First, what passes for action may involve no change or process, but rather a state or condition which is described, as in "Le Rat qui s'est retire du monde". Moreover, as I suggested above, the grounds for emotional response provided by the descriptive or narrative materials serves mainly to pique interest or to reinforce some rhetorical or dialectical point. It would therefore be more precise to say that the fable's narrative or descriptive portion is not an action or a state—which would be intrinsically interesting and hence the organizing principle of a mimetic work—but an apologue, a fictive state or process which incarnates a problem, an issue, an idea, or a thesis. As such it may consist of particulars from which a generality is to be inferred—in other words, an exemplum (for instance, "Le Meunier, son fils, et I'ane"). Or the apologue may be an allegory, a play of personified abstractions which can be related to particulars by deduction, as in "La Mort et le mourant". Or the apological reasoning may be analogical, based either on the likeness of genus to genus (animals to men, for instance) or on the likeness of different species of the same genus (e.g., one class of man to another, as in the parable "Le Jardinier et son seigneur").

This set of distinctions still does not exhaust the topic of form. Though the apologue is the fable's most conspicuous part, is is not the principal one. In fact the apologue is secondary to a statement—usually a command or virtual command (e.g., "Mais que faut-il faire? / Parler de loin ou se taire", in "L'Homme et la couleuvre") or an empirical generality (for instance, "Le monde est plein de gens qui ne sont pas plus sages …" in "La Grenouille qui se veut faire aussi grosse que le boeuf ") or a combination of command and generality. The statement is usually explicit but may, as in "Le Loup et le chien", be implied, at times against the background of an explicit, but contextually false advice or assertion, as for example, in "Les Compagnons d'Ulysse". The apologue merely illustrates the statement, provides grounds for it or—when the statement is explicit but contextually false—serves as a counterexample.

To argue that fable is a rhetorical or problematic form consisting of an expressed or implied statement and an apologue still fails to make sufficiently clear the magnitude of the genre. Indeed, whatever its length, however many statements or apologues it may contain, fable is always the uninterrupted discourse of one or more personages in a stable situation, that is: it is always autonomous speech or scene. As such, fable is lyric, in the sense used by Ronald Crane, Elder Olson, Norman Friedman, and Gemino Abad.⁴

Beyond this tentative characterization, fable connot be differentiated from other literary kinds as regards technique (i.e., selection, arrangement, scale, and viewpoint), or means (prosody, diction, syntax, and figures).

This much asserted, I shall turn to the second problem of this paper: La Fontaine's impact on the genre as defined. The French poet's chief sources are the Greco-Latin tradition and the Indic. For the former or Aesopic model, Phaedrus and his many imitators provided examples. For the latter, the Panchatantra (known in seventeenth-century Frence as Le Livre des Lumieres) played the same role. Before discussing La Fontaine's contribution to the genre, it is necessary to review inductively and formally the main features of his sources.

Written in a plain or low style, typical fables of Phaedrus and his followers are equally direct in their treatment: complete, logically ordered, and marked by narrative irony, that is: irony at the expense of morally or intellectually inadequate personages or readers. All types of apologue appear: exemplum, allegory, parable and "genus-to genus" analogies, serving as the basis or illustration of explicit statements cast advice or generalities corresponding perfectly to the conjoined narrative or description. In short, the "Aesopic" fable is rhetorical.

Bidpay, the legendary poet of the Panchatantra wrote in a middle style with touches of high eloquence. Though in the main as direct as Phaedrus, Bidpay occasionally uses what appears to be unreliable narration, that is: irony at the expense of morally or intellectually inadequate narrators. Because of the highly redundant context, however, the reader is never uncertain of the author's values, so that the task of reconstruction is truly child's play, and the poet's rhetorical end is never put in doubt.

Now, as I suggested before, traditional scholarship has shed very little light on the relationship between La Fontaine's Fables and their models. The historical consensus is that the poet, an "ancient", merely prettified the materials that he had found in Phaedrus or Bidpay. Nothing, however, could be further from the findings of inductive formal analysis.

Readers have long noticed and the work of J. D. Biard has confirmed⁵ that La Fontaine's language is more varied than that of almost any French author after Rabelais and that among lyric poets, he is in this respect without peer. This mixture of styles, which Philip Wadsworth has called "La Fontaine's salad", includes both straight and parodic versions of terms, formulae, and figures from such sources as dialect, archaic French, philosophy, science, and law, as well as poetry in the epic, pastoral, and amatory modes. While La Fontaine certainly sought to stimulate his readers' interest and to keep it simulated, the ultimate goal of such a technique must have gone beyond mere piquancy. Two possibilities suggest themselves: by shifting styles within a given fable (for instance, from epic to political to familiar to gnomic in "Les Animaux malades de la peste") or by allowing a consistent style only in parody (e.g., "La Tortue et les deux canards") or in resolutely plain poems (such as "La

Femme noyee") the poet may have sought to disrupt a serious response, if grounds for one had been established or to withold such grounds altogether.⁶ Secondly, a a mixture of vocabularies and the equivocations made possible not only by parody but La Fontaine's notorious weakness for puns opens a treasury (to some, a Pandora's box) of thematic possibilities. This occurs because the verbal technique permits creation of networks of images, metaphors, symbols, and allusions capable of reinforcing or counterpointing a thesis—implicit or explicit.⁷

Complexity and indirection are the technical analogues of La Fontaine's rich, resonant style. Of the many representational devices often used in tandem to provoke the implied reader, two are particularly important: irony and the disruption of the customary structure of the statement or of its relationship to the apologue. In addition to narrative irony, La Fontaine often employs double irony and fully unreliable narration. Double irony consists in opposing two or more viewpoints that at least appear to cancel each other out. Thus, instead of clear-cut lessons, the reader is left with a puzzle or an object of disinterested contemplation. In "Contre ceux qui ont le goût difficile", for example, there is a false dilemma created by an incomplete, ambiguous final statement. In fact, the poet need not comply with the demands of his hare-brained, double-binding critics, nor must he abandon writing; he may continue writing fables—for the narratee, who through various rhetorical and stylistic strategies is characterized as sophisticated, just, and esthetically open-minded. But in "Le Loup et le chien", the dilemma is real: how to choose between the alternatives of prosperity coupled with degrading constraints, and freedom accompanied by excruciating want? Here the statement is missing and the reader must reconstruct it on the basis of apological evidence alone. A complete and explicit but contextually false statement may occur where La Fontaine wishes to undercut his narrator, as in "Les Compagnons d'Ulysse", where the narrator's prejudice leads him to misinterpret the anecdote and impels him toward an altogether inappropriate conclusion. These the implied reader is expected to notice and reconstruct.⁸ In addition, La Fontaine employs what I would call false displacement, the attribution of an apparent lesson to a morally or intellectually deficient personage within the apologue. Typical of this device is the supposed point of "Le Corbeau et le renard". Though true and a propos, the lines, "Apprenez que tout flatteur/Vit aux depens de celui qui l'ecoute", do not constitute a generality separate from and related to the action. Instead, it is part of the apological story-line, a manifestation of the fox's naïveté in revealing his strategy and the occasion for the crow to resolve to be less gullible in future. The real statement of the fable must be inferred by the reader, taking into account not only the ruse but the disclosure and revelation that forearm the victim against a repeat offense.

From the foregoing sketch, it is clear that while La Fontaine preserved the original form of the fable—its magnitude, its choice and hierarchizing of parts, its use of all apological and assertional modes—he drastically reoriented its end from persuasion to provocation, which is to say that the Lafontainian fable only remotely resembles rhetoric. True, it incites: but to reflection, not action: true, it inculcates an attitude—that of critical inquiry; and true, it teaches a lesson—less of morals, however, than of moral discrimination. Under the French poet's spell, Aesopic and Indic recipes for better living are transformed to food for thought.⁹

Notes

² Babrius and Phaedrus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), xx.

³ Jules Brody, "From Teeth to Text in 'De l'experience': A Philological Reading", ECr 20, 1, 7-22;

Joan DeJean, Libertine Strategies (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981); and Gordon Pocock, Boileau and the Nature of Neo-classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

⁴ See Crane's The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953), p. 160; Olson's "The Lyric" in On Value Judgments in the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 112-119; Friedman's Poetry: An Introduction to Its Form and Art, in collaboration with Charles McLaughlin (New York: Harper and Row, 1961); and Abad's little known but extremely important A Formal Approach to Lyric Poetry (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1978).

⁵The Style of La Fontaine's Fables (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1956), passim.

⁶ For a discussion of this way of managing reader reaction in classical "didactic" works, see David Richter, Fables's End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), Chapter 2.

⁷ See my discussion of "La Tortue et les deux canards" in Higher, Hidden Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 18-21.

⁸ See my essay, "Four Modes of Double Irony in La Fontaine's Fables", in The Equilibrium of Wit, ed. Peter Bayley and Dorothy Coleman (Lexington: French Forum, 1982). pp. 201-12.

⁹ Used throughout this paper: La Fontaine, Fables, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Garnier, 1975).