SOURCE: "La Fontaine and Phaedrus: A Relation Reargued," in French Studies: In Honor of Philip A. Wadsworth, edited by Donald W. Tappan and William A. Mould, Summa Publications, Inc., 1985, pp. 19-26.

[In the essay that follows, Rubin compares the degrees of subtlety and ambiguity in the fables of Phaedrus and the seventeenth-century French writer de La Fontaine, who used Phaedrus as a source.]

Off-hand, it would be difficult to think of a subject less immediately promising than this one.¹ We already know—or think we know—how La Fontaine adapted his sources. He revealed it himself in the preface to the 1668 edition of the Fables, and generations of scholars have convincingly argued for a perfect fit between his announced intentions and his achievement. In what follows, the key word is égayer. The poet wrote,

On ne trouvera pas ici l'élégance ni l'extrême brèveté qui rendent Phèdre recommandable: ce sont des qualités au-dessus de ma portée. Comme il m'était impossible de l'imiter en cela, j'ai cru qu'il fallait en récompense égayer l'Ouvrage plus qu'il n'a fait.²

La Fontaine then explained that gaîté is not: "ce qui excite le rire," but rather: "un certain charme, un air agréable qu'on peut donner à toutes sortes de sujets, même les plus sérieux."³ In practice, what is this supposed to mean? Amplification, for one thing, and the use of a more piquant style, for another—but only if La Fontaine used the terms égayer and gaîté in their sens classique alone. I will try to suggest in the next few pages that while the sens classique applies exclusively to a certain number of fables, it must be supplemented in many other instances by sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century meanings. This is more than a mere quibble; indeed, it bears directly on the vital issue of La Fontaine's originality of ends and means or (to put it differently) his contribution to the development of the fable genre.

Space limitations preclude a detailed discussion of the fable as a literary kind, but in order to prepare for the argument to follow, I will sum up the main points of two previous essays in which I developed and refined an improved (if not altogether new) definition.⁴ In general, fable represents one or more speakers operating within a single, closed situation; that is, it is uninterrupted speech or scene, independent of a larger formal principle. In other words, fable is lyric.⁵ The monologue or colloquy has a clearly identifiable structure. Its principal part is an exposition—a thematic label, an interpretation, or a precept. Its secondary part is an apologue, a description or a narrative so constructed as to embody an idea, a problem, an issue, or a thesis. The apologue may belong to one or more of five modes: allegory, exemplum, comparison between generic similars (as in parable), or comparison between generic dissimilars (as in the familiar stories likening animals to humans, or those of the Panchatantra, in which the converse procedure is common). The apologue and the exposition stand in either an inductive or a deductive relation to one another; wherever that relation seems to be analogical, the apparent expository materials constitute further illustration of the fable's point. Finally, the end of fable is didactic, but as I will attempt to show, didacticism is far from being unitary, and actually denotes something like a continuum between very different special ends, determined in large measure by the poet's choice of manner and means.

While La Fontaine contended that the Phaedrian model of fable writing is distinguished by élégance and brèveté, other factors may be vastly more important to our understanding not only of that model itself but of La Fontaine's art of adaptation as well. To that end, I must now introduce some technical and stylistic notions.

Consider the following fable, "Vulpis et Ciconia," in the authoritative translation of Ben Edwin Perry:

It is not right to injure any man; but if someone does inflict an injury, this fable warns him that he is liable to punishment in kind. A fox is said to have invited a stork to dinner and to have set before her on a slab of marble some thin soup of which the stork, though hungry, could find no way to get a taste. The stork in turn invited the fox to dinner and set before him a narrow-mouthed jar full of solid food, into which she thrust her beak and so satisfied her own appetite while tormenting her guest with hunger. While the fox was vainly licking the neck of the jar, the pilgrim bird, so we have heard, made this remark: "One who sets an example ought to bear it with patience when he gets the same in return.⁶

Formally, this is a typically Phaedrian fable: narrative, analogical (in this case a comparison of generic dissimilars, animals and humans), containing both a precept and an interpretation. Technically, it is also typical. First of all, it is complete, for the exposition is present and the apologue has a beginning, middle, and end. Secondly, it is closural: all formal and thematic problems are unknotted—there is no sense of irresolution or contradiction at the end. Thirdly, the parts of the fable correspond to one another: that is, the double exposition is a full, precise, and accurate account of the apologue. Fourthly, the entire text is crystal-clear, free of unstable irony, ambiguous displacement of parts, or representational ambiguity (such as would arise if the apparent exposition were wholly or partially another apologue). Moreover, Phaedrus indulges in no allusive or intertextual games. With respect to language, there is a similar state of affairs. Plain style predominates and is used with great consistency. There is no verbal ambiguity, and the poet has not constructed a system of thematically charged images, symbols, or incomplete metaphors by which to insinuate his ideas. Now all of this, taken together, exemplifies a special didactic mode, one which is demonstrative, persuasive, even magisterial, in addition to presupposing a passive reader. This mode of didacticism I call resolvent.

Any reader familiar with La Fontaine's adaptation of Phaedrus I, 26 ("Le Renard et la Cigogne," I, 18), would argue that it, too, is resolvent. The French fable is distinguished from the Latin chiefly by its more extended treatment of the episodes, its delicious invention of new details, and its ironic modulations, which are, incidentally, stable, transparent, and finite. Indeed, there is nothing here to complicate the issue or to suggest any messages hidden below the surface. And this is not an isolated case: some 20% of the fables directly derived from Phaedrus are "zesty amplifications" of this type. It is the other 80% that perplex, and to these I will now turn.

At its simplest, La Fontaine's deviation from the Phaedrian norms produces a puzzle, as in the following case.

When a man without resources tries to imitate the powerful he comes to grief. Once on a time, a frog caught sight of a cow in a meadow, and in envy of so much bulk, puffed up her wrinkled skin. Then she asked her children whether she was bigger than the cow. "Not so," said they. Again, with greater effort, she stretched her skin and in like manner inquired which was bigger. "The cow," said they. Refusing to be beaten, in a final effort to blow herself out still more, she burst herself and fell flat.(I, 24)

Like the paradigm case, the Latin fable is complete, closural, correspondant, and clear: stylistically, it is monomodal, unambiguous, and free of thematically charged language. Not so La Fontaine's adaptation, "La Grenouille qui se veut faire aussi grosse que le boeuf (I, 3). While there is an exposition, "Le monde est plein de gens qui ne sont pas plus sages" (v. 11), it does not provide a very precise account of the folly illustrated in the apologues. The plural is required here, because the fable presents a slight ambiguity of manner: the humans cited after the expository verse are analogues of the frog; thus, instead of being part of the exposition, they constitute further instances of the unnamed folly. There is also a great difference between the account of the frog and references to the bourgeois, the prince and the marquis. The first apologue is complete, having a beginning, middle, and end, whereas the others notably lack any indication of a human equivalent for bursting. Just as the reader must infer the nature of the folly from a close reading of the apologues, he must also devise appropriate endings for the human component of the total system. On the other hand, once these blanks are filled, all formal and thematic problems are resolved. Expressed in the epicurean terms, the folly is a desire for the unnatural and unnecessary pleasure of self-aggrandizement—literal, in the frog's case; symbolic in those of the humans, who build needless hôtels de ville, or frivolously dispatch representatives in all directions. To attempt this is to seek a kind of rebirth or selftranscendance (suggested by the image of the egg in verse 3). The same image, supplemented by the etymological sense of the term chétive (v. 9), suggests inescapable, countervailing limits imposed by nature or society. As a result, the attempt can result in obliteration: if the frog bursts, the bourgeois may go bankrupt, the marquis—as well as the prince—may be deflated by the ridicule of their betters.

In the main, La Fontaine's adaptations of Phaedrus do not result, like the preceding one, in a puzzle, a modality which challenges the reader only a little. More typical of his practice is the kind of difficulty that appears in his reworking of "Lupus ad canem" (III, 7). First, Ben Perry's rendition of the Latin:

How sweet liberty is, I will briefly declare. A wolf, emaciated with hunger, happened to meet a well-fed dog. After greeting each other they came to a stand and the wolf said, "How comes it, do tell me, that you look so sleek? What have you been eating to put on so much flesh? I am much stronger than you, and yet I am starving." The dog replied frankly, "The same lot may be yours if you can render like service to a master." "What is that?" said he. "To be the guardian of his threshold and protect his house from thieves at night. Bread is brought to me without my asking; my master gives me bones from his own table; the servants toss out tidbits to me and whatever dainties anyone has no taste for. In this way, my belly is replenished at no pains." "Well," said the wolf, "I'm ready for that, all right. At present I have to endure snow and rain, and it is a hard life that I lead in the woods. How much easier it would be to live under a roof, and at my ease to sate myself with food in abundance." "Well, then, come with me," said the dog. As they were going along, the wolf noticed that the dog's neck had been worn bare by a chain. "How did this happen, my friend?" "Oh, it's nothing." "Tell me, please, just the same." "Because they think me restless, they tie me up in the daytime, to make me be quiet while it is light and keep watch when the night comes. At dusk I am unchained and wander about wherever I please." "Come now, suppose you want to go away somewhere, are you allowed to do so?" "Why no, as a matter of fact, I'm not." "Well, dog, go on enjoying the things you praise; I don't choose to be a king, if I can't be free to please myself."

The Latin model is, again, completely resolvent. The reader is not invited by any devices or techniques to reassess the poet's introductory exclamation, to consider the problem as open, or to criticize the reasonings of either party to the debate. La Fontaine's adaptation, "Le Loup et le chien" (I, 10), is quite different. First of all, La Fontaine has omitted the exposition. In certain fables—"La Cigale et la fourmi," for instance—this omission presents a major interpretive problem, because the apologue alone does not set clear and distinct limits on the fable's thematic scope. Thus the reader is solicited by the text to generate an almost endless series of complementary significances. In "Le Loup et le chien," however, the lack of thematic labeling, precept, or other commentary, does not leave the issue unclear, for the debate between the personages is quite extended and straightforward. Obviously, the fable deals with the relative value of two modes of existence: one of apparent freedom undercut by material want; the other, of constraint mitigated by material abundance. The lack of exposition does present another difficulty, however, for the narrator withholds explicit judgment on the two modes of existence and their exponents. While one might reply that the apologue presents more than ample evidence on which to base a clear-cut evaluation by the reader, I am skeptical. La Fontaine actually balances the evidence pro and con in each case, focusing less on the argumentation than on harmonies and discordances in the personages' moral dispositions, passions, and thought, as well as circumstances and comportment. For instance, the supposedly free, shrewd, and morally impeccable wolf is a craven hypocrite in his approach to the dog (vv. 5-10), envies him to the point of tears (vv. 30-31) and cannot distinguish between limited freedom (or constraint) and absolute states of both qualities. ("Pas toujours" in verse 37 is not to be understood as a litotes, as the phrase "qui s'était fourvoyé par mégarde" confirms in verse 4). Moreover, through imagery, the poet portrays the wolf as a void, a near-wraith, a creature almost wholly lacking in substance (v.l). As for the dog, he differs importantly from that of Phaedrus, not only as just noted in the comment on verse 37, but also in his appearance of plenitude and vitality (vv. 3-4, 9). This, of course, is offset by his insufferable pomposity and the rhetoric by which he transforms a menial job into a high-status appointment, without, however, minimizing its limitations on his freedom of movement. All of this is plainly non-resolvent. And to what end? It would seem that unlike Phaedrus, La Fontaine is not attempting to instruct the reader in a correct moral stance, but rather to present the issue at hand as an object of reflection. For example, once both proponents have been partially discredited, the poet emphasizes tradeoffs. The price of absolute freedom (or the illusion of it) is to live always on the edge, to be constantly at risk of perishing, in a word: to lack the ataraxia which epicureans value above all else. By contrast, the price of material comfort, especially if it exceeds one's survival needs, may be an inability to dispose of one's time or person with total autonomy. Beyond this, La Fontaine suggests nothing more. The choices, the compromises, and the accommodations that may be worked out from these givens are the reader's to contemplate and—if the case presents itself—to determine.⁷

As a last instance of La Fontaine's special didactic modes, consider his adaptation of Phaedrus I, 1, presented here in the Perry translation:

Impelled by thirst, a wolf and a lamb had come to the same brook. Upstream stood the wolf, much lower down the lamb. Then the spoiler, prompted by his wicked gullet, launched a pretext for a quarrel: "Why," said he, "have you roiled the water where I am drinking?" Sore afraid, the woolly one made answer: "Pray, how can I, wolf, be guilty of the thing you charge? The water flows from you downstream to where I drink." Balked by the power of truth, the wolf exclaimed, "Six months ago you cursed me." "Indeed," replied the lamb, "at that time I was not yet born." "Well, I swear, your father cursed me," said the wolf, and with no more ado, he pounced upon the lamb, and tore him, and the lamb died for no just cause." This fable was composed to fit those persons who invent false charges by which to oppress the innocent.

Again, the Latin original is completely resolvent: no ellipsis, discrepancy, ambiguity, pun, or half-buried metaphor prevents the reader from absorbing the instruction. In La Fontaine's adaptation, "Le Loup et l'agneau" (I, 10), matters are presented quite differently. But for the exposition, the fable could pass for another of those zesty amplifications we have all read so much about, for La Fontaine reproduces the plot and the argumentation of the original, adding only those details which enhance our interest or seem destined to increase our outrage at the wolf or our pity for the lamb. The exposition, however, is troublesome, because it is not only ambiguous but contextually suspect. "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure." We habitually read this as pure antiphrase: "La raison du plus fort est toujours la pire," for in our minds "le plus fort" is identified with "le moins juste" and even at times with "le plus bête." But the total context of the Fables does not support that view. While true enough in I, 6 "La Génisse, la chèvre, et la brebis en société avec le lion," it is not in I, 7 "Le Besace," or I, 14 "Simonide préservé par les dieux," or fables in other books, such as VII, 17 "Un Animal dans la lune." In the latter three cases, la raison du plus fort est bien la meilleure. The strength or weakness of the reasoning may be purely formal or purely moral, and the wolf is certainly a master of fallacious procedure, as well as a scoundrel. His reasonings are transparent rationalizations for murder and gluttony. Thus, on a philosophical level, the antiphrastic reading is fully justified. On a pragmatic level, however, the wolf's thinking and his sense of right—being backed by brute force—are better than the lamb's; that is: they are more efficient, and in La Fontaine's Fables efficiency is never decried. So the wolf may be condemned as a moralist or a logician, but recognized as a pragmatically effective creature at the same time. This, however, legitimizes a "straight" reading of the exposition. It is possible, of course, to live in varying degrees of discomfort with the paradox that all this adds up to. Indeed, one recent school of criticism would have praised La Fontaine's adaptation precisely because it enables (or forces!) the reader to entertain two conflicting viewpoints simultaneously. In the poet's eyes, however, that might have seemed an esthetic extravagance.

To sum up, in special didactic goals La Fontaine's adaptations differ radically from most of their Phaedrian models.⁸ Whereas the latter are in the main demonstra tive, instructive, and persuasive, the former are provocative and unsettling—in a word, problematic. The work of Phaedrus is, as I have already suggested, reader-passive; that of La Fontaine, reader-active. Accordingly, the notion of a sufficient or adequate reader differs sharply from one author's work to the other's. If Phaedrus requires little more than receptivity and a talent for dealing with the simplest ironies, La Fontaine requires far more: a willingness to wrestle with oblique, elliptical, dense, and allusive discourse; an ability to suspend the need for formal and thematic closure and clarity; and an enthusiasm for serious play as well as the playfully serious.⁹ This brings me to the second point, the meanings of égayer and gaîté. The sens classique, which involves the agreeable, the pleasant and the entertaining (and so gives rise to the accurate if incomplete idea of La Fontaine's poems as zesty amplifications of Phaedrus) must be supplemented by earlier—not to say archaic—meanings. I refer to those found in Cotgrave and Huguet, which emphasize sport, gamesmanship, and the ludic in general. As my brief analyses have suggested, La Fontaine played with the Phaedrian materials, both formally and ideologically, then presented the results to the reader as an object or device of intellectual play.

From the standpoint of genre history, these modifications can and perhaps should be seen as signs of a major change, the beginning of a new phase in the life of fable. The shift of finality from the resolvent to the problematic correlates with a change of formal emphasis more apparent perhaps in other fables by La Fontaine, but certainly hinted at in these, namely: a narrative preoccupation with philosophical issues or the philosophical import of commonplace problems. There is a movement away from shrewdness and toward system; this will culminate in longer expositions—virtual essays of the sort found in Discours à Mme de la Sablière—while apologues take on a symbolic resonance. Technique and style, as we have seen, veer away from the straight and narrow and toward the reconstructible, the broadly suggestive. In short, one is dealing with an altogether new kind of fable, one which Alistair Fowler would call tertiary.¹⁰ La Fontaine, it would appear, transcended Phaedrus' limits as Phaedrus himself had transcended those of the Aesopic compilers from whose work he borrowed, turning their materials to new ends with fresh (or freshly applied) expedients of manner and means. To trace this development in the detail it deserves, however, is the matter not of an article, but a book.

Notes

¹ Research toward this article was completed with the aid of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an appointment to the University of Virginia Center for Advanced Studies. For useful comments on an ampler version, presented as a lecture at the University of California (Berkeley), Stanford University, and The Catholic University of America, I am indebted to Alvin Eustis, Pierre Saint-Amand, Robert Nicolich, and Ellen Ginsburg.

² Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, edited by Georges Couton (Paris: Gamier, 1975), p. 7. All citations refer to this edition.

³ Couton, pp. 7-8.

⁴ "A Genre Renewed: La Fontaine and the Fable," PFSCL, tenth anniversary issue (forthcoming); and "The Dynamic and Dynamis of Dream in La Fontaine's Fables," PFSCL, (forthcoming).

⁵ For a fuller discussion of the underlying concepts, see the introduction to my essay, The Knot of Artifice: A Poetic of the French Lyric in the Early 17th Century (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1981), as well as the accompanying bibliography.

⁶Babrius and Phaedrus (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library-Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 221-23. All citations of Phaedrus refer to this edition.

⁷ For a fuller discussion of this fable, see my "Four Modes of Double Irony in La Fontaine's Fables," in The Equilibrium of Wit: Essays for Odette de Mourgues, edited by Peter Bayley and Dorothy Gabe Coleman (Lexington: French Forum Monographs, 1982), pp. 202-212.

⁸ For reasons of space, I have omitted an interesting group of slightly non-resolvent fables by Phaedrus which—in La Fontaine's version—become vastly more challenging to the reader. These will be the subject of a separate study.

⁹ For an analogous situation, see Terence Cave's "Problems of Reading in the Essais," in Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce, ed. I. D. MacFarlane and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 133-66, from which I have borrowed several descriptive terms.

¹⁰Kinds of Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 163-164.