fable
A fable is a story, often told by means of animal, that seeks to illustrate a moral truth. There are always other definitions. A fable is also any untrue story, any lie, as in “the poet’s fables.” Another note—fable is the root of fabulous, and its own root comes from speech itself. To use words is to lie. Ask Bjork.
Why would this class move from repetition to list to dialogue to fable? Because it’s my class probably, and that’s how I see writing’s imitation of the evolution of language…
Repetition is the perhaps the heart of memory and comfort—how we learn-- as in *mamamama.*
List is how we order, or show the lack thereof: our ABCs and 123s.
Dialogue introduces us to multiple points of view and to conflict—play&fight eventually becomes love&war.
And fable? Well fable and myth and archetype are perhaps at the core of plot. Fables and their ilk are the means and structures by which we first learn story.
On Thursday I pointed out how Judy Budnitz used stock characters—sympathetic-but-dim mother, aggressive-and-violent father, brothers needing to prove themselves—to move us securely into her tale of civilization’s oh so quick deterioration. Judy used a pseudo-animal (man-dog) to convey this moral truth. He was perhaps the harbinger, the scout that went ahead to show how, faced with real hunger, we will all recognize our animal natures, and one-by-one, embrace them.
Angela Carter uses transformation to a different end. In "The Company of Wolves," the girl who strays from the path finds her own way to her own kind of hunger, and in the end—she is not so much transformed as is the tender wolf. This story, unlike many fables, has a strange meta-complexity to it. Even grandmother is not painted wholly as a victim, but as a woman who once had appetitites, the vestiges of which remain in her noticing eye. The first half of this story is not a story at all but a list of local stories about lycanthropes, that is: werewolves. About how and why and when men can be transformed into howling beasts… and in Angela Carter’s world, this first half of the tale lets us know there is no singular explanation—although fear, rage and sadness all take their turns.
James Thurber shows us just how quickly fables can tell their tales. He puns, he jokes, he relies on dialogue to communicate the stock (and skewed-from-stock) personalities of his chosen beasties. When the clothes moth tries to woo the luna moth and she encourages him to batter himself to death against the window and then promptly extinguishes herself in the flame she actually desired—no idiocy of courtship is left unmocked. But you also understand in these tiny tales that something *must* happen. No lesson is learned from navel-gazing unless a red worm bores out of your bellybutton causing you to reflect meaningfully on the error of your raw-meat-consuming ways. (This was the seed of the movie Alien, btw. And Sigourney Weaver went on from that franchise, notably, to playing primatologist Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist… a movie and life about how the differences we imagine between species to be so profound are perhaps nonexistent. )
This ultimate lack of moral differentiation is one of the things that Bhanu Kapil pulls apart for us in her book Humanimal. In her powerful reconstruction of the story of Kamala and Amala – known widely as the wolfgirls - she recounts the myths of their feral upbringing, but also their dehumanizing treatment at the hands of civilization. There were two girls. They existed. They were probably orphans. Joseph Singh, the clergyman who gained fame from treating them, he may have fictionalized much, but even if the tortures were imagined, the violence done to their identities is beyond understanding. Who was transformed in this story? Who is reviled? Who and what is the evil?
By setting human behavior against and among other animal behavior, we have the opportunity to attend to it with larger, potentially multi-directional hearing.
As Shel Silverstein once wrote: “A little bat cried out in fright, turn on the dark, I’m afraid of the light.” The use of fables has this potential… to open up the world from a different doorway… to fly in a broken window or burrow up from under the cellar. To take an old story, a basic plotline, and reimagine it with the ultraviolet compound eyes of insects.
Rainier Maria Rilke wrote: “We are the bees of the invisible.” This week I invite you to describe your own bee dance as you turn the most common flowersperm to honeywine. And to do it fabulously.
