Archimedes

History

The fable was already practiced in Mésopotamie, nearly two thousand years before our era. Shelves coming from school libraries of the time briefly tell stories of flattering fox, of awkward dog, (“the dog of the blacksmith, not having been able to reverse the anvil, reversed the water pot”), of presumptuous elephant (“a mosquito being posed on the back of an elephant wondered to him whether its weight were bearable for him or if it should rather fly away”). Many of these texts show a great affinity with the Proverbe S and have an antithetic construction (“what you found, you do not speak about it; but what you lost, you speak about it”). However, they do not have explicit morals.

The Indian influence

The fable also was a remarkable success in India, with the Pañchatantra . Originally written in Sanskrit between -300 and 570, this collection of Indian fables will know innumerable rehandlings. One of the derived versions is entitled Hitopadesha or the useful Instruction . The bestiary usual of the fables is found there: ass, Lion, Singe, Serpent, etc with the difference that the Chacal plays there the part of the European Renard. It influences the Occident at the end of an extremely complex advance. Initially introduced into Persian and translated into Arab under the title of Kalîla wa Dimna , it will be then translated into Hebrew, then in Latin under the title Directorium humanae vitae in 1280. Pierre Poussines makes another translation in of it 1666 under the title Specimen sapientiae Indorum veterum . A version Persian will be in his turn translated into French in 1644 under the title the Book of the lights or the Control of the Kings, composed by the wise Indian Pilpay, translated into French by David Sahid, of Ispahan, capital city of Persia , the name of the translator being in fact a pseudonym of Gilbert Gaulmin. These works inspire in their turn certain fables of Jean of the Fountain, in particular “the Bear and the Amateur of the gardens” “the Dairy one and the pot with milk”, “the Tortoise and the two Swans” and “Poisson and the Cormorant”.

The fable in Greek Antiquity

The first known fable is “the Nightingale and the Sparrowhawk”, which Hésiode tells, in the neighborhoods of eighth century BC, in Work and the days. One sees there a poor nightingale which, taken in the greenhouses of a sparrowhawk, makes him the lesson. This fable aims at making reflect on the concept of justice, using an antithetic reasoning where the main character exploits his strong position outrageusement.

The fable will develop especially under the feather of Ésope, which would have lived with before our era and which is regarded as “the father of the fable”.

At the time traditional, Socrate itself would have devoted its moments of prison before its death to put in worms fables of Ésope. He would have been explained some in the following way: “A poet must take for matter of the Aussi myths I chose myths with my range, these fables of Ésope which I knew by heart, randomly meeting. ” (61b)

Démétrios de Phalère publishes the first collection of fables historically attested. This collection, lost, gave rise to innumerable versions. One of those was preserved in the form of a whole of manuscripts probably dating from the 1st century of our era, called Augustana . It is with this collection that one refers when one speaks today about the “fables of Ésope”.

From Greece, the fable passes to Rome. Horace proposes a remarkable adaptation of the “Rat of city and Rat of the fields” ( Satires , II, 6) that some critical estimate higher than the version of Jean of the Fountain. He will be followed by Phèdre which truly will make fable a poetic kind.

The vogue of the fable is large in the world gréco-Roman. At the 4th century, the Roman poet Avianus leaves forty it, for the majority of the adaptations of Phèdre but of which several are not attested nowhere are built elsewhere and extremely well.

With the Middle Ages

The fable continues to be transmitted through all the Moyen-âge under names of authors or collections which resemble pseudonyms: Romulus, Syntipas, pseudo-Dosithée. But literary quality is then forsaken with the profit of moralities.

The set of themes of the fable takes a singular expansion with the Romance of Renart , collection of accounts due to anonymous clerks of the 12th century. In these stories inspired of Ysengrinus , Latin work of the Flemish poet Nivard of Ghent, the fight of the fox against the wolf serves as a pretext for a vigorous satire of the feudal company and of its injustices. The fable yields here the place to an animal comedy where all is held.

In the 12th century, Marie de France publishes a collection of 63 fables.

With the Rebirth

With the Rebirth, the kind of the emblems was very with the mode during all it. After having indicated only engraving, the direction of the word “emblem” will extend to also apply to the Poésie which is used to him of legend or comment. One writes books of emblems then, with the imitation of those of Alciato, as those of Guillaume Guéroult which seems to be specialized in this kind with the Blazon of Oyseaux (1551), the Anthems of Time and its parts (1560), the Figures of the Bible (1564) composed on the same model of an engraving accompanied by a short piece of poetry. With the number of the emblems of Guéroult whose subject was taken again by Jean of the Fountain, one counts:

the Cock and Regnard ; * the Monkey and the Cat ;
the Spider and the Swallow ;
Court of the Lion ;
Sick animals of the plague ;
the Astrologer who drops himself in a well

After Jean of the Fountain

In France, the extraordinary success of the fables of Jean of the Fountain inspires many vocations: large lord with the clerk, while passing by the magistrate, the priest or the merchant, each and everyone tests himself then with the kind of the fable. The Jesuit François-Joseph Desbillons, professor, produces five hundred and sixty of them. Boisard publishes a collection which contains thousand of them and one. Jean-Pons-Guillaume Viennet publishes in 1843 the fables which he wrote during all his life. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, before being crowned emperor, composes one of them, considered to be rather good at the time.

All these authors fell down in the lapse of memory. Only one name survived durably the side of that of the Fountain; that of Florian (1755 - 1794). Its collection counts a hundred fables. Those are directed either towards a political morals, or towards a private morals. This last author is inspired sometimes by the English John Gay or the Spaniard Tomás de Iriarte there Oropesa. To, the fable hardly will be applied. In Russia, however, Ivan Krylov will make its kind of predilection of it.

Narrative diagram

The traditional fable is contingent on a double structure. As of the title, one finds an opposition between two characters whose subjective positions are dissimilar: one is placed in high position and the other in low position. Thanks to an unforeseen narrative event, that which was in high position is found in position low and vice versa. This diagram is indicated by Christian Vandendorpe like “a double inversion. ” This diagram, which is found in tens of fables (often most popular), makes it possible “to block” comprehension and to convey a clear morality.

Like says it Hegel, “the fable is as a enigma which would be always accompanied by its solution. ”

Even if the fable does not have any more the popularity which she knew, the diagram which makes the force of it finds in the fact various and the urban Légende.

The theatrical fable

For Aristote, the fable is one of the six elements of the Tragédie, with the characters, the song, elocution, the thought and the spectacle. The tragic fable is the sequence of the actions and the exposed facts, forming the narration. In other words, in the cinematographic language, the Scenario.

See too

Parabola
Tale

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