Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History

174 Pages·1991·1.8 MB·English

by  Annabel Patterson

Fables of Power
■ Post-Contemporary
Interventions
Series editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson
Fables of Power
AESOPIAN WRITING AND POLITICAL HISTORY
■ Annabel Patterson
Duke University Press Durham & London 1991
© 1991
Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last page of
this book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Aesop’s Life: Fathering the Fable
2 Fables of Power: The Sixteenth Century
3 “The Fable Is Inverted”: 1628–1700
4 Body Fables
5 “The World Is Chang’d”: 1700–2000
Postscript
Notes
■ Acknowledgments
Gratitude points first to the Rockefeller Foundation, at whose Study Center in
Bellagio I was a guest when this book was assembled, in idyllic circumstances.
It was also facilitated by a semester’s sabbatical leave from Duke University.
Individuals who have contributed to it include Arthur Kinney, Gary Waller, and
Gail Paster, each of whom made valuable suggestions and helped me to place
my cards more squarely on the table; Dr. Josef Jařab, Barbara Herrnstein Smith,
and Charles Williams, who supplied references I might not have found; Terri
Clerico and Phillip Wegner, for valuable practical assistance; and Kevin Sharpe
and Steven Zwicker, who not only permitted me to reprint from The Politics of
Discourse my first essay on the politics of the fable, but provided the incentive
to write it. Finally, I am grateful to my children, for being children no longer,
and to my husband, Lee Patterson, whose Bellagio fellowship I was lucky to
share as his spouse. Our manuscripts grew side by side on identical laptops and
were finished together in congenial collaboration.
■ Introduction
It was prettily devised of Aesop; “The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot
wheel, and said, ‘What a dust do I raise?’”
—Bacon: “Of Vain-Glory”
Quoting Sir Francis Bacon quoting “Aesop” quoting a fly,1 I admit that this
project, though not actually making much of little, may be thought to do so.
Whenever during its development its subject has been mentioned in casual
conversation, it has met with some incredulity. Everybody has been, since
childhood, familiar with Aesop’s fables, and almost everyone, consequently,
believes them to be children’s literature. As Marcel Gutwirth put it,
“pedagogical practice did more than its bit in creating an indissoluble bond
between our notion of childhood and our notion of fable,” the latter now
commonly thought of as “a place where the archaic and the puerile meet.”2 In
fact, the fable’s use in elementary pedagogy was only one branch of the
educational practice initiated by the Renaissance humanists who recovered the
great texts of classical antiquity and made them the staples of early modern
philology and rhetoric. And long after the boys of the sixteenth century had been
taught what they could learn from the fable as a form—grammar, the essentials
of narrative fiction, the relation between moral and exemplar—they were
reading and rewriting fables for their adult sagacity and cogent, real-world
applicability.
This book describes the Aesopian fable as a hitherto underestimated function
in Renaissance culture and subsequently. Partly thanks to their traditions of
origin—how fables came to be written, by whom, and why—traditions which
(whether or not they believed them) were deeply interesting to sixteenth-and
seventeenth-century readers, the stories of the beasts, the birds, the trees, and the
insects quickly acquired or recovered their function as a medium of political
analysis and communication, especially in the form of a communication from or
on behalf of the politically powerless. As Lydgate had put it for the late middle
ages: