The Tortoise & the Easter Bunny ?

 
A Brief History of Fables 
From Aesop to Flash Fiction. 
Lee Rourke.    

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“For in the beginning of Literature is the myth, and in the end as well.” Jorge Luis Borges.

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In the introduction to this book it states that it is “a brief history of fables and, in particular, their literary influence in popular culture throughout the ages”  and that  as part of the brief histories series, Lee Rourke has set out to “briefly chart the popular Aesopic fable’s literary heritage” as he, the writer, sees it, taking as his starting point “ Aesop’s ancient oral and mimetic roots, to its myriad stylistic and symbolic influences in the burgeoning age of flash fiction and the internet”

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Aesop’s  life is like Homer’s, obscured by myth & rumour, what is known would make a fantastic tale of it’s own. Thought to have been born around 620 BC and rising from slave to become a courtier  to the King of Babylon, famous throughout the land for his great wit as a speaker and storyteller. His fables were used as common currency, passing from individual to individual & country to country, becoming the moral and philosophical guidance of the people. This didn’t last as Aesop offended the citizens of Delphi so much that they decided to kill him, first by framing him, they then executed him by chucking him off a cliff, although this came back on them, as they were met with a series of awful calamities, that at the time were recorded as “the blood of Aesop”.
After this event a statue was erected in Athens, to honour him, sculpted by one of the  foremost artists of this period (Lysippus), an event recorded by Phaedrus in verse

“The Athenians erected a large statue of Aesop, and placed him, though a slave, on a lasting pedestal, to show that the way to honour lies open indifferently to all.”

(Phaedrus, Thrace of Macedonia {trans unknown})

At the time of his death, Aesop’s fables were so thoroughly embedded in both Greek and Roman society, that his influence can be seen in the works of Plato & Socrates, in fact Lee Rourke goes on to state that we can place Aesop in a contrasting relationship to the likes of Socrates, placing Aesop in the role of the “first real public anti-hero & as an anti-philosopher par excellence” stating that where  Socrates went on to preach the mantra “Know Thyself” it was Aesop who first preached the contrary philosophy of “No”,  posing the question of what can we really know, or if we have any real knowledge of our own, this he did through his use of analogy (an important tool in the history of Philosophy) for example:

 This tale from the “Life of Aesop” of when his master sends him to inspect the baths. 


“While Aesop is on his way there, he runs into a government official, who asks Aesop where he is going. Aesop says simply, “I don’t know.” This infuriates the official, who insists on knowing where Aesop is going. Aesop still refuses to answer the question, saying only, “I don’t know.” The official, completely enraged, orders that Aesop be arrested and taken to jail. At this point, Aesop explains: “You see that my answer was correct; I did not know that I was going to jail!” The government official is so startled by Aesop’s display of wisdom that he lets him go.”

In this one analogy Aesop turns around the  famous motto* of “Know Thyself” and replaces it with the motto of  “I don’t know!” and thus escaping the philosophical trap of supposing to understand all, replacing it with the idea that  “For all our plans and purposes, do we really know where we are going…?”.


This motto is just one of the strands that “A Brief History of Fables”  unpicks, as it traces the route these tales have taking us on, tracking them through their various translations (whether cultural, language or religious), from the Greek and Roman world through the cultures of Islam, Judaism & Christianity,  through writers such as Phaedrus, Plutarch, Marie De France, and onto Rumi **, William Caxton, Franz Kafka , Samuel Beckett ,James Joyce &  Jorge Luis Borges right up to the present day.


This brings us to the second part of the title “Flash Fiction”, and this is where Lee Rourke, ties all his strands together by stating  that “It seems to me that in flash fiction we have come full circle and, once again , in one of our most modern forms of literature, the oldest of influences looms large – enlivening it in a modern context”.  He goes on to cite the work of writers such as Tania Hershman, Shane Jones, Blake Butler & Joseph Young demonstrating how their  microfictions distillate the essence of Aesop & how in their linguistic & mythic properties we can  trace this process back to the original fables, here’s one from Joseph Young’s collection  of 86 microfictions, Easter Rabbit


Diction

“It was easy to hear the word that turned through the table. It could sound like death, or listen! or ridicule, but it caught at the throat and stuck. The other words, those at the spiked green corners of her eyes or the bittersweet planes of his mouth, were pregnant with it, its sons and daughters. They’d labor on, these people, without fruit it seemed, though in fact the table was in the blossom of it.”                                                                      (Easter Rabbit, Joseph Young – Publishing Genius Press)

By focusing on the works of these present day writers he shows where & how Aesop & his fables  have surfaced time & time again, from Aesop’s tortoise and hare, via Plato’s socio-political works and the later ribald medieval tales, to Kafka’s anthropomorphism, to present-day authors work, such as Blake Butler’s “Scorch Atlas”, Shane Jones’s “Light Boxes” or Joseph Young’s “Easter Rabbit”.  A Brief History of Fables offers a bold take on the new face of literature. I’ll leave the last word to the Author, Lee Rourke:

“This book is in no way an instruction manual. Nor is it a work of critical theory. It is a celebration of a particular history of literary communication in all its glorious phases, a celebration of literature and one of its myriad interpolations. And finally, if that doesn’t grab you, just think of it as a signpost to another world: a wonderful, fabulous, mindbogglingly brilliant world of infinite possibilities.”

Lee Rourke
Lee Rourke(Wiki)
Lee Rourke’s Top 5 Modern Post-Fabulists:



*attributed to Socrates, Pythagoras, and Thales (amongst others).


** Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī)13th-century Persian, Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Rumi is a descriptive name meaning "Roman" since he lived most of his life in an area called "Rûm" (then under the control of Seljuq dynasty) because it was once ruled by the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Car Thief–Theodore Weesner.

Buick Riviera. The Buick, coppertone, white sidewalls, was the model of the year, a '59, although the 1960 models were already out. Its upholstery was black, its windshield was tinted a thin color of motor oil. The car's heater was issuing a stale and odorous warmth, but Alex remained chilled. He had walked several blocks through snow and slush, wearing neither hat nor gloves nor boots, to where he had left the car the night before. The steering wheel was icy in his hands, and he felt icy within, throughout his veins and bones. Alex was sixteen; the Buick was his fourteenth car.

This is our introduction to the hero of this book, although in reality this sixteen year old boy is less rebel without a cause, more lost without a compass bearing. Alex has no understanding of why he steals cars beyond a restlessness, an ache for something different than the life he has.

 

“Billy don't like it living here in this town
He says traps have been sprung long before he was born
He says "hope bites the dust behind all the closed doors
And pus and grime ooze from its scab-crusted sores
There's screaming and crying in the high-rise blocks"
It's a rat trap, Billy, but you're already caught
And you can make it if you want to or you need it bad enough
You're young and good-looking and you're acting kind of tough
Anyway it's Saturday night, time to see what's going down
Put on a bright suit, Billy, head for the right side of town
It's only eight o'clock, but you're already bored
You don't know what it is, but there's got to be more
You'd better find a way out, hey, kick down that door
It's a rat trap, and you've been caught” *

Alex Housman is intelligent, yet school holds no interest for him, he lives with his father in a part of town that, if he had friends, he would be to ashamed to take them. His father has moments of sobriety between his alcoholic normality whilst still holding down a job working the second shift at the local Chevy plant. Alex spends an awful amount of time by himself, struggling with feelings that bubble & boil just below the surface, or else he buries them behind the wheel of a stolen car. The inevitable happens and he is arrested, as both Alex and reader knew he would be. Taken to a detention home, he finds himself locked up with no idea of a release date. Confined, with no way to escape or hide from himself, forces Alex to confront his feelings & acts as a catalyst. We follow Alex as he faces this moment and the issues that arise from it, until an event both horrific & yet ultimately freeing sends him off on a path that will define his life.

The car thief is a blunt & harsh tale of one individual trapped in a world not of their own making, with seemingly no way out. The writing has a simplicity that allows all the intensity of Alex’s life  to be laid bare without any unnecessary embellishment. This is a tale that appears devoid of hope and yet a slight glimmer shines and in grasping that we can see there are possibilities of a future. Having read Theodore Weesner’s biography, made me realise that this is a work of autofiction & it takes quite a chunk of his youth as the basis of the tale. This isn’t meant as a slight on the book, just a relevant observation.

Theodore Weesner’ born in Flint, Michigan, is aptly described as a “Writers’ Writer” by the larger literary community.  His short works have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly and Best American Short Stories.  His novels, including The True Detective, Winning the City and Harbor Light, have been published to great critical acclaim in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, Boston Magazine and The Los Angeles Times to name a few.

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Weesner is currently writing his memoir, two new novels and an adaptation of his widely praised novel—retitled Winning the City Redux—also to be published by Astor + Blue Editions.  He lives and works in Portsmouth, NH.

*This is part of a single called Rat Trap  written by Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats, it reached #1 in the UK singles charts in November 1978 and tells the tale of a boy who feels trapped by where & how he lives.

Rat Trap - Boomtown Rats (You Tube)

 

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Across the Land and the Water–W.G. Sebald.

Selected Poems

1964 – 2001.

Unlike a lot of people whose introduction to the writing of W.G. Sebald was through books such as Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, or Vertigo, mine was through the Micropoems in Unrecounted, a slim volume of thirty three poems, with accompanying lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp. So when I saw this Selected poems at NetGalley my curiosity was piqued and I requested it wondering whether without the pictures the poetry featured would be as hermetic or whether the act of trying to match the image with the poem was the lock that forbade admittance.

Published a decade after his death, this anthology pulls together poetry from various periods of his life. Stretching over 37 years it contains poems from two early collections Poemtrees and School Latin, these are followed by his later writing Across the Land and the Water and The Year Before Last ending with the appendix containing two poems Sebald wrote in English, making this a wonderful addition to any Sebald completist’s library.

If, on the rare occasion, I get to interview someone who writes novels & poetry, one of my default questions is how they perceive themselves, a poet who turned to fiction, or  as a novelist first. This question seems to me relevant when dealing with the work of this writer & better still seems to have been answered by Iain Galbraith (translator notes), who writes -  Sebald once stated that “My medium is prose”, a statement that is easily misconstrued, if it wasn’t for the subtle distinction added by this writer “Not the Novel”, in fact Galbraith goes on to say that “ far from disavowing his fondness for the poetic form, it is through it that we can begin to sense the poetic consistency that permeates his literary prose and also of his writing as a whole.” This makes sense as many of the themes ( borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend etc.), that would be recognised in his later acclaimed work feature in those early poems.

Epitaph.

On duty

on a stretch in the alpine foothills

the railway clerk considers the essence

of the tear-off calendar.

 

with bowed back

Rosary Hour 

waits outside

for admittance to the house

The clerk knows:

he must take home

this interval

without delay.

(from Poemtrees)

 

That’s not to say, that this collection doesn’t stand up on its own, anyone without knowledge of this writers oeuvre, will still find this a fascinating read, will like myself try to prise understanding from the words written, unlike the epic quality of his later prose work, a lot of the poems are sparse and compressed, they allude to places and by association events, things, people, although the later ones seem  to loosen up, unwind slightly, it’s merely by degrees. As I said in “Unrecounted” you're making  connections, trying to find routes into its dialogue, but this is ideolectic, the patterns here are those of an individual, there are probably reference points, but like all reference points, they act as signposts to something - not the thing itself.

At the edge

Of it’s vision

the dog still sees

everything as it was

in the beginning.

(from the year before last)

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. He taught at the University of  East Anglia, Norwich, England for thirty years becoming  professor of European literature in 1987 and from 89 – 94 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.

The Whispering Muse by Sjon.

Myth or Mythos, From the Ancient Greek μῦθος (muthos, “report”, “tale”, “story”)

A story or set of stories relevant to or having a significant truth or meaning for a particular culture, religion, society, or other group.

Anything delivered by word of mouth: a word, speech, conversation, or similar; a story, tale, or legend, especially a poetic tale.

A tale, story, or narrative, usually verbally transmitted, or otherwise recorded into the written form from an alleged secondary source.

The interrelationship of value structures and historical experiences of a people, usually given expression through the arts.

 

The year is 1949, the year Iceland joined NATO, sparking off what is arguably Iceland’s most famous riot in March of this year. The riot was prompted by the decision of Althingi, the Icelandic parliament, to join the newly formed NATO, thereby involving Iceland directly in the Cold War, opposing the Soviet Union and re-militarizing the country. All this appears to have bypassed the hero of Sjon’s book The Whispering Muse, the self obsessed eccentric Valdimar Haraldsson, who has little regard for his fellow countrymen and whose thoughts are elsewhere because, also in March of this year, Haraldsson received a letter inviting him to join a Danish merchant ship on its way to the Black Sea. Haraldsson has been invited on this voyage because of his promotion of the idea that the predominantly fish diet of the Nordic race has led to their superiority, an idea he shared with the recently deceased son of the Danish shipping line owner, Haraldsson is a solitary man obsessed with this ideal and who has spent his life writing his journal Fisk og Kultur with aim of  recording this perceived superiority.

Every evening on board the ship, everyone gathers round the captains table and one member of the crew regales them with tales of his adventures and exploits as a member of the crew of the legendary Argo.

This crewmember, claims to be Caeneus, who according to Greek mythology was originally a beautiful maiden named Caenis and was raped by Poseidon, who then promised to grant her anything she wished; she wished to become a man, so that nothing like this could ever happen to her again. Poseidon granted her wish, and in addition, made her/him invulnerable to all weapons. At the wedding of Pirithous, when fighting broke out between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, Caeneus slew many of the Centaurs but remained unharmed himself. The Centaurs tried in vain to kill him. Finally a mob of Centaurs began piling pine trees upon him, because they could not kill him, but Caeneus changed again and he flew away as a bird.

We learn this & much more as each evening Caeneus enthralls his fellow travellers, starting every tale by removing a piece of wood, a splinter from the bow of the Argo and holding it to his ear appearing to listen to its whisperings, then the telling unfolds as Caeneus entwines both Greek and Scandinavian mythology into his own story. Each evening he holds the passengers in the palm of his hand as he unfolds the tale of Jason and his heroes, of himself.

Mythos = anything delivered by word of mouth: a word, speech, conversation, or similar; a story, tale, or legend, especially a poetic tale, is an apt description of this fantastic (with all its meanings) yarn. Sjon’s fiction trawls the world of myth and fable, gaily highlighting the absurdity and surrealism inherent within the genres. He has the ability to astonish with his storytelling and yet the language is precise, appearing to be pared back to the marrow with nothing extraneous or out of place. This is the second book of Sjon’s I have read and I’m amazed how he can create a world that is, at the same point on the page, both totally believable and yet is also hallucinatory, grotesque, phantasmagorical and fabulous, this is a writer I want to know more about.

Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson (Sjón) was born in Reykjavik in 1962,. His pen name is formed from his given name (Sigurjón), and means 'Sight'. Poet, novelist and playwright, he has received numerous literary awards, including the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for The Blue Fox, which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009, as was From The Mouth of the Whale in 2012. He was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Brit Award for the music, which he collaborated on with Bjork, for Dancer In The Dark. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages, his works include numerous books of poetry, prose and even children's novels.

This book shares the same translator Victoria Cribb , as the previous two mentioned, Victoria works as a freelance translator from Icelandic to English. She has an MA in Icelandic and Scandinavian Studies from UCL, a BPhil in Icelandic from the University of Iceland, and lived and worked in Iceland for a number of years as a publisher, journalist and translator. In a review of From the mouth of the Whale featured in the Guardian, AS Byatt wrote: 'Sjón is an extraordinary and original writer. And his translator, Victoria Cribb, is also extraordinary in her rendering of the roughness and the elegance, the clarity and the oddity of this splendid book.'  This I believe also holds true for this one.

 

"In many respects, Sjon's oeuvre constitutes a novelty in Icelandic literature. The way in which Sjon employs international culture, myth, literature, and popular culture is unique, as is the breadth of his scope of reference. The narratives are enriched by light and humorous touches, which allow him to work pliably with what would otherwise seem obscure matters."
(Eysteinsson and Dagsdottir, p. 452, A History of Icelandic Literature, U of Nebraska Press, 2006)

 

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