Linguistic pecularities of english-american fable

V.A. Harvey and H. Bergson distinguish some more features of fables[ 13; p.20]:

• Generalization of the meaning - the situations described in the fable can be applied in real life.
• The structure of the fable reflects the world sensation of the people who started to learn about the world.
• An action has a fable character only when it is said in it: act like this and all will be well.

To understand the fable correctly we should take into account the following points:

     First, it is not necessary that everything described in the fable has really happened. Moreover not all the actions described are good. The purpose of the fable consists not in exact transmission of an action, but in revelation of highest spiritual powers.

      Second, it is necessary to realize the purpose of the fable that can be understood from the circumstances that induced somebody to create it.

      Third, it shows that not all the details of the fable can be understood on the spiritual level.

      Fourth, notwithstanding this, except for the main idea, the fable can have the details that remind us about other truth or confirm itimpact [13;p.56-59].

 

The main characteristics of fables

Composition of the fable has three main elements: orientation, which contains the message about the idea of moral, complicating action-the main events which are described there, and the resolution with evaluation.

Let’s focuse on one of the features of fable - moral, that is combined with an element of humour (perhaps not laugh-out-loud but at least a small smirk at the foolish behaviour that is described). What fables do not do is supply us with a sentimental ending, or indeed much sentiment at all - losers are losers and little feeling is spared on them. The message is practical and frequently hard-hearted, force and cunning prevail and advantage is taken of the feeble. 

      The fable is composed of two parts, of which one may be termed the body and the other the soul. The body is the subject – matter of the fable and the soul is the morale.

Fables have been told to children for centuries. The majority of fables use animals that talk and they are usually used as a teaching tool. A fable's moral usually consists of a negative outcome for making the wrong decision. One easy way to create a fable with a moral is to think back into your own life lessons and put animals in the place of the humans involved.

    So, what is moral in the tales? It is something that you can learn from a story or experience [5; p.921] .

Moral is an indispensable element of  fables. Whenever it is present as a separate part of the text, it always comes in the form of a promotion. In the fables in which the moral is not an independent element it is included within the fable proper . The moral is a preceptorial voice, a statement of evaluative power and of mentorial function. It is usually expressed on the form of a proverb or as a direct advice to be followed [13; p.56-59].

         In more modern times however the fable has fallen out of favour, perhaps we prefer more subtle forms of teaching or dislike or simply disbelieve the morals.

Fable is one of the satirical and humorous kinds   of the literature, which  combines funny and serious  aspects of the tale, that is a symbiosis of humor and satire. In such a way, humor is another feature of the fable. In the text of the tales, depictions of animals are funny aspect, when throughtheir natural properties  social contentenlightens (human characters, the relationship between people). Immanent features of animals compare to human habits, behavior, manners and become  the object ofaesthetic evaluation as a result of human experience . Description of animals that talk and behave like people is a humorous part of the fable, and designing somenegative signs from the world of animals into the human worldis satiricalaspect. Thus, a person becomes the subject of something comic, although the last one  does not belong to its ontological properties.

    Alvin Schwartz, a folklorist and author, says ‘Humor is a slippery subject’. What makes one person laugh is quite different to another. What a person finds funny is influenced by many things: the historical period in which we live, cultural and social experiences, age, gender and their own unique personality.  

      In the English fables embodiment of the literal concept of comic is going through verbalization of its components (humor and satire), which are provided directly in the text because of linguistic and cognitive operations of the contrastive mapping. The last one facilitates separation of irony and sarcasm as the dominant means of objectifying  of comic tone,  that determine the features for the general image of the person , who is removed by reconstruction of conceptual system of the comic in the lyrics of English fables.

     J. Glavatska defines humorous and satirical kinds of irony, which are differentiated with the help of function (function of characterization and function of paradoxes), the manner and conditions of realization. Satire ceases to be a satire, if there are no components of humor. And on the contrary , it is typical for   humor to have  the  elements of satire, there is no objection, but  there is a criticism of something to be laughed  at.

Humorous irony – it is a kind of irony, that is the result of semantic lack of reasons, resulting from the contrast between the context of fables and direct meaning of the word or phrase, and is focused on the removal, elimination of defects, that are inherented for ambivalent and grotesque images of people. To implement the humorous irony the fallowing lexical and syntactic features are used: metaphor, simile, allusion, illogical use of phraseological units, hyperbole. Indicated type of irony depends on the linear context. 

Satirical irony is oriented on objectof ridicule, because there is a sense of annoyance, resentment, anger.   Satirical irony is characterized by: paronymy, repetitions, inversion, separate sentence, nominative sentence, antithesis, rhetorical figures and parcelation.

     Speaking about stylistic devises which are used in the fable, allegory takes the most important place. Allegory is a device used to present an idea, principle or meaning, which can be presented in literary form, such as a poem or novel, fable or fairytale, in musical form, such as composition or lyric, or in visual form, such as in painting or drawing. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric; a rhetorical allegory is a demonstrative form of representation conveying meaning other than the words that are spoken.

      As a literary device, an allegory in its most general sense is an extended metaphor. As an artistic device, an allegory is a visual symbolic representation.

      Analytical review of works, which are connected with the problem of studying the genre of fables, allowed penetrating in the ontological and epistemological nature of fables, to track a number of trends and changes in the development of English tales [21; p.9]

 

History of English and American fable

 

     One, of the earliest and most notable collections of animal fables is that of Aesop, who lived in the 60^th century BC. Aesop retold his fables orally, and they were transmitted in this manner for a long period. Greek and Roman writers subsequently wrote down versions of Aesop’s fables in their prose or verse.

       The best known early fable in English is the Nun’s Priest Tale in The Canterbury Tales by English poet Chaucer. Composed in the 1390s, the 626-line narrative poem is a beast fable and mock epic based on an incident in the Reynard cycle. The story of Chanticleer and the Fox became further popularised in Britain through this means.

The Nun's Priest’s Tale is a wonderfully crafted short story and beast fable that provides an excellent example of Chaucer’s vast learning and scholarship. The tale abounds with an impressive number of diverse scholastic references ranging from the Bible to Greek philosophy and from medieval medicine to theology. The Nun's Priest’s story of the cock and the fox is based on an Aesopian fable. Chaucer probably adapted the French ‘Roman de Renard’ by Marie de France and the German ‘Reinhart Fuchs’ for his beast fable. However Chaucer has made the tale more real and interesting. He also adds the characters of the widow and her daughters and places his story in their humble farmyard [37; p. 54].

The Nun's Priest’s Tale also speaks volumes for Chaucer’s skill as a craftsman and short story writer. Chaucer’s choice of the Nun's Priest for telling the tale is a brilliant stroke of luck. The tale is perfectly suited to its teller. The Nun's Priest is a religious man and is expected to be a man of vast learning and knowledge. His story is thus replete of learned allusions. The fable also has all the traditional ingredients of an exemplum that the Nun's Priest could preach. The reader can easily associate the Nun's Priest with the moral of his fable. The tale focuses attention upon the Nun's Priest himself and may be seen as a comment on his own position. Like Chaunticleer, the Nun's Priest too is ruled by women and evidently does not like it.

The Nun's Priest’s Tale is a mock epic and is absolutely hilarious because of the ridiculous disparity between the manner of writing and the subject matter. An epic is usually a long, narrative poem on a serious subject, narrated in a formal and elevated style. It is centered on a quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of an entire nation. The Nun's Priest’s Tale also has as its central character, a cock named Chaunticleer on whom nothing but his own life depends. Nonetheless it’s a long narrative poem and adopts various conventional features of the heroic poem. The setting of an epic is ample in scale. However Chaunticleer is owned by a widow and has a barnyard as his hall. The action of an epic involves superhuman deeds in battle such as Achilles’ feats in the Trojan War. However Chaunticleer’s plight is his being stalked and carried away by a fox, to be eaten as a meal. His journey takes him from the yard to the edge of a wood. Chaunticleer escapes by a reversal of Fortune. The fox had tricked Chaunticleer through flattery and he in turn tricks the fox. At the end of the tale both have learned survival strategies[32; p. 45].

     The tradition of the fable was continued in the 17^th and 18^th century, by John Dryden and John Gay.

      John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, and playwright. Besides being the greatest English poet of the later 17th century, Dryden wrote almost 30 tragedies, comedies, and dramatic operas. He also made a valuable contribution in his commentaries on poetry and drama, which are sufficiently extensive and original to entitle him to be considered, in the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson, as “the father of English criticism.” 

      The Fables were greatly admired throughout the 18th century, and their form and versification were imitated  many times."

      His last work for was” Fables , Ancient and Modern”  (1700), which were mainly verse adaptations from the works of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, andGiovanni Boccaccio, introduced with a critical preface.

     The book    “Fables, Ancient and Modern “, was published in March 1700, two months before the poet's death at the age of sixty-eight. The volume consists of tales or narrative episodes in verse translated from two classical poets (Homer and Ovid) and two medieval writers (Chaucer and Boccaccio), together with a number of ‘original’ poems, most notably the St Cecilia's Day ode, ‘Alexander's Feast’, for long Dryden's most celebrated single poem. Fables was widely believed for over a century after the poet's death to be Dryden's crowning achievement, and to constitute proof positive that he had been, in the words of his friend William Congreve, ‘an improving Writer to his last; improving even in Fire and Imagination, as well as in Judgement’. The volume was thought to have combined the vitality, daring, exuberance and unsentimental shrewdness of youth, with the sober wisdom, sympathy, and geniality of mellow maturity – a combination all the more remarkable in the light of the political disappointment and ill health under which Dryden had laboured during the period of its composition [28; p. 76].

      John Gay - English poet and dramatist, chiefly remembered as the author of “The Beggar’s Opera”, a work distinguished by good-humoured satire and technical assurance.Gay’s poetry was much influenced by that of Alexander Pope, who was a contemporary and close friend.

     “The Fables, Volume 1” consists of 50 fables. Among them :  “The Lion, the Tiger and the Philosopher”, “The Lady and the Wasp”, “The Lion, the Fox, and the Geese”,  “The Butterfly and the Snail”,   “The Two Monkeys “,  “The Owl and the Farmer”,  “The Hare and many Friends”,  “ The Man and the Flea “,  “The Court of Death”,  “ The Hound and the Huntsman” and others.

As a writer of Fables Gay stands preminent amongst English writers, as in all the history of literature only four names deserve special notice besides Gay ; these are

Esop, Phsedrus, Pilpay, and La Fontaine : and only two of these wrote in verse.

Gay wrote a second series of Fables, which were published after his death, in 1738; but, whereas the first series consisted of fifty fables, the second was only sixteen, one, "Ay and No," being subsequently added in later editions[13; p.231].

       Mary Howitt (12 March 1799 – 30 January 1888) was an English poet, and author of the famous poem “The Spider and the Fly”.

      Among her original works were “The Heir of West Way Ian” (1847). For three years she edited the Drawing-room Scrap Book, writing (among other articles that would be included therein) "Biographical Sketches of the Queens of England". She edited the Pictorial Calendar of the Seasons, translated Ennemoser's History of Magic, and took the chief share in The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe (1852). She also produced a Popular History of the United States (2 vols. 1859), and a three-volume novel called The Cost of Caergwyn (1864).

      Mary Howitt's poem the "Spider and the Fly" was originally published in 1829. When Lewis Carroll was readying Alice's Adventures Under Ground for publication, he replaced a parody he had made of a negro minstrel song with a parody of Mary's poem. The Lobster Quadrille, which is an important part of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is a parody of Mary's poem concerning a spider and a fly[34; p. 72].

      The use of the fable in the 20th century can be seen in James Thurber's “ Fables for Our Time” (1940) and in George Orwell's political allegory, “Animal Farm“(1945).

      James Grover Thurberwas born in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 1894.Uniquely among major American literary figures, he became equally well known for his simple, surrealistic drawings and cartoons and fables.

Thurber wrote over seventy-five fables, most of which were collected in Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956). These usually conformed to the fable genre to the extent that they were short, featured anthropomorphic animals as main characters, and ended with a moral as a tagline. An exception to this format was his most famous fable, "The Unicorn in the Garden", which featured an all-human cast except for the unicorn, which didn't speak. Thurber's fables were satirical in nature, and the morals served as punchlines rather than advice to the reader. His stories also included several book-length fairy tales, such as The White Deer (1945), The 13 Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957). The latter was one of several of Thurber's works illustrated by Marc Simont.

        In “Fables for Our Time” , Thurber the Moralist is in the ascendancy. The fables are imperishably illustrated, and are supplemented by Mr. Thurber's own pictorial interpretations of famous poems in a wonderful and joyous assemblage. This book includes such fables as:”Mouse who went to the country”, “Little girl and the wolf”, “Two turkeys”, “Tiger who understood people”, “Fairly intelligent fly”, “Lion who wanted to zoom”, “Very proper gander”, “Moth and the star”, “Shrike and the chipmunks”, “Seal who became famous” and others[33; p. 89].

       George Orwell - English novelist, essayist and critic, famous for his political satires” Animal Farm “ (1945), an anti-Soviet tale, and “Nineteen Eighty-Four”(1949), an attack on totalitarianism and the metric system, which shows that the destruction of language is an essential part of oppression.

       Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles “Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four”. The former is considered an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that “Animal Farm “ was a reference to Stalinism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist, but he remained to the end a man of the left and, in his own words, a 'democratic socialist'.  
Animal Farm is regarded as a successful blend of political satire and animal fable[25; p. 65].

       The American poet Marianne Moore wrote poems quite similar to fables in their use of animals and animal traits to comment on human experience; she also published an excellent translation of ” The Fables of La Fontaine” (1954).

        Marianne Moore was one of the most interesting poets writing in English in the 20th century. It is impossible to compare her with other poets, because she was so special - a fabler whose animals remain animals, a baseball fan, and a praiser of museum rarities, office furniture, scientists, and biblical characters. Her poetry embodies precise observation and language, syllabic meter and light rhyme, the flow of cultivated American talk, and unique forms. Her experimental method, however, served traditional values, for Moore was a moralist, aware herself that she was sometimes too didactic.

        In 1946 Moore began her long labor of translating “ LaFontaine's 

Fables”. Her “Collected Poems “appeared in 1951, and the following year she won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. She published her translation of “ The Fables of La Fontaine” in 1954. Like all creative translators, she had entered into the original, and at times one is conscious not so much of La Fontaine as of her wit, language, and imagery[38; p. 99]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part II. Means of actualizing irony in English-American fable of 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Satirical irony of English-American fables of 18 century

      In our investigation we rely on the classification of J.Glavatska. She distinguishes satirical and humorous irony.

      Satirical ironyis characterized by:

• Paronymy (the relationship between two or more words partly identical in form or meaning, which may cause confusion in reception or production:affect/effect ;  feminine/feminist).
• Repetitions (the act or process or an instance of repeating or being repeated:The teatcher thought and thought and thought).
• Inversion(putting the verb before the subject in a sentence: No sooner had he got into the bath than the phone rang).
• Separated sentences ( extraction  of one member of the sentence with the help of pronunciation and  intonation in speaking, and  in writing by commas from both sides : This lady, slim and tall, does not  leave my thoughts).
• Nominative sentence (composite nominative sentences:What a picture! ).
• Antithesis( the rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangements of words, clauses, or sentences :action, not words;  they promised freedom and provided slavery).
• Rhetorical questions ( any question asked for a purpose other than to obtain the information the question asks:Why me, God?!).
• Parcelation (separation of the sentenceswith the help of intonation to pay the reader’s attention: So, we should be ready. We leave soon. Almost now).

       As a result of quantitative analysis of the English and American fables of 18^th century, the following datas had been fouded:

 

 

Repetitions :

It is the key of thehouse, in the house is a cat, the cat has a rat[3; p.45];  

Ring-a-ding-dill, ring-a-ding-dill [3; p. 45];

Who knows--who knows what Heaven designs [3; p.342];

Tis the necessity of trade-necessity is no transgression[ 3; p. 342];

Whilst there is life,there's hope![3; p. 342];

Shestarts, she stops, she pants for breath,she hears the near advance of death[4; p. 684];

"Ha! ha! my good friend, are you there? There you may be! [15; p. 113];

Brer Rabbit laughed and laughed and laughed, but he made sure he kept out of Brer Fox's way for some time afterwards[14; p.129];

"Stick! Stick! Beatdog! Dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile and I shan't get home to-night [14; p. 139];

Fire! Fire! Burnstick; stick won't beatdog;dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile and I shan't get home to-night." But the fire wouldn't[14; p.139];

Water! Water! Quenchfire; fire won't burn stick; stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile and I shan't get home to-night." But the water wouldn't [14; p. 139];

Such forward airs, so pert, so smart, were sure to win his lady's heart; Each little mischief gained him praise; so pretty were his fawning ways![14; p.129];

One night several wolves were killed in earthquake and this was blamed on the rabbits/ On another night one of the wolves was killed by a bolt of lightning and this was also blamed on the rabbits/ This was blamed on the rabbits , for it is well known that carrot –nibblers with long ears cause floods[14; p.152];

For that was it! Ignorant of the long and stealthy march of passion, and of the state to which it had reduced Fleur; ignorant of how Soames had watched her, ignorant of Fleur’s reckless desperation … – ignorant of all this, everybody felt aggrieved [9; p. 451].

Paronymy:

One small step for a man, one giant leap for allmankind[3; p.185];

Dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile and I shan't get home to-night [14; p. 139];

But how can finite grasp infinity?[2; p. 329];

name-flame/depend-friend/dawn-lawn/sounds-hounds/ heart-apart [5; 342];

On my track, let me refuge on your back [5; p. 343];

Then she implored the stately bull, his answer we relate in full / “ Madam, each beast alive can tell how very much I wish you well”/ But business presses in a heap, I am appointment have to keep [5; p. 345]

People of talents, sure, should thrive,And not be buried thus alive [5;p.321];

Believe a friend, and take my word,This jaunt of yours is quite absurd[5; p. 321];

Go to your froggery again;In your own element remain[5; p. 321];