A fable is literary genre that is usually very short and epigrammatic in nature, revealing by story’s end an instructive moral. The most famous writer of fables is Aesop, of course, and so successful was he that very few writers even attempt to take up the challenge of adding to the substantial canon attributed to him. Certainly the lack of fables is not due to the lack of a need for moral lessons. A fable’s character can include animals as well as humans, as well as gods or objects. The most common fables, however, usually take animals as their subjects by anthropomorphizing them so that they speak and otherwise behave like people. The use of animals in fables makes sense because animals are instinctual creatures not given to moral relativism; they do what they do and there is little room for gray. This black and white approach to morality stands as another reason for the decline in popularity of the fable. Animals are also utilized because their behavior is easily stereotyped. Ants are prodigious workers and therefore they work much better than the comparably lazy human being to instill a moral about hard work. Turtles are slow and steady, whereas hares are fast but all over the place so they are the perfect animals with which to draw a moral about keeping your eye on the prize.
That Aesop to whom the most famous fables are attributed was actually a Greek slave who lived in the 6th Century BC. All subsequent efforts at writing fables have had the specter of Aesop hanging over them, but in fact there have been a number of famous writers in his wake who have been quite successful in taking up the Greek slave’s mantle. A French writer named Jean de la Fontaine, for instance, wrote a series of wildly popular fables in very witty poetic form during the 17th century. Beatrix Potter and George Orwell also tried their hands at writing fables with Orwell, as you might expect, lending his tales a certain tough satiric flair that is not found in most others. And, of course, Oscar Wilde produced some fables as well. As well as these famous authors, there is a strong sense of the fable to be found in traditional Native American folk tales.
The 20th century Modernist movement saw the explosion of many traditional literary conventions that were based on widely accepted views toward absolutist morality. The Modernist movement cut a swatch through many of the most cherished beliefs, chief among the idea that moral precepts could be applied in all situations. As a result the moral linchpin upon fables became an object of parody and satire itself. Perhaps the most famous parodies of fables in American history were those found in the Aesop & Son segment on the 1960s animated show starring Rocky and Bullwinkle. In these parodies, Aesop is trying to teach his son a moral lesson, but the son subverts the intended moral with an alternative one of his own. Postmodernism has co-opted the fable as it exists today through similar subversion to reveal the inherent flaws in attempting to impose an absolutist sense of morality in a complicated world.
Oh, and by the way, the technical term for someone who writes fables is fabulist. Someone who writes fables incredibly well would be called, of course, a fantastic fabulist.
