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Yu-yen: Classical Chinese Fables
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17042 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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Date : |
8 / 1990 |
4,844 Words |
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Pack Carnes
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The fable as we know it is Greek. The form of the fable that is recognized as "Aesopic" is an inherited genre from Greco Roman models with its fairly recently evolved but now standard form of narrative and epimythium, or moral tag line at the end.
This model is not, strictly speaking, classical, as it was only during the many centuries of writing and rewriting the same motifs over and over again in the Middle Ages that the final form of narrative and epimythium became the standard form. The fable lived on for millennia after having been established as a fairly distinct rhetorical device and later a literary genre of its own, and it extends into our day.
But there are fables to be found elsewhere, and some were considerably earlier than those associated with the Aesopic form. The Sumerian fable, for example, would have been at least as old to Aesop as Aesop's fables are to us. The Babylonians inherited a great deal of material from the Sumerians, and their descendants carried on a similar tradition for centuries before and after Aesop. And there are indications of other fable traditions that might be as old as the Babylonian fables. All these may well be interconnected and borrowed in part, but the idea of fable seems to have occurred to a small number of peoples perhaps quite independently. A few cultures have developed fables all on their own, or in analogy with other cultures. The Chinese equivalent is the yu-yen. Yu-yen ("lodged words") denotes allegory, metaphor, or fable and is also used to cover certain anecdotes and other forms. The Yu-yen is found in all periods of Chinese literary history, but the form especially flourished during the fifth to the third century B.C. The classical forms have always been very popular and have been anthologized in various collections through the centuries. Today virtually all Chinese share some of the motifs from these fables as part of their common cultural package, just as, say, most Europeans have a number of Aesopic fables in theirs.
The fables of China, too, are from an altogether separate tradition. The form and the function in part, however, is remarkably similar to the Greco-Latin fable. They are very short, with a single motif, and demonstrate some sort of application through their paranaeic (didactic) or sententious content. Like the Greek fable in the western tradition, few are animal tales. (The modern "Western" fable has retained very few fables from the many hundred of fables of the classical tradition, and the fact that most of these are animal and plant fables is an artifact of survival). Like the Greek form, there is generally no specific moral spelled out for the reader. The application of the fable ought to be understood whenever it is used as a rhetorical device; otherwise, it is simply not a very well-constructed fable. Many classical fables are connected with famous schools of Chinese philosophy, but it is clear that many originated in the people's oral tradition and are re-circulated. That might well explain why some of these have exact counterparts among the Greek and earlier fables. One of the Chinese fable complexes is "The Goat in the Tiger's Skin," in which the goat could not forget that he was, after all, only a goat:
A goat found a tiger's skin and hid it away. As winter came, the goat was so cold he could not stand it another minute and got out the tiger's skin and put it on. He was as warm as could be and happily ran back and forth over the mountains where he lived, behaving as fearless as a tiger. He saw another skin dropped by a
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