Animal Thinking in La Fontaine’s Fables 31 prioritizes human concerns. 21 This work of sympathetic imagination contributes to the Fables not just the idea that humans might pity animal suffering or that animals fall within the sphere of human moral concern, but also the idea that humans betray their own humanity in their relations with animals. 22 While the fable in Book X L’Homme et la couleuvre is in some respects a reprise of Le Loup et l’agneau, this time the power relation analyzed in the apologue is framed in terms of relations between human and animal species. At the outset, the poet himself insinuates that the common attributions of perversity and ingratitude to the snake are anthropocentric projections: “l’animal pervers / (C’est le serpent que je veux dire / Et non l’homme: on pourrait aisément s’y tromper)” (4-6). However, it is above all the snake’s judgment on human affairs in its address to its human captor that pinpoints the self-interestedness and cruelty informing human conceptions of justice as far as animals are concerned: “ta justice, / C’est ton utilité, ton plaisir, ton caprice” (20-21). As in Le Loup et l’agneau the fable shows man to be a wolf, but this time with respect to other animals. At the conclusion of the fable, after enduring the adverse judgments of the cow, the ox and the tree, the human figure in the poem resorts to violence to settle a dispute with his animal interlocutors that he can no longer win in the court of reason: “L’Homme trouvant mauvais que l’on l’eût convaincu / Voulut à toute force avoir cause gagnée.” (79-80). It is true that the fable’s moral suggests that it may be taken as a symbolic reflection on hierarchy and power relations between humans: “On en use ainsi chez les grands. / La raison les offense; ils se mettent en tête / Que tout est né pour eux, quadrupèdes, et gens, / Et serpents.” (84-87). Once again, the author’s discursive voice seems to intervene in order to control and limit the implications of the fiction. Nonetheless, unlike those in which both exploiter and exploited appear in animal 21 Maya Slater notes that such texts portray a La Fontaine “champion of his animal creations, and critic of man” (109), although Slater usually emphasizes the anthropocentric qualities of the Fables: “The poet stresses the fact that his numerous animal characters exist primarily to make points about human beings, not about their own species” (97). 22 Such a testimony is arguably even present in the text of the Discours à Madame de La Sablière itself, in which the internal passage from discursive reasoning to poetic examples of animal thought and behavior, rather than the usually celebrated Gassendianism, might point to where the work is most provocative and original. Although La Fontaine’s characterization of the ruses of the stag as “dignes des plus grands chefs, dignes d’un meilleur sort! ” indicates that the poet’s plea for compassion is based on its resemblance to a human figure, the subsequent verse “On le déchire après sa mort” (80) clearly links the spectacle of animal suffering to an awareness of human injustice. Andrew Billing 32 form the presence of a human figure in the fable as well as the inclusion of quadrupeds and serpents in the ranks of the exploited mean that the text’s allegorical sense cannot be limited to exclusively human relations. The critique of the injustice of the human treatment of animals remains, along with the suggestion, perhaps, that the privileged defend their exploitation and domination of their fellow humans by means of their figurative animalization. La Perdrix et les coqs is another fable from Book X whose text resists a purely allegorical or anthropocentric reading. Although the fable’s naturalistic quality has often been noted, 23 La Fontaine also links its observation of the relations between animal species to the theme of human cruelty. The female partridge pecked mercilessly by the roosters excuses the behavior of the latter—“Ce sont leurs mœurs, dit-elle, / Ne les accusons point”—since this aggressivity is ingrained in their nature, and “Il est des naturels de Coqs et de Perdrix” (14-18). Instead, she assigns responsibility to the human master who insists on housing both species in the same enclosure: Le maître de ces lieux en ordonne autrement Il nous prend avec des tonnelles, Nous loge avec des Coqs, et nous coupe les ailes: C’est de l’homme qu’il faut se plaindre seulement (21-24). A similar reflexion on human cruelty and animal natures appears in another fable in the same collection, Le Loup et les bergers (X, 5). The fable begins with the mise en scène of another animal reasoner, here a “loup rempli d’humanité” (1), although unlike the thinking beast in the Discours à Madame de La Sablière who “ne réfléchirait / Sur l’objet ni sur sa pensée” this wolf notably proves capable of self-awareness via a “réflexion profonde” on his own cruelty “[q]uoiqu’il ne l’exerçat que par nécessité” (4-5). Moreover, La Fontaine’s ironic attribution of “humanity” to the wolf should not be allowed to mask the serious point that the fable constitutes a critique not only of the bad faith of human judgments on animals but also of what the poet describes in his own voice at the end of the fable as a war of species: Est-il dit qu’on nous voie Faire festin de toute proie, Manger les animaux, et nous les réduirons Aux mets de l’âge d’or autant que nous pourrons? Ils n’auront ni croc ni marmite? (34-38) 23 See for example Russell Ganim, “Scientific Verses,” p. 109. Animal Thinking in La Fontaine’s Fables 33 The rhetorical “est-il dit” points to what has in fact, here and now, become a “dire,” a discursive statement on a form of human ethical blindness which in this example condemns the necessary predations of the carnivorous wolf but is unable to recognize and avow its own aggressive and gluttonous meat-eating. The sympathetic identification with an animal point of view we have noted in the apologues in late fables such as L’Homme et la couleuvre is now fully assumed in the moral. As La Fontaine concludes, in a statement that repeats the themes of Le Loup et l’agneau but that this time allows for no ambiguity in its targeting of human attitudes towards nonhuman creatures: “le loup n’a tort / Que quand il n’est pas le plus fort” (39- 40). 24 In these late texts, a space opens up in the Fables, in the apologues and then increasingly in the morals, as a consequence of an apparently growing curiosity about animals in their diversity as non-human others. Beyond any new naturalism, this curiosity is reflected in an increasing recognition of the possibility of an animal point of view on the world of human affairs. In these poems, La Fontaine’s animals are neither simply figures for humans, humanized animals or animalized men, but instead elements in a literary discourse that however fleetingly entertains the possibility of a “point de vue des bêtes.” Certainly, this discourse is a “speaking-for,” a discourse that positions itself in the place of the animal, just as the speaking animals who condemn human hypocrisies and cruelty clearly retain anthropomorphic traits. Yet to speak, however clumsily, for an other who is inarticulate does not necessarily entail the betrayal of its interests. Furthermore, to imagine the value of such a gesture presupposes the realization that that other has an ethical claim, predicated on its possession of awareness and sensibility. There is a sense in which the animal is no longer simply instrumentalized here, or, in the terms of the snake in L’Homme et la couleuvre, a servant for human utility, pleasure, or caprice. In producing a “dire,” in giving voice to an animal point of view on the human, La Fontaine in his later fables both begins to elaborate a reflection on human rights and duties with respect to animals, and recognizes and records a literary response to an elusive but insistent animal subjectivity. 24 See also Le Chien a qui on a coupé les oreilles (X, 8), in which the mutilated dog apostrophizes man: “O rois des animaux, ou plutôt leurs tyrans, / Qui vous ferait choses pareilles? ” (5-6). It is true that similar themes appear occasionally in the earlier fables, although without the same emphasis on human cruelty. See Le Cheval s’étant voulu venger du cerf (IV, 13): “De tout temps les Chevaux ne sont nés pour les hommes. / Lorsque le genre humain de gland se contentait, / Ane, Cheval, et Mule, aux forêts habitait” (1-3). Andrew Billing 34 Works Cited Burgat, Florence. Animal, mon prochain. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997. Cohen, Sarah. “Animal Performance in Oudry’s Illustrations to the Fables of La Fontaine.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39.1 (2010): 35-76. Calder, Andrew. The Fables of La Fontaine: Wisdom Brought Down to Earth. Droz: Geneva, 2001. Collinet, Jean-Pierre. Le Monde littéraire de La Fontaine. Paris: P.U.F., 1970. Dandrey, Patrick. La Fabrique des Fables: essai sur la poétique de La Fontaine. Paris: Klincksieck, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. “L’Animal que donc je suis (à suivre).” L’Animal autobiographique: autour de Jacques Derrida. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Paris: Galilée, 1999. 251- 301. — L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilee, 2006. — Séminaire: La bête et le souverain. Volume I (2001-2002). Paris: Galilée, 2008. — Séminaire: La bête et le souverain. Volume II (2002-2003). Paris: Galilée, 2009. Descartes, René. Discours de la méthode. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Fontenay, Elizabeth de. Le Silence des bêtes: la philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Ganim, Russell. “Scientific Verses: Subversion of Cartesian Theory and Practice in the ‘Discours à Madame de La Sablière’.” Refiguring La Fontaine: Tercentenary Essays. Ed. Anne L. Birberick. Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 1996. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2007. La Fontaine, Jean de. Fables. Ed. Alain-Marie Bassy. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Lawlor, Leonard. This is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Lestel, Dominique. Les Origines animales de la culture. Paris: Flammarion, 2003. Rubin, David Lee. A Pact with Silence: Art and Thought in the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Slater, Maya. The Craft of La Fontaine. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Waal, Franciscus B. M. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. PFSCL XL, 78 (2013) Hoarders and Parasites in the Fables of La Fontaine B RUCE E DMUNDS (T HE U NIVERSITY OF A LABAMA , T USCALOOSA ) To justify his collection of fables, La Fontaine makes the gesture essential to all prefaces of the time, but the way he imagines the pleasure and the instruction occurring merits some further consideration. The parable, he states, is an apologue, an “exemple fabuleux, et qui s’insinue avec d’autant plus de facilité et d’effet, qu’il est plus commun et familier.” 1 The goal is to please and instruct, but manifestly not to surprise or provoke admiration in the full Cartesian sense, nothing so exalted or ambitious. A more detailed comparison will help illuminate La Fontaine’s position. In articles 75-78 of Les Passions de l’Âme Descartes shows both the value and danger of admiration, which arises when one encounters something unfamiliar. It may spur learning but also has the power to entrap attention and fix it in a kind of passivity that makes learning impossible. To instruct, for La Fontaine, does not imply the kind of revolution admiration entails, nor does it carry the same risk. It is not necessary to create novelty either. In other words, caution and modesty both appear to dictate La Fontaine’s understanding of “instruction.” To find the most authentic of the many La Fontaines inhabiting the text, then, one might well leave the most visible, impressive paths in favor of the smaller, hidden ones. I borrow this delightful image from Patrick Dandrey. For him, the fables are a “jardin français” in which one finds “longue allées thématiques et esthétiques,” to be sure, but also, and more relevant to my purpose, “des bosquets plus secrets où l’association de textes sinon disparates, du moins divers, ménage le plaisir de l’imprévu tout en offrant de nouveaux points de vue biaisants mais pittoresques sur les avenues majeures” (85). It is just one of these bosquets that Michel Serres 1 See page 9 of the Gallimard Edition of the Œuvres complètes. References to La Fontaine will be to this work. For the Fables I will indicate the book, the fable and the verse by number. Bruce Edmunds 36 sets off to explore in his book Le Parasite. The parasite, like the apologue, is all the more compelling in that it is common and familiar, and insinuates itself easily. Indeed, parasites abound, notes Serres, feeding on both organisms and signals. The relationship between host and parasite, moreover, is both primordial and necessary, an observation that bears within itself a warning: any effort to ignore, suppress, or destroy the parasite imperils the host. 2 Diverse strategies deploy themselves to this end, of course, but many, I would argue, constitute a form of hoarding. This strategic affinity emerges when one follows Serres’ suggestion and reads the parasite as a solicitation from the collectif (31). To be specific, one may foolishly seek to achieve definitive freedom from this parasite by hoarding knowledge, food, or stories. In L’Enfant et le Maître d’Ecole (1, 19) the solicitation takes the form of a child’s call for help. The teacher creates the possibility of dismissing this call by diminishing its source, in the first instance by naming the child in such a way as to deprive him of humanity: “Ah, le petit babouin” (v. 12). La Fontaine, it is true, often seems to prefer animals to human beings, and many fables show human beings to be paradoxically the least humane of creatures, but here the term issues from the mouth of the teacher and serves to admonish (“tancer”, v. 12). It is the more scandalous in that the act results from a decision (“s’aviser”, v. 11) rather than from a regrettable but understandable lapse of compassion and good sense. La Fontaine reinforces the sense of cruelty by indicating that the words are uttered in a “ton fort grave” (v. 11). The teasing, far from being the badinage of “gaieté”, appears mean-spirited and petty. One is tempted to say that such a tone is always “à contretemps” (v. 11) for La Fontaine, but in any case it is clearly so here. If the fabulist acts as a teacher of sorts, he does not do so in the mode of the magister, a mode of pedantry antithetical to the ethic of honnêteté. 3 The honnête homme rein- 2 See pp. 9-12 of the preface to the Hachette Littératures edition, and part 2, “nouveaux repas interrompus,” in which Serres writes: “Le parasite est toujours là, il est inévitable. Il est en tiers sur le schéma trivial, sur l’étoile à trois branches. Voici la relation inanalysable, j’entends par là qu’il n’en est aucune plus simple” (116). All references will be to this edition. 3 Many moralists wrote about honnêteté, but none, I think, with more verve than Pascal. I’m thinking for example of his famous statement concerning style: “ Tout ce qui n’est que pour l’auteur ne vaut rien ” (Lafuma, 798). Nicolas Faret’s description is very a propos here as well: “Un honnête homme… doit tâcher d’être utile à sa patrie, et, en se rendant agréable à tout le monde, il est obligé de profiter nonseulement à soi-même, mais encore au public, et particulièrement à ses amis qui seront tous des vertueux.” Sociability, one might say, emerges as the sunnier side Hoarders and Parasites in the Fables of La Fontaine 37 forces solidarity by attempting, in conversation, to celebrate others and make them look good. The pedant intimidates and diminishes others to make himself look good. Hoarding words and bits of information allows the pedant to fill so completely the space of discourse that he crowds out both the honnête homme and the poet, shutting off the solicitation of the collectivity, extirpating the parasite, creating his own social death. As a competition for attention the sides are hardly equal. A child must pit himself against this hoarder of words, in fact a child in physical distress. In this way the pedant ensures his own victory by deploying his words when he perceives a situation advantageous to him. In this sense one might argue that for La Fontaine the pedant always positions himself as magister, the interlocutor as weak, vulnerable child. In this instance he pushes his victim still further towards the border of social existence, away from genuine relationship by referring to him in the third person in his response to the call for help: “Voyez, dit-il, où l’a mis sa sottise” (v. 13). The magister then justifies his coldness by using labels indicative of some moral flaw (“fripon” and “canaille”, vv. 14 and 16). This is all the more surprising in that the child’s “crime” is a moment of inattention due to his badinage, a harmless pastime, especially when compared to the one practiced by those La Fontaine summons for judgment, the “babillard,” the “censeur,” and the “pédant” (v. 20). Badinage, as both the source and the expression of a certain legitimate verbal pleasure, reinforces social bonds, diminishes the distance between individuals and ensures the health of the collectivity. In these aspects it opposes all three of the above figures. In its spontaneity and sense of play it further opposes both the censeur and the pedant. True, in some cases La Fontaine mocks inattentiveness itself, but this is so when it arises from some deeper error or misdeed. In L’Astrologue qui se laisse tomber dans un puits (2, 13), the “victim” is guilty of fraud, practicing an “art mensonger” (v. 45). After apologizing for digressing, for getting carried away in the expression of indignation, La Fontaine cruelly trivializes the astrologer’s fate: “Je m’emporte un peu trop: revenons à l’histoire/ De ce spéculateur qui fut contraint de boire” (vv. 44-45). If the astrologer “drinks” from the bottom of the well surely he drinks his last. The milkmaid of La Laitière et le pot au lait (2, 9) also suffers for her inattention, though she will survive the mishap. We find her contemplating her impending punishment after she has dropped the milk which was to have been the origin of her imagined prosperity: “La dame de ces biens, quittant d’un œil marri/ Sa fortune ainsi répandue,/ va s’excuser à son mari/ En grand danger d’être of honnêteté, the darker side of which, as Albanese has shown, is fear. See his book Le Dynamisme de la peur chez Molière. Bruce Edmunds 38 battue” (vv. 24-27). La Fontaine does not judge her as harshly as the astrologer. Indeed he expresses solidarity with her and indicates the universality of her flaw. Everyone, he states, gets carried away by grandiose schemes and dreams: “Chacun songe en veillant, il n’est rien de plus doux” (v. 34). Why then does the severity of the punishment vary so greatly in the two cases? Again I think the answer must have something to do with the individual’s relationship to the community. The milkmaid’s moment of weakness occurs in the context of the basic struggle to live, and does not threaten the social fabric. The astrologer’s activity is described as solitary. This is not criminal in itself, but here it serves neither to regenerate the individual nor to allow any larger contribution to others. Rather it benefits only the astrologer and does so through fraud, which does threaten the social fabric by promoting delusion, and by disseminating false information which will then form the basis for decision and action. In contrast to the astrologer and the milkmaid, the child is innocent and in no way merits the “punishment” of the teacher’s harsh words. It is not only a child, but a young child (v. 3). Moreover it is a child that benefits from divine protection: “Le Ciel permit qu’un saule se trouva/ Dont le branchage, après Dieu, le sauva” (vv. 5-6). The pedant, in contrast, is far from innocent. His folly (“sot”, v. 3) results from a kind of intellectual laziness disguised as productive labor: “Dans ce récit je prétends faire voir/ d’un certain sot la remontrance vaine” (vv. 1-2). I have written of this theme elsewhere and will not repeat the contents of that article here. 4 It will suffice to observe that for La Fontaine, the simple stockpiling of words is easier, but less enriching, than true dialogue. In the context of the parasite one could say that the pedant’s refusal to establish and maintain an evolving, therefore genuine, relationship to the other equates to a doomed and potentially dangerous attempt to cut the parasite out of all communication. For any system, writes Serres, “le couple bruit-message est du système, et son rapport est un indice juste de la bonne marche et de l’âge dudit équipage” (124). In other words, the pedant’s effort entails the enshrinement of a false kind of suffisance. For La Fontaine true and workable suffisance, which equates to competence or quality, entails recognizing the need for a continuing, indeed perpetual, relationship with solicitation of the collectivity even if that solicitation embodies itself in a specific individual. 5 4 “Oisiveté and danger in La Fontaine’s Fables”. 5 Larry Riggs has traced this theme in numerous works, especially those of Molière. See his book, Molière and Plurality: Decomposition of the Classicist Self. I use suffisance in describing the pedant’s aspiration in the way Pascal means it when speaking of the Jesuits, that is to say, behavior indicative of vanity and of the Hoarders and Parasites in the Fables of La Fontaine 39 Reviewing the pedant’s moves one cannot fail to notice a contradiction. If the child is at the very border of human being and thus merits no consideration, he must occupy the same amoral space as the wolf of Le loup et l’agneau (1, 10). He cannot, in this logic, contain a moral flaw because he is not a moral being at all. This move would seem to render nonsensical the pedant’s labels (“fripon” and “canaille”, vv. 14 and 16), used also to justify his, the pedant’s, callousness. What are we to make of this apparent lack of coherence? I would argue that it is not the poet’s flaw but the pedant’s. It indicates that the pedant opportunistically uses whatever he finds, unconcerned with principal or logical consistency. The pedant, in other words, exhibits exactly the same pattern as the wolf. It is the pedant, not the poor child, who removes himself from all ethical and human space in his illconceived effort to remove definitively the very possibility of exchange, with its requirement of openness to transformation. True, the relationship of teacher to pupil could scarcely be cast as a relationship among equals, but hierarchy does not imply movement in one direction only, or the impossibility of exchange. In fact, no less influential a thinker than Montaigne had already penned a thorough critique of the “educational” system the maître d’école embodies: “On ne cesse de criailler à nos oreilles, comme qui verserait dans un entonnoir, et notre charge ce n’est que redire ce qu’on nous a dit” (119). In fact, for Montaigne, the student must be free to accept or reject what is offered as he sees fit: “Qu’il lui fasse tout passer par l’étamine et ne loge rien en sa tête par simple autorité et crédit” (120). The continuing education of both teacher and pupil depends on exchange, nourished by travel, reading or conversation, for “Il se tire une merveilleuse clarté pour le jugement humain, de la fréquentation du monde” (124). Nothing indicates that the contact occurring in a pedagogical context is somehow exempt from this deeper human need, either for Montaigne or for La Fontaine. Toward the end of the fable we learn that those who fail to respect the necessary and proper relationship to the collectivity exist in great numbers, and that God has blessed their growth: “Je blâme ici plus de gens qu’on ne pense./ Tout babillard, tout censeur, tout pédant,/ Se peut connaître au discours que j’avance: / Chacun des trois fait un peuple fort grand; / Le Créateur en a béni l’engeance” (vv. 19-23). Here the papillon du Parnasse (as La Fontaine dubs himself in the Discours à Madame de La Sablière that closes Book 9 of the Fables) seems to have adopted a surprisingly apocalyptic tone. attempt to be sufficient unto oneself. The accusation is made repeatedly throughout the Provinciales. As to the second meaning, it occurs, for example in the pensée on the imagination: “Nous ne pouvons pas seulement voir un avocat en soutane et le bonnet en tête sans une opinion avantageuse de sa suffisance” (Lafuma, 44). Bruce Edmunds 40 Of course, to explore the implications of these verses would require another study. I note them only to raise the issue of danger and to further refine the description of the parasite La Fontaine has under the magnifying glass. Close scrutiny of the pedant reveals him to be that variety of parasite who refuses (or tries to refuse) to participate in the fundamental relationship of the individual to the larger collectivity. The danger emerges when one considers the proper sequence, action then harangue, which the pedant fails to respect. Discourse fills the scene, substituting itself for useful action and excluding any real exchange or communication. The order the pedant observes shows where his real interest lies: maintaining his reputation by producing a censorious account of the event. The poet reverses the pedant’s order, indeed pushes what is first for the pedant to the very last, harangue being the last word of the fable: En tout affaire ils ne font que songer/ Aux moyens d’exercer leur langue./ Hé, mon ami, tire-moi de danger: / Tu feras après ta harangue” (vv. 24-27). He had already in fact diminished the speech’s importance by labeling it “remontrance vaine” (v. 2). From the perspective of the récit, La Fontaine uses the harangue to frustrate the reader’s wish to arrive at the resolution. The harangue makes the reader wait, just as it makes the poor child wait. At a diegetic level it is not just extraneous, but positively nefarious. Words are hoarded then used to maximize the distance between the pedant and his interlocutor. At the extradiegetic level the poet’s “harangue” serves to reveal and mark that of the pedant as inappropriate and even cruel. 6 Viewed in the context of Serres’ parasite, one could say the pedant exemplifies a cowardly and ultimately doomed way of responding to the solicitation of the collectivity; he attempts to create a “self” that cannot be assailed or subject to outside pressure because a hoard of words protects it. The misguided, false form of suffisance also appears in a very different fable, Le Chêne et le Roseau (1, 22). While it is true that classical mythological references suffuse the literature of the period, in the tree’s mouth (! ) they express the same kind of galling suffisance as the pedant’s harangue and form a stark contrast to the reed’s far simpler, less pretentious language, devoid as it is, of mythological references and poetic figures. The oak’s words enact a distancing, a refusal of genuine connection that disguises itself as its finest expression: compassion. The oak opens the conversation with a statement that seems to indicate empathy: “Vous avez bien sujet d’accuser la Nature” (v. 2), but his repeated expression of the contrast between his greatness and the reed’s weakness ends up creating the 6 I use the terms as they were first developed by Gérard Genette in his book, Figures III, pp. 288-9. Hoarders and Parasites in the Fables of La Fontaine 41 impression that the oak is using the reed to elevate himself (vv. 3-16). The reiteration of the expression of empathy that closes the oak’s speech sounds quite hollow and unconvincing : “La Nature envers vous me semble bien injuste” (v. 17). The poet emphasizes the act of distancing by having the oak lament the physical distance that separates the reed from him (vv. 11-16), and by designating its cause as unfortunate birth (vv. 11-15). Note that I wrote “that separates the reed from him,” and not the more natural sounding “that separates him from the reed”. This choice of words reflects the fact that the oak represents himself as occupying the privileged space, the center, while the reed must exist on the periphery. In this dantesque cosmology one suffers to the degree that one is distant from God (the oak). Plants don’t change location, of course, so their “birth” determines their existential standing. It is telling, though, that the oak uses a form of the word “naître” twice in one sentence and that the “vous” shifts from the singular to the plural with the adverbial modifier “le plus souvent” (v. 15). It seems ultimately to function as a designation of caste. Given La Fontaine’s aversion for the court one might well suspect that the oak’s statement of “compassion” represents in fact the reflexive gesture of a nobility whose dignity had come under attack from numerous directions: the assertion of high birth. Like the hoarding of knowledge that allows the pedant in his harangue and the oak in his literary statement of compassion to define once and for all their relationship to the collectivity, thus silencing its solicitation, birth, once established, permits a stable definition of place. Or does it? The fact that oak finds it necessary to assert it twice bespeaks a lack of confidence in its talismanic power. This reading agrees with Albanese’s characterization of honnêteté as a strictly aristocratic ethic rooted in sentiments of fear and insecurity, and plays out a drama of reversal: “Profondément religieuse, cette vision consiste à accorder à ceux qui se trouvent les plus proches de la source du Pouvoir (c’est-à-dire, Dieu) un prestige et un respect manifestes; grâce à la proximité de la Divinité, ceux-ci se prévalent de la pureté religieuse de leur sang” (19). The oak, described as “Celui de qui la tête au ciel était voisin (v. 31) would appear to be the being most worthy of respect, the highest born. La Fontaine boldy uproots it coupling “voisine” with “déracine” (v. 30). The humiliation is the greater in that description of the oak’s fate precedes the statement of his greatness, the precedence on the page representing visually precedence in fact: “Le vent redouble ses efforts,/ Et fait si bien qu’il déracine/ Celui de qui la tête au Ciel était voisine” (vv. 29-31). Finally, then, the assertion of noble birth fails as surely as the hoarding of special knowledge. The furie that punishes the oak (v. 25) shows that the Bruce Edmunds 42 misdeed is hubris, though hubris of a special kind. For the oak does worse than try to step outside the place a hierarchical society appoints for him. He attempts to place himself beyond the order entirely by putting into circulation figures and references that aggrandize him in precise ways and do so by their mere use. The parasite, the vent paraclet, the whisper of the collective, are all the wind that one must hear and bend to. They are parasite in the sense of the static, the bruit de fond that accompanies the carrier wave of all audible communication (Parasite 177). The oak learns that one ignores this parasite at one’s peril; it blows right through his words and strategies, destroying him utterly, for the gravity of the crime elicits an equally grave punishment. Logic would dictate a similar fate for the ant in La Cigale et la Fourmi (1, 1) though the reader never sees it. The poet’s wonderfully terse observation regarding the ant’s refusal to offer a loan, “C’est là son moindre défaut” (v. 16) begs the question: “What is his greatest flaw? ” 7 Serres’ parasite helps provide an anwer. Here the collectivity takes the form a mouth that speaks and demands to be fed. Refusing to heed it the ant fails to make his obligatory contribution. The biblical injunction to show charity plays a role here, to be sure, but so does the requirement that one’s behavior sustain the social order by binding its members in relationship. To share what one has (even if it is only a bit of tobacco, as in Sganarelle’s panegyric in the opening lines of Molière’s Dom Juan) founds, authorizes and sustains social intercourse. 8 This also is the insight contained in Panurge’s (not so) paradoxical praise of debt: out of that basic business arrangement the entire social order spins itself and perpetuates its existence. To refuse to participate is nothing less than diabolical: “Qui rien ne preste est creature laide et 7 In his annotation of this fable in the Gallimard édition of the Œuvres complètes (671-2) René Groos distinguishes between the apparent meaning, which he states as “N’être pas prêteuse, c’est le moindre de ses défauts,” and the ironic one: “Prêteuse! être prêteuse! ah! c’est là le défaut qu’elle a le moins, le défaut que l’avare fourmi a le moins à se reprocher.” He then chides the reader who stops at the apparent meaning for being too hasty. Surely one need not choose only one reading as legitimate then discard the other. From my perspective the apparent or hasty reading has proved the richer of the two. 8 See Serres’ book Hermès ou la Communication. On this particular scene Alabanese’s exploration of fear and its social dynamics goes a bit astray. For him it is a display of the magical power of tobacco which can, he writes “douer le consommateur d’un air d’honnêteté indispensable à tous ceux qui veulent réussir dans le monde” (46). This cannot describe Sganarelle who cannot conceivably have such pretentions. Also, Sganarelle claims that it inspires “des sentiments d’honneur et de vertu” and a sentiment is not the same as an aspiration, delusional or otherwise. Hoarders and Parasites in the Fables of La Fontaine 43 mauvaise: creature du grand villain diantre d’enfer” (Ch. 3, 571). Debts are the binding force of the social order, and the key to human survival: Bien pis y a, je me donne à sainct Babolin le bon sainct, en cas que toute ma vie je n’aye estimé debtes estre comme une connexion et colligence des Cieulx et Terre, un entretenement unicque de l’humain lignaige; je dis sans lequel bien tost tous huymains periroient; estre par edventure celle grande ame de l’univers, laquelle, scelon les Academicques, toutes choses vivifie. (Ch. 3, 573) A world full of lending is a terrestrial paradise: Entre les humains Paix, Amour, Dilectin, Fidelité, repous, banquetz, festins, joye, liesse, or, argent, menue monnoie, chaisnes, bagues, marchandises troteront de main en main. Nul process, nulle guerre, nul debat: nul n’y sera usurier, nul leschart, nul chichart, nul refusant. Vray Dieu, ne sera ce l’aage d’or, le regne de Saturne? (Ch 4, 579) La Fontaine obviously does not represent the cicada as heroic in the same way Panurge represents the debtor, but Rabelais’ text does make assigning some legitimate function to the cicada credible. Here then is the situation: The cicada begs (v. 9) and promises (v. 12), the ant commands (v. 22), and he commands a performance that should be witnessed by others. After all, when the king himself commands a performance it is not so he may enjoy it alone. It will be the cicada’s last performance - he will dance until he dies, waiting for the charity that will never come. The ant will have silenced the voices enjoining charity and even simple decency in his effort to destroy the parasite. That the cicada is a parasite and a rascal is clear from his promise to repay both principal and harvest “avant l’oût (vv. 13-14). This is not an act of duplicity so much as a jest. It requests charity, not exchange. It exists at a second register that founds the literary or poetic act and hints at the identification of the poet and the cicada. As Jules Brody writes in his discussion of the contrasting figures of the poet and the pedant, “Le poète dit vrai en paraissant mentir; Malheur à qui ment en se donnant pour véridique” (101). The cicada’s false promise of repayment contains the truth concerning relationship. The ant’s flat enactment of the command “If anyone will not work let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3: 10) expresses the lie that self-sufficiency is achievable or even possible. In Brody’s scheme the cicada is the poet, the ant the pedant. Returning to the context of the fable, one might say that the ant’s hoard of food, or so he appears to believe, allows him to refuse all relationship, to be a self-contained entity, a monad, to be, finally, self-sufficient. If Harpagon had a glimmer of intelligence, this would have been his dream as well.