Man and the adder
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The man and the adder ( French L'Homme et la Couleuvre ) is a fable by the French poet Jean de La Fontaine , which he published for the first time in 1678. L'Homme et la Couleuvre is the most striking of a number of his fables in which he discusses the merits of animals and specifically compares them with the inadequacies of humans. Literary scholars see this story as a reappraisal of the fable The Lamb and the Wolf . La Fontaine paints a completely different picture of the proverbial “false snake”, such as that in the Indian Panchatantra- Poetry is depicted where she wants to kill man after he had saved her from certain death. The literary historian Adolf Laun wrote in 1877: "The whole fable is a masterpiece of the characteristics of the corresponding linguistic expression and the lively painterly rhythm."
contents
A person saw an adder, which he caught and put in a sack. He told her that he would kill her because she was worthless and the image of ingratitude. The snake asked the man from its sack if in the world the ungrateful were condemned, which of these could be forgiven? Then she pointed out to him that he was suing himself because her life was in his hands and he was free to use it as he liked and to his own advantage; the symbol of ingratitude is not the serpent, but the human being.
Man replied that it was vain, false and worthless, that he had the right and that he was free to choose. But you can ask others. They brought their case to a cow. The cow agreed with the adder, then she also accused the people of feeding him for years, but he took everything away from her, the milk and the offspring. He tied her up in the stable, and now that she was old, he tied her up in a corner with no grass - she was the reason that his economy was flourishing.
The man shouted that the cow had gone mad. So they wanted to consult the ox. But he said that for years he alone has carried the yoke in the field work on which they all lived. The only thanks he received was a lot of blows and little hay. In old age man mocked him by sacrificing his blood to the gods.
The angry man also rejected the ox's judgment. Now the tree was questioned by them. He complained that he served everyone as protection from sun, storm and rain, but he bore fruit for man alone. As a reward, however, it would be felled, although it would have continued to grow for a long time.
The human wanted to decide the argument for himself and because he didn't want to listen to "this pack", he hit the snake in the sack against the wall until it was dead. This is how the greats of the world behave, the moral inference concludes.
analysis
La Fontaine's verses are maliciously naive when he writes “C'est le Serpent que je veux dire, / Et non l'Homme: on pourrait aisément s'y tromper” (I am speaking of the snake, it could easily be misunderstood ) or "Ces paroles firent arrêter l'autre", whereby with "l'autre" (the other) he equates people with their animal interlocutors. By insulting the cow for having lost her mind, La Fontaine alludes to his dispute with the philosopher René Descartes , who denied animals thinking in his Discours de la méthode . La Fontaine's animals agree that human behavior is unforgivable and that it exploits them mercilessly. For his part, as the narrator, the poet adds sarcastic comments (“l'animal pervers”), which reveal the total disappointment with the human species. La Fontaine reverses Descartes' theory by giving the cow, the ox, and the tree personality and confirming judgment. By killing the snake the violent anthropocentric order is apparently restored, but the act only ironically underpins La Fontaine's contradiction to Cartesianism and its predecessors.
Like the fable of the wolf and the lamb, this fable also depicts the tyrannical oppression of the weaker by the mighty who justify themselves. The common thematic basis of the two fables differs in several points in La Fontaine's version. On the one hand, the snake is not an absolute embodiment of a moral idea. The snake in the context of “man and adder” does not stand for the bad and reprehensible in the same way as the lamb in the context of “wolf and lamb” for the good and faultless. La Fontaine leaves out the essence of the proverbial “false serpent”, as depicted in the Indian Panchatantra poetry, in his version. For this he puts the snake, which is usually considered to be the embodiment of all harmful creatures, in the status of the innocent victim. Another difference concerns the nature of the argument between the protagonists. In wolf and the lamb is about property rights, because the wolf accused to drink water from his Bach the Lamb. With humans and snakes it is about social contracts, as the cow, the ox and the tree show through terms of the commercial language ("pour recompenser" [as payment], "pour salaire" [for wages], "loyer" [as reward] ) as they accuse man. The indicated breaches of contract therefore suggest more than just people's ingratitude towards others. Having made no such agreement with the snake, his decision to eventually kill the beast is not an act of ingratitude, but pure arbitrariness . In addition, both fables give the impression of a courtly milieu. While the sheep addressed the wolf with “Majesty” and “Sire” in the case of the wolf and the lamb, in the case of man and the adder it is generally “les grands” (the big ones ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Man and the adder. In: Lafontaine's Fables (second volume). Tenth book, second fable. M. Moeser Hofbuchhandlung, Berlin, 1876, p. 208 , accessed on September 8, 2021 .
- ↑ a b Randolph Paul Runyon: In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread Through the Fables . Rookwood Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1-886365-16-2 , pp. 136 ff .
- ^ A b Jean de La Fontaine: Fables of La Fontaine . Ed .: Adolf Laun . Gebr. Henninger, 1878, p. 142-145 .
- ^ A b Desmond Hosford: Uneasy Anthropocentrism: Cartesianism and the Ethics of Species Differentiation in Seventeenth Century France. JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 30, Numbers 3 & 4, 2010, pp. 532-534 , accessed August 26, 2021 .
- ↑ Maya Slater: The Craft of La Fontaine . Associated University Presses, 2001, ISBN 978-0-8386-3920-7 , pp. 109 ff .
- ↑ Anne Lynn Birberick: Reading Undercover: Audience and Authority in Jean de La Fontaine . Bucknell University Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-8387-5388-0 , pp. 116 f .