The fable and its place in story practice

As children, the stories we are told are often in the form of a fable. The protagonists are usually animals, insects, birds and mystical creatures who live their lives and behave like humans. The stories are usually simply told and one-dimensional, with an implied or real ending in which good triumphs over evil - thus, fables have a moral message. Thus, in the story of The Tortoise and The Hare, we learn that it is better to be slow and steady than fast and careless. Some famous early fabulists include Hesiod, Aesop, Phaedrus, and Jean de la Fontaine - many of these stories have been retold through generations, standing the test of time.

In fables that relate to largely unexplainable events, such as the beginning of time, the creation of the universe and everything in it, and uncontrollable things like the weather, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, gods became the central protagonists, whether they were in human, animal, or other-worldly creature form. It was simply too difficult to explain that a person could have ever held such power, so these activities were reallocated to one or more deities, depending on the prevailing religion. These stories underpin all modern cultural beliefs to some extent, and were often elaborately told, such as those of Ancient Greek and Roman times, while the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime stories are very simple.

Thanks to developments in the Middle Ages, we can now also read about normal human beings achieving extra-human feats. Becoming popular with Everyman, the title of a story about an average man living an ordinary life in the 15th Century, the Everyman story was a device used by the Christian church to keep the population under control - the poorer you were in your human life, the richer you would be in the afterlife, and the harder you worked on earth the easier time you would have once you got to heaven. This genre is better known these days as magical realism, made famous by Latin Americans such as Jorge Luis Borges and Paulo Coelho . These stories have a similar construction to that of the fable. One large collection of fables that contains identifiable elements of Everyman and magical realism is The Bible.

In the Everyman stories, men (yes men, not women), rather than other creatures, mythical or otherwise, became the central characters. Everyman was an ordinary person who was capable of achieving extraordinary feats, usually because of the intervention of a supreme being, such as God, Allah, or Om. the term everyman has come to mean an ordinary individual, with whom the audience or reader is supposed to be able to identify easily, and who is often placed in extraordinary circumstances

Every culture is rich with fables, or myths, and whether we realise it or not, these underpin how we live our lives - we may live according to the prevailing moral code of our society or rebel against it, but either way it is present in our lives and informs the choices we make.

The messages of fables are usually intended to reach a wide, or mass, audience, hence the characters are often not named, and if they are, this name will most likely become synonymous with a character trait. Often a name is fabulised so that people become branded or associated with the term, to the extent that we don't often know that there was actually a real person attached to it - modern ones include Maverick (Samuel A. Maverick, mayor of San Antonio in the mid-1800s), Murphy's Law (Captain Ed Murphy, an aircraft engineer during WW2, complained about an incompetent technician on his team: "If there is any way to do it wrong, he will"), Guy Fawkes, Boycott, and Silhouette. This highlights the one-dimensional nature of the fable, making it simpler to understand and retell, and thereby promoting its longevity.

Another key element of the fable: the Everyman, provides an opportunity for each person within a society to identify with the characters and action in the story to some extent, and can see the possibility within themself for right and wrong, good and evil through identification or non-identification of the centrally expressed trait. These become a kind of unwritten law or rule, by which an individual can make a judgment as to whether they are a moral, worthy person, or immoral and unworthy. We can also easily judge other people using this technique, with the suggestion that a person's actions makes him or her either praiseworthy or punishable.

Topical in Australian news this week is the bludgeoning to death in prison of Carl Williams, who wore the crown as King of the Melbourne Underworld for several years. It is not hard to invest Carl Williams with the title of Evil, just as the Catholic world recently invested the title of Good on Mary MacKillop, making her a saint - even non-Catholics who know her story would be inclined to agree that she was worthy of this title.
As we have seen, fables are simple and easily remembered. They are also reductionist. Giving people the opportunity to only assess something as good/evil, right/wrong, black/white, does not provide for the possibility that both (or neither) can exist simultaneously. Likewise, good/bad, right/wrong etc. can be easily reversed using manipulation. Many will argue that the terms 'good' and 'bad' were stood on their heads during the reign of the Nazi Party in Germany. More than sixty years later, Germans and non-Germans alike can label Hitler as evil, but in the 1930s he was seen as good - saving Germany from the devastating effects of foreign domination post World War 1. Even the tortoise is getting a run for his money in our fast-paced society, where risk and spontaneity are seen as survival skills, and the plodders challenged to keep up the pace.

So, because of their simplicity and the universal truths they disperse with alacrity, fables have been often criticised as propagandist and suppressive, and at the very least a blatant attempt to pass on preconceived biases to younger generations and to maintain the status quo. To subscribe to this view is, however, unrealistic, narrow minded, and potentially dangerous. The growing youth culture in Australia that puts people who rape, steal, and attack others on a pedestal shows that fables may not necessarily be the receptacles of truth that we would like them to be. Is this because the world is changing, becoming more sophisticated, or simply that, in a world where cultures and worldviews collide on a regular basis we are now less likely to accept the universal truths that are indicated? Or, are the old fables in fact being replaced with new ones?

From what I hear and read, fables are very much still a part of human society. What has changed, perhaps, is that sub-cultures are more likely to actively create their own fables, ones that provide a better fit with their own rules. People are still subjected to propaganda, but this might be created for a short period of time or within a small group, often to the extent that actions and behaviours become synonymous with these groups and/or times. Think about our tolerance of subcultures like bikie gangs, Greenpeace groups, footballers after a win, men on buck's nights, high school graduates during schoolies week (which is now more like a month) and veterans on ANZAC Day (the one day of the year when it is socially acceptable to have a beer for breakfast). In this way, fables other than the prevailing ones, can be accepted or tolerated, and any associated bad behaviour is contained to particular sub-groups or to set time periods.

Whether they are universal, or restricted to particular cultures or even families, fables are transactional stories: do this, and you will be rewarded, do that and you will be punished. Given their centrality in our societies and lives, fables should rightfully have a place in story practice. I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog that story practice is interested in transformational stories - ones that lead to, or talk about meaningful change in people's lives.

So, are fables to be dismissed as irrelevant in story practice? Given the all-pervasive nature of fables, it would be madness to suggest this, nor am I about to do so. Fables, folk stories, fairy tales, myths, everyman stories all have an important place. For instance, we can use them to highlight the current fables that we live by and which may be holding us back, to deconstruct and analyse the truisms that currently provide a blanket, protecting us from noticing how we and the world have changed, how we are different from others. We can also use simple techniques to create new, more personal and more meaningful fables to live by. In this way they become powerful tools for change, or in other words, transformational.