Aesopic Voices

Aesopic Voices Re-framing truth through concealed ways of presentation in the 20th and 21st centuries

Edited by Gert Reifarth & Philip Morrissey Aesopic Voices: Re-framing Truth through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Edited by Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrisey

This book first published 2011

Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-3443-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3443-8 We dedicate this book to the memory of Prof. Greg Dening (1931–2008), who believed that history is not something we learn but something that we perform, and who taught history by asking his students first to describe their present so that they could better hear the silences of the past.

Contents

List of Images and Texts x Acknowledgements xi

Introduction

1 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey Aesopic Voices: A Foreword 1

Part I Aesop in time

2 Gert Reifarth Old Aesop and ‘Aesopics’: Facts and Fiction, Film and Fables 14

3 Justin Clemens The Slave, the Fable: A Political Hermeneutics of the Aesopic 45

Part II Aesop in Literature

4 Erwin Rotermund ‘Concealed Writing’ (Verdeckte Schreibweise) in the ‘Third Reich’: Forms and Problems of Reception 76

5 Evgenia A. Kravchenkova ‘Once GPU came to Aesop…’: Political Fables in Russian Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 101

6 Gert Reifarth Aesop vs Censor in the GDR: On the Subversive Power of Political Fairy Tales 128

vii viii Contents

7 Odile Cazenave Dis-Enchanted, Dis-Entangled Tales: Francophone African Literature Today. The Examples of Boubacar Boris Diop and Véronique Tadjo 157

8 Laura Petersen ‘We are story animals’: Aesopics in Holocaust literature by Art Spiegelman and Yann Martel 174

Part III Aesop in Film and Theatre

9 Catherine Collins and Patricia Varas Thrilling the Audience, (Dis)tracting the Censors: Suspense as Diversion in Adolfo Aristarain’s film Tiempo de revancha 210

10 Xan Colman and Tamara Searle Once Upon a Time, Tonight: Aesopic Dramaturgy in Community Development and Intercultural Art in Thailand 235

11 George Katsadoros The Disfiguration of Aesop and Karaghiozes: Embodiment of Indirect Expostulation and Resistance in Greek Shadow Theatre 257

Part IV Aesop in Science and Religion

12 Stephan Packard Aesopic Transformation in Scientific Discourse: Observations on Galileo and a Perspective on Dawkins 292

13 Julia Vassilieva Back to Orthodoxy? Religious Discourse in Post-communist Russia as an Empty Signifier 320 Contents ix

Part V Aesop in Australia and the South Pacific

14 Greg Dening Wayfinding: Dances on the Beaches of the Mind 338

15 Philip Morrissey ‘Old Cobraboor’: Colonial Violence and Aboriginal Modesty 358

16 Marcus Waters Contemporary Urban Indigenous ‘Dreamings’: Connection, Ceremony and Practice 369

Part VI aesop Re-invented in the Twenty-First Century

17 Kevin Murray Changing the World is Child’s Play: The Challenge of Aspirationalism in the South 406

18 Catherine Fargher The Man with no Ear: Bioethical Issues as a Base for Fables 415

Contributors 443 Index 451 List of Images and Texts

Cover Front: Former prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, photo © Christian Herrnbeck 2010, and Diego Velázquez: Æsopus (1638), reproduced courtesy of Museo del Prado, Madrid. Back: Former prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, photo © Christian Herrnbeck 2010. Images used with permission. Chapter 2 2.1 Anonymus: Esopus woodcut (printed, for example, in Heinrich Steinhöwel’s German edition of Aesop’s fables, 1476/77, and in a 1489 Spanish edition); 2.2 Diego Velázquez: Æsopus (1638), reproduced courtesy of Museo del Prado, Madrid (original colour). Chapter 10 All photos © Xan Colman and Tamara Searle 2007. Chapter 11 All images from the book Greek Shadow Theatre: From Light and History, ed. Alexandra Charitatou (Athens: The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, 2004), used with permission. Images 11.1 and 11.2 first appeared in ‘Εικονογραφημένο ημερολόγιο Pirelli’ (Illustrated Pirelli Calendar), 1970. Image 11.3 is from The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive Collection, image 11.4 from the K. Makres Collection, image 11.5 from the M. Hatzakes Collection. All originals are colour images. Appendix text 1 used with permission of the University Press of Kentucky. Permission to use Appendix text 2 has been requested from Gnosis Publishers, Athens. Chapter 14 14.1. A Most Remarkable Voyage, created by Emily Brissenden from a concept of Greg Dening (original colour); 14.2. Cook’s Copy of Tupaia’s Chart. British Library ADD MS 21593c; 14.3 Australian Aborigines Paddling Bark Canoes. By ‘Artist of the Chief Mourner’ (now identified as Tupaia). British Library ADD MS 15508, f.10; 14.4 Drawing by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff from hisTravels and Voyages in Various Parts of the World, vol. 1, London: Colburn, 1813, plate VI, p.117. Images 14.1, 14.2 and 14.3 used with permission of the copyright holders. Chapter 16 Computer paintings by Maiala Waters (16.1 and 16.2) and Marcus Waters (16.3). © The artists. Chapter 18 Images used with permission of the copyright holders (18.1 Jonathon Oxlade, 18.2 Sean Williams, 18.3 Sydney Opera House from the Kids in the House program 2007). All originals are colour images. ‘The Woman Who Knitted Herself a Child’ © Catherine Fargher 2004.

x Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank all contributors, the publisher, the Museo del Prado (Madrid) for permission to reproduce the image of Velázquez’ painting, the other copyright holders for their permission to use their images and texts, our text editor Bruce Sims, our book designer Adrian Saunders, photographer Christian Herrnbeck for the cover images, Donna Denning for help with her late husband’s chapter, Laura Petersen and John Morrissey for help with individual chapters, and last but not least Johanna Simmons for her kind assistance throughout the whole duration of our Aesopic project, to Meg Tudor for her help in its first stages and to Kate Rendell for assistance in its last stage.

Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey

Aesopic Voices: A Foreword

1. The Realm of the Aesopic How does one respond, as a humane and critical thinker, when political, social or religious circumstances are hostile to truth and open discussion? Responses differ remarkably: thinkers can succumb to the pressures of a régime and even openly serve its purposes, they can try and ignore the situation and retreat into inner or actual exile, or they can resist the régime and try to incite change. Such resistance can in itself assume various forms, and it is one of these forms that our book Aesopic Voices. Re-framing Truth through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries is devoted to, namely the seeking of artistic and intellectual refuge in the clandestine realm of the Aesopic. Aesop is said to have written fables in the sixth century BC to veil his opinions about the ruling authorities. While the name ‘Aesopic fable’ later, especially in the Victorian era, tended to describe morally educating pieces often associated with children’s literature, the genre’s political potential also continued to flicker (for example Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s fables in

1 2 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey

the times of the German Enlightenment and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s fables in Tsarist Russia). In contemporary times, the political potential of the Aesopic finds continued use and development, and the term ‘Aesopic’ has evolved to also mean the description of a critical intellectual attitude and its artistic and academic expression. The modern Aesopic realm serves both as a safeguard and a battlefield: from a relatively safe and protective aesthetic cave, the Aesopic mind combats conditions that are hostile to artistic and academic practice and often to humane living in general. The contributions to our book devote themselves to a broad range of Aesopic voices, presenting examples from both a narrow and a wide understanding of Aesopic creation. In a narrow sense, the Aesopic method involves the creation of fables and fairy tales in camouflaged modes, often employing myths and elements of folklore (for example in novels, short stories and poems, or films, paintings and sculptures). Artists can relate to such elements in a number of ways. They can create new fairy tales and fables, or recreate old ones; they can reactivate old folktales or traditional stories and relate them to their present situation; elements of old tales can be merged with modern counterparts in narrative and visual art forms; and traditional symbols or figures can feature in otherwise contemporary writing, storytelling, film, painting and other artistic practices. A wider understanding of the term ‘Aesopic’ is, in contrast, not restricted to fables, fairy tales and myths but instead refers in general to the great arsenal of artistic camouflage and allegory. A further extension of the term would relate it to methods of camouflage in works that are outside of artistic creation, namely in academic and scientific writing; academics and scientists also have at their disposal different techniques of camouflage that could either refer back to established methods or rely on modified or new discursive codes.

2. Conditions for Aesopic Creation At the end of the 1960s, both Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes provided strong analytical criticism of the well-established and overbearing concept of the ‘author’, which both writers urge literary studies to transcend. In its Foreword: Aesopic Voices 3 stead, Foucault calls for an examination of the nature of the discourse of writing while Barthes pointed to the importance of the reader.1 The Aesopic quality of a work depends precisely the two factors called upon here, and only together do they realise a work’s Aesopic potential. Firstly, there must be a discursive structure in place in which certain aspects of reality are being falsified, obstructed, hushed-up or neglected. Aesopic works, in turn, do not address these aspects directly and explicitly, but in a camouflaged or encoded fashion which places them between reality and its direct expression.2 In this shift from an ‘official’ to an Aesopic discourse, there is thus a double alteration of reality at work: while the powers- that-be manipulate reality to serve their own interests and to obstruct it from being seen, understood and potentially changed, critical thinkers ‘veil’ it in Aesopic devices to expose the first alteration. Ideological modifications are thus countered and uncovered with artistic and stylistic ones; the neglected is brought to light under an Aesopic cover. A prime example for discursive conditions that foster Aesopic creation are those in repressive societies across all ages and continents, among whose key features are the suppression of critical ideas and the threat of censorship or even persecution, imprisonment or death.3 While the Aesopic is often and most prominently associated

1 Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ (Foucault 1969) and Roland Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (Barthes 1968); in English Foucault 1984 and Barthes 1977. 2 Stephan Packard describes this phenomenon when he states that there exists ‘an imaginary double of the Aesopic texts’, and explains: ‘An Aesopic text then indirectly speaks as another, imaginary text. While that alternative text might never be explicitly realised or indeed altogether unrealisable, its materialised twin implies its existence as a point of reference. The Aesopic text acquires a relative harmlessness and implies another, absent version of itself that is forbidden, dangerous, or even discursively impossible, but that needs to be partially constructed in order to understand the doubleness of the presented words.’ (Packard 2011, 293). ‘Text’ should here be understood in its broadest sense, applicable to all genres of art (e.g. literature, painting, sculpture, architecture), academic and scientific writings. 3 These features can, ironically, be seen as conditiones sine quibus non for Aesopic art and writing: it is due to their existence that the thinker who wishes to refer to falsified or obstructed aspects of reality (and thus try to overcome their falsification or obstruction) will encode or camouflage them. The close connection between censorship and Aesopic creation is described by Stephan Packard in the following way: ‘The concept of Aesopianism as a companion to censorship and other forms of textual control is centred on the idea of a text that might well elicit censorship, but does not. A text cannot be Aesopic if it is 4 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey

with the struggle against repression and censorship in dictatorial societies, it is by no means restricted to such severe circumstances. Milder forms of Aesopic struggles also take place in Western democracies where they are engaged with issues such as migration, minorities, political leadership, genetic engineering, climate change, war, the threat of terrorism.4 Inevitably, however, any Aesopic approach is initiated by the existence of a ‘discursive régime’, a society’s ‘régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth’5 which assists or even force intellectual and artistic choice. Truth, Foucault argues, ‘is produced and transmitted under the control […] of a few great political and economic apparatuses’.6 The task for intellectuals, then, would be to change ‘the political, economic, institutional régime of the production of truth’, and to ascertain ‘the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth’.7 The use of Aesopic devices may potentially undermine the official ‘régime of truth’, re-frame the conditions for the production and control of ‘truth’ and give voice to an alternative truth. In democratic societies, thinkers may choose to use Aesopic methods in this quest; under totalitarian conditions, such methods do, more often than not, represent the only subversive means which it is relatively safe to use.

irrelevant to censorship; and yet its Aesopic technique fails if it is censored.’ (Packard 2011, 292). Another insightful remark on censorship is to be found in a discussion of artistic restrictions on Aesopic creation by Lev Loseff, who speaks of ‘the beneficence of censorship’ (see Loseff 1984). 4 The different nature of discursive conditions allows for the distinction of ‘forced Aesopics’ and ‘playful Aesopics’ (see Reifarth 2011[a], 32f). 5 Foucault 1980, 112 & 131. Foucault defines this régime as ‘the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as truth’ (ibid. 131). Of importance is also the inextricable entanglement of ‘truth’ with life, power and society; in Foucault’s words: ‘truth isn’t outside power […], truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves’ (ibid. 131) but ‘linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it’ (ibid. 131 & 133). 6 Ibid. 131f. 7 Ibid. 133. Foreword: Aesopic Voices 5

The second factor which contributes to the Aesopic quality of a work is the need for a recipient who decodes the relation of the Aesopic descriptions to reality. In other words, Aesopic voices need to be heard, and without ability and willingness of a reader or viewer to decode the Aesopic encryption, the message intended by the author is lost, and the Aesopic quality of the work nullified.8 The recipient’s ability to decode presupposes both an alertness to the oppressive or inhumane environment and a capability to recognise this environment under layers of disguise; yet such an ability can (presumably less frequently) also be instigated by an Aesopic work which allows recipients to gain a new perspective on the reality of their lives.9 The Aesopic success of a work is, in any case, contingent on the relationship between the Aesopic creator and his/her ‘consumer’; only through its reception is the Aesopic given an environment in which to unfold. The likelihood and intensity of this reception depends not only on the political and personal circumstances that surround an Aesopic work, but also on the level of the Aesopic concealment: Aesopic ‘masks’ can be put on only superficially, thus being easily spotted and removed, or else firmly attached, rendering the underlying ‘truth’ harder to perceive. From this discussion it becomes clear that the Aesopic quality of a work is one that is first and foremost pragmatic and exists in addition to other qualities, especially aesthetic ones. Yet the pragmatic and the aesthetic are also, it could be argued, very closely connected. Aesopic creations with their varied forms of coding and camouflage can – and in our view, should – be considered an artful aesthetic device, yet as also always unavoidably and

8 Annabel Patterson defines the Aesopic arsenal as ‘a flexible and constantly renewable system of metaphorical substitutions for actual events, persons, or political concepts that can, but need not, be recognised as such’ (Patterson 1991, 52, our emphasis). Patterson argues that Aesopian writing in this sense emerged in the last decades of sixteenth-century England (see ibid.). 9 In the GDR, for example, many readers of literature were highly ‘trained’ in reading between the lines and more or less demanded their writers to be critical. There were also instances where an unsuspecting reader would find critical descriptions of communist reality in unlikely places, such as a children’s book which contains a subversive fairy tale by Gert Prokop (see Reifarth 2011[b], 135 and 141–143). 6 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey

inextricably connected with the subject matter that is seized and encoded (e.g. the political situation at the time of writing and the writer’s opinion about it). However, the Barthian concept of fiction being eternally written (that is, read) anew in every here and now10 also applies to all Aesopic works; therefore their Aesopic quality may vanish once the necessity of encoding due to a particular discursive structure has disappeared, and along with it the existence of ‘consumers’ who know how to crack the Aesopic code. What then remains is a work whose former Aesopic quality is either only retraceable through guided interpretation, or entirely severed from it and thus undetectable.

3. The Essays in this Collection Our collection of essays is based on papers presented at the conference Aesopic Voices: Re-framing Truth in Twentieth-Century Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fables, held in Melbourne in February 2008 and convened by the editors of this book. (The two exceptions are the chapter by Laura Petersen and Stephan Packard, an important addition which we commissioned to include Aesopic approaches to the Holocaust and to science in our discussion.) The collection takes its point of departure from the legendary Greek fabulist Aesop, and moves on to discuss and illustrate the varied modes, methods and voices within the realm of the Aesopic. The contributions expand the boundaries of what may be traditionally be thought of as the realm of the Aesopic, examining constructions of Aesopic modes and subjectivities. They are not restricted to historical works but also refer to contemporary societies and imagine future scenarios. The breadth and variety of the Aesopic emerges, as its influence is found not only in art created in reaction to oppressive political systems but also, directly or indirectly, in areas as diverse as the traditions of the Pacific Islands, contemporary Australian Indigenous expressions of culture, in Western psychoanalytical theory and current and future biomedical

10 See Barthes 1977, 145. Foreword: Aesopic Voices 7 practice. Accordingly, our collection is interdisciplinary in approach, and the contributing essays and case studies of the Aesopic bring together historians, literary scholars, film theorists, scholars from Australian Indigenous studies, cultural theorists and arts practitioners. With this collection, we attempt to break new academic ground. While Aesop has now been a ‘household name’ (mostly related to children’s stories) for at least a century and a half, academic recognition of Aesopic art and writing has been relatively sparse. Our book intends to fuel systematic analysis and appreciation of various examples of Aesopic creation. The six sections of this book are devoted to various ‘sub-realms’ of the Aesopic, and discuss the Aesopic in its diverse locations and forms of expression. Following an introductory section about the political relevance of Aesopic approaches and its academic exploration (part I), various genres of Aesopic creation are explored, namely literature (part II), film and theatre (part III) and science and religion (part IV). In part V, a geographical area is highlighted (Australia and the South Pacific), before new literary Aesopic inventions are discussed (part VI).

Part I. Aesop in Time Gert Reifarth’s introductory chapter sets out to trace Aesop the man and Aesopic writing back to its contested origins, while also acknowledging the presence of the Aesopic today. The potential of ‘Aesopics’ as an academic discipline that would examine Aesopic strategies in all areas of life is explored (chapter 2). Justin Clemens undertakes an examination of the connection of the Aesopic with slavery, both literal and political, and extends his argument to outline a political hermeneutics of the Aesopic. He argues that the Aesopic is essentially polyvalent dissimulation, whereby real political situations are at once allegorised and transformed, at least for the duration of the narrative (chapter 3). 8 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey

Part II. Aesop in Literature The essays within this section cover the use of Aesopic strategies in social orders as diverse as the 'Third Reich', the Soviet Union, the German Demo- cratic Republic and Francophone Africa. On the basis of classical rhetoric, Leo Strauss’ ‘awakening stumbling blocks’ and the principles of conversation of H. Paul Grice, Erwin Rotermund proposes a hermeneutics of reading for ‘camouflage texts’ circulated in the ‘Third Reich' and discusses how concealed messages were hidden deeply in such texts and kept traceable for the readers at the same time (chapter 4). Eugenia Kravchenkova retraces the development of Russian political fables throughout the twentieth century from the Revolution (Demian Bednyi’s works) to fables published on the Internet, and focuses especially on works by Nikolai Erdman and Vladimir Mass from the Stalin era (chapter 5). Gert Reifarth demonstrates the use of Aesopic tactics in the writing of political fairy tales in the GDR that were highly critical of the authorities yet managed to slip past the censors (chapter 6). Odile Cazenave discusses the reassessment of Aesopic writing through the works of two major francophone African writers, the Senegalese Boubacar Boris Diop and the Ivorian Véronique Tadjo, whose disenchantment with post-independence régimes in Africa leads them to redefine the notion of storytelling (chapter 7). Laura Petersen analyses works by Art Spiegelman and Yann Martel and argues that the use of animals as an Aesopic device in Holocaust literature enables readers to re-engage with the horror of the Holocaust (chapter 8).

Part III. Aesop in Film and Theatre The three essays in this section explore and analyse film and theatre as popular vehicles for the Aesopic. Catherine Collins and Patricia Varas look closely at the Aesopic techniques in Adolfo Aristarain’s film Tiempo de revancha and demonstrate how this film, released in Argentina in 1982 during the last year of the military Foreword: Aesopic Voices 9 dictatorship known as ‘the process’, was an instant Aesopic triumph, enabling criticism and critique of the government through its clever construction and distortion of the genre of the thriller (chapter 9). Xan Colman and Tamara Searle describe their first-hand experience of creating contemporary theatre in Thailand through an Aesopic interaction with traditional mythologies. They reflect on the impact of such an approach in problematic social environments (chapter 10). George Katsadoros examines how Karaghiozes, a main character of Greek Shadow Theatre, is related to Aesop both in his disfigured appearance and in his ridiculing and outwitting of the powers-that-be. This phenomenon – alive today, ever adopting and adapting to modern-time situations – is shown to be at work in plays from the time of the Turkish occupation of Greece from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century (chapter 11).

Part IV. Aesop in Science and Religion The two essays in this section develop and uncover important tenets of the Aesopic in three central discourses, namely science and religion. Stephan Packard reveals how Galileo Galilei inadvertently moved towards and away from Aesopic techniques in some of his writings, controlling their content and protecting them against censorship with varying success. These observations are then contrasted with the ‘Aesopics without censorship’ in the writings of geneticist Richard Dawkins nearly four centuries after Galilei (chapter 12). Julia Vassilieva contends that religious discourse under the Soviet dictatorship was displaced to the realm of Aesopic discourse or even beyond it into a realm of ‘hushed-up’ reality. For the description of the state of religious discourse in present-day Russia, Vassilieva employs the semiotic term of the ‘empty signifier’ (chapter 13).

Part V. Aesop in Australia and the South Pacific The three chapters in this section trace Aesopic devices in Indigenous cultures in Australia and the South Pacific. 10 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey

In his essay ‘Wayfinding. Dancing on the Beaches of the Mind’, the final work completed before his death in March 2008, the eminent scholar Greg Dening discusses how the Aesopic functions across cultures, particularly in the historiography of the Pacific Islands. This essay enacts the author’s personal philosophy of sophisticated and sensitive engagement with such histories (chapter 14). Philip Morrissey examines the Australian Indigenous narrative ‘Old Cobraboor’, a depiction of a massacre of Aboriginal Australians by white settlers in the 1880s, and its first ever written version in 1990 in a short story by Ellen Draper, which reconfigures historical fact and indirectly addresses White Australia’s denial of what happened (chapter 15). Marcus Waters uses a personal narrative to demonstrate how the Indigenous Kamilaroi people apply Aesopic strategies to ensure ongoing cultural maintenance and survival of their intellectual property as an ongoing and evolving ceremonial practice. He explains how such a strategy of cultural adaption serves to ensure the survival of the eldest living human pedagogy in the world (chapter 16).

Part VI. Aesop Re-invented in the Twenty-First Century The essays in this section explore creatively the continued viability of the Aesopic storyteller to comprehend and respond to increasingly complex social issues. Kevin Murray recounts how Aesopic strategies are involved in the creation of two present-day stories that are concerned with the North-South hierarchy in viewing the world (chapter 17). Catherine Fargher discusses her own bioethical fables and explains how the use of the storytelling mode can assist us in understanding contemporary social quandaries, such as the ethical issues surrounding new biotechnologies, for example cloning, xeno-transplantation, GM foods and therapeutic stem cells (chapter 18). Foreword: Aesopic Voices 11

4. The Power of the Word The search for and distribution of truth is as much part of human society as is its obstruction and persecution. This persecution can be seen as having an effect opposite to the one intended; in an essay published in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

The history of persecution is a history of endeavours to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. […] Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.11 Such optimism may today appear romantic and obsolete, considering the extent of censorship intrusion, of book burnings and the boundless silencing and imprisonment and murder of advocates of the truth that have occurred in the 170 years since Emerson wrote these words. Yet in our opinion, Emerson’s belief that the power of the word makes persecution counterproductive is proven by our examination of Aesopic creation as a means of expression of truth and for its advocacy. Consequently, the cover images of our book by Christian Herrnbeck highlight these different aspects. On the front cover, we see the cell doors of a prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen (where political prisoners were kept and tortured in the GDR between 1951 and 1989), and between them the figure of Aesop (as painted by Velázquez in 1638) is standing tall, manuscript in hand, the power of the word at his disposal. The back cover photograph, on the other hand, points to the very real possibility of the power of the word being abused: it depicts an interrogation room at the same prison and the typewriter of the interrogator. We hope our book will make the realm of the Aesopic accessible, help scholars understand its status as an alternative discursive form of protest and subversion, fuel systematic analysis and increase appreciation of Aesopic creation.

11 Emerson 1983, 298f. 12 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey

References

Barthes, Roland. 1968. ‘La mort de l’auteur’. Manteia 5, 12–17. (An earlier version appeared in English in Aspen 5/6, 1967). Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘Thed eath of the author’. In Barthes, Image Music Text. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. 142–148. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1983. ‘Compensation’. In Emerson, Essays and Lectures. New York: Viking Press. 283–302. (Originally published 1841). Foucault, Michel. 1969. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 63:3, 73–104. Foucault, Michel, 1980. ‘Truth and Power’. In Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. 109–133. Foucault, Michel. 1984. ‘What is an author?’ In The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. 101–120. Loseff, Lev. 1984.On the Beneficence of Censorship. Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. Munich: Sagner. Packard, Stephan. 2011. ‘Aesopic Transformation in Scientific Discourse: Observations on Galileo and Dawkins’. In this volume. 292–319. Patterson, Annabel. 1991. Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reifarth, Gert. 2011[a]. ‘Old Aesop and “Aesopics”: Facts and Fiction, Film and Fables’. In this volume. 14–44. Reifarth, Gert. 2011[b]. ‘Aesop vs Censor in the GDR: On the Subversive Power of Political Fairy Tales’. In this volume. 126–154. Part I

Aesop in Time 2

Gert Reifarth

Old Aesop and ‘Aesopics’: Facts and Fiction, Film and Fables

‘Aesop’ is a modern construct which has become a blanket term for a wide array of cultural occurrences ranging from children’s animal stories to political affairs. This chapter will examine first the presence of Aesop today (section 1), then the historical as well as the fictional figure Aesop and his pictorial representations (section 2). The following section investigates what we know as ‘Aesop’s fables’ (section 3). Next, an academic discipline will be defined for which the term ‘Aesopics’ is employed (section 4). I will conclude the chapter with a discussion of the Bulgarian filmEzop (1970), which is a prime example of modern ‘Aesopics’ in practice (section 5).

1. Aesop: A Presence Today Countless editions are in print around the world of ‘Aesop’s fables’, including children’s books as well as academic and bilingual versions. ‘Aesop’s fables’ have been published in countless languages, among them Nahuatl1 and Irish

1 Aesop 1987. Nahuatl was the language of the Aztec empire.

14 Old Aesop and ‘Aesopics’ 15

Gaelic.2 Numerous audio recordings of the fables exist, including American storyteller Diane Ferlatte’s, CD Aesop: Alive & Well (2001), which focuses on Aesop’s life as well as a selection of his fables. Visual realisations of the fables include cartoons from the early 1930s produced by the Van Beuren studio, the Encyclopaedia Britannica version of ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’ (1947),3 a series of animations in the early 1970s with Bill Cosby, as Aesop, introducing the fables and the twenty-six short episodes of the Japanese animation, Aesop’s World, in which Aesop is a giant fish who wants to fly. The canon of ‘Aesop’s fables’ is constantly enriched by re-tellings and new additions, like Vivian French’s Aesop’s Funky Fables (1999),4 Toni Morrison and her son Slade’s series of Aesop fable adaptions (2003 and 2004),5 and Robert W. Long’s New Aesop Fables (2006).6 Books and essays about Aesop and his fables also continue to be published. Among them are academic treatises such as the introductions to new editions of the fables,7 Annabel Patterson’s Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (1991) and Laura Gibbs’ Aesop’s Fables in Latin: Ancient Wit and Wisdom from the Animal Kingdom (2009). Other publications reflect a rather more casual or obscure angle on Aesop’s fables, for example Aesop’s Management Fables: The Wombat Manager and Other Cautionary Tales (1997) by Dick McCann and Jan Stewart, Prayers and Fables: Meditating on

2 Aesop 1900–1902. 3 A dramatised version of Aesop’s fable starring farm animals, including an owl, a fox, a goose, a rooster, a raccoon and a hare (see http://www.archive.org/details/Hareandt1947). 4 The book jacket informs us: ‘This is a re-telling of Aesop’s classic moral tales – some well- known and some almost unknown. Rap your way through these wacky new versions of Aesop‘s classic fables, supported by vibrant subversive illustrations.’ 5 Published as a three-volume series entitled Who’s got game?. According to Scribner, the publisher, Morrison’s re-workings are ‘Aesop live’. 6 Long’s publisher, Lulu, has the following description on their website: ‘These new Aesopian fables expand on the themes that Aesop wrote about and now concern the issues, vices, and virtues of this century. These one hundred fables, which involve animals, insects, people, and objects, touch on a variety of social, moral and even political themes that are particularly relevant to this time.’ (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback_book/new_ aesop_fables/169673). 7 For example by Robert Temple (1998), Laura Gibbs (2002) and D. L. Ashliman (2003). 16 Gert Reifarth

Aesop’s Wisdom (1998) by William Cleary and Aesop & the CEO: Powerful Business Insights from Aesop’s Ancient Fables (2005) by David Noonan. A further Aesop connection in the pop part of Western culture is American rapper Ian Bavitz who calls himself Aesop Rock and has been releasing CDs since 1999. The video clip for the title track from his latest album None Shall Pass (2007) features cartoon characters in animal disguises as well as the rapper himself in an (animated) animal mask. Bavitz has his slogan ‘Must not sleep, must warn others’ from his track ‘Commencement at the Obedience Academy’ (2000) tattooed on his arms. Who is this Aesop with whom we seem to have so many connections?

2. Aesop the Man vs Aesop the Fable Aesop is the unlikely brother of Heracles and Achilles. Supposed God-like human beings, their deeds have been reported by writers and propelled them to the status of a myth of which their actual ‘humanness’ is no longer a part. In the Aesop myth, developed and passed on by writers of antiquity, muscles and heroic deeds are substituted by words and brave outspokenness. The man, if ever he was there at all, has vanished behind the myth, and himself become a hero – and a fable.8 Aesop’s life is a mystery, an obscurity full of contradictory elements, ‘For, the Story is come down to us so Dark and Doubtful’, as Roger L’Estrange observed in the late seventeenth century.9 Despite the ‘durability’ and 2500 year history of what we today associate with his name, any ‘evidence of the actual existence of Aesop is surprisingly scarce and fragmentary’.10 It is

8 Todd Compton mentions that the Delphi oracle ‘prescribe[d] hero cult to Aesop as expiation’ for Delphi’s unjust treatment and sentencing of Aesop. This ‘oracle-prescribed hero cult’ which ensues might have set in motion the mystification of Aesop the man (Compton 1990, 333). The suggestion that Aesop himself was a fable was made in 1839 in an essay by Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker entitled ‘Aesop eine Fabel’ [Aesop a Fable] (Welcker 1845). Welcker attempts to expose Herodotus’ short account of Aesop as fiction and part of a mythologisation of Aesop (241f. et passim), and speaks of his ‘Gefühl, daß Aesop eine mythische Person sey’ [his feeling that Aesop is a mythical person] (246), ‘eine Volksfabel’ [a people’s fable] (253) and the typos of a slave with a sharp tongue (see 254). 9 Aesop 1699, A. 10 Becher 1996, 4. Old Aesop and ‘Aesopics’ 17 impossible to establish Aesop as a historical figure, as our knowledge about him consists merely of ‘guessed facts’ due to the absence of trustworthy sources. Even the authenticity of his name is by no means undisputed; L’Estrange mentions ‘his Name, Æsop, or (as some will have it) Lochman’,11 and we also read later that ‘[a]n African named Lochman, the “World’s greatest fabulist that ever lived,” was born in Itiopi [Ethiopia or Kush], East Africa – South of the Sahara. The Greeks renamed him “Aesop”.’12 In antiquity, Aesop was a well-known figure that needed no introduction for the readership of philosophers and the audience of the theatre.13 Thus Herodotus in the fifth century BC, in The History, when considering the semi-mythical figure of Rhodopis – a slave who married a pharaoh and thus became a queen, in what is considered the world’s oldest Cinderella story14 – can afford to be brief and devote only a total of four sentences to Aesop, the first of which is: ‘Aesop, the fable-writer, was one of her fellow-slaves.’15 A century after Herodotus, Aesop is mentioned by Aristophanes in some of his plays, The Wasps and The Birds among them.16 Plato, in his Phaedo, tells of Socrates’ putting some of Aesop’s fables into verse in his prison cell,17 and Plato’s

11 Aesop 1699, A1. 12 ben-Jochannan 1972, 259. 13 Leslie Kurke, in her recent extensive study on Aesop, stresses the importance of the figure of Aesop for ancient Greek culture in general and philosophical literature in particular (see Kurke 2011, 241ff). 14 Greek rhetorician Athenaeus, writing six centuries after Herodotus, claims in Book XII of his Deipnosophistae that the latter mixed up two different women in his account (see Herodotos 1854, 951). In this work, there is also a mention of a work called Æthiopia by a writer named Posidippus (ca. 310–240 BC). Campbell (1982, 15) quotes Athenaeus in the section on Aesop’s contemporary Sappho; Posidippus’ (lost) work is referred to as Aesopia (17). The two varieties of this title are mentioned by Joel B. Lidov (2002, 219), who also discusses the connection between Sappho, Rhodopis and Aesop in Herodotus. Mary Ann Beavis mentions the fourth century BC comedy Aesop by Alexis [of Thurioi] as well as Posidippius’ Aesopia (Beaver 1992, 45). For a discussion of Alexis’ fragment Αίσώπος (ca 320 BC) see Arnott 1996, 75–79. 15 Herodotus 1910, 183 (The History, Second Book, chapter 134). 16 See The Wasps lines 566f., 1256ff., 1446ff., The Birds 471ff., 651ff. (see Aristophanes 1993). On the presence of Aesop in Aristophanes, see duBois 2008, 178–180 (section ‘Comedy & the Fables’). 17 Phaedo 60d (see Plato 1993, 26). In his commentary, the editor mentions the possibility of Socrates’ – who according to Plato (Phaedo 60e & 61a, see ibid. 27) is asked in a recurring 18 Gert Reifarth

student Aristotle relates a fable told by Aesop in Samos to help a defendant.18 Much later, Plutarch (46–120 AD) has Aesop appear as a guest in his Banquet of the Seven Wise Men, albeit not as one of those seven.19 The Βίος Αίσώπου, or the Life of Aesop, a novel of uncertain authorship and written in the second or third century AD,20 fictionalised Aesop and his stories further. Arguably the largest step into fiction is taken by Maximus Planudes, a Byzantine monk who, in all likelihood drawing on the earlier novel, composed a Life of Aesop (in Greek) in the early fourteenth century. This manuscript in turn seems to have been what Rinuccio d’Arezzo translated into Latin in 1448, which then was printed for the first time in Milan in 1474 and included by William Caxton in his 1484 collection of Aesop’s fables.21 It is through Caxton that Planudes’ Life of Aesop came upon us. Richard Bentley, in his Dissertations upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and upon The Fables of Æsop, is so outraged that he gives his opinion about the work of Planudes in no uncertain terms: ‘That idiot of a monk has given us a book, which he calls The Life of Æsop, that, perhaps, cannot be matched in any

dream to ‘make music’ – putting the fables into verse, and also setting them to music (see ibid. 120). Annabel Patterson concludes that this incident places Aesop in a ‘superior relation to Socrates’ as the latter would be reduced to merely modify the former’s ‘concept of wisdom’ (Patterson 1991, 6). 18 Rhetoric 1393b (see Aristotle 2010, 93f.). Aristotle quotes Aesop as refering to the defendant as ‘my client’; Robert Temple is convinced that this story ‘indicates that Aesop was a lawyer’ (Temple 1998, xiii). 19 Those seven are Solon, Bias, Thales, Anacharsis, Cleobulus, Pittacus and Chilo; a total of ten guests appear during their feast. The Banquet is usually included in editions of the Plutarch collection Moralia, for example in Plutarch 1928, 346–449. 20 For an examination of this text and its different manuscripts see Perry (1933, 198–244). Also see Papademetriou (1997), Ludwig 1997 (esp. 13–73), and Holzberg (1992), where the editor in his foreword mentions the text’s first appearance in a Latin translation [by Rinuccio] in 1448, a German version of this translation in 1476/77, and the printing of the Greek original in 1488 (see Holzberg, x). William Caxton’s English translation was printed in 1484, Sir Roger L’Estrange’s in 1692. According to G. A. Karla, Caxton’s version is based on a French translation by Julien Macho (1480), which was also the basis for a Czech (1487) and a Spanish translation (1489) (see Karla 2001, 10). Another noteworthy account is given by John Dillery (1999). 21 Caxton’s work is available in an edition by R. T. Lenaghan (Caxton 1967); it includes the ‘lyf of Esope’ (27–72).