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| Steinhöwel's woodcut, Basel, 1501 |
I think this paper speaks to concerns of our group, particularly the effects that the limits of textual environments have on discourse communities. So please comment!
Here's the abstract (aka short version) if you don't have the patience for the rest:
Commuting with the
City Mouse: Aesop's Fables and Academic Commentary
The instant message
poses a formidable threat to literary interpretation. While texting may contribute to recent demands for abbreviation,
the desire for the instant message predates
digital technology and has long plagued teachers' attempts to cultivate
extended conversations about classroom texts. The common readerly attraction to singularity and brevity often
belies the interpretive multiplicity necessary for academic dialogue. Perhaps no genre fully satisfies this appetite
for the message more than the Aesopic
fable. Each brief fable is
accompanied by a concise moral that readers can easily consume. Yet, fabular interpretation has not
always been so digestible. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries throughout Europe, Aesop's fables were
standard classroom texts that offered more than a kernel of moral advice. As staples of grammar and composition
instruction, readers paraphrased and elaborated upon the fables in extensive commentaries,
which served as medieval hypertexts that subsequent readers could read,
associate with other classroom texts, and extend through marginal and
interlineal glosses. The medieval
fable then offered the opportunity for practice in literary elaboration and
collaborative constructions of knowledge, a far cry from the instant message we have to come to
associate with Aesopica.
Furthermore, this model of medieval fabular reading is based on the same
principles as user-friendly digital environments such as blogs and wikis,
within which commentary can be produced at an unprecedented rate. This paper suggests that these modes of
digital elaboration and dialogue recall and remediate medieval fabular reading
and writing practices. While the
restrictions of print culture reduced and often eliminated commentary, the
digital network drastically expands the field of interpretation for literary
texts. In particular, the
wiki offers a cyberspace within which students and teachers can compile
commentary about course texts outside of the classroom. Most importantly, the inscription of classroom
dialogue onto this digital palimpsest can mitigate the challenges of
maintaining cohesive academic communities on a commuter campus such as UMass
Boston. As a new form of fable
commentary, wiki-writing can attenuate the desire for the instant message and develop a new respect for the virtues of collaborative
elaboration.
Alex Mueller
English Department
alex.mueller@umb.edu
Commuting with the City Mouse: Aesop's Fables
and Academic Commentary
I
begin with a tale that most of us know from the picture books of childhood,
"The City Mouse and the Country Mouse":
A
city mouse once happened to pay a visit to the house of a country mouse where
he was served
a humble meal of acorns. The city mouse finished his business in the country
and by
means of insistent invitations he persuaded the country mouse to come pay him a
visit. The
city mouse then brought the country mouse into a room that was overflowing with food.
As they were feasting on various delicacies, a butler opened the door. The city mouse
quickly concealed himself in a familiar mouse hole, but the poor country mouse was
not acquainted with the house and frantically scurried around the floorboards, frightened
out of his wits. When the butler had taken what he needed, he closed the door behind
him. The city mouse then urged the country mouse to sit back down to dinner. The country mouse refused and said, "How could I possibly do that? Oh, how
scared I am!
Do you think that the man is going to come back?" This was all that the
terrified mouse
was able to say. The city mouse insisted, "My dear fellow, you could never
find such
delicious food as this anywhere else in the world." "'Acorns are
enough for me," the country
mouse maintained, "so long as I am secure in my freedom!"
It is
better to live in self-sufficient
poverty than to be tormented by the worries of wealth.[1]
This last
line, better known as the moral, is what we have come to learn is the payoff
for such a fanciful tale of two talking mice. We are provided a simple and seemingly straightforward
message, a kind of acorn of a lesson that we can take away from the story and
easily consume. And yet, as
teachers of academic interpretation, we see the manifest limitations of this
reduction of the tale's meaning to a simple aphorism about poverty and wealth. In fact, it's often difficult not to
blame such instant message-driven (pun intended) interpretation that we witness
in student responses to course texts on the precepts of moralistic fable
reading. We're all familiar with
the pervasive sentiment not only that is there something tangible to be
obtained from reading, but also that it is often one thing, often practical,
often simplistic. Fables fulfill,
it seems, some readers' greatest fantasy: a brief, easily understandable
interpretation.
For
even others, this desire for the message is even stronger within the
dynamic world of ever shifting cyberspace. If you read a popular book and then google it, you will be
faced with an overwhelming number of hits that cite interpretations offered by
a range of readers, from credentialed specialists to enthusiastic
amateurs. And on the Internet many
potential dangers to interpretation seemingly await, from the error-ridden Wikipedia
page to the apparently brilliant, but plagiarized, article. So many acorns, but which one to
choose? It is tempting to become
country mice and seek the solitude and assurance of something printed, like the
The Reader's Digest. The
multiplicity of meaning inherent in the digital network seems to be in direct
contrast with fable reading. I
want to suggest that this is not the case, however. Rather, I want to argue that online practices such as
blogging and wiki-writing are based on the textual principles that made fables
the most persistent literary genre in reading and writing instruction. And furthermore, I want to suggest that
these digital textualities remediate fabular reading in a way that can enhance
collaborative knowledge production in our classrooms, particularly for commuting
city mice, such as our students at UMass Boston.
I
have selected the word "commuting" to address the concerns of a
commuter campus like ours, which must take extraordinary measures to maintain
cohesive academic communities. As
I will suggest at the end of this paper, collaborative writing environments,
such as the blog or wiki, offer new modes for us to continue and enhance (not
replace) the conversations we have in our classrooms. To demonstrate this, I want to delve into the archaeology of
"commuting" a bit further by recognizing its Latin root, commutare,
which means "to change, to exchange" or even "to converse."[2] This premodern meaning imbues
"commuting" with the discursive sensibility that I also attempt to
foster in the classroom.
Unfortunately, the commuting student is often difficult to commute
with. The antiquity of commutare
also invokes the classroom of the Middle Ages, where the teaching of fables
was a staple for grammar and composition instruction. And as it turns out, the kinds of readings students were
encouraged to pursue were ones that were continually "commuted" or
subject to revision within the academic communities that examined them.
To
identify the affinities between digital and fabular literate practices, it's
important to understand that fable interpretation has not always been reduced
to an instant message. In fact, if
we examine the history of Aesop's fables, we discover not only that there is no
single set of interpretations for each fable, but also that there is no single
set of fables themselves. No
original Greek Aesop has ever been sufficiently identified, and instead his
status as the "author" was fashioned in Latin by a number of ancient
and medieval translators known as Phaedrus, Avianus, and Romulus, who
individually invoked Aesop as a means to "authorize" their versions.[3] Thus, the students and teachers of the
Middle Ages, who effectively canonized Aesop as the author of these beast
fables, only knew Aesop's fables in their later and Latin forms.
Unlike
our common desire for singularity, however, the manuscripts that contain the
fables demonstrate little preference for one set of fables over the other. For example, one fourteenth-century
Austrian manuscript, Codex Vindobonensis
Palatinus 303, is a veritable cornucopia of Aesopica, containing six
different versions, and even one set, known as the prose Romulus, appears
twice.[4] The first time the prose Romulus
fables appear, they appear as promythia, or prefaces to a metrical version
known as the elegiac Romulus.[5] Given their appearance later in the
manuscript, it is likely that these promythia were written by students in an
attempt to demonstrate their knowledge of the fable tradition, which would
require that they know the variations of each fable. As Willene Clark notes, it was common pedagogical practice
after the twelfth century for pupils to produce paraphrases and imitations of
texts as a means to learn grammatical rules, identify rhetorical tropes, and improve
their writing fluency. In response
to fables, students would often compose promythia, prose introductions, or
epimythia, prose conclusions that served as moralitates or
"morals."[6] Of course, the fact that this was
common practice does not provide assurance that the promythia in Codex Vindobonensis Palatinus 303 were written
by a student, but a comparison of the two sets of prose Romulus fables
further suggests that an amateur – whose knowledge of the tradition was
incomplete – produced the first series.
For example, if we turn to the promythium for "De lupo et agno"
[The wolf and the lamb], we find both a repetition and an omission indicative
of a tentative understanding of the standard fable. The writer repeats the phrase "sursum bibebat
lupus" [the wolf was drinking upstream] (fol. 13r) and then omits the
final summative line "Haec in illos dicta
est fabula qui hominibus calumniantur" [this fable is written
about those who falsely accuse others] that appears at the end of the later prose
Romulan fable (fol. 132r).
Furthermore, the error-ridden promythia are accompanied by numerous
marginal glosses, which suggest moments of teacherly intervention. This is an extreme example, but this kind
of redundancy became the rule, rather than the exception, throughout the Middle
Ages. If we follow the textual history
of these fables into the early print era, we see that the earliest printed book
of fables, compiled by Heinrich Steinhöwel and printed by Johann Zainer at Ulm
in 1476 or 1477, contains not only the curricular versions of Romulus and
Avianus, but also selections of the popular fables of Rinuccio d'Arezzo, Petrus
Alphonsus, and Poggio Bracciolini.[7] In a later, probably 1481, printing by Heinrich
Knoblochtzer in Strassburg, the elegiac
Romulus is also followed by prose summaries that are reminiscent of the
epimythia, or prose epilogues, of the medieval classroom.[8] By 1501 Steinhöwel's collection had
been expanded to three hundred fables
by the famous schoolmaster Sebastian Brant.[9]
The encyclopedic compilation of
fables had clearly become the norm by the late fifteenth century, but this
emphasis on accretion, over condensation, would soon come to an end as the
printing industry became increasingly selective in their choice of texts.
The
death knell may have been sounded even earlier with the first publication of Steinhöwel's
collection, which included German translations of the Latin fables. This edition, which only survives in
ten copies, proved to be the only bilingual one. After its publication the collection was split into two
separate editions, one German and one Latin.[10] The intervention of the vernacular seems
to have begun the canonization of Steinhöwel's version, because many other
national languages followed suit.
Julien Macho's translation of Steinhöwel's collection into French, which
appeared in print in 1480 in Lyon, in turn served as William Caxton's base text
for his English Aesop, which was published in 1484.[11] By 1485 a Dutch translation was printed
in Gouda and by 1488 a Spanish translation was printed in Toulouse.[12] The fate of Aesop was now in the hands
of printers, who effectively vernacularized and popularized the predominantly
Latin academic tradition, leaving the curricular fables such as the elegiac
Romulus, which could previously be elaborated upon by students and teachers
in the margins of classroom manuscripts, in a typeset form that could only be
changed or expanded at the behest and cost of printing houses.
Appropriately,
the slowed growth of the Aesopic corpus corresponds with the ossification of
standard interpretations of individual fables. The best example of this phenomenon in the late fifteenth
century is the emergence of what has become known as the Esopus moralizatus. This text, which is limited to the elegiac
Romulus collection, contains academic commentaries that provide both moral
and allegorical interpretations between, and sometimes in the margin of, each
fable. Its accommodation of
academic interpretation within the text itself reflects the long-standing medieval
practice of leaving adequate space in the margins of the manuscript page for glosses
and commentary by teachers or students.
The print versions of the Esopus moralizatus, however, differ
from their medieval predecessors in that they only include the interpretations
of one commentator. A.E. Wright
characterizes this commentary tradition to be "brief, simple, and predictable,"
which he suggests was likely "a result of the not inconsiderable
technological challenges to be overcome in the reproduction of complex
manuscript layouts on the printed page."[13] The prospect of printing unruly and
lengthy commentaries, which often appeared in the margins, between lines, and
even between selections of text, was surely formidable and it is no surprise
that printers chose more manageable and standardized forms for their
editions. Edward Wheatley suggests
that these printed Aesops "represent only the final, fossilized form of
what had earlier been a dynamic interpretive tradition: further reader response
of the type in which medieval scribes engaged, that is, marginalia, remains
largely absent from the printed editions that contained their own
commentaries."[14] Just as the accumulation and
replication of fables had been more volatile, so too had been their
interpretations.
In
fact, the commentary of the earlier medieval classroom often displaced the
fables themselves. For example, in
one mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, Codex
Claustroneoburgensis 1093, the commentary that accompanies the elegiac Romulus is so lengthy that it overwhelms
the fables inscribed in the middle of the pages. Even the prologue to the fables had to be divided into two
parts to accommodate the effusive exegesis (fol.s 350v-52r).[15] In another fifteenth-century
manuscript, Codex Vindobonensis Palatinus 3235, the glosses, marginalia, and even
maniculae are so pervasive that the commentary is occasionally
indistinguishable from the fables (see especially fol. 1r).[16] The most extreme example of commentary
displacing fable, however, can be found in the fourteenth-century Codex S.
Pauli in Carinthia 255/4, in which only the first two words, or lemma, of each
fable are cited.[17] This was apparently sufficient
identification of the fables, which were likely memorized in the
classroom. The rest of the text is
entirely devoted to commentary upon each fable. This excessive emphasis on commentary is so widespread in
the existing manuscripts that Wheatley even goes so far as to suggest that the elegiac Romulus may have been composed
specifically for the pedagogical production of classroom commentaries.[18] If this is the case, the text serves
the commentary, overturning the standard assumption that interpretation is
extraneous to its object. In the
case of the medieval fable, the commentary completes the text.
And
if we turn to the content of these medieval commentaries, we discover that the
complex and discursive nature of the interpretations they contain is a far cry
from the instant-messages we have come to expect from Aesopica. As a representative example, let us
turn to one of the most well-known fables, "The Crow and the Water
Jar":
A
thirsty crow noticed a huge jar and saw that at the very bottom there was a
little bit of water.
For a long time the crow tried to spill the water out so that it would run over
the ground
and allow her to satisfy her tremendous thirst. After exerting herself for some time
in vain, the crow grew frustrated and applied all her cunning with unexpected ingenuity:
as she tossed little stones into the jar, the water rose of its own accord
until she was
able to take a drink.
This fable shows us that thoughtfulness is superior
to brute strength,
since this is the way that the crow was able to carry her task to its
conclusion.[19]
Like
"The City Mouse and the Country Mouse," this tale is accompanied by a
pithy moral, suggesting that reason, not might, makes right. If we examine medieval commentaries on
this particular fable, we will find a similar interpretation, but in an elaborated
form. For example, a fourteenth-century
Copenhagen manuscript contains the following interpretation: "Ingentem. Hic docet quod ingenium preualet
uiribus, et hoc per coturnicem que dum sitiret in quodam campo urnam semiplenam
aqua inuenit, quam uiribus inclinare non potuit. Sed eam ingenio lapillis inpleuit et istam aquam
extraxit. Fructus talis est:
Melior est sapiens forti uiro" (fol. 139r) [Ingentem. Here he teaches that cleverness is better
than strength; and he teaches that through a quail, which, when it was thirsty,
found an urn half-full of water in a field, and it could not tip the urn. But using its cleverness, it filled it
with stones and drew out the water.
The moral is this: The wise man is better than the strong].[20] Like the Carinthian manuscript
discussed above, this Copenhagen codex only includes the lemma, or incipit, of
each fable, which in this case is the word ingentem. As Wright suggests, "the lemma is
absolutely indispensable, not only serving the proper alignment of primary text
and annotation, but also providing the internal articulation of the commentary
accomplished in the other manuscripts by the regular alternation of prose with
verse fables."[21] What Wright calls "proper
alignment" I could call the hypertextual displacement of the fable itself
by its commentary, which is clearly deemed to be more important. Furthermore, a reader of this codex
would have been expected to associate this commentary or read it along with
other manuscripts that contained these fables.
Nevertheless,
is the interpretation of the fable in this commentary significantly different
from our current understanding of the fable's meaning? A quick comparison will tell us
"no," since both suggest that wisdom is better than strength. Yet, if we collate these with other
medieval commentaries, we find elaborations on its moral significance,
which was associated with praxis in the Middle Ages. In fact, the standard hermeneutic framework was fourfold,
following the exegetical formula: "Lictera gesta refert, quod credas
aligoria / Moralis quod agas, quod speres anagogia" [The literal presents
the acts, the allegorical that which you ought to believe, the moral what you
ought to do, the anagogical what you ought to hope]. Usually applied to biblical exegesis, these lines appear in
a fourteenth-century fable collection in Biblioteca Marciana MS 4018, which
suggests that fables themselves expressed multiple levels of theological meaning.[22] The "moral" or "what you
ought to do" is privileged over the other three modes in fable interpretation
and commentators articulate the moralitas of each fable in diverse ways. In response to "The Crow and the
Water Jar," one commentator in a fifteenth-century Wrocław
manuscript claims that "in hoc appologo docemur quod multa sunt que citius
fiunt per artem quam per vires" (fol. 130r) [in this fable we learn that
there are many things which can be done more quickly by skill than by
strength].[23] Here we have moved from the ontological
realm of being wise or strong to the practical world of doing things with
wisdom or strength. And in other
commentaries we find even more urgent moralitates
such as the following: "Hic monet nos ut studiosius acquiramus
scientiam quam vires, quia magis proficit" (fol. 9r) [Here he urges us
that we be more eager to acquire knowledge than power, because it is more
useful].[24] While the previous commentator stresses
the efficiency of skill, this commentator emphasizes knowledge, both its
acquisition and utility.
And
yet other commentaries become elaborations or compilations, incorporating both
proverbial and homiletic material.
In addition to the standard preference of wisdom over strength, the
commentator of a Munich manuscript recites a relevant proverb: "Vnde: Homo
sepe vincit illa per sapientiam que per vires non faceret. Eciam monet nos ut studiosius sapientia
et ingenio insistamus magis quam viribus" (fol. 228v) [Whence the saying:
A man often conquers with knowledge those things that he could not do by
force. This also urges us to rely
more on wisdom and cleverness than on strength.].[25] This inclusion of a similar maxim adds
credence to the message of the fable and reflects the accretive nature of
academic commentary. A more radical
example of this accumulation of evidence can be found in a fifteenth-century
codex in Budapest: "In hoc appollogo auctor docet nos quod queramus
prudenciam, dicens 'Tu debes scire quod prudencia est maior viribus et prevalet
eam, quia per sapienciam vincet homo qui viribus vincere non posset.' Ideo subiungit dicens quod sapiencia
complet opus cuiuslibet hominis inceptum.
Vnde Salomon Prouerbiorum: 'Potencior est sapiencia'" (fol. 15r)
[In this fable the author teaches us that we should seek knowledge, saying,
"You should know that knowledge is greater than strength and more valuable,
because with wisdom a man can attain what he cannot with strength." He continues saying that wisdom
accomplishes the task begun by anyone.
Thus Solomon in the Proverbs: "Wisdom is stronger"].[26] The apparent redundancy of this
interpretation should remind us of the repetitious nature of the fables
themselves. Yet the commentator
cleverly turns the idea of strength (viribus)
upon itself by suggesting not only that wisdom (sapiencia) is greater than strength, but also that it is stronger (potencior) than strength itself. By elaborating upon the basic principle
"knowledge is greater than strength" (prudencia est maior viribus), the commentator interrogates the very
nature of strength itself, a philosophical investigation that surely transcends
simplistic interpretations so often associated with fables.
Moreover,
medieval commentators dare to go further than this, revising the fables
themselves within their commentaries to suit their particular contexts or
audiences. Consider the following
fifteenth-century commentary in a codex held in the University Library at
Prague: "Ingentem sitiens.
Hic actor ostendit quod prudencia est melior et maior viribus. Ergo studiosius admonet ut sciamus et
prudenciam acquiramus, quod probat dicens: Quedam sitiens cornix volans per
campum venit ad vnum fontem, quem circa vidit pendere vnam vrnam in qua modicum
aque fuit, quam haurire non valebat.
Post hec cupiens effundere vrnam planis campis, quia cornix nusquam
potuit inclinare, tandem invenit sua arte calliditatem, et congregans lapillos
in vrnam misit. Quibus immissis
aqua sursum ascendit et sic habuit facilem viam potandi (fol. 22r) [Ingentem sitiens. Here the author
demonstrates that wisdom is better and greater than strength. Thus he urges us quite eagerly that we
know that we should seek wisdom, which he shows by saying: A thirsty crow,
flying across a field, came to a well, above which it saw a bucket hanging in
which there was little water, which it could not pour out. Then, hoping to spill the vessel onto
the ground, because the crow could not tip it, it nevertheless thought up a
strategy in its cleverness; and gathering pebbles it dropped them into the
bucket. When they had been put in,
the water rose up, and thus the crow had an easy way to drink].[27] If we compare the plot details of this
commentary with the fable itself, we find a number of novelties, which not only
appeal to the sensibilities of their academic audiences, but also prove to
become standard elements in the future versions of the fable. As Wright puts it, "The
conciseness of the verse fables . . . can verge on narrative reticence, and it
can in fact come as no surprise that the late medieval annotators should have
taken advantage of the freedom afforded them by the conventions of their own
genre to introduce in the commentaries new motivations, causalities, or simple
embellishments lacking in the verse fables."[28] In this case, the thirst of the bird
and the method of quenching it are given explanations through implication and
elaboration: the bird has just flown over a field (per campum) and seeks refreshment from a bucket (urnam) that hangs above a well (fontem). It is clear that the word urna, which appears in the original
fable and likely referred to a funerary urn, caused confusion for the reader
that this commentator sought to clarify by characterizing it as an urn, or
bucket, that hung above the well.
And as it turns out, this addition of the bucket and well persisted in
the Aesopic tradition, as is evidenced by its appearance later in the same
century in the woodcut that accompanies this fable in the many printed versions
and translations of Steinhöwel's Aesop.[29]
This
kind of textual elaboration, and its influence on subsequent fable writing and
commentary, suggests that the fable commentary tradition's dynamic and
expandable nature was an essential component of its academic use. An example from the commentary in an
Erfurt manuscript demonstrates how even the fable of "The Crow and the
Water Jar" itself can serve as a metaphor for the collaborative
construction of knowledge. The
commentator adds the following pedagogical summary to an interpretation of the
fable: "Licet sicud cornix non potuit effundere vrnam, sic nullus
scholaris studens potest quamlibet scientiam acquirere; set potest acquirere
aliquam partem scientie si proiciat lapidem, id est si adhibit laborem et
dilegenciam" (fol. 35r) [Just as the crow could not spill the urn, so no
student can attain any knowledge he desires; but he can acquire a certain
portion of knowledge if he throws in the stone, that is to say if he applies
effort and diligence].[30]
Here the commentator warns readers
that complete knowledge of anything is not achievable through individual
pursuits. Instead, students can
acquire knowledge by contributing stones, or offering their own efforts to the collaborative
cause. A revision of this
fable, which survives in at least two fifteenth-century manuscripts, even goes
so far as to compare the act of writing itself to the accumulation of pebbles
in a water-filled bucket: "Versus cev scribit, taliter arte bibit" [In
the same way as the author writes verses, so the crow drinks by skill].[31] Written elaboration and revision are
construed as the means to the attainment of knowledge. Wright aptly explains that, "Here
the act of writing is described as a process of patient accretion similar to
the crow's gathering of pebbles," but I would take this a step further to
suggest that this line characterizes the entire enterprise of writing fable
commentary, which necessarily involves responding both to the individual fable
and to the larger and ever expanding corpus of fabular interpretation.[32] Consider the words of the medieval rhetorician
Geoffrey of Vinsauf who, in teaching the rhetorical method of amplificatio or
what we would call "elaboration," beseeches his students to
accumulate words and phrases in the manner of the crow: "sic ex modica
maxima crescit aqua" [And so, from a little water, much water arises].[33] If each fable is a "little
water" (modica aqua), the contributions of the commentators produce
much water (maxima aqua) from which future fable readers will satisfy
their thirst for knowledge.
One
of those future fable readers was the late-fifteenth-century Scottish
schoolmaster, Robert Henryson, who composed his own English fables and
commentaries that adopt the virtues of amplificatio to the extreme. If each commentary adds a pebble to the
tradition, he tosses in a boulder.
His commentaries, or what are commonly referred to as his moralitates,
have been derided by modern critics such as J.A. Burrow, who suggest that they
are "at best unpleasing and at worst desperately confusing."[34] At least some of the bewilderment must
originate from Henryson's attempt to combine his revision of well-known fables
with an elaboration upon the fable commentary tradition. And to make matters more complex, Henryson's
commentaries often suggest possibilities rather than present answers, using
tentative language to articulate his interpretations. He belies allegorical precision by using subjunctive terms
such as "may" or figurative ones such as "liken": "This
cok . . . may till ane fule be peir" (141-2) [This cock . . . may be compared
to a fool]; "this cok weill may we call / Nyse proude men"
(590-1) [this cock well may we call foolish, proud men]; "This volf
I likkin to sensualitie" (1118) [This wolf I liken to
sensuality]; and "This selie scheip may present the figure / Of
pure commounis" (1258-9) [This innocent sheep may represent the figure of
the poor commoner].[35] By couching his interpretations with
such qualified language, Henryson implies that his reading is simply one among
many possibilities.[36] If, for example, we examine his
commentary on the fable with which I began, "The City Mouse and the
Country Mouse," we witness not only his distinctive narrative voice, but
also his penchant for elaboration:
Blissed
be sempill lyfe withoutin dreid;
Blissed
be sober feist in quietie.
Quha
hes aneuch, of na mair hes he neid,
Thoct
it be littill into quantatie.
Grit
aboundance and blind prosperitie
Oftytmes
makis ane euill conclusioun.
The
sweitest lyfe, thairfoir, in this cuntrie,
Is
sickernes, with small possessioun.
Of
wantoun man that vsis for to feid
Thy
wambe, and makis it a god to be;
Luke
to thy self, I warne the weill on deid.
The
cat cummis and to the mous hes ee;
Quhat
is avale thy feist and royaltie,
With
dreidfull hart and tribulatioun?
Thairfoir,
best thing in eird, I say for me,
Is
merry hart with small possessioun.
Thy
awin fyre, freind, thocht it be bot ane gleid,
It
warmis weill, and is worth gold to the;
And
Solomon sayis, gif that thow will reid,
"Vnder
the heuin I can not better se
Than
ay be blyith and leif in honestie."
Quhairfoir
I may conclude be this ressoun:
Of
eirthly ioy it beiris maist degre,
Blyithnes
in hart, with small possessioun.
(373-96)
[Blessed
be a simple life without fear; blessed be a temperate feast in peace. Whoever has
enough, though it is little in quantity, has no need of more. Great abundance and blind
prosperity often produce a bad conclusion. Therefore, in this country the sweetest life
is security with modest possessions.
O greedy man, accustomed to feed your stomach
and make it a god, look to yourself, I warn you in all earnest. That cat comes, and
has an eye on the mouse. What is
the use of your feasting and splendor, with a fearful
heart and tribulation? Therefore,
the best thing on earth, I say for my part, is a merry
heart with modest possessions.
Your own fire, friend, though it is only a coal, warms
well, and is worth gold to you.
And Solomon says, if you care to read him, "Under
the heaven I can see nothing better than to be always happy and live
virtuously." Wherefore,
I may conclude with this saying: "The highest degree of earthly joy comes from
blitheness of heart, with modest possessions."]
Henryson
begins with "Blissed be sempill lyfe withoutin dreid" (373), the
common moralitas of this tale that I read at the beginning of this paper,
but this is also his point of departure to a meditation on the blindness that
accompanies prosperity and the security that follows from modesty. Moreover, his focus on " this
cuntrie" (379) localizes his interpretation and speaks to the concerns of
his audience, a rhetorical move that should remind us of the transformation of
the funerary urn to the well and bucket in "The Crow and the Water
Jar". And after this first
stanza, he launches into an invective against human greed, ironically quoting
one of the richest of Old Testament patriarchs, Solomon, whose proverb shifts
the focus from possessions, almost entirely. Henryson ultimately seems concerned with "Blyithnes in
hart" (396), which accompanies modest living. And yet, when he includes phrases such as "I say for
me" (387), "gif that thow will reid" (391), and "I may
conclude" (394), he makes it abundantly clear that this is only his
interpretation, subject to the volition and scrutiny of his audience. These elements suggest that Henryson
was fully aware of the flexible nature of fable interpretation and that moralitates
were rarely codified or closed.
Henryson's
expansion and revision of the standard moralitas, combined with his
interpretive flexibility, offer a fitting climax to the historical volatility
of the commentary tradition, which would slowly, but surely, become fixed and
reduced into the pithy instant messages we have come to expect from Aesop's
fables. In fact, Henryson's
fabular commentary represents a fleeting emergence of Roland Barthes'
well-known "writerly text" for which "the goal of literary work
. . . is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the
text."[37] Within this formulation, readers become
writers, or in the case of the fables, readers become commentators who write
the very text they read. While
this kind of "writerly text" is possible within manuscript culture,
in which readers write directly onto the texts they read, the emergence and
widespread dissemination of the printed book made this kind communal reading
and writing less common. Martin
Foys suggests that it is therefore important to consider "the large part
that the cultural and economic dominance of the unvaried, mass-produced, and
author-friendly print product plays in constructing the relationships of the
written word as fixed, linear, and largely closed to alternative
textualities."[38] While it may not be fair to
characterize the printed text as "unvaried," it undoubtedly played a
large role in the facilitation of what Barthes calls "the pitiless divorce
which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and
its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its
reader."[39] I believe this divorce is never more
apparent than when we consider the limits of fabular reading in the modern era.
Yet,
digital textuality offers ways to mediate, or should I say remediate, this
divorce through dynamic writing modes such as blogs or wikis, which allow users
to read and even revise texts within user-friendly and hyperlinked environments. Hypertext, what Theodor H. Nelson
originally characterized as "non-sequential writing – text that branches
and allows choices to the reader . . . a series of text chunks connected by
links which offer the reader different pathways," offers the reader a
chance to shape the text in ways almost unthinkable within print culture.[40] While the sheer number of textual
itineraries and speed by which they become available to readers offered in the
digital age are unprecedented, this kind of textual sensibility, in which the
reader actively links texts by association, rather than a linear sequence, is
also represented by the principles of late-medieval fabular reading. Consider the lemma, a textual unit of
the first word or phrase of each fable, which serves as a kind of premodern
hyperlink. The reader encounters
the lemma, which associates the corresponding text with a particular fable or
tradition of fables. While the
reading pathways are relatively limited, especially in comparison to a digital
network, the wide variety and variations of each fable, the interlineal
glosses, and the marginalia that pervade the commentary tradition suggest that
the teachers and students of these texts operated more often by association
than by linear sequence.
Moreover,
digital text, as it appears in blogs and wikis, is produced collaboratively and
demands contributions from its readers.
Likewise, late-medieval fable texts were completed by their accompanying
moralitates, which were actively revised and elaborated upon throughout
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
As a teacher of literature, I have become increasingly convinced by the
virtues of elaboration, especially when it is a collaborative enterprise that
encourages multiplicity over singularity in literary interpretation. I have used course blogs as a
means to extend conversations beyond the classroom, but I have discovered that
blog entries are easily overlooked and often become individualistic musings
that fail to attract readers. And
if they do obtain responses, the commentary is hidden and readily ignored by
those who choose not to follow the comment link. By contrast, contributions to wiki pages are readily
apparent because any changes or additions appear within the pages themselves,
rather than relegated to discrete pages.
More importantly, the appearance of the wiki more closely resembles the
typical fable manuscript, which often combined the text and its commentary on
the same page.
Because
of this shared accumulative feature, I experimented with "late-medieval fabular
reading" in a commentary assignment, which required that students in my
"Understanding Literature" course post commentaries on course texts
to a wiki, which I playfully called "Romancing the Tome."[41] Students selected passages from the
texts we were reading from week to week and posted short responses, which could
take a variety of forms: "a series of
discussion questions, an exploratory interpretation, a creative revision, an
explanation of the historical background, a comparison of the text to others on
the syllabus."[42] And once a student had posted a
commentary to the page, subsequent visitors would add their own responses,
contributing what I called a "commentary upon a commentary."[43] For example, in response to J.R.R.
Tolkien's The Hobbit, one student posted a commentary, which suggested
some connections between Bilbo's ring and the holy grail of medieval romance. This commentary inspired a number of
responses, which included a comparison of language used to describe green eyes
in The Hobbit and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "Holy Grail,"
Bilbo's motivations for concealing the ring, the influence of the events of
World War I on Tolkien's writing, and even a challenge to the first commentator's
ring-grail connection.[44] I could detect traces of classroom
discussion in almost all of the wiki contributions, which must have germinated
outside of the classroom until they could fully flower on the wiki pages. The wiki allowed students the chance to
elaborate upon topics that they could only begin to address in class
discussion.
I
have come to believe that both our city mice here at UMass Boston and the
country mice on more rural campuses need to find common spaces, besides the T, to
"commute." While social
networking has given rise to one kind of controversial "instant
message" and offers many new and difficult challenges to academic
discourse, I think that the "instant messages" we have come to expect
from fabular, and quite frankly most literary interpretation, can be
interrogated through a historically situated understanding of models of
collaborative knowledge production, such as late-medieval commentary and
wiki-writing. Moreover, the
virtues of elaboration, which are often difficult to pursue within the
classroom, can be tapped in the extramural environments of blogs and wikis. Rather than flee to the countryside and
limit our diets to printed books, I suggest that we be willing to risk the
dangers of digital consumption.
After all, the city mouse may be right when he says, "you could never find such delicious
food as this anywhere else in the world."
[1] Aesop's Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 190-1.
[2] Charlton T.
Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin
Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879).
[3] For a
reception history of Aesop's fables through the Middle Ages, see Gibbs, Aesop's Fables and her incredible
website, "Aesopica: Aesop's Fables in English, Latin, and Greek" at
http://www.mythfolklore.net/aesopica (January 18, 2011); Ben Edwin Perry, Aesopica (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1952); Perry, ed. and trans., Babrius
and Phaedrus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); Klaus
Grubmüller, Meister Esopus:
Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Funktion der Fabel im Mittelalter (München:
Artemis Verlag, 1977); Aaron Wright, The
Fables of "Walter of England" (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1997); Wright, "Hie
lert uns der meister": Latin Commentary and the German Fable, 1350-1500 (Tempe:
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001); Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education,
Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2000).
[5] The elegiac
Romulus was composed by one Walter of England, also known as the Anonymous
Neveleti. See Edward Wheatley,
"The Aesopic Corpus Divided Against Itself: A Literary Body and Its
Members," Journal of the Early Book
Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 2 (1999): 46-72.
[6] Willene B.
Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts: The
Second-Family Bestiary: Commentary, Art, Text, and Translation (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2006), 103. This
teaching technique is described by Quintillian in Institutio oratoria 1.9.2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1980), 157. See also Suzanne
Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar,
Rhetoric, and Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
8-11; Kristine Haney, The Saint Albans
Psalter (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 186-8, 190-4; Frank Barlow, The English Church, 1066-1154: A History of
the Anglo-Norman Church (London: Longman, 1979), 238-42.
[7] Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, 19.
[9] The first
edition was printed in Basel by Jakob Wolff von Pforzarim (Huntington
Library 110966). For a discussion
of this new Brant-Steinhöwel compilation, see Pack Carnes,
"Heinrich Steinhöwel and the Sixteenth-Century Fable Tradition," Humanistica
Lovaniensia: A Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 35 (1986): 1-29, at 5.
[10] Carnes,
"Heinrich Steinhöwel and the Sixteenth-Century Fable Tradition," 4.
[11] Léopold
Hervieux, ed., Les Fabulistes Latins
depuis le siècle d'Auguste jusqu'a la fin du moyen âge, vol. 2 (New York:
Burt Franklin, 1960), 602-19; William Caxton, Caxton's Aesop, ed. R.T. Lenaghan (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1967), 4; Wheatley, Mastering Aesop,
19.
[12] Bengt
Holbek, Æsops levned og fabler:
Christiern Pedersens oversættelse af Stainhöwels Æsop, vol. 2 (Copenhagen: J.H. Schultz, 1962), 117; Theodore S.
Beardsley, Jr., Hispano-Classical
Translations Printed between 1482 and 1699 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1970), 20-1; John E. Keller and Richard P. Kincade, Iconography in Medieval Spanish Literature (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1984), 93; Wheatley, Mastering
Aesop, 19.
[13] Wright, 'Hie lert uns der meister', xxiii. For more on the limitations of the Aesopus moralizatus, see A.E. Wright,
"Readers and Wolves: Late-Medieval Commentaries on 'De lupo et
capite'," Journal of Medieval Latin 8
(1998): 72-9; Thomas Cramer, "Æsopi wolff," in Festschrift Walter Haug und Burghart Wachinger, eds. Johannes
Janota et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 955-66.
[14] Ibid., 62.
[16] Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Codex Vindobonensis Palatinus 3235.
[17] Carinthia, Stiftsbibliothek,
Codex S. Pauli in Carinthia
255/4.
[18] Edward
Wheatley, "The 'Fabulae' of Walter of England, the Medieval Scholastic
Tradition, and the British Vernacular Fable," Ph.D. diss., University of
Virginia, 1991. For further
discussion of the central role of commentary, see Wright, 'Hie lert uns der meister', xvii-xviii.
[19] Aesop's Fables, trans. Gibbs, 208.
[20] Copenhagen,
Gl. Kgl. Saml., 1905 4o. See
Wright's reading of this manuscript in 'Hie
lert uns der meister', 23.
It's also apparent that this commentator, or a previous scribe, misread cornicem, which means "crow",
as coturnicem, which means
"quail."
[21] Ibid., 24.
[22] Hervieux
refers to this "Liber Catonianus" manuscript by its former shelf
mark, MS LXXXVIII, Class. XI. See Les Fabulistes Latins, vol. 1, 595.
For a discussion of this distich, see Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, 67-9.
[23] Wrocław,
Bibl. univ., ms. cod. Q.126. See
Wright, 'Hie lert uns der meister',
25.
[24] Berlin,
Staatsbibliothek, Preußischer Kulturbestiz, cod. Q 536. Similar admonitions can be found in
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 391, fol. 29v and Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
cpv 15071, fol. 68v. See Wright, 'Hie lert uns der meister', 26.
[25] Munich,
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cgm 3974.
See Wright, 'Hie lert uns der
meister', 26.
[26] Budapest,
Magyar nemzeti múzeum, ms. lat. med. aev. 123 (referring to Prov. 24:5:
"vir sapiens et fortis est et vir doctus robustus et validus.") See Wright, 'Hie lert uns der meister', 26.
[27] Prague,
Universitní Knihovna, ms. 546. See
Wright, 'Hie lert uns der meister',
28.
[28] Ibid., 29.
[29] Ibid., 29.
[30] Erfurt,
Stadtbücherei, Amplon.Q.21. See
Wright, 'Hie lert uns der meister',
41.
[31] "Novus
Avianus," Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 14703; and Vienna, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, cpv 303; edited in Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins, vol. 3, 443, line 10. For further discussion of this version,
see Wright, 'Hie lert uns der
meister', 41.
[32] Ibid., 41.
[33]Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et
versificandi, ed. Edmond Faral, in Les
artes poétiques du xiie et xiiie siècle. Bibliothèque de l'école des hautes éstudes,
238 (Paris: Champion, 1924; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1982), 265-320, at
283. See also Wright, who makes this
connection in 'Hie lert uns der meister',
41.
[34] J.A.
Burrow, "Henryson: The Preaching of
the Swallow," Essays in
Criticism 25 (1975): 25-37, at 35.
For a similar critique, see James Kinsley, Scottish Poetry. A
Critical Survey (London, Cassell, 1955), 18. On the opposite extreme is Arnold Clayton Henderson's
"Having Fun with the Moralities: Henryson's Fables and Late-Medieval Fable Innovation," Studies in Scottish Literature 32
(2001), 67-87. For a more measured
response, see Jill Mann's From Aesop to
Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 262-305.
[35] My
quotations are taken from Denton Fox's edition, The Poems of Robert Henryson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981).
[36] Henderson,
"Having Fun with the Moralities," 72-3; Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: Brill, 1979),
129; Marianne Powell, Fabula docet:
Studies in the Background and Interpretation of Henryson's Morall Fabillis,
Odense University Studies in English 6 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1983),
181; Phillipa M. Bright, "Henryson's Figurative Technique in The Cock and the Jasp" in Words and Wordsmiths. A Volume for H.L. Rogers, ed.
Geraldine Barnes, John Gunn, Sonya Jensen, and Lee Jobling (Sydney: University
of Sydney Press, 1989), 13-21, at 20.
Mann alternatively suggests that "these phrases bring the
moralizing narrator, and particularly his intellectual ingenuity, to the
forefront of our attention."
See From Aesop to Reynard,
295.
[37] Roland
Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 4.
[38] Martin Foys,
Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New
Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2007), 40.
[39] Barthes, S/Z, 4.
[40] Theodor H.
Nelson, Literary Machines (Swarthmore,
Pennsylvania: Self-published, 1981), 0/2.
For an extensive discussion of "literary" hypertext, see
George Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical
Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006), 2-6.
[41] "Wiki
Commentary Assignment," Romancing
the Tome, http://engl200-mueller.wikispaces.umb.edu/ (accessed on January
27, 2011).
[42] Ibid.
[43] "How
do I comment upon a commentary?" Romancing
the Tome, http://engl200-mueller.wikispaces.umb.edu/How+do+I+comment+on+a+commentary%3F
(accessed on January 27, 2011).
[44] "The
Hobbit 1-7," Romancing the Tome, http://engl200-mueller.wikispaces.umb.edu/The+Hobbit+1-7
(accessed January 27, 2011.
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