Victor: I didn’t mean that a footnote about the Aesop “Cry Wolf” connection might or might not be needed — after all, the tale itself is neatly encapsulated in the quoted text — rather, I was querying whether it was necessary for the author himself to cross-reference the quote in some way to its source, viz., Nabokov on literary theory. It’s really up to the novelist how much to reveal! Some allusions are best left as “gems for the (re-)reader to uncover” -- with or without the help of later scholarly annotation. Mr Islam seemed to take an unNabokovian path in expecting the short story to serve as a Ph D thesis explaining VN’s theory of the origins of story telling.
I do agree that it’s hard to pin down ur-sources for widely-spread, almost universal, morsels of folkloric morality! Especially so when the original written Aesopica did not survive. Aesop himself (herself?!) seems a rather tenuous “individual,” more a collective oral tradition like Homer, and tales were undoubtedly added pseudonymically over the centuries. The moral itself (persistent liars will be hung by their own petards, or even more painfully by their testicles), as you show with the Chinese Emperor version, can be expressed in a variety of colourful anecdotes. One thing has always puzzled me: the quintessential Aesop fable has anthropomorphic animals in ALL the roles. A neat ploy, JM, to grab the children’s attentions? But here we have a human shepherd boy interacting with fellow humans. Aesop, one fancies, would have had a dishonest rooster guarding the chickens? The later date for the fable suggests La Fontaine (1621 – 1694) the great French fabulist who regularly included humans in his tales (e.g., The Sculptor and the Statue). Interestingly, La Fontaine cites not only Aesop but also the Indian sage Pilpay among his inspirers.
JM: I may be misreading your point about needing “at least two consecutive lies to believe in what they were told.” To recap the yarn: on the boy’s first “Cry wolf” the farmers have no reason to doubt him until the truth emerges, viz., false alarm. Real wolves are alurking, and it would be folly to ignore the warning cry. They also fall for the second “Cry wolf” but are beginning to form an opinion that the boy is an inveterate liar. (Victor reports versions where it takes more than two incidents before the boy’s unreliabilty sinks in.) The third “Cry wolf” exhausts their patience, and is assumed to be false. It’s the boy-liar who suffers on the rare occasion when he’s not lying. The farmers also suffer for not believing him — so I detect the added moral that folks should try to be more discerning when judging warnings and, more generally, judging the truth of all assertions.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 30/09/2008 05:09, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Victor Fet: I agree with Stan that such folkloric references hardly needs a footnote, they are part and parcel of our culture. However, Wikipedia says that “The Boy Who Cried Wolf, also known as The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf, is a fable attributed to Aesop but in fact written in 1673 ...
JM: We are invited to imagine how tv-deprived peoples needed at least two consecutive lies to believe in what they were told...Perhaps that's why children always ask to hear the same story over and over again and complain if they find any alteration in the telling.
Btw, there's a nuance in VN's use of this fable that develops still further the image about art as "shimmering go-between"* and way beyond the fabled wolf. In his lectures at Cornell, VN refers not only to the “tall story” about a boy crying wolf ( as in GRGW) but he also mentions: “the magic of art is manifested in the dream about the wolf, in the shadow of the invented wolf" (1955, 347).
.........................................................................................................................................................
* “between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature."
Search the archive <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu=en> Contact the Editors <mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" <http://www.nabokovonline.com>
Visit Zembla <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> View Nabokv-L Policies <http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm> Manage subscription options <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/>
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.