From Imagination to Reality: A. L. Kennedy's 'The Little Snake' as a Fable

13 2. The fable as a genre: an overview 2.1 An anthropocentric anthropomorphism “A character is any entity in the story that has agency, that is, who is able to act in the environments of the story world.” 21 Speaking of fables, characters are most nonhuman animals or other entities who behave like humans. In this regard, the fable is considered one of the earliest literary forms that used animals to mirror humans: archeologists found clay tablets with Sumerian proverbs 22 from ancient Mesopotamia that date back to the third millennium BCE and seem to belong to the fable tradition where humans are compared to animals. Aesop, the legendary pioneer of the Greek fable, used crows and ants, lions and monkeys, ravens and donkeys to satirize the follies and vices of human beings. Famous tales such as The Tortoise and the Hare, The Fox and the Grapes, and The Ant and the Cricket highlight Aesop’s tendency to project human instincts and responses onto animal figures without paying too much attention to genuine animal behaviour. One of the original prerogatives of Babrius, a Greek fabulist that lived during the Augustan age, consisted in the refusal of exhibiting stock characteristics in animals, so that there were no fixed archetypes in fables. For example, foxes were not always or only sly and donkeys had not to be always stupid. In a number of his fables, in fact, the animals could be changed and the moral remains the same. Thus, at that time the animal was less important than the moral lesson, and almost any animal could be used to portray that truth. Isidore of Seville, the seventh-century bishop who praised the power of the fable in mirroring human beings, wrote in his masterpiece Etymologiae (1933): “Fables are told in order to produce a recognisable picture of human life through the conversations of imaginary dumb animals.” 23 Later, the appearance of different sorts of animals by the 12th and 13th centuries in literary sources marked a growing emphasis 21 Ignasi, Ribò. Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019, p.47. 22 Taylor, Jon. "The Sumerian Proverb Collections." Revue D'Assyriologie Et D'archéologie Orientale 99 (2005): 13-38. Accessed January 8, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23281243. 23 Isidore of Seville. Etymologías. Madrid, 1933. Citato in Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 2012, p. 83.