A Fable, A Satire, Or What?

Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of the English Language defines 'a tale' thus: 'A narrative; a story. Commonly a slight or petty account of some trifling or fabulous incident'. A definition which suggests the reading of such a work so defined will be straightforward and afford pleasure, when often, though it may supply the latter, the former is anything but! For that called a tale could also be referred to as an account, a myth, a fable, a short story, an anecdote, a yarn, a legend, a rumour, a report, a saga, an exaggeration (of the false and actual), the elements of which are various, each with their style in the telling, or a tale might include all these and then it might be called a novel, for nothing so fantastical could be so short. Or perhaps it will defy all definition, so that regardless of its length, the reader will question what is it? which is it? How should it best be described? and yet find a descriptive label for the work remains elusive. Johnson's own novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia defied categorisation, and also presented its readers with another dilemma, for it failed to deliver what it promised and yet delivered more. It was no simple tale with its philosophic musings, nor did it have the morals of a fable, nor the magical elements of a fairy or folk tale or the foreign, it was other, still widely read but with perhaps some disappointment, and incomprehension, even.
Readers now, although the same species, are a different beast. We have seen with our own eyes more lands, the world has opened up in every way: in commerce, in knowledge, in literature, and we have the advantage of lecturers on eighteenth-century authors who provide us with a greater understanding of the life and times, of possibly the author's motives and their thoughts behind or contained within the work. The lecturer, the scholar, the expert gratifies the reader with this come-to-be-expected instruction. The reader feels superior, for he knows more than the readers of that time and place, and from this distance appreciates the author differently. His mind replete with different images, which he, like much-travelled Imlac, Johnson's philosopher, 'can vary and combine with pleasure', perhaps solely for learning's sake, for he can amuse himself in 'solitude by the renovation of the knowledge', even as some fades from memory and he sets about acquiring still more. And as he renovates and acquires he realises the truth of wise Imlac's words: '...the first writers took possession of the most striking objects for description, and the most probable occurrences for fiction, and left nothing to those that followed them, but the transcription of the same events, and new combinations of the same images.' All new and later writers can do is imitate and polish them.

Picture credit: Arabian Poet (Persian), 1886, Gustave Moreau (source: WikiArt).

See The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson (Penguin Classics, with introduction and notes by Paul Goring).

Adapted from a journal entry, February 2021.