A Fable of Film: Ranciere's Anthony Mann

Abstract

Enterprising editors in sixteenth-century France often launched translations of Aesop's fables to endow a classical genre with a new power of illustration. Wearing a deceptively childish appearance, a fable was a text coordinated with a picture. The combination was aimed to convey a lesson or to impose, often obliquely or through visual strategies, a reassuring mode of conduct.1 But in the play of image and text, as in cinema, enigmas, contradictory readings, and perplexities abounded. These books verified what early modern lexicographers noted about the meanings of fable. Henri Estienne's Dictionnaire françois-latin (1549) cites and translates Varro to register "Devis, et propos, ou conte, soit vray ou faulx," and Terence "une farce, une comédie, that includes "menterie... bourdes et mensonges." Nicot's Trésor de la langue française (1605) associates the telling of fabulous tales with an art of directing action: "raconter une fable, Apologum facere, vel agere." Nicot's analogue, Randle Cotgrave, in A Dictionarie of the French & English Tongues (1611) underscores deceit and contrariety at its basis. "Fable: f. A fable, tale, lie, leasing, false tale, unlikely thing repeated; also, a Comedie, or Enterlude." The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1694) posts two definitions. One, a "chose feinte, & inventée pour instruire, ou pour divertir," leads to "le sujet, l'argument d'un poëme épique, d'un poëme dramatique, d'un roman," held in a collective sense of "[t]outes les fables de l'Antiquité Payenne" before the definition is inverted as "[f]ausseté, chose contournée. Vous nous comptez des fables." The reversible nature of the form fit the designs of authors wishing to produce enigmas and perplexity, if not counter-meanings, within the frame of clearly drawn parables and moral tales.