3 - Idolatry and the Questioning of Mastery in La Fontaine's Fables

Summary

“Quand Prométhée voulut former l’homme, il prit la qualité dominante de chaque bête. De ces pièces si différentes il composa notre espèce, il fit cet ouvrage qu’on appelle le petit monde.” (When Prometheus wanted to make man, he took the dominant quality of every beast. From these very different pieces he composed our species, he made this work which we call the little world.)

Jean de La Fontaine offers this anecdote in the preface to the first volume of his Fables, ostensibly to explain why the information the fables convey about the properties and personalities of diverse animal species is useful to humanity; since we have been shaped from beasts, learning more about animals can help us to learn more about ourselves. Yet placed against seventeenth-century France's preoccupation not only with the divine creation of the world but also with the special standing of humans as images of God on earth, La Fontaine’s rather nonchalant presentation of Prometheus fashioning man out of various animal parts is, like many of his fables, both mischievous and provocative. It serves to announce the central position that the question of creation, divine and artistic, occupies throughout the Fables by slyly suggesting that the poems’ wisdom is only accessible to those who loosen their grip on the biblical creation story, with all that it implies concerning legitimacy and human uniqueness. Prometheus's activity is not the ex nihilo creation of the biblical divinity, and indeed, nowhere in this sentence is the verb “créer” used. Instead, Prometheus, a bit like La Fontaine himself, engages in a kind of bricolage, an assembly of diverse parts that forms a work, an ouvrage, whose identity as fabricated entity is contained in its name. And, La Fontaine goes on to note, the name is provisional and fabricated; what Prometheus fashions is not the World itself, but “ce qu’on appelle le petit monde,” a much more humble entity.

It might well be objected that La Fontaine's literary exploitation of pagan myth, here and elsewhere, is nothing more than a signal of his affection for the ancients and an announcement of his intent to distance himself from the messy theological disputes and concerns of his age.