" The Voice of an Animal " : Robert Bresson and Narrative Form; Symploke (2016) (original) (raw)

Fable is a literary genre that is structurally bipartite, and the anthropomorphised characters in the narrative part illustrate a truth in the moral part. It is one of the few literary genres that has come down from the classical times to the Middle Ages without undergoing a dramatic change. During this time, it was mostly used as a school text for teaching Latin and occasionally used as exampla by the preachers. However, after the twelfth century, it became popular as a serious literary genre, and a growing number of authors began to appropriate the genre for their own purposes of social and religious criticism. In this respect, Scottish poet Robert Henryson (c. 1430 – c. 1506 ) is one of the most important representatives of these fabulists who regarded the fable genre as a serious form of literature and appropriated it to the time period he was living in. Robert Henryson's main reason in employing the fable genre was to express the growing corruption and sinfulness among people in his time and to motivate people to be virtuous. In this regard, the fable genre presents an ideal analogy for him with its animal characters. However, he does not confine himself only to animal-like characters of a traditional fable, but creates two additional character types which are namely hybrids and human-like characters. To that end, he employs the concept of the Great Chain of Being where humans are presented between the angelic and the bestial. Thus, he shows in the fables that when humans indulge in their carnal appetites and worldy temptations and neglect reason, they become indistinguishable from animals. For this reason, the purpose of this study is to analyse the characters of Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis in relation to the theme of carnality which makes humans bestial and to illustrate how the poet utilises this genre to advise people moralistically. The character analysis has been conducted by evaluating the characters within the fables, determining the characteristics each character has, and grouping these characters that display similar characteristics under the same character type. In this regard, three character types are observed: animal-like, hybrid and human-like. Hence, out of the thirteen fables that constitute the work; six fables include animal-like characters, five fables include hybrid characters and two fables include human-like characters. It is argued that along with the animal-like characters, Robert Henryson's use of the hybrid and human-like characters within the narrative part allows him to situate his main theme of carnality in the middle of the narrative part. Hence, various character types re-emphasise the main theme and make the narrative part as important as the moral part. What is more, these fables are arranged in an ascending and descending order from animal-like characters to human-like and then back to animal-like. This arrangement in the work suggests human's in-between condition in the Great Chain of Being, thereby stressing the work's main idea of human's position between angels and animals. As a result, it is concluded that Henryson employs the fable genre for Christian moralisation to invite man to use his reason and avoid sin. Besides, he makes it more intricate so that unlike any other fable collection, the whole work is unified around the theme of carnality in humans which is present in the character formations, in the arrangement of the fables within the work, the narrative and the moral part of the fables.