Worst Introduction Ever

Tuesday, 28 August 2012

Today I finished reading the Wordsworth Children’s Classic version of Aesop’s Fables.

This was one of three books I brought with me to the cabin last week, and it was the only one I didn’t finish reading while there. I finished it up today during my lunch break.

I’ve wanted to read Aesop’s fables for a long time. I’ve heard many speakers reference them and I just wanted to, for once, see them all laid out before me in print. I bought this book using a discount coupon at “Half” Price Books last spring. It sat on my shelf until this month.

Now, while I enjoyed many of the fables, and the accompanying illustrations by Arthur Rackham are outstanding, here’s what I want to talk about instead: the Introduction, by G.K. Cherterton, is possibly the worst introduction I’ve read in any book. Ever.

First of all, G.K. likes to write himself a rambling prose. The five page intro contains only five paragraphs. And in those paragraphs there are some insanely long sentences. For example, the sentence that begins on page 18 and continues to page 19 boasts a whopping 110 words. (Yes, I did take the time to count.)

Amidst the largely incoherent prose, G.K. inserts a few doozies. Here’s what he says on page 15:

“The nursery fairy tales may have come out of Asia with the Indo-European race, now fortunately extinct…”

Oh man, I’m so glad those pesky Indo-Europeans are extinct, aren’t you? I mean, after all, they’re not fully European, so damn their bastardized hybridization!

Here’s something from the very next page:

“The truth is, of course, that Aesop’s Fables are not Aesop’s fables, any more than Grimm’s Fairy Tales were ever Grimm’s fairy tales.”

Okay, you say, even though he sounds like he’s stuttering here, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is he’s here trying to point out that Aesop merely collected the fables – he didn’t start them. But then, on page 19 (a mere two paragraphs later), he writes: “…whether fables began with Aesop or began with Adam…” So what is it, GK? Did fables begin with Aesop or not? Oh – and I like the choice here: fables either started with Aesop or they started with Adam. Yeah, it’s really one of the other. I’m sure it was Adam. In between having rib surgery, hanging out at a nudist camp, and naming two million species of animals, he also had time to pen a few dozen fables.

Did I mention that Adam is fake?

Here’s another asinine comment:

“There can be no good fable with human beings in it” (page 17).

What? That means that, like, half the book is “no good.” Indeed, three of the first five fables in the book have people in them, and one of them – “The Charcoal-Burner & the Fuller” – has only people in it (no animals).

And on page 18, he writes, “As the child learns A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow…” When I read this statement, I had to check on the copyright of the book. It was published in 1994. I was around back then, and I don’t recall any children’s book, toy, or TV show telling kids that “A is for Ass.” Can you even picture Elmo saying something like on Sesame Street? In our books at home (many of which were published in the 90s), A is for Apple or Ant or Alligator. It’s never ever ever for Ass.

(Although, this does give me an idea: an A to Z book of scatological words: A is for Ass, B is for Bowel Movement, C is for Crotch… Who’s with me?)

And just as an example of the incoherent nature of GK’s prose, here’s one example that stood out to me, primarily because it uses the word atheist, and I always perk up when I see freethought terms in unexpected places:

“Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to anyone is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful.”

What. The hell. Does that mean? I could just picture my wife and I sitting on the couch looking down at our cat:

ME: You know Jennifer, I love our cat.

SHE: Are you sure? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure you simply salute her as an expression of abstract and anonymous energy in nature.

ME: Oh yeah, you’re right. And since I don’t believe in deities, she’s simply frightful.

Yep, this is exactly how we kick off many an evening.

GK ends his steaming pile of doggerel by claiming: “There is every type and time of fable: but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything.”

Huh? What does it mean “every time of fable”? And what’s with the odd use of a colon and the incorrect use of a semicolon? And how is there “only one moral to everything”? Everything? Really? Like, can’t a story or a poem or, heck, even a person’s entire life, have more than one moral to it? This was just a stupid ending to a stupid introduction. My advice is to buy the book, but rip out the introduction and use it to wipe your A is for ____.