The fabulous fable lions by Millôr Fernandes: case studies of aesopic reception

Abstract

Imbued with a combative spirit against well-established truths, journalist and humorist Millôr Fernandes (1923-2012) chose the fable as one of his many fronts of action in the critical interpretation of 20th-century Brazil. With this literary genre, which for the ancients was an expression of marginalized sectors, his reception of Aesop and the resulting tradition expresses the revolt against oppression, reclaiming the fable as a kind of critical, argumentative and dismantling artifice of the social and political forces that permeated both times of military dictatorship and democracy in Brazil. With his lion characters, specifically, several Aesopian-based fables by this author demonstrate the discomfort inherent to the prevailing hierarchies; the feline is sometimes portrayed as ignorant, sometimes as alienated, but always arrogant in the status that nature had assigned him. The animal he oppresses, often despised and diminished, excels in recursion, whether to escape the claws of the predator that ambushes it, or to confront the lion, and even defeat it. By presenting the source and target texts, we propose a joint analysis of the fables of Aesopian form and basis with which Millôr operates his recreational inversions, having as the main goal of analysis the demonstration of the way in which the texts illuminate each other reciprocally. In conclusion, we intend to demonstrate how Millôr Fernandes' receptive expedient operates on classical material, insofar as it rescues a long-neglected facet of the fable material: the capacity for critical questioning.