Victor Fet: I
agree with Stan that such folkloric references hardly needs a footnote, they are
part and parcel of our culture. However, Wikipedia says that “The Boy Who Cried
Wolf, also known as The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf, is a fable attributed to
Aesop but in fact written in 1673 ...
JM: We are invited to imagine how
tv-deprived peoples needed at least two consecutive lies to believe in what they
were told...Perhaps that's why children always ask to hear the same story over
and over again and complain if they find any alteration in the
telling.
Btw, there's a nuance in VN's use of this fable
that develops still further the image about art
as "shimmering go-between"* and way beyond the fabled
wolf. In his lectures at Cornell, VN refers
not only to the “tall story” about a boy crying wolf ( as in
GRGW) but he also mentions: “the magic of art is
manifested in the dream about the wolf, in the shadow of the invented
wolf" (1955, 347).
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* “between the wolf in the tall
grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That
go-between, that prism, is the art of
literature."