A very young Fox, who had never before seen a Lion, happened to meet one in the forest. A single look was enough to send the Fox off at top speed for the nearest hiding place.
The second time the Fox saw the Lion he stopped behind a tree to look at him a moment before slinking away. But the third time, the Fox went boldly up to the Lion and, without turning a hair, said, “Hello, there, old top.”
This is a standard retelling of the Aesop fable "The Fox and the Lion." for which the moral is always, "Familiarity breeds contempt" (which word connotes not a negative feeling for another person but simply taking for granted that the other means you no harm).
The fable came to mind after I received some input to the effect that I ought to try writing a new summation of my "NUM Theory." This appealed to me because I know that some fine points of the theory have changed since I first started devoting essays to the subject of fictional phenomenality, even though the essentials are the same. With this project in mind, I reread all ARCHIVE posts on the subject of "NUM formula," and came across this interesting sentence I quoted from Rudolf Otto, whose musings on "the uncanny" influenced me through a mention in a C.S. Lewis essay.
"...this expression [of unfamiliarity] is popularly used for a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes, and in whose presence we have the feeling of the uncanny."
-- THE IDEA OF THE HOLY (1917), p. 197.
As it happens, I have written a number of essays on the subject of "strangeness," a quality I find universally in works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous," but not in works of "the naturalistic." I've tended to focus on the nature of the work's relationship to the notion of causal coherence, i.e., the idea that the physical world and everything in it is fully explicable by the laws of cause and effect. In such a world, "strangeness" has no place. When in fiction an author chooses to depict something that does not conform to the proposition of causal coherence, he produces something that seems "strange," and often (to use a related term) "unintelligible" to the reader's experience.
Now, to speak of "familiarity" focuses the conundrum more upon the writer's expectations of the reader's affective world, rather than his cognitive apprehensions. Now, in the real world, from which all readers draw their conclusions about what is or is not strange or unintelligible, what creates the impression of familiarity and its opposite?
First, familiarity arises from the expectation that aspects of the causal universe will work in a predictable fashion. In the Aesop fable, the fox does not KNOW that the lion will not attack him the third time. He makes a supposition on the fact that in the first two encounters, the lion did not choose to attack him, and so the fox allowed himself to act in a familiar manner toward the King of Beasts.
This would be what I will term "primary familiarity," which is essentially the same as the Aesopian "contempt." This can range from all presumptions about physical predictability-- the expectation that gravity will continue to keep us attached to the earth-- to predictions about the way we expect other sentient persons to react. It's easy to imagine a version of "the Fox and the Lion" in which things don't turn out well for the Fox because the Lion happens to be hungry on the third occasion of their meeting. Yet the fable is accurate enough in describing how sentient persons calculate the reactions of other sentients. The psychology of this familiarity does not diminish just because a particular expectation does not bear fruit; it will just make the perceiving person more militant about a particular entity.
More on "secondary familiarity" in a future post.
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