The great collections of folktales made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries therefore provide a rare opportunity to make contact with the illiterate masses who have disappeared into the past without leaving a trace. To reject folktales because they cannot be dated and situated with precision like other historical documents is to turn one’s back on one of the few points of entry into the mental world of peasants under the Old Regime. But to attempt to penetrate that world is to face a set of obstacles as daunting as those confronted by Jean de l’Ours (tale type 301) when he tried to rescue the three Spanish princesses from the underworld or by little Parle (tale type 328) when he set out to capture the ogre’s treasure.
The greatest obstacle is the impossibility of listening in on the story tellers. No matter how accurate they may be, the recorded versions of the tales cannot convey the effects that must have brought the stories to life in the eighteenth century: the dramatic pauses, the sly glances, the use of gestures to set scenes—a Snow White at a spinning wheel, a Cinderella delousing a stepsister—and the use of sounds to punctuate actions—a knock on the door (often done by rapping on a listener’s forehead) or a cudgeling or a fart. All of those devices shaped the meaning of the tales, and all of them elude the historian. He cannot be sure that the limp and lifeless text that he holds between the covers of a book provides an accurate account of the performance that took place in the eighteenth century. He cannot even be certain that the text corresponds to the unrecorded versions that existed a century earlier. Although he may turn up plenty of evidence to prove that the tale itself existed, he cannot quiet his suspicions that it could have changed a great deal before it reached the folklorists of the Third Republic.
Given those uncertainties, it seems unwise to build an interpretation on a single version of a single tale, and more hazardous still to base symbolic analysis on details—riding hoods and hunters—that may not have occurred in the peasant versions. But there are enough recordings of those versions—35 “Little Red Riding Hoods,” 90 “Tom Thumbs,” 105 “Cinderellas”—for one to picture the general outline of a tale as it existed in the oral tradition. One can study it on the level of structure, noting the way the narrative is framed and the motifs are combined, instead of concentrating on fine points of detail. Then one can compare it with other stories. And finally, by working through the entire body of French folktales, one can distinguish general characteristics, overarching themes, and pervasive elements of style and tone.
One can also seek aid and comfort from specialists in the study of oral literature. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have shown how folk epics as long as The Iliad are passed on faithfully from bard to bard among the illiterate peasants of Yugoslavia. These “singers of tales” do not possess the fabulous powers of memorization sometimes attributed to “primitive” peoples. They do not memorize very much at all. Instead, they combine stock phrases, formulas, and narrative segments in patterns improvised according to the response of their audience. Recordings of the same epic by the same singer demonstrate that each performance is unique. Yet recordings made in 1950 do not differ in essentials from those made in 1934. In each case, the singer proceeds as if he were walking down a well-known path. He may branch off here to take a shortcut or pause there to enjoy a panorama, but he always remains on familiar ground—so familiar, in fact, that he will say that he repeated every step exactly as he has done before. He does not conceive of repetition in the same way as a literate person, for he has no notion of words, lines, and verses. Texts are not rigidly fixed for him as they are for readers of the printed page. He creates his text as he goes, picking new routes through old themes. He can even work in material derived from printed sources, for the epic as a whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts that modifications of detail barely disturb the general configuration.10
Lord’s investigation confirms conclusions that Vladimir Propp reached by a different mode of analysis, one that showed how variations of detail remain subordinate to stable structures in Russian folktales.11 Field workers among illiterate peoples in Polynesia, Africa, and North and South America have also found that oral traditions have enormous staying power. Opinions divide on the separate question of whether or not oral sources can provide a reliable account of past events. Robert Lowie, who collected narratives from the Crow Indians in the early twentieth century, took up a position of extreme skepticism: “I cannot attach to oral traditions any historical value whatsoever under any conditions whatsoever.”12 By historical value, however, Lowie meant factual accuracy. (In 1910 he recorded a Crow account of a battle against the Dakota; in 1931 the same informant described the battle to him, but claimed that it had taken place against the Cheyenne.) Lowie conceded that the stories, taken as stories, remained quite consistent; they forked and branched in the standard patterns of Crow narrative. So his findings actually support the view that in traditional story telling continuities in form and style outweigh variations in detail, among North American Indians as well as Yugoslav peasants. Frank Hamilton Cushing noted a spectacular example of this tendency among the Zuni almost a century ago. In 1886 he served as interpreter to a Zuni delegation in the eastern United States. During a round robin of story telling one evening, he recounted as his contribution the tale of “The Cock and the Mouse,” which he had picked up from a book of Italian folktales. About a year later, he was astonished to hear the same tale from one of the Indians back at Zuni. The Italian motifs remained recognizable enough for one to be able to classify the tale in the Aarne-Thompson scheme (it is tale type 2032). But everything else about the story—its frame, figures of speech, allusions, style, and general feel—had become intensely Zuni. Instead of Italianizing the native lore, the story had been Zunified.13
No doubt the transmission process affects stories differently in different cultures. Some bodies of folklore can resist “contamination” while absorbing new material more effectively than can others. But oral traditions seem to be tenacious and long-lived nearly everywhere among illiterate peoples. Nor do they collapse at their first exposure to the printed word. Despite Jack Goody’s contention that a literacy line cuts through all history, dividing oral from “written” or “print” cultures, it seems that traditional tale telling can flourish long after the onset of literacy. To anthropologists and folklorists who have tracked tales through the bush, there is nothing extravagant about the idea that peasant raconteurs in late nineteenth-century France told stories to one another pretty much as their ancestors had done a century or more earlier.14
Comforting as this expert testimony may be, it does not clear all the difficulties in the way of interpreting the French tales. The texts are accessible enough, for they lie unexploited in treasure houses like the Musée des arts et traditions populaires in Paris and in scholarly collections like Le Conte populaire français by Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze. But one cannot lift them from such sources and hold them up to inspection as if they were so many photographs of the Old Regime, taken with the innocent eye of an extinct peasantry. They are stories.
As in most kinds of narration, they develop standardized plots from conventional motifs, picked up here, there, and everywhere. They have a distressing lack of specificity for anyone who wants to pin them down to precise points in time and place. Raymond Jameson has studied the case of a Chinese Cinderella from the ninth century. She gets her slippers from a magic fish instead of a fairy godmother and loses one of them at a village fête instead of a royal ball, but she bears an unmistakable resemblance to Perrault’s heroine.15 Folklorists have recognized their tales in Herodotus and Homer, on ancient Egyptian papyruses and Chaldean stone tablets; and they have recorded them all over the world, in Scandinavia and Africa, among Indians on the banks of the Bengal and Indians along the Missouri. The dispersion is so striking that some have come to believe in Ur-stories and a basic Indo-European repertory of myths, legends, and tales. This tendency feeds into the cosmic theories of Frazer and Jung and Lévi-Strauss, but it does no
t help anyone attempting to penetrate the peasant mentalities of early modern France.
Fortunately, a more down-to-earth tendency in folklore makes it possible to isolate the peculiar characteristics of traditional French tales. Le Conte populaire français arranges them according to the Aarne-Thompson classification scheme, which covers all varieties of Indo-European folktales. It therefore provides the basis for comparative study, and the comparisons suggest the way general themes took root and grew in French soil. “Tom Thumb” (“Le Petit Poucet,” tale type 327), for example, has a strong French flavor, in Perrault as well as the peasant versions, if one compares it with its German cousin, “Hansel and Gretel.” The Grimms’ tale emphasizes the mysterious forest and the naïveté of the children in the face of inscrutable evil, and it has more fanciful and poetic touches, as in the details about the bread-and-cake house and the magic birds. The French children confront an ogre, but in a very real house. Monsieur and Madame Ogre discuss their plans for a dinner party as if they were any married couple, and they carp at each other just as Tom Thumb’s parents did. In fact, it is hard to tell the two couples apart. Both simple-minded wives throw away their family’s fortunes; and their husbands berate them in the same manner, except that the ogre tells his wife that she deserves to be eaten and that he would do the job himself if she were not such an unappetizing vieille bête (old beast).16 Unlike their German relatives, the French ogres appear in the role of le bourgeois de la maison (burgher head of household),17 as if they were rich local landowners. They play fiddles, visit friends, snore contentedly in bed beside fat ogress wives;18 and for all their boorishness, they never fail to be good family men and good providers. Hence the joy of the ogre in “Pitchin-Pitchot” as he bounds into the house, a sack on his back: “Catherine, put on the big kettle. I’ve caught Pitchin-Pitchot.”19
Where the German tales maintain a tone of terror and fantasy, the French strike a note of humor and domesticity. Firebirds settle down into hen yards. Elves, genii, forest spirits, the whole Indo-European panoply of magical beings become reduced in France to two species, ogres and fairies. And those vestigial creatures acquire human foibles and generally let humans solve their problems by their own devices, that is, by cunning and “Cartesianism”—a term that the French apply vulgarly to their propensity for craftiness and intrigue. The Gallic touch is clear in many of the tales that Perrault did not rework for his own Gallicized Mother Goose of 1697: the panache of the young blacksmith in “Le Petit Forgeron” (tale type 317), for example, who kills giants on a classic tour de France; or the provincialism of the Breton peasant in “Jean Bête” (tale type 675), who is given anything he wishes and asks for un bon péché de piquette et une écuelle de patates du lait (“crude wine and a bowl of potatoes in milk”); or the professional jealousy of the master gardener, who fails to prune vines as well as his apprentice in “Jean le Teigneux” (tale type 314); or the cleverness of the devil’s daughter in “La Belle Eulalie” (tale type 313), who escapes with her lover by leaving two talking pâtés in their beds. Just as one cannot attach the French tales to specific events, one should not dilute them in a timeless universal mythology. They really belong to a middle ground: la France moderne or the France that existed from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century.
* * *
† Robert Darnton, “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 9–22. Copyright © 1984 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. The author’s footnotes have been edited for this Norton Critical Edition.
1. This text and those of the other French folktales discussed in this essay come from Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze, Le Conte populaire français (Paris, 1976), 3 vols., which is the best of the French folktale collections because it provides all the recorded versions of each tale along with background information about how they were gathered from oral sources.
2. Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths (New York, 1951), pp. 235–41, quotation from p. 240.
3. Literati [editor’s note].
4. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, 1977), pp. 166–83.
5. See Aarne and Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (2nd rev.; Helsinki, 1973); Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977; 1st ed. 1946); and Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin, 1968). Aarne and Thompson used the “historical-geographical” or “Finnish” method, developed by Kaarle Krohn, to produce a world-wide survey and classification of folktales.
6. This information comes from Paul Delarue’s introduction to Le Conte populaire français, I, 7–99, which is the best general account of folklore research in France and which also contains a thorough bibliography.
7. Delarue, “Les contes merveilleux de Perrault et la tradition populaire,” Bulletin folklorique d’Ile-de-France, n.s. (July–Oct., 1951).
8. William Thoms launched the term “folklore” in 1846, two decades before Edward Tylor introduced a similar term, “culture,” among English-speaking anthropologists. See Thoms, “Folklore” and William R. Bascom, “Folklore and Anthropology” in Dundes, Study of Folklore, pp. 4–6 and 25–33.
9. Noël du Fail, Propos rustiques de Maistre Leon Ladulfi Champenois, chap. 5, in Conteurs français du XVIe siècle, ed. Pierre Jourda (Paris, 1956), pp. 620–21.
10. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
11. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale.
12. Lowie’s remark is quoted in Richard Dorson, “The Debate over the Trustworthiness of Oral Traditional History,” in Dorson, Folklore: Selected Essays (Bloomington, IN, 1972), p. 202.
13. Frank Hamilton Cushing, Zuni Folk Tales (New York and London, 1901), pp. 411–22.
14. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977). See also the studies published by Goody as Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968).
15. Raymond D. Jameson, Three Lectures on Chinese Folklore (Peking, 1932).
16. This remark occurs in Perrault’s version, which contains a sophisticated reworking of the dialogue in the peasant versions. See Delarue and Tenèze, Le Conte populaire français, I, 306–24.
17. “Jean de l’Ours,” tale type 301B.
18. See “Le Conte de Parle,” tale type 328 and “La Belle Eulalie,” tale type 313.
19. “Pitchin-Pitchot,” tale type 327C.
MAX LÜTHI
Abstract Style†
The clear-cut way in which the folktale achieves its depthlessness lends it a lack of realism. From the outset, the folktale does not seek empathetically to recreate the concrete world with its many dimensions. The folktale transforms the world; it puts a spell on its elements and gives them a different form, and thus it creates a world with a distinct character of its own.
Within the depthless world of the folktale, individual figures are physically set off from each other by sharp outlines and pure colors. By its nature, a flat surface calls for outlines and colors. A painter’s picture needs frame and coloring, whereas a sculptor’s image can dispense with both. The contours of a three-dimensional form blur in the depths of space; they fade into the indefinite. On a flat surface, however, lines are sharp and unequivocal. The exterior of a body constantly informs us of a hidden interior, whereas a flat surface is isolated in and of itself. A painting can either obscure or intensify the unrealistic character of the pure plane. It can simulate curves, three-dimensionality, and reality, and it can make the flat surface appear to have depth. But a painting can also permit the flat quality to stand by itself and can emphasize it by means of geometric lines and stark colors. The folktale follows this latter approach.
The sharp contours of the folktale are evident at once in the way that it does not describe particular objects but only names them. Action-oriented as it is, it leads its figures on from point to point without pausing to describe anything at length. The legend gazes spellbound at certain buildings, trees, caves, paths, and apparitions and constantly tries to discover new aspects of them. The stories of The Arabian Nights likewise tend to lose themselves in descriptions of the fabulous palaces and the towns made of stone into which the hero makes his way, and thus they attain a fullness that bewilders. Detailed descriptions do not convey distinct images, rather they make us lose all perspective. The European folktale is not addicted to description. When it has its hero set off in search of his brother and sister and come upon a town made of iron, it does not waste a single word describing the iron buildings. Looking neither left nor right, and without the slightest trace of astonishment, the hero pursues his goal:1
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