Lecture about our Volumes of Folktales

Prof. Dr Habil Blint Pter, Dean of the Faculty

Three years ago the Association of Applied Narratology, hosted by the

Faculty of Child and Adult Education, University of Debrecen has launched a
new series of books, entitled Fabula aeterna. The bilingual volumes (Hungarian
and English) are first and foremost devoted to investigating, analysing and
publicising the heritage of the tale world of the Roma and other ethnic groups in
the Carpathian Basin. As a result of our research there is a wealth of source
material handed down to us by many great tale-telling individuals, the study of
which helps us to understand local societies and the fundamental relationships
between the tale teller and the everyday world of the community.

Even though Foley and Lord conducted important and comprehensive

research in the region regarding the performance of singers telling stories, we
know it too well, that Western-European ethnographers are hardly or not at all
familiar with the folk tale tradition of the people in the Carpathian-basin and in
the West Balkan territories. In the above mentioned two geographical regions
the folk tale tradition of Gypsy story tellers these Gypsy communities are

scattered all around the regions, still they are very close to each other in
respect to their archaic world view, the performance style and complicated
language structures, and the tendency to contaminate stories, all of them being
features that are characteristic of orality. I may even say that Gypsy narratives
are intact, whole narratives, and we should not forget about the fact that most of
them had been collected in the past half century while due to the modern
technical equipments they have been recorded in their original form. Therefore
in these archived texts there are no rewritings, mutilations, stylizations; the
archaic images, language formulas, and peculiar self-narrative modes have been
preserved. In these narratives essential episodes defining the heros choice of
destiny are not absent, even if they are rather cruel. In their language we may
often find a mirror structure that I have called the tale in the tale; examples of
it are dream narratives, bird-prophesies, the repetition of an introductory story
that creates identity. Finally, we may discover details that have been omitted or
silenced in the tales of other ethnic groups, a fact that makes textual
interpretation more difficult; during our work of reconstruction, we may rely on
Gypsy tales since we surely find these absent elements, images, metaphors of
destiny in them. I would like to emphasize another characteristic feature since
up until recently story telling had been a living tradition in these communities:
their structures are not as closed as the structure of Western European peasant
tales, many elements of modernity find their place in their world view.
Allow me, if you will, to quote in the spirit of the German sceptical
philosopher, Odo Marquard, to convey the essence of what I wish to say; to be
precise, I should quote two key ideas from the study, The Necessity of the
Spiritual Sciences, which in my reading of them are closely connected and thus
help my own interpretation. According to the first, we need the art of the
intimate elements of the world of origins which has become foreign to us: this
is the art of hermeneutics, or interpretation.
Its previous source is the following:

All analysis is based on understanding declared Heidegger in Time and Being;

in other words, every interpretation is also a hermeneutic act. Furthermore, the
goal of all hermeneutics is the struggle to bridge the gap created by cultural
distance. In our case the hermeneutic effort is to discover, re-analyse and bring
to life the archaic forms/images hiding in the Gypsy tale tradition.
I speak of a hermeneutic effort because it does not matter how long Gypsy
tale telling was a living tradition in our region, we hardly have any chance to
examine and analyze tale telling, e.g. oral transgression. It means that we,
researchers and readers, have, over the past half century, met traditional folk
tales that have become quite foreign to us; we might say that we are
encountering them in institutional libraries or in our collections at home (it
would be useless to deny this, since we always encounter texts in collections in
our role of hermeneutical readers). To give our subject intimacy we continually
reread them, question them, and interpret them. And since we belong to the
culture of multiplicity and multiple values (if at all we wish to be part of the
kind of cultural thinking in which events have more than one meaning), we
cannot allow the folktale, which has long been marked off as the hunting ground
of folklorists, to be appropriated, although linguists, philologists, mythologists
and literary studies experts, and more recently psychologists and cultural
anthropologists, have tried to keep it on a life support machine. At the same
time, the oft-quoted idea that the traditional folktale (or what our excellent
Hungarian folklorist Ilona Dobos refers to as the peasant tale) has died a
natural death, and that consequently the booktale designed for children and the
urban tale (in other words a life-story epic) have taken its place, is not entirely
true either.
The second key idea in Odo Marquards study is that the race to
modernisation of the experimental sciences has caused a loss of the lived world;
and this idea itself raises further questions. First of all, the tale researcher must
discover what kind of loss of the lived world it is that affects, or can affect,

human beings, if they allow the traditional folktale to wear out and fade away
into death. Marquard first and foremost emphasises that people sacrifice their
traditional otherness on the altar of modernisation, and this is followed by the
triumph of uniformity. If one is not afraid to make an effort to follow the
colourful folktale traditions of the Carpathian Basin, and one reads the
Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Ruthenian, Swabian (i.e. German-speakers in the
Carpathian Basin), Southern Slav and Gypsy tale repertoires together and as
one, one will be profoundly surprised:
(1) by the informed state of the lived world of the traditional tale teller;
(2) by the topicality of the different ways of fulfilling destiny through free
choice and the exchange of life experiences which the chains of imagery and the
motifs of these tales offer us;
(3) by the almost philosophical depth and the moral sensitivity shown in
communal feeling, or to express it in the language of Lvinas and Waldenfels,
the manifestation of responsive ethics. One is surprised, since the tale corpus
created by the taleteller, who often has complex ethnic roots and vast
experience, encompasses all of this, and the teller makes it evident in the
pictures, chains of images, words, deeds and the tissue of events which feature
in individual tales. The hermeneutic expert (for simplicity, the tale researcher),
starting out from the experiences laid down in the tale texts (the expression
experience indicates both the store of knowledge and the birth of a new
recognition), and following a deductive methodology, teases out his or her own
interpretation, in order to make the world of origins, which has become alien,
intimate in another field of meaning.
Finally, we must also ask the following question: beyond the creation of
uniformity (the loss of colour), what other losses of the lived world are we
subject to? In what and how is this loss of colour made perceptible in tale texts?
As a result of the elimination of the symbols of the formation and fulfilment of
our destiny (which can be pictures or words, or from the hermeneutic

perspective, phenomena and in the Aristotelian and Kantian sense inter-related

expressions which stimulate surplus thinking), what Propp refers to as the tissue
of action, and ultimately the tale itself, lose their original meaning and essence.
At the same time, the hero (who, according to Lvinas and MacIntyre, can
behave heroically or unheroically, with due caution or thoughtlessly) must see in
the course of events that the solution to the task which lies ahead of him and the
fulfilment of his destiny are impossible without adhering to certain rules of the
game: these rules teach the community the normal order of life, a life lived
according to the canon of the community. The rules of the tale include the
following:
(a) accepting advice (including heeding the prohibition and the taboo received
from the other, as well as the others predictions and teachings);
(b) setting a condition, and being able to reach an agreement with the Other (the
call and the answer, the gesture of giving and receiving, which play a central
role in communication theory and phenomenology);
(c) making a promise (including taking seriously the acceptance of commitment
and of the oath, as well as understanding the gravity of breaking of ones word
out of thoughtlessness or indifference a word which the warning and the
demand for accountability require);
(d) the acceptance of responsibility and the openness of mutual love;
(e) the recognition of sin (which is the Kantian road to the good or the better)
and the ability to forgive (which is the acceptance of judgement in general and
of the judgement brought by another). These phenomena (or to simply stay with
our previous expression, the rules of the game) which appear together in the
concepts of wisdom, moral canons and survival strategies inherent in the tale (or
in Benjamins sense the threefold benefit,) teach the hero that the task which
he is obliged to accomplish includes: (1) the appropriate use of reason in
following feelings; (2) the creation of communicational and ethical relations
with the alien through the face of the Other encountered on the road; (3) the

fulfilment of one for the hero the best of the many possible destinies. These
tasks, just like the necessary actions required for the use of reason and the
functioning of the conscience, cannot be postponed without having to pay a
heavy price.
To further enumerate the losses of the lived world, Marquard speaks of
the disenchantment related to modernisation, as well as our hunger for colour,
our hunger for intimacy and our hunger for meaning, which can be satisfied by
tales which compensate for the damage of modernisation, and let us add
immediately, by listening to traditional tales. When encountering traditional
folktales we feel that one of the greatest gains is that the multiplicity and variety
of the narrative contained in the individual tales offers to our understanding
from its multi-layered nature and from the multiplicity of different forms of
being, precisely that possibility of being which we must choose; in other words,
it gives us the chance to choose from a variety of possibilities and the freedom
to make our own decision