popular tradition in folktales

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Russian Literature XII (1982) 57-70 North-Holland Publishing Company POPULAR TRADITION IN FOLKTALES ITALO CALVIN0 The first objection to the use of the folktale as a historical document is the difficulty of pinning it down to a particular place and time: when the histor- ian (or the geographer, the ethnographer, the sociol- ogist) cites a folktale as expressive of a period or of an environmental or social situation, the folklor- ist can immediately show him that the same narrative scheme reappears almost identically in a very differ- ent country and in a wholly different historico-social situation. If other products of the popular oral nar- rative tradition (legends, tales of fear, anecdotes, witty sayings) reveal a local and temporal origin, true or presumed, the story of magical marvels, from the opening "once upon a time" to the various ending- formulae, refuses to be fixed in time and space. The only information one can be sure of is that concerning documentation, that is to say, the fact that a particu- lar story was told (i.e. remembered and transmitted) in a particular place and at a particular moment; and the Finnish-American school of folkloristic studies which called itself "historical-geographical" confined its investigations to establishing, on the basis of material collected, a map of the diffusion of each type of story and of each theme, and a chronology of literary and folkloric evidence. If to this body of comparisons we then add those of the classical mythologies, of the non-European relig- ions, and above all of ethnology, establishing the de- rivation of folktales from the most primitive myths and rites (this has been the approach of the "anthro- pological" school and of its numerous derivations), how shall we fill the gap that opens up between pres- ent expressions of tradition, and cultural contexts that, as far as Europe is concerned, take us all the 0304-3479/0000-0000/$02.75 @ North-Holland

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Page 1: Popular Tradition in Folktales

Russian Literature XII (1982) 57-70 North-Holland Publishing Company

POPULAR TRADITION IN FOLKTALES

ITALO CALVIN0

The first objection to the use of the folktale as a historical document is the difficulty of pinning it down to a particular place and time: when the histor- ian (or the geographer, the ethnographer, the sociol- ogist) cites a folktale as expressive of a period or of an environmental or social situation, the folklor- ist can immediately show him that the same narrative scheme reappears almost identically in a very differ- ent country and in a wholly different historico-social situation. If other products of the popular oral nar- rative tradition (legends, tales of fear, anecdotes, witty sayings) reveal a local and temporal origin, true or presumed, the story of magical marvels, from the opening "once upon a time" to the various ending- formulae, refuses to be fixed in time and space. The only information one can be sure of is that concerning documentation, that is to say, the fact that a particu- lar story was told (i.e. remembered and transmitted) in a particular place and at a particular moment; and the Finnish-American school of folkloristic studies which called itself "historical-geographical" confined its investigations to establishing, on the basis of material collected, a map of the diffusion of each type of story and of each theme, and a chronology of literary and folkloric evidence.

If to this body of comparisons we then add those of the classical mythologies, of the non-European relig- ions, and above all of ethnology, establishing the de- rivation of folktales from the most primitive myths and rites (this has been the approach of the "anthro- pological" school and of its numerous derivations), how shall we fill the gap that opens up between pres- ent expressions of tradition, and cultural contexts that, as far as Europe is concerned, take us all the

0304-3479/0000-0000/$02.75 @ North-Holland

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way back to the Palaeolithic ? The most serious objec- tion, then, is that which asks how it is possible to introduce into a history that is a linear succession of distinct cultural phases materials which bear wit- ness to the permanence of a prehistory preserved up to the present at the heart of that same "historical" world, without calling in question the very notion of history?

The problem of defining the ItaZian folktale domi- nated my collection published in 1956,' for which I chose two hundred characteristic texts from among those recorded by folklorists in the various regions of Italy. For a first approximation, the reader is referred to that selection and to the comments with which I justified it, in the introduction and notes. But it is not pointless to resume the discussion, since the shape of folktale studies has changed per- ceptibly in recent years.

To establish the general context of this new inter- est in folktales, one must take as one's starting- point Claude Levi-Strauss's researches into t2e struc- ture of the myths of peoples without writing, and the importance to these investigations of a book that was published in Leningrad in 1928, but which only thirty years later became an obligatory point of reference, when Roman Jakobson brought it back to the attention of scholars, and when it had been discussed by Levi- Strauss: V.Ja.Propp's MorphoZogy of the Fo2kta2e.3

Rather than classifying folktales into types and picking out recurrent themes, as did the "historical- geographical" school, Propp extracts from their vari- ab2e manifestations (characters and attributes) a fi- nite number of constants (actions and functions) which are to be found in all folktales in the same order: he re-defines characters in terms of their functions, which he reduces to seven; and he proposes the formula of an outline common to all folktales, composed of thirty-one functions. In two distinct stages of his work Propp separates morphologica study, in which he takes into account only the magical tales of Russian folklore (Afanas'ev's 19th century collection) from historica - or rather,.genetic - study, which search- es for the origins of folktales in the myths and rit- uals of so-called primitive cultures, on the basis of the findings made by ethnology.

L&i-Strauss detaches himself from Propp by stat- ing: 1) that the study of myths is inseparable from that of folktales, given the continuity of their con- tents and form, and their existence side by side in many non-European cultures; 2) that functions and at-

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tributes are inseparable as facets of the same unit or mytheme (a character, king or sheperd, day-eagle or night-owl, draws his significance from the system of oppositions by which he is placed in relation to other characters, so that the Zexis of the story is not ex- ternal to its structure): 3) that it is necessary to study this Zexis not only syntagmaticaZZy, by consider- ing the narrative succession of functions, but also paradigmatically, that is to say by making an inven- tory of the variants of each function.4

At the same time A.J.Greimas' has followed the for- malistic path opened up by Propp. Since the roles of different characters can be united, while the same character may assume different roles within the same narrative, Greimas substitutes for the classification of characters that of actantial (actantielles) cat- egories. This involves (in agreement with Levi-Strauss) a further reduction in Propp's numbers: fewer roles (no longer seven characters, but six actants linked by three relations of implication: subject-object, donor- receiver, helper-opponent), fewer functions (no longer thirty-one but twenty, divided into three categories: contractual, executive - performancielles - and dis- junctive - disjonctioneZZes). The method tends to reach towards a general grammar of narration, to be traced not only in every narrative, but in every ver- bal proposition.

At the opposite pole, i.e. a definition of the folk- tale in its totality (without breaking it down into its primary elements) and in its immediacy (addressing itself only to its explicit manifestations and to the intentions of the narrator) is a morphological inves- tigation contemporary to that of Propp, but conducted within the limits of the autonomous study of form: Andre Jolles's fundamental text Einfache Formen (1930), which has recently been republished in a French trans- lation. 6(3)The chapter on "Msrchen" is one of the least rich (that on legends is by far the best), but the definition of Miirchen, however general, is worth bear- ing in mind. For Jolles, the mental state that pro- duces folktales is that of naive moraZity: the moral- ity that concerns itself with events and notbehaviour, that suffers and rejects the injustice of the facts, the tragicness of Zife, and constructs a universe in which for every injustice there is a corresponding reparation. This sense of life's injustice and of the necessity for a reparation (to which corresponds, in grammar, the optative mood) marks all the elements of the folktale, which for Jolles are not "themes" :or "functions" but verba gestures. It is possible to

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discern a fundamental agreement between Jolles and the accounts of the narrative development of the folktale given by Propp, by Levi-Strauss and by Greimas (al- though, unlike Jolles, they do not resort to psycho- logical or moral categories). For all of them it is a transition from negative conditions (separation, pro- hibition, injury, lack, obstacle) to conditions that reverse or overcome the initial negativeness.

Let us now return to the question of the possibil- ity of using the folktale as a historical document. The formalizing process common to these investigations would appear to remove the folktale even further from the historian's sphere of interest. In fact the re- verse is true: the reduction of the folktale to its unchanging skeleton helps to emphasize how many geo- graphical and historical variables go to make up the covering of that skeleton; and the rigorous establish- ing of the narrative function, the place occupied within that outline by specific situations arising from life in a given society, by the objects of prac- tical experience, utensils peculiar to a particular culture, plants or animals peculiar to a particular flora or fauna, can provide us with some information that might otherwise escape us, as to the value at- tached to these things by that particular society.

In Propp's formalisaticn, the folktale can be given its impetus only by a state of injury or Lack, and it is no coincidence that when one examines the collec- tions made by folklorists one finds the most specific references to time and place in the opening sections, in the adversities of the initial situation, while the development and the happy end are more often stereotyped, and far from the lived experience of the story-teller and his public: the usual marriage to the usual prince or princess. So the value of the folktale as a historical document can most easily be found in the form assumed by the initial adversity-situation: for instance, departure from home, which in southern Italy is represented as unemployment among farm la- bourers. "CIA v6 garzuni - ca vugghiu patrune!" ["Who- ever wants me as a servant - I want him as a master"] the three orphan sons cry through the streets in a tale from the Catanzaro region reported by Raffaele Lombardi Satriani.' Also in southern Italy the theme of the girl who is disguised as a man is introduced into a departure-situation, in which a father of seven daughters is mocked by a father of seven sons, or at any rate feels shame in his presence; the first liter- ary instance of this opening, amply documented by oral tradition,' is in Basilio's Pentamerone (III 6).

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One would then suppose that the narrative flesh around the morphological kernel would be juicier at the beginning of the tale and less so as the narration proceeds in its development; but in fact it is those juices that are hardest to squeeze out that can pro- vide us with information that is not obvious. If we ask, "What are the magical agents most characteristic of Italian folktales?" or, more generically, "What helpers?" (in Greimas' actantial system even magical agents are categorized as helpers) we must not merely accumulate a list of variants, but should bear in mind (with Levi-Strauss) that the value of these manifesta- tions can be understood only within the story as a whole; the relation between lexis and narrative se- quence, between paradigm and syntagm, is never arbit- rary.

A magical agent iS generally a fruit ox an instru- ment whose first connotation is its worthlessness and uselessness, just as the magical helper appears in the form of a person or animal from whom one does not ex- pect help. The historical meaning of the narrative function of that particular vegetable, animal, object or trade, is to be found in the possibility of revers- ing its initial negative connotations. So we may con- sider the fact that one of the most famous animal helpers, that cunning and deceptive cat which, before becoming Perrault's Chat botte' had already appeared as an Italian character (in Straparola and in Basile), is, in a Sicilian variant (Don Giovanni Misuranti, told to Giuseppe Pit&' by his best narratrix, Agatuzza Messia) is nothing but a bean, found on the ground by a hungry man, and kept with respect. For the rest, the plot is identical, with the roles of the hero and the cat com- bined in one, and with the bean having no other func- tion than that of a lucky charm; only in the finale is the bean transformed into ,a fairy, taking on the func- tion of donor. (In Perrault it is the Ogre who is forced by the cat to transform himself from opponent into donor.)

How can we explain the fact that the same role can be played by a cat and by a bean? It is worth knowing that in Sicily the very same plot of Puss in Boots provides a variant in which the cat is replaced by a wolf. Levi-Strauss has taught us to classify the ani- mals of mythical stories according to special units of meaning (zoemes) in relation to their context. Here the situation is that of a young man who onhis father's death receives a miserable inheritance: so it is with reference to a poverty-wealth axis that we must estab- lish the isotopy of the cat and the wolf: the one ani-

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ma1 a helper, but inactive unless there is a granary to be defended against mice, the other harmful, but inactive unless there is a chicken-run to be attacked. The same poverty-wealth axis could also define the bean, as an object of no value and at the same time as the foundation of wealth.

The idea that an object of little value may be the means of achieving wealth is fundamental to a particu- lar type of popular story based on a progression of exchanges or indemnities of increasing value, but in- terrupted by a rude anticlimax (Propp has devoted a separate study to this type of cumulative foZktaZe)." In a typical story of this type, told in Mantua, "the object of departure is indeed a bean. The Sicilian folktale we are dealing with also has an element of economic fantasy which might be described as being the cumuZative type: the hungry young man plans to plant the bean, pick the pods, plant again, first in a pot, then in a rented vegetable garden, to become a dealer in vegetables, etc. But after this rapid progression the narrative takes another course: having reached the point of imagining himself to be "un niguziantu gros- su", the young man goes to rent a warehouse on credit, presenting himself as "Patruni di ciciri e favi, o tanti 0 quanti" (Seller of chick-peas and beans, so much and no more). With the realistic characterization that distinguishes her, Agatuzza Messia gives us the transformation of her penniless hero into a rustic bourgeois, ambitious and enterprising. So the poverty- wealth axis here marks the leap from the first element of the economic process, the bean, to the last, the warehouse, and the unfolding of the story must restore as a whole the elements that have been leaped over, which include possession of the land and manpower. In Perrault land and manpower belonged to the Ogre, and the Cat with its cunning managed to take them away from him to the advantage of the disinherited young man; in Pitr4 they belong to the bean-fairy, who gives them to the pauper, registering them in his name, in- deed, with all the proper paper-work.

Le chat bottc? is the story Jolles uses as an ex- ample of behavioural immorality (the cat's lies) cor- responding to naive morality (setting right the injus- tice of the disinherited man's condition). We are now able to say that the verba gestures with which Per- rault and Agatuzza Messia express this immorality- morality (or let us say, the variants the narrator chooses among the number of possible variants) are homologous to their historic context. For Perrault, a bourgeois at the court of the Sun-King," the context

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is the feudal one, perceived as adverse, and which can become favourable only if with its cunning the Cat can succeed in turning the Ogre into a mouse and eating him. For Dr.Pitre's old nurse, a woman of the people in the service of the professional middle-class in Palermo at the time of Sicily's annexation to the King- dom of Italy, the context, perceived as favourable, is that of an economic process that seems to develop of its own accord, in which a new middle-class hopes to make its way with no assets save the quality of initi- ative and the presence of mind to seize chances.

It is tempting to over-emphasize the cues provided by the text to "historicize" it even further, taking advantage of the remarkable correspondence between the strangeness of the variant and the state of mind of a society at a moment of transition; but we should not let ourselves forget that folktales by their nature address themselves to the past: they are as static as the agricultural world in which they endure, and the transitions whose traces they bear are more anthropo- logical than historical. A folktale can only be "dated" arbitrarily, or else approximately, in terms of cen- turies, if not millennia.

Let us consider, for instance, the variants of a folktale pa$$ern whose diffusion in Italy is richly documented; a pregnant woman seized by a "longing" steals parsley from an ogre's garden; caught in the act, she is forced to promise that she will deliver to the ogre the daughter who is to be born. In Italy this daughter may be called Petrosinella (in the Pentamero-

II 1) or Prezzemolina (in the NoveZZaja fiorentina i;'Vittorio Imbriani). The story is found throughout Europe, with other plants and other names; in Germany (the brothers Grimm) it is called RapunzeZ, rampion.

To the stories that begin in this way can be assimi- lated those, found widely in Sicily, of the cicoriari (in Calabria) or cavuziciddari (in Sicily): in order

to survive, a poor family has to "run on soup", that is, by gathering wild herbs; when a plant larger than the others is plucked - chicory, fennel, Savoy cabbage - the ground opens, revealing the entrance to an under- ground world, which swallows up the youngest daughter.

Both of these openings are followed by the imprison- ment of the daughter in the "world below", or at any rate in the other world, and by various developments that permit her to return to the familiar world, gen- erally with a husband released from the enchantment that held him prisoner down below.

To say that the stories which follow this pattern (transgression in the form of picking vegetables, im-

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prisonment and secret marriage of a young girl in the chthonian world) are modelled on the vegetation myth of the winter sojourn of Proserpina, Ceres' daughter, in the underworld, is to make an obvious but very vague comment. (A Sicilian variant incorporates also the Christmas mytheme of the glorious son born in an obscure place, in this case a hen-house.14)

If we wish to understand something of the way in which the story has been diffused in Italy we should first of all study the variants on the theme of the plant regarded as fatal (prohibited?) which in many cases provides the name of the captive girl. It is easy to see that the "rampion" of the Grinuns' German variant carries a sense of mediation between the under- ground world and the vegetation of the surface, but it is less obvious why in Italy rampion should be replaced by parsley. The fundamental opposition evoked by the pregnant woman's blow-out of parsley is that of food- plant/aromatic plant; which brings us to the thresh- old of those "gardens of Adonis" Marcel Detienne,"

recently studied by the home of an archaic botany based

on the opposition food /spice, farming /gardening, Ceres /Venus. While the literary sources used by De- tienne are more on the side of Venus (the side of pleasure and transgression), the folkloric sources, evidence of the peasant world's spirit of resistance, are more likely to be on the side of Ceres, that is to say, they support the perpetuation of the cycle of veg- etable and human fecundity. We have still to establish the function of the parsley (or fennel, or a particu- lar species of chicory) as a forbidden plant (an abort- ive? an aphrodisiac?) but at the same time as a magic plant: the girl marked by the "longing" for the plant and by its name will pass through a world of alimen- tary transgression (cannibal elements are present in several variants) and amorous transgression (invisible bridegroom, forbidden marriage) and will achieve her liberation from the chthonic prison. In order not to neglect the other oppositions that are to be found, all the variants must be laid out on a multi-dimen- sional grid: eating for hunger/ eating for "longing"; plants that are grown/.plants that grow wild; edible plants /aromatic plants; plants with an edible leaf / plants with an edible root (or tuber, etc.).

I would recommend to the attention of anyone wish- ing to make such a survey a rare pamphlet by Piero Pellizzari, Canti e canzoni popolari del. contado di MagZie in Terra d'otranto (Maglie 1881), as the notes to the "Cuntu dela massara" contain a full list of the local names of edible chichoriaceae or "mixed leaves"

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(foie maddhate), the picking of one of which (the cu- Zacchi de porcu) coincides with the abduction of the picker. But the "Cuntu de la massara" (cf. my transla- tion "La madre schiava", no.131 of the Fiabe itaZiane1 provides quite different grounds for interest: it does not tell of a descent into the underworld, but of an abduction by Turks, who take the chicory-pickers over- seas as slaves.

Here there opens up another area of historica re- search: the relations between mythical and geographi- cal topologies; in the same way as the division be- tween the Christian world and the Islamic is assimi- lated to earlier mythical-folkloric patterns, especial- ly in coastal regions exposed to barbarian incursions, so is the East of the "Turks", an antagonistic, other world, identified with the Plutonian world, including its connotations of (mineral) wealth. It is noteworthy that the underworld has not disappeared from the story, but has only had its function transformed from that of abductor to that of donor: two years after the woman's abduction, her family discovers a buried treasure, which in its place in the unfolding of the story ap- pears almost as a.gift received in exchange for the abducted woman; and this treasure is used to ransom her from the slave-traders. So there appears here an- other widespread popular mytheme, that of the hidden treasure, instituting an implicit chain of relations: treasure - Turkish pirates - underworld - after-life.

The variant also offers another "novelty", equally striking: the abducted woman is not the daughter but the mother. The sojourn in the other world is no long- er to be seen as a phase in the passage from girlhood to the age of fertility (as it was in the story of the girl-child promised to the witch), but as a phase in the symmetrical passage from the age of fertility to old age. This is indeed the theme stated at the be- ginning and at the end of the story: an owl (the only supernatural element in the story) has asked the woman, "When do you want wealth, in youth or in old age?" and the woman has chosen old age. If previously it was the last-born creature to be promised in sacrifice to the dark vegetable powers so that she herself could become vegetable, we now have a conscious renunciation, an im- mediate sacrifice made so as to enjoy future benefits, almost an agreement to be turned into an object of trade, as a pledge, in order to benefit from a trading economy (the abducted and enslaved woman is later ran- somed by means of a discovered treasure).

We may say that this "Cuntu de la massara" recounted in Terra d'otranto and transcribed by Pellizzari re-

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presents a tradition of mythical folktale elements in terms of "histoire larmoyante" (Jolles defines the "tragic story" - well known from antiquity onwards - as. the "simple form", as opposed to that of the folk- tale), or rather, given that the story here hasa happy ending, tending towards novelistic narration, which lends a certain air of probability to extraordinary adventures.16 So it can help us in the study of the transformations that occur within the folktale, be- tween magical fairy-tale and romance. The group of transformations "underworld/Islamic East", "sacrificed daughter /sacrificed mother", "anthropomorphized na- ture /human being reduced to an object" corresponds to the passage from .a mythical-vegetable universe to a historical-geographical universe. If the most archaic versions of the story took us back to a pre-agricul- tural culture (of food-gatherers), to a survival-econ- omy based on the seasonal self-reproduction of vegeta- tion and on rapid consumption without accumulation and without trade, this novelistic variant belongs within the cultural context of an economy based on trade, ac- cumulation and deferred consumption. And here morality comes in the form of the economy of sufferings and sat- isfactions (somewhat anticipating the morality of Robin- son Crusoe) which leads one to expect that the suffer- ings of youth and maturity will be compensated by the satisfactions of old age, and the sufferings of the parents by the satisfactions of the children. The cult of the sacrifice of the younger son, which typifies the contract with the forces of nature in an archaic agricultural-pastoral culture', is superseded by the cult of the sacrifices of the mother, which typifies the contract modelled on the process of the investment of hard work and suffering that regulates an economy of trade and accumulation.

An investigation of this kind can, then, show us how the folktale, the archaic narrative product of an agricultural society, represents man's integration within the reproductive cycle of predominantly veg- etable and animal wealth, experiencing all the precari- ousness of this process, all its efforts to move from penury to abundance; and, through the range of its variants, the folktale provides evidence of the strati- fication of cultural transformations, always from the point of view of the peasant and countryman. Even though its viewpoint is that of the humblest and most rejected, the folktale restores a total universal vi- sion, as long as this vision of the whole is possible,'7 that is, until the experience of the natural and agri- cultural cycle is narrowed to an experience of labour

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leading merely to more labour. In the Favole italiane 'a I have already pointed out

as being among the most interesting pieces of Italian narrative folklore such tales as "Quattordici" ["Four- teen"] (from the Marche and the Abruzzi, but also found in other regions)," in which the magic object is a hoe, the hero a peasant and the antagonist a land- owner (contad gross0 in the version from the Marche), and the Devil is forced to play the part of donor and helper - indeed, his alliance with the antagonist or with the hero is decided by the crucial test: the peasant wins, and the Devil leaves him his treasures, taking the landowner away with him to hell. Another noteworthy detail is the repetition of the number fourteen: a magical number, probably, but also a sign that we have entered a world in which everything is counted numerically.

All that remains for me to do now is to repeat that "one of the major monuments of Italian popular narra- tive" is "Peppi, spersu per lu munnu", no.27 of Pitre's Fiabe, novelle e racconti popoZari siciliani (which I have translated literally in the Fiabe italiane: no. 172, "Sperso per il mondo" ["scattered through the world"]). Propp puts forward the hypothesis of a po- tential, ur-folktale whose formula never appears in its completeness in the stories which we know were really told; and we can say that "Sperso per il mondo" is one of those that most nearly approaches complete- ness in Propp's sense, and also one of those in which each constant is represented by more original vari- ables. The text, which Pit& reports as "told by Anto- nio Loria and collected by Sig. Leonardo Greco" at Salaparuta, unites features of the folktale, of the realistic-picaresque story, of cosmic myths. But all is concentrated within the universe of the agricul- tural labourer: the picaresque story is that of the picciotto [Sicilian youth] in search of work (thefunc- tion of departure, an obligatory starting-condition for a folktale, coincides with the enforced condition of the southern proletariat, of the emigrant "scattered through the world"); this is the tale in which the tests that must be passed in order to win the hand of the princess do not consist in knightly deeds, duels, tournaments, but in ploughing a salma (seventeen hec- tares) of land in one day; the myth of a sun-miracle concerns only the length of the day: the day, unit of payment and unit of land-area to be worked, is the labourer's only horizon.

The function of magical helper is assumed by an ox, but by an old ox, apparently no longer fit for farm-

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work. From this ox, in life and in death, all the magi- cal power is released, and the universe of the folktale is restored. The old ox fights and defeats a savage bull; yoked to the same plough, old ox and bull pass all the ploughing-tests. When Peppi has won the hand of the king's daughter, the ox asks Peppi to butcher him; the meat must be cooked, and will transform itself into "meat of rabbit, hare, poultry, turkey, mutton and also fish" for the wedding-feast; the bones must be buried, and will bring forth fruit and flowers.

Clearly, we find ourselves here at the centre of a web of semantic relationships connected with the ox and ploughing. As a semantic unit the ox signifies castra- tion, sterility, in contrast with the bull; but it also signifies motive power for ploughing, the increase of the land's fertility, in contrast with herding and the forms of agriculture that pre-date the plough. All the meanings are distributed along the axis sterility-fer- tility: the technological revolution of the plough and the yoke brings fertility to the fields but also ste- rility; at this point the historian can define this at- tribute in the terms that fit: extensive cereal culti- vation, destroying other forms of cultivation andstock- raising, a starch-based diet, large landed estates, serf-labour. The old ox and the bull are two unusable natural elements (old age, wildness) that are called on to reinforce the agriculturally useful castration of cattle. Perhaps the tale of Peppi is derived from the myth of a cultural hero, the inventor ofthe plough (the contract with the sun would fit such a context);

but as he is represented in the text recorded by Pitre, Peppi is the hero of an optative tale, called on to re- pair the injustice of the farm-labourer's life. The sacrificial slaying of the ox - a magic ox, not a farm animal - marks the return of the abundance and variety of edible meats and fruit. IS it a regressive myth, of the restoration of a prehistoric culture (of hunters and forest food-gatherers) or merely of an agriculture of stockbreeders and growers not based on large estates? Or is it a prophetic myth of a new contract with the elements (the sun and its mediators) for a different rate of time, a different human destiny in a different astronomy?

This can bedescribed as a last effort on the part of the folktale to construct a whole universe. With the disappearance of an archaic natural-cultural wholeness the folktale dies, that is it loses the capacity to multiply its variants. Other representations of a world-totality in a sequence of events take shape, mul- tiply their variants, die, are partially born again

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and partially die again. All the time they repeat something of the first forms of storyI so that every story that has a meaning can be recognized as the first story ever told, and the last, after which the world will no longer let itself be told in a story.

NOTES

1. Fiabe itaZiane collected from popular tradition over the past hundred years and transcribed in Italian from the various dialects by Italo Calvin0 (Torino 1956, latest edition 1971).

2. Of those works of Claude Levi-Strauss that are fundamental to a methodology of the analysis of mythical structures, I wish above all to mention AnthropoZogie structuraZe (Paris 1958) and the four volumes of MythoZogiques (Paris 1964-71).

3. V.Ja.Propp, MorfoZogia deZZa fiaba, with an introduction by Claude L&i-Strauss and a reply from the author, edited by Gian Luigi Bravo (Torino 1966). One should also bear in mind another work of Propp's of the same year, The TransfoMnation of Magical FoZktaZes, included in the anthology I formalisti russi, edited by Tzvetan Todorov (Torino 1965). It is worth recalling that the second phase of Propp's work, which ex- plains the genesis of folktales ethnologically was already known in Italy from the translation of a book written by him in 1946: The Historica Roots of Fairy-taZes [Le radici sto- riche dei raceonti di fate] (Torino 1949).

4. Levi-Strauss's essay on Propp, "La structure etla fonne" (orig- inally published in the Cah<er de Z'lnstitut de Science Eeono- mique AppZiquQe, serie M p7, mars 1960) is translated as an appendix to the Italian edition of Morfologia deZla fiaba (op.eit;), together with Propp's reply. A useful summary of the whole subject is the essay "L'etude structurale et typolo- gique du conte"by E.Meletinski, translated from the Russian in one of the two French editions of Propp, MorphoZogie du eonte (Paris 1970).

5. A.J.Greimas, S&mantique strueturaZe (Paris 1966). Italian translation: Semartiea strutturale (Milan0 1969).

6. (3) Andre Jolles, Formes SimpZes, translated from the German by A.M.Buget (Paris 1972).

7. Raffaele Lombardi Satriani, Raceonti popolari eaZabresi,vol.l (Napoli 1953). The story "I tre orfani", %41, I have translat- ed as t?138 of Fiabe italiane, op.&t.

8. The reader is referred to the bibliographical information con- tained in the notes to @W69 and 124 of Fiabe italiane, op.&t.

Page 14: Popular Tradition in Folktales

Italo Calvin0

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Fiabe, novelle e racconti popoZari siciliani, collected and illustrated by Giuseppe Pit&, 4 ~01s. (Palermo 1875)(BibZio- teca deZle tradizioni popolari siciliane vols.IV-VII). The work is now available in a facsimile reprint, The story in question is p87; I have translated it as N9154 of the Fiabe italiane, op.&t., "Padron di ceci e fave". V.Ja.Propp, "La fiaba cumulativa russa", in Ricerche semio- tiche, edited by Ju.M.Lotman and B.A.Uspenskij, Italian ed. edited by Clara Strada Janovi? (Torino 1973). "La fortuna facile", in Fiabe mantovane by Isaia Visentini (Torino 1879), recently republished, transcribed and editedby Paola Gozzi Gorini, with an introduction by Italo Calvin0 (Mantova 1970). Cf. Marc Soriano, Les Contes de PerrauZt. Culture savante et traditions populaires (Paris 1968). However unconvincing its central idea (the life and work of Perrault is explained in terms of a psychological trauma he is presumed to have suffer- ed as the survivor of a pair of twins), the book is useful for its abundant documentation. The reader is referred to the notes to PN~86,136,142,174 and 181 of Fiabe italiane, op.&t. Pitre, Fiabe... (op.&t.) 832, "Lu Re d'Animmulu", translated as "I1 figlio de1 Re nel pollaio", 1174 in my Fiabe itaZiane, op.&t. Also in Pitre are the stories of the cavuZiciddari [cabbage-sellers] (K%18,19,20). Marcel Detienne, Les jardins d'Adonis. Mythologie des aro- mates en Gre'ce (Paris 1972). In the 15th century cantare "Istoria di Ottinello e Giulia" (and its approximately contemporary European variants), an- other story of separation (of two lovers) brought about by an abduction by pirates, it is the young man who, sold as,aslave, finds a buried treasure, in Eastern soil. In other forms of oral peasant narrative poverty is seen as an irremediable evil, in contrast with the approach of the folktale. In Sicily these forms inspired by a hard "class" sarcasm are the parita' (fables and parables), the storie (leg- ends and anecdotes) and rustic jokes mocking fools and cuck- olds. I have recently had occasion (on the suggestion of Leo- nardo Sciascia) to study the characteristics of these narra- tive forms in the introductions to new editions of two excel- lent collections: Serafino Amabile Guastella, Le paritd e Ze storie moraZi dei nostr< viZlani (1884), introduction by I. Calvin0 (Palermo 1969); Francesco Lanza, Mimi siciZiani (1928), introduction by I.Calvino (Palermo 1971).

Fiabe italiane, op.eit. Cf. the end of the introduction and the notes to the stories cited here. NovelZine e fiabe marchigiane, collected and annotated by An- tonio Gianandrea (Jesi 1878); Xradizione popoZari abruzzesi, collected by Gennaro Finamore, ~01.1: Novelle, part I (Lanci- ano 1882); part II (Lanciano 1885). For other comparisons, see my note to t+96 of the Fiabe italiane, op.&t.