“The notion of language,” writes Fredric Jameson, “designates both the abstract structure of speech, on the one hand, and the concrete social relationship of actual speaking, on the other” [1]. So “folktale” (conte) in one of these books, denotes the abstract structure of narrated actions and characters (actants), and in the other, the concrete, situated social interaction of someone narrating to an audience. Marie-Louise Tenèze, after a distinguished career cataloging French folktales, initially in collaboration with the great Paul Delarue, presents here a rather forbidding analytic effort to re-conceive how folktales are structured. Michel Valière, having interviewed and recorded storytellers over thirty years, surveys the history of live performance, the listening to it, the translation of it into publishable form, and its continuing vitality today. Conflicting approaches? No, they complement each other, for instance by keeping France as the main area of scrutiny. Marie-Louise Tenèze’s corpus is the set of French types represented in her catalogue, which Michel Valière calls that “monumental, bountiful work” (Valière, 91). M. Valière traces the course of the folktale from its engendering of European literature in the Middle Ages through the era of collecting, publishing, and “revival,” always drawing on his and others’ fieldwork. Still, the subtitles do indicate that the authors were formed in, and are contributing to, different disciplinary traditions. In that country where “folklore” is a word these authors try to avoid, is the discipline large and generous enough to house both structural-morphological and social-interactional study? The books answer yes.

Out of the heritage of past scholarship, Marie-Louise Tenèze has synthesized a new mode of narrative analysis, in which the Aarne-Thompson tale-type concept, the Proppian “functions,” and certain “paradigmatic” distinctions are all brought into play. The most important paradigmatic distinction in her tales separates the ways character roles are opposed to each other, in “external” and “internal” oppositions. While the function Propp called Lack exists in both, his function Villainy, in an external opposition, is practiced on the object of search, such as the girl; in an internal opposition it’s the hero himself who gets it. In the first set, the hero’s object of search resides in the Other World, thus establishing an opposition between two worlds. “The Object is linked to the Villain from the start, by belonging to the same Other World… the Villainy function has no place; there is a Lack” (Tenèze, 10). In others, the object of search belongs to the hero’s world; hero and girl are already connected, and the Villain practices his Villainy on the object by abducting her. What results is three sorts of structures-of-opposition: external, internal, and mixed. To explain these, the author divides her treatment into four “books,” according to these kinds of opposition, supporting her classification by referring to a number of types under each heading. It is curious that in her second “book,” on “mixed” structures which move from an external to an internal opposition, the author makes no mention of Denise Paulme’s seven-part schema for African tales. The last of Paulme’s seven classes explicitly makes room for such mixed structures, in a schema that otherwise is syntagmatic. So narrow is Marie-Louise Tenèze’s concentration on France. Yet, technically detailed as it is, her analysis aims at telling us nothing about the Frenchness of French folktales. Scholars of structural analysis may want to test this scheme on other corpora. In her conclusion, Marie-Louise Tenèze rejects the archetypal status Propp awarded to the princess stolen by the dragon, because in her analysis, a supernatural princess and a this-world princess are quite different Objects. Finally she suggests that the composition in two structurally different movements, as occurs in a number of types, has the effect of awarding a new value to the hero-object connection which is determined by sociohistorical circumstance (Tenèze, 156).

Michel Valière, writing an introduction to the folktale for university students, focuses from his first page on the experience of listening to a story. His book, oriented to both France and the world, is an admirable modern counterpart to Stith Thompson’s The Folktale (1946), with the difference that M. Valière keeps his eye on performance. The chapters take up the history of the oral folktale in Europe, as well as the Grimms and other collectors of oral literature, who created national treasuries. Questions like “Who is the audience?” and “What is the relation between audience and performer?” have to be answered empirically, he says, by looking at regions of living art like French Canada and West Africa (57–60). The cliché that writing drives out oral performance gets its refutation from field study (60–66) and from the many responses collectors have made to their problems of fieldwork, language, transcription, and translation (Chapter 4). The comprehensive Chapter 5 illustrates the various subdivisions (wonder tales, religious tales, a diverting section on jokes and anecdotes) from his fieldwork or that of others. Chapter 6 places storytelling in its sociocultural context, treating Jewish stories and jokes as a window into the simultaneous imagining of a past community and the maintenance of present identity, pointing to the unexpected ways stories can be transmitted from old to young, describing the increase of story-hours in local libraries, and ending with the therapeutic function stories can and do play in the modern world. This continually engaging book ends with an exploration of the present vitality of the folktale, bringing before the reader many individual artists the author has known. The contemporary relevance of mentioning regional and international gatherings, and festivals where storytellers meet audiences, is powerfully appealing. No reader now will think the folktale a dead art. An unexpected dividend, at the end of M. Valière’s book, is an openhanded set of additional resources: glossary, bibliography, some sixty relevant journals, a “webliographie” of thirty sites, a “filmographie,” and a listing of sound recordings.

These two contributions represent high achievements in French folkloristics.

[1] Jameson, Frederic. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithica: Cornell University Press. p. 205.

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[Review length: 995 words • Review posted on September 5, 2006]