A reader aware of present-day trends in folkloristics might wonder why, in a book about folklore theory, only two genres appear, the folktale and the folk song. In the post-WWII setting, all-too-recent events, particularly in Central Europe, presented folklorists with an existential quandary. The word Volk (folk) had been perverted so as to justify one of the most destructive, immoral regimes in the history of the world. Scholars struggled as a result to justify folkloristics as a discipline and folklore as something worthy of study. The folklorist who wrote this book chose her battleground carefully. Folktales and folk songs were the best-known folklore genres at that time. Every German speaker could narrate or sing one or more of them.
Lutz Röhrich’s 1956 book, Folktales and Reality -- Märchen und Wirklichkeit—broke with the prewar past, as well as certain wartime distortions, bringing a radically new perspective and expectations. Naithani remarks, however, that this seminal work, unlike the widely translated and quoted works of contemporary theorists Vladimir Propp and Max Lüthi, found only a thin readership outside the German-speaking world.
Folklorists today may see the folktale as a quaint reminder of days long past, but in the 1960s it was the most researched folk genre. There is arguably, still today, a greater quantity of research in existence about the folktale than about any other genre.
Professor Henry Glassie at Indiana University explained to me in my first semester as a graduate student how interconnected all folklore genres really are; narrative inspires the creation of objects of craft and decoration, food, ceremonies, images, rituals, songs, even landscape and architecture. These in turn inspire tales. Every object humans craft to delight the senses has its corresponding tale. Every tale inspires other genres. Folk arts, like all arts, relate to the society and events surrounding their inception and use. It’s a procession, not a snapshot.
For Röhrich the very notion, all the rage in some postwar circles -- that there never was a folk, that in reality the literate elite had created the arts and crafts of each age -- was illogical. To accept that social strata existed, in which some occupied more privileged, and others less privileged positions, was for him to accept the existence of a non-ruling sector. For Röhrich the non-ruling sector is and always has been the folk; distinct forms of folk expression exist as well. The folk may have less power, but it does not have less humanity, less creativity, less insight, than the elite. This was the defining assumption underlying Röhrich’s research as Naithani’s book so capably presents it.
Röhrich identified a partnership in the folktale between fantasy and reality, a notion which may have begun as a way to counter the often-repeated accusation that folktales were complex systems of lies, not useful for the real world. Naithani’s second and third chapters, an overview of Röhrich’s theoretical legacy in the form of triangles of analysis and circles of interpretation, are highly relevant for genre theorists in particular; a broad spectrum of folklorists will also find handy insights there. The book’s subject matter moves parallel to certain recent performance theory findings, and also cuts across some psychological approaches, such as Bettelheim’s or Freud’s, while supplying recipes for crafting insights and for changing the world, as well as one’s own discipline.
“Every folktale is somehow connected to reality” (33). This sentence expressed defiance and challenge in its time and place. Naithani’s triangles of analysis depict the complexity of Röhrich’s theoretical work as well as its versatility. Because reality and the folktale are each individually unmoored from determinations of time and space, Röhrich wrote, neither can be a reflection of the other. Folktales, in other words, cannot be the cause of human cruelty or other evils, nor can causality flow in the other direction (30).
Naithani’s first triangle is that of folktale, reality, and genre (38): Röhrich’s predecessors had overlooked the genre’s reality orientation, or lack of it. Each genre has its characteristic form, Röhrich wrote, but it also has value, in order to survive in oral transmission. Naithani sees Röhrich as a tracer of transformations, because a tale’s value emerges in (transformative) performance or in the (transformative) allusions of discourse (40). Performance strategies come into play, and genre definitions change, much as countries may change after wars. Narrative cultures also change over time.
Naithani’s second analytical triangle is that of time, space, and narrative culture. In one specific instance, about which scholars have taken a variety of stands over the decades, Röhrich opposed the notion that the legend is realistic and the folktale unrealistic. He quoted the Grimms, who wrote that the one was more historic and the other more poetic; for Röhrich both criteria contained sliding scales, rather than excluding the lesser element (41). The folktale ends with harmony restored, however, while the legend often ends in tragedy. This comparison reflects the theories of contemporaries Lüthi and Propp to some extent, but not entirely (43). Here, too, a specific definition of the word reality appears. For Röhrich there is an inward reality as well as an outward reality in nearly every folktale plot. This is his pathway to including fantasy as a real, not added-on element of the folktale (44, 58). The third triangle is that of magic, belief, and aesthetics (48).
War and its aftermath, like upheavals of other kinds, tend to overturn expectations and bring new hope. Naithani’s book shows how a scholar reinvented a discipline and a genre fallen into scorn and disrepute. It is an inspirational as well as practical guide to overturning traditions and taking a radically unorthodox look at artistic phenomena and their function in the world. I recommend it highly.
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[Review length: 946 words • Review posted on September 8, 2015]