In May 2007 in Paris, I attended a colloquium titled “People and narratives: recognition, classification, interpretation,” organized by the medieval Arabic scholar Aboubakr Chraïbi, author of many articles on literature and editor of a fine anthology on the Thousand and One Nights. We met at three awe-inspiring locations, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), the sumptuous headquarters of the Fondation Singer-Polignac, and the Sorbonne. Papers were assembled in advance for distribution and written comment; thus they could be published far more promptly than is usual for academic colloquia. In his introduction, before commenting on each of the articles, the editor-organizer points to the problems of classifying and indexing a collection like the Thousand and One Nights or the corpus of medieval Christian exempla (see http://gahom.ehess.fr/thema). As a participant, I comment here on the resulting book. Folklorists might be pardoned for wondering why the task of classification should be brought up as if it were not the oldest of their received wisdom, but Classer les récits raises questions well worth our attention.
Part One, with theoretical papers, opens with the master narratologist Claude Bremond presenting a complex, deeply-thought-out structuralist “Index of Passions, Motivations, and Actions in the Thousand and One Nights.” According to the editor, this “minutely detailed work...may well serve as a model for other corpora. At the moment, what remains is to transfer the index on to a data base for public consultation” (40 n.). In discussion, Claude Bremond delivers this far-seeing observation: “the narrative, at the fundamental structural level I envisaged it in Logique du récit [1973], is not of the order of mimesis but of that of poiesis” (46). A second master narratologist, Gerald Prince, addresses directly the stated theme of the colloquium in a survey of the large number of criteria used to classify narratives, asking whether any distinctively narrative traits are evoked by the names of genres. In third place comes a method to classify feuilletons (continued stories in newspapers). To deal with the question of truth vs. fiction, authors Françoise Revaz, Stéphane Pahud, and Raphaël Baroni propose a continuum from a simple chronicle to a narrative shaped by plot; they conclude that stories in newspapers present different degrees of narrativity (81). Part One concludes with an account by Francis Berthelot of the notion of “transfiction,” developed out of science fiction by his group Limite in the mid-1980s. The huge bibliography appended to this paper (90-93) indicates that Limite produced a major corpus of new fiction.
Part Two takes up “practical cases” in medieval Arabic and Persian literature. Julia Bray takes up the question whether a genre of medieval Arabic biography actually exists, and concludes that the examples depend so much on biographical formulas, which may be without factual basis, that the genre exists only fluidly. In her wide-ranging paper, “Literature as performance,” on a medieval Arabic text, Wen-chin Ouyang uniquely applies contemporary literary criticism to confronting the problem of how today’s reader is to approach such a text, with what tools and what handicaps. Her extraordinary essay is, for its yoking of texts and criticism, the most interesting thing in the book. Hachem Foda’s paper on the rhetorico-narrative kernel of pre-Islamic self-celebratory poetry models a kind of close reading folklorists could well emulate. Aboubakr Chraïbi’s own contribution questions genre boundaries by dealing with a motif I haven’t found in Thompson’s Motif-Index: a rat loses his uncommon jumping ability when a hunter steals a bag of gold pieces out of his hole. “De-fictionalizings” of this popular motif, according to the author, recommended it to numerous other kinds of texts, even religious. Never-ending questions about ambiguity and double meanings are raised by Abdelfattah Kilito, writing about Kalila and Dimna (233-240). The many accounts, not all factual, of Alexander the Great are treated by Yuriko Yamanaka, who calls him a hero of a thousand faces. Finally, Christophe Balaÿ writes about experiments in narrative form by the popular modern Persian novelist Samad Behrangi. This author, situated among Azerbaijanese, Persian, and Western cultural currents, drew on folklore, the most enduring thing he found in his region’s culture.
Part Three takes up material more challenging to the folklorist, the exempla of the Christian Middle Ages, which are being indexed and classified with modern technology by the group GAHOM. Their example, which has drawn from Thompson’s Motif-Index, shows that if more accurate folktale texts were online, adequate search tools could do away with the need for keywords for tales. Still, there remains the question raised by Claude Bremond on page 305: what’s the objective of any indexing?
Part Four comes to the folktale. Hasan El-Shamy makes an impressively thorough catalogue of Arabic folktale genres, never questioning the inherited methods of folktale study and always maintaining a separation between the oral and the written, though these seem to have been undermined by other papers. In discussion, Dwight Reynolds questions the separation between prose and verse and asks about the relation between academic classification systems and ethnic genres. Next, Nicole Belmont offers a fascinating hypothesis: whether every narrator may be carrying a “hidden story” behind each performance; whether he or she may have an itinerary, much as the hero or heroine has. The genre of pranks, discussed from Greek data by Marilena Papachristophorou, is particularly interesting to American folklorists, and her paper, plus the incisive comments of Michèle Simonsen, raise questions of terminology and classification. The final paper, by Pierre Darnis, proposes an “anthropo-psychological” explanation for folktales: the force of psychological phenomena, passed on through natural and sexual selection, have operated to create and diffuse narrative structures, playing the same role environment has played in the creation and diffusion of biological adaptations (453). The colloquium didn’t allow time for discussion of this startling hypothesis, but one has to welcome its attempt to connect contemporary science with the study of narrative.
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[Review length: 972 words • Review posted on November 5, 2008]