Le conte en ses paroles: La figuration de l’oralité dans le conte merveilleux du Classicisme aux Lumières (review)

The volume under review presents the proceedings of the second conference titled Le conte en ses paroles: le dire et le dit dans le conte merveilleux de l’âge Classique (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles), which took place at the University of Grenoble 3–Stendhal, September 22–24, 2005. The thirty-two presentations, put together by Anne Defrance and Jean-François Perrin, join a larger group project directed by Perrin and focused on the subject of “The Fairy Tale in the Seventeenth Century: The Wonder Tale and the Baroque Culture of the Voice” (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, LIRE, University Grenoble 3, 2002–2006). Perrin opens his preface to the volume by quoting the initial challenge for this original research: “At a time . . . when the notion of ‘oral literature’ was widely circulating and especially attached to the mighty revival of tale-telling as a social practice, it seems necessary to re-think this notion in a critical way, by reviewing the overpowering of speech by writing and the special capacity of literature to produce ‘fictions of presence.’” Orality and literature are thus perceived as complementary notions.

The studies present in this volume cover the period from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of eighteenth century. These two centuries in France represent the golden era when fairies became fashionable among the members of a social elite who attended the “salons.” This elite was often presided over by women, who maintained an important role as tale-tellers. Combined with the art of conversation, this tale-telling drew its themes and techniques from three distinct sources: oral tradition, literary tradition, and translated oriental tales. The volume’s objective, as Perrin defines it in his preface, is to investigate the representations of orality in wonder tales (fairy tales and oriental tales) by employing a resolute literary perspective. In other words, the volume purports to examine language and style, since literary fairy tales were written in order to be read.

The volume is organized into three large sections: (1) Fictions de voix (Voice fictions), (2) Co-énonciation et mise en scène (Co-enunciation and staging), and (3) Le corps des mots, le jeu des récits (The body of words, the playful ways of narration). The volume also combines several approaches, which all focus on the transformations of orality and literary enunciation, with an emphasis on the connection between classical fairy tales and dramaturgy or staging.

The first part (Fictions de voix) brings to the foreground the tale’s and the classic tale-teller’s polyphony. In their focus, numerous papers straddle orality and literature, as they examine the convergences with and divergences from other literary genres of the fairy tale as a (sub)genre; for instance, several papers compare fairy tales with theater, which also derives from oral discourse.

Lewis C. Seifert opens the volume with an important essay on the history of literary critics, from seventeenth-century tale-tellers to twentieth-century historians, philologists, and anthropologists, who have concerned themselves with classic fairy tales. The essential point of this retrospection is to depict the evolution of orality itself as a concept, and to comment on its complexity and polysemy.

Jean-Paul Sermain approaches the fairy tale as a subgenre of the wider genre of the novel and examines the features that connect it with orality by looking at three synchronic models of writing—those of Charles Perrault, Antoine Galland, and Anthony Hamilton. Christine Noille-Clauzade follows the same interconnecting direction in her paper and relates fairy tales to historic and chivalric novellas. Françoise Gevrey associates parodic tales with a typology of comedy through a detailed presentation of the use of the terms bavard (talkative) and babillard (babbling), introduced into the fairy tales’ vocabulary from the domain of the oral. Julie Boch...