La Fiaba di Tradizione Orale (review)

Giuseppe Gatto's compact but thorough exploration of how scholars have tried to wrest meaning from the magical subgroup of ordinary folktales, ATU 300ndash;749, also suggests why these stories are so central to many European, African, and Asian cultures, and now to global mass-mediated culture—a "why" bound inextricably to the intuitive brilliance and imaginative failures of those scholars.

Gatto divides his book into "Aspects of the Tale," "The Tale: Documentation and Study," and "Texts." None of these sections is exhaustive, but they are convincingly representative. Gatto first introduces Venetian, Scottish, Russian, Sicilian, Emilian, and Sardinian versions of ATU 709 ("Snow White"), and then he introduces the concept of tale type with a critical reminder: "The terms we are using —type, motif—are neither generic nor neutral, but rather have a precise history and methodological connotation" [I termini che stiamo usando—tipo, motivo—non sono generici e nemmeno neutri, ma hanno una storia e una connotazione metodologica precisa (21)]. He follows with four Italian versions of ATU 300 ("The Dragon Slayer"), like "Snow White" one of global popular culture's favorite folktale commodifications. These two tales echo explicitly and implicitly through Gatto's study, from considerations specific to their gendered protagonists, to formal issues, to matters of performance.

Subsequent chapters in this section define broad concerns surrounding narrator-audience, narrator-text, formal characteristics, and transcription. Citing recent work by Bernadette Bricout (1987) and Maurizio Bettini (1998) as the latest elaborations on Milman Parry and Albert Lord's pioneering oral formulaic theory and Richard Bauman's performance theory, Gatto arrives at this eloquent summary: "One can speak of a theatricality of narrative, of a narration that is in reality a complex act, not simply a verbal one; an act, and not a performance, because a fundamental aspect of performance is missing, and that is the distinction between actors and spectators: here the spectators do not watch, but participate" [Si può parlare di una teatralità del narrare, di una narrazione che in realtà è fatto complesso, non puro atto verbale; fatto, e non spettacolo, perché è assente un elemento fondamentale dello spettacolo, appunto la distinzione tra attori e spettatori: qui gli spettatori non assistono, ma partecipano. (35)]

The chapter on narrator-text notes that the narrator's technique or "particolare tecnica combinatoria" (37) resembles Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage in mythic thought. Gatto offers Fabiano Mugnaini's recent fieldwork in Umbria (1999) as evidence for considering a particular narrator's repertoire as hypertext. Nicole Belmont's twenty-first-century reconsideration of the much-maligned tale type from a narrator's perspective as a "narrative space, the area of admissible oscillation of a scenario" (38, paraphrasing Belmont, 2001) returns Gatto to that space's first elaborated set of rules, Axel Olrik's 1908 Epic Laws of Oral Tradition, which bulwarks the elaborate structural exploration to come.

A short chapter on formal issues places opening and closing formulas into their performance setting, noting the worldwide predominance of late evening for tale telling, formulaic opening exchanges between narrator and audience, and the impossible aspect of many openings (e.g., "Back when animals talked . . ."). Folklorists, however, have so focused on the folktale's "negation of good sense" that they have systematically ignored the profound "tale truth" shielded by the opening formula's disavowal of reality, Gatto argues (46). As for transcription, Gatto reminds us how much material still awaits (Mugnaini's Tuscan fieldwork is a recent example), adding, however, that "narration as a collective act belongs to the past, and the descriptions we have are often fruit of a reconstruction along the thread of memory" ["la narrazione come fatto colletivo appartiene al passato, e le descrizioni che abbiamo sono spesso frutto di una ricostruzione sul filo della memoria" (51)].

The book's central section, culminating in Vladimir Propp's intuitive prioritizing of function over type and his successors' elaborations and renunciations of structuralism, reveals what a dramatic tale is that of folkloristics itself. Even discredited theory still merits review for understanding...