La fille difficile: un conte-type africain (review)

This work presents studies by fifteen of the most well-known scholars in the field of African folklore. Its principal directors, Veronika Görög-Karady and Christiane Seydou, introduce a methodology developed specifically to shed light on a certain tale-type (AT 400-459, supernatural or enchanted husband/wife or other relatives) as it has been performed by narrators from historically strongly oral cultures in Africa.

The first of three sections presents some twelve studies of "the" tale told originally by storytellers from a dozen African ethnic groups living in sixteen African countries. The tale, chosen as one of the most popular (or most collected?) tales in sub-Saharan Africa, is studied here with an eye to the historical-geographic method and the structural approaches of Propp and Levi-Strauss, but insights and interpretations by the authors employ ethnological in addition to linguistic data and rely more than most structuralists on considerations of difference as well as similarity of content and context. (How, for example, might the different degrees or types of power held by women in different ethnic groups affect the tales?) Such a study requires collaboration among specialists of/from various areas of Africa who can pool their language and culture expertise in order to take a nuanced look at both the commonalities and the differences found among the many and complex stories as well as to identify the diverse layers of significance each teller decides to imbue them with. Each of the thirteen authors for this volume also has a particular scholarly focus to bring to the study of the tales—literary, ethnographic, sociological, and psychological—providing another type of multifaceted web of interrelated insights.

Presentation of the tales (or summaries) in the book's second section as well as in-depth presentation in the third section of the structural scheme of the story(ies) leaves open the possibility of further or alternative interpretations from those proposed by these scholars and provides a way to understand what is significant about a particular version of a story told in a particular time and place. In a sense, the authors trade on the strength of their corpus, the rich cultural diversity of the tellers, thus making a virtue out of the necessity to approach the tales synchronically due to the lack of written or recorded historical examples. This is felicitous because differences, rather than similarities, among the tales from teller to teller and community to community become foregrounded. This is important, I think, because indigenous listeners who would be familiar with the basic tale also listen for and doubtless look for meaning in what has been altered from previous tellings. All too often structural studies of orature tend to foreground those very formulaic, repetitive, dimensions of the genre that community members themselves would take for granted. Marie-Louis Teneze enhances this approach by bringing more examples of the tale from European sources. Among these Western examples, many, like Blue Beard, are drawn from the meticulous collection of French popular stories amassed by her and Paul Delarue.

The foregrounding of difference over similarity continues in the second and third sections of the book, which address the texts comparatively—focusing on elaborating the underlying structure of the tale-type with its similarities and differences within and across cultures. The goal, as the authors point out, was not to submit the texts to a structural, formalist, or semiotic analysis, but to find a means to present the tales' elements in a way that leaves clear the narrative logic, the articulation of the narrative route along with the contents that support it and give it form. This arrangement allows for both structural and figurative variants to be put in conversation in multiple ways, to draw out "une sorte d'archi-texte virtuel à 'géométrie variable' ou de...