Classical Folklore Research Revisited

Abstract

Classical Folklore Research Revisited Jack Zipes (bio) Lüthi, Max , The European Folktale: Form and Nature. Trans. John D. Niles. Foreword by Dan Ben-Amos. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982. Propp, Vladimir . Theory and History of Folklore. Ed. Anatoly Liberman. Trans. Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. In the preface to this translation of Das europäische Volksmärchen, which first appeared in 1947, Max Lüthi expresses his delight that the book had finally been made available to English-speaking readers after thirty-four years, and that it had broken a famous record in the process: "Vladimir Propp's Morfoloógija skázki (The Morphology of the Folktale), published in 1928, had to wait only thirty years for its English translation." Ironically, Lüthi spoke too soon. Two years after the publication of his comments, the University of Minnesota Press shattered Lüthi's record by publishing some of Propp's work that covers the period from 1928 to 1968. These long delays force us to ask an important question: was it worthwhile to translate two works that are over thirty years old and which may no longer serve a vital function in the field? The translation of Lüthi's Das europäische Volksmärchen is based on the seventh (1981) German edition, and therefore, it includes a supplementary chapter on folktale scholarship and an essay on Propp's Morphology of the Folktale. By synthesizing the distinctive features of different European folk tales, Lüthi endeavors to demonstrate that all the tales have certain universal characteristics. For instance, he argues that the folktale employs space and time in a one-dimensional manner, and centers on a plot in which the protagonist is generally assigned the task of discovering what he is missing. By embarking on an adventure he unites isolated elements which are drawn in a sharp, abstract manner. These isolated elements are remnants from myth and ritual that have been sublimated and transformed into universal components which reflect the existential dilemma of human beings. It is the capacity of the folktale to transform specific components of life into universale that constitutes its great appeal. Lüthi's entire work—including his other books—can best be summarized by his definition of the folktale: "The folktale is a world-encompassing adventure story told in a swift, sublimating style. With unrealistic ease, it isolates its figures and knits them together. Its sharp outlines and clarity of form and color go hand in hand with its emphatic refusal to explain its operative interrelationships in dogmatic terms. Both clarity and mystery are integral parts of it" (82). This classical definition and Lüthi's overall phenomenological method are qualified by the last chapter in this book, which discusses other possible approaches—anthropological, psychological, biological, categorical (the Finnish motif index) and especially Propp's morphological study, which Lüthi considers a complement to his own work, even though Propp underestimates the "significance and impressive constancy of the dramatis personae" (127). Lüthi finds all these approaches useful in some way, but he does not probe and examine them in a critical or exhaustive manner. And here lies the difficulty in Lüthi's general approach: he always remains on the surface—descriptive, explicatory, synthetic, with the goal of establishing "the essential laws of the genre" (107). Aside from the fact that whether there are "essential laws of the genre," I find that Lüthi constantly obfuscates the historical origins and social function of the oral folktale. When told, the folktale is not swift, sublimating, and all-encompassing, but often bumbling, diversionary, emphatic, and specific. Lüthi's work falls far behind contemporary folklore scholarship that has focused on performance and the individual narrator, and which has uncovered the multiplicity of the tales and their unique, distinctive qualities. In contrast, Lüthi tends to homogenize the components of the folktale (as does Propp in The Morphology of the Folktale) where distinctions need to be made. In the process we lose a sense of national and regional differences, and a sense of the variety of generic forms produced by narrators in a sociohistorical...