Henri Pourrat and “Le Trésor des Contes.” ed. by Royall Tyler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Henri Pourrat and “Le Trésor des Contes.” ed. by Royall Tyler Anne E. Duggan (bio) Henri Pourrat and “Le Trésor des Contes.” Edited and translated by Royall Tyler, Blue-Tong Books, 2020, 387 pp. Although his tale collections appeal to a broad readership in France, Henri Pourrat has been a somewhat marginal figure within fairy-tale and folktale studies. In this critical edition of a selection of Pourrat’s tales, Royall Tyler seeks to resituate and validate the work of Pourrat within the field. Tyler translated an earlier collection of Pourrat’s tales into English, French Folktales (1989), organized in sections titled “Fairy Enchantments,” “The Devil,” “Bandits,” “Around the Village,” “The Mad and The Wise,” “Bestiary,” and “Love and Marriage,” following editions of Pourrat’s work in France and Pourrat’s own apparent wishes. Some thirty years later, Tyler returns to Pourrat, producing an interesting anthology that provides biographical, historical, and methodological contexts to better understand Pourrat’s work, as well as tales not included in the 1989 collection. Part 1 includes a biography of Pourrat and the social and historical contexts in which Pourrat produced his collections of tales. Part 2 brings together Pourrat’s field sources with the published form Pourrat gave them, which allows the reader to understand his method of adaptation. Part 3 follows a similar scheme as French Folktales with sections titled “Loves,” “The Devil and His Devilry,” “The Mad and the Wise,” “Animals,” “Fairies,” “Robbers,” and “Around the Village.” Together they give Anglophone [End Page 380] readers a sense of the ideological motivations, the sociohistorical context, and the methodology of Pourrat’s important collections of French, and specifically Auvergnat, folktales. Pourrat concentrated his attention in the Auvergne region of France. A bourgeois from the town of Ambert, Pourrat first began collecting tales in 1908 and continued through the 1950s, his most productive years being the 1910s and 1920s. Tyler situates the Trésor within the context of Pourrat’s other important publications, the most notable being Gaspard des Montagnes (1921–31), which Pourrat characterized as “a sort of epic novel of Auvergne a hundred years ago” (19). Like nineteenth-century folklorists, Pourrat sought to preserve the memory of the rural folk at a time when “[r]ural society was under threat” (23), and he clung to French Catholic and preindustrial values, which led him, initially, to embrace Pétainism during World War II, with its values of “travail, famille, patrie” (“work, family, country”). Tyler then goes on to place the Trésor within, on the one hand, the history of the European tale in the tradition of Noël du Fail, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, and Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier; and, on the other, the tradition of French regionalist folklorists such as François-Marie Luzel (Brittany), Jean-François Bladé (Gascony), Emmanuel Cosquin (Lorraine), and Paul Sébillot (Brittany). Interestingly, Tyler maintains that Pourrat “explicitly recognized the possibility, even the likelihood, of written-to-oral transmission,” which is evidenced in the second section of the anthology (38). In Part 2 of Henri Pourrat and “Le Trésor des Contes,” Tyler juxtaposes Pourrat’s source texts from the field with the versions he eventually published in the Trésor. Already touching on some of Pourrat’s adaptation techniques in the introduction, including the economical use of patois and the use of literary language from canonical writers like François Rabelais to both send the reader back in time yet make the texts accessible, Tyler gives specific examples of Pourrat’s transformation of oral tales into Trésor tales. The first tale discussed, “Finon-Finette,” was collected from Marie Claustre, a domestic servant and lacemaker. The two-page field version clearly is a folklorized version of Lhéritier’s “Finette, ou l’adroite princesse” (“Finette, or the Clever Princess”); Pourrat develops these two pages into a ten-page tale incorporating an important detail taken directly from Lhériter’s literary tale: Claustre does not specify where the father goes when he leaves his daughters on their own; Pourrat pulls the detail of the father going to the Holy Land from Lhéritier’s “Finette...