6

Plurality and Metanarrativity in the Fairy Tale

Is the structural model proposed as the foundation for each exemplar of the Irish fairy tale tradition something to which each narrator unconsciously returns in creating and recreating his tale? Or, is it a priori consciously present in the minds of those who wish to venture into the ambit of the fairy tale? (These questions stay within the limits of our research here, but the validity of the model in question can be extended well beyond the confines of Ireland, to the extent that similar material conforms naturally to the canons developed in the course of the preceding chapter, no matter what its country of origin.)

The first hypothesis would assume a sort of ineluctability, on the part of the fairy tale, to develop according to a certain consolidated scheme. The second would instead see in this scheme the recognized premise from which every storyteller would take the cue for his performance, a sort of elementary draft on which to model the individual’s contribution to the narrative tradition. The answers to these questions lay on the subtle margin between mere structural necessity and autonomous creative intent. The individuation of a fundamental structure lying at the basis of the narrative genre that we have identified in the fairy tale lends itself to varied interpretations according to the approach that, over the course of time, the individual establishes to the model of referral. This model is exemplified in the so-called priomscel, which may be read as the logical expression of the state of affairs that, at a certain moment, came into being in Ireland, and conversely, as the possibility of appropriating this state of affairs narratively. Put differently, this structure that, with its fundamental functions, permits the interaction of characters and dimensions pertaining to a certain conception of the real, can be read both as the heritage of a past in which these functions had extranarrative significance1 and as the appropriation by a certain part of humanity of its own context in an eminently creative, and hence narrative, function. The fairy tale, located on the boundaries between fabula and historia,2 is the terrain most suited to giving a univocal answer to the questions posed at the start of this chapter—questions, moreover, that form part of a dialectic between liberty and necessity that has a by no means negligible influence on the creation and circulation of the most typical Irish narrative product. This dialectic can be understood correctly only after a careful examination of the relationship, in time and space, established between a tradition that continuously brings its weight to bear on a collective scale and the innovation introduced by the individual in a field that has already repeatedly taken form.

Substructure and Metastructure

The identification of the relationship between collective heritage and individual intervention should be conducted through the introduction of conceptual categories that can isolate the principles from which the variable characters intrinsic to each of the tales making up the tradition ensue. The structure is the constant, immutable aspect of the construction of the fairy tale, thanks to which continuity is preserved and the identity of a specific narrative mode is set up. However, this mode would remain pure theoretical potentiality if it were not realized through the act of a narrator and the reception of a public. Two factors, the individual (re)creator and the group of individuals who receive the message, must give consistency to a peculiarity that otherwise could easily be reduced to a cold and elementary sequence of fundamental predicates. This operation is even easier when one is dealing with the written version of a fairy tale that, due to its static nature, allows the reader to rationally possess himself, so to speak, of the text. However, the reading of the text also clarifies how the structural factor is just one component of the narrative. To put it more clearly, the structural factor is the implicit component of an explicit whole represented by the text in its formal and thematic evidence.

Since each narrator who adopts a traditional plot elaborates it according to his own needs and his own tastes, and to the specific requests of the public that he is addressing, it is clear that although the structure of the plot will remain unchanged—in that it maintains the continuity and identity of a tradition—the same will not occur in the case of those aspects in which a natural process of variation takes place. As an example, we can take the case of the narrator b, who will employ twice the number of words to illustrate the tale’s initial stasis than will a previous narrator a. Narrator b may describe the hero’s movens according to motivations that are quite different from those given by narrator a; or, narrator b may move directly from the interaction to the final stasis, on which he will perhaps dwell longer than his predecessor. Whether these changes depend on the taste of the narrator or on the demands of the public or both is of no importance. What it is important to notice is how, using a preestablished structure, individual innovation has a wide margin of liberty. The deep nature and sense of the tale do not change; rather, its exterior characteristics, those within the power of the single recreator/beneficiary, change. If we assign the five structural functions of the fairy tale to fill as many empty compartments—the whole of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and so forth with which, in each narration, these spaces are concretely filled—it takes on intelligible form, and this can be defined as the substructure of the tale itself. This term implies a certain idea of subordination with regard to the structure, in the sense that a species of invisible but indivisible link is established between the practical narrative act and the abstract theoretical model in which the steps to be taken in the telling of the tale are laid out.

The substructure, therefore, in the widest sense, is the properly aesthetic component of the fairy tale. It marks the passage from structural necessity to liberty of expression, from the generic to the specific; it is the aspect that, in the oral context, makes it possible to distinguish one variant of the same traditional exemplar from another. Migrating then into the written context, this can become constant and also establish a model on the substructural level. However, writing, when its scope is artistic, tends to correct the substructure of the oral text, in order to give it a form and a content in line with determinate literary canons. When the end in view is instead the documentation of an oral tradition, then the transcription will attempt to follow the original substructure as faithfully as possible. The variation of names, attributes, circumstances, landscapes, thoughts, gestures, actions, and so forth that makes up the narrative material allows the structure of the fairy tale to manifest all its intrinsic expressive potentiality and its capacity to adapt to the most disparate contexts through the two fundamental channels of orality and writing. These channels, whether converging on the same objectives or following separate paths, and despite the change in time and space, repropose each time a universally valid model.

A second variable quantity can be identified in the composition of the fairy tale. Along the lines adopted until now, a metastructure can be defined as a sort of metanarrative frame in which the voice of the narrator himself is foregrounded, sounding explicitly above his more or less fictional characters to the point of involving his audience (which, in the oral tradition, frequently interrupts the storyteller’s performance). This component lies beyond the tale itself, linking it to the real context in which the act of narration takes place.3 The metastructure is therefore the present in its relationship with the heredity of the past, the space that the storyteller occupies to give a current identity to his narration, an opportunity for him to observe the fairy tale from without. It is the chief space of orality, directly connected to the circumstances of the tale. Writing tends to neglect this space, to the extent that it is not functional to the economy of the text.

In Yeats’ collection, there are many tales in which the metastructure is preserved, since it certainly gives a more accurate idea of the specific reality of oral narration. But there are also examples in which the collector has cut it out, symptom of the desire to render the tale a literary object, freed from a context that, on the written page, no longer makes any sense.4 However, one should also mention the case in which the writer himself has added a metastructure to the text to provide his own personal comment on the events narrated, perhaps to impose an illuminated vision of a phenomenon popularly understood in supernatural terms, or simply to give an account of the occasion on which he heard the tale; or again, as seen in Croker’s work, to create, more often than not a posteriori, a frame in which to link up the most disparate texts. Regardless of the motivation, one is dealing in any case with interventions that alter the perception of the text and, in substance, place the writer on the same active level as the storyteller from whom he has heard the tale. Moreover, when the collector’s metastructure contaminates the purity of the tale, Yeats himself eliminates it to restore the more authentic value of the text, most suited to his idea of popular tradition.5

Substructure and metastructure should therefore be understood as dynamic factors on the basis of which the fairy tale—otherwise static, as the depository of a model imposed once and for all—is able continually to renew itself. Each exemplar of the fairy tale, in the course of oral transmission, is subject to the variations dictated by the substructural and metastructural elaboration of each storyteller and the circumstances of the narration. This continues until one arrives at the written version of the tale, in which substructure and metastructure are permanently fixed by the writer. The same structure, therefore, can develop an infinite number of variants.6 By this, I do not intend only to consider the various versions of a specific fairy tale that it is possible to collect in the field as, for example, Yeats’ Master and Man. I intend also to demonstrate how the structure of this particular tale can be found identically in numerous other fairy tales, in no way connected to it—or rather, only connected to it by sharing, at root level, an authentic model of composition that reveals itself to be indispensable to a certain number of narrative types.

Deep Structure and Surface Structure

The structure is the constant system overseeing the composition of fairy tale. But one may also identify in it a variable component. In effect, what remains constant is the immutable succession of functions that make up, invariably, each fairy tale.7 There also exist, however, numerous modalities through which these functions can organize themselves within the tale. One can affirm that although, at a deeper level, the structure remains identical to what we saw in the case of the priomscel, at the surface level, it is characterized by criteria of mutability, which respond to narrative exigencies that obviously differentiate it from the original fairy tale. The scheme of the priomscel demonstrates how, in the phase of realization, the model can assume various other forms. It is enough to analyze other fairy tales to see how the same basic structure can manifest itself according to different organizational strategies and, consequently, how it is possible to identify, within the general whole delimitated by the narrative category of the fairy tale, a finite series of subsets from which to obtain an overall idea of the formally adoptable outlines of the tale.

As verified in chapter 5, the particular structural identity of each tale can be identified through graphic symbolism, from which, at the same time, one can trace the equivalence, always at a structural level, between single tales.8 But how can one designate the criteria by which the deep structure of the fairy tale operates on the surface level? According to what circumstances is it possible to explain the structural variability that distinguishes exemplars of the same tradition? We were furnished a first example by the notion of completeness and incompleteness, with regard to the explicit presence of all the functions within the tale or not; a second example was found in the nine categories used to identify a corpus with the fundamental attributes necessary to define the dynamic functions. All the others, albeit indirectly, have been enunciated, or at least given graphic representation, in the progressive construction of the scheme of the priomscel. These criteria regulate the specific plot through which the universal fabula of the fairy tale expresses itself.

Dimensionality can be taken as the first category: once established that the fairy tale operates in a multidimensional context, one can have a tale that connects two dimensions—one definite and one indefinite; one that connects three, with the inclusion of the semidefinite dimension; and finally, one that gives an account of all four dimensions present in the Irish context in the historical age. In the first case, one would be dealing with binary dimensionality, which distinguishes all the stories in Stephens’ collection, centered on the relationship of Myth to Legend (apart from two texts that focus on the relationship of Legend to History, which nonetheless remain secondary with respects to the main body of the text, which they frame). Binary dimensionality also marks the greater part of Yeats’ collection where, instead, the meeting of Myth-History prevails, exemplified particularly in the first three sections, in which encounters between men and fairies are narrated; in the section Ghosts, it connects men and exponents of the Christian Otherworld, whereas in the two tales making up the section Saints, Priests, we see the interaction of Legend and History.

Ternary dimensionality is far less frequent, found, for example, in Yeats’ tale The Little Weaver of Duleek Gate,9 in which a historical character first arrives in a legendary context and then enters into a relationship with a creature of mythical stamp. Quaternary dimensionality, at least as regards the material under examination, remains pure potentiality.

A fairy tale may also distinguish itself according to the number of movements that it contemplates. In this regard, it seems opportune to create a fundamental distinction between tales with a single movement and tales with more than one movement. Fairy tales focused on the simple discovery of a given aspect of the Otherworld tend toward the first solution. This is seen, for example, in How Thomas Connolly Met the Banshee10 by Yeats, whose title announces its bare plot, based solely on the meeting between the main character and a specific figure pertaining to the indefinite, the Banshee. Fairy tales in which the attention is focused on the feats of the character tend toward the second solution, as in the case of The Fairy Greyhound,11 in which the unfortunate hero goes three times to an enchanted tumulus in search of treasure and three times is undone by a diabolical greyhound. This latter example has a precise number of movements, but there are also tales, as for instance the above-mentioned Master and Man,12 in which the exact number of movements cannot be estimated and in which, indeed, the interaction between the definite and the indefinite assumes an iterative aspect, as if to give an impression of normality to an event that is entirely abnormal.

Moving now from quantitative to qualitative variability connected to the aspect assumed by functions within the tale, one notices above all that the two static functions—leaving aside the intermediate stasis, which is superfluous in this context—adopt two fundamental modalities, one definite and one indefinite. By this I intend that the initial stasis, in its function of introducing the event on a one-dimensional level, usually in the definite dimension. This is by far most frequently the case, as evinced by the two collections that I have examined. However, The Priest’s Supper,13 which opens directly on a scene involving a group of fairies whose initial equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of a priest, opens in the indefinite dimension. The same is true of the final stasis, which normally and logically corresponds to the initial stasis. This apart from the case in which the tale, as in The Priest’s Supper, begins in the indefinite and ends in the definite, or in which, in ternary dimensionality, the protagonist moves from the definite to end his adventure in the semidefinite, passing obviously through a decisive interaction with the indefinite. In The Lazy Beauty and Her Aunts,14 the main character, belonging to a humble historical context, is raised by the classical Prince Charming to a higher plane, thus recalling Legend, but only through the intercession of three witches, who evoke the mythical dimension.

Besides the nine categories in which, in the qualitative sense, the dynamic functions have been framed, there are other criteria on the basis of which these functions influence the plot of the fairy tale. Hence, we need to identify the direction that the movens takes in the tale: as mentioned in the previous chapter, this can be descending or ascending. In the first case, a definite character descends into an indefinite dimension, as for example does Jamie Freel in the tale of the same name by Yeats,15 when he decides to go to the place where he thinks that the fairies dwell. The second case regards instead the representatives of the indefinite who ascend to the definite plane, as the fairy who presents himself in the house of the wife of Paddy Corcoran to explain her ills.16 A particular case is given by those tales, as found in the section Ghosts, in which the indefinite, represented by the superior level of the transcendent, undertakes a descending motion toward the definite. What has been said concerning movens is also valid for rediens, taking into account that, since the movement is the contrary, ascent and descent are also in the opposite direction to that indicated for movens.

The interaction also assumes two fundamental forms, based on the already mentioned concepts of escape and invasion, depending on whether one or the other (or both) are present. When the definite moves toward the indefinite, both modalities are possible, perhaps paired. This happens in The Soul Cages,17 in which the main character meets a merrow, first on the neutral territory of the beach,18 and then under the sea, where he discovers the normally inaccessible place where the merrow dwells. If one considers that the apparition in a neutral field of the indefinite would not take place without the escape of a figure from the definite, as long as the indefinite stays out there and nobody goes out to meet it, the fairy tale remains pure potentiality. This is so because it lacks the figure who might make its presence evident to the rest of the historical community; one can understand why the interaction provoked by the indefinite always takes the form, logically, of an invasion: even when, as for example in The Legend of Knockgrafton,19 the human character is immobile in a wood and the fairies come toward him. Here, it is supposed that the meeting would not have taken place if the man had not ventured into the wood, and, moreover, at night.

The interaction can also be classified according to a quantitative criterion; that is, it can be single or multiple. In the first case, between a movens and a rediens, there is only one interaction, recognizable by the fact that (its length aside) it involves the same interlocutors from the beginning to the end. In the second, there is more than one interaction within the time–space dimension enclosed between a movens and a rediens: obvious examples are the meetings or battles between the hero Conn-eda and the indefinite sustained during the mission given him by his stepmother.20 One should be careful not to confuse the number of interactions with that of the movements: the latter begin with a movens and end with the corresponding rediens. Hence, one should not be surprised at the existence of a fairy tale, such as The Story of Conn-eda, in which a single movement, being divided into numerous interactions, gives birth to a very long tale; conversely, a far shorter tale, such as the above-mentioned The Fairy Greyhound, is organized into three movements, all based on a single interaction.

We are already aware of the concept of assimilation within the fairy tale, one that, although not representing a fundamental quantity, can influence structure. In fact, this process, which implies a permanent passage from one dimension to another, is frequently crucial in creating within the tale the specific plane of the indefinite with which the representative of the definite will interact. In Yeats’ collection, we find the example of a “beautiful lady . . . that the fairies took away”21 to turn her into white trout; in a lake, she awaits the return of her prince, but during the tale she enters into contact with the definite in the person of an arrogant English soldier. On other occasions, assimilation involves the disappearance from the narrative context of the plane on which the tale began, as when the main character of The Lazy Beauty and Her Aunts, abandoning her mother’s home and not coming back (a movens not followed by a rediens), not only assimilates herself to the semidefinite plane of her prince, but also cancels the definite plane from the context of the narration.

The combination of all the elements taken into examination until now provides, I believe, an extremely exhaustive reply to the heterogeneity of plot characterizing the tradition of the fairy tale. This tradition has left room for numerous attempts at classification that have proved mostly unnecessary in face of the uniformity that lies at the basis of so much variety. This structural uniformity is so significant as to make converge, in the same field, not only a folklore collection and another of consciously literary tales (albeit strongly linked to an oral and popular tradition), but also a collection of absolutely literary tales, in no way oriented toward the revival of a traditional patrimony. Although the first two references are obviously to Yeats and Stephens, the third is to Joyce’s Dubliners, a work that apparently shares nothing with the fairy tale but, as shall be seen later, is not so far removed from it. Evidently, in this recurring structure lies hidden a preeminent quality of narrativity, which can adapt itself to more than one narrative context, both because of its archetypal form and its capacity to carry a universal significance (an aspect dealt with in the next chapter).

The Narrativity Produced by the Fairy Tale

In Ireland, speaking about narrativity means above all repeating how the narrative phenomenon here receives unparalleled attention, as underlined by the abundance of stories about storytelling,22 tales in which the protagonist is the act of narration itself and the sources from which it can draw. One is struck in particular by those stories in which the characters have no story to tell, a lack that exposes them to danger until they are able to remediate it. This implies that, in the absence of previous knowledge and in an urgent situation, it is necessary to draw from personal experience, thanks to which “everybody should be able to narrate.”23 In this way, a symptomatic fusion is set up between the hero of the tale and the narrator, a coincidence that places the listener or reader face to face with the birth of the tale itself and of the relative tradition. When a character lives out a story, to be able to narrate it later in first-person, the audience witnesses the fateful passage that takes place from event to narration, where the former is organized according to the particular rules of the second.

As the examples in Yeats’ collection demonstrate, finding a story to tell means living out in the first person a supernatural experience, entering into contact with any aspect of the indefinite, so that this can then be testified to before a larger public. Pat Diver, the main character of Far Darrig in Donegal,24 is a tinker who is denied hospitality because he cannot satisfy the desire of his hosts to hear a story; in fact, he holds the custom of storytelling in contempt.25 Later, however, he is involved personally in a triple interaction with four far darrig, a species of solitary fairy, due to which, despite himself, he acquires a story to tell—as one of the far darrig brings to his attention in the meeting that ends the tale. The impression one receives on reading this tale is that both the inhospitable house owners and the fairies conspire to create a fairy tale,26 which acquires even more value in that its protagonist and witness is a character who opposes the narration and does not accept its foundational function for the community.

In A Fairy Enchantment,27 we meet a certain Michael Hart who narrates in the first person how, finding himself alone in a strange house, he receives the sudden visit of two fairies who give him the duty of turning a corpse on a spit. Returning to him, the fairies ask whether he knows a story and, on receiving a negative reply, throw him out in the middle of the night. Later, one of the fairies goes back to him and repeats the question. This time, the reply is in the affirmative, since the protagonist now knows a story—none other than what has just happened to him with his two interlocutors from the indefinite. Thanks to this, he gets back indoors and goes to bed, until, waking up, he finds himself in the middle of a lawn. In practice, Michael Hart is involved in a spell, from which he nevertheless emerges enriched by something he previously did not possess—a story to tell, a fairy tale procured for him directly by a pair of fairies. Although the main theme should be the deceitful art of the fairies, one can understand how, in reality, the entire illusion undergone by the main character was designed to turn an ordinary figure into a storyteller able to witness to a supernatural event, so as to lend to the illusion a tangible dimension, albeit purely verbal.

In these two examples, as in all the vast corresponding tradition,28 an equivalence can be seen between the lack of and the desire for a narration and the need to have a meeting with the fairies to narrate; it is as if one can improvise oneself a storyteller if one possesses at least one fairy tale to tell. What emerges from these two tales is a sort of narrative triangle, made up of the narrator/hero, antagonists who provide the narration, and an audience. This triangle is organized according to a scheme, which, in practice, reworks the structural scheme of the fairy tale. If, as the initial stasis, we identify the audience who want to hear a story and a hero who is devoid of one; if we identify as the movens the hero who, consciously or unconsciously, escapes from the reality that has rejected him; as the interaction the space and time in which he obtains story at his own expense; as rediens his return to the reality temporarily abandoned; and as the final stasis the moment in which the hero, possessing a story, is able to satisfy the preceding requests of his audience, then there is a correspondence between the fairy tale itself and the dynamic underlying the process that generates it. Behind a movement that is only figurative, in the course of the narration there lies a real movement, responsible for the birth of this particular fairy tale. And in this real movement we discover that at the roots of the fairy tale hero is a character with the need to become a narrator, and hence that his adventures do not have autonomous value but are finalized in the acquisition of a plot to be made available to traditional narrativity, a discourse that gains even more credit in the Irish context, where one is denied social integration if one is incapable of participating actively in the communal activity of storytelling.29

From this viewpoint it seems to me possible to interpret Fairyland, and therefore all the indefinite reality that one imagines lying beyond the definite world, as a formidable locus narrativus, which invests so much importance in the popular mentality precisely on the basis of its capacity to furnish the raw material for the narrative tradition. On the value intrinsic in a phenomenon as variegated as fairy lore, the most differing theories can be built, all in their way open to discussion; what is definite, however, is that on it is founded the most conspicuous and significant part of a narrative patrimony that, evidently, cannot do without it. Representing the movement that leads to the acquisition of a tale on the basis of the structural scheme of the fairy tale implies recognizing a modality that forms part of the popular spirit, for which there exists a sort of perpetual repertory from which to draw in order to enrich a tradition that is never saturated. Narrator, audience, and indefinite figures are the three angles of a dialectic that extends inevitably toward that synthesis par excellence—the fairy tale.

This synthesis is divided into two fundamental parts. The first can be individuated in the narrative triad of lack–acquisition–transmission, which reflects the adventures of an individual who, to satisfy the request of a certain public (although one might also be dealing with an individual desire), becomes first the character in an exceptional event and then its narrator; hence, he is responsible for the first transmission of a fairy tale. From this, we can move to the second part, the traditional triad of memory–reworking–narration, which reflects a later stage, when the tale has entered to form part of a tradition, of a collective memory from which all can draw in order to satisfy a communal or individual desire, thus setting off a movement that only metaphorically reproduces the real movement lying at the origin of the tale itself, a movement that ends with a new narration.30

On the basis of these fundamental processes, it is possible to identify the principles on which an entire narrative tradition is built, that avails of the immediate relationship set up between the individual as a character and as a narrator. Almost all the tales in Yeats’ and Stephens’ collections include a reference, more or less direct, to the narrative dimension. One receives the distinct impression that the events themselves, despite being undeniably extraordinary, are undergone by the characters principally so that these characters can narrate them as soon as possible, to share them with other human beings; thus, the moment of narration is, so to speak, anticipated in the tale that the storyteller is telling. One can perceive that an internal metanarrative dimension (not to be confused with the external metastructure) is always present in the fairy tale. In practice, we are put in touch not only with the events themselves, but also with the very process that made them tellable. When this takes place through a narrator who, in the first person, exposes an experience of his own, one can speak of immediate narrativity, in which a minimum distance is created between the event and the tale. As an example, in A Fairy Enchantment, Michael Hart himself recounts his nocturnal adventure. When, instead, the person who is narrating is someone who has heard the tale from the direct protagonist, or when the narrator describes the manner in which the latter transmitted his experience for the first time, then one has explicit narrativity. An example of the first modality is the extremely short A Donegal Fairy,31 in which the narrator relates a story directly confided to him by his aunt. An exemplar of the second modality is Teig O’Kane and the Corpse,32 in which the narrator recounts the moment at which the protagonist relates his story to his father, the only person to whom he entrusts it: hence, Teig O’Kane’s parent is to be considered as the filter through which the directly lived event becomes a tale. Here, the distance between event and narration has grown, but a recognizable link exists between the source and the successive tradition. One encounters implicit narrativity when, instead, the effective moment in the tale in which the story is transmitted by the protagonist to the tradition dispersing it in time and space is no longer identifiable. In this case, a link with the original source is not excluded, but upon it has sedimented an entire series of intermediate narrations, which have considerably increased the distance between event and narration. But it is also possible that the current narrator, especially if he is a writer intending to free the tale from its oral origins or instead wishing to subtract it from any link with contingent reality, decides consciously to conceal the circumstances that led to the event’s becoming a tale. The Far Darrig in Donegal is indicative of this third genre of narrativity, in that the narrator does not communicate if and how Pat Diver has handed down to posterity his adventures with the fairies. Clearly, from the point of view of the purely fictional tale,33 the question of narrativity poses itself in an ambit of free invention on the part of the author, from whom is demanded complete responsibility for the text. Moreover, the progression individuated in the three grades of narrativity just illustrated implies a parallel ascent or descent, according to the viewpoint, from a purely oral context to a more plausible written one. One observes the progressive decay of the metastructural component and a corresponding distancing of the factual aspect of the tale.

In any case, the fairy tale is always connected to a certain event, either one deriving from fact as something that really took place or one that can be totally invented. We already know that, in this field, it is impossible to trace a clear line of demarcation; the traditional concepts of truth and falsity have to confront themselves with a properly narrative logic.34 This logic comes into play every time a given event is entrusted to a purely fabulosa transmission, a context in which the oral word dictates the conditions according to which the event should be transmitted. The value to be attributed to it will be determined by the particular treatment it receives each time from the single narration. In this way, the fairy tale becomes a specific channel of knowledge of a past that cannot be reconstructed according to the canons of veracity. Apart from its purely aesthetic or hedonistic value, it is reinforced by the absence of records of historia, sanctioned by written documents and possibly contemporary to the fact, that can provide the one definitive word on the events in question—even if this proves to be partial, tendentious, or entirely fictitious. In fact, an event could be immediately written down by a poet, who would certainly have less at heart the historical truth of the fact than its aesthetic value. Thus, from a historicum approach, too, it is possible to give birth to a fairy tale, and from a written text to begin a new oral tradition—hence, sanctioning the circularity of the relationship between fabula and historia. On the other hand, there also exists the possibility of aphasia, or rather that an actual event is not in fact transmitted, so that there is no trace of it, fabulosum or historicum. In this case, one is dealing with a genuine invention, which simulates, through the narration, the existence of an event that is consciously devoid of any reference to reality, an occurrence that subtracts the fairy tale from the folkloric and traditional context and transposes it to an exclusively literary one. There, it can follow an entirely autonomous evolution, leading it to encourage the most innovative ferments intrinsic to its narrativity.

In this final concept lies the crucial point on which we can seek an answer to the questions posed at the beginning of the chapter. The structure that from the priomscel onward has created and transmitted all the fairy tales in the Irish tradition is at once cause and consequence of narrativity. This is in the sense that it has revealed itself to be the ideal model on which to construct an eminently dynamic process, but that, in the moment that its archetypal value has been constructed, has been adopted as an instrument with which to test reality and appropriate oneself of the occasions that will expand the narrative patrimony.

Notes

1. Cf. Susan Reid quoted in Gose, The World of Irish Wonder Tale, 53: “The fairytale retains with precision a structure which is necessary to the ritual but has, in the main, forgotten the reason for this structure. From half memories and the rationalizations which make up for this loss spring many of the motifs of the tale.” On my part, I by no means criticize those who seek a mythical or ritual origin for the fairy tale, but am also of the opinion that there has been some exaggeration in this respect, without considering that the preexisting value of the fairy tale as a narrative object has too frequently been undervalued.

2. In the fairy tale, the two fundamental modalities of the acquisition of reality combine to give birth to a third that substantially distinguishes itself from the other two. Cf. Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 588: “With truth and lies, we may consider fiction as the third angle of a triangle, linked with the other two and often closer to one of them, but relatively independent.”

3. Cf. Stephen Belcher, “Framed Tales in the Oral Tradition: An Exploration,” Fabula 35 (1994): 1, in which the evolution of the concept of the metanarrative frame in the context of folklore is considered, at least as far as American studies are concerned: “Indeed, the concept of the frame, in current American folklorist usage, has shifted and no longer suggests primarily a narrative mechanism for the linkage of possibly unrelated tales, but rather the series of devices by which a narrator signals, and exploits, the disjunction between the fictive world evoked in the story being performed and the immediate human context of narration.” Beneath the concept that I have adopted of metastructure fall both of the meanings given by Belcher.

4. The Lazy Beauty and Her Aunts is, for example, symptomatic of a rich metastructural apparatus, and it is no coincidence that Yeats should take it from Kennedy. At the end of the tale, we read (Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales, 307): “And in troth, girls and boys, though it’s a diverting story, I don’t think the moral is good; and if any of you thuckeens [a popular term which can be translated as little sillies] go about imitating Aunty in her laziness, you’ll find it won’t thrive with you as it did with her. . . . Thus was the tale ended by poor old Shebale (Sybilla). Father Murphy’s house keeper, in Coolbawn, Barony of Bantry, about half a century since.” As one can see, in the metastructure, pride of place is found in the moral that the old narrator gives to her young listeners, then in the intervention of the collector, who inserts the transcribed text into a precise space–time context. Rent-Day, once again significantly drawn from Croker, is an example of a text devoid of metastructure; the narration opens with an exclamation of the main character in the first person (ibid., 216): “‘Oh, ullagone! ullagone! This is a wide world, but what will we do in it or where will we go?’ muttered Bill Doody, as he sat on a rock by the lake of Killarney.” The conclusion is completely inherent to the event narrated, without any external reference (ibid., 219): “From that hour Bill Doody grew rich; all his undertakings prospered; and he often blesses the day that he met with O’Donoghue, the great prince that lives down under the Lake of Killarney.”

5. Whosoever has had the chance to read the text from Lover from which Yeats drew The White Trout: A Legend of Cong (ibid., 36–39) would discover that originally the text was far longer, since in the source a series of introductive pages preceded the narration itself. Questions of textual economy apart, one should note, in Yeats’ substantial editing, his intolerance for the excessive presence of a collector, albeit in dialogue (who knows how real . . .?) with his female informer, which seems to diminish the authentic center of attraction.

6. I would emphasize that this affirmation is theoretical, since in the reality of the narrative tradition one observes very frequently the reintroduction of events that are not necessarily structural. Cf. Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, “‘The Old Woman as Hare’: Structure and Meaning in an Irish Legend,” Folklore 104 (1993): 80: “The concrete details which are in theory infinitely variable but which in practice vary only slightly.”

7. As Propp teaches, moreover, about the functions of his tale of magic: “The number of functions known to the fairy tale is quite limited. . . . The sequence of functions is always identical” (Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 21–22).

8. Cf. the scheme proposed by Propp in “Appendix” (ibid., 119–27), where the structural analysis assumes a graphic guise.

9. See William B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (Gerrard Cross: Colin Smythe, 1973), 372–80.

10. See Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales, 118–21.

11. See Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 325–28.

12. See Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales, 89–96.

13. See ibid., 10–14.

14. See ibid., 303–7.

15. See ibid., 54–61.

16. See ibid., 32–34.

17. See ibid., 66–79.

18. Regarding the beach as the place joining the two dimensions of the real, both temporal and spatial, cf. Wilhelm F. H. Nicolaisen, “Concepts of Time and Space in Irish Folktales,” in Celtic Folklore and Christianity, ed. Patrick K. Ford, 157–58: “The beach becomes the seam between land and sea and a metaphor for the border between the known and familiar, the firm land, on the one hand, and the threatening or at least unpredictable other, the infirm sea, on the other. It is a place of ambiguities. . . . It [the beach] is also the limit of temporal existence, for there beyond the horizon, at the faraway edge of that expanse of water lies Tír na nÓg, the island of eternal youth from which there is no return for ordinary mortals” (my italics, apart from Tír na nÓg).

19. See Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales, 42–47.

20. See ibid., 323–36.

21. Ibid., 36.

22. For an ample and complete vision of the question, see Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 517–49.

23. Ibid., 548.

24. See Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales, 96–99.

25. So much so that, in contrast to what has been said up to now regarding the seriousness of the relationship between the Irish and storytelling, Pat Diver states: “A story, indeed . . . Auld wives’ fables to please the weans!” (ibid., 97).

26. It is not surprising that in this conspiracy, the figure of far darrig should appear, whose exclusive activity is soon described by Yeats: “The Far Darrig . . . busies himself with practical joking, especially with gruesome joking. This he does, and nothing else” (ibid., 86).

27. See Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 319–20.

28. Cf. Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 539–40.

29. So precious is this activity as to make pass into the background the personal qualities of the given narrator. Cf. ibid., 549: “A fictional storyteller could be cunning or silly, brave or cowardly, lucky or victimized; but his function was essential.”

30. A general synthesis of the two phases identified in the birth and evolution of the fairy tale can be discerned in the triad individuated by Carlo Tullio-Altan regarding the mythopoetic process: dehistorification–transfiguration–identification (see Tullio-Altan, Ethnos e civiltà, 14).

31. See Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales, 47–48.

32. See ibid., 17–32.

33. Cf. the definition given for this term in Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 366: “Relating to literature in which there are internal characters, apart from author and his audience; opposed to thematic.”

34. Cf. Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 588: “[In the fiction] the referents may be an illusion accepted by the recipient of the story, or ‘reality’ itself—often a mixture of both. What matters is inner cohesion, clarity, opportuneness and interest.”