9

Narrative Construction and Reconstruction of the World

Paradigm and Syntagma, Fabula and Plot

Is it correct to say that a marked distinction is to be found between the realistic tale (pertaining in the broadest sense to the weak and limited conception of the tale developed in the last chapter) and what is defined as the fairy tale in the paradigmatic significance of the latter with respect to the more markedly syntagmatic approach of the former? Paradigm and syntagma are the two fundamental axes on which fairy tales, as well as any other narrative texts are constructed. They represent the vertical and horizontal dimensions within which the narration is modeled. Borrowing from linguistic theory, let us say that on the paradigmatic axis a selection is made, based on the choice of one element above others, all belonging to the same category or function, but each with its own semantic value. On the syntagmatic axis, there is instead a combination of the self-same elements that, each time, are extracted from the paradigmatic axis until, one after the other, they go to form a chain of varying length providing a determinate sense both to the simplest phrase and to the more complex tale. Whereas combination presupposes a more or less extended temporal development—and hence a diachronic dimension—selection is marked by the contemporary coexistence of elements lying on an indefinite number of planes, forming, as it were, an ideal edifice: the operation is effected therefore in a synchronic dimension. This consideration allows us to perceive in the syntagma the univocal realization of a narrative project which, remaining on the level of the paradigm, would contemplate an almost infinite number of realizations, always relegated nonetheless to the field of potentiality. History, understood as the irreversible succession of events that man has undergone in the temporal arc of his evolution, is the most explicit manifestation of the unilinear development following which the syntgmatic level of the narration unfolds. From the point of view of historia, it is only possible to follow and record the effective, and hence the only, concatenation of elements and actions on the basis of which a given event has developed diachronically. Each of the elements present, along with what has become real, is destined to oblivion or in any case to remain hidden, at least until history has taken an innovative path.

To ask to what extent the nature of the fairy tale can be considered paradigmatic in comparison to a certain syntagmaticity in the realistic tale, broadly speaking, implies research aimed at clarifying to what degree the first can bring to light all the signifying potential that the merely historical approach is incapable of unveiling and that the tale, circumscribed in the world of History, limits itself to evoking. The fairy tale, being the result of an interaction between folklore and literature, between collective tradition and individual innovation—and hence an accumulation, more or less amalgamated, of historia and fabula—is the ideal location for the meeting between a vertical dimension (depositary of potential planes of reality) and a horizontal dimension in continual and inexorable progress. From this point of view, the fairy tale is a means to preserve and indeed render explicit all those elements that, on the basis of a certain historical evolution, are to be found above and below the level of referral on which the official events of human history take place (up to now identified as the plane of History). As seen in the previous chapter, none of the myths pertaining to the Irish area would have come down to us if a narrative tradition had not been constituted in the course of time and capable of giving them a form. From this perspective, the fairy tale becomes above all the depository of precious semantic wealth, a perspective that gains ever greater weight when seen from the viewpoint of a literature oriented to reinforcing the link with an exemplary past. What becomes inevitable is an immediate paradigmatic reading of the fairy tale, as if it were the tool most suited to piercing the veil that time has progressively laid over the eyes of those who observe the world from a partial point of view.

Whatever its nature and ends may be, the tale necessarily develops in a horizontal dimension, is built up through the juxtaposition of logically linked elements, and takes on consistency thanks to the actions of a hero who consumes time and space in the name of those who either hear or read about his feats. However, these feats acquire an even deeper significance when the existence of a space–time dimension is perceived in them that is not perceptible to common sense. And the more importance that is given to the exploration of levels parallel to and simultaneously present with that of the one being used as a reference, the less predictable will it be to find in the tale—and hence on the part of the storyteller—a significant elaboration on the syntagmatic level, or rather within the plot.

Mentioning the plot leads us to consider the other fundamental pole individuated in the narratological debate, that of the fabula. Fabula, leaving aside the meaning that we have given it up to now, is “the content, or better its [the text’s] cardinal elements, reorganized in logical and chronological order,” where by plot is understood in “the content of the text in the order in which it is presented.”1 In this definition can be found both the components on which to reconstruct the content of a narrative text, and also two specific orientations of view through which it is possible to direct the progress of a tale. Whereas on the axis of the fabula the interest is in the substance of the tale, on the axis of the plot increasing value is given to the form assumed by the elements going to make up the text. Whereas the fabula can be considered the simplest and most explicit stage of the expression taken by a given myth (to remain faithful to our terminology), the plot is the progressive complication of the myth provided by the fabula, a complication through which—the more it moves ahead—the storyteller’s formal elaboration increasingly operates.2 Hence, although every tale is necessarily based on a fabula that, in its orderly a posteriori reconstruction, clearly evinces its paradigmatic value, it is the specific plot that makes it possible to perceive the content implicit on the syntagmatic level. Indeed, one fabula can give birth to a potentially infinite number of plots, since each storyteller, especially in an oral context, can organize the content of a given myth according to an order responding more or less to logical and chronological criteria and on the basis of collective necessity or personal taste. The many variants of a traditional tale are basically the outcome of the continual alteration and interweaving of a shared patrimony.

It should nevertheless be emphasized that, in the case of the popular storyteller—and even more so when his narration is a personal experience—what must above all be communicated is the specific nature of the element or elements with which he or his hero has come into contact. Hence, it is vital to follow as faithfully as possible a logically and chronologically ordered sequence, in such a way as not to distract the listener from the main theme but also to preserve the storyteller’s memory;3 form becomes strictly functional to the explication of a paradigmatic message, or of material dealing with the founding values of a community. Thus, its indispensable recreational function apart, the folk narrative, and therefore the fairy tale in particular, bases its general validity on the capacity to maintain constantly alive the relationship of the individual with a series of elements that constitute his most deeply rooted identity, focusing in particular on the individuation of an otherness that is fundamental in the fairy tale to a greater degree than elsewhere.

Tales oriented toward the explication of the universal dialectic between identity and otherness are characterized by a perspective view, one which, organized according to simple plot, goes well beyond merely chronological datum, being attracted instead to an atemporal sphere, as if every event did not take place but rather existed.4 In this sense, the syntagmatic dimension becomes a sort of essential link between material that is perennially present and in potential and its recreation within the canons of rigid space–time schemes. What else is the structure identified as constitutive in the composition of the fairy tale if not this, a sort of filter through which myth becomes the tale, the tool by which what is beyond time and space acquires humanly valuable consistency? Lévi-Strauss was not entirely in the wrong, therefore, when in the famous debate with Propp, author of the Morphology of the Folktale, he proposed, for the analysis of the folktale, rather than Propp’s chronological scheme with 31 Functions, one according to a matrix composed of a limited number of elements susceptible to transformation.5 The latter system brought out the multidimensionality of the fairy tale and was capable of demonstrating how the narration, apart from being “in time (consisting of succession of events)” is also “beyond time (its signifying value is always in the present).”6

As seen in the examination of Joyce’s Dubliners in the light of the fairy tale, the progression of the Joycian tale remains imprisoned in a dimension from which there is no effective escape. Hence, an in-depth selection of elements with which to compare characters pertaining to the historical level is not admitted. Leaving aside The Dead, what is developed in Dubliners is a dialectic between elements that can be traced back to a preexisting identity. One can see, therefore, how the author, operating on a limited paradigmatic axis, has concentrated his efforts on the plane of syntagmatic elaboration, lending complexity to the plot and making up for the lack of real depth by means of symbolism; he invests objects and actions pertaining to an absolutely historical plane with meanings not visible at first sight. From this viewpoint, too, one can explain the far greater attention to the description of setting and the marked individualization of the character, two characteristics that create a net distinction between the tale and the fairy tale precisely because the first requires greater construction—a further deepening of what lies, so to speak, at hand and not having the conceptual width of the second, which instead draws from surface elements not considered absolutely necessary.7 Metaphor, in its function of linking far distant levels of meaning, makes sense in a context in which the character is allowed only to move horizontally; it becomes superfluous when the narration effectively contemplates transference beyond a purely historical dimension. Basically, the metaphorical process is located in a dialectic between historia and fabula, hence between reality as given and as imagined, a dialectic that emerges in differing quality and quantity according to the context under investigation. Proof of this is clearly given by the three narrative collections examined up to now, which, in the final analysis, identify three points of view from which to judge the capacity of the tale to relate the stasis of the real to the movement of the imagination (the latter term should be understood in an extremely active sense, in its capacity to recreate the datum of historia).8

In short, it is precisely through the comparison of points of view that it is possible to clarify how, from one tale to another, from one narrative context to another, the relationship varies between paradigmatic depth and syntagmatic extension, between fabula and plot, between the categories of identity and otherness. When Yeats decides to collect a certain number of fairy tales (or pseudo-fairy tales), his aim is mainly to save from disappearance not only the authentic production of his people, but also to find a way of narrating and, at the same time, of conceiving of reality. His objective, therefore, is to form a repertory par excellence on which to develop a literary movement. On the one hand, the fairy tale in itself is the purest expression of the fabula, in contrast to the complexity of the literary plot, to the extent that it is the main expression of a universe that represents paradigmatically the reality of an entire people whose identity, as previously mentioned, is built precisely on an incisive relationship with otherness. On the other, however, the fairy tale must be inserted into a wider dialectic, that in which a new idea of literature is opposed to a traditional one (where by traditional is intended to represent the literary canon imposed by the writers preceding the advent of the Irish Revival). An exclusively contextual object—such as the oral tale of the Irish peasantry—by means of an acquisition from above, is detached from a specific space–time context and is absorbed into the universal logic of the literary text. Already in this first passage, in substance from orality to writing, the original characteristics of the fairy tale inevitably undergo an evolution. This evolution leads the fairy tale to complicate, to a greater or lesser degree, according to the collector or the writer involved, its elementary plot, since, in consequence, the folkloric paradigm is distributed with greater care in the literary syntagma. A powerful opposition between identity and otherness as it is felt at the source is diminished on the literary page. Thus, although not reworked, the elements of folklore are acquired in a necessarily fictional key, functional to the needs of the author, who in this case is more precisely a “re-creator.”

In Yeats’ collection, despite the presence of a marked poetic project, one can identify, precisely due to the purifying care of the editor, a fairy tale produced in conformity to the original point of view, using a lens that is substantially faithful to the nature and functions of the original context. In Stephens’ collection, however, we observe the authentic literary (and therefore personal) acquisition of traditional material that has already passed through medieval transcription. Stephens operates according to the point of view preached by Yeats, and hence appropriates not only the substance, but also the form of the fairy tales provided by the tradition. He does this not to become a passive imitator, but rather to weave into a tale that maintains its fundamental identity a plot that casts his own poetics into necessary relief. The imaginative approach to reality furnished by the fairy tale, albeit a reality pertaining to Myth and Legend, is the ideal key for an author such as Stephens, who is decidedly impatient of the limits imposed by his own milieu.9 On the other hand, the escape allowed to the writer by the multidimensional paradigm of the fairy tale is a fundamental necessity in any narrative context and should indeed be considered the indispensable cipher through which the fairy tale can lead its recipient beyond the purely historicum datum. Whereas at the source the fairy tale is unaffected by the detachment between fabula and historia, given that the two aspects tend (potentially at least) to coincide, on a literary level, this detachment becomes clearer, leading authors such as Yeats and Stephens to seek nowhere else than in the fairy tale fabulosum refuge from the nightmare of History, which one must ultimately re-enter.

From the point of view of Folklore (i.e., Yeats’ peasants) and Legend (i.e., Stephens’ heroes) indefinite planes of reality are always close at hand, frequently a few steps away; from a modern or literary point of view, these planes can be reached only through the fabulist magic of the tale, and in particular of the fairy tale, which is moreover the most complete manifestation of the first point of view. Joyce’s intense efforts to find escape from the suffocating reality of Dublin do not lead to the rediscovery of Myth and Legend. These remain nevertheless indispensable points of reference for an Irish writer, but in a dimension that, other as it may be to the tale’s point of departure—and hence identifiable as fairy—was imposed by a properly literary dialectic (specifically that established by Joyce using Ibsen’s plays, one of the favorite models in his artistic formation). This dialectic demonstrated itself to have absorbed definitively the function originally performed by the fairy world.

An Essential Dialectic

When reference was made to the dialectic between identity and otherness, an allusion was also made to the dialectic set up between the absence and the presence of a tale. As one has seen, in a text such as Far Darrig in Donegal, the rejection of the tale implies the rejection of contact not only with the other, represented by a certain category of fairies, but also with the identical, or rather with the two people who do not welcome the main character into their home since he is incapable of bringing a tale with himself. The identity between the person who requests hospitality and those who have the faculty to concede it or not is recognized thanks to the ability of the tale to put the similar into direct contact with the dissimilar. The main character, who explicitly declares his desire not to enter into the lusus of the narration, finds himself excluded from the community in which he should be peacefully accepted. Only after having had a direct experience of the fairy world do the doors of the community open to Pat Diver,10 insofar as he has finally been inserted into a paradigmatic dimension on the bases of which he is capable of giving a more profound consistency to a vision that previously was exclusively syntagmatic. Perhaps this will be his only direct experience of the indefinite; yet, this does not exclude the possibility of his being elected as a figure in the collective imagination, a figure able to generate a tale that, in turn, will generate a potentially infinite number of similar figures, rendered meaningful thanks to the dialectical depth intrinsic to the narrative movement itself. The area of the tale represents the zone of human existence in which it is possible to enter into the game mentioned with regard to Dubliners, one that lasts as long as there is a willingness to halt the course of nature in human affairs. Hence, the fairy tale can be taken as an authentic paradigm of narrative creation, in that it is the fundamental expression of a dialectic in which the twin poles mark an eternal conflict between the immanent and the transcendent, the mutable and the unchanging—in short, it marks the point where what is already definite and what is still indefinite confront each other. The indefinite remains as such, at least until it enters into the possession of History, which puts on the same level all that it manages to encompass and assimilate of what it receives from a more or less traditional fabula. The more the tale aims at the recognition of (or indeed has already recognized) a substantial distinction between definite and indefinite, the more there is mirrored in it man’s ability to create and see beyond the visible, perhaps by scrutinizing himself.11

How is the paradigmatic depth of a tale such as The Dead born? It is, broadly speaking, realist, despite a temporary detachment from the logical sequence of the events and the consequent summoning up—through a tale within the tale—of a past that conceals a whole range of values that transcend the common datum provided by the preceding, merely syntagmatic account. What else was the detailed description of the Christmas dinner if not the most eloquent manifestation of the absence of lusus conceded to the imagination, and in turn connected to the tale’s property of creating a lusus? The Dead becomes almost the illusion of an eternal illusion, thanks to its closing evocation of correspondence between the living and the dead, or rather between what exists and can be seen and what (may) exist but cannot be seen: it is a fairy tale devoid of a final stasis, and hence is a story that remains permanently as such. Although admitting that Joyce is employing a grandiose metaphor, one cannot but recognize that it creates a link with a primigenial dimension of narration, a dimension in which nothing is really comprehensible and everything is imaginable. Gabriel Conroy rejects the prosaic datum and listens to the poetic one connected to his wife’s tale; this tale is innocuous at first sight but, having found an appropriate recipient, it triggers off the spark that ignites the paradigmatic deepening with which The Dead surprisingly ends. The parabola of the story outlines a decidedly fundamental dialectic, such as that between the opposed poles of life and death, which can be extended to take in the entire collection which, as such, becomes two-dimensional. This recalls the fairy tale (in particular when one thinks of the section entitled Ghosts in Yeats’ collection, in which living human beings face their fellow men returning as ghosts), but, differently from it, The Dead is not based on a net opposition between divergent planes, but rather on a gradual transition from one plane to another, as if to evince the impossibility of perceiving any real distinction between what is living but seems dead and vice versa.

Although in the Joycean tale, therefore, it is impossible to individuate an authentic dialectic between opposites, since the traditional opposites flow together in a single, not exactly identifiable dimension, in the fairy tale, the sense of the tale is built instead on the clear opposition between poles. As we know, one can be dealing with a conflictual or friendly relationship or a purely external one, in a context in which the boundaries between one plane and another are not always recognizable:12 in any case, mankind must unequivocally face something that is different from it. In the opposite case, moreover, there would be no sense in a structure based on the concepts of movens and rediens, of escape and invasion, which refer undoubtedly to the infraction of barriers which, impalpable as they may be, have precise semantic validity. From this point of view also, one can easily individuate a paradigmatic dimension in the fairy tale with respect to what occurs in a narrative modality in which the syntagmatic plane tends to level out parameters and values that were opposed at the source. Hence, the fairy tale reveals itself to be the key, and Yeats is the first to be aware of this. He realized that literature can serve to restore an absolute value, connected ab origine, to the fundamental categories of human experience. Life and death are two exemplary categories that conserve their original sense only if they are adopted as the poles of a well-defined paradigmatic dialectic, where they are represented, that is, by clearly distinct elements that can always be traced back to the antithesis definite–indefinite. On the contrary, where this antithesis has been supplanted by a sort of spurious synthesis, the original categories tend to become confused and to be perceived in an ever more relative way.

Faced by the opposition between an absolute and a relative conception of the paradigmatic apparatus underlying narrative elaboration, there emerges, on the one hand, a necessary relationship of dependence between the relative and the absolute approach, in that it seems undeniable to me that modern narrative—operating according to a scheme that complicates and renders problematic the elementary outline given originally by an exemplary narrativity (represented by the fairy tale)—is a continual reworking of what can be identified in the broadest sense as tradition. On the other hand, a process of an evolutionary nature comes into being in the passage from a tradition that can be ascribed to the fairy tale, and hence to the collective elaboration, and one which can be traced back to the modernity forged by the individuality of authors whose intention is to construct and impose new models of narrativity, if not of Weltanschauung itself. The sense of Yeats’ work, and I am referring to the entire corpus, resides basically in the attempt to mediate between the absolute of the fairy tale and the relativity of modernity, between the indispensable patrimony inherited from a tradition that is a depository of universal values and the no less indispensable novelty of modern individuality, including that of the author himself. The idea is that the fundamental fabula has been composed once and for all, but that there is also plot that can be woven and rewoven each time. The paradigm of referral remains the same, albeit observed every time from a differing angle. Whereas to the legendary bard death appeared under a well-recognizable, or at least unmistakable, guise, to the writer, immersed in History, it displays itself in a far more problematic manner, thus admitting that one can attempt to identify it in the first place.

Assuming, or rather reassuming, the patrimony of concepts and values deposited in a national tradition means once more weaving together the loose ends of a web in continual becoming, since it contains the main traits of an ancestral identity that is never complete as long as those who survive can alter it with their personal contribution. A given approach to reality on the part of a Yeats or a Stephens is not merely a personal choice or a question of poetics,13 because the fairy tale becomes the expressive means through which to let re-emerge from the darkness an identity that would otherwise be buried by the evolution of modernity. This identity can be further enriched by the active intervention of the writer on the same narrative form, based on his capacity to introduce themes and modalities received from other ambits, either literary or pertaining to foreign traditions.14 The function of the writer is decisive in this regard because he keeps the national literature alive and capable of confronting itself with others, rather than sterilizing itself within the narrow confines of tradition.15 Furthermore, it is the task of the true writer, from the Yeatsian point of view, to direct literature toward occupying itself with themes that can justly be considered profound.16 Reviving the identity linked to the fairy tale implies a parallel revival of an essential modality of observing the world, a capacity to identify the elements that constitute the immortal substance of literature.17 This means redefining what can be defined as the paradigmatic map, on which the plot introduced by each writer who intends to make of his text a deep exploration of the reality that he is setting out to represent, organizes itself. Joyce’s epiphany, moving, as seen, from a supposition of the fairy tale evoked and left punctually unrealized, finds its force in the deepening of aspects of a reality that, at first sight, seemed devoid of meaning. Hence, he created a sort of degraded, but absolutely revealing, alternative to the eagerness for the absolute visible in the fairy tale itself.

But this eagerness should be individuated primarily in the natural inclination of the entire Irish people to pay attention principally to what lies beyond the veil of appearance, a tendency that concedes the widest powers to the fabula intrinsic to the narration. This power is, in effect, conceded because, in the context of folklore, it is by no means easy to locate the precise confines between fabula and historia, to the degree that both concepts are entirely entrusted to orality. And orality is incapable—by its very nature, but often by choice—of establishing criteria by which to judge the events conserved in and handed down by popular tradition. When writing eventually imposes criteria that can provide a definitive interpretation of a given event, this enters into a sphere of relativity, or rather is absorbed into a purely historicum context and is hence removed from the dominion of the fairy tale, which acquires force precisely on a terrain in which definitive confines cannot be fixed.18 If one is to speak of confines, one must do so with regard to the aforementioned absolute polarity around which is built a narrative discourse intending to give an extremely essential image of the world, in the sense, that is, of revealing the essence of a universe that, time and space apart, remains constantly faithful to itself.19

Discovering, or at least imagining, the essence of an immutable universe means, at the same time, isolating the essence of narrativity itself, at least in its function of organizing on an ordered syntgmatic plane the fundamental acquisitions of which the paradigm of humanity consists. Therefore the writer, such as Yeats, who dedicates himself to the recovery of tests of oral and popular origin, displays not so much the intention of guaranteeing to writing a patrimony that it would otherwise be denied as the desire to make writing itself pass through the essentiality proper to the fairy tale. This essentiality implies returning narrativity to its origins, to the, so to speak, real consistency of the movement through which the tale sets in motion a dialectic that, as already seen, takes in the planes both of time and space, to the point of involving the very suppositions underlying our conception of the world. In the same way, a writer such as Stephens, who organizes his collection around the main developments in the life of a legendary character such as Finn and readopts a modality typical of the Irish narrative tradition,20 commits himself to evincing precisely those essential elements and values that render narrativity an instrument for the appropriation of a paradigm that is both heroic (pertaining to a well-defined literary and cultural climate) and more widely human (given that, in Finn’s adventures can be recognized the existential parabola of each of Stephens’ readers). Obviously, the fairy tale cannot be denied its faculty of widening and complicating its syntagmatic extension, which was also suggested by the identification of a five-phased evolution. This is the inevitable price to be paid for a progressive absorption into a literary context. But it is precisely in this that the opportunity of recognizing in the fairy tale its value as a narrative paradigm resides, in the sense that, in the very passage from an oral/popular ambit to a written/literary one, it displays its capacity to be taken as the fundamental point of reference in the construction of narrative discourse. Whereas between the mythical (potential) phase and the anecdotal one (the first, essential actuation) the fairy tale identifies itself organically with its paradigmatic plane, in the three following phases it matures an increasingly complex interaction with the syntagmatic plane, thus evolving effectively into the modern story, realist or not, as it may be. In any case, between fabula and plot, one observes through the fairy tale a process by which the universe reveals its secrets. This is because a narrative intention is operative on it, a capacity, connected to a sort of creative imagination, to restore through verbal material the essence of a reality preceding the word itself.21 The word separates man from being, but reveals itself to be the indispensable means by which, each time, he can make a new voyage back to the roots of his existence. One is dealing with an illusion, a constant pitting of the self against nothingness, but it is precisely in this inexhaustible attempt that human nature resides. The fairy tale, in the ultimate analysis, tries to second and facilitate this attempt.

Notes

1. Cesare Segre, Le strutture e il tempo (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), 4.

2. It seems appropriate to me to note that the fabula, in its primitive simplicity, is the ideal test for measuring and appreciating the compositional effort of the writer. Cf. ibid., 8–9: “Šklovskij and Tomaševskij have brilliantly identified two co-existing syntagmatic lines, one of which, the fabula, acts as a neutral foil ingeniously employed to unveil, by contrast, the process of composition activated by the writers.”

3. When the oral storyteller draws on literary tradition, his choice is carefully meditated on the basis of specific requirements that make the tale suitable to oral and popular reception. Cf. Gose, The World of Irish Wonder Tale, 5–6: “Alan Bruford, in his study Gaelic Folk Tales and Medieval Romances, presents evidence about the way the written romances entered the oral tradition. One of his preliminary conclusions is that ‘only what is easy to remember and interesting enough to be worth remembering, has a good chance of being passed on’ (167). This puts a premium on brevity and ‘a strong coherent plot line’ (168)” (my italics, except for the title of Bruford’s text).

4. Cf. Thuente, “‘Traditional Innovations’,” 96: “Legend transcends history and time by depicting past events as simultaneous rather than chronological” (my italics). Needless to say, here, legend takes on the meaning of fairy tale.

5. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “La structure et la forme. Réflexions sur un ouvrage de Vladimir Propp,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Sciences Économique Appliquée 7 (1960): 3–36.

6. Ibid.

7. The strictly functional choice of narrative material, on the one hand, is part of the nature of the fairy tale, but on the other, leads to its being enjoyed by the public. Cf. Gose, The World of Irish Wonder Tale, p. 118: “Much of our enjoyment of a wonder tale [read fairy tale] is knowing that each character, event, and object that is described will play a part in its plot and theme.”

8. Cf. Thuente, “‘Traditional Innovations,’” 97; “According to Yeats, a country does not begin to produce great literature until it ceases to consider history ‘merely as a chronicle of facts’ and begins to consider history ‘imaginatively’” (two passages taken from Yeats’ Explorations are quoted).

9. Cf. James Stephens quoted in Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival, 250: “The constant engagement of every artist is to dodge his own atmosphere: environment, which is everything to the historian and the biographer, is poisoned air for an imaginative writer: imagination is in effect the escape from environment.”

10. At the beginning of the tale, the main character is surprised by the lack of hospitality in a town renowned to the contrary: “Where was the boasted hospitality of Innishowen, which he had never before known to fail?” At the end of the tale, it is the far darrig himself who reveals, implicitly, the town’s rejection of Pat Diver: “‘Do you not know me, Pat?’ Whisper—‘When you go back to Innishowen, you’ll have a story to tell’” (Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales, 96–99).

11. Cf. William B. Yeats, “First Principles,” in The Collected Works: The Irish Dramatic Movement by William B. Yeats (New York: Scribner, 2003), vol. VIII, 58–59: “and in the end the creative energy of men depends upon their believing that they have, within themselves, something immortal and imperishable.”

12. It is not by chance that the boundary dividing one world from the other is to be found in an unstable element such as water. Cf. Gose, The World of Irish Wonder Tale, 99: “Water was an important boundary in both the ancient Celtic tales and in the medieval romances. As John Reinhard concludes, entry to the other world was ‘made by one of the three ways: over water, through water, or through the sidh or earth mound’” (my italics, except for sidh).

13. Cf. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, 24–25: “The spiritual, the visionary, and the occult are fit subjects of concern for Irish writers because they are essentially related to the true Celtic nature.”

14. Cf. ibid., 16: “He [Yeats] would therefore have to create a new Prometheus Unbound in which Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fionn would be substituted for Prometheus, Cro Patrick or Ben Bulben for Caucasus.” Given the universal significance of a figure such as Prometheus, Yeats’ ambition is to readopt him using Irish heroes and places, considering, on the one hand, the native figures worthy of incarnating such an illustrious myth, on the other, taking into account the need for the tradition of his country to enrich its mythical store.

15. Cf. Yeats, “First Principles,” 63: “A writer is not less National because he shows the influence of other countries and of the great writers of the world. No nation, since the beginning of the history, has ever drawn all its life out of itself.”

16. Cf. ibid.: “I mean by deep life that men must put into their writing the emotions and experiences that have been most important to themselves.”

17. Cf. ibid., 57, where Yeats takes into consideration the vivid imagination of classical authors such as Boccaccio and Cervantes, whose fecundity of inspiration is, in his opinion, due to the fact that “they lived in times when the imagination turned to life itself for excitement. The world was not changing quickly about them. There was nothing to draw their imagination from the ripening of the fields, from the birth and death of their children, from the destiny of their souls, from all that is the unchanging substance of literature.”

18. Cf. André Jolles, Einfache Formen: Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz (Halle: Niemayer, 1930): “As soon as the fairy tale takes on historical characteristics, which happens sometimes when it meets the novella, it always loses part of its force.”

19. In the essentiality of the content is reflected the simplicity of the form that the fairy tale assumes, particularly in confrontation with the literary sources. Cf. Gose, The World of Irish Wonder Tale, 6: “The folktale version usually drops ‘irrelevant motifs’ to dramatize scenes merely narrated in the romance, to reduce the number of characters, to preserve ‘precise chronological order’ (no flashbacks), and ‘to knit the story together with small details.’” According to Bruford, who is the author of the quoted passages, the simplification introduced by the folktale (to use his expression) is “aesthetically far more satisfying than the original form.”

20. Cf. Cataldi, introduction to Fiabe irlandesi, by James Stephens, 16.

21. Cf. Gose, The World of Irish Wonder Tale, 107: “Literature is ‘constituted of words’ but signifies ‘more than words,’ is ‘at once verbal and transverbal’ (156). But fantasy goes further; it uses words to recreate a vision of the world before it was divided up by words” (Todorov’s The Fantastic is quoted).