Flesh and Bones: On Literary and Real Codes in Fairy Tales

Mirjana Detelic

Flesh and Bones: On Literary and Real Codes in Fairy Tales

Abstract

BELGRADE 1998 270 Balcanica XXIX Mirjana Detelić a poetics have already been built into the results of the research done so far and,

Key takeaways

The present approach is grounded on several prepositions: 1) that structure of fairy tale is complex; 2) that realization of this structure is simple; 3) that the former is possible to achieve by cliche and formula; 4) that fairy tale, as well as oral literary texts in general, is burdened by two dominant codes: a real and a literary; 5) that cliche and formula, keeping the same qualities in many different types of application, are successfully used as means of encoding on both levels -the level of realia.
In the fairy tales which for hero's adversary take the witch, (Af. No.108,109,110,112), the rolling mentioned by the formula is performed on the ground or in the grass.
NB: in the first type of the fairy tale (where the eagle takes the hero to the upper world), the young birds at first hide the hero from their bird-mother, because they are afraid that she could eat him from happiness 2. demon eats man 2.1 Dragon, the hero's adversary, every day ..carries a dead man home" to eat it for dinner.
Rolling over the bones, yaga utters the formula about rolling Filjuška replies: over bones, and Rock, mother, roll, mother, over the bones of your daughter Yaga attacks him, he defends himself by hitting her with the hammer and runs onto the roof.
-the flesh has not been eaten, baba-yaga utters the formula before she even looked at the lunch; only the rolling formula is uttered, but the rolling does not.

The aim of this study is to draw new perspectives to the theoretic approach towards the complex nature of the modern fairy tale genre, examining Milne’s books about Winnie-the- Pooh, Jansson’s books about the Moomintrolls, and Raud’s books about Naksitralls. In this thesis, I examine the disputable problem of defining the fairy tale genre in modern literature. I assume that drawing a diachronical perspective over the transformation of the folk fairy tale genre in the literary legacy of children’s authors would give a more complex overview on the genre development. Studying a literary genre requires awareness about its traditional background and development in literary history: it is important to understand whether the genre has got its final “classic form” and is not used in its traditional means anymore, or if this genre has found its continuity and assimilates itself with a new time and a new reader. Fairy tale is a complicated genre that historically derives from folklore with its collective conscience of society. With use of Bakhtin’s terminology and theoretical approach to the folkloric intertext, I defined the following dominating folkloric genre categories, actual in the books I examine: -- Bakhtin’s chronotope, that specifies particular arrangements of time and space, artistically expressed in literature; -- mythological thinking and mythocreation that are incarnated by playing with the map and the superconductivity of fictional time and space; -- fantastic category, mostly presented by fantastic creatures and occasional magic, has realistic realization, as it is in folklore; -- formal and narrative presentation of some folkloric functions in characters (like helpers and personification of nature) get new axiological and semantic interpretation. As a whole, these genre-making categories help to recreate the archaic world-view. Modernism as literary method re-evaluates folkloric aspects such as nonlinear time, the blurred boarders between individual and cosmos, material and spirit, text and reality. Further, I analysed the folkloric intertext in the scope of children’s literature, which I see as the most vital and natural continuation of fairy tale poetics. Authors’ artistically create dialogue between folkloric ‘mytho-logic’ and children’s logic through folkloric intertexts and memory of their own childhood. Jansson, Milne and Raud use the “memory of the genre”, combined with the “memory of childhood”, while coming to a new round in literary history. Authors’ modernistic interpretations of fairy tale poetics build up a new world that shines at its best when seen through the lens of children’s eye. The folkloric laughter intertextually reproduced by naïvism of the Moomins, the Naksitralls, and Winnie-the-Pooh’s friends, while folkloric collective hero is presented by universal harmony of a happy family. Happy-endings were inevitable in folk fairy tales many ages ago, and they are aesthetically justified by children’s addressee in modern fairy tales, too. The way authors create their characters is important from the point of narrative, as Bakhtin says, “the hero creates the world”, and so the child-like protagonists create a very special literary world with larger fictional possibilities. Allegory, so important in folklore, has become a dynamic artistic technique that hides the “adult” meaning behind the aesthetics of a children’s book. Regarding ambivalence of addressing in modern fairy tales, the main category, children’s addressee, should prevail, so that modern fairy tales would be accepted and understood by children, and so that they would carry out the main task – to entertain and teach life. Folk fairy tales have been known to convey this meaning with help of its poetics since the beginning of literature, and that is probably why this genre is considered to be the oldest genre of children’s literature. All these intertextual levels are not to be examined separately from the whole living organism of the fairy tale genre. All the genre dominants presented in this thesis have unique literary realisation, depending on the author’s ideas. The ideas are not separable from the concrete artistic structure they are formed in, whether it is a novel, poetry, or fairy tale.

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