The stories assembled by Henry Glassie include some from those collections made by Yeats and his friends nearly a century ago, some from other nineteenth-century collections, others recorded far more recently by the editor himself and by other collectors currently working in Ireland, a nation which no longer contains a significant proportion of illiterates, but is, folklorically, far from a worked-out seam.
An American academic who has made the English language folklore of Ireland his special study, he is scrupulous about notes and sources; his bibliography is enormous and comprehensive; his Irish Folk Tales is both scholarly reference book and a pleasure to browse in – but the spare fluidity of the language of his informants has not rubbed off on him, alas.
He is grievously afflicted with fine writing (‘Pure darkness welcomes the winds that skim off the ocean’, etc.), and embarrassingly lyrical about his informants. ‘They call him eccentric . . . they call him a saint,’ he says of one. What does his informant call Henry Glassie?
But here are stories about Finn MacCumhail and the Fenians, as Jeremiah Curtain noted them down in Donegal in 1887; stories about St Finbar, and St Brigit, and St Kevin who made apples grow on a willow tree; stories about true folk heroes – Robert Burns, Daniel O’Connell. Yes, indeed; here is an Irish Cinderella (in which the three sisters are called, Fair, Brown, and Trembling). And a giant who opines of a visitor: ‘I think you large of one mouthful and small of two mouthfuls.’
There are also some moving examples of legendary history. For example, how Cromwell possessed a black Bible that was so big ‘it would take a horse to draw it’. When his servant opened up this Bible on the sly, lots of little men came out of it and ran around until the servant cried: ‘Off ye go in the name of the Divell!’
The circumstances of life in these stories are universally harsh and the happy endings few and far between. A good breakfast is a pot full of boiled turnips. Drink is a curse. A man named George Armstrong went to Australia but all he came back with was thruppence and when he got home again he weighed so little his mother put him in a basket and kept him by the fire.
Inea Bushnaq’s tales from Libya, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Syria – from all over the Arab world – reflect a different kind of life, one full of delicious smells and sights and sounds, fresh coffee, baking bread, rosewater and incense, flowers, embroidery, cloth of gold, apricots, figs. The Iraqi Cinderella wears golden clogs and a pearl comb in her hair. The people might be poor but the imagination is lavish.
The Arab countries have in common a language and a religion, Islam, and a still predominantly peasant culture in which storytelling as pastime and entertainment has survived in good order rather longer than it has in the advanced industrialised countries, although, as Inea Bushnaq says, television may well deal the coup de grâce with amazing speed.
Her method is quite different from Henry Glassie’s: she has compiled an anthology from a variety of text materials, splicing some together and has selected stories ‘most likely to interest the English reader’. It would be nice to know what criteria she used in picking them out.
She provides a vast amount of cultural background in a series of introductions to different sections of the collections, with their mouth-watering titles – Djinn, Ghouls and Afreets, Tales Told in Houses Made of Hair (that is, the goat-hair tents of the Bedouin), Beasts that Roam the Earth, and Birds that Fly with Wings. But this is not a scholarly collection so much as a triumphant, shining, glorious labour of love.
Perhaps Inea Bushnaq is more cavalier with her sources than a professional folklorist because she has heard many of the stories herself when she was a child and truly feels that they belong to her for just that moment of the telling, when the storyteller makes the story his or her own, the fleeting gift of the storyteller.
The stories invent a world of marvels – flying carpets, girls from whose mouths fall lilies and jasmine each time they speak, a boy whose ears are so sharp he can hear the dew fall. The cry goes out: ‘A calamity and a scandal! The king’s new queen has given birth to a puppy dog and a water jug!’ A green bird spells out the stark terror of family life: ‘My father’s wife, she took my life. My father ate me for his dinner.’ And once upon a time, there was a woman called Rice Pudding . . .
(1987)
• 4 •
Danilo Kis: The Encyclopedia of the Dead
The scrupulously intelligent stories in The Encyclopedia of the Dead are fiction, but also, in an important way, about fiction. Implicit in the book is the question that all fiction raises by its very existence: what is real and what is not – and how can we tell the difference? In a story called ‘The Legend of the Sleepers’, Danilo Kis, a Yugoslav writer living in Paris, puts it this way: ‘Oh, who can divide dream from reality, day from night, night from dawn, memory from illusion?’
The question is clearly rhetorical, and Mr Kis’s apparatus of postscript and notes gives shape, purpose and an edgy, more documentary dimension to his storytelling. Mr Kis himself tells us that the stories are all about death – the one truly inescapable reality. Even if one of the legendary sleepers of Ephesus in ‘The Legend of the Sleepers’ may be dreaming his own death, death is the universal end of all our personal histories. The title story, ‘The Encyclopedia of the Dead’, reminds us of that.
This great encyclopedia is housed, we are told, in the Royal Library in Stockholm. Its many volumes contain complete biographies of everyone who ever lived. There is only one qualification for entry: nobody gets in who is featured in any other reference book. It is a memorial for those without memorials. A woman looks up her father’s entry; the plain details of an ordinary life, meals eaten, hobbies, work, final diagnosis, are very moving.
And then the woman wakes; it was a dream. Yet in the dream she had made a drawing; awake she recreates it, and the drawing exactly resembles the fatal cancer that killed her father. This fusion of book, dream, and the world irresistibly recalls the fiction of Borges; but Mr Kis is more haunted, less antic than the Argentine master, and his notes contain fewer jokes.
In his notes, Mr Kis introduces a further twist: he tells us that the encyclopedia might not be real, but the dream was – dreamed by a certain M., ‘to whom the story is dedicated’. And he tells us that if the encyclopedia does not exist yet, work on an analogue has begun, and ‘the Genealogical Society of the Church of the Latter Day Saints’ is, at this present time, compiling just such a comprehensive reference book, filing away on microfilm details of everybody who ever lived, as far as can be researched, so that the Mormons can retrace their family trees and retroactively baptise their ancestors.
Truth is always stranger than fiction, because the human imagination is finite while the world is not, and Mr Kis seems to be ambivalent about making things up from scratch.
Indeed, he almost seems to apologise for the story, ‘Red Stamps With Lenin’s Picture’, because it is ‘pure fiction’, about a literary love affair. He quotes Nabokov sympathetically: ‘I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books or penning things that had not really happened in some way or other.’ Not for Mr Kis art for art’s sake, but for truth’s sake.
Everywhere in these stories the correspondence among what is real, what might be real, and the mediation of the written word between these conditions, reverberates on many levels. In the superb ‘Book of Kings and Fools’, Mr Kis investigates the morality of the written word itself.
In this story, the central character is itself a book, titled ‘The Conspiracy, or The Roots of the Disintegration of European Society’. We are told that the existence of the book was first hinted at as a rumour in an article in a St Petersburg newspaper in 1906, the time of the Jewish pogroms. This rumour concerned a document ‘demonstrating the existence of a worldwide conspiracy against Christianity, the Tsar and the status quo’.
No sooner is it rumoured than the book appears, incorporated into a hysterical text by a fanatically mystic Orthodox priest. (And here I may have glimpsed one, only one, pos
sible glitch in what reads like a seamlessly perfect translation by Michael Henry Heim: ‘The local Red Cross Chapter volunteered to publish this book’, it says here. But I can’t see the International Red Cross doing any such thing. Perhaps the culprits were the Rosicrucians?)
‘The Conspiracy’, as the book is called, offers universal explanations, always popular. In Germany, it seeds the mind of ‘a then unknown (as yet unknown) amateur painter’. It makes a deep impression on ‘an anonymous Georgian seminary student who was yet to be heard from’. Soon it finds its way into the delirious paranoia of human practice. It is the obscene triumph of the anti-book – a forged text designed to destroy.
Mr Kis scrupulously instructs us as to the nature of the reality constructed by the book’s most zealous readers – the reality of the death camps, a reality beyond the power of the human mind easily to imagine.
In his essential postscript, Mr Kis tells us that his intention was ‘to summarize the true and fantastic – “unbelievably fantastic” – story of how The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came into existence’. The story began as an essay, but in researching the obscure history of that anti-Semitic forgery whose construction is one of the greatest of all crimes against humanity, there came a point where Mr Kis ‘started imagining the events as they might have happened’. Then he moved into fiction; the fable is no less powerful than fact.
Books don’t really have lives of their own. They are only as important as the ideas inside them. The book, as we know it, took shape with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century; it was the tool of the dissemination of humanism but can, just as easily, spread the antithesis of humanism. ‘In point of fact,’ says Danilo Kis, ‘sacred books, and the cannonized works of master thinkers, are like a snake’s venom: they are a source of morality and iniquity, grace and transgression.’ He is wise, grave, clever, and complex. His is a book on the side of the angels.
(1989)
• 5 •
John Berger: Pig Earth
In a formal sense, Pig Earth is innovatory. John Berger uses three kinds of writing – fiction, poetry, and exposition – to precipitate in the reader a precise awareness of a specific kind of life, that of a contemporary French peasant community in the Alps.
This community is the village in which Berger himself lives. Though he does not invoke his own presence as an actor in any of the stories, the section of exposition titled ‘An Explanation’ relates his work as a writer, a professional storyteller, to the storytelling and gossip that makes life in the village what he calls a ‘living portrait of itself’, a continuous narrative that ‘confirms the existence of the village’.
Pig Earth is devoted to the imaginative exploration of a way of life rooted in what Berger calls a ‘culture of survival’, as opposed to the ‘culture of progress’ which is the urban imperative of all classes. He is, in part, attempting to crystallise and define this ‘culture of survival’ at the very time when it may not, in fact, survive.
The three kinds of writing in Pig Earth fit together to make a three-dimensional picture of a village which is also artistically three-dimensional. That is to say, the heightened lyricism of the brief poems illuminates the straightforward verismo of the stories in a way which recalls Hardy’s dry observation – how Farmer Oak was not, as the sophisticate might think, insensible to the beauties of nature.
The polemical nature of the two sections, ‘An Explanation’ and ‘Historical Afterword’, informs the physical landscape and the landscape of labour through which the reader has travelled in the course of the book with a sense of urgency that removes Pig Earth altogether from the genre of bourgeois pastoral, which is the consolatory celebration of a fictive ‘rusticity’.
Berger says: ‘Nobody can reasonably argue for the preservation and maintenance of the traditional peasant way of life. To do so is to argue that peasants should continue to be exploited, and that they should lead lives in which the burden of physical work is often devastating and always oppressive.’ But his culminating assertion is that the elimination of the peasantry is the final act in the destruction of the experiential reservoir of the past, so that it can no longer be part of the totality of the present. This destruction Berger sees as the ‘historic role of capitalism itself, a role unforeseen by Adam Smith or Marx’.
Once history is destroyed, all energy may be concentrated on what is about to occur, the future, which, as every grammarian knows, does not exist; though the old man who, in the story, ‘The Value of Money’, plants apple trees he will not live to see bear fruit, can prepare for a hypothetical future because he has certain knowledge of the past.
The ‘Afterword’ gives a depth of focus to the stories which precede it. Some are spare, lucid accounts of events – the slaughter of a cow, the birth of a calf, the mating of a goat on a snowy night, genre scenes in which men and women engage with domestic beasts on terms of familiarity and respect. Another, more evolved story is organised around a pig-killing, a feast, and the death of the grandfather who is a boy’s ‘authority about everything which was mysterious’; this culture is carnivorous and patriarchal. And the community is growing old.
Here, youth and, in some sense, hope exist as memory; the sons of Marcel, the orchard planter, won’t work the farm when he’s gone. Young people mostly leave the village. A certain elegaic tone is inescapable and the longest and strangest story, ‘The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol’, takes its narrator finally among the dead. This story, with its fierce dwarf heroine and its hero who has returned to the village to die, is the only one that seems to carry a burden of allegory.
Tiny Lucie, nicknamed the Cocadrille out of love and hate, despised, half crazy, scours the mountains for berries, mushrooms, herbs that she sells in the city, is murdered for her savings, comes back to haunt the man who rejected her in favour of the spurious lure of America, and convinces him at last of her inextinguishable love and the presence of the good neighbours, the dead.
Pig Earth is only the first part of a larger work, in which Berger intends to examine still further the meaning and consequence of the threat of the elimination of this reservoir of human experience.
(1979)
• 6 •
John Berger: Once in Europa
Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe. These stories of European country life in the late twentieth century are permeated with a sense of loss. We know that, even as we read them, the world they describe is crumbling away. They are stories about the final divorce of human beings from the land, as great a change as, perhaps greater than, the transition from Stone Age to Bronze Age, yet one that has been accomplished within the lifetime of the old people who still hope to die in the houses where they were born, to which their children will never return.
Not that the deserted village is a phenomenon unique to the late twentieth century. Throughout history, plague, famine, and changes in agricultural practice have periodically emptied the countryside. What is unprecedented is what could be called the deruralisation of the countryside, as the multinational agribusiness industry renders subsistence farming in general and the small farmer in particular permanently redundant. Then everywhere that is not part of a city becomes in effect a giant suburb, dependent for all its services on the urban areas. This has already happened in parts of the USA and in much of Britain. In Europe, it is happening at dizzying speed.
There is a time limit on the timeless, eternal world of the peasant. The villages do not stay deserted for long. They become tourist resorts. Conurbations of weekend cottages. The land becomes so much scenery, no longer the site of labour, reduced to pure decoration.
John Berger approaches this enormous theme with infinite delicacy, through the experience of some of the men and women of the region of the Alps where he himself lives. He is often present, a reticent witness, in these stories, which are remarkable for their quality of visionary intimacy, a sense of the sacred quality of everyday things that recalls the interiors of Vermeer. And also for thei
r intense respect for people, their seriousness.
Berger says that these are love stories, and ‘Boris is Buying Horses’ is, amongst other things, a study of obsession, but they are just as much stories about loneliness, that savage passion, as if love and loneliness are aspects of the same thing.
In the first story, ‘The Accordion Player’, the central figure, left alone to work his remote farm after his mother’s death, finds himself suddenly weeping for the loss of the past, and also for the loss of the future. ‘He wept for the farm where there were no children.’ For what woman would marry a peasant farmer, these days? Marry toil that remains ceaseless and an isolation that increases in direct relation to mechanisation, as farming requires fewer and fewer workers? In the old days, the whole village turned out to help with the hay harvest. In summer, everybody adjourned to the high pastures, to graze the cows. What used to be celebrations are now lonely chores. ‘In the Time of the Cosmonauts’ puts this very graphically: ‘A number of years ago when the Russian, Gagarin, the first man in space, was circling the earth, every one of the twenty scattered chalets at Peniel housed, each summer, cattle and women and men. So many cattle that there was only just enough grass to go round.’ Twenty-five years later, only an old man and a girl are there, and ‘there was so much grass they could let their animals graze night and day’.
As it happens, this girl, Danielle, might have married a peasant farmer, if one had asked her. But the mountains, in the concrete person of the old man, filthy, almost demonic, almost heroic, offer themselves to her in such a primitive and atavistic manner that, terrified, she runs away.
Even so, little that is primitive and atavistic remains in these upland farms, where now the mating season heralds the visit to the eager cows not of the bull but of the inseminator. The most primitive and atavistic thing in the mountains is a man-made horror, the manganese plant in the title story, ‘Once in Europa’.