"Tale Is Ourselves"

ZOLTÁN BÓDIS

It was a real Chistmas present for the readers that the Academic Publishing House came out with Ildikó Boldizsár's The Poetics of Tales in December 2004. It's now nearly for twenty years that the name of Ildikó Boldizsár has become inseparable from tale. In this book she undertakes again to open her field of research for a wider public, to make the theory of tales accessible to anyone without undue concession in scientific exactness. Her former book, Witchcraft and Slimming Cure (already in the second edition in 2003) disclosed the similarities and differences between the deep structures of folk tales and literary tales, using the tools of tale morphology. In the present one she concerns herself mainly with the manifold ways of approaching the world of tales.
It is a collection of writings that had earlier appeared in volumes of essays, in periodicals or papers as reactions to some daily topics, as commentaries or reviews of some recent books of tales. This implies a varied way of treating or examining tales. The most stressed way of access is that of psychology without a detailed expounding of the theoretical background, using the Jungian symbols of archetypes rather than the Freudian psychoanalytic aspects. We find as well studies of style, interpretations based on the aspects of the sociology of reading or on the outlook of morphologic analysis, combined with criticism disclosing the flaws of certain literary tales. The author has eyes also for less traditional guises that tales may wear: series of tales on TV (like Tales of Uncle Remus), audio cassettes with tales accompanied by music, the tale theatre of Péter Levente or therapeutic tales told for children in hospitals.
And it seems that, where tales in Hungarian are concerned, the last ten years have done more than some earlier decades had done. New authentic translations have been published from the tales of the Brothers Grimm, from The Thousand and One Nights and from the important Norwegian folk tale collection of Aasen. We also have the popular surrogate tales of Harry Potter in hundred thousands of copies. The author observes also a palpable change in the place and reception of tales. On the one hand, in the footsteps of now classic tale-tellers like Ervin Lázár, István Csukás, Magda Szabó, Éva Janikovszky, Pál Békés we see younger followers with their new fables and fabular novels (Gábor Nógrády, Ferenc Szijj, László Darvasi, Krisztina Tóth, András Petőcz, Alíz Mosonyi, Tibor Tarcsai Szabó), and related books from world literature continue to appear in the careful translations of Lajos Adamik, László Márton, Csilla Prileszky, István Tótfalusi, Tamás Boldizsár Tóth and others. On the other hand, researchers and scientific studios dealing with tales, together with publishers and reviews of children's literature, have slowly moved from their peripheral place towards the "House of Tales" which, for the time being, is a hope of future, and is outlined only in this book.
There is an additional reason why the perusal of this book is very profitable. The crisis of our age is at the same time a crisis for the worlds of tales. Among the tales we are offered there are cloned tales, false tales, written-for-money tales, and the unsuspecting reader can be easily cheated by the various tricks of authors, translators and publishers. "There is no aspect of human existence that tales could not throw light on with their wisdom and strength" - means Ildikó Boldizsár, and therewith she raises the bar rather high. If a tale is not "wise" or "strong" enough, she doesn't hesitate to pronounce it unequivocally. Her book reviews, dealing with more than fifty works, give a rule in our hand which we may use while reading any book of tales. Her eyes spot the slightest flaw - for instance the inconsistent use of English and Hungarian names of characters in one given book -, and major faults as well, like the shackled structure of the story or the lack of a coherent conception.
Our book is, at the same time, a confession of faith to tales: "Tales and tale-telling are means of survival." Tales appear to be eternal, it is only tale-tellers that change in the course of time. That which our great-grandfathers understood we have to struggle for, to investigate, and we have to hear the appeal concealed in each tale, "the encouragement to surpass ourselves." Those who do not hear, do not surmise that imperative are probably unfit for reading or listening to tales. A tale-teller mentioned in the book called himself "Tale King": each reader of tales must wander in that kingdom and stand the trials awaiting him or her. Each reader of tales is namely a "chosen one" insomuch as he or she can find answers there to his or her questions, and can satiate his or her "hunger for tales". "The tale-teller's mission is to preserve and pass down integrity" .
The title (The Poetics of Tales) and the publisher (Academy Publishing House) seem to predict a book of scientific austerity with its professional jargon meant for the initiated few. Happily it is nothing of the like. Without lacking professional reliability, it is recommendable to the widest public. For anyone who wants information and orientation concerning published books of tales, authors and literary tendencies of the last two decades the work of Ildikó Boldizsár is indispensable.
(Fine pen drawings of Andrea Horváth revive folk tale motives on the pages of the book.)