Original scientific paper
ORAL NARRATIVE IN THE SURROUNDING OF DARUVAR
Divna Zečević
; Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
This choice of the material of the above titled collection contains the folk tales and legends which I have gathered (recorded) at the villages surrounding Daruvar (1966) — among the Croats and Serbs, some of the narrators being of Czech or Slovak origin, which can be seen from the list of narrators, but they spoke Serbo-Croatian too. Their narrations make possible an insight in the intermingling of narrative traditions in the ethnically miscellaneous area.
The selection of the material published here with introductory comments represents the first supplement from the bulk of the closely linked research work carried out for some years of Institut za narodnu umjetnost (Zagreb) and Ustav pro ethnografii a folkloristiku ČSAV (Czech Academy of Science), Prague.
The researches were carried out in the regions of Slavonija, Bilogora and Moslavina inhabited by Croats, Serbs, Czechs and some other minor ethnical groups (Slovaks).
The introductory comment concentrated on the nature of oral narrative as well as on the fact that "recording inevitably deforms and transfers it into an other category" (R. Jakobson and P. Bogatirjev).
The reader approaches the records the way he does every other text, though he is directed during the reading to the oral character of the word which, transformed into another, written, form, reveals its stylistic features and surprising possibilities of expression, i. e. in the above (page 28) quoted sentences of an old blind man whose vision of death of a tall, thin woman comprises only colours. The death appearing in the spectrum of colours — retained in itself something threatening. The stylistic expression of such threat in the old man's narration is discernible in repetition that this slim and tall woman is growing up. By the short sentences (five times running) repeating the "fact" that the woman constantly grows in front of his eyes, comparing this growth to a big apple tree beside which he »saw" the death — the old man at the climax of his narration — uses for the last time (the sixth) the perfective verb, saying that the woman »grew up« higher that the apple tree.
Attention of the introductory comment was payed to the narration of the so called true (miraculous and inexplicable) happenings whose function is distinguished in the course of the narration itself thus connecting the everyday monotony of the hard life to live source of the man's imagination.
Possibilities of the real and fantastic are intermingled. What has re¬mained inexplicable and marvelous is a proof of the man's poetic sensitivity and his sense for metaphysical questions.
Narration of the "true« inexplicable happenings proceeds all further pos¬sibilities springing from it.
The introduction then gives observations on phenomena of "modernizing" the fairy tales both in the vocabulary and the means by which the marvels are realized (e. g. a flying automobile), then on contradictions characteristic of oral narrative (the automobile flying over the woods — runs over a mouse so that it halts).
An example of modernization of the fairy tale is when the narrator says that the witch touched by the magic plant is "automatically" turned into a stone. Wander is actually proved in the narrator's consciousness just by the idea of technical automatism.
Further the introduction gives observations on the economic state of the region in which the material had been collected — immigration into the cities. The passion of getting rich of those peasants who remained on the land is not any more evident so much in their want to enlarge the land, as in their insisting to gain the industrial consumption wares. In the said introduction are put forth the observations on narrators, nature of their narration as well as on their life.
To the selection of texts a list of narrators has been added; a short survey of folk tales and legends that have not been entered into this selection but are contained in the manuscript of the subject collection (rkp. INU, 773) and typological division of folk tales and legends according to international classification (page 68). The texts (mostly legends) that in typological division have been presented descriptively are specified below, as follows:
No. 1 (pretended night apparition), No. 2 (casting spells on the bride), No. 3 (apparition in the church, the priest sanctifies the church), No. 4 (opening of the sky), No. 5 (a witch figured as a big woman, by night) and (processions of the dead), No. 6 (a nightmare), No. 7 (apparition: death in the shape of woman), No. 14 (obscene end: the loss of the penis).
Afterwards there comes the editorial notice with the particulars contained also in this summary.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
39258
URI
Publication date:
15.5.1970.
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