The Irresistible Fairy Tale by Jack Zipes

Author:Jack Zipes [Zipes, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

Pitrè’s Concept of Folklore

Pitrè’s attachment to the Sicilian people was profound and boundless, and because of this, he has often been criticized for romanticizing the Sicilian folk and its traditions. Some scholars have charged him with creating an image of common Sicilians as pure, innocent, and noble “primitives,” downplaying many crude and deplorable aspects of the Sicilian folk and even the role of the Mafia as a criminal organization. Others have complained that he edited and censored some texts that he gathered with the purpose of establishing respect and honor for the Sicilian folk. In other words, his view as a folklorist was allegedly skewed, and one critic has argued that his representation of the evolution of Sicilian culture resulted from many fixed binary divisions such as rural/urban and nonliterate/educated that he conceived to uncover what he saw as the authentic Sicilian spirit.

Some of these allegations may, indeed, be true, but they are also simplistic, for it was precisely this passionate love for the common people, almost an obsession, that drove him to become more and more scientific in his research. He aspired to grasp not only the “Sicilian” qualities in the habits, customs, rituals, and mentality of the folk but also the similar modes of oral narrative representation and thinking that the Sicilians shared with other European peoples. Paradoxically, Pitrè’s romanticism led him to become more international, rational, and comprehensive in his research, and resulted in his producing a huge treasure of materials that do not romanticize the Sicilian people or lead to their “romanticization.”

If anything, his collections, historical commentary, and anthropological research reveal checkered and diverse traditions that demand a nuanced and careful analysis, even though it may be true that Pitrè, like all folklorists of his time, sought to fulfill his own personal mission to preserve the essence of the Sicilian folk and open other people’s eyes, especially those of the educated classes in Sicily, to what he thought they were missing. At one point in the preface to Fiabe, novelle e racconti, he observed that when common people in villages and cities were asked to explain the history of certain names, locations, or events, they always knew a great deal, but the educated people were at a loss because they never bothered to become intimately acquainted with this history. Pitrè wanted to compensate (perhaps overcompensate) for this neglect and sought to celebrate the accomplishments of common Sicilians. Certainly there was and still is a social class “split vision” in the way history is recorded and remembered in all cultures. In Pitrè’s day, he saw himself as an educated scholar who wanted to turn over the smallest stone to see what was beneath it, for he believed that the hidden history of the Sicilian folk constituted the hidden treasure of Sicilian culture. He came to believe, moreover, that this culture had unusual links to other so-called primitive cultures that revealed how the common people throughout the world thought, preserved customs and habits, and disseminated them through their stories.

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