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Article Excerpt
Translator's Introduction
Elected to the French Academy in 1896 and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, Anatole France (1844-1924) was one of the most prominent writers and critics of France's Third Republic. He was appreciated by Marcel Proust, and along with Emile Zola and Leon Blum, he proved to be a fervent Dreyfusard. However, his stories and novels steer away from the scientific realism of Zola and often draw from the fairy, all the while containing ironic and skeptical elements. For instance, in his version of Bluebeard, published in his collection of tales Les sept femmes de la Barbe-Bleue et autres contes merveilleux (The Seven Wives of Bluebeard and Other Marvelous Tales, 1909), France pokes fun at the new scientific approaches to the analysis of the fairy tale and comically establishes Bluebeard's innocence.
In 1885 France published Le livre de mon ami (My Friend's Book), which includes his "Dialogue sur les contes de fees" ("Dialogue on Fairy Tales"). Through the "Dialogue" France celebrates the imagination and the tradition of tale-telling, at the same time that he criticizes certain scholarly approaches to the study of fairy tales. Immediately preceding the "Dialogue," France includes a letter to "Madame D***" in which he deplores the new emphasis on science in the education of children. He laments the fact that for the past twenty years, in France and elsewhere, people have the idea that "one must only give children scientific books, for fear that poetry will spoil their spirit" (262). (1) He applauds the creativity of storytellers, which is passed on to their listeners: "Storytellers remake the world in their own way and they give the weak, the simple, and the young the opportunity to remake it in their own way ... They help people imagine, feel, and love" (265). His distrust of science extends itself to early science fiction, which deceives children into believing, "on the reputation of M. Verne, that one goes to the moon in a shell and that an organism can defy the laws of gravity without harm" (265). Ironic words, indeed, given the scientific progress of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, France's message is clear and resonates still today: "Alas! our society is full of pharmacists who fear the imagination ... Oh mothers! don't be afraid that it will be your children's downfall: imagination, on the contrary, will prevent them from making vulgar mistakes and facile errors" (266).
The dialogue itself is constructed as a conversation between Laure, her cousin Raymond, and Laure's husband, Octave. Laure initiates the discussion by asking Raymond to speak about fairy tales. Raymond clearly is a learned man, which explains why Laure fears he will ruin fairy tales for her. Laure appears to be Raymond's country cousin, as her husband is a farmer of some sort (he knows about planting cabbage). Raymond's discourse constantly moves between positing theories of the origins of myths and fairy tales and criticizing other all-encompassing theories, often in somewhat arbitrary ways, as Octave points out. Nineteenth-century theorists who wrote on myths and fairy tales, such as Charles Athanase de Walckenaer, Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury, Charles-Francois Dupuis, and Friedrich Max Muller, all provide food for thought in a conversation that evolves into a parody of mythological and Aryan theories of the origins of tales.
The text used for this translation is taken from Anatole France's Le livre de mon ami (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1923), 267-316.
Laure, Octave, Raymond
Laure
The band of purple that was blocking the sunset has paled and the horizon is tinted with an orangish glow, above which the sky is a pale green. Here is the first star; it's all white and it flickers ... But I find another and another and another, and pretty soon we won't be able to count them any longer. The trees in the park are black and seem bigger. This little path, which descends down there between the thorn bushes and of which I know all the little pebbles, seems to me, at this time, profound, adventurous, and mysterious, and I imagine, despite myself, that it leads to countries similar to those we find in dreams. What a beautiful night! and how nice it is to breathe! I'm listening to you, cousin; speak to us about fairy tales, since you have so many curious things to say about them. But please, don't ruin them for me. I warn you that I adore them. It's to the point where I get a bit angry with my daughter, who asks me if ogres and fairies are "real."
Raymond
She is a child of the century. Doubt grows before wisdom teeth. I'm not of the school of this short-skirted philosopher, and I believe in fairies. Fairies exist, cousin, since men made them. Everything we imagine is real: one could even say it is only this that is real. If an old monk came to tell me "I saw the Devil; he has a tail and horns," I would answer this old monk, saying: "My father, in accepting that, by chance, the Devil didn't exist, you have created him; now, certainly, he exists. Beware of him!" Cousin, believe in fairies, ogres, and the rest.
Laure
Let's talk about fairies, and leave the rest. You were telling us earlier that scholars are interested in our popular tales. (2) I tell you again, I have a terrible fear that they will ruin them for me. Taking Little Red Riding Hood out of the nursery and bringing her to the Academy! (3) Imagine that!
Octave
I thought that scholars today were more disdainful; but I see that you are good princes and that you don't despise stories that are perfectly absurd and extremely childish.
Laure
Fairy tales are absurd and childish, that is sure. But I have a hard time agreeing with you, since I find them so charming.
Raymond
Let's agree, cousin, let's agree without fear. The Iliad is childish as well, and yet it's the most beautiful poem one can read. The purest poetry is that of childlike peoples. Peoples are like the nightingale of the song: they sing so well that they have a light heart. Upon aging, they become serious, scholarly, careful, and their best poets are nothing more than magnificent rhetoricians. Certainly, Sleeping Beauty is a childish thing. That is what makes it like a canto from the Odyssey. Not to be found in literary works of classical periods, this beautiful simplicity and divine ignorance characteristic of this first age are preserved, still in blossom with all their perfume, in tales and popular songs. I might add, like Octave, that these tales are absurd. If they weren't absurd, they wouldn't be so charming. Wouldn't you say that absurd things are the only agreeable, the only beautiful, the only things that give grace to life and prevent us from dying of boredom? A sensible poem, statue, or painting makes men yawn, even sensible men. Why cousin, your skirt's flounces, pleats, puffs, and bows, this play of fabrics is absurd, and it's delicious. You have my compliments.
Laure
Let's not speak of fashion; you don't understand anything about it. I agree that one must not be too obviously sensible in art. But in life ...
Raymond
The passions are the only beautiful thing in life, and the passions are absurd. And the most beautiful of the passions is also the most unreasonable of them all: love. There is one passion less absurd than the others: greed; it is furthermore horribly ugly. Dickens used to say: "Fools alone amuse me." Woe to him who doesn't resemble at times Don Quixote and who never mistakes windmills for giants! This magnanimous Don Quixote was his own enchanter. He equaled nature in his soul.
This isn't being a dupe! Dupes are those who see neither anything beautiful nor anything grand before them.
Octave
It seems to me, Raymond, that this absurdity you admire so much has its source in the imagination and that what you just told us in brilliant and paradoxical form can be expressed quite plainly as: imagination makes an artist out of a sensitive man, and a hero out of a brave one.
Raymond
You're expressing precisely one side of my thought; but I'd like to know what you mean by the word imagination and if, in your mind, it is the faculty that represents to oneself things that are or things that are not.
Octave
I'm a man who only knows how to plant cabbage, and I'm speaking of imagination as a blind man speaks of colors. But I believe it's only worthy of its name when it gives being to forms or to new souls; in a word, when it creates.
Raymond
Imagination such as you define it is not at all a human faculty. Man is absolutely incapable of imagining what he has neither seen nor heard nor felt nor tasted. I'm not going to be fashionable and I'll stick to my old Condillac. (4) All of our ideas come to us through the senses, and imagination consists not in creating, but in assembling ideas.
Laure
How dare you speak like that? I can, when I want, see angels.
Raymond
You see children with goose wings. The Greeks saw centaurs, sirens, harpies, because before that they had seen horses, women, fish, and birds. Swedenborg, who has imagination, describes inhabitants of planets, those of Mars, those of Venus, those of Saturn. (5) Well, he doesn't give them a single quality that one can't find on earth; but he assembles these qualities in a most extravagant manner; he is constantly delirious. See, on the contrary, what a beautiful and naive imagination does: Homer, or better said, the unknown rhapsodist, has a young woman emerge from the white sea "like a cloud." She speaks, she laments with celestial serenity! "Alas, child," she says, "why did I care for you? ... I gave birth to you in my house for a terrible destiny. But I will go to snowy Olympus ... I will go to...
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