Book Review: Lwin, S. M.(2010). Narrative Structures in Burmese Folk Tales.

Abstract

Book Review: Lwin, S. M. (2010). Narrative Structures in Burmese Folk Tales. Amherst: Cambria Press. ISBN 978-1-60497-716-5. 178 pages.In order to properly evaluate Soe Marlar Lwin's book that is excellently structured, rich in references, and provides a well-chosen text selection, we need to give a short overview of the historical 'currents' in folktale research. European culture has been a 'cradle' for folktale research and by the 20th century a new interpretive approach, breaking away from this historicity, has been formed providing a universal interpretive framework independent of the European roots.1Taking a closer look at the historical changes considering the history of European tale research, we should distinguish between three different periods, all of which approach tales with a specific point of view. Therefore, each of them is associated with different aspects of folktales and the phenomena in tales. In the premodern period concepts, thought schemes originating from European Romanticism defined the essence of tales. For researches of the period, the most important task of folk culture when following the Herderian organic historical approach was considered to be the formation of identities of linguistic-cultural communities through the concept of nation based on folk culture, folk poetry, and especially folktales. Therefore, in accordance with their most significant aim, collecting and canonizing folktales resulted in the establishment of a set of texts (according to the latest research we should rather speak about the creation of these texts) - previously folktales were not regarded as part of high culture - by which a special value was bestowed upon folktales: On the one hand, preserving the traces of the mythical past of nations, folktale functioned as an inexhaustible archive (for the disciplines of the history of language and of folklore); on the other hand, it functioned as a model for contemporary literary production and national awakening that everywhere brought with itself the process of the literary tale becoming a special, priority genre.Those interpreting the modern period - partly due to the oral tradition seemingly being pushed to the background - were not interested in finding new tale texts; they rather turned to the interpretation of already existing (collected) texts from various aspects. The folktale text is separated from the concept of the national; attention is turned toward the universality of tales. This is how the interpretation of tales becomes the research of structures - the series of narrative elements as Proppean or archetypal reminiscences, as in the case of Jungian tale interpretations. In both cases folktale becomes interesting as a text that may carry a message for the community, remaining valid over a long period of time because it either activates the basic narrative desires of man ("Narrare necesse est!''), or the cathartic force hidden in recognizing and making conscious of world view structures identified with the images of the collective consciousness. A pledge for all this is the well-graspable structure of the text which partly carries pseudo-initiative characteristics (Mircea Eliade) - a text that may be well-revealed and may be transformed into structural formulas and motivic catalogues.Folktale research in Central-Europe took the first steps toward the interpretation of folktales in the postmodern period when tales were no longer interpreted as being a historical archive or a network of narrative structure but a kind of socio-cultural phenomenon in which text production and reception governed by interpretative tendencies gave a new color to folktale research. Between the 1940s and 1970s Central-European folktale research has stepped out of the closed world of texts collected in the 19th century; researchers again began to venture out to field work and recorded the last traces of the living traditional European folktale telling tradition. According to the theory of the individuality (or Budapest) school coined by Gyula Ortutay - which became famous and respected internationally due to Linda Degh's work - folktale is not simply a structure but it carries with itself traces of the storyteller's world view and experiences. …