Mimesis Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The article is focused on the questions, how is social reality mirrored in the "fairy" tale, how does mirabilis take place in it and what is the function of the use of mirabilis. The author is predominantly engaged with the earliest literary form of "fairy" tales from the period of Italian Renaissance when tales were both published and transmitted orally, but had yet to establish themselves as a literary genre. The author specifically studies the case of the Renaissance Cinderella tale. The most noteworthy and prolific storyteller, as well as tale writer of the period, was the Venice-based Gian Francesco Straparola who published The Facetious Nights (Piacevoli Notti), generally considered as the first European collection of fairy tales, in 1551 and 1553. Researchers have not attained consent on whether Straparola based his collection on the received oral tradition of the native population, a view held by Jack Zipes, or he had invented the fairy tales anew, as Ruth Bottigheimer believes. Referring to the Cinderella tale, the author of this article argues that Straparola reshaped some of the earlier variants of comparable tales. The author also finds interrelations between the examined Renaissance cases and Slovenian folktales, which could be considered as the variants of the first. Straparola enriched his tales, and particularly the tale that frames the collection, with vivid descriptions of Renaissance culture. The stories feature actual historical personalities and approximations of events as might have happened. The author shows that by applying this technique of referring to the cultural reality of his age, as well as with other techniques, Straparola imposed the principles of resemblance utilized by Renaissance creators in general. Furthermore, the author analyses the epistemological approach of Renaissance men to the world, which rested upon the principles of resemblance. She examines these principles through Straparola's work while comparing them to the attitudes of visual artists of the period, who have written extensively on the subject. The visual was dominant in Italian Renaissance culture, and as such, it is also to be found in Straparola's literature, which mirrors the society and culture of the time. As an epistemological principle, the search for resemblances was so essential in Renaissance that it served for establishing analogies between human and animal physiognomies and their supposedly associated temperaments. The objective of a Renaissance creator was to grasp the outside world and present it in the chosen medium. Natural sciences, humanities, and art converged. Straparola included accounts of natural phenomena and animals, as found in Pliny's Natural History, in his narratives, all the while searching for analogies between described phenomena and the temperaments as well as actions of the protagonists of his tales.
In this period in time, science on nature and its phenomena comprised of cataloguing diverse animals and various "natural things", which surprised Europeans: exotic animals and their characteristics, embryos, mutants, as well as mythological creatures, which were granted equal status and were included in the taxonomy of species. All these "natural things", as recorded, for instance, by the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, were the marvels of the world or mirabilia. The age was so strongly signified with the marvellous that the renowned humanist Benedetto Varchi even lectured at the Florentine Academy on the generation of monsters seeming to be found everywhere. The mirroring of nature, best illustrated by the metaphor of a mirror, therefore included depictions of the marvellous and is also to be found in Straparola's work. Mirabilis, however, as the article shows, has its roots in the visual; it is etymologically and conceptually related to the idea of mirroring and thus to the principle of resemblance.
Historian Jacques Le Goff analysed the presence and conception of mirabilis in medieval era, which was adopted by the Renaissance in numerous respects. The marvellous was a way of resistance to the official Christian ideology after all. Le Goff concluded that the historicizing tendency worked against the tradition of the marvellous. It is for this reason that the author of the article focuses on the tale of the Renaissance when the marvellous was still present and the tales had a relevant relationship to the social reality they represented. The Renaissance tale, as can be found in Straparola's writings, exhibits references to nature and concurrently represents natural principles, the marvellous, which blends into the everyday, as well as it offers a glimpse into the sixteenth-century Venetian social life. Historian Robert Darnton who studied French cultural history and the history of eighteenth-century mentalities was interested in the orally transmitted tales as told by the "ordinary" people. He understood the folktale to be a historical document testifying to the "history" of a social class, which did not partake in the official writing of history. In this article, the author treats Facetious Nights as a historical document, yet understands this process of documentation differently than Darnton, specifically on account of the Renaissance episteme.
In the scope of the article, the author conducts an etymological investigation into the terminology related to tales. Terminology concerning previous forms of the genre displays a strong correlation with the Latin term historia, meaning a narration on the past events. Tales evoke worldviews of people circulating them and present the culture and possibly the history of the society that tells them. The article treats Renaissance literary tales as unique testimonies of the society and culture of the time. The documentation of culture and society is in this case authorially mediated, yet distinctly present, because the writer, as the author of the article argues, was committed to the use of resemblance techniques. This perspective, however, prompts another question the author explores in the article, namely, what was the primary function of Straparola's tales. Given the likely readership and the specific structure of his tales, many of which are tales on individual's social rise, an achievement quite unimaginable in the confines of Venetian law of the times, it seems plausible that Straparola promoted visions of a different, better social reality. The marvellous thus seems to frequently serve as a means towards attaining this objective.