"Simple Forms" by André Jolles in English

No tales told here

 This is a long overdue post, no two ways about it.

A few years ago I came across in the PMLA (vol. 128:3) a contribution by my Goethe Society colleague Peter Schwartz, which included an excerpt from Simple Forms, his translation of the book Einfache Formen by André Jolles, which first appeared in 1930. (See my earlier post on other work by Peter.) It so happened that I had read the book back when I was in graduate school. This was before Goethe and I got together, when I was in my German philology phase. In those days I was steeped in the study of Old High German, Middle High German, Gothic, Dutch, Norwegian, as well as the story of the Indo-European family of languages. I could talk volubly about “Lautverschiebung” and Werner’s Law. Einfache Formen, with its wealth of material about medieval lore and its references to early scholars in the field (Wilhelm Scherer, Walter Porzig, Andreas Heusler, not to forget the real forefathers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Herder and Hermann), were like honey to the bears. It was one of the first instances of a methodology that I sought to wrap my mind around, and in my case, as a non-native speaker of German, I was proud of my ability to follow Jolles in his formidable erudition.

Over the following decades I only once or twice encountered anyone who had heard of the book (a much annotated copy of which is still in my possession). As I have now learned, from reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Critical Inquiry as well as from the introduction to Peter’s translation by Frederick Jameson, Jolles was among a number of scholars investigating earlier “folk forms” (Vladimir Propp was another) for the light such forms throw on the way that humans conceptualize the world. Later this would come under the aegis of “structuralism” and be applied to all human thinking and cultural production, not simply that of our pre-literate ancestors. According to Robert Scholes, who discussed Einfache Formen (working from a French translation!),  “The perception of order or structure where only undifferentiated phenomena had seemed to exist before is the distinguishing characteristic of structuralist thought.” I hope I can be forgiven for suggesting that the notion also suggests Noam Chomsky’s concept of “deep structure,” where the underlying forms of linguistic composition are generated.

As Scholes writes, the simple forms are “intimately connected with the human process of organizing the world linguistically.” Scholes combines here two aspects of Jolles’ treatment. Regarding the first, Jolles speaks of Geistebeschäftigung to describe the mind’s attempt to categorize the world. Peter and others use the term “mental disposition” to translate this term, which, to my ears, suggests something settled and does not convey the active sense with which the mind assembles the facts on the ground. That, however, reflects an insuperable difference between German and English. In the case of legend, in its simple form it encapsulates the human disposition to endow certain individuals with exemplary attributes. The saints that appear in legends that have been written down have little authentic historicity and stand before us in their exemplary state, achieving feats that ordinary humans are hardly capable of enduring (early Christian martyrology provides plenty of examples). It speaks to a human desire to emulate virtuous actions, even as we fall short. Today, we have only “sports legends,” but you get the idea. As for the “linguistic” part, Jolles speaks of Sprachgebärden, or verbal gestures. Under the pressure, so to speak, of the mental disposition, over time various attributes accrue to the imitation-worthy individual of legend.

While literary scholarship has traditionally had as its subject a finished work — a Gebilde is Jolles’s term —Jolles interest is not in genres as we know them, but the “elementary narrative structures” that seem to exist in the mind before they are actualized in language  (Jolles use the term “Veranschaulichung”), without the work of the poet. These nine forms, “underling all literary production” (in Peter’s words), are  legend, sage, myth, riddle, proverb, case, memorabile, folk or fairy tale, and joke.

The folk tales that the Grimms collected are a good way to consider what Jolles was getting at: a collective working out of the problem of justice or, better, injustice. They typically present a situation that conflicts with our feeling concerning what is unjust or unfair in the real world. In the real world, the poorly dressed Cinderella does not generally get the prince. In the fairytale, she does after overcoming obstacles. The obstacles sound like life, but the reward is not always there.

Jolles works backward from the “Kunstformen” with which we are familiar in either literature or in popular genres—legend, joke, riddle, saga, and so on—in order to isolate the mental disposition and that then produces the "verbal gestures" that express the “solution” to the problem. Another way of thinking about this is to consider that, once upon a time, before radio, before TV, people actually sat around talking and in the process, using the resources of their everyday life, gave expression to perennial human issues that led to genres then gave an “answer” to a “question.” For instance, myth (writes Jameson) gives an answer to the question: "Where did the world come from?

The very sad photo at the top of this post (click to enlarge) encapsulates what we have lost in the modern world. The group of Indian soccer players, instead of talking, all sit (except for one whose iPhone battery was probably low) staring at devices. It is not only athletes who no longer talk. I was recently at a birthday party for a young woman who is a graduate of Columbia University. Her friends of the same age were likewise graduates of Ivy League schools. They talked a lot, they were very verbal, loquacious, but what do you suppose they talked about? Movies and TV shows. Such is the devolution of contemporary collective wisdom. It is not surprising that the rise of journalism began at the same time as traditional forms of life underwent a process of erosion. But what is the wisdom in contemporary journalism? Today’s “answer” is rejected for another one tomorrow, which likewise gives little comfort to the imagination or to the soul.

For those who cannot read German, Peter Schwartz has achieved an estimable, indeed awesome, feat both in bringing Jolles's work into English and in making this fascinating book new to us.

Picture credit: Twitter Moments; Business 2 Community