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Robert Darnton, the historian, says (in his essay, ‘Peasants Tell Tales: the Meaning of Mother Goose') that folktales ‘provide a rare opportunity to make contact with the illiterate masses who
have disappeared into the past without leaving a trace.' This is rather an apocalyptic way of putting it. We may not know much about the lives of those ‘illiterate masses' but most of us are directly descended from them, and we retain, if we have lost everything else from the oral tradition, a complicated folklore of family.

Besides, a flourishing illiterate culture has always wonderfully nourished the productions of the literati. Henry Glassie reminds us in his introduction to
Irish Folk Tales
that James Joyce named
Finnegans Wake
after a Dublin street song, even borrowed the plot.

But Ireland is a special case. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory went out on purpose to listen to country storytellers, to strive consciously to reach out to those who had slipped through the huge holes in the net of history down which the common people vanish – to reconstruct from the mouths of the poor the basis for an authentically Irish literature, a project that bore abundant fruit. (It is interesting to read, in Inea Bushnaq's book, that there is ‘a lively folklore department in the university at Bir Zeit,' on the debated West Bank, and an increasing interest is the collection and preservation of Palestinian culture.)

The stories assembled by Henry Glassie include some from those collections made by Yeats and his friends nearly a century ago, some from other nineteenth-century collections, others recorded far more recently by the editor himself and by other collectors currently working in Ireland, a nation which no longer contains a significant proportion of illiterates, but is, folklorically, far from a worked-out seam.

An American academic who has made the English language folklore of Ireland his special study, he is scrupulous about notes and sources; his bibliography is enormous and comprehensive; his
Irish Folk Tales
is both scholarly reference book and a pleasure to browse in – but the spare fluidity of the language of his informants has not rubbed off on him, alas.

He is grievously afflicted with fine writing (‘Pure darkness welcomes the winds that skim off the ocean', etc.), and embarrassingly lyrical about his informants. ‘They call him eccentric . . . they call him a saint,' he says of one. What does his informant call Henry Glassie?

But here are stories about Finn MacCumhail and the Fenians, as Jeremiah Curtain noted them down in Donegal in 1887; stories about St Finbar, and St Brigit, and St Kevin who made apples grow on a willow tree; stories about true folk heroes – Robert Burns, Daniel O'Connell. Yes, indeed; here is an Irish Cinderella (in which the three sisters are called, Fair, Brown, and Trembling). And a giant who opines of a visitor: ‘I think you large of one mouthful and small of two mouthfuls.'

There are also some moving examples of legendary history. For example, how Cromwell possessed a black Bible that was so big ‘it would take a horse to draw it'. When his servant opened up this Bible on the sly, lots of little men came out of it and ran around until the servant cried: ‘Off ye go in the name of the Divell!'

The circumstances of life in these stories are universally harsh and the happy endings few and far between. A good breakfast is a pot full of boiled turnips. Drink is a curse. A man named George Armstrong went to Australia but all he came back with was thruppence and when he got home again he weighed so little his mother put him in a basket and kept him by the fire.

Inea Bushnaq's tales from Libya, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Syria – from all over the Arab world – reflect a different kind of life, one full of delicious smells and sights and sounds, fresh coffee, baking bread, rosewater and incense, flowers, embroidery, cloth of gold, apricots, figs. The Iraqi Cinderella wears golden clogs and a pearl comb in her hair. The people might be poor but the imagination is lavish.

The Arab countries have in common a language and a religion, Islam, and a still predominantly peasant culture in which storytelling as pastime and entertainment has survived in good order rather longer than it has in the advanced industrialised countries, although, as Inea Bushnaq says, television may well deal the
coup de grâce
with amazing speed.

Her method is quite different from Henry Glassie's: she has compiled an anthology from a variety of text materials, splicing some together and has selected stories ‘most likely to interest the English reader'. It would be nice to know what criteria she used in picking them out.

She provides a vast amount of cultural background in a series of introductions to different sections of the collections, with their
mouth-watering titles – Djinn, Ghouls and Afreets, Tales Told in Houses Made of Hair (that is, the goat-hair tents of the Bedouin), Beasts that Roam the Earth, and Birds that Fly with Wings. But this is not a scholarly collection so much as a triumphant, shining, glorious labour of love.

Perhaps Inea Bushnaq is more cavalier with her sources than a professional folklorist because she has heard many of the stories herself when she was a child and truly feels that they belong to her for just that moment of the telling, when the storyteller makes the story his or her own, the fleeting gift of the storyteller.

The stories invent a world of marvels – flying carpets, girls from whose mouths fall lilies and jasmine each time they speak, a boy whose ears are so sharp he can hear the dew fall. The cry goes out: ‘A calamity and a scandal! The king's new queen has given birth to a puppy dog and a water jug!' A green bird spells out the stark terror of family life: ‘My father's wife, she took my life. My father ate me for his dinner.' And once upon a time, there was a woman called Rice Pudding . . .

(1987)

The scrupulously intelligent stories in
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
are fiction, but also, in an important way,
about
fiction. Implicit in the book is the question that all fiction raises by its very existence: what is real and what is not – and
how can we tell the difference?
In a story called ‘The Legend of the Sleepers', Danilo Kis, a Yugoslav writer living in Paris, puts it this way: ‘Oh, who can divide dream from reality, day from night, night from dawn, memory from illusion?'

The question is clearly rhetorical, and Mr Kis's apparatus of postscript and notes gives shape, purpose and an edgy, more documentary dimension to his storytelling. Mr Kis himself tells us that the stories are all about death – the one truly inescapable reality. Even if one of the legendary sleepers of Ephesus in ‘The Legend of the Sleepers' may be dreaming his own death, death is the universal end of all our personal histories. The title story, ‘The Encyclopedia of the Dead', reminds us of that.

This great encyclopedia is housed, we are told, in the Royal Library in Stockholm. Its many volumes contain complete biographies of everyone who ever lived. There is only one qualification for entry: nobody gets in who is featured in any other reference book. It is a memorial for those without memorials. A woman looks up her father's entry; the plain details of an ordinary life, meals eaten, hobbies, work, final diagnosis, are very moving.

And then the woman wakes; it was a dream. Yet in the dream she had made a drawing; awake she recreates it, and the drawing exactly resembles the fatal cancer that killed her father. This fusion of book, dream, and the world irresistibly recalls the fiction of
Borges; but Mr Kis is more haunted, less antic than the Argentine master, and his notes contain fewer jokes.

In his notes, Mr Kis introduces a further twist: he tells us that the encyclopedia might not be real, but the dream was – dreamed by a certain M., ‘to whom the story is dedicated'. And he tells us that if the encyclopedia does not exist yet, work on an analogue has begun, and ‘the Genealogical Society of the Church of the Latter Day Saints' is, at this present time, compiling just such a comprehensive reference book, filing away on microfilm details of everybody who ever lived, as far as can be researched, so that the Mormons can retrace their family trees and retroactively baptise their ancestors.

Truth is always stranger than fiction, because the human imagination is finite while the world is not, and Mr Kis seems to be ambivalent about making things up from scratch.

Indeed, he almost seems to apologise for the story, ‘Red Stamps With Lenin's Picture', because it is ‘pure fiction', about a literary love affair. He quotes Nabokov sympathetically: ‘I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books or penning things that had not really happened in some way or other.' Not for Mr Kis art for art's sake, but for truth's sake.

Everywhere in these stories the correspondence among what is real, what might be real, and the mediation of the written word between these conditions, reverberates on many levels. In the superb ‘Book of Kings and Fools', Mr Kis investigates the morality of the written word itself.

In this story, the central character is itself a book, titled ‘The Conspiracy, or The Roots of the Disintegration of European Society'. We are told that the existence of the book was first hinted at as a rumour in an article in a St Petersburg newspaper in 1906, the time of the Jewish pogroms. This rumour concerned a document ‘demonstrating the existence of a worldwide conspiracy against Christianity, the Tsar and the status quo'.

No sooner is it rumoured than the book appears, incorporated into a hysterical text by a fanatically mystic Orthodox priest. (And here I may have glimpsed one, only one, possible glitch in what reads like a seamlessly perfect translation by Michael Henry Heim: ‘The local Red Cross Chapter volunteered to publish this book', it says here. But I can't see the International Red Cross doing any such thing. Perhaps the culprits were the Rosicrucians?)

‘The Conspiracy', as the book is called, offers universal explanations, always popular. In Germany, it seeds the mind of ‘a then unknown (as yet unknown) amateur painter'. It makes a deep impression on ‘an anonymous Georgian seminary student who was
yet to be heard from
'. Soon it finds its way into the delirious paranoia of human practice. It is the obscene triumph of the anti-book – a forged text designed to destroy.

Mr Kis scrupulously instructs us as to the nature of the reality constructed by the book's most zealous readers – the reality of the death camps, a reality beyond the power of the human mind easily to imagine.

In his essential postscript, Mr Kis tells us that his intention was ‘to summarize the true and fantastic – “unbelievably fantastic” – story of how
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
came into existence'. The story began as an essay, but in researching the obscure history of that anti-Semitic forgery whose construction is one of the greatest of all crimes against humanity, there came a point where Mr Kis ‘started imagining the events as they
might have happened
'. Then he moved into fiction; the fable is no less powerful than fact.

Books don't really have lives of their own. They are only as important as the ideas inside them. The book, as we know it, took shape with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century; it was the tool of the dissemination of humanism but can, just as easily, spread the antithesis of humanism. ‘In point of fact,' says Danilo Kis, ‘sacred books, and the cannonized works of master thinkers, are like a snake's venom: they are a source of morality and iniquity, grace and transgression.' He is wise, grave, clever, and complex. His is a book on the side of the angels.

(1989)

In a formal sense,
Pig Earth
is innovatory. John Berger uses three kinds of writing – fiction, poetry, and exposition – to precipitate in the reader a precise awareness of a specific kind of life, that of a contemporary French peasant community in the Alps.

This community is the village in which Berger himself lives. Though he does not invoke his own presence as an actor in any of the stories, the section of exposition titled ‘An Explanation' relates his work as a writer, a professional storyteller, to the storytelling and gossip that makes life in the village what he calls a ‘living portrait of itself', a continuous narrative that ‘confirms the existence of the village'.

Pig Earth
is devoted to the imaginative exploration of a way of life rooted in what Berger calls a ‘culture of survival', as opposed to the ‘culture of progress' which is the urban imperative of all classes. He is, in part, attempting to crystallise and define this ‘culture of survival' at the very time when it may not, in fact, survive.

The three kinds of writing in
Pig Earth
fit together to make a three-dimensional picture of a village which is also artistically three-dimensional. That is to say, the heightened lyricism of the brief poems illuminates the straightforward verismo of the stories in a way which recalls Hardy's dry observation – how Farmer Oak was not, as the sophisticate might think, insensible to the beauties of nature.

The polemical nature of the two sections, ‘An Explanation' and ‘Historical Afterword', informs the physical landscape and the landscape of labour through which the reader has travelled in the
course of the book with a sense of urgency that removes
Pig Earth
altogether from the genre of bourgeois pastoral, which is the consolatory celebration of a fictive ‘rusticity'.

Berger says: ‘Nobody can reasonably argue for the preservation and maintenance of the traditional peasant way of life. To do so is to argue that peasants should continue to be exploited, and that they should lead lives in which the burden of physical work is often devastating and always oppressive.' But his culminating assertion is that the elimination of the peasantry is the final act in the destruction of the experiential reservoir of the past, so that it can no longer be part of the totality of the present. This destruction Berger sees as the ‘historic role of capitalism itself, a role unforeseen by Adam Smith or Marx'.