“Irás y no Volverás”: Cuentos Maravillosos de la Cultura Tradicional Argentina

Abstract

“Irás y no Volverás”. (You shall go and never return) Argentinian Marvelous Tales Marvelous Tales: Fiction and History Marvelous tales are a gateway to a magical world that offers an alternative look at our daily life and, as such, makes our existence more bearable. Approach ing these tales allows us to imagine times and spaces inhabited by characters who live in worlds in which objects and animals speak, help or get in the way of obstacles to accompany or hinder the actions of the characters who accom plish impossible tasks, and are often, but not always, succeed. This wonderful world is rooted, however, in a historical place and moment, which, in this case, corresponds to the Argentinian context. Those who tell them are living nar rators, with their own cultures, ideas and beliefs. Real times and places are in tension with this marvelous world, defined in classic works such as Roger Pinon’s (1965) as a utopian and achronic one, that is to say, in a fictional a world without a specific spatial or temporal location. The tension between fiction and history is, certainly, the distinctive feature of the tales included in this collection, compiled directly from the living voice of oral narrators, ordered and classified with academic criteria. These tales are a treasure of Argentinian culture and identity. In fact, beyond the fictional world of kings and princesses each narrator opens a window to local daily lives, telling something about who Argentinian people are, who they could be, and how to overcome the obstacles of struggling people. This gateway can show the way to live happily ever after, like the heroes and heroines of these tales, despite all the adversities. The Research Project This book, whose origin was the research project “Argentinian Folk Narrative Archives”, sponsored by the Argentinian National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), is the second volume of a collection aimed at gathering the results of more than thirty years of fieldwork and research in Argentinian folk narrative. This ethnographic research began in the last decades of the 20th century in the Northwestern Argentinian province of La Rioja, and continued over the years. As it will be explained below, the tales are classified into “folk matrices”, and such classification is aimed at at highlighting the close relationship between marvelous tales and “ belief narratives” (Valk, 2021). Thus, the axis of taxo nomic principle is the intertwining of the categories of “fiction”, “history” and “belief ” reflected in the narrative versions, that has been the focus of my re search through my career as an Argentinian researcher in folk narrative. To make the reader’s access to the stories easier, as well as to show the richness and vitality of the versions and variants of the folktales, I selected a basic tale of each group of versions, as a point of departure of alternative itineraries in the mouths of different narrators. The choice should not be understood in a quali tative sense, nor the choice of the “best” version –since there is no story “better” than another– but rather the one that reflects more accurately the distinctive features of the local context, as well as the influence of social beliefs on narra tive texture. As an intertext, I include not only different versions of marvelous tales but also those linked to local beliefs, registered within the category of “be lief narrative”, with the purpose of highlighting the interrelationship between different folk narrative genres. This is why the first version of each group is not indicated in each group with a particular mark, as a “better” version, but rather I simply clarify in this introductory study the classification criteria of the versions within each cluster. I include a brief analytical comment of each group of versions, and the presence of such matrices in other Spanish and Latin American collections. As the readers can notice, the key aspect of this collection is the tension between the adjustment to general models and the anchoring in the local daily life of different Argentine communities. Marvels, Folktales and Social Beliefs The initial hypothesis is that fictional tales are intertwined with narratives presented as cases of true occurrence, or even as ritual expressions and other narrative manifestations that express social beliefs. Such local beliefs underline the relationship between human beings, animals and plants, on the one hand, and with supernatural beings and other creatures endowed with extraordinary powers, on the other one. In this regard, folk tales in general, and marvelous tales in particular, recreate themes and conflicts linked to the social identities of the most varied human groups, in a fictional world. This fictional world is the result of a poetic elaboration, understood as a work of selection and adequate combination of elements, articulated in the message in such a way as to pro duce an aesthetic effect ( Jakobson, 1964). The interweaving between fiction, history and social beliefs is then the guiding thread of the organization of this set of versions, aimed at showing how these local beliefs modify universal pat terns fixed diachronically not only through oral transmission but also through written, filmic, theatrical, musical, and choreographic expressions. In this way, I intend to offer the readers an expression of Argentinian collective memory, embodied in the adventures of different protagonists who live in a fictional world, through the living voices of local storytellers, who give new meanings to universal tale types with their own accents. In the texts, characters and situations of the Argentinian context can be recog nized, in an aesthetic recreation of cultural identities, expressed through a nar rative format, which provides instruments to organize a message into episodes and sequences in a narrative message which, as expressed above, tells the world something about who Argentinian people are. The word “marvelous” means “what is worthy of being looked at and ad mired”. The “gaze”, to which Tzvetan Todorov (1982 [1970]) devotes his attention in his studies on fantastic literature –whose delimitation with respect to the marvelous I will deal with later– acquires a relevant place in mar velous tales. This is how, among the magical objects that populate the verbal universe, are the glasses, which serve to broaden the spectrum of the hero’s or heroine’s gaze towards a different universe, ruled by different rules than those of the real world. The gaze of the marvelous provides a gateway to wonder and admiration of a space ruled by its own laws, which include magic and enchantment. Discursive Genres and Marvelous Tales In a previous work (Palleiro, 2015) I characterized the folktale as the retell ing of an event or a set of events that express, on a fictional level, distinctive features of the cultural identity of a local community, in a temporal sequence. This sequential ordering can be deconstructed into non-sequential itineraries which, as I will explain below, are similar to those of a virtual hypertext (Palleiro, 2004a, 2018a). In the articulation of the narrative discourse, the poetic work on the message becomes relevant. Such poetic work is based on the updating re-crea tion of general narrative models or matrices in specific spaces and times, reflect ing the imprint of the style of each narrator (Palleiro, 2018a). The one of the marvelous tales is a specific discursive genre, whose distinctive features are the high degree of fictional elaboration and the complexity of its structure, which means that it presents a more elaborated form of composition that of other categories of folktales, such as animal tales. Such complexity is linked to rhetorical elaboration, being rhetoric related to a poetic work on the message, aimed at convincing the receivers of the narrative message, whose distinctive feature is the incorporations of topics related to the domain of fic tion, in which animals can talk, objects are endowed with magical powers, and other elements are deviated from the normal operating conditions of the real world. The presence of marvels such as supernatural adversaries and even su pernatural spaces such as trips to the Other World, are worthy of being admired. Supernatural adversaries can be ogres or other types of creatures, such as Death personified. Such presences put the hero in a position to carry out supernatural or impossible tasks, with the collaboration of supernatural assistants such as “Blancaflor, the Devil’s Daughter”, who is the protagonist of one of the tales in cluded in this book. In this fictional universe, what does it consist of convincing the receiver of a marvelous tale, and what must he or she be convinced of? It is about presenting all these aspects in such a way that the narrative message is coherent to the person who receives it. Convincing is thus related to present this marvelous world in such a way that it could be acceptable to whoever receives it, and this goal is achieved through the use of poetic resources such as person ifications, oppositions or antitheses, allusions to specific elements of each local context, comparisons, metaphors, and displacements between the whole and the part typical of the metonymy and the synecdoche. Marvelous Tales and Possible Worlds To understand a little better what the category of “the marvelous” consists of, the distinction proposed by the abovementioned Tzvetan Todorov (1982 [1970]), in his approach to fantastic literature, is extremely useful. This au thor thus differentiates “the strange”, which is what is out of the ordinary but does not break the operating rules of the real universe, from “the mar velous”, located in the field of the purely fictional. Between these categories that represent two extremes, lies the domain of the fantastic, in a vanishing zone between the marvelous and the strange. It is here where the gaze, as I anticipated, becomes important, since it is linked to a specific perspective through which this kind of tales is accessed, through objects such as mirrors or glasses. This is how, for example, in this collection, some versions refer to the ability of certain characters to see beyond the ordinary with “glasses”, as occurs in a version entitled “The Glasses of the King’s Daughter”, and they allude as well to to the apparition of characters from the domain of the supernatural through a mirror, as occurs in “The angel of the mirror”. Susana Reisz de Ri varola (1979: 99-109) defines the fictive semantic field as one that allows a “modification of the modality of essence of the real universe” (my translation from Spanish), that is to say, a change of the laws that rule daily life. This change is, perhaps, what makes the world of wonder so fascinating, since the limitations of our daily life are transformed, in a universe in which animals can speak and behave like humans, and objects like a comb or a mirror be come hills or lagoons that help the hero in his “magic flight” from his enemies, and where heroes and heroines can reach enchanted lands such as “The Seven Stripes of Fine Gold” and can live in houses whose gardens host wonderful objects and beings such as a talking bird, a singing tree and a lake with golden water. This transformation of the real universe relates to the creation of “possible worlds” whose laws transgress the limits of reality. Nevertheless, these “possible worlds” are conceivable, compatible and accessible from the real universe (Hintikka, 1962; Kripke, 2005; Palleiro, 2008a; Lewis, 2009); that is to say, that they can be conceived from our daily experience, they can coexist with the real world without any problem or interference, and they can be accessed from our own concrete existence and from the limitations of our universe, which do not prevent us from imagining better –or worse– ones. In such alternative worlds, the characters are endowed with the abovemen tioned extraordinary powers and faculties, which allow them not only to descend to the Underworld but also to access paradisiacal realms such as the land of Irás y no Volverás (You Shall Go and Never Return). The protago nists can also use magic objects such as a “wand of virtue” to make the king’s daughter remain pregnant, or they can recover youth or wealth simply by expressing this desire, as it happens to the hero “John the Lazy” –protagonist of the homonymous story– who also makes palaces of gold and silver appear out of nothing. In the verbal space, princes and princesses of the medieval world coexist with gauchos and local peasants, according to the principle of “juxtaposition of heterogeneous semic nuclei” and “semantic leaps”, which is a distinctive feature of the folk message (Mukařovský, 1977). Such principles refer to the possibility of combining essentially diverse elements, and to the possibility of moving from a semantic field such as that of a palace, to a small ranch in the middle of the hills, with full creative freedom. In this sense, Jan Mukařovský (1977) draws attention to the relevance of apparently inconse quential “details”, which he considers to be essential elements in folk art. “De tails” such as the reference to “the hills” through which the protagonist must pass to reach the king’s castle, give a new meaning to the general matrices of the folktale, to transform them into vehicles of expression of the local identity of each community. That is why Mukařovský deems these details as the “basic semantic units” of the folk message, which update the general frames trans mitted in the process of oral tradition (or scriptural textualisations) in the “here” and “now” of each new narrative situation. Marvelous Tales, Narrative Matrices and Contextual Recreations: Fairies, Wolfs, Witches and Elfs Marvelous tales gave rise to multiple recreations. In this sense, Jack Zipes (2006a; 2012 [1982]) focuses the attention on the transformation of marve lous tales in today’s society, traversed by media culture. These mediated trans formations and recreations of marvelous tales have been also underlined by Christina Bacchilega (2013), who studied the contemporary adaptations and the politics of wonder, proposing a decolonialization of marvelous tales, aimed at displacing the Euro-American hegemony towards the incorpora tion of vernacular cultures. She also proposed an approach to marvelous story from the perspective of gender studies, sustained as well by Donald Haase (2004). Both scholars highlighted the relevance of such approach, associated with feminism and with the deconstruction of stereotypes. In this collection of Argentinian folktales, many of these aspects are mirrored, and new ones can be discovered. It can easily be seen that the construction of the female figure is closely related to local beliefs, in which women often acquire a relevant agency. This aspect can be seen in one of the versions of the matrix “The magic flight”, in which the female protagonist, Blancaflor, not only helps and advis es the hero, but also architects the flight and the actions oriented to overcome the obstacles to reach a happy end. This agency is often in tension with stere otyped female roles, such as domestic chores, reflected not only in this group of versions but also in many others, in which marriage appears associated with a restoration of the order broken by the initial narrative conflict. In this sense, I included a chapter focused in the recreations of the matrix of “Little Red Riding Hood” not only in oral versions, but also in cinematographic, liter ary, and theatrical ones, as well as in choreographic transpositions. In these multiple recreations and transformations, many of these aspects are reflected, from the agency of women to female solidarity and generational conflicts. There is as well in some versions a contextual transformation, in which ver nacular supernatural creatures such as the "duende" (a sort of elf ) replaces the “wolf ” of European versions. A striking aspect, which can be considered a distinctive feature of Argentinian tales, is the absence of marvelous creatures such as fairies and gnomes, present in European versions. Fairies and gnomes are in fact central figures in Euro pean fairy tales, as Robin Gwyndaf (2006) has rightly pointed out in his study on “The Wonder Tale in Welsh Folklore”. Such creatures are replaced by others related to the supernatural such as the vernacular duende (a sort of elf ) whose different names are the Mikilo or the Sombrerudo, among others–. Moreover, “the devil’s daughter” –named Blancaflor– and other female figures endowed with extraordinary powers, such as the “old mother” (Mama Vieja), are associ ated in some narrative itineraries with witches and sorceresses, who belong to the realm of evil and, in others, to the realm of vernacular wisdom. Not only the female characters, but also the “old men” are associated with the traditional wisdom of the community, as it can be seen in the version “Los tres indiecitos diaguitas” (“The Three Diaguita Indians”). However, there are differences be tween the knowledge transmitted by characters of each gender, connected with the roles assigned to them in each local community. Both these roles and the narrative construction of these beings and characters relate to the social beliefs of each group, and their inclusion in the marvelous tale leads us to consider the relationship between fiction, history, and belief. The aforesaid Gwyndaf (2006: 191) highlighted the relevance of beliefs in marvelous tales, pointing out as well that, although beliefs and the way of expressing them can change from one generation to the next, the deepest fears and desires of men and women remain unchanged throughout the centuries, and one of these deepest desires is to escape from the daily routine, to enter the enchanted world of the un known. This possibility that marvelous tales offer to go beyond the real world to imagine a better one is perhaps the key to the fascination they exert, that can explain their ongoing relevance. The presence of helping animals and magic objects, and of supernatural protective beings opens a door to hope in our struggling daily life. As I already anticipated, marvelous tales are fictional narratives ruled by dif ferent laws than the ones that govern the real world. Although also in “animal tales” and even in the so called “realistic tales” there is also a fictional recreation of reality, in marvelous ones this recreation reaches a higher degree of complexity. As Hayden White (1973) wisely pointed out, even in historical narratives, closely linked to reality, there is a poetic elaboration of history. Such poetic elaboration of history is also present in other folklore genres closer to daily experience, such as “cases”, “memorates” and even in legends. This poetic elaboration shows the flexible boundaries between different folklore genres. Based on these considerations, I include within each matrix not only the versions classified by the narrators as “marvelous tales” but also local “cas es”, “legends” and “memorates” that share some topics with the marvelous ones, pointing out similarities and differences in the modalities of compo sition and style. The purpose of this inclusion is to highlight the intertex tual connections between different folk narrative genres, from those closest to the realm of fiction to those that are more closely related to history and belief narratives. In this way, each matrix includes within the same group both tales, cases, memorates, legends, histories, anecdotes and other narrative categories which are closer to reality. In these categories, there is a greater use of argumentative resources, aimed at convincing the audience of the veraci ty of the narrative discourse. To highlight such similarities and differences, each group of versions organized around a “narrative matrix” including a short analytical comment of the different itineraries . As aforesaid, I deem the “matrix” (Palleiro, 2004a, 2018) as a set of thematic, structural and rhetoric features, identif ied through the intertextual comparison of dif ferent versions. Once identif ied and described such matrix, I provide a short summary of the variants identif ied in each version. Each matrix includes a reference to the international thematic classification of the folk tales provided by Aarne-Thompson (Aa-Th 1961) and Aarne-Thompson Uther (ATU 2004). As I explain in the analytical comment, some of the Argentinian tales are closer to the thematic description of A-Th rather than to ATU, and that is the reason why I decided to include both thematic de scriptions. The short comment of each group is aimed to highlight the flex ible narrative paths and multiple transformations of each matrix, which, as I will explain below, can be compared to the ones of a virtual hypertext. Other purpose was to underline the contextual local transformations of each narrative matrix, and to highlight the presence of element of the historical environment and vernacular cultures, even (and specially) in these narra tives presented as fictional tales. The interweaving of fictional elements with others from the local culture reveals how local beliefs transform the semantic structure of each folk narrative message. As aforesaid, the axis of the clas sification of this collection of marvelous tales is the interweaving between fiction, history and belief, which has been also the focus of my research work from my first collections (Palleiro, 1992b, 2008a and others) to the last one, in which I analyzed this intertwining in animal tales (Palleiro, 2020). In all these works, I verified how the dimension of beliefs contributes to blur the limits between different folk narrative genres. Fiction and Belief in Marvelous Tales At this point, it is worth defining, on one hand, what is meant by “belief ”. From a semiotic perspective, belief consists of a subjective or intersubjective consensus about the truth value of a statement (Greimas and Courtès, 1982; Palleiro, 2008a). This means that there is a conventional agreement, that leads a certain group –such as the one formed by the narrator and his audience– to accept the truth value of a speech. On the other hand, as aforesaid, fiction implies an essen tial modification of the laws and principles that regulate the real world (Reisz de Rivarola, 1979), oriented to the construction of alternative possible worlds. There is, however, a distinction between the domain of the fictional, which is related to an ontological dimension, to the extent that it concerns an essential modifica tion of reality, and the domain of fictionality, connected with the communicative dimension of discourse. From this perspective, Reisz de Rivarola defines from fictionalization procedures as duplications of the basic components of the speech act: the sender or emitter, the receiver, and the referential background. In other words, fictivity implies a with a deliberate modification of the rules that govern the real world, which opens the doors to a world in which objects have magi cal properties, animals are endowed with intelligence, and heroes and heroines have supernatural powers, such as the power to predict the future. Fictionali zation, instead, relates to the dynamic duplications of the constitutive elements of communication –in this case, the narrator(s), the audience and the referential content of each tale–. Such duplication makes room to a secondary textual space is that duplicates the primary colloquial interaction, which is the frame of oral folktales. This spontaneous dialogue is, in fact, the communicative context of the narrative text, transformed in a verbal secondary space with its own operating rules, different from those that govern the primary communication between the person who tells the story and the person who listens to what is told. Such dupli cations can also be connected with what Octave Mannoni (2003 [1973]) affirms in his study “I know well, but all the same”, in the sense that fictional discourse consists of entering a world in which characters and actions move and take place in a parallel world, with its own logic, which “all the same” imitates that of the well-known real world, in accordance with the Aristotelian principle of mimesis or imitation. Marvelous Tales, Today A question that arises when facing an edition of marvelous tales collected a few years ago, revisited in the present times, is: why marvelous tales today? Are they still valid? And if they are, how and why? A first answer has to do with the multiple itineraries, and with their different versions, variants, and possibilities of transformation, which led to the characterization of the folktale as an attempt of an infinite text (Rodríguez Almodóvar, 1989). As pre-textual models to be transformed in alternative itineraries in diverse historical, social, political, and cultural circumstances, the narrative matrices become vehicles for the expression of social identities of the most different communities. In addi tion, this narrative genre gives us the illusion of conceiving as possible what is impossible to happen in the real world. This is how the hero can overcome the so-called “impossible tasks”, such as planting a seed in the morning and being able to pick up “a basket of ripe peaches” at noon, as it happens in “Blancaflor, the Devil’’s Daughter” and objects such as a “scissors” can become rivers, as hap pens in the version “Snow White and the Witch” ("Blancanieves y la bruja"), which proposes an alternative itinerary of the classic children’s tale crystallized in filmic versions. Whether to imitate, deny, contest, or transform it, the model of the marvelous tale is always present in the collective memory, as a possible world and, as such, conceivable, compatible and accessible from the real universe, that is to say, possible to imagine from one’s own experience, from which each one of us can enter to this world which is somewhat familiar to us. Each one’s own experience takes place in a concrete historical and cultural context, that, in our case, cor responds to the everyday life of Argentinian communities of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This world today is crossed by issues such as gender, which tends to break with some of the stereotypes of the marvelous tale, to propose a critical look. But it is precisely the flexibility of these models, which are only pre-texts, that invites us to break, transform and resignify them from our own circumstances. The aforementioned Jack Zipes (2006b) deals with the narrative transforma tions of the fairy tales, and the different supports and channels in which this genre circulates, from film recreations to memes. In a dialogue with Bajtín’s theory, which affirms that there are as many genres of discourse as there are communicative situations (Bajtín, 1982), Zipes affirms that the multiple ver sions of the marvelous tales continue to be relevant in today’s world for the solu tion of conflicts that threaten our happiness. The ability to create these possible worlds of the marvelous tale, which have challenged us since the most remote times, ensures their permanence. Such vitality relates to a resignification of the past from the present, in which, as Gary Alan Fine (1989) affirms, resides the transforming dynamism of tradition. This is how the royal atmosphere of castles, kings and princesses is updated both in a rural house in the Argentin ian province of La Rioja, surrounded by hills and jarilla plants, as well as in an urban apartment of Buenos Aires city, where Javier Daulte sets his own theatrical version of “Little Red Riding Hood,”, oriented to explore the family relationships in a single-parent group made up of three generations of women, in which Little Red Riding Hood is the daughter of a single mother, who is going to visit her sick grandmother in an urban hospital. Details, Gender, Deconstructivismand Decolonialism in Marvelous Tales In an approach to the marvelous tale, aspects such as deconstructivism and gender studies cannot be ignored. Deconstructivism was defined by Jacques Derrida (1976, 1982) in opposition to logocentrism –or the preeminence of reason– as an oblique perspective, which can take into account overlooked as pects, which can be connected with the apparently irrelevant “details” of the folk message (Mukařovský, 1977). Many of these aspects have been underlied by authors such as Elaine Showalter and Raewyn Connell from the perspective of gender studies, to claim a new look at old stereotypes linked to the subaltern female figure, product of a cultural construction crystallized over the centu ries. Showalter (1981) coined the term “gynocriticism”, to refer to women as producers of meaning in a text, associating the man/woman dichotomy with a hierarchical opposition with a logocentrist position, which needs to be decon structed. Such hierarchical opposition, which is frequently found in the folktale, responds to a cultural stereotype. In this regard, Connell (2006, 2011) calls attention to gender stereotypes as socially constructed molds. Michael Pickering (2001) defined stereotyping procedure as a way of organizing the social world based on binary divisions aimed at providing order, security, and domination. Any stereotyping procedure creates in effect an illusion of precision in defin ing and evaluating people, reducing them to the characteristics attributed by a crystallized model (Inzunza Acedo, 2013). These proposals grounded in Derri da’s deconstructivism, with his opposition to logocentrism and the claim of the marginal aspects of philosophical thought. In relation to these proposals, Jean François Lyotard (1986), in his reflections on postmodernity, vindicated the relevance of “integrative” narrative knowledge, in the face of what he called “the contemporary dispersion of competences” of scientific knowledge, associated with Derrida’s logocentrism. In stories like the ones above “Blancaflor, the Devil’s Daughter” by José Corso or “Snow White and the Witch” by Sonia de la Fuente, the female figure has total agency, and moves with ease in a world in which animals, such as horses, have the ability to transform into churches and lakes; the scissors, in rivers, the thimbles in hills, and the needles in thorny plants, in a magical world that has coherence in itself, with a logic totally alien to that of logocentrism. The relevance of oblique approximations was highlighted from the perspective of microhistory by Carlo Ginzburg (1992 [1986]) who set the principles for the construction of oblique paradigms of knowledge, based on abductive procedures of decoding general meaning from marginal details, which are also, according to the aforementioned Mukařovský (1977), the basic semantic units in folk art. Such details give also new meanings to vernacular expressions of marvelous tales, catalogued into universal tale types. Thus, for example, in his version of “Blancaflor”, José Nicasio Corso provides a new meaning to the universal tale type “The Magic Flight”, connected with local beliefs in wandering souls, ghost ly apparition and devilish curses. These apparently irrelevant details such as the allusion to these ghostly apparitions who frighten the passer by late at night provides give new meanings to the folk matrix, transformed in an expres sion of the cultural identity of a peasant local community. Such deconstructive transformation converts the typifying stereotypes of theme, composition, and style, through the insertion of details connected with local beliefs, into differ ential expressions of the social group in which this narrative circulates. In this way, in specific versions collected in fieldwork, the narrative patterns connected with European Hispanic cultural heritage dialogue fluently with vernacular cultures, in an original expression, which breaks spontaneously with gender stereotypes and other crystallized cultural values, to offer an original message rooted in local worldviews. In a paradoxical way, this rooting in vernacular cultures gives the narrative message its universality. This tension between ste reotype and variations is a key concept to approach the folktale in general and, specifically, the marvelous tales, in which these cristallized patterns seem to be more relevant. Other trends rooted in deconstructivism are those related with the “affective turn” and “the decolonial theories” (Dussel, 1977, 1979, 2003; Quijano, 1992; Mignolo, 2003, 2007; Grossfoguel and Mignolo, 2008), that contribute to this deconstructive process of stereotypes. Such proposals claim subaltern views from the perspective of an “epistemic disobedience” to colonial and hegemonic aes thetics, promoting instead a decolonial aesthetic. In the field of folk narrative, Christina Bacchilega (2013) proposed in this sense a “provincialization” of marvelous tales, associated with a poetics and politics of wonder. In a similar way, Donald Hasse (2004) drew the attention to the transformations of the stereotyped models of marvelous tales, connected with social changes, which re quire the redefinition of formulae such as “happily ever after”. Many of these aspects, related to the absence of a happy ending, are present in the different narrative itineraries of this collection. Thus, for example, the version of “The Three Wonders” by the vernacular female narrator Fortunata de Fuente ends with the mention of the death of the protagonists and with the destruction of “the three wonders” (“Las tres maravillas”), in a closing sequence in which the narrator tells that “after a long time, the [protagonists] died, the wonderful tree dried up, the magic water also dried up and the speaking bird died”). This final sequence contrasts with crystallized endings, in which happiness is presented as a permanent state. Wonder in Times of Social Changes All these aspects contribute to the redefinition of the narrative patterns of marvelous tales in today’s world, in which social changes, incorporated into its flexible structure in the form of oblique “details”, make room to multiple trans formations. Such transformations update models transmitted diachronically from the traditional past, to redirect them towards new forms in the contemporary world, in which obstacles that must be overcome in the search for happiness is part of an unfinished process. This process relates to a different look at a world in which magic appears as a conceivable horizon, which invites us to think about it from our own experience and from our own history. Thanks to the extreme flexibility of its patterns or matrices, which serve as pre-texts for its multiple transformations, it not only persists through changes but is also enriched with new nuances and itineraries. Each of these itineraries is proposed to help us, as Jack Zipes (2006a) states, to deal with all the obstacles that we find in the search for happiness in today’s world. Folktales, Legends and Belief Narratives As verbal expressions of social identities structured in narrative formats, folk tales have either a complex elaboration form, as marvelous tales do, or simpler forms with less codification, such as legends and anecdotes. In many versions in this collection, in which actions carried out by fictional creatures, the genre of marvelous tales is intertwined with anecdotes and belief narratives, in a polyphonic combination of tales with local rites and legends. In this sense, the Grimms characterized legends as folktales historically grounded, based on social beliefs, to the point that the term “belief legend” can be considered as a pleo nasm (Dégh, 2001). All these narrative genres are closely related to the daily experiencesof the societies in which they circulate (de Blécourt, 2012). From this standpoint, narrative can be characterized as a cognitive principle of sequen tial articulation of experience (Bruner, 2003), and folktales, as spontaneous narrative expressions of social identities, organized in sequences, and endorsed to the social group to which narrators belong, being this group the source of legitimation of the narrator’s discourse (Palleiro, 2018). Folk narrative genres, within which marvelous tales are included, serve as a reaffirmation of the com mon values and traditions of the community to which both narrators and their audience belong, being tradition understood in the sense of updating the past from the present (Fine, 1989), which transforms patterns transmitted from the past in new times and places. Traditional transmission implies that the past should have a relevant significance in each new present, so as not to fall into a mere preservation of crystallized elements or mere antiquarian curiosities. From this perspective, marvelous tales can be characterized as metaphorical expressions that recreate in a fictional verbal space, aspects of the historic and social contexts in which they are narrated. As such, the patterns passed down through tradition challenge us in today’s world. Thus, these narrative patterns stabilized since immemorial times serve as pre-texts that challenge us to seek new narrative itineraries and new answers to universal questions that concern the most diverse human groups of all times, in their different itineraries that lead towards the search for happiness, through the gateway of a magical world that can be conceived, approached and made compatible with our day-to-day life, in any corner of this planet. Classification Criteria As aforesaid, the classification of the versions, based on the concept of “narrative matrix” (Palleiro, 2004a, 2018a, 2020), is aimed to highlight the relativity of the boundaries between different folklore genres. This concept adds to the the matic narrative types described in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Universal In dex, valid for all folktales of different times and places, structural and stylistic aspects, identified by intertextual comparison of different versions. Such classi fication tends as well to underline the influence of social beliefs in the bifurca tion of itineraries of each matrix, by including within the same group not only “tales”, but also “cases”, “memorates”, “legends”, “histories” and other narrative expressions of social beliefs. As aforesaid, I defined the folk narrative matrix as a set of thematic, structural, and stylistic features common to different narra tive expressions, identified by the researcher through the intertextual compari son of similar versions. The parameters of theme, structure and style proposed to characterize the concept of “narrative matrix” are based on the characterization adopted by Míjail Bajtín (1982) to define the genres of discourse. This matrix, fixed in the diachronic process of oral transmission and e written textualisations, is transformed and updated in each new synchronous communicative situation, performed in a concrete historical, social and cultural context. In this way, each individual narrator recreates, with his or her style, through a poetic work, general patterns, and each researcher tries to reconstruct such pattern through the com parison of different textualized narrative expressions. The referential content of the folk narrative message is connected with constitutive aspects of the cultural identity of a group, legitimated by the audience. In marvelous tales, this poetic recreation shows a complex process of fictional elaboration (Palleiro, 2004a, 2018). The variations between different narrative expressions make room to different versions of the same matrix, in alternative itineraries. In the same way that Bajtín emphasizes that there are as many genres as there are specific communicative situations, in the folktale there are as many versions as narrators, and such versions can be grouped into different matrices, which vary according to the contexts in which they are told, and a to the organiza tion criteria of each archive that, as Derrida (1997) points out, comes from the Greek arkhé, which means ordering principle. From a genetic perspective, focused on the study of variants of manuscripts, oriented to reconstruct the dynamic genesis of writing, Jean-Louis Lebrave (1990: 156) classified such variants into additions, suppressions, displacements and substitutions in the drafts of a written text. In my theoretical proposal, I reformulate these concepts around the abovementioned notion of “genetic matrix”, considering the matrix as a germinal nucleus of different narrative itineraries, stored in the memory of the narrators as a pre-textual model, to be updated in specific communicative situations. Such matrix serves thus as a narrative a pre-text to be transformed through additions, suppressions, substitutions and displacements of contextual details in each new itinerary. The structure of the folktale, as a dynamic text, can be compared to that of the virtual hypertext, characterized by Theodor Nel son (1992: 2-3) as a series of textual blocks connected to each other by links that form different itineraries for the user. Hence, from this genetic perspective, the folktale can be considered as a set of textual blocks made up of minimal inde pendent and fragmentary units, connected to each other by flexible links. Such a mechanism results in a structure of alternative itineraries, generated from transformations of the aforesaid pre-textual matrix that activates a mecha nism of corrections and variants. The matrix works, in this way, as a classi ficatory instrument, reconstructed by the researcher through the intertextual comparison of different versions. Such dispersive itineraries mirror the flexible associative connections of memo ry. From a formalist perspective, the abovementioned Jan Mukařovský (1977) describes the structure of the folk message as a verbal mosaic, formed by the addition of heterogeneous “details”, which he considers to be the basic semantic units in folk art. From this point of departure, he underlines the relevance of such seemingly random or insignificant details, linked together by a process of additive juxtaposition; that is, through the mere addition of elements, without a subordination mechanism or causal link. Acting as mnemonic resources that activate the memory of the narrators, such details are quite relevant, to the extent that they can provide the interpretative key of the folk message. This is why, in my proposal, I highlight that the addition, suppression, substitu tion, or displacement of such details generates contextual transformations in the folk matrices, mirrored in alternative itineraries which can be considered as narrative expressions of vernacular cultural identities. This classification into matrices highlights the open structure of the folktale, permeable to contextual changes, many of which are introduced in the narrative discourse by means of the aforementioned “details”. The genesis of the folktale is thus based on the trans formation of the matrices in new cultural environments through apparently irrelevant changing details, which give rise to the expression of the differential identity of each community (Bauman, 1972; Palleiro, 2018). Such transfor mations allow the narrators to recreate the worldview and social beliefs of each local community in a fictional world (Palleiro, 2004a, 2018). Serving as a vehicle for expressing the cultural identity of a social group (Bauman, 1972), the folktale provides both the narrators and the audience a sense of belonging that differentiates one local group from others. Folk matrices and contextual transformations The selection of matrices of this collection shows, as aforesaid, the dispersive itineraries of different versions, revealing as well the flexible boundaries be tween different folk narrative genres, as highlighted in the short commentary included at de beginning of each group of versions, in which I also underline the influence of vernacular social beliefs in the transformation of generic dis cursive patterns. Such patterns act as pre-texts stored along the traditional ARGENTINIAN MARVELOUS TALES || 25 process in the memory of folk narrators, to be updated in each contemporary new context. The matrices here documented are: 1) “The Magic Flight”, La fuga mági ca (common thematic elements with the ATU 313 “The Magic Flight” and with other types and motifs listed below); 2) “Caranchi, take her doll away!”, “¡Caranchi, ¡tómale la muñeca!” (common thematic elements with ATU 408, “The Three Oranges”); 3) “The Maiden without Arms”, “La niña sin brazos” (common thematic elements with ATU 706: “The Maiden without Hands”); 4) “The Fisherman’s Son (Daughter) and the Mermaid”, “El hijo (La hija) del pescador y la sirena” (containing common thematic elements with ATU 316, “The Nix of the Mill-Pond”, ATU 425, “The Search for the Lost Husband” and other types listed below; 5) “The Seven Stripes of Fine Gold”, “Las Siete Hileras del Oro Fino” (which presents common thematic elements with ATU 303, “The Twin or Blood-Brothers”; 6) “The Magic Fruit”, “El fruto mágico” (common thematic elements with ATU 610, “The Healing Fruits”; 551, “Water of Life” and others listed below); 7) “The Three Wonders”, “Las Tres Maravillas” (com mon thematic elements with the ATU 707, “The Three Golden Children”); 8) “Three Hairs from the Devil’s Beard”, “Los tres pelos del diablo” (common the matic elements with ATU 461, “Three Hairs from the Devil’s Beard”); 9) “The Three Wishes”, “Los tres deseos” (common thematic elements with ATU 750A: “The Three Wishes”); 10) “John the Lazy”, “Juan Flojo” (common thematic ele ments with ATU 675, “The Lazy Boy”); 11) “Half Chicken”, “El Mediopollo” (common thematic elements with the ATU 715, “Demi Cock”); 12) “The Man Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is”, “Juan Sin Miedo-El hombre que quería saber lo que era el miedo” (containing common thematic elements with ATU 326: “The Youth Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is” and 326A, “Soul Released from Torment”); 13) “The Underworld”, “El Mundo de Abajo” (containing common thematic elements with ATU 301: “The Three Stolen Princesses” and other types and motifs listed below); 14) “The Strong Man”, “El hombre forzu do” ( containing common thematic elements with ATU 650A, “Strong John”) and 15) “The Magic Hiding Place”, “El escondite mágico” (containing common thematic elements with ATU 329, “Hiding from the Princess”). As can be observed in this enumeration, the matrices include thematic regulari ties that, in many cases, share common thematic elements with those described in the ATU universal type indices whose numbers I have indicated in brackets. The influence of the local context is also mirrored in the thematic, structural and stylistic organization of all the different versions. Thus, for example, in some versions of “The Magic Flight”, the devil appears dressed as a local gaucho, with a “black suit and an ‘aludo’ hat” similar to the one of Argentinian peasants. Contextual details are inserted through allusions to the local environment as well as through the metaphorical condensation of human and supernatural elements, linked with the local beliefs in devilish ghostly apparitions, in the reference to the “gaucho1 devil”. This metaphor is connected with the personi fication of the supernatural entity of the devil in the figure of a local gaucho. The “caranchi” (raven) of one of the versions, who takes a girl’s doll away, is mentioned with a noun that incorporates the Quichua suffix -i, which connotes affectivity, strongly connected with the local culture. One of the alternative itineraries of the general matrix “The Maiden without Hands” presents re markable coincidences with the “history” of a vernacular young woman, kid napped by the Spanish conquerors. “The Magic Fruit” sought by three brothers to cure their sick father becomes one of the itineraries in “the fruit of the algarroba [carob]” sought by “three Diaguita indians” eager to marry “the daughter of the cacique” –the chief of the local tribe–. The underwater kingdom of the matrix “The Fisherman’s Son and the Mermaid” is compared with the local legend of “The Lost City of Bañado de los Pantanos”, which refers to a haunted city of La Rioja mysteriously disappeared from the earth. The matrix “The Seven Stripes of Fine Gold” presents notable similarities with the local legend of “The Northern Wind” (“El Viento Norte”), and some versions of “The Underworld” incorporate elements linked to local rites regarding deals with the Devil, like the one of the Salamanca –the ceremony in which a pact with the Devil takes place–. The setting of the most part of the versions is a rural space, like the rural area in which the folktales have been collected, incorporated in the narrative sequence through descriptive enumerations. In “The Three Wonders”, the youngest of three daughters is named with the Quichua form of “shulca”,” a Quichua word that means the youngest daughter. In one of the versions of “Half Chicken”, the hero is a personified chicken who decides to go to the Catholic festivity of Saint Blas, which is the celebration of the patron of the local community. The stylistic distinctive feature of these versions is the synecdoche, centered on a dynamic fragmentation between the whole and the part, reflected in the name of the protagonist, “Half Chicken”. In some of the alternative narrative itineraries, this chicken recovers the missing half part of his body. Some versions of the ma trix “The Man Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is” present an interweaving with local cases of hidden treasures in local rural ranches. These hidden treas ures are linked with indigenous traditions, connected with the times in which vernacular people were compelled to hide their belongings from the Spanish conquerors. The epithet “flojo” (“lazy”) given to the hero “John The Lazy” (“Juan Flojo”) is a local linguistic use, which reveals the influence of the context. One of the versions of “The Magic Hiding Place” is set in “a small town in La Rioja, lost in the middle of the hills”, which has obvious similarities with the rural con text in which the tale was registered. In “The Three Wishes”, the protagonists live “in a small ranch” which has strong similarities to many of the rural houses of the Argentinian province of La Rioja. Likewise, one of the versions of the matrix “Three Hairs from the Devil’s Beard” is set in the Devil´s residence, located “in the middle of the hills”, in a desert landscape that mirrors the one of the rural environment in which the tale was recorded. This version combines the structure of the folktale with the one of the narrative of personal experience, as described by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky (1967). There is in fact an intertwining of the folk matrix with the narration of the personal experience of a car accident, typical of the contemporary context. Such intertwining is a clear example of the additive combination of heterogeneous semantic units, based on an accumulation of apparently irrelevant details that seem to have no direct relationship with the general meaning of the message although they are, instead, key elements to give a new meaning to the narrative text (Mukařovský, 1977). All these contextual aspects create a tension between the adjustment to general matrices of theme, composition and style, and the incorporation of local varia tions linked to the collective memory of the group, expressed with the personal style of each individual narrator. Such tension is part of the dynamics between fiction and history, which reveals the influence of local beliefs in the construc tive process of the versions, which is the axis of this collection, based on the organization of the narratives into narrative matrices, with their dispersive itineraries. All these marvelous tales were collected in field research. The experience of col lecting narrative material in fieldwork showed the interweaving of marve lous tales with cases, anecdotes, memorates and legends, many of them, grouped within the same matrix, which gave rise to a dissemination of itineraries. As I anticipated, such bifurcations explain the definition of the folktale as an “at tempt of infinite text” (Rodríguez Almodóvar, 1989). The multiple bifurcations reproduce the flexible structure of memory, which I have already compared in previous works (Palleiro, 2004a, 2018a, 2020) with that of a virtual hyper text. Theodor Nelson (1992) defines the virtual hypertext as a combination of textual blocks, whose flexible links are freely established by the user of a virtual system. The principle of additive combination of heterogeneous units, that is to say, the sum of diverse elements, considered by the aforementioned Mukařovský (1977) as a distinctive feature of folk art, is similar to the flexible linkage of a virtual hypertext. The matrices, defined as stable combinations of thematic, structural and stylistic features, serve as dispersion nodes of divergent routes, in also diverse contexts. This conceptualization of the folk message is based on the concepts about dissemination of Jacques Derrida (1981 [1969]), being dis semination understood as a dispersion of elements that are neither homogeneous nor univocal. The concept of “folk narrative matrix” attemps to mirror such dissemination of itineraries, which reproduces the flexible connective structure of memory (Assman, 1997). This classificatory method is thus oriented to highlight the open nature of the folk message, permeable to the incorporation of contextual transformations and to the poetic recreation of each individual narrator. As I already anticipated, the matrices are not understood as a priori models, independent of the concrete narratives, but rather as classificatory reconstructions of each researcher based on the intertextual comparison of versions, which allows the researcher to iden tify common features of theme, structure, and style. Such transformations of the narrative patterns made by each living narrator reveal a vitality and richness that goes beyond any classification, and their inclusion in an archive or collec tion constitutes an invitation to think about new itineraries and new ways of organizing the narrative material. For the cataloging and classification of the narratives, I organized them around the abovementioned matrices, characterized as sets of thematic, struc tural and stylistic nuclei common to different versions, identified through the intertextual confrontation of versions (Palleiro, 2004a: 61, 2018a). Each matrix thus serves as a pretextual nucleus, which generates different narra tive paths. For the identification of thematic regularities of the matrices, I un derlined the similarities with the International Thematic Index of Narrative Types by Aarne-Thompson (1961 [1928]), and with the updating of such In dex by Hans Uther (2004), in the original English language. Regarding the classification of the versions by the narrators, I tried to respect the title that they themselves gave to each version, as well as their classification into “(folk) tale”, “story”, “case”, “legend”, “memorate”, “history”, “anecdote” or another kind of narrative. I registered as well the source from which each narrator heard or knew each narrative (usually oral source, heard from adults or peers, but also written, in some cases). I also indicated whether the narrator used to transmit or not each version to other members of the group, in the cases in which this information was provided to me. In these two volumes of marvelous tales, I included, in the introductory section of each group, a general analytical commentary on the dispersive itineraries of each matrix, in which I highlighted distinctive features of theme, structure, and rhetoric style, as well as the contextual transformations, to highlight the diver gent itineraries and the interweaving between fictional discourse and belief narratives. Such analytical commentary varies in its extension from one group to another, since in some cases I was only interested in highlighting certain distinctive features, linked to the ordering criterion of this collection and, in others, the aim has been to give to the readers a more complete idea of the con textual variations of the different versions. This organization criterion tends to show the relativity of any classificatory method, as well as the intertwining of different narrative categories presented in indexes as fixed patterns. As afore said, the matrices have been reconstructed through an intertextual confronta tion of concrete narrative expressions, pointing out as well the similarities with the universal thematic descriptions of the tale types, along with structural and stylistic features that show the differential identity of Argentinian narrators. In the textualization of each group of versions, I chose as the initial narrative the one that most clearly enhanced the intertextual connection between fiction and history, since I centered the analytical comment on this interconnection, which is the axis of this collection. Each initial version was the starting point to a later comment on the dispersion itineraries of each narrative matrix. In this collection, I offer the readers an approximation to the richness of Ar gentinian marvelous tales, with the aim of highlighting the continuity that unites the fictional story with the historical environment and the social beliefs of the narrative context, which makes the limits between narrative genres more flexible. The narratives tend to show, on the one hand, the reality effect of fictional discourse and, on the other, the poetic reconstruction of the historical context that leads the narrators to use folk matrices as fictionalization device of history. Beyond all analytical considerations, these narratives, performed by children, adults and elder people; both parents, sons, daughters and grandparents, are simply delicious, due to their spontaneity and freshness, which does not elude the complexity of their structure and their rhetorical work. From this stand point, I tried to propose an invitation to enjoy the texts. Whoever reads should consider that these narratives were born to be heard orally and that, as Walter Ong (1985) rightly stresses, oral discourse has always a somatic dimension. I thus invite the readers to replace with their imagination the voices and bodies of Argentinian folk narrators, and to approach the versions not only as the one who reads but also as the one who listens. The fundamental task of the folklorist is, in fact, to listen, because every folk narrative expresses the social identity of a community, with the personal style of each narrator, whose art can tell some thing about who we are and what our own heterogeneous culture is like, as a mixture between vernacular and migrant European, Asian, African and other cultures, combined in a unique blend whose distinctive feature is the unity in the diversity.