There is in the world more than thirty thousand tales... and as Jean Borella says "we don't know where they come from, but one thing is sure, they can take us far away... ! ". The tale is a literary erratic work (which comes from nowhere) and that specificity gives it universality: it teaches us like myths, gnosis or every form of Traditional Knowledge: "which is forgotten nowadays"..
From this immemorial past, the reader-auditor may acquire intuition, the feeling or the utter conviction (based on his opening degree to "spirit things" we could say now, or "to a super human world" in initiatory words) that tale teaches him something about himself.
Man has an insatiable thirst of knowledge and interpretation. Thus, depending on fashion and culture, there are different levels of interpretation of tales, from the most utilitarian (moral & sociological) to the emotional (literary), to purely human (too human: the psychoanalytic analysis) or even global (metaphysical analysis).
This is what Jean Borella, Bruno Bérard, Catherine Conrad and Bruno Guillemin will analyze in this presentation, upon the release of the book « Métaphysique des contes de fées » (Ed Harmattan, 2011).
Do you want to understand the articulation and the hierarchy between these different levels of interpretation.?
How to admit that the tale "the handless girl" represent an implicit denunciation of "Cathar heresy" and its search of extreme purity ?
Do tales help to untie the links which bound Metaphysics to Spirituality ? Simone Weil, Bernanos, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle and many others participated to untie this Ariadne's clew... which could be called cosmogony ?
Answer by our four participants in this debate filmed at Jean Borella's place in Nancy.
We thank Gabrielle Borella for her warm welcome.
