Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Last time, talked about genres and gave examples
American and Russian
I have the complete list in the lecture notes. See these if you would like the complete list
1. Epic
2. Ballads
3. Lyric song
Parodies to all of these
Lullaby - they sadistic nature of these
4. Rhymes and folk poetry
a. Nursery rhymes:
b. Counting-out
c. Jump rope
d. Rhymed insults, taunts, jeers
e. Peddler's cries
f. Planting rhymes
5. Riddles and other verbal puzzles
Parodies - the dirty ones
Droodles - non-oral
A couple more droodles
GESG
ECNALG
R/E/A/D/I/N/G
T
O
W
N
Russian material:
Galina's work on insults
Russian riddles &endash; emphasis on human being as one who works
Emphasis on mouth - something that they will see in the folktales
Discuss cultural relevance in general: this is what they are to get out of the various classifications
That these things correspond to:
What is going on in a society at the time
What is going on in the life of an individual
Special events
Disaster jokes
The necessity of trembling body
But some things are too disastrous for jokes
Then a more structured genre like limericks
And more disastrous still &endash; epic, other STRUCTURING narrative
Folklore as a way of studying things that could not be studied otherwise, like human reaction to disaster
Cannot stage a disaster to see how people react
Rather, study traditional reactions, ones developed over a LONG period of time
Laughing at a disaster is not trivializing what happened
Go back for a few minutes to the sadistic nature of lullabies and some of the theories to explain
1. Real aggressive intent: raising a child and caring for a small infant is truly stressful
With sadistic songs, you get it out of your system and don't need to act on aggression
2. Attempts to "rebirth" as sickly infant; analogy to baking
3. Protection: saying the opposite of what you mean to keep evil spirits away
4. Protection in the dangerous period of passage from day to night
New material:
6. Proverbs
Boys will be boys.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Some parody of proverbs: Absence makes the heart go wander.
Be true to your teeth or they will be false to you.
Above essentially poetic forms
The prose forms:
7. Legends and anecdotes
Material claimed to be true - I told some last lecture and we will examine in more detail toward the end of the course
a. Religious legends - origin of Adam's apple, Cassian, St. Peter
b. Supernatural legends &endash; ghost
Virginia governor's mansion haunted
Hitchhiker stories, vanishing and other
Russian stories of the return of the dead are legion
Mom appears to son, to daughter
Older ones are things like treasure stories
Domovoi stories
Various pregnancy beliefs and legends
Frightened during pregnancy
Used in Elephant Man
Influencing personality, aptitude of child
Russian and Ukrainian &endash; stealing and marking child
c. Historical legends:
American: Custer
Russian: Ivan the Terrible, Pugachev, Sten'ka Razin
d. Urban legends
The "newspapers" like Weekly World News
Technology - microwave
Vacuum cleaner
Tanning salon
Russian: body parts
Return of the domovoi, babushka restores icons
Breaking candles
Other set of terms
Legends - religious, historical
Fabulates - friend-of-a-friend stories, things that happened in next village
Memorates = anecdote - stories of personal experience
8. Myths - high level
In other cultures - creation stories, etiological stories - Killer of Enemies examples
Our closest is probably the various myths of Washington
Chopped down a cherry tree
Threw a silver dollar across the Potomac
Crossed in Delaware in the midst of a blinding snowstorm
Please note cultural relevance for GW is father of country
Cherry tree of father
Slept everywhere
Monument erected to him
Mary Washington monument?
Russians and the earth diver myth
How evil came into the world
Why death needs to exist &endash; 2 versions
9. Folktales and I am about to do the subdivisions of those today
Prose/poetry distinctions
True/false distinctions
Inexactness and fuzziness of the various lines drawn
But schemes and charts help see and understand
The story of the Vampire exists as BOTH a tale and a legend
What folklorists do
Collection
Presentation
Analysis
Purpose: preservation &endash; this is great stuff and need to make it accessible to all
Way to do that is through print media
Not everyone can travel to a village to hear a great teller perform
Oral performances are single; each telling is unique; preserve at least one sample
Analysis: it works differently
The more things that we differently we analyze, the better we understand how we think and how we work
If you look at oral as well as written lit. you understand the verbal arts better
And being verbal is something that is central to being human
Early scholarship: the first really substantial collection is done in Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. It is called Kinder- und Hausmarchen
It is a collection of German tales done at the beginning of the 19th century, specifically 1812
Their motivation for collection is Romantic period, interest in the common man (as opposed to high culture); interest in nature and children and countryside and simplicity
Fear that this is being lost and needs to be preserved
So they collect a really huge collection
It is the first substantial collection, as opposed to the publication of single tales, or at most a few tales
They are bad folklorists in the sense that they doctor their material. Oral texts, even the texts of the greatest of tale tellers, or perhaps precisely the texts of the greatest of tale tellers, do NOT read well
They are good to listen to, not to read
Lesia and my experiences
Implications for them and their work: oral, written, digital
And the Grimm brothers DO make their tales read well
But, the sin of messing with the material is mitigated by the fact that they do not admit the possibility of oral composition
The possibility of oral composition was really only established by my PhD advisor Albert B. Lord about 60 years ago.
So, they assume that what they collect was WRITTEN by someone, a long time ago
That the original manuscript was then lost (and this would be long enough ago so that we would be dealing with single ms. rather than something that is published and printed in multiple copies.
The ms. is read in public and perhaps to the common folk, who commit it to memory and tell others, children and grandchildren
With the ms. lost, the only thing that survives is the oral version. But the oral version is unstable. With no original to refer back to, memory problems cause forgetting and what we now call variants. And also the traits of oral style.
So they feel justified in trying to reconstruct the written original
Part of the assumption behind written origin is that the originals of the tales were composed for the same purpose as the purpose behind various medieval and older ms. about which we did know.
If we had a ms. we might know something about it: that it was found in a monastery, perhaps, or among the possessions of a courtier, or in the library of a royal family
The purposes of old ms. was to record history, much of it mythological or cosmogonic: how the world came to be.
So the assumption is that folktales which seem to be more for entertainment or comfort and I cannot underscore the latter, were once serious, religious or historical narratives which became trivialized, in a way (I don't think they are trivial at all. To me, very important; and the legends, too, because of cultural relevance.)
German term is gesunkenes Kulturgut: high culture which sinks to the level of the common folk
Further assumption: if you are going to understand these narratives, you need to reconstruct the high culture, the mythic and historic stuff on which they are based
This is Haney's approach
One more item before I go to Haney:
Back to the huge collection point, the availability of a very large number of tales
Not only variants become apparent, as in the stories that one person tells are similar to, but not identical to the stories told by another person
What the person tells on one occasion and the next will vary
Depending on the teller's mood
Depending on the audience, their composition and their mood
Greater variation from village to village, region to region
Other thing that becomes apparent is that there is a certain commonality
The same tales exist across ALL of Germany
What is more, they are similar to tales in France, Spain, England, Holland, Poland, Russia, Iran and even India.
This is a tremendous shock and a revelation back then &endash; that places so seemingly dissimilar are actually related
Leads to the discovery of the relationship between the Indo-European languages
If the stories are related, then the languages in which they are told must be also. Jacob so intrigued by all of this that he gives up the study of narrative for the study of language
It is from this that we get the understanding of the Indo-European language family
Sanskrit and Hindi
Farsi and Persian
Slavic Languages:
East Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian
West Slavic: Polish, Czech, Slovak
South Slavic: Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Slovenian
Romance Languages: French, Spanish, Italian
Germanic Languages: English, German, Dutch
Tales are related, just as the languages are
And, as the Slavic languages are more closely related to one another than to the languages in another group, say Romance, so the tales are also.
This permits use of Slavic myth, say, in the search for the mythic basis of tales
At that point, the Slavic nations as we know them now did not exist.