Historians
are great at telling linear stories and written narratives that have a
specific point of view, and an agenda. Historians try to define a
moment in time with a certain set of facts while they leave out others.
Now with the advent of web 2.0 pictures might prove to be history's
next frontier. The Internet uses pictures to show off the natural
social process that history actually is.
What historians really do.
"History in the archives is not rational inquiry," he writes, "and it
is seldom disinterested. It is disorganized, messy, and obsessive, much
like junk-road scavenging . . . We are suspicious of other people's
narratives, but we always assemble our own stories out of the flotsam
and jetsam we find." ~ Nelson
Legend scholars and other folklorists need to comment of comedian Stephen Colbert's concept of
"truthiness".
STORYARTS
The Greenwood Library of American Folktales. 4 vols. Edited by Thomas
A. Green. 2006. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. 1592 pages.
ISBN: 0-313-33772-1 (hard cover).
Reviewed by Carl Lindahl, University of Houston (clindahl@uh.edu).
[Word count: 983 words]
The Greenwood Library of American Folktales offers a wide
first-reader's window into American folktale texts collected in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This massive compendium,
running to four volumes and nearly 1600 pages, organizes its subject
by region, dividing the nation as follows: The Northeast, The
Midwest, The Mid-Atlantic (vol. 1); The South, The Caribbean (vol.
2); The Southwest, The Plains and Plateau, The West (vol. 3); and The
Northwest, "Cyberspace" (vol. 4). Within each regional section, texts
are divided into four categories: "Origins" (dominated by Native
American myths), "Heroes, Heroines, Tricksters, and Fools"
(represented largely by märchen and jokes and anecdotes), "The
Powers That Be: Sacred Tales" (more accurately, "Supernatural Tales,"
for this section includes vampires and witches and consists
preponderantly of belief legends), and "The Powers That Be: Secular
Tales" (encompassing historical and personal experience narratives
among other genres).
In his preface, Thomas A. Green supports his regional focus by
stating that folktales, through their frequent "focus on the origin
of plant and animal life, social and sacred institutions" and "local
landmarks," "provide crucial evidence for gauging the importance of
region to the human experience" (1: xii). We are invited to consider
how place affects story, but we see almost nothing of the
interpersonal processes that connect the landscape to the folktale
text.
"Folktale text" is the operative term here. The apparatus and
commentary are sparse: a preface of six pages, an introductory note
for each region (with five pages devoted to the Northeast, for
example, and seven to the South and the Caribbean combined), and a
glossary explicating 24 terms (two entries of which read, in their
entirety, "genre: Type or category"; "variant: Version of a standard
tale type"). Headnotes (averaging, by my estimate, about ten lines
per story) attempt to bridge the thin frame of region and the
substance of the text. For example, the note to "The Coyote and the
Woodpecker" (Isleta Pueblo, narrator identification "unavailable,"
published in 1910) reads,
This story of the trickster trying to imitate another occurs in other
variants in the Southwest (See, for example, the Jicarilla Apache,
"Tales of Fox: Fox and Kingfisher," p. 116). As in the tale types
designated by folklorist Stith Thompson as animal tales, "The Coyote
and the Woodpecker" offers a moral lesson. The philosophy of
acceptance and noncompetitiveness is consistent with general Pueblo
worldview and morality. (3:109)
The texts are undeniably valuable, even if the great majority
predates the current professional standard of exact transcription as
well as the recording technology to make such transcription
practicable. Most of the tales are reprinted from early numbers of
the Journal of American Folklore (some three-quarters of the
narratives in the New England section and almost two-thirds of those
representing the South were taken from the pages of JAF). Many of the
greatest early American folklorists and ethnologists--including
Austin Fife, Aurelio Espinosa, Arthur Huff Fauset, Herbert Halpert,
Zora Neale Hurston, James Mooney, and Elsie Clews Parsons--are
represented here, and many of the tales are relatively hard to find
for those without ready access (via hard copy or the Internet) to a
complete run of JAF.
While it is good to see these texts available in such
beginner-friendly form, it is dismaying to see them presented as
literary artifacts standing almost utterly alone. In the section
devoted to the South, for example, nearly two-thirds of the narrators
are unnamed. The major reason for the storytellers' anonymity is, of
course, that most of the earliest collectors did not identify their
sources, and Green's texts are extremely early. Twenty-one of the 47
New England texts pre-date 1900, the most recently collected dates
from 1941, and their average date is 1904. In the early twentieth
century, it was a truism among American folklorists that traditional
culture varied relatively slightly over time, but relative greatly by
region. This principle, which most contemporary folklorists consider
problematic for portraying much twentieth-century American folk
culture, is renewed in exaggerated form by Green, whose preface
acknowledges that "the majority of the tales in the present
collection were drawn from the 'Golden Age' of regional collections,"
but he dates that period "from the late-nineteenth through the
mid-twentieth centuries" (1:xii), a considerable misrepresentation of
the books' contents.
Although it is true that many of the tales anthologized in the
Greenwood Library of American Folktales first appeared in JAF with
little or no significant commentary, many of the
collectors--including Fauset, Hurston, and Mooney (not to speak of
Halpert)--rank among the great contextualists of their times. Early
scholars sometimes used JAF principally as a repository for texts,
but they also provided copious contexts in their other published
work, nearly all of which goes uncited in Green's bibliographies.
The result is a mass of important narratives stripped of their
connections to the individuals and groups that shaped and sustained
them. Consider the seven tales narrated by Jane Gentry in the
anthology; these derive from the earliest published collection of
narratives from the Hicks-Harmon family, the most studied and widely
known märchen-telling family in the United States. Gentry is the
protagonist of a full-length book and several articles; she is also
cited in many of the scores of publications that treat other famed
family members, including Samuel Harmon, Ray Hicks, Stanley Hicks,
Maude Long, and Marshall Ward. Yet Green does not mention any of
these connections, nor do his bibliographies and lists of "suggested
readings" cite one publication that discusses the family and its
narrative traditions. It is not reasonable to ask a 1600-page
anthology to do everything, but it is essential to expect a
twenty-first century folklore publication to do more. Folklorists are
likely to welcome the fact that many of our most important early
texts have found a new home, but many are likely to regret, as I do,
that The Greenwood Library of American Folktales fails to point the
beginner toward the artists and communities behind the texts.
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Read this review on-line at:
http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=467