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Esthetic Form in British and American Folk Narrative

While the folk ballad has won its way into the canon of English and American literature, the folktale remains as yet outside the pale. Literary histories and anthologies pay their early respects to “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Young Hunting,” “The Four Marys” and other illustrious specimens of English and Scottish popular balladry. Instructors in English department courses discuss stylistic and compositional elements of Anglo-American ballads to familiarize students with “leaping and lingering,” the dramatic use of dialogue, dependence on commonplaces, and other techniques of the traditional ballad. Courses on the folktale are much rarer, and emphasize European and primitive rather than British and American folktales. The fact is that no one is quite sure about Anglo-American oral narratives. They suffer in contrast with the highly visible and esthetically proven ballads, so clearly and proudly a possession of the English singing world. But where are the folktales of English speakers? What are their forms, esthetic or otherwise? Do they deserve consideration from the literary historians?

Unlike the clear-cut Child ballads permeating Scotland, England, and the United States, the folktales of the three countries tell three separate stories. In his Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America, published in 1966, Ernest W. Baughman abstracted some 13,000 tales, exclusive of the American Indian, the American Negro, and foreign-language groups in the United States and the Celtic peoples in Great Britain. Here arises the first question in our inquiry: which folktales do we include as part of English and American literature? I would unquestionably include the American Negro and exclude the American Indian, and with less assurance divide the Gaelic tales of Scotland from those of Ireland to bring Scottish traditions within the English realm. Negro storytelling takes place inside the frame of American language and civilization, but tribal Indian narratives belong to another world. Gaeldom unites the Highland and Hebridean Scot with the Irishman, but political boundaries now set them apart. Campbell of Islay presented English translations with the Gaelic texts of his famous Popular Tales of the West Highlands and addressed his work primarily to an English-speaking audience. The ample store of West Highland folktales contains a high incidence of the Märchen or magical fictions uncovered first by the Grimm brothers and ever since the primary object of interest for folktale scholars. Among the genres of folk narrative, the Märchen lends itself most easily to the case for esthetic form, with its firm structure of thrice-repeated episodes, its dramatis personae of peasant heroes, royal princesses, demonic ogres, and supernatural helpers, and its happy resolution of the hero’s quest. But the Märchen is a rarity in England and the United States. Of all the countries of Europe, England has proved leanest in wonder tales, and consequently had few to transmit to the American colonies—although we must recognize the surprising finds in the southern Appalachians, from the 1920’s on, of the socalled Jack tales. Still, Baughman’s tables prove that the Märchen must take a back seat to other oral narrative forms. Even in Scotland, the balance in favor of Märchen is receding with the publication in 1964 of The Dewar Manuscripts, a collection of local history chronicles recorded under the supervision of Campbell of Islay but lying in file drawers for the past century.

While the narrators both in England and the United States tend to shun Märchen, their repertoires still differ noticeably from each other. English oral narratives run heavily to local legends of super-natural and spectral beings, but legends of elves and bogles are not told in the States—perhaps because, as immigrants say, half in jest, spirits cannot cross the ocean. Conversely, the lying tale or tall tale so abundantly collected in the United States is a stranger in England. Baughman arrives at a 25 percent correspondence between English and American tale types, a figure that might be stretched to 50 percent if narratives not reported from England but found in sections of the United States settled by the English are counted.

We come to the question, what are the main forms of AngloAmerican oral prose traditions? and for an answer we must rely on imprecise terms: local legend, ghost story, anecdote, yarn, joke, shaggy dog, protest tale, animal and bird stories, numskull or noodle tales, dialect stories, tall tales or lies. None of these forms are sharply defined. By and large they tend to be short narratives, as opposed to long wonder tales and romances, and their characters and content often determine what names they possess. A dialect story may be told as a terse anecdote or an extended recital but it always hinges on ethnic stereotypes who speak in accents contrasting humorously with standard English. A ghost story involves a spectral experience but this may be a fragmentary report of an eerie sight or sound or a local adaptation of a hardy tale type, such as the now famous account of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. In lieu of any acceptable replacement, the vague label “legend” continues to designate the large body of believed narratives that circulate in our society. We can distinguish certain subgroups of legendary tales revolving around persons, places, or events, according to the focus of the tradition. One of the most popular species of American storytelling is the anecdote about a village or neighborhood character, and this may be called a personal legend, or legendary anecdote, or anecdotal legend.

The idea of legend involves a communally shared tradition possessed and credited by a cohesive group—geographical, occupational, ethnic. Legends are usually told in conversational and reminiscent fashion. Vance Randolph’s collections of Ozark folktales take the form of breezy local legends. In spite of the wide latitude accorded the concept of legend, the word still does not satisfactorily cover all varieties of believed oral traditions. The Swedish term memorat denotes individual reports of encounters with super-natural creatures and is making its way into English usage. Still it does not apply to the richly detailed autobiographical stories and recollections of W. H. Barrett, the raconteur from the Cambridgeshire fens, whose wry and mordant Tales from the Fens bear a distant likeness to Icelandic family sagas.

Then there are jokes or jocular tales, the prime story form of our times, dispersed in town and country social circles, through the mass media, by public speakers of every hue from politicians to clergymen, and via professional and parlor entertainers. In preparing his expanded edition of The Types of the Folktale (1961), Stith Thompson found that the section on “Jokes and Anecdotes” had grown far more substantially than any other category. No one has yet taken the humble jest and the lowly anecdote seriously as oral art, although they surely deserve as much consideration as any other kind of folktale. Jokes seem so ephemeral, topical, and trivial that the literary and folk critic may well be excused for scorning them. But some have showrn remarkable staying power, enduring from Greece of the fifth century B.C. to America of the midtwentieth century. Athenian contemporaries of Pericles laughed at the unworldly behavior of the absent-minded pedant who vowed, after a narrow escape from drowning, that he would never go near the water until he had learned how to swim; and who cut his horse’s feed daily to teach him how to live without eating, and grieved that, just as the animal was learning to do so, he died.¹

A genre only recently baptized is the protest tale, whose humor, often grim and biting, turns on racial prejudice and social injustice. The Negro repertoire is especially rich in protest tales which mingle with better known genres such as the Br’er Rabbit fictions of speaking animals. Some humorous stories mock social protest itself, such as dialect jokes told by Jewish storytellers ridiculing excessive sensitivity to anti-Semitism.

We turn from the question of the genres of British and American storytelling to the problem of their texts. The text of an oral tale includes a good deal more than spoken words. There are facial expressions, intonations, chanted phrases, onomatopoetic sounds, gestures, bodily movements, pauses, emphases, eye contact and interplay with the audience, the use of props, noises made by banging on the table and slapping of the palms—all adding up to a small theatrical performance. The term performance is indeed now commonly used by folklorists to describe a story-telling situation. Even the electronically recorded recital conveys only a portion of the scene. Once when I was discussing the matter of textual fidelity with Vance Randolph, he admitted to some editing of his Ozark folktales, but contended that literally transcribed texts still took no account of silent intervals; and he told an illustrative tale. One time he met an Ozark friend limping, and asked the cause of the lameness. The hillman said, “I went to a dance, and a feller stepped on my foot.” Pause. “He was from Chicago.” Without the pause, said Vance, the written words would lose their humorous effect based on the Ozarker’s disdain for the outlander from the big city.

Furthermore, any written representation of an oral tale reproduces but one variant text. Even the same speaker telling the same story varies his text with each delivery. There is no fixed text. Even the single variant is difficult to trap in print, for the exact words, including the hems and haws and confusing pronouns and incomplete sentences of transcribed oral speech need a little pruning and sprucing before they meet the reader’s eye. The question is, how many small adjustments can an editor make before the text ceases to be oral? I scarcely trust my own printed texts, and go back to the field notebook or tape if I want to be thoroughly certain of the original wording.

On the other hand, the literary text is not all that definitive, what with variant editions, misprints, and censorship from authors’ wives. Francis O. Matthiessen brilliantly explained the symbolic meaning of the phrase “soiled fish of the sea” in White Jacket, unaware that Melville had written “coiled fish of the sea.”²

Still the point needs to be underlined that the oral text, slippery as it may be, differs wholly from a literary text based on an oral tale. The sketches in the New York Spirit of the Times, brought to the attention of literary historians in 1930 by Franklin J. Meine in his Tall Tales of the Southwest, are not folktales but sophisticated literary compositions. A writer seeking to convey the rhythms and manner of oral delivery is still a writer addressing readers. Ever since the Grimms first published their Household Tales and drew a line between the spoken and written story, collectors polishing their narratives and authors emulating village bards have crossed the line, including the Grimms themselves, and blurred the distinction. But oral art and literary art are separate productions.

The classic statement on this score was made by the eminent Danish folklorist Axel Olrik in his essay of 1909 on “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative.”³ Olrik formulated a number of principles governing oral compositions, such as the need of the narrator to present the story-line clearly and simply, even repetitively, without subtleties or subplots, since listeners had no opportunity to reread the text and ponder over its meanings. In particular he emphasized the law of concentration of character, the restriction of the characters to two strongly opposed figures, and the construction of the narrative around peak tableaux readily visualized by the audience. Olrik generalized for the European oral literature he knew best, the heroic epics, Sagen, Märchen, and ballads, and our purpose is to see how well his conclusions hold for Anglo-American forms.

Traditions of Single Combats

With these preliminary matters of genre and text in mind, we will present three oral narratives that come from widely scattered sources but reveal common patterns of composition. The first is a portion of a Highland Scottish tradition about the battle of Culloden, collected in the 1860’s by John Dewar and translated from the Gaelic by Hector Maclean.

This text may be called an historical legend. It derives a good deal of its dramatic power, in the first place, from its setting in history. The battle of Culloden on April 16, 1746, brought to an end the Jacobite uprising of 1745, staged by the Highland forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart pretender, against the royal army of George II in the last battle fought on British soil. Culloden signified the doom of the Highland cause and the extirpation of Highland culture. Anecdote, ballad, oral and written history, and documentary film all bear witness to the impact of Culloden on the imagination of Englishmen and Scotsmen. In 1964 a stirring television film of the BBC, produced by Peter Watkins, reenacted the battle scene and the desperate charge on foot of the Highland clans, whose parts were played by citizens of Inverness living close to the battle site, some themselves descendants of the survivors. Culloden is a highly charged historic name, conjuring up the final conflict of Stuarts and Hanoverians, of kilted clansmen and soldiers of the Crown, of Highland and English ways of life. It conjures up, too, the sadistic figure of the Bloody Duke of Cumberland, general of the king’s army, and a heartless butcher in countless legends.

The episode of traditional history here presented thus gains considerable drama at the outset from its cast of characters, the commanders and soldiers of Culloden. It develops its own drama with the wager between the Bloody Duke and the defecting Highland general, John Campbell, who recognizes the valor of his countrymen. A classic David and Goliath duel ensues in the epic tradition of single combats between opposing champions.⁵ Our sympathies are already enlisted on the side of the underdog Scots, vanquished, underfed, outnumbered, and are further moved by the injury and stoicism of Fierce John and the audacity of his small brother. In the narration the Highlander’s anticipated victory is scanted, contrary to the Hollywood movie script which would have given it extended emphasis. Rather than emphasize the obvious, the narrator dwells on the Highlander’s reticence and his quick dispatch of his opponent when he sees he must take his enemy’s life to save those of his fellows. By contrast, the mean vengeance on other Highland prisoners taken by the Bloody Duke accords with the known character and legendary cruelty of the English general.

This selection illustrates the artistic power that oral traditional history can achieve. The action marches surely to its climax, the language is sinewy and taut (allowing for some fluff in translation), the dialogue simple and crisp, and the heroic mood of valor and honor sustained from first to last. In place of any vainglorious taunt after the Highlander’s triumph, his sponsor, General Campbell, softly lauds him with a homely adage. All four protagonists fall at once into place. The Highland general and soldier duplicate each other in manly virtue as do the English general and soldier in contemptuous bluster. Cumberland and Campbell debate the merits of the Highlander in a verbal joust enacted out physically by the combatants. The heroism and tragedy of Culloden are felt from the initial prison scene through the wager, the selection of duelists, and the combat, to the final bitter order of slaughter.

In its form, this historical legend resembles other traditions in The Dewar Manuscripts and in clan chronicles. These oral annals are straightforward accounts of raids and feuds and tricks between rival lairds and their men, of varying length, filled with names of families and localities unfamiliar to the outsider. Frequently the sober statements are lit up with marvelous dreams and shocking acts and bizarre events. One unusual tradition describes the imprisonment of two Highlanders in Boston during the American Révolution and their rescue by a countryman they accidentally discovered, Duncan Stewart, who then himself had to flee to Britain. There Stewart encountered the Campbells whom he had saved, and they now intervened with King George III to help Stewart recover his hereditary land. The train of events is astonishing and the coincidences, escapes, and just conclusion heartwarming for a Highland audience. As a specimen of oral art it exhibits some of the same qualities as the Culloden narrative, but without achieving its tautness and tension.⁶

The second text represents a contemporary example of urban American story-telling. It was first told me on June 14, 1967, during my Harvard Thirtieth Reunion at Martha’s Vineyard, by an old friend and classmate going back even to preparatory school at Exeter, William B. Gresham, Jr. “Gresh” resides at Tampa, Florida, where he is in the pest control business, and I telephoned him from Bloomington, Indiana, on June 22 to re-collect the story verbatim. He remembered his source as Tom Dowd, the traveling secretary for the Boston Red Sox, who had spoken to the local branch of the American Personnel Association at the Commerce Club in Tampa in March, 1967.

The first point to observe is that the central motif of this tale exists in tradition. On a field trip in 1953 to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, located in the Mississippi Delta, I heard from a Negro the related story of “John in Alabama.” In this narrative a colored man from Arkansas named John was visiting in Alabama and was informing his friends how much better the colored were treated in Arkansas, when a white man passed by, heard him, and knocked John down. John struck back, and was winning when the police arrived, arrested John, buried him in the ground up to his shoulders, and turned two bulldogs loose on him. John nodded his head so fast the “laws” stopped the dogs and told John to hold his head still and fight fair.⁷

Here is a clear example of a protest tale, and in fact it was told to me by John Courtney drinking coke in his home after I had been refused curb service by a teen-aged white girl because I had “colored” in my car. We may further note that the skillful dodger appears in the Negro but not in the white version, and that the dodger clearly belongs to Negro tradition. In still another tale type, of which I collected three variants, a Negro defies a white man to beat him up and then simply dodges his blows.

Immediately following the delivery of this paper (September 7, 1967), I was told an intermediate variant by Donald Stoddard of Skidmore College, in which the lion rushes three times at the colored boy, who the third time seizes the tender parts. Mr. Stoddard heard this in June, 1966, in Boston from a maintenance supervisor at Northeastern University.

The white text has combined the protest tale of racial injustice, recently surfacing on the American scene, with the honored American tradition of the poker-faced tall tale. Usually tall tales deal with backwoods and agricultural themes—remarkable feats of hunting and shooting, enormous vegetables, extraordinarily rich or poor soil, changeable weather. Such “windies” are amusing but lack any emotional charge. The marriage of exaggeration and protest has produced a potent offspring, a tale funny and grim, articulating the deep anxieties of a racially divided nation.

Both the protest tale and the tall tale are anecdotal in form. That is, they purport to relate actual incidents about real people in brief, conversational narrations. Supernatural beings do not enter into the dramatis personae. The protest tale characteristically makes use of irony and inversion, rather than overt social criticism, by having colored folk accept the white man’s code and extend it to the point of absurdity. The tall tale too contains only natural phenomena and traps the listener by a sudden leap from the possible to the impossible. Tall tales soon become monotonous, and while they can be and are still collected today, the repetitious lies about giant pumpkins and lucky hunting shots mean little to contemporary Americans. In the above text the impulse for creative exaggeration has fastened onto new and more immediate themes. The form remains anecdotal; this is a supposedly factual incident occurring to an actual person in a specific locality, the fearsome one of Jackson, Mississippi, and introducing familiar situations: the appearance of a traffic violator before an implacable judge, a spectacle in a crowded football stadium. As blacks tell tall tales, so whites tell protest tales, and the shift from a black to a white narrator has brought an added awesomeness to the ordeal of the victim. The private incident has become a public entertainment, recalling the punitive ritual of primitive Christians thrust before the lions in the Roman amphitheater. Helpless, friendless, accused, and accursed, the poor little colored boy is the Christ-figure, reviled when he uses his last means of defense to protect himself from his would-be killers.

Platitudinous sermons delivering the message of racial injustice do not circulate among secular Americans, who consume with relish the same preachment hid in a mocking story capped with the customary joke-ending punchline. As befits the mood of the tale, the narrator maintains a solemn tone and a somber rhythm—“awful sure, awful fatal, and awful dead”—along with the deadpan mien of the older frontier Münchausens. But the laughter of this anecdote borders on tears.

In the central scene where the poor Negro boy faces Leo the lion in the football stadium, we see reenacted the single combat of heroic legend, as in the duel between Fierce John’s brother and the British champion. Traditionally the hero battles not only other champions but also monsters, dragons, and wild beasts. The single combat provides one of the visual tableaux defined by Axel Olrik as narrative peaks and perfectly illustrates his law of two to a scene. What episode can more readily stir and imprint itself on a listening audience than the duel to the death between an underdog hero and a powerful ogre before opposing armies or a bloodthirsty throng?

While the Scottish tradition faithfully conveys the heroic mood of classical epic and medieval romance, the American folktale is told in a mock-heroic spirit of parody and irony. Single combats did take place in American life, although not under conditions of chivairy; the Crockett almanacs set forth encounters between Davy and assorted rapscallions of the backwoods, and in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula I collected lurid descriptions of eye-gouging, groinbutting affrays between whiskey-inflamed lumberjacks in barroom melees. The third text in this group reflects the violent and reckless spirit of the Upper Peninsula. Its narrator is a Swedish immigrant, Swan Olson, who specialized in autobiographical yarns in which he outwitted and outfought highway robbers, crazed lumberjacks, and murderous tramps. Yet audacious Swan, a gentle old man of seventy-three when I met him in 1946, scarcely looked the part of the swashbuckler portrayed in the following personal narrative, which I printed in Bloodstoppers and Bearuoalkers.

These three narratives come from quite unlike tellers: a Scottish Highlander, a Harvard graduate living in Florida, a Swedish immigrant in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. One story deals with a famous battle, another with an imaginary public spectacle, a third with employer-employee relations on a farm. They seem to have little in common. Yet generically, esthetically, and traditionally they all conform to the same pattern. Each is told on the plane of sober fact as a realistic occurrence. Each portrays a single combat in which the underdog hero emerges triumphant against a bully or monster. The Swiss folklorist Max Lüthi stresses the pervasive theme in folk narrative “of the defeat of the great by the small, the mighty by the apparently powerless,” and cites examples:

Lüthi sees the same theme displayed in the written literature of Kafka, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Shakespeare, Goethe, and French comedies of manners, but of course in highly complex form. We may extend Lüthi’s examples to American literature, folklore, and history. There come to mind the triumphs of Br’er Rabbit over the bear and the fox, clever John the slave over his Old Marster, and Signifying Monkey over the lion in Negro tradition; of Davy Crockett over b’ars, panthers, and armies of Mexicans and cannibals in frontier legend; of Jack the giant-killer in the southern Appalachians; of Ahab’s conquest of the great white whale; of the perilous odyssey of Huck Finn; of Thoreau’s defiance of the State; of Horatio Alger’s novels celebrating the rapid rise of Ragged Dick, the bootblack; of the success stories of Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie. It is the same tale of a determined underdog hero vanquishing powerful foes or subduing a hostile society.

Our three texts are variations on this theme. From disparate materials the narrators have fashioned dramatic compositions intended to be told. They have followed a construction, presented characters, and employed speech in the manner of universally successful prose traditions. These tales have not accidentally come into existence and endured by chance. They are products of individual oral artists working within a time-honored folk tradition.

Other genres of folk narrative possess stylistic and compositional elements that contribute to their traveling power and staying power. The lowliest of Anglo-American folktale forms, the anecdote of local characters, proves on closer examination to follow a fixed story line that ends with the dupe lamenting his deception at the hands of the trickster. Folktales have to fight for approval from fresh audiences at each new telling, and their long survival testifies to the persistent appeal of oral fiction.

Now that written literature is receiving such intensive and subtle analysis, perhaps more critical attention will be directed to oral literature, its precursor and constant supplier.

Notes

1. The Jests of Hierocles and Philagrius, newly translated from the Greek by Charles Clinch Bubb (Cleveland: Rowfant Club, 1920. Wittol Series No. 1).

2. David Dempsey, “Refurbishing American Authors,” Saturday Review 50 (June 10, 1967): 30.

3. In The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1965),pp. 129-41.

4. The Dewar Manuscripts, I, Scottish West Highland Folk Tales, collected originally in Gaelic by John Dewar, translated into English by Hector MacLean, edited with introduction and notes by John Mackechnie (Glasgow: William MacLellan, 1964), pp. 233-36.

5. The relevant motif in Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955-58) is H 1561.2, “Single combat to prove valor.”

6. The Dewar Manuscripts, pp. 218-24.

7. Richard M. Dorson, Negro Tales from Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Calvin, Michigan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), p. 110.

8. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952; reprinted 1972), pp. 251-54.

9. “Parallel Themes in Folk Narrative and in Art Literature,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 4 ( 1967): 3-16.

Reprinted from Medieval Literature and Folklore Studies, Essays in Honor of Francis Lee Utley, edited by Jerome Mandel and Bruce A. Rosenberg (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), pp. 305-21.