Myth, Oral and Written
American Folklore.
by Richard M. Dorson.
University of Chicago Press. 328 pp. $4.50.
“Since the arc of tradition in a given culture may vary considerably from country to country, it is only right that the study of folklore should follow the contours of a particular civilization. The scientific folklorist seeks out, observes, collects, and describes the inherited traditions of the community, whatsoever forms they take.”
Such is Professor Dorson’s undertaking, and it is a broad program which has my own sympathies and interests deeply involved. Yet such a program might easily parallel Lewis Carroll’s idea of a map of the scale of one mile to the mile. Carroll pointed out that since such a map would inevitably rouse the hostility of farmers, we might alternatively use the earth itself as a map of itself. And is not this what folklorists have hit upon as a strategy of culture—with the ordinary citizen in the role of the farmer about to be blanketed by an earth map? If so, can we find some means of awareness that will not obliterate the cultural scene, some way to get enough light through and still prevent a general brainwashing by putting too much light on?
One of the many things in this book for which I am grateful is the clarity with which Professor Dorson reveals the oral bias of the folklorist. “American field collectors have found surprisingly little trace of heroes in oral tradition. Vaunted pioneers like Daniel Boone and Kit Carson live in books, not in tales. . . .” Yet it is a pity that by using a rigid oral criterion, the folklorist should neglect the riches of other media. The dynamic patterns of oral culture, which had been suppressed by centuries of print culture, revived swiftly in the later 19th century, in poetry as much as in anthropology. But this new stress on the spoken word should not conceal the peculiar dynamics of the printed word in fostering a folklore of its own, and one which still seems to be hidden from the literary man.
As students of ancient myth have sometimes pointed out, the peculiarity of myth lies not in its content but its mode: a myth tells us in a few phrases how some new situation worked out its consequences in a culture over a long period. Because the written form, while capable of hyperbole, tends strongly to exclusive, single-level statement and awareness, it seems natural to think of such forms as less likely to embody myth or folklore. But the all-at-onceness of a complex action—whether private or collective, whether in the tale of Sisyphus or of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth—is perhaps the basic form of myth, and it appears equally in the Lincoln yarn or the Madison Avenue ad.
Another fascinating feature of American Folklore is its rich illustration of how creativity is nourished by the interplay of cultures. The book of Slave Songs of 1867, for example, “came about as a joint enterprise of Union agents stationed on the Carolina coast during the war.” Yet, Professor Dorson writes, it is not so easy to see why “the yeasty oral traditions of the American Negro took form in the plantation culture of the Old South.” He suggests that the cotton plantation economy, based on a staple that molded life from Georgia to Texas, also “molded the Southern slaves into homogeneity.” But might there not have been in fact an oral homogeneity among the white planters themselves which made such an interplay possible with pre-literate Negroes? An oral tradition was much less characteristic of the highly literate and individualist North, and the “Northern freedmen who settled in free States before emancipation possess none of this folklore.” In fact, the Southern white code of the cowboy who has “gotta do what I gotta do,” may be an echo of an older (feudal) oral code.
The principle of creative enrichment through the interplay of worlds on some inner or outer frontier appears throughout American Folklore—in Professor Dorson’s analysis both of the businessman’s joke and of the immigrant’s relation to nationalism. Is it not the same principle that is wryly encoded in the remark, “The first ingredient of genius is an unhappy childhood”? Perhaps the same creative goals can be achieved both individually and collectively by less wasteful means as we come to understand more. Professor Dorson has done much to advance such understanding.
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