Lore and Language The Journal of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language

Editor J.D.A. Widdowson Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, University of Sheffield

Editorial Board N .F . Blake, University of Sheffield D.O. Buchan, Memorial University of Newfoundland G . Cox, University of Reading D .G. Hey, University of Sheffield J.M. Kirk, The Queen ·s University of Belfast R . L e ith, Leamington Spa C. Neilands, The Queen's University of Belfast P .S. Smith, Memorial University of Newfoundland

© 1993 Hisarlik Press. Apart fro1n any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticis1n or review, as pennitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or where reproduction is required for classroon1 use or coursework by students, this publication 1nay only be reproduced, stored or trans1nitted, in any fonn or by any tneans, with the prior pennission in writing of the publishers. US copyright law applicable to users in the USA. Lore and Language is published twice annually, in January and July. Volutne 11 is a single vol mne ( cotnprising two issues) covering two years, 1992-1993; Volutne 12 will cover 1994. Subscription rates for Volutne 11 are: Institutional, £50.00; Personal, £12 (all prices in Sterling). Send pay1nent to Hisarlik Press, 4 Catisfield Road, Enfield Lock, Middlesex EN3 6BD, UK, or credit card details to Vine House Distribution, Waldenbury, North Cointnon, Chailey, East Sussex BNg 4DR, UK. All other business correspondence concerning Volutne 11 and later volutnes should be addressed to Hisarlik Press, 4 Catisfield Road, Enfield Lock, Middlesex EN3 6BD, UK; tel. +44 992 800 989; fax +44 81 292 6118; e-tnail: lore(i!!hisarlik.denton.co.uk. Correspondence concerning vol mnes previous to Volunu.·. 11 should be addressed to Sheffield Acadetnic Press, 343 Fulwood Road, Sheffield S10 3BP, UK. For editorial correspondence and Instructions to Authors see inside back cover. The opinions expressed in this journal are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher, and are the responsibility of the individual authors. Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenha1n, Wiltshire Lore and Language The Journal of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language

Volume 11 Number 1 1992-1993

Contents WIDDOWSON, J.D.A. 1-2 Editorial ALABA, OLUGBOYEGA 3-25 The place of verbal jokes in Yoruba life ATKINSON, DAVID 27-44 Incest in ballads: the availability of cultural meaning EBEOGU, AFAM N. 45-67 '"City and transcity" folk literature: the dramaturgy and rhetoric of oral advertisetnent of medical products in Nigeria FRYE, CHARLES 69-90 The African South: a critique of Puckett's Folk beliefs of the Southern Negro YANKAH, VICTOR 91-94 Review Article-The novels of Chinua Achebe: a reappraisal N OTES AND QUERIES 95-97 REVIEWS 99-126

Lore and Language 11, 1-2 (1992-1993)

Editorial

The publication of Lore and Language Volume 11 marks a new phase in the development of the journal. Founded in 1969, primarily as a newsletter and discussion forum for fieldworkers, correspondents and others interested in the Survey of Language and Folklore, Lore and Language has been published twice a year since then, and will celebrate its silver jubilee in 1994. Its relaunch in a new format under the auspices of Hisarlik Press provides an opportunity to remind readers and contributors that back numbers are available from the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language (CECTAL), an institution which developed directly from the ongoing Survey of Language and Folklore, inaugurated in 1964. It is also an occasion for restating the aims and scope of the journal and to invite new contributors and readers to join the international list of subscribers to this unique publication. This interdisciplinary journal includes articles on all aspects of cultural tradition and welcomes contributions from the fields of folklore, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, popular culture, psychology, history (especially oral history) and literary studies, among others. It regards all such disciplines as making their distinctive contribution to a holistic description and analysis of culture, particularly in their mediation through language. Modern approaches to the study of folklore and cultural tradition, whether theoretical or applied, are emphasised, and the recognition of the importance of urban folklore is central to the aims of the journal. It has a special interest in English folklore, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and British culture, but publishes articles in English from all cultures and languages; material on African folklore and language, for example, is strongly represented. A substantial proportion of the journal is devoted to reviews of recent releases across the very wide field of interest concerned. A Notes and Queries section maintains the discussion forum which has been an important feature from the outset. The journal also actively encourages written contributions from young writers entering the disciplines concerned. It seeks to promote the work of younger scholars, especially those in England and other parts of the British Isles where folklore and cultural studies are currently enjoying something of a renaissance after a lengthy period of neglect. The two issues comprising Volume 11, which covers 1992-1993, 2 J.DA. Widdowson include a typically wide-ranging selection of subject matter-from English regional dialects and blason populaire to folk beliefs, verbal jokes, early English drama, the ballad and aspects of moral education. Volume 12 will consist of a celebratory 25th anniversary double issue of papers presented at the highly s uccessful 22nd International Ballad Conference of the Societe Internationale d ,Ethnologie et de Folklore in Belfast in 1992. The conference conveners, Dr John M. Kirk and Dr Colin Neilands of the Queen's University of Belfast will be the Guest Editors. We also take this opportunity to thank all friends and subscribers who h ave supported the journal and the Centre for almost three decades. At the same time, we welcome new friends and subscribers, and look forward to your contribution and your support in the years to come.

J.D.A. WIDDOWSON Lore and Language 11, 3-25 (1992- 1993)

The place of verbal jokes in Yoruba life

OLUGBOYEGA ALABA

Introd uction The Yoruba The Yoruba people1 primarily inhabit the South-Western part of Nigeria (Lagos, Ogun, QyQ, Ond6, parts of Kwara and Bendel States). The people are basically hard-working peasants, hunters, traders and craft-workers. They are in most things religous in the African sense. 2 They love verbal art and music.3 They are fond of social activities at leisure when they engage themselves in various entertaining activities such as outdoor and indoor games, storytelling and cracking jokes in chit-chat conversation over drinks. Not even the influence of Western civilisation has been able to reduce let alone destroy these customs of the Y aruba people. The customs are continually adapted to the changing culture of the people while their essence remains intact.

The Yoruba language in relation to verbal jokes The Yoruba language is a tone language4 which is also rich in words and lends itself to easy manipulation for generating puns, riddles, jokes, proverbs, tales, chants and songs, among other forms of communication by the people. Looking cursorily at Yoruba verbal jokes, one is inclined to regard most of them as mere instances of figures of speech such as metaphors, play upon words, play upon tones and idiomatic expressions. But they are really more than these. If one carefully considers them in their social context, that is, the totality of their cultural and sociological background, one would definitely see them as constituting interesting problems for scholars such as linguists, folklorists, 4 Olugboyega Alaba

anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, historians and even philosophers.

The focus of the present study In this paper, we focus on each successful Yoruba verbal joke as a speech act5 and will attempt to answer the basic question: "What is the significance or overall meaning of Yoruba verbal jokes?"6

The significance of Y oruba verbal jokes AMUSEMENT

The primary significance of Yoruba verbal jokes is to make the Yoruba laugh when and if there is need for it. In this, the Yoruba as a people are not unique, for laughter is so highly regarded the world over. Laughter, a. "'is a universal human response"7, b. "the 8 universally uniting commodity" , and c. ""a very effective antidote to the tensions built up by the stress of modern life."8 All these observations point in only one direction: it is that human beings do need to laugh occasionally. Since Yoruba verbal jokes provoke laughter, they are meant to satisfy this human need and as such constitute a significant aspect of Yoruba life. Laughter is the overt yardstick for verbal jokes throughout the world. Psychologists see laughter as ··an experimental test" while, to them:

"Humour is the only form of communication in which a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a stereotyped, predictable response on the psychological reflex level. Thus the response can be used as an indicator for the presence of the elusive quality that is called humour. " 9 This has been tested during our fieldwork on Yoruba verbal jokes. Whenever a Yoruba verbal joke is created, laughter ensues, but occasionally the people merely smile; in short, there is normally no adverse reaction from any of the language users involved, and so humour is assumed. Basically, Yoruba verbal jokes are a means of amusement. There is, however, a limit to laughter in Yoruba speech, because they say: Iw()n l~rfn dun mQ, Verbal jokes in Yoruba life 5

~ si rin in nfba. (Laughter needs measurement, Do laugh moderately). This is in keeping with the universal truism that "Too much of anything is bad." So, the Yoruba use their verbal jokes to provoke laughter, not indiscriminately but judiciously. They are always conscious of the joking relationship, in the absence of which they do not crack any jokes. However, with verbal jokes punctuating Yoruba speech, whatever is going on is kept alive and interesting. No Yoruba gathering can be dull and quiet from the beginning till the end. This is not to say that the people are ordinary noise­ makers. They do deliberate on vital issues, but verbal jokes would still be incorporated, albeit subtly. In an ordinary Yoruba gathering where there is no work to do and no specific point to discuss, Yoruba verbal jokes are created to fill the apparent vacuum. Such jokes are known as klf.numadil~/ klf.numaiigbofo/kl{,numatutu (May-mouths-not-be-idle/May-mouths­ not-be-cold). Thus engaged, the Yoruba disallow erokero (evil thoughts) because they know that "'Idle hands are the weapons of the Devil" and they do not want to "'give the Devil a chance". For instance, a group of young men were waiting outside the Qy<} State Broadcasting Station, lbadan, one bright morning in October, 1977. The following was recorded from their speech:

A: Ta 1~ SCJ pe a n duro de? B: Bamji Oj6 ni in. C: Bamji Oj6! Bamji 0 rilu ni 0 j6 o! B: B<} ba rilu y6o kuku j6. A: 6 dabii ti ~ni kan t6 ni oun Fajana ni Ek6. W<]n waa ni ki FaJ· ana 6 sora k6 maa J. ana m6 m6to lenu! 6 0 0 0 0

( A: Who did you say we are waiting for? B: It is Bamji Oj6. C: Bamjf Oj6! It is because Bamji has no one to play drum music for him that he has refused to dance; if he gets good drum music, he would surely dance. A: It is just like someone in Lagos who calls himself Fajana. People warn him not to run across the street when a 6 Olugboyega Alaba

car/lorry is speerling by. )

The speakers consciously played upon these Yoruba personal names to amuse themselves. During collective work such as qw~ (occasional communal self­ help work) and adr6, (regular, friendly, rotatory, self-help work) Yoruba verbal jokes are created to serve as amu~f{yd (aid-to-quick­ execution-of-business). One such joke was recorded during one qw~ to scoop out ...melon seeds from their pods in August, 1968 at our farm. A Mr. Qj~wQbi told the following humorous fable: 10 Ngba k~n, ~daba ati aparo, ¢r~ ni WQn. Adaba bi gmgblnrin ~~n ~o~o, Ojo leekg ~· Aparo n~~~ si ... bi gmgkunrin k~~­

Ogiinl~~-11 Adaba waa ... ni iw<;,> Qr'2 oun Aparo ... ba I un mii Ojo ~gd¢ oun ri IQ ebi o. Oun o ni j p~~ de o .... Aparo nl, ... ~ Hoo.

Qn~~ re 0 I. Ngba ¢r~ r~ lg t~n, Aparo gbe Ojo Q t... a a! Adaba de, 6 beere <;?_IDQ r~, Apar~ n I oun Q rna ri i m(! o. Adaba dak~ ko fowun. Ngba 6 ya, Aparo neee lo ebi, 6 fi omo e s6 0 0 Adaboa. Actaba n~~~ gbe Ogunl~~ 'o ~ ta a. ~ugbQn ~ra OApar~ (! gba a rigba Q gbq; q dey~, (! b ~ Ierl igi 6 r1 ke: ·~6 ~Ogunl~~! o tOgunlee! 6 tOgunl~~! ~~ Adaba n ~~~ ha d~y~ Q b~ Ierl igi 6 n ~e ""Ngbo o t6jo,

Ta r1 I gb666? .... ~ 0 0 Ngbo o tOjo T, a' n' I g h'CJ_QQ. ' '·~ Ngbo o tOjo

T a n I gb666?" .._ 0 0 0 Igbe tawgn mejeejl ri ke doni nl In ni. (Once upon a time, D ove and Bushfowl were friends. Dove had one female child and called her Rain. Bushfowl had one male child-Ogunl~t,?- One d ay, Dove said, ·~My friend Bushfowl, help me look after my child, 1 am going on a journey. I shall not stay long:· Bushfowl agreed and wished his friend safe journey. But after his friend had gone away, Bushfowl sold Rain! Wh~n D ove returned, he asked for his child. Bushfowl replied that he could no longe r find her. Dove kept mute. Later Verbal jokes in Y oruba life 7

on, Bushfowl too went on a journey and left his child with Dove. Dove retaliated by selling off Ogiinl~~· But Bushfowl could not endure this when he learnt that Dove had sold his child; he turned into a bird, flew to a tree top and started crying:

~~He sold,Ogiinl~~! He sold Qgunl~~! He sold Ogiinl~~!" Then Dove too turned into a bird, flew up to a tree top and started saying: "When you sold Rain, Who knew of it? When you sold Rain, Who knew of it? When you sold Rain, Who knew of it'r' These have been the peculiar cries of both of them. In such instances, the humour produced would go a long way towards removing the tension that might have built up as a result of previous activities; it would also prevent boredom from setting in. Thus the execution of the job would be facilitated. On any joyous occasion, room is made for verbal jokes in the Yoruba social gathering. Most of the verbal jokes on any such occasion centre on drinks:

' Qmu kfnnf: ~ tgn na m f ri.gba k~n si i Qjare. Qmu' kej f: 0 ri mu un gbun iin, 0 mu iin gbun un, omi odo lo pe e ni? Qmu kfnnf: Kf l~mu wa fiin, ~ebf mumu ni. Qmu kejf: Q daa, melo6 lo tf i ra?

Qmu kfnnf: ~yin ~e e 0 olura, ol6w6o I gb6.

(First Drinkard: Please pour me another calabashful (of beer/palm wine). Second Drinkard: You keep draining it as if it were mere water from the river! First Drinkard: What is beer/palm wine for, isn't it for 8 Olugboyega Alaba

drinking? Second Drinkard: Agreed. But how much have you bought? First Drinkard: Thank you, Mr. Buyer, the antisocial w althy man!)

During games for relaxation (both indoor and outdoor), the Yoruba make use of verbal jokes to amuse themselves. Those who detest being made fun of in such situations are usually isolated or wittily advised to isolate themselves honourably:

Wo o, <)r~~ wa, Madamisilnilara kf 1 dodo! (Look here, our friend, "Do-not-spill-water-on-me" should not come to a place where water is being fetched!) 12 The most popular indoor game in this connection is Ayo • Consider the following good-natured abuses which are verbal jokes in the a yo context:

Alayo kinni: Ta fun mi, ode.0 0 Abo 0 ri sun? Alayo keji: 0 ro p6 0 ti pa? Ng 00 mu <:; dQfa! Eyf ni 0 gbe; narun r~ ko j~ 0 rfran taara m¢. Alayo kinnf: Mo ~ebf ~ran 1~ ~ ta, o a le pa mi layo. Alayo kejf: Qm<:; Eklfi, Qm<:; Qk~r~. Alayo kinnf: Eni, eji, ~ta. Ewo 16 ku? Alayo kejf: 6 ku sikin ti a je nf sf{fiin saafu!

(First player: Play, you fool. Are you sleeping or what? Second player: You think you~ve beaten me? I'll beat you in six consecutive rounds. Play this, your nettlerash is making it difficult for you to see well. First Player: Isn't it meat you are known to sell? You cannot beat me at this ayo game. Second player: Ekltl man. Ik~r~/Squirrel's offspring. 13 First player: One, two, three. What else remains? Second player: It remains chicken which we ate at seven o ·clock prompt. 14

There are many favourite puns at the ayo game. One example is: Verbal jokes in Yoruba life

Ma a ta, rna a ta, okiti <)bQ 16 pe e ni? C'I will play' I will play!'' You think it is a monkey's somersault?)

The pun is with the monosyllabic verbs ta "to play" and ta "'to bounce". It constitutes a funny rhetorical question interjected by a winner to his less fortunate opponent who earlier has been loudly clamouring for his turn to play. At home, between married women and the friendly relatives of their husbands, the joking relationship is often exploited for the sake of amusement. Consider the following:

a. Iyaw6: Bur9da Y ~16, mo f~~ yara de ile wa were. Aburo QkQ (Bur¢da Y elo ): Ile wo ni ile ole? ~e ile ab~r~w<) bi ile okete y~n naa?

(Married woman: Brother Yellow, I want to go to our house and come back, quickly. Husband's junior brother (Brother Yellow): Which is a thief's house? Is it not that small house like the house of a big rat which makes one bend very low before entering it?)

b. Iyaw6: Bur(>da, mo ri IQ ile wa ki ng b<) 0. "'Mo ri lo ile wa" ti k1 i J. e ki 0 0 obinrin 6 m6 ara re leru. Se o ko 0 0 0 0 m<) pe awa la ni Q patapata bauyii nl.··-, Iyaw6: Iy~n ni o!

(Married woman: Brother, I am going to our house. r ll be back very soon. Husband's junior brother: ""I am going to our house" which makes a married woman forget that she is a slave. Don't you know that we now own you completely? Married woman: That is great!) 10 Olugboyega Alaba

In this kind of joking relationship anthropologists rightly observe the expression of hostility which has been brought about by marriage relationship whereby some adult has to leave his/her own family to live with another family and become an integral part of the latter. The person-man or woman-is drawn into a new group but he/she is an intruder. Conflict is latent, but strife must be avoided. The permanent safety valve for the tension situation which can never be completely resolved is the consciously created verbal jokes. So hostility expresses itself tn teasing, and it is permitted and indeed required. In fact, '"it is much better to insult someone in a jocular way than harbour a corroding and sulky antagonism. The response must not, of course, be anger and resentment at the insult, but a good-humoured laugh.'~ 15 Among their age-groups, Yoruba boys and men coin jocular names for one another because of the same psychological need, i.e. amusement. The jocular names are known as inagij(j (nicknames). Whoever detests his own inagij(j is regarded as antisocial and is soon ostracised by his playmates. Such nicknames usually describe vividly the main attributes/characteristics of the bearers. Consider the following examples:

1. Ikan rila bori-jagbadu, Atari o joorun 6 ran. (Big-headed giant ant, The-centre-of-the-head-shuts-off-sunshine.)

11. 6-te-J· ee-J· ee-tol6bo-Ieyin q 0 00 00 0 ' ~6kq!

(He-follows-stealth i I y -a-vagina -owner, He-goat!)

111. Qya-o-1Qriln-a-ki-i-16fi. (The grass-cutter-has-no-neck-one-grips-it-by-the-head.) iv. Arigba-rila-mu-ti-okuu- 'tara. (He-who-takes-a-big -ca Ia bash-to-drink -1 iqu or-at-the­ Celebration-of-an-untimely-death). Verbal jokes in Yoruba life 11

v. 6-tori-amala-ba-won-gb6kin1-rOy6. 0 0 0 (Be,cause-of-yam-flour-food-he-helps-in-carrying-a-corpse­ to-Qy(>.)

INDIRECT INSTRUCTION Yoruba verbal jokes are used to teach some moral or wisdom. They are used to condemn any behaviour indulged in by some fellow(s) which is disapproved of by the society; consequently, they serve a corrective purpose and are a deterrent to others, since normal human beings prefer praise to abuse (a good name to a bad name) and would rather belong to their community than be isolated from it. Moreover, each joke appears to underline a norm, i.e., has some wisdom to inculcate in the hearers:

~~I....aughter appears to underline the norm by placing the deviant or ambiguous item of behaviour in sharp relief against the norm."10 Yoruba verbal art is thus full of satire because the verbal artists do not only want to amuse their audience but also to instruct them, so Yoruba verbal art (both prose and poetry) includes satire. Both traditional and contemporary Yoruba theatre make good use of satire. The Agbe~ok6/A{drinj6 that has been studied in detail by Professor Adedeji, 7 the Ij~bu ritual dr~ma that has been fully c!escribed by Professor Ogunba, 18 the ~[[IG~l~d1, group of the ~gbado studied by Professor Qlabimtan, cJ and the ~sa chanters studied by Chief Qlajubu,Z0 as well as contemporary humour­ oriented concert parties su~h as Moses Qlaiya, alias Baba Sahi and I:is Alawada group, and Oj6 Ladifp<), alias Baba Mer6 and his Awada K~rfk~ri group, to mention just a few, corroborate this observation. A few examples from some genres of Yoruba verbal art will suffice here.

Orin etfyc:rf

I~<)la has rightly observed that the etfy~rf may be seen as part of a larger set of instruments to control the conscience of the Yoruba society:21 12 Olugboyega Alaba

The etfy~rf is the moral policeman, to see that society' s norms are respected. He, like the policeman, therefore, always looks for areas where order is being threatened. He sniffs around to discover whose private misbehaviour is endangering public stability or where individual greed is impoverishing communal values. H e then draws the attention of everyone to the malpractice, but he does so in such a tellingly pleasant way that the audience' s feeling of annoyance at the culprit is mitigated by the humour-packed presentation .... For example etfy~rf talks of a lady-thief and he says: Sarfyu Op6p6 ii ja b6to 16le, 6 ii ja b6to 16le 6 k6 ' lee wolewole. Wolewole nlkan 16 fl s6su mefa, 6 t~w¢n de, 6 k~n i tf y66 f~ ~- (Sarfyu of Op6p6 quarters is very good at stealing, she is really very good, she burgled the house of a sanitary inspector. The inspector single-handedly jailed her for six months. Now she is out of prison, who wants to marry her?)22 Esa 0

One important component of !;,sa chant, according to Qlajubu, 23 IS witty sayings. Below are a few examples: a. From Adlsa Adedijf, Iklrun: 6 ~e Iaelae, 0 6o gbadun ara. Ara y66 rna a gbad un r~. Bi oylnb6 ~e gbadun bata. Bi alagba~e ~e gbadun il~ tf 6 ba kiin. ~6t6k6t6 oj ii o ~ee gbena sf. Aaya b~ ~ 1~ Q b~ are, Sebi igi oun o ga ni. 0 0 0 J;;:ranko t6 16un 6 ba takiite j~, Eyfn ~nu r~ o nf 1 ~~ku kan. (This is life, You will enjoy your body. Your body will enjoy you. As Europeans enjoy shoes. Verbal jokes in Yoruba life 13

As farm labourers enjoy thick bush. Eye pits are not good for placing lamps. The monkey jumps down and starts to run, Isn ~t it because the tree (from which it has jumped) is not tall? The animal that would spoil the trap Would lose all its teeth.) b. From Lasiinkanmi, Iklrun:

Ata nf f mii yaw6 al~ ana b I okele gboiigbo,

I Gba I yaw6 ba b I okele gboiingbo, Oko re a se ~~Ha!~' 9 0 0 0 A nf ~' Ma se 'Ha!' rna~· 0 0

A n fyan 16 ya mQ I un lQWQ,

Iyan k6 ya mQ I yaw6 lQWQ, Qb~ 16 dun. (Tasty peppery soup is what m akes a newly wed bride take very large morsels. When she takes one very large morsel, Her husband would raise an exclamation. She would tell him not to be surprised For it was a big slab of pounded yam that broke off and clung to her hand. That is not the fact. It is that the soup is sweet. )24

Orin ij~ From the group at Igangan: ~ a nl I bAr~bayQ mQ o. E e e e e. A a nl i bArQbay¢ mQ ba a ~QdQn. ~ a nf 1 bArgbay{} m<;? 0. Eeeee A a nl i bArQbayg mg ba a ~Qctgn. Egiingiin ¢ wiin ygl~. Ko t6 nl I gba bfkii de Eyf ¢rna daa! A a nf I bArQbayQ mQ ba a ~QdQn. (We will not worship ArQbayQ any more. 14 Olugboyega Alaba

Eh eh eh eh eh! We will not worship ArqbayQ any more during our annual festivaL We will not worship ArqbayQ any more. Eh eh eh eh eh! We will not worship Arqbayg any more during our annual festival. The egungun is very lazy, It cannot save one from death. This is not good! We will not worship Arqba,;;¢ any more during our annual festival. )-5 ljala

Emi ni Igbagb<} wa lq lee Y~mwo? Emi ni I.iisunmade lQ ree mil

Lo6do0 0 adaunse?0 En I tf o ba gba kadara. I.iisun aya Alnla, Oluar~ y66 gba kodoro.

Gbogbo ow6 tf o ba moo0 0 fi robl, 6 b6 s I6do ada~nse. 0 0 0 0 0 (For what on earth did a Christian go to consult an Ifa priest? What was liisunade seeking from the magic diviner? A person who is not contented with his God-ordained fortunes, liisun, wife of Alnla, Will assuredly become penniless. All the money you would have invested in your kola trade Has now passed into the magic diviner's coffers. 26

Orin agbe

Mo Iemi o Ie ~e ooo. Mo lemi o le se 6oo. Wosflatu 16 le se o o. Ng o le yIn <}r~ m~fa sf lie kan. Ng o le f' eyf ~e fi<}hun ~e. (I say I cannot practise it, I say I cannot practise it. It is Wosilatu who can practise it. Verbal jokes in Y aruba life 15

I cannot choose six boyfriends from one house. I cannot befriend this one and that one simultaneously.)27

Orin murana28 a. 6 fe 'bmrin Akengbe, 9 0 0 0 se bawa o ri un;

6 ~~ m I 6k6o I pake lo e booboo I Ge. 0 6 fe b'inrin Akengbe, 9 0 0 0 se bawa a ri 'un; 6 ~~ m '6k6o 'pake lo e b<} 'boo 'Ge. Saamu tgg ba gba · Ge g gb~bgra, N 'tori onipakee lq rna rna ri f~ 'Ge oo. (He slept with Akangbe's wife, Thinking that we saw him not; And used his hernia-infected penis to cohabit with lge. He slept with Akangbe's wife, Thinking that we saw him not; And used his hernia-infected penis to cohabit with lge. Samuel, if you remarry lge, you remarry a demon, Because lge is now married to a victim of hernia. )29 Here the poet exposes and ridicules one very adulterous man who first illicitly slept with a certain woman and then proceeded to seduce that same woman's daughter from the latter's husband. These are horrible acts. The original husband of the seduced woman was warned against taking back the wife so as to avoid hernia-infection. Although this shows the poet's ignorance of the non-infectiousness of hernia, a rupture of the muscle wall enclosing the large intestine, the moral lesson of the satire in this stanza used by the songster humorously to ridicule a shameless elder, remains tangible and valid. In b. below, the poet describes an adulteress as a busybody, a lazy person, who is also fond of gossip. This acquaints people with the fact that vices tend to cluster. Here, adultery, marital infidelity, is portrayed as the begetter of various other vices. The song is intended to prod the adulteress to turn over a new leaf. b. Of6f6o ·lee, Alal~~d6pin-in;

Bq ba d6de a SI maa s I (Jr(J ~ym. 16 Olugboyega Alaba

Ofofoo I lee,

Alaleedopin-in00

I Bo0 ba dode a s'i maa s oro0 0 ey'in.0

Qb'inrin tl ri. p I eetl a§<;;.> me} I I abiya,

Oun I I al~gb<)riin -alee-maa-mllk~n o. (The household busybody, The very lazy one; When outside the house she would gossip. The household busybody, The very lazy one; When outside the house she would gossip. A woman who keeps the edge of the wrapper under the armpit; Such is surely the nonchalant-possessor-of-a-thousand­ boyfriends.)30 itan apanill[rin-iin Most of the Yoruba short stories told to amuse the audience are very funny and appear factual.31 They are actually meant to serve as satire. Consider the following:

a. Okunrin kan r~ fanta 'igo kan mu. Ko p~ l~y'in naa tl'it<) fi ri. gbon on. 0 ba di oko ob'inrin re mii o nl "Ki ng mu 0 0 0 0 0 fari.ta <;;.>lqgb<)n-kc}b<) nis~nyln kf 'it{} s'i yara maa gb(]n mii. Ko ~~ o. Ng o ni f gba."" (One man bought a bottle of Fanta to drink. Not quite long from then he was so pressed by nature that he felt like urinating. He quickly held his private part and declared: ''For me to drink thirty kobo Fanta now and be ready to pass it out as waste? Never, I shall not agree!~') This story is not only funny but it also satirically condemns mimr;­ ojtj,-ow6-jit, "too much love for money". b. Okunrin ara oke kan ni. 6 lo sise lEkoo. Owo waa tan ( ~ 6wo re. Won s'i so fun un pe \~6n maa ri. te waya sile. T{ w~n oba t~ wayao ni aw<;;.>n obi ooluwaar~ yoo ba maa fowo rannse. L6 ba beere pe eeloo ni won fi ri. te waya? 0 0 0 Won nf egbaaarun ni; ewa mej'i abo. L6 ba ko ewa mej'i ab~ to k~ u ku laye lc}run, lo ba kd o I<;;.> si 'idi bpo lo ba di Verbal jokes in Y oruba life 17

HWaya mo t~ Q o, Ba mi WI fun yaaa mi o, Ow6 oUnJ· e o si 16w6 o. 0 0 0 K<] yaa tete m6w6 wa o." 6 ~e b~~ tan nlyl, lle ibi t6 ri gbe 16 kQrl sL Ko tl 1 p~s~da tan t} aW<,?n <]m\) jaguda fi 16 OWO to ko Sl }d} op6! (This is one man from the hinterland. He went to Lagos to work. And it came to pass that he became broke. He was told that wire could be pressed, i.e. a telegram could be sent to one's parents back at home, and they would quickly send money to relieve one. He quickly asked them how much it would cost to press the wire (send the telegram) and he was told that it was twenty five kobo. He quickly took the remaining twenty five kobo with him, went to the foot of one electric pole and started to say: HWire, I do press you. Please tell my mother, That money for food has been exhausted. She should please send money quickly.~~ After having done this, he went back to his house. No sooner had he left the foot of the pole than thieves rushed there and picked up the money!) This story is amusing and it also teaches one to find out properly how any new thing is done before embarking upon it. One very interesting class of Yoruba verbal jokes also used as satire is those created by placing the deviant or ambiguous linguistic item in sharp relief against the norm. Non-native hearers seldom catch the jokes, so they may not laugh while native speakers are laughing in such a situation. For instance, in Won nl akayin, o o y6 J·egede? 0 00 0 000 Akayln nl "KI a ha ri hwa h~h~h~h~'r'

(The toothless was teased, ~~would you eat bananas?" He replied, ~,;What else has one been looking for?") In the translation, the joke is obviously lost, since it is based on the inability of the toothless person to say "Ki Ia ha n wa t~l~t~l~?" because this involves articulating the sounds It/ and Ill, both of 18 Olugboyega Alaba which require some use of an active teeth ridge! The following example involves Yoruba orthography:

One woman, Jqk~, wrote the obituary of her late father in one of the daily newspapers on one April Fool,s Day (1st April) and ended the write-up with ''Joke for the family,, instead of "Jqk~ for the family"! People who should have attended the funeral merely took the information as an April Fool joke and J9k~ was quite surprised at the poor turnout. In fact, Joke is not the same word as J c;kl[! JQk~ has told the family a joke! Most humorous Yoruba proverbs underline some social norm as well as amuse the people. Consider the following examples: a. Ohun gbogbo l()bun o nf, Bfi to6run k6. 0 (The dirty person lacks many things, But not filth.) This emphasises the fact that it is laughable as well as antisocial to be dirty, while its deeper meaning is that no human being is entirely worthless. b. Tftf tf eleyfn gan-ii-gan 6 fi ja sf koko, trm la 6 ~e bf 6 ri rin! (Until the person with protruding teeth falls into a ditch, people would think that he has all the while been laughing!) This is humorous because the appearance of the person' s mouth which cannot be properly closed is laughably deceitful. The deep meaning of the proverb is that people should not always take things at their face value.

RESTORING LOST HARMONY Yoruba jokes are used to settle quarrels and cheer up people who are in sorrow, pain or fear. This is possible because the Yoruba have such a broad outlook on life that it is not difficult for them to rationalise any event, however unpleasant it may appear. The final settlement of domestic quarrels is the prerogative of the immediate Verbal jokes in Yoruba life 19 elder. For instance, in the case of an agboole (a compound), the baale (the eldest man in the household) may jokingly disperse some quarrelling members of his household by saying:

Emi ni mo j~bi; ~ rna ja m<}, lja ti pari! (I am to blame, stop quarrelling; the quarrel is over!) It appears incongruous for someone who is not party to a quarrel to accept responsibility for it. A Yoruba verbal joke is at work here which is meant to show that that quarrel was ultimately baseless after all. If the people concerned had been more broad-minded, more patient and sounder in their judgement, the misunderstanding would not have ensued. Elders who are usually patient and broad­ minded are like little children who seldom quarrel in the adult sense of the word. To tell an offending wife to apologise to her husband, an elder may use the following laughter-provoking story: Oblnrin, kan ~ee~l s6 p_a 9k9 r~. 6 ba yara b~ 9k9 r~ nl Yoruba Ij~bu bayH pe HJ; s6 e, baale ~ni, ~6oun jab<}!,,

(One woman accidentally released flatulen~e in the presence of her husband. She quickly apologised in Ij~bu Yoruba thus: HPlease, my husband, it came out accidentally!") Incidentally, the Ij~bu Yoruba 4 s6 (please) is nearly homophonous with the standard Yoruba ~ s6 (you released flatulence) as if she wanted to accuse her husband of the "foul"! After telling this funny story, and having allowed the laughter to die down, the elder would ask the offending wife to apologise for the wrong she had done. In case the offended party in a domestic quarrel which is being settled refuses to pardon the offender who has been made to apologise or actually suffer somehow for what he/she had done, the elder settling the quarrel may tell the funny story of Snail and Tortoise which may be rendered in English as follows: Once upon a time, there were two friends, Snail and Tortoise. Their friendship was so happy that Snail gave Tortoise his only daughter in marriage. But famine soon struck their area of the world. It was so severe that nobody except very hard-working farmers who were wise enough to have stored food for one year could survive. Tortoise being a weak and indolent fellow 20 Olugboyega Alaba

soon finished his store of food. He then started to steal yam tubers from his father-in-law's barn. One fateful morning, Tortoise was caught red-handed by the owner of the yam tubers. Snail was so disappointed and enraged at this villainous act. He therefore tied Tortoise to a tree near the road that passed by his farm to the neighbouring market. Passers-by would laugh at Tortoise's shamelessness and say, ~~Tortoise, a thief! And this is Snail's son-in-law?" However, later on in the evening, when the passers-by were returning from the market they still found Tortoise, half-dead, still languishing in Snail's prison. They reversed their abuse and derisive laughter and turned these on Snail, Tortoise's father-in-law. They were of the opinion that Snail had been too harsh. After all, Tortoise would feed his wife, Snail's own daughter and their children, Snail's own grandchildren, with most of the stolen yam tubers. Supposing the thief had been someone farther removed from Snail, perhaps the latter would have slaughtered the former instantly! Therefore they exclaimed again, ~~And this is Snail's son-in-law!" The elder settling the quarrel would then conclude by saying something like the following:

Ko s I 6hun t I 6jii 0 rf rf, ~ j~ 1Q §e suiiru: Ki lja rodo k6 1~ miimi. (There is nothing totally new in life; do learn to be patient, and bury the hatchet.) In a gathering to cheer up whoever is in sorrow, pain or fear, the Yoruba tell a series of amusing-cum-instructive stories so that in a relatively short time the sorrow, pain or fear would be laughed away and the lost harmony and confidence restored. If there is anyone being so cheered up that has refused to see reason, hard verbal jokes, AkQ Apara, may have to be used. Consider the following examples:

a. <;>bmrin kan padanu ak(>bf r~ Qklinrin ninii ijanba m(>to. 0 ba faraya g~g~ bf abiyamQ. Gbogbo eniyan pejQ, w(>n b~r~ si i ~·p~ fun un; ~ugbQn ko gba, 6 saa ri ke ~aa. Wqn fun up nf 6unj~ ko j~. Baba agba, J.y~n baale ba nJ ki 6 Wa. 0 pe gbogbo aWQn QIDQ r~ 1y6ku jQ p~lu. 0 waa b~r~ si f naWQ sf WQn l(}k<)(}kan 6 ri ~e, ••Ta 16 bi eyf? Ta 16 bf eyi? Ta 16 bf eyf?'' tftf 6 fi naka sf gbogbo WQn tan. ~aU ni oju obinrin naa da. ~aba naa nf, ~~Turaka, Ql(>un nikan 16 IDQ akuusin ~ni; Edumare y66 Verbal jokes in Yoruba life 21

ba e0 d 'ani ly6kll sf. Ase."00 (One woman lost her first born son in a ghastly motor accident. She naturally started to lament. People rallied round her and started to console her; but she refused to be consoled, she merely continued weeping bitterly. She refused the food which her people offered her. The eldest man in the household, that is the badle, then called her to his own apartment. He also called the rest of her children to join her. Then he started pointing to the children one after the other while asking their mother, ''Who is the mother of this one? Who is the mother of this one? Who is the mother of this one?" until he had pointed to all of them. Before he finished, the woman had become sober. The old man declared, "Cheer up, it is only God who knows which of one's children would remain to perform the final funeral rites for one; may God spare the rest of your children for your benefit. Amen.")

b. Qkunrin kan ti QmQ CJWCJ iyaw6 r~ ~e alaisi 16jiiji ti w(Jn b~ ~ titi ti ko tete gba, ni 9r~ r~ tim(Jtim(J pe ~Q yara t6 YCJ chun t6 y~ k6 maa fi ~fJkrJ ... oblnrin han an. 0 ni, "Nj~ o mo pe kinnf ylf o sise? Iwo ti tie n sise o wa n 0 0 00 0 0 0 00 gbaradal~ nftorf pe rJmrJ CJWCJ lyaw6 r~ ~alaisf. ~ebf o tun le bf omiran! Eni ti o le bf rara, ki 16 le ba Ol6run 0 0 ~ ~~?" Kfa loju r~ wal~ ara yiya 16 sl fi jade ni yara. o ya awf}n eniyan l~nu. (One man whose baby died suddenly and people tried to console him but who refused to be easily consoled, saw his favourite friend enter. The latter called him into the bedroom and brought out his private part, showed it to his friend, and asked, ~'Do you know that this thing is not active? You whose own is active has now refused to be consoled on the loss of your baby. After all you can still have another one! What would someone who is incapacitated to give birth to a child in his life do unto God?" Immediately, the man cooled down. He came out of the bedroom with a cheerful countenance. This surprised the people.) Whatever happens, the Yoruba would rationalise it and finally cheer up because they believe that: 22 Olugboyega Alaba

Bf emf ba wa rretf s} ri be. a. 0 0 0 (While there is life there is still hope.) and

b. Qr<} t6 ba goQn ~kun lQ ~rin la a ff f rin. (Whatever surpasses lamentation, one should laugh it away.)

Conclusion This discussion of the significance of verbal jokes in Yoruba life suggests that the Yoruba are really cheerful; they know how to enjoy life (in the presence of all odds) by verbally cushioning most of what is apparently hard in their experiences. However, Yoruba verbal jokes are not only used for amusement, they are also a means of indirectly instructing people. This is an important aspect of Yoruba informal, traditional education which is a lifelong process. Well annotated collections of these verbal jokes could serve certain pedagogical and academic purposes:

1. They could be serialised as supplementary readers for use in both primary and post-primary institutions; ii. They could be used along with Yoruba riddles and traditional prose narratives as teaching materials in institutions of higher learning in Yorubaland;

lll. They could serve as source material for scholars native and foreign who are interested in aspects of Yoruba life, including folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, psychologists, historians and philosophers. Finally, comparative studies of the various aspects of verbal jokes in Yoruba and other African and non-African languages could be very interesting and academically rewarding in pointing out certain universals in human languages, worldviews, customs Verbal jokes in Y aruba life 23 and institutions as well as distinguishing between the different culture-bound aspects of human behaviour.

Notes 1. Numerous publications are available concerning the Yoruba people. See, for example, Fadipe, N.A., The Sociology of the Yorubas, lbadan, lbadan University Press, 1970; Bascom, W.R., /fa Divination: Communication between gods and men in West Africa, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1969; The Yorubas of South-western Nigeria, New York, Rinehart and Winston, 1969; Babalgla, S.A., The Content and Form ofYoruba Ijala, London, Oxford University Press, 1966; Johnson, The Rev. Samuel, The History of the Yorubas, Lagos, C.S.S., 1921; Ojo, G.J.A., Yoruba Culture: a geographical Analysis, Ile-lft;!London, University of If~/University of London Press, 1966; ldowu, B., Ol6dumare: God in Yoruba Belief, London, Longmans, 1962. 2. In Bolaji ldowu's opinion, (Idowu, 1962, pp. 1-10), the Yoruba are in all things religious. But we have to modify this adequately. For details, see Alaba, 0., ~~A touchstone for the classification of Yoruba traditional oral poetry'', paper presented at the 6th Ibadan Annual Conference on African Literature, July 1980, pp. 8-9. Surely ''religion" in the African sense is broader in scope than it is in the Western cultures. For instance, ~~ritual drama" in the Western sense constitutes "religious festivals~~ in African cultures. 3. See Beier, U., Yoruba Poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 11-25; and Bolgla, A., ~ ~ Not Vernaculars But Languages!", Inaugural Lecture, Lagos, University of Lagos Press, 1974. 4. For a full description of tone languages, the reader should refer to Pike, K.L., Tone Languages, New York, University of Michigan Press, 1948. 5. Searle, J .R., Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969, is entirely devoted to this phenomenon. 6. Alaba, 1.0., ·~A Semantic Study of Yoruba Verbal Jokes~\ unpublished M.A. Project, lbadan, University of lbadan, 1978, tries to answer this question in respect of each of the jokes studied, from the semantic point of view. 7. Arthur Koestler, ·~why We Laugh'', Dialogue, Vol. 8, (1975), No. 3/4, 96. 8. The Psychologist Magazine, (1976), cover notes by the editor. 24 Olugboyega Alaba

9. See note 7 above. 10. For details on humorous Yoruba folktales see Ogunpolu, I.B., "Pathos and Humour in Some Yoruba Folktales", Fabula, 16 Band, Heft 1/2 (1975), 1-19. 11. Ogunl~~ is the shortened form of Ogunl~y~ ( Ogun-worship is befitting). 12. For details, see Kukoyi, A., •c.:Ayopoeia' Folk Creativity in a popular Yoruba pastime", Seminar Paper, Department of African Languages and Literatures, University of Lagos, January, 1980. 13. The ambiguity here is due to the fact that QmQ Qkftrtf ••squirrel 's offspring", is constructionally homophonous with QmQq 'k~r~, 4 'Ik~r~ man", he who hails from lk~r~, a town in Ondo State of Nigeria. 14. Here the second player is under a good-natured verbal attack in retaliation for what he has just done to his playmate (see note 13 above). He is an lbadan man who says si/dn for sikin (chicken) and sefiin saafu for sefiin saafu (seven o'clock sharp). 15. Lewis, John, Anthropology Made Simple, London, W.H. Allen, 1969, p. 151. 16. Gossen, Gary H., ' 4 Chamula Genres of Verbal Behaviour", Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 84, No. 331, (1971), 157. 17. Adedeji, A., •'The Alarinjo Theatre", Ph.D. thesis, University of lbadan, 1969. 18. Ogunba, 0., ,.Ritual Drama of the lj~b(i People'', Ph.D. thesis, University of lbadan, 1967. 1?. Qlabimtan, A., ••An Introductory Study of $f~/G~l~d~ Songs of the J;gbado Yoruba", Staff Seminar, School of African and Asian Studies, University of Lagos, 1969. 20. Qlajubu, 0., Ak6jQpq Iw'i Egungun, Lagos, Longman, 1972. 21. I§Qla, A., "Etiy~ri: One type of Social Satire Songs in Yoruba'\ Staff Seminar, Department of African Languages and Literatures, University of If~, 1977, p.2. 22. Ibid., pp. 20-21. 23. Ibid., p.13. 24. Ibid., p.14. 25. This song was composed to make fun of the ancestral spirit which one late Qj~wgla of Kill<;? compound worshipped while he was alive. Egungun Ar9bay9 was so lazy as to be unable to save the man from an untimely death. The group is indirectly telling people that death is ultimately inevitable. Verbal jokes in Y oruba life 25

26. From BabalQla, A., ~~The Art of Composing and Performing Ijala Poetry Among the Qyfi Yoruba Communities" Seminar/Workshop on Traditional Oral Poetry in Some Nigerian Communities, Department of Culture of the Federal Ministry of Social Development, Youth, Sports and Culture, Lagos, January 16-18, 1980, pp. 14-15. 27. Orin Agbe from the Ilgrin Ansar-Islam Secondary School, ~gb~ Iyaw6 Ahigbe, June 22nd, 1976. 28. Murana Ahibi (died November, 1971) was a renowned local oral poet in Igangan during his lifetime. For details about his poetry see Alaba, 0., ~~The Study of individual African oral poets: The example of Munina Alabf", 12th WALC Paper, University of If~, April, 1976. 29. Ibid., p. 8. 30. Ibid., p. 9. , 31. For many such stories, see ~obande, A., ~ ~A.gbfijugbana ati Agbfir~rln-in," Ol6kun, No. 13 (January, 1982), 14-17.

Department of African Languages and Literatures, University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria.

Lore and Language 11, 27--44 (1992-1993)

Incest in ballads: the availability of cultural meaning

DAVID ATKINSON

The theme of incest is present in only a few of the traditional ballads in English. In addition, though, there is textual evidence for the availability of an underlying incest motive in a number of other ballad types. Such evidence is largely dependent upon the compari­ son of the broad range of their different versions. Among ballad versions from which brother-sister incest can be derived as a motive for killing, some also belong with the much larger grouping of "ballads of family opposition to lovers", where a young man's or woman's choice of partner arouses antagonism from one or more members of his or her family. It is quite possible to demon­ strate the structural homogeneity of this grouping and to describe its cultural function, which then provides a larger context for the versions from which incest can be derived. It is, however, also possible to demonstrate the structural and cultural continuity of all ballad versions in which brother-sister incest is present or from which it can be derived as a motive for killing. They are cultural manifestations of the virtually universal taboo against incest, and they share in the anthropological context which explains the function of the incest taboo. The overlapping of these two different kinds of context establishes a theoretical basis for incest as a possible motive in family opposition to lovers, creating an area of very specific cultural meaning which is available from certain ballad versions. The conflicts in ballads of family opposition to lovers have variable outcomes, and they are classed as tragic or romantic according to whether the lovers are parted by death as a result of family opposition or else are eventually united (see Table 1). Categories of tragic and romantic ballads can be defined by tale role analysis. 1 This method describes the characters of traditional 28 David Atkinson

narrative according to their functions, which then permits the establishment of groups of structurally and culturally related ballads. The tragic and romantic categories both involve tale roles of Upholder, Partner, and Opposer. The subgroups of ballads of family opposition to lovers readily fall into such a pattern. The Upholder tale role is designated as unsuccessful in the tragic category, and is occupied by the character who attempts the union of the lovers but is dead by the end of the story. The same tale role is designated as successful in the romantic category, and is occupied by the character who effects the union of the lovers. The Partner tale role is occupied by the character who completes the central pair of lovers, generally taking the less active part. The Opposer tale role is designated as successful in the tragic category and unsuccessful in the romantic category, and is occupied by the character(s) who endeavour(s) to prevent the union of the lovers. Various ancillary characters may assist in any of the tale roles. Besides the classification on structural grounds, the ballads of family opposition to lovers can be grouped according to the status of the family member opposed to the union of the lovers. In spite of some variation between different versions of some of the ballads, it is clear that opposition comes most frequently from the woman' s father. Otherwise, family opposition comes from the man' s mother, the woman's mother, the woman's brother, or a combination of family members acting together. The primary focus for their opposition can be either the young man or woman from their own family or the lover from outside of the family. The overall theme is one of young lovers in conflict with predominantly patriarchal authority, and is readily paralleled in literature of all kinds in English. It is fair to say that in the areas and during the time from which traditional ballads in English are known, the prevalent form of social organisation has been the patriarchal family. Different families at different times have exercised varying degrees of authority over the romantic and marital choices of their younger members, with men usually enjoying rather more freedom than women, but violent opposition has probably been relatively unusual. The ballads, however, depict exceptional and often violent instances of family opposition to lovers, which are then shown to be either totally destructive (in the tragic forms) or else ultimately irrelevant (in the romantic forms). In fact, it is not uncommon for Incest in ballads 29

traditional songs to depict unusual situations which contravene social norms, and in so doing they help to define the limits of acceptable behaviour. 2 Whether tragic or romantic in outcome, the ballads of family opposition to lovers assert the necessity for young people to break away from the family and follow their own inclinations in their choice of partner. Moreover, the prevalence of opposition by the woman's father conceivably indicates a particular concern with a woman's right to choose in a patriarchal society. Opposition which involves the woman's father or mother, the man's mother, or any combination of family members acting collectively may be either successful or unsuccessful. In either case, the ballads work towards the same cultural end, but this evenness suggests overall a balanced description of the destructive and the irrelevant in the exercise of familial control over the romantic and marital choices of young people. Such a balance is, however, notably lacking in a group comprising "The Cruel Brother", certain versions of "Lady Maisry" (Child 65A, 65H), and "Clerk Saunders", in which a woman's choice of lover is opposed by her brother alone and the outcome is invariably tragic. The ballad versions in this group also present certain problems of motivation. Given the relationship involved, the underlying presence of brother-sister incest (either intentional or actual) provides one possible solution, and it has in fact been identified in "The Cruel Brother" and hinted at for "Lady Maisry". 3 Such a distinctive explanation is then able to account for the invariably tragic outcome of this particular group of ballads of family opposition to lovers. In "The Cruel Brother", the sister usually advises her suitor to seek consent to their marriage from her whole family, but he fails to consult her brother. The brother then stabs her as she is about to go to her wedding. She leaves a dying testament in which she curses him by willing to him "The gallows-tree to hang him on". The brother's reaction appears quite disproportionate to his sister's supposed offence, and it contrasts sharply with the ready consent given by other family members, especially their father. Sexual jealousy and shame resulting from brother-sister incest can, however, offer further motives. One alternative explanation, prompted by analogues in Danish and other Germanic languages, is that in a matriarchal society, where a man's closest ties are with 30 David Atkinson his sister's children, a brother's consent must be obtained before his sister can marry.4 Another somewhat similar explanation is that an old family custom required that permission be obtained from the parents and all the older brothers and sisters if a younger member of the family wished to marry. 5 Neither of these alternatives, though, readily accords with the prevalence of the patriarchal family as a form of social organisation, and they are therefore unlikely to be widely acknowledged. There are, moreover, a number of versions of " The Cruel Brother" which do not provide even the failure to consult the brother about the marriage as a reason for the murder, but for which the underlying presence of brother-sister incest can offer an adequate explanation. This is the case when the suitor is told to seek permission from the entire family, but the failure to ask the brother is not mentioned.6 In another version, the suitor is advised to seek consent only from the father and mother.7 Elsewhere, the whole question of the family's agreement is omitted altogether, and the brother is not even cursed in his sister's dying testament. 8 Furthermore, there are versions in which the brother apparently does consent to his sister' s marriage and yet still kills her, while his wife is cursed along with him in his sister's dying testament and so seems also to be implicated in the murder.9 This situation can be explained on the basis of a complex of motives arising from brother-sister incest, involving sexual jealousy and shame on the part of the brother, and jealousy on the part of his wife. In one such version, the sister advises her suitor to seek consent to their marriage from her whole family-father, mother, sisters, and " my lover John", all the other references in the text being to " brother John". 10 In "Lady Maisry", the sister's family learn that she is pregnant by her lover, and as a result she is to be burned. Usually, this is carried out by some combination of father, brother, mother, and sister. The motivation apparently arises from the harm done to the family's reputation, compounded by xenophobia if the family is Scottish and the lover English. These typical versions provide a strong story of unified opposition to the lovers, including the father as the representative of patriarchal authority. In contrast, in a minority of versions it is her brother alone who learns about his sister' s lover and insists on punishing he r. Again, se xual j e alousy Incest in ballads 31 and shame resulting from brother-sister incest can offer further motives to account for this rare variation. In a Danish ballad, "M0en paa Baalef'' (Grundtvig 109), which translates as "The Maid on the Fire" and has similarities with "Lady Maisry", brother-sister incest is present as an explicit theme. 11 The brother seeks his sister's favours, and when she refuses, he falsely tells their father that she is ~whore. She is consequently condemned to be burned, and the fire is described as her marriage-bed. In Grundtvig 109A, she leaves a dying testament in which she curses her brother. The sister is burned in the fire and eventually ascends to heaven, while her brother descends to hell. In most versions of "Clerk Saunders", seven brothers find their sister and her lover in bed, and in spite of the sympathy for them shown by the other six, one of the brothers kills his sister's lover. Yet again, sexual jealousy and shame resulting from brother-sister incest can offer different motives for this one brother. A contrast is provided by versions in which a number of the brothers act in concert, or at least appear to be united in their opposition. 12 These belong with other ballads involving opposition by several family members, rather than with a group for which incest provides a possible explanation. Similarly, in a song which is related to "Clerk Saunders", "Willie and Lady Maisry", and "The Bent Sae Brown", four brothers together kill their sister's lover. 13 Brother-sister incest is present as an explicit motive for killing in three ballads. In "The Bonny Hind" (Child 50) and "The King's Dochter Lady Jean" (Child 52), the brother and sister discover that they have unwittingly committed incest, and out of shame either the brother kills his sister (Child 52B) or else she kills herself (Child 50, 52A). In "Lizie Wan" (Child 51), the sister is pregnant by her brother, who murders her when he finds that she has revealed their relationship. These ballads are also associated with "Lord Randal" (Child 12) and "Edward" (Child 13). Thus the greenwood meeting in Child 12A may have been transferred from a ballad along the lines of "The King's Dochter Lady Jean" .14 The name Randal appears in "The Bonny Hind". " Edward" is frequent­ ly attached to "Lizie Wan", and it also sometimes forms part of "The Two Brothers" (Child 49). Such transfers of ballad material are presumed to take place on the basis of perceived similarities of narrative and emotional situation, and it seems probable that the 32 David Atkinson incest theme provides the shared ground. 15 Versions of "Lord Randal", "Edward", and also "The Two Brothers" present some problems of motivation, to which the underlying presence of brother-sister incest provides one possible solution, and it has in fact been identified in ''Edward" and "The Two Brothers". 16 In "Lord Randal", the poisoning is usually carried out by the Randal figure's lover, or occasionally his wife. He then leaves a dying testament in which he curses her. No reason is given for the murder here, or in versions in which the poisoner is another relative such as his father or grandmother, although it is well motivated when it is the conventionally wicked figure of the stepmother. There are, however, quite a number of versions in which it is a sister who carries out the poisoning and who is cursed in her brother's dying testament. 17 This association of the sister with the dominant form of the ballad which has a lover as the poisoner can imply an incestuous relationship. A resultant sense of shame and possibly pregnancy can in turn offer adequate explana­ tions for the murder. There may be some indication of a conflation of sister and lover in Child 12C, where the lover is the poisoner and is willed "The highest hill to hang her on", but the sister also seems to be cursed in her brother's dying testament, "The world's wide, she may go beg". In another version, the sister and lover apparently collaborate in the poisoning, and both are cursed in the dying testament. 18 This situation can be explained on the basis of a complex of motives arising from brother-sister incest, involving sexual jealousy, shame, and possibly pregnancy on the part of the sister, and jealousy on the part of the lover. The relationships and motivations across the range of versions of "Edward" present particular difficulties. It is, though, most commonly a story of fratricide. 19 Yet where a reason is given for the brothers' rivalry, it is about the breaking of a little bush, or some similar formula, which without further interpretation appears inadequate as a motive for murder. 20 This is, however, said to be a kenning which refers to a very young girl, according to one of Cecil Sharp's informants.21 The cause for the rivalry between the brothers may, then, be a lover-although it is unclear whi such jealousy should be expressed obscurely--Dr else a sister. 2 The existence of a number of versions in which a brother-in-law takes the place of a brother as the murder victim lends some support to Incest in ballads 33 the latter interpretation. 23 In such versions, sexual jealousy resulting from brother-sister incest can offer a motive for the murder, and also account for the occurrence of a relation who might otherwise appear to fall outside of the ordinary scope of variation. A similar explanation is then applicable to a version of "Lord Randal" in which the lover's brother is cursed along with her in the :?Jing testament and thus seems to be implicated in the poisoning. In other versions of "Edward", either sexual jealousy, if two brothers entertained a passion for their sister, or else the attempt of one to protect her from the advances of the other, can offer an adequate explanation for the murder. 25 In the case of an especially unusual version, in which the murder victim is "the mother of three I Whose sins God and man did o'erthrow", a sense of shame and the fact of pregnancy resulting from an incestuous relationship can offer at least a conceivable explanation. 26 "The Two Brothers" is also a story of fratricide, which often results from rivalry over a lover. The ballad usually terminates with the dying brother instructing the other not to inform his family that he is dead but to tell his lover the truth, or with the murderer saying that this is what he will do. In some versions, however, the brother is to tell the truth not to a lover but to their sister.27 As in the case of "Lord Randal", this association of the sister with the lover of the dominant form of the ballad can imply an incestuous relationship. In the most extensive versions of "The Two Brothers", there is a post-burial scene in which the lover summons the dead man from his grave in order to crave a final kiss from him. In versions in which a sister takes the place of the more usual lover in this part of the ballad too, the implication of an incestuous relationship is very strong.28 As in ''Edward", sexual jealousy between the brothers, or else the attempt of one to protect their sister from the other's advances, can then offer an adequate explanation for the murder. A conftation of sister and lover may be suggested by a version in which the rivalry is apparently over a woman named Suzanne, but which begins, "Brother comb my sister's hair, I As we go marchin' home"; according to one of its singers, who learned the ballad as a child, this "doesn't mean he's combing his sister's hair; it's a game they used to play. We never learned the game though."29 The weight of evidence thus indicates that "Lord Randal", 34 David Atkinson

"Edward", and "The Two Brothers" can all accommodate brother­ sister incest as a motive for killing. Sexual jealousy resulting from brother-sister incest can offer a motive both for ballad versions in this group and for the invariably tragic group of ballads of family opposition to lovers. Equally, the shame motive apparent in "The Bonny Hind", "The King's Dochter Lady Jean", and "Lizie Wan" can offer an explanation in versions of "Lord Randal" (and perhaps the versions of "Edward" in which the victim is "the mother of three") and in the invariably tragic group of ballads of family opposition to lovers. In "The Cruel Brother" and versions of "Lady Maisry", the brother kills his sister, demonstrating a possessiveness like that of the brother in "Lizie Wan". In " Clerk Saunders", the brother kills his sister's lover, which accords especially closely with versions of "Edward" in which a brother-in-law is murdered. The formula of the dying testament, which signifies the restoration of order to a family, is associated with "Lord Randal", "Edward", ''The Two Brothers" "Lizie Wan'' "The Cruel Brother" and the ' ' ' Danish "M0en paa Baalet", and appears to have the capacity to carry a general relationship with the incest theme?0 Unlike the ballads of family opposition to lovers, ''The Bonny Hind", "Lizie Wan", and '"The King' s Dochter Lady Jean" contain only two main characters, the brother and sister. Nevertheless, since these two characters participate in both a sexual relationship and a murder story, they function in all three of the tale roles which are characteristic of the category of tragic ballads (see Table 2). The sister occupies the unsuccessful Upholder tale role, since she is dead by the end of the story. The brother completes the central pair of lovers, and so occupies the Partner tale role. The brother also occupies the successful Opposer tale role when he kills his sister, but the sister herself occupies it when she takes her own life. "Lord Randal" similarly involves two main characters functioning in the three tale roles of the tragic ballads. The Randal figure occupies the unsuccessful Upholder tale role, since he is dead by the end of the story. His lover usually completes the central pair of lovers, and so occupies the Partner tale role. She also occupies the successful Opposer tale role, since she takes his life. In some versions, though, the Partner and successful Opposer tale roles are occupied by the sister. Incest in ballads 35

"Edward" again involves only two main characters, but here the kenning of the little bush introduces a third character, who may be the sister, as a functional presence providing a reason for the killing. The murdered brother occupies the unsuccessful Upholder tale role. The sister may complete the central pair of lovers, and so occupies the Partner tale role. The brother who is the murderer occupies the successful Opposer tale role. "The Two Brothers" similarly involves two main characters, while a third is evident usually as a functional presence, and in the most extensive versions appears in the story in her own right. The third character is usually the lover, but sometimes she is the sister, and the pattern of characters in tale roles is the same as that indicated for "Edward". These ballad versions then share a structural continuity with "The Cruel Brother", versions of "Lady Maisry", and "Clerk Saunders". The successful Opposer tale role is regularly occupied just by the woman's brother, or sometimes the man's sister, which points to a particular cultural concern with sibling relationships. Together, all of the ballad versions in which brother-sister incest is present or from which it can be derived as a motive for killing form a small sub-group within the category of tragic ballads. When incest is present in or can be derived from any of these ballad versions, it is in every case presented as destructive, so that they uphold the virtually universal taboo against incest. Moreover, by depicting unusual situations in which social norms are contra­ vened, they help to define acceptable behaviour. This cultural function accords with that described by Claude Levi-Strauss for the incest taboo itself. The creation of social alliances, and hence cultural organisation in general, is understood to be governed by the principle of gift exchange, of which the supreme form is exogamous marriage.31 The prohibition of sexual relations between a woman and men of the same family means that she must be given in marriage to a man from another family.32 The incest taboo therefore operates less as a rule which prohibits sexual relations within the family than as one which makes exogamous marriage obligatory. 33 Given this purpose of the incest taboo, then, the ballads which uphold it serve in effect a parallel cultural function to the ballads of family opposition to lovers. Both groups depict contraventions of acceptable behaviour which indirectly promote the same social norm whereby young people must break away from 36 David Atkinson

Table 1. Major characters in tale roles in ballads of family opposition to lovers.

Tragic ballads Upholder Partner Opposer (u) (s)

"Fair Janet" (Child 64) s H SF "Willie and Lady Maisry" (Child 70) H s SF "Lord Saltoun and Auchanachie" s H SF (Child 239) "The Suffolk Miracle" (Child 272) H s SF "Lady Diamond" (Child 269) H s SF "The Lass of Roch Royal" (Child 76) s H HM "Prince Robert" (Child 87) H s HM "Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow" H s HM (Child 215) "The Mother's Malison" (Child 216) H s HM+SM "The Cruel Brother" (Child 11) s H SB "Lady Maisry" (Child 65A, 65H) s H SB "Clerk Saunders" (Child 69) H s SB "Earl Brand" (Child 7) H s SF+7SB "Lady Maisry" (Child 65) s H SF+SB+SM+SS "The Braes o Yarrow" (Child 214) H s nSB/SF+n "Andrew Lamtnie" (Child 233) s H SF +SM +nSS+SB

Romantic ballads U pltolder Partner Opposer (s) (u)

"The Gay Goshawk" (Child 96) s H SF "Brown Robin" (Child 97) s H SF "Johnie Scot" (Child 99) H s SF "Willie o Winsbury" (Child 100) H s SF "Willie and Earl Richard's Daughter" s H SF (Child 102) "Will Stewart and John" (Child 107) H+1 s SF "Tom Potts" (Child 109) H s SF+l "The Duke of Gordon's Daughter" H . s SF (Child 237) Incest in ballads 37

"Auld Matrons" (Child 249) H s SF+1 "Lang Johnny More" (Child 251) H+l s SF "The IGtchie-Boy" (Child 252) H s SF "Lord William, or, Lord Lundy" H s SF (Child 254) "Rose the Red and White Lily" 2S 2H HM (Child 103) "Lady Elspat" (Child 247) s H SM "Erlinton" (Child 8) H s SF+6SS+7SB "The Bent Sae Brown" (Child 71) H s SF+SM+3SB "Willie o Douglas Dale" (Child 101) H s SF+SM+nSB

Table 2. Major characters in tale roles in ballad versions accommodating incest as a motive for killing.

Up/wider Partner Opposer (u) (s)

"Lizie Wan" s H SB = H "The IGng's Dochter Lady Jean" s H SB = H (Child 52B) "The Bomty Hind" s H HS = S "The IGng's Dochter Lady Jean" s H HS = S (Child 52A) "Lord Randall" H s HS = S "Edward" H [= SB] [S] [SB] = HB "The Two Brothers" H = SB s SB = HB "Clerk Saunders" H s SB "The Cruel Brother" s H SB "Lady Maisry" (Child 65A, 65H) s H SB

Abbreviations: H, S = he, she (generally the leading tnale and fetnale char­ acters, between whotn a rotnantic relationship exists); HB, HM, HS = H's brother, tnother, sister; SB, SF, SM, SS = S's brother, father, tnother, sister; 1 = an ancillary character, only the most protninent of whom are indicated; n = a variable or uncertain number; (s) = successful; (u) = unsuccessful; [] = character inferred. 38 David Atkinson the family in their choice of partner. Thus there is a complete cultural coherence to the establishment of incest as a possible factor in the invariably tragic group of ballads of family opposition to lovers. Ballad versions in· which the theme of incest is explicit remain unusual. There are other allusions to the subject in "Babylon" (Child 14), "Sheath and Knife" (Child 16), "Brown Robyn's Confession" (Child 57), and in ~~The Maid and the Palmer" (Child 21) in Ireland (known as "The Well below the Valley").34 In view of this relative scarcity, incest is sometimes held to be an original theme, and even the oldest source of fatal rivalry between two brothers, which in the course of time tends to be lost or else modified into something either obscure or commonplace.35 On the other hand, the recovery of "The Well below the Valley" demon­ strates its recent currency, which was previously unknown in "The Maid and the Palmer'' in English, although present in the Scandina­ vian ballad. 36 While the subject may have caused some diffidence on the part of singers and collectors, the impression is that the explicit treatment of incest in the ballads has always been rather sparing. In the ballads, the theme is dominated by brother-sister incest, although to this is added mother-son incest in "Brown Robyn's Confession", and father-daughter and uncle-niece incest in "The Well below the Valley". The Oedipal theme of mother-son incest alone can be deduced from rare versions of "Edward", in which a son appears to have murdered his father with the collusion of his mother.37 Child 138, the Percy text, is usually regarded as a literary creation. 38 However, the more recent recovery of another similar version may indicate the traditional currency of mother-son incest.39 Internationally, incest is not altogether uncommon in traditional song, but examples are again dominated by brother­ sister incest. 40 Reinforcement of the taboo against all kinds of incest can be traced in traditional tales, although the explicit treatment of the subject remains sparing. 41 Father-daughter, mother-son, and brother-sister incest provide the material of some of the erotic tales of the southern mountain regions of the U.S.A., from where numerous ballads have also been collected. 42 The inhabitants of these areas are frequently stereotyped as being uninhibited by the Incest in ballads 39 incest taboo, but in fact the bawdy humour often depends on the recognition that incest represents a contravention of social norms.43 Psychoanalytical interpretation can further identify incestuous elements of different kinds in erotic tales involving children of various surrogate figures, and such material may allow the expression of anxieties about incest while still maintaining the overt taboo.44 More significantly, Bruno Bettelheim's psychoanalyt­ ical study of Marchen has identified the presence of Oedipal conflicts involving incestuous attachments between parent and child, which are not explicit, but which are inherent in develop­ mental processes.45 Such tales again assert the necessity for young people to break away from the family in their choice of partner. In the same way, then, ballads need not always be explicit about a subject such as incest. Social norms can be promoted by overtly confronting incestuous desires. Equally, though, they can be reinforced by the treatment of tragic events within the family for which motives related to incest can, but need not of necessity, be present. This means that there is no requirement to assume that the theme was at one time more explicit in certain ballads but has become lost or modified. The derivation of brother-sister incest from versions of "Lord Randal", "Edward", or "The Two Broth­ ers", or from the invariably tragic group of ballads of family opposition to lovers, simply indicates that a cultural reinforcement of psychosexual norms within the family is available from them. The presence of incest need not be incompatible with other interpretatio ns.46 It follows, therefore, that cultural reinforcement of psychose xual norms s ho uld be availa ble as well from some of the ballads o f family o pposition to lovers which involve parents and hence may contain O edipal conflicts. By the same reasoning, the story of the Percy text of " Edward" should not be ruled out from traditional currency. Incest in ballads can contribute to the definition of norms for love and marriage, and its cultural function is fully complementary to that of a much larger number of ballads. Its actual importance will, of course, depend upon the immediate social context of any particular ballad version at any time. Information relating to this particular subject unfortunately does not appear to exist, and it might in any case be expected to be fraught with difficulties for two specific reasons. The first lies in the nature of a subject which 40 David Atkinson

if present is likely to be secret, or largely subconscious, or misrepresented. The second is the probability that traditional singers will be aware of and influenced in one way or another by the existence over many years of scholarly suggestions that incest somehow underlies certain ballad versions. In consequence, the availability of incest as a cultural factor in family opposition to lovers in traditional ballads is likely to remain demonstrable primarily through scholarly analysis.

References

1. David Buchan, ~~Propp's Tale Role and a Ballad Repertoire .. , Journal of American Folklore, 95 (1982), 162-65. 2. Vic Gammon, ~~song, Sex, and Society in England, 1600-1850~\ Folk Music Journal, 4 (1982), 235-38. 3. See Helen Hartness Flanders, Elizabeth Flanders Ballard, George Brown, and Phillips Barry, eds., The New Green Mountain Songster: Traditional Folk Songs of Vermont, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1939, p. 94; Albert B.Friedman, ed., The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World, New York, Viking, 1956, pp. 75, 175; James Twitchell, ~~The Incest Theme and the Authenticity of the Percy Version of ~Edward"', Western Folklore, 34 (1975), 33; James B. Twitchell, Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture, New York, Columbia University Press, 1987, pp. 64-65. 4. MacEdward Leach, ed., The Ballad Book, New York, Harper, 1955, p. 78; Willa Muir, Living with Ballads, London, Hogarth Press, 1965, pp. 162-64. 5. Patrick W.Gainer, Folk Songs from the West Virginia Hills, Grants­ ville, Seneca Books, 1975, p. 13. 6. Helen Hartness Flanders, ed., Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England from the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, critical analyses by Tristram P. Coffin, music annotations by Bruno Nettl, 4 vols., Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960-65, I, 172-74; Leonard Roberts, In the Pine: Selected Kentucky Folksongs, music transcriptions by C. Buell Agey, 2nd edn, Pikeville, Pikeville College Press, 1979, pp. 19-21. 7. E.B. Lyle, ed., Andrew Crawfurd's Collection of Ballads and Songs, 2 vols., Edinburgh, Scottish Text Society, 1975, I, pp. 139--40. 8. Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads with their Texts, According to the Extant Records of Great Britain and Incest in ballads 41

America, 4 vols., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959-72, I, 188- 89 (6). 9. Phillips Barry, ccThe Ballad of ·The Cruel BrotherH', Journal of American Folklore, 28 (1915), 300--01; George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition, London, Sinclair Browne, 1983, pp. 186-88; Hamish Henderson and Francis Collinson, ccNew Child Ballad Variants from Oral Tradition", Scottish Studies, 9 (1965), 17-18. 10. Deacon, pp. 186-88. 11. Svend Grundtvig, ed., Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, continued by Axel Olrik, H. Griiner-Nielsen, Erik Abrahamsen, Hjalmar Thuren, Karl­ Ivar Hildeman, Thorkild Knudsen, Nils Schi0rring, Erik Dal, and I0rn Pi0, 11 vols., K0benhavn, Samfundet til den Danske Literaturs Fremme; Otto B. Wroblewskis Bochandel; Gyldendalske Boghandels Sortiment; J.H. Schultz Forlag, 1853-1965, II, 585-90 (109). See also R.C. Alexander Prior, trans., Ancient Danish Ballads, 3 vols., London, Williams and Norgate, 1860, II, 62-65. 12. Child 69B; Lyle, I, 109-12. 13. [Frank C. Brown], The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, general ed. Newman Ivey White, 7 vols., Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1952-64, III, 559 (A). See O.K. Wilgus, ··A New .:Child' from North Carolina~~, Journal of American Folklore, 83 (1970), 353-54. 14. Archer Taylor •"A Contamination in ·Lord Randal"', Modern Philology, 29 (1931), 105--07. 15. See Tristram P. Coffin, '"The Murder Motive in ' Edward'~', Western Folklore, 8 (1949), 317-18. 16. See Phillips Barry, ccThe Two Brothers", Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, No. 5 (1933), 6; Flanders, Ballard, Brown and Barry, p. 94; Coffin, '.:The Murder Motive in 'Edward"", 314-19; Friedman, p. 169; Jan Harold Brunvand, A Guide for Collectors of Folklore in Utah, University of Utah Publications in the American West, Vol. 7, Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1971, p. 74. 17. Phillips Barry, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, and Mary Winslow Smyth, British Ballads from Maine: The Development of Popular Songs with Texts and Airs, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1929, p. 53 (F); Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads with their Texts, I, 222 (92), 222 (93); John Harrington Cox, ed., Folk-Songs of the South Collected under the Auspices of the West Virginia Folk-Lore Society, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1925, pp. 26-27 (E); Mary 0. Eddy, Ballads and Songs from Ohio, New York, J.J. Augustin, 1939, 42 David Atkinson pp. 21-22 (C); G.L. Kittredge, ed., ''Ballads and Songs:o:o, Journal of American Folklore, 30 (1917), 290; Roy Palmer, ed., Songs of the Midlands, music eds. Pamela Bishop and Katharine Thomson, East Ardsley, EP Publishing, 1972, pp. 64 (A), 65 (B); Cecil J. Sharp, ''Folk­ Songs Noted in Somerset and North Devon:-,, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 2 (1905), 29-30. 18. Henry W. Shoemaker, Mountain Minstrelsy of Pennsylvania, 3rd edn of North Pennsylvania Minstrelsy, Philadelphia, Newman F. McGirr, 1931, pp. 144--45. 19. See Archer Taylor, "Edward:>, and "Sven i Rosengardn: A Study in the Dissemination of a Ballad, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1931, pp. 22-23. 20. For some different explanations of " Edward:-,, see Herschel Gower, "Jeannie Robertson: Portrait of a Traditional Singer:>:>, Scottish Studies, 12 (1968), 125; Mike Yates, "A Note on the Ballad'Edward' (Child 13r·, Folk Song Research, 1 (1983), 26-28. 21. Phillips Barry, review of ((Edward '' and ((Sven i Rosengllrd" by Archer Taylor, Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, No. 5 (1933), 20. It has not proved possible to trace the source of this information amongst the Cecil Sharp material in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. 22. Coffin, "The Murder Motive in 'Edward':>:>, 316. 23. Flanders, I, 209-12; Helen Hartness Flanders and Marguerite Olney, Ballads Migrant in New England, New York, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953, pp. 100---01; Jean Ritchie, Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians as Sung by Jean Ritchie, New York, Oak Publications, 1965, pp. 12-13; Roberts, pp. 23-25; Dorothy Scarborough, A Song Catcher in Southern Mountains: A1nerican Folk Songs of British Ancestry, New York, Columbia University Press, 1937, pp. 181---83 (A, B); Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, ed. Maud Karpeles, 2 vols., London, Oxford University Press, 1932, I, 47--48 (D). 24. Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., ed., Traditional Ballads of Virginia Collected under the Auspices of the Virginia Folk-Lore Society, Cam­ bridge, Mass., HaiVard University Press, 1929, p. 116 (K). 25. Coffin, ''The Murder Motive in "Edward',:-, 318. 26. Peter Kennedy, "Edward:-', Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 6 (1951), 99. 27. H.M. Belden, ed., Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society, University of Missouri Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, Incest in ballads 43

Columbia, University of Missouri, 1940, pp. 33-34; Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., ed., More Traditional Ballads of Virginia Collected with the Cooperation of Members of the Virginia Folklore Society, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1960, pp. 95-97 (BB); Mary Celestia Parler, An Arkansas Ballet Book, Norwood, Norwood Editions, 1975, pp. 53-54; Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, I, 75-76 (K). 28. Parler, pp. 53-54; Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, I, 75-76 (K). 29. Brunvand, pp. 72-74. 30. Coffin, ''The Murder Motive in 'Edward"', 318. 31. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Les Structures elementaires de La Parente), revised edn, ed. Rodney Needham, translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969. 32. Levi-Strauss, p. 51. 33. Levi-Strauss, p. 481. 34. Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads with their Texts, IV, 457-59. 35. See Barry, ''The Two Brothers~~, p. 6; Flanders, Ballard, Brown, and Barry, p. 94; Coffin, ''The Murder Motive in 'Edward'", 316. 36. See Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols., Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1882-98, I, 229. 37. Child 13B; Gainer, pp. 18-19. 38. Bertrand H. Bronson, "''Edward, Edward' : A Scottish Ballad'\ Southern Folklore Quarterly, 4 (1940), 1-13; Bertrand H. Bronson, '"A Footnote to 'Edward, Edward'", Southern Folklore Quarterly, 4 (1940), 159---{)1; Margaret Morton Blum, "'Edward' and the Folk Tradition··, Southern Folklore Quarterly, 21 (1957), 131-42; Twitchell~ ''The Incest Theme and the Authenticity of the Percy Version of 'Edward' .. , pp. 32- 35. 39. See Tristram Potter Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America. revised edn with a supplement by Roger de V. Renwick, Bibliographical and Special Series Published through the Cooperation of the American Folklore Society, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1977, p. 218. 40. Paul G. Brewster, The Incest Theme in Folksong, FF Communica­ tions, Vol. [90], No. 212, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia/Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1972.

L_ 44 David Atkinson

41. Some important tale types include Aarne-Thompson 313E *, 51 OB, 706, 931. See also Frank Hoffmann, Analytical Survey ofAnglo-American Traditional Erotica, Bowling Green, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973, X739.

42. See Vance Randolph, "Pissing in the Snow H and Other Ozark Folktales, introduction by Rayna Green, annotations by Frank A. Hoffmann, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1976, pp. 18-20 (10), 54-55 (33), 61---62 (39), 80-81 (53), 147--48 (100). 43. G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, 1st Series, London, Jonathan Cape, 1969, pp. 460---62; Randolph, pp. xx, 54; Twitchell, Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture, pp. 53-54. 44. Legman, pp. 91-96. 45. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, London, Thames and Hudson, 1976, pp. 92- 93, 111-16, 172-75, 194-99, 245-50, 307-D8. See also Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 8-10, 149-55. 46. Thus one brother is sometimes instrumental in killing his sister's lover in .:.:The Braes o Yarrow", and his prime motive appears to be a social one, which is shared with other suitors. Nevertheless, the brother may seem to act alone or in an especially vindictive way, and an additional underlying incest theme is conceivable. Lore and Language 11, 45--67 (1992- 1993)

"City and transcity" folk literature: the dramaturgy and rhetoric of oral advertisement of medical products in Nigeria

AFAM N. EBEOGU

Introduction Contemporary scholarship in Folklore studies has been full of surprises, not the least the pleasant realisation that there are forms of literature which we live and experience every day at virtually no cost. This realisation always compels us to want to revisit estab­ lished notions about the discipline of Literature, and modern scholars in the field have had to modify the ancient notions of the subject as necessarily a written verbal art, so as to accommodate the apparently ambiguous phenomenon of a "literature that is oral" because "unwritten".1 This expansion of the scope of the literary disciplint has brought with it new challenges in definitions: expressions which have become popular in the face of the new frontiers in the literary scholarship have had to attract the urgency of definitive restatements. While some departments of Language and Literature in the universities are satisfied with enlarging the scope of their pro­ gramme to accommodate "Oral Literature", some scholars would want this apparently fertile area of vigorous research wrenched out of the domain of the traditional Department of Literature, and properly instituted within the framework of a burgeoning Folklore scholarship, or what has become fashionably known as Folklor­ istics, especially in the United States. This appropriation of "Oral Literature" by "Folklore" is manifestly reflected in the twenty one definitions of "Folklore" in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, 46 Afam E. Ebeogu

Mythology and Legend. 2 Virtually all of these definitions incorpo­ rate the unwritten verbal art, as is represented in this brief definition by Jonas Balys: Folklore comprises traditional creations of peoples, primitive and civilized. These are achieved by using sounds and words in metric form and prose and include also folk beliefs or superstitions, customs and performances, dances and plays ... 3 The insistence that Folklore includes both ancient and modern forms of lore is an understandable emphasis, against the back­ ground whereby there had been an earlier tendency, as clearly shown in Alan Dundes's book, The Study of Folklore,4 to associate that field of scholarship with an antiquarian sensitivity. Whereas W.J. Thoms, who originated the term folklore in 1846, associated the folk with an illiterate peasantry, the contemporary scholar of that field, like Marion Bowman, would insist that "we are all folk" . It is necessary to quote her in full: It is not now necessary to locate some decrepit, rural, material­ ly-deprived, preferably illiterate ... peasant who has never been tainted by the media or travelled outside his/her community to find the stuff of folklore. City bankers circulate legends about computer fraud; a graduate wears a St Anne medal to discos to help her find a prospective husband; scientific research staff worry about a haunted lab; nurses know not to put red and white flowers together in a hospital ward. Folklore is all around us, whoever and wherever we are, and we are all folk. 5 It is on this spirit of "we are all folk" that this essay is based. If we prefer the expression " Folk Literature" to " Oral Literature", it is because we want to associate the scholarship with all the trappings of modernity it deserves. We share Bowman' s view that "folklore is all around us, whoever and wherever we are" . No phenomenon can illustrate this point better than the performance of oral advertisement of medical products in Nigeria' s buses and motor stations. This literary phenomenon, motivated primarily by commerce, is both rhetorical and dramatic, and it is the intention of this essay to examine these aspects of this form of literature which is recreated every moment in many places in Nigeria. The data for the study is based not only on the many recordings which we have managed to make in buses in the last three years, but Oral advertisement of medicines 47 perhaps more importantly on the very close observation and alertness with which we have monitored this phenomenon of the strategy of oral advertisement of drugs in Nigeria's cities and buses. Because the recordings were made in moving vehicles, more "folkishly" known as "luxury buses" in Nigeria, it has been quite problematic transcribing some of the tapes, due to poor audibility. However we found one of these tapes fairly reliable in terms of audibility, and this recording provides the texts which we have used to illustrate the rhetoric of this performance. For the discus­ sion on the dramaturgy of this genre, we can do no better than to rely on our recollections of the on-the-spot critical observation of one of such performances in a motor station in Onitsha. The alternative would have been to use video equipment, which facility we did not have, and even if we had, it would not have been available at that auspicious moment of performance.

Oral advertisement of medical products in Nigeria: a brief socio-economic background Oral advertisement of medical products in Nigeria emerged as a result of colonial contact, and subsequently became a phenomenon in certain parts of Nigeria. especially the urban centres where the development of extensive commercial activity led to the growth of large markets.6 Onitsha is such a place, and as Emmanuel Obie­ china has observed in relation to the growth of the chapbook tradition in this sprawling city, Onitsha was the educational and commercial centre of the Eastern Region of Nigeria. Its importance depended very much on its favourable natural location. Situated on the left bank of the River Niger ... it is thus well-suited for trade between the areas lying to the east and the west and, because the Niger is navigable north and south, with places up and down the River. The early European missionaries and traders, realizing the strategic position of the town, made it their first base of operation . ... From the late nineteenth century, Onitsha became an important trading missionary centre .... The existence of the Onitsha Main Market which dissects the town ... [made it] the ·commercial hub of Eastern Nigeria. Its market remained for a long time a sprawling bazaar where people could purchase virtually everything from a ··pleasure" car to the teeth of an 48 Afam E. Ebeogu

adder. In the late 1940s it was re-structured and given a new look. It became one of the most splendid of its kind in West Africa, if not in the whole of Africa. 7 Among the items of _trade for which Onitsha has remained known are medical products of all sorts. l..,arge areas of its multi-localised markets are associated with medicines of various brands, and the mode of trading in these incorporates both the exclusively whole­ sale pattern, the combination of the wholesale and the retail, the exclusively retail operations and the ubiquitous hawking tradition. The products are not only imported from all parts of the world and through the many multinational drug companies in Nigeria, but are also manufactured in Onitsha and its suburbs. It is generally believed in Nigeria that if any type of medicine is not available anywhere in Onitsha, then it is not likely to be found anywhere in the country. A perverse corollary to this fact is that one cannot always rely on the currency and genuineness of medical products bought in Onitsha, especially from the retailers and hawkers. Because of the rate at which new medical products invade the Onitsha market, and the novel claims of efficacy often attributable to some of them, the traders have never lacked sufficient patron­ isers, and one often hears Onitsha traders comment that dealers in medical products form a significant percentage of the very wealthy class of people which the Onitsha market has produced. No amount of Government legislation has been able to control the activities of the quacks among these traders ~ especially because medical treatment in Nigeria's hospitals, whether public or private, has remained quite expensive, and the dealers and their agents who have permeated even the remotest of villages, find easy patronage from the unenlightened rich, the enlightened poor, and the unenlightened poor who are easily the most vulnerable of the customers. Over the years, these traders have perfected strategies of oral advertisement with which they persuade their customers into reluctant or willing patronage. In the 1950s and 1960s, as witnessed by this writer as a teenager and adolescent, the dominant strategy was the itinerant use of gramophone records and a couple of highly professionally competent dancers b/ means of which crowds of prospective buyers were attracted. This strategy has persevered even in modern times, though it is now somewhat less pervasive. But other complementary strategies have emerged, the Oral advertisement of medicines 49 most current being advertisement in luxury buses that ply between major urban centres in the country. The rest of this essay will examine the dramaturgy and rhetorics of the strategy of medical product advertisement, as studied by the writer, using two differing contexts for analysis. The first context is a scene witnessed on Saturday, 24 February, 1991, in one of Onitsha's motor stations, and the second is a taperecorded rhetorical performance by a "transcity" itinerant advertiser in a luxury bus travelling from Onitsha, in the eastern part of Nigeria, to Jos in the north, on 3 June, 1990.

The oral advertisement of medical products: a dramaturgical perspective That there is an easily perceived theatrical technique which the oral advertisers of medicines use to attract their audience, from whom they ultimately draw their customers, is not in doubt. We use the word theatre, not in its purist conventional sense of an institution­ alised locality for elaborate and carefully stylised dramatic presentation, but in a more general sense. This is articulated appropriately by Bakary Traore when he says:

We know that among the ancient Greeks, the word "theatre~~ not only signified the building where entertainments were presented, but every place that is common to actors and spectators. 9 This vision of the theatre accommodates certain impromptu performances which, by their nature, are not divisible into scenes, nor do they necessarily have a narrative framework. These performances are no doubt mimetic in the sense of "representation of action", but they would not qualify as "conventional theatre", especially modelled after Aristotelian canons of drama. Indeed, they are more in consonance with the concept of the "popular theatre", described by Yemi Ogunbiyi in the following words: The term [popular theatre] is used in the finest tradition of a genuinely popular theatre where all that a living popular performer needs is, not necessarily a text or an elaborate stage, but rather, a place, a time, an audience and himself.10 The audience of the theatre of the oral advertisers of medicines is 50 Afam E. Ebeogu very impromptu. Practically all of the audience are men, women, children, idlers, busy people, the educated and the illiterate, who are compelled by curiosity to abandon what they are doing by the shared strategy of advertising which the performers have employed. This is a "folk audience" not only in the sense of their coming from one locality and being associated with a number of activities which, in one way or the other, have spatial affinity with the place of the theatrical performance, but also because there is a bond of "brotherhood" common to them and built around a magic of curiosity that impels them to recognise a point of common interest-an emotional pull to which they all subscribe. The actors themselves are practical psychologists who, over the years, have taken time to study and understand their audience, and have therefore come to possess more than an instinctive knowledge of what to do in order to build an immediate audience. They may not have attended any formal classes in advertising, but they are intelligent and experienced enough to recognise that all creative advertising must do more than merely inform and entertain .... It must change or reinforce an attitude or behav­ iour.11 On the day of the particular theatrical event under study, I had taken my wife to the Onitsha market to do some shopping. Then, for reasons of safety, I had parked in one of the motor stations, where lorries to and from the northern part of the country load and unload. It was around eleven in the morning, and I had reclined in the car, determined to keep myself busy with a novel while waiting for the end of my wife's shopping. Then noises that indicated some mild commotion permeated my concentration, and I raised my head to behold a gathering crowd a short distance away. As I watched, the crowd increased, and I noticed that some small-time traders were abandoning their wares to join the crowd. Instinctively, I grabbed my taperecorder, got out of the car and joined the spectators. Then I was able to witness the entertaining spectacle at first hand. The crowd had formed a ring around somebody who, at first sight, appeared like a lady. But one did not have to look for too long to realise that the character was physically too masculine to be a woman, in spite of the fact that the face was effeminately Oral advertisement of medicines 51 handsome enough to look like a woman's, and that he was costumed in trendy long skirts and blouse. But the biceps were too muscular for a woman's; his unisexual sandals were too large, the hair was undisguisedly a wig-wigs are obviously out of fashion for the contemporary Nigerian woman-and, even though the face was very handsomely cut, the eyes did not look effeminate, in spite of the heavy eye-shadow. The lipstick he was wearing, however, was expertly applied, and when he spoke, the voice, a smooth and well-practised falsetto, was moderately effeminate. When he walked, his gait and steps were admirably ladylike, and he carried his rather long hands in such a way that the long, varnished nails would show prominently. I realised immediately that the figure before us was that of a young man who was, however, quite familiar with the strategies of female make-up. Even then it did not take most other members of the audience long to realise that the figure before them was that of a man disguised as a woman. As his performance progressed, I realised that he was already known by some of the spectators as a man. The character was therefore not so great a novelty as such, and he was ultimately under no illusion that the audience mistook him for a lady. In many ways he reminded one of a Brechtian character. His was not a costuming meant to convince; it was a comic disguise. His falsetto was not intended to be the voice of a lady; it was a deliberate pretension not aimed at perfect deception. This became obvious even in his miming and mimetic acts; he seemed to be saying to the audience: "I am only pretending to be a woman, and I am aware you know it. On that score we are agreed, and therefore nobody is deceiving anybody. I am here to entertain you, and in the process coerce you into patronising me." His theatricals were therefore reminiscent of a theatre for a purpose-a functional type of theatre in which acting is mere pretence and in which, in the same breath as one is entertained, one is being pressurised not to absorb any notions of a dramatic illusion demanding a willing suspension of disbelief. The essence of his disguise and acting was to attract an audience and to keep that audience long enough to buy what, ultimately, he was selling. And what he was selling, contained in a plastic basket before him was a particular kind of medical product. This actor in an unelevated, open-air stage, completely surround- 52 Afam E. Ebeogu

ed by spectators who, however, kept a respectable distance between them and their entertainer, had at his command a limitless repository of miming and mimetic intrigues. He would, ladylike, exhibit a number of masterful dance-steps to which he sang gramophone numbers extracted from current and trendy LPs. He would occasionally stop, move to a spectator, and whisper audibly and coquettishly some sweet nothings that set the audience roaring with laughter. He spoke in English most of the time, even though the grammar was far from being standard. For example he approached me, placed his hand on my shoulder and said in coquettish falsetto, ''Hello darling, I like your dress. You are the kind [of] person I like to move with. What say you to a tete-a-tete at the Metro? It is a nice hotel you know; no nonsense women there. Decent darling, and I no cost much money. 13 Just a bottle of 12 14 udeku , and a little naira and then back for ground." To this the spectators responded with thunderous laughter. The actor moved away from me without even waiting for a reply, after blowing a loud kiss. He immediately moved on to another person. He had a masterful way of getting the audience involved in the performance. In no time he had gathered a crowd which he obviously considered adequate, and then proceeded to the main business of the day. He produced from his basket a tiny bottle which he raised for the audience to see. It contained some liquid substance with heavy sedimentation. He walked round the circle of spectators, displaying the bottle for proper view. The he said in his lady's voice: 15 "Ladies and gentlemen, you may wonder why a lady of my repute is exposing herself to the full glare of the market-place, in order to sell some medicine. In reality I have not come to sell but to advertise. This thing in my hand is the product of New Wonders International Pharmaceuticals Limited, based in Geneva, but with a branch at No. 12 Port Harcourt Road, Onitsha. I am the Confidential Secretary to the branch Manag­ ing Director. The Company had intended to announce the arrival of this wonderful new product, called Afro-Skin Wonders, in the television, radio and newspapers. We will still do that. But out of respect for the enterprising people of Onitsha, the Company decided to first of all introduce the product to you by personal contact, and the fact that they decided to send a lady 'of no me~n calibre' like myself is a testimony of the great love and respect which the Company has Oral advertisetnent of medicines 53

for this great commercial city. This great medicine is for all kinds of skin diseases, from eczema, acne, skin rashes to pimples. Its ability to cure is instant, and I will demonstrate this fact soon. When the manufacturers were manufacturing it, they had the black skin in mind. You see, the black person has very tough skin, and most of these medicated creams which the white man manufac­ tures-Ambi, Dorot, Clear Tone, Nature Essence, Collagen Elastin, Shirley, Simba, Esoterica, and so on and so on-are all meant for the white skin. My Company, realising this, decided to manufacture something unique for the black skin. What did they do? Can anybody here guess what they did? (The audience shouted a loud ,;,;No!"). You cannot. Well, my Company went into deep meditation, consulted the divinities of the land, asked questions from traditional herbalists, and then went into the black forests. When they came out of the forests, they came out with a particular kind of root. Ladies and gentlemen, I will not waste your time in 'procrastinated talk' . This medicine in my hand is called Afro-Skin Wonders, and it is produced from that particular herbal root. It is manufactured by our home branch in Geneva under the best hygienic circumstances, and its cure is instant. To show you that its cure is instant, I want a volunteer from the crowd, somebody who has some skin problem, like pimples. Any volunteers?~' The crowd was hesitant; nobody volunteered. The actor said, very coquettishly: "Come on loves, do not embarrass a lady. Any volunteers?" Still there was none. Then the actor moved to a lad standing nearer him, perhaps no more than twelve years old, and gently dragged him to the centre of the stage, saying, "Come on bob.16 It will do you no harm." He shook the tiny bottle and opened it. Then, using one of his long fingernails, he cut open a small pimple on the boy's forehead. He applied a little of the liquid on the cut, and asked the spectators to watch attentively. The waiting was not for more than three minutes, but it seemed like ages. Then something happened. I noticed some whitish substance coming out from the opened pimple; a chemical action of some sort was obviously in progress. Then, with deft movements one would associate with a surgeon, the actor used his nail to scrape the substance off the boy's forehead. The actor asked softly, "Do you feel any pains?" The boy shook his head. The actor straight- 54 Afam E. Ebeogu

ened up with deliberateness and began to walk the boy round, showing the spectators how the cream had apparently dug into the boy's skin to extract the offending pimple. After the round the actor went back to the basket, turned to the spectators, and said: ''A bottle of Afro-Skin Wonders will cost just three naira on the counter. Compare it with the price of any of these skin creams imported from all over the world. The quantity I have here is for promotion sales only, and I will give each to you at one naira; that is the benefit of buying straight from a Comp­ any's Managing Director's Secretary.~~ At first there was a little hesitation from the audience. Then somebody asked for two bottles, and paid two naira for them. Then the rush began, and within ten minutes or so, the actor had sold out all the bottles in the basket. It was difficult to guess how many they were; perhaps up to a hundred. After the sales, the actor did something quite unexpected: he began to undress in full view of the spectators, some of whom had begun to go away. First went the wig, revealing a young man with a Tyson haircut. He brought out a comb and a mirror from a handbag, and tidied up his hair. Then he pulled off the blouse, revealing a yellow American sleeveless polo singlet underneath. The next to go was the long skirt, revealing rolled-up trousers which he proceed to straighten with deliberateness. After that he turned to the face make-up, and in no time the lipstick and the eye-shadow were gone. Then, with studied patience, he began to pack his things methodically. The last thing to disappear from view was the bundle of naira notes which he arranged neatly and put into an underpant pocket. Then he straightened up, turned to the remaining members of the audience and said, still in his false lady's voice: " Bye-bye for now, my dearies." He picked up his basket and handbag and began to walk away, waving at the audience. One or two voices called out, "Ayoola!", and the disappearing actor replied, "Yeah guy, business, men." His voice was no longer falsetto. On inquiry, I learnt that he was fairly well-known in Onitsha as an oral advertiser of medi­ cines, and that Ayoola was his alias. An examination of the above spectacle reveals a number of significant issues. It is clear that Ayoola, the popular actor who uses his theatrical craft in order to persuade an audience to buy his medical products, does not pretend to be a woman. His make-up Oral advertisement of medicines 55 is not designed to mask his identity; rather he dresses as a woman in order to achieve a comic effect, which is buttressed by his deliberately acting like a woman while in performance. The comic performance is aimed at a functional purpose: that of attracting an audience, and then persuading that audience to buy. His most effective design is acquired not in any training school but through innate intelligence and repeated performance. It is the Brechtian strategy of destroying dramatic illusion through the agency of mock-illusion: he does not want the audience to believe that he is true, and that a great deal of what he says is true, but that his acting and whatever he is saying need to be "accepted" by the audience on the understanding that they are not necessari I y accepting a "truth". There is therefore a tacit conspiracy between the actor and the audience, and this conspiracy is revealed even in the long speech which he uses to persuade the audience. For example, he makes several exaggerated claims: that "she" is the Confidential Secretary to the Managing Director of a Company with a name that is somewhat suspect; that the company has an international scope of organisation; the medical cream, sceptically named Afro-Skin Wonders, is the product of the genius of African herbalism and the best skin cream amongst a host of others which ''she" proceeds to list with unquestionable familiarity; "she" sells the medical cream to the audience at a promotional price that is one third of the expected counter price. It is doubtful if any member of the audience would believe many of the above claims. And yet the same audience proceeded to buy the product, perhaps even if vaguely aware that it might be fake! It is true that the actor has visually illustrated how effective the cream could be, but one wonders if the audience would not be sceptical of a medical product, and a skin cream at that, that is an instant cure. In a different but similar spectacle, a spectator observed that most of these advertisers plant their own people amongst the audience from where such people either volunteer or are "persuaded" to be used for illustrating the instant efficacy of the medicine being advertised. If this is so, it would be further evidence of the Brechtian vision characteristic of this form of popular theatre in which a member of an impromptu audience is transformed immediately into an actor of sorts. It is indeed possible that most of the members of the audience, and potential patronisers 56 Afam E. Ebeogu of the advertisers, do not, in their heart of hearts, believe in the efficacy of the medicine, but are courteously paying for their thirty minutes or so of entertainment. Perhaps they would not mind very much doing so considering that the " charge" for the performance, which is the price of the product, is quite moderate. It is instructive that the prices at which these advertisers sell their judiciously chosen medicines are always moderate. Lastly, one notes the methodical and deliberate manner in which the actor disrobes after the performance right there in the presence of the audience. It is a most effective method of destroying Aristotelian dramatic illusion. It is made clear to the audience that they had been "deceived", and this revelation does not daunt them. The actor is merely being faithful to the terms of the tacit agree­ ment between him and his audience, and the actor would not leave the scene without destroying whatever illusions may have remained over the reality of his person and role!

Oral advertisement of medical products: a rhetorical perspective From an open-air context of the performance of the oral advertise­ ment of medicines we move on to that which takes place in buses, known as "luxury buses", that ply between Nigerian cities. The majority of the owners of luxury buses in the country happen to come from the lgbo ethnic group. This arose perhaps because the earliest transport magnates in the country were Igbo, and their success tended to attract many other lgbo businessmen to the enterprise. Many of these businessmen are based in Onitsha, with the result that though all lgbo and other Nigerian cities have stations and substations for these buses, Onitsha has gained the reputation of being the headquarters of the "luxury bus'' business in Nigeria. Most modern oral advertisers of medicines have seen in the phenomenon of transportation by luxury buses an opportunity for quick turnover sales. By special arrangement with the driver, an advertiser boards a bus bound out of the city, with his wares properly packed in an expensive-looking briefcase. For about one hour of the journey, usually between the city of departure and the next station or substation where there is bound to be a brief stop, Oral advertisement of medicines 57 the advertiser hawks his medical products to the passengers in the bus. He is most likely to alight at this substation, wait and board another luxury bus returning from any of the Nigerian cities to the headquarters, which is usually, but not always, Onitsha. The practice has assumed such a regular dimension that one can always be sure of encountering one or two such oral advertisements during any major journey by luxury bus. I therefore developed the habit of travelling by such buses whenever I had the need to make a long-distance journey in Nigeria. The usual strategy is to choose a seat somewhere about the middle of the bus, preferably by the aisle, with a taperecorder ready. Since an advertiser tends to occupy a position in the aisle about the middle of the bus, the possibility of one being near enough to him for a tolerably clear recording has always been high. The recording made on June 3, 1990, part of which is reproduced here, was made in such circum­ stances as described above. On that occasion, I travelled by car to Enugu, where I boarded a Jos-bound luxury bus which had started off at Onitsha. The bus obviously had not loaded fully at Onitsha, and so had to stop for some time, as is the usual practice, at the Enugu Ninth Mile Corner in order to load fully. When that was done, and just as the bus was about to set off for the long journey to Jos, the advertiser, carrying the usual executive briefcase, leapt into the bus and staggered to the centre of the aisle. After the bus had gathered speed, the advertiser, speaking in Igbo, began to attract the attention of the passengers and to announce that he had an important message for them. But somebody from the back of the bus shouted at him to the effect that he did not understand the Igbo language. Conse­ quently, the advertiser apologised, and switched over to what turned out to be fluent but largely ungrammatical English, punctu­ ated by occasional code-switching involving Pidgin English and lgbo, the latter often employed in the form of proverbs, idiomatic witticisms and ideophones. For purposes of easy communication, however, I have chosen to reproduce the text in a fairly standard English translation, retaining as much as possible the advertiser's own diction. The advertiser, a young man probably below thirty, first of all started off with a Christian prayer, which he prefaced with a comment to the effect that every traveller by "motor" was solely 58 Afam E. Ebeogu in the hands of God who alone was "the Almighty Driver who knows not what an accident is". After the prayer he proceeded In a declamatory tone, reminiscent of a church sermoner: ,;,;Ladies and gentlemen, some of you are, I am sure, baffled by the way I prayed. You may be wondering: who is this man who prays like the Bishop of Rome? (Giggles from the audience; the performer clears his throat dramatically). The fact is that though I am not a bishop, I received the proper training that could have made me a bishop if I had continued in the profession. You see, I was to be a reverend gentleman. I attended the juniorate seminary at Awomamma. Does anybody know it? (Pauses for an answer). You do, you are nodding. Thank you very much: it shows that you are a good Christian. Christ will remember you in the day of paradise (Giggles from the audience). After my education at the juniorate seminary I proceeded to Ikot Ekpene for my training in ·episcopal philosophy~ .17 At the end of that training, I decided to complete my studies as a reverend gentleman in Germany. Unfortunately, when I got to Germany, I defected. (He made a sign of the cross as if asking for forgiveness.) I wi II not tell you the details of the story, because it pains my heart to think of it. When a church has invested a lot on you so that you can become a priest, it is sinful to decamp from the call. (He made another sign of the cross.) However, I prayed very hard about it, and I know that I have been forgiven. Consequent upon that experi­ ence, I decided that I would spend the rest of my life in the service of "the rest of human beings~. A German professor of medicine immediately recognised the great talent in me, and offered me a place in the German School of Pharmaceutical Medicine for a study in Pharmacology. I won three German scholarships for the purpose, one from the German Govern­ ment, another from the German College of Theological Medicine and a third from the German Institute of Advanced Medical Research. I then did my studies at the German School of Pharmaceutical Medicine in the University of Munich, and qualified as a professor of Pharmacology. After that I was employed by a German company which specialises in the manufacture of drugs. Now, some of you may have guessed who I am. I am no other than Professor Brandt, spelt B - R - A - N - D - T, John Nduka, alias Omeile, 18 the Special Representative of Veksam Oral advertisement of medicines 59

Medical Complex Limited, a German pharmaceutical company known all over the world for the 'most efficacious medicines'. My company has just come out with its latest 'medical release', which is 'an antibiotic of no mean calibre' . (He stopped, bent down, clicked open his brief case, and brought out a packet of capsules. From the packet he extracted a card, and walked up and down the aisle in order to display the bluish substance.) But there is something I want you to realise before I tell you about this wonderful medicine. You are all travellers, and every traveller is a target of gastro­ fungal infection, by which I mean a disease that destroys the intestinal tissues, causing wear and tear to the abdominal walls of the stomach. Why do I say so? Because as you travel from one place to another, you buy this and that. (Mimicks voice of hawker): 'Buy banana, buy banana!' (Mimicks voice of passenger): 'Hello banana-seller, come here. How much?' You buy banana, then (mimes ideophonically the act of eating) the banana is rushed down the stomach. (Again mimicks the voice of a hawker) 'Buy groundnuts, buy groundnuts!' (Mimicks the voice of the passenger) 'Groundnut, come here!' (Mimes ideophonically the act of eating groundnuts.) And the ground­ nut is rushed down the stomach. In this way you buy and eat everything that a hawker carries about. Rotten biscuits, iwuu19 (demonstrates the speed with which the food moves down the alimentary canal). Decayed bread, iwuu,20 boiled eggs, iwuu, fried snails, iwuu, roast chicken, iwuu, akara21 iwuu, moi moi, 22 iwuu, bush meat, iwuu, domestic meat, iwuu, everything, iwuu. Nor is the passenger satisfied with all these. When the bus breaks the journey at any popular stop, you all rush to the hotels. (Mimicks voices of passengers in hotels): 'Madam, 23 give me this; madam, give me that. I want Coke, I want beer, I want garri, I want rice. Madam, this water is dirty, change it.' And you rush everything into your stomach as if there will be no other opportunity for you to eat another day. All the hurry because you do not want the bus to leave you behind. "Po po po, zooo" (mimicks the sounding of the horn by the bus driver, and the setting-off of the bus), and the journey is resumed. You know the human system is a machine. Your intestines wait a bit to allow you to relax in your position, and then the music begins. (Demonstrates the noise from the stomach as the digestive system goes to work.) It is the grinding of all that 60 Afam E. Ebeogu

you have 'masticulated' that is in progress. (Demonstrates again.) You have given the 'machine of your digestive system' a task, and so the commotion goes on. The Igbo say that he who brings ant-ridden firewood to his house invites a dance of the lizards. Before the bus has covered ten kilometres, air bubbles begin to issue from your anus like air leaking from the valve of a tubeless tyre. (Mimicks the 'sighing' sound of a leaking tyre. Prolonged laughter from the passengers.) And you shout, 'Driver, driver, stop. I have stomach upset; I want to ease myself. Driver stop.' Eziokwu, 24 you want to ease yourself (repeats with mock English intonation). But when you were putting all those ngwodongwo, 25 into your stomach; you did not realise that you were getting yourself into trouble. Well, you cannot stop passengers from behaving the way they do. But you can save yourself from 'gastrofungal infection and other germicidal disease' which you have caused yourself. That is where this medicine which I am holding comes into the picture. It is called Epiclomycin. It is the latest invention by Veksam Medical Complex Limited. I know that there are many types of antibiotics in the market, like Tetracycline, Penicillin, Ampicillin, Ampiclox, Terramycin, Septrin, Coccomycin, Metamycin, Yoyomycin, Luxurymycin, and so on and so forth (general laughter from the passengers). But this latest invention by my company, Epiclomycin, is the winner. Just take one capsule in the morning before you set out on your journey, provided that you have eaten properly. Take it with a lot of water. Let me warn again, you must eat 'pro-per- what?' Properly. And you must drink plenty of water. Only one capsule in the morning, and that will deal with all the nta nta na ngwo ngwo26 which you will eat on your way. When you get home, take another capsule after food, with plenty of water. That will deal severely with whatever stubborn germ that is still 'a refugee in your belly' (general laughter from the audience). Now, how much does the medicine cost? In any medicine store, this costs ten naira per card of ten; in the market, you may get it at eight naira. But for me, just bring five naira. This is because this is a promotional sale. There you are; you have your choice. I have carried a curative to your house so to say; if you choose to ignore me and die in silence, that is your business. After all, according to the Bible, the Jews asked God Oral advertisement of medicines 61

for a Messiah, but when He sent Christ to them they killed him (Prolo~ed laughter.) Now, who wants to buy? Going, going 2 -- Do not waste time because I will get down at Obolo­ Afo."' A passenger asked for a card. It was as if that was all the rest were waiting for. Hands shot into the air, requesting cards of the capsule, and in about ten minutes the advertiser's stock of Epiclomycin was exhausted. Then he announced that he had other "latest" medical products to introduce to the passengers. A close examination of the performance of this advertiser gives an insight into his strategy of persuasion. One of these is the proper and non-proper names which he uses. Some of the names, like Awomamma and lkot Ekpene, are real placenames, and the Roman Catholic clerical institutions he attributes to them do exist in these places. His choice of such names would seem to be a deliberate attempt to give some degree of legitimacy to his otherwise fantastic claims. But he seems not really to be attempting to convince the audience that he attended such institutions, because some of the other names which he attributes to himself are obviously fabricated. When he calls himself "Professor", he would not expect to be taken seriously, especially since his first name, Brandt, is quite exotic and may well have been an obvious attempt to "Germanise" his identity; after all, he claims to have been educated in Germany, and has chose questionable but seemingly reputable names as belonging to the insti ~ !.ltions which he attended there. His lgbo name, "Nduka", translates as "Life is Superior", and may have been deliberately chosen in order to associate his name with his profession as a dealer in medicines with which life is saved. This argument is stengthened by the fact that his alias is "Omeile", which means "That Which is Efficacious". Our investi­ gation reveals that the root name of the German pharmaceutical company for which he claims to work, Veksam Medical Complex Limited, also suggests this image of efficacy which he is trying to construct around himself. It is not unlikely that "Veksam", which seems to me the nearest orthographic representation of the world uttered by the advertiser, is the same as the German "wirksam',, which could translate as "very effective". This advertiser may have thus come across the word, or a medical firm that answers that name, in the course of his searching through medical literature, or 62 Afam E. Ebeogu his interaction with colleagues in the business world of medicine. It would therefore appear as if our advertiser has cultivated a habit of serious homework in the course of his hawking business.28 This impression is strengthened by his obvious mastery of the medical register. He uses some medical expressions with ease, and even though some of such expressions may have been fabricated by him, he has taken care to make them fall into the morphological pattern of the non-fabricated medical names. For example, he uses freely such terms as pharmaceutical) pharmacology) efficacious) antibiotic) gastrofungal infection) intestinal tissues) abdominal tissues etc., which suggest that he must have been reading medical drug literature studiously. Some of the antibiotics which he lists as available in the market, like Tetracycline, Penicillin, Terramycin, Septrin, Ampicillin and Ampiclox, are rather familiar and perhaps wellknown to many, but such other names as Coccomycin, Metamycin, Yoyomycin, and the really satirical " Luxurymycin", are obvious fabrications by the advertiser, perhaps aimed at emphasising that there are already too many of these antibiotics in the market, and that the latest invention by his company, called "Epiclomycin", is aimed at putting a stop to the proliferation of these antibiotics; "Epiclomycin" is then the ultimate antibiotic! His audience would be expected to be impressed by this " formidable" display of medical knowledge, including the fact that capsules must be taken only after meals, and with " plenty of water". The advertiser's other strategy is the prefacing of his advertise­ ment with a prayer. Here he is courting an emotional empathy with his audience. He realises that travelling by road is hazardous in the country, and that most travellers resort to prayers to God for a safe journey. Interestingly, Many of these luxury buses are fitted with powerful radio cassettes connected to public address equipment. The drivers play various forms of religious music during their journeys. The advertiser' s knowledge and assessment of the psychology of the travellers therefore puts him at a distinct advantage, and so he begins early enough to court their patronage by praying for their safety. And the prayer, the text of which as been excised from this essay for reasons of space, was offered in so appropriate a linguistic idiom and style that one might well be tempted to believe the advertiser' s claim that he had received some clerical training before going into the business of selling medicines. Oral advertisement of medicines 63

Perhaps the most effective advertising strategy used by this oral performer is humour. All through the performance, he is able to create and maintain a comic atmosphere in which many members of his audience kept on either chuckling or laughing uproariously. He achieves this through a number of strategies. One of these is a frequent resort to mimicry, as indicated in the text. The mimicry is not only vocal but also histrionic, with the result that his performance is greatly underscored by a combination of visual and auditory demands in the appreciation of the aesthetics of his art. For example, he mimics the calls of hawkers of various kinds of food and snacks at the major stops along the expressway, the calls from the passengers to them to bring their wares, and the breaking of wind that follows the constipation caused by indiscriminate eating of various foods. He also demonstrates the speed with which passengers gulp down the food, and their agony during the pains of constipation. All these transfonn the drug advertiser into an imaginative folk actor drawing liberally from his repertoire of histrionic competence. In addition, the advertiser makes very effective use of ideo­ phones, like iwuu, ngwodongwo and ngwongwo. By their vocal and tonal qualities, they enlarge the lexical resources of the performer, creating dramatic associations in situations where ordinary words would have not been effective, and enforcing a sense of linguistic familiarity between him and many metnbers of the audience with whom he shares a cornmon cultural background. Even more importantly, these ideophones highlight the satiric content of the performance, for there is no doubt that the performer uses the opportunity of his performance to satirize certain attitudes associat­ ed with travellers in particular, and the Nigerian public in general. To illustrate the above, one notices that while the advertiser may be serious over the need for travellers to pray to God, he may also be satirizing the tendency by many to pray fervently only when they are in uncertain situations. While he satirizes the indiscrimi­ nate buying tendencies of travellers, he rnay also be laughing at the culture of scramble and greed which is becon1ing engraved in our national psyche. From the text, it is obvious that he is also satirizing certain dirty habits which have corne to characterise a large percentage of the catering industry in Nigeria. Indeed, whereas it is true that his prirnary ain1 is to sell his medicines, 64 Aja1n E. Ebeogu there is an air of blatant deceit underlying the whole exercise. Indirectly the advertiser may be laughing at the gullibility of his patrons, and this gullibility provides his source of livelihood. This may explain why, in his list of antibiotics, he can include fabrica­ tions that are quite obvious, without being afraid that this might undermine his trade. Those who constitute his audience usually cover all spectrums of classes in Nigeria, from the literate to the illiterate, and from the poor to the well-to-do, and most of these end up buying the medical products. I myself have had occasion to buy some of the medicines, with the excuse that I had known about them before, that they are quite efficacious, that their sell-by date had not expired, and that they were cheaper when bought in the buses. Some educated patrons of the hawkers whom I interviewed admitted that they had bought the advertised medicines on excuses quite similar to mine. Incidentally, the most popular types of medicines involved in this hawking business are antibiotics, analgesics, balms (especially Chines balms) and multivitamins. These, one may argue, feature prominently in first aid administra­ tions which may not need professional consultation. As long as the sell-by date of the medicine has not ex pi red, some patrons have argued, and as long as one needs them, one might as well buy them from these quick-turnover sellers.

Conclusion It can therefore be concluded that, from the point of view of artist­ audience relationship, all the passengers of a luxury bus constitute one folk consciousness during the period of their journey. They share a sense of geography and social culture which is Nigerian; a stage which is restricted in space, and in which there is easy interaction not only between the actor and the audience, but also between some members of the audience; a sense of common fate predicated on the state of uncertainty created by the hazards of travelling on Nigerian roads, and a shared knowledge of some of the latest arrivals in the medical market, and the range of diseases which these medicines can cure. The passengers and the advertiser also share a common language, whether it is the Igbo language, or some significant patterns which have come to characterise both Oral advertise1nent of medicines 65

"Nigerian English" and Pidgin English in Nigeria. This common folk consciousness which is established in the luxury buses is also reminiscent of that established between the oral advertiser of medicines in the motor station and his willing audience. In both cases, there is a shared recognition of a popular form of performance for which nobody pays in the technical sense, as one would pay in order to go and watch a play on a proscenium stage. It is true that passengers pay in order to use the buses, but this fee is not for the entertainment which they get from the performance of the advertiser, nor is it for the satisfaction they get from buying the medicines. Some of the patrons are aware that the hawking of medical products is illegal in Nigeria. Yet nobody, not even law enforcement agents (who themselves are sometimes part of the audience), has cared to get them apprehended. Perhaps this audience is sensitive to the fact that a performer is playing a dual role: that of an entertainer and of a breadwinner. As an entertainer, he is providing for his audience that which institutionalised structures of entertainment in the country lack: a widely accepted tradition of the popular theatre. As a breadwinner, he is involved in a business in which nobody is compelled to be a customer. Above all, there seems to be a shared understanding between entertainer and audience that no moral issue is at stake; what is at stake is an aesthetic demand which the performer seems to satisfy. The oral advertisement of medical products is a popular folk entertainment in Nigeria, and may remain so until such time that its obvious moral implications compel the relevant authorities to severely enforce the law that proclaims the activity illegal. Until then, this form of folk performance remains a transmitter of a rhetorical and dramaturgical tradition, and provides telling evidence which shows that forms of folk art are a dynamic product of the socio-economic consciousness of an era.

Notes and references

1. Albert Lord, "Perspectives on Recent Work on Oral Literature'~, in J .J. Duggan, ed., Oral Literature (Seven Essays), Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1975, pp. 1-24. 2. Maria Leach, ed., Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1984, pp. 398--403. 66 AfaJn E. Ebeogu

3. Ibid., p. 398. 4. Alan Dundes, The Study of Folklore, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice­ Hall, 1965. 5. Quoted in Gillian Bennett, Traditions of Belief: Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987, p. 10. 6. See U.I. Ukwu and B.W. Hodder, Markets in West Africa, Ibadan, University of Ibadan Press, 1969. 7. Emmanuel Obiechina, Onitsha Market Literature, London, Heine­ mann, 1972, pp. 4-8. 8. John Munonye's novel, A Dancer of Fortune (London, Heinemann, 1974), is a fictionalised portrayal of the activities of these dancing drug advertisers. 9. Bakary Traore, The Black African Theatre and Its Social Functions, trans. Dapo Adelugba, Ibadan, lbadan University Press, 1972, p. 55. 10. Yemi Ogunbiyi, "~Nigerian Theatre and Drama: A Critical Profile~\ in Yemi Ogunbiyi, ed., Dra1na and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book, Lagos, Nigeria Magazine, 1981, p. 11. 11. W. Wright, et a/. Advertising, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1962, p. 10. 12. A Nigerian euphemism for a large bottle of stout. 13. "I no cost money" is Pidgin for ""I am not expensive". 14. ~~Back for ground" is from "~Money for hand, back for ground", a common expression in Nigeria, often attributed to women of easy virtue. It means that once the customer paid the required cash, the prostitute would supply his sexual needs without much ado. 15. The taperecorded speech was partly in ungrammatical English and ·partly in Pidgin. For reasons of space, I have chosen to reproduce only the version translated into standard English, retaining as much of the colloquialism of the actor as possible. 16. A term of address generally used ·"guyishly~~ by adolescent males to refer to one another. 17. A Roman Catholic juniorate seminary does exist at Awomamma in Imo State, Nigeria; so does a senior seminary, essentially for the study of Philosophy, in Ikot Ekpene in Akwa lbom State. 18. Meaning "'most efficacious"; in traditional Igbo society, the name was mostly borne by herbalists. 19. Ideophone for the act of rushed eating. 20. Some of the passengers subsequently pick up the iwuu refrain. Oral advertise1nent of 1nedicines 67

21. Fried bean cakes. 22. Cooked bean pastes. 23. Refers to the proprietress of the hotel. 24. Igbo for "True?~~, but uttered with a great deal of scepticism. 25. Ideophone for ''hotch-potch~·. 26. Igbo onomatopoeia and ideophonc from nta '~to eat'' and ngwo­ ngwo suggesting "hotch-potch~~ respectively. 27. This gives the impression that he is auctioning the medicine. 28. A number of attempts made by me to interview the advertisers proved abortive. On one occasion I approached one of them who was about to begin an advertisement in a bus and requested him to stay near my seat so that I could taperecord his speech audibly. I suggested that I would not mind paying for the favour. The effect of my request was a result quite opposite to what I wanted: he kept as far away from me as possible. It became clear that these advertisers whom I wanted to interview were suspicious of my intentions. They might have suspected me to be a kind of police agent attempting to enforce the law making hawking of medical products illegal.

School of Hu1nanities, Abia State University, Nigeria

Lore and Language 11, 69-90 (1992-1993)

The African South: a critique of Puckett's Folk beliefs of the Southern Negro

CHARLES FRYE

Introduction: some assumptions Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro by Newbell Niles Puckett is a wellspring of information on African American folk culture, and, hence, a source for serious scholars from Melville J. Herskovits to Lawrence W. Levine. The book is also a racist litany. This paper will place both the book and its author in their appropriate philosophical and historical contexts by examining the source of Puckett's mixed motives and by highlighting the African philosophical constructs behind African American folk beliefs and practices. Hoodoo and conjuration are central themes in Puckett's Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Hoodoo is a topic not usually addressed directly because of its reliance on secret knowledge. Informants are often reluctant to share such knowledge. Puckett, whose research was published in 1926, is to be com­ mended for the large number of informants he was able to persuade to assist him. Puckett attributed his success to the fact that he often passed himself off as a fellow conjurer. Two definitions might be useful here: first, according to Webster, to conjure means "to summon a devil or spirit by invocation or incantation". Secondly, Henry Middleton Hyatt says of hoodoo: To catch a spirit, or to protect your spirit against the catching, or to release your caught spirit-this is the complete theory and practice of hoodoo. 1 Hoodoo, facilitated through conjuration, is concerned with spirit­ capture, spirit-protection, and spirit-release. Clearly, we have introduced here a category-spirit-which is alien to contemporary 70 Charles Frye

Euro-American academia. The notion of sptnt is, however, not alien to what Fela Sowande calls the arcane (or occult) tradition2 in the west. Dame Frances Yates has documented the history of this tradition in several volumes,3 the most notable of which is Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Similarly, in studies on African religion and philosophy, where references to spirit are quite common, spirit is usually referred to as a single "life forceH, 4 which is stratified according to its efficacy but which permeates everything, including the dead, the unborn, and innumerable other states of being. These studies suggest that one's life force can be diminished or increased by other manifesta­ tions of the life force. This, of course, is the premise of hoodoo. Dorothy Harrison argues for the universality of this concept of life force which she refers to as "life energy". (See Table 1). For example, the Akan people call the life force kra. The Igbos call it chi, as do the Chinese with their rchi. Both place it in the solar plexus and both agree that it can be enhanced or decreased through specific exercises or activities. For the Chinese these would include meditative, dietary, and/or martial arts practices. Similarly, the Igbo have a proverb which says that even though all the gods may plot against a person, the plan will come to naught, unless that person's own chi sits among those other gods.

Table 1. Life energy: universality of the phenomenon.

Discoverer/user Name given Approximate date

PREHISTORIC SOURCES Akon (Western Ghana) Kra, Sutnsunl Gold Coast Mulungu I turi Pygmies Megbe Ngoni (Nyasaland) Umkulutnqango Mende (Guinea Coast) Hale Peruvians Huaca Eskimos Sila Australian Aborigines Arunquiltha Gelaria (New Guinea) Labuni Sioux Indians Wakonda Algonquin Indians Manitou Iroquois Indians Orenda Polynesians Mana Hawaiian Kahunas Mana The African South 71

(Table 1, continued)

Discoverer/user Name given Approximate date

EARLY HISTORIC SOURC ES Chinese Chi 3000 BC Japanese Ki 3000 BC Yogia Prana 3000 BC Hebrews Ruach 1000 BC Greeks Pneutna 400 BC Sufis Baraka 7th century AD Christians Holy Spirit 1st century AD

MODERN SOURCE S Para eels us Mutnia or tnunia 16th century Johannes Kepler Facultas Fonnatix 17th century Franz Anton Mesmer Animal Magnetism; 1775 Magnetic fluid Karl von Reichenbach Od, odic force 1845 Charles Richet Ectoplastn 19th century H.P. Blavatsky Astral light 1888 Luigi Galvani Life Force 1790 Rudolf Steiner Etheric fonna tive forces 20th century William McDougall Hannie energy 1920 Henri Bergson Elan vital 1920 Harold Saxton Burr L field (electromagnetic 1935 life field) Alexander Gurwitch Mitogenic Radiation 1937 Radiesthesists Etheric force 20th century C.G. Jung Synchronicity 1951 Wilhelm Reich Orgone 1940 George De la Warr Biotnagnetistn, Prephysical 1967 energy Edwin Schroedinger Negative entropy 1945 J.B. Rhine et al. Psi faculty 1947 Andrija Puharich Psi plastna, Inergy 1962; 1974 Ambrose Worrall Para electricity 1970 Arthur Koestler Integrative tendency 1967 Charles Muses Noetic energy 1972 Victor Inyushin Bioplastna 1968 Robert Pavlita Psychotronic energy 20th century

After Dorothy D. Harrison, PhD (Medical anthropologist); prepared for colloquiutn, Cotntnittee for Understanding of Psychic Phenotnena, Douglas Hall, Howard University, 26 April 1976. 72 Charles Frye

The ancient Egyptians were rather elaborate in delineating the manifestations of this life force, especially in their enumeration of the subtle "vehicles'' which comprise the human being. They called the physical body the Khat; the double (appetitive nature) was ka; the shadow (emotional nature) was Khaibit; the body-soul (human intelligence) or soul of Ka was the Ba; the heart (immortal soul) was Ab or Hati meaning "my mother", "my being"; the spirit-body (higher mind, life spiri~ was Sahu; and the spirit-soul (god-mind, divine spirit) was Khu. What is implicit in the practice of hoodoo among African Americans is a certainty that the human being is more than a physical body. In fact, the "spirit" about which hoodoo is con­ cerned with capturing, protecting, or releasing is probably some combination of the four lower vehicles identified by the ancient Egyptians. In the western esoteric tradition these are called the physical body (Khat), the etheric body (Ka), the astral body (Khaibit), and the mental body (Ba). Both the Egyptian and Western traditions agree that it is the etheric double which appears as a "ghost". Separated from the physical body at death, the etheric double nonetheless hovers above the corpse. Because they are not immortal, these doubles appear as horrible apparitions above gravesites as they decay at the same rate as a physical body. They are visible, of course, only to those beings sensitive enough to see them. Both traditions also agree that the astral body can be projected during dreams, a practice popular among Egyptian initiates. Puckett makes similar comparisons between African, African American, and European folk beliefs and practices. However, he does this while disparaging all three traditions as superstitious. Obviously, this paper will attempt to rescue these folk beliefs and practices from such labelling and libel, by placing them in the continuum of older esoteric traditions. It seems unnecessary, nor is there space here, to argue for the Africanness of ancient Egypt. Others6 have and continue to do that very well. Suffice it to say that traditions from all over Africa manifest themselves in African America. This paper will demon­ strate the extent to which African American folk beliefs and practices, particularly in the American South of the Jim Crow era, have their roots in these African religious practices and philosophi- The African South 73 cal constructs. The paper will also comment on Puckett's relation­ ship with his subject. And, true to its title, the paper begins with a brief commentary on the implications of African placenames in the American South.

On places, people, and power West African languages are characterised by affinities, i.e. classes of words relating gods, human beings, objects, and activities of similar natures.7 Unlike English, with its over-reliance on copulat­ ives which stress ownership and identification, West African languages stress relatedness. The fundamental relationship is among people. This is especially evident in United States Southern placenames derived from West African linguistic sources. Winifred Vass argues that Native Americans often named places based on the physi­ cal/spiritual characteristics of the locale. African Americans, on the other hand, named places for attitudes, events, or activities involving the people in that place.8 Vass has surveyed placenames in five Southern States: Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, and the Carolinas for possible Bantu origins. Some examples of her findings are the following: For Florida- Colee from Kola for .:.:strong, powerful or great"; or more likely 9 Kolee!, c.: Become strong, powerful, great! "

Kanapaha from Kena papa for Hhe isn't here'~. This was an area often searched for runaway slaves. The searchers received little information from the locals. 10 For Mississippi- Bobo from Bobo meaning ""they, them", in reference to slave owners. 11 Lula from Lula meaning ""be bitter, refuse to obey" .12 Yockanookany from Yaku, nukana or ""go make a (voodoo) charm against someone". 13 74 Charles Frye

For North Carolina-

Makatoka from mua katoka or ~'in the little white men's town".14

Nakina from Nuakina a plural imperative for ~'hate, be cruel to, be mean to". 15 For South Carolina-

Beetaw from Bita for ~'handcuffs, manacles, shackles" used In slavery. 16

Chukky from Tshuki an imperative for ~'don't answer, don't reply, be closemouthed''. 17 For Virginia- Dongola from Ndongola: meaning "I fix, prepare, work on''.18 Wakema from Wakema to ''be amazed, astounded, wonder at".19

Zacata from Zakata to "strike against, hurl violently" such as beating an anvil. 20 Again, relationships among humans were central in the culture of everyday black life in the American South. A major feature of those relationships was the subtle power plays in which individual life forces were often at state. A contemporary film which highlights this issue is "To Sleep with Anger" directed by Charles Burnett. Although contemporary and set in California, the film, with its all-black cast, harks back to the South of another era. "To Sleep With Anger" provides us with profound insights on African American folk culture. The plot revolves around the prolonged visit of a "back home" relative, Harry (played by Danny Glover), to an African American family which had previously transplanted itself from the rural, deep South to urban California. Harry brings all those deep Southern sensibilities with him and reawakens them among his hosts-with disastrous effects. These sensibilities are a mixture: part consists of the apparent Christians versus sinners dichotomy which informs so much of African American folklore and creative expression. (Harry is on The African South 75 the sinners' side). Part consists of the African-derived human development craft. The "work" of this craft is the strengthening of one's life force by feeding on the life forces of others. The goal of this craft is the acquisition of personal power. The nature of this power is atemporal and charismatic as opposed to temporal and institution-based. Zahan describes the African origins of this quest for personal excellence and power, which he sees as twofold. One path is internal, meditative, and self-reflecting. The other is concerned with the mastery of some medium of self-expression to have an impact on others. 21 This medi urn might be an art or a craft or the develop­ ment of linguistic skills. In contemporary times, it might simply be putting a sphere through a hoop with as much skill, flair and daring as is humanly possible. In the "old days", it often meant "working roots" on someone. Raboteau writes of another apparent schism in African American communities, that between conjurers and Christians. He concludes that the two were really complementary. Some conjurers saw nothing strange in calling upon God to assist their cures .... The conflict between Christianity and conjure was more theoretical than actual. Even those slaves who condemned conjure as evil did not deny its reality. Moreover, among black folk there was a refusal to dichotomize . power into good and evil-a refusal which Herskovits and others see as African. In the slave community the power to heal and the power to harm resided in one person, the conjurer. ... There is an amoral quality to conjure which makes it stray outside norms of good and evil. Whether it was good or bad, one had to respect power that worked. In a world of practical power, good was power which worked for you. Bad was the power which turned against you. The primary categories were not good and evil but security and danger. Therefore an unequivocal rejection of conjure was not only unnecessary but foolhardy. To be safe, one kept on the right side of all spiritual power.--'' Spiritual power, like electricity, could be used for whatever purpose the conjurer/electrician chose. 76 Charles Frye

On Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro Broad studies of the culture of the African Americans of the Jim Crow era have been produced by Melville J. Herskovits and Lawrence W. 1....-evine. Herskovits' The Myth of the Negro Past, first published in 1941, includes chapters on African cultural retentions among African Americans in secular and religious life and in language and the arts. 1....-evine's Black Culture and Black Con­ sciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom, published in 1977, covers some of the same ground but adds chapters on sacred and secular music, on humour, and on heroic figures such as tricksters and badmen. · Another useful text on this issue of the folk beliefs of African America is Albert J. Raboteau's Slave Religion: The ''Invisible Institution,, in the Antebellum South (1979). In chapter 2, "The Death of the Gods", Raboteau frames the famous debate between E. Franklin Frazier and Melville J. Herskovits over African cultural retentions. In a very thoughtful and even-handed analysis, Raboteau argues that, in the United States, while African religiosity survived, the African gods did not. The exception is New Orleans, where the gods of Yorubaland and Dahomey became identified with various Catholic saints. Of course, scholars such as Robert Ferris Thomp­ son argue that, culturally, New Orleans is actually the northern rim of the Caribbean and not really a part of the United States at all. Thompson's Flash of the Spirit demonstrates that African Ameri­ can folk beliefs and their African antecedents are still very much alive today. Both Levine and Raboteau quote Herskovits extensively, while all three authors make at least one reference to Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men. But it is Folk Beliefs of The Southern Negro by Newbell Niles Puckett which garners the greatest attention of Herskovits (especia-lly), Levine and Raboteau, as far as citations are concerned. Therefore, when one thinks of books to recommend for this topic of African American folk beliefs and practices, these are the authors who come to mind: Puckett, Hurston, Herskovits, and Levine-with a little of Raboteau, on the side, again because of his insightful critique of Herskovits. Hurston can be recommended especially because of her accessibility and the primary nature of her work: she does not cite any other scholars. She also does not attempt an analysis, leaving the materials to The African South 77 speak for themselves, and requiring us to bring our own analyses to them. One gets stuck on Puckett, however. His book, like the proverbi­ al tar baby, both infuriates and fascinates. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro is a primary text, thanks to Puckett's extensive use of informants and halting attempts at initiation. It is also a deeply flawed text, due to Puckett's incredible conceits. Yet as a primary text, it ever confronts those who are concerned with the esoteric dimensions of African American life. And it seems high time to put Puckett into some kind of readable context. Puckett is useful because he confirms a great deal of what other scholars say about the religious and philosophical beliefs of African peoples generally. As for his conceits, they are characteris­ tic of his times, not just the 1920s when his book first appears, but going all the way back to the seventeenth century. Newbell Puckett's conceits derive from what loan Couliano23 calls a shift in the Western imagination. Stephen Toulmin24 calls it a "quest for certainty", born of religious intolerance and political strife. And Ginsburg in his book, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,25 demon­ strates how, during that period (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), orthodox Christianity and the scholastics conspired to eliminate a European worldview that tolerated the reality of dreams and the existence of nature spirits. Frances Yates26 documents this situatio!l by suggesting that the basic intellectual techniques of this quest for certainty and imagination-shift were those introduced by Egyptian and Jewish mysticism in the forms of the hermetic and kabalistic traditions. What all of these authors27 are describing is the Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter Reformation in Europe. The product of these psychological and historical movements is a scienti fie positivism which makes possible, for the first time, the division of the world into that which is alive and that which is dead (as opposed to everything being alive), the division of the human species into inferior and superior races, and ultimately, the alienation of white Southern conjurer, Newbell Puckett, from his black colleagues. No wonder Puckett's motives appear crossed. On the one hand, he wants to eliminate what he sees as a collection of worthless and 78 Charles Frye

retarding superstitions. On the other hand, he wants to preserve the record of these beliefs. He denigrates the system of beliefs but seeks to establish "more cordial relationships" among the races through "objective study" of that system. 28 His dilemma is that he wants to both embrace and distance himself from these materials. Mudimbe describes this dilemma thus: The discovery of primitiveness was an ambiguous invention of a history incapable of facing its own double.29 To his credit, Puckett does provide extensive cross-cultural analyses, acknowledging, for example, the "pagan" elements in Christian traditions such as Easter30 and the non-Christian origins of the image of the cross.31 He further suggests that the functional power of the cross is that it "draws from all directions"32 and finally, that the cross is "of African origin in part".33 He also notes the old Scottish practice of stickin} pins in wax figures of enemies in order to kill these enemies. 3 And Puckett lists fairies, brownies, witches, wizards, fantasms, hob-goblins, and ghosts as common inhabitants of the English landscape, as late as the early nineteenth century. 35 After disparaging remarks about the African American " national character" which includes laziness, duplici~, impulsiveness, a "lively sense of humor", "sexual indulgence"3 and the tendency to mutilate the English language, Puckett concedes some African linguistic survivals such as buckra (and buckaroo) from Mbakara for "white man", and goober from gooba or guba " ground nut".37 Puckett finds the origins of the term voodoo in the Ewe word Voda, the root vo meaning "harmful"?8 He refuses to accept voodoo as a distinct religion but equates it with hoodoo and conjuration. He sees New Orleans as an exception to his " rule" that black urban areas are less superstitious than rural areas. New Orleans, after all, is the capital of voodoo in the United States. He sees the use of candles by conjurers in that city as peculiar to New Orleans, and representing a Catholic inftuence.39 Mainly he focuses on the more sensational aspects of the voodoo ceremony by making several references to accounts of racially mixed services which included " a large number of white wotnen of respectable middle-class families ... almost completely disrobed" .40 There certainly are distinctions one can make between voodoo and hoodoo: The African South 79

Voodoo, or vodu, as practised in Haiti and New Orleans (and New York City, etc.), is comparable to Santeria practised in Cuba and Condomble' practised in Brazil. Each is a syncretic religion, combining rituals from Yoruba, Dahomean, and Christian Catholic religious traditions. As a religion, voodoo has priestesses and priests. It has fixed meeting places of consistent design which includes a central column, ve -'ve _, ground-signs, and an altar. It has standard prayers, songs, drum-patterns, and dances. And like many Christian fundamentalist (gnostic) denominations, it has as its object spirit-possession. But unlike those Christian " holy-rollers" who seek possession by the Holy Ghost, the voodoo congregation seeks communion with the goddesses and gods of Yorubaland and Dahomey personified in the images of the Catholic saints. When certain members of the congregation are possessed or " ridden" by these loas of deities, other members use the possessed's temporary mediumship to address the gods directly: to offer petitions, seek divine advice, speak to dead relatives, and so on. Christians call it prayer. Hoodoo is not an organised religion; and it lacks the semi-public nature of voodoo. Hoodoo is usually practised in secret by a single individual. It has as its object, to reiterate, the capturing, protect­ ing, or releasing of the spirit of another person. That the same individual might be involved in both voodoo and hoodoo could be a source of confusion for an outsider such as Puckett. What follows is a summary of and commentary on Puckett's observations in the areas of religion and conjure, birth and child care, medicine, good and bad luck, animal lore, dreams, and death.

Religion and conjure African religious assumptions include the belief in a single God too great and too powerful to be concerned with mundane human affairs. Lesser deities and nature spirits are therefore approached to respond to daily human needs. African Americans often appear to act from the same assumptions. 41 God rules heaven but the Devil is in charge on earth, so it makes common sense to stay on the good side of the Devil.42 Eshu Elegbe, the Yoruba trickster figure, has long been equated with Satan by European Christian missionar­ ies. Not evil but mischievous, Eshu has gained his prominence because, no matte r which d e ity' s services are petitioned, the 80 Charles Frye petitioner must also always make an offering to Eshu in order to placate him. This is so because Eshu is the executor of Murphy's Law: "What can go wrong will go wrong''. Eshu is the consum­ mate "Murphy". In West Africa, religion and witchcraft have the same source, which is spirit power, used with either good or evil intent. African gods are not concerned with (Western) morals.43 Their power, like electricity, can be used for whatever purpose the devotee can devise. Both Africans and African Americans know that the spirits will not descend without song.44 Black women served as community standard-setters, regulators, and sometimes enforcers. A literary example of the latter role is provided by Toni Morrison in her novel, Beloved. Although set in quasi-urban Cincinnati, Morrison's climactic depiction of the women singing to dispatch Beloved resonates to the final scene in the contemporary film, "The Long Walk Home", set in Alabama. Both display the subtle power which women exercised in and outside of their communities, by invoking beneficent spiritual beings through song. For both the African and the African American, dance serves as a "visual prayer", 45 except that the African American regards the holy dance as one in which the feet do not cross. 46 African American prayer often takes the form of "a spontaneous song".47 In church services, African Americans begin their songs with the chorus rather than the verse, which is the Euro-American practice. 48 The African American church code often forbids "checker-playing, baseball, and dancing".49 Similar monastic prohibitions are not unknown in traditional Africa. The Fulani people as a group seem naturally to harbour such (Puritan) inclinations. With regard to conjure, ima~ination is central.50 Mental telepathy may play a part in its success. 1 But a community of believers also helps. Ultimately conjure is concerned with control. It is based on a "perfectly subjective iron will".52 "Every possible contingency is brought under the supposed control of [humanity]". 53 Even fatal omens can be opposed with "counter-acts and charms". 54 A potential conjurer should be willing and able to allow "snakes, lizards, frogs, scorpions, snail~ worms, and rats" to crawl all over her or him without ftinching. 5 The African South 81

A harmful charm usually includes the hair, fingernails, and menstrual or seminal fluid from the intended victim wrapped in red flannel and placed in contact with or in the path of the victim. Grave dust from an old wicked person has the most potency. Actual poisons added to food or drink are also used. These include Jimson weed and belladonna, the latter being especially popular in New Orleans.56 Among the practical, positive functions of the conjure is the locatinf of underground water by the direction in which the trees bend. 5 Puckett accurately captures the African emphasis on the development of mental faculties in order to maintain control over the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual environment. Most traditional priesthoods seem to have had such development as their major concern and reason for being.

Birth and childcare Reincarnation is not an explicit notion among Southern blacks, as it is among Africans. But there is a general African American belief that "when someone dies, a baby is born in the world to take his place" .58 The breech child cannot be bound or jailed. 59 This is consistent with Yoruba beliefs about the formidableness of such children. To stop the haemorrhaging after birth, apply cobwebs and soot.60 Scorched linen bandages are routinely applied after birth-a practice "having some distinct sanitary advantage". 61 The fingernails of babies less than a Jear old should be bitten off not cut, lest the child become a thief. Never sweep a room while a child sleeps therein. One might sweep away the child's dream-soul.63 Never place an infant on the bed of young marrieds unless the intent is for the bride to become pregnant. Finally, abortion or contraception is achieved by chewing dog­ fennel root and swallowing the juice.64 The possibility of sweeping away· a child's "dream-soul" bespeaks not so much of the power of the broom but rather the tenuous attachment of the human's subtle spiritual vehicles to the physical body, especially in infancy. Almost all of the broom lore collected by Puckett alludes to this tenuousness. For example, if 82 Charles Frye

one wishes to make a guest leave, place a broom upside down behind a door. To ensure that he does not return, sweep after him as he leaves. Even a slight stroke on the foot by a broom sends a visitor away. This folk belief is dramatised in "To Sleep With Anger" when the little boy of the house accidentally brushes Harry's foot with a broom. Harry immediately goes through elaborate rituals, including the tossing of salt over his shoulder. He also spits on the broom, an act which, Puckett informs us, takes off the spell. The power of spit will be discussed shortly. But here it is essential to note, as Puckett does, that sweeping " disturbs the spirit". Again this folk tradition draws on ancient traditions which say that the human is more than a physical body.

Medicine Earth has many medicinal properties, including the healing and strengthening of bones. Therefore, one should bury a slow-to-walk child up to his or her waist in the earth.65 A snake-bit foot should also be buried. 66 For conjure-prevention, silver should be worn and/or a little of it ingested. 67 Lime water serves as a feneral tonic.68 Weak eyes should be bathed in one's own urine.6 Urine is a purifying agent. One should ingest the thing that injures, such as thorns, splinters, even a little hair from the dog that bites.70 This is, of course, the principle behind inoculation. Cure a sore by having a dog lick it. Fever blister? Kiss a dog. 71 Unfortunately, tapeworms are often mistaken for serpents in the body. These worms can be drawn out by the smell of fresh milk.72 The use of earth to set broken bones, strengthen and straighten weak ones, and to cleanse the skin are practices employed by groups as diverse as the Sea Islanders or Gullah people off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, the Sande Society of Sierre Leone, and the ancient Essene communities along the Dead Sea.

Good and Bad Luck Spit can be a source of luck. Spitting on the bait makes the fish bite-a practice '"common in many parts of the world".73 Spitting The African South 83

on one's hand brings the best bargains while trading.74 The moisture of the mouth is associated with human speech and, hence, the power of sound. As a power conduit, spit links the human with other beings in her or his environment in ways that are advanta­ geous to that human. A common practice in some traditional African societies is to spit on the hand and hold it up to the sun as one emerges from one's house in the morning, thus reaffirming one's connection with the source of life. Four is a lucky number.75 Generally, even numbers are lucky, odd numbers unlucky.76 The Bantu say that four is the perfect number, the embodiment of stability. Finally it is considered ~ood luck to meet the same person going and coming from a place. 7 Bad luck can come from eating out of another person's hand78 or putting one's hat on the bed79 or wearing one's hat wrong-side out or one' s coat over one' s head.80 Spilling salt81 or dropping the ring at a wedding ceremony82 are bad luck, as is lightning and the objects it touches. 83 It is bad luck for menstruating women to handle food or plant crops.84 Menstrual blood is magically potent. Like all taboo objects, it was once regarded as sacred. The left side of anything is generally the "wrong side" .85 And finally, if two people look into a mirror either the younger one will die or both will see a ~host. In the English version, one of the two will be disappointed.8

Animal Lore Rabbits and cats are sacred.87 The Chinese sometimes make them interchangeable in their lists of years. The Egyptians mummified cats.88 In the American South, only the memory of the potency of the cat, black ones especially, remains. There they are regarded as bad omens and instruments of conjure. The horseshoe is related to the crescent moon which is sacred and a bringer of good luck.89 Crickets in the house also bring good luck.90 By rubbing rattlesnake rattles on one' s eyes one will always see rattlesnakes before they can strike.91 Frogs call the rain.92 ''The Emerald Forest" , a contemporary film 84 Charles Frye set in South America, has a remarkable scene depicting this. And one should always keep a strange dog that follows one home.93

Dreams Dreams are real.94 Interestingly, death and marriage are often equated in dream imagery.95 Eggs in dreams refer to life;96 fish to fertility. 97 To avoid nightmares one should avoid consuming heavy/greasy foods at night.98 Among traditional Africans and other so-called primitive peoples, dreams were sometimes regarded as more real than phenomena experienced in the waking state. Dreams were the means by which the gods and ancestors spoke directly to humans.

Death Africans have expensive funerals because the position of the deceased in the other world depends on the style of his departure. 99 The corpse is buried with the head to the west. The gravedigging tools are laid across the grave and left for a " day or so" because "the ghost of the dead remains in that locality for a definite period of time". 100 It is dangerous for young children to go near the graves of the old.101 Sometimes the house of the dead is left deserted for a time.102 (Africans often destroy the dwelling altogether). Africans and African Americans often have a second burial of the deceased about a year after death. Shiny objects and the broken utensils of the deceased often adorn the grave site.103 The dead eat the essence of the food left for them.104 One is reminded of Homer's Odyssey, specifically Odysseus' visit to the underworld and the dead. Ghosts are most active on Friday nights.105 Wicked ghosts appear red and black. Good spirits are w hite.106 Zahan's discussion of colour designations in traditional Africa suggests that black, red, and white were the "primary" colours. But in Africa black stood for life and fertility, while whiteness was associated with death. Red was associated with activity and youthfulness. The African South 85

Beings who can see ghosts include persons born with a caul over their face, persons whose eyebrows meet, persons born on Christmas day, and all animals, particularly cats.107 To dispel ghosts introduce a rank smell108 or have a preacher pass the collection plate! 109 In Dance of the Forest, Wole Soyinka comically dramatises the gods' response to foul smells.

Summary Any comparisons between Puckett and someone like Hurston are painfully obvious. Hurston embraces her materials. Puckett feels compelled to stand to the side and wink at his. Leopold Senghor might have described this dichotomy as the reason of the embrace and the reason of the eye. However, together, these two approaches provide a comprehensive picture of what one might regard as the core elements of the folk culture of African American life in the Jim Crow South. As Thompson's Flash of the Spirit suggests, these core cultural elements are alive today as well. Mark Taylor argues, in a recent New York Times Book Review, that: The past several decades have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the process of modernization does not necessarily destroy traditional patterns of belief. Furthermore, we have gradually been forced to admit that modernity itself is something of a mythological construction. 110 Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro can most productively be approached with this in mind. Because of the twofold nature of human consciousness (a thing is perceived only at the expense of the negation of its opposite) the myth of modernity, now post-modernity, can and does exist side­ by-side with the folk beliefs and practices documented by Puckett. The "paradoxical cube"111 probably best illustrates this relationship. The ''Cube" is an illusion with two surfaces competing for the observer's eye. It seems significant that African, African American, and European folk traditions, which are the public expressions of occult traditions, have consistently demonstrated an appreciation for just 86 Charles Frye

such paradoxes, an appreciation which modern physics is only now gaining. These thought systems also betray a knowledge of what lies beneath such paradoxes: singularity and interconnectedness, personified in human relationships.

Notes

1. Henry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rhetoric (vol. 1 of 5, 1935), p. 24. 2. Fela Sowande, ~~Children of the Gods Among the Yoruba"', Black Lines (Spring 1971) pp. 55-70. 3. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, New York, Random House, 1964; The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979; The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Boulder, Shambhala, 1978. 4. See Placide Temples, Bantu Philosophy, Paris, Presence Africane, 1959, and Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: The New African Culture, New York, Grove Press, 1963. Also see Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, New York, Random House, 1983. 5. Fela Sowande, ~~ The Seven Levels of Consciousness: The Seven Bodies (or Vehicles) of Man" in Charles Frye, ed., Level Three: A Black Philosophy Reader, Washington, University Press of America, 1980, p. 137. Also see Manly Palmer Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Natural Occultism, Los Angeles, Philosophical Research Society, 1960, p. 4. 6. See for example, Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civiliza­ tion: Myth or Reality, Westport, Lawrence Hill, 1974, or Olivia Vlahos, African Beginnings, New York, Viking, 1967, pp. 32- 51. 7. R.E. Dennet, West African Categories, London, Macmillan, 1911. 8. Winifred Kellersberger Vass, The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States, Los Angeles, University of California Center for Afro­ American Studies, 1979. 9. Ibid., p. 49. 10. Ibid., p. 50. 11. Ibid., p. 52. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., p. 53. 14. Ibid., p. 54. The African South 87

15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., p. 55. 17. Ibid., p. 56. 18. Ibid., p. 59. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 60. 21. Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979. 22. Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution~· in the Antebellwn South, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 287. One of Webster~s definitions of conjure is: ~ ·to summon (a spirit) by oath or magic spell,,. 23. loan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. xix. 24. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York, Free Press, 1990. 25. Carlo Ginsburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1983. 26. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Boulder, Shambhala, 1978. 27. Also see Charles Frye, "Rhetoric, Memory, and Moving Imagery from Egypt to Hollywood: The Possibilities of Cultural Re-lmaging", unpublished paper, 1990. 28. Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, Monclair, New Jersey, Patterson Smith, 1968, p. vii. 29. V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 190. 30. Puckett, op. cit., p. 55. 31. Ibid., p. 319. 32. Ibid., p. 283. 33. Ibid., p. 566. 34. Ibid., p. 244. 35. Ibid., pp. 132-133. Also see W.Y. Evans Wentz, The Fairy Faith in the Celtic Countries, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Humanities Press, 1911. 36. Puckett, pp. 8-10. 88 Charles Frye

37. Ibid., p. 15. 38. Ibid. See also Milo Rigaud, The Secrets of Voodoo, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1985. Rigaud says vo means ''introspection''; du means ''into the unknown". 39. Puckett, p. 227. 40. Ibid., p. 187. 41. Ibid., pp. 522-523. 42. Ibid., p. 548. 43. Ibid., p. 175. 44. Ibid., p. 531. 45. Ibid., p. 177. 46. Ibid., p. 60. 47. Ibid., p. 62. 48. Ibid., p. 66. 49. Ibid., p. 69. 50. Ibid., pp. 240-241. 51. Ibid., p. 273. 52. Ibid., p. 189. 53. Ibid., p. 356. 54. Ibid., p. 484. 55. Ibid., p. 222. 56. Ibid., pp. 232, 226, and 238. 57. Ibid., p. 207. 58. Ibid., p. 112. 59. Ibid., p. 336. 60. Ibid., p. 333. 61. Ibid., p. 334. 62. Ibid., p. 338. 63. Ibid., p. 340. 64. Ibid., p. 332. 65. Ibid., p. 340. 66. Ibid., p. 378. 67. Ibid., p. 288. 68. Ibid., p. 378. 69. Ibid., p. 383. The African South 89

70. Ibid., pp. 389-390. 71. Ibid., p. 377. 72. Ibid., p. 254. 73. Ibid., p. 355. 74. Ibid., p. 318. 75. Ibid., p. 233. See also V.C. Mutwa, Indaba, My Children, South Africa, Blue Crane, 1965. 76. Puckett, p. 463. 77. Ibid., p. 462. 78. Ibid., p. 408. 79. Ibid., p. 410. 80. Ibid., p. 430. 81. Ibid., p. 442. 82. Ibid., p. 460. 83. Ibid., p. 421. 84. Ibid., p. 423. 85. Ibid., p. 416. 86. Ibid., p. 414. 87. Ibid., p. 472. 88. Ibid., p. 256. 89. Ibid., p. 478. 90. Ibid., p. 492. 91. Ibid., p. 322. 92. Ibid., p. 507. 93. Ibid., p. 480. 94. Ibid., p. 498. Also see Charles Frye, From Egypt to Don Juan: The Anatomy of Black Philosophy, New York, University Press of America, 1988, pp. 7-8; 33-50. 95. Puckett, p. 499. 96. Ibid., p. 500. 97. Ibid., p. 501. 98. Ibid., p. 148. 99. Ibid., p. 91. 100. Ibid., p. 95. 101. Ibid., p. 100-101. 90 Charles Frye

102. Ibid., p. 101. 103. Ibid., p. 106. Also see Thompson ' s discussion of grave adorn- ments in Flash of the Spirit, pp. 132-141. 104. Puckett, p. 104. 105. Ibid., p. 117. 106. Ibid., p. 120. Also see Dominique Zahan, ~~white Red and Black: Color Symbolism in Black Africa'~, in Ernst Benz, et al., Color Symbol­ ism, Dallas, Spring Publications, 1977, pp. 55--80. 107. Puckett, p. 138. 108. Ibid., p. 142. Also see Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests, London, Oxford University Press, 1963. 109. Puckett, p. 191. 110. Mark C. Taylor, ''In the Beginning Was Belief", New York Times Book Review, May 12, 1991, p. 37. 111. HThe Paradoxical Cube: Physicists have discovered that our universe follows the laws of quantum physics. According to these laws, the physical universe is fundamentally paradoxical. Our universe seems to be composed of facts and their opposites at the same time. Yet we don't seem to observe these paradoxes. Why not? Because when we observe something, we see either the fact or its opposite, but not both at once. Without our acts of observation, the universe proceeds on its merry, magical, paradoxical way with facts and counterfacts intermingling. This intermingling is necessary; without it, no 4 real' world would ever be possible.'' Fred Alan Wolf, Taking the Quantu1n Leap, New York, Harper, 1981, p. 130.

Center for African and African American Studies, Southern University at New Orleans Lore and Language 11, 91-94 (1992-1993)

REVIEW ARTICLE The novels of Chinua Achebe: a reappraisal

VICTOR YANKAH

GIKANDI, Simon, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction, London, James Currey, Portsmouth and Nairobi, Heinemann, 1991, 165pp., £9.95.

Chinua Achebe's novels have received so much critical attention that one could almost say that to venture into that domain would appear like gleaning an over-harvested field. Nevertheless in this work Gikandi unveils and pursues hitherto unexplored lines of enquiry in Achebe's novels. Gikandi sets out to countervail existing critical praxis that treats Achebe's novels at an elementary introductory level. The work is a fascinating study of the deep structures that inform Achebe's narratives. Gikandi demonstrates the interrelationships between narrative strategies and ideology in the novels. The analyses are amply informed by references to authoritative sources, both African, including Achebe's own theoretical writings, and non-African. This enhances readers' understanding not only of the novels themselves but also the background against which they should be read. The work follows an elaborate structure with each chapter apart from the first focusing on a single novel. At the same time each chapter is conveniently broken into subsections, with each subsection devoted to a line of enquiry in the relationship between narrativity and ideology in the particular novel. The introductory chapter takes as its point of departure a basic truism: Achebe is not the first African novelist, yet it is generally considered that modern African literature originated with him. The reasons for this are not 92 Victor Yankah

far to find. Drawing upon Achebe's own critical and theoretical reflections, Gikandi observes that, coming at a transitional period from colonialism to the new postcolonial independent state, what the novelist himself has referred to as the "crossroads of cultures", Achebe's writing is a reaction against colonialist rhetoric on Africa, and an attempt to debunk such rhetoric by "evoking an alternative space of representation". To this end he adopts narrative strategies that bear close affinity with ideological concerns in his account of each stage in the evolution of the new postcolonial African state. The novels, Gikandi argues, are therefore experimental in nature; narrative strategies are shaped by the novelist's need to experiment with different forms of representation. The discussion of Things Fall Apart in chapter two hinges on Achebe's evocation of an "authentic Igbo world" through a collection of social semiotic codes and signs which are central to the meaning of the novel-the cultural circle, the market, wealth, etc.-signs which establish a grammar of culture upon which precolonial Igbo society thrives. Significantly, an undermining of these codes spelled communal tragedy. At the individual level, the hero Okonkwo's tragedy stems from his narrow adherence to these semiotic codes by which the society defines itself. In the final section of this chapter Gikandi asserts that Things Fall Apart dramatises the ambivalent ethics in the novel. Beginning with the lgbo proverb "where something stands, something else stands beside it", the writer explores the semiotic significance of this dualistic ethic in precolonial lgbo society, and how it is demonstrated in the narrative strategies Achebe adopts. The chapter on Arrow of God continues the discussion on the significance of narrative and cultural semiotic values in traditional lgbo society. Narrative in Arrow of God is aimed at expressing the ways " in which authority-including the authority of language and power-has become dispersed among contending forces". The writer observes that n.arrative in the novel is designed to expose "the disjunctive relationship between Ezeulu's [the protagonist's] monological perspective and the plurality of the lgbo world view." We are informed, for instance, that Ezeulu's tragedy results from errors in the interpretation of his relationship with his god and community, the two entities he is supposed to minister to, and his The novels of Chinua Achebe 93 refusal to acknowledge his errors "lest they invalidate his desire for power and the grievance that camouflages this desire." "Writing in the Marginal Space", the next chapter follows on with an examination of No Longer at Ease. Here Gikandi proffers the view that the novel is basically an experiment in the representational potentialities of narrative language. The writer begins by dismissing conventional critical approaches which generate such interpretations that see Achebe as being unable to "realise a coherent social space", develop a '"rounded' character and/or probe into his subjects' psychology or consciousness". Gikandi then presents the cogent argument that whatever incoherence there is in the novel is a reflection of the inability to tame the unstable and widely divergent realities of the new Nigeria within the confines of a singular representative language. Narrative strategies adopted in the novel arise from the fact that Ache be's linguistic referents "resist organization into any simple textual framework". Language and plotting are identified as significantly amplifying the theme of fragmentation in the novel. In a final section titled "The Generation of a Postcolonial Subject", Gikandi notes that the protagonist exists in liminal entities, searching vainly for an appropriate language with which "to project himself into the Nigerian scene". Turning to A Man of the People, the writer considers the narrative strategy Achebe employs here as a quest for appropriate forms to represent new national realities. To begin with, a homodiegetic narration makes it possible for the story to be told from within so that the novelist can "show how postcolonial subjects are caught up in a great ironic moment which also calls attention to their historical belatedness". The narrator's predominantly retrospective perspective is an attempt to impose order on the contradictions in the new society. The narrator/hero himself objectifies these contradictions by manifesting an ironic narrative voice. His re-ordering of experiences is symptomatic of the national predicament: the search for an appropriate national idiom. The writer believes that Achebe uses Odili not only to expose the corrupt world of the politicians, but also to lay bare the confused motives and limited knowledge of the interpreters of this world. Odili 's narrative strategy also signifies that until such interpreters can be "self-analytical" they deserve no claim to being 94 Victor Yankah

agents of change and transformation in the new society. The final chapter, based on Anthills of the Savannah, considers the view that narrative is used in the novel to recreate the past in order to enrich the present and provide vistas for the future. The main characters have to interrogate their shared past in order to explain the choices they have made in the present. In this sense, Achebe posits narrative as a means of liberation and consciousness. The postcolonial state has become an instrument of repressing cultural identity and promoting the cultural values of the colonizer. But in what way can narrative be a means of liberation? Starting from the observation by reviewers that Achebe's novel is haunted by authorial digression on the function of narrative and writing in the postcolonial movement, what he describes using Jameson's expression "metacommentary", the writer argues that to question the legitimacy of narrative as an agent of liberation a new narrative form needs to be found, one that "speaks about but transcends its historical imperatives". In a world which has been turned upside down, Achebe believes that reality itself is a forbidden object; thus narrative must be geared toward the institution of an African hermeneutics that might help us recover the hidden objects of our contemporary history. Achebe thus brings narrative strategies into play to challenge the previous methods of explicating the postcolonial situation and the ideological explanations they have spawned. The important point Gikandi draws from this is that Achebe's concern in this novel is to write an ending to the colonial and neo-colonial narratives of African history, thereby hallowing a new discursive space for a genuinely postcolonial beginning. Gikandi 's intense discourse style marks out the work for ambitious readers, while at the same time making it daunting for the uninitiated in Achebe's novels. Nonetheless, the book is excellent reading for anyone interested in understanding not only the works of Chinua Achebe, but also the enterprise of African literary criticism as a whole. Lore and Language 11, 95- 97 (1992-1993)

NOTES AND QUERIES Records of early English drama in Cheshire

A.D. MILLS

Readers are probably familiar with the Records of Early English Drama (REED) research project. Founded in 1974, its stated aims are "to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642". The project's Executive Board, made up of major scholars from Canada, the United States of America and Great Britain, is supported by an Editorial Advisory Board of similar international eminence. The Director, Professor Alexandra F. Johnston, and the Executive Director, Professor Sally-Beth Maclean, are both from the University of Toronto, where the project' s editorial staff of six are based. There is a British group of supporters, " Friends of REED", organised by Mr. Peter Meredith of the School of English, University of Leeds, which provides details of REED' s activities and offers the opportunity of purchasing REED volumes at considerable discount. The definition of "drama, ceremonial, and minstrel activity" is generously wide. It includes not only mystery plays and other text directed drama, but also sports such as bull- and bear-baiting, folk customs involving music-rushbearings and morris dances, etc.­ and references to related items such as musical instruments, play­ clothes and maypoles. Through the records it is possible to gain a picture of the diversity of dramatic and quasi-dramatic activity in Great Britain before the closing of the professional theatres. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is already clear that " mystery plays" were something of a rarity and that folk dance and folk play were the dominant genres for the majority of the people throughout the country. 96 Notes & Queries

Thirteen volumes of records have so far been published. Some cover the records of the major civic centres for drama-Cambridge, Chester, Coventry, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Norwich, York. Others cover counties-Cumberland, Devon, Gloucestershire, Hereford­ shire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Worcestershire. Each is the product of an individual scholar working through thousands of records in a variety of archives and libraries. Most are by North American scholars, who have been funded by North American Research Councils, Trusts and Institutions. By 1991 all the civic centres and English counties were being surveyed, with the exception of Cheshire, and work was also in progress on the records of drama in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In 1992 the Leverhulme Trust granted funds for a two-year Research Assistantship under the direction of Professor David Mills of the English Department at Liverpoo l University to work on the early drama records of Cheshire-the first time that an English grant-awarding body has given funds for such a project. The project differs from other REED projects in two respects. First, it is team-research, in which Professor Mills is joined by Dr. Eliza­ beth Baldwin (research assistant), Dr. John Anderson (Department of English, University of Manchester), and Professor Alan Coman (University of Toronto). Second, material will be stored on an expandable database, to which access (read-only) will ultimately be available. Work began in March, and it is already evident that there is much valuable information to be obtained, including additional data on drama in the city of Chester and in the neighbouring county of Lancashire. It seems probable that many records relevant to the project are in private collections or lie uncatalogued or inadequately described in local libraries. While the team has ready access to major public collections, such as those in the City and County Record Offices in Chester and in the Public Records Office, we are eager to learn of any collections of documents relating to Cheshire before 1642 which may not be in public collections. Readers of this journal may possibly have examined such records when researching folk drama. If so, we should be grateful for information about their location, and about any possibly relevant material that you have found. All help will be acknowledged in the REED Cheshire volume. Notes & Queries 97

If you have any information to offer, or would like further information about the Cheshire project or about REED, please contact: Professor A.D. Mills Department of English Language and Literature The University of Liverpool PO Box 147 Liv·erpool, L69 3BX.

Department of English Language and Literature, The University of Liverpool

A Nate on Treacle Wells

JACQUELINE SIMPSON

In 1982, in Lore and Language 3:6, 61-73, I wrote upon the many different meanings and contexts of the terms "treacle mine" and "treacle well". I have recently noticed yet another: it can signify "an inextricable difficulty", as in the following quotation from The Independent of 2 September 1992, p.l, col. 6: Conservative MPs in marginal constituencies in London and the South-east are worried that many constituents will now pay more under the council tax than the "community charge". Sir Rhodes Boyson, MP for Brent North in London ... has warned that the Government is climbing "out of one treacle well into another''.

9 Christchurch Road, Worthing, W. Sussex, BNJJ JJH.

Lore and Language 11, 99-126 (1992-1993)

Reviews

BAKER, Ronald L., ed., The Study of Place Names, Terre Haute, Indiana, Indiana Council of Teachers of English, Hoosier Folklore Society, 1991, 99pp., $6.00 Since the inception of the Place Name Survey of the United States in Denver in 1969, members of the American Name Society have advocated the publishing of a basic manual of placename studies. This collection of essays discusses the philosophy and practice in an attempt to fill this need. Though the essays have been selected from Indiana Names, published by the Department of English at Indiana State University between 1970 and 1974, most deal with general placename theory and practice and therefore aim to have value for readers interested in other geographical areas. This is an aim in which they seem successful for the student of American placenames, though perhaps rather less so for those interested in other countries. One reason for this is the comparative youth of the United States, which results in placename study with a historical emphasis. Placenames, particularly in the West, are of such recent origin that it is still possible to find people whose parents or grandparents named, or were present at the naming of, some particular place. Only non-English names--Spanish, French or Indian-which have passed through many forms before becoming standardised, or have survived the obsolescence of the parent language, are exceptions. Here, as in all old languages, linguistic evolution makes historical significance more difficult to discover and thus etymology gains in importance. This interdisciplinary nature of placename study is recognised and stressed throughout. Placename study can be stimulated and researched by students in many fields of study. W.F.H. Nicolaisen argues for the recognition of onomastics as an independent field of study, but also argues that the name-study scholar must be something of a ~ ~ renaissance man", having an interest in, and knowledge of, many other disciplines including linguistics, history, prehistory, geography, folklore and legend. To become well versed in so many areas is daunting for the beginner. Consequently, suggestions on how to collect, store and retrieve informa­ tion can be invaluable. Frederic G. Cassidy in his essay "How to Collect Local Place Names ~ ~ , does not suggest the use o f a computer-perhaps 100 Reviews

this shows the age of the essay--but does tell us how to build up a file of clear, easily retrievable information in a form suitable for inclusion in the National Survey. He also lists useful written sources and the fieldwork which needs to be undertaken. Robert M. Rennick also includes advice on collecting oral history and conducting an interview. Though the practical approaches advocated may be of the greatest use to the student of American placenames, there is much that can point the way for others. All the contributors write with an infectious enthusiasm for a subject which, through interdisciplinary research, can lead to an understanding of the culture that created the names from historical times to the present day. V. Edwards

BASWELL, Christopher and William SHARPE, eds., The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, New York and London, Garland, 1988, xix, 316pp. WILHELM, James J., ed., The Romance ofArthur Ill: Works from Russia to Spain, Norway to Italy, New York and London, Garland, 1988, viii, 268pp. The legend of Arthur, once and future king of the Britons, has scarcely lapsed in popularity since the twelfth century, when his name was introduced into the literature of England in the Latin works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the French of Marie de France, and into the English of the early thirteenth century by the Worcestershire priest, Layamon. The Passing of Arthur does not, as its title might suggest, restrict itself to the decline of the Round Table, but offers essays which rather chart the passage of the Arthurian legend through English (and some early French) literature. The essays are grouped around four main topics: the early French versions, the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Spenser, and the Victorians. Both the first and last of these groups contain non-literary contributions, firstly in the form of an illustrated essay in which M. Alison Stones discusses ··Aspects of Arthur' s Death in Medieval Illumination", and provides an iconographic survey of manuscripts illustrating Arthur's death, and secondly, in William E. Fredeman 's parallel survey of Arthurian subjects in Victorian art. The volume arose from a conference held at Barnard College and space prevents mention of all of the fourteen papers included. From the point of view of the English medievalist, those on Sir Gawain are of especial interest, but mention should be made of Judith H. Anderson's suggestion, which is no doubt worth further investigation, that Spenser might have Reviews 101 known one of the surviving two manuscripts of Layamon, since his use of the name Argante seems to have come from that source. Marie Borroff, a well-known name in the criticism of Sir Gawain, contributes an essay on ~~The Passing of JudgemenC' in the poem, in which, in addition to making some very dubious linguistic associations in order to promote her argument, she more plausibly suggests that its theme is one of maturation, which is paralleled by the increasing humanisation of all of the protagonists, as the prerogative of passing judgement descends from supernatural to human administration. In ~~Le aving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in SGGIC', Sheila Fisher contends that the figure of Morgan is deliberately marginalised as part of an authorial strategy to defuse the threat posed by women to the essentially masculine ideals of knighthood. By suggesting this revision of Arthurian history, she seeks to demonstrate a way in which the tragedy of Arthur might have been averted. Finally, R.A. Shoaf, in ~~The Sygne of Surfet and the Surfeit of Signs in SGGK~ seizes upon an important aspect of the poem: its frequent use of symbols and the language of signification. Although his initial insight is sound, and some of the supporting evidence he brings for his argument supports it, there is a strange determination to enfeeble his arguments by what seems to be consciously faulty reasoning. The discussion of the word knot disregards both chronology and the various senses which it may bear. There is a constant tendency to equate signs and symbols with texts, and the suggestion that Gawain might just as easily have chosen the holly branch as the axe, and so averted the danger, seems to be made in full awareness of its outrageousness. Apart from the necessity of the choice to the plot, a simple analysis of the topic structure of lines 281ff makes it clear that there is no ambiguity between holly branch and axe as proffered trophies. Thus, ShoaCs article becomes a warning of the dangers of regarding words as symbols detached from contextual constraints on meaning and use. James 1. Wilhelm ~s collection forms part of a series intended to illustrate the wide dissemination of the Arthurian legend, and contains translations of material from all over Europe, varying in date from the late twelfth century until the sixteenth. The earliest text is Mildred Leake Day's translation of the Latin De ortu Waluuanii, a less wellknown adventure relating Gawain's discovery of his identity and his arrival at Arthur's court, and containing some Wonders of the East material, including an account of the technology of Greek fire. The latest is a version of the Tristran story translated from Byelorussian by Zora Kipel. In b~tween are the Old French ~~Knight of the Parrot" (Le Chevalier du papegau) by Thomas E. Vesce; the Old Norse ~~saga of the Mantle" (Mottuls saga) by Marianne E. Kalinke; an Italian Cantare on the death 102 Reviews

of Tristran, by James J. Wilhelm; Der Stricker's Middle High German ,;,;Daniel of the Blossoming Valley" (Daniel vom dem bluhenden Tal), by Michael Resler; two short fifteenth-century Spanish ballads concerning Lancelot; and a modernised and glossed text of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, prepared by James J. Wilhelm. This last is of interest to Chaucerians since it is a fifteenth-century analogue of the ,;'Wife of Bath's Tale." All in all, this makes a very diverse collection of material, whose only common feature is a mention of King Arthur. For collectors of Arthur­ iana, this will be enough, but other scholars will regret the omission of much editorial material. Apart from a two page introduction, these are plain texts with no notes or other explanatory material, and only the briefest bibliographies. But, since all but three of the texts have been published within the last ten years, with translations and scholarly notes, and mostly by the same editors in Garland series, the choice of the serious scholar is plain. J.D. Burnley

BENNE'IT, Margaret, The Last Stronghold: Scottish Gaelic Traditions in Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland, Breakwa­ ter, 1989, 200pp, Can.$14.95 This volume explores Gaelic tradition in a unique manner-and I do not use that word lightly. Margaret Bennett gleaned much historical relevance from the elderly Allan MacArthur, who was the last native Gaelic speaker in Newfoundland. Her mother, a native of Skye, often acted as a catalyst in this process. Allan's family also contributed much insight on the tradition down the generations. There are interesting similarities with more modern Scottish highland tradition and folklore, and indeed with the lowlands too. The strong oral tradition of ··sgeuldachan" at a ceilidh, often telling personal history, means that here we have a useful account of the struggles and day to day living problems of the first settlers in the Codroy Valley of western Newfoundland about 140 years ago. The continuous links in this chain ensure a rare freshness in details of events now long past. Customs at different times of the year relating to work and play are explored in depth, along with associated songs-sung only when accompanying the rhythm of the job in hand. This too, reveals the community spirit which was such a necessity for the settlers. The text is interspersed with black and white photographs of the MacArthurs' life and land, and the songs and stories quoted are often written in both Gaelic and English. I read this account with great interest Reviews 103 and later I savoured just how much it had taught me about life from the late nineteenth century, both in Scotland and Newfoundland. J.C. Massey

BORD, Janet and Colin BORD, Atlas of Magical Britain, London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1990, 192pp., £12.95. After an introduction, glossary and dating key, this book is arranged in sixteen regions, where, county by county, the supernatural legends and happenings are recounted, and locations described and annotated, so that the reader can visit them himself. There are also accounts of extant traditional customs that can be attended today, demonstrating this is definitely a volume to be dipped into before visiting a particular area. However, the excellent photography (especially the colour views) means that it can be savoured from the armchair too. J.C. Massey

BREWER, Derek, ed., Studies in Medieval English Romances: Some New Approaches, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 1988, 197pp., £25.00/$45.00. Of the nine essays printed here, two and a half have been previously published as papers in journals, including the wellknown attempt by Derek Pearsall to provide an outline of the development of popular romance by classifying the genre into "'epic'" and ~~lyric'" types, and tracing the evolution of verse forms. He takes his leave of a stimulating, if not entirely successful, enterprise by offering it as '-scaffolding for others to build o n ''. None of the other HNew Approaches ' ~ of the subtitle in fact attempts to build upon it or anything like it. Only one is as unequivocally concerned with Middle English popular romance as Pearsall, and the influence apparent in most is rather that of Derek Brewer' s own book Symbolic Stories (1980). His introductory essay outlines his proposal that dream analysis, folktale, myth and romance share features of narrative structure, story pattern, and similar types of symbolism, in which multiple protagonists may be --splits" or different aspects of a single personality. The archetypal story is that of the relationships within the nuclear family, the development and maturation of its junior members, their passage into 99 adulthood. T.A. Shippey, in '-Breton Lais and Modern Fantasies , examines some of Marie de France's works in this light in comparison 104 Reviews with modem novels aimed at an adolescent market. Not surprisingly, the social-psychological pattern emerges most compellingly from the modem works written by authors with both social-psychological and medieval backgrounds. Shippey is aware of the kind of censure which might be levelled at an approach which sometimes seems to read the wrong emphases in order to reduce all stories to an underlying sameness, and he demands time for "Freudian" criticism to achieve the subtlety of other methods; but it may be significant that Brewer himself prefers to quote Jung, and that a good proportion of the "Freudian'' interpretations cited by Shippey belong to the 1920s. Christopher Wrigley, although stressing the experimental nature of his paper, seems less apologetic than Shippey when exposing "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the Underlying Myth" to a comparison with African folktale. He rejects the association between the Green Knight and a vegetation deity, but sees the poem as a rite de passage from childhood to adolescence. Claude Luttrell's "The Folk-Tale Element in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (previously published in 1981) offers an independent interpretation of the poem in terms of folktale motifs, and particularly Aarne-Thompson 313. The major parallel, however, involves too many shifts in the emotional colouring attaching to events to be entirely convincing, but the analogues between the Green Knight and various diabolic hunters and gamesters, especially in the Germanic tradition, are most suggestive. Julie Burton examines the type of the .:.:Calumniated Wife" in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and some of its romance precursors. The three remaining essays do not concern themselves with the folktale, either traditional or social-psychological in method. Barry Windeatt looks closely at Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, finding the parallels in incident, technique, and wording with the popular Middle English romances--especially Willia1n of Palerne and Ipomadon-which preceded or accompanied it. He suggests, quite convincingly, that Chaucer became disenchanted with romance, and sought, whilst exploiting its techniques, to surpass them. Chaucer's critical perspective on romance can sometimes be caught in the attitudes expressed by Pandarus. Disenchantment is the theme, too, of Terence McCarthy's study of Malory, in which Malory is presented as the historian of an heroic world, where the private enterprises of knights, which would have been approved in the values of romance, are instead the occasion of a threat to the public good, and eventually the downfall of the Round Table. Finally, Anne Scott examines the very early romance King Horn in terms of the function in it of causality and its expression in language. The relationships between promise and fulfilment, command and act, prophecies and events are considered, and it is suggested that conditional statements, in which stipulations are made before certain acts are carried Reviews 105 out, are characteristic of romance rather than epic. It may be truer to relate them to the values of courtliness underlying the romance ethic, but this article, which seems like the condensation of a doctoral thesis, has a real freshness of approach to complement its wide range of reference and useful bibliography. The collection, as a whole, raises in the reader, but does not seek to answer, a question which only Pearsall even approaches: what is the nature of Middle English popular romance? This is a question which can hardly be answered in terms of medieval references to the genre, which are disconcertingly self-contradictory, but this collection, too, is tangential to the output of Middle English romance mentioned in its title, concen­ trating on French works, or those by major authors, to which Middle English romance is admitted only by contrast. Above all, the symbolic­ psychological-folktale approach threatens to bypass the romance as the artefact of a particular language and society, which consciously reflects the concerns of that society, preferring instead a cultural myth whose significance is alternatively said to be .. universal'' or ''very ancienC~ (Wrigley), but the parameters of whose reconstruction are very imperfect­ ly specified. J.D. Burnley

CHRISTIAN-SMITH, Linda K., Becoming a Woman through Romance, New York and London, Routledge, 1990, 208pp. In undertaking the research for this book the author chose to play down her experience and qualifications as a remedial teacher of those with reading difficulties. She hoped that this minor subterfuge would allow her access to pupils and teachers who might otherwise have been disinclined to trust her. Her gamble seems to have paid off in that she was indeed allowed access to classrooms and was given permission to interview twenty nine girls regarding their reading of Teen Romance Fiction. Christian-Smith's interest lay in the possibility that young readers may have been politically influenced by their reading and coerced towards gender subordination, right wing values of hearth and home and the established values of femininity, heterosexuality and the nuclear family. The author examines three periods of American history spanning the years 1942 to 1982 and, using thirty four Teen Romance Novels, investigates why such books are read and by whom. As a teacher she is also interested in the fact that reluctant readers, who might otherwise never pick up reading material, were extremely keen to involve them­ selves in Teen Romances. Christian-Smith argues that if such reading 106 Reviews

material were used as a springboard for discussion in the classroom, it should not be viewed as inferior literature, but rather as an aid to developing valid opinions regarding class, race, relationships, traditional roles and so on. She discovers several ironies as her research continues, not least that girls are encouraged via the romances to value hearth and home before the workplace, whilst at the same time they are urged to buy cosmetics and beauty magazines in order to snare the boy of their choice. The novels do not make any suggestions as to how the money for such luxuries is come by, if not by work! The author does not go so far as to suggest that there is a deliberate, government sponsored brainwashing operation within the seemingly innocent pages of the Teen Romance Novel, but she does draw attention to the fact that the Reagan Administration actively discouraged feminism, and was apparently involved in the bombing of abortion clinics. With the onset of the Political Correctness movement on American campuses, which upholds extreme left-wing views, it might be interesting to investigate how much of this -'new~' ideology the Teen Romance Novel of the 1990s will embrace, if any. J. Harkness

CLAR:K J.O.E., Harrap,s Dictionary of English Idioms, London, Harrap., 1990, 593pp., £4.95. When travelling on the back seat of a car with German friends, one turned to me and said, -'we are like fish in an iron box'~. The truism that idiomatic expressions are metaphorical rather than literal could not have been better expressed. The purpose of this dictionary is '-to assist with the learning process". It contains some 10,000 idioms, idiomatic expressions and sayings in current English usage. The tautological American/English "at this moment in time" is, thankfully, omitted. Old favourites of mine are not included. No doubt this illustrates how the language adapts to provide each generation with new combinations of words. The entry old hat makes this point succinctly: --The sixties expressions cool, hip and far-out are now old hat." Little wonder that in this age of packaged food ''not the strength to knock the skin off a rice pudding" is omitted. However, for those German friends who did not understand me when I said, "We are in the middle of nowhere'~, I have found the ideal gift. This dictionary will also be useful to all speakers of the language. D. Bates Reviews 107

GREENBAUM, Sidney and Janet WHITCUT, Guide to English Usage, Harlow, Longman, 1988, 786pp., £10.95. One does not have to be a retired colonel living in Cheltenham and write letters to The Times or the BBC to notice changes in the use of English. Since a politician with a Huddersfield accent announced, back in 1964, that he was being pragmatic, this word has been increasingly used in a sense not given by Fowler's English Usage. The 1950 edition of the latter also provides notes on the usage of explicit and expletive, in 251 words, and fifty seven words respectively. This clearly printed Longman guide, with bold headings, combines explicit, express and implicit in forty nine words, and omits expletive. Perhaps the assumption is that watching television eliminates the need to explain such words. Does this present a dichotomy? There are those who use Fowler and those who do not. The word dichoto1ny is often heard used in the sense of difference or conflict. Fowler fails me, but this guide helps. It tells me that this usage is often heard, but should not be used. Perhaps you have little sympathy with this modern usage, or should I say empathy? Fowler remains silent, but again this new guide helps me. The choice is between ~~pity for distress" and "'imaginative identification". Continuing with an A to Z check I notice that whereas Fowler found it necessary to inform me about the Monroe doctrine, that there is no hyphen in Yorkshire Pudding, and in regard to that "'belt of heaven outside which the sun and moon do not pass'~ ... "'it is likely to be useful to know that this", divided, produces the signs of the Zodiac-all this is missing from the Longman guide. However, Fowler omits words that have become new additions to English usage. Zero is one example, co­ respondent another. Commercial and social change certainly have brought about new conventions in the use of language since Fowler's day. One of the conventions that this guide omits is that relating to a parenthesis. Am I therefore free to write the following, which under Fowler's rules '~cannot possibly be justified''? One last thought: Fowler omits the word verbosity. Before you can look up the usage of the word (in this 5000- entry, comprehensive, practical guide on difficult points of English usage, which is fully cross-referenced, noting, in passing, that rules about the use of parenthesis are not given as in Fowler' s day), this new guide is an essential companion for all who need to free themselves from dated conventions and old attitudes. D. Bates 108 Reviews

HALL, Patricia and Charlie SEEMANN, eds., Folklife and Museums: Selected Readings, Nashville, The American Association for State and Local History, 1987, 194pp., $17.95.

WHO ARE THE FOLK? WHAT IS ART? WHAT IS FOLK ART? Put Your Answer in This Box.

The above display is reported to have caused people to practically fight over their definitions. These events were claimed to demonstrate that the particular exhibition was an organisational success. After reading this, and other essays in this book, I feel more optimistic about folk museums. Why was I ever pessimistic? Two reasons: first, my experience of guiding at a working museum. Venturing the opinion that a colleague's script, although entertaining, was historically inaccurate, back came the reply, <;<;Inaccurate, Yes!, but people come here for a day out, not to be depressed by hearing accurate facts about nineteenth century work practice and customs." Second, I have seen Garry Lyons' black comedy The People,s Museum. Briefly the plot is about a museum of the future. Here the exhibits are live human beings, caught in a time warp, condemned to play the past-forever. The museum's live exhibits go through their domestic and work routines, forever under the watching eyes of visitors. Two visiting journalists come to do a piece for a Sunday supplement. The way of life, set in 1910, gets caught up in a macabre game of past and present; this reveals the truth about the museum and its live exhibits-the living museum concept taken to its logical and disturbing conclusion. Will the future see the United Kingdom as one big theme park like the one in the play? Will managers of such museums be exhibiting our national decline, or our national heritage? Will these managers of nostalgia drag us all into the past, obliging us to put on costumes and dance round maypoles? These doubts are why I needed the optimism that this book provided. One essay discusses balancing the given. Acknowl­ edging past failures to make realistic statements about ordinary past lives, it goes on to discuss how museums can work within their parameters, balancing preconceived expectations of the public with historical and cultural authenticity in presentation. Emphasis is placed on the interpreta­ tion of processes and relationships rather than the collection and exhibition of objects. Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves, '<;What would I do if I had the opportunity?" This book will help in finding some answers. It also prompts some questions, such as <;'Ought we to be content with generating sympathy for, say, pauper apprentices, or ought we to risk striving to Reviews 109

create empathy? How do we reconnect the past with the present without creating a dream of a bygone age which never existed, as in the Hovis advertisement-set in Yorkshire but filmed in Somerset, with Dvorak's From the New World as its theme music? Are those museums that are opening in Britain at the rate of one every fortnight entering the heritage industry?" Which brings us back to the question, ''Who are the folk?'" D. Bates

HEY, David, Yorkshire From AD 1000-A Regional History of England, London, Longman, 1986, xv, 343pp., £19.95 hardback, £10.95 paper. The reason for dating the industrial revolution 1760 to 1830 has been attributed to Toynbee's desire to give a chronological framework to his lectures. As a result, many students were taught that this was a period of time rather than a process. A later generation of students was taught that it was an evolutionary path and that the Industrial Revolution did not bring a sharp break with the pre-industrial past. Hartwell ( 1965) stated that the causes of the Industrial Revolution were ''perhaps too complex for even the most talented historian to disentangle'" . This book by David Hey, one of a series of regional histories, provides an excellent means by which to disentangle and reassess the various interpretations of history. Those variable explanations which some historians have elevated to the "one main cause"' can be examined in detail as they affected one region. Generalisations, through David Hey~s own research and the research of many others from various disciplines, can be particularised. In Dr. Hey's case, all this is done in a style which reflects not only academic knowledge but a love for region built up over many years. If it is true that to understand the present one needs to know about the past, then this is essential reading for anyone who wishes to be sympathetically aware of the character and nature of the lives of Yorkshire folk. D. Bates

HINES, Terence, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal-A Critical Examination of the Evidence, Buffalo, N.Y., Prometheus Books, 1988, 372pp., $17.95. The author defines pseudoscience as a doctrine or belief system that pretends to be a science. The common characteristics of such systems are that they are based on non-falsifiable or irrefutable hypotheses. Placing Freudian analysis in this category will cause some eyebrows to be raised, 110 Reviews

but Hines (who incidentally is an Assistant Professor of psychology) bases his case on Leonardo da Vinci's alleged fantasy dream of a vulture. This dream was apparently interpreted in terms of Freudian symbolism; the acceptance of the vulture as a mother symbol is central to the analysis. Unfortunately, a mistranslation of Leonardo' s notes into German transformed a kite into a vulture. Thus Freud built his entire psycho­ history on an error. In true pseudoscience fashion, claims the author, the psychohistory views were not modified to take account of the new data. According to this book, in 1980 the Nobel prizewinner Pauling claimed that large doses of vitamin C are a useful treatment of cancer. This claim was tested by other scientists, and the results showed that vitamin C had no effect at all on either the progression of the disease or the survival rate of the patients. This is quoted as a typical example of the pseudo­ science claims made for above normal levels of various vitamins as cures for specific diseases. Studies show that such self-administered treatments are neither beneficial nor benign. Other studies reveal that some vitamins play a role in the prevention or treatment of some types of cancer. Such mixed results indicate the difficulties in countering the hypotheses of the irrefutable or non-falsifiable kinds used in pseudoscience. To answer the question, ''Does astrology work?" the classification extroverts/introverts is used to examine the personality of persons born under the birth sign of Aries. Astrologically such persons are bold, assertive, aggressive, selfconfident and determined. Given this prediction, more extroverts than introverts should be born under this zodiac sign. "Greater correlations'' were found, but only where respondents had a knowledge of the alleged relationship between birth sign and personality. The results of all other studies, where the alleged relationship between birth sign and personality were not known, failed to yield support for astrological claims. The Bermuda Triangle, ancient astronauts, UFOs, faith healing, and the Cottingley fairies, all come under the author's scrutiny. The effect of reading this volume is that it causes one to place hand on heart and attempt to say "I have never been deceived by a pseudoscience claim, not even for one minute.~' Whatever one's own convictions, this book has been written out of the firm conviction that it is not enough to debunk paranormal beliefs. It is of equal importance to consider why people continue in such beliefs in the face of clear empirical evidence that claims are invalid. It is this interface of belief and the believers that makes this publication valuable to the folklorist. D. Bates Reviews 111

HUMPHRIES, Steve, A Secret World of Sex, LDndon, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988, 224pp., illus., £11.99. This erudite study concerns itself with many aspects of sexuality in British society from the 1900s to the 1950s. Those researchers whose particular interest lies in the area of spoken history are well catered for in Mr. Humphries' many interviews. Indeed some of his interviewees not only permitted their memories to be committed to print but also appeared in the video which accompanies the book. The fact that ~~real life" characters are used, however, ensures that both book and video are of interest to the general reader/viewer as well as scholar, especially since such emotive topics as back-street abortion, early birth-control and unmarried motherhood are discussed. Archive film footage in the video, and grainy black and white photography in the book provide an appropriately sombre atmosphere when discussing such horrors as mustard baths, Epsom Salts, Mother and Baby Homes and Workhouses. However, the compelling nature of the video is fed by the fact that the interviewees have ' 4 faces~~ and are thus no longer candidates for an objective study, but rather people for whom we come to care. A more academic stance is available if the reader concentrates attention upon the statistics and official figures provided, which show, for example, rates of illegitimacy from the Edwardian years to the 1950s. Documents which chronicle the role of the National Council for Unmarried Mothers, and material from Mass Observation Archives relating to courtship rituals are also included. There is a plethora of information here which will be of use not only to folklorists but also to social scientists interested in living conditions in the recent past. For those involved in women's studies a field day awaits ... persecution, prosecution, prostitution, it's all there. Perhaps things have not changed so much after all. J. Harkness

LUTHI, Max, The European Folktale: Form and Nature, trans. John D. Niles, Folklore Studies in Translation (gen. ed., Dan Ben­ Amos), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982, xxv, 173pp., $7.95.

This .is the long-awaited translation of Max Luthi ~s classic study, Das europdische Volksmdrchen, in which the author presents a descriptive analysis of folktale as it appears in a number of literary texts, important among which are those of the Brothers Grimm. In six chapters he deals 112 Reviews with the Hone-dimensionality'' of the folktale (by which he means the phenomenon of the numinous, the Hother'' world, not being perceived, either by the narrators or by the protagonists, as fundamentally different from the everyday world), its depthlessness (i.e. the fact that the characters of folktale lack an inner life, an environment, or a relationship to past or future); and its abstract style, evidenced in the lack of descriptive detail, the formulaism, the single-stranded plots, the dovetail­ ing of incidents and objects, the rigid structures and shapes. Since the book first appeared in 1947, the author has added another chapter, ''Folktale Scholarship", as well as a Supplement, " Structural Folktale Scholarship", which is an assessment of the value and achieve­ ment of the work of Vladimir Propp. This is particularly interesting since, as the author himself points out, ''Propp's structural analysis is a kind of counterpart to the stylistic analysis attempted in the present book'' (p.l26). Because his analysis is based on considerations of language and style, many folklorists have objected to the fact that the author used as his raw material literary and edited texts which must, to a greater or lesser degree, bear the hallmarks of individual authors. Others have objected that Hthe European Folktale" which is the subject of this study is no more than an abstraction. Yet, as one reads through the six chapters that formed the original work, one cannot but be struck by the truth of the author's observations and the lucidity with which they are expressed. To be sure, it would not be too difficult to sit down and find exceptions in individual tales to the general statements the author makes about ' 4 the folktale:"; but the lover of folktales will nevertheless recognise their essential validity. The present translation is based ull the seventh German eJitiuu uf 1981. It is a model of clarity, and therefore undoubted! y a good translation. Terminology is always a problem, particularly with the German tendency towards compounding. Prime candidates for misunder­ standing are of course the terms Mdrchen, Legende, and Sage, with which the translator deals in his Preface (p. xxiv). The word character, too, could be felt to be a confusing choice in a chapter which deals with the depthlessness, the lack of substance or inner life of the figures which carry the action forward; but then there is no English equivalent of Handlungstrdger (p. 15, footnote). The translator is occasionally driven to paraphrasing or giving alternative translations: e.g. 4 'single-strandedness (Einstrdngigkeit) of ... plot" and 44 the division of this plot into more than one episode (Mehrgliedrickeit)'' (p. 34, sic); "'the invisible interconnection of all things (Allverbundenheit)'' (p. 51); 4 'Motifs drawn from the sphere 4 4 of social life (Gemeinschaftsmotive'' (p. 66); and ' prescriptive· or 'normative' literature (Seinsollendichtung)" (p.87). The fact that the original German words are added in brackets will not do much for the Reviews 113 reader who has no German, but the reader who has may well be given added insight, not to mention the opportunity to admire the translator' s ingenious rendering of these nightmare words. J. Hunter

MECKlER, Jerome, Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens~ Realism~ and Revolution, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1987, 310pp., $29.00. Jerome M e ckier states in chapter one that Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction argues that ninetee nth century British fiction should be seen as a honeycomb of intersecting networks. Within and between these networks, novelists rethink and rewrite other novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In a world increasingly relative (thanks mostly to the triumph of a scientific secularity), the goal was to establish one's credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by taking away someone else's-generally Dickens' s. Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot, attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing the pre-eminent Dickens aside. At the same time, but from the opposite flank, Wilkie Collins tried a different form of revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down or repair. Dickens replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had re-used his characters and situations to make their own statements and discredit his. The author goes on to quote John Fowles as saying ~~That the novel ... has always been a kind of self-feeding form, a cannibal form'~ so that one ,;~cannot conceive of a writer not breaking down the material he admires in past novelists and reusing it in his own work.~' And this is what Meckier says happens in the Victorian age. He takes five examples of hidden rivalry. The first is Felix Holt in which George Eliot rewrites Dickens's Bleak House. The second is The Warden which deserves special recognition as the only Victorian novel to parody a Dickens novel that Dickens never actually wrote. Trollope pretends to be answering an imaginary broadside entitled The Almshouse. The third one is Mrs. Gaskell's North and South in which she presents a more favourable picture of indstrialisation than Dickens presents in Hard Times. And fourthly there is the struggle between Dickens and Wilkie Collins in which Wilkie Collins tried to outdo Dickens but Dickens retaliates in Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Fifthly, George Eliot in Middlemarch reaffirms her parodic treatment of Bleak House and expands the attack to cover The Mystery 114 Reviews

of Edwin Drood. The chapter on The Mystery of Edwin Drood is particularly interesting. Edmund Wilson, the American critic, writes that The Moonstone ''in which a band of Hindu devotees commit a secret murder in England seems to have inspired Dickens with the idea of outdoing his friend with a story of a similar kind"-and the novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In The Moonstone there are two divided people. Franklin Blake is given opium and removes the moonstone from Rachel's room without realising it. Thus he has a night-time self. Ablewhite is the real villain but Collins reveals Ablewhite's criminal self only later in the novel. But in The Mystery of Edwin Drood Dickens takes the character of Jasper and reveals him as divided from the very beginning. He has a supernatural force which makes him a very powerful character. He is reminiscent of Dracula. Rosa Bud tells Landless that Jasper terrified her because she feels ''as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of.~· Altogether he is a more rounded and powerful character than Ablewhite. However, The Mystery of Edwin Drood was never finished, so the battle between Dickens and Wilkie Collins was unresolved. Altogether Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction is a fascinating and stimulating book. M. Knight

MURPHY, Michael J., My Man Jack: Bawdy Tales from Irish Folklore, Dingle, Co. Kerry, Brandon, 128pp., £4.95. Like many folktales, this collection of Irish tales would no doubt be better heard than read. Equivocal tales require to be woven round a person, place or time with just the right amount of truth added to make the tale plausible, the narrator reacting to disbelief or laughter with mock hurt that his story has been misunderstood or disbelieved. Even then, the time and place have to appropriate, otherwise they are likely, colloquially speaking, to go down like a lead balloon. Lacking these prerequisites these bawdy tales have to be looked at in the cold light of day. If these are truly Irish folktales then, personally, I prefer the fake Irish tales. For example, the folktale about the daughter who, while taking a urine sample of her father's to the doctor's, broke the bottle and rather than admit her carelessness substituted a sample of her own, and after it was tested was told "go and tell your father he is pregnant.·~ The fake tale relates how Michael (I) had to take a sample to the doctor's. Not knowing what was meant, he asked Patrick (He) "What' s a sample?~~ said I. " ... Piss in a bottle,'' said he. •'Shit in your hat,~~ said I, and the fight was on. A description of the old custom of dressing boys in petticoats so as to Reviews 115 deceive the fairies prefaces the tale of the boy who was dressed in petticoats. He was summoned in a paternity suit. Defending him in court, his grandmother lifts his petticoats and, pointing to his genitals, asks, ~~How could such a young lad be accused?" Another version of this story concerns a young negro boy. His mother holds his genitalia and asks the court, ~~How could a young boy with such a small thing commit such an act?" Before anyone can answer the young boy whispers to his mother "Mamma if you don' t take your hot hand away, we are going to lose this case." Of these sixty nine tales the author has cross-referenced eleven with Aarne-Thompson tale types and thirty three to Thompson's motif index. Unfortunately these references are incomplete. In allocating a space to such stories Thompson added a footnote that there was no point to thousands of obscene motifs, except the obscenity itself. Thompson, having found it impossible to avoid the existence of erotic tale types, then left space for such motifs. Hoffman (1973) lent impetus to the development of these motifs. Using the Aarne-Thompson index he created variant numbers where the existing types were not directly usable. The author of this collection of Irish tales appears to have followed the Hoffmann motifs. However, they are not very close to the motifs in Hoffman, and the variant numbers have been extended beyond Hoff­ mann' s numbering. Therefore it is impossible to say whether the numbers are the author's own extensions or derived from an unattributed source. These stories indicate that sexual tales emerge from ordinary life situations and cannot be regarded as belonging to any one culture. Wherever people tell stories there seems to be a need for bawdy tales to satisfy some need, albeit fantasy or to demonstrate that we are not so ignorant, or so easily deceived or so impotent, or to act as cover for some sexual fear or problem. As Dundes (1987) put it: "if people knew what they were communicating when they told jokes, the jokes would cease to be effective as socially sanctioned outlets for expressing taboo ideas and subjects." For those interested in what people find amusing, or in making comparisons between similar jokes, this is a useful book, even if somewhat marred by poor motif indexing. D. Bates

PADDON, Harold G., Green Woods and Blue Waters: Memories of Labrador, St. John's, Breakwater, 1989, 307pp., $24.95 Green Woods and Blue Waters is an evocative and charming portrait of life in Labrador presented by the son of an English missionary doctor. In easy, unpretentious prose rising at time to eloquence, Harold Paddon 116 Reviews

traces thirty-odd years of his life from his boyhood in the 1920s through marriage and a career operating a sawmill in the 1950s. Within this loose autobiographical framework a larger picture of Labrador appears. Characters known to the author relate yams of other characters, past and present, real and apocryphal, creating an effect of tales within tales, linking the author's personal reminiscences with the wider experience of the land and people he so clearly loves. The reader is drawn into a landscape beautiful but exacting, often bounteous but frequently cruel, and introduced to a people strong, proud, independent. Travelling with the narrator in the only ways possible--by foot or dogteam or, in summer, canoe or small boat-we meet characters ranging from comical eccentrics to tragic heroes, friendly dogs to helpful ghosts, the indomitable Indian woman Penamee to the mysterious Traverspine Monster. Perhaps most compelling is the sense of isolation that emerges from these interlocking tales. Tiny villages such as North West River, where Paddon was born, were often composed of no more than half a dozen families and could go for months without contact with the outside world. The Labrador trapper, leaving his family each autumn to travel miles to his hunting territory, remained alone for months while capturing the o;o;furbearers" that provided his livelihood. But isolation is not desolation, nor solitude loneliness; these, to Paddon, were found not in Labrador but in his years of confinement in an American boarding school. Throughout the book there is a strong emphasis on the importance of social ties--stories abound of dependable neighbours and hospitable strangers, of convivial gatherings complete with home brew and the inevitable storytelling. Life in Labrador follows the cycles of nature; the patterns of the seasons and the habits of wildlife determine the lifestyle of those who live by the land. Paddon describes this life with evident love but without sentimentality-the book is no idyllic Disney portrait. Death by the elements or starvation is a real danger, and to choose to live in such surroundings requires strength, determination and above all gruelling hard work. Paddon concludes on an uncharacteristic note of sadness, almost of defeat. By the 1950s modernisation and change had reached even to remote Labrador. With fishing and trapping no longer economically viable and with financial troubles necessitating the closure of his sawmill, Paddon ends his book with 'o;the end of my life as a free Labradorman'~. R. DuBianc Reviews 117

PEARLMAN, Mickey, ed., American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, Lex-ington, University Press of Kentucky, 1989, 236pp., $20.00 c loth, $10.00 paper. The most intcre ting essays in this book are on Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Louise Erdrich, Alison Lurie and Jayne Anne Phillips. Joyce Carol Oates, the first of these, is a very prolific writer but some critics think her finest achievement is in the short story. The author of the essay, Frank Cunningham, examines her first five collections of stories. He shows that her char acters are only liberated through accident or random violence and this is no liberation at all. In the story HPuzzle'', however, the characters do achieve a liberation and this points a way forward in Joyce Carol Oat es~ fiction . Mary Gordon is by no m ans as prelific as Joyce Carol Oates and by the time this essay was written she had published three novels and one collection of short s tories. In all her work s h e explores how people love or fail to love each other in a world where b elief in God is either a memory or inconceivable. Her first two novels portray communities and it is only in her third that she uses the image of the nuclear family. The babysitter commits suicide and at her funeral the main characters may come to realise that familial love is not enough. Louise Erdrich, the third of our writers, breaks new ground. Her novel Love Medicine marks a new approach in the treatment of the American Indian. The Indian is deb a ·ed by economic and historical factors, but Louise E rdricn IS _tttempting no historical survey or tract. She takes two C hippewa families and examine~ their lives at critical moments. She makes great use of symbols, in particular in Love Medicine. In this novel, w ater, which used to be of great s piritua l importance to the Indians, flows through its pages. Water is the link with the past, but the car symbolises the present. It is used to sho\v Indians adjusting or failing to adjust to their twentieth century role and is there at moments of heightened intensity or dramatic climax. Alison Lurie, along with Joyce Carol Oates, is perhaps the best known of these writers. Her first novel, Love and Friendship, resembles those of Jane Austen. Her heroines are testing life choices, but they are older than Jane Austen ~s heroines and, with one exception, are all married. When the story begins, the heroines have everything: they are intelligent, well educated, sophisticated, with high moral standards. Only one has a career. But they indulge in extramarital affairs which reveal the flaws in their lifestyle. All her protagonists, except for Katherine in The Nowhere City return to their husbands. Jayne Anne Phillips, the last of these writers, has published one novel and two collections of short stories. The essay discusses mainly the novel 118 Reviews

Machine Dreams. In this, women are the survivors, the storytellers; the men are dominated by machines and, in their dreams, machines appear out of control. All in all, an interesting collection of essays. M. Knight

PICKNETT, Lynn, The Encyclopaedia of the Paranormal: A Complete Guide to the Unexplained, London, Macmillan, 1990, 296pp., £17.99. This book ought to carry a health warning, aimed at those who are given to rising to intellectual bait, lest they have an attack of something while reacting to such statements as H... scepticism is an extreme form of gullibility ... being rational may in fact blind an individual to events in the real world ... An individual in the last throes of scepticism will accept any rational explanation, even if it is utterly ludicrous ... " As this quotation is taken from the entry under the heading of ''Explanations'~, it will not be a surprise that in the introduction the author states that this book is '"not aimed at the sceptics". The definition of sceptic as used by Picknett is certainly different from that attributed to Pyrrho of Elis who taught the doctrine of the impossibility of attaining certainty of knowl­ edge. The entry on the Cottingley Fairies (four cross references) expresses certainty, despite what might be regarded as possibilities of doubts. (p.82) The photographs were faked because of the perpetrators' frustration at not being able to capture on film the fairies they often saw. The article on which this claim is based (Unexplained, Volume 10, Issue 117, pp. 2338-2340) also states that the attitude of Elsie and Frances " ... to the whole question of fairy photographs is a typical Yorkshire one-to tell a tall story with a deadpan delivery and let those who will believe it do so." When asked if she [Elsie] could still endorse her statements as reproduced in Conan Doyle ·s book, she replied HYou will have to make your own mind up about that.~~ This was said "with a suspicion of that deadpan Yorkshire humour.~· Nostradame receives four references. His successful prediction of three events is given as proof of his ''extraordinary" career. Other reference books credit him with over 100 quatrains and four successes. With a success rate of some three or four percent, any student of statistics could point out that this might be a chance happening. One deduction that can be drawn from these facts is that it is not only the sceptics that are gullible. This work, unlike most encyclopaedias, is not arranged alphabetically but Hdivided for convenience''. Justification for an entry is on the basis Reviews 119 that each must lead to a cross reference with other entries included. The section on the Case for God concludes: " ... but sooner or later the spiritual knock at the door must be answered." My conclusion is that Lynn Picknett is deliberately provocative throughout. Her knock at the door signals it is Mischief Night. This is a book to read as a reference source for some 400 extraordinary happenings, for non-falsifiable or irrefutable hypotheses (no doubt thought up by the Cosmic Joker) and, given that your belief system focuses on the relationship between the belief and the world, I suggest you read it for the intellectual fun! D. Bates

ROBERTSON, Alex J., The Bleak Midwinter 1947, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, 207pp., illus., £10.95. According to Mr. Robertson, oral history is unreliable. He bases this statement upon the observation that Mr. Emmanuel Shinwell, the Minister for Fuel in the 1947 Attlee government, has made what appear to be conflicting statements-in interviews, diaries, memoirs and so on­ regarding his role in the events surrounding the winter of 1947. Unfortu­ nately therefore, the author~s total reliance upon documentary evidence results in a work which, whilst scholarly, is also rather lacklustre. We learn, for example, that in 1945 Douglas Jay predicted the Fuel Crisis accurately, and that Mr. Shinwell countered this by saying that he would get ~ ~All the fuel he wanted"; that Jay, Herbert Morrison, J.E. Meade, and Stafford Cripps warned of Hlndustry dislocated on a wide and uncontrollable scale~~, and of Mr. Shinwell's bitingly sarcastic retort that ~.:Everyone knows that there is a fuel crisis except the Minister fo r Fuel.·· Somehow, however, we d o not care, because the book is so clinically well done. Even in chapter five, which purports to examine ··everyday experiences '~ , the emphasis is upon the results gleaned from various polls and statistics. There is one black and white photograph in this section of a little girl, well wrapped up against the cold and sitting on a makeshift coal-waggon, which whets the appetite for more pictorial information. Such luxury is not forthcoming. There are, however, welcome if brief inserts from disgruntled interviewees, but even these are borrowed from Mass Observation' s archives. Although Mr. Robertson's book has been painstakingly researched, the fact that he has decided to take no risks whatsoever regarding ~·collective remembering" forty years after the event has resulted in an academically sound but unexciting book. This of course assumes an absence of bias in the official records, newspapers and so on. It is possible that the finished tome will appeal to a very limited audience, probably consisting only of 120 Reviews those wishing to pursue the author's argument as to the unreliability of collective remembering. In the Preface, Mr. Robertson says he had hoped ~~to interview people like the late Lord Shinwell ... ~, Now that would have made interesting reading, a real ghost writer no less! J. Harkness

STAHL, Sandra Dolby, Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989, 148pp., $25.00. This book sets out to propose an interpretive methodology for folklore text. To this end the author develops a chart to represent schematically the connections between the individual and eight significant categories of folk group. This takes the form of a wheel. Incidentally, in order to read this wheel one needs to turn the book round and upside down-a matrix would have made the task easier. The wheel is intended to show the general divisions in the perception of identity which aims to provide a format for discussing the backgrounds of individual storytellers and specific listeners. A comparison of the two charts-the storyteller and the listener-with at least one corresponding group, allows for the under­ standing of a narrative text. A second stage involves identifying the inte rprete r 's response to the text or performance. A third analytical stage suggested by the author is based upon Dundes~s essay (in Interpreting Folklore, 1964). In this analytical strategy Dundes's terms texture, text, and context undergo metamorphosis. Texture becomes style, which includes elements of culture and personalore. Text becomes type, which includes elements of structure and plot. Context become discourse, which includes elements of situation and rhetoric. The section on interpreting personal narrative texts concludes with the statement ~~ ... the interpreter's task is to be true to his or her personal insight into the folklore and the reader's responsibility lies in respecting that choice of focus." For my part I am willing to accept this. In so doing and after reading thirty three pages of text (out of a total of 128 pages) devoted to "The Canary, or the Yellow Dress" my view is that the author has developed a unique methodology for the examination of oral personal narratives. Unfortu nately, its uniqueness, while contributing to the practice of interpreting folklore, fails to convince one that dependence upon a subjective rhetorical interpretation has been lessened by a meticulous Reviews 121 analytical framework. The point that the author makes regarding the storyteller and the listener sharing at least one folkgroup is well illustrated by "The Yellow Dress". It prompts the question: to what extent can two people of different generations share the same cultural resources? The prominent theme of "The Yellow Dress" concerns the author' s mother's making a decision to buy a yellow dress and a pair of shoes with a $5 gift during her student days in the 1930s. Those who have experienced economic hard times at some stage of their lives might offer a shorter analysis, namely that beggars cannot be choosers. Another can be borrowed from economic theory of the ratio of marginal utilities. The purchase of a dress and shoes for a total of $5 brings greater satisfaction than any other combination of purchases. Neither of the alternative interpretations involves the super ego, the id, or second guesses deep psychological motives and it must be admitted too that neither provides a complete understanding of the purchase of a yellow dress. Perhaps skill in using Stahl's method of examination of oral personal narratives comes with practice. The book is recommended to all those intrigued by folk narrative research and who wish to develop a rational response to the attempts to provide a general methodology for this purpose. D. Bates

STILL, James, The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life, Lexington, The University Press of Kentucky, 1991, 178pp., $19.00. A prolific poet, novelist and short story writer whose career spans sixty­ odd years, Still has spent his life writing of the American Deep South, particularly of that geographically ill-defined but culturally distinctive region-Appalachia. During the period, roughly between 1931 and 1965, Still kept a series of notebooks in which he recorded sayings, snatches of dialogue and stories overheard from his Kentucky neighbours. The result is The Wolfpen Notebooks, a collection of Appalachian speech. The book is loosely organised by subject matter, including such topics as ''Sparking'~ ("When love comes to a rolling boil and can ~t be stirred down, it's time to get married"; ··superstitions" (".A sniff of polecat is good for a bad cold''); "'Moonshine~~ ('"Reach me one more little horn o · that likker. Hit's got a whang to it I like~'); and the rather grandly titled "Nature of Man" ("He's so sorry he ought to be stomped until the ground looks level"). We are introduced to the volume by means of an interview with Still 122 Reviews

himself, in which he describes his rural Southern childhood, his career as an author and his love for Appalachia and its people. Following the selections of sayings there is a short story by him, "I Love My Rooster", whose characters speak in the Appalachian dialect, and a poem, ~~Heritage", which is written, conversely, in standard, even formal, English. Still has also provided a glossary which is in itself a treat (Big Eyed Bird: God; gitworks: reproductive organs). Although short, The Wolfpen Notebooks is a book to savour slowly, a bit at a time. A page or two is amusing and instructive; more and the downhome wit and wisdom become cloying. Still writes, ~~People [in Appalachia] are more likely to express themselves in an original manner than any place I know'~, and the reader is inclined to agree with his conclusion: ~~I think it is something to celebrate.'~ R. DuBianc

TANNEN, Deborah, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 6, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, x, 240pp., £9.95. Deborah Tannen investigates some features of conversation with two wider aims in mind. The first is to underline the linguistic strategies that create involvement and make understanding possible in ordinary conversation, to show how these are similar to the strategies used by orators and literary writers. The differences between conversation and the language of persuasion (in oratory or literature) are shown to be fewer at this level than has been commonly assumed in the past. The second is to suggest that linguistics needs to remember in its insistence on being a scientific discipline that it is also a humanistic one, and that it will be much impoverished if it forgets this essential aspect of its work. The volume itself deals with involvement in discourse, repetition in conversa­ tion, constructing dialogue in conversation, and imagery and detail in conversation. Each chapter tends to analyse small pieces of conversation to isolate some of the structural features, and these are then often compared with the features that one finds in other types of language such as literature and oratory. The conversations are mostly in English, though there are some examples in Greek, and they have been collected by Tannen herself. This is a very stimulating book which makes one look with fresh eyes on conversation and what it can tell us about linguistic structures in general. N.F. Blake Reviews 123

URDANG, Laurence, ed., The Oxford Thesaurus~n A-Z Dictio­ nary ofSynonyms, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, 1042pp., £14.95. Two things that can cause word amnesia are: a blank sheet of paper and the winking cursor light on a wordprocessor. The recommended cure is to spell out Alzheimer's disease. If you can spell it correctly then the chances are that you are only suffering from a temporary lapse of memory, and you are only in need of a thesaurus. If you happen to have a Roget's to hand then look up the synopsis of categories for a headword; this leads to a word category or concept; then select the grammatical part of speech to meet your need. However, depending on the severity of the attack of amnesia, you may be left with a doubt as to the extent to which idiomatic or syntactical congruity has been stretched by your particular choice, in which case you will no doubt recall that, like hurricanes in Hampshire, ideal synonyms hardly every happen. This thought will cause you to reach out for a dictionary to see if you have been guided to a true and safe alternative. This can be a time consuming process. This thesaurus aims at limiting this painful groping. Headwords are selected on the assumption that the likelihood is that synonyms will be most frequently sought for the most frequently used words. To avoid duplication of listings, the index serves as the principal finding mecha­ nism. Words or phrases that occur in the main text as headwords are 0 indicated by a degree sign ( ). Each main heading in the synonym listing is followed by one or more sense groupings and illustrated by one or more sentences. Each sentence -'illustrates each sense discrimination within a context likely to be encountered in written or spoken ordinary English.... Wherever possible the proper prepositional or adverbial particle normally accompanying a verb in a certain sense has been supplied." Where they are easily recognised as being typically colloquial, archaic, literary, technical etc., they are also labelled. Another useful feature is to provide the user with a collection of words that can be substituted in the context of designated words. For example: ~'porous adj. spongy, sponge like, permeable, pervious, penetrable: The rainwater runs through the porous rock and collects in the pools below." Another feature, no doubt helpful to those who have difficulty with blank paper and winking cursor lights, is the large number of taboo, slang and colloquial words included. This is ._to ensure that users who need alternatives to them can find them readily". For those who study language this dictionary (containing 275,000 synonyms) with its example sentences and its single A to Z listing will be helped in choosing the ··correcC' word for any context. Old dogs (and reviewers) who are unchangeable, immutable or unalterable, will 124 Reviews inevitably find the groping from category or concept to listings familiarly comforting; but if the new tricks of this dictionary can be learnt, these users will arrive at the word with the right nuance for their composition. Struggles with the proper prepositional or adverbial particles normally accompanying a verb in a certain sense will be over. Put this book on your .:.:presents I would like" list, and while you are waiting request that it be put on a library shelf near your desk. D. Bates

WEINREICH, Beatrice Silverman, ed., trans. Leonard WOLF, Yiddish Folktales, New York, Pantheon Books in co-operation with Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, 1988, 413pp., $19.95. At this time of great change in Eastern Europe, this collection celebrates the continuity of myth and belief throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century amongst East European Jewry, with nearly 200 folktales drawn from the vast number housed in the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. The tales have been drawn from widely differing areas, from farming communities and villages to major cities. They have been handed down by all manner of people in all walks of life-holy men and Rabbis; tailors, coachmen and pedlars; grandparents, teachers and students. On the Sabbath, in the interval between afternoon and evening prayer, the popular entertainment took the form of parables, a favourite form of instruction that employed examples or analogies to point out a moral, whilst long winter evenings were enlivened by tales of wonder and magic or .:.:spooked" by yarns of ghosts and demons. Whether pious, humorous or '.:Wonder tales'', all are firmly routed in the background from which they grew~ne of grinding poverty, hard work and few rewards; of persecution, of lingering medieval fears and superstitions. They served as guides to proper conduct and to make statements about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. They pointed the way to survival in a hostile world and demonstrated how the virtuous would be rewarded and the wicked punished. All this does not lead to a collection of serious narratives. Many are joyful celebrations of life, and many are fun stories for children, for it is during childhood that most are introduced to folktales and the imagina­ tion is caught. There is something here for everyone. My favourite is .:'The Shoemaker and the Elves'", introduced to me, not at my grand­ mother's knee, but when an infant at my (English) village school. Long may such tales be told. V. Edwards Reviews 125

WILLIAMS-DAVIES, John, The Craft of the Blacksmith: Llawr-y­ glyn Smithy, Cardiff, University of Wales Press and the National Museum of Wales, 1991, 35pp., £3.95. Here is an interesting and informative book giving excellent value; it not only is a guide to Llawr-y-glyn Smithy, reconstructed at the Welsh Folk Museum, but has succinct d escriptions o f too ls and the blacksmith "s work, and shows how he was part of the rural community, accommodat­ ing change over the years. The text is augmented by well-documented black-and-white photographs and clear drawings of the tools. Examples are quoted from specific account books to show the pattern of work, the expenditure and payment of this central village figure. In community spirit, the horse-drawn vehicles of the village annually transported the coal for the smithy from the railway station, their owners thereby defraying part of their bill. In more recent years, with the decline of the horse, the blacksmith "s work has had to adapt and diversify, so it is pleasing to have such a full and readable account of this traditional craft. J.C. Massey

WILSON, C. Anne., ed., Traditional Food East and West of the Pennines, Vol. 3, Waste Not, Want Not, Vol. 4, Food and Society Series, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, 220pp., 166pp., £25.00, £22.50. These publications are based on Leeds symposia on food history and its traditions, and explore diverse aspects from his tori cal writings, not least the availability ot publishing facilities in the north in different ages, the necessity of writing things down, and how both writers and readers were drawn from various groups of society in different eras. Every chapter has a substantial reference list both of cookery manuals and observations from con tern porary writers. Volume 3 explores regional differences and specialities, often showing why they have arisen, and includes an interesting section on food associated with calendar customs. Finally, there is a chapter on recipes from a country house manuscript, with modern interpretation of methods. Volume 4 progresses through history, from times when the threat of famine made food preservation a necessity, through the use of salt and sugar by wealthier society, to household management for a group and then the individual family. It ends with an overview of commercial freezing, irradiation and canning of food. There is also a chapter about the development of the container used for potting food. The section I 126 Reviews

found most engrossing was Jennifer Stead's scholarly and lucid account of keeping food in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Many food terms which we use glibly (e.g. green bacon) have the physical and chemical changes involved explained here with a freshness that makes me look at our food in a new light. The only criticism I have of these volumes is that their necessarily high price may deny them the wide readership they deserve. J.C. Massey

The Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize

Applications are invited from persons interested in the Folklore and Folklife of Great Britain and Ireland to enter their contributions for this prestigious Prize which will be a warded for the fourth year in March 1994. The Prize will be £4,000 for the winning entry.

Please apply in the first instance for application forms and detailed Guidelines to John K. Burleigh, W.S., Drummond Miller, W.S., 31/32 Moray Place, Edinburgh EH3 6BZ.

The last date for submitting entries is 31 December, 1993.

l Aims and Scope Lore and Language, the journal of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language at the University of Sheffield, was established in 1969 and is published twice a year in January and July. This interdisciplinary publication includes articles on all aspects of cultural tradition and welcotnes contributions front the fields of folklore, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history (especially oral history) and literary studies, atnong others. Modent approaches to the study of folklore, whether theoretical or applied, are etnphasised, and the recognition of the iinportance of urban folklore is central to the aitns of the Centre and the journal. Lore and Language provides a forutn for the prornotion and encouragernent of original research both internationally and within the British Isles. The work of younger scholars is therefore especially welcorne. A Notes and Queries section provides an opportunity for readers to record their findings in brief, or to seek infonnation frotn others. A substantial section of the journal is devoted to book reviews across the whole field of language and cultural tradition at international, national, and local levels. The journal acts as a focus for the redeveloptnent of folklore studies in England specifically, where for so ntuch of this century the discipline has not enjoyed the status and support accorded to it in tnost other cultures. In particular, the Centre and its jountal etnphasise the itnportance of language in the transtnission, interpretation and social hnpact of tradition.

Instructions to Authors Please send a double-spaced, single-sided printed ntanuscript to 1 .D.A. Widdowson, Editor-Lore and Language, Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language (CECTAL), University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN , UK. If possible, authors should include a copy of their subrnission on IBM­ cornpatible contputer disc in ASCII fonnat. Guidelines for preparation of disc versions to be cornpatible with the typesetting systern used are available frotn the publishers. Line illustrations should be provided in catnera-ready fonn, sized for reproduction at either 100% or 50%;. The ntaxintunt display area for figures is 133 x 203 nun (5.25 x 8 in.). Proofs will be provided to the first or corresponding author of each paper. They should be corrected and ret1.1rned as quickly as possible. Offprints of articles tnay be ordered when returning proofs. Subrnission of a paper to Lore and Language will be taken to intply that it contains original, unpublished work, not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By subtnitting a ntanuscript, the authors agree that the copyright for their article is transferred to the publisher if and when the article is accepted for publication. The copyright covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article, including reprints, photographic reproductions, tnicrofihn or any other reproductions of sirnilar nature, and translations.