COMMEMORATION MY MEMORIES of ALAN DUNDES a Belated
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Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 53 (2), pp. 451–456 (2008) DOI: 10.1556/AEthn.53.2008.2.16 COMMEMORATION MY MEMORIES OF ALAN DUNDES A belated necrology On Wednesday, March 30, 2005, at 4.30 p.m., Alan Dundes, the greatest American folklorist of the last half century collapsed in mid-sentence while holding his graduate seminar. He died in the ambulance. As the first reports of his death all noted: it was a typical and worthy death for the outstanding professor who loved to teach. Dundes was born in New York on September 8, 1934. He received his BA and then his MA in English philology at Yale (1955 and 1958), and continued his doctoral studies in Bloomington as a folklorist. His PhD dissertation (1962) was a monograph on the morphology of North American Indian tales. By then Dundes was already publishing regularly and everyone knew the very knowledgeable, dynamic and innovative young man with the brilliant tongue. He went almost immediately (in 1963) to the anthropology department of the University of California, Berkeley. He was an excellent lecturer and hundreds attended his lessons or waited for years for the chance to do so. He received awards as an outstanding professor and teacher, as well as the most coveted American and European folklore prizes. Although he did not like to be involved in associations, to organise congresses and journals, his activity in these areas was also substantial. He trav- elled a lot in his earlier years but later he was a guest lecturer and keynote speaker at conferences only within the United States (although he was difficult to reach). He spoke very rapidly, knew and listed countless facts on world folklore. He was a provocative lecturer in the positive sense: he said such things as everything is folklore, American football is a homoerotic game, inscriptions in toilets and Xerox jokes need to be studied, Jesus and the Easter bunny are both striking, and at times he had ideas that amazed. He compiled a dozen or so anthologies collecting the best writings on a given folklore theme (from Cinderella to the Flood, from Red Riding Hood to blood libel). He knew how to write books jointly with his best students: on anything from the footnotes of American folklore dissertations to the Siena palio horse race. He provided excellent commentaries with the volumes he compiled; these are in practice the best introductions to different fields of anthropology or folkloristics. He was always able to add new data, known only to him, to works that have been cited countless times. (These transmitted the literature in English. Dundes also knew French, although not as well as, say, Meletinsky.) He included an article by a Hungarian author in practically all of these compilations. He published the volume of collected folkloristic papers of Géza Róheim. He himself also favoured the psychoanalytical approach and in particular the “orthodox” Freudian explanations. Not all colleagues liked this method even within the United States. His earlier, structuralist period, then his interest in genre theory, followed by papers giving a folkloristic interpre- tation of various new phenomena acted as a catalyst, although even his closest students or 1216–9803/$ 20.00 © 2008 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 452 Commemoration friends did not follow their master in this field who, despite all the changes, actually did the same thing throughout his life: he “analysed” folklore phenomena. (He himself used the word in a double sense.) All American folklorists (could have) learnt a lot from him. Even though many people envied his amazing productivity (from 1960 he published more than 250 studies, 12 books of his own, at least 20 volumes that he compiled, in a quality and depth that grew rather than declined with time), not to mention his ability to “steal the show” wherever he was, I believe that many of his colleagues were fond of him. From the 1960s he almost always invited a visiting professor of folklore to his university: from Mihai Pop to Bengt Holbek, from Wolfgang Mieder to Ülo Valk. Their visits to Dundes’ lessons, time spent in his wonderful private library and joint searches for data in libraries and bookshops left an unforgettable imprint in their own work. He had the latest technical devices in his home. He handled the game machines, the electric meat carver and such gadgets with childish delight. He loved music. He was not poor and he knew how to handle money. He was a cheerful, sincere, dynamic person, he would burst into peals of laughter and also had a good (not only American) sense of humour. We literally had to leave an American–Hungarian folklore symposium because we could not stop laughing at the fact that all attempts to project a film (on the making of felt hats) failed. I believe that among the Hungarian folklorists it was Linda Dégh that he knew best, but he also helped others, most recently Anna Litovkina. I, too, had been in contact with him for many years. I wrote about his folktale morphology in my dissertation, and pub- lished a review of other works by him. (He himself told me that he had showed this to the dean when he applied – successfully – for travel expenses to a congress in Bucharest on folklore narrative.) It was not an easy thing to review him. For example, in a German publication I had to criticise his book that literally identified the Germans with shit, and although I am not in favour of simplifying psychoanalysis, I succeeded in writing my opinion in such a way that neither he nor the German colleagues were offended. I was one of those who recommended he be promoted to the rank of distinguished professor, and I wrote the entry on him in the German Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Since this was written decades ago I was not able to show his lifework in its full breadth. (And the edi- tors warned me against popularising “his cheap Freudian ideas”.) Even then I regarded him as a much more important researcher than that entry reveals, a view that I now hold even more strongly. I first met him in person in 1969. In the autumn of 1973 he invited me to teach at the university at Berkeley. He wrote the foreword to my volume of studies in English. Even fewer can boast that Dundes wrote an original study for their Festschrift. I am at least as proud of his excellent piece on small proverbs as if I had written it myself. The fact that all Hungarian folklorists have heard about him would have happened even without my help, at the most it happened sooner and his influence lasted longer. He had a great and indelible influence on the work of Linda Dégh. From the 1950s right up to the recent past he was an outstanding folklorist in the United States. For a while from the late 1960s the modern American folklore school was the best in the world. Dundes’ predecessors and at times even his teachers (Stith Thomp- son, Archer Taylor) were comparative philologists, precise and dry men. Compared to them, Dundes was a different world: his textual analysis was very much alive. In the past decade other trends have predominated there – although I do not dare say here whether .