Day 52. Derivation AND Creation

Something I've been thinking a lot lately as I work through Baer's attempt to do a type and motif analysis for the stories is how the classification scheme is based on similarities, while at the same time we know that oral storytelling is not about the "identical" kinds of similarities we can find in printed materials; every storytelling event is different, original, something new. Even if the performance were verbatim word for word, there are the performance factors -- and, of course, verbatim performance is the exception rather than the rule, especially in oral cultures.

So, I don't want to fall into the trap of just looking for, say, African folktale analogues, as if the goal were somehow to stay "true" to the African stories as if they were originals and the American stories are somehow secondary products. That's not the case at all. Each story is its own moment of creation, with the storytellers drawing on anything and everything that they can use to give the story meaning. I'm amazed by the survival of the African stories and that is a big motivating factor for me in this project; collecting and sharing the African analogues is one of my most important goals. Yet at the same time I need to keep reminding myself not to fall into the trap of prizing a story because of its closeness to an attested African story. Each of these stories that has survived is precious, and each story represents both old and new; the magic is in that moment of re-creation.

Meanwhile I am so grateful for the work that Klipple did in African Folktales with Foreign Analogues. I've been working my way through her bibliography to see what access I can get to the books that she used, especially the public domain books. I can muddle my way if needed through the French sources, but not the German ones, so of course I am very grateful for the approach she has taken in providing summaries of the stories, as Parsons did also for both the English stories and the Creole ones. When I look at books like the ATU or the TMI, the wall of bibliography without summaries of the stories is very offputting; here's a screenshot of a typical page in Klipple's book: not a wall of bibliography, but a wall of story summaries. That is my kind of book. :-)