One of the most enduring topics of debate in folklore research is the question of performance: how do we understand, convey, and theorize about performance? what is the role of the performer? who is the audience? what relation does the traditional text have to the general cultural context? Furthermore, how do we analyze the interaction of these components in a performance situation? In his remarkable book, Hikâye: Turkish Folk Romance as Performance Art, ?lhan Ba?göz engages with these questions through an ethnographic and folkloric meditation on hikâye performance, based on his lifelong research with many a??ks, the teller-singers of the Turkish romance, and with the audiences of hikâye performance.

Hikâye: Turkish Folk Romance as Performance Art is one of the most original and compelling ethnographies of folklore that I have read in years. Ba?göz creatively interweaves his theoretical enquiry with a narrative rendition of his encounters with a??ks, a rendition rich in a??ks’ words and experiences. In addition, he powerfully juxtaposes his own autobiographical narratives, ethnopoetry, memories, and reflections with his thoughtful and detailed analysis.

Ba?göz’s main argument is that folklorists can recover and convey certain truths about a performance event, its audience, and performers by studying their construction of discourse. He contends that the hikâye performance in particular is a social event which combines, in a subtle way, the past, present, and future culture of the folk. “In each performance, a teller-singer a??k, carrying a saz in his hand, faces a group of people, an audience, and narrates a traditional hikâye, in the sense that it was told by other a??ks in the past and will continue to be told in recognizable form in the future, until the tradition itself ceases to exist” (153). Ba?göz argues that the creativity of the individual artist in a performance of the hikâye is controlled by the values and wishes of the audience, on the one hand, and the tendency toward consistency of the traditional text, on the other. Therefore, although the traditional hikâye in its performance undergoes important changes, the norms and demands of the audience are restricted by the creativity of the narrator and the tendency toward continuity of the traditional hikâye. According to Ba?göz, a good hikâye performance is a micro-model of an ideal society, every component of which works in harmony with the others. In this harmonious discourse, we find the past and the present culture interacting selectively with a future image as expressed by symbols, signs, direct discourse, and the kinetic movement of the teller.

Ba?göz goes beyond the contextual study of folklore and proposes a new performance paradigm that draws on but also moves beyond Bakhtin’s approach of “dialogic imagination.” Drawing on his lifelong research and his close experience with numerous a??ks and their audiences, Ba?göz demonstrates that the dynamic interaction in a performance may change every component of a hikâye, but the name and the morphological structure remain constant. In every performance, as Ba?göz demonstrates, a tension as well as reconciliation develops in the locus of performing. This tension derives from deviations from established norms and behaviors in the performance, and missteps on the part of the audience are punished by the narrator, sometimes quite severely.

Ba?göz provides valuable data on the life stories of the a??ks. In the chapters devoted to this biographical information, eleven a??ks share their views and opinions, and tell of their lives, educations, when and how their great passion for becoming an a??k began, and how they value their storytelling and audiences. They also recount their relationships with the local and central authorities. Although, as Ba?göz admits, he has learned much from these disclosures, he warns the reader that the information given by the a??ks should not be accepted as completely truthful, because a??ks, like other individuals who report their life stories, reveal only what is socially acceptable. For this reason, Ba?göz is skeptical of these life patterns as the main components of hikâye performance.

His study of performance does not ignore a broader comparative perspective that seeks to compare Turkish, Greek, Iranian, and Arab folk romances. His comparative study documents that the romance tradition has a cross-cultural dimension among these nations with common features in structure, plot, the concept of love, traditional devices, the ethnographic background of the teller-narrator, and the musical accompaniment of the performance. Ba?göz cautions the reader not to attribute the origin of these romances to a specific nation or geographic area. He cautions that it would be a mistake to study isolated individual examples to the exclusion of the great corpus of the Middle Eastern romance. Instead, he directs our scholarly attention to a comparative study that emphasizes the complex and reciprocal interaction of the various components of the romance tradition.

Ba?göz’s study of the structure of the hikâye follows Propp’s methodology while sidestepping one of its shortcomings. The most important criticism of Propp is that he reduces the folktale to an abstract mathematical formula, ignoring its language, plot, motifs, and narrator. Unless this abstract form is attributed some meaning within a culture, it is hard to separate a folktale from a fake tale. Ba?göz, following Propp’s methodology, establishes six plot actions (referred to as functions in Propp’s theory) common to all romances, but also explores the meaning of these six plot actions in Turkish society. By analyzing mainly the dreams of two a??ks, he discovers that the structural pattern of the hikâye is “the expression of a complex wish or fantasy of a young boy--a boy who dreams of challenging his father’s authority, of leaving his family, and of meeting, falling in love with, and marrying a girl--to establish a new family in which he possesses authority” (150).

Ba?göz provides us with new theoretical insight in his discussion of function and meaning in folklore. He proposes that folklore in general and any individual folklore genre cannot and should not be attributed a constant and general function and meaning. The performer of folklore may embed, in negotiation with the performance components, different functions and meanings in his art. To bolster that theory, Ba?göz provides a persuasive and enjoyable example of performances of the narrative unit of childlessness. In one performance, the unit takes on a religious meaning; in another, a protest of the heavy taxation of peasants; in yet another, an expression of despair of women from various religious and ethnic groups.

Ba?göz’s study includes the analysis of male and female audiences, and documents their impact on performance with lively examples from the field. On one occasion, a member of the audience accused the teller of ignorance, and the teller was so ashamed that he stopped performing his art for three years until he learned it to perfection. On another occasion, a member of the audience was so upset toward the end of the romance of Kerem and Asli, that when the hero was about to die, he jumped from his seat, drew a pistol, aimed it at the narrator, and said: “Look, if you kill the hero I will kill you” (204). Not surprisingly, the a??k provided a happy ending to the romance.

The book also includes a full romance, the hikâye of A??k Garip and Sah Senem, which was told by a famous a??k and recorded during a real performance. The text shows by special markings the traditional narrative elements and the digressions of the a??k. The appendix includes the main plot actions of fifty hikâyes and a general summary of the plots of the entire body of material used in the study from Ba?göz’s data.

I wish that Ba?göz had explored hikâye performances without the use of saz. Although he incorporates some of his own experiences in the book, we never learn how hikâye is performed in homes by storytellers who are not professional a??ks. In greater Anatolia, it is the custom for mothers, fathers, or grandparents to narrate such stories, transporting the members of their audiences to fantastical worlds.

This suggestion aside, Hikâye is an important work and I recommend it to all folklorists, especially those with an interest in the poetics of performance and in Middle Eastern Studies. Ba?göz engages in broad theoretical debates, drawing on the performance of hikâye to discuss the transformation of images and motifs in this tradition. I can imagine that scholars will be reading and debating Ba?göz’s arguments for some time.

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[Review length: 1384 words • Review posted on January 26, 2009]