Bruce Jackson—literary scholar, music critic and producer, notable photographer and filmmaker, acclaimed documentarian with his wife Diane Christian, erstwhile editor of the Journal of American Folklore—produces a second edition of his 2008 book about lies, truth, and fiction. He addresses you and me, often in second person: people who live in the world of urban legends, contemporary literature and films, Kennedy’s assassination, conspiracy theories, and “what really happened that night in Santa Monica” (145) or any other night in any other town. To that large public he demonstrates many fundamental principles of folkloristics and tells many great stories. He acquaints the reader with narrators from his fieldwork, including incarcerated men in state prisons; the poets Stephen Spender, Allen Ginsberg, and John Berryman; literature by “Homer, Mary Shelley, William Faulkner, and Dashiell Hammett” (xii). He takes his reader from personal narratives through public discourse into film and literature, ever complicating the search for “what really happened” with more stories. The “stories that we tell one another are protean—one thing one time, another thing another time,” depending on the context of their performance (16). Giving precise, careful analysis of a story he has heard and retold, in informal, understandable language, he leads the reader into Folklore 101: all folklore exists in variant forms. Usually textbooks stop right there; this book carries on the expansion in American folklore studies that has made context into text. It follows that the reality of stories can come only by keeping them embedded in the place, time, and situation in which they are performed. Literary critics, take notice.
A particularly tortuous case about what really happened arises from Stephen Spender’s oft-told accounts of his experience in the Spanish Civil War. Variant versions yield contrasting interpretations, as we know from many a British ballad. Perhaps Spender rewrote his experience merely to make sense of it, but his supposedly final account (1997) was fiercely refuted by his widow and seemed to invalidate all previous interpretations. “Nobody knows, nor will anyone ever know” what really happened (44). Jackson’s experiment with truth terminates in undecidability, not on Derridean grounds but simply by putting the facts side by side.
In a stunning critical analysis of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the great collaboration between photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee, Jackson goes far to explain why a book with such conflicting messages is a classic. He confirms his earlier aphorism: “[T]he only thing you ever know for sure about a story you tell or that someone tells you is, at that point in time, the story got told that way” (45). I concur, as this aphorism underlies my recent book of African folktales, Folktales of Mayotte, an African Island (Open Book Publishers, 2023). This radical yet everyday conception of truth renders useless the assumption of folktales as stable across space and time.
More directly and assertively, Jackson debunks the legends around O. J. Simpson and Bob Dylan, central figures so attractive that people generated their own stories about what really happened. The O. J. murder case offered Americans “a story, a structure, an ethic, an ethos for just about everyone” lacking enough facts (144). In it “we each found some other narrative or narrative element of primary importance,” which enabled us to settle our minds. Anastasiya Astapova, in a recent article in the Journal of American Folklore (2023), calls this kind of folklore “vernacular authority.” As for Dylan legends, Jackson introduces them with folkloristic definitions we read impatiently, expecting the reality behind what everybody still seems to believe: that Dylan was booed off the stage when the festival audience “was driven to rage because their acoustic guitar troubadour had betrayed them by going electric and plugging in” (163). Jackson explodes the legend from his direct observation. “Bob Dylan’s Newport concert wasn’t disrupted by booing” (168), but by his following the prearranged program. The legend that using an amplified instrument was his unwelcome innovation, rejected by an audience loyal to his old songs, quickly swept over the popular imagination. Alternative fact displaced the old kind of fact. Both legends lead the author to conclude that stories “are the way we domesticate the world’s disorder. Facts are incidental” (170). We reject available facts in favor of a narrative that joins us to others.
In Part III of The Story Is True, the author becomes a good person to go to the movies with and produce discerning film criticism afterward. He explains the permanent appeal of the Western, analyzes the nearly incomprehensible plot of Arthur Penn’s Night Moves, and opens the genre difference between film and novel in a discussion of The Great Gatsby. By capturing in his film what Scott Fitzgerald did in writing, Jackson states, “Baz Luhrmann is the only director to have made a great film out of a great novel” (232). Fellini’s Amarcord is performing or describing “nearly every kind of narrative I’ve discussed thus far” (233). The most powerful chapter, about Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, echoes the earlier theme: “Just because you read something in a book or see and hear something in a documentary doesn’t mean it’s true. It means only that you read it in a book or saw and heard it in a documentary” (217). Neither the impossibility of knowing nor a measure of compassion for the warmaker means concealing one’s hearty detestation of Robert McNamara.
The perfect addition to a book about stories is the “coda” to conclude this second edition. Here Jackson analyzes the vitality of Donald Trump’s false assertion that he won the 2020 presidential election. This “Big Lie” (a term from Hitler’s Germany) is generated from Trump’s unassailable conviction that “I cannot lose. I always win.” Thousands of Trump’s followers have chosen to believe it, not because they want to support that unreal self-image, but because they have cast him as the one person who will fulfill all their expectations (in contrast to inherently unacceptable leaders like Barack Obama). “Perhaps the most dangerous story,” Jackson concludes, “is the one we want to be told before someone tells it to us” (281). By placing this powerful lie and its consequences at the conclusion of his book about telling stories, Bruce Jackson demonstrates the universality of folklore and the power of its grip on people.
It’s too bad SUNY Press doesn’t furnish proofreading services. They would eliminate errors like the three misspellings of Errol Morris’s name (214). Otherwise, the book is attractively presented. Few books have given me so much pleasure.
--------
[Review length: 1084 words • Review posted on February 26, 2024]