This is a Festschrift on the occasion of Hans-Jörg Uther’s 65th birthday. The title translates as, Narrative Culture: Contributions to Narrative Research from the Perspective of Cultural History. Five articles appear in English, twenty-three in German.
Articles fall into seven subdivisions: The Basics of Narrative Research, Culture-Based Narrative Research Today, Exploring the Classics, Case Studies in Historic-Comparative Narrative Research, Visual Media and Narrative Research, Small Forms of Verbal Folk Art, and Narrative Research and the Encyclopedia of the Folktale. Articles in English are in the Case Studies and Visual Media areas.
The five articles in English are Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s “From Printed Page to Thrice-Told Tale,” Mirjam Mencej’s “Narrating About Witches,” Carme Oriol’s “Thumbling (ATU 700), a Folktale From Early Childhood,” Christine Goldberg’s “The Wolf and the Kids (ATU 123) in International Tradition,” and Luisa Rubini Mersserli’s “The Death of the Royal Dwarf.”
The introduction takes time and care grounding this collection’s combination of folk and “high” literature, as well as other narrative-friendly disciplines, including the visual. This follows the administrative structure of European universities, which typically include folklore and cultural studies—ethnology—in literature departments. In the United States and other places, however, disciplines subdivide along fault lines as well, just not the same ones, including for example, academic versus public folklore or—even within academia—material culture or folklife versus folk narrative. Folk music may turn up in yet other areas or cubbyholes of office or conceptual space. It’s a contention of Albrecht Lehmann’s narrative theory piece, in the collection’s second set of articles, that all knowledge and learning, including all human memory, organizes itself around a form of narrative, including the stories we tell ourselves in internal narrative, to organize how we see ourselves, as well as how we see the rest of the world (64–65). Readers of the introduction—and it’s helpful to do this to get a sense of the collection’s context—should expect to encounter the names of a number of Central and Eastern European researchers from the first seven or eight decades of the twentieth century, and perhaps fewer America-related or Anglophone names.
The first set of articles contains a survey by Ingo Schneider of the proliferation of narrative theories now current, and in particular of how numerous the so-called anthropology-based approaches have become. It might be subtitled “How Too Many Anthropologists Spoiled the (Narrative) Soup,” or even “Everybody Wants to Be an Anthropologist.”
The second set of articles, also in German, would be of interest to students of the Holocaust, of history, and of communication theory, because it describes how Germans, through forms of narration, may become capable of voicing the unspeakable and using narration as a form of national healing. Siegfried Becker and Gudrun Schwibbe wrote articles dealing with this area.
In the book’s second set of articles Albrecht Lehmann provides a general orientation to narrative theory, in German, with the title “Homo Narrans: Individual and Collective Dimensions of Narrative.” It treats of societal and individual memory and cognition, as they take shape in narration, and perhaps only by means of narration; it is well worth the effort involved to read (and translate) it.
Werner Bies, whose article (in German) appears in the category “Narrative Research and the Visual Media,” touches on political uses of advertising en route to analyzing, quite wittily, the techniques of intertextuality used in selling products to consumers. It’s about the conversation of one text with the other in the public’s mind, taking place in nanoseconds through imagery-based shortcuts. The idea is to find texts and/or message-laden images the public is so familiar with that the connection to their emotions short-cuts cognition. To do this advertising has turned to folk-related themes and motifs with the feel of tradition. Listerine, for example, selected the image of a dragon-fighting, sternly androgynous woman—Joan of Arc?—to combat the dragon of bad breath (353). In a televised commercial for a brand of mineral water a fairytale queen dismisses one brand of water after another, like rejected suitors, until the advertised brand—“the queen of table water”—arrives to great acclaim (354).
These vivid motifs come from myth, folktale, legend, aphorism, riddle, joke, fable, children’s literature, science fiction and fantasy, animated films, comics, and superheroes. The Marlboro cowboy is one of the more long-lasting (in the TV world) of these iconic images. They convey messages instantly; Bies theorizes that even the creators of commercials may themselves be unaware of some of the reasons they chose them (354). He finds more resemblance to the modern-day TV commercial in more “modern” genres such as anime or fantasy, because in themselves they resemble advertising more than “older” genres like folktale or legend. He does not use the word intertextuality, precisely, but it seems more and more appropriate as he goes along. In overtly narrative terms, witty reversals or unexpected turns of phrase help the commercials stay as memorable as the jokes or witticisms they come to resemble. Consumers have a huge store of images and phrases stored away; how many commercials have been built around Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare (in Germany, the hedgehog and the hare)? It is anything but surprising that the two folktales most loved and most often chosen by advertisers are the persuasion-based, not to say seduction-based, “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Frog King” from the Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Advertising substitutes, in Linda Dégh’s phrase, the wonder of the well-advised purchase for the wonder-tale’s original wonder (Dégh 1979:49).
It’s quite helpful that the advertising and commercials cited in this particular article come from Europe; they make their points more clearly; we non-Europeans might out of long habit gloss over ads familiar to us from our own environment.
WORK CITED
Dégh, Linda, and Andrew Vázsonyi. 1979. “Magic for Sale: Märchen and Legend in TV Advertising," Fabula 20:47-68.
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[Review length: 971 words • Review posted on November 3, 2010]