This edited collection of essays by eight widely-respected Nordic scholars offers some very exciting textual analysis, disciplinary commentary, and new directions for research on personal narrative and folk belief. It is a most welcome addition to the literature on narrative research, especially as it presents in English much of the current thinking going on in the Scandinavian journals. But beyond simply giving the “Nordic perspective” as the subtitle suggests, this slim volume demonstrates the application of narrative and linguistic theory that scholars in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland have been developing over the past decade and more. Most of the essays were translated for this volume, and we who must rely on this helpful and creative task owe thanks for that right at the start.
I was especially pleased to see that Barbro Klein not only included one of her own essays but also wrote the introduction. Those of us trained by Richard Dorson in the 1970s will remember his oft-repeated praise for Professor Klein’s “Testimony of the Button” published in the (then) Journal of the Folklore Institute (now Journal of Folklore Research). As I recall, the article examined stories and beliefs about the eighteenth-century death of King Charles XII of Sweden—supposedly he was killed by a button taken from his own coat and fashioned into a bullet. Clearly even then she was casting a sharp analytical eye on storytelling, belief, history, and the discipline of folklore study. She has continued that impressive scholarship in numerous other publications as well as here in her introduction, in her own article, and in this edited collection.
As Klein explains in the introduction, the essays grew out of various workshops examining the three concepts involved—narrating, doing, and experiencing—as they play a role in folkloristic research. Obviously the three concepts are extremely broad, but the task of the writers here was to focus on how each concept can be or has been applied in the study of folk narrative texts—particularly those texts often called personal narratives. In general, the essays look at narrating in face-to-face situations, examine the internal taleworld (to borrow Katherine Young’s term) of stories or speech acts, and ponder the problematic notion of experience as it influences or is influenced by the act of narrating. Klein is careful to compare the research coming out of the USA and that produced in the Scandinavian countries. She offers an excellent review of earlier research and laments the loss of folklore programs in Denmark and Sweden, where continuing research on folklore is often found only in neighboring academic fields.
Following Klein’s introduction we encounter the eight essays, each taking up in rough sequence the three themes of narrating, doing, and experiencing. First is an essay by Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj titled “War as a Turning Point in Life.” In this piece, the author examines the narratives of four women of Finnish descent living near St. Petersburg in Russia. While the intent of the fieldwork was to collect life stories, Kailova-Bregenhøj was surprised to find that all four women began their narratives with a description of the time when war broke out in their Finnish homeland. Even though fifty years had passed from the time of the forced exile, it was this event that each of the narrators chose to relate as most important. In the second essay, “Places Lost, Memories Regained,” author Anne Heimo also looks at narratives growing out of wartime—in this case the 1918 Finnish Civil War in Sammatti (Lönnrot’s home town). She examines the sense of place in memory and considers ways that gender affects how that sense is formed and maintained. Both of these first two essays demonstrate analytical methodologies that highlight the significance of strongly emotional and local detail in narratives, much as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and her father do in their recent book on pre-war Poland.
Third is an essay by Norwegian scholar Torunn Selberg titled “Our Lord’s Miracle.” Here the author looks at the kind of stories Gillian Bennett discusses in Traditions of Belief or Linda Dégh considers in her chapter “Tape-Recording Miracles for Everyday Living.” But Selberg’s focus in attending to the narrator’s story is less on the belief core of the story of how she is cured of eczema by a healer called The Pilot and more on how the storyteller creates a definition of “miracle” as she tells her story, citing details that challenge her own former disbelief and pointing to things in the story that can only be explained as “miraculous.” In the fourth essay, Barbro Klein looks even more closely at the linguistic components that come to the fore in effective conversations and storytelling. Here she analyzes the interaction between a brother and sister as they reminisce about earlier times. The brother, Gustav, is especially skilled at creating an effective context for humorous verbal performance, primarily by setting himself up to quote known figures from the community, past or present. His performance is somewhere between tall tale and witty repartee. It draws the listener in and forces some sort of response (usually laughter). Klein’s analysis attends to shared cultural knowledge as part of the interpretive process, much as does my methodology in Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative.
The next two essays, Ulf Palmenfelt’s “The Dark Shadow of the Un-mentioned Event,” and Georg Drakos’s “HIV/AIDS, Narrativity, and Embodiment,” both explore intertextuality as it emerges in storytelling situations that are potentially disturbing or awkward. Again, as with much of Richard Bauman’s work with intertextuality, the subtle skills of the narrators are made apparent in careful analysis of the process. Palmenfelt’s discussion of “collusive dialogue” is especially useful. Lena Marander-Eklund’s essay on “The Actors in Young Women’s Childbirth Narratives” moves from a consideration of intertextual process to one of dramatis personae. Here the author compares stories related immediately after a birth experience with stories told a year later. The changes in the relative importance of the actors involved is quite telling. Again, Katherine Young’s notions of taleworlds and storyrealms inform the article in an effective way.
Finally, Anne Leonora Blaakilde offers an essay titled “‘It’s Just a Story I’m Telling You, I Haven’t Experienced it Myself’: A Grandmother’s Narratives and Experiences.” The article is an interesting one; it raises issues tied to another favorite topic of mine—self-help books. In this case, Blaakilde views much of the material she collects as a specific speech genre she calls “good advice-giving.” While the question of genre may not be as pressing as it once was among folklorists, still the specific function of this kind of speech act is, I think, rightly identified as tied to narratives advice-givers tell about their own experience in withholding that advice. In other words, a grandmother often must refrain from offering the good advice she would like to offer, and her own stories reflect that restraint—a wise storyteller, or a silent one as the case may be.
This collection of essays will be a very useful addition to folklore reading lists and classrooms in the English-speaking world, a fine companion to works by Bauman, Hufford, Shuman, Lawless, and many others in the USA whose work echoes much of the spirit of these Scandinavian perspectives.
Works Cited
Bauman, Richard. A World of Others’ Words: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. New Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004.
Bennett, Gillian. Traditions of Belief. London: Penguin, 1987.
Dégh, Linda. American Folklore and the Mass Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Dolby, Sandra K. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. Bloomington: Trickster Press, 2008. (Republished, with a new Preface; originally 1989).
Dolby, Sandra K. Self Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Kirshenblatt, Mayer, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Young, Katherine Galloway. Taleworlds and Storyrealms. Boston: Marinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987.
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[Review length: 1305 words • Review posted on September 8, 2009]