Joseph Sobol gives readers a wide range of essays and reflective pieces based on over three decades of his experiences, research, and reflections as a storyteller, folklorist, and musician. His own career is grounded in performance studies and folklore, and he uses this background in this publication of fourteen entries that blend scholarship in folklore with writings and reflections from scholarship on contemporary storytelling. The earliest section of the book, In a Tradition, includes chapters on storytelling within the Appalachian region that surrounds Jonesborough, Tennessee. Special focus is on the highly acclaimed teller, Ray Hicks, but he also includes consideration of earlier storytellers whose verbal artistry laid the foundation for contemporary storytelling.
The book’s second section, From Tradition to Revival, adumbrates the coalescence of a contemporary storytelling that began over four decades ago within this region. Sobol provides a vivid portrait of Kathryn Tucker Windham’s contributions to the ongoing tradition, and he writes of other performers and promoters who contributed to the vitality of a storytelling revival that also is linked to various folk music revivals. He traces influences from these earlier periods and writes of more current interests, in the book’s final section, The View from Here. The book includes previously published scholarly articles and essays and original reflective pieces. This mixed bag of writing provides an overall sketch of the history of contemporary storytelling as a highly staged and professional art, as well as tightly focused inquiries into major themes that emerge in scholarship from a range of academic interests.
One of the strongest early chapters is “Jack of a Thousand Faces.” The witty allusion to Joseph Campbell’s writing is largely a subtle trope rather than an encomium to Campbell. Rather than simply postulating a monomythic archetype, Sobol’s approach is much more in-depth and interesting. He masterfully employs techniques derived from the historic-geographic method to provide a detailed discussion of the figure of Jack, and suggests reasons for the character’s popularity in Appalachia. The treatment includes an excellent elucidation of a typology for the Jack tales that are part of this narrative tradition. Sobol’s chapter could serve as a model for similar studies and as an affirmation of the continued value of this approach to narrative. Other chapters in these first two sections document storytellers’ reactions to shifting into new contexts for performing their tales, with special attention provided to their involvement in Jonesborough’s National Storytelling Festival. Sobol’s skill as a raconteur translates well in entries that read like memoirs, encomia, and even a eulogy. Sobol often seamlessly blends accounts of his own first-person experiences into the overall narrative arc in a compelling style that shows why he warmly appreciates the talent within the storytelling community.
The finest piece of writing in the book is in the third section. Sobol considers Daniel Morden and Clare Muireann Murphy’s December 14, 2017, performance of “The Remarkable Tale of Robert Desnos.” This piece uses theatrical presentations to stage the narrative as a dramatic performance that Sobol witnessed at The Cube in Bristol, UK. The performance took the audience’s imagination to 1944 and set the scene within the Buchenwald concentration camp. The complex, multivalent presentation is grounded in a frame-story that features a prisoner within Buchenwald who tells tales that help prisoners survive the immediate threat of the gas chamber. This frame creates dramatic space for more storytelling, but the resistance is futile for the physical survival of the victims of atrocity. A theme emerges that despite the death, the stories will go on. Sobol offers nuanced reflections and insightful commentary. He recognizes the power of Morden’s and Murphy’s emphasis on avoiding endings that try to establish resolution, and he appreciates the boldness of creating these kinds of narrative presentations. The chapter’s major tension explores whether or not artistic license is fully ethical within these kinds of presentations of scenes that can be subsumed within a range of genres within the literature of atrocity. Sobol offers guiding points for considering the limits to creative and imaginative expression of fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust. His reflections on these themes are well worth considering when thinking about dramatizing other tragic and horrific events in public presentations that are far-removed from the small-scale contexts in which these stories are told.
Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers includes important discussion on a wide range of themes that emerge in public presentations of narratives. Much of this discussion is relevant to those with interests in public folklore. He emphasizes that highly theatrical and elaborated stage presentations of storytelling are well worth consideration by folklorists, and the book opens up the potential for connecting studies of applied storytelling with the folklife-in-education movement. Some of the essays, however, tend to be more digressive than unified in their prose. Rather than offering a tightly focused thesis statement, for example, Sobol often uses a variation of the phrase “this essay explores” followed by a discussion of some of the relevant themes to be explored. Finding specific arguments derived during this exploration can be challenging, and Sobol tends to drop in scholarly musings from writers such as Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Marshal McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others whose work is favored more by writers on public presentations of storytelling than by folklore scholars. He does refer to some of the scholarship by folklorists, but the references read a bit more like allusions to the literature than resources for gaining deeper insights grounded in folklore scholarship. There is interesting scholarship on public folklore and applied ethnomusicology that offers insights into many of the topics Sobol explores. This scholarship simply is not on Sobol’s radar screen.
There is another somewhat frustrating problem that makes some chapters difficult to read. Rather than elegantly integrating the excellent narratives of his raconteurs into the chapters, Sobol instead puts some of them in appendices. This makes it hard to read the narrative while recognizing how it fits into the analysis, and also does a bit of a disservice to the storytellers’ artistry. I doubt that literary critics who unearth a new poem by Emily Dickinson would place the work in an appendix. Putting a story into an appendix literally marginalizes the teller’s eloquence as it casts the work more as data than as verbal art. The storytellers and Sobol have excellent things to say (and write). Selected essays that focus more on interpretation and theorization than on documentation and reflection, would be greatly improved with rhetorical and stylistic changes that integrate the writer’s analysis with the skill of master narrators.
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[Review length: 1080 words • Review posted on April 15, 2022]