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Last quarter, I wrote a research paper for HSTEU 451: East-Central Europe Since 1342 with Professor Felak (HIGHLY recommend) focusing on how authors of folk stories sought to create a national identity during the Czech National Revival of the nineteenth century. In it, I was confronted with the questions of authenticity and how to interpret multi-layered stories written in one time and place but inspired by another—those stories that tend to fall under the categories of written folklore or mythology. My starting place was the idea that an “original myth” does not exist, because myths are retold and reimagined over and over all time, meaning that one of my main arguments was a critique of “authenticity,” a word that should be carefully examined when applied in this context. At the same time, I also needed to analyze the folk stories as products of the nineteenth-century Bohemian context, and even more specifically, as multi-layered products of the nineteenth century inspired by previous versions. The resulting framework is what I think of as the iterative approach to folk stories; that is, each retelling or “iteration” adds new context to the body of retellings, which is not simply a collection of variations but an ever-changing process of storytelling. The following is an attempt to outline the approach, its theoretical basis, and its possibilities for future application.
Bohemia, in the region that is now the modern Czech Republic, experienced profound changes to nearly all aspects of society during the nineteenth-century, as industrialization and nascent nationalism appeared in force throughout Europe. The railway infrastructure, factories, and growing urban cities that now dotted the Bohemian countryside were visual representations of the ideological movements sweeping Prague academics and politicians. Calls for a cultural awakening and the development of a national identity following Johann Gottfried Herder’s ethnolinguistic model—that is, that language, culture, and tradition combine to form the national character of a people—transformed pre-national concepts of the state, and coincided with general rising frustration under the Habsburg Empire. From this context emerged a unique intellectual, cultural, and political movement to define the national character of Bohemia, and to preserve and cultivate it against the imperial aims of Austria, referred to as the Czech National Revival. It is difficult to overstate the extent of revolutionary change during this period; one twentieth-century author, summarizing its impact on literature, phrased it this way: “suddenly the sky is darkened by the smoke of a steam-engine which is ‘tearing’ through the fondly remembered countryside.” This gives some sense of the jarring quality felt in works from the National Revival, as well as its intrinsic relationship with nostalgia.
It was during this whirlwind period of great political, economic, and cultural upheaval that a young Karel Jaromír Erben, an archivist working under Bohemia’s leading national historian, wrote a poem about a water sprite sitting in a poplar tree—and about a golden spinning wheel, a dove, and Christmas Eve, to name a few others. Erben was one of many nineteenth-century scholars to turn to an idealized, medieval, and rural past as a solution to the challenges of the industrialization era, publishing several collections of folk stories and songs including Kytice z pověstí národních (“A Bouquet of Folktales”). Together with other collectors like the Brothers Grimm, whose Children’s and Household Tales remains popular today, this group turned folklore into a field of interest for ethnographic work and for popular entertainment. Typically, these collections resulted from a mash-up of research, both first-hand conversational and second-hand archival, by the authors into a highly stylized and sometimes embellished publishable form (rather than, say, honest reproductions of existing versions of the stories). Two questions are immediately obvious in matters of interpretation: To what extent can these compiled folk stories then represent “authentic” or “original” folk traditions—if such an ideal exists at all? How much influence did the author’s own experiences and their historical context have on the stories? A third question I want to pose is, how can we use this understanding of context to complicate the idea of the “original” story? To attempt an answer to these questions, it is helpful to turn to Erben’s process of collection and composition as an example.
His position as an archivist and ethnographer allowed him considerable access to medieval and contemporary sources, as well as to the different parts of Bohemia he visited on assignment. As a result, he collected different versions of folktales from maids or peasants he met on walks through the countryside (two categories that, significantly, heavily favored women), or from the work of his contemporaries at home and abroad (meaning that although the work of composition was concentrated in Erben’s hands, it was informed by extensive research). As for the composition of his prose and poems, his position in the middle of the Czech National Revival gave him access to the literary developments of the previous couple generations of scholars, which heavily influenced his use of language and syntax. Although he wrote in multiple styles of verse in Kytice alone, not to mention in his other works of prose, Erben’s approach to composition consistently followed the prevailing Czech theories at the time, which emphasized building up and standardizing Czech vocabulary and grammar on level with Latin or other literary languages on the Slavic branch. At the same time, conforming with the popular theory that “authenticity” was held in folk culture, seen as the sphere farthest removed from the modernizing influences of broader society, Erben’s stories written in verse followed the simple style of folk songs. His place amid broader societal changes and his own firsthand experiences therefore informed his retellings of folk stories, giving them both historical and personal contexts. These context-informed tellings and the body mythos that he collected them from are the two factors I wish to explore further, using one of his most famous poems.
“The Water Sprite” opens on a scene in the Bohemian countryside:
“Over the lake in a poplar tree
sat a sprite one evening:
‘Shine sweet moonlight shine,
I stitch a dainty line.
‘I sew, I sew me little boots
to wear in wet and dry pursuits:
Shine sweet moonlight shine,
I stitch a dainty line.
‘Today is Thursday, Friday’s next,
I sew a jacket with a vest:
Shine sweet moonlight shine,
I stitch a dainty line.
‘Green suit, with boots of cherry,
Tomorrow I will marry:
Shine sweet moonlight shine,
I stitch a dainty line.’”
The vodník, or water sprite, is a popular character of Slavic folktales. It varies across different stories, but usually appears as a frog-man, or a green-haired man, with a long beard and wet clothes that causes mischief in towns and traps drowned souls in teapots in his underwater palace. Erben’s research notes suggest that he knew of a version of the water sprite story from his hometown, and of others told throughout Bohemia. It is also likely, considering his other work, that he was aware of the Slavic tradition behind the water sprite and its manifestations outside of Bohemia, as well as similar stories from other traditions (mostly Greco-Roman, to which he frequently drew parallels). These versions constituted the nebula of variations of the water sprite story that Erben had knowledge of—a crosscut of the huge corpus of water sprite stories ever in existence, that includes every version told but unrecorded around dinner tables or at bedsides—and was thus able to draw from to write his own iteration.
Erben’s place in history also informed his retelling. Writing during an intellectual age heavily influenced by Romanticism, which tended towards beautiful, poetic, and symbolic nature imagery, Erben’s language and syntax choices centered this aspect of the story. (For contrast, it is conceivable that, for example, a different author writing when rationalism was the prevailing literary ethic might have dwelt more on how the water sprite story depicts the institution of marriage.) Similarly, as a writer of the Czech National Revival who fervently believed in the Czech national cause, Erben chose to present the story in the style of a folk song, rather than prose or poem; in fact, some lines he borrowed expressly from the folk songs he had heard. The carefully Romantic yet simple language he chose represents an attempt to elevate Czech as a literary language and, therefore, elevate Czech national identity. Each of these choices, informed by the Romantic and nationalist context of Bohemia around the mid-century, shaped the form of Erben’s iteration.
By the example of “The Water Sprite,” I mean to demonstrate that, rather than being an independent product of individual work, or a static representative of the whole body of water sprite stories, it is instead an iteration influenced as much by context as by the tellings that preceded it. This iterative approach to folktale analysis grants more dynamism to the process of storytelling; there is not one definitive tradition to point to as representative of the whole, rather, each iteration draws from the body mythos and adds to it from its own context. In this way, I argue that viewing folk stories as a process rather than as static products allows us to more fully analyze the collection as multifaceted, and individual iterations as products of their time-place contexts. This, too, allows us to move away from the concept of “authenticity” or “originality,” viewing storytelling on a continuum with no one valid starting or end point, merely a similar story being retold again and again at different times.
This approach derives from theories that have gained popularity in recent decades in the field of posthumanism. Although these theories are far beyond my focus here, I would briefly mention Karen Barad’s framework of “agential realism” which, among other things, seeks to step away from representationalism (the idea that we can only know the world through our representations of it, and any attempts at direct knowledge are futile) towards giving agency to non-human forces of creation. Barad posits that, within this framework, institutions and epistemologies are dynamic arrangements of various interacting elements; that is, the matter that impacts our lives, like stories, are not static, pre-existing things, as it were, but instead ever-changing products of an ever-changing world. This form of realism also has many similarities to some Indigenous philosophies that assign agency to non-human elements that interact with us and each other in a dynamic process of creation. Eva Marie Garroutte and Kathleen Delores Westcott, for example, argue that “myth functions as a conscious vital entity possessing the power to create the world,” this framework referred to as “mythic thinking.” This idea that when we tell stories, stories tell something back lends itself to the iterative approach: storytellers engage with the existing body of stories while adding their own context in a continual process of co-creation. Because the body of the story is not static, we are then able to analyze it as a result of time-place specific arrangements of iterations, which themselves derive from time-place specific arrangements of institutions and belief systems.
Moving from analysis to possible applications, I will conclude by mentioning two of the most significant opportunities that viewing folk stories in this way grants us. In this, I hope to complicate the prevailing framework in folklore/myth studies that condemns the notion of the “original story” by asking, so what? I argue that the fact that there is no static, original story is what allows us to step in with analytical interventions to figure out why things have been told in certain ways, and with what effect.
There is no static, original story is what allows us to step in with analytical interventions to figure out why things have been told in certain ways, and with what effect.
There is no static, original story is what allows us to step in with analytical interventions to figure out why things have been told in certain ways, and with what effect.
As much of the recent literature in folklore and myth studies has highlighted, modern systems of oppression tend to use the moralizing elements of older stories as evidence for reinforcing biases like sexism or xenophobia (I am looking at you, haters of Medusa). In this context, the first opportunity provides a framework for breaking down this phenomenon. The iterative approach opens up the stories, such that instead of treating them as tales that emerge from the ether untouched by human prejudices, we can understand them as they are: stories told by people who are thoroughly influenced by the world they live in. For example, because Erben’s world in the nineteenth century almost exclusively cast women as wives and mothers, his stories presented the moral that women who fail to live up to this societal standard are deserving of righteous punishment. As a modern audience, we can (and should) then utilize criticality in our interpretations to analyze and disrupt the related institutions like the patriarchy.
The second opportunity relates to the question of “authenticity”—whose story-tellings are listened to and remembered. It is significant that Erben remains one of the preeminent authors from this period, as do K. H. Mácha and the Brothers Grimm, all educated men of a small, elite group of scholars. As a result, it is their stories that were recorded and passed down, and therefore it is also their stories that tend to merit scholarly attention, and not those of, for example, the singing maids in boarding-houses that Erben borrowed freely from. Not only has this excluded the voices of those who have traditionally lacked access to the same institutions, but it also drastically limits our understanding of the complexity of stories (yet again, I think of Medusa, and repeat the question so many others have also asked: what of those stories told of her by women? Were they kinder?). By viewing the stories as part of a much larger, pluralistic nebula of iterations, we can return some legitimacy to the storytellers that have been ignored. And, by expanding beyond normative narratives, we open up the body of stories to far more nuanced and complicated analyses that more accurately depict the multifaceted way in which stories operate in society.
As is one of the main applications of Barad’s agential realism, this reframing allows for radical interventions in a field wherein tradition tends to obscure attempts at redressing historical injustices. By viewing storytelling as a double-layered process, contextualizing its specific iterations and acknowledging its position amid an ever-changing body, I argue that we can move towards better and more nuanced analyses. My analysis is necessarily limited and constrained—some might note my occasional conflation of folk story and myth, a differentiation with its own huge body of literature—but this framework has nonetheless been helpful in developing my own understanding of the history of stories. Further research might benefit from a more rigorous application of posthumanist realism and mythic thinking. Incorporation of the idea that the non-human world has the power to act would complicate my double-layered model by arguing that although we create stories, stories also create us, leading to a more thorough understanding of how media feeds injustices, or disrupts them.
9 February 2024
9 February 2024
References:
References:
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Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801-831.
Erben, Karel Jaromir. A Bouquet of Czech Folktales. Translated by Marcela Malek Sulak.
Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2020.
Garroutte, Eva Marie and Kathleen Delores Westcott. "The Story Is a Living Being:
Companionship with Stories in Anishinaabeg Studies." In Centering Anishinaabeg
Studies: Understanding the World through Stories, edited by Jill Doerfler,
Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, 61-79. East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.
Johnson, Lonnie R. Central Europe Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011.
Rosiek, Jerry Lee. "Agential Realism and Educational Ethnography: Guidance for Application
from Karen Barad's New Materialism and Charles Sander Peirce's Material Semiotics." In
The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education, edited by Dennis Beach, Carl
Bagley, and Sofia Marques da Silva. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
Součkova, Milada. The Czech Romantics. ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton & Co, 1958.
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