Subsequent generations wondered how much more brilliant a scholar she might have been had she not devoted her youth to drunken debauchery in Siberia. Fruitless attempts to visualize these crops of genius gone with brain cells lost puzzled as well as disgusted succeeding schools of thought.
Yesterday in in my class “Folklore Theory” we discussed folk-belief and legends. Back in the days, there was a famous Swedish folklorist, C. W. von Sydow, who first collected stories about folk-beliefs from the ‘people’ out in the field, and then decided that the material he had acquired needed to be classified, categorized, and systematized. It had to be explained according to ‘what’ it really was. Often when he was out and about in the country side listening to people tell their stories – in my mind, I see him wondering rural areas of Sweden sometime in the 1920s or early 1930s – he would come across narratives containing elements of the supernatural, i.e. fragments of folk-belief, that began like “I saw…” or “This happened to me…”, or “I heard…” and “This happened to my father/neighbor/friend…”. Folklorist von Sydow decided that these stories must be based on personal experience, that in some way they resemble memories of a sort; thusly he named this folklore genre memorate. He also came up with a bunch of other genres and sub-genres – working the same magic on folk traditions that Carl von Linné had previously worked on biology – but what stuck with folklore theory was the memorate: narratives about a personal experience involving interactions with the supernatural. Later this genre was to lead to much confusion, or perhaps not confusion – but rather a rude awakening leading one field of the humanities to come face to face with the human construct that is our culture. As folk-belief and legends were being continuously collected all over the world – not only in rural Sweden – during the remainder of the 20th century it became increasingly clear to several scholars that the so-called memorates had very little to do with personal experience. Rather, it was revealed to be a genre that demanded a narrative disguising itself as personal. One Finnish folklorist tried to understand why his favorite informant could not produce any legend-based narrative that was more than four times removed from her – i.e. the furthest source from her memorates could be only “the friend of a friend”. For a long time, it did not occur to folklorists that people lie.
For von Sydow it must have been unthinkable that his informants were displacing the actual agent behind the narrative on purpose. Yet, the genre itself demands this displacement. The genre itself – let us still call it ‘memorate’ even though it has nothing to do neither with personal experience nor personal memory – is confined within a [cultural/social/historical, i.e. belonging to a value-based world-view] context that works according to the simple principle of inclusion and exclusion: inclusion of belief and exclusion of disbelief. In form, the memorate strives toward believability. For example, when retelling an encounter with a ghost that one has heard from someone else and which in that version was about a third or even fourth party, the narrator must cut out one or several links in order to fulfill the genre’s interior desire for credibility. Yesterday in class I tried to illustrate this point with the following story from my own life [containing several instances of genre-appropriating displacement as well, of course]: when I was 10 years old, I heard the urban legend “The Boyfriend’s Death” while at summer camp. I remember that it was told at night, while a group of us were out walking in the woods in the dark, and the narrator emphasized that we were ‘in the vicinity of where it had happened’. A year later, I was once again at summer camp and a group of us were once again out walking the woods at night in the dark – a summer camp tradition of scaring each other so as to create a need for protection which in itself stirs a sense of community – and the same tale was told. This time, however, it had happened near to where this summer camp was located. I realized that “The Boyfriend’s Death” was a ‘spökhistoria’, as they are called in Swedish, or in English simply: a spooky story. Many years later, when I was in Russia and found myself one evening in a story-telling setting where we were sharing experiences of the supernatural or the scary [or both!], I was asked if I had anything. Even though “The Boyfriend’s Death” is such a famous legend – I heard it at every summer camp I ever attended and at slumber parties as well – I reckoned that since this is in deep provincial Russia and because the Iron Wall of the Soviet years protected this society from such Western influences, they have probably not heard it before. When I told it, however, I did not start with “One time, at summer camp…”. If the memorate is to be successful, it prerequisites displacement and relocation; it doesn’t have to be about the narrator, but the narrator is to have heard it from one of the actual agents of the narrative. Thus, in my rendition of “The Boyfriend’s Death” this horrific incident had happened to one of my friends back home in Sweden not too long ago. At this, someone in the class reacted: “But weren’t you afraid that they’d call you out on it?” Once again, the genre saves you here: told properly – and telling tales like these is not for everyone – the memorate becomes believed and in the same instance fulfills its function. Legends are not ‘tales of truth’; legends are ‘tales of concern’. The context which invited the legend to be shared in the first place is the same context which accepts it; where a legend might be doubted a legend is not told. It can only be a tale of concern if it receives the ‘seal of approval’ by the community; i.e. the ‘concern’ presented fits the value-based world-view of this particular society, and, subsequently, suits the presiding standards of its culture.
The most fascinating with all of the above is that von Sydow – and many folklorists as well as other scholars of the 20th century with him – did not recognize humanity’s fabulating instinct. Or, rather, the humanistic paradigm within which he worked [and within which many others worked, and – scary though it may be – still work today] did not allow for the idea that truth is not highest in hierarchy. To von Sydow – and all the others – truth was ‘the ultimate destination’ to which all verbal activity was heading, against which all human narrations could and should be measured. Folklorists constructed their theories on faulty foundations: that there is difference between truths and lies, that we can know the truth, and that lying is destructive, subversive, and – at the end of the day – a bad thing. Why must it be like that? What is hidden underneath this reverence of truth in our culture, beneath our continuous consumption of ‘based on a true story’ narratives, where is the cause for wanting to distinguish between ‘the real’ and ‘the unreal’? Why does it matter what ‘really happened’ and what ‘really did not happen’? “What is truth?” Pilate asked Jesus. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is often given to – objectively speaking – absurd utterances. Yet, today nobody reading the New Testament would distinguish the nonsensical insanity contained within his claim that “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” – nor would many modern day readers recognize the one fundamental rhetorical device of the Holy Scriptures which is here also inserted: an audience that does not understand, that misinterprets, and ultimately rejects. The reader is subconsciously already above someone – though not as high as Jesus, who knows the end of history – but already a hierarchy within the text has been established: the reader is smarter than the audience because the reader understands and accepts. The Holy Scriptures are filled with philological treasures like this; today, we can hardly grasp them anymore, like someone who can’t see the peculiarities, the scars, etc. of her or his own body once it has been seen enough times. The body becomes the perspective from which the world is viewed. The same is true for the Bible – it is meta-commentary not on what God is like, but what it is like to be human. Why can’t we ever decipher the words of Jesus? Because between us today and the ascendance of God’s son to Earth there are layers upon layers upon layers of human culture, human history, human society – and each layer has used as well as abused the previous, added and deleted from the previous, creating a remarkable palimpsest of incomprehensible information. The Word of God was supposed to be the Truth; not surprisingly humanity chose the last station of authority to be one thing impersonal and unattainable – language – and the other disguised as something else than what it is: law.
Truth is a result of a value-based world-view, not the cause of it. Every society needs to avoid taboo in order to survive; where there is property, everything connected to it will follow: borders, economies, legal procedures such as marriage and confirmation of incorrect/correct progeny, etc. Distinguishing between the truth and the lie becomes important in order to avoid taboo.
Nevertheless, human beings lie, have always lied, and will always continue to lie. Why do we lie? Why do we hide this natural urge behind lies – call them ‘concepts’ if you may – of truth? When I was a small child, I remember how one of my friends told me that her parents didn’t like that she spent so much time with me because I ‘lied so much’. I remember that all through my childhood, I would often have to force myself to tell the truth. The truth did not matter much too me; as a matter of fact, I don’t care for truth to this day. Already as a child, I suspected that the truth was a construct, and that things similar to it could easily be constructed in such a way that they would be taken for truth, i.e. believed. I still remember some of my best lies. The thrill was not in deceiving other people – the thrill was in seeing where my community had placed its imaginary moral and cultural borders, how far one could go before being forced back in the fold. How stretchable is our common realm of life? What are the normative limits of experience? I do believe that I learned more about people when I told lies then when I told the truth.
Not to mention how much I learned after my lies had been revealed as such!
