An Instinct for Dragons

Western Folklore, Spring 2002 by Jordan-Smith, Paul

An Instinct for Dragons. By David E. Jones. (New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. v 188, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, bibliography, index. $17.95 paper)

Why are we so beguiled by the question of origins? What is it about the mystery of how and where a custom, story, or image became part of one or several cultures that keeps some scholars returning to the well of the past, whose waters seem never to quench their thirst? There's little need to rehearse the early history of folklore studies, dominated as it was by the question of how "the same" practice or narrative came to exist in diverse cultures: but why is it that even this late in the game, some scholars still pursue the unachievable goal of locating in time and space the chimera of the Urtext? Most folklorists learn early in graduate school to move on to more interesting and solvable issues. The origins question persists, however, even in the face of its fruitlessness.

David Jones, who teaches anthropology at the University of Central Florida, should have known better than to tangle with dragons, bereft as he seems to be of a much-needed arsenal of data, clarity, and logic. He tries to show, in a rambling and disjointed display of half-understood concepts from various sciences, how the dragon (a) is a pancultural image of danger; (b) is a composite of images of the serpents, predatory cats, and raptors that presumably terrorized our primate ancestors; and (c) is hardwired into the human limbic system (the so-called "reptilian brain").

The claim that a cultural manifestation is ubiquitous is quaint, given how antiquated the notion of "cultural universale" is by today's standards. One can attribute that to the kind of hyperbole that Jones employs in the excited defense of his main thesis. To posit multiple hypotheses and use them to argue one another, however, beggars one's patience. That an image is ubiquitous is indefensible; in the case of dragons, it's also demonstrably untrue, a fact that Jones tries to hide behind verbal shrubbery. Certainly images may be compounded of diverse elements, and one could comfortably entertain the idea that common dangers (and other human interests) might become codified in a single representative symbol such as the dragon. That this could occur among peoples who never experienced one or more of the dangers, or for whom the dragon is benign, is problematic. Jones rises to the challenge with the hard-wiring hypothesis. Never mind that this cannot be clinically demonstrated: it must be so, according to Jones, because dragons are found "everywhere," and dissemination by the usual channels of cultural sharing is out of the question, for reasons that remain obscure.

Several of the many illustrations seem designed to implant this muddled concept in the reader's unconscious, a visual parallel to Jones's rather bullying approach of repeating his thesis in page upon page. One method of argument is so transparent as to be laughable. This is to present an explanation as "suggested" in one paragraph and then take it as given in the very next. Mindful of our possible ignorance in other matters, Jones fleshes out this meager fare with long-winded and simplistic explanations of Darwinism and natural selection, primate ethology, innate releasing mechanisms, current theories of consciousness, and an entire history of human evolution, physical and cultural. As if this were not enough (and it is not), the author adds as an appendix a chapter on the image of the tree of life-a bewildering departure quite tangential to the whole. A final appendix contains brief and fragmentary stories about dragons, taken from many cultures.

In theme and method, Jones's book seems a half-hearted attempt to replace Campbell's Jungian archetype explanations of the origin of mythic images with those from the hard-wired school of pop psychology. Campbell's work was a grand and beautiful failure. The present work has all of his flaws, little of his vision, and none of his rhetoric. One is tempted to say, as Dorothy Parker once did, that this is a book not to be tossed aside lightly but thrown violently. But no, it is not worth spending even that much energy on.

PAUL JORDAN-SMITH

Seattle, Washington