Perspectives on the Jack Tales and Other North American Marchen

Western Folklore, Fall 2002 by Jordan-Smith, Paul

Perspectives on the Jack Tales and Other North American Marchen. Edited by Carl Lindahl. (Bloomington: Folklore Institute, 2002. Pp. vii 179, foreword, photographs, notes, bibliography. $17.95 paper)

Sixty years after Richard Chase cast his spell in folklore circles and the general public with The Jack Tales, the subgenre continues to beguile us: if, in fact, there is such an identifiable subgenre as "a Jack tale" (which in turn raises the question of whether "genre" and "subgenre" are still useful concepts). According to Carl Lindahl and other contributors to this anthology of articles and stories, genre is still a vital folkloristic concept and both Marchen and Jack tale are alive and well in spite of Chase, not because of him. Rather, as Lindahl makes clear, they are alive and are exceedingly richer and more varied than what Chase delivered.

Lindahl's book comprises four essays (two by Lindahl), six transcripts of Jack tales (three of which are presented in two versions), and a memorial note on folklorist Herbert Halpert, whose research notes graced both Chase's Appalachian collection and Vance Randolph's Ozark tales (WAo Blowed Up the Church House), and whose spirit hovers, no doubt bemused, throughout. Lindahl's introduction gives a short survey of North American Marchen studies, focusing particularly on the question of why the academy has let them fall into neglect. He also examines Chase's influence on the academy and the public, as well as the careers of other scholars of the genre, including Leonard W. Roberts, Vance Randolph, Herbert Halpert, Chuck Perdue, and others. In his second essay, "Sounding a Shy Tradition: Oral and Written Styles of American Mountain Marchen," Lindahl continues his examination of Chase, Randolph, and Roberts, comparing versions of tales included in the present collection, and concluding that Roberts's versions were vastly more faithful to the oral styles of the tellers than either Chase's literary versions or those of Randolph, who tended to present them, in Lindahl's view, as legends or jokes.

Charles L. Perdue Jr., in his essay, "Is Old Jack Really Richard Chase?" compares Chase's published version of Jack tales with their unaltered transcripts and analyzes the eleven tales published by Isabel Gordon Carter in 1925, demonstrating that Chase's versions were "less emblematic of the narrators he claimed to represent and more a reflection of himself." Chase, a shameless self-promoter, had a well-developed talent for appropriation, as he subsequently came to assume "ownership" of the tales he published-one might almost say, of the genre itself-becoming not merely a collector but a performer. After collecting tales in North Carolina in the late 30s, he attached himself to James Taylor Adams, and the two of them collected Jack tales from tellers in Wise County, Virginia. The present work gives both Adams's and Chase's simultaneous transcripts of a single tale, "Jack and the Bull," as told in 1941 by Polly Johnson. Comparison of the two texts reveals both the care with which Adams transcribed the teller's speech and Chase's more telegraphic method of taking notes for future enhancement. Chase's earlier collected tales from Beech Mountain, North Carolina, together with tales from other collectors, became the basis for The Jack Tales, published in 1943. Some of his published tales represent as many as ten versions by different tellers from different areas. In other words, he created his own Normalform and proceeded to validate it by claiming exclusive rights to its use.

The essays in the present volume are substantive, defensible, well presented, and give credit where it is long overdue, principally to Roberts and Halpert. The debunking of Chase, however, seems a bit tedious and tendentious. This is perhaps partly because Chase himself was that way, but the theme wears itself thin. The academy has long dismissed Chase, and rightly, yet Lindahl appears intent on hammering home his disapproval. Were the present volume intended for a general public, his point would be well-taken; here, he is preaching to the choir. One point that comes across strongly, especially in Martin Lovelace's essay on Jack tales in Newfoundland, is the need for an approach to narrative (or any other folklore genre) that accounts for the circumstances of each performance. As Robert A. Georges trenchantly demonstrated in his 1969 essay, "Toward an Understanding of Story-Telling Events," the circumstance in which a narrative is performed can itself be treated as a minimal unit of investigation. Each storytelling context, whether natural or contrived solely for the purposes of research, has its own dynamic, its own rights and obligations, and carries its own sociocultural and psychological loads. The contributors to this volume are well aware of this, and raise appropriate cautions about interpretations based solely on texts. Unfortunately, certain kinds of narratives continue to be marginalized, as Lindahl does with the so-called "tale abstracts" that some tellers resort to when feeling shy about telling a story to an adult. Such abstracts constitute another narrative form, with its own structure and function, its own contexts, and its own cultural load, something of which linguistic anthropologists have been aware for years, but that folklorists continue to ignore. As Bob Georges would say, "There's a paper in that!"