I’m working on a volume of African American Folktales, to be published by W.W. Norton in 2016. This morning I found a passage in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake that helped me understand that we are way too insistent on separating the oral from the written.  Here are some thoughts for the day:

African American authors famously—and paradoxically—write in the oral tradition.  Many literary cultures insist on distancing themselves from oral traditions and from the vernacular.  By contrast, we find a self-conscious melding of oral forms, storytelling, and print culture in African American literature, a liquidation of the divide between what we hear and what we read. (It’s what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls the “talking book.”)  Ralph Ellison once mistakenly accused Zora Neale Hurston of “perpetuating the minstrel tradition” because she relied too much on the vernacular.  Still, he understood how folklore offers writers a golden well of inspiration:

Folklore has been such a vital part of American literature that it is amazing that more people (and especially writers) aren’t aware of it.  Constance Rourke points out that there are folk motives even in the work of Henry James.  I guess one of the difficulties here is that people think of folklore as ‘quaint,’ as something that is projected in dialect, when in fact it is its style and wisdom that count. 

A rich mix of vernacular styles is, ironically, exactly what became the mark of modernism in works by writers ranging from James Joyce to John Dos Passos to Alfred Döblin.  “How good you are in explosition!  How farflung is your folkloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary!” Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake.  The language and grammar of folklore is attractive not only in its expansive artlessness but also in its restive challenge to the status quo. Herbert Marcuse once described how rebellion and insubordination, even when subdued in real life, “bursts out in a vocabulary that calls things by their names: ‘head-shrinker’ and ‘egghead,’ ‘boob tube,’ ‘think tank’ and ‘beat it,’ ‘dig it’ and ‘gone man gone.’”  Folklore captures the candor of the vernacular, which not only speaks truth to power but also operates in a powerful poetic register.