House Signs and Collegiate Fun: Sex, Race, and Faith in a College Town

2. Witty House Name: The Textual Lives of House Signs

c h a p t e r t w o Witty House Name: The Textual Lives of House Signs Since a man generally named his own plantation, there arose a variety and originality such as New England lacked—a touch of wit or irony, a pun, an alliteration. So came Chaplin’s Choice and Jordan’s Journey, Flower dieu Hundred, Argall’s Gift, and Martin’s Brandon. Thus the Virginians brought to the New World a touch of Elizabethan fancy. —George R. Stewart, Names on the Land Whatever else house signs are—pieces of wood, metal, or plastic—they are texts. The notion of text is a staple of scholarship in anthropology and folklore . Textuality, the quality that makes a text a text, might be imagined as something like a force that emerges from the interrelatedness of elements in unfolding discourse, whether spoken, sung, heard, read, remembered, or otherwise, that lends continuity. Describing textuality as something like a force is harder to conceptualize than the popular notion that texts are written or printed on the page or are easily recognizable, often named, instances of discourse such as the Gettysburg Address or My Fair Lady. Describing textuality as something like a force has the advantage of distancing us from our ready-­ made notions of texts so that we can see that we are more often engaged with texts than we might realize and that we often alter them as we reproduce them. Textuality is so pervasive because it is found in multiple aspects of discourse, sometimes simultaneously; aspects of discourse that give 64 Hou se Sign s a n d Col l egi at e F u n evidence of textuality include repetition, parallel constructions, and formulaic literary devices that can occur at any level of acoustic, linguistic, or pictorial complexity. How, then, do we conceptualize texts as they actually take shape such that we recognize them more or less easily? When aspects of discourse lead one to expect a certain kind of text, the text belongs to a genre. A particularly salient example is “once upon a time . . .” for which there is the genre name “fairy tale.” The ensuing text might also be called a fairy tale or might have a name of its own like “Snow White.” The people who name or produce the texts belonging to a genre do not always have a name for the genre. My grandfather and many men of his generation, for example, often told stories about commandeering vegetables during their teenage years from fields guarded by men who had replaced the shot in their shells with rock salt. I never knew a name for these tales, nor did the men who told them, yet I could recognize one as soon as the teller began to tell it. Though I have no recorded examples to draw from, my recollection does make it possible to fit the stories into one kind of genre rather than another. For example, the man told the story from his own point of view, he told the story as if he had experienced the dramatic events, the story’s setting was in the rural South during the Depression, and the action included screaming kids running with rock salt in their backsides. These aspects made the stories more like personal narratives than tall tales, for example (Dundes 1971). Given all that can create textuality, how do we begin to recognize the aspects of house signs that indicate they belong to a genre? First, we need to explore the properties that give them form and substance as a genre, focusing on three aspects of texts: the formal, thematic, and pragmatic. Second, we need to consider the fact that the genre of house signs, like all genres, rests on the experience of those who encounter them and thus can prompt different evaluations of significance, purpose, and morality that can tell us much about the genre’s social life. Formal Properties Texts might be identified by their formal properties. Bauman explains, “The formal properties of texts have to do with how they are made, their formal constituents and organizing principles, what it is that marks them off from their discursive surround and renders them internally cohesive—in a word, their poetics” (2008, 31). W i t t y Hou se Na m e 65 Minimally, a house sign consists of a board with a name on it. Sometimes the surface forms the...