Between Narrating Bodies and Carnal Knowledge

Now, when the body seems to have been laid to rest, after the almost feverish attention by which it was addressed in the study of culture and literature during the nineties, it may be possible to approach it with relative composure. It is thus, less agitated by the once ticklish, at other times painful, touch of interpretative endeavors fully or dominantly addressing the body as a cultural construct, as a discursive idiom, or as a vehicle of experience, that I attempt to put into words my relations with the body—my scholarly relations with the body.

In folk-narrative scholarship concerning orally narrated traditions, the body is encountered in a distinctly double manifestation. First, one sees and senses the bodies of the individuals performing narratives, songs, jokes, proverbs, and riddles. Their contemporaneous proximity with the audience, including the researcher as audience, has been considered by some the very touchstone of the folkloric mode of experience.¹ It is certainly the physical presence of a performing body, or of a number of performing bodies, that introduces the powerful sense of immediacy into folk-narrative research; in Walter Benjamin's beautifully humanizing definition of storytelling, "A man listening to a story is in the company of the story-teller."²

Such is the immediacy of the bodily presence that it at once burdens the analytical urges of the scholar with a serious threat of banality and arouses a heightened sense of empathy that creates very personal conditions for research. A powerful expression for this was articulated in a recent study of the laments of Israeli women born in Yemen: "The lamenting women not only express sorrow, they are it."³

In addition to the performer's body, or the performers' bodies, the scholar's body is present too. The convergence of all of those bodily presences creates a mode of hermeneutics that can with all caution be termed "hands on." It thus seems to be in stark opposition to any attempt to theorize. This may be just the reason why folk-narrative research has always oscillated between pure ethnographies or recordings on one hand and highly formalized modes of theory on the other.⁴

In addition to immediacy there is also a high level of concrete participation shared by performers and audience, always in close cooperation, sometimes with their roles reversed.⁵ This distinctive feature of folklore accounts for the keen sensation of jouissance that singles out folk creativity from various modes of popular culture.⁶ Popular culture may in comparison be found to be encumbered by the impact of the "age of mechanical reproduction" that accounts for its repetitive and sometimes ordinary character.⁷

Perhaps only a video recording of the narrating body of Tamar Lugasi in the company of her audience (me and her granddaughter) could have reproduced some of the playfulness encompassed in the performance of a tale by one woman to another, the title being the proverb "women's measure is twice the measure of men."⁸ Ms. Lugasi, not a slim person at all, was seated with her legs straight in front of her, performing with lively mimicry and gesticulation from her waist up, on a bed in a small room in her home in Kiryat-Gat, one of the biggest of the Israeli towns founded as "development towns" in the fifties, this particular one some thirty kilometers north of Beer-Sheva. As the audience was all female, Ms. Lugasi, usually observing the Orthodox Jewish rule to cover her hair, took off her transparent pale blue chiffon scarf and employed it in an intricate staging of the events of the complex romantic novella she was telling. The scarf served as the wedding dress of the clever young bride who had tricked the prince into matrimony. It further served as the tent of the same woman when she, dressed as a courtesan, invited her treacherous husband to spend a night of pleasure with her in masquerade. And in a swift movement of her hand she transformed the scarf into the galloping horse of the husband returning...