Shadows: Deeper into Story (review)

Shadows is the third in a trilogy-so far-exploring narrative as manifested in African oral and written literatures and, in this volume, numerous texts from around the world and across centuries. Beginning with his groundbreaking study of Xhosa oral performances, The Xhosa Ntsomi (Oxford, 1975), Harold Scheub has been pursuing the core and nature of "story," in articles and monographs for over thirty-five years. This latest volume is both a reiteration and an expansion of the central tenets of a long career.

Scheub restates them early: "Image is the basic unit of the story; pattern the rhythm that works the imagery into form. Meaning is dictated by the form of the story" (18); "The tension between the images of the real world and those of tradition creates an imbalance in the story, and the resulting tension moves the audience, itself a part of this activity by means of its emotions, to metaphor. The basic ingredients of the story are image, pattern and feeling" (16). Ideas developed in two earlier volumes from the University of Wisconsin Press (Story [1998] and The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry & Narrative [2002]) are woven into the current book, particularly the notion of "the poem in the story" as a way to understand metaphor in oral traditions.

Shadows is divided into ten parts, each of which contains chapters focusing on numerous narrative texts. These parts range over several thematic emphases, with titles such as "The Oral Tradition: Through a Glass Darkly," "Oral Tradition and the Written Word: Shadowed Worlds," and "The Written Word: Fantasy and Reality." To study the theme of each section Scheub examines various texts that illustrate how narrative operates, at least in part, within the framework of "shadows."

This key term is defined at the outset, then broadened and reshaped throughout. "The story is a shadow of the real-life audience, and within the work of art itself is a shadow. . . . There is no story that is not a shadow of another story; that other story can be history, myth or tale. The shadow story influences and is the model for the real story" (10). Scheub considers numerous angles to the concept of shadow. On one level, the more common term intertextuality could be applied to many of his analyses and claims here. More narrowly, his term shadows applies to the repetition, rhythm, and recurrence of images or actions within and between texts/ performances. He sees these processes as innately tied to the production of meaning in narrative, the kinds of parallels that create and recycle symbols and metaphor.

The book examines such a wide range of texts that it is difficult to assess its ideas in any unified way. For example, in one chapter the prebiblical epic Gilgamesh is briefly referenced and compared to a Swahili tale collected in the late nineteenth century, a Russian fairly tale, and short stories by the South African writers Pauline Smith and Nadine Gordimer. What unites these disparate texts, according to Scheub, is how narrative works in each. Undergirding this comparative effort is the claim that oral and written literatures are always linked by common narrative techniques and structures: "The oral tradition set the basic design for all storytelling, oral and written. From the most straightforward stories to complex epics and myths, storytelling involves the manipulation and organization of images" (158); "It is not so much the orality or written form that defines it: the story adapts itself to whatever medium is at hand, whether oral or written, prose or poetry, dance or music" (162).

At times this central claim is convincing, and at other times, provocatively vague. On the one hand, scholarly theories of narratology do validate assertions that narratives possess more or less universal traits. On the other hand, fundamental questions arise not only about differences between oral and written literatures, but also about the variety of texts that have been produced around the world over two millennia. Can we work only with an aesthetic...