Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border: Characters and Community

6 The Wider Range of Storytelling Genres

The ubiquity of the local character anecdote suggests its centrality, and yet the anecdote significantly overlaps with jokes, tall tales, personal experience narratives, and legends to the point that the anecdote has the potential to lose its autonomy in the “crowd of neighboring genres” (Stahl 1975:296). This permeability of the boundaries of the anecdote as a genre in fact reiterates its prominence. Storytelling genres appropriate at Aghyaran wakes and ceilis have either direct or indirect thematic, stylistic, organizational, or functional links to the anecdote. Thus, the anecdote is not only quantitatively significant, but also conceptually central in the generic system of Aghyaran storytelling. This chapter identifies genres in addition to the anecdote that are appropriate in the storytelling contexts discussed in chapters 3 and 4. In doing so, it will give special attention to the relationship between each of these genres and anecdotes, and what light these relationships shed on the nature of Aghyaran’s central genre, the anecdote. Although there is much overlap between the genres appropriate at ceilis and wakes, some genres that typically deal with supernatural themes are not as common at wakes for reasons already discussed in chapter 3. Because the range of genres appropriate at ceilis is broader, the ceili will stand in as the default situational context of the generic system of Aghyaran storytelling to be described. In other words, our focus will be on the generic system of ceilis, realizing at the same time that the generic system of wakes is comparable but slightly narrower. Undertaking this descriptive project should inform us sufficiently to further bear down in the next two chapters on specific stories and especially on the common issues raised by 6 The Wider Range of Storytelling Genres 108 • Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border and potential social functions of anecdotes about local characters told in Aghyaran. Defining the entire generic system of local discourse in Aghyaran, in itself an ideal model, is beyond the scope of this project. The system would include smaller conversational genres such as riddles and proverbs (Abrahams 1968, 1976; Yerkovich 1983) and a breathtakingly broad range of recurring, patterned, convention-informed types of verbal exchange familiar from the management of face-to-face interaction in everyday life (Goffman 1971; cf. Hymes 1975:351). Limited but informed, our focus here will remain on genres of “larger” narrative—what Abrahams refers to as fictive genres (1976)—including the legend, personal experience narrative, tall tale, and joke, in order to better understand the anecdote. Many of these narrative genres are more familiar to folklorists than the conversational genres Hymes and Goffman identify, but less familiar than the Märchen, fairy legends, and hero tales that are no longer as central in contemporary oral traditions in Ireland as they seem to have been in the nineteenth century. These genres to be discussed should be considered paradigmatic ideal typesratherthanrigidanduniversalanalyticalcategoriesfortheclassification of narrative. Although characterizations of genres are drawn from observations of storytelling events and from subsequent conversations with participants, for the most part I give the genres to be discussed etic names for our convenience. • Theclosestgenretothecontemplativeanecdoteisthepersonallegend, atypeofhistoricallegendthatfocusesontheactionsandtraitsofanactual person or persons from a previous historical period. The protagonists in all the personal legends I heard in Aghyaran were locals or near-locals, with the exceptions of St. Patrick, who is said to have visited the area, and of Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century military campaign through Ireland had a lasting effect on the local political environment. Some folklorists would make a distinction between the personal historical legend and the local historical legend, which details the events that took place at a specific local place. Local legends in Irish tradition may be referred to with the Irish-language term dinnsenchas, “place lore.” In Aghyaran most The Wider Range of Storytelling Genres • 109 examples of place lore involve human actors and what they did at a particularlocation .Insomecasesalegendexistssimplytoexplainthesignificance of a place rather than to memorialize particular people from the past. For the most part, however, location serves as a sort of mnemonic device for recallingeventsthataretheresultofactionsandreactionsofpastindividuals . Thus, the distinction between personal and local historical legends is relatively unnecessary for our purposes here. One of the main distinctions between contemplative anecdotes and personal legends in Aghyaran is that of time period. The anecdote memorializes contemporary persons or ones within living memory, whereas the personal legend memorializes those who died before tellers and listeners were born or cognizant of a given personal legend’s protagonist...