Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border: Characters and Community

10 Patterns and Implications

Franz Boas—pioneer of anthropology and folklore studies in the United States—declared that studying the creations of a group of people, particularly folklore, is paramount because this practice “has the merit of bringing out those points which are of interest to the people themselves” (1970 [1916]:393). If we are concerned with culture, with the dynamic interaction between the individual and the collective, paying attention to what concerns people everyday and to their own articulations of mind affords the most ethnographic insight. Embracing Boas’s priorities, I began research in Aghyaran with the goal of understanding and telling others about this community by attending to the expressive forms people there find most meaningful. Brought into the circle of Aghyaran wakes and ceilis, I began to appreciate the centrality of these events as opportunities for the enactment of community life. Finding people at wakes and ceilis enthusiastically engaged in storytelling, I began to investigate the social work accomplished through specific stories molded to specific situational contexts. As it happens , the most popular genre of storytelling at wakes and ceilis—the local character anecdote—is one in which the portrayal of individuals allows for, among other things, meditation on contrasts between past and present ways of life. Swapping local character anecdotes during social interaction, people in Aghyaran simultaneously entertain themselves and contemplate therangeofpossibilitiesforbeinganindividualwithinagroupinthemidst of change. As we have seen, portrayals of known local individuals in these anecdotes take shape in patterned ways through generic conventions shared by Aghyaran storytellers and audiences. Represented as characters in narrative ,theseindividualsbecomerhetoricalconstructsofcollectivevalueand 10 PatternsandImplications 224 • Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border significance. Given the long-recognized role of the audience as co-author in face-to-face oral performance (Lord 1960, Duranti and Brenneis 1986), characters and the anecdotes told about them may also be seen as products of collective authorship. The audience as understood by the storyteller has a substantial influence in the myriad choices the storyteller makes in an effort to construct narrative that resonates with his or her audience. In general terms, the storyteller’s genius may be understood as the ability to use language in creating and sustaining human communities (cf. Briggs 1988:xv). Whether an individual characterized in a given anecdote appears as a familiar type or appears through a cycle of anecdotes as a more singular combination of traits, character types and traits continually reasserted in Aghyaran anecdotes emanate from a remembered amalgamation of storytelling over time. Stories that feature such characters responding to a shared social and cultural environment inevitably exhibit collective concerns, ethics, and aesthetics. While specifically personal identities are proposed, fixed, and commemorated in local character anecdotes, tellers of anecdotes give voice to both the individual and the group in the same breath. I chose to focus on the local character anecdote as a genre because it is clearly a form of folklore in which my Aghyaran friends and neighbors have invested their intellectual, emotional, and artistic energies. Here is a body of popular narrative, a vernacular oral literature, that serves in part as a community study established by the very members of that community . My hope is that I have allowed the people of Aghyaran to represent themselvesintheirownterms.Myhopeisthatincoaxingtheexplicitfrom the implicit—in drawing generalities from a wealth of specifics—I have distilled the insight of others rather than imposed my preconceptions on their words and actions. • To further extend and link other people’s ideas, we must review certain materials to answer lingering questions in a more declarative fashion. What concerns preoccupy Aghyaran storytellers and audiences? What issues are at stake in this body of narrative ideally suited for both celebrating local individuals and proposing a community self-portrait? What conclu- Patterns and Implications • 225 sions can safely be drawn from local character anecdotes about culture, collective memory, and local identity in Aghyaran? Taken as a whole, the types of humanity most often commemorated in both celebratory and critical character sketches establish a range of potential ideological stances and ways of living through which storytellers and audiences may evaluate their own ideological stances and ways of living. In order to elucidate statements made through local character anecdotes we should review the limited but telling range of the reoccurring character types in comic anecdotes, the most popular variety of local character anecdotes within the larger genre. True, a particularly celebrated character such as John McHugh cannot be contained by any one character type when an...