Deaf American Literature: From Carnival to the Canon

Chapter 4: The Oral Tradition: Deaf American Storytellers as Tricksters

Chapter 4 The Oral Tradition: Deaf American Storytellers as Tricksters ! IN THE 1960s American Sign Language finally achieved recognition as a legitimate language, after more than one hundred years of relegation to the realm of gestures. During that time the vernacular had gone underground, its more indigenous form preserved and perpetuated primarily by Deaf families with hereditary deafness. These family members passed on not only the vernacular itself but also the culture’s rhetorical tradition, including traditional narratives and other forms now termed “ASL art” (many of which do not correspond to mainstream literary art forms). They, as well as a number of others exposed to ASL from an early age, have since provided the culture’s storytellers and artists: Bernard Bragg, Pat Graybill, Bill Ennis, Mary Beth Miller, Ella Mae Lentz, Ben Bahan, Sam Supalla, and others, with more appearing every day. Now that ASL has come up from the underground, its users desire to showcase the vernacular and its properties. Frequently, this is accomplished—in a very carnivalesque fashion—in relation 52 to and at the expense of English and the mainstream literary tradition . As a whole, this language play often has an instrumental purpose that shows relatively little concern for meaning: that is, how something is communicated has more importance than what is communicated. To be sure, ASL art has content—but how the language is used and that it is used at all has much cultural meaning or value. The emphasis on form is particularly strong in more vernacular productions, which thereby challenge conventions of Western literature that traditionally have put less stress on the medium itself. (Yet in response to the concept of the “artistic” in the Western literary sense, some ASL artists now strive for more layered meanings in their productions.) For most Deaf Americans, whose visual vernacular has so recently gained legitimacy, the use of ASL continues to take precedence over what is being said.1 Such play is not entirely new, but it is newly visible. Because Deaf Americans have often grown up relatively isolated from one another—spread across the country, born into hearing families, and often mainstreamed—few use ASL as their first language. Many instead mix sign language and English to create a kind of manually coded English. Thus, they are not fully aware of the vernacular’s distinctive properties. Even fewer have the facility with the language needed to become storytellers and performers. It is hardly surprising that they are often most interested in the fluent use of the language and the values thereby conveyed and pay little attention to precisely what is being said. Delivery over Content As we have already seen, as possessors of an “oral” culture, Deaf Americans have not a literature but an orature, a form with somewhat different properties than written literature. For instance, in the ASL vernacular tradition, a storyteller often draws on a stock of well-known stories, modifying the standard version to a greater or lesser extent. Moreover, as a storyteller tells and retells any particular story to different groups, it always changes because the context of each telling changes.2 Many scholars of traditional oral literatures have argued that formal oral discourse was rather formulaic, The Oral Tradition 53 allowing the speaker to memorize and use phrases, themes, episodes, and even whole stories in different ways to reflect different circumstances.3 Very often, after a storyteller or performer has moved on, one of the bolder audience members will try out some of the stories and art forms, taking certain parts, certain themes, certain phrases, and remolding them to make the product his or her own. So too the ASL narrative emphasizes not the content of the story but its delivery, that is, a “procedural aesthetics”—how a storyteller proceeds with his or her story. The ASL storyteller or performer engages his or her spectators in the process of storytelling , in taking note of formal qualities that include the properties of the language itself and the way the story is delivered. As Dennis Tedlock has stressed, the result is a performance-based event, not a text-based art form.4 We can see an analogous form in African American culture in the practice of “playing the dozens,” a kind of discourse utilizing an almost endless string of tropes.5 The process of change is vastly accelerated, but the core is the same: an individual’s skillful manipulation of...