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America In Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present
24x17. 414 pgs. Ilustraciones en b/n.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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December 27, 2012
This is a thorough yet witty and accessible survey of legendary figures in the United States by the acknowledged dean of American folklore. Dorson places figures like Cotton Mather, Davy Crockett, Casey Jones, and psychadelic guru Owsley in the contexts of their respective times. Dorson posits four "impulses" in the history of American folklore: Religious (as exemplified by the colonial Salem Witch Hunts), Democratic (in the form of antebellum frontier heroes like Crockett and Mike Fink), Economic (embodied by guilded age industrial figures like Jones and the legendary lumberjacks of the north), and Humane (highlighted by figures of the hippie culture).
What is most interesting about this book is how it has aged; in many ways, it is more a document of Dorson's time in the late 1960s into the 1970s than it is of the span of American folk history. For example, it is arguable that the field of History has thoroughly reclaimed the Salem Witch Trials from the realm of Folklore; though I see what Dorson is getting at in his exploration of the development of American folk consciousness, it is disconcerting to see these figures as creatures of folklore when they have been so thoroughly historicized by subsequent writers.
Conversely, Dorson takes great relish in dismissing characters like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Febold Feboldson as figures of "fakelore"--fictional characters passed off as oral legends by literary fraudsters. Though it is obviously true that Bunyan and his cohorts were born of the typewriter instead of the spoken word, Dorson does not apply this same standard to Antebellum figures like Mose the Bowery Boy, who rates several pages of exposition despite his origins (as far as the reader can tell) as a character in popular plays of the era. At the time, Dorson was fighting hard to disavow notions that characters like Bunyan were oral creations, and this is admirable. It would have been nice to have shown that level of consistency with earlier eras, however--or at least to have been more forthright about why Mose is a figure of legend and Pecos Bill is decidedly not.
What is jarring about the text is the discontinuity between the first three quarters of the book and the final chapter on the 1960s. Dorson entirely dispenses with about sixty years of chronology. There are no tales from the Roaring Twenties, nor any mention of the Depression or the wartime generation. Instead, Dorson skips to the folklore of his time in Berkeley in 1968 as a visiting professor. It is intriguing to see Dorson thresh through the living language of that generation, treating the craftiness of drug users and draft dodgers with the same aplomb as trickster heroes of earlier generations. It would be easy to dismiss these pages as dated, but the empathetic reader must acknowledge that it is impossible to anticipate history, and what may today be viewed as disproportionate attention should be understood as an excited researcher treating his own time with relish. What is more difficult to understand is Dorson's muteness on the folklore of his own youth. America in Legend is a great book, but it does appear to be lacking a bridge between the distant past (from which Dorson was detatched by not having been yet born) and Dorson's ironically distant present as he writes about a world which he, as a middle-aged professor, could only view through the lens of his students and their fieldwork. Dorson was a great academician, but he lacks the self-awareness of a great folklorist here, and I find that troubling.
What is most interesting about this book is how it has aged; in many ways, it is more a document of Dorson's time in the late 1960s into the 1970s than it is of the span of American folk history. For example, it is arguable that the field of History has thoroughly reclaimed the Salem Witch Trials from the realm of Folklore; though I see what Dorson is getting at in his exploration of the development of American folk consciousness, it is disconcerting to see these figures as creatures of folklore when they have been so thoroughly historicized by subsequent writers.
Conversely, Dorson takes great relish in dismissing characters like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Febold Feboldson as figures of "fakelore"--fictional characters passed off as oral legends by literary fraudsters. Though it is obviously true that Bunyan and his cohorts were born of the typewriter instead of the spoken word, Dorson does not apply this same standard to Antebellum figures like Mose the Bowery Boy, who rates several pages of exposition despite his origins (as far as the reader can tell) as a character in popular plays of the era. At the time, Dorson was fighting hard to disavow notions that characters like Bunyan were oral creations, and this is admirable. It would have been nice to have shown that level of consistency with earlier eras, however--or at least to have been more forthright about why Mose is a figure of legend and Pecos Bill is decidedly not.
What is jarring about the text is the discontinuity between the first three quarters of the book and the final chapter on the 1960s. Dorson entirely dispenses with about sixty years of chronology. There are no tales from the Roaring Twenties, nor any mention of the Depression or the wartime generation. Instead, Dorson skips to the folklore of his time in Berkeley in 1968 as a visiting professor. It is intriguing to see Dorson thresh through the living language of that generation, treating the craftiness of drug users and draft dodgers with the same aplomb as trickster heroes of earlier generations. It would be easy to dismiss these pages as dated, but the empathetic reader must acknowledge that it is impossible to anticipate history, and what may today be viewed as disproportionate attention should be understood as an excited researcher treating his own time with relish. What is more difficult to understand is Dorson's muteness on the folklore of his own youth. America in Legend is a great book, but it does appear to be lacking a bridge between the distant past (from which Dorson was detatched by not having been yet born) and Dorson's ironically distant present as he writes about a world which he, as a middle-aged professor, could only view through the lens of his students and their fieldwork. Dorson was a great academician, but he lacks the self-awareness of a great folklorist here, and I find that troubling.
Displaying 1 of 1 review