Trikucian's Archives: Cultural History in Folktales

I've realized that it's been way too God damned long since I posted anything, so here's an old essay I wrote for my American Studies class talking about Rip Van Winkle. I plan on doing an audiobook of Rip Van Winkle in the near future. Let me know what you think!

Cultural History in Folktales

Change is a difficult concept for many people to grasp. It causes people to question and understand their own times and the times that came before. To help understand people will dissociate from the times at hand through folklore. In Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle the author represents a change in history through the life of his titular character. That which is unchanged becomes revered. In Rip Van Winkle, Irving explores folklore as a history of people trying to understand a great change in their society.

When European settlers came to North America they brought their culture with them. Local examples include the similarities between Ogopogo and the Loch Ness monster and the Westminster Abbey in Mission located close to the Xa:ytem spirit stone. Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving deals with the area of the Hudson River valley in the Appalachian Mountain range in what is now present day New York and mixing it with Dutch and German folklore. The characters and village within the story are Dutch, for the area was first settled by the Dutch. This fact is commonly alluded to within the story in a narrative sort of sense: “It is a little village of great antiquity, having been founded by some Dutch colonists” (Irving 449). If this were not an important fact overall it would only be mentioned that the area was founded by the Dutch once or so, but the historical Dutch are mentioned many times throughout the story. This history has become a folk tale of the people of Rip Van Winkle’s village and the other Dutch settlements of the area so easily that characters from these histories have become fantastical in nature. The gnomish creatures that inhabit the Kaatskill Mountains to bowl the ninepins that create thunder every twenty years are none other than Hendrick Hudson and his gang, for whom their river was named. Literally this section foreshadows a drastic event through the sound the ninepin bowling makes. The inherent Dutch undertones in this American folk tale are that these magical characters have become naturalized to the area, but they don’t fit. They dress like Europeans and their magical potion is their special alcohol, which would not have existed in native America. Irving uses the Dutch characters in America with the old German fairy tale about a man who sleeps for twenty years to create a folk tale out of the experiences of the people before and after the American Revolution to give a simplified rural viewpoint on the historical events. This dissociation from being American but being Dutch is central to effect, or lack thereof, of the American Revolution and how it barely etches the surface of the area’s folklore.

In Rip Van Winkle change came suddenly and easily, as it usually does. The difficulty with change is how people react to it. Van Winkle is a carefree character that lives life day to day. He first loses touch with reality when he is lured by the fairy creatures of the Kaatskill Mountains. Van Winkle is an impractical man with and “insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour” (450) and is content in helping others. This impractical personality allowed him to be swallowed up by the magic that these gnomish, ghostly figures presented. When he awoke completely lost he was akin to the settlers who were lost from their native Europe and needed their old culture to keep them from being depressingly homesick. “As he approached the village, he met a number of people, but none that he knew” (455). He had been alienated from his once close community through the magic that had been done upon him. His village had changed and become something alien to him, which he only recognizes through the help and memories of the village people. This section alludes to how histories are created collectively, and the tall tales are created by the ‘folk’ of the area.

In his life prior to the insurmountable event of the American Revolution Van Winkle was basically a useless person. He was kind and was socially active, but he did nothing to better himself or his family and helped too many people at once to be of much use. When he comes to the village twenty years later as the same man he becomes a village relic. Through the revolution the village had grown, become faster paced, and better connected to the outside world. Van Winkle, through his preservation, became a preserver of the time before and therefore thoroughly Dutch and steeped in heritage: “[Van Winkle] was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war’” (459). As a person who preserved the history and culture from before the war, his fantastic story became village lore. “[Van Winkle] used to tell his story to every stranger” (459). His tale became more important to his village than the history of the revolution, despite the constant reminders of politicians and mementos throughout the village. This is because his tale was part of his life, therefore part of the village and its culture. Even the old gnomes in their dated clothing would continue unchanged and forever creating magical thunder in the Kaatskills. Thus the folklore is about the people’s history and one man’s experience, but expands to encompass a whole culture of people because of its context.

The author, Washington Irving, acts like the editor and narrator of this piece. He is fully aware of the connections he makes between history, culture, and folklore. As a person writing about an event many years after it took place he would have an outside perspective but gains access to the inside through the collective memory of the people. His tale of Rip Van Winkle is purely fictional, though he creates the sense of the folk who live in the area. “I know the vicinity of our old Dutch settlements to have been very subject to marvelous events and appearances” (460). He ends with the statement “The story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of a doubt” (460) to enforce the truth that the story describes the collective memory of both the Dutch folk and those displaced by the emigration to North America and further the American Revolution.

Rip Van Winkle is a delightful folk tale with subtle undertones about how history is experienced and recorded. In emigration to North America European settlers brought their culture and changed their folklore to include characters from their new world. This folklore was further used to understand the constant changes in their world and to preserve their old way of life in the new era. Folklore is the history of the people who create and experience it. The stories will continue to change and evolve but the essence of their creation will continue to live on in the culture of the people they represent.

Bibliography

Irving, Washington. "Rip Van Winkle." The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. Ed. Philip F. Gura and Francis Murphy. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 2003. 446-460.

Old vs. New

I made a comic! This is in practice for the release of my graphic novel style comic Absent Horizon, the first chapter of which will be available January 1st, 2013.

Facebook: The Unsocial Network

I agree completely with Aaron Sorkin's (script writer for "The Social Network") remark that " It (Facebook) is pushing us further apart. Socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality." The reality of Facebook and other similar social networking sites is that they are, in fact, not reality, in the same way "reality TV" is not reality. An old adage for filming reality, like the news for example, is that the subject of the filming cannot know they are being filmed. If they do, then they end up acting for the camera that they know is there. The only exception to the rule is Close Circuit Television (CCTV) because we know it is always there and we don't care. Even then we still make silly faces at the CCTV camera as we go into the bank, etc.

This performance-like behavior is the same that we see on social networking sites on Facebook. Facebook is just like the newsreel camera we know is there: we dress up for it and put on the face we expect people to see; whether that face is well thought out is irrelevant. The majority of posts and photos on Facebook are those of milestone events. A wedding, the birth of a new baby, or some kind of devastating news. Whether these events are sad or pleasant, they end up on Facebook. Dirty laundry also appears on Facebook, but even that, albeit unpleasant or unflattering, isn't indicative of the reality of that particular user, just of some point of their life they feel is interesting to share with the world. We rarely see the mundane, and the be honest the mundane is what makes life, well, life.

Essentially Facebook is edited reality, and because it is edited, it is no longer reality, making itself a paradox. It is impossible to be oneself on Facebook because nobody can express themselves completely without being face to face with the person they're interacting with. Humans evolved to interact with all five senses, whether with the world or with other humans. The majority of Facebook's communication is done through text, which is just a subsidiary of the sense of sight. There are photos, and on rare occasions video, but it is impossible for a person to give nearly as much meaning in a block of text. Communication through Facebook completely negates the senses of touch, smell, and taste, and negates much of the sense of hearing, and even sight. Through Facebook body language and inflection on words is eliminated, thereby making many words open for interpretations that have nothing to do with the user's initial meaning.

What I find most disturbing about digital communication is that if you know a person only through digital means you lose the ability to smell and touch them. That's a gigantic part of just and individual personality. One of my most cherished memories of my Grandmother is her house always smelled like freshly baked bread. Or swimming with my cousins and wrestling with them in the water. Facebook can catalogue these events and remind me of them, but it is little more than an online album. A social networking site could never replace actually talking with an interacting with a person in real life because it is simply not real.

Facebook has given people a means to interact with each other without actually having to interact with each other. People have gained yet another means to put their best or preferred face forward at all times without having to show what they don't want. While many will argue a drunken photo of a sorority girl and her friends "duck-facing" to the camera isn't their "best face", it is beneficial to the girl because it is proof to the world that she's wild and independent. This photo then has the potential to be seen by thousands of people, even go viral. People want to be seen, to be noticed, and social media has given them the means to do so very easily. The problem is that many people cannot distinguish the edited reality of Facebook, and even reality TV, and what they are actually experiencing in their physical lives.

Social networking, particularly Facebook, is changing how people interact with each other, and while we have gained speed and the ability to communicate on a world stage, we are also losing the means to communicate and connect on a personal level, and this will present a multitude of social problems in the future.

Aaron Sorkin's interview on "The View"

Stan Rogers - The Musical Chair

This episode of Nash Bozard's "The Musical Chair" features one of my favorite folk artists, Stan Rogers. It hit me so hard that I felt I needed to repost it here. This man's music had a gigantic impact on my life and I love how much respect Nash gave him in this video. If you haven't listened to Stan Rogers you have to, he is just epic. And I dare you not to cry at the end of the segment.



Video is owned and produced by Nash Bozard of Radio Dead Air: http://www.radiodeadair.com/

Site Update

Hi Internet!

It's safe to say that it has been a flipping loooooooong time since I've updated this site. The reason being is I am super busy getting used to the new post-secondary program I just started. Awesome thing is, this program is all about websites and digital art, so just by doing my homework I'll have cool stuff to post. But, for other stuff I'm doing, I've got a bunch of artist alley tables over the Christmas season so I'm getting stock ready for that. This stock includes knitted hats, stuffies, pillows, cocktail dresses, and several wicked fanart pieces. As each of these are finished I will (eventually) post them on the site. I'm also working on an epic Loki cosplay and making several pages for this site. Right now there are pages, but they're going to look a lot more awesome once they are out of the editing phase. And I learn more about HTML and CSS. So, in the mean time, here is a picture of my signature and one of my favorite toques:

I'm also working on my Halloween costume, aka fixing up my old Bulma costume and then asking random drunk people for dragonballs :)