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Achtung, pioneers!
Mar. 6th, 2005 12:04 pmSo I was going through some of my field notes late last night trying to organize the Quichua stories about the forest and half-assedly classify them as "ontogenesis stories," "Ayahuasco stories" or "warning tales." The "warning tales" pretty much follow the same format as urban legends: someone's friend/friend of a friend/cousin of a friend gets a warning (for example, no talking to the forest spirits!), does not heed that warning and the forest spirit takes him/her in the husband/wife capacity and the poor chap/lass never sees the community or the family again. Or someone has sex with the forest spirit and their penis gets stretched, cut off, and chopped up into pieces, which are turned into anacondas (this was cross-filed under "ontogenesis"). This started me on a train of thought, first about captivity narratives and how they incorporate the predominant cultural anxieties re: radical alterity into the narrative. So, the forest spirits in the "old" (old not, like, in terms of ahistorical, mythological "past" but colonial-era old) stories are all remarkably golden-haired and blue-eyed, and, if you think about it, American Indian captivity narartives from the old west are tropologically very similar to alien abduction narratives in the second half of the 20th century*. This got me on a downright functionalist Marvin-Harris train of thought and I had to slap myself out of it. But I did keep thinking about the most basic function of these stories, aside from all the encoded particularities that just beg for thick description, I mean, what kind of simple memetic (vomit) purpose they serve, never mind what they are really about in the larger sense. By and large they are yellow-light stories, "be careful...or else" with a ridiculously hyperbolized "or else" teaching you through the proxy of a fool who picks up a hitchhiker, or teenagers who tautologically doom themselves by Doing "It" While Being American Teenagers.
All of this brings me to my main point, which is the confusion that set in when I started remembering the weird urban legend equivalents of my Soviet youth. The thing is, those stories make no sense. The creepy-crawlies that were exchanged around the Young Pioneer bonfire have standard "scary" elements, but the more I remembered them last night, the more bewildered I became. What the fuck were they supposed to warn against? I was reminded of a conversation with my mom from a few months ago. She had just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I asked her what she thought. She reflected for a minute and finally said: "you know, on one hand it is a brilliant, incredibly complex work of both fiction and history, as each other. On the other hand, you read it and you think: what a cluster of Japanese schitzophrenia." Now, the Soviet canon of "scary stories," for all its ethnographic complexity was obviously not penned by Murakami, but comfortably fits in the second category. If other canons of stories and urban languages are semiotically a bit like language systems, the Soviet stories are a psychoanalytic equivalent of esperanto--weird, artificially constructed bricolage that reproduces nothing except itself in an overdetermined group, is basically insane, and could only be popular in a country where Lamarck trumped Darwin because that worked better with dialectical materialism.
I sort of understand the complaints of my friends who don't "get" Russian jokes. I love Russian humor, but can see where the chasm lies. But even *I* don't get these Russian equivalent of urban legends, and I grew up on them. They are not really scary and they don't really warn you against anything tangible like picking up hitchikers or entertaining your boyfriend on babysitting time. Instead, they just sort of convey general anxiety. While they employ elements from everyday reality and occasionally have moralistic underdones as befits the genre, they do so in a dreamlike fashion, where these elements are arbitrary and inscribed into some internal truth of the narrative, rather than any kind of recognizable logic. There is no cat, no cradle, only a coffin on wheels:
( Enter at your own risk )
See? Totally insane. Actually, now that I wrote them down a dominant theme does emerge, sort of: a warning against the color red, which, I suppose, does make sense and can be summed up by the following Soviet joke:
A foreigner walks down the street in Moscow, trips and falls into a sewer hole. A policeman helps him out of the sewer and the foreigner says angrily: "you know, in other countires open sewer holes are marked off by red flags so that people don't fall in. The policeman says: "when you arrived at the border, did you see a large red flag?" "Yes," says the foreigner. "So what are you complaining about?"
*
All of this brings me to my main point, which is the confusion that set in when I started remembering the weird urban legend equivalents of my Soviet youth. The thing is, those stories make no sense. The creepy-crawlies that were exchanged around the Young Pioneer bonfire have standard "scary" elements, but the more I remembered them last night, the more bewildered I became. What the fuck were they supposed to warn against? I was reminded of a conversation with my mom from a few months ago. She had just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I asked her what she thought. She reflected for a minute and finally said: "you know, on one hand it is a brilliant, incredibly complex work of both fiction and history, as each other. On the other hand, you read it and you think: what a cluster of Japanese schitzophrenia." Now, the Soviet canon of "scary stories," for all its ethnographic complexity was obviously not penned by Murakami, but comfortably fits in the second category. If other canons of stories and urban languages are semiotically a bit like language systems, the Soviet stories are a psychoanalytic equivalent of esperanto--weird, artificially constructed bricolage that reproduces nothing except itself in an overdetermined group, is basically insane, and could only be popular in a country where Lamarck trumped Darwin because that worked better with dialectical materialism.
I sort of understand the complaints of my friends who don't "get" Russian jokes. I love Russian humor, but can see where the chasm lies. But even *I* don't get these Russian equivalent of urban legends, and I grew up on them. They are not really scary and they don't really warn you against anything tangible like picking up hitchikers or entertaining your boyfriend on babysitting time. Instead, they just sort of convey general anxiety. While they employ elements from everyday reality and occasionally have moralistic underdones as befits the genre, they do so in a dreamlike fashion, where these elements are arbitrary and inscribed into some internal truth of the narrative, rather than any kind of recognizable logic. There is no cat, no cradle, only a coffin on wheels:
( Enter at your own risk )
See? Totally insane. Actually, now that I wrote them down a dominant theme does emerge, sort of: a warning against the color red, which, I suppose, does make sense and can be summed up by the following Soviet joke:
A foreigner walks down the street in Moscow, trips and falls into a sewer hole. A policeman helps him out of the sewer and the foreigner says angrily: "you know, in other countires open sewer holes are marked off by red flags so that people don't fall in. The policeman says: "when you arrived at the border, did you see a large red flag?" "Yes," says the foreigner. "So what are you complaining about?"
*
