Achtung, pioneers!

[lapsedmodernist]

So 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:

Coffin on wheels
A little girl comes home from school and turns on the radio. Instead of music or a regularly scheduled program, she hears an announcer address her, and the announcer says: "Little girl, the coffin on wheels has arrived in your city." She turns the radio off and a little while she turns it back on and hears "Little girl, the coffin on wheels has found your street." A little while later the radio says "Little girl, the coffin on wheels has entered your building." Etcetera etcetera, until the coffin on wheels finally arrives at her door. Then the mother comes home from work and finds the little girl dead and a wheel beside her.

The Green Eyes
A girl hears a story from her older sister about the Green Eyes that can be conjured with a rhyme that roughly translates to: "The Green Eyes run down the wall, they will choke you, yes yes yes." She is instructed to never say the rhyme while at home alone. Obviously that is exactly what she proceeds to do and the Green Eyes appear, run down the wall and strangle her. How this is physically accomplished is unclear. (This particular story had variations featuring the Red Hand and the Black Bedsheet, both of which--you guessed it--strangled the protagonist. There were also the Green Fingers that tickled you to death)

The Red Stain
A family receives a new apartment and moves in. On the wall of one of the rooms there is a red stain that has not been painted over. They spend the first night there and the morning the daughter discovers that her mother is dead and the red stain is brighter than before. The next night the girl falls asleep, but wakes up terrified and sees that there is a red hand stretching from the stain trying strangle her. The girl has time to write a note before she dies. The next day the police arrives and finds nothing. One policeman shoots at the red stain, and it disappearts. When he comes home that night the red stain is at his house. During the night he feels something strangling him. In the mornign the neighbours come and see that the policeman is dead and the red stain is gone.

The Red Meatballs
A girl had a mother, but no father. Her mother often entertained guests all night but the girl never remembered any of it because before she went to bed the mother fed her the red meatballs, which the girl loved. They also had a red piano in the house. One day the girl was playing the piano and after she pressed some keys the piano moved away from the wall and revealed a secret passage. She went into the passage and found a basement with headless men. The red meatballs were cooked from their brains and that's why they made you forget everything. The girl called the police and the police came and arrested the mother.

The Red Gloves
A mother gives her daughter money to buy a pair of gloves and instructs her to buy any pair except the red one. The girl goes to the store, sees the red gloves, likes them and buys them against her mother's wishes. She puts the gloves on and when she comes back to her house she sees that it is on fire. The fire brigade arrives and can't put it out. Then a woman with a red face comes up to her and everyone is scared of her and runs away, except for the girl. The woman tells her that she will put the fire out if the girl comes to the cemetary at night and puts her gloves on a grave. The girl is scared to, but agrees to do it. The fire goes out and at night the girl goes to the cemetary and does as she was told. When she puts the gloves down, a grave nearby opens and the woman with the red face steps out of it and tried to grab the girl, but the girl runs away. The woman screams after her "you won't get rid of me that easily, your grandmother is going to die!" So the girl comes home and her grandmother is dead. Soon her mother dies too. At the funeral the woman with the red face comes up to her and says that she herself will die that night. And indeed she dies, she is buried, she lies underground and sees the woman with the red face again. Then she sees her grandmother and mother and runs up to them and sees that their faces are red too, and her own face has turned red. And from then on she visits the people who buy the red gloves.

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?"

^*

Comments

[rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com]

My own (strictly non-professional) view is that what's wrong with Harris isn't the functional explanations but his blinkered belief that once you've found a functional explanation you can go home.

One thing all the urban legends and warning narratives have in common--if this isn't just restating their definition--is that they convey that the world is a scary, unpredictable, hostile place, and that You Better Watch out because You Just Never Know.

My Irish-American dad was told that a relative of his in the Old Country went out one Saturday night to play cards. Nobody had clocks but the candle was marked near the bottom with "the Devil's Bit," the part that told you midnight was approaching. Involved in the game, my relative ignored the candle till by chance he happened to drop a card; bending to pick it up, he saw to his horror that one of the other players had a cloven hoof. "And he up outa there and away off home with him as fast as he could run!"

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

My own (strictly non-professional) view is that what's wrong with Harris isn't the functional explanations but his blinkered belief that once you've found a functional explanation you can go home.

Yes, that was the ethos in which evolutionary psychology is currently blooming, alas.

But at least your dad's relative's story warns against The Devil, which conventionally = bad. I feel like non-Soviet stories like that have a locus of anxiety that's more concentrated than the general meta.

[rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

Around 1979 I read an article by a Soviet journalist about the movie Jaws which argued that its underlying "message" was the insecurity and unpredictability of life in capitalist America: there are huge maneating sharks just beneath the calm surface of the water, and there's nothing you can do about it.

[boymaenad.livejournal.com]

I wonder about The Red Shoes. (peasant buys red shoes, they ruin her life, then she dies. I wonder where transcripts of the pre-Andersen version of that story can be found.)

actually, the whole metaphor of Red - and here I'm out of my league with terminology - is starting to poke at me. red means stop, red means warning, seeing red is anger, red roses mean passion, red cheeks mean hot emotion... did you know that red is the hardest color for cameras to capture accurately? yet film, when it ages, fades to red. it's all dizzying to my just-woke-up brain.

but anyway, it's very 1984; the idea that the proles are given these stories, the only purpose of which is to inspire generalized fear and cowed, sheep-ish behavior.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

yeah, I guess, Red Riding Hood, Red Shoes, it's true...Where is the chicken and where is the egg? I mean, red IS the color of blood, but in USSR it is also the color of blood of the Soviet Proletariat.

but anyway, it's very 1984; the idea that the proles are given these stories, the only purpose of which is to inspire generalized fear and cowed, sheep-ish behavior.

Yeah, but those stories aren't even really scary...Although I can't really remember whether they freaked me out as a kid or not, they might have.

[paracelsus.livejournal.com]

I recently read a piece by Jean Paulhan concerning the 'sacred' language of the Malagasy, which consists of proverbs and miniscule tales such as: "Grasshopper's body fits in the hand/his voice covers the field." These little gnomic utterances were used in debates: someone would come up with one to prove a point, and then someone else would counter with an opposed verse. Interestingly, the point of these exchanges hardly seemed to be 'winning the argument' so much as exchanging wisdom or keeping the cultural circulation going. So, such proverbial language can have a function beyond reference or object-orientation that may make sense in the Russian context. The place of the radio in the 'coffin on wheels' story may mean it's a warning about general relations with technology and propaganda, and the inexorable nature of such entanglements than watching out for runaway coffins when crossing the street.

I think folklore is fascinating in the way that treating it as object or referent-oriented can obscure the meaning. Like those abduction stories, there really isn't anything to look out for. If it happens, you're already screwed.

(Yes, Lamarkianism... there's nothing more unseemly than seeing great philosophers like Hegel and Engels bending over backwards to prove that nature is dialectical. I still think that human ideas/power structures may well be... at least, they can clearly be Lamarckian.)

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

ohhh yeah, I remember reading about the Malagasy. If memory serves, part of the whole deal is that with each round of the proverb-fighting they speak for themselves and their opponent too, like each "turn" is a complete set, so the loser is the loser not just because he loses but also because he allows the winner to have the last word on his behalf? I read that at roughly the same time as I saw "8 Mile" and I somehow correlated the stuff in the article to Eminem's last rap battle.

I think folklore is fascinating in the way that treating it as object or referent-oriented can obscure the meaning. Like those abduction stories, there really isn't anything to look out for. If it happens, you're already screwed.

That is true, and that belies the fallacy of algorythmically looking for underlying structures in everything but at the same time all this stuff is so ethnographically rich and in that way signifies much beyond itself.

I still think that human ideas/power structures may well be... at least, they can clearly be Lamarckian.
"Hopeful Monsters" is a wonderful novel by Nicholas Mosley that basically takes that approach to the 20th century. Lamarckian evolution is a very powerful and compelling idea as metaphor. The problem was when Lysenko and Michurin cut off cows' horns and expected them to give birth to hornless offspring, destroying the agriculture in the process.

[mycrust.livejournal.com]

I still derive some mild, physics-centric amusement from Landau's comment to Lysenko: "How do you explain the continued birth of virgins?"

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I thought it was Vavilov who said that if Lamarch was right, how come every Jew was born uncicrumsized and every woman a virgin?

Of course, perhaps that very logical line of argument was used more than once against Trofim Denisovich.

[pdanielson.livejournal.com]

"The thing is, those stories make no sense."

"Instead, they just sort of convey general anxiety."

Think about the correlation between Bush's approval ratings and incidences of terror alerts, threats, etc. Like clockwork, every time his poll numbers started to slide, there was some sort of news item designed to scare people, and all of a sudden there was more approval of a "leader" who projects a tough image and purports to take care of everyone.

In other words, it doesn't matter what a population fears, but rather the fearing itself makes people more complacent and trusting in a perceived authority.

I know that might be over-simplifying things, and I'm no anthropologist, but fear seems to work pretty well as a general control mechanism. In fact, not knowing exactly what it is that you should fear might even be more effective, because then you will never actually be able to *confront* that fear, and thus potentially get over it.

If these stories were directed toward children, it would be because a fear of the world, or a fear of the unknown, would make the children more likely to be obedient and rely on their parental authorities, teachers, policemen, etc.

Or I could be completely wrong.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Think about the correlation between Bush's approval ratings and incidences of terror alerts, threats, etc. Like clockwork, every time his poll numbers started to slide, there was some sort of news item designed to scare people, and all of a sudden there was more approval of a "leader" who projects a tough image and purports to take care of everyone.

That part, the usefulness of fear, I agree with you on, 100%. But the thing about the Orwellain Bush fear iteration is the vagueness of the threat--the language of "we don't know when or where, but it's a question not of it, but of when the next terror attack will take place." That is the American approach to fear, one that dovetails nicely with capitalism, you can see a precedent of that in the Nuclear Fear Narrative of the 1950s. Vague nuclear threat from behind the Iron Curtain with nothing much to do about it except become a consumer of the products designed as part of that discourse (bomb shelter in the back yard etc.) The Soviet approach to fear was very different. When it came to real threats, information was simply stonewalled. My parents, who were teenagers during the Cuban Missile Crisis said that they didn't even know it was happening. The news of Chernobyl weren't released for 3 days, and even then only because of pressure from Sweden. No, Soviet fear was more akin to the fear of emasculation, like you weren't going to be a good enough party cadre, like America was going to Win The Race and it would be All Your Fault. It was tautologically impossible for Soviet children to be afraid because fear didn't exist as the public institution it comprises in the US, one that can be easily tweaked and manipulated by the dials of "vague" and "televised."

a fear of the unknown, would make the children more likely to be obedient and rely on their parental authorities, teachers, policemen, etc.

The thing is, I am pretty sure the stories were composed by the children themselves, they weren't from any books to begin with. And the authorities in them are usually hapless and die often, shortly before the children do.

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

See, they remind me of a bunch of stories that I really don't remember because I used to hear them when I was in elementary school. Since most of my childhood memories are under muffled beneath a fuzzy mix of time, alcohol and repression, I can't remember any story in particular. Nevertheless, the Coffin story especially, and the others too, have a familiar ring (not those stories, in particular, but the pointless, vaguely scary for no good reason, "I am the bloody finger-inger" narrative.) It wasn't until adolescence or near adolescence that I remember hearing the stories that had a clear moral (which, of course, was none too clear since nobody really made out in cars, as such, anyway). Even the hitchhiker theme seems to me to belong to an older set of stories that have no clear lesson. They seem to me to be a variant of the 19C or earlier stories in which the young man gives the young lady a ride home in his carriage, only to be informed by her parents that she died several years before. It's an excursion into the uncanny, but not necessarily a very morally directed lesson.

[pdanielson.livejournal.com]

Well apparently the only correct assertion in my comment was the last sentence. :-P

[apropos.livejournal.com]

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

Genealogically speaking, alien abduction narratives seem to be modelled after travellers' tales of the 15th - 17th centuries, in which white-man-meets-the-indigene figured pretty centrally. My supervisor once had a grad student whose thesis argued just that. So there is no reason to rule out the possibility that there is a genealogical borrowing from other types of American-genesis 'discovery' tropes.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

That's true...I wonder if there is a control crossection of worldwide alien abduction narratives. Or is it an American culture-bound syndrome?

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... good question.

[apropos.livejournal.com]

I can answer that: alien abduction is only found as a 'complex' in North America and Brazil, although it's being globalized, naturally. Indigo Crystal Fifth World !

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

Not in Australia? 'Cause I could so imagine being abducted by aliens in Australia.

Lost in time

[brainchilde.livejournal.com]

Back to the original question (yes, spotting this thread late), it could simply be that the meaning and symbolism of the story has been lost in time. My best English example would be the children's rhyme

Ring around the Rosy
Pocket full of posY
Ashes, ashes
we all fall down
(at which point the circle of children fall to the grass)

This was originally a warning of the bubonic plague. Rosy rings and pockets full of puss were the warning signs, and the bodies had to be burned to ashes or everyone died. Not many people today (this group may be the exception) are even aware of this.

Re: Lost in time

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

While most people probably aren't aware of the origin of this rhyme, to the best of my knowledge it's not really used in games anymore, and the people who are aware of it (through texts) usually do know it was about the plague. But that was a medieval ditty; these stories are contemporary, or at least were, when I was little. They were both actively shared and reproduced and they featured contemporary elements, such as police (militsiya in Russia), guns, etc.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read the Brothers Grimm? A lot of the stories there, besides being grisly, are totally bizarre as well. They feature beans as main characters, for example. I think part of it is that the tales are old leftovers from medieval legends which are more abstract, maybe before the Age of Reason when a terrifying story had to have a rationale.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

The original Grimm tales are extremely violent and grotesque, but I don't know how ABSTRACT they are. They are also warning tales--be careful! Of the forest, of strangers, esp. if you are a girl, etc. etc. But these stories...your mom makes meatballs from people's brains? What exactly is the moral lesson therein?

Grimm

[(Anonymous)]

Your stories do seem very much like bad dreams rather than fables-- nonsensical, just scary. The less purpose them seem to have the scarier they are.

A fabulous Grimm story:


How Some Children Played at Slaughtering

In a city named Franecker, located in West Friesland, some young boys and girls between the ages of five and six happened to be playing with one another.  They chose one boy to play a butcher, another boy was to be a cook, and a third boy was to be a pig.  Then they chose one girl to be a cook and another girl her assistant.  The assistant was to catch the blood of the pig in a little bowl so they could make sausages.  As agreed, the butcher now fell upon the little boy playing the pig, threw him to the ground, and slit his throat open with a knife, while the assistant cook caught the blood in her little bowl.  A councilman was walking nearby and saw this wretched act.  He immediately took the butcher with him and led him into the house of the mayor, who instantly summoned the entire council.  They deliberated about this incident and did not know what they should do to the boy, for they realized it had all been part of a children's game.  One of the councilmen, an old wise man, advised the chief judge to take a beautiful red apple in one hand and a Rhenish gulden in the other.  Then he was to call the boy and stretch his hands to him.  If the boy took the apple, he was to be set free.  If he took the gulden, he was to be killed.  The judge took the wise man's advice, and the boy grabbed the apple with a laugh.  Thus he was free without any punishment.


-Taima

[missmimesis.livejournal.com]

the night after I read this post, I had an extremely vivid and (well, at least so it seemed) lengthy nightmare which involved me being somehow in a position to observe a little girl go home from school and take a piece of paper out of a drawer and then suddenly have her arms all cut up and bloody (thus red, obviously). It was my duty to prevent this from happening to her again the next day but I couldn't figure out how. It was really terrifying.
Maybe it was the opium...