<AN> Joseph Sobol is Director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of South Wales. <AA> Joseph Sobol <AT> Adaptive Occasions: Synchronic Correlatives in Traditional Folktale Adaptation <ABTXT> This essay examines a contemporary re-figuration of the traditional Appalachian folktale “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” through the lens of a recent performance event. The mechanisms of parody generate imaginative friction of foreground and background, a structural aesthetic of formal or functional congruence and indicial dissonance. I posit a key device for such genre-crossing adaptations, one I call the synchronic correlative. Synchronic correlatives are a form of meta- discursive parallelism, synchronic because they work as non- linear connectors between otherwise independent local/temporal constructs; they are thematic or indicial pivot points that serve to launch a tale - type from one imaginative frame into another. <TXT> Keywords AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus
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<AN>Joseph Sobol is Director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the
University of South Wales.
<AA>Joseph Sobol
<AT>Adaptive Occasions: Synchronic Correlatives in Traditional Folktale Adaptation
<ABTXT>This essay examines a contemporary re-figuration of the traditional Appalachian
folktale “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” through the lens of a recent performance event. The
mechanisms of parody generate imaginative friction of foreground and background, a structural
aesthetic of formal or functional congruence and indicial dissonance. I posit a key device for
such genre-crossing adaptations, one I call the synchronic correlative. Synchronic correlatives
are a form of meta-discursive parallelism, synchronic because they work as non-linear
connectors between otherwise independent local/temporal constructs; they are thematic or
indicial pivot points that serve to launch a tale - type from one imaginative frame into another.
<TXT>KeywordsAFS Ethnographic Thesaurus
<TXT><SC>KeywordsAFS Ethnographic Thesaurus<NM>: Sstorytelling, Jack tales, creativity,
adaptation, parody
<TXT>Folk tales are endlessly adaptive. They provide a cultural rhizome of familiar motifs that
continuously sprout in new local and temporal settings, generating fresh shoots of imagery and
insight. This process carries on at every socio-cultural level, from the pre-literate to the high
literate to the post-literate, in spite of ever-recurrent expressions of critical conservatism that
would bind us to presumed originals—whatever textual landmark happens to be identified as the
point where that clock should immutably be started. That clock never starts, however, because it
has never stopped. Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Charles Perrault, the Grimm brothers, Yeats,
Angela Carter, Edward Kitsis, and Adam Horowitz, and many more have drawn from the well of
adaptation to illuminate their own times and traditions and to animate their own complex
agendas (Sobol and Zalka 2018).
It will be useful at the outset to recap a pair of broadly accepted folkloristic principles
bearing on the discipline’s founding dialectic of tradition and variation. The first of these is that
works in the oral tradition, even works distilled from it into print or other media, are inherently
homeostatic—they have built-in mechanisms to take on the coloration of their time and place.
Walter Ong reports the case of an epic recorded from the Gonja people of Ghana at the turn of
the twentieth century, in which the founder of the ruling dynasty was said to have had seven
sons. When the same tale was recorded 60sixty years later, the culture-hero now had only five
sons—because in intervening decades, two of the seven divisions of the tribal territory had been
eliminated due to assimilation and boundary shifts (Ong 1982:48). Symbolic coordinates of the
narrative were redrawn to reflect shifts in the social landscape. This is an elemental form of
narrative thinking—adjusting details to engage a changing environment. The second principle is
that oral traditional tales are fundamentally intertextual, or, more precisely, inter-imaginal: they
tend to rely on prior performances of parallel narrative sequences by other tellers of a lineage,
recalled and interpreted to fit a current audience, mood, and moment. Traditional tellers often
invoke those prior performers and performances to borrow authority for their retellings. Before
Appalachian master teller Ray Hicks told his version of “Hardy Hardass” at his home in 1984, he
gave a preface in which he summoned the image of his grandfather, John Benjamin Hicks,
telling the tale to him as Ray sat on his grandfather’s lap, “watch[ing] his lips work, through the
beard” (Sobol 1994b:11). Everything that followed was visualized through that authorizing
image, as if the grandfather’s bearded mouth were imaginatively superimposed upon Hicks’s
own.
When contemporary storytellers adapt traditional tales by imaginatively transposing them
to parodic local and temporal environments, a different sort of inter-imaginal palimpsesting
occurs. Rather than visualizing the performance through a screen of past tellings, contemporary
performers foreground their revisionist landscapes against an implicit background of pre-figuring
models, whether from past performances or canonic literary versions. Through the mechanisms
of parody, imaginative friction of foreground and background creates an aesthetic composed of
formal or functional congruence and indicial dissonance (Barthes 1977). Parody is used here in
Hutcheon’s expanded sense, connoting a range of intended effects, from ridicule to reverence,
satire to homage, often within the modulatory ethos of a single work (2000:50-68).
In this essay, I will posit one simple mechanism for these adaptations across times and
places, a device that I call the synchronic correlative. The synchronic correlative is a form of
parallelism that operates on the meta-discursive level, beyond metrical syntax and beyond
individual texts or individual occasions of production. “Synchronic” because they work as non-
linear connectors between otherwise independent local/temporal constructs;, they are thematic or
indicial pivot points that serve to launch a tale -type from one imaginative frame into another.
The term appears fleetingly in cognitive socio-linguistics to denote a language change process
that does not follow a direct chronological chain of transmission (Harder 2014:62). In relation to
the conscious adaptation of oral or literary materials, the synchronic correlative harks back to T.
S. Eliot’s objective correlative—a concrete image in a story or poem that evokes without further
external commentary or description the precise emotion that the author is attempting to embody
in the work. The synchronic correlative echoes C. G. Jung’s “acausal connecting principle” of
synchronicity, which also operates by means of resonance across realms ([1952] 1993). The
synchronic correlative is an image, a verbal formula, or an action motif in a traditional narrative
that evokes a parallel resonance from a separate and distinct temporal/local milieu. It is a
principle of decoding and response on a listener’s part, yet, on the part of the creative storyteller,
it also functions as a kernel of inspiration and construction. To extend the organic imagery, it
serves as a narrative spore that migrates from a traditional to a contemporary milieu, opening a
formal congruence between story-worlds.
<T1HD>Synchronic Adaptation
<TXT>In adapting authored works with strong local and historical settings, such as the
innumerable synchronic transpositions of Shakespeare plays, the alternate milieu is most often
localized and historicized to a similar degree as the original—as in Bernstein and Sondheim’s
West Side Story or Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. Adapting traditional folktales usually involves
transposition from a generalized ahistorical wonder-tale time/space into a particular
contemporary frame, evoking resonances of both the archetypal and historical worlds. DuBois
defines resonance in cognitive linguistic terms as “the catalytic activation of affinities across
utterances” (quoted in Frog 2017:428). The synchronic correlative is a key to the adaptive reflex
—it opens a pathway between present and generic worlds, allowing them to vibrate
sympathetically for an audience. It forges further links in the chain of intertextuality and co-
present imaging that allows us to think about the contemporary moment with stories drawn from
the rhizome of familiar wonder-tale forms—that which Bacchilega calls “the fairy- tale web”
(2013).
The field of fairy-tale studies has done extensive service in excavating the historical,
folkloric, and literary roots of this age-old popular genre. There has been wide-ranging
innovative critical work on contemporary branchings of the tales into fiction, poetry, cinema,
television, cartoons and graphic novels, and video-, online-, and role- play gaming. Donald
Haase, Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, Cristina Bacchilega, and others have
extensively unpacked the political, social, cultural, and gender implications of various adaptive
strata of the tales (Greenhill et al. 2018). Amid the welter of contemporary media on which fairy-
tale studies fixes its sights, it is easy to overlook the foundational medium upon which the genre
stands—that is, the medium of live interactive performances by single narrators in domestic or
public platform settings. This is due perhaps to the intangibilities inherent in live performance:
the fact that story performers often operate without fixed texts, that their performances usually
lack durable artiefacts and are full of unscripted interjections and para-linguistic involvement
strategies that are difficult to replicate for analysis. Yet many experienced storytellers and
listeners can tell of what Fran Stallings (1988) and Brian Sturm (2000) have called the “story-
listening trance,” a state of heightened focus wherein the story unfolds with the conjoined
imaginative reflexes of a crafted communal dream. Within this hypnotic reverie, all kinds of
conscious and unconscious suggestions and negotiations are enabled. The synchronic correlative
in itself is an ethically neutral device—capable of being pressed into the service of virtually any
aesthetic or ideological design. It is simply a tool, a powerful and vital one, for lighting up the
web of narrative associations.
<T1HD>Adaptive Occasions
<TXT>The purpose and the prime presentational strategy of the panel convened for the
conference, “Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict,” was to demonstrate the particular
powers of the storytelling performance medium. Panelists engaged those powers to explore
critical themes, formal properties, and fixed and variable elements in the generic matrix that
make the form so durable, regenerative, and responsive to changing social and performance
contexts. We worked inductively from our own performance adaptations to critical, political, and
ideological agendas embodied in the fabric of the tales. My segment featured an adaptation of the
traditional trickster tale, “Jack and the Giants’ Newground,” set in coal-country Appalachia. This
was a ten10-minute segment of a two2-hour crafted storytelling piece, Jack and the Least Gal
(Sobol 2017abA) that has toured the United States.S. and the U.K. since 2012. I had intended to
perform “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” live at the “Thinking with Stories” conference,
alongside work by three other esteemed storyteller-scholars. Unforeseen circumstances made it
necessary to send a video clip, filmed at a live performance two2 weeks prior to the event (Sobol
2017ab). Thus, the panel featured traditional-style storytelling, live and interactive between the
tellers and the audience present in the conference room—as well as mediated storytelling
featuring an absent performer interacting with an audience seated off-screen and in the past. The
same clip presented at the conference has been transcribed and appended to this article. The clip
is available on the mixed-media companion website of Journal of American Folklore.1
The performance from which this excerpt and the transcription that follows this article
have been taken is built upon two creative premises—exploratory tasks, or research questions, if
you will. One is to imagine a world in which any of the stories in the Appalachian wonder-tale
tradition could be happening concurrently, and therefore characters from any tale might wander
into the path of any other. Since they are aesthetic and not natural creatures, however, they
would tend to meet at dramaturgically compelling moments—junctions of episodes at which the
A Same-year entries were rearranged into alphabetical order by title; see References.
characters’ tasks and motivations converge. The second task is to reimagine the landscape of the
tales by seeking out those places where the ancient language of action intersects with the
recognizably temporal and local—synchronic correlatives.
<T1HD>Jack and the Giants: From Then to Now
<TXT> “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” is itself a multi-layered set of adaptive occasions.
Drawing on the traditional English folktale “Jack the Giant Killer,” published in chapbook form
in the early eighteenth century (Opie and Opie 1974:58-81), the oral tale immigrated with its
tellers to the American colonies and resettled in certain precincts of Southern Appalachia. Jack is
an Everyman hero type, easily adapted to fit his host culture, whether it be English, Scottish,
Irish, Welsh, German, Romany, or Appalachian mountaineer (MacDermitt 1983, 1986;
Nicolaisen 1978). The name itself indicates a generalized representative quality, embodied in
linguistic usage to signify a male principle of almost any species (jackass, jackrabbit, jack deer,
jack-tar, “any man-jack of them,” [Sobol 1992:77-82]). Its ruling tendency is to take on the
coloration of its host culture and environment—while maintaining the impulse of both the
character and the tellers to link popular story-types and genres: nursery rhymes, fool stories,