The Dynamics of Folklore

The Dynamics of Folklore Barre Toelken 439 pp.

Barre Toelken’s  The Dynamics of Folklore is an excellent introduction to the study of folklore. Through the course of the book, richly detailed with examples of his research, Toelken takes the reader on a guided introduction to the field. Towards the end of the book, Toelken’s focus shifts from a generalized overview of the discipline to a more practical, hands-on guide to performing the study.

Toelken’s examples cut across three folk groups. The majority of the discussion of folklore comes from his experiences with the Navajo. Peppered throughout the text, however, are discussions of Northwest logging culture and Japanese American immigrant culture.

Toelken’s experiences with the Navajo provide the richest store of details and open the book for a discussion of perspective. In none of the groups Toelken studied can he be described as possessing an insider knowledge of the culture. His experiences with the Navajo can be described as a threshold perspective. A threshold perspective emerges when the researcher is neither wholly in-group, nor wholly out-of-the-group; they can act within the group smoothly and comfortably, but they do not quite belong. Toelken can speak the language well, and discuss stories with his informants on their terms; yet, as he frequently points out, he is “out of the loop” on many references and jokes. This threshold perspective differs from the approach he brings to loggers and Japanese-Americans, mainly in the knowledge with which he comes to his sessions.

In the outsider perspective interviews, Toelken’s knowledge seems to come mostly from information one could glean from studying the extant literature concerning the group. By contrast, Toelken’s threshold perspective feels lived-in. His insistence on ritual obligations, notably the taboo on coyote stories outside of winter, read as an understanding reached after lengthy immersive experience in the group.

The awareness as a researcher of different notions of discussing folklore is perhaps the most useful aspect of the book. It is easy, as Toelken points out, to come to a study with the assumption that knowledge may be freely shared; but this is not necessarily the case. Toelken gives several examples of how the violation of the informant’s trust can damage further research with the group.

The Dynamics of Folklore was a great introduction to the study of folklore. It has primed me well for my further reading in this subject, and will do the same for any reader.

Would I recommend The Dynamics of Folklore? Yes.

Score: 4.1/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Probably not, the text was an excellent primer, but I don’t see myself coming back to it. However, Mrs. Cheddar would likely kill me if I got rid of it before she takes the comprehensive exam for her master's degree in folklore.

-Mr. Cheddar

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell 416 pp.

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces forms the basis of the monomyth theory of analyzing literature generally and mythology specifically. This theory, in brief, is that the hero in almost every story told in any culture around the world goes through most or all of the same stages in their journey. Thus, by applying the monomyth structure to stories, we can gain a rapid understanding of their similarities and an insight into their meaning.

To discuss this book further, I will separate this review into two parts; first I will discuss the theory itself, it’s positive traits and its drawbacks. Second, I will discuss some larger issues with the structure of the book itself and some of Campbell’s claims about “primitive” societies.

Campbell’s central conception of the book is the monomyth, a cycle of stages present in nearly every story told throughout human history. The hero will pass through a fixed progression of coarsely-defined motifs, beginning with the refusal of the call to adventure, progressing through the dangerous task ahead, and finally returning to bequeath the boons of his task. This conception is remarkably useful as an analytical tool, but it is problematic to assume that all stories can be shoehorned into one narrative structure, no matter how coarse the defined stages of that structure are.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces takes each of these stages in the journey and provides selections from myths from around the world to demonstrate them. Campbell picks up different stories at different points, weaving them throughout the book as a whole. This structure works very well for illustrating the application of the theory to individual events in stories, but I found myself wishing for just a little bit more. If Campbell had taken some space aside at the end of the book to lay out one or two myths beginning to end, annotating them with each stage in the cycle, the reader would easily be able to apply the structure to a story as a whole, without taking the added challenge of compiling Campbell’s scattered references.

I wanted to like this book. I’ve been a fan of Campbell’s work since high school, especially of Myths to Live By and The Masks of God. Yet, until now, I’d never managed to make my way through The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Every time I attempted to read the whole book, I ran aground on Campbell’s style of writing. Hero was Campbell’s first major book, and the unpolished nature of his prose shows. Frequently Campbell’s voice seems to be little more than a backgrounded narrator, meekly tying together lengthy quotations from other texts.

The problem, however, comes forth when Campbell does begin to use his authorial voice. For much of the book, he ties together myths from all around the world, Native American, European, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and does so somewhat seamlessly. Two-thirds of the way through the book, Campbell decides to address, “folk mythologies.” At this point, he makes the claim that the stories from cultures on the periphery of what he describes as great civilizations (Mostly empire building, large edifice erecting, literate cultures) simply could not have arisen organically. To deny the independent origination of ideas hurts The Hero with a Thousand Faces in two ways.

First it hurts the book’s credibility as an academic work. To belittle and deny the validity of the cultures whose stories one is studying damages the reader’s interest and the author’s voice. Denying the creations of cultures one does not consider to be “civilized enough” reeks of the imperialistic and racist mindset which led many European explorers in Africa to invent progressively more and more ludicrous theories to explain the builders of large stone structures and cities across the continent.

Secondly, it damages, by virtue of a very odd sense of humility, the potential reach of Campbell’s monomyth theory. If all humans across the entire world tell stories which fit neatly into one large narrative structure, then it seems that this structure is something inherent in the human mind. Campbell picks up on this idea in Primitive Mythology, so I won’t discuss it in detail here. 

These flaws do not entirely manage to sink the book in my estimation, but they do problematize my enjoyment of it. After making my way through the entirety of the text, I realized why I was never able to finish it before now, despite at least a dozen attempts. Campbell’s style is not developed adequately in the book, the structure focuses far too heavily on the placement of block quotations, and when Campbell’s voice does rise to the foreground, his opinions, products of their time or not, force the reader to question the validity of his writing.

Would I recommend The Hero with a Thousand Faces? Hesitantly yes, but only as a way to fill out one’s understanding of Campbell’s thought after reading his other works.

Score: 3.2/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar

The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead Ayn Rand 704 pp.

Ayn Rand’s paperweight of a novel, The Fountainhead, drags on through seven-hundred pages of monotonous pontificating by one-dimensional characters. Objectivism, as presented through the novel’s protagonist Howard Roark, is the philosophy of sticking to one’s own thoughts and desires at the total and complete expense of every other human being on the planet.

The novel quickly establishes a structure it will fall back on later in the text: Roark, an architect, is given a commission or some other means by which he may see a building he designs brought into the world. He attacks the challenge with gusto, deriving great, visceral pleasure from solving the problems of materials and the site, until he comes to what he, and he alone, has determined as the perfect solution. From that point hence, he will only allow the building to commence if his vision is left untampered with. The slightest modification from a client, the merest hint of deviation from Roark’s Holy Writ, and the building will never be erected. This pattern repeats, ad nauseam, throughout the novel.

Contrasting Roark is Peter Keating, a spineless man, worthless as an architect, but well versed in the socializing necessary to acquire commissions. Keating makes a career not out of designing his own buildings and fulfilling his own commissions, but by passing off the work of other architects, frequently Roark, as his own. 

This dichotomy, between Roark’s perfection, and Keating’s ineptitude forms the spectrum along which every actor in the novel must fall. Any individual who brings about their own exclusion from society by an unswerving adherence to their own thought without consideration of others is all-good, regardless of their actions. Any individual who gives the slightest concern about social activity is spineless and worthless. One exception to this rule is made in the case of Ellsworth Toohey, the only character in the novel of any real depth.

Ellsworth seeks control over the whole world, to relegate all human desires to the simplistic need to satisfy the desires of one’s fellow man. Altruism, even as Ellsworth preaches it, is evil. It is simply the means of gaining control over other people through the application of emotional, if not physical force. This negative socialism does not strike me as the kind of knee-jerk, interpretation one might form after a negative experience with modernist literature.

One last negative element I want to discuss. Rand takes a very negative stance on Modernist literature, at one point somewhat indirectly singling out Joyce’s Ulysses as a particular example of Ellsworth and company’s villainous aims in literature, “When the fact that one is a total nonentity who’s done nothing more outstanding than eating, sleeping and chatting with neighbors becomes a fact worthy of pride, of announcement to the world and of diligent study by millions of readers-the fact that one has built a cathedral becomes unrecordable and unannouncable.” Yet, in its structure, The Fountainhead is rather modernist itself. Roark faces and overcomes trials as an architect, struggling to build according to his vision without concern for the desires of his clients. By the end of the novel however, he has had no arc in the slightest. At the opening of the book, Roark is an outsider to society, vindicated in his self-righteousness, determined to do his own thing. And by the end of the novel, he is exactly the same, an outsider, uncompromising and self-righteous. Rand’s dislike of modernist literature is somewhat contradictory and highlighted by her own portrayal of the literature.

I will give Rand some credit, however. I was able to overlook the simple characters and bland plot for the first two-thirds of the book, because her writing was marvelously edited. On the small scale, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Rand’s prose is phenomenal. Thoughts flowed into each other smoothly, and I didn’t want to put the book down. Watching Roark and Keating establish themselves in the architectural community was riveting. After they were established in their ways, Rand began to focus on Ellsworth’s conspiratorial degradation of the human race to the point of losing focus on the strengths her story possessed. 

From the perspective of setting construction, she succeeded again, New York felt lived in and developed, even with only small chunks of the city discussed in any great detail. I believed the city, I could see and understand the buildings, even with a minimal amount of explicit description. The sleek, minimalist lines of Roark’s designs leapt from the page and into my imagination. In the end, these strengths were not enough to overcome the dreadful storytelling which persisted throughout the rest of the text.

Would I recommend The Fountainhead?

Absolutely not. If you are 17, then this book will confirm everything you believe about yourself in opposition to your parents and all other authority figures. Any older, and you will recognize it for the thin, weakly argued, poorly structured mess it is.

Score: 1.9/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? No.

-Mr. Cheddar

Good Morning, Romantics

Good Morning, Romantics Shanna Compton 20 pp.

Shanna Compton’s Good Morning, Romantics is a fantastic chapbook cut out of her larger volume, The Seam Rovers. Compton’s poems are lively, popping with fresh and unexpected twists of imagery in every poem. It would be tempting to spend this review simply quoting lines from the poems, “Hey Mike, we need you to wean the Elizabethans off the tern eggs and lipstick,” or, “There are scattered concessions. Overheard confessions.” Even if Compton had not succeeded so admirably with these poems as a collection, the sheer refined brilliance of her language on a line-by-line basis alone would be more than enough to make me love this book.

On the large scale, Good Morning, Romantics is a book about seeking unity with society outside of oneself. The chapbook is divided into two sections, each delving into a separate approach to this theme. In the first half of the book, Compton lingers on how differently people can try to integrate themselves into a society. This becomes clearest in “Hospital for the Ear & Neck,” where we witness the active work of matching step with a group. Throughout its lines, the poem presents us with images of unifying our perceptions of reality and the way we produce our own understanding of the world.

“Setting and receiving tones,

we tune our beating machines

which cluster flocklike

and crow alone.

Fiddling our knobs together,

distilling notes, patterning after”

This opening couplet immediately brings to mind notions of radios and transmitters; the machinery used to project and receive thoughts and communication from other human beings around the world. But this machinery is not to be tuned in the solitary, according to one’s own individual plan. Rather, it is tuned with a group, bringing the whole population into unity through the use of their receptive and transmittive faculties, each patterned after the notes of others in the group.

Formally, Compton’s poems suggest this groupthink as well. The text is dominated by couplets, triplets, and quatrains, with only the rare line standing alone. In these few cases, the language and imagery heightens the effect, drawing the reader’s attention to the solitary nature of the subject matter and the lines themselves. Compton’s sometimes playful couplets draw the reader into a state of comfort with their rhythm and completeness-the effect of reading the solitary lines at the end jars us. We read them and feel almost strung out, waiting for their completion, but knowing it will not come.

In the second half of Good Morning, Romantics, Compton turns integration into society at large around, giving us a confession in five poems, each of which presses on a different angle of a close-knit group of outcasts and criminals. This lengthy confession dwells on the various crimes of the group, ranging from the destruction of cars to the reckless amputation and burial of limbs.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of this series is the final poem of the set. Compton ends with a haunting note, the longing of her narrator to rejoin the community she has confessed her way out of through this cycle of poems. She cries for the loss of her friends, for the loneliness she feels in a society which is not hers. She still hums, 

“the songs we whisper-sang

pepperstung under the stars.”

Would I recommend Good Morning, Romantics? Yes.

Score: 4.7/5

Would I keep it on my bookshelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar

Twitter

I set up a twitter feed for snippets I find in the books as I read them and updates on new reviews. You can follow here.

-Mr. Cheddar

When Life Nearly Died

When Life Nearly Died  Michael J. Benton 335 pp.

Michael J. Benton’s When Life Nearly Died was an interesting piece of science journalism. While ostensibly a book about the extinction event at the end of the Permian era, the majority of the book was spent on the history of our understanding of mass-extinctions, especially the K-T extinction event. Discussion of other subjects notwithstanding, I found the book to be tremendously enjoyable-when ingested in manageable chunks.

Benton displayed no lack of pride at When Life Nearly Died’s lack of equations, reducing all the difficult science down to a discussion of one simple equation. However; for a book with such an evocative title, I found myself wanting more vivid description of a paleontological view of life in the late Permian and early Triassic, painting a bold picture of the devastation in the wake of the calamity. What Benton delivered instead was a thorough discussion of the history of paleontology. Much to my surprise, I found myself drawn into discussions of rock beds, following along breathlessly.

Nonetheless, Benton’s writing is lively and enjoyable, if a little dense at times. I found myself eagerly devouring the book in chunks of three to four chapters at a time. Like candy, good science writing is best indulged in quantities just large enough to satisfy. At the end of the book, however, Benton took advantage-to marvelous effect- of the trust he had built up with the reader of the preceding three-hundred pages.

When Benton launched into a full chapter-length description of speculative life-forms and habitats in the late Permian era, I ate it up voraciously. Moreso than any other section in the book, Benton’s ability to paint a picture of an ecosystem which has been absent from the planet for more than three hundred million years, set a flame in my mind and a burning desire to turn the page and explore the next life form on the next page. Despite only giving the reader our experience of the late Permian ecosystem in small, broadly painted descriptions, Benton’s world-building was skillfully executed, allowing the reader to walk away with a good grasp on what the Earth must have been like at that time.

Would I recommend When Life Nearly Died?

Heartily yes.

Score: 4.0/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Probably not.

-Mr. Cheddar

Paul For Everyone

Paul for Everyone Chester Warren Quimby 176 pp.

Chester Warren Quimby’s Paul for Everyone is a marvelous tool for understanding Paul’s epistles, the majority of the New Testament.  Quimby presents Paul’s thought in a slim, concise volume. The book can be divided into two main sections, a biography of Paul himself, and an explanation of his thought.

Quimby’s dedicates a chapter early in the text to discussing the social and political climate of the Roman empire in the first century A.D. informing us how pax romana allowed for such a ready spread of ideas and thoughts, moreso than the vast majority of human history. This chapter of world-building was not simply successful as a tool for granting us a sense of Roman life, but gave a great insight into the social needs early Christianity fulfilled.

While I found the biography to be a useful tool in piecing together hints and clues about the enigmatic author of much of the New Testament, there was one section which struck me as particularly beautiful. Picture Saul on the road to Tarsus. Here is a man who has struggled to root out the Christian community in Jerusalem for years. Yet, for all his labor, this heretical sect of Judaism simply will not be put down. Quimby dives deep into Paul’s mind for one, exquisitely written section, leading up to his vision and conversion on the road.

From then on, the book makes a simple synthesis of Paul’s theology, tying together the disparate thoughts scattered throughout his letters into one, overarching structure. Quimby's primary tool for discussing Paul's theology is to provide a synthesis of his thoughts scattered throughout the letters in the New Testament. He breaks down each individual epistle into its component parts and provides a simple scheme for assembling them into a more concrete doctrinal theology.
     Easily the most useful single chapter of the book is a discussion of Romans. Quimby sets this letter aside from all the others as being nearly a complete expression of Pauline theology in itself. He then proceeds to break Paul's thought down into six sections. Phrasing each of these sections in the form of a question and then a lengthy answer, Quimby's writing feels almost catechismal. This format is extremely useful in giving the reader a framework with which to attack the sometimes convoluted thought which dominates Paul's writing. As a result, Paul for Everyone is a very valuable tool for approaching the New Testament.

Would I recommend  Paul for Everyone?

For everyone? No. For the inquisitive, making their first entry into understanding the New Testament? Yes.

Score: 4.4/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar

August 1914

August 1914  Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Michael Glenny Tr.)  714 pp.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, August 1914, sounds his tremendous cry against the futility of war. Over the course of the book’s seven hundred pages, he takes us through the earliest month of Russia’s involvement in World War 1.

I must admit that August 1914 feels its length at times, and the structure does not help with these issues. The action around Tannenberg forms the core of the novel, as we chase Colonel Vorotsyntsev around the battlefield. Bookending this story Solzhenitsyn presents us with two narratives, one in Moscow, one in Rostov-on-Don. August 1914 is the first book in The Red Wheel cycle, and it seems that the segments outside of Tannenberg are threads Solzhenitsyn will pick up on later in the series. As they don’t weigh on the plot of this book very heavily, I will refrain from discussing them.

Solzhenitsyn’s treatment of the Russian serfs is marvelously executed. No one but the intellectual caste of the officer corps is concerned about the larger geopolitical consequences of the war. The men in in the trenches are solely concerned about fighting for the Tsar, doing their duty for Russia, and most of all, coming home again safely. This disconnect creates a bizarre situation late in the book when, under heavy shelling, the conscripted serfs hold in their trenches, stalwartly waiting for the rain of death to end, while the officers begin to turn and run.

This could, very easily, have turned into a trite sermon on the virtues of the proletariat, fighting more bravely than the intelligentsia in a war waged without any thought of benefit for the common man. Solzhenitsyn quickly deconstructs this possibility through Alexander Lenartovich. The communist’s opportunistic sermonizing provides a none-to-subtle thread of irony throughout the book. Early in the novel, he says to a doctor, as they are sitting on the outskirts of the battle, that the worse this war is for Russia, the better it will be for the upcoming revolution. Later, once he has his first taste of battle, Lenartovich does not recant his philosophy of “the worse, the better,” but suddenly wants it not to include him. As he flees the battle, he quickly finds himself working with Vorotyntsev and several other loyal soldiers to get their report to central command.

That segment of bringing the report out of the battle leads to Solzhenitsyn’s greatest charge of ineptitude against the Russian army in the war. Immediately before Vortyntsev makes his escape from the disaster at Tannenberg, we see the first reports of the battle making their way to central command. Most interestingly of all, the forward command staff’s escape is described as “read[ing] like a boy’s adventure novel.” This claim drives home two points, first the nature of the Russian mode of war during the battle- confused and disorganized, over-sure of its own capabilities, and desperate to prove itself to others; much like the typical boy in an young adult adventure novel. Second, a theme of that genre which I hope to see explored in future volumes.

In the typical boy’s adventure novel, after overcoming his struggles, the protagonist will find himself accepted into the ranks of manhood, his capabilities exercised. If we read August 1914 as the opening acts of such a novel, then I cannot help looking forward to Russia beginning to exercise its newfound capabilities later in the series. 

Solzhenitsyn’s creation of the area around Tannenberg as place comes across a little sparse. Normally I would find this off-putting, but in this instance it worked wonderfully. Much like The Red Badge of Courage, the characters’ ignorance of the fine-grained detail of the landscape is as much a player in the book as the germans themselves. Thus, Solzhenitsyn skillfully leaves us with a landscape of precipitous drops, blanketed in mist covering the thunder of death ringing out from across the shrouded folds of a largely unknown landscape.

Would I recommend August 1914?

Without a doubt, yes.

Score: 4.7/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar

Project Summary

I stood in front of my bookshelf the other day and thought to myself,

“I have a lot of books here.”

This immediately brought a question to my mind, 

“Have I actually read all of these?”

So I started looking through the books piled on the shelves, some of them neatly arranged by subjects- my beat shelf, my religious shelf, my wife’s folklore shelf- some of them piled up halfway to the ceiling, mostly the victims of recent readings, and some of them sitting crisp and unread among the thoroughly beaten copies I’ve read over and over again. Sure enough, I could say with some confidence that I had read the vast majority.

But the unread volumes bothered me, and the prospect of an unread book lurking patiently on my bookshelf bothered me. At first, I thought about going down the shelves, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Read it. The Moons of Gomrath? I always meant to read it, but never quite got around to it,” making a list like that. But my memory is fallible, and there are too many books I want to read again on the shelves. Not to mention, what a great project it would be to read through each and every book. And that is part of the project that I am launching with this blog. 

Over the next three years, I intend to read every book my wife and I own, all three hundred and four of them. Now, this is not to suggest that I won’t be buying more books over the next three years, but it will require me to put more thought into which books I do buy.

This might make for an interesting accomplishment on its own. Possibly something to tell my friends about, a personal oddity at best. Certainly not something worth putting out for the whole world. The project needs something more.

I’ve been writing myself for a few years now. Part of the challenge for me over the last year has been trying to determine what exactly I want out of literature in general, and my own writing in particular. I have a head filled with amorphous ideas about what makes good writing, what qualities I want to see, and how I want those topics to be addressed and developed. When I’ve tried to write them out explicitly, the result has never been quite what I want.

The problem with that, the way I see it, is that I’m trying to launch into large-scale criticism, without the background in analyzing individual books I need for that task. That problem, however, gives me the tools to solve another. When I was in college, one of my creative writing professors told us that if we wanted to review books, talk about them, and get our thoughts out there; we should write up a review of every book we read. So that’s exactly what I intend to do.

As I work my way through this project, taking books from the to-read list and devouring them like a starving animal, I will write up a review on every one. I’ll focus on the things in them I like, build a voice as a critic, and come to realize what I like in other people’ writing, so that I can put it into my own.

So that’s the project. I hope you’ll join me for the journey I’m on over the next three years and share the beauty of the written word with me.

-Mr. Cheddar