Narratives, Space and Drama: Essential Spatial Aspects Involved in the Performance and Reception of Oral Narrative

Abstract

In the past, oral narrative tended to be regarded as a two-dimensional phenom- enon largely confined to the form of the spoken or (later) printed word. Over the last twenty years, however, oral narratives have gradually gained thickness in the eyes of folklore scholars who have increasingly demanded that more attention be paid to the social and personal contexts that gave rise to these narratives. This present article reviews the ways in which the understanding of oral narrative depends on its physical, mental and social sur- roundings, noting also how the process is actually reciprocal, since while taking much from their surroundings, narratives are also capable of subtly changing the contexts that gave birth to them. Working out from the three-dimensional nature of the oral narrative per- formance, it is argued that much could be gained from analysing oral narratives as pieces of theatre or dramatic performances rather than as pieces of text. It might be argued that all folklore unconsciously involves ideas of boundaries and inhabited space, especially with regard to its relationship with the recurring concept of us and them, and following on from this, the closely associated ideas concerning otherness and the inside and the outside of the worlds we in- habit. These ideas are probably most clearly reflected in the fields of festival, game and folk narrative: indeed, in the field of folk narrative studies, the concept of has taken on ever-increasing importance over the last few years, espe- cially with regard to the examination of the direct living context of the perform- ance event that produced the story (see Bauman 1977: 27-29), and then the role played by the space which the individual storyteller inhabited throughout his or her life. 1 The central themes of the International Society for Folk Research Con- gress in Tartu, in 2005, were Narrative Theories and Modern Practices. Without doubt, one of the key developments in the scholarly approach to the folk narra- tive over the last 150 years has been a gradual move away from the earlier ap- proach of examining these narratives merely as a series of written or recorded words printed anonymously on a flat page below neat story headings. In such a form, oral narratives are as isolated from their context as dead butterflies pinned to a table for examination. Thanks to the work of Parry and Lord and their follow-