Nearly Dark, Darkly Near. Telling tales: storytelling in the Scottish oral tradition and the problems inherent in attempts to study, preserve or continue it: a suggested methodology for future interactions
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Date
02/07/2015Author
Whelan, Greg
Metadata
Abstract
This doctoral thesis is composed of two separate sections: a novel and a
contextualising critical discussion.
The novel deals with a thirteen-year-old boy named Morgan whose parents
are separating, moving him from a comfortable city life to his mother’s hometown
in rural Perthshire. There he begins a friendship with a mysterious young girl and
together they tap into the landscape’s rich cultural history of Scottish tales and
folklore. Split between parents he cannot understand and an ancient world of
which he is not a part, Morgan’s flirtations with Scottish storytelling become a
search for personal history and heritage, culminating in Morgan crafting his own
story. This final story acts as a teller-created bildüngsroman but also challenges the
authority and validity of the stories that he is told, highlighting the fallacy of any
concepts of “ownership” inherent in them.
The critical portion contextualises Morgan’s tale. It discusses how we
problematize our interactions with the form of storytelling by fixing it as linear
history to promote it as a national signifier or cultural vessel. The paper discusses
this by engaging with the novel’s main themes through three distinct sections. The
first examines eighteenth century engagements with Scottish storytelling and their
role in creating national identity. It focuses on MacPherson’s Ossian scandals,
Scott and Burns. The second section examines how this fractious groundwork
developed during the twentieth century folk revivals and the cultural engagements
of Henderson and the Scottish travellers. The final section discusses methodology
and both the problems and strengths of contemporary academic responses. The
paper argues that we have developed a methodology that is too rigid and
reverential, often essentializing “fixed” understandings of storytelling in attempts
to distribute ownership or champion nationalistic priorities. The thesis argues that
attempts to preserve or promote the form often work to limit it. To make any
progress in developing the “tradition”, we must approach it with a critical
methodology that is free of elitism and allows new patrons of whatever experience
or knowledge to contribute to it. The discussion poses that this is only possible if
our critical and academic interactions become as malleable as the form itself: rather
than attempt to absolve or excuse the difficulties and historical contradictions
inherent in the form, it must openly embrace them as a vital part of a very
“Scottish” form of storytelling.