Wilderness and Storytelling

Edith Fowke is a professor emeritus at York University and author of the
recently published Canadian Folklore: Perspectives on Canadian Culture.

The title of this book may be slightly misleading. To many, storytelling implies fiction, while the stories in this book are autobiographical. The narrator is an 88-year-old man who spent his life working and travelling in the wilderness along Lake Superior’s North Shore. Lindsay Staples recorded Dolph King’s reminiscences in the little fishing village of Rossport, Ontario, in 1979, and transcribed the tapes with as little editing as possible. The narratives give a realistic picture of the life of the people who depended on the land for their livelihood: logging, fishing, hunting, and trapping.

Staples was primarily interested in his informant’s relationship to the land, and he concluded that, while storytelling was a social activity, “it also came to be viewed as the verbal space within which man’s relationship to wilderness unfolds.”

Part One consists of Dolph King’s reminiscences; in Part Two, titled “Folklore and Oral Storytelling: An Inquiry into Textual Practices,” Staples criticizes previous approaches to life-history material and sets forth his own. While he seems to have studied this field in depth, his writing is unfortunately so jargon-ridden that his argument is hard to follow. A couple of sentences chosen at random will illustrate:

Speech acts convey a cognitive awareness of the entire relational system that displays itself through the performance of the system and the accentuation and de-emphasis of its constituent features (p.176),

Deconstructing the effacement of writing in a text, folklore can attend to the decisions made over meaning(s) immanently “present” in a text which outline the visible limits of its presence (p.185).

Perhaps some readers will be able to make sense of such writing, but I’m afraid I can’t.