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TRANSCRIPT
<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,
trickster stories, wonder-tale hero stories, fabliaux-type adult trickster stories, tall tales, and
occasionally stories with mythic or culture-hero echoes.
At some point in the resettlement process, the English, Celtic, and German backgrounds
that originally blended to form the tradition of Southern Appalachian storytelling began to
recede, and the language and imagery of mountain “hollers” and river roads filled in the stories’
surface textures. Probably by the heyday of Council Harmon (1806-1890), whose many
descendants maintained the tales throughout the twentieth century, a new Appalachian cultural
coloration had evolved for the Jack tale cycle. This local species was given canonic literary form
in the 1940s by Richard Chase, and unforgettable vernacular eloquence by Ray Hicks in his
twenty-eight28-year reign as signature teller of the National Storytelling Festival (Sobol
1999:104-16). Meanwhile, the cycle has attracted plentiful attention from folklorists and
performers alike, who have elevated “Jack tales” into a generic signifier for traditional American
storytelling (Chase 1943, 1948; Emrich 1972; Davis 1992; McCarthy 1994), while scholars have
also explored the minute dynamics of local and family narrative transmission (Roberts 1980;
Perdue 1987; Lindahl 1994, 2001, 2004; Nicolaisen 1994; Sobol 1994a, 1994b, 2006, 2017ba).
It may be historically short-sighted to reify this particular Appalachian coloration as a
fixed quantum of authenticity, however, as it would be to do so for any particular local stop on
the tales’ migratory routes through world traditions. The adaptive reflex will continue to
function, even as what have been traditionally seen as isolated Appalachian enclaves become
ever-more inescapably porous to the influences of the post-industrial economy. The key to
whether such adaptations will rise or fall in the space of contemporary audiences’ reckoning will
turn on whether the adaptation is able to construct out of traditional background forms and the
new foreground milieu a compelling warp and weft of human motivations to drive the
characters’ actions, a logical “grammar of motives,” to use Kenneth Burke’s phrase (1969).
Synchronic correlatives allow history, politics, psychology, economics, class, and cultural
identity to figure into the motivational scheme. Putting those elements in play against the
traditional design is a standard exercise in narrative thinking.
Like Renaissance paintings of the Stations of the Cross in which Christ’s tribulations are
envisioned as unfolding within the walls of a typical Tuscan hill town, Jack and his feminine
counterpart, the unnamed Youngest Daughter or “Least Gal,” have their adventures in
“palimpsested” places—settings that are at once the dark forest of archetypal folklore and the
Blue Ridge cabins, forests, and logging roads of the traditional tellers’ own childhoods. Since I
did not haveNot having had one of those particular Appalachian childhoods myself, however,
over the course of thirty-five 35 years of studying, writing about, and performing the tales, my
own retellings have labored in a kind of riptide of creative and re-creative forces. There is the
pressure to remain true to the voices and images of those from whom I learned the stories—
primarily Ray Hicks, Donald Davis, and the transcribed or synthetic versions of Jane Gentry,
Maud Long, and Richard Chase. But there is also the pull of my own lived environment—the
engrossing condition of environmental and community loss, for example, as well as the
psychological pressures of individuation. Those latter pressures are what I determined to give
freer vent to in this extended cycle. The result is a fantasia of wonder- tale episodes and
postmodern comic and dramatic riffs, in which segments of one story become frames for pieces
of other stories, and so on through the night.
The particular tale type of “Jack the Giant Killer” is a trickster tale sub-cycle, usually
amalgamating a series of related giant-killing motif incidents (including ATM 1088, 1060, 1045,
1121, and others), capable of being told separately or in variable sequences subject to the
audience, the occasion, and the instincts of the teller. The story can be problematic for modern
audiences, though, in that it is transparently the story of a professional killer, a genocidal hit
man. Even so, we instinctively like and identify with this young lad. Whether as tellers or
listeners, we seek to pad the narrative with enough evaluative justifications for his murderous
behavior to remain faithful to him as our protagonist. The giants must be evil: cannibals, thieves,
raging sociopaths who need to be eliminated; then again, Jack is small, he is weak, he is clever,
he is a poor underdog trying to live by his wits in a world of towering hostile forces. Still, all this
never quite erases the potential stain from his actions or from our listening conscience. Who are
these folktale giants, anyway, Jack’s habitual victims? And why have they been sentenced to
death by centuries of generic functions?
The history of folktale interpretation gives us some clues. Psychological interpretations
from Bruno Bettelheim, Marie- Louise Vvon Franz, and Alan Dundes forward would posit the
giants as stand-ins for the overweening parental figure in the imagining of a helpless child, or
else as images of uncontrolled basic impulses—hunger, avarice, lust, rage. In either case, the
giants’ overthrow figures as a victory for the developing ego. Interpretations keyed to the span of
cultural history, on the other hand, tend to see the giants and other otherworldly beings as images
out of the mythologized landscape of cultural succession. Thus, the Irish legends of the Tuatha
de Dé Danann Danaan , certain branches of the Welsh Mabinogion, and a range of ancient
European and African epics have been read as narrative distillations of historical shifts in
political control between ancient tribes. In the memories of the victors, the vanquished peoples
develop magical and/or grotesque features, both more and less than human; and the killers
become small, sympathetic trickster-underdogs, winning by their wits—a psychological buffer
against collective guilt. This reading removes the giants from the clinical safe zone of Freudian
or Jungian myth and situates giant-killing in the American context as a re-enactment of a
national primal scene—the dispossession of iIndigenous tribes from their native domains.
Bringing this element from the unconscious substrata to the foreground of my version of the tale
is the first of its synchronic correlatives.
The second, linked correlative is the function of the helper, the man for whom Jack
becomes an agent. A king in the European originals, this donor figure is still nominally a king in
the traditional Appalachian versions (Carter 1925;, Chase 1943;, Lindahl 2001, 2004), but one
who is no different in manner from any wealthy landowner. Branching out associatively from the
image of endangered Iindigenous, peace-loving giants is the image of the giants’ persecutor as a
king of the extractive industry, a coal company CEO, whose goal is to “blow the top off” their
mountain to get at the minerals below. Posing this trickster Jack as a mercenary for a
representative of brutal hegemonic power reverses the polarity of the story. Highlighting the
potential of traditional motifs to attach themselves afresh to contemporary structural oppositions,
we see the intrusion of the modern anti-hero to challenge the traditional winner-take-all morality
of the trickster.
The excerpt transcribed here begins with one of the transitional segments, where the fool
story “Jack’s First Job” intersects with “Jack the Giant Killer” along the mountain road. Jack the
Fool has his day’s wages, a block of fresh butter, melting over his head. He meets Jack the Giant
Killer returning from his first day of work, dragging a pair of giant heads. The elder Jack stops to
tell Little Jack Fool the story of his day. At the story’s end, they chat about their futures, and
Jack the Giant Killer sings his new friend a giant-killing song that briefly returns the frame tale
to the psychological terrain of treating the monstrous figures of fairy tales as aspects of the inner
landscape of the self. In the context of the larger work, however, this move does not give him
peace. As the narrative thinking process of the cycle proceeds, Jack is shown struggling with
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the murderous requirements of his job. After a detour
through the tales of the “Kind and Unkind Girls” (ATU 480) and the “Animal Bride” (ATU
402), Jack briefly redeems himself by shedding his trickster skin and switching sides, joining
forces with the giants and, in one last trickster flourish, turning over a cache of energy company
documents to WikiLeaks. But this only leads him deeper, again, into the darkness of the wonder-
tale forest.
<T1HD>Other Adaptive Occasions
<TXT>I have used this technique of adaptation through synchronic correlatives throughout my
storytelling career, since well before enshrining it in academic nomenclature. In 1987, I was
attempting to transition from the electric typewriter on which I had composed the first two
chapters of my Mmaster’s thesis to an early word processing computer to finish the job. As I
struggled with the function keys, an image came into my head of a valiant secretary, queen of the
old-time typists, facing off in mortal hand-to-hand combat with the upstart PC. A first verse
quickly assembled itself:
<PXT>When Jane Henry was a little baby, sitting on her Mammie’s knee,
She picked up a ribbon, put her fingers on the keys,
Said typewritin’s gon’ be the death of me, Lord, Lord.
Typewritin’s gon’ be the death of me.
<TXT> The synchronic correlative here is the image (with the name as its aural token) of
a champion of an earlier technological order performing a sacrificial rite of combat with a
representative of the new. This adapted version reverses the gender setup of the story, but not the
moral valences. The super-secretary is still victorious even unto death,; although a meta-narrative
epilogue lays out a number of alternative verses in which the champion withdraws from the
formulaically -assigned victim role, changes professions, and makes a successful transition to the
new economy —Bacchilega would call these “activist responses” in her chapter by that name
(2013):
<PXT>Now Jane Henry listened to her daughters, and she heard what her daughters said.
So you can tell your mom, go search JaneHenry dot com:
She’s selling fine antique typewriters on the web.
She’s selling fine antique typewriters on the world-wide web. . . .
<TXT> Later that year, while working as a Vvisiting Aartist in Catawba County, North
Carolina, I was driving down a country road when a pair of his-and-hers Harleys roared past my
vehicle. The lady-biker had an infant strapped to her back. Immediately, the synchronic
correlative arose in my imagination for an adaptation known afterwards as “Goldilocks and the
Three Bikers.” The characteristic fusion of wildness and domesticity in the biker nuclear triad
was what gave the story its synchronic resonance. From that image, the entire structure of the
narrative arranged itself in a series of tidy correlations: the porridge bowls became size-ordered
Budweiser mugs, the three chairs became three color TV sets, and featherbeds became waterbeds
on the floor. The bikers’ discovery of Goldilocks asleep added a layer of sexual danger that both
thrilled the intended middle -school audiences and sometimes roused their teachers to violent
offense.
A decade later, I was trying to explain to a class of new storytellers about the ethical
disputes roiling the nascent professional storytelling community around issues of oral copyright
and appropriation of other storytellers’ work. The traditional story of “Tailypo” came to mind as
an analogy of stealing a vital part of a colleague’s psychic anatomy so as to inadvertently arouse
the other storyteller’sir vengeful spirit. The result was a revisionist version of the old chestnut,
entitled “Signature Tale,” in which a famous professional storyteller passes away and requests
that she be buried with her greatest hit. When the story is dug up and recycled by a young,
upwardly mobile storyteller, the typical chain of haunting events is set in parodic motion. The
derivative correlates of the adaptation are devised to touch on key points in current ethical
debates about intellectual property and professional ethics.
“Parody,” Hutcheon claims, “is one of the techniques of self-referentiality by which art
reveals its awareness of the context-dependent nature of meaning” (2000:85). Widening our
focus to the contextual web of related works whose adaptive strategies reflect those of “Jack and
the Least Gal,” one sees a cultural matrix steeped in fairy-tale motifs and imagery, employed
both to reinforce and to subvert traditional values and roles (for a paradigmatic analysis of fairy-
tale media and adaptive strategies, see Bacchilega (2018). To pick a small set of resonant
illustrations: Catherine Storr’s “Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf” series (discussed in by Jack
Zipes B20179) is an example of the most straightforward kind of character inversion, taking the
traditional foolish victim character and developmentally promoting her to victorious trickster
while correspondingly reversing the power status of the wolf. It was a popular parodic move,
yielding a parade of sequels, all exuding a confident British upper-middle-class feminism that
exalts girl -power while rendering the male-gendered shadow -figure reliably ridiculous. The
action motif that provides the synchronic correlative between versions is the charged encounter
between human female and theriomorphic male predator in which the cultural valences of
innocence and experience are contested. Though the text of Storr’s version features few explicit
markers of historical or temporal realm status, the illustrations and the management of power
dynamics between the principals clearly codes the girl’s haute-bourgeois status, with the wolf as
hapless outsider to the differential information she controls. Recent illustrations even portray the
girl as blonde and the beast as black, leaving little doubt as to the effects of these pigmentations
on the characters’ inverted power positions.
Inverting this stereotypical color-coding in his adaptation of the Red Riding Hood tale set
B Did you mean “2017” here?
in Ghana, South African author-illustrator Niki Daly portrays his Red Riding Hood figure, Pretty
Salma, as a rich shade of brown, while her trickster-antagonist Mr. Dog is mostly white with a
few tan patches. In the natural realm of the classic fairy tale, the wolf may hold the power of
experience over the innocent child; but nature is rendered dumb in the face of Storr’sr’s
modernized heroine and her store of bourgeois privilege. Daly’s Pretty Salma, meanwhile, is
empowered to vanquish Mr. Dog by allying herself with traditional African wisdom in the form
of her grandfather dressed in an intimidating Anansi costume (Daly 2007). It seems that the
ideological flexibility of this slender yarn is well-nigh endless in its contrastingly coded array of
synchronic correlatives.
Sondheim and Lapine’s fairy- tale musical Into the Woods introduced the convention of
treating a suite of familiar tales as co-present in a folktale time/space—conveniently named “The
Woods.” The classic fairy-tale genre itself provides the primary synchronic correlative of this
work, as the convolutions of the thickly interwoven plot lines create a web of meta-generic
allusions. The show braids musical comedy and fairy tale with a set of motives and evaluative
frames drawn from Bettelheim’s popular Freudian interpretative primer, The Uses of
Enchantment (1976). Like Storr, Lapine and Sondheim kept their piece largely rooted in the non-
local, ahistorical world of the literary fairy- tale genre. They relied on their Freudian framework,
leavened with a strand of feminist empowerment, to render these pillars of nursery literature
palatable to middle-class adults hungry to draw new meanings from childhood memories.
The 2017 Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water, Ddel Toro’s revisionist take on
“Beauty and the Beast,” subverts the Disneyesque positioning of the Beast as romantic hero by
pushing it a crucial step further: rather than Beauty’s love redeeming the Beast by transforming
him back into his prior human form, del Toro’s Beast redeems the human female by bringing her
to the fullness of her aquatic mammalian, pre- or possibly post-human condition. The film is set
within a specific historical and local milieu, early 1960s Baltimore, painstakingly simulated
through a production design that combines bright Technicolor exteriors and dark laboratory
labyrinths. There are temporally fixative moments such as fire hoses trained on Ccivil Rrights
marchers and clips from contemporary sitcoms, glimpsed through flickering images on movie
and TV screens, and there is an indicial matrix of period genre motifs, from cCold Wwar spy
thrillers to Sirkian melodramas to the classic horror tropes of Frankenstein, King Kong, and The
Creature from the Black Lagoon—themselves distilled in various measures from versions of
“Beauty and the Beast.” Del Toro explicitly associates his Creature with Iindigenous peoples and
myths as well as with the contemporary ordeals of Latin -American immigrants, even while
refracting him through this web of aesthetically distancing genre- and period frames. “The
Amazon tribesmen worship him as a god,” one of the scientists offhandedly remarks (Shape of
Water 2017), but in captivity, the Creature is treated as nothing more than a lab animal, a piece
of usable but ultimately disposable matter. All these disparate elements combine to create an
inter-imaginal root system of prior artworks, contemporary resonances, and strikingly personal
visualizations, tracing the outline of another innovative meta-genre. In this reverential fairy-tale
parody, ecology battles technology, propelled by a romantic alliance of human outsiders and
sympathetic monsters. It appears from these and many other parodic fairy tales that a basic
gravitational impulse of adaptation through synchronic correlatives is inversion, and, through
inversion, as Greenhill, Turner, and Bacchilega suggest, subversion of the traditional tropes of
hegemonic power (Greenhill and Turner 2012; Bacchilega 2013).
<T1HD>Ever After
<TXT>The intersecting tales of “Jack and the Least Gal,” like The Shape of Water, set
contemporary political, social, and ecological issues to spinning within the discursive system of
the larger frame story alongside the psychological language of personal growth. As the evening
unfolds, Jack and the Least Gal succeed themselves, respectively, as in the dispersed units of
their folktale cycles, from fool to trickster to earnest pilgrim to a kind of transcendent culture -
hero, and from passive victim to trickster heroine to animal outcast to mistress of her own human
fate.
The ultimate creative research question of the work is whether the images of the
traditional tales can be creatively re-engaged to weave together political, psychological, and
mythopoeic threads within the same web of synchronic correlations. Only the pragmatics of
performance and audience reception can yield a satisfactory answer. Each performance
encounter is a fresh adaptive occasion. Each telling raises new shoots from the rhizome of
ancient forms, and sets them to tremble, transmitting and receiving, exchanging cultural nutrients
with the shifting, sentient winds of the zeitgeist.
<T1HD>Jack the Giant-Killer
<T1HD>Told by Joseph Sobol, July 22, 2017 (transcribed by the author)
<T1HD>Jonesborough Repertory Theatre, Jonesborough, TN
<EXT>. . . . So Jack picked up that block of butter, and he just snugged it down tight on top of
his head, and started down the road for home.
But it was a warm day, like today, and the sun was a-beatin’ down—
That butter started meltin’ over his forehead, over his cheekbones, down over his chin and under
his Tt-shirt—
Jack was a pretty well-nigh buttered boy . . . as he walked along that mountain road thinkin’ . . .
—Isn’t this how Mama told me to get this home . . .?
And as he pondered that eternal question . . . he rounded a bend and down that road toward him
was comin’ another lad . . .
. . . just about a head taller than Jack . . . and a few years older.
And speaking of heads—he had something at the end of each hand, draggin’ the ground, and as
Jack got closer, he saw that what feller was draggin’ . . .
. . . was a giant head, at the end of each hand, roughly cut off at the neck, and trailing gouts of
giant gore in the dirt road behind.
Put the fear o’ God into Jack. He stopped. And that feller walked right up. He looked up at that
stranger, said —Howdy stranger. What’s your name?”
Feller looked down at him, says —My name’s Jack. What’s yours?
—That’s funny. My name’s Jack, too.
—Well, Jack, says the Big Feller—reckon this story’s big enough for the both of us?
Little Jack says —Sure hope so. Where’d you get them heads?
—Well, tell you the truth, Jack, he said, I’m getting worn out from draggin’ ’em. If you’d care to
take a seat in the shade, I’ll tell you the story. Jack said, I’d like that.
So they dragged those heads over to the side of the road, sat under a maple tree. Each one of
‘’em pulled up a head. And Jack began to tell . . .
<ORN>*****************
<EXT>Jack the Giant Killer-to-be was out in the world a-seeking his fortune, following the
river-road for ease of travel. And when he rounded a bend he saw, up the embankment and
across a great meadow, he saw the biggest, finest house he had ever seen!
That house was risin’ story upon story, wing upon wing, gable upon gable—it was magnificent,
and Jack said—, “CLooks like a fortune to me. Best go up and see how it’s made.”
So Jack went up the embankment, up that meadow, till he came to the arch of a topiary hedge,
made out of boxwoods, and he walked right underneath into a labyrinth, a maze, and he went this
way and that until . . .
. . . he came to a man with his back to him, and a hedge-trimmer in his hand, and Jack thought—
Must be the gardener. Maybe I can find some work. So he stepped up behind the man and said—
Pardon me, sir. My name’s Jack and I’m looking for a job of work.
And that fellow turned around. . . . And from the way he held himself Jack knew, this wasn’t the
gardener. He acted like he owned the place. And sure enough.
He said—Jack, my name’s King. Charles King. Founder and CEO of King Resources
International, a global energy concern. And we just might have a job of work for you.
Jack said—Tell me.
—Well, we own the mineral rights to New Ground Mountain, out behind the house. And our
geologists have informed us there’s about a billion dollar’s worth of coal underneath that
mountain. And all we’ve got to do is blow the top off the mountain and have at it.
Jack said—Well, why don’t ye then?
Mr. King said—It ain’t so simple. See there’s a tribe of giants been livin’ up there—occupying
the place.
Jack said—Well how long they been occupying it?
Mr. King said—Nobody knows, some say 10,000ten thousand years or more. Anyway, we figure
it’s long enough.
Jack said —So why don’t you get rid of ‘’em, get the Army, cops, National Guard, Pinkerton,
C There are no other quotation marks for speech in the transcription. Edited for consistency.
somebody, get rid of ‘’em?
Well, Jack, that’s a problem for public relations. Might hurt the stock price if things get ugly up
there. We don’t need that. We’d much prefer to have a nice well-mannered boy like yourself, go
do the job on the down-low.
Jack said, —What’s in it for me?
Mr. King said, —Well, we’re offering a million dollars per each giant head you bring down to
us.
Jack said, —How many heads they got?
Mr. King said —Nobody knows. Some got two, some got three, some got four. Some say you cut
one off, and two-three more grow in its place.
Jack says—Sounds like a full-time job to me. Thanks, Mr. Job-Creator!
So Mr. Job-Creator King took Jack into the house. And set him down at a great big table, one
end of a table, bigger than the house Jack come out of. Set him down to a seven- course meal.
And every course, every time Jack cleared his plate, they were droppin’ more food onto it. Jack
couldn’t get ‘’em to stop, couldn’t even get ‘’em to slow down.
Finally, when Mr. King and his wife weren’t lookin’, he took to takin’ big heaping handfuls of
that food and shovin’ it into the pockets of his L.L. BeanD travel vest. That thing was covered
with pockets!
And pretty soon, Jack was all pooched out—but at least he hadn’t busted.
And finally King’s servants got tired of feeding Jack. And Mr. King got tired o’ lookin’ at him.
And took him up to his room for the night.
Left him there on the great big four-poster bed. Jack went to the en-suite bathroom;, he looked
around and saw there was a little scale right there, and without taking off his travel vest he stood
D The company “logo” uses no spaces: L.L.Bean.
up on that thing.
Saw he’d gained 47forty-seven pounds—and he hadn’t even started work yet. Jack’s thinking,
this is a growth opportunity, for sure.
Well, the next morning, Jack was up before the crack o’ dawn, and slippin’ down the stairs to go
to work.
Mr. King was on his third banana daiquiri before breakfast, so he barely noticed Jack troopin’
out the door, but finally, just before he got to the door, he raised his head, cocked one eye, and
said, —Jack, you goin’ to work, son?
Jack said— —Yessir.
He said —You want any weaponry?
Jack said—Uh, no, I got my tommy-hatchet. . . . I got my case knife. But just in case, he said,
you got some pepper spray?
—Sure thing, Jack. He went to the safe, tossed Jack a can of pepper spray, Jack caught it, put it
in the one empty pocket of his travel vest, and up the mountain he went.
Well, he heard them before he saw them. As he got towards the summit of Newground
Mountain, he could hear their voices, their raspy ugly giant voices, floatin’ down the slope, and
when he got to the perimeter, you know, the little copse of woods before the bald at the top o’ the
mountain, he hunkered down and he looked, and there they all were . . . standing around in a
great circle. Hand in hand, arm in arm, some had arm around waist. All their big ugly giant heads
thrown back, singing, in unison, an ancient giant folk song:
Sing it with me . . .
[To the tune of Kumb a i ya ]}
<PXT>Fee-fi-fo, my Lord, Fo-fo-fum.
Fee-fi-fo, my Lord, Fo-fo-fum.
Fee-fi-fo, my Lord, Fo-fo-fum.
Fee-fi, fo-fo fum.
<EXT>Jack goes—Sheesh! Pacifist giants! It’s enough to make you sick! If they weren’t so darn
big, I could walk out amongst them and just knock ‘’em over like dodo birds.
But since I don’t hardly meet their knees, I better just reconnoiter the perimeter, see if I can split
one or two off from the herd.
So that’s what he done. He slipped around the edge o’ that copse o’ woods, until he came . . . to a
little sylvan glade, with the morning sun filtering through. And there, between two great big
boulders, was one little two-headed giant, practicing giant yoga.
Sun salutes . . .
Downward-facing dog . . .
Double headstand . . .
Jack snuck up behind. Said—HEY!
Giant toppled right over. He wasn’t too steady on his heads, you know.
Jack said—You know, I bet I can teach you . . . how to find a source of clean, recyclable energy
for all time.
Giant said, How—How—How you do—How you do that?
(He wasn’t quite in sync with himself, the two heads—there was a little delay goin’ on.)
Jack said—I’ve discovered how to open myself up, take out what I had for dinner last night, and
eat it all over again.
Giant said, How—How?—Show me!—Show me!
So Jack took his case knife out of his pocket. He stuck it in one o’ the pockets of his L. L. Bean
travel vest. Drew it open, reached in, brought out a big old biscuit, semi-fresh. Popped it in his
mouth. Wasn’t bad.
Giant said—You can do it—You can do it—I can do it!—I can do it! Gimme that—Gimme that
case knife!
Jack flipped him the case knife.
Giant took that knife. Stuck it in his guts. Drew it across, made a nice clean incision.
Reached his hands in there, started pulling out his kishkes, hand over hand over hand over hand.
Then all of a sudden, got this real queasy look on both his faces. Looked down at Jack, and said
—Jack! We can’t eat this! We’re vegan!
And he fell over dead.
And Jack said—So I took my tommy hatchet, cut off them two heads and started back along the
road to Mr. King’s place. . . . And that’s where I run into you.
Little Jack said—Whatcha gonna do now?
Big Jack says—I reckon I’ll turn in these two heads for a million dollars apiece and then go on
my way. He said—I’m seekin’ my fortune. But I don’t know if I like this giant killin’ business.
Jack said—You reckon Mr. King’ll let you just quit, just like that?
And Big Jack said— . . . Mmm. . . . Probably not.
Little Jack said, —Glad I don’t have to kill no giants.
And Big Jack said— . . . Someday you will.
And he reached out, grabbed a cittern, which, this being a fairy tale, happened to be growin’ wild
all over the side of that road there . . .
Tuned it up. And he started playin’ what forever after has been known as “Jack the Giant-
Killer’s Song of Advice to Jack the Fool.” And when you catch on, you can join in.
[Instrumental intro]:
<PXT>Everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime.
Everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime.
I don’t care what your mama may say,
You’ve gotta kill you a Giant some dark day.
‘ ’ Cause everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime.
And everybody’s gonna meet their Monster sometime .
Everybody’s gonna meet their Monster sometime.
Well , I don’t care what your mama may claim
You’re gonna meet your Monster , and he’ll know your name.
‘ ’ Cause everybody’s gonna meet their Monster sometime.
And everybody goes to the Witch’s castle sometime.
Said everybody goes to the Witch’s castle sometime.
I don’t care if your Mama says no,
The Witch’s gonna call , and you’re gonna go.
’ ‘ Cause everybody goes to the Witch’s castle sometime.
Everybody walks to the middle of the forest sometime.
Said everybody walks to the middle of the forest sometime.
Where the well with the waters of wisdom flow,
And the Giant and the Monster and the Witch bow low ,
And your Mama can’t stop you ’ ‘ cause she won’t know—sometime.
Now everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime .
Said everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime.
Though your Mama’d wanna stop you before you start,
Gotta kill that Giant a-livin’ in your heart,
’ ‘ Cause everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant ,
Everybody’s gonna meet their Monster ,
Everybody goes to the Witch’s castle ,
Everybody walks to the middle of the forest,
Sometime, sometime, sometime . . . sometime!
<N1HD>Notes
<NTXT>1. A portion of this performance of “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” can be found at
the JAF multi-media website: http://jaf.press.illinois.edu/.
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