Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live / Edition 1

by Bill Ellis

Overview

Written for both the cultural studies expert and the reader fascinated with reactions to extraordinary phenomena, Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults pursues motivations for why people tell these “true stories, heard from a friend of a friend.”

Ellis shows legends creating a sense of community in a multi-ethnic institutional camp. He traces some contemporary scares to such old tales as the vanishing hitchhiker and murderous gang initiations. In analyzing some newly emerging legend types, such as alien abductions and computer virus warnings, Ellis discovers connections between earlier types of religious experience and supposed witchcraft. Finally, the book reveals how legends can inspire people to actions, ranging from playful visits to haunted spots to horrifying threats of violence.

Legends rely on active discussion to spread and mutate. This book considers them to be a social process, not a kind of narrative with a fixed form. People worldwide may tell a legend or one person to who

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578066483
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	11/05/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Bill Ellis is an associate professor of English and American studies at Penn State University, Hazleton campus. His previous books include Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media, and he has been published in Psychology Today, Skeptical Inquirer, Journal of American Folklore, and Journal of Popular Literature.

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Chapter One

WHAT IS A LEGEND?

Few concepts have provoked so many varied definitions and characterizationsas the legend. While the earliest students of folk narrative recognized a basicdistinction between fantasies ("tales") and allegedly factual stories ("legends"),the exact traits that distinguish the ones from the others have beenthe subject of controversy. Some have evaded the issue by studying legendsunder the general heading of tales, even though "this form of tale purports tobe an account of an extraordinary happening believed to have actually occurred.To reconcile this contradiction, folklorists have assumed that suchhappenings "cannot have happened, rather they have been formed by thefabulating gift of the people." Thus the legend came to mean any story believedby an informant and disbelieved by a folklorist.

    In defining legends, folklorists have unsuccessfully tried to apply three criteria:(1) their departure from objective truth, (2) the degree to which theirnarrators believe them, and (3) their stylistic characteristics as a peculiar formof narrative. The first of these, however, assumes that the collector is more intouch with "reality" than the folk. True, some widespread legends can beobjectively disproved, but many more are accurate oral history, and still morecannot be "proved" as either true or untrue.

    A second, more currently found criterion is the belief factor: the legend issupposed to be believed, by narrators, by their audiences, or, ideally, byboth."The strong element of belief in the legend as told, or in the individual folkbeliefs inherent in the legends, constitutes the hallmark which sets the legendapart from the folk tales," argues Wayland Hand. While such a definitionavoids the ethnocentrism of the first criterion, it too is difficult to apply inpractice. Many folklorists have identified some narratives as "ficts," that is,stories told as the truth but actually intended to scare children and othertrespassers away from places where they are unwanted. In style and performancethese may be indistinguishable from other legends, even though narratorsand many of their listeners may recognize them at once as politic lies.Similarly, scholars have shown that legends reinforcing folk beliefs stronglyheld in a community will coexist in tradition and in performance with "fabulates"or entertainment legends. These have little or no connection with localbeliefs and persist mainly because they are interesting stories. In fact, someEuropean folklorists have taken a position exactly the opposite of Hand's,claiming that the only narratives that deserve to be called legends are thosethat lack documentation by the teller and hence are probably disbelieved bythe community.

    If objective truth is hard to determine, so too are the internal thoughts ofnarrators. They may be telling what they sincerely believe, or may be telling astory because they think that is what the collector wants, or they may even betrying to mislead the audience or collector. Attempting to define belief ordisbelief among members of a storytelling audience likewise often proves futile.Not only may they misrepresent their beliefs for the same reasons notedabove, but even in natural context their responses may vary considerably,from active corroboration to open scoffing. Thus belief alone cannot be usedto define the genre, or we would have to redefine narratives after the factbased on new information of which the collector was originally ignorant.

    Still, there is a grain of validity in this criterion, in that belief is nearlyalways a factor in legend performances. Even after discrediting truth as adefining criterion, Dégh and Vázsonyi still maintain that "the legend tellsexplicitly or implicitly almost without exception that its message is or wasbelieved sometime, by someone, somewhere.... general reference to belief isan inherent and the most outstanding feature of the folk legend." Thus eventhe most hardened skeptic who relates an alleged encounter with a ghost, onlyto refute and ridicule it, nevertheless concedes by so doing that this is a narrativethat requires disproof. He also enables listeners of the opposite party topick it up and repeat it as evidence for their own belief. In sum, folkloristsagree that while tales are certain fiction, needing no refutation, the legend isregarded as no less than potential fact.

    Is There Such a Thing as Narrative? A legend might be defined as anarrative treated by a storytelling circle as "possible" and requiring documentationor disproof. But even this definition presents difficulties. This shouldnot be taken as a sign that folklorists are uncertain about what they are studyingbut only as a recognition that previously defined boundaries of the genreare less distinct than once thought. Is a legend a narrative?

    If by that we mean that all legends are characterized by conventionalopening and closing formulas and follow coherent, conventionalized plots, thenthe answer is no. While some stories may present experiences in full detail,the same teller may drastically abbreviate them on other occasions, reducingthem to mere allusions that the audience does not need to hear in full again.Similarly, extended discussions of beliefs make it difficult to draw sharpboundary lines between a circumstantial narrative about how a storyteller sawa ghost by the bed last Sunday and related forms of conversation. Such a storymight merge imperceptibly with discussions of what ghosts are, statements ofbelief in ghosts, and allusions to experiences not actually narrated: "Well,what about last Sunday?" Since all these statements communicate the message"Ghosts may exist," it is often a moot question which ones we would identifyas legends, even implied legends.

    Henrik Lassen has recently placed the dilemma of defining the concept of"legend" in the context of modern narrative theory. Surveying a broad rangeof recent theoretical studies, he argues that the concept of "narrative" hasbecome more and more problematic for scholars. He notes that the study ofstories has to distinguish between two objects of study, which in European-basedresearch have been termed sjuzhet and fabula. The first of these refersto the actual linguistic strategies involved in communicating any specific renderingof a story. Thus, in folkloristic terms, the sjuzhet would be the actualcollected text of a legend, in as much or little verbatim detail as could berecorded. By contrast, the fabula would be the "deep" structure underlyingthe individual performance that would allow one to link it to many othercollected texts. The folkloristic equivalent would be a tale type, motif number,or footnote leading to a scholarly discussion of the legend in all its forms. Thetwo, theorists note, have to depend on each other: the audience has to use theevidence of the various sjuzhets to construct a concept of a fabula, while theteller has to rely on the audience's sense of the fabula in order to produce anindividualized performance or sjuzhet.

    But scholars working in the theoretical field of narratology have becomeincreasingly skeptical about the validity of fabula as a concept. Barbara HerrnsteinSmith, in particular, has critiqued the actual practice of constructing"basic stories" or "deep plots" out of corpuses of texts. When these are examinedclosely, she says, they turn out to be "quite manifest, material, and particularretellings—and thus versions—of those narratives constructed, as allversions are, by someone in particular, on some occasion, for some purpose,and in accord with some relevant set of principles." In other words, thealleged "core plot" of a given tale or legend is the analyst's individual performanceof it, no more, no less. Herrnstein Smith observes that the "Cinderella"tale exists in many variants across the world, such that any attempt toidentify "the" story of Cinderella is "an artifact of folkloristic assumptionsand methodology." In other words, the tale type or standardized title of agiven narrative reflects merely the set of versions that the scholar decided wererelated to each other, "in accordance with some particular but arbitrary set ofrelational criteria." In point of fact, though, there are no underlying basicstories but an unlimited set of possible narratives that the scholar, storyteller,or audience could see as related to it. More important, there is also an unlimitedset of possible narratives that each of these parties could construct in thefuture in response to these existing narratives. That is to say, whatever else wecould propose "a legend" to be, it is not an underlying plot but rather a socialimpetus to create new narratives in the shape of the old.

    Lassen finds no convincing evidence that there is any universally sharedsense of "narrative" in a deep mental or epistemological sense. The apparent"similarity" of narratives in a given "family" is, he proposes, a mental constructonly so far as it allows one to observe unique features in a given text.He concludes:

    We shall have to accept, in other words, that the quest for an understanding ofnarrative as a one-dimensional, entirety mappable phenomenon remains an impossibleone, and content ourselves with the fact that the pragmatic working-hypothesis of narrativestructure may function as an especially useful perceptual instrument, a general-purposeconstruct conducive to the enterprise of analyzing the variable functions ofnarrative ...

    If we choose to operate with the axiom of the existence of narrative (and from apragmatic perspective at least, this is certainly not inappropriate) and employ the abstractconstruction of narrative structure as a convenient means for focusing, in concreteterms, on what is different between individual performances, versions, variants, andtypes rather than speculation on the subject of what is ostensibly shared by them, theidea of narrative structure may, then, in fact function as an enabling concept, a worthwhileand effective tool.

     Text-based research too often gives more attention to a perceived a prioritradition that the researcher sees as central to folklore. Lassen correctly seesthis sense of tradition as something heuristic, a means to an end rather thana form of knowledge in itself. In other words, the sense of "sameness" isuseful only to the point to which we can give full value to the features thatmake each collected version more or less individual creations. Lassen's approachsuggests ways of moving the process of narration into the center ofcritical attention, thereby giving the same credit to performers' innovativeskills that "the folk" do in the context of narration.

    This discussion, interestingly, is not new to folkloristics. In its most extremeform this position has been advocated by Robert A. Georges, who sees"stories" not as linguistic entities, or texts but "nothing more than a writtenrepresentation of one aspect of the message of complex communicativeevents." Similarly, he asserts that every storytelling event is absolutelyunique and that it is "misleading" to suggest that two or more such eventsmight be variants of each other or carry the same message. If we grant thispoint of view, "legends" are scholars' creations, artificially abstracted fromcontinuously changing legend-telling events. Certainly traditional approachesdeny rather than affirm what is unique about each unique, not-repeatabletelling.

    Legends more than any form of oral discourse are subject to communalcomposition and performance, and the specific interests of one group, whichdetermine to a large extent the text being narrated, may have little in commonwith the interests of other groups. Thus, fragmentary, incoherent plots are thenorm rather than the exception among legends. Since the essentials of a givenexperience can many times be assumed, storytellers will often omit them,presenting only the outline of a plot, which can be implicitly realized by thelisteners individually. For this reason folklorists have often proposed that "thelegend has only content and no fixed form at all and depends on the natureof the message it communicates. If legends consist of content alone, thenthere is no craft of telling, and many scholars have said so. Dégh commentsthat the legend-teller "is no artist, he has no artistic inspirations, he claimsonly to tell the truth." From this argument it is only a short step to say thatthere is no formal distinction to be made between legends, belief, customs,and rituals, and that there is nothing in the style of any given legend thatcould be said to define a distinct genre of oral narrative.

    Nevertheless, it is a mistake to assume that the legend has no form, onlycontent. To begin with, early field-workers consistently confused the narrativewith that being narrated, thus reducing many legends to statements of beliefalone. In other cases, narrators' own styles of storytelling were not consideredartistic enough to record, so the collectors simply retold the stories in theirown words, making whatever changes they thought were necessary or desirable.Both field techniques falsified legends. Collectors often did not distinguishlegends that supported beliefs active in the community from those toldfor the sake of entertainment alone, reducing both to "folk beliefs" attributedto the community, superstitions or customs not actually active in tradition.Likewise, one reason the stylistic conventions peculiar to legends have beenso difficult to isolate is that such elements have usually been eliminated ormisrepresented in printed texts.

    But what is the quality in legends that must be transcribed literally? Giventraditional content-focused approaches to legend, the real text is not what isverbalized but what lies behind the skull of the informant—the cultural attitudesthat motivate his speaking. If this is so, then surely all that is necessaryfor scholarly analysis is a clear, grammatical summary of the performed text.But if belief is the crucial factor, why not study beliefs? If content is primary,why consider a story about the content a self-sufficient genre? Why study"urban" legends and not attitudes about cities? The problem with this conceptionof legend is that it ultimately destroys the thing it defines. If all iscontent and there is no art of legend telling, then the thing as verbalized isnothing in particular. The study of legends is often a flight from the utteranceitself toward something else whose presence can only be inferred from thelinguistic details that the researcher finds significant enough to notice.

    Yet the discipline of folkloristics is founded on the notion that some traditionshave continuity over time and space. Given texts that vary widely inwording and even dramatically in the presence and order of motifs, though,we must try to say as closely as possible what it is that continues. Even Déghhas noted: "The acceptance of the validity of the legend is expressed by itsconvincing style. Claim for belief lies in the style of the legend, in the way itis structured, in its painstaking precision to present witnesses and evidence.If there is artistry in the way a legend is told, it is in the skillful formulationof convincing statements."

    Tales contain more consciously formulaic patterns and phrases that surviveeven in heavily doctored texts. But all events, whether they happened to narratorsor to someone else, must be interpreted, organized, and dramatized tomake them tellable. Even the humblest form of legend telling is consciouslyartistic, but such art is difficult to abstract from texts that have been "corrected"according to the collector's notion of literary artistry. Legends normallyform part of an ongoing discussion and are continually subject tocontributions, corrections, comments, and objections from the other participants.Unlike tales, which usually are separated from normal conversationand attended without interruption, legends must be seen as part of a communalevent, in which the audience's role is as important as the narrators'. Ittherefore has been argued that what we should be trying to define is not thestyle of legend texts but rather the style of legend performance. In other words,legends are not folk literature but folk behavior.

    Legends may appear in more than one legend-telling event, but the particularform they take in any one telling reflects the dynamics of that particularevent. The same narrator may tell what he considers the same story in radicallydifferent ways at different times or may alter the style of narrating becauseof the social dynamics of the telling. It follows that the messagecommunicated by such different tellings may also vary, even if the narrator isthe same. And while folklorists can suggest general social functions for legendsthat remain approximately the same over many different retellings, they mustalso deal with other narrations that are unique to only one event. These toomust be seen as part of a behavioral, not textual, tradition and deserve studyas much as the more widespread legends.

    What then is a proper definition of the legend-telling event, regardless ofwhether the text being told is well traveled or unique? In the same essay inwhich Dégh claimed that the legend-teller had "no artistic inspirations," shenevertheless identified a recognizable narrative frame. Although she admitsthat the sequence of elements in this frame may vary from text to text, still,she says, "I certainly can tell what belongs to it." Characteristic of this frameare (1) a reason for telling the narrative (for example, a moral or warning),(2) detailed identification of the persons involved, and (3) accurate fixing ofthe time and place. And the events recounted are not everyday, trivial happeningsbut unusual, anxiety-provoking incidents, ones that place the group'snorms in question. Hence we can say that two features define the typicallegend. It begins by placing the events that follow as precisely as possible inthe group's conception of the real world, and the events it narrates or alludesto challenge in some way the boundaries of what the world is or should be.Bearing in mind that the legend is not self-contained but is part of an ongoingconversation, we see why the text cannot be separated from the legend-tellingevent, since the performance arises from the group's concerns and in turnprovokes further discussion and performance.

    Suppose we approach the genre from another angle, asking not what formulaslegends contain but what these formulas embody. What are peopledoing when they tell legends? From experience, we can see that people gatherto share information about happenings that they accept both as significantand as actually, allegedly, or potentially part of the real-life world they inhabit.Sometimes these events are merely alluded to; at other times, however, eventsare narrated; that is, they are "replayed" in such a way that both teller andaudience can vicariously re-experience what took place? When many suchevents are replayed (doubtless accompanied by many more in abbreviatedform) and when these narrations are embedded in a larger conversationalcontext, then we are looking at the behavior that we call "legend": participantsusing the extremes of experience, their own and others', to explore, test, andredefine their perspectives on the "real" world.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ALIENS, GHOSTS, AND CULTS by Bill Ellis. Copyright © 2001 by Bill Ellis. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Legends in Emergence	xiii
PART ONE: THE LIFE OF LEGENDS	3
1. What Is a Legend?	5
2. When Is a Legend Traditional?	26
3. When Is a Legend Contemporary?	46
4. When Is a Legend?	58
5. Why Is a Legend?	75
PART TWO: LIFE AS LEGEND	93
6. The Frackville Angel	99
7. The Fast Food Ghost	117
8. The Varieties of Alien Experience	142
PART THREE: LEGEND AS LIFE	161
9. Ostension as Folk Drama	65
10. What Really Happened at Gore Orphanage	186
11. The Devil Worshipers at the Prom	199
12. Death by Folklore	220
Conclusions: What Next?	236
Notes	245
References Cited	267
Index	283