“Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression” - Albert Camus, describing the role of the writer during the banquet speech at the event celebrating his Nobel Prize for Literature, 1957.
This article is about the opposite of what is stated above. Sort of.
It has been said that “there are many ways to skin a cat”, usually as a means of suggesting a search for an alternate way of completing a task. It seems it was first written by the American humourist Seba Smith in his “Way down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life”, based on the much older seventeenth century proverb with a similarly cruel tone: “There are more ways to kill a dog than hanging” (!) Different times, I suppose…
Seba Smith, as an aside, also penned the famous American ballad “Fair Charlotte”, based on/originating one of the earliest American urban legends (or, at least proto-urban legend - straddling the line between folk tale and urban legend). Here’s a recording of it from 1954.
Proverbs, old wives’ tales and urban legends. These commonly shared elements of culture occupy a strange spot between fact and wisdom. There are some nagging issues with all three of these elements as parts of contemporary society:
first, they tend to be inferior ways to impart a mini-life-lesson than simply telling a person directly. If you were to say “John, that wrench isn’t turning. Maybe try another way”, it is unlikely that John would misunderstand you. Now try: “John, that wrench isn’t turning. Remember, there’s more than one way to skin a cat”. John may know the saying and alter the direction of his turn. What if he has not heard it before? Consider for a moment how that may come across. Maybe closer to: “Judy! You’re going to drop that jug if you carry it like that! Remember, there’s always yellow snow under grandma’s chair”. If you squint hard enough, you may glean a lesson. Then again, squinting will make it more likely for Judy to drop that jug.
With old wives’ tales, they’re less of a potted form of wisdom like proverbs, as some may consider, rather they’re closer to a statement that may or may not be true. More often not, it must be said. They’re more folk knowledge that folklore. And folk can be quite wrong quite often:
have you ever been told (or maybe believe) any of these?
1. You must wait an hour after you eat to go swimming.
2. If you want eyesight good enough to see in the dark, eat more carrots.
3. Don’t crack your knuckles unless you want arthritis.
4. Dry your hair before you leave the house, or you’ll catch a cold.
5. Don’t leave a cat in a room alone with your baby because they suck the air from their mouths (which probably led to the many discoveries in feline flaying techniques outlined above).
None of these old wives’ tales are true, but they do carry decent messages just not the prescriptions offered:
1. Swimming rigorously immediately after eating a herculean amount of greasy or fatty foods isn’t great for you, but mainly just feels horrid.
2. Carrots are good for you, just not for your eyesight.
3. Cracking your knuckles makes some people squeamish, plus doing it obsessively can increase the chance of an injury, as with constant, repetitive actions of any joint. Arthritis? No
4. Going outside in the winter with wet hair (or a wet anything else… I was thinking clothing, you filthy breath-pilfering moggy!) will make you even colder, maybe even get pneumonia, maybe even freeze to death, but you are not more likely to catch the common cold.
5. Cats won’t steal oxygen from your infant’s tiny lungs, but they may curl up on their face for a cuddle. Either way…
Urban Legends, on the other hand, are shape-shifting wonder beasts riding on a tidal wave of word-of-mouth. They are sometimes borne from real events, carrying enough societal trauma/joy in the details so that in ensures the story keeps moving. But as with a Darwinian view of life on earth, to “adapt or die” is what such a tale must do to survive – keep moving, pick up new pithy elements to the plot, and retain just enough of the original form so that it remains coherent, or it will surely calcify and crumble.
They serve as simple morality tales, injunctions against what the community deems as risky/uncouth/obnoxious behaviour, funny rejoinders against the drudgery of everyday life, or for reasons lost to the ever-rising mists of the past, just a seemingly random (if entertaining) elongated factoid. Sometimes, they are clearly not based on a real event at all. Pure fiction, just not in print.
NB - Factoid is often confused with factlet.
With each example I’ve presented here, as interesting to consider their finer points as they may be, we don’t often take a moment to consider the listener - so let’s do that for a while.
Reams of words have been written about audiences for the far more codified and vaunted areas of art and entertainment, but not about the person who hears one of these gussied-up rumours for the first time, or a child who’s told by their grandmother the severe reason for not pulling that face, lest the prevailing winds fix it forever (for the umpteenth time without ever happening). These odd artefacts from the corners of culture must have some value beyond ‘fun’. Maybe people actually believe what is being stated.
But do they? Do some people actually believe this stuff, rather than deriving meaning from them?
It seems that they do. All this storyteller can do in the way of proving this is recount an anecdote, one drawn from one of the many engagements he has arranged for the sharing of urban legends.
It was during the balmy summer of 2023, when every surface laid by man over South Wales shimmered and sweated through the ebb and flow of the haze. An over-50s club in Llanelli had booked me to tell tales and discuss their context. The talk skittered all over the landscape of story and the folk traditions: from forgotten battles and the eccentricities of medieval Welsh law to the Japanese tradition of Kimodashemi - a test of mettle involving the telling of ghost stories at night alongside the extinguishing of a candle with each tale told, until the darkness invariably wins on the snuffing of the last light - to the varied uses of blackthorn – the tree bares delicious fruit that make the Japanese preserved plums known as umeboshi as well as providing the wood for the quintessential Irish self-defence weapon, the shillelagh
(nota bene, this is the incredible wood I chose for my own ‘tellers staff: it’s not soft, I can tell you that).
The group were graciously engaged in this frenetic oscillatory talk, asking good questions without any hint of a jarring interruption, and reacting in the expected ways at the expected times. I ended my 2-hour engagement with a few tales. One was an urban legend that I remembered hearing when I was around 12-years old. I have since discovered older versions of the tale, chronicled by the noted folklorist Prof. Jan Harald Brunvand in his book ‘Too Good to be True – The Colossal Book of Urban Legends’.
The tale (or the version that I was told) recounts the travails of an eccentric old lady living alone in the depths of the Swansea Valley during the latter half of the 1970’s. she sits upon a colossal trust fund in a crumbling mansion, her only reason to leave the place being to engage in her only hobby: she drives her whale-like WWII Land Rover down the narrow country lanes to the town of Pontardawe to purchase a single item from every shop on the high street. The rooms of her house were filled with unused purchases, from drawers full of cast iron door handles and coat hook from the blacksmith to stacks of fabric swatches from the tailor. One day, wonderful news came to the elderly hoarder – Pontardawe was to see the opening of its first supermarket just outside the town centre. She promptly fired up her Behemoth of a vehicle and began the slow trundle into town. On arriving at the place, she was disappointed to see that everyone and their mother had the same idea she had. The car park was full. Undeterred by this setback, bolstered by the idea of picking one random item from each of the shiny new aisles, she drove slowly around the lot, stalking for a spot like a diesel-fuelled predatory cat. Finally, a space appeared. She began to turn into it with all the speed and grace of an oil tanker, the Land Rover braying and bellowing like a brazen bull, when another unexpected setback befell her. A young man in a sharp suit behind the wheel of an open-top red sport car nipped into the very spot the old lady was manoeuvring into. He hopped out of the car without opening the door and sauntered to the new shop. The old lady wound down the window and shouted after him:
“Excuse me, young man! That was my parking spot!”
The yuppy answered, “Sorry lady. That’s just what happens when you’re young, fast and rich!”
Most of us would give up at this point, leaving that place with the plan to return a few days later when it would be quieter. Maybe we’d be slightly more stoic in our resolve and return to crawling down the lines of full spaces hoping that you eventually get an opening.
Not this lady.
She put her monster of a truck into 1st gear and shunted up against the sport car. It didn’t budge, but that was not the old lady’s plan. She mounted the little red roadster like a sumo wrestler dominating a badminton player, the noise of ripping leather and rending metal drawing a crowd. Then the crush came. The old lady opened her door and hopped out as though she’d just parked perfectly in an opened space when the young man came running back, screaming “What are you doing, you old bat?! Why would you do this?”. The lady brushed herself off and started walking to the supermarket. She called back as she strode:
“Sorry, young man. That’s what happens when you’re old, slow and VERY rich”.
The group really enjoyed that story. Some had heard a slightly different version based somewhere near where they had grown up - from Llanelli itself to Sevenoaks, Kent, England. One person came to me to express how much they had enjoyed the tale in the very particular way that people enjoy stories they haven’t heard before - they’d been “enchanted, fully taken into this woman’s life, her world“. This person, who’d already asked several good questions during the previous 2 hours, had one last question which they asked just as I was making myself a cup of coffee:
“What was her name?“
“She doesn’t have one”, I answered, without stopping my spoon stirring.
An immediate change in mood flashed across the questioners face - from a smiley, wide-eyed curiosity to utter, piteous disappointment.
“Oh“.
On further discussion, I discovered a rather curious thing had occurred. I’d immediately assumed that the person’s disappointment was due to an assumption of my laziness as an “author” of this (clearly apocryphal) tale in not having bothered to name such an inspirational/fierce/weird character. But no, not at all. The disappointment was due to the tale itself being collectively derived fiction, probably one not based on any real event that ever occurred. The person wasn’t being critical, they were sincerely crestfallen. The problem was that his story wasn’t real: the value that they had placed in the tale, as with many people for any number of stories in all mediums, is that they think it is in someway real.
“So what?” you may be thinking.
Well, instead of diving headlong into the complex ideas surrounding the nature of reality, I’ll simply point out a long-standing if somewhat underdiscussed phenomenon that Storytellers face (and associated performers too - actors, comics etc):
If an audience believes that what is being presented is objective, fundamentally misunderstanding that artistic expression is nearly entirely subjective, discovery of this distinction is never a good feeling. Not to be too patronising, but it is analogous to a young child and their belief in Santa Claus. Has any child ever been relieved or happy on finding the fictional nature of their pseudo-grandfather who gives them the things they’ve dreamt about every year?
Let me posit a reason for this before my conclusion. It’s the diminishment in how we regard the fictional, the archetypal and subjectivity. Empirically-measured reality has killed the mythic. Questions like “But why didn’t King Arthur just send out his knights and have the giant arrested?“ show this perfectly. It’s because that is not how the story goes. “But that’s not when Bruce Wayne was born“. It’s because that’s Michael Keaton, not Batman. These tales are not facts - It’s because this is meta truth not a newspaper article or an encyclopaedia entry. It’s because the veracity of, say, an urban legend is always subordinate to how entertaining it is. It’s because wisdom cannot exist without knowledge (or, if you prefer, empiricism), and knowledge is extremely dangerous without attendant wisdom, but they are most certainly not synonymous.
What can be done when facing such an epistemic error?
Well, I have no idea. I tend to simply apologise. I’m not sure this works, but I do feel there may be an answer out there somewhere. But I do hope this article may spark some ideas for you in how to solve this. If you find one, please share it far and wide.
But do tell me first. It’ll save me quite a bit of reflexive apologising.