Communal Creation Revisited

In the spring of 1993 I presented paper at UCLA as part of symposium on Storytelling Events. My paper considered performances of satirical skits and readings during the carnival celebration (Fasnet) in the southwest German town of Elzach.2 Considering these events from perspective borrowing from and behavioral approaches to folklore, thus examining them in the contexts of their enactment, I argued that rather than embodying Bakhtinian inversion of social order (Bakhtin 1984), or poetic form of social control on morality (Petzoldt 1981; Scharfe 1972), these texts celebrate Elzach identity through their multiple layers of encoded esoteric knowledge of local places and persona. Always one to take sane, flexible position in text-context debates, Robert Georges (1980) approached me following the session and inquired about the texts themselves featured in these performances. He wanted to know who prepared the texts employed in the skits, and under what circumstances the composition process occurred. When I told him that there are various composition scenarios, but that often the participants brainstorm portions of together, he slyly remarked: Sounds like communal creation to me-there's paper in that. This is that paper. Fasnet in Elzach features numerous occasions for reading and singing original compositions. These texts and the events of which they are part are known in Elzach as Moritaten (sing.: Moritat). In this paper I am more concerned with Moritat texts than with Moritat events.3 Such dichotomy might at first appear to be anathema in paper honoring the contributions of Robert Georges to studies. In his influential conceptualization of storytelling, Georges (1969) taught us to understand the as part of behavioral dynamic which occurs in the form of an event. However, isolating the and its creation actually demonstrates that the behavioral model described by Georges does indeed provide useful tool for understanding Moritat events. Because Moritat texts are literally prefabricated prior to their use during carnival, the notion of textual emergence, central to approaches in folkloristics (cf. Lord 1960; Bauman 1977), fails to describe the true dynamic of these events. The approach developed by Georges allows us to treat the more holistically, as component, rather than product, of larger context; it enables us to consider authorship apart from contexts. Nonetheless, the prefabricated Moritat must come into being somehow. In Elzach, the composition of texts intended for public consumption occurs in private. Each year, numerous authors in Elzach spend hours, pen in hand, carefully crafting one or more Moritaten for the coming carnival. This scenario immediately raises questions about the dynamic and communal nature of texts. Can we consider which is reflectively composed and then presented statically in folkloric? Can we speak of communal property (if not composition) if the author of Moritat withdraws from community interaction to contemplate quietly and draft Moritat text? Notably, the Moritat is document of different order than that which we usually refer to as folklore text (cf. Fine 1984) . The Mot/tat is not merely scholarly representation of an event, rather it is produced by participants in folkloric event and intended for use in another, related performance. This text, contrary to recent statement defining the folkloristic understanding of the term, is indeed a script or score meant for performance (Titon 1995: 433). Moreover, concerns about subsequent leak into the authoring process and play substantial role in determining the content and style of the written artifact. Folklorists emphasizing the of texts have generally focused on individual authorship within contextualized interactions, thus making the creation of resemble the processes employed by authors of elite arts to great extent

Creativity · Sociology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Media, Communication, and Education · Psychology · Social Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis

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