SOURCE: "That Which 'The Whole World Knows': Functions of Folklore in Eudora Welty's Stories," in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 9-15.

[In the following essay, Vaschenko discusses the folklore elements present in Welty's short fiction.]

When it is approached, the subject defined appears to be a part of the general mystery that the stories of Eudora Welty present for any attentive reader. Yet the literary and the folk do intertwine in such an unprecedented way in her narration that this constitutes a challenge for any critical mind.

This approach to the short stories and novellas of Welty reveals some of their complexity of form and meaning, for the genres of folklore employed are as various as the means to employ them. Indeed, the field to be covered quite unexpectedly may turn out to be so vast that it cannot be encompassed here. Yet what may be called the most pronounced ways to bring the folk elements into narration, as manifested in Welty's shorter fiction, will be discussed here at length. I should like to approach my subject from the point of view of the aesthetic function performed by concrete folklore elements.

In the American tradition, folklore is understood in a broad sense to include almost all of the manifestations of folk life, not just verbal art. From that point of view, we should begin with the mythological dimension, especially if mythology is thought of in terms of a body of concrete myths and the specific ways to tell them. This level manifests itself in Welty's fiction by way of the symbolic chains exemplified mainly by ancient Greek and Celtic images. These two different mythologies certainly combine in bringing forth the purport of the stories in The Golden Apples. Although both traditions can be traced back to written sources, rather than to oral, these are undoubtedly based on folk models. Because of them the general atmosphere of the stories in The Golden Apples becomes one of life as wonder, mystery and fantasy, which is characteristic of Celtic folklore and, to a large extent, ancient Greek mythology.

Even though the images of Psyche, Circe, Perseus, Medusa, the Shower of Gold, the Golden Apples and many others may persist in the works of Eudora Welty, they lose considerably their orality, assuming a function that is purely literary in nature. For this reason, folklore in Welty moves toward the more concrete and exceptional uses of folklore proper.

All classifications work poorly with Welty's stories, and not all of the writer's stories are to be regarded as good cases for the study of folk elements as the first and foremost features in making their structure and meaning. Most obvious and easy to deal with is the case when the subject matter as a whole is borrowed or reset from a folk source, but that is, characteristically, the least common with Welty. The Robber Bridegroom, being a creative remodeling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, may be an exception that proves the rule. Yet at least two groups of stories which are very different from each other show that they are designed with the idea that the literary and the folk should complement each other. And each group of stories employs folk elements that are different and uses them for different reasons.

The first group comes somewhat early in Welty's career and thematically is grouped around the Natchez Trace, that is, most of the stories in The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943) and The Robber Bridegroom. These works are grouped not only thematically but stylistically, because of the special goal the author wished to achieve.

Being closely connected with specific and striking landscape features, these stories are oriented toward imitation of the folk genre called "local legends," hovering between these and historical anecdotes, with concrete historical names involved. This presupposes that the time is also legendary. In "First Love," for example, the narrator begins, "Whatever happened, it happened in extraordinary times, in a season of dreams." The real time, if one bothers to investigate, is the period between the 1790s and the 1810s. The Robber Bridegroom, as the author specifies in The Eye of the Story, is "set in the Natchez country of the late eighteenth century, in the declining days of Spanish rule."

The outcome of this combination, of the legendary time and place in these works, is that the writer implants the Natchez Trace in our consciousness as an aesthetic symbol and spiritual landmark of universal scope, performing, on the level, a task not unlike Miguel Angel Asturias in the Leyendas de Guatemala, E. Pauline Johnson in the Legends of Vancouver, or a number of writers in the Russian tradition, be it Shergin with his tales about the northern seamen, the pomors or Bajov with his legends of the Ural mountains. After reading these Welty stories, one is truly convinced that there appears such a place as the Natchez Trace in the imaginary—as well as geographic—map of the world and that there is no America without the Natchez Trace. One could not have achieved this goal through folklore alone, for it would be confined only to the local vicinity, having stayed limited to the folk knowledge of the early settlers. Only by giving birth to this folk material as a literary reality could it be made widely appreciated and universally significant.

Welty has written, "The line between history and fairy tale is not always clear." In The Robber Bridegroom, where the fairy tale quality is so clearly manifested, one must notice also the hidden presence of such genres as the tall tale and the ballad, especially with the appearance of such figures as Mike Fink and Jimmy Lockhart. Besides, one can notice that two different times are combined in the narrative: the unspecified time of the fairy tale and mythic time. These times merge, for as we proceed from the beginning to the end of the narrative, the surrounding wilderness becomes civilized. One structural peculiarity is also present, for we experience every now and again some gap in explanation and are to take the striking and the grotesque for granted. In folklore this is natural, as the stanzas of the ballad leap from one piece of narration to another, but here it becomes a device to enhance the analytical and mystical qualities of the narrative.

This legendary atmosphere becomes clearly manifested through the structure of the language and the imagery employed, the peculiar rhythm and syntax, as can be seen especially in the opening lines of many of these stories. These just slightly modify but clearly make use of the folk formulas for the beginning of the story.

Whatever happened, it happened in extraordinary times, in a season of dreams, and in Natchez it was the bitterest winter of them all. ("First Love")

Lorenzo Dow rode the Old Natchez Trace at top speed upon a race horse, and the cry of the itinerant Man of God, "I must have souls and souls I must have" rang in his own windy ears. ("A Still Moment")

Solomon carried Livvie twenty-one miles away from her home when he married her. He carried her away up the old Natchez Trace into the deep country to live in his house. She was sixteen—only a girl, then…. He told her himself that it had been a long time and a day she did not know about, since that road was a traveled road with people coming and going. He was good to her, but he kept her in the house. ("Livvie")

These are clearly marked folktale-like opening lines, but in the same passages Welty brings into the narrative the literary preoccupation with the details of the immediate and individual perception, constantly breaking the folk pattern, in order to complicate the general idea of the story. It continues to be one of the author's chief artistic devices in all of the Natchez Trace stories.

Beginning with these early stories, another type of narrative structure began to develop in Welty's stories—one structure among all the diversity of her stories. Yet it is unmistakably present in stories like "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," "Petrified Man," "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Old Mr. Marblehall," as well as in several stories in The Golden Apples and some of the later ones. In these stories, the narrator (the protagonist) represents somebody who is an intricate part of a community who is usually telling about somebody who is at odds with community views, or vice versa. Again, we can see the striking structural difference when we read the opening lines in these stories:

Mrs. Watts and Mrs. Carson were both in the post office in Victory when the letter came from the Ellisville Institute for the Feeble Minded of Mississippi…. Mrs. Watts held it taut between her pink hands, and Mrs. Carson underscored each line slowly with her thimbled finger. Everybody else at the post office wondered what was up now. ("Lily Daw and the Three Ladies")

Reach in my purse and get me a cigarette without no powder in it if you kin, Mr. Fletcher, honey, said Leota to her ten o'clock shampoo and set customer. I don't like no perfumed cigarettes. ("Petrified Man")

Old Mr. Marblehall never did anything, never got married, until he was sixty. You can see him out taking a walk. Watch and you'll see how preciously old people come to think they are made. ("Old Mr. Marblehall")

That was Miss Snowdie Maclain. She comes after her butter, won't let me run over with it from just across the road. Her husband walked out of the house one day and left his hat on the banks of the Big Black River—that could have started something, too. ("Shower of Gold")

Let us make a special note of the place of action: the post office, the beauty shop, the neighborhood or, equally, it may be the house of the dead, as in "Wanderers." The diversity of these will look similar only in one respect: these are the places and the occasions where and when the people gather to chat, exchange news and gossip. So the reader is brought at once on the scene of the traditional speech events, so to speak. Here the folk elements, as employed in the narrative flow, represent not the local but the regional way of life, linking it with the universal. The South in general is the place, be it Morgana, Victory or any other small town. And this time it is the different folk genres that are being structured. To portray the South preeminently as a way of life which is most characteristic yet universal, Welty turns to what with some risk may be called a folk genre, small town gossip. Yet the risk happens to be not so great after all, when one outlines its peculiar qualities.

In the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture one may come across many broad characteristics of southern life, such as laying an emphasis on "leisure time, the strong continuity between generations of many fàmilies, the interest in family background and genealogy and the love of storytelling"; or that "southern regional identity will partially determine the aspects of a person's life that are worth telling stories about, but these narratives also relate to American culture and to universal human concerns"; or that "the personal experience narrative acts as a means of reincorporating the mystical event into everyday reality, a structuring of an unstructured incident so that it can be shared with and perhaps inspire others." The latter quotation describes the genre of the "Personal Experience Narratives," the "Family Narratives," the "Oral History Narratives" and, one may add, just "Gossiping-or Sitting-on-the-Porch Narratives."

We can find examples of all these in the Welty short fiction under discussion here, but for the sake of brevity, we should concentrate on small town gossip narrative. As I understand it, gossip is viewed as a complex phenomenon. Not only is it entertainment, but it is a way of being, of sharing and expressing certain community views and values. Gossip involves taking sides, employing many speech events, such as metaphors, understatements and the like—including a great deal of improvisation, acting, impersonation, etc.—in other words, folklore characteristics. And out of the many great southern writers, Welty seems to be the most aware of the creative potential in this element of folk life and folk expression—which she uses to its full measure. Each time she uses it, the small town gossip element may be presented differently, yet it is manifested on many levels.

A comparison between Faulkner's narration and Welty's will illustrate this point. In Faulkner, however different his characters may be in social, cultural or racial terms, be it Benjy Compson, Ike McCaslin or Gavin Stevens—or even Lucas Beauchamp—their voices are, in the long run, the same written-speech voice, the epic literary biblical voice of the author coming through in long monologues incorporated into the narrative.

It is very different with Welty. First, she seems to avoid the depiction of extraordinary events as her subject matter. She sticks to the apparently insignificant. Second, her narrators, while gossiping, often serve the role of counterposition between the visually present or told about and what is actually meant by the author.

What, then, does this small town gossip technique actually amount to when applied to Welty's narrative composition? First of all, it means the adoption of a loose structure of gossip storytelling. When reading these stories, we experience constant digressions from what appears to be the main issue or subject. Instead, we come across interruption or running-ahead-of-time information, the inclusion of less important or what appears to be seemingly unrelated matters, all kinds of odd motifs which are seemingly at war with the main idea of the story. The plot itself seems to wander about freely, coming and going as it pleases. Before the reader has time to account for what is going on in the story, the "gossip technique" has reached the level of the reader's psychology, bringing forth the aftermath of the oral mental processes of a small community, so that the reader—now actually the listener and participant—becomes the wanderer among those others meant in the closing story of The Golden Apples. Little by little we also come to understand that all this is done to both challenge our intellectual analytical activity and to give us the opportunity to formulate our own view on the matter. On the more abstract level, it brings forward the philosophical concept of life as a complex phenomenon, where some kind of mystical and wonderful pattern is making its way through all of the haphazard and chaotic manifestations of the story. This technique also helps to avoid the narrowness of certain conventional literary techniques, but it nevertheless complicates the position of the reader. There are many variations to this technique in Welty's stories, with or without the oral speech patterns involved, with just a community point of view present.

Secondly, the gossip technique, when employed as the means of telling a story, involves the characteristic logistics of phrase structure. One immediate aspect of this is that the phrase and the sentence acquire an immense multitude of meanings. It simultaneously characterizes the events of the fabula, the community point of view and, by extension, its values and the philosophy of the narrator and narration—even when they may be expressing different points of view.

Another verbal and narrative outcome of the gossip technique is that the written phrase structurally tends to become oral. This means that the relationship between the narrator and the reader becomes close to the relationship between the storyteller and the listener. And more: the story itself acquires the touch of "just a story for entertainment," told for the mere purpose of passing the time, for amusement. It is only eventually that it proves to reveal the whole of its meaning through small trifles and everyday details. These "trifles," however, involve a leisurely time and thought and actually point to the freedom of self-expression, as well as the freedom, the variability of the events depicted, freedom of interpretation of the causes and effects, of the detail and the whole.

Thus, on a general level, gossiping is implanted in the reader's perception as a local way of life which is preserved only through this style of living and storytelling and by means of this proves to possess universal appeal.

Given all this, we might conclude that there are two groups of stories in Welty's short fiction classified according to the use of folk styles. First, when the meaning of the story is extracted from the plot itself, from what is told, so to speak (as in the Natchez Trace stories, organized according to the poetics of certain folk genres). Second, when the meaning is derived in spite of the plot or from the way the story is told. In the Natchez Trace stories, the author is the narrator and the discourse is clearly of a "narrative" type. In the "gossip technique" stories, a line of imaginary storytellers appears, and the story is told rather than narrated. Both are, to an extent, folk structured but according to different aesthetic systems.

From this we can see that quite often the events narrated and the voice of the narrator, the "point of view," make a peculiar combination. Contrast between the two is more pronounced in the second group, for the events being narrated are everyday occurrences, while the mode of the narration is oral. The event and the telling about it are simultaneous but counterpositioned, unlike in the Natchez Trace stories, where the narrator is blended into the narrated, as in the romantic legendary tradition. In the "gossip technique" stories, the actions of a hero undermine the community views, paradoxically enough, as in "The Shower of Gold."

In One Writer's Beginnings Welty states that her self-education began with listening—that is, mastering the oral characteristics of the language and the world around her. This statement holds true for many southern writers whose distinguished oral quality is too often obscured by their openly literary means. The fictional world of Eudora Welty shows eloquently the multitude of consequences coming out of this orality. If the reader is a symbolic wanderer and the community is ambivalent about its values—and the world, too, possessing the quality of a fairy tale in all that is bitter and sweet—then it means we have to look deeper into these categories, redefining that which "the whole world knows": community values, immediate reality, the meaning of the self, the fairy tale and storytelling itself.

In Eudora Welty's fiction we indeed come across the making of a metaphor for the South, which is oral in quality. The technique and the framing of the story that she employs has proved to be so rich and productive that it has been developed in stories by Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Spencer and perhaps others. In other words, it is by listening that these writers have developed their craft, which is so unique in the literary world, and succeeded in building up a metaphor which is invariably a combining of the oral with the literary and is, at the same time, endlessly confirming and questioning that which "the whole world knows."