The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 58, July 1954 - April, 1955 Page: 467
650 p. : ill., maps (some col.), ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Texas History and Texas Folklore
With few exceptions, lore that is labeled "American" is either a
regional or a highly artificial product. Advertising men produce
a great deal of the latter. So do Hollywood writers and comic-
strip artists. And so do foreigners. But this "American folklore"
is manufactured; it is unnatural where true folklore is natural,
forced where true folklore is spontaneous. The folklore of the
American Indian is tribal in the best sense. That of plantation,
ranch, sea, plain, rivers, and mountains is limited in other ways.
Certainly the most memorable expressions of folk wisdom in
America spring from relatively small groups and relatively specific
places.
There are critics who think that this kind of "regionalism" is
limited in the worst sense. They usually neglect one of the most
important uses of this "limited" folklore: it allows people to make
fun of themselves. For Texans to make fun of Texas is still legal,
and it can be sanely cleansing. To make fun of the United States
in the same way might smack of treason. Much more likely, it
would be meaningless, because it is almost impossible to tell a
really good joke on the whole United States. Funny points, to get
told right, and to be telling in the after-effect, have to be smaller-
bore stuff. That is one reason why most of the good satire in early
Texas was folklore. Mark Twain's American tourists and Sinclair
Lewis's Babbitt may be profitably compared with Russia's stereo-
type of the bloated American for more recent illustration of these
points.
Just as humor fails if it is stretched to cover too much, satire
turns to allegory, symbol to abstraction, and imagination to
naught if it is confronted by facts already out of the size of normal
experience. There is not much that imagination can do for Valley
Forge or the old-time Mississippi flood or the Redwood forests.
One of the troubles with imaginative accounts of early Texas is
this: the facts got there first. No imaginative literature worth
reading has been written about the Alamo because human cre-
dulity has all it can manage in straight history.
The main characteristic of the communication by which re-
gional folklore, including that of Texas, achieves its best enter-
taining or serious or merely practical effect is definiteness. The
sound and the look of the memorized "picture" are essential.467
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 58, July 1954 - April, 1955, periodical, 1955; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101158/m1/560/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.