<AN>Joseph Sobol is Director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the

University of South Wales.

<AA>Joseph Sobol

<AT>Adaptive Occasions: Synchronic Correlatives in Traditional Folktale Adaptation

<ABTXT>This essay examines a contemporary re-figuration of the traditional Appalachian

folktale “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” through the lens of a recent performance event. The

mechanisms of parody generate imaginative friction of foreground and background, a structural

aesthetic of formal or functional congruence and indicial dissonance. I posit a key device for

such genre-crossing adaptations, one I call the synchronic correlative. Synchronic correlatives

are a form of meta-discursive parallelism, synchronic because they work as non-linear

connectors between otherwise independent local/temporal constructs; they are thematic or

indicial pivot points that serve to launch a tale - type from one imaginative frame into another.

<TXT>KeywordsAFS Ethnographic Thesaurus

<TXT><SC>KeywordsAFS Ethnographic Thesaurus<NM>: Sstorytelling, Jack tales, creativity,

adaptation, parody

<TXT>Folk tales are endlessly adaptive. They provide a cultural rhizome of familiar motifs that

continuously sprout in new local and temporal settings, generating fresh shoots of imagery and

insight. This process carries on at every socio-cultural level, from the pre-literate to the high

literate to the post-literate, in spite of ever-recurrent expressions of critical conservatism that

would bind us to presumed originals—whatever textual landmark happens to be identified as the

point where that clock should immutably be started. That clock never starts, however, because it

has never stopped. Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Charles Perrault, the Grimm brothers, Yeats,

Angela Carter, Edward Kitsis, and Adam Horowitz, and many more have drawn from the well of

adaptation to illuminate their own times and traditions and to animate their own complex

agendas (Sobol and Zalka 2018).

It will be useful at the outset to recap a pair of broadly accepted folkloristic principles

bearing on the discipline’s founding dialectic of tradition and variation. The first of these is that

works in the oral tradition, even works distilled from it into print or other media, are inherently

homeostatic—they have built-in mechanisms to take on the coloration of their time and place.

Walter Ong reports the case of an epic recorded from the Gonja people of Ghana at the turn of

the twentieth century, in which the founder of the ruling dynasty was said to have had seven

sons. When the same tale was recorded 60sixty years later, the culture-hero now had only five

sons—because in intervening decades, two of the seven divisions of the tribal territory had been

eliminated due to assimilation and boundary shifts (Ong 1982:48). Symbolic coordinates of the

narrative were redrawn to reflect shifts in the social landscape. This is an elemental form of

narrative thinking—adjusting details to engage a changing environment. The second principle is

that oral traditional tales are fundamentally intertextual, or, more precisely, inter-imaginal: they

tend to rely on prior performances of parallel narrative sequences by other tellers of a lineage,

recalled and interpreted to fit a current audience, mood, and moment. Traditional tellers often

invoke those prior performers and performances to borrow authority for their retellings. Before

Appalachian master teller Ray Hicks told his version of “Hardy Hardass” at his home in 1984, he

gave a preface in which he summoned the image of his grandfather, John Benjamin Hicks,

telling the tale to him as Ray sat on his grandfather’s lap, “watch[ing] his lips work, through the

beard” (Sobol 1994b:11). Everything that followed was visualized through that authorizing

image, as if the grandfather’s bearded mouth were imaginatively superimposed upon Hicks’s

own.

When contemporary storytellers adapt traditional tales by imaginatively transposing them

to parodic local and temporal environments, a different sort of inter-imaginal palimpsesting

occurs. Rather than visualizing the performance through a screen of past tellings, contemporary

performers foreground their revisionist landscapes against an implicit background of pre-figuring

models, whether from past performances or canonic literary versions. Through the mechanisms

of parody, imaginative friction of foreground and background creates an aesthetic composed of

formal or functional congruence and indicial dissonance (Barthes 1977). Parody is used here in

Hutcheon’s expanded sense, connoting a range of intended effects, from ridicule to reverence,

satire to homage, often within the modulatory ethos of a single work (2000:50-68).

In this essay, I will posit one simple mechanism for these adaptations across times and

places, a device that I call the synchronic correlative. The synchronic correlative is a form of

parallelism that operates on the meta-discursive level, beyond metrical syntax and beyond

individual texts or individual occasions of production. “Synchronic” because they work as non-

linear connectors between otherwise independent local/temporal constructs;, they are thematic or

indicial pivot points that serve to launch a tale -type from one imaginative frame into another.

The term appears fleetingly in cognitive socio-linguistics to denote a language change process

that does not follow a direct chronological chain of transmission (Harder 2014:62). In relation to

the conscious adaptation of oral or literary materials, the synchronic correlative harks back to T.

S. Eliot’s objective correlative—a concrete image in a story or poem that evokes without further

external commentary or description the precise emotion that the author is attempting to embody

in the work. The synchronic correlative echoes C. G. Jung’s “acausal connecting principle” of

synchronicity, which also operates by means of resonance across realms ([1952] 1993). The

synchronic correlative is an image, a verbal formula, or an action motif in a traditional narrative

that evokes a parallel resonance from a separate and distinct temporal/local milieu. It is a

principle of decoding and response on a listener’s part, yet, on the part of the creative storyteller,

it also functions as a kernel of inspiration and construction. To extend the organic imagery, it

serves as a narrative spore that migrates from a traditional to a contemporary milieu, opening a

formal congruence between story-worlds.

<T1HD>Synchronic Adaptation

<TXT>In adapting authored works with strong local and historical settings, such as the

innumerable synchronic transpositions of Shakespeare plays, the alternate milieu is most often

localized and historicized to a similar degree as the original—as in Bernstein and Sondheim’s

West Side Story or Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. Adapting traditional folktales usually involves

transposition from a generalized ahistorical wonder-tale time/space into a particular

contemporary frame, evoking resonances of both the archetypal and historical worlds. DuBois

defines resonance in cognitive linguistic terms as “the catalytic activation of affinities across

utterances” (quoted in Frog 2017:428). The synchronic correlative is a key to the adaptive reflex

—it opens a pathway between present and generic worlds, allowing them to vibrate

sympathetically for an audience. It forges further links in the chain of intertextuality and co-

present imaging that allows us to think about the contemporary moment with stories drawn from

the rhizome of familiar wonder-tale forms—that which Bacchilega calls “the fairy- tale web”

(2013).

The field of fairy-tale studies has done extensive service in excavating the historical,

folkloric, and literary roots of this age-old popular genre. There has been wide-ranging

innovative critical work on contemporary branchings of the tales into fiction, poetry, cinema,

television, cartoons and graphic novels, and video-, online-, and role- play gaming. Donald

Haase, Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, Cristina Bacchilega, and others have

extensively unpacked the political, social, cultural, and gender implications of various adaptive

strata of the tales (Greenhill et al. 2018). Amid the welter of contemporary media on which fairy-

tale studies fixes its sights, it is easy to overlook the foundational medium upon which the genre

stands—that is, the medium of live interactive performances by single narrators in domestic or

public platform settings. This is due perhaps to the intangibilities inherent in live performance:

the fact that story performers often operate without fixed texts, that their performances usually

lack durable artiefacts and are full of unscripted interjections and para-linguistic involvement

strategies that are difficult to replicate for analysis. Yet many experienced storytellers and

listeners can tell of what Fran Stallings (1988) and Brian Sturm (2000) have called the “story-

listening trance,” a state of heightened focus wherein the story unfolds with the conjoined

imaginative reflexes of a crafted communal dream. Within this hypnotic reverie, all kinds of

conscious and unconscious suggestions and negotiations are enabled. The synchronic correlative

in itself is an ethically neutral device—capable of being pressed into the service of virtually any

aesthetic or ideological design. It is simply a tool, a powerful and vital one, for lighting up the

web of narrative associations.

<T1HD>Adaptive Occasions

<TXT>The purpose and the prime presentational strategy of the panel convened for the

conference, “Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict,” was to demonstrate the particular

powers of the storytelling performance medium. Panelists engaged those powers to explore

critical themes, formal properties, and fixed and variable elements in the generic matrix that

make the form so durable, regenerative, and responsive to changing social and performance

contexts. We worked inductively from our own performance adaptations to critical, political, and

ideological agendas embodied in the fabric of the tales. My segment featured an adaptation of the

traditional trickster tale, “Jack and the Giants’ Newground,” set in coal-country Appalachia. This

was a ten10-minute segment of a two2-hour crafted storytelling piece, Jack and the Least Gal

(Sobol 2017abA) that has toured the United States.S. and the U.K. since 2012. I had intended to

perform “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” live at the “Thinking with Stories” conference,

alongside work by three other esteemed storyteller-scholars. Unforeseen circumstances made it

necessary to send a video clip, filmed at a live performance two2 weeks prior to the event (Sobol

2017ab). Thus, the panel featured traditional-style storytelling, live and interactive between the

tellers and the audience present in the conference room—as well as mediated storytelling

featuring an absent performer interacting with an audience seated off-screen and in the past. The

same clip presented at the conference has been transcribed and appended to this article. The clip

is available on the mixed-media companion website of Journal of American Folklore.1

The performance from which this excerpt and the transcription that follows this article

have been taken is built upon two creative premises—exploratory tasks, or research questions, if

you will. One is to imagine a world in which any of the stories in the Appalachian wonder-tale

tradition could be happening concurrently, and therefore characters from any tale might wander

into the path of any other. Since they are aesthetic and not natural creatures, however, they

would tend to meet at dramaturgically compelling moments—junctions of episodes at which the

A Same-year entries were rearranged into alphabetical order by title; see References.

characters’ tasks and motivations converge. The second task is to reimagine the landscape of the

tales by seeking out those places where the ancient language of action intersects with the

recognizably temporal and local—synchronic correlatives.

<T1HD>Jack and the Giants: From Then to Now

<TXT> “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” is itself a multi-layered set of adaptive occasions.

Drawing on the traditional English folktale “Jack the Giant Killer,” published in chapbook form

in the early eighteenth century (Opie and Opie 1974:58-81), the oral tale immigrated with its

tellers to the American colonies and resettled in certain precincts of Southern Appalachia. Jack is

an Everyman hero type, easily adapted to fit his host culture, whether it be English, Scottish,

Irish, Welsh, German, Romany, or Appalachian mountaineer (MacDermitt 1983, 1986;

Nicolaisen 1978). The name itself indicates a generalized representative quality, embodied in

linguistic usage to signify a male principle of almost any species (jackass, jackrabbit, jack deer,

jack-tar, “any man-jack of them,” [Sobol 1992:77-82]). Its ruling tendency is to take on the

coloration of its host culture and environment—while maintaining the impulse of both the

character and the tellers to link popular story-types and genres: nursery rhymes, fool stories,

trickster stories, wonder-tale hero stories, fabliaux-type adult trickster stories, tall tales, and

occasionally stories with mythic or culture-hero echoes.

At some point in the resettlement process, the English, Celtic, and German backgrounds

that originally blended to form the tradition of Southern Appalachian storytelling began to

recede, and the language and imagery of mountain “hollers” and river roads filled in the stories’

surface textures. Probably by the heyday of Council Harmon (1806-1890), whose many

descendants maintained the tales throughout the twentieth century, a new Appalachian cultural

coloration had evolved for the Jack tale cycle. This local species was given canonic literary form

in the 1940s by Richard Chase, and unforgettable vernacular eloquence by Ray Hicks in his

twenty-eight28-year reign as signature teller of the National Storytelling Festival (Sobol

1999:104-16). Meanwhile, the cycle has attracted plentiful attention from folklorists and

performers alike, who have elevated “Jack tales” into a generic signifier for traditional American

storytelling (Chase 1943, 1948; Emrich 1972; Davis 1992; McCarthy 1994), while scholars have

also explored the minute dynamics of local and family narrative transmission (Roberts 1980;

Perdue 1987; Lindahl 1994, 2001, 2004; Nicolaisen 1994; Sobol 1994a, 1994b, 2006, 2017ba).

It may be historically short-sighted to reify this particular Appalachian coloration as a

fixed quantum of authenticity, however, as it would be to do so for any particular local stop on

the tales’ migratory routes through world traditions. The adaptive reflex will continue to

function, even as what have been traditionally seen as isolated Appalachian enclaves become

ever-more inescapably porous to the influences of the post-industrial economy. The key to

whether such adaptations will rise or fall in the space of contemporary audiences’ reckoning will

turn on whether the adaptation is able to construct out of traditional background forms and the

new foreground milieu a compelling warp and weft of human motivations to drive the

characters’ actions, a logical “grammar of motives,” to use Kenneth Burke’s phrase (1969).

Synchronic correlatives allow history, politics, psychology, economics, class, and cultural

identity to figure into the motivational scheme. Putting those elements in play against the

traditional design is a standard exercise in narrative thinking.

Like Renaissance paintings of the Stations of the Cross in which Christ’s tribulations are

envisioned as unfolding within the walls of a typical Tuscan hill town, Jack and his feminine

counterpart, the unnamed Youngest Daughter or “Least Gal,” have their adventures in

“palimpsested” places—settings that are at once the dark forest of archetypal folklore and the

Blue Ridge cabins, forests, and logging roads of the traditional tellers’ own childhoods. Since I

did not haveNot having had one of those particular Appalachian childhoods myself, however,

over the course of thirty-five 35 years of studying, writing about, and performing the tales, my

own retellings have labored in a kind of riptide of creative and re-creative forces. There is the

pressure to remain true to the voices and images of those from whom I learned the stories—

primarily Ray Hicks, Donald Davis, and the transcribed or synthetic versions of Jane Gentry,

Maud Long, and Richard Chase. But there is also the pull of my own lived environment—the

engrossing condition of environmental and community loss, for example, as well as the

psychological pressures of individuation. Those latter pressures are what I determined to give

freer vent to in this extended cycle. The result is a fantasia of wonder- tale episodes and

postmodern comic and dramatic riffs, in which segments of one story become frames for pieces

of other stories, and so on through the night.

The particular tale type of “Jack the Giant Killer” is a trickster tale sub-cycle, usually

amalgamating a series of related giant-killing motif incidents (including ATM 1088, 1060, 1045,

1121, and others), capable of being told separately or in variable sequences subject to the

audience, the occasion, and the instincts of the teller. The story can be problematic for modern

audiences, though, in that it is transparently the story of a professional killer, a genocidal hit

man. Even so, we instinctively like and identify with this young lad. Whether as tellers or

listeners, we seek to pad the narrative with enough evaluative justifications for his murderous

behavior to remain faithful to him as our protagonist. The giants must be evil: cannibals, thieves,

raging sociopaths who need to be eliminated; then again, Jack is small, he is weak, he is clever,

he is a poor underdog trying to live by his wits in a world of towering hostile forces. Still, all this

never quite erases the potential stain from his actions or from our listening conscience. Who are

these folktale giants, anyway, Jack’s habitual victims? And why have they been sentenced to

death by centuries of generic functions?

The history of folktale interpretation gives us some clues. Psychological interpretations

from Bruno Bettelheim, Marie- Louise Vvon Franz, and Alan Dundes forward would posit the

giants as stand-ins for the overweening parental figure in the imagining of a helpless child, or

else as images of uncontrolled basic impulses—hunger, avarice, lust, rage. In either case, the

giants’ overthrow figures as a victory for the developing ego. Interpretations keyed to the span of

cultural history, on the other hand, tend to see the giants and other otherworldly beings as images

out of the mythologized landscape of cultural succession. Thus, the Irish legends of the Tuatha

de Dé Danann Danaan , certain branches of the Welsh Mabinogion, and a range of ancient

European and African epics have been read as narrative distillations of historical shifts in

political control between ancient tribes. In the memories of the victors, the vanquished peoples

develop magical and/or grotesque features, both more and less than human; and the killers

become small, sympathetic trickster-underdogs, winning by their wits—a psychological buffer

against collective guilt. This reading removes the giants from the clinical safe zone of Freudian

or Jungian myth and situates giant-killing in the American context as a re-enactment of a

national primal scene—the dispossession of iIndigenous tribes from their native domains.

Bringing this element from the unconscious substrata to the foreground of my version of the tale

is the first of its synchronic correlatives.

The second, linked correlative is the function of the helper, the man for whom Jack

becomes an agent. A king in the European originals, this donor figure is still nominally a king in

the traditional Appalachian versions (Carter 1925;, Chase 1943;, Lindahl 2001, 2004), but one

who is no different in manner from any wealthy landowner. Branching out associatively from the

image of endangered Iindigenous, peace-loving giants is the image of the giants’ persecutor as a

king of the extractive industry, a coal company CEO, whose goal is to “blow the top off” their

mountain to get at the minerals below. Posing this trickster Jack as a mercenary for a

representative of brutal hegemonic power reverses the polarity of the story. Highlighting the

potential of traditional motifs to attach themselves afresh to contemporary structural oppositions,

we see the intrusion of the modern anti-hero to challenge the traditional winner-take-all morality

of the trickster.

The excerpt transcribed here begins with one of the transitional segments, where the fool

story “Jack’s First Job” intersects with “Jack the Giant Killer” along the mountain road. Jack the

Fool has his day’s wages, a block of fresh butter, melting over his head. He meets Jack the Giant

Killer returning from his first day of work, dragging a pair of giant heads. The elder Jack stops to

tell Little Jack Fool the story of his day. At the story’s end, they chat about their futures, and

Jack the Giant Killer sings his new friend a giant-killing song that briefly returns the frame tale

to the psychological terrain of treating the monstrous figures of fairy tales as aspects of the inner

landscape of the self. In the context of the larger work, however, this move does not give him

peace. As the narrative thinking process of the cycle proceeds, Jack is shown struggling with

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the murderous requirements of his job. After a detour

through the tales of the “Kind and Unkind Girls” (ATU 480) and the “Animal Bride” (ATU

402), Jack briefly redeems himself by shedding his trickster skin and switching sides, joining

forces with the giants and, in one last trickster flourish, turning over a cache of energy company

documents to WikiLeaks. But this only leads him deeper, again, into the darkness of the wonder-

tale forest.

<T1HD>Other Adaptive Occasions

<TXT>I have used this technique of adaptation through synchronic correlatives throughout my

storytelling career, since well before enshrining it in academic nomenclature. In 1987, I was

attempting to transition from the electric typewriter on which I had composed the first two

chapters of my Mmaster’s thesis to an early word processing computer to finish the job. As I

struggled with the function keys, an image came into my head of a valiant secretary, queen of the

old-time typists, facing off in mortal hand-to-hand combat with the upstart PC. A first verse

quickly assembled itself:

<PXT>When Jane Henry was a little baby, sitting on her Mammie’s knee,

She picked up a ribbon, put her fingers on the keys,

Said typewritin’s gon’ be the death of me, Lord, Lord.

Typewritin’s gon’ be the death of me.

<TXT> The synchronic correlative here is the image (with the name as its aural token) of

a champion of an earlier technological order performing a sacrificial rite of combat with a

representative of the new. This adapted version reverses the gender setup of the story, but not the

moral valences. The super-secretary is still victorious even unto death,; although a meta-narrative

epilogue lays out a number of alternative verses in which the champion withdraws from the

formulaically -assigned victim role, changes professions, and makes a successful transition to the

new economy —Bacchilega would call these “activist responses” in her chapter by that name

(2013):

<PXT>Now Jane Henry listened to her daughters, and she heard what her daughters said.

So you can tell your mom, go search JaneHenry dot com:

She’s selling fine antique typewriters on the web.

She’s selling fine antique typewriters on the world-wide web.   .   .   .

<TXT> Later that year, while working as a Vvisiting Aartist in Catawba County, North

Carolina, I was driving down a country road when a pair of his-and-hers Harleys roared past my

vehicle. The lady-biker had an infant strapped to her back. Immediately, the synchronic

correlative arose in my imagination for an adaptation known afterwards as “Goldilocks and the

Three Bikers.” The characteristic fusion of wildness and domesticity in the biker nuclear triad

was what gave the story its synchronic resonance. From that image, the entire structure of the

narrative arranged itself in a series of tidy correlations: the porridge bowls became size-ordered

Budweiser mugs, the three chairs became three color TV sets, and featherbeds became waterbeds

on the floor. The bikers’ discovery of Goldilocks asleep added a layer of sexual danger that both

thrilled the intended middle -school audiences and sometimes roused their teachers to violent

offense.

A decade later, I was trying to explain to a class of new storytellers about the ethical

disputes roiling the nascent professional storytelling community around issues of oral copyright

and appropriation of other storytellers’ work. The traditional story of “Tailypo” came to mind as

an analogy of stealing a vital part of a colleague’s psychic anatomy so as to inadvertently arouse

the other storyteller’sir vengeful spirit. The result was a revisionist version of the old chestnut,

entitled “Signature Tale,” in which a famous professional storyteller passes away and requests

that she be buried with her greatest hit. When the story is dug up and recycled by a young,

upwardly mobile storyteller, the typical chain of haunting events is set in parodic motion. The

derivative correlates of the adaptation are devised to touch on key points in current ethical

debates about intellectual property and professional ethics.

“Parody,” Hutcheon claims, “is one of the techniques of self-referentiality by which art

reveals its awareness of the context-dependent nature of meaning” (2000:85). Widening our

focus to the contextual web of related works whose adaptive strategies reflect those of “Jack and

the Least Gal,” one sees a cultural matrix steeped in fairy-tale motifs and imagery, employed

both to reinforce and to subvert traditional values and roles (for a paradigmatic analysis of fairy-

tale media and adaptive strategies, see Bacchilega (2018). To pick a small set of resonant

illustrations: Catherine Storr’s “Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf” series (discussed in by Jack

Zipes B20179) is an example of the most straightforward kind of character inversion, taking the

traditional foolish victim character and developmentally promoting her to victorious trickster

while correspondingly reversing the power status of the wolf. It was a popular parodic move,

yielding a parade of sequels, all exuding a confident British upper-middle-class feminism that

exalts girl -power while rendering the male-gendered shadow -figure reliably ridiculous. The

action motif that provides the synchronic correlative between versions is the charged encounter

between human female and theriomorphic male predator in which the cultural valences of

innocence and experience are contested. Though the text of Storr’s version features few explicit

markers of historical or temporal realm status, the illustrations and the management of power

dynamics between the principals clearly codes the girl’s haute-bourgeois status, with the wolf as

hapless outsider to the differential information she controls. Recent illustrations even portray the

girl as blonde and the beast as black, leaving little doubt as to the effects of these pigmentations

on the characters’ inverted power positions.

Inverting this stereotypical color-coding in his adaptation of the Red Riding Hood tale set

B Did you mean “2017” here?

in Ghana, South African author-illustrator Niki Daly portrays his Red Riding Hood figure, Pretty

Salma, as a rich shade of brown, while her trickster-antagonist Mr. Dog is mostly white with a

few tan patches. In the natural realm of the classic fairy tale, the wolf may hold the power of

experience over the innocent child; but nature is rendered dumb in the face of Storr’sr’s

modernized heroine and her store of bourgeois privilege. Daly’s Pretty Salma, meanwhile, is

empowered to vanquish Mr. Dog by allying herself with traditional African wisdom in the form

of her grandfather dressed in an intimidating Anansi costume (Daly 2007). It seems that the

ideological flexibility of this slender yarn is well-nigh endless in its contrastingly coded array of

synchronic correlatives.

Sondheim and Lapine’s fairy- tale musical Into the Woods introduced the convention of

treating a suite of familiar tales as co-present in a folktale time/space—conveniently named “The

Woods.” The classic fairy-tale genre itself provides the primary synchronic correlative of this

work, as the convolutions of the thickly interwoven plot lines create a web of meta-generic

allusions. The show braids musical comedy and fairy tale with a set of motives and evaluative

frames drawn from Bettelheim’s popular Freudian interpretative primer, The Uses of

Enchantment (1976). Like Storr, Lapine and Sondheim kept their piece largely rooted in the non-

local, ahistorical world of the literary fairy- tale genre. They relied on their Freudian framework,

leavened with a strand of feminist empowerment, to render these pillars of nursery literature

palatable to middle-class adults hungry to draw new meanings from childhood memories.

The 2017 Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water, Ddel Toro’s revisionist take on

“Beauty and the Beast,” subverts the Disneyesque positioning of the Beast as romantic hero by

pushing it a crucial step further: rather than Beauty’s love redeeming the Beast by transforming

him back into his prior human form, del Toro’s Beast redeems the human female by bringing her

to the fullness of her aquatic mammalian, pre- or possibly post-human condition. The film is set

within a specific historical and local milieu, early 1960s Baltimore, painstakingly simulated

through a production design that combines bright Technicolor exteriors and dark laboratory

labyrinths. There are temporally fixative moments such as fire hoses trained on Ccivil Rrights

marchers and clips from contemporary sitcoms, glimpsed through flickering images on movie

and TV screens, and there is an indicial matrix of period genre motifs, from cCold Wwar spy

thrillers to Sirkian melodramas to the classic horror tropes of Frankenstein, King Kong, and The

Creature from the Black Lagoon—themselves distilled in various measures from versions of

“Beauty and the Beast.” Del Toro explicitly associates his Creature with Iindigenous peoples and

myths as well as with the contemporary ordeals of Latin -American immigrants, even while

refracting him through this web of aesthetically distancing genre- and period frames. “The

Amazon tribesmen worship him as a god,” one of the scientists offhandedly remarks (Shape of

Water 2017), but in captivity, the Creature is treated as nothing more than a lab animal, a piece

of usable but ultimately disposable matter. All these disparate elements combine to create an

inter-imaginal root system of prior artworks, contemporary resonances, and strikingly personal

visualizations, tracing the outline of another innovative meta-genre. In this reverential fairy-tale

parody, ecology battles technology, propelled by a romantic alliance of human outsiders and

sympathetic monsters. It appears from these and many other parodic fairy tales that a basic

gravitational impulse of adaptation through synchronic correlatives is inversion, and, through

inversion, as Greenhill, Turner, and Bacchilega suggest, subversion of the traditional tropes of

hegemonic power (Greenhill and Turner 2012; Bacchilega 2013).

<T1HD>Ever After

<TXT>The intersecting tales of “Jack and the Least Gal,” like The Shape of Water, set

contemporary political, social, and ecological issues to spinning within the discursive system of

the larger frame story alongside the psychological language of personal growth. As the evening

unfolds, Jack and the Least Gal succeed themselves, respectively, as in the dispersed units of

their folktale cycles, from fool to trickster to earnest pilgrim to a kind of transcendent culture -

hero, and from passive victim to trickster heroine to animal outcast to mistress of her own human

fate.

The ultimate creative research question of the work is whether the images of the

traditional tales can be creatively re-engaged to weave together political, psychological, and

mythopoeic threads within the same web of synchronic correlations. Only the pragmatics of

performance and audience reception can yield a satisfactory answer. Each performance

encounter is a fresh adaptive occasion. Each telling raises new shoots from the rhizome of

ancient forms, and sets them to tremble, transmitting and receiving, exchanging cultural nutrients

with the shifting, sentient winds of the zeitgeist.

<T1HD>Jack the Giant-Killer

<T1HD>Told by Joseph Sobol, July 22, 2017 (transcribed by the author)

<T1HD>Jonesborough Repertory Theatre, Jonesborough, TN

<EXT>. . . . So Jack picked up that block of butter, and he just snugged it down tight on top of

his head, and started down the road for home.

But it was a warm day, like today, and the sun was a-beatin’ down—

That butter started meltin’ over his forehead, over his cheekbones, down over his chin and under

his Tt-shirt—

Jack was a pretty well-nigh buttered boy . . . as he walked along that mountain road thinkin’ . . .

—Isn’t this how Mama told me to get this home . . .?

And as he pondered that eternal question . . . he rounded a bend and down that road toward him

was comin’ another lad . . .

. . . just about a head taller than Jack . . . and a few years older.

And speaking of heads—he had something at the end of each hand, draggin’ the ground, and as

Jack got closer, he saw that what feller was draggin’ . . .

. . . was a giant head, at the end of each hand, roughly cut off at the neck, and trailing gouts of

giant gore in the dirt road behind.

Put the fear o’ God into Jack. He stopped. And that feller walked right up. He looked up at that

stranger, said —Howdy stranger. What’s your name?”

Feller looked down at him, says —My name’s Jack. What’s yours?

—That’s funny. My name’s Jack, too.

—Well, Jack, says the Big Feller—reckon this story’s big enough for the both of us?

Little Jack says —Sure hope so. Where’d you get them heads?

—Well, tell you the truth, Jack, he said, I’m getting worn out from draggin’ ’em. If you’d care to

take a seat in the shade, I’ll tell you the story. Jack said, I’d like that.

So they dragged those heads over to the side of the road, sat under a maple tree. Each one of

‘’em pulled up a head. And Jack began to tell . . .

<ORN>*****************

<EXT>Jack the Giant Killer-to-be was out in the world a-seeking his fortune, following the

river-road for ease of travel. And when he rounded a bend he saw, up the embankment and

across a great meadow, he saw the biggest, finest house he had ever seen!

That house was risin’ story upon story, wing upon wing, gable upon gable—it was magnificent,

and Jack said—, “CLooks like a fortune to me. Best go up and see how it’s made.”

So Jack went up the embankment, up that meadow, till he came to the arch of a topiary hedge,

made out of boxwoods, and he walked right underneath into a labyrinth, a maze, and he went this

way and that until . . .

. . . he came to a man with his back to him, and a hedge-trimmer in his hand, and Jack thought—

Must be the gardener. Maybe I can find some work. So he stepped up behind the man and said—

Pardon me, sir. My name’s Jack and I’m looking for a job of work.

And that fellow turned around. . . . And from the way he held himself Jack knew, this wasn’t the

gardener. He acted like he owned the place. And sure enough.

He said—Jack, my name’s King. Charles King. Founder and CEO of King Resources

International, a global energy concern. And we just might have a job of work for you.

Jack said—Tell me.

—Well, we own the mineral rights to New Ground Mountain, out behind the house. And our

geologists have informed us there’s about a billion dollar’s worth of coal underneath that

mountain. And all we’ve got to do is blow the top off the mountain and have at it.

Jack said—Well, why don’t ye then?

Mr. King said—It ain’t so simple. See there’s a tribe of giants been livin’ up there—occupying

the place.

Jack said—Well how long they been occupying it?

Mr. King said—Nobody knows, some say 10,000ten thousand years or more. Anyway, we figure

it’s long enough.

Jack said —So why don’t you get rid of ‘’em, get the Army, cops, National Guard, Pinkerton,

C There are no other quotation marks for speech in the transcription. Edited for consistency.

somebody, get rid of ‘’em?

Well, Jack, that’s a problem for public relations. Might hurt the stock price if things get ugly up

there. We don’t need that. We’d much prefer to have a nice well-mannered boy like yourself, go

do the job on the down-low.

Jack said, —What’s in it for me?

Mr. King said, —Well, we’re offering a million dollars per each giant head you bring down to

us.

Jack said, —How many heads they got?

Mr. King said —Nobody knows. Some got two, some got three, some got four. Some say you cut

one off, and two-three more grow in its place.

Jack says—Sounds like a full-time job to me. Thanks, Mr. Job-Creator!

So Mr. Job-Creator King took Jack into the house. And set him down at a great big table, one

end of a table, bigger than the house Jack come out of. Set him down to a seven- course meal.

And every course, every time Jack cleared his plate, they were droppin’ more food onto it. Jack

couldn’t get ‘’em to stop, couldn’t even get ‘’em to slow down.

Finally, when Mr. King and his wife weren’t lookin’, he took to takin’ big heaping handfuls of

that food and shovin’ it into the pockets of his L.L. BeanD travel vest. That thing was covered

with pockets!

And pretty soon, Jack was all pooched out—but at least he hadn’t busted.

And finally King’s servants got tired of feeding Jack. And Mr. King got tired o’ lookin’ at him.

And took him up to his room for the night.

Left him there on the great big four-poster bed. Jack went to the en-suite bathroom;, he looked

around and saw there was a little scale right there, and without taking off his travel vest he stood

D The company “logo” uses no spaces: L.L.Bean.

up on that thing.

Saw he’d gained 47forty-seven pounds—and he hadn’t even started work yet. Jack’s thinking,

this is a growth opportunity, for sure.

Well, the next morning, Jack was up before the crack o’ dawn, and slippin’ down the stairs to go

to work.

Mr. King was on his third banana daiquiri before breakfast, so he barely noticed Jack troopin’

out the door, but finally, just before he got to the door, he raised his head, cocked one eye, and

said, —Jack, you goin’ to work, son?

Jack said— —Yessir.

He said —You want any weaponry?

Jack said—Uh, no, I got my tommy-hatchet. . . . I got my case knife. But just in case, he said,

you got some pepper spray?

—Sure thing, Jack. He went to the safe, tossed Jack a can of pepper spray, Jack caught it, put it

in the one empty pocket of his travel vest, and up the mountain he went.

Well, he heard them before he saw them. As he got towards the summit of Newground

Mountain, he could hear their voices, their raspy ugly giant voices, floatin’ down the slope, and

when he got to the perimeter, you know, the little copse of woods before the bald at the top o’ the

mountain, he hunkered down and he looked, and there they all were . . . standing around in a

great circle. Hand in hand, arm in arm, some had arm around waist. All their big ugly giant heads

thrown back, singing, in unison, an ancient giant folk song:

Sing it with me . . .

[To the tune of Kumb a i ya ]}

<PXT>Fee-fi-fo, my Lord, Fo-fo-fum.

Fee-fi-fo, my Lord, Fo-fo-fum.

Fee-fi-fo, my Lord, Fo-fo-fum.

Fee-fi, fo-fo fum.

<EXT>Jack goes—Sheesh! Pacifist giants! It’s enough to make you sick! If they weren’t so darn

big, I could walk out amongst them and just knock ‘’em over like dodo birds.

But since I don’t hardly meet their knees, I better just reconnoiter the perimeter, see if I can split

one or two off from the herd.

So that’s what he done. He slipped around the edge o’ that copse o’ woods, until he came . . . to a

little sylvan glade, with the morning sun filtering through. And there, between two great big

boulders, was one little two-headed giant, practicing giant yoga.

Sun salutes . . .

Downward-facing dog . . .

Double headstand . . .

Jack snuck up behind. Said—HEY!

Giant toppled right over. He wasn’t too steady on his heads, you know.

Jack said—You know, I bet I can teach you . . . how to find a source of clean, recyclable energy

for all time.

Giant said, How—How—How you do—How you do that?

(He wasn’t quite in sync with himself, the two heads—there was a little delay goin’ on.)

Jack said—I’ve discovered how to open myself up, take out what I had for dinner last night, and

eat it all over again.

Giant said, How—How?—Show me!—Show me!

So Jack took his case knife out of his pocket. He stuck it in one o’ the pockets of his L. L. Bean

travel vest. Drew it open, reached in, brought out a big old biscuit, semi-fresh. Popped it in his

mouth. Wasn’t bad.

Giant said—You can do it—You can do it—I can do it!—I can do it! Gimme that—Gimme that

case knife!

Jack flipped him the case knife.

Giant took that knife. Stuck it in his guts. Drew it across, made a nice clean incision.

Reached his hands in there, started pulling out his kishkes, hand over hand over hand over hand.

Then all of a sudden, got this real queasy look on both his faces. Looked down at Jack, and said

—Jack! We can’t eat this! We’re vegan!

And he fell over dead.

And Jack said—So I took my tommy hatchet, cut off them two heads and started back along the

road to Mr. King’s place. . . . And that’s where I run into you.

Little Jack said—Whatcha gonna do now?

Big Jack says—I reckon I’ll turn in these two heads for a million dollars apiece and then go on

my way. He said—I’m seekin’ my fortune. But I don’t know if I like this giant killin’ business.

Jack said—You reckon Mr. King’ll let you just quit, just like that?

And Big Jack said— . . . Mmm. . . . Probably not.

Little Jack said, —Glad I don’t have to kill no giants.

And Big Jack said— . . . Someday you will.

And he reached out, grabbed a cittern, which, this being a fairy tale, happened to be growin’ wild

all over the side of that road there . . .

Tuned it up. And he started playin’ what forever after has been known as “Jack the Giant-

Killer’s Song of Advice to Jack the Fool.” And when you catch on, you can join in.

[Instrumental intro]:

<PXT>Everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime.

Everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime.

I don’t care what your mama may say,

You’ve gotta kill you a Giant some dark day.

‘ ’ Cause everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime.

And everybody’s gonna meet their Monster sometime .

Everybody’s gonna meet their Monster sometime.

Well , I don’t care what your mama may claim

You’re gonna meet your Monster , and he’ll know your name.

‘ ’ Cause everybody’s gonna meet their Monster sometime.

And everybody goes to the Witch’s castle sometime.

Said everybody goes to the Witch’s castle sometime.

I don’t care if your Mama says no,

The Witch’s gonna call , and you’re gonna go.

’ ‘ Cause everybody goes to the Witch’s castle sometime.

Everybody walks to the middle of the forest sometime.

Said everybody walks to the middle of the forest sometime.

Where the well with the waters of wisdom flow,

And the Giant and the Monster and the Witch bow low ,

And your Mama can’t stop you ’ ‘ cause she won’t know—sometime.

Now everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime .

Said everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant sometime.

Though your Mama’d wanna stop you before you start,

Gotta kill that Giant a-livin’ in your heart,

’ ‘ Cause everybody’s gotta kill them a Giant ,

Everybody’s gonna meet their Monster ,

Everybody goes to the Witch’s castle ,

Everybody walks to the middle of the forest,

Sometime, sometime, sometime   .   .   . sometime!

<N1HD>Notes

<NTXT>1. A portion of this performance of “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” can be found at

the JAF multi-media website: http://jaf.press.illinois.edu/.

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