Mother Goose: A Modern Oral Tradition

Mother Goose is an archetypical country woman who supposedly wrote stories and rhymes that have become standard fare for the nursery. Nobody knows who she is or whether she even lived, though most would agree that her roots are in England.  In fact, there are different versions of her rhymes so even the words aren't set in stone.

The Mother Goose ryhmes are a good example of how oral tradition preserves meaning while not always preserving form.  We are not going to explore the possible social critique conveyed in these rhymes. We are interested only in how the various versions maintain meaning. Consider the following versions of Bah, Bah Black Sheep.

Bah, bah, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, marry have I,
Three bags full;
One for my master,
One for my dame,
But none for the little boy
Who cries in the lane.

Here's another version:

Bah, bah, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full.
One for the master,
One for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.
Bah, bah, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full.

The The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), p. 88, has this shorter and more formal version:

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full.
One for the master,
One for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.

Ed Pacht, a regular reader has made this observation:

I've always been intrigued with nursery rhymes -- as a teen My uncle found me reading a book about nursery rhymes, and failing to notice that it was a historical and political commentary, made fun of me for being concerned with stuff I should have outgrown. These rhymes, whether really old ones or relatively modern do indeed carry a great deal of meaning, and do it by being preserved in a form. I'm afraid I don't see that you've demonstrated your theseis here: that oral tradition preserves meaning while not always preserving form. The two versions you quote preserve the form remarkably well, but in actuality reverse the meaning rather than preserving it. I find this to be a common phenomenon in the transmission of folklore. In this case the climactic line in each version concerns a little boy in the lane. Without attempting to identify the historical referent (though it can certainly be fruitful to make the attempt), it is quite clear that the whole point has been reversed.

In one version, which I would guess to be the older, there is NONE for the little boy, contrasting him sharply with the Master and Dame, and producing a mood of deprivation and crying, as well as a bit of a mystery as to the disposition of the third bag. There most certainly is a story here, probably filled with intrigue and perhaps moral significance.

In the other version (probably altered from the original) there is ONE for the little boy, putting him on a par with the master and dame, eliminating both the mystery and the feel of tragedy, and converting the story to as rather simple and bucolic one with little significance.

I've heard both versions before and have been much struck with the contrast. Whatever the referent of the original, when the events had receded from memory, the form of the rhyme persisted, altered to carry a much less puzzling meaning. Similar things have happened to the classic Faerie stories and other folk tales, in which the rough edges have worn off and the deeper significance has eroded, while the outline and form have remained constant. Compare earlier and later versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and others.

I would propose that oral tradition most certainly preserves form, but often alters meaning, and that use of oral tradition in historiography needs to involve finding out what the story originally conveyed and why the change occured.

Here is my response to Ed's excellent observation:
 
You are quite right!  None for the little boy and one for the little boy appear as reversals, but I was thinking in terms of a 4-way proportion. There are three bags and presumably 3 people, but if this is about taxes (as often supposed), the the narrator must keep something for himself. Then it seems that, though the form is different, the point is the same: heavy taxation disempowers the one being taxed, the narrator.

An old-guard Republican would argue that the heavy tax makes it impossible for the one taxed to spare something for the neighbor boy. The Democrat/Socialist would argue that 3 bags should be distributed to 3 parties: 2 ruling members and one on welfare. Where does that leave the one being taxed?

Ed responded:

The original may well have refered to the heavy taxation placed upon wool in late medieval England, a tax that was almost confiscatory -- different only in degree from Stalin's treatment of the Ukraine. That original version with that specific cause would certainly bear your interpretation: none for the boy because the King and his collector (perhaps the narrator) got his bag.

The second version (One for the boy) serves as a good example of what happens when the original referent for a beloved rhyme is forgotten. Someone reciting it was unhappy with the seeming disappearance of one bag, so he gave it back to the little boy, thus producing the pleasant, warm, and friendly version I learned as a kid -- everybody satisfied, no one crying, the narrator being only an observer. Precisely the opposite effect, taxation having disappeared from the equation.

My response:

In pre-literate societies, which depend on story-tellers (such as griots) to preserve history from generation to generation through narrative and genealogy, usually both form and meaning are preserved since the story is regarded as sacred.  This is why anthropologists claim that meaning in oral tradition is stable among tribal peoples. Yet there is evidence that form is more likely to change than meaning.

Consider the seemingly opposite interpretations of Afro-Asiatic cosmology as it is presented in the Bible. In one tradition the Earth is the center with the Sun (God's eye, chariot or solar boat) making a daily circuit.  This geocentric cosmology stresses God's omnipresence and omniscience. Yet the ancient Afro-Asiatics, who were great observers of nature, also had a heliocentric tradition by which they oriented their sacred buildings and defined God, whose emblem was the Sun, as the sacred center of all things. The traditions - geocentric and heliocentric - take different forms, but they are saying the same things about God.

This relates to the confusion about Science and the Bible.  Both sides miss the point that both the geocentric and heliocentric forms speak of the same metaphysical center. Jacques Derrida, after all his deconstructive "freeplay" of narratives, concluded that the center is real, absolute and fixed, and that it is called by different names, including God. In a series of lectures that Derrida delivered at Villanova University, he said: "It would be possible to show that all the terms related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence, ... essence, existence, substance, subject, ... transcendentality, consciousness or conscience, god, man, and so forth.” The existence of the metaphysical center is detected by examining the reversal of form. This reversal of the subordinated term of an opposition is no small aspect of deconstruction's strategy. Derrida's argument is that in examining a binary opposition and reversal, deconstruction brings to light traces of meaning that cannot be said to be present, but which must have metaphysical existence. This is not a new idea or even a new approach to meaning. It is consistent with the mystical approaches of the Afro-Asiatics and Derrida, as a North African Arabic-speaking Jew, introduced Western Philosophy to their interpretive approach to meaning.

For more on Oral Tradition, go here.