Mrs. Wilsons True Tales Retold

(corresponding to “Adventures in a Wobbling World”) This tale is typical of the characteristic disjunctiveness of oral storytelling, what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss likened to bricolage. Most often this characteristic is evident in the concatenation of commonplace motifs or recurrent techniques—how things often happen in threes, for example—or in the artificial incorporation of popular vignettes, which the storyteller has retold for new, although borrowed and old (howsoever artfully adapted). In this tale the disjunctiveness is featured with a fractured episodic plot; as if the whole tale were actually a collation of several unrelated tales. Its nominal characters sustain its continuity, but only barely, the tale as a whole lacks coherence in theme or logic and integrity to its plot. Its incoherent transitions will seem contrived, gratuitous, and inadequate to our aesthetics. Conceivably, these several episodes were traditionally related about the Mink and simply grouped for the occasion, as a comp