Ah well, us anthropologists have a lot of other things to think about, and
if I am out of order by raising this subject on the ballads list, then so be
it, and I apologise.
I know little about ballads in general, my relevant expertise being
restricted to WWII soldiers' songs, but it might be an interesting exercise
to see if a general typology of folksongs might be generated on the axis of:
Innocent-----------------------Ambiguous----------------------Bawdy
Of course this would not (could not indeed) be the only axis for a typology,
but it might produce some interesting results.
Someone raised the subject of Benny Hill, meaning to imply (I infer) that
the idea of looking for the nasty among the innocent was a prurient waste of
time. And indeed, there is a strand of academics in social anthropology
(particularly the Structuralists (Levi-Strauss, Leach etc)) who have been
castigated for exercising their apparently dirty minds in areas where the
dirt lay only in the mind of the anthropologist. Suffice it to say that
there is substantial academic weight behind them, though of course not
everyone exposed to their ideas agrees with them.
Finally (perhaps), if the power lies in the ambiguity then there is no need
for the ambiguous thread to make coherent positive sense. This means that
linguistic allustions/puns/homonyms that create ambiguity in a text do not
need to tell a story - they just need to exist.
PS - anyone found Scotch and Polly yet?
All the best,
Charles.
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