A few posts back, I asked readers to read a story twice and then recite it back without referring to it again.  This exercise was a partial recreation of a study done by Sir Frederic Bartlett, a psychology professor teaching at the University of Cambridge.   In a 1920 paper titled “Some Experiments on the Reproduction of Folk Stories,” (Folk-Lore, v.31), he described an experiment in which he composed a written version of an oral tale told by indigenous Americans (i.e., the “War of the Ghosts,” which I cited verbatim), told twenty subjects to read the story twice, and then write it out. 

Thus, in our exercise, we used the same text and procedures as Professor Bartlett did in the first stage of his experiment.  The primary difference between our exercise and his experiment is that I asked the reader to recall the story immediately, and then only once.  Bartlett, on the other hand, asked students to repeat the story at various time intervals--from weeks to months.  During that time, the story began to change, very similarly to the party game of Telephone, where the message that you start out with is almost never the one you end up with. 

To Professor Bartlett, the “War of the Ghosts” experiment demonstrated the tendency of human memory to shape narratives within the context of cultural perception.  Some of this shaping is obvious.  In some cases, we might tend to ascribe motives for the characters that they don’t have, or that the original story doesn’t intend to convey.  For example, in our exercise, one respondent wrote:

The first young man said no, he was afraid he'd be killed and his relatives wouldn't know what had happened to him, but he told his friend to go (which makes me question what kind of a friend he actually was, considering his own reasons for staying behind).

Spoken from the perspective of Western culture, the above statement not only makes perfect sense, but is quite insightful.  But we’re talking about a story from a non-Western culture. We therefore do not know, for example, if the culture that originally produced this story saw death as a transient experience--a loss, no doubt, but not a humongous deal.  Moreover, war, or battle, might have represented an opportunity for status, glory, personal legitimacy, and so on.  So we cannot assume that the man who chose to go home instead of to war did so despite his actual desire for combat.  Moreover, the story doesn’t say that the one man told the other to go, but rather that he “may go.”  This could have been more analogous to the Western question, “Wanna get wasted at Rick’s, tonight?” with the response, “No, I gotta cut down.  You can go, though, if you want.”

Professor Bartlett’s primary concern was the shaping of the story through the omission of details that the Western reader would see as either irrelevant, unfamiliar, or “unpleasant,” but that the reader versed in the original culture would not.  The above example he might see as an omission of the unfamiliar, since we’re not sure exactly what the original culture might have seen as important.  Likewise, no one in our exercise mentioned Egulac, the hometown of our protagonist and his friend.  These are just a couple of guys from somewhere, to us.  Yet in the original context, the city (or town, or village) of Egulac could have had a specific meaning to the story.  Although we don’t admit to holding stereotypical notions about other people based on geography, we do.  So such terms as ‘New Yorker,’ ‘Brit,’ or ‘African’ evoke a certain set of expectation as to the nature of a person’s experiences, aspirations, attitudes, and so on.  In short, someone hearing this story in the context of its original culture might say something like, “Ach!  Typical Egulacans!”

Other than Seamus the Barbarian, who simply copied-and-pasted the story into the comments section (giving me a decent chuckle in the process), no one in our exercise mentioned that as the pair hid behind the log, they could hear the sounds of paddles in the water.   Bartlett would say this is an omission of irrelevance, since you’re probably saying right now, “What the #$@! ‘s the difference?  They came down the river in canoes.  Yeah, yeah, the paddles made a noise.  But is that critical to the story?” 

I dunno.  Is the two-note (minor second) motif in Jaws critical to its story?

The third type of omission discussed by Professor Bartlett, that of the “unpleasant,” is rather difficult to see in our exercise, for we did not repeat it as he did.  Every response in our exercise mentioned the ghosts, and that “something black” came out of the protagonist’s mouth shortly before he died.  Yet even in our immediate re-tellings, we see the seeds of a changing narrative.  For example, one respondent did not mention that the protagonist wondered about whether or not ghostly deployment had been used during battle.  “Something black” likewise was related as “black stuff” in one instance, and a “black shape” in another.  Bartlett’s respondents showed a persistent tendency to change those two aspects of the story after time had lapsed, and after repeated tellings.  Many of the original respondents eventually omitted the ghostly angle altogether, despite the fact that the title of the story is “The War of the Ghosts.”  Likewise, many of the respondents eventually reinterpreted the “black stuff” coming out of the protagonist’s mouth as “his soul.”

Bartlett further found that salient features were over-emphasized, allowing for the introduction of items into the story that were not there originally.  But, I did not intend to use Professor Bartlett’s experiment as he did, specifically to demonstrate how sociological factors impact upon what we remember, and what we forget. I used Professor Bartlett’s experiment to illustrate something else: specifically, a point made by two proponents of false memory syndrome.  They cite Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” research, and accurately describe its intentions.  Yet they used the study to prove something very different.