Yarn. Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

Narrative discourse or a narrative that is loquacious in style, usually picaresque in
development, prone to hyperbole, and variable in form and length. The themes of the
yarn typically deal with adventures and escapades in a manner eidier humorous or
miraculous. Good “yarn spinners” (storytellers) are reputed to have had some experience
of which they speak, especially if the narrative is first person, and they speak
convincingly, although their listeners may or may not believe them. The term “yarn”
lacks the analytical status of a folknarrative-genre term, such as “folktale,” “legend,” or
“tall taie.” Instead, folkloristic usage of the term is casual and reflects local usage and
classification. Richard M.Dorson, for instance, used the term in his essays on “Esthetic
Form” and “Oral Styles” of American folk narrative but conceded that the terms of
several such prose narrative traditions are imprecise and not sharply defined (Dorson
1972).
A yarn is defined by style, theme, and the scene of its telling more than by stability of
content and form. Benjamin A.Botkin, in attempting a definition, followed the distinction
MarkTwain made between “comic and witty stories,” on the one hand, and the
“humorous story,” on the other. The former are concise, goal oriented, and display a more
stable and transparent form than the latter, which “may be spun out to great length.”
Unlike the anecdote or comic, witty story, yarns are more conducive to garrulousness and
not constrained by any expectation to reach a conclusion or achieve self-containment. It
is in this sense that “yarning” (or, “to yarn”) is sometimes used as a verb for conversation
and conversational storytelling. Tellers spin yarns wherever the conditions for casual talk
prevail, typically at the so-called “liars bench,” but this context does not exclude serious
talk or hybrid narratives recognizable in other respects as legend or tale.
Although “yarn” resists any clear generic classification and can serve as a catchall
classification for a usually humorous and rambling narrative, it is often treated as a form
of tall tale or “lie,” possibly because of its association with the liars’ bench or because of
the liberties a narrator may be expected to take with the presumed ignorance of his or her
audience. In the sense in which “yarn” is a species of tall tale, it is a narrative that
promotes an untruth as true, but it does so in language that focuses attention on
accumulating detail and in a style that is loquacious, and it progresses with narrative
development intended to betray the “lie” of the narrative. It is accepted by listeners as a
good-natured deception While the place of yarn spinning may commonly be the liars’ bench, the term and
occasion is traditionally applied to sailors and refers to their discourse and the stories they
customarily tell during the leisure hours aboard ship. It is probable that the term “yarn” as
denoting a narrative arose in this context. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an 1812
text as a first example of “yarn” in its narrative sense. A subsequent text from 1835 cites
Captain Marryat, a popular writer of sea fiction. But in seafaring, “yarn,” “rope yarn,” or
“spun yarn” as terms referring not to narrative, but to the intertwining strands of yarn or
rope yarn from which rope is made, date at least to the 17th century with the publication
of A Sea Grammar by Captain John Smith; an earlier (1535) citation linked the term to
fishermen’s nets. A contemporary of Marryat’s in a book titled An Old Sailor’s Yarns
(1835) included the term “long yarn” among the terms “narratio,” “apostrophe,”
“approsiopesis,” “obtestasis,” “invocatio,” and “simile” in a brief exposition on the
rhetoric of sailors. Whatever the origin of the term for a narrative, folk etymologies
combined the two meanings of an intertwining strand in the making of rope and of a
narrative discourse loosely held together by a single theme.
The term is still in use among seamen and may be used interchangeably with the
increasingly more popular term “sea story,” perhaps to distinguish true personal
narratives from the ambiguous sense of “lie” inherent in the term “yarn.”
Thomas Walker
References
Beck, Horace. 1973. Folklore and the Sea. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Botkin, B.A. 1944. A Treasury of American Folklore. New York: Crown.
Dorson, Richard M. 1972. Folklore: Selected Essays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Henningsen, Gustav. 1962. The Art of Perpendicular Lying. Journal Of the Folklore Institute
2:180–219.

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