I hesitated and ended up not doing this one last year, but I want to include it. But first, let me tell you why I hesitated.
You probably know this story. But you probably don't know its context. See, it's not a short story. It's a chapter of a book, titled The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. I first read the book when I was something like 22 or 23. It's probably ended up being one of the most influential books in my life, even if I don't necessarily like it all that much. I don't dislike it either, mind you. I just don't reread it, is what I mean.
It's a book of things, of sketches, as a fictional character, the titular Crayon, travels the US and Europe and writes of what he sees and experiences. These were fairly common books to see at the time, both personal and published. Irving had a very interesting way of working with texts, something that's become kind of one of my prime ways of valuing texts. What's the reason they're books, and not movies? For a lot of people, it's because they can't afford to make a movie. But the writing is "cinematic," which often bores me personally. I want the book to be a book; I'm often fond of saying that a book should be "unfilmable," because it should be so deeply and integrally textual that moving it to a new form is pointless.
That's obviously hyperbole. The Tristram Shandy movie is excellent, though notably, it's a fake documentary about trying to make a movie out of the book. So it gets what's up.
Anyway. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" isn't just a story, in which a guy is menaced by a ghost and it turns out the ghost isn't real, except when it is. It's a part of a travelogue, a legend Crayon hears upon visiting a small New England town and records for posterity. This, too, was common. It's how we have a lot of our folk stories and fairy tales.
And, as we now know, a lot of the Brothers Grimm stories were given to them by a single woman, and those stories often don't have precedents elsewhere. They appear to be, not folk stories, but her stories.1 And we have to face the prospect that the legend of Sleepy Hollow was just someone's story, fed to a tourist to keep him interested in spending time and money in the town.
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a story about fooling a fool from out of town. Except it's both Ichabod Crane and Geoffrey Crayon who are being fooled.
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you can check out this article and this other article for more on this.
