July 9, 2024: Found Footage Stories: The “Introduction” to “Rip Van Winkle”

[25 years ago this coming weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On a silly and a serious layer to Washington Irving’s continued use of found footage frames.

If you happened to miss yesterday’s post on Washington Irving’s way-ahead-of-its-time A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), I’ll ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back here for further analysis of Irving’s subsequent use of the fictional, found footage-style historian character Diedrich Knickerbocker.

Welcome back! As I highlighted in that post, Irving continued to use Knickerbocker as a framing device for some of his short stories, most famously in the “Introduction” to “Rip Van Winkle” (1819; scroll down to find that Introduction). He did so most clearly to add some of the same ironic humor to “Rip” that thoroughly defined the style of History; of the three paragraphs in this short “Introduction,” both the second and the third are largely there to feature such tongue-in-cheek lines as “Its chief merit is its scrupulous accuracy” and “it cannot do much harm to his memory to say that his time might have been much better employed in weightier labours.” Given the popularity of History that I discussed yesterday, it's safe to assume that Irving would have expected his readers to be familiar with that prior text and its style and tone, and thus that he included Knickerbocker as part of a short story like “Rip” in order to create some continuity across these different publications and genres.

Yet if that were the only layer to or effect of this Introduction I wouldn’t be writing about it in its own post for this week’s series, both because it would be too similar to yesterday’s subject and because it just wouldn’t interest me all that much. Much more interesting, and I think genuinely new to this use of Knickerbocker, is the Introduction’s first paragraph and the way it defines history. “His historical researches,” Irving writes of his fictional historian, “did not lie so much among books as among men; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas he found the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary lore so invaluable to true history.” There are many ways to define the found footage genre as a whole, but it seems to me that one consistent and central element is an attempt to present cultural works—and generally fictional ones—as representations of “history,” of real events that took place. Which makes Irving’s Introduction a particularly interesting commentary on how both people and legends can be “true history” in a way that history books might not.

Next found footage studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?