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“It’s beyond Candide – it’s Švejk” – Wise Foolery in the Work of Jack Lynch, Storytelle

This book chapter forms part of an ongoing enquiry into contemporary storytelling performance that Wilson has been conducting over the past fifteen years and adds to the growing literature on storytelling practice. It is also one of a series of articles in which Wilson uses the case study of a particular performer – in this case, Irish actor/storyteller Jack Lynch – to interrogate a particular aspect of, or issue relating to, contemporary storytelling performance.

This chapter was developed out of a conference paper originally delivered at the International Conference on the Wise Fool, held at the University of Malta in December 2006, which compared the work of two Irish storytellers, Jack Lynch and Billy Teare. This chapter focuses on the work of Lynch to examine his performance persona as a contemporary reinvention of the ‘wise fool’ figure from folklore and literature. It also examines key elements of para-performance in storytelling and introduces the concept of ‘performing the footnotes’, which is an ‘epic’ technique that allows performer to separate him/herself from the material and comment upon it, for the first time into storytelling scholarship.

As with other ‘case study’ essays on storytelling performance that Wilson has published (‘The Story was Sufficient: a profile of Michael Harvey, Storyteller’, 2004; ‘Passing Through the Chink in Snout’s Wall: Daniel Morden and The Devil’s Violin’, 2010), this article draws from close observation of live performance and original practitioner interview material. It is also published here within the context of a volume on Performance Studies, which is unusual for an essay on contemporary storytelling, but appropriate for the Irish context, given the strong tradition of oral storytelling performance in Ireland.