SOURCE: "The Three Great Lies: Riddles of Love and Death in a Postmodern Novel," in Southern Folklore, Vol. 48, No. 3, 1991, pp. 235-54.

In the following essay, de Caro examines the cultural context and significance of contemporary urban folklore in Story of My Life, particularly as revealed in formal and informal communication among the novel's characters.

At the Indiana University Folklore Institute in the 1960s two bits of lore circulated relevant to the current essay. One was the title of an imaginary, mock study such as waggish graduate students concoct: "Frontier Humor in the Writings of Henry James." The other was the supposedly true story of a colleague who had undertaken to do a seminar paper on folklore in Ernest Hemingway's writings only to discover too late that he could discover none and that failure loomed. Both pieces of lore make the same assumption about two different writers, namely that...