Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature

4. The History, Rhetoric, and Poetics of Three Palenque Narratives

123 The History, Rhetoric, and Poetics of Three Palenque Narratives Michael D. Carrasco 4 The ruins of the ancient city of Palenque now lie largely concealed in the forested foothills of the Sierra de Palenque. However, Palenque was once a prosperous Classic period polity at the western edge of the Maya world. From a protected hillside plateau, the city commanded a northern view of the broad lowlands that stretched to the Gulf of Mexico. The city served as a point of connection between the lowlands and highlands as well as a node along the historic route linking Central and Gulf Coast peoples to the cities of the Maya heartland. Long abandoned when the first European explorers “discovered” Palenque, it was not until the 1841 publication of the very popular Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan by travel writer John Lloyd Stephens and artist Frederick Catherwood that the city became famous within the modern world. The captivating description and depictions of the city presented in this book fixed the ruins of Palenque firmly in the Western imagination and sparked an intense 4 124 Michael D. Carrasco popular interest in Maya archaeology. Since then we have learned a great deal about the people who built and lived within the kingdom of Baak, the most common ancient name for the site. Today, it is a testament to the builders of Palenque that the ruins are one of the most visited archaeological sites in Mexico. A century after the publication of the Incidents of Travel, in 1952, academic and popular attention was again focused on the site when the French-born archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier (1955) discovered the tomb of Palenque’s greatest king, K’inich Janaab Pakal (AD 603–683), in the Temple of the Inscriptions—one of the most important scientifically excavated burials in the Maya world. The discovery of this remarkable tomb, along with the Mesa Redonda meetings beginning in the 1970s, inaugurated the research that has served as the bedrock for much of our current understanding of the ancient Maya. The lengthy inscriptions preserved at Palenque have provided the clearest view of mythology and history of perhaps any Maya city. Accordingly, it was at Palenque where Heinrich Berlin (1959) and, later, Peter Mathews and Linda Schele (1974) compiled the first dynastic lists and where Schele and Freidel (1990) and others began to unravel Classic period mythology (Kelley 1965) and political history. Many of these inscriptions, the structures that house them, and their associated sculpture would not exist were it not for K’inich Janaab Pakal, his eldest son, K’inich Kan Bahlam (635–702), and the descendant kings who followed them. This chapter examines the texts and iconography of the Temple of the Inscriptions and the Temples of the Cross Group as well as the narrative of the Panel of the 96 Glyphs not only to better understand the history of Palenque, as these earlier studies have done, but also to see these texts as aesthetic objects in their own right. These inscriptional narratives are more than just records waiting for the historian to mine; rather, they are poetically crafted expressions of courtly verbal art that possess a large-scale structural elegance and complexity nearly unsurpassed in the surviving corpus of Maya writing. It is worth returning to an important, though underappreciated, moment in hieroglyph studies when Kathryn Josserand (1991: 15) observed: Hieroglyphic texts are very poetic in their structure, as are traditional Mayan texts, whether they be prayers and rituals or tales of gods and heroes. The grammatical structures that characterize these language styles are formal and constrained. Where our poetry is governed by patterns of meter and rhyme, theirs is revealed in patterns of repetition and coupleting . . . in stanza structures and parallel constructions . . . and in word plays of many kinds. The rules of poetic structure are revealed in the discourse strategies used in texts. The particular grammatical elements or processes used to signal discourse functions (such as highlighting or backgrounding) may vary regionally and through time, but the basic strategies are always 125 The History, Rhetoric, and Poetics of Three Palenque Narratives there and can be seen to persist in traditional narrative genres throughout the modern Maya Languages. Accordingly, as do the other chapters in this volume, this one will posit the importance of parallel structures and other poetic devices known to figure prominently in Maya verbal art (Lacadena, Hull, Anderson, and Christenson...