Frames of Folklore, Frames of Fiction: The Narrative Frames in "El kacuy" and "Marta Riquelme"

Frames of Folklore, Frames of Fiction: The Narrative Frames in "El kacuy" and "Marta Riquelme" Bonnie Frederick Washington State University During the period from about 1860 to about 1930, many Hispanic American writers used a narrative frame to give the appearance of oral narrative to their written folkloric sketches and short stories. By feigning orality, the narrative frame evokes an underlying relationship of references, imitations, and contrasts between the oral narrative and the written text. In addition, the frame defines the values and language shared between storytellers and their rhetorical audience; this common bond is manipulated to determine the degree of ideological distance from which the audience is to regard the narrated folkloric events. The congruity or incongruity of the values embodied in the frame relationship with the values embodied in the folkloric event produces different narrative texts. In order to study these differences, three Argentine narratives have been chosen that concern the same folkloric motif: the kacuy bird whose cries are said to be the cries of an abandoned woman. The narratives include the anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche's catalogued report of the tale (1928), the folkloric sketch "El kacuy" (1925) by Ricardo Rojas, and the short story "Marta Riquelme" (1902) by William Henry Hudson. In all three, the original oral tradition exists as an implied subtext, continuing in various ways to influence the written version. The original story ofthe kacuy was an oral tale, told by a storyteller to an audience that held the same cultural beliefs as the storyteller and communicated with the same system of linguistic signs. Studies of oral narrative reveal a typical storytelling pattern of orientation, complicating action, suspension before resolution, resolution, and coda (Labov 369). The orientation and coda form the narrative frame. The frame signals to the hearers that the story is about to begin, and that they must listen in the manner appropriate to such a story. For example, "once upon a time" is the formulaic signal that the events about to be told are ruled by the logic of the magic world, not that ofthe world ofeveryday experience. The frame also closes the narrative with ending formulas that signal to the hearer that the special narrative is over, and ordinary discourse may proceed. Though each narrative performance is unique, the storytellers "must draw 8 Rocky Mountain Review upon past language, symbols, events, and forms which they share with their audience for their narrations to be both comprehensible and meaningful" (Oring 123). These narrative conventions form the metanarrative, that is, the communication between the speaker and the audience that is maintained during the time in which the narrator tells the events. Thus, the frame in an oral tale confirms the common values and language ofthe speaker and audience; the narrative itself is congruent with the audience's general set of beliefs and customs. Disruption of this congruence of language and customs could break the metanarrative relationship, as when the hearer of a joke says "I don't get it" or when the audience laughs at what was meant to be serious. Anthropologists who collect oral tales usually remove the oral narrative frame from the written report of the oral tale, thus forcing the reader's attention away from the storytelling apparatus and focusing instead on the morphology or "deep structure" ofthe story's events. As Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted, the value of the myth "does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells" (210). Without a narrative frame, a folkloric motif in written form generally looks like this Indian legend, collected by the folklorist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche and published in 1928: Dos hermanos, varón y mujer, pasaban el tiempo juntando "balas". Ella era muy mezquina. El en desquite la invitó entonces a subir a un árbol muy alto y se bajó cortando todos los gajos que le servían de apoyo, y se fue a la casa. La hermana que quedó arriba, lloró desesperadamente sin poderse bajar, y siempre llamándolo. Así pasó el tiempo y de tanto llorar se hizo pájaro que siempre grita: Kacuy. (282) This condensed version is a far cry from the original oral...