Parallelism and Orders of Signification (Parallelism Dynamics I)

Discussions¹ of parallelism in verbal art have customarily focused on semantic and grammatical parallelism between adjacent verses or equivalent units, "similarities between discourse segments that are sequentially juxtaposed" (Urban 1991:60).² It is easy to get the impression that parallelism mainly concerns dyadic pairs that form couplets, even if it is common to acknowledge extended series of parallel verses,³ figures like cross parallelism or chiasmus,⁴ and parallelism between verses separated by one or a few lines of intermediate text.⁵ However, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1959 [1865]:84) reflected that "perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces to the principle of parallelism," a perspective that is today more familiar from Roman Jakobson's view that the "recurrent returns" of parallelism are "the essence of poetic artifice" "at every level of language" (1981 [1966]:98). From this perspective, "recurrent returns" at the level of sounds, words, syntax, morphology, semantic units, and so forth, all fall under the aegis of "parallelism;"⁶ alliteration and rhyme are "only a particular, condensed case of a much more general" phenomenon of parallelism (1981 [1960]:39). It may seem peculiar to some readers that parallel verses that reiterate the same information should be compared to rhyme, but this line of thinking was current at least as early as the seventeenth century,⁷ and is built into the German term Gedankenreim ("thought-rhyme") for semantic parallelism.

In this article I am interested in theorizing and formalizing this broader view of parallelism with a focus on verbal art, and in developing methodological tools for its analysis. Research on verbal art tends to look at how a tradition works in terms of the surface levels of communication—what is heard and seen in a performance situation. Everything involved in the verbal part of communication tends to be viewed more or less exclusively at the level of language. A "theme" in the sense of Oral-Formulaic Theory is thus recognized as a unit of narration but is treated as a unit of language, a unit of utterance, rather than as something mediated by language (for example, Foley 1999:83-86). Here, a central concern is to peel apart the layers involved in communication, separating sounds from the words they mediate, words from the images and motifs they mediate, and these from the signs that they mediate, and so on. When these layers are distinguished, parallelism can be seen as "recurrent returns" of elements within the same layer in relation to the metered frames of units of utterance. Parallelism in each layer can then be looked at in relation to what is happening in other layers, how and whether parallelism in language relates to motifs or themes, and so on.

The approach to parallelism presented here has developed from my work on identifying and understanding units that are meaningful in a tradition, whether they are narrated through language, allusively referred to in conversation, represented iconographically, or enacted. There is nothing profound in observing that a motif is not, strictly speaking, a unit of language but rather something that can be communicated using language or in some other way. Working across language, material culture, and embodied activity motivated me to differentiate types of units in order to address how they interact in use. It became necessary to examine how these units are affected or shaped by a medium such as language and may become interfaced with it. Here, the focus is on verbal art and meaningful units mediated through language in verbal art. However, the platform for approaching the units and their relations has a much broader background. Thus, the definitions of "motif" and other units of tradition described here have been developed to analyse symbols and their arrangements in Iron-Age burials, how the same units can be found across medieval poetry, prose, and iconography, how verbal art may relate to actions, objects, and the environment in a ritual performance, or the anticipated outcome of violating a taboo (see, for example, Frog 2014a:360-79 and 2015a:35-47). I present an overview of what becomes observable in verbal art when language is distinguished from...