Multimedial Parallelism in Ritual Performance (Parallelism Dynamics II)

Ritual performances create situations in which language, movements, spaces, and objects can all be coordinated in powerfully symbolic ways. The turn to performance expanded studies of verbal art from viewing tradition as text to tradition as embodied behavior wherein language is only one part.¹ This expanded view on verbal art was well established already decades ago and continues to evolve.² However, frameworks for analyzing relationships between linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of performance, relationships between speech, gesture, and movement through space, have remained less developed. The present article contributes to discussion by applying parallelism as a tool for approaching some of these relations in ritual practices that engage with unseen forces. On the one hand, the social perceptibility of parallelism between speech and other aspects of performance can be less ambiguous where it appears connected to a ritual’s efficacy. On the other hand, this type of parallelism in ritual leads into significant questions about imaginal understandings of the world where the unseen referred to in verbal art is considered no less “real” than empirical experience. Emphasis is on theory and discussed in relation to a variety of traditions, including those addressed by other authors in this special issue of Oral Tradition, traditions of magic and ritual of cultures in the Baltic Sea region, and some traditions of shamanism.

Parallelism is here viewed as a general semiotic phenomenon of sameness or similarity and difference in commensurable units that allows those units to be perceived as parallel members of groups (see also Cureton 1992:263). In traditions involving verbal art, parallelism is customarily treated as a purely linguistic phenomenon of co-occurring sequences of text that are similar in form and/or meaning without being identical (for example, Fox 1988: passim; 2014:3–199; Fabb 2015:140). Roman Jakobson (for example, 1981 [1966]) considered parallelism more broadly as “the essence of poetic artifice,” organizing everything from sounds to meanings and structures. Nevertheless, he only considered the phenomenon at “every level of language” (1981 [1966]:98, emphasis added) rather than extending it to other aspects of performance. Restricting parallelism to linguistic signs is an outcome of text-centered approaches. When verbal art is viewed not as text but as embodied behavior or performance, restriction to language becomes arbitrary and potentially inappropriate. Parallelism between linguistic and non-linguistic expression is here described as “multimedial parallelism” (distinguished from other potential terms below). Parallelism is here revealed to be a phenomenon of intersemiotic syntax, viewing syntax in Charles W. Morris’s (1971 [1938]:22) broad sense as “the formal relation of signs to one another.” Intersemiotic syntax of parallelism is related to the metrical structuring of performance discourse (see also Kataoka 2012:117–23).

This approach to multimedial parallelism is developed from my work on parallelism at different levels of signification in verbal art (“Parallelism Dynamics I,” this volume). There, I address parallelism not only in sounds (alliteration, rhyme) and language (semantic, grammatical, morphological parallelism), as familiar from the approach of Roman Jakobson (for example, 1981 [1960]), but also in signs or symbols mediated by language, from basic images and motifs to more complex units. Put simply, once parallelism is considered between two images or motifs mediated through language, it is a small step to consider a verbally expressed motif and its coordinated enactment as a form of parallelism. The present article is intended to be accessible without knowledge of my broader approach to parallelism in verbal art. Relevant terms and principles are outlined in §1. In §2, forms of multimedial parallelism between ritual speech and non-linguistic features of performance are introduced. The emic perception of unseen realities is discussed in §3, where it is argued that people naturalized to a tradition can undergo a shift in how they think about and perceive the world in relation to a performance. In §4, relations between verbal art and imaginally projected agents, forces, and events are discussed as dialectically constructed through parallelism between expressions in performance and their presumed reality. In §5, symbolic correlation between verbal art and the performance space or environment is discussed as a means of construing its meaningfulness through parallelism...