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13. Opening "Salt": The Oral-Scribal Continuum in Caribbean Narrative
- The University of Alabama Press
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13 opening Salt The oral-scribal Continuum in Caribbean narrative Barbara Lalla Gordon rohlehr refers to a continuum that “exists between a living oral tradition , and a growing scribal one in the West Indies. It relates,”he continues,“to the continuum that exists between the various West Indian Creoles and standard West Indian english.”1 In his continuing discussion,rohlehr applies this idea mainly to the work of louise bennett, concluding with emphasis on “the notion that most things in the West Indies are fluid, and most people caught in a series of interlocked continua.”2 This chapter investigates the interlocked continua of which the oral-scribal continuum partakes, in relation to the dynamics of lovelace’s opening to Salt. early in Salt, lovelace’s narrator reflects: “That was one of the beginnings of the story that Uncle bango sat down that year to tell.”3 here, bango’s discourse begins with the legend of Guinea John, then is interrupted by bango’s nephew who contextualizes bango’s discourse, and then is resumed by bango in reflection on the impossibility of unfreedom. The present discussion assumes a shared understanding of oral expression as primal, and that this primal nature is not only clear of connotations of the “primitive”but also of attitudes of sentimentality and of values of political correctness .Another assumption is that such concepts as orality or literariness are distinguished on the basis of linguistic and discursive patterns rather than on any sense of one being more “advanced” than the other. The scribal text is context-free in the sense that the message can be retrieved at any time, in any place, and by any reader rather than to an actual contextbound addressee,and it is on this basis that ong describes the addressee in the written text as “fictionalized.”4 Partly because of its independence of circumstances , and because of its consequent fixity, the written text asserts authority. ong distinguishes not only the scribal text itself but also the text-oriented mind as analytic, focused on interior rather than exterior circumstances. It is essential,in discussing orality in such discourses as Salt, to remain aware of the 214 / lalla obvious fact that the oral material is inscribed and that this material is being transmitted by an author in what is now a “text-oriented tradition”(text being used here for “written text”). The oral-scribal relationship in Caribbean discourse, as rohlehr points out, fits into a matrix of other concepts, but it is an uneasy fit.The most obvious of these other continua is that of the Creole continuum (itself a minefield of linguistic debate) reflected not only in dialogue but in one narrative embedded in another. “Whole night blackpeople have they drums going,”(5) runs bango ’s consciousness, without quote marks, within his nephew’s memory.The association of orality with the Anglophone Creole of Trinidad and of literariness with standard english is misleading oversimplification in an age when the Creole is increasingly versatile functionally, in which the Caribbean Diaspora has scattered versions of Creole widely, and in which global recognition of Caribbean culture has raised the prestige of both literary and oral Caribbean discourse. susanne mühleisen recognizes this in relating the deterritorialization of Creole not only to geographical but also to functional shifts in which the renegotiation of language prestige is ongoing.5 The relationship between Caribbean continua defies mapping even if each element is simplified beyond the possibilities of accuracy. According to continuum theory, which David DeCamp first articulated in 1971, speakers in a Creole continuum cannot be sorted into discrete groups socially or regionally; nor can the varieties of language be separated into clearly bounded versions; nor can the whole spectrum of language use be seen as a single entity, because the far ends of the range are so clearly distinct.At the same time,a linear order appears of varieties from one extreme of the system to the other, prompting rickford’s criteria of nondiscreteness and of unidimensionality, which others , like Peter Patrick, have correlated with social dimensions.6 most Creole speech is scribally represented in dilute form, and Creole narrations especially are (roughly speaking) mesolectal: “The rain decide when it going to fall.” now a similar gradation has been suggested in connection with speechthought transitions in narrative, and transitions between speech and thought are implicated in shifts between dialogue and narrative. Also, the connections between direct or indirect speech and the relationship of either to thought are clearly interrogated in...