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

13. Before Poetry, the Words: A Metalinguistic Digression

339 Before Poetry, the Words A Metalinguistic Digression Aurore Monod Becquelin and Alain Breton 13 As Don Rigoberto, a fifty-year-old exceptional storyteller, re­ counted a long narrative about the ancient history of the region of Rabinal (Guatemala), the etymology of the name of a particular lineage puzzled him. In the middle of the narrative, something else also emerged: a discourse on language. Are etymology , ancient language, word-for-word translations, context and poetic intention, levels of language, figures of speech, or language and thought the exclusive territory of linguists? No! Don Rigoberto thinks aloud about his own language through a kind of ethno-metalinguistic process. Don Rigoberto’s asides, his seemingly trivial remarks in the context of his telling of the region’s mythic history, illustrate suggestively an issue researchers involved in the study of oral traditions are seeking to unravel: namely, the issue of genre and particularly the poetic nature of a text that Don Rigoberto associates with both an ancient state of the language and an active engagement in the transmission of this oral tradition. 13 340 Aurore Monod Becquelin and Alain Breton The first section of this chapter deals with the difficulty of defining the genres that frame a text and provide its specific meaning. It also scrutinizes the specifics of performance. The next section presents the excerpt exactly as it was performed by Don Rigoberto, and the following section analyzes three major points of particular interest in this text: the confrontation between different words—language change; different worlds—the ancient versus the new; and a description of the arduous way by which power can be given to speech. The final section advocates another way of taking into account what is at the core of the making and use of genres and the purpose of argumentation and stylistic devices used in this performance. From Genre to Speech Genres are acknowledged as “essentially culturally bound ‘relative’ phenomena ” (Hawks 1977: 104, cited in Hull 2003: 198) related to speech and its status , and they are amenable to a typological contrast between themselves and “ordinary,” “standard,” or “everyday” language. The recognition of genres is a legitimate inquiry, even a required one, given that the meaning of a text depends heavily on the genre within which it is written or said. Each genre is defined by internal structural criteria, such as form and organization, and contextual criteria, such as the interaction of participants, channel, situation, goal, intention, and function (cf., e.g., Bricker 1989 [1974]: 388; Sherzer 1984 [1977]: 142; Wang 2009: 81). Mayanists involved in the study of both oral and written texts have provided convincing taxonomies of genres with the help of these criteria. A deep knowledge of the language, literature, and culture is indispensable in developing these detailed descriptions (Bricker 1989 [1974]; Burns 1983; Fought 1972, 1985; Gossen 1984 [1977]; Hull 2003; Laughlin 1977, 1980). Paradoxically, the same researchers agree that the classifications (“etic” as well as “emic”) do not provide stable boundaries among genres and that, while genres are necessary frames for interpretation, they have fuzzy limits and can overlap in many respects. Robert Laughlin, the author of one of the most important dictionaries of Amerindian languages (1975, also see Laughlin, this volume), highlights both the difficulty and the need to specify the category into which each word, phrase, and text fits. Laughlin created no fewer than nine “speech categories”—which he is careful not to call genres—outside “standard” language, such as archaic, male joking, ritual, baby talk, male, female, polite, scolding, and denunciatory. Laughlin explains: “I have essayed to delimit with slightly greater precision the context of certain vocabulary entries by inventing a number of speech categories whose degree of reality varies considerably” (1975: 28). Richard Parkinson advocates the adoption of a terminology based on nonexclusive types (1996), while others such as Fernando 341 Before Poetry, the Words Peñalosa (1996) accept heterogeneous criteria (that is, mixing forms, functions, cultural settings, roles, and others). In addition to the fact that genres are almost never realized exactly according to the rules described by analysts, speakers themselves manipulate the genres that are at their disposal. For example, Joel Kuipers (1990) described subtle modal shifts that allow the Weyewa to erase the hic et nunc forms and provide a generic, mythical, and conservative orientation to recitations so they can be close to the “words of the ancestors,” thereby minimizing the recontextualization of each performance...