Agency in Ancient Writing

6 .Performance, Presence, and Genre in Maya Hieroglyphs

139 This chapter examines the objecthood of Maya hieroglyphic writing as well as the discourse about writing in hieroglyphic narratives. Two of my specific goals are to advance a genre-based approach to the study of Maya writing and to augment interpretations that have traditionally privileged oral performance in their understanding of the role of writing in Maya society. To this end, I examine texts from the vantage points of genre, media, and performance to suggest that the presence of text was an important part of an inscribed object’s meaning and that the agentive power of a text comes just as much from its embodiment and presence as it does from its recitation. I suggest that writing’s presence, its objecthood, realized in the media (architecture, stone monuments, ceramics, books) that transmit it to its audience, is itself meaningful apart from its semantic content or performance (see Chartier 1995, 1). PERFORMANCE To date, performance, defined both in the sense of a literal performance and as a particular set of theoretical concerns (Bauman 1972, 1977; Hymes 1975; Inomata and Coben 2006; Monaghan 1990), has S i x Performance, Presence, and Genre in Maya Hieroglyphs Michael D. Carrasco DOI: 10.5876/9781607321996.c06 140 Michael D. Carrasco been the main theoretical lens through which writing and its presence on surviving objects have been understood (Houston 1994; Houston and Stuart 1992; Houston and Taube 2000; Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006; Hull 2003, 317). Performance has been a useful concept in the interpretive toolbox of Maya scholars. From assigning meaning to architecture and sculptural programs (see Guernsey 2006; Reese 1996, 97) to understanding the function of calligraphic monuments, it has laid a path to meaning that transcends iconographic analysis or the tabulation of historical data in glyphic narratives. Performance has enabled scholars of Maya art and writing to construct theories of how epigraphs and the objects that preserve them were used and to attempt to unravel the complex and dynamic relationship between text and the reader or audience.1 Following this focus on performance, Maya epigraphers, although acknowledging that most texts possessed some degree of narrative integrity (Hull 2003, 26), have seen inscriptions as relying on oral performance to enact their communicative power and flesh out their narrative content (Houston 1994; Houston and Stuart 1992; Houston and Taube 2000; Hull 2003, 317). Under this view, glyphic inscriptions were skeletal texts that would have been elaborated on during their recitation. That is, their agency as cultural artifacts should be understood largely in terms of their reading to a hypothesized ancient audience. For example, Stephen D. Houston and David Stuart (1992, 590–91) have argued that the Maya script “most likely functioned within a system of ‘recitation literacy ,’ in which writing served alongside an oral tradition that played a crucial role in fleshing out the schematic messages transmitted by the hieroglyphs.” In addition, Houston and Karl A. Taube (2000, 263) have claimed that there is persuasive evidence that most script, regardless of geographical zone, was intended to be read aloud, . . . a point reinforced by the occasional appearance of first- or second-person references and quotative particles in Classic Maya script . . . This was no less true of the ancient Mediterranean, where Eric Havelock and others identified the ubiquity of “recitation literacy,” involving oral delivery and public performance (Houston 1994, 30). What this means is that Mesoamerican writing was not so much an inert or passive record, but a device thought to “speak” or “sing” through vocal readings or performance. As a form of communication, writing was inseparably bonded to the language that it recorded. The view that script was an abstract, isolable text was most likely unthinkable, since, to quote Sennett [1994, 43] on ancient Greek writing, the “reader would have thought he heard the voices of real people speaking even on the page, and to revise a written text was like interrupting someone talking.” The aforementioned studies epitomized in this quotation have been extremely valuable in highlighting the importance of performance, performative acts, and the multi-sensorial context of much of Maya visual and verbal art, even if one 141 Performance, Presence, and Genre in Maya Hieroglyphs might disagree or believe the evidence is lacking to support some of the specific claims made in this passage—the reading habits of ancient Greeks, even if Sennett’s views are to be accepted (see Chartier 1995, 15–16), tell us little about those of the...