The Ethnography of Rhythm

Orality and Its Technologies

Haun Saussy

• Editorial: Fordham University Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780823270484
• Categoría: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Categoría: Ricerca e competenze ingegneristiche e tecnologiche

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the "device"—core ideas of modern literary theory—were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts—starting with Homer and the Bible—had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian "techniques of the body" as belonging to the domain of Derridean "arche-writing, " Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.

1

Poetry Without Poems or Poets

Avis aux non-communistes: tout est commun, même Dieu.

—BAUDELAIRE, MON COEUR MIS À NU

After ten years, I no longer saw the ox.

—COOK DING, IN ZHUANGZI, “YANG SHENG”

In 1908–10, while serving as a lycée teacher in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Jean Paulhan often observed the sort of scene he described as follows:

After the evening meal, the children spread a clean mat over the floor, and a group of village men who have been waiting in the courtyard are admitted. They sit down on the mat next to the householders. One of the men opens the session by reciting a few verses. He pronounces them with a forceful rhythm and with such energy that he seems to be voicing a complaint or in some way demanding his due. And then one of the inhabitants of the house, the father or a son or sometimes one of the women, will answer him in the same tones—sometimes brusquely, sometimes ironically. The discussion continues. The audience now and again takes part, interjecting a few rhythmic words that seem meant to redirect the discussion towards its real object. Bit by bit the speeches of the two opponents become longer, more forcefully accentuated; by now each speaker has acquired a cheering section to encourage him with their bravos and their laughter. At the end the opponents are shouting, until suddenly one of them finds the decisive words—or so one discovers when the other hesitates and finds no answer; that speaker then acknowledges defeat and the crowd rushes to congratulate the winner.¹

What Paulhan witnessed night after night and attempted to record in his notebooks was “a poetry of dispute,” performed in the course of “poetic duels.” The inhabitants of Madagascar called this poetry hain-teny—a term of uncertain derivation, but usually interpreted to mean “the science of language, the knowledge of words”; or in another rendering, “examples in words, exemplary words.”² Fascinated by the allusiveness and rhetorical versatility of this poetry as well as by its omnipresence in everyday life, Paulhan collected some eight hundred examples and published a selection of these together with an account of the performance practices surrounding them as his first book.³

“Two or Three Hundred Rhythmic Phrases”

“To the European ignorant of the native tongue,” says Paulhan, “the recitation of hain-teny has the appearance of a bitter conflict of interests, where every hain-teny poem is an argument.” From the expression of conflict emerge “a few verses”; a few more verses answer the first; the alternation of points of view continues and a poem is built up through argument and counterargument until one speaker concedes defeat. Most frequently, hain-teny “are uttered for the pure sake of play,” but there has to be at least the pretext of a disagreement even when the object of the duel is merely to test the wits of the participants. And when a disagreement really exists,

it sometimes happens that the visitor who appears as a participant in the evening discussion has had, during the daytime, a conflict or dispute with one of the householders. Improvising in hain-teny is thus for him a means of demonstrating the justice of his cause. One day, in the house of Ambatomanga where I was a guest, a roofer came to call. That day he had finished a job for which he demanded sixty centimes, and Ambatomanga paid him only thirty . . . The roofer who demanded an unusually high salary became a mistreated young girl who had broken with her boyfriend, and the householder, becoming that boyfriend, pleaded with her to come back . . . The householder lost the match, and had to pay the workman at the rate demanded.⁴

Lovers in the place of employer and laborer, poetry in the place of lawsuits: such a transposition of themes might seem a pretext, designed to mask whatever real-life interests are at stake in a bout of hain-teny composition. But this kind of poetry has as its necessary precondition a nucleus of conflict. Poetry does not replace conflict but formalizes and articulates it.

Near Alasora, two young cowherds are playing with captive crickets. One of them leaves for a moment, and the other steals his crickets. When the first returns, he sits down, without a trace of anger, opposite the thief and recites a hain-teny. The other answers in the same style. The argument continues for a long time, without anyone raising his voice. . . .

I could cite many other incidents of the same kind, where the discussion in hain-teny derives from a real dispute, which it prolongs and resolves. But these are exceptional cases, and it would be mistaken to think of hain-teny as playing a judicial role in social life. Normally they are uttered as mere play, and if their recitation bears the outward marks of a quarrel, it may be artificial.

At Ambatomena, a village of twenty or thirty houses not far from Tsinjoarivo, a fifty-year-old Merina named Rakotobe debates in hain-teny every evening with his two sisters, Razay and Rasoa, as an amusement. The audience is made up of several village children. Before beginning, Rakotobe sketches out for them the argumentative pretext that he has made up: one of his slaves has escaped, and his sister Razay agrees to speak on the guilty party’s behalf. On another evening, it may be a love-rival who has crossed Rakotobe’s path, or a wizard who has put a spell on the family’s rice supply.⁵

Hain-teny poetry is formed in dispute and dialogue. It cannot be elicited otherwise, as Paulhan quickly learned when he began to go on collecting tours. “Do you know any hain-teny?” he would ask the village wise man, and the elder would happily comply, chanting out a couplet or two—and then fall silent. “Now the men sitting around us would turn to me and say, ‘Answer him, answer him! He won’t say a thing if you leave him alone; he won’t have anything more to say!’”⁶ Until the second punch is thrown, there is no fight. Like chess or tennis, the art of hain-teny exists, can be elicited, only in a climate of real or imaginary antagonism between participants; and to get anything at all out of his informants, Paulhan had to learn a good many standard responses and join in the game, at however low a level.

Hain-teny poetry, then, is what Charles Taylor might call an “irreducibly social good.”⁷ It cannot be created or enjoyed by a solitary subject. Beyond the formal and semantic characteristics of the individual lines, what shapes the genre and every work in the genre is an antagonistic rhythm of call and response, challenge and answer, back and forth, each verse attempting to crush the precedent verse.

A hain-teny poem has no value by itself, taken singly. Whether its recitation contributes to a debate with a practical origin and purpose, or whether it is a mere amusement, it presupposes a real or imaginary rivalry and hostility that must end with the victory of one of the rivals. Hain-teny is, if I can suggest this term, a poetry of authority. It belongs to a contest of language, where it is nothing but an argument. Its argumentative character is so ingrained that the Malagasy idiom is not to “utter” or “recite” hain-teny, but to “fight with proverbs, to set hain-teny fighting.”⁸

Though produced by antagonism, the poetry does more than express disagreement. Directing each participant to stage-manage antagonism is, in fact, one of the refinements hain-teny brings to conflict. Every stanza of hain-teny is, as Paulhan puts it, “an image of the total struggle.” “As the discussion follows its course, the man and the woman alternately emerge as the winner: for each reciter gives victory, after a simulacrum of combat, to the combatant he has chosen to represent. . . . So, the better to prepare for his final triumph, [each reciter] first affirms his victory in little struggles over details where he takes on himself the role of the two adversaries.”⁹ When A performs his “inning” of poetry, so to speak, the rules demand that he represent first his own position and then the opponent’s position, giving himself, of course, the better lines and representing his opponent’s answers as sensibly weaker. I don’t just say what I say and leave you to answer; rather, I say, “When I say such-and-such, you will no doubt answer that . . .” The loser in a debate has not only fallen silent, he has allowed the winner to have the last word in the loser’s name. Thus, there is a combination of open-endedness and closure in each episode of hain-teny. I utter my piece strategically, in the expectation that you will answer it, but if you don’t, my tentative ending becomes your ending too, and then the ending.

Thus far, then, Paulhan’s observations on the performance conventions of the hain-teny. But what are the means of the contest? What exactly enables the roofer to defeat his employer? What brings victory in a combat of hain-teny is not the unprecedented insight, the new angle or the striking coinage, but rather the strategic marshaling and use of stock proverbs known to everyone. The hain-teny is a combat of and by clichés. It is devoid of innovation, of originality, of the verbal “making” that is at the root of poetry’s Greek name. A reciter has to pick the right proverbs for the aggressive part of his entry, then provide the right inadequate proverbs for the second part; the person who replies needs to find proverbs that outdo the proverbs of the first speaker, either by appealing to loftier principles or by adhering more closely to the facts of the (fictitious-factual) case. Any overstatement, ambiguity, or inaccuracy is sure to be exploited in the adversary’s response. It is significant that so much of the hain-teny situation is conventional. The framework of stereotyped love stories known to everyone in advance bring to the fore the strategic and rhythmic element, the question of timing: both parties responding to each other’s stories, saving their best hits for last while trying to get the adversary to squander the whole arsenal prematurely. And it is being able to follow the good and bad shots as well as the depletion of the stocks that makes for the interest of a hain-teny combat. The adept speaker possesses a stock of basic proverbs and the skill to adapt them in new ways (these adaptations may, in the course of time, become proverbs in their turn) together with an experienced campaigner’s knowledge of the terrain, the enemy’s strong and weak points, the most likely thrusts and the most effective parries.

Lest it seem that the choice of good verses is the thing to aim for, let us remember what Paulhan only slowly came to understand: that what one acclaims in the successful hain-teny is not at all a matter of the word or of the line for that matter but of its place in the context of a dispute. A “good” proverb was not enough by itself to end an argument; Paulhan had before him examples where “slight” sayings won out over “weighty” ones, on account of their more shrewd deployment.¹⁰ The words are there for naught; the same phrases, put in the wrong place, would have no effect or a negative effect on the player’s score. Likewise, when Paulhan tried to organize his collection of hain-teny by themes, he found that

such distinctions run the risk of remaining incomplete and false, if one expects to see in the theme a subject given once and for all, which every reciter develops in his or her fashion. Rather, it must be thought that a hain-teny, in reality, is never alone: one part of its meaning certainly derives from the verses and proverbs it contains, but another part is imposed by the hain-teny it is meant to answer, and the following hain-teny will in its turn pin down the precise implications of the former. Take a poem that seems to express simple pride: if used to reply to a modest, timid declaration of love, it will signify refusal. Another poem ostensibly meant to give advice may [depending on its placement in the series] become acquiescence or mockery. A complex of meaning builds and unbuilds itself moment by moment through a thousand exchanges.¹¹

Victory in hain-teny combat rests on memory and analogy, not on the creation of new verses. The adept player will prefer an effective precedent over a novel reasoning. New verses, when they appear, sound much like existing verses, and are often uttered immediately after their models, making the resemblance obvious. A frequent poetic procedure is the

elementary assonance provided by the repetition of a single word or word-group . . . [sometimes] not only word-repetition, but repetition of a whole sentence, not so much in the sound and form of its words as in its logical and semantic structure. We find parallelism and symmetry in two, three, four, sometimes even twelve successive verses.

One might imagine a language consisting of two or three hundred rhythmic phrases and four or five hundred verse-types, fixed once and for all and passed on without modification by oral tradition. Poetic invention would then consist of taking these verses as models and fashioning new verses in their image, verses having the same form, rhythm, structure, and, so far as possible, the same meaning. Such a language would quite closely resemble the language of Malagasy poetry: its type-verses are proverbs, and its poems, imagined in imitation of these proverbs, reproducing them in hundreds of new copies, stretching them out or shortening them, setting them for the sake of contrast amid other differently rhythmed phrases, are the hain-teny.¹²

Singular verses, well-constructed poems, original themes, incomparable st...