Arthur T. Hatto, The Mohave Heroic Epic of Inyo-kutavêre. Re-appraised and further interpreted on the basis of the edition of A. L. Kroeber and consultation of his field record. Folklore Fellows’ Communications No. 269. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Academia Scientiarum Fennica). 164 pp. 1999.
Hard (ISBN 951-41-0838-8), FIM 100,-
Soft (ISBN 951-41-0839-6), FIM 75,-
Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore,
Kirkkokatu 14, FIN-00170 Helsinki, Finland
fax: +358 9 635017; e-mail: tiedekirja@tsv.fi
With The Mohave Heroic Epic (hereafter, MHE), Arthur Hatto broaches new ground, for himself and the field of folklore, and indeed for world literature. One must add that for Hatto new ground is an old habit. Although he had training in classics, I believe, his academic appointments were in German. At retirement (1977) he was Professor of German Language and Literature in the University of London, and had translated Wolfram’s Tristan, the Nibelungenlied, and Wolfram’s Parzival for Penguin Classics. In middle-age, nonetheless, he learned Russian and made himself conversant with epic traditions in what was then the Soviet Union, publishing particularly on the Kirghiz epic. He was a founder of the London Seminar on Epic (1964-72). By 1980 he had also examined the Native American text which is the subject of this monograph (MHE 14, citing Hatto 1980: 5), and used a passage from it to clinch a presentation of his concept of “epic moment”. By 1995 he had completed a typescript of this monograph.
The monograph brings attention to material that has been almost completely ignored. It gives to the Mohave narrative, and Kroeber’s work with it, a close reading, appreciative yet not uncritical. Hatto draws on other work by Kroeber and other work on the Mohave, and points to work that needs to be done (e.g., with regard to linguistic identification of names [120]).1 The result is a stimulus to thinking about the Mohave and neighboring traditions, and to thinking about Native American narrative more generally.
The circumstances that led to a record of the epic are these. In 1902 Alfred Louis Kroeber was 26. Raised in Hoboken, New Jersey in a German-speaking family, at Columbia University he was attracted to anthropology by Franz Boas, and gained a position with the University of California, where he remained all his life. The obvious task at the time was to record as much as possible of the ways of life and languages of the Native Americans of the state, and Kroeber devoted himself to this for many years. The Mohave, at the edge of Arizona, held his attention for some time. In March 1902 he traveled with Jack Jones, who had become his customary guide and Mohave interpreter, in search of someone said to know about the origins of clans. Such knowledge, “great-telling” in Mohave idiom, was a specialization of certain old men. As with other such knowledge, to be able to tell it was to have received it in a dream from the founding spirit of the Mohave, Mastamho.
Song-cycle myths still were being dreamed (seen) at that time, encouraged by the singing of cycles as a gift at the impending death of a kinsman. Clan origins and migration, which figure in the epic, were not associated with such cycles. Kroeber judged that occasions for hearing the epic would have been pretty much lost in the generation or two preceding his work. He came to think that no one had acquired the epic for decades. His source, Inyo-kutavêre, told him, indeed, that he had never told the story from beginning to end. He had told parts of it a number of times at night until the audience fell asleep.2
What we have is not complete. Inyo-kutavêre underestimated how long the telling would take (as did other Mohave narrators with whom Kroeber worked). Evidently he did not take into account that the time involved would not be only how long he would speak, but also how long it would take Jack Jones to put what he said in Mohave into English (Kroeber found the same to be true for other narrators). For each of six days there were three to four hours of narration, and as many of translation and writing. Inyo-kutavêre thought one more day would suffice, but Kroeber was overdue at Berkeley. He promised to return by the next winter, and did, but by then Inyo-kutavêre had died.
It was then not just a matter of finding someone to finish what Inyo-kutavêre had said. Someone would have to have dreamed the entire thing himself, and tell all he had dreamed. Kroeber was given the names of two other men, but one turned out to be speechless from a paralytic stroke, and he was unable to reach the other before he died. In 1908 another man did give a partial version before becoming ill.3
Kroeber did not bring the material to publication until 1951, when he himself was 75. He had been steadily working with California languages, mythology, and culture, published a Handbook of the Indians of California, pioneered in aspects of Peruvian archaeology, made an innovative study of the relation of culture to environment and geography in native North America, shaped a department and research program, was president of societies, undertook an overview of configurations of culture growth in the world as a whole. In his later years he returned systematically to the Mohave materials of his youth, publishing “Seven Mohave Myths” in 1948, this epic in 1951, and completing the manuscript of “More Mohave Myths” in August of 1960, intending it as the third part of a trilogy. A few days later he left for Austria to chair a conference he had organized on “Anthropological Horizons”.4 A few days after the conference he died in Paris in a hotel on the Quai de Voltaire, facing the Seine.
Inyo-kutavêre’s narrative has lain largely unnoticed since then (as Hatto documents). Does it indeed belong to the genre of heroic epic? Hatto has no doubt (MHE 11, 22ff.). It has the high seriousness demanded by Aristotle; it has a firm structure, which Hatto elucidates and takes to be inherited, not improvised (25-26); it has an almost perfect purism as to time, in that there is nothing from the coming of Whites (28-29).5 It is indeed a stirring story of leaving a valley promised by the source of their way of life, Mastamho, then fighting to regain it, first with failure, then with success. There are Protagonists and Antagonists (pp. 113ff.), heroic warriors and fatal combats between equals. And there are epic moments, a concept introduced by Hatto (1980: 4-6), who has called attention to fine examples in other traditions (1980: 84, 1989: 178-80), and calls attention to them here.
The concept is not defined in the monograph, so let me quote its 1980 introduction:
Epic poetry is apt to condense long-drawn tensions into brief scenes of dramatic power enhanced by visual magnificence, that is, “epic moments” (4).
Epic moments are highly charged narrative ganglia, and it is suggested here as one of the fruits of comparative study that possession of them in memory confers power on the mature bard to build up an episode or even a string of episodes. In other words, it is suggested that epic moments, in addition to being great poetry, are mnemonic elements of epic of an order altogether superior to that of “themes” or “formulae”, now so well-discussed; and that they will therefore mark or help to mark the structures of epics (6).6
Heightened language
As an epic, as characterized by Aristotle, the only lack perhaps is heightened language. (Singing is not taken as necessary.) Kroeber found no trace of metrical or other formally stylized language, except to a very slight degree in names of personages (MHE 31). Hatto notes several signs of heightening (MHE 31ff.), possibly indicators of a more ornate style in the past (36), and he generously notes my own suggestion of a pervasive kind of heightening.
The suggestion came about because of our being together at a conference on epic in Turku in 1996. There I became aware of Hatto’s Mohave work, then already in typescript. After the conference, I was able to use Kroeber’s monograph to suggest indications of what Hatto here terms “throughgoing phrase-patterning” (p. 32, n. 2), “a phrase-patterning measure” (p. 40), or simply “phrase-patterning” (p. 134). Let me briefly explain.
In many Native American oral narratives, and also oral narratives from other parts of the world, there are recurrent relations among lines, or groups of lines. There is measured, not in the sense of counted relations within a line (meter), but in the sense of patterns for relations among lines, patterns for how many constitute a sequence. Generally, two types of patterning are found, sequences of three or five, or of two or four. Final intonation contours, and recurrent initial elements, commonly indicate what is to be counted as a unit (I call such a unit a verse) in a sequence.7
Thanks to Leanne Hinton, of the Department of Linguistics at Berkeley, herself a scholar of another Yuman language, Havasupai, Hatto and I were able each to obtain a microfilm of Kroeber’s field record. Dr. Hinton also called our attention to an opening section of the epic, which Kroeber had not published, and she identified clan names within it.
The actual record – what Kroeber wrote down in English – is verbally sparse, especially when read beside the sentences of the published version. Yet the sparseness discloses what I take to be an authentic skeleton. Here are the first two sections, as published by Kroeber (1951: 77), followed by the corresponding part of the field record.
1951 publication
1. In Mohave Valley. – Mathkwem-tsutsam-kwilyêhe and Tinyal-tseqwârve were intelligent; the rest of the people knew nothing. They two were the leaders. Mastamho had said: “Some of you will dream and be lucky: they will be chiefs.” These two had had dreams and were the leaders of the people.
2. Emigration to the Barstow Desert. – Now they went west with their people, to Savtsivuta and Hotahaek-konuve. They entered between these two mountains and sat and rested. Then they went on to Providence Mountains and to Avi-ku-tsoaiye. When they arrived there they sat and rested again. Then they came to Its’ipai-thauve and Aha-’ithave, where there is a spring, and there they sat again. Then they went on to Tsukopai and Atisiara. There they stayed awhile. Then, still going west, they came to Katsoak-kunuve and Amat-kohôye. These two places had not been named, but when they reached them they gave them these names. Mathkwem-tsutsam-kwilyêhe and Tinyal-tseqwârve were going to live there.
When the field record is sorted out, relations of three and five prevail, often with pairs as constituents. Even lines that seem to be explanatory interpolations almost always fit within relations of pairs, or of 3 and 5.
Now among the Mohave the explicit pattern number is four, and relations of four do occur in the epic. Kroeber presented the narrative in some eighteen sections (A-R), themselves reasonable. Hatto’s neat schema for the underlying structure distinguishes three major sections:
Exodus and Dispersal (A)
Four invasions
abortive minor invasion (B)
abortive major invasion (C-G)
abortive maximal invasion (H-L)
triumphant maximal invasion (M-P)
Repulses of counter-invasion (Q)8
Notice the four-part core (the invasions). If one adds what Hatto dubs “The Mastamho Preamble”, not published by Kroeber (see further discussion below in relation to myth), there is a four part pattern as well overall.9
Patterning of phrases, however, is not in relations of four, but primarily in relations of three and five. Here are the two initial passages, set out in lines.
Notice that italicized words are present only in the field record.10 At the end of the first stanza, “headmen”, not in the publication, makes a semantic couplet with “leaders”, thereby rounding out three sets of pairs. At the end of section 2, “make home”, not in the publication, makes a semantic couplet with “stay there”.11
[1. In Mohave Valley.]
Maqkwem-tsutsam-kwilyêhe, (A)
Tinyal-tseqwârve,
these 2 were smart,
rest knew nothing,
they were the leaders, 5
headmen.
St.[= Mastamho] had said, (B)
“Some of you will dream + be lucky men,
they will be leaders.”
These had dreamed (C) 10
+ so were leaders.
[2. Emigration to the Barstow Desert.]
Now these 2 went W[est] (A)
sartsivuuta and hotahabek konube,
(S. of Ibex,
high mt.) 15
two mts.
They went between.
They sat down between them
+ took a rest.
Did not go through. 20
Avi ko kaasú [Providence Mountains] + avi kotsóalye,
(B)
when got there,
sat and took a rest again.
Then Itsathaube + axaithabe,
sat there again. (C) 25
Is a spring there.
(still going W.)
This country not made yet).
Tsukopai and Atisiara. (D)
There stayed awhile. 30
Katsoak-kunuve and Amat-kohôye (E)
These two places had not been named.
They, when they got there,
gave them these names.
(= 24 miles S. of Barstow) 35
These 2 men were going to stay there,
make home.
Is such phrasal patterning pervasive? I think it likely. Certainly it continues through all of the first section, (A) The Emigration from Mohave Valley. As to coupling of words, or phrases, Kroeber himself noted the frequency of what he called a “sort of double-riveted syllogizing of the simple” as a characteristic of style, especially for Inyo-kutavêre (n. 28 to section I, p. 160 in Kroeber 1951). Hatto (p. 34) points this out, drawing on a suggestion of mine. I should have added before now that Inyo-kutavêre’s semantic pairing can be more than mechanical, just as Biblical parallelism is likely to be more than mechanical (Kugel 1981). The second element may add an ingredient of meaning, such as completion, as in the last lines just above: “stay there : make home”.
What about other narrators and narratives? In the year (1902) in which he took down the epic narrative, Kroeber took down an account of the origin myth from Nyavarup (1972: 5-14), aided again by Jack Jones as translator. Kroeber had reservations about the material, since it was at almost the very beginning of his work with the Mohave, but the text appears to be in good form. I have analyzed Part A, Matavilya (5-6).12 There are clearly three parts, or acts, each in turn with three parts (scenes). Four-part relations are evident; so also are relations of three and five.
In 1903 Kroeber obtained from Jo Nelson (Chooksa homar) a telling of the death of Matavilya and of Mastamho’s actions in instituting Mohave ways (1948: 50-64). Analysis of the first section, A. Mastaho disposes of dead Matavilya (52-53), shows relations of three and five and pairing, such as are salient in the epic.
In the same year Kroeber also obtained from Nelson an extensive war reminiscence, not published until after his death (Kroeber and Kroeber 1973).13 Its first episode, “War with the Cocopa: Captives”, is strongly marked by relations of three and five, both as to stanzas within acts, and verses within stanzas. So is the last episode, 13, “Acceptance of Law”.
Finally, the opening of a narrative on origins which focuses on war, and deals with Mastamho, told Kroeber in 1903 by Tokwatha (1972: 80-81), also shows relations of three and five, along with relations of four.
Only a few sections of the epic have yet been studied in terms of the field record. Presumably field records for the rest and for other narratives would show some differences from the published English. Nonetheless, the sense of patterning gained with the aid of the field record seems to me to carry over to the other materials. There is never a sense of another kind of patterning.
If recurrent three and five part relations can be taken as heightening, it seems that Aristotle’s requirement of heightened speech is to present. Moreover, it seems that such heightening is shared with Mohave myths of origin and accounts of recent historical experience (Chooksa homar). Just so, dactylic hexameter was not limited to epic.
This kind of patterning has not been investigated in Mohave texts by linguists versed in the language (Pamela Munro, personal communication). At present one cannot say if the narratives taken down by Kroeber stand alone, or apart from other styles of speech. I hope the question can be answered. I have encountered other cases in which odd-numbered relations obtain where conscious awareness of patterning is in terms of fours (Tlingit [Hymes 1989], Arikara [Hymes 1996]). But much remains to be learned about those cases as well.
Narrators do seem aware of numerical patterning only when it is matter of an expected number of actors or items in a set, or of the number of times an act is expected to recur. In Chinookan and Sahaptin, languages of Oregon, the expected numbers are three and five. In Takelma and Coos, other languages of Oregon, the expected numbers are two and four. In the one case there will be five brothers, say, something will happen five times. In the other case there will be four women, something will happen four times. There are sometimes exceptions, which can be seen as expressive alternations (cf. Hymes 2000b). In Chinookan and Sahaptin, where relations of three and five are the general rule, relations of four clearly foreground women.14 In Takelma and Tillamook, where the prevailing pattern is in terms of four, there are marked exceptions involving a male character with relations of three and five.
So far, we have heard little from narrators themselves. The experience of my wife and myself is summed up in the preceding paragraph. Narrators seem unaware even that patterning runs throughout a narrative. It is likely that pervasive relations are acquired in the same way as syntactic patterns, not through explicit instruction, but through immersion in practice.
If three and five part relations prove the rule in Mohave, then any relations of four ought to count as marked. Of course in Mohave some focus of foregrounding other than gender might be the case.
Reading the Mohave epic: Orientation
Readers of Hatto’s monograph may not have access to Kroeber (1951), and for further study will need to consult it; twenty pages of the epic itself (77-106) are followed by seventy pages of discussion and correlative information (107-76). Kroeber provides 2 large-scale maps, comparison with other narratives, Mohave and classical, a chronological outline and analysis of the clan system, a discussion of literary qualities, including a table showing the occurrences of the characters, a consideration of other versions, and a detailed assessment of geography and itineraries. All this goes far beyond what is usually found with the publication of Native American narratives.15
Hatto is generous in praise of Kroeber not only for obtaining the epic and persevering in its publication, but also for analyses of what can be inferred and what can be brought to bear from other sources. Hatto himself provides a clear orientation to the epic text, and a discussion of it that is brimming with interest. There is a map of the territory (8), a lucid paragraph of synthesis of the story (Synopsis I [9]), and an extended account of its action as well (Synopsis II [16-21]).
Hatto treats characteristics of the epic in terms of (epic) Time (37-39), Myth and quasi-myth (40-46), the Mohave heroic ethos (47-56), Some leading characters (57-92), the Landtake (in which the valley is shared out among the Mohave) (93-102), Chiefs, headmen, leaders (103-05), Mohave fractions (not their arithmetic, but the various subgroups that are noted) (106-12), “The Four Tribes”, alias “the Residents”, that is, the people who take the valley when they have left it, and who must be overcome to regain it (113-24), and food (125-32).
Six appendices discuss (A) Nose-pendants (a heroic and dramatic symbol), (B) Scalping, (C) Stone knives, (D) Martial dust, (E) Echoes of Kroeber’s edition (such review and comment as their has been), and, as noted, (F) The Mastamho Preamble.
Reading the Mohave epic: Narrative logic and detail
Hatto early on provides a penetrating insight into the logic of the narrative, one that brings to mind the subtle literary critic Kenneth Burke. He considers why the Mohave, having been given their valley, leave it for no reason (23). The answer is, that if not of their own free will, they must have left under duress. That would give credit to others for driving them out. And the retaking is a measure of what they are willing to do to have it. Let me add that the retaking of the valley dramatizes at length that they deserve it, not only as Mastamho’s gift, but for their own heroic efforts. Not only grace, but works, one might say.
A small criticism: at a point or two, Hatto refers to oral tradition as mechanical: “…stock figures of universal folk narrative are introduced … folktale automatism” (37, cf. 91). And later (90):
To attempt to sketch in Inyo-kutavêre’s “art of characterization” on the basis of the foregoing would be vain. The personages of heroic epic lie at the opposite pole to the characters of novels. The personages of heroic epics are simply those who did the needs narrated. Therein lies their strength. Displays of “a knowledge of human nature”, of psychological plausibility (the novelists’ will-o’-the-wisp) are unknown to and unattempted by the bards.
This very statement follows a shrewd reading of the motivation of one of the women in the epic, Mathkwem-kwapaive’s wife, in which Hatto admonishes: “Let us be as understanding of this woman as we can, let us be a trifle novelistic” (89).
The truth is that in the section “Some leading characters” (57-92) Hatto is closely attentive to clues to character and motivation, considering what is provided in the text and how it is likely to be viewed by Mohave (cf. p. 80). He several times expresses admiration for the skill of the narrator in the handling of a point, and admiration, or sympathy, or disapproval for the kind of person a character is. Of the man who leads the Mohave in recovery of their homeland, he concludes:
Hipahipa can be hailed as one of the superlative characters of heroic epic poetry worldwide (70).
He enters into the narrator’s involvement in his story to the point of saying:
Kroeber was surely right to suggest that Nyitse-vilye-vave-kwilyêhe was originally conceived as a foil to Umaséaka but ran away with the part (75).
The passing statements about folklore automatism, and myth vs. epic as absolute opposites (95), seem to echo battles now far-off and only dimly glimpsed. As to myth vs. epic, Hatto recognizes the continuity of the Preamble, and its atmosphere of myth origins, with the epic itself. And he observes that the epic proper might be considered “secondary myth” (40). Fortunately for the reader, and the text, Hatto’s grasp of epic possibilities, his responsiveness to indications of character, his keen grasp of motivation and detail, run away with the discussion.
There is one dichotomy on which Hatto takes a firm and very public stand. The stand appears in the title of the study: “heroic epic”, as against Kroeber’s “historical epic”. Hatto notes that Kroeber himself considers that the narrator has provided verisimilitude, not clear links with what is known of Mohave history. Hatto himself says, any oral heroic epic digests and transforms whatever there may be of history (11-12). The label “A Mohave Historical Epic” “must be rejected. Ethnopoetics knows no such genre.”
For someone like myself, trained to discover the categories and concepts of others, in culture as well as language, the fact that they consider something to have happened is to be treated circumspectly. Of course at the end of the day, I am not going to accept, say, a claim that a group has always lived where it is now, when archaeological and linguistic evidence indicate otherwise. But I would not want to start with that. Observations from native traditions sometimes correct mistaken certainty, even dogma, on the part of scientists (cf. De Loria 1995). I want to be open to such voices.
These few differences do not take away from the value of the work. I hope it may stimulate others to think seriously, and comparatively, about the extended narrative sequences known from Native Americans. Whether or not they can be considered epics, they share features with epics. Transformer-Trickster sequences, for example, have moments akin to “epic moments”. The naming of places in the course of the adventures of the main character is analogous to the claiming of place in the Mohave epic. There are heroes who behave in ways like those of the heroes of established epics, though there may be only an extended story, not a sequence. If two sides to a conflict are required, Transformer-Trickster sequences have that as well. One side is the world as it once was and should not be, the other side is the Transformer-Trickster who sets that other world right for the people who are coming.
If we examine Native American extended sequences (to use a neutral term) in the light of what is known about epic sequences in the Old World, we shall come to understand them more deeply. If this happens, Hatto’s monograph will have planted the seed.
One slip: Volume One of Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry, of which Hatto was general editor, is found in the References (1980), but not Volume Two (1989), containing Hatto’s “Towards an Anatomy of Heroic and Epic Poetry” (145-306), to which significant references are made. To be sure, the information can be found on p. 14 of the text and in the unpaginated postscript about Hatto. But a reader noting the citation of Hatto 1989: 172 for “secondary myth” might have forgotten p. 14 and not yet have noticed the postscript.
A user of the monograph could wish for an index (although an owner of the monograph of course can mark the copy).
References
Bahr, Donald, Juan Smith, William Smith Allison and Julian Hayden 1994: The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Boas, Franz 1916: Tsimshian Mythology. Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology 31: 29-979. Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office.
De Loria, Vine 1995: Red Earth, White Lies. Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. New York: Scribner.
Hainsworth, J. B. (ed.) 1989: Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry, Vol. Two: Characteristics and Techniques. London: The Modern Humanities Research Association.
Hatto, A. T. (ed.) 1980: Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry. Vol. One: The Traditions. London: The Modern Humanities Research Association.
Hatto, A. T. 1989: Towards an Anatomy of Heroic and Epic Poetry. In Hainsworth 1989: 145-206.
Honko, Lauri 1998a: Textualising the Siri Epic. (FF Communications 264.) Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Academia Scientiarum Fennica).
– 1998b: Alfred Kroeber and the Mohave epic. In Honko 1998a: 180-83.
Honko, Lauri (ed.) 2000a: Textualization of Oral Epics. (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 128.) Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Honko, Lauri (ed.) 2000b: Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition. (Studia Fennica Folkloristica 7. / NNF Publications 7.) Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Hymes, Dell 1989: Tlingit Poetics: A Review Essay. Journal of Folklore Research 26(3): 236-48.
– 1994: Ethnopoetics, oral formulaic theory, and editing texts. Oral Tradition 9(2): 330-70.
– 1996: Arikara rhetoric: ethnopoetic suggestions. In John D. Nichols and Arden C. Ogg (eds.), nikotwâsk iskwâhtem, pâskihtêpayih! Studies in honour of H. C.Wolfart. (Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics, Memoir 13.) Winnipeg, Manitoba, 263-80.
– 1998a: Boas on the Threshold of Ethnopoetics. In Lisa Valentine and Regna Darnell (eds.), Theorizing the Americanist Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 84-107.
– 1998b: Reading Takelma Texts. Bloomington, Indiana: Trickster Press.
– 2000a:
– 2000b: Variation and Narrative Competence. In Honko 2000b: 77-92.
– ms: Survivors and Renewers. Folklore Forum (in press).
Kroeber, A. L. 1948: Seven Mohave Myths. (Anthropological Records 11:1). Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
– 1951: A Mohave Historical Epic. (Anthropological Records 11:2). Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
– 1972: More Mohave Myths. (Anthropological Records 27). Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Kroeber, A. L. and C(lifton) B. Kroeber 1973: A Mohave War Reminiscence, 1854-1880. (University of California Publications in Anthropology, 10). Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Kugel, James L. 1981: The Idea of Biblical Poetry. Parallelism and its History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Smith, John D. 1986: Where the Plot Thickens: Epic Moments in Pabuji. South Asian Studies 2: 53-64.
– 1989: Rajasthani. How to Sing a Tale. Epic Performance in the Pabuji Tradition. In Hainsworth 1989: 29-41.
Swann, Brian (ed.) 1994: Coming to Light. Contemporary translations of Native American literatures of North America. New York: Random House & Vintage Press, 273-85.
Dell Hymes
Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus)
University of Virginia
Footnotes
1 Hatto himself corrects an inference by George Devereux linking the name of the major hero of the epic, Hipahipa, with a Crazy-Coyote syndrome, and provides a shrewd identification with the name of the plant, cholla, and a plausible territory from which Hipahipa would have come (pp. 59-61).
2 This is not unique. At Warm Springs Reservation, Oregon, in the 1970s, Linton Wineshut told Virginia Hymes, whom he chose to record his telling of the complete Coyote cycle, that he had not told it as a whole before. Such examples need to be kept in mind, as against a tendency to think of narratives as truly existing only in performance. For some narrators the stories live in their minds as well, subject to reflection. Some of the creative direction they give their stories comes from that.
3 Honko (1998b: 183) cites the experience as an object lesson.
4 His daughter, the author Ursula LeGuin, remembers helping her father calculate the distances and sites mentioned in the song-cycles, places that are the scaffolding of dreamed narratives.
5 In 1894 Franz Boas took down from Charles Cultee in Kathlamet Chinook (spoken near the mouth of the Columbia River) the “Sun’s Myth”, perhaps the most powerful Native American myth I know. It tells in tragic terms of a chief who goes to the Sun, and can have everything a human could desire, but cannot cease desiring the power of the Sun itself. At last she must give it to him (he is now a relative); on his return to see his own people, he destroys them. No whites, but a tragic flaw, hybris, within a native framework. (See Swann 1994: 273-85.)
6 Cf. Smith 1989: 32 discussing the Rajasthani oral epic of Pabuji: “…performers do explicitly speak of it as consisting of a sequence of named episodes. (…the epic is always performed in partial form…) …each one [episode] is marked off from the next by a journey of importance to the narrative, and …each culminates in a tense scene or epic moment.” Quoting an earlier paper, Smith continues: “The native segmentation of the story into parvaros recognises the sequence [of epic moments] as the basis of the entire structure of the narrative. Every parvaro culminates in a crux – that is to say, every element of the story is defined in terms of the crux to which it leads…” (Smith 1986: 63.)
7 See chapters in Hymes 1996 for examples from English; Native American texts are scrutinized in these terms in Hymes (1994, 1998b, 2000a, ms). Hymes (1998a) discusses this finding of structure in recurrent relations against the background of the attention of Boas to recurrent content.
8 (R)“The Half-Walapai Boy” appears to begin another story whose direction is not clear (28). Hatto judges Inyo-kutavêre to have grafted it to the rest to keep coming Kroeber’s supply of fine cigarettes (88). I agree with Hatto, (R), while linked by kinship to figures in the epic proper, is quite unclear as to its link in to the epic’s plot. But I prefer to leave open the question of motive. Perhaps Inyo-kutavêre enjoyed telling what he knew of Mohave history and would have moved on into a later kind of period (cf. Bahr [1994] on Pima traditions), itself becoming a four-part whole.
9 This would agree with Hatto’s weighing of reasons for and against Kroeber’s decision to exclude the Preamble (Appendix F), coming down on the side of its very well being an integral part. Hatto’s examples from other epic traditions, and his close reading of the Mohave itself, are entirely convincing. His deep respect for Kroeber seems to keep him from flatly saying that Kroeber was wrong. Rather, he concludes (159): “The transition from Mastamho’s direct speech in Pristine Time in the Preamble … to his speech reported in our Time … seems to us so easy and natural that only a great scholar could question it.” Not placing the Preamble starkly at the outset of his structural design seems an expression of the same tact.
10 Roman numerals (e.g., 2), underlining, parentheses, abbreviation, as to an initial letter (W, S) are in the field record.
11 There may have been more verbal coupling. Describing writing down what Jack Jones told him in English, Kroeber says: “With omission of repetitions, condensation of verbiage, and some abbreviating of words, I nearly kept up writing in longhand” (1951: 72).
12 Origin accounts begin with Matavilya, who dies, and is succeeded by Mastamho as the one who institutes Mohave ways.
13 The work was carried through to publication by Kroeber’s son, Clifton, who learned that Jo Nelson’s Mohave name was Chooksa homar, and gave it precedence.
14 Cf. the examples from Western Native North America marshalled in Hymes 2000a.
15 Of course there are major exceptions, such as Boas’ account of Tsimshian mythology (1916).
FF Network No. 20
(November): 16-21