Narrative Motifs Research Articles

Intertextual Interpretation, Fantasy and Samoan Dreams

This paper offers both an intertextual method for analyzing dreams and a model of fantasy processes in culture. The method consists in interpreting a dream in light of other narratives in a culture that share a motif with it. There is a spectrum of tales in cultures, ranging from founding myths rooted in the political realm to the highly personal proto-narratives we dream. I argue that narrative motifs from stories that circulate in public life move into people’s dreams, where these motifs represent shared meanings. In dreams, motifs are combined in novel ways; these combinations are, in effect, thought about these meanings. The narrative spectrum, together with this symbolic traffic, comprises a cultural fantasy system that is compelled by socially stylized desires and shared anxieties rooted in historical experience. The method and the model are explicated and illustrated through the analysis of four Samoan dreams from a larger collection.

Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (review)

by Robert Alter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 198 pp. $18.50.In this elegantly written volume Robert Alter reassesses the notion of literary canon as it has evolved in recent decades. He challenges the emphasis that has been placed on canon as an instrument of ideological coercion, and he champions instead a vision of canon as transhistorical textual community. Focusing on the Hebrew Bible and on ways in which twentieth-century writers have assimilated and imaginatively recast biblical materials, he sets out to show how a common literary heritage can inspire new and original artistic expression in a diverse range of texts. Scripture, he notes, serves not just as a source of doctrine and belief, but as a source of artistic models and of stylistic and imaginative authority. It is this double canonicity that gives the Bible such sustained inspirational power for writers of many subsequent historical periods.Exploring these ideas, Alter examines uses of biblical elements in the fiction and poetry of three great modern writers: Franz Kafka, Hayim Nahman Bialik, and James Joyce. By way of introduction, Alter also illustrates his points through a brief analysis of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and through readings of verse by Saul Tchernikhovsky and a number of medieval Hebrew poets.The chapter on Kafka concentrates primarily on the novel Amerika, commenting also on other texts such as Kafka's reflections on the Tower of Babel. Kafka's interpretive wrestling with the Bible, and his transmutations of narrative motifs from Genesis and Exodus, produce what Alter calls heretical midrash -- a combination of serious spiritual and theological searching with modernist iconoclasm and narrative experiment.The following chapter then turns to Bialik's Dead of the Desert (1902). This poem takes as its point of departure Numbers 14, in which God decrees that the generation of Israelites freed from slavery in Egypt will die in the wilderness without reaching the Promised Land. Bialik presents those figures as heroes who, having met their aforetold end, return to life, take up arms, and rebel against God and their fate. Highlighting the poem's mythic qualities, Alter reads Dead of the Desert as an affirmation of heroic will, a celebration of man's pitting himself against the forces of eternity in defiance of God's will. The poem merits special attention, Alter avers, precisely because it does not stand in exegetical relation to the biblical text. While allusions to the Bible are ubiquitous in modern Hebrew literature, and while this poem takes biblical idiom as its basic building blocks, it uses Hebrew in a largely non-allusive way. Consequently, Bialik drastically disrupts the canonical authority of the Bible -- by forging out of the biblical materials themselves a compelling counterworld to that of the Bible.The chapter on Joyce lays out yet a further example of how modernism merges traditionalism with iconoclasm. Along with Homer, the Bible serves as a fundamental allusive matrix in Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. Among the hallmarks of this novel are parody, playfulness, and chains of associative thoughts and images. As snippets of Scripture circulate through this citational reality, severed from their function as ultimate source of truth, and more often than not misconstrued or misremembered, the result is that the novelist tacitly puts aside [the Bible's] claims to transcendent authority, affirming instead its purely literary canonicity. …

The Normalization of Economic Life: Representations of the Economy in Golden-Age Buenos Aires, 1890-1913

This essay examines the cultural impact of the market transition in Buenos Aires during the so-called golden age (ca. 1890–1913), when Argentina experienced a process of export-led growth, centered on agriculture and livestock. The international mobility of labor and capital resources, in a context of an expanding frontier, facilitated rapid and important gains in productivity. By the turn of the century, a model of accumulation based on mass immigration, foreign capital, and the redistribution and use of land taken from indigenous peoples was firmly established. Important changes in technology (breed selection and threshing machines) and social relations (tenancy and sharecropping) modified the landscape of the pampas. The city experienced more directly the turmoil of “progress,” receiving massive inflows of immigrants from Europe and rapidly absorbing modern means of transportation and distribution. Soon, a large consumer market developed, underscoring the modernity of the city’s economy. Some scholars view this period as a turning point in the history of Argentina. Social and urban historians have noted two fundamental changes: the revolution of wheat that transformed the social landscape of the pampas; and the modernization of the city that ultimately allowed some improvement in the living conditions of immigrant workers. Labor historians found in this period a deepening of class confrontations: the transition from artisan-based and ethnically divided working-class communities to a politically active and organized working-class movement under socialist and anarchist leadership. The very success of capital accumulation made the disparities in the distribution of income and wealth all the more evident, facilitating the diffusion of radical ideologies. Anarchist-dominated labor unions, mutual-aid societies, socialist cultural centers, and renewed activism within the workshops signaled the emergence of class politics.

Masculin, féminin dans le lai de Guingamor

Diverse though they are, narrative lays raise the issue of the relationship between man and woman. The anonymous lay of Guingamor just as much as any other. So as to base historically an actual understanding of the story, narrative motifs in this text and in closely related texts have been compared to show that the lay is structured by the oppositions between places, time-schemes, games and amusements, and moral values. These can be related to the opposition between the sexes. In that light, the terror caused by Guingamor's unquestionably uncanny adventure demonstrates the anxiety wich woman's desire arouses in man.

The Rich Man and Lazarus: The Parable and the Parallels

The interpretation of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16. 19–31) shows both how misleading extra-biblical parallels to biblical motifs can be when misused, and also how enlightening they can be when correctly used. The parable makes use of two major narrative motifs which can be paralleled in other ancient literature: (1) a reversal of fortunes experienced by a rich man and a poor man after death; (2) a dead person's return from the dead with a message for the living. Since Gressmann's monograph drew attention to one important example of (1) – the Egyptian story of Setme and Si-Osiris (together with later Jewish stories derived from it) – much discussion of the parable has been dominated by this one parallel. Both the way in which this parallel has been used in the interpretation of the parable and the restriction of interest to this one parallel have had unfortunate consequences.

Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida by David Anderson

REVIEWS DAVID ANDERSON. Before the Knight's Tale: Imitation of ClassicalEpic in Boccaccios Teseida. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Pp. xiii, 269. $29.95. The title and subtitle give some clue to the book's perspective. It reaches The Knights Tale in the fourth, and last, chapter. Before that the focus has been chiefly on Boccaccio's "creative" and "allusive" transformation of Statius's Thebaidin his Tesetda. Such transformation, Anderson argues, is what Boccaccio was aiming for-not the "faithful reconstruction of the epic genre" which nineteenth-century (and later) critics thought he had failed to achieve. The core of the work, chapters 1-3, seeks to dismantle the "failed epic" argument by attending closely to Boccaccio's "imitative strategy" with regard to Statius. His dealings with formal simile, the theme ofrivalry, and the main action ofbooks 3-6 ofthe Teseida inrelationto thefirstfour ofthe Thebatdare the main subject of the first chapter. The second argues for a very different pattern of borrowing in the Teseida's "books of war" (6-11). The perspective widens in chapter 3, to take account of the epic "model" that Boccaccio was imitating-and suggests, for instance, what the fourteenth-century Thebaidhad in the way of verse argument, summaries, etc., and what the late-classical and medieval commentators on Statius and Virgil can contribute to our understanding of Boccaccio's "transformative" design. The focus on questions of genre is sustained in the final chapter, where Anderson argues stronglyagainstthe still influential view of the Teseida as a "ragbag of narrative motifs and rhetorical topoi awaiting the will of a master tailor" and The Knights Tale as "an exercise in taking the romance out of its epic clothing." Chaucer's tale is thus seen as epic rather than romance-retaining parts of the Teseida that relate closely to the Thebaid and further developing some of the links with Statius. There is a good deal of productive thinking about the medieval epictradition in this account of Chaucer's "collegial and respectful collaboration" with Boccaccio. The end of the discussion, though, disappointingly drifts away from The Knights Tale into a rather ponderous meditation on love, history, and "divisioun." And the end ofthe whole chapter seems breathless and overcrowded. Like the bearers and seekers of "tydynges" in the Domus Dedaly, references to 177 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER seven of Chaucer's works and three of Boccaccio's trample on each other's heels during the last two pages, and it looks rather as if the whole work is being cut short before the man of great authority can have his say. I do not want, however, to give the impression that the structure of Anderson's book is one of whirling wicker. The main discussion, as out­ lined, is buttressed by a good deal ofsolidand useful apparatus. There is no separate bibliography, but full notes and references follow each chapter, and three substantial appendices provide further illustration of the argu­ ment. The first two appendices enable readers to judge medieval attitudes toward epic for themselves, through two accessus to the Thebaid(one of the twelfth, the other of the fourteenth or fifteenth century), while the third appendix shows Boccaccio coming to grips with the text of the Thebaidin what is probably his own commentary in his own copy of the poem. The book also shows a thorough and discriminating command of the secondary literature, including the long tradition of commentary and scholarship on the Teseida in Italian. This makes it all the more surprising that the author's grasp of the language of the primary text is not so secure. He rightly points out(p. 84 n. 10) that the only complete English transla­ tion of Teseida, B. M. McCoy's The Book of Theseus, "contains many errors" -and he could well have here referred the novice reader to A. K. Cassell's list of corrections in MLN 91(1976):164-67. It has to be said, though, that there are frequent occasions when Anderson's own renderings of Boccaccio's Italian are inaccurate. A very basic mistake is "buffeted" for cosse in Tes. 9.31(p. 106, presumably mistaking cuocere for scuotere)-as...

The oriental reception of Greek novels: A survey with some preliminary considerations

Under three headings: (1) Translations, (2) Adaptations, and (3) Creative borrowing, the possible influence of the ideal Greek novel on Oriental narrative literature is considered. The emphasis is on Arabic literature, Muslim or Christian, but attention is also paid to Syriac, Persian, and Coptic literature, in their own right or as intermediaries between Greek and Arabic. Unsuri's verse romance of Vāmiq and ‘Adhrā (11th cent. AD), based on the Greek novel of Metiochus and Parthenope, is pointed out as an actual example of translation; and there is a discussion of what intermediaries (Arabic, Syriac, and/or Pahlavī?) it may have had on its passage from Greek to New Persian. The Christian Martyrdom of St. Parthenope, transmitted in a Coptic fragment and a complete Arabic version, is chosen as an instance of adaptation, whereas creative borrowing is exemplified by stories in the Arabian Nights, in which some narrative patterns, motifs, and points of narrative technique may go back to the Greek novels.

From Meaning Postulates to Narrative Motifs

From Meaning Postulates to Narrative Motifs

From Meaning Postulates to Narrative Motifs

From Meaning Postulates to Narrative Motifs

Making Yourself All Up Again": The Composition of Samuel Beckett's That Time

Like much of the later Beckett, That Time' appears to be an assemblage of reordered fragments from earlier work. Beckett is fond of echoing and alluding to Beckett, and in the earliest, holograph version of That Time he selfmockingly describes a character as "something out of Beckett." To those familiar with the Beckett world, That Time offers few surprises. It features a head, which listens to three memories, some ten feet above stage level, hair flaring "as if seen from above . ..." Both stage image and narrative motifs echo a number of earlier works: Krapp's Last Tape, the funerary Play, especially Not 1 (finished just two years before Beckett began That Time), and ultimately The Unnamable (which very well may be the center of Beckett's work since it is the culmination of much which precedes it and the anticipation of almost all that follows). The play's narrative fragments, labelled, A, B, C, are memories which belong to the visible head (and probably to Beckett as well), and the head listens to these internalized voices which suggest three related stages of the protagonist's life and offer variations on the titular themes of time and memory; "voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me" is the way the internalization is phrased in How it is (p. 7). The image on stage is yet a fourth phase of the protagonist's life, perhaps the body very near-or just after-death, as in Fin de partie. The fragmentation of the narratives suggests both Play and Not I, the latter especially as the voice which recounts memory A, like Mouth, is given to prolonged silences, "not another word to the living as long as you lived ..."(p. (3). The retrospective review of major crises further suggests Krapp' s Last Tape, except for the synecdoche and the fact that the head is apparently not free to select among its recollections. The memories appear to the involuntary, yet so symmetrical that they are neither surreal nor chaotic but conspicuously artful, in the reading if not the viewing.

Traces of Shamanism in Norwegian Folktales and Popular Legends. Religious Reliefs Transmuted into Narrative Motifs

Traces of Shamanism in Norwegian Folktales and Popular Legends. Religious Reliefs Transmuted into Narrative Motifs

Folk Narrative Motifs, Beliefs, and Proverbs in Cervantes' Exemplary Novels

Folk Narrative Motifs, Beliefs, and Proverbs in Cervantes' Exemplary Novels