PETER GRZYBEK
FOUNDATIONS OF SEMIOTIC PROVERB STUDY[1]
The investigation of proverbs in their semiotic aspect
is one of the most gratifying tasks for a
folklorist.
P.G. Bogatyrev (1937: 366)
1. "Simple Form" Proverb: Text, Context,
Function
Although, after all, André Jolles' book Einfache Formen has been "more stimulating than
clarifying" - as Mohr (1956: 321) put it in a survey of
echoes to it - practically any modern investigation of
so-called "simple forms"[2] refers to this most influential study.[3] When Jolles, in 1929, published his book, he attempted to
investigate the various forms which are part of what had
been summarized under the name of Naturpoesie by
Jacob Grimm in the early 19th century. According to Grimm,
Naturpoesie was characterized by the process of Sichvonselbstmachen as opposed to Kunstpoesie, of which the process of individual Zubereitung by a
particular poet is characteristic. For Jolles, then, Formbestimmung and Gestaltdeutung are the
central morphological tasks of literary scholarship, and in
this way he wanted to define the various genres of Naturpoesie in a more detailed manner than had been
done by his precursor, Jacob Grimm. But Jolles' notion of
these terms is, at least from a modern point of view,
misleading: although he was very well aware of his
innovative approach, Jolles remained caught in the Romantic
concept of language. At the same period of time, when, in
Russia, for example, the futurists' and formalists'
concentration on The Word as Such had already passed,
when formalism was already converting into structuralism
(as, e.g., in the manifest by Jakobson/Tynyanov from 1928),
language, for Jolles, was still an "anthopomorphic deity",
"Goddess language", as Klemperer (1930: 405ff.) phrased it
in his review of Jolles' book. It is exactly for this reason
that Jolles himself, who tried to trace back the various
simple forms to particular mental impulses or activities
(Geistesbeschäftigungen), closed the way which
might have led to a Formbestimmung in the strict
sense of this word, in spite of the
theoretical-methodological novelty of his question: "Leading
back the concrete manifest simple forms to a Geistesbeschäftigung, the linguistic poetic code
characteristic of these forms is transferred into the
metaphysical sphere, and it is made inaccessible to an
empirical-poetological investigation" (Kanyó 1981:
75).
Practically at the same time, a somewhat different line
of thought was developed by the two Russian scholars, Roman
Jakobson and Petr Bogatyrev. In a similar way to Jolles,
they too, argue in favor of a predominantly synchronous analysis of folklore in order to
determine both common and distinct traits of folklore and
literature. As opposed to Jolles, however, they do this with
an explicitly functional orientation, strictly
rejecting genetic questions. Instead, the notion of the
"preventive censorship of the community" is central to their
approach: "In a word, in folklore only those forms remain
which prove to be operative within the given community"
(Jakobson/Tynyanov 1929: 143).
The approach advanced by Jakobson and Tynyanov opened the
way for two important perspectives in analysing simple
forms: first of all, we obtain the possibility of actually
providing a Formbestimmung of a simple form's text on a synchronous level (which, of course,
implies a notion of language as a basic means of interhuman
communication), and secondly, it allows the investigation of
its function. Unfortunately, however, Bogatyrev's
call for the investigation of proverbs in their semiotic
aspect, promoted as early as in 1937, remained practically
unheard until the late 1960s.
The full text of this
article is published in De
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1:1995, an
electronic book, available from amazon.com and other leading Internet booksellers.
Still, these two terms, text and function, should focus the semiotic study of proverbs, if a proverb is
to be understood as being a particular text to which a
particular function is ascribed or attributed within a given
culture.
Proverb research, at the time of Jolles, was still in a
relatively poor state. Quite typical is the statement of
Archer Taylor, who introduced his seminal book The
Proverb with the words: "The proverb and related forms
have long been objects of general interest and the occasion
for many books, but they have attracted little serious and
thorough study" (Taylor 1931: vii).
Modern investigations like to refer to Friedrich Seiler's Deutsche Sprichwörterkunde (1922) as the first
serious philological investigation of the proverb.
Interestingly enough, however, it was Jolles himself who
argued against Seiler's definition of the proverb as
"self-contained sayings current among the people, which are
of didactical tendency and of above-standard form", and who
rejected this definition as being incorrect and
unsatisfying. If a proverb actually has a "didactical
tendency", Jolles argues, has one to understand this as
being a necessary (obligatory) or possible (facultative)
quality? If proverbs are current in the Volksmund, how can one then accept Seiler's confession that there may
be proverbs which are common in the whole folk, and others,
which are known only in a particular village, district, or
group? Additionally, and mainly, for Jolles, a proverb is
"the form, which concludes an experience", and therefore it
is essentially oriented to the past, whereas Seiler ascribed
a moralistic-didactical (and therefore future-oriented)
tendency to it.
Many years later, Mathilde Hain, in her empirical
"folkloristic-sociological" investigation of the proverb,
tried to solve the discrepancy between these two viewpoints
by pointing out the general irrelevance of such an absolute
dichotomy. Showing that the strict either-or of experience
or morale cannot grasp the essence of the proverb, Hain
provided evidence for the essential polyfunctionality of the proverb. She did not, however, refer to the
theoretical concept of polyfunctionality, as it had been
developed in Czech structuralism with regard to language in
general, and by Petr Bogatyrev, with regard to folklore in
particular. Still, with her empirical orientation, Hain
entered a new field at least within the German-speaking
area, although Firth, who was later to become a leading
representative of functional cultural anthropology, had
referred to the importance of proverb context as early as in
1926, when he wrote: "The essential thing about a proverb is
its meaning,- and by this is to be understood not merely a
bald and literal translation into the accustomed tongue, nor
even a free version of what the words are intended to
convey. The meaning of a proverb is made clear only when,
side by side with the translation, is given a full account
of the accompanying social situation, - the reason for its
use, its effect, and its significance in speech" (Firth
1926: 134).
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The description of proverb meaning is, as was stated
above, not possible without reference to contextual factors.
Yet, it seems most reasonable, as Peter Seitel (1969, 1972)
argues, to take into consideration the importance of context
only as a potential, or virtual factor, and to abstract for
heuristic purposes from all contextual elements (such as
number, age, gender, social status of the involved persons,
etc.), and to outline the "ethic frame" of proverb use. The
heuristic model of proverb use developed by Seitel is based
on the central assumption that the situation in which a
proverb is actually used (the interaction situation) is not
identical with the situation inherent in the proverb text
itself (the proverb situation), and that both of them are
not or need not be identical with the situation the proverb
refers to, i.e., the situation to which it is intended to be
applied (the context situation[*4]). Thus, when
uttering a proverb, "the speaker asserts that the
relationship between the things in the proverb situation is
analogous to the relationship between the entities in the
context situation" (Seitel 1972: 147). Therefore, proverb
usage is related to two distinct, though closely related
processes, namely "the process of relating proverb situation
to context situation and the speech act of applying the
proverb in an interaction situation" (ibd., 240). The
distinction of the different types of situation involved in
proverb use can be summarized in the following schema:
Figure 1:
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Partially, such newly created proverbs can be technically
generated with the help of a computer. Baevskij (1970) made
such an attempt; as his starting-point he chose the logical
class K = P _ Q on a "semantic" level, syntactic
kernel formulae such as 'He ...who', 'Where
...there', and others, on a "morphological" level, and
integrated exclusively "traditional Russian" lexical items
in form of antonymic verbs with particular metrical
characteristics, on a "lexical" level. Thus he indeed got
proverbs such as, e.g., As you sow, so shall you
reap, and the like. Such a model can only work, however,
as long as the semantic oppositions implicit in the second
level of signification are realized in an equivalent form on
the first level of signification, too. In order to generate
proverbs such as A watched pot never boils, and many,
many others, one further utopic precondition would have to
be fulfilled: The whole stock of all possible and
conceivable realia, including all the associations and
connotations tied to them, additionally structured in their
hierarchy, would have to be included in a thesaurus. Thus
one need not agree with Permyakov's assumption that one can
easily understand a proverb of any culture without ever
having heard it before - this presupposes (in addition to
language knowledge, of course) at least the knowledge of all
relevant associations and connotations, and also perhaps
some knowledge about usage adequate to the relevant
situations.
All these considerations, however, go far beyond the
question of how proverbs, or proverb situations, are
modelled. These considerations are very similar to those
which were discussed in the beginning of this article. It
turns out to be true that the ultimate meaning of a proverb
cannot be predicted from the description of the modelled
proverb situation, or, in other words, that the description
of a modelled proverb situation cannot adequately grasp all
concrete (or possible) meanings of a proverb in a given
interaction situation.[7] Yet,
one can, retrospectively, subsume all actually realized
meanings of a proverb under the model advanced by Permyakov.
And this is one of his fundamental achievements, namely to
have provided a framework able to describe these possible
proverb situations in a consistent system. Further questions
may be added.
Permyakov's system has suitably been called a
"Mendeleevian proverb table" (Kharitonov 1969) - a
formulation which adequately points out both the general
character of this model and the scientific exactness which
it aims at. On the other hand, Permyakov's conception has
been called a "hocus pocus system" (Krikmann 1971, Kuusi
1972), and it has been opposed to Kuusi's classificational
schema which has been termed a "God's truth system". Such an
evaluation has been derived from Permyakov's claim to
describe all actually existing and all possible
(conceivable) proverbs within the framework of his model
(Permyakov 1968: 42), and from the existence of so-called
"free cells" within this system. Such "free cells", however,
are well-known in linguistics, in particular in the field of
phonology (cf. Martinet 1955; Revzin 1978: 109ff.). The
juxtaposition of "God's truth systems" and "hocus pocus
systems" originally has been promoted in linguistics, too.
Householder (1952: 260) characterized this juxtaposition as
follows: "On the metaphysics of linguistics there are two
extreme positions, which may be termed (and have been) the
'God's truth' position and the 'hocus pocus' position. The
theory of the God's truth linguists [...] is that
language 'has' a structure and the job of the linguist is
(a) to find out what the structure is, and (b) to describe
it [...]. The hocus pocus linguist believes that a
language (better, a corpus, since we describe only the
corpus we know) is a mass of incoherent formless data, and
the job of the linguist is somehow to arrange and organize
this mass, imposing on it some structure [...]."
Roman Jakobson has repeatedly pointed out that such a
controversy is ultimately useless, and that the reason for
its discussion has to be seen in the fact that phenomena of
language have to be described with its own means, i.e.,
meta-linguistically (Jakobson 1962: 276). Householder (1952:
260), too, admits that ultimately it seems to be rather a
question of ideological-philosophical differences in
approaching one and the same question, partially arriving at
identical results, and he confessed, "it may be that these
two metaphysical viewpoints are in some sense equivalent."
That this observation directly concerns Permyakov's and
Kuusi's models, too, has been pointed out by Voigt (1977:
167): "Kuusi directly departs from the given material, and
he tries to arrive at the same results as Permyakov has,
with the help of the deductive method."
One may discuss how far Permyakov's approach actually is
a deductive one: firstly it has been developed out of the
merely practical need to work out a consistent system of
organizing a proverb collection, and it has been constantly
verified, modified, developed; secondly, his system is based
on the analysis of more than 50,000 proverbial sayings of
more than 200 cultures. In his approach, as in any
scientific approach, deductive and inductive ways of
developing scientific models cannot be strictly separated,
and they have to complement each other. Scientific models,
however, are secondary modelling systems too, being
superimposed on natural language, and the question of which
model finally turns out to be the "more correct" one, is
ultimately a question of adequacy and consistency, which can
only be proved when applied to the phenomena being
modelled.
The adequacy of Permyakov's theory then, being a model of
(proverb) models, will have to be verified in investigations
to come. In any case, due to the consistently semiotic
approach in Permyakov's works (or in the works inspired by
him), Permyakov has, on the one hand, succeeded in solving
many questions in an innovative way, and, on the other hand,
he has brought up another set of questions, the answer to
which we will (hopefully) get only in the course of the
years to come, but, probably, not without reference to
Permyakov's work.
5. Notes
-
-
The present text was originally
published in German as the introduction to the Semiotische Studien zum Sprichwort - Simple Forms
Reconsidered I (Grzybek, ed. 1984). An updated
version of that text was then published in English in Proverbium. An International Yearbook of Proverb
Scholarship, vol. 4 (1987); 39-85; I am sincerely
grateful for David Beal's friendly help in "anglicizing"
that text.- Except for minor stylistic changes, the
English text has been deliberately left mainly unchanged
for the present edition. The text thus basically reflects
the author's view as it was at that time. Those few
necessary alterations which imply either essential
modifications or additions, have been marked by an
asterisk ['*'] throughout both the text and the
footnotes, and they may easily be recognized.
-
Due to convention, the German term
"Einfache Formen" has been translated as "simple forms"
throughout this paper, although Taylor's (1962) proposal
"primary form", ultimately, seems to be more
suitable.
-
Cf., for example, Sprichwörter - Analyse einer einfachen Form (Kanyó 1981), Simple Forms - Einfache
Formen (Kanyó, ed. 1982), Semiotische
Studien zum Sprichwort - Simple Forms Reconsidered I (Grzybek, ed. 1984), Semiotische Studien zum
Rätsel - Simple Forms Reconsidered II (Eismann/Grzybek, eds. 1987), Simple Forms. An
Encyclopaedia of Simple Text-Types in Lore and
Literature (Koch, ed. 1993).
-
On the basis of this standpoint, it
is easily possible to explain why a proverb such as Rolling stones gather no moss can "actualize"
rather heterogeneous connotations in different cultures
(cf. Milner 1969a,b; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1973; Ruef
1983).
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Peter Grzybek
Institut für Slawistik
Karl-Franzens-Universität
Graz
Austria
Forum
