290 Book reviews

Senft, Gunter, 1985a. Weyeis Wettermagie - Eine ethnolinguistische Untersuchung von fiinf wettermagischen Formeln eines Wettermagiers auf den Trobriand Inseln. Zeitschrift fur

Ethnologie 10(l): 67-90, 10(2) Erratum. Senft, Gunter, 1985b. Trauer auf Trobriand - Eine ethnologisch/linguistische Fallstudie. Anthro-

pos 80: 471492.

Senft, Gunter, 1986. Kilivila. The language of the Trobriand Islanders. Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter. Siikala, J., ed., 1990. Culture and history in the Pacific. Helsinki: Finnish Anthropological

Society.

Wason, David (producer/director) and Annette Weiner, 1990. The Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea. Disappearing world series. Granada Television of England. London and Man-

chester: Granada Television.

Umberto Rapallo, Metafore animali e mondo eroico nel ‘Cantare di Aneirin’. Pisa: Giardini, 1989, 218 pp. Lit. 40.000.

Reviewed by Enrico Testa*

The compilation of elegiac, lyrical and epic poems known as the Canu Aneirin (CA) is an outstanding representative of all the pre-Norman British literary tradition. It is an exemplary text for the greater Cymric area, which is much wider than present-day Wales. The CA text poses several textual problems: its relation to the previous oral tradition; its estimated date (possibly 12th century, with some parts from the 9th or 10th); and, above all, its obscure language, which at times makes understanding and translating very difficult. In order to answer some of the queries listed above, mainly those concerning lexical structure, Rapallo (henceforth: R.) has chosen an innovative approach. Seeking to define the all-important role of the ‘hero’ considered as a “Privatfi-

gur of suffering and moral significance” (p. 20), he examines the animal metaphors as defining factors in the functional economy of CA.

The aim of this operation is not only the examination of the animal imagery pertinent to the ‘heroic’ ideal in Celtic culture, but, above all, a better understanding of the narrative and of the discourse structure of CA. The author advocates an interactionist view of animal metaphors, which aims at an understanding of their links with other figures of speech, attributes, formulaic expressions, and in general, with any outstanding contextual refer- ence. The premise in R.‘s work is that recurrent animal metaphors are markers of coherence and cohesion in the overall structure of the text; this assumption enables him to explain the most obscure areas of CA, to trace the texture and wholeness of the text, and to determine “l’intenzionalita dell’

* English translation by Mafalda Stasi. Correspondence to: E. Testa, Universita per stranieri di Siena, Piazzetta Grassi 2, I-53100 Siena,

Italy.

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autore o della tradizione nei riguardi di un’ideologia dell’ ‘eroe’, i modi di presentazione e di caratterizzazione dei personaggi, i riflessi di una realta storico-sociale in uno spazio concrete e in un precise tempo storico” (p. 23) [‘the gradient of intentionality in the author’s or in the genre tradition’s attitude towards the mystique of the ‘hero’; the ways of presenting and of delimiting characters; the reflections of historical and social reality in relation to a concrete space and a precise historical time’]. The ordinary connecting models of Textlinguistik, which don’t work with a poetic text like CA, full as it is of semantic gaps and polysemic words, are not the basis for R.‘s perspective. It is thus possible for him to effect a total methodological U-turn: he assumes that the therionymic metaphors constitute the imagery core of the lyrical discourse, function as an isotopic path and play a key role for the continuity of meaning. R.‘s text analysis is not restricted to the formal analysis of the texture by means of the metaphoric network. In general it follows three stages.

The first is an intrinsic analysis of the animal metaphors: in relation to their immediate co-text and to their contiguity with non-metaphoric expressions referring to animals, in relation to other (non-animal) meta- phors and to other figures of speech. On this background he can define various figurative fields (e.g. ‘food’, ‘religion’, ‘society’, ‘colours’, etc.), and highlight therionymic pairs, in which the equivalence of the terms is established by their simultaneous occurrence and shared properties and symbolic functions. The author examines the frequent transitions between different figurative fields and the etymological density of therionyms; whereafter he draws up a network that links semantic fields, and sheds light on fundamental traits of textuality in CA. This happens, for example, with the attributes of the hero as a wolf (bleidlbleidyat). Drawing etymolo- gical links with blawdd (Cymr. ‘fear’) and blawd (Cymr. ‘flour’, ‘meal’), they reinforce an ambivalence which reflects traditions and contacts bet- ween different languages and cultures.

The analysis of the difficult term (1)lew is representative of R.‘s approach. Often it is not possible to determine whether lew is meant to be the lenited form of glew ‘warrior’ (non metaphoric), or lew ‘[hero]-lion’, ‘[hero]-lynx’, [hero]-raven’, (metaphoric and polysemic). In face of the several levels of textual structure, the author does not choose a single interpretation of the term and follows all the tangled paths leading to different interpretations. This is not due to indecision, but is done out of respect for the different layers of the text structure, and for the pattern of overlapping sign@ata in the apparent linearity of the text (see p. 67): “Al centro dell’attenzione e la rete paragrammatica de1 CA, con le sue correlazioni di suono e di senso, a sottolineare la vitalita della parola nella dinamica de1 testo, come totalita della predicazione e strumento della coerenza transfrastica” (p. 70) [‘Centre of attention is the paragrammatic network of CA, together with its sense and

292 Book reviews

sound correlations; this evidences the vitality of words in the textual dyna- mics, in the total of predication and as instruments for transphrastic cohe- rence’] .

Two apparently opposite operations thus converge: the metaphors interlock in knots crucial for textual cohesion, realizing a “common plan” in the interpretation of CA. At the same time it is possible to systemize several problematic aspects of the “parallel background of the text” (p. 67). Before moving towards a description of this background we must advance another step in methodological formalization. The second crucial moment in the analytical procedure aims at finding linguistic correlations and intertexts, progressively widening its scope from the Cymric and Celtic (both insular and continental) to the Celto-Germanic and generally Indoeuropean and finally even touching the non-Indoeuropean area. A great deal of space is in fact reserved for biblical calques, as proof of the syncretism of pagan and Christian elements, typical of Celtic religiosity (see especially pp. 138-139).

In a larger perspective, the discovery of intertextual relations leads to a reading of CA based on the reconstruction of the grain of the text’s allusions to an indefinite number of other texts in other languages (see p. 199).

This position presupposes a semiotic highlighting of the receiver’s role (but it never yields to a deconstructionist reading completely removed from the text), and implies the analysis of an extremely high number of possible intertexts, and the unearthing of millenary contacts and interferences between different languages and cultures. The zoomorphic metaphors of the hero become in this way polyphonic nuclei of discourse configurations, knots of an extremely wide cultural diachronic and diatopic network. This approach becomes most prominent in the third and last stage of R.‘s work. Here he carries out an extrinsic analysis of zoomorphic metaphors in CA, using anthropological data. We find here extralinguistic data from mythology, folklore, history of religion, archaeology, etc. This leads to the establishment of ethnographic contexts, where traits and occurrences of metaphoric value in animals’ names can be collected.

Together with the first two stages of the analysis, this procedure tends to fill the information gaps caused by the apparent discontinuities in the text, and it is supported by two basic methodological principles. The first one springs from the proposition that textual semantic rules refer not only to a strictly linguistic meaning but also to a cultural one. Thus, as in Soviet semiotics, the language of the text is equated with a speech act, and the historical cultural creative system with a language (see p. 120). The second principle overturns in a way the proposal of Meillet and Benveniste (1969: 179) regarding the value of lexical evidence for the reconstruction of prehistoric religious culture, and establishes the need for a move in the opposite direction: “non e senza rilievo il case opposto in cui una cultura religiosa, preistorica e storica, vada a sostegno dell’interpretazione lessicale dei testi, specialmente nei casi in cui

Book reviews 293

questa incontra difficolta insormontabili sul piano della ‘lingua linguistica’” (p. 194) [“the opposite case, in which a religious, prehistorical and historical culture supports the lexical interpretation of a text, especially when there are insurmountable problems at the level of ‘linguistic language”‘]. This passage is not without consequence: just as the analysis of animal metaphors of the ‘hero’ in CA passes from the linguistic to the translinguistic domain, it re- enters an absolute and global vision of meaning (see Barthes 1985: 295): sense as a connotation embraces all and every inter- and extratextual correlation (see p. 79 and p. 194).

In a difficult balance between respect for the autonomy and the structures of the text on one side, and a system of multiple decodifications on the other, it is possible to find some middle ground where many of the limitations found with the extreme positions can be overcome, somewhere between the irregular drift of the signzJ?ant and the rigid disciplinary boundaries of classificatory study. This approach, tending towards a polyphonic representation of the text, is especially valuable with a work like CA, where the structure of meaning is finally recreated through a paradoxical notion of text; it cannot in fact be conceived as a ‘closed’ entity, but as a reality in progress, whose stages of approximation grow and expand through the examination of the animal metaphors of the ‘heroes’, interpreted with the contribution of data ranging from the co-text to near and far contexts.

This methodological prerequisite allows the figurative sequences of CA to retain their multiple significance (stemming from the clustering of anthropolo- gic and mythic “concentrates of predication”, p. 53) and not to reach an all too easy explanation of obscurities in the text from external and situational factors only. As R. puts it, the lexical crux is mainly due to the implications of a poetic discourse which suggests much more than it says (p. 200) and that makes ample use in its structure of the principle of ‘parallelism’. This is the principle ultimately connected with the frequent secondary mimologisms (or cratilisms) (see Genette 1976), that is, sound or sense correlations that poetic discourse projects at a surface level with a double structure (see p. 197) and that reinforce the metalinguistic component and the manneristic taste so notoriously prominent in most of Celtic literature.

It is clear, from what has been said so far, that the linguistic thought at the root of this book (in some parts close to Hagege 1985) is removed both from the classic, Saussurian dichotomies and from the extremist positions (with their negative consequences) so often assumed in the contemporary debate. Avoiding any simplistic treatment in the dynamic interpretation of linguistic phenomena, focussing on perspectives both linguistic-comparative and interlinguistic, on values and functions of literary writing, on the role of the receiver and on the intricacies of meaning, Metafore animali e mondo eroico nel ‘Cantare di Aneirin’ is highly recommendable as an example of linguistic analysis which takes into account the complex relationship between language, history and culture.

294 Book reviews

References

Barthes, Roland, 1985. L’aventure semiologique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Benveniste, Emile, 1969. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes. 1. Economic, parent&

societt; 2. Pouvoir, droit, religion. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Genette, Gerard, 1976. Mimologiques. Voyage en Cratylie. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Hagege, Claude, 1985. L’homme de paroles. Contribution linguistique aux sciences humaines.

Paris: Libraire Artheme Fayard.