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A Few
Words from the Editor
This may be the oddest issue of Praesidium ever
published. The off-beat, of course, need not be synonymous with the
uninstructive (except perhaps to empirical science, where only the
repetitive has interest). Once upon a time, I developed an intriguing
article about oral-traditional style over a period of several years
following my dissertation work which explored the clustering of narrated
events in threes. I knew of no other study quite like mine, so I was
excited about its reception. Only as the ever-more-polished paper met with
constant stiff rejection did I begin to suspect that the very novelty of
my thesis was proving to be its ruin. I had discovered, in other words,
that what commonly passes for scholarship—the journal refereed by a
select group of recognized experts (recognized by younger
"experts" who have successfully borne a mentor’s theoretical
banner through the killing fields of academic employment)—does not brook
dissent. The system is not primarily designed to uncover latent truths:
the system is designed to keep proving, per saecula saeculorum,
what is not really provable, to begin with, but acquires the fixity of
truth once a generation has sung its litany.
My revenge is to publish that odd article on the very
odd number three here and now. Students of literature will perhaps enjoy
the discussion of Homer and the Celtic Middle Ages. More general readers
of the journal whose interest is drawn to the "culture wars" may
find that my comments following the article proper are grist for their
mill. We all know that the ivory tower is tumbling about our ears; yet few
of us, I think, realize that even the most insistently backward-looking
disciplines of the troubled humanities are more committed to preserving a
certain ideological pecking order than to sustaining a Western tradition
where the notion of the classic nestles.
Classic: I was aware that the word had been
applied to Coca-Cola, but only this spring did I learn that it also has
special meaning to fans of Star Trek! Those who know me even
through the impersonal medium of a year or two’s issues of Praesidium
may well be shocked to see the journal carry two analyses of the popular
TV series. In the first place, these are very good analyses, though they
also radically disagree. In the second place, they radically disagree—an
exercise almost always enlightening in matters of taste! Finally, I
realize that I am quite isolated in my indifference to science fiction,
and I am unwilling to deny readers the pleasure of these essays simply
because I have never sat through an hour of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock in
my life. I recall as a teenager having to seek out an obscure corner of
the house so that I could follow a BBC detective serial called Man in a
Suitcase which was scheduled (to its ruin, of course) adversarially to
ST. Now there was moral reality! A slandered and wrongfully
dismissed CIA agent trying to make a buck in a foreign country by cleaning
out the dirty closets of the rich and the powerful without drawing
attention… and getting shafted by his employers more often than not,
just like old times in the Agency. Ariosto would have enjoyed that one—for
Ariosto, I must explain, sits high on my list of moral realists.
It occurred to me, of course, that fortune had again
conspired against me in bringing to the journal a rare science-fiction
submission for the last issue but none for this one. Mr. Davies’ very
sad story about a professor shot down in his tenure review, however
(actually about the consequences of this catastrophe), may well turn out
to be the better choice for the Summer issue. I say this because the short
story raises questions about the academy’s fairness and efficiency
which, though posed from a different angle, jibe with my own essay’s. To
my mind, the most elite and research-oriented institutions are as deeply
mired in careerism and self-aggrandizement as is the political hack’s
pasty wade to power. To Mr. Davies’ mind, apparently, the smallest and
intellectually least pretentious campuses feature exactly the same kind of
egotism operating with more or less the same measure of lethality. That
makes a pair of bookends: cynical assessments of the system around visions
of men in tights boldly going where none has been before. Is the truth
some blend of these extremes? Are not both extremes, rather, true at the
same time—homo paradoxicus longing to touch alien fingers over
Barnard’s Star even as he circulates uncharitable tales about his rival
missionaries?
May the heaven beyond our intrepid starships protect us
all from each other—and from ourselves!
J.H.
A disclaimer: The "Evangelus University"
which appears in Mr. Davies’ story is fictitious and in nowise an
allusion to schools of a similar name (of whose multiplicity the author
was ignorant while writing).
back to Contents
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How
Never to Write a “Scholarly Article”:
On Falling Afoul of Academic Bigotry
by
John
R. Harris
Postmodernists are fond of writing stories within stories—or at
least of writing about them. I
offer below an article within an essay.
I instantly reassure the reader, however, that my purpose is not
“metacritical” or otherwise cutely ironic.
I am in grim earnest. My
opinion of the academy’s conventions for screening articles submitted to
any of its myriad journals—lest anything but the most “cutting-edge”
work find its way to publication—could not well be more grim.
The quotation marks of my title share in this sobriety.
I do not intend to rail at the scholarly article from a
humorist’s remove: I intend to indict the system behind it of patent
fraud.
The occasion of this piece was my return to the undergraduate
classroom and, specifically, my teaching once again of Homer’s Odyssey
in the context of a sophomore survey.
Several years earlier, while still held captive by the naïve
notion that I might earn tenure though publishing worthy articles (in
fact, publication only ever earned me antagonism on the small campuses
where I taught), I composed an article about triadic structures deeply
embedded in the plot of traditional texts like the Homeric epics.
I argued that a persistent trebling of narrative events of a
similar sort must have helped Homer to complicate his tale while
remembering where he was amid all its folds.
I argued, further, that structuring a plot with triads is a common
oral-traditional technique around the world.
I offered my evidence. The
case seemed to me compelling—and maybe just a little too facile.
How could something so transparently true have passed unremarked
since the days of Maurice Bowra and Milman Parry?
Yet the article was repeatedly rejected—and not for saying the
obvious! What upset me far
more than its failure to find a home were the terms of the rejections.
The anonymous referee of the highly respected Oral
Tradition, for example, sniffed that the paper was “deeply
disturbing”—as if proceedings should be initiated to repeal my
doctorate, or at least force me into a five-step program.
I hadn’t the resources at my disposal which an Ivy League
professor enjoys—the libraries, the research assistants, the grant money
and time off from teaching. I
knew full well that many of my efforts were sophomoric.
But I found “very disturbing” very disturbing.
Shortly thereafter, I allowed the paper to yellow away in a file
cabinet, from which I retrieved it only this Spring, after about a decade.
I had a great craving to read it all over again; for, as I came to
Homer once more, my mind cleared by a lay-off of years, I found that the
article’s argument made more sense to me than ever.
In fact, I had discovered new evidence for my case as my group of
undergraduates read through the Odyssey
in English. There it lay,
right on the surface: one needn’t even read Greek to find it.
Yet reputed scholars had insisted over and over that it wasn’t
there at all—and I have no doubt that they would do so today.
I have reproduced below the text of this ill-fated article for Praesidium’s
readership. Many of you, I
know, teach a survey class similar to mine, and a few of you (such as
Professor Bertonneau) are not novices to the body of theory surrounding
oral tradition. I consider it
a worthwhile endeavor to elicit responses from sensible people who labor
“in the trenches”. My
mature verdict about the whole business is, in fact, that the paper was
rejected for reasons having nothing whatever to do with Homer or the other
texts discussed therein. Having
once presented it (and I have introduced only a few changes into the
original version), I shall conclude by naming the forces I suppose to be
at work. I will anticipate
those final remarks only by saying that the academy imposes a sweeping
worldview upon its variously focused searches for the “truth”—a
complete ideology—and that any investigation which conflicts with
mainline dogma is… well, “very disturbing”.
This kind of supercilious sophistry operates even within Classical
Studies, a discipline which basks in a reputation of relative objectivity and rigor: it
most certainly pervades the rest of the Humanities, as well, and has been
known to leave its stain upon the Sciences.
Structural
Triads in Homeric Epic and Other Traditional Narratives: A Case for
Mnemonic Utility
I
The prominence of triads in such well-known products of folk
tradition as Grimm’s Fairy Tales
strikes even the most casual and untutored of readers.
Many of us must have remarked the magical presence of threes in
such stories even before we knew how to read, if we were lucky enough to
have been weaned on fairy tales.. The
reason for these riots of threeness, however, is anything but
transparent.. In the case of
certain cultures, such as ancient Celtic civilization, a quasi-religious
significance clearly attaches to the number three; but in other
traditions, triads persistently crop up without any discernable religious
justification. It might seem
tempting to conclude that the number three simply fascinates the human
mind. Yet many scholars have
derided this conclusion as needlessly mystical or denounced it as
ethnocentric. The oral works
of certain non-European cultures, they warn, bestow upon other numbers the
importance enjoyed by threes in the West (e.g., Dundes [“Number Three”
and Hansen). The fours of
American Indian myth and lore or the fives of
China
are often cited to repudiate the universal magnetism of the triad.
Such objections are intimidating.
In his eloquent preface to a collection of classic essays dedicated
to exposing ethnocentric views, Alan Dundes wrote, “It is difficult to
doubt the validity of one’s own native categories of cognition.
Far too often such cultural categories are projected to the point
where they are considered categories of nature rather than categories only
of a single culture…. Of
equal importance is the fact that cultures also serve as barriers between
peoples, often interfering with, if not preventing, meaningful
communication” (“introduction” vii).
Without doubt, the traits which distinguish people—even two
individuals—are innumerable (the very title of Dundes’s anthology, for
instance, might be labeled sexist). Yet
surely this is why one must eventually return to formulating
generalizations; otherwise, all the amassed circumstantial differences so
dear to the scholarly comparatist become a barrier as immense as
unexamined prejudice. Indeed,
to argue that the brains of native Americans or Chinese work differently
from those of white Europeans is potentially to indulge not only in
ethnocentrism, but in the racism of asserting, “They just don’t think
like us.”
I would contend that the academic community has come to consider
the particular issue of trichotomy from just such a narrow perspective.
Several years ago, Classical
Journal carried a stimulating series of exchanges on the subject of
threes.
W.F. Hansen’s argument that the employment of triads results
entirely from cultural conditioning seemed to enjoy a kind of victory by
default, since no immediate response challenged his observations.
As if to concede an empirical vulnerability without relinquishing
an intuitive resistance, Lawrence Giangrande recently opined in the same
journal, “My own answer to ‘Why three?’ consists of three reasons.
It is charming, traditional, and I like I, despite its
non-universality” (66).
Since Giangrande’s final words come very close to surrender,
however, I believe the issue deserves to be re-opened.
Is the mystique of threeness truly a mere cultural accident?
In what follows, I wish to offer a particular demonstration and to
make a general point. The
particular case primarily concerns the Homeric epics.
By analyzing their structure, as many hundreds of scholars have
done, one may find evidence of a marvelously simple method of composition
which most of those scholars have chosen to overlook, perhaps due to its
very lack of complexity: i.e., the triadic stucturing of narrative events.
Inasmuch as the number three is neither overtly mentioned nor
plainly visible in this function, a deliberate religious or mystical
invocation of its powers seems very unlikely.
Rather, I would conjecture that the Homeric bard employed triads
(at least originally, before our texts were recorded) because they, like
the formulaic phrase, assisted him in recalling and ordering a vast amount
of matter during oral performance. Twos,
of course, would have been more easily recalled than threes to the extent
that memory favors brevity, and Homer paired scenes quite often for
reasons connected with oral performance.
Yet the plurality of two is ambiguous, suggesting comparison or
contrast on a single basis (the double-edged sword, the two sides of the
coin, etc.), whereas three things offer an unequivocally multiple
prospect. They create a sense
that the full range of possibilities has been measured (and in ancient
Greek, of course, the dual number was not
plural in form: only three or more objects were discussed with plural
inflections). An array of
three happenings also contributes a stronger sense of suspense—of
approaching climax—than would two occurrences.
Hence the triad would have served the Homeric performer as the most
reliable means of pleasantly complicating a narrative without losing track
of the complications: it is the least forgettable form of manyness.
In this capacity, it really needs no religious or sociological
conditioning to account for its attractions.
Essential human logic is enough.
The complexity which devoted Homerists like to see in their author,
certainly exists, to be sure: triadic structuring seems a simple, if not
simplistic, mnemonic device only in abstract.
A short tale with a patently threefold structure would be the work
of an amateur. A bard like
Homer who had arranged his triadic reference points carefully could
indulge in numerous excursions around them, thereby drawing the
audience’s attention away from their naïve design.
Furthermore, when one visualizes this evolving, intricate role of
triads in oral narrative, one need hardly wonder that threeness should
often have acquired a religious value.
Sacred tales about gods and heroes would naturally come to have a
threefold motion, which would (in the better tales) appear coyly, almost
magically hidden under the narrative’s surface.
Added to the logical qualities of the number which rendered it
memorable, this gradual association with orally communicated myths must
have elevated the three to an especially reverend status.
At the very least, utility and sanctity would have complemented
each other, for revered objects are less easily forgotten than incidental
ones.
In thus conflating the number three’s power to stir emotion and
to serve practical necessity, I may seem to be clouding the issue to the
logical, literate minds of our academy, which revel in fine distinctions
and excel at descrying them. Yet
I contend that the triad’s ritual and mnemonic aspects would have drawn
strength either from the other, symbiotically: three was useful because it
was special and special because it was useful.
The culturally conditioned and the rationally ordered, the
preemptive and the adaptive, the sacred and the profane, are categories
which distance us from oral culture more than they render it
comprehensible to us. In an
oral culture, there is no
distinction between theory and application, properly speaking: there are
only particular reenactments of the cosmic.
In Mircea Eliade’s elegant terms, “An object or an act becomes
real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype” (Myth
of the Eternal Return 34).
To conform to the ritual is to be practical, for the surest way to
get things done is to do them in the pre-established pattern.
II
I am not referring to such obvious and decorative triads in Homeric
epic as Diomedes’ three attempts to slay Aeneas through Apollo’s
protection (Il. 5.436-37) or
Telemachus’s three attempts to string his father’s bow (Od.
21.125-26). These threesomes
(like most of those, by the way, which Perry listed impressively to
inaugurate CJ’s ongoing
discussion) are named explicitly and incidentally rather than enacted:
they certainly do little to cement the plot together or to add suspense.
At most, they emphasize a plurality of efforts while, perhaps,
infusing just a trace of tension or expectation. Fritz
Göbel’s study (cited approvingly by both Dundes and Hansen) treats
triadism almost exclusively at this level.
Even the highly literate Vergil could appreciate the efficacy of
three as epic garnishment (e.g., Aeneid
10.685—and, naturally, Aeneas and Odysseus both try to embrace a
parent’s ghost three times). The
rhetorical conventions of both Greece and Rome fully acknowledged the
power of ostentatious threesomes to insinuate an artificial multiplicity
into the supporting evidence. Plato’s
Socrates knows that three points prove the case and that three
embarrassing questions exhaust the other side’s credibility (cf. Republic
1.332c-335d). Aristotle’s Rhetoric
favors resonantly threefold groupings right from the start (e.g., the
judge’s three feelings in 1.1.5, the three reasons for framing clear
laws in 1.1.7, and the three services of rhetoric in 1.1.12).
The author of the Ad
Herennium often practices triadic argumentation (e.g., the highly
stylized charge against Ulysses in 2.19.28-30 or such florid examples of
figures as those involving epanaphora and paralipsis in 4.13.19 and
27.37). As for Quintilian,
whose monumental Insitutio Oratoria
is perhaps more devoted to a philosophy of education than to the practical
stages of good oratory, his teaching and thinking are nonetheless prone to
trichotomy. In one brief
section (2.4.22-33), for instance, he mentions three examples of vice
often denounced in commonplaces, the three kinds of thesis, three problems
with writing out speeches beforehand and memorizing them, and the three
kinds of law. To find Homer
similarly using threes in order to impress upon his listeners a plural
conception is hardly surprising—his abstaining from the practice would
have been far more so.
With some persistence, however, one finds threefold order on a much
broader scale. In the Iliad,
three Achaean heroes—Diomedes, Patroclus, and Achilles—rout the
Trojans irresistibly at different times.
There are three duels in which an Achaean and a Trojan champion
represent their side before a passive audience.
The provocative Thetis appears thrice to her son, if we may view
her return in book 19 as a continuation of the previous book’s encounter
(the description of Achilles’ shield separating the two scenes is
doubtless a late accretion, ingeniously spliced into the visit); and Zeus
pontificates from his throne to the assembled Olympians on three crucial
occasions. All of these
triads are thoroughly obscured by the superficial action of the story and
the sheer distance dividing their members.
They do not exist to be worshiped, admired, or even noticed by the
audience, but they could easily have reoriented the struggling performer
to the general scheme of his vast undertaking; for, obscure as they are to
the casual observer, they are vital to the plot.
Each aristeia is a
little more concentrated and ferocious than the last, leading up to
Achilles’ greatest of triumphs. Similarly,
the duel between Menelaus and Paris looks rather comical beside that
between Ajax and Hector, while the Achilles-Hector match provides the
epic’s climax.
Thetis’s intrusions motivate every major turn of events, from the
jeopardy into which the Achaean campaign falls to Achilles’ resumption
of arms to the poignant surrender of Hector’s body; and Zeus, having
pledged to support Thetis (book 1) and forbidden the gods to assist either
army (book 8), finally ordains that Hector should receive a decent funeral
(book 24) and so resolves the plot’s ultimate tension.
Such clusters of significant events solidify the narrative’s
skeleton at a depth where formularization could scarcely have penetrated.
Whether or not our Homer—the poet who engineered the surviving Iliad—consciously
used triads in this capacity is another matter.
He may well not have done so, but their vestiges suggest that his
predecessors had found them helpful.
The Iliad contains still
other triads which feature a fine orchestration of minor events for easy
recall. In book 6—a small
masterpiece of characterization—we see the noble Hector from three very
different female perspectives: first his moth Hecuba’s, then the ever
enigmatic Helen’s, and finally his wife Andromache’s.
The exchanges which pass between Hector and each woman reveal a
generous amount about the four characters and about Homer’s notion of
human nature (a quintessentially classical notion, owing much to the
traditional sense of cycle and limitation).
These scenes must surely have captivated any audience.
While not indispensable to the plot, they offer a sympathetic look
at the trauma of a long siege and at the tragic tendency to underestimate
looming miseries even among the afflicted.
The episode’s triadic nature may have helped to insure that it
would be correctly passed along. When
Hector’s corpse is returned to Troy in book 24, the same three women—Andromache,
Hecuba, and Helen—succeed each other in eulogizing the slain hero.
Their speeches are again powerful, as powerful as any great
narrator could have desired for his tale’s closing moments; and the
threefold bundle is just a little easier to carry in memory, even if the
poet who added these final touches was more writer than reciter (which
seems unlikely).
The Odyssey shows the
Homeric poet relying much more heavily upon triads than in the Iliad.
The greater density of triadic structuring here is hardly
surprising in view of the Odyssey’s
lesser degree of historical resonance, political significance, and formal
religious orthodoxy. The Iliad
projects a quasi-national struggle of east against west.
It reveals a nascent sense of ethnic consciousness in the
collaboration of several more or less legendary Bronze Age kings, and the
bard would have outraged both traditional and evolving values in radically
changing its story. There
were names to be applauded, customs to be observed, and—in short—egos
to be curried. The sea
adventures of Odysseus, in contrast, are rich in popular lore which the
bard might have reshaped, multiplied, and displaced with little fear of
stirring indignation.
If, as some have implied, the Odyssey
contains fewer blatant inconsistencies (cf. Page on Iliadic
contradictions, 297-340), then the main reason may well be that the
performer was freer to put the stamp of his individual genius upon its
matter.
The story viewed as a whole immediately displays triadic
structuring. The first twelve
books neatly halve into the medias
in res scene-setting on Ithaca and Ogygia (which includes the
so-called Telemachy) and Odysseus’s recounting of his adventures to the
Phaeacians. This leaves a
rather oversized third member to occupy the tale’s entire second half.
Yet the hero’s homecoming could easily have been told as a yarn
unto itself, and indeed also breaks into a definite triad: the appearance
of a disguised shipwreck whom Eumaeus succors, of a disguised beggar whom
the suitors abuse, and of a declared king who metes out justice.
In fact, if I may focus (in rambling epic manner) upon
the second half first, I would stress that it has benefited from an
extraordinary degree of subdivision into memorable clusters of three.
Odysseus passes three days (counting his mid-morning arrival
inclusively, as the Greeks would have done) with the swineherd Eumaeus,
then three more scouting out the situation in his palace and exacting his
revenge. In his beggarly
guise, he is insulted three times by the suitors, twice when Antinous and
Eurymachus hurl stools at him (17.462 and 18.394) and once when Ctesippus
flings a pig’s hoof his way (20.299).
There are three impudent rascals from the lower social orders, as
well—the upstart goatherd Melantheus, the overbearing beggar Irus, and
the sharp-tongued servant girl Melantho—who try the hero’s patience at
successive points in the narrative. Three
good servants, on the other hand, are to be found in the nurse Eurycleia
and the herdsmen Eumaeus and Philoitius, each of whom has a private
encounter with the returned master (though the meeting with Philoitius in
book 20 is much the least dramatic in our Odyssey).
Odysseus has three living family members to confront in Telemachus,
Penelope, and Laertes. These
scenes of recognition are each rendered quite distinct by the
circumstances and personalities involved, making them among the epic’s
most memorable passages. Homer
handles the slowly mounting tension and gradually emerging characters of
his tale’s second half with truly remarkable finesse.
The ready points of reference within his triadic groups would have
assisted him handily in orchestrating so delicate a crescendo.
Triadism is particularly prominent in Odysseus’s long Phaeacian
yarn—a rather self-conscious triadism, apparently, based on the
rhetorical principle of increasing members wherein the last element is
markedly more developed than the first.
The hero relates two brief encounters with the Cicones and the
Lotos-eaters before weaving a more elaborate tale out of the Polyphemus
incident; he continues with two brief episodes involving Aeolus and the
Laestrygonians, then has an especially long stay in the land of Circe; and
finally he skirts the Sirens and barely escapes Scylla and Charybdis only
to be delayed nightmarishly where the tempting Cattle of Helius graze.
The longer adventures themselves display a threefold division.
Polyphemus murders and devours members of Odysseus’s crew on
three occasions before he is outwitted, the encounter with Circe is
actually two encounters framing the trip to Hades (which trip, by the way,
presents Odysseus with three distinct classes of spirits: minor
individuals—three of them—with news or requests, heroes who fought at
Troy, and illustrious women), and the Cattle of Helius are structurally
the first element in a
catastrophe which sees the remaining crew members destroyed and Odysseus
himself nearly sucked into Charybdis.
Even the hero’s stay on Scheria contains several triadic
components. Odysseus spends a
total of three days with the Phaeacians.
His first day is punctuated by meetings with Mausicaa and her
maids, with the goddess Athena (from whom he has recently been estranged),
and with Queen Arete at Alcinous’s court: three august women.
The second day (book 8) is also split into three scenes, moving
from Alcinous’s palace to the athletic contest to the palace again.
All in all, these retrospective books feature the kind of runaway
trichotomy that looks too good to be true and leaves one spinning naively
mystical explanations—or, in despair, mistrusting his own counting.
The mnemonic explanation, on the other hand, may seem less
satisfactory here then elsewhere, for books 9-12 are relatively free of
plot intricacies and have little direct bearing on the main plot.
The poet could have strung together whatever maritime adventures
occurred to him or appealed to him without apprehending any great risk to
the narrative as a whole. It
might also be argued that most of the Odyssey’s
few points of incoherence arise precisely from the strange indifference of
these four books to the rest of the epic, and that triadic structuring,
therefore, has notably failed to impose that order which I have
hypothesized as its purpose. Circe
forces Odysseus to visit Teiresias in Hades so that he may learn what
awaits him back home—but Teiresias’s advice (11.100-137) is neither
specific nor optimistic, and Odysseus assumes a beggar’s guise in Ithaca
to find out the same information, in any case.
Furthermore, Athena, our hero’s guardian angel, is conspicuously
absent throughout these narrated times of crisis, and her excuse in
13.341-43 rings true only for the adventures which succeed Polyphemus’s
blinding.
My answer is that oral tales have innumerable versions, and the
poet of our Odyssey is clearly
selecting and tailoring the traditions for the sake of creating one great
narrative. The marvelous sea
adventures of Odysseus might well have exhibited a fairly taut coherence
in another telling which was entirely occupied with them; in that telling,
they might well have received such elaboration that triadic structuring
was necessary to keep pieces from being mislaid.
We know that Odysseus’s exotic travels were so popular that they
survived in translations which ignored or severely distorted other parts
of the tale (e.g., the medieval Irish Merugud
Uilix).
If we consider the material in the broadest possible context—not
that of Homer’s Odyssey, but
of recurrent themes in folklore around the world—we find that an immense
popularity surrounds stories about seductive witches, spirits in limbo,
and cannibalistic ogres (cf. Mondi).
Hence there is every justification to believe that the sights and
deeds in Odyssey 9-12 were
often told, embellished, and supplemented by Homer’s predecessors.
The triads identified above would have been much less ornate and
much more serviceable under such circumstances.
I note here that the foregoing discussion is not remotely a complete
catalogue of triadic groups in the Odyssey.
For instance, Athena appears thrice to Odysseus disguised as a
young inhabitant of a new land (7.19-20, 13.221-24, and 16.155-58).
The council scenes in books 2 and 16 are built around three suitors
as speakers. The list could
grow quite lengthy.
Yet in proceeding to later ages, we observe that triadic structures of this
sort quickly disappear from the Greek narrative tradition as it becomes more
firmly based in literacy. The
dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, not to mention the highly literate
Euripides, have no such structuring despite a frequent debt to the Trojan
War cycle. Apollonius’s Argonautica
relates the same kinds of seafaring tales as the Odyssey,
yet lacks a single instance of triadic ordering; and Vergil’s Latin Aeneid,
which reproduces many of Homer’s explicit threesomes (as mentioned
before) in a much more imitative pursuit of the epic Muse than the
neoteric Apollonius’s, nevertheless wholly overlooks the master’s
threefold structuring. Were
triadism dictated exclusively or primarily by a peculiar cultural taste,
its absence from these later texts would be incomprehensible.
Not much controversy has been stirred by the assertion that dyads
exist in Homer for reasons connected to those which I have offered to
explain triads. In a now
classic work, A.B. Lord observed that the Odyssey
often employs two “parallel” sequences of action—parallel both in
the sense of one episode’s mimicking another within the same narrative
(e.g., Telemachus’s sojourn in Sparta and Odysseus’s in Scheria) and
in an intertextual sense (e.g., the disguised homecomings of Odysseus and
Orestes). Lord theorized that
the oral poet, having a recent or frequent version of the sequence fixed
in his mind, would naturally repeat it to some degree under the pressures
of live performance when narrating a similar episode (172-77).
This tendency appears prominently on the level of single formulae
or short clusters of phrases: one need hardly be surprised, then, to find
it embedded in the plot. Subsequent
scholarship has emphasized the conscious art which may be discerned in
Homer’s dyadism. Besides
rendering his matter more easily recalled the second time around, the dyad
would also offer him the opportunity of underscoring significant
similarities between different characters, and even of suggesting ironic
differences between similar situations (cf. Kirk’s contrast of Il.
3 and 7).
These explanations of dyadism, in both their utilitarian and their
artistic implications, apply equally well to Homer’s use of structural
triads. Indeed, to the extent
that the triad arranges a greater volume of material and multiplies the
opportunities for foils and contrasts, it suits the reasoning advanced
above even better. We seem to
discover a new dimension to the Homeric poet’s subtlety every time we
carefully analyze one of his mnemonic stratagems.
Scholars have already redefined his creativity over the past four
decades in response to Milman Parry’s challenge.
It should be stressed, therefore, that the mnemonic employment of
triads would actually have enhanced an oral bard’s powers of finesse.
With the assistance of such structural support, he would have been
freer than ever to think ahead to the next phrase, the next line, and the
next narrative twist. The
best critical studies of the verbal formula have stressed its gift of
liberation within restriction—not unlike what the sonnet does in the
hands of a skillful craftsman. L.C.
Muellner’s assessment of the formula’s virtues could easily be
extended to Homer’s use of triads: “Formulas are not cliché’s,
receptacles of cant, or merely convenient phrases to help a faltering
poet. They are metrical
combinations of words in which the heritage of the primordial past could
achieve its highest potential for the expression of living poetic
meaning” (140).
In the same way, threefold structures are very far from
non-dramatic, unwieldy vestiges of crude narration.
Properly speaking, the bard’s choice was between a simply tale
and a more elaborate tale—not between a tale organized triadically or
after “realistic” variation of plural encounters.
Since any good narrator desires his story to have a certain
intricacy, the recollective help of the triad must truly have been an
artistic breakthrough. We
have seen how adroitly the Odyssey
poet integrates several such structures at once to generate tension.
The need to remember multiple elements of the plot is only a need
in the first place because multiplicity so often serves the end of a
well-told story.
It is worth adding that the presence of threesomes, to the extent
that it was ever evident yet not evidently relevant to the tale (as
through religious invocation), would scarcely have outraged the earliest
audiences of any oral tradition. Modern
notions of relevance are heavily influenced by our scientific mentality,
which has little patience for imaginative (or “subjective”, as we say)
associations between events. Members
of a mythopoeic culture would have exercised far more leniency in
determining what might or might not have caused ta particular condition or
occasion. To their mind,
nothing which happened in the stories of the gods, demigods, and heroes
could be merely utilitarian, even if we may demonstrate to our own
satisfaction today that it was so. The
“ornamental epithet” and the “mnemonic triad”, rather, would
belong to that level of the cosmos where ultimate truth is expressed.
Seen from this vantage, what we would consider largely practical
features in the tales and crafts of simple hunter-gatherers or unlettered
fishermen would already have appeared vaguely sacred to them from the
beginning—the antelope-horn cup, the whalebone keel—and would grow
more so as both they and their culture stabilized and developed.
“By manifesting the sacred,” wrote Eliade, “any object
becomes something else, yet it
continues to remain itself, for
it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu.” (Sacred
and Profane 12). The
reverse of this is also true: that which participates consistently in its
surrounding cosmic milieu manifests something of the sacred, for the
sacred is none other than that which penetrates existence, day in and day
out.
III
The issues surrounding trichotomy may be elucidated by comparing
classical Greek with medieval literature, but they also become even more
complicated in several respects. Triads
were long ago and are to this day brilliantly apparent in Celtic folklife.
Narrative, social custom, superstition, and religious ritual all
exhibit a persistent triadism, which is confirmed in each particular area
by its prominence in others. Some
of this persistence may be attributed to extrinsic influences rather than
to native oral traditions and beliefs.
To be sure, the oral past, substantial and fertile, clearly
shimmers through the pages of many extant manuscripts composed in Irish
and Welsh monasteries. The
Celtic scribes who consigned their ancestral lore to paper were uncommonly
tolerant of paganism (by the standard of the day), despite their own
monastic calling.
Yet they nonetheless tended to insert, delete, and rearrange, as
did all scribes of their era. Hence
their writings are a less-than-accurate record of waning orality, unlike
Homeric epic, seasoned heavily with allusions to Catholic liturgy and the
Trinity. Such compositors can
prove surprisingly erudite, often self-consciously so to the point of
derailing a simple tale in a wealth of references.
The threefold arrangements which, prima
facie, seem obvious remnants of an oral heritage are just the modest
sort of flourish by which a scribbling monk might have directed audiences
toward his new faith.
This is certainly not to say that a peculiarly oral triadism may
not be detected in ancient Celtic literature.
Indeed, it has often left extraordinary and unequivocal traces.
The Welsh Trioedd Ynys
Prydein (Triads of the Isle of Britain), finally written down by some
subversive scribe in the early Middle Ages, features dozens of threesomes
which have emerged from centuries of oral tradition (Bromwich lxx-lxxvii
and Stevens 598-99). A few of
these are versified and answer to Morgan’s description of a distinctive
folk genre. Most, however,
are quite blunt; and we must assume that, rather than constituting an
artistic endeavor in themselves, they merely connect similar themes or
motifs to assist the storyteller’s or historian’s recollective effort.
“Their actual form suggests that they were preliterate,” claims
Rutherford, “as triplets of this kind would have been a convenient
mnemonic for those who had to memorize them” (48); and the evidence in
favor of his argument is most persuasive.
We know that the master story-teller of preliterate Wales, the cyfarwydd,
memorized voluminous lists of triads in the process of learning his craft.
They were, in effect, indices or all the major tales—and many of
the minor ones—for which he would be held accountable.
The narrator of the Mabinogion
occasionally cannot resist orienting his matter within some time-honored
triad of this kind. For
example, at the end of Branwen
Verch Llyr, he tells us that the burial of Bendigeidfran’s head was
one of the Three Happy Concealments, its disinterment one of the Three
Unhappy Disclosures, and the slap to Branwen which began the tragedy one
of the Three Unhappy Blows.
To be sure, an adept oral performer would seldom have used the
triads in this otiose, self-promoting manner. Again,
what we see, even in the Four Branches of the Mabinogion
(the ancient core of the work), is a quasi-literate, or transitional,
reportage of essentially oral matter.
Triadic name-dropping of the
kind just mentioned seems especially self-conscious and remote from oral
technique. Perhaps the author
in these instances simply wanted to pay homage to the narrative tradition,
or perhaps he wanted to show off his knowledge of that tradition. In
either case, it would seem more likely that the exhibitionist was truly
the literate scribe rather than someone in the line of oral transmission,
since a tradition is usually in jeopardy when scribblers feel moved to
advertise loyalty to it or strut knowledge of it. Yet
the scribes are not above taunting their oral predecessors at times. The
recorder of the Breudwyt Ronabwy
(Dream of Rhonabwy) declares in open triumph at the end of his work that
no one can repeat its lengthy, detailed descriptions—none of which
displays triadism—without his written text.
(The gray area of transition
is discussed eloquently by Hainsworth and Nagler, above all.)
The use of triads merely to shepherd similar themes for convenient
storing remains one of their humbler functions in oral narrative, at any
rate, and indeed seems largely confined to Celtic culture. Far
and away the most common service which threes perform in such narrative
lies in organizing its actual plot structure. Here
one must examine individual tales with a magnifying glass, for the number
three is seldom mentioned explicitly.
To turn to the Mabinogion
once again, the tale of Branwen
is itself constructed in three parts: the princess’s ill-starred
marriage, her brother’s expedition to Ireland, and the marvelous
experiences of the survivors. A
triadic order supports the story’s excursive appendages along with its
trunk, as well. For instance,
Bendigeidfran feasts Matholwch for three nights at Aberffraw, first on
Branwen’s wedding night and then twice after Efnisien’s insult.
The other tales of the Mabinogion’s
original core—those about Pwyll, Manawydan, and Math—reflect the same
kind of threefold structuring.
Pwyll
Pendeuic Dyfed divides neatly into the episodes of Pwyll’s
substitution for Arawn, his courtship of Rhiannon, and his recovery of
their kidnapped son. Upon
closer inspection, we again find smaller triadic clusters of action, such
as Rhiannon’s three mysterious appearances on horseback. As
a matter of fact, the tale of Pwyll turns out to be a relatively weak
example of triadic order, since it seems to originate in a dyadic “solar
myth” of death and rebirth.
Manawydan’s story, by
contrast, so abounds in threefold adventures that the tracing of them all
would prove intolerably tedious here.
As I have suggested, three episodes or events can be easily
remembered, whereas four might be too many to handle and two would hardly
yield the desired dramatic amplitude.
Some of the Welsh triads are altogether too transparent, however:
surely they advertise themselves as well as—or instead of—bringing
intricacy to the plot. Particularly
in such intermediate tales of the Mabinogion
as Llyudd a Llefelys, one finds
triadism without pleasing complexity.
In this case, the story is quite brief and the plagues to be
dispelled quite superficially introduced.
Could such grouping be more cultic than mnemonic?
The late Georges Dumézil, more than any other, is associated with
the notion that Indo-European cultures have a predilection for threes in
their mentality based upon their peculiar socio-economic order.
According to Dumézil, “la tripartition en magiciens-juristes,
guerriers, éleveurs-agriculteurs” holds the secret both to the history
and the myth of these civilizations (7).
Whatever one thinks of Dumézil’s theory (which itself is
probably influenced by cultural predilection, the Celtic consciousness),
both ancient and medieval, was indubitably conditioned to regard the
number three as special. On
the other hand, a medieval text’s awkward, ostentatious use of triadism
is no proof that an oral precedent did not integrate triads much more
functionally into the story line. Perhaps
Lludd a Llefelys is a
scribe’s skeletal recollection of an oral performance, or even a
performer’s shorthand: the writer recalls the memorable groups of three,
but does not labor to reproduce the artistry of their presentation.
His assumption may well have been that future readers would
embellish as the bare text refreshed their memory, and he may well have
been correct. Though A.B.
Lord asserted in The Singer of
Tales that literacy immediately shakes off orality, he was later to
recant this position, and the Middle Ages are its obvious and irresistible
rebuttal. An era wherein
writing tries to negotiate a spoken heritage before declaring a fully
independent technique may drag on for generations and achieve remarkable
stability. Nagy has stressed
of the Celtic Middle Ages that “most of what ‘happens’ in these
literary texts, on the levels of both form and content, is directly and
even self-consciously expressive of this clash” between oral and
literate style (368). In the
slightly different context of Old English literature, Renoir repeatedly
warns that “we should exercise caution in guessing the rapidity with
which earlier societies might have crossed the boundary line between
preliterate and literate culture” (58).
In short, it would be equally surprising if the Mabinogion’s
scribes had expurgated all traces of oral technique and if they had
preserved it fully and accurately.
By way of reaffirming the complex relationships within the Welsh
material, let us briefly consider the Old Irish tradition.
In Ireland, story-telling followed much the same course as it did
in Wales, except that corresponding tendencies are even more ancient and
exaggerated (cf. Bromwich lxiv-lxvii).
The Irish fili, too,
would have committed to memory a ling list of triadically arranged themes
(some of them the same as the cyfarwydd’s)
in the process of becoming a professional.
These triads are sometimes cited rather ostentatiously in the texts
recording the ancient Ulster Cycle: e.g., a late manuscript containing the
Tochmarc Emire, of Courtship of
Emer, refers to Cú Chulainn’s Three Harnessings of the Sickle-Chariot,
and the Aided Con Culainn, or
Death Tale of Cú Chulainn, mentions the Three One-Horse Drives of Ireland
(Van Hamel 63 and 116). Once
again, we are by no means certain that the fili
himself (as opposed, say, to a pedantically show-off monastic) was
responsible for such name-dropping; yet it seems fairly obvious that, like
his Welsh counterpart, he used triadism liberally in the structuring of
the plot. A medieval
transcription of the Táin Bó Cúalnge
in the Book of Leinster (LL), for instance, features threefold action
throughout, and is generally agreed to stem from a lengthy oral tradition
(cf. O’Rahilly xii-xiv). The
Macgnímrada (or Boyhood DeedsO
of Cú Chulainn recounted by Fergus to Medb and Ailill includes the
following three adventures (LL
739-1217
)). The young Cú arrives at
Emain Macha to dazzle Conchubar with his prowess; then he slays the
ferocious hound of Culand, winning himself a sobriquet thereby; and
finally he takes a warrior’s arms for the first time, and episode which
is itself tripartite and one of whose elements involves Cú’s defeating
the three sons of Nechta. Later
on,. The sorceress Morrígan assumes the form of three different animals
in an effort to wound Cú Chulainn, only to be maimed each time herself
(LL1989-2011); yet she quickly manages to wheedle a threefold blessing
from him in still another shape, and so is cured (LL2103-2113).
The climactic context between Cú Chulainn and his foster-brother,
Fer Diad, builds to its tragic finish over three days of matching strength
against strength (LL 2606-3596).
These examples are among the most apparent, but scarcely begin to
make up a complete tally. While
other versions of the Táin may
not produce the same list of triadic structures, they share the Book of
Leinster’s respect for this technique of organization.
That different manuscripts should present differing accounts only
emphasizes the utilitarian, non-ritualistic side of triadism in the Irish
tales. An oral teller could
most surely get lost in so many episodes, and he had most surely inherited
some conflicting accounts.
Now, if triadism thrives here as in the Welsh texts because the
number three is uniquely memorable to Celtic bards for its cultural
implications, the technique should thrive even better in the early
Christian era. Christianity
was grafted onto Celtic paganism quite readily in many ways, and the two
traditions would certainly have reinforced each other’s reverent
affection for trichotomy. Nevertheless,
just as Apollonius’s literate romance abandoned the threefold ordering
so pervasive in Homeric epic, so the romances which conclude the Mabinogion—Peredur,
Gereint, and Owein—display
little of the triadic structuring so evident in the Four Branches.
For instance, Enid warns Gereint of attacking brigands three times
despite his command to be silent—and then does so yet a fourth time the
next morning; and the otherworldly fountain of the last tale is violated
three times, but Owein’s further adventures observe no such order.
These Welsh romances are written narratives, conceived to be read
(though probably aloud, and to others) rather than recited.
Their style resembles that of Chrétien de Troyes (who wrote
romances about the same three heroes, and may even have influenced the
Welsh author) rather than distinctly threefold tales of Branwen
and Manawydan.
Their ancient Celtic origins notwithstanding, they have little
traffic with threes simply because they have left mnemonic concerns far
behind.
In Ireland, too, virtually the same decades that produced the last
records of the Ulster Cycle saw the arrival of utterly new matter from
Greco-Roman antiquity by way of continental popularization.
The late medieval translations of Vergil’s Aeneid,
Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and
Statius’s Thebaid into Irish
are fairly true to their originals. The
Irish Merugud Uilix, however,
does not remotely resemble Homer’s Odyssey;
the Togail Troí is equally
un-Homeric, and in general those romances based on Greek mythology are an
impossible tangle of garbled transmission.
Even such renditions of contemporary matter as we find in the Eachtra
Mhelóra agus Orlando’s evocation of Ariosto share no significant
similarity with their nominal sources.
Except for adaptations of Latin epic, then, these stories have been
written and rewritten with the utmost license (from the perspective of
modern translation). The
Irish authors, no doubt relishing a new degree of freedom, have introduced
many native stylistic peculiarities, such as an exuberant alliteration
during sequences of heated action (a touch found abundantly even in the
Irish Aeneid).
Yet triadism of any sort—and here is the critical point for our
discussion—is almost entirely absent.
The single relevant difference between the new romances and the
manuscripts of the Ulster Cycle is also the explanation of this vacuity:
the romances had not reached scribal hands through a purely oral medium at
any point. The scribes did
not record triadic structuring because they had not encountered it in
their sources and did not need it in their re-tellings; and they had not
encountered it and did not need it because triadic order is a mnemonic
device of use only in oral performances.
We shall never reconstruct the precise chain of
events which gave many medieval Celtic texts their recorded form.
Yet I would conclude this section by hearkening to a much more
recent Irish story-teller—Tomás Ó Criomhthain—of whose tales we
sometimes have both oral and written versions. The
contrast observable in Tomás’s narrative technique was reviewed in a
recent paper. I offer here a
single instructive instance. “Tóír
an Chiosa” (Collecting the Rent) was first told verbally to Robin Flower
for publication in the collection, Seanchas
ón Oileán Tiar (131-35). Tomás
himself would later write down the incident in An
t-Oileánach.
Both versions relate how the women of the Great Blasket Island once
drove away the police sent by their landlord with a ferocious pelting of
stones. In Tomás’s
dictation, we learn that the official steamboat tried to land its launches
at three different points without success, being anticipated at the first
two points by a mob of stone-wielding females.
The third site on the island’s windward side is simply
inaccessible due to rough weather, though several men drench themselves in
a vain attempt to come ashore. The
three landing sites may be a clue of orality.
They structure the first encounter in a pleasantly(for there will
be more, of course) complicated yet easily remembered pattern, the first
two members of which are quite similar and the third of which follows an
alternate scenario (like several of Homer’s triads: e.g., the Paris/Menelaus
and Hector/Ajax duels and the climactic Hector/Achilles duel).
Upon this tripartite episode ensue two more, which are rather less
violent and bring the story to a morally uplifting fulfillment as if it
were something near to a parable. Both
subsequent episodes involve what are now errands of mercy to the
impoverished islanders. A
boat leaves from the mainland town of Dingle again, this time bearing
sympathetic observers who marvel at the misery of Blasket life.
The encounter ends peacefully as a boatload of staple goods
arrives. Three more boats of
foodstuffs follow—a triadic flourish of no narrative importance, since
the three missions take place without incident and are mentioned
concurrently. In the
story’s final adventure, the gentry in Dublin, moved by the accounts of
abject poverty which have reached them, send an agent west to view the
situation. On his
recommendation, the relief effort continues.
The exciting confrontation between armed officials and the
island’s womenfolk is thus kneaded into a somewhat rambling narrative
full of conventional moralism. The
account which Tomás wrote later in chapter 6 of An
t-Oileánach (59-61) is stunningly different.
A young Tomás is now an active participant in the excitement,
assisting in the collection of stones for the women to hurl, and his point
of view as a narrator is accordingly quite limited.
As the steamboat’s first launch reaches the strand and stones
begin to fly, the boy sees a young officer cock his gun ominously… but
the trigger is never pulled, and the unwanted visitors retreat.
There are no second and third attempts to land on other
beaches—just a second attempt to land along the same shore.
Many of the characters have a more rounded personality and (in a
literate sense) more realism in this version.
As for the subsequent errands of mercy, they, too, dissolve into
“realistic” detail. The
next authorities from the mainland are not conscience-stricken by the
poverty they see but beguiled by the islanders’ trick of hiding all but
the most sickly livestock. The
final visitors are a group of health officials whom the islanders
similarly delude by jumping clothed into their beds and feigning illness.
Hence the triadic structures of the Seanchas
version have been virtually discarded.
Instead of three distinct landing sites, the more reflective
autobiographical account mentions three launches which attempt two
landings in unison at the same site; and instead of two subsequent
episodes which reintegrate the violent original encounter into a communal
ethos, the last two vignettes are caustic barbs aimed at a foolish,
self-righteous gentry. At
least one of the two versions must simply be untrue if both are judged by
literate standards of accuracy. We
would progress farther toward an understanding of the oral mentality,
however, with its concatenations of similar events and its ultimately
serene moral vision, if we would concede that the Seanchas
yarn has a truth of its own. The
triads provide a rhythm and an amplitude to this vision.
In an oral idiom, they say that the tale’s optimism is not
haphazard or premature, but based upon a patient, thorough experience of
life. They are not mystical
symbols: they are straightforward assurances that the picture before us is
complete. Might Homer’s
triads not have had a very similar kind of origin?
IV
A culture-wide gravitation to a certain number which once met
largely practical needs may also account for the tetrads of virtually all
American Indian societies. These
foursomes are often cited to prove that threes cannot have the universal
attraction which Europeans love to discern in them.
Yet Amerindian oral tales employ triads in the same menner as did
the Celtic and Greek narratives, if somewhat less frequently.
The phenomenon of Amerindian tetradism, then, does not so much
rival triadism as coexist with it. For
whatever reason, the Celts had elevated triads to occupy an exalted
religious role as well as a humble mnemonic one.
Amerindian culture exalted a different number to occupy the most
visible and—in a sense—superficial position in its art and rites.
Perhaps the four seasons clearly observable in most parts of North
America (the cradle of this culture in the Western hemisphere) exercised a
decisive influence. Or
perhaps the origin of these tetrads was more rational than circumstantial.
The number two is at least as deeply embedded in the human mind as
three. Indeed, three may be
viewed as a working compromise between the polarized absolutes of the
dyad. Another way of
resolving such a polarized worldview would be to pair off two such poles.
At the same time, the tetrad, as a group of two twos, might be seen
as a celebration of the cosmos’s essential dyadism, just as three groups
of three crop up commonly in the Old Irish tales.
Without indulging in further speculation, we may simply declare
that the tetrad holds a special fascination for Amerindians which
manifests itself brilliantly throughout their oral traditions. Such
passages as the following (from a Brule Sioux myth which clearly serves to
explain existing rituals) seem as exuberantly fourfold as the Celtic
tradition is threefold.
Iyan
Hokshi closed the entrance of his little lodge with a flap of buffalo
robe, so that no air could escape or enter. Pouring
water from the bag over them, he thanked the rocks, saying, “You brought
me here.” Four times
he poured the water; four times he opened the flap and closed it. Always
he spoke to the rocks and they to him. As
he poured, the little lodge filled with steam so that he could see nothing
but the white mist in the darkness. When
he poured the water a second time, he sensed a stirring. When
he poured the water a third time, he began to sing. And
when he poured the water a fourth time, those dead, dried-up things also
began to sing. (Erdoes and
Ortiz 19)
Sometimes other numbers add variety to the tales (Iyan Hokshi
happens to have five uncles), yet four is not only preferred in all
explicit contexts, but specially revered in religious or ritual scenes. Every
North American Indian tradition documents this phenomenon. Four
seems to hold the key to the rhythms of the universe. It
is not merely aesthetic: it is holy (to the extent that a mythopoeic
culture would have distinguished the two). The
passage below (also from a Brule Sioux tale) addresses the metaphysical
even more directly than the one just cited--and the tetrad is even more in
evidence.
“With this holy pipe,” she said, “you will walk like a living
prayer. With your feet
resting upon the earth and the pipestem reaching into the sky, your body
forms a living bridge between the Sacred Beneath and the Sacred Above. Wakan
Tanka smiles upon us, because now we are as one: earth, sky, and all
living things, the two-legged, the four- legged, the winged ones, the
grasses. Together with the
people, they are all related, one family.
The pipe holds them all together.
“Look at this bowl,” said the White Buffalo Woman.
“Its stone represents the buffalo, but also the flesh and blood
of the red man. The buffalo
represents the universe and the four directions, because he stands on four
legs, for the four ages of creation. The
Buffalo was put in the west by Wakan Tanka at the making of the world, to
hold back the waters. Every
year he loses one hair, and in every one of the four ages he loses a leg. The
sacred hoop will end when all the hair and the legs of the great buffalo
are gone, and the water comes back to cover the earth.”
(Erdoes
and Ortiz, 50)
As riddled with mystical foursomes as the White Buffalo Woman's
instructions are, however, we must not fail to notice that, even here, a
triad intrudes. The body
“forms a living bridge” between earth and sky: there
is no fourth member. The
conception of a culture hero interceding between earth and sky (sometimes
interpreted as the earthy and celestial components of human nature) occurs
in oral traditions around the world.
Amerindian raconteurs, then,
are no more immune to the triadic logic of mediation than anyone else. Furthermore,
they are not above using threes to impart a sense of plurality or urgency,
as Demosthenes or Cicero would have done. The
triadic cry of Komashtam'ho in a Yuma tale, “Wood, come into being!
Wood, come alive! Wood, come here to where I stand!” (Erdoes and Ortiz,
79), builds to a rhetorically effective climax. And
when the Navaho gambling-god Nahoilpi fumes in one telling, “I will kill
you all with lightning. I will send war and disease among you. May the
cold freeze you! May the fires burn you! May the waters drown you!”
(Matthews 96), the third element of his curse is itself a triad. Such
threesomes occasionally graduate to the status of aphorisms, it would
appear, as has so often happened in the European tradition. The
protagonist of a Sioux tale, for example, finds out that "a vision
comes as a gift born of humility, of wisdom, and of patience" (Erdoes
and Ortiz, 72).
Indeed, the native Americans of some areas have bestowed upon the
triad a little of that aesthetic/religious recognition usually reserved
for tetrads. The prehistoric
inhabitants of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico worked triangular motifs into
the basically square patterns of their pottery (at a time several
centuries before the first European’s explosive arrival). Many
tribes of this southwestern region still employ such motifs in their art
(Stiles 40-76). A thousand
miles farther east, the engineers of the Mississippian mounds, which in
many respects seem monuments to the square (cf. Hudson 220-21) and which
antedated the European onslaught by about as much as Chacoan civilization,
have left occasional evidence of a tendency to construct in threes.
It appears that the plateaus on top of the mounds were either
rendered rectangular or were occupied by rectangular buildings, and the
mounds themselves are often squared against the four points of the compass
with marvelous accuracy; yet the number three has nonetheless been
admitted into the sacred equation on a few sites.
Again, one cannot contest that, as a matter of cultural
circumstance, Amerindians find foursomes to symbolize cosmic truths more
effectively than threesomes. Hence
the number four is mentioned explicitly, and even ritually, in many of
their tales, whereas the word "three" occurs very seldom. Furthermore,
since tetrads are (as one might say) on their minds, Amerindian raconteurs
frequently organize the essential plot structure of their stories into
fours. The favoring of one
number over the other, however, is ultimately a question of degree. Threes
have by no means been ignored in the art and ritual of this culture, as
some would have us believe. Since
my objective is to establish only the triad’s utility in oral
story-telling, let us examine how threefold structures support the
minutiae of especially complex performances, in Amerindian culture as
elsewhere.
There is no dearth of recorded tales which demonstrate this
practical reliance upon triads beneath the reverend and highly visible
adornment of the tetrad. While
a given tale, viewed as a whole, is likely to consist of four episodes,
one or more of these episodes may well display a threefold order if it
happens to be especially long and involved. In
a Seneca story about a young lad reminiscent of Cú Chulainn, the boy-hero
is forbidden by his father to seek adventure in each of four
directions--which he proceeds to do, anyway, overcoming a more ferocious
ogre on every new foray. The
second and longest episode pits him against the giant Stone Coat. This
monster he duly slays after three—not four—trials of strength and wits
(Erdoes and Ortiz, 22-3). Similarly,
a Blackfoot tale about the boy who brought horses to his people from an
enchanted land is ostensibly tetradic in style and organization; but the
boy’s journey to the Great Mystery Lake takes him past two smaller
lakes, making an obscure but convenient triad. The
distance between each of the lakes demands four-times-four days of
walking, and, once at his destination, the boy must watch four days for a
chance to ensnare the spirit chief. He
is instructed, however, to ask the chief for three gifts. The
much-coveted Elk Dogs (i.e., horses) are granted, as a result, and the
chief assures him that they will approach docilely if he retraces his
steps for four days. Yet he
receives three commands to be followed at various stages of his return
journey: to trust in his magic clothes without looking back, to ignore the
horses when they first appear, and to catch one with his magic rope when
they finally overtake him (Erdoes and Ortiz, 56-59). Triadic
structuring plainly serves the Amerindian raconteur as a mnemonic tool
even as he weaves more evident fourfold structures. The
two numbers work together harmoniously in his hands, one of them being
mystically charged, the other simply a practical help.
The list of instances above could easily be extended. Though native
American culture differs widely from end to end of the vast continents
which it spans, its reverence for the number four is persistent—but
scarcely less so is the tendency of Amerindian story-tellers to build
intricate episodes upon a threefold pattern. This
simple fact of narrative mechanics is especially clear in western North
America, where a substantial body of tradition has been garnered directly
from native sources. A Hopi
tale in which the sun’s child, like Phaethon, goes to seek his father
relates how the boy travels four days and nights on each stage of his
journey; yet a mere three stages in all bring him to the sun’s house (Erdoes
and Ortiz, 146-47). A Cochiti
story about a maiden who refuses all suitors has her ignoring two
courtship dances and two artistic displays put on by local beaux before
Coyote finally wins her with a third dance and a third display. In
other words, there are four original suitors, but the method of Coyote’s
suit fills out two triads (Erdoes and Ortiz, 310-11).
As we saw in the Celtic and Homeric traditions, the number three
itself is not mentioned in the coordinating of such structural groups. From
the oral teller’s perspective, the sheer ease with which three things or
similar events may be recalled recommends the triad. It
has no immediate mystical value when used as the principle for organizing
superficially variegated episodes. This
is not to say that triadic religious rites or concepts do not render the
number yet more memorable in some cultures—but neither should we assume
that the occasional influence of cultural circumstance is the one and only
cause of the triad’s mnemonic utility.
NOTES
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