Verbal Charms in Malagasy Folktales

Abstract

When, long before he became the doyen of the French literary world, the twenty-four-year-old Jean Paulhan began collecting proverbs in highland Madagascar in 1908, he noticed features of performance which were theorized only generations later. Speakers talked rapidly, yet with ‘singular dignity and seriousness.’¹ One would spread his arms and lean forward; another conveyed the impression she was about to announce an accident or death; another ‘went so far as to stand up every time he uttered a proverb.’ Paulhan could tell that the listeners were paying close attention, the way people respond to an acrobat or the refrain in an operetta. Paulhan could not avoid noticing the ways in which performance of these special sets of words was, as an analyst today would say, ‘keyed.’ Keying included parallel structure, symmetry, balance, and metaphors, which ‘signified on’ something in the social situation (using the vernacular term for indirect, ironic speech). The old-fashioned language of proverb, ohabolana, spoke out of a known body of traditional discourse, a transcendent order which M. M. Bakhtin later theorized under the name of monologic speech.² That order was the standard against which the proverb speaker would be measured. In all these ways, ‘the act of expression itself [was] framed as display.’³ So it would be too in a verbal charm.