Edward, Edward” (Child 13)...236 - 244

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REVUE INTER-TEXTUAL

Revue semestrielle en ligne des Lettres et Sciences Humaines du Département d’Anglais adossée au Groupe de recherches en Littérature et Linguistique anglaise (GRELLA)

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ADMINISTRATION DE LA REVUE

DIRECTEUR DE PUBLICATION

M. Pierre KRAMOKO, Maître de Conférences

COMITÉ DE RÉDACTION

- Professeur Guézé Habraham Aimé DAHIGO, Professeur Titulaire

- Dr Vamara KONÉ, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Kouamé ADOU, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Kouamé SAYNI, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Koffi Eugène N’GUESSAN, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Gossouhon SÉKONGO, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Philippe Zorobi TOH, Maître de Conférences

- Dr Jérome Koffi KRA, Maître de Conférences

COMITÉ SCIENTIFIQUE

Prof. Azoumana Ouattara, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Coulibaly Daouda, PhD,Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Djako Arsène, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Francis Akindès, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Lawrence P. Jackson, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Prof. Léa N’Goran-Poamé, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

Prof. Mamadou Kandji, Université Ckeick Anta Diop, Sénégal

Prof. Margaret Wright-Cleveland, Florida State University, USA

Prof. Kenneth Cohen, St Mary’s College of Maryland, USA

Prof. Nubukpo Komlan Messan, Université de Lomé, Togo

Prof. Séry Bailly, Université Félix Houphouët Boigny, Abidjan

Prof. Zigui Koléa Paulin, Université Alassane Ouattara, Côte d’Ivoire

TABLE OF CONTENTS/ TABLE DES MATIÈRES

1. Kouadio Germain N’GUESSAN, GENDER HIERARCHY AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY: THE IMPOSED MASK.…………1 - 19

2. Goh Théodore TRA BI, HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NARRATIVE THEORIES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.…………………………………………20 - 37

3. Ezoulé Miézan Isaac KANGAH, BRITISH POLITICAL SCENE IN JONATHAN COE’S THE CLOSED CIRCLE.……………………………38 - 56

4. Gabrielle KEITA, UNCOMPLETED ASPECT MARKING FROM STANDARD ENGLISH TO NIGERIAN PIDGIN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY.…………………………………………………………………………57 - 68

5. Constant Ané KONÉ, REMEMBERING SLAVERY MEMORY IN GAYL JONES’ CORREGIDORA.…………………………………………………….69 - 88

6. Germain ASSAMOI, MODALITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE, BETWEEN RADICAL AND EPISTEMIC.………………………………89 - 105

7. Koffi Eugène N’GUESSAN, BRIDGING THE VALLEY OF NIHILISM IN AUGUST WILSON’S FENCES.…………………………………………106 - 121

8. Souleymane TUO, SLAVE REBELLION IN ANDRE PHILIPPUS BRINK’S AN INSTANT IN THE WIND.……………………………………………122 - 139

9. Dolourou SORO, A MARXIST READING OF ERNEST GAINES’ A LESSON BEFORE DYING.……………………………………………………………140 - 156

10. Tié Emmanuel TOH BI, POÉTIQUE TRAGIQUE ET TRAGÉDIE, POUR L’ESQUISSE D’UNE POÉTIQUE DU TRAGIQUE DANS LA POÉSIE NÉGRO-AFRICAINE; UNE ILLUSTRATION DU MICROCOSME IVOIRIEN DANS LA MÈRE ROUGE DE CEDRIC MARSHALL KISSY.…………157 - 178

11. Paul KOUABENAN, THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF ART: A STUDY OF CHINUA ACHEBE’S NO LONGER AT EASE, A MAN OF THE PEOPLE AND ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH.………………………………………178 - 192

12. Renais Ulrich KACOU, COLONIALISM AND RACISM IN TSITSI DANGAREMBGA’S THE BOOK OF NOT.………………………………193 - 203

13. Adiele Kilanko ZANNOU, THE AMERICAN DREAM IN LANGSTON HUGHES’ SELECTED POEMS.…………………………………………204 - 226

14. Jean Jacques Gnahoua SABLÉ, LA LITTERATURE COMME UN EXAMEN DE MEMOIRE, D’OUBLI ET DE RECONCILIATION.……………….227 - 235

15. Aliou Badara KANDJI, VIOLENCE, INCEST AND DELAYED DECODING IN THE SCOTTISH BALLAD, “EDWARD, EDWARD” (CHILD 13)...236 - 244

16. Pierre KRAMOKO, THE HOMELESS HOUSEHOLD: A REFLECTION ON THE FAMILY IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA AND SONG OF SOLOMON.…………………………………………………………………245 - 259

17. Désiré Yssa KOFFI, THE VOICE IN THE PERIPHERY: BLACK CULTURE IN TONI MORRISON’S TAR BABY.………………………260 - 272

18. Minata KONÉ, THE NGURARIO OR MARRIAGE IN FICTION AND REAL LIFE.……………………………………………………………….273 - 285

19. Daouda COULIBALY, THE DRAMATIZATION OF THE FEMALE BODY: DISCOURSES OF RESISTANCE AND POWER IN OF EVE ENSLER’S THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES.……………………………………………286 - 298

VIOLENCE, INCEST AND DELAYED DECODING IN THE SCOTTISH BALLAD, “EDWARD, EDWARD” (CHILD 13)

Alioune Badara KANDJI Maître de conférences de littératures anglaises Aliou DIOUF Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherches Anglophones (LERA) Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines Université Cheikh Anta Diop Dakar, Sénégal

INTRODUCTION

In traditional societies, the sense of honour and its guiding principles were sometimes impediments to the freedom of the individual. Codes and values codified by the community controlled the lives of its members. Acceptance and sympathy of the group strongly depended upon the delicacy with which the individual regarded moral codes in vigour. No breaking of the rules established by ancestors or the former lineage was tolerated. Those who broke or trod upon these codes often went in disgrace, albeit eliminated.

Through many tales of oral literature, instances of repudiation or elimination of people who commit repulsive acts are mentioned. Ballad composers, like the other folk storytellers, were willing to dramatize those social occurrences. But the tone and the details they used responded to a very special way of narration which subdued the emotional core. This art of delaying information is termed hermeneutic code (Barthes 1970; Diagne 2005). Indeed, when it comes to taboos, ancient societies found a well controlled technique of distorting and disjointing the linear phases of any discussion related to the drama of their lives1. Even if the incident is referred to, it is rendered in a cryptic and enigmatic way which alleviates the crudity of the facts.

The hermeneutic code is often referred to as a method to procrastinate discourse information. Its use in balladry rests upon a high sense of encoding and decoding domestic messages. In the ballad “Edward, Edward” (Child 13), the clue to the dialogue between mother and son is procrastinated until the ultimate term of revelation: the last line. The delaying code used in this ballad highlights a sense of artistic communication which hides the truth of the murder of the younger brother by the elder till the end of the dialogue. From query to query, and from question to question, the mother inquires about the blood-tattered garments

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of her elder son. The latter, not without a cautious sinuosity, delays, as long as possible, the truth of having murdered his younger brother, John.

The depth of the emotions the reader feels when reading a tragic ballad such as “Edward, Edward” may overcome the unjustified negative perception he may have of ballad narratives as violent archaic fixed period pieces. None the less, analyzing the intricacies of love affairs in primitive societies should widen our understanding of human passion. These old fragments of sibling incest offer a symbolic occasion to rewrite the drama of the past and get insight into their techniques of dramatising taboos and prohibitions.

“Edward, Edward” echoes other ballads about symbolic violence such as: “Lizie Wan” (Child 51), “The Cruel Mother” (Child 20), Lord Randal (Child 12), etc. In these “Domestic Tragedy ballads”, a concept we borrowed from James Twitchell in The Incest Theme and the Authenticity of the Percy Version of “Edward” (1975: 32). When reading “Edward, Edward” in its three versions collected in Percy’s Reliques (1765) and Motherwell’s Minstrelsy (1827), the reader perceives better the pedagogical and how incest is developed in balladry and for which reasons ballad composers had recourse to a delayed decoding when narrating such incidents. This hermeneutic perspective of analysis may foster a considerable interest in revisiting the traditional tales, as a case in point, Edward, Edward.

English and Scottish border ballads are undoubtedly unfathomable documents that hint at the most delicate questions related to human nature. Analyzing them by knitting close correspondences with the vision and technique of folktales from the Senegambia can forcibly foster a new decoding approach to oral texts.

This study will first lay emphasis on the brutal and tragic atmosphere which prevails in revenge and incest ballads, then it will interpret the delayed decoding in the dialogue between mother and son in “Edward, Edward” and it will ultimately analyse all the speech acts which contribute to the encoding-decoding technique.

I. Violence and Revenge in Sibling Incest Ballads

English, Scottish balladry like African folktale narrative overlaps many themes. The readers of these oral texts experience an exciting journey in the depths of a past epoch where they encounter a multitude of places, characters and situations. The impulse one feels when reading ballads is very striking. Dealing “almost entirely with the circle of the life of the body, with birth, instinctive action, death, and the decay of the body” (Speirs 1935: 45), ballads are

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reenactments of the main questions that affect folk lives. Their composition is an attempt to respond to situations which upset the serenity of their existence.

The terror, horror and the uncanny, which prevailed at that period, forced those people to imagine violent tales in order to deliver warning messages. War, rapt, rape and revenge coalesced in both the tone and the discourse of the ballads. Ballad composers and their audience ultimately dramatize murder and revenge in order to sensitize people about the follies and foibles of human nature.

Among the most frequent themes referred in balladry we can notice the hideous face of man: violence. Its omnipresence and various manifestations are, by far, the most apparent traits of balladry. So, in Child collection which consists in a rich corpus of ballads, the theme of violence is largely developed. “The Daemon Lover” (Child 243), “The Twa Sisters” (Child 10), “The Cruel Brother” (Child 11), “The Cruel Mother” (Child 20), etc. shed light on the cataclysmic atmosphere of ballad dealing with violence.

The facts enumerated in these narratives are valid instances of cruelty. Overt mention of violence responds to a reality which ballad composers want to depict as corrective modalities:

The good and the wicked brothers in fairy tales are, after all, dual aspects of complex human relationships that are made pure and simple in fairy tales where good and evil are given separate identities instead of remaining closely knit parts of a single psyche. What matters is that these stories present recognizable patterns of human behaviour (David 1964: 195).

The achievement of these specialists is to present ballads in such a way that their humaneness can be recognized by everyone. Today, apart from the writers who derived inspiration from these intense scenes and symbols, children and adults will learn much about human nature through these very telling stories.

In “Edward, Edward”, we may see the entire sibling murdering scenes as symbolic substitutions of the tension and jealousy which often prevail in families. As Shakespeare would say “Blood relations are bloody relations”. No doubt there is a symbolic significance that the ballad composer wants to foreground when performing such hideous episodes. One may fail to recognize, in the many situations where a brother or a sister is killed or where suicide is committed, the pure moral force.

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II. A Delayed Sequencing

To capture the essence of domestic tragedy ballads in general and those dealing with sibling incest on the other, one simply has to revisit their encoding techniques. Ancient ballads singers and composers had lived in a world full of taboos, and their works were, therefore, encoded with discursive rhetoric codes. Those codes were given their noblest embodiment in sibling incest narratives. It was, then, a rule to depict abominable incidents in a tempered manner so as to keep the solemnity and the courtesy of traditional cultures.

Delayed decoding is a recurrent technique in incest ballads and novels, such as Heart of Darkness (Conrad 1899). That technique was systematically applied to wrap up the villainy in fairy tales. In dialogue situations where a mother questions her son – the case of Edward – it becomes the sole way to preserve the courtesy distance between parents and offsprings. Furthermore, apart from these parental regards, it would be too painful to reveal to a mother that one has med one’s own brother.

“Edward, Edward” consists in seven stanzas which can be sequenced in three phases. “All these are a dialogue between mother and son, with a question and answer in each stanza” (Child, 1965: 168). In Child’s version A, which counts 12 stanzas the mother’s query and the son’s responses are discarded in the following stanzas; whereas in Child version B, the 7 stanzas embrace a question and a reply. But one thing remains in all these Child versions of this ballad: the dialogue between Edward and his mother follows a proairesis2 code.

In this narrative, the first sequence is the liminary inquiry episode about what has happened; the second sequence delineates the revelation of the truth, and the last phase depicts the disgrace with the laments of a disheartened mourning mother. But the specificity of this ballad is the way its composer widens the plot with additional sequences which could have been clamped down to very succinct sections. Instead of answering straightforwardly, the son evokes different possibilities to justify the blood on his sword.

‘Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, Edward, Edward, Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid,

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And why sae sad gang yee O ?’ ‘O I hae killed my hauke sae guid, Mither, mither, O I hae killed my hauke sae guid, And I had nae mair bot hee O’ (Child 13 B).

Permanent reconfiguring of the puzzles of truth sources to match his mother’s curiosity eclipses the linearity of the dialogue into an oblique direction. The son’s attempts to derive a multitude of answers allow him more leeway for delaying the answer. Here, the young man adopts the posture of an ambiguous interlocutor. He overtly blinkers and creates an eclipsed interpretative dialogue which he serves to a worrying mother. The meaning he construes with such a closed technique is directed to an evasive tactic as a trick of oral narratives.

The mother’s impatient attitude also participates in the building up of the son’s narrative construct. Her repetitive questions obviously and anxiously aim at the truth which her son hides. The refutation of the son’s arguments construe on blood, she argues by the following parataxis: “Hawk’s bluid was neer sae red…Hound’s bluid was neer sae red” (Child 13 A), which situates the mother in a hermeneutic argumentative posture. Being the one to construct understanding through a dialogue which opens up many horizons of interpretation, she subtly breaks off the game her son plays to hide the truth. Her sceptical semantic questions enable her to go through the disjointed puzzles laid down by her son.

The meaning mother and son try to construe, through reference to their immediate milieu, displays a sophisticated hermeneutic circle which Schleiermacher3 explains as follows: “everything requiring yet further definition in a given discourse can be determined only through reference to the language domain common to the writer and his original public” (1959: 95). Following up Schleiermacher, we can see that when interpreting any discursive text meaning we unmistakably have to corroborate references to the context.

The fact that he has killed his brother is only revealed when the protagonist, Edward has saturated all his orally produced semantic possibilities. When he feels that his answers have grown unproductive, he decides to tell the truth. Even if his mother sees his blood- tattered clothes, Edward wittingly delays the denouement in the revelation of the murder.

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More conspicuous are the reasons for the killing. Edward encoded as well the motive of the murder. In the Motherwell version A, the confession is an alluding metaphor: “What about did the plea begin.../It began about the cutting of a willow wand/ That would never been a tree” (Child 13 A). Phillips Barry and Tristram Coffin’s4 conclusions on that confession, as James Twitchell puts it, are:

The breaking of a little bush was a kenning referring to an incestuous relationship between a brother and a sister. Hence in the brother’s jealous battle for the sister’s affection, one brother is killed” (1975:34).

The twig motive is but a riddle alluding to the prohibited act of incest.

This metaphorical allusion calls on some Wolof discursive maxims. The wolof maxim: “ku bȅt sa ñag dug ci toolu jaambur” (By going through the limits of your hedge one will trespass somebody’s else field) or the speech act: “sama guinaw tool” (what lies beyond my hedge) hint at what is unlawful and morally prohibited. Wolof people like other ethnic groups in Senegambia have various verbal arts to circumvent prohibited acts and moral codes. Without naming things, as Edward did in the ballad, they can say while leaving unsaid crudest truths.

The codes applied in this ballad, not only hinder the manifestation of truth, but also subdue the tenacity of the murdering deed. The fact of fusing horizons and testing the interlocutor’s capacity to guess the truth or gather the pieces of the puzzle is certainly a well mastered verbal art in traditional societies. Indeed, delayed decoding of meaning is part of a large system of discursive practices which underline, once again, the force of oral art.

III. Riddling as a Mode of Verbal Art in Popular Discourse

Traditional tales still speak to us and tell us about ourselves. Nothing better illustrate that than do the verbal arts we have inherited from ancient tales. The old verbal techniques used by ancestors are still in use in every day discourses. Time and technology have failed to erase those marks of the traditional genius. Not all the genres of folklore survive, but some, like the riddle, the proverb and the maxim still function recurrently in our dialogues.

In “Edward, Edward”, the dialogue between mother and son ends up after a series of questions and answers. What should be a moment of lament and sobbing turned out to a game of wit and words.

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Then follows a series of questions as to what the son will do with himself, and what shall become of his wife, children, etc…Finally, in all, the mother asks when he will come back, and he replies (with some variations), When crows are white. And that will be? When swans are black. And that? When feathers sink, etc.”(Child 1965:165).

These answers echo the use of riddles in popular stories. Tales ending with riddles or riddle-tales are abundant in the Celtic folklore. Ballads of the same description are well known “among the Gaels, both Scotch and Irish” (3). In Thomas the Rhymer (Child 37), one of the most popular Scottish ballads, there are instances of riddling. One of them: “what is whiter than snow?”, is a recurrent riddle in Celtic fairy tales. Its frequency is certainly linked to the importance of snow in Celtic culture and mythology. With riddles we may guess the geography but also the fauna and flora of a place.

The place of riddles in traditional cultures is unanimously accepted by folklorists. Riddles occur in all folktales. They are the heart of the sarcastic tone in popular stories. The very essence of a riddle is to combine irreconcilable words: “swans” and “black” (Child:165). A parallel to Wolof or Serere cultures in Senegambia may grant us with very telling examples of oppositional riddles. Among the most demonstrative illustrations, we may notice these Wolof speech acts: “bu guinar saxee beuñ” (the day hens will grow teeth) or “bu guej gui feree” (the day the sea will run dry). Such examples and the like contain the essential substance of discursive practices. Another observation about the oppositional riddles is the fact that only the use of metaphorical substitutes can help construe meaning. A definition of the riddle which takes into account the notion of irreconcilability can, therefore, be largely extended to black African popular stories.

However, the cultural substance of riddles encompasses many social commodities. Riddles were used to challenge strangers, rivals and were meant to solve some conflicts. One could win the hand of a woman or even a crown by answering test riddles. “In a second class, a suitor can win a lady’s hand only by guessing riddles, as in our ‘Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship’ and ‘Proud Lady Margaret’” (Child 1965: 1). With riddles traditional societies solved difficult problems and gave space to their verbal arts. The use of riddles still plays an important part in the decoding of social messages.

CONCLUSION

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The ballad contains innumerable codes of conduct and values, which are reused in our daily interpretations of reality. Without proper knowledge of folklore, the literary critic will misinterpret violence and terror present in the popular traditional stories. One needs to go deeper in the organization of these societies to get hold of its substance. Those domestic tragedy ballads encompass human nature and its hideous face.

Ballad composers were willing to dramatize the symbolism of violence. Brother or sister murder, infant elimination and patricide were instances of the cruelty of domestic tragedy ballads. Such shocking scenes of violence pointed at the terror, horror and the uncanny in ancient societies.

The fidelity one may show to tradition stems to a large extent from an admitted basic premise: there is a deep human motive which finds expression in oral literature. Human nature blends, not only positive passions: gaiety, love, compassion, but also their opposites which testify to the goodness of man. Man is capable of vile abominations. He is often jealous and bitter and sometimes expresses these feelings in a brutal way.

The ballad “Edward, Edward” appears to be a particular literary occasion to descant on the very richness of the codes used in oral discourse. Failure to decode the truth could result in one’s being unable to appreciate fully the dialogue between mother and son. To determine the full measure of this delayed decoding, the reader has to identify the essence of riddles, maxims and kennings in the traditional oral system.

NOTES 1. This is what Diagne calls « les ruses de la raison orale » (the tricks of oral discourse) in Critique de la Raison Orale (2005). 2. Proairesis also proaeresis means in Oxford dictionaries practical deliberation or reasoning leading to choice. Its earliest use is found in John Milton (1608-1674). 3. The argument that textual interpretation is circular originated in Friedrich Daniel Ernest Schleiermacher’s writings: Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, Ed. Heinz Kimmerle (1977). 4. Phillips Barry, Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, Nos. 5, 6 (1933) as mentioned in Tristram Coffin, The Murder Motive in “Edward”, Western Folklore 8 (1949).

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