Genres of Stories About the Past

Knowledge of the yearly cycle and the control of time is a key strategic resource of the local polity. Calendrical knowledge is concentrated in the most prestigious genre of storytelling, the recitation of narratives that are "attached" to persons, objects, or locations. These narratives usually concern origins, and knowledge of an object's origins can carry power over that object. No ancestral relic can be addressed without pronouncing its special couplet names; yet it is both dangerous and inappropriate to pronounce these names without an understanding of their sources and significance. The classification of a narrative as "fixed" or "grasped" by a particular person, therefore, implies certain standards of authentication and legitimation that do not apply to other genres.

Kodi storytellers recognize four categories of narratives,^[1] which are differentiated by their relations to space and time: "stories from long ago" ngara kedoko e nawu ; "stories performed with songs,' ngara kedoko lodo ; "stories that are held or attached" ngara kedoko pa ketengo ; and "the voices of the ancestors" li marapu . "Stories from long ago" which make up the first group, happen in a distant, bygone era that is roughly similar to the "once upon a time" frame of Western folktales. They refer to an age when trees and animals could still talk, people did not yet die, and the Kodi did not yet live at their present village sites. They include animal fables of a vaguely philosophical and speculative character (Needham 1957b, 1960), accounts of how people acquired shared human characteristics, and the stories about the origins of days, months, and seasons that we have

[1] These four genres can be compared to Adams's (1970, 1979) enumeration of three similar categories in East Sumba: harvest myths told in the fields, clan myths told on the porches of clan houses, and chanted texts in ceremonial language performed inside the clan house for the invisible audience. Her list marks a similar progression from unmarked, ordinary language to more fixed, invariant speech but does not differentiate between the "stories from long ago" and the "stories performed with songs." Christine Forth's (1982) dissertation on Rindi oral narrative concentrates on nine orphan (ana lalu ) stories that I classify among the "stories performed with songs;' though her texts are much briefer than the Kodi ones. Kuipers (1990), writing about Weyewa ritual speech, notes a similar progression toward invariance and greater textual authority in the movement from divinations to misfortune rites to feasts of fulfillment (woleko ), but his discussion focuses only on genres of couplet speech and does not include vernacular narratives.

"Stories that are attached" can be narrated only by their rightful owners,
who usually prefer to speak on the wide verandas of their ancestral houses,
where they can request permission from the dead to tell each tale. 1985.
Photograph by the author.

already surveyed. They do not refer to social divisions between people, houses, or territories, and can be told by anyone in an informal context.

"Stories performed with songs" in the second group, are elaborate performances that alternate vivid scenes of dialogue and action with commentaries sung or chanted in ritual couplets. Their recitation requires a specialized, and usually paid, storyteller, who speaks for an entire night. Moreover, because the stories are sacred, they must be preceded by the sacrifice of a chicken to the ancestors to ask permission. They feature standardized heroic protagonists: the male figure is called Ndelo in the greatest number of stories, though occasionally Rangga or Haghu; the female figure is almost always Kahi or Leba. The story typically begins with the birth of the protagonist and usually concerns orphanhood, abandonment, and a struggle to recover a lost position of privilege. It is punctuated by long songs of lament, in which the hero's or heroine's trials and tribulations are recast in poetic couplets. It ends with a happy reso-

lution, usually a marriage or a triumphant feast of celebration. Although these stories may "belong" to a specific village, they can be told by a number of talented storytellers, and are a form both of entertainment and of edification.

The third genre comprises stories that are "attached" to persons, places, or things; often, therefore, they are called in Indonesian the "property" (milik ) or "legacy" (warisan ) of a particular descent line. They are highly sacred, but need not be told in an elaborate style, and at times are in fact quite truncated in their presentation. Although they contain short passages in couplets, they are narrated in the vernacular and are more "realistic," even "historical" in their content than stories in the first two groups: that is, they take place in actual, named locations, concern the ancestors of the storyteller, and have a minimum of supernatural elements. They may be jealously guarded, so that not everyone is allowed to listen in when a performance occurs. These stories document how people and objects came to their present homes and contain historical "evidence" in the form of references to named valuables, places, and persons.

The fourth genre, the li marapu —"voices of the ancestors"—is a chanted, relatively invariant series of couplets that is performed only when actually invoking ancestral spirits. Recited almost exclusively beside the sacred pillar in an ancestral house, these narratives refer elliptically to the events of the "attached stories" but do not elaborate on them. Their purpose is not to explain the past, but simply to evoke it, using a chain of place names, ancestor names, and the names of sacred valuables to "travel back" to the marapu and summon them as an invisible audience for a ritual event.

The genres are distinguished by the conditions of performance, their "truth frame" and the community they address as an audience. While the first two groups are considered part of the heritage passed down through the generations, it is expected that a narrator may change or at least embellish their story lines to achieve the proper effect. In contrast, the "attached narratives" are supposedly invariant, and a narrator must assert that he is doing his best to repeat the tale as he heard it from his father or grandfather. The li marapu , as ritual invocations, are so rigidly structured that a mistake in pronouncing the couplets could necessitate the paying of a fine or, in an extreme case, result in physical danger to the speaker: if someone speaks wrongly in an important ancestral house he risks illness and even death, sanctions from the listening ancestors who decide that their voices have not been properly rendered.

Each genre has characteristics of what Bakhtin (1981, 84) has called the chronotope : "In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal in-

dicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history." The chronotope defines generic distinctions as different relations to time: in the first category of narratives, the relation is reflective and generalizing; in the second, time is used to edify by means of dramatic tension, comedy, and song; in the third, an authoritative but partisan vision of a sequence of legitimating events is provided; whereas the fourth is characterized by a definitive and invariant ritual text.

The "stories from long ago" and the "stories told with songs" recall the romance genre in many ways, taking place in an abstract adventure-time where no significant changes occur. At the end of the story, the initial equilibrium that had been destroyed by chance is restored, and everything returns to its own place. For some storytellers a psychological development occurs, with the hero or heroine becoming more knowledgeable as a result of these various experiences, but it is not characteristic of the genre as a whole. The songs are repeated, sung once at each stage of the protagonist's travails; their very repetition reinforces the idea of an unchanging time frame in which the individual simply moves through a series of stages. The space of the "stories with songs" is also abstracted: although specific villages are named, the same story can be told by different storytellers in different locations. Thus, the narrative itself is not fixed to particular locations but simply uses them as a frame for the action.

The "stories that are held or attached," by contrast, occur in concrete space, with great importance given to named locations and features of the landscape. The time that they contain is a time of sequences and orders, but not yet a "chronology"—in the sense of a time situated in relation to an external time scale, such as the passage of years. Nonetheless, such a chronology could be said to be emergent in the form of the stories themselves, since they are about the origin of a single external time scale: the ceremonial system that synchronizes events to provide a unifying cycle for social life in the domain.

The li marapu are conceived not as narratives about the past but as the actual voices of the ancestors—that is, the past speaks directly in the present. The spirits play a ventriloquist's role, "placing" the words into the mouth of the speaker and requiring that they be pronounced correctly. As he chants or recites these couplets, the priest is said to be a simple mouthpiece of the spirits ("the lips told to speak, the mouth told to pronounce" wiwi canggu tene, ghoba tanggu naggulo ; see Hoskins 1988b). There is no loss of consciousness on the part of the speaker, who does not become possessed. He remains responsible for his words, and this respon-

sibility is immediately checked by the ancestor for whom he speaks, who can punish any errors that misrepresent him or other traditions.^[2]