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Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics. Dell Hymes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. xi + 512 pp.
Dell Hymes approaches narrative like an anatomist. In his eyes, words coalesce into organs and bones, structures that transcend their individual verbal cells and tissues. Where Lévi-Strauss deduced mythical structures from contrasts in content, Hymes sees meaning emerge from narrative form as well. Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics is Hymes's equivalent of Gray's Anatomy. A collection of previously published analyses (1984-2000) of both Native American oral narratives and several of Robinson Jeffers's poems, this book illustrates the human poetic corpus through a unique approach to narrative criticism honed over five decades of work.
Hymes's interest lies in the "measured" organization of lines into groups (p. 22) rather than the meter of individual narrative Unes or Tedlock's delineation of units through pauses (pp. 37, 126, and 246). Across time and place, Hymes argues, narrators rely on the same basic rhetorical patterns to tell stories, arranging lines into groups of twos and threes or variations of these. A group of four, for example, may reveal paired couplets; a group of five, two sets of three lines overlapping on a shared, central pivot (p. 49). The choice of structure depends on the narrator's goals. Doubled sequences frame situations that lead directly from an event's initiation to consequences. Tripled patterns leave room for an intermediary phase, encompassing an event's onset, ongoing occurrence, and outcome (pp. 247-248). Hymes borrows Jakobson's principle of "equivalence" to characterize how multiple markers-intonation contours, time expressions, quotatives, turns at talk, paralleUsms, repetition, et cetera (p. 234)-demarcate units of...