Читать книгу The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai - S. N. Haleole - Страница 21

Table of Contents

1. Much of the material of Hawaiian song and story is traditional within other Polynesian groups.

2. Verse making is practiced as an aristocratic art of high social value in the households of chiefs, one in which both men and women take part.

3. In both prose and poetry, for the purpose of social aggrandizement, the theme is the individual hero exalted through his family connection and his own achievement to the rank of divinity.

4. The action of the story generally consists in a succession of contests in which is tested the hero's claim to supernatural power. These contests range from mythical encounters in the heavens to the semihistorical rivalries of chiefs.

5. The narrative may take on a high degree of complexity, involving many well-differentiated characters and a well-developed art of conversation, and in some instances, especially in revenge, trickster, or recognition motives, approaching plot tales in our sense of the word.

6. The setting of song or story, both physical and social, is distinctly realized. Stories persist and are repeated in the localities where they are localized. Highly characteristic are stories of rock transformations and of other local configurations, still pointed to as authority for the tale.

7. Different types of hero appear:

(a) The hero may be a human being of high rank and of unusual power either of strength, skill, wit, or craft.

(b) He may be a demigod of supernatural power, half human, half divine.

(c) He may be born in shape of a beast, bird, fish, or other object, with or without the power to take human form or monstrous size.

(d) He may bear some relation to the sun, moon, or stars, a form rare in Hawaii, but which, when it does occur, is treated objectively rather than allegorically.

(e) He may be a god, without human kinship, either one of the "departmental gods" who rule over the forces of nature, or of the hostile spirits who inhabited the islands before they were occupied by the present race.

(f) He may be a mere ordinary man who by means of one of these supernatural helpers achieves success.

8. Poetry and prose show a quite different process of development. In prose, connected narrative has found free expression. In poetry, the epic process is neglected. Besides the formal dirge and highly developed lyric songs (often accompanied and interpreted by dance), the characteristic form is the eulogistic hymn, designed to honor an individual by rehearsing his family's achievements, but in broken and ejaculatory panegyric rather than in connected narrative. In prose, again, the picture presented is highly realistic. The tendency is to humanize and to localize within the group the older myth and to develop later legendary tales upon a naturalistic basis. Poetry, on the other hand, develops set forms, plays with double meanings. Its character is symbolic and obscure and depends for its style upon, artificial devices.

9. Common to each are certain sources of emotional Interest such as depend upon a close interplay of ideas developed within an intimate social group. In prose occur conventional episodes, highly elaborated minor scenes, place names in profusion which have little to do with the action of the story, repetitions by a series of actors of the same incident in identical form, and in the dialogue, elaborate chants, proverbial sayings, antithesis and parallelism. In poetry, the panegyric proceeds by the enumeration of names and their qualities, particularly place or technical names; by local and legendary allusions which may develop into narrative or descriptive passages of some length; and by eulogistic comparisons drawn from nature or from social life and often elaborately developed. The interjectional expression of emotion, the rhetorical question, the use of antithesis, repetition, wordplay (puns and word-linking) and mere counting-out formulas play a striking part, and the riddling element, both in the metaphors employed and in the use of homonyms, renders the sense obscure.