i was struggling thru the jakobson and last night i got annoyed so i started reading the other essays in the volume. whereupon, in an essay called realism in art, i found the concept of the "armenian riddle". the example of which in essay goes:
Q: what's green and hangs in the drawing room? A: a herring. - why in a drawing room? - well, why couldn't they hang it there? - er, right, but why green? - it was painted green? - but but, why? - to make it harder to guess!
which must be the extreme example of an unfair riddle, even more unfair than rumpelstiltskin's, or any kind of biographical riddle. or you can say, well it is really a joke concealed as a false riddle, like any number of chicken crossing road jokes. but it must remind you of the kind of alice in wonderland logic.
but but, see what jakobson says about this: "this desire to conceal the answer, the deliberate effort to delay recognition, brings out a new feature, the newly improvised epithet. exaggeration in art is unavoidable, wrote dostoevsky; in order to show and object, it is necessary to deform the shape it used to have, it must be tinted.....you colour your object in an original way and think that it has become more palpable, clearer, more real.....the same is true of literature. the herring is green because it has been painted; a startling epithet results, and the trope becomes an epic motif. why did you paint it, the author will always have an answer, but in fact, there is only one right answer, to make it harder to guess."
and that is very cool! and! that means that there are two riddles. the "joke riddle", a fish dipped in paint and hung in a room, a "nonsense answer" just because the riddler felt like it and because you'll never guess it. but if you think of the riddle mode as a kind of necessity to producing literature, then you can decide that the green herring riddle’s answer is a *drawing* of a herring - so it *hangs* in the drawing room, and it is *painted* green.
and that is something that fits with riddles as/in literature. take thurber's white deer. (which incidentally prof nohrnberg gave me a source for - the lay of graelant).
the stony eyes of the sphinx stared straight ahead and its stony jaws did not move but it spoke:
i tell you why else i'm so happy. he uses the word epithet. epithet's etymology: epitheton, from greek, neuter of epithetos, added, attributed, from epitithenai, epithe-, to add to : epi-, epi- + tithenai, to place; see dh- in indo-european roots.]
also i got this out of american heritage dictionary:
a term used to characterize a person or thing, such as rosy-fingered in rosy-fingered dawn or the great in catherine the great.
i know prof nohrnberg says that not all epithets are riddles. and he would be right. rosy-fingered dawn isn't a riddle. just a description. but what abt the second definition. a descriptive substitute. doesn't that work like a riddle, in a synechdochic sense. and i want to make the case that epithets can function like riddles especially when it relies on biography, and biography is often the basis of unfair riddles. but of course all riddles are biography riddles in a way. because all riddles ask what am i? or: tell me my name. all of which has to do with naming. and with seeing that one feature that has been enlarged so much so as to define you. which is an epithet. my example was macbeth when he comes on stage and is addressed as thane of glamis, thane of cawdor, king of scotland. which are what he was, is, and will be. (nohrnberg suggests that this corresponds to the sphinx's three stage riddle.) i thought that they fit with epithet riddles (a term i coined for bilbo's riddling with smaug) and that epithet riddles are the opposite of biographical riddles - they work in opposite directions. by the time the play ends macbeth has become what he was named at the start. biographical riddles ask a=b, why. epithet riddles ask a=b: how. this is all very incoherent. to be continued...
okay here's what's up with herrings.
name me a riddle, sphinx, said jorn
and you might say, well, that riddle's content is all arbitrary nonsense, or then you can say, a quest story is defined by a task, and by emphasising that riddle-task we're creating - not realism here - or the E realism of jakobson, but something that fits in the story world of thurber.
what is whirly
what is curly
tell me what is pearly early
jorn replied in a trice:
gigs are whirly
cues are curly
and the dew is pearly early
he rode on a little way and then rode back.
what was difficult about that riddle? asked the prince.
it was difficult to say without moving my jaws, said the sphinx.
from the white deer, james thurber
or
a term used as a descriptive substitute for the name or title of a person, such as the great emancipator for abraham lincoln.