SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

II8 I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes
Tropical Semiotics I 119
stitutions fulfill the requirement that they alternate between the conventional,
collective, facilitating modality and the innovative, individual, motivating modality.
What is immediately striking is that two highly particular, clever, even magical
acts in the story, the ogress's stranding the woman up in the tree in order to
steal her husband (C) and the arboreal male's clever plan to repay this trickery
by having the woman descend by the very sago palm the ogress and her new
husband are cutting down (E), are placed in the faciliting modality. Considering
the fact that these two acts are performed by the two metaphorical personae in
the story (the ogress is a cassowary and the arboreal male is a hornbill), this
labeling is even more puzzling. Furthermore, the narrative itself provides an important
clue that these are the operant, parallel magical moments: after each
event, the person being duped by the trickery thinks he or she hears something
being said (perhaps a magical spell?) and each time is reassured (falsely) that
nothing is amiss: "Some biting ants have stung me" and "Some wasps have stung
me" (cf. R. Bauman 1986:97). What is equally strange is that the two substitutions
which best mirror conventional norms of Foi sociality, the provisioning of
the woman by her arboreal husband who builds a fire, a house, and a birth hut
and nurtures the woman's child (D) and the return to cooperative labor by cowives
(F), are both listed as motivating modalities. These problems should be
sufficient to raise suspicions, especially in light of Wagner's principle, cited
above, that an interpretation must have rapport with the sense of the tale.
Nevertheless, Weiner (1988:165) claims that his identification of the two
classes of substitutions is proper: "The facilitating modality represented by substitutions
ACE detail the transformations in the relationship between the two
women, while the motivating modality represented by substitutions BDF detail
their competitive relationship to husbands, impelling their assumption of a cowife
relationship." Again, serious problems arise. First, it is not clear what these
two sets of conditions have to do with the relationship between conventional and
innovating dimensions of symbolization, which are by definition the criteria for
identifying the facilitating and motivating modalities. Second, if anything serves
as a metaphor for the transformation in the relationship between the wife and
the ogress it is the act of switching clothing (B), but this is listed in the opposite
modality; and if anything serves as a metaphor for the competitive rivalry these
two women have in relationship to the man it is the ogress's stealing the woman's
husband (C), which is also listed in the opposite modality.
The next phase of Weiner's analysis involves the demonstration that the second
half of the plot forms an inverted triangle in which facilitating and motivating
modalities are subject to point-by-point reversals:
B-inverted: ogress appropriates land (obviating exchange of clothing as personal
identities)
A-inverted: fighting between co-wives (obviating solidary cooperation)
F-inverted: young woman calls hornbill in sky (obviating return to terrestrial
husband)
E-inverted: rescued to arboreal home (obviating descent to terrestrial home)
Although it is not part of the formal substitutional analysis, Weiner points out
that the end of the story is to be interpreted as effecting not only the change of
the ogress into a cassowary (explicit in the narrative) but also the change of the
young woman into a hornbill (not expressed in the narrative). These obvious metaphorical
transformations are not, however, the crucial points in Weiner's account,
which insists that the second half of the tale involves the transformation
of the marital destinies of the two women, whereas the first half involves the
transformation of the relationship between the women from cooperative "quasisororal
identification" to rivals and finally to (temporarily) cooperative co-wives.
I have not been able to determine how the substitutions in the second half are
examples of inversions of the facilitating/motivational modalities of the first half.
But more important—and a point not clearly articulated by Weiner—it is evident
that these latter substitutions have a different semiotic status than the substitutions
in the first half. In the first half, the two poles of each of the substitutions
(A through F) are established at the point of the substitution itself (e.g., changing
clothing, moving from treetop to ground, etc.); in the second half, the two poles
of the substitution exist in different halves of the narrative. That is, it is not so
much that the substitutions in the second half of the story (D-inverted through
E-inverted) are formal inversions of counterpart substitutions in the first half;
rather, the second-half points supply one pole of a discourse-internal trope, the
other pole being a point in the first half of the narrative. In this way, the narrative
turns back upon itself in order to harness enough rhetorical energy to accomplish
the magical transformations described and implied at the end.
This observation does match the sense of the text, which clearly begins an
asymmetrical repetition at the moment when the co-wives go out gardening together
(recall that the story opens with the solitary young woman on her way to
garden). This suggests that the second group of substitutions does not start inverting
at D, as Weiner claims; rather, it recapitulates the narrative from the beginning
in a series of obvious parallelisms:
First Half
Second Half
D-inverted: rejoins husband (obviating bond with arboreal husband)
C-inverted: co-wives cooperate gardening (obviating treacherous collecting tree
leaves)
solitary female gardening
trickery of ogress
ogress hits tree so woman will die
co-wives gardening
scheming of co-wife
husband hits wife, drawing blood