SHIRLEY L.

ARORA THE PERCEPTION OF PROVERBIALITY* Probably the most consistently accepted generalization concerning proverbs, in virtually any language, is that they are "traditional," and that it is their traditionality--the sense of historically-derived authority or of community-sanctioned wisdom that they convey--that makes them "work." Most definitions, to be sure, reflect the scholar's concern for proverbs as an analytical category; they are attempts to answer the question, as Seitel puts it, "How does one recognize that which he is going to study?"1 Even in Archer Taylor's oft-quoted--and sometimes criticized--statement to the effect that "an incommunicable quality tells us this sentence is proverbial and that one is not," the "us" is, by implication, the community of proverb scholars, for Taylor goes on to remark that "those who do not speak a language can never recognize all its proverbs, and similarly much that is truly proverbial escapes us in Elizabethan and older English."2 Still, traditionality--whether considered in terms of age or currency--tends to be central to the delineation of the proverb as an ethnic genre also. Certainly this is true in Spanish, the language with which I shall be principally concerned here, and probably in most other languages as well. Spanish-speaking informants typically characterize the refrn as "an old saying," "a popular saying," "a teaching in oral tradition," and so on.3

The full text of this article is published in De Proverbio - Issue 1:1995, an electronic book, available from amazon.com and other leading Internet booksellers.

In the opening paragraph of their well-known essay on "Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore," Arewa and Dundes cite as an illustration of proverb use a situation in which a parent seeks to direct a child's action or thought by means of a proverb, thereby projecting "the guilt or responsibility for directing the child . . . on to the anonymous past, the anonymous folk": A child knows that the proverb used by the scolding parent was not made up by that parent. It is a proverb from the cultural past whose voice speaks truth in traditional form. It is the "One," the "Elders," or the "They" in "They say," who direct. The parent is but the instrument through which the proverb speaks to the audience.4 In the study thus introduced, the authors provide a series of interesting examples of Yoruba proverbs in context, specifically in the context of the upbringing of children. But they leave unanswered a particularly intriguing question raised by the opening statement just quoted: how, indeed, does the child, with his or her limited experience, "know" that the proverb was "not made up by the parent"? Presumably he or she has not heard the saying before, at least not from anyone other than the parent. How is it then identified as a "voice from the cultural past" rather than the parent's own words? How, for that matter, and at what age, does the concept of that past take shape? Such questions are outside the scope of the Arewa-Dundes study, and of the present one as well, although they might suggest fruitful directions of investigation in regard to the understanding or use of proverbs by children.5 Yet the passage

quoted has interesting applications as well to the broader question of how proverbs work in normal, everyday contexts of all kinds. With a few changes-with the substitution of more general terms in place of "parent" and "child"--it becomes a succinct statement of the presumed role of traditionality in the effectiveness of proverb use: The listener knows that the proverb used by the speaker was not made up by that person. It is a proverb from the cultural past whose voice speaks truth in traditional terms. It is the "One," the "Elders," or the "They" in "They say," who direct. The proverb user is but the instrument through which the proverb speaks to the audience. The distinctive feature of this passage, in contrast to most descriptions of proverb use, is its emphasis on the listener rather than the speaker. We are accustomed to thinking of the speaker's purpose in using a proverb, and indeed the passage cited begins with a consideration of precisely that purpose: the shifting of responsibility for what is said away from the speaker and "on to the anonymous past, the anonymous folk." But the speaker is only half of the "interaction situation," to use Seitel's term.6 The success of a proverb performance as such must depend ultimately on the listener's ability to perceive that he or she is being addressed in traditional, i.e., proverbial, terms. If the listener does not reach that conclusion, the performance of the proverb as a proverb must fail, although the speaker's opinions, comments, etc., may have the desired effect for other reasons. The listener's identification of a proverb as proverbial is actually a two-fold process, involving first the abstract notion of the genre "proverb" as it is culturally or ethnically conceived, and secondly a means of assigning individual utterances to that genre. The latter step is the crucial one in the performance context. It is, in fact, less than accurate to describe this process as one of "knowing" that a particular saying was not made up by the speaker. That is something only the speaker can "know." The listener assumes on the basis of certain types of evidence that such is the case. He may in fact be mistaken, but it will not matter. The utterance in question--"truly proverbial," i.e., traditional, or not--will function as a proverb, with all the accompanying weight of authority or community acceptance that the concept implies, as the direct result of the listener's perception, right or wrong, of its "proverbiality."

The full text of this article is published in De Proverbio - Issue 1:1995, an electronic book, available from amazon.com and other leading Internet booksellers. If a non-traditional saying is perceived by the hearer as a proverb, and therefore functions as a proverb, should it be considered a proverb by the investigator as well? Probably not; we need to retain our analytical categories to give order to our subject matter and to keep it within manageable bounds. It is important, nevertheless, to be aware of the criteria by which the speakers of a language judge their own proverbs, both on an abstract, generic level and at the specific level of the individual saying. A greater appreciation of the processes involved in the hearer's perception of proverbiality may help us to understand why it is so very difficult to arrive at an all inclusive definition of a proverb, and why attempts to analyze the proverb on a cross-cultural or universal basis invariably meet with but limited success. And there are even broader implications as well. Archer Taylor affirms, in his chapter on "The Origins of the Proverb," that "the acceptance or rejection by tradition which follows immediately upon the creation of the proverb is a factor in its making quite as important as the first act of invention" (p. 35). One could say more precisely "the acceptance or rejection by the hearer,"

for it is with the individual hearer that "tradition" begins and--with each successive performance--will be either extended or cut short. By exploring in greater detail the mechanisms underlying the perception of proverbiality, we will be enlarging our understanding of an aspect of the proverb that is indeed "quite as important as the first act of invention."26

NOTES *Previously published in Proverbium, 1 (1984), pp. 1-38 and in Wolfgang Mieder, ed., Wise Words: Essays on the Proverb (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 3-29
1

Peter Seitel, "Proverbs: A Social Use of Metaphor," Genre, 2 (1969), 144. The study is reprinted in Wolfgang Mieder and Alan Dundes, eds., The Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb (New York: Garland, 1981), pp. 122-139, with the passage cited appearing on p. 124.
2

Archer Taylor, The Proverb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 3.

These and similar quotations elsewhere in this study on the nature of the refrn are translations from definitions supplied by Spanish-speaking informants of varying national background. The terms refrn and dicho ("saying") are often used interchangeably, although for some informants dicho is a broader term, i.e., a refrn is a dicho but not all dichos are refranes. The term proverbio is known to informants but seems to be little used; the various subcategories (adagio, mxima, sentencia, etc.) differentiated by some proverb investigators in Spanish are almost universally ignored.
4

E. Ojo Arewa and Alan Dundes, "Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore," American Anthropologist, 66, No. 6, Pt. 2 (1964), p. 70.
5

The ability of children to understand and to use proverbs is studied in dissertations by Patricia J. Brewer ("Age, Language, Culture, Previous Knowledge and the Proverb as Social Metaphor," Diss. University of Pennsylvania 1979) and John Wayne Chambers ("Proverb Comprehension in Children," Diss. University of Cincinnati 1977). Catherine Hudson deals more briefly with children's ability to recognize as well as understand proverbs in "Traditional Proverbs as Perceived by Children from an Urban Environment," Journal of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, D.C., 3 (1972), 17-24.
6

Peter Seitel, "Saying Haya Sayings: Two Categories of Proverb Use," in J. David Sapir and J. Christopher Crocker, eds., The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), p. 77.

26

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the California Folklore Society held at the University of California, Berkeley, April 18-20, 1980.