Resumen de The Folklore Eroticon between the Ritual and Poetic Metaphor
This paper points out the metaphorical aspects of the erotic discourse in Serbian oral poetry on a selection of examples whose sources are discovered in the mythical experience of the world and ritual praxis, as well as the various forms of “nonliteral meaning”, determined not only by poetic reasons, but also by contextual and culturological ones. The system of folklore genres was built on the experience and understanding of life, the world, man, and the poetics of each genre insist on the varying aspects of the community in question, as well as the individual’s position and role within it. Potential dispersion is overcome by the strong gravitational field of traditional culture which encompasses values, beliefs, a way of life, production, as well as social organization. By using selected examples from the classical Southern Slavic lyrical and narrative oral corpus (epic poetry, narrative poems, ritual, customary and love poetry, sevdalinkas, legends etc.) and manuscript materials and the corpus of postfolklore and authorial texts (newly composed folk music), we redefine the fossilized concept of national oral tradition and expose its polyphone image. We show that lascivious themes and erotic content are suprageneric categories, transmitted as formulas – metaphors, and review the voyage from the initial ritual to poetical estrangement. This analysis selects two types of erotic statements: metaphors belonging to the domain of cultural animalistics (“the livestock discourse”), i.e. the matriarchal concept of the universe (“hemp string and spindle”). The possibility of articulating erotic content in oral literature is shown on the example of the genesis of two lyrical images and their related syuzhet units that indicate the archetype of erotic discourse. The images were named “girl at water” and “garden”, highlighting the semantic importance of the chronotope. Space and time, agents and elements are the basic units of the ritual modeling of the world in which man has fathomed the secret of birth and fertility, and this was insisted on in approaching the selected sample. Individual cryptogrammic images have been deciphered with complete respect for the traditional culture’s context, inextricably related to the symbolic manifestations of these metaphors. The text accentuates the multiple functionality of the erotic content, ranging from an archaic apostrophe of fertility over a provocation of the traditional canon and the carnevalesque taboo inversion to the affirmation of the phallocentric male concept of the patriarchal world. We confirm that the metaphor’s core remains recognizable despite variations determined by ambient, performativity and cryptography, demanded by the patriarchal attitude towards the tabooed and norm-regulated Eros. The oral poetry discourse of the erotic is never reduced to individual experience, and therefore it inescapably reexamines the fundamental stratification of patriarchal culture, based on the inequality of gender roles, while different narrative strategies, imminent to the genre system, more or less successfully neutralize its subversive potential. On the level of material, the principle of exemplarity has suppressed the demand for a broad or representative selection, and on the level of methodological approach, the uncertainty and instability of establishing the poetic image’s genesis, as modeled in the process of oral communication, have found a foothold by applying the theoretical concept of the historical poetics and literary archeology
