Neck-Riddle as a Dialogue off Genres: Applying Bakhtin's Genre Theory

Author(s): John D. Dorst

Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 96, No. 382 (Oct. - Dec., 1983), pp. 413-433
Published by: American Folklore Society
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 JOHN D. DORST

Neck-riddleas a Dialogue of Genres

ApplyingBakhtin'sGenreTheory

Suppose for a moment that it were impossible not to mix genres. What if there were within
the heart of the law [of genre] itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination?

Jacques Derrida (1981:53)

POST-ROMANTIC GENRETHEORYdeparts from the venerable heritage of Aris-

totle and Horace. "Instead of emphasizingthe distinction between kind and
kind, it is interested . . . in finding the common denominator of a kind, its
sharedliterarydevices and literarypurposes" (Wellek and Warren 1977:235).
Still, genre in both pre-Romanticand modern theory is primarilyan issue of
delimitation, a focusing upon the major stabilitiesin literaryexpression. "As
soon as the word 'genre' is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one at-
tempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn" (Derrida 1981:52).
An important task of modern folklore studies is to extend the investigation
of such stabilitiesto genres and genre systems outside the canon of "official"
literary types. For folklorists, genre research has become largely an
ethnographic enterprisein which identifying recurring patterns of behavior
and repeated situations of performanceis as important as recognizing the
stabilities of form and content (Ben-Amos 1976). We should be aware,
however, that the consistencies and stabilities central to both analytic and
ethnographic genre studies automaticallyimply the existence of their com-
plements. Genericinstabilitiesand ambiguitiesconstitute a legitimate, though
largely neglected, areaof genre research.Perhapsthis neglect is a function of
inadequatetheory.
When we acknowledgethe social natureof genres, which we do in making
them the object of ethnography,our theory must keep step by accommodating
emergence, transformation,obsolescence, and so on as positive realities of
genre, that is, as active processes to be treated in their own terms and not
merely as forms of defect or breakdownin generic order. Even the centralfact
of generic stability, viewed from a social perspective, shows itself to be the
result of active maintenance.Our theory must also provide a frameworkfor
considering the interactions among genres. A culture's genres are not just

Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 96, No. 382, 1983

Copyright © 1983 by the American Folklore Society 0021-8715/83/3820413-21$2.60/1

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414 JOHN DORST

structurallyrelatedas contrastiveelementsin a static "grammar" of verbalart

(Ben-Amos 1976:237). As effectivesocialforces, genresarerhetoricaland ideo-
logical; they engage one anotheractively. Any given genre is overcastto some
degree by the shadows of other genres in its cultural environment, and the
nature of these intergenericinfluencesis open to investigation.
I suggest that we can find a genre theory adequateto such issues as in-
tragenericand intergenericinstability in the work of M. M. Bakhtin and his
colleagues V. N. Volosinov and P. N. Medvedev. Developed in the Soviet
Union of the 1920s and 1930s, the ideas of this Bakhtin circle remained
obscureto the West until fairlyrecently;but a growing numberof translations
and criticalappreciationsis revealingBakhtin to be one of the seminalthinkers
of our century (Wehrle 1978; Holquist 1981b:xv-xxxiv), and folkloreresearch
has begun to feel his influence (Proschan 1981; Bauman 1982; Dargan and
Zeitlin 1983; Kodish 1983; Schrager1983). My purpose here is to consider
Bakhtin's conception of genre and then pursue some of its implicationsin an
analysisof one genericallyambiguous phenomenon in folklore.
The issue of genre is cruciallyimportant to Bakhtiniantheoriesof language
and literatureand their relationto society. Generalstatementsabout genre and
historicalanalysesof particulargenres lie scatteredthroughout the work of the
Bakhtin circle, but an explicit theoreticalconception first comes into focus as
part of a polemical confrontationwith the Russian Formalists.In particular,
Bakhtinianideas about genre are quite consciously antagonistic to the genre
theory underlying, for example, Vladimir Propp's Morphologyof the Folktale
(1968[1928]). In The FormalMethodin LiteraryScholarship: A CriticalIntroduc-
tion to SociologicalPoetics,published the same year as Propp's folklore classic,
Bakhtin1spins out his "sociological poetics" from a relentlesscritique of the
Formalistprinciplesthat dominated Russian literarytheory in the late 1920s.
For the Formalists,he says, genre is merely a matterof compositionalarrange-
ment, the stabilizedgrouping of a ready stock of devices (Medvedev/Bakhtin
1978:135-137). (One example of this Formalist approachwould be Propp's
definition of the folktale as a limited number of particular"functions" ar-
rangedin a certainsequence.)To Bakhtin, such a view is superficialand entire-
ly incapableof appreciatinga genre's "vital totality."
An adequategenre theory requiresthat we recognize, as Bakhtin puts it,
"the two-fold orientation of genre in reality." "The first orientation," he
says, "is in the direction of real space and real time." Through this
"external" orientation a genre "enters life and comes into contact with
variousaspectsof its environment.It does so in the processof its actualrealiza-
tion as something performed,heard, readat a definite time, in a definiteplace,
under definite conditions. ... It takes a position between people organized in
some way" (Medvedev/Bakhtin 1978:131). How familiar that sounds to
folklorists today; and how easy it is to miss the novelty such a view of genre
would have had when Bakhtin first expressedit.
His second "orientation of genre in reality," on the other hand, the "inter-
nal" orientation, remainslargelyunacknowledgedin folklore theory,2yet it is

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NECK-RIDDLE 415

essentialfor an adequateconsiderationof genericchange and interaction.

"Everysignificantgenre," Bakhtinsays, "is a complexsystemof meansand
methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality"
(Medvedev/Bakhtin 1978:133).Each "possessesdefiniteprinciplesof selec-
tion, definiteformsof seeingandconceptualizing reality,anda definitescope
anddepthof penetration"(1978:131).In otherwords, genresareparticular
points of view towardthe world. They are "ways of seeing" that possess
somemeasureof formednessandclosure,thoughthat does not precludethe
possibilityof genericflexibility.As pointsof view throughwhich we "fix"
time andspacein certainwaysandin termsof whichwe experienceour social
andmaterialenvironment,genresareconstitutiveof humanconsciousness; and
for Bakhtinconsciousness itselfarisesin the processesof socialexchange(i.e.,
communication)under particularhistoricalconditions.3
Bakhtin's twofold orientation of genre, external and internal, really "turns
out to be a single, two-sided orientation" (Medvedev/Bakhtin 1978:133), two
ways to view the crucial fact of genre's essentially social character. On the one
hand, genres are social because they exist only through concrete enactment
among "people organized in some way"; on the other hand, social forces and
relations are themselves "enacted" through the points of view genres embody.
From either perspective, genre only "develops and generates in the process of
ideological social intercourse. Therefore, a genuine poetics of genre can only be
a sociology of genre" (1978:135).
Such a conception throws open the issue of generic interaction. A
sociological poetics recognizes that there are no pure genres; no genre exists
outside the dense thickets of citation, commentary, resistance, approval,
mimicry, parody, and so on, that constitute the responses of other points of
view (i.e., other genres). Generic interactions are ongoing accomplishments,
often with variable or uncertain outcome; for the most part they involve the
unconscious genres of everyday discourse (Hymes 1975b:351-352). No doubt
the great majority of these exchanges are so evanescent that they will fail to
register on the retina of ethnographic observation, or in native perception for
that matter. On the other hand, canonical forms of artistic expression
sometimes display such a degree of "finalization" that their capacity for ex-
change with other genres is extremely limited. Presumably, the more fixed a
genre is in its internal orientation, the less able it will be to respond to other
points of view.
Between these extremes of fluidity and rigidity are instances where complex
generic interactions take on a discernable, if flexible, shape and some degree of
standardization. One task of genre research, then, might be to identify and
analyze these more or less stable sites of generic exchange. In an essay entitled
"Speech Genres,"4 Bakhtin (1979) suggests this area of investigation by
distinguishing between "primary (simple)" and "secondary (complex)"
speech genres.5 Secondary genres are those forms that arise in relatively highly
developed and organized cultural communication: artistic, scientific,
sociopolitical, and the like. In the process of their formation they "absorb and

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416 JOHN DORST

digest" the simple genres of "unmediated speech communication"

(1979:239). These primarygenres are inevitablytransformedby being brought
together in the context of complex utterances.The relationbetween primary
and secondarygenres in the historicalformation of the latter is important to
our understanding of the "complex problem of the interrelations among
language, ideology and Weltanschauung" (1979:240).
While a distinction between primaryand secondaryspeech genres is prob-
lematic (the line between simplicity and complexity being relative at best),
Bakhtin's conceptualizationprompts us to consider how genres engage one
anotherin varying degreesof integrationand exchange. One question implicit
in Bakhtiniantheory asks what the observableforms of interactionare when
the point of view that is one genre encountersthe point of view of another.
Perhapsthe first will be so limited in its own scope as to be almost blind to the
second genre. Perhapsit will only comprehendthe other mechanicallyand in-
strumentally,as in the case of a folktale in which a characterspeaksa proverb.
More interestingly, perhapsthe first genre will have the capacityto infiltrate,
even victimize, the second, inhabiting its body and turning it to alien pur-
poses. Something like this occurs in many parodygenres: so-calledparodyrid-
dles for example, in which ajoke or "catch" createsits effect by pretendingto
establishthe riddlepoint of view, only to explode it when the riddle solution
turns out to be a punchline.
The limiting case of generic relationships,the most complex and slippery,is
that in which genres come together on an equal footing, each forced by the
other to entertainthe possibility of an alien conception of reality. When two
(or more) genres activelyencounterone anotherbut neitherclearlydominates,
possibilitiesfor generic ambiguity proliferate.6I want to suggest that folklore
offers a particularlyclear example of such "arenas of generic dialogue"7 (or
secondarygenres) in the odd phenomenon folklorists call "neck-riddle."8
Although Bakhtin's social theory suggests the whole rangeof researchissues
concerning hierarchicalintegration, interaction, and ambiguity of genres, in
his own analyseshe devoted most of his attention to genre stabilities. In the
following discussion I take neck-riddleas the basis on which to pursue an
aspect of Bakhtiniangenre theory that remainsundevelopedin terms of con-
crete cases. Archer Taylor described neck-riddle as a "well-established and
enigmaticgenre," lumping it with the other forms that are not "true" riddles
(1951:1). In contrast, I want to see what we gain in analyticalpower by tak-
ing neck-riddleas the name for an arenaof generic conflict within which a
range of intergenericaccommodationscan occur. Given the natureof my data,
drawn mostly from "old-fashioned" folklore collections, my analysisfocuses
on the textual manifestationsof neck-riddle'sdialogue of genres.

Before turning to this analysis,I want to detour back through Bakhtin and
follow an importanttheme in his work that will lead us to neck-riddlefrom a
different, less theoreticaldirection. Bakhtin was deeply interestedin folklore,
and his study of the folk culture of medievalcarnival(1968) is of obvious in-

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NECK-RIDDLE 417

terest to folklorists. His treatment of the subject is thoroughly literary, ex-

tremely erudite, and no doubt in some respectsobjectionableto specialistsin
folk celebration.But his purposein studying carnivalwas really to give name
and substance to an organizing concept that could illuminate the neglected
areasof culture and literaryhistory that interestedhim. Putting it oversimply,
for Bakhtin, "carnival" and "carnivalesque"(and "folklore" for that matter)
apply to conditions in literature and social life where relativity, open-
endedness,ambiguity, free mixture of forms, and democraticconfrontationof
incompatibles characterize the scene. No single authority dominates and
everything is open to question. Carnivalis the realm where voices9confront
one another in free and equal dialogue.
Bakhtin follows the history of carnivalesqueliteraryforms from an archaic
stage in the Hellenistic prose romancesand "Menippean" satiresof late anti-
quity, on to the popularculture of medievalfolk celebration,and then into the
modern novel through the immense portal swung open by Rabelais(Bakhtin
1981a, 1981b). My immediate point is that neck-riddle is a folk pathway
parallelingthis high roadof literaryhistory. It is, so to speak, a minicarnivalof
Western verbal art.
For the moment, while we attend to the patternsof neck-riddleimagery, it
will serve our turn to treat this form simply as a straightforwardfolklore
genre-a temporaryfiction to be abandonedwhen we return to the issue of
genericinteraction.Provisionally,let us acceptas a neck-riddleanyfolktalethat
turns on the motif of a hero who must pose an unsolvableriddle in order to
save himself from execution and/or win the hand of a princess.The definitive
featureof his riddleis that he makesit up on the spot by presentingas a formal
enigma some unusual, often bizarreprivateexperiencehe has had-a situation
"unique in riddling" (Abrahamsand Dundes 1972:134).
Since we are temporarilyoperatingon the assumptionthat neck-riddleis in
fact a kind of folktale, let us acceptthat we can get a reasonablycomplete pic-
ture of neck-riddleimagery by tracking down two standardtale types in the
Aarne-Thompsonindex (1964): AT851 (The PrincessWho Cannot Solve the
Riddle) and AT927 (Out-riddlingthe Judge). These types are the classificatory
tracesof a tale field organizedaroundthe definitivemotif of a riddlederivedad
hoc from the hero's private experience.The purpose of the riddling-to save
one's neck or win the hand of a princess-determines the basic subdivision
within this field. Given these primary elements, one finds in neck-riddlesa
great variety of style and tone, but in content they display remarkablecon-
sistency. Only a handfulof specifichero experiencesand correspondingriddles
account for most of the hundredsof publishedneck-riddletexts. In an appen-
dix, I identify seven analyticallydistinguishableregions within the overall
neck-riddlefield, four involving a hero who saveshimself from execution and
three based on winning a princess.10The considerableoverlap among these
regions affirms the correctnessof viewing them collectively, that is, as con-
stituting a "neck-riddlecomplex."
Some very direct historicalconnectionsindicatethat this complex belongs to

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418 JOHN DORST

Bakhtin's literaryworld of carnival.In tracingthe history of prenovelistic(car-

nivalesque)literature,Bakhtindwells at length on the prosefiction of late anti-
quity, and he finds that such forms as Hellenistic romance and the sb-called
"Menippeansatire" (e.g., Petronius'Satyriconand Apuleius' GoldenAss) em-
body the folk spirit of carnival(1973:87-100, 1981c:41-83). In their topicality
and "serio-comical" tone, they contrastsharplywith the officialgenres of the
age (epic, tragedy, rhetoric). The matter of our neck-riddles clearly has
historicalaffinitieswith the secularprenovelisticprose of late antiquity. "The
generaltheme of the winning of a bride through the giving or solving of a rid-
dle," Stith Thompson tells us, "goes back at least to the Greek romances"
(1946:156).
The Hellenistic story of Appolonius of Tyre, best known to us today by
way of Shakespeare'sPericles,is one example of this theme. The centralmotif
of father-daughterincest expressedin a riddle of confusedfamily relationships
has obvious relevancefor the presentdiscussion(see Appendix, # 7). A similar
enigma, one based on the reversalof generations, belongs to the neck-riddle
about a woman who savesher fatherfrom starvationby nursinghim through a
hole in his prison wall ( #4). Minus the riddle motif, that is, not as a neck-
riddle at all, this story of the good daughtercan be found in Latin authorsof
the first century A.D. (Kuntze 1904; Taylor 1948; Deonna 1954).
Quite apartfrom such genetic connections to early prenovelisticliterature,
neck-riddlescontain clear echoes of carnival practice. When the hero puts
leavesin his boot and gravelon his head, when someone climbs a tree to eat an
"unborn" pig (#3), when the daughter nurses the father, they declare
themselvescitizens of the land of Cockaigne, where the mice eat the cats, the
childrenspankthe parents,and the cart goes before the horse. In other words,
the "absurd" reversalsof behaviorand social roles so characteristicof carnival
show themselves quite distinctly in neck-riddles.1
But above everything else, we know we are in the world of carnivalesque
folklore with neck-riddlesbecauseof their thorough grotesqueness.Taken all
together, neck-riddlesconstitute something like a folk exploration of the
grotesque. In his study of Rabelais's works and their background in folk
celebration,Bakhtin assemblesa virtual encyclopediaof carnivalimagery-an
imagery informed throughout by the principle of "grotesque realism"
(Bakhtin 1968:18-27).
In the realm of the grotesque the parts and materialprocessesof the human
body are exaggerated, self-penetrated, divided, degraded, recombined,
destroyed, and revived in a riot of joyous ambiguity and openendedness.The
whole world is conceivedin terms of the processesof the humanbody, which
are never completed, for this "materialbodily principleis containednot in the
biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people
who are continually growing and renewed" (Bakhtin 1968:19). Because the
grotesque sees all apparentfinality as merely conditional, every end as the
ground of a new beginning, it "liberatesman from all the forms of inhuman
necessity that direct the prevailingconcept of the world. This concept is un-

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NECK-RIDDLE 419

crownedby the grotesqueand reducedto the relativeand the limited"

(Bakhtin 1968:48).
Perhapsthe paragonof grotesqueimageryis the motif of "pregnantdeath,"
as in Bakhtin's example of the laughing "senile, pregnant hags" depicted on
certain Greek terra-cottas.They combine "decaying and deformedflesh with
the flesh of new life, conceivedbut as yet unformed" (1968:25). The message
of the grotesqueis crystallizedin that one image. The pervasivetheme of neck-
riddles, recognized as long ago as 1899 (Petsch 1899:16; Heusler
1901:140-141; R6hrich 1967:105-110), is just this ambiguous relationship
between life and death, a point recentlyreaffirmedby Roger Abrahamsin his
monograph on neck-riddle(1980). A typical English language neck-riddleis
one in which the hero saves himself with this enigma:

As I walked out and in again,

From the dead the living came.
Six there is and seven there'll be,
So tell me this riddle or set me free.

He has seen a horse's skull in which a bird is hatching its brood-six eggs
hatched and one remaining (Halpert 1941:197).
This tableau of nascent life amid death and decay is the most sublime
representativeof the coherent analogic system of imagery from which neck-
riddles are constructed. The murderousbirths and parturientdeaths, confu-
sions of family relations,of youth and age, of wholesome food and poison, the
dismemberments,incest, and sundry nonsensicalreversals-the stuff of neck-
riddles-correspond from top to bottom with the categories of Rabelais's
quintessentiallygrotesque literaryworld.
In trying to bring some order to the chaos of Rabelaisianimagery, Bakhtin
identifies seven basic "series," or thematic domains, each devoted to a dif-
ferent aspectof the humanbody and its processes.Using these in a bewildering
arrayof extensions and combinations,Rabelaisdeconstructsthe whole world,
drawing in all of human experienceand comically re-presentingit from the
relativizing perspectiveof the grotesque. The seven series, which bleed easily
into one another, include: (1) the anatomy and physiology series; (2) human
clothing series; (3) food series; (4) drink and drunkennessseries; (5) sexual
series;(6) death series;and (7) defecationseries(Bakhtin 1981a:170). A quick
look through the appendix shows that virtually all of neck-riddleimagery
belongs to one or the other of these series, only the last of which goes
unrepresentedin the published neck-riddletexts.
A 19th-centurycollection of folktales from Lesbos includes a neck-riddlein
which the lineaments of Hellenistic romance are clearly evident. Here is a
synopsiswith the relevantseriesindicatedin parenthesesto demonstratehow
thoroughly the tale is constructedfrom the imagery of grotesque realism:

Robbers ransacka house, kill the housewife (6) and take her daughter to sell into slavery.

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420 JOHN DORST

Later, the young girl's own father, unaware of her identity, buys and marriesher. When he
discovershis abomination, he kills the girl and takes from her body the son he had begotten (1,
5, 6). He has the girl's corpse flayed (1). Having grown up, the son comes into possessionof a
horse that, like himself, was born posthumously (1, 5, 6). He meets a man wearing beautiful
gloves and out of envy gets his father to make him a pair from his mother's skin (1, 2). Even-
tually he meets a princesswho poses him a riddle: "I walk on that with which I eat (1, 3); I
wear on my finger that with which I see (1, 2); and I have a skull from which I drink (1, 4)."
The hero counterswith his own riddle:"My horseand I, we areunborn;and in walking I carry
my mother." Unable to solve his riddle, the princessis obliged to revealhers. She once was in
love with a Moor. When he failed to return her affection, she had him killed, his teeth fixed in
her shoe, his eyes set in a ring, and his skull made into a drinking cup (6, 1, 2, 3, 4). [My
synopsis after Schultz 1912:81-82]12

I choose this examplebecauseit bids fair to being the most complete expres-
sion of the grotesquein the literatureof neck-riddles.But for that samereason
it is an anomalouscase. Most neck-riddlesare less thorough, being organized
aroundone or two of the grotesqueseries. However, they are characterizedas
a whole by the combinationof death (6) with some form of its opposite:either
birth (an extension of series 5) or taking sustenance(3 and 4). A hallmarkof
neck-riddlesis the efficiencywith which they embody these combinations.In-
cest (destructive sexuality), posthumous birth (life from death or birth that
kills), nest or hive in a carcass(new life and sustenanceamid decay), eating
"unborn" food (new life, taken out of the dead, dying to sustain life), com-
pounding deaths (destructivefood or drink)-each of these motifs crystallizes
the grotesque in a single image. This tendency of neck-riddlesto distill the
essenceof the grotesquefinds its extreme expressionwhen the images are fur-
ther compressedand cast as formal riddles, the posing of which either saves a
life or results in a marriage. Taken individually, neck-riddlesseem to run
against the Rabelaisianaesthetic,which develops the grotesqueextensively, in
an explosion of images that fills the world. Only by viewing the whole neck-
riddlefield as a kind of folk Gargantuado we get a comparablesenseof carnival
richness.
There is much more to say about the grotesque in neck-riddles,but this
should sufficeto confirm their placein the carnivalesqueworld so importantto
Bakhtin. One quality of Bakhtin's work is its consistency. It is so much of a
piece (remarkable,given the great variety of issues he addressed)that one can
take it up anywhere and track down correspondinganalysesand analogous
concepts anywhere else. The analogic leap I want to make here, a very short
one, is from carnivalesquefolklore to genericdialogue, with neck-riddleas the
link. Grotesque realism is the manifestationin the plane of imagery of the
dialogic principle.The conflicts, deflections, mutual distortions, and mergings
of voices that constitute dialogue correspondto the interpenetrations,rear-
rangements,and reversalsof body parts and processesin the grotesqueimage.
The question is, then, how do we see in neck-riddlesthe dialogic confronta-
tion of genre voices?
One thing is obvious from even a quick survey of neck-riddlesin standard

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NECK-RIDDLE 421

folklore collections. It is wrong to describethem, as I have done provisionally,

as tales with a certainkind of riddleas the definitivemotif. In many casesthey
are perceived and performed as riddles with narrativesolutions, sometimes
with the narrativereducedalmost out of existence, as in a Nova Scotianexam-
ple:

I killedno one and yet killedtwelve.

-There was a man, he injected poison in a chicken. He fed the chicken to twelve people and
killed them. [Fauset 1931, cited in Abrahams 1977:164]

While we might be inclined to see this as a defective version, perhapsit is in

fact an example of riddle gaining the upper hand in a generic dialogue with
folktale. The Low German tradition exhaustively collected by Richard
Wossidlo supports this view, for there the compressed,riddle form of neck-
riddle is typical, not aberrant(1897:I, 191-222).
Roger Abrahamsreports the perfectillustrativecase of a Tobagonianinfor-
mant who performsthe "compounding deaths" neck-riddle(# 5) sometimes
as a riddle with a long narrativesolution, sometimes as an elaboratefolktale
with riddling as its climax (1977:165-167). In Abrahams's West Indian
materialwe find at least one traditionfor which there is detailedcontextualin-
formation to support the presentview of neck-riddle.In Tobago, "the neck-
riddle is drawn upon in either riddling sessions or storytelling sessions. Both
occur at bongo(wake)," which "is an essentiallycarnivalesqueoccasion, in-
asmuchas it is the time of in-betweennessin which all kinds of entertainments
are juxtaposed. It also involves a betwixt-and-between space, for bongo-as
with Vincentiannine-night-takesplace in the yard, a place otherwise kept in
severe order" (Abrahams,personalcommunication;see also Abrahams1982,
1983).13
It appears,then, that accordingto native perceptionsas manifestedin per-
formance, the neck-riddlecomplex can only be taken as a genericallybivalent
whole. But the matter is more complicated than that. Recourse to native
classificationreflectedin performancecategoriescan take us only so far toward
an understandingof neck-riddleas genericdialogue. The outwardlyregistered
bivalenceof performancepossibilitiesis the symptom of a more generalinward
ambivalence, a fluid internal ambiguity of intergeneric influence and
exchange.14It would be a mistake to see neck-riddleeither as the mechanical
hybridof two genresor as merelya body of materialavailableto two modes of
performance.The point of adopting Bakhtin's conception of genre is that it
resists such reductionsand allows for the subtle shadings, deflections, and in-
determinaciesthat constitute the active life of genres.
Unlike open polemicalconfrontations,where contending points of view oc-
cur as explicitly stated positions, genre dialogues are nondiscursive.Their ef-
fects will be felt not as open argument, but as subterraneanconflict over those
aspectsof realitythat the genericparticipantsconceptualizeand fix differently.

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422 JOHN DORST

We should expect active intergenericexchanges to manifest themselves in-

directly, often, no doubt, in quite subtle or apparentlytrivial stylistic features
of the dialogic texts.15The influenceof one genre on anotherin such interac-
tions is like the effect of an unseenplanet on its visible neighbors. We infer its
presencefrom the slight distortions it causesin the predictedorbits of obser-
vable bodies.
The Tobago example, where the neck-riddledialogueof genresregistersex-
ternally as separatefolktale and riddle versions of the same material,provides
visible evidenceof intergenericinfluencemanifestingitself through style. This
is how Seaton Sandy, Abrahams's informant, introduces the hero in his
folktale version of the compounding deaths story. In this performance, rid-
dling functions as a narrative motif:

A boy, a jiggerfoot boy [one with a clubfoot] was living by his grandmother. He decide,
"Mama, 'ma go take me chance." Say "Chance where, boy?" Say "Mama, we hear the king
say anyone who gi' him a riddle that he can't answer, ha' go give him this girl for married."
Said, "One jiggerfoot poor boy like a you, you know, see wha' we poor? How, boy, you jus'
gone los' your life." [Abrahams1977:166]

When Sandy performs the compounding deaths material as a riddle, the cor-
responding passage, now part of a riddle solution, is this:

A young man was living with his grandmother. After hearing, told his grandmotherlike he
going to make a try. The grandmother begged him not to go. He still insist. [Abrahams
1977:165]

Typically, riddles operate by dressing the unexceptional objects of everyday

experience in fantastic costumes and then delighting us with the surprise of the
unmasking. We see in the second passage a narrative attempting, through its
style, to assume an appropriately mundane tone of voice-one suitable for a
riddle solution. This shift involves more than an abridgment. All the heighten-
ing features of performed narrative in the folktale version-the direct
discourse, the interjection of the narrator's own voice, the touches of
verisimilitude-are flattened in a stylistic "riddleization" of story. Of course,
depending on one's generic prejudices, one might want to see the first passage
as a "narrativization" of riddle. Actually, the two versions constitute a unity
of generic interaction: riddle/folktale deflecting and deflected by folktale/rid-
dle.
One context in which Bakhtin explicitly raised the issue of intergeneric
dialogue (1981a) is especially relevant to the present discussion of neck-riddle.
Obviously, the way we view time and space is fundamental to our experience
of reality. As phenomena that tend to fix particular conceptions of reality, the
various genres of verbal art can be expected to display distinctive capacities for
"seeing" time and space. Bakhtin went so far as to say that spatial and tem-
poral conceptualizations, which he combined in a post-Einsteinian unity

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NECK-RIDDLE 423

aredefinitiveof genreand genericdistinction(1981b:85).These

(chronotope),
chronotopes
are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace, or oppose one
another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelation-
ships.... The general characteristicof these interactions is that they are dialogical(in the
broadest sense of the word). [1981b:252]

The questionof how a givengenrefixes time andspaceis immenselycom-

plicated.Bakhtin'sessayon the chronotopesof novelisticgenresattemptsto
answerthis questionfor a seriesof separatenarrativetypes. The difficulties
multiplymanyfoldif we begin to ask what happenswhen two or more
chronotopesmeet andinfluenceone another.As an illustrationof genericin-
teraction,neck-riddle hasthe advantage of involvingchronotopesso drastically
differentthat theirconfrontationbecomesespeciallyvisible.
The conceptualization of time in particular is at issuein neck-riddles. They
involvenotjust a confrontation betweentwo waysof representing time,but a
dialogueoverthe veryfactof temporality itself.Althoughnarrative genresdif-
ferin the waystheyconceptualize time, the representation of temporalmove-
ment is commonto them all. In fact, narrative"is usuallydefinedas the
representation of real or fictive events and situationsin a time sequence"
(Prince1980:49;seealsoPrince1973).Riddle,on the otherhand,is atemporal
or extratemporal (cf. Bakhtin1981b:156-158).Of course,the act of riddling
hasdurationin realtime, andthe exactnatureof thatdurationfiguresin rid-
dle's externalorientationto reality;16 but its internalorientationis another
matter.There, the spacebetweenposing and solvingis temporallyvoid-a
metaphoricflashin whichriddlesmapa culture'scategoriesonto one another
(Hamnett1967;Maranda1971;Todorov1973).17
Justas the neck-riddle complexexploresthe rangeof grotesquecarnivalim-
agery, so it embracesa spectrumof dialogicaccommodations betweennar-
rativetemporality andriddleatemporality. Theseexchangesaremanifestin the
broadrangeof rhetoricalformsthatneck-riddles take.In the NovaScotianex-
amplecitedabove,we seethe orientationtowardatemporality carriedto anex-
treme.In this neck-riddle,not only does the folktalecomponentappearas a
riddlesolutionbut also its plot (i.e., its representation of temporalrelation-
ships) is so compressedthat one hardly sees a story there at all. To generalize
dangerouslyfromthe uncertainevidenceof standardfolklorecollections,this
orientationseemscharacteristic of the northernEuropean/Germanic tradition
of neck-riddle.
At the otherextremearethoseneck-riddles whereriddleis fullyintegrated
in well-developedfolktaleplots.Thebestexamplesarethe tales(especially# 5)
in whichthe princessandherhandmaidens visit the heroduringthe nightand
trickhimout of the solutionto hisunsolvableriddle.Whentheprincesssolves
the riddlethe next day, the herocounterswith a secondenigma,one referring
to hertrickery,andon thatscoreshemustremainsilent.The rhetoricaleffect

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424 JOHN DORST

derivesless from the unsolvableriddleitself than from the ironic twist that em-
phatically clinches the plot. The princess solves the unsolvable but cannot
speak when she knows the answer. Neck-riddles of this type approachthat
form of intergenericrelationshipin which one genre incorporatesanotherin-
strumentally. The narrativedepiction of riddling (and the subversionof rid-
dling), more than the internal influence of riddle's generic point of view,
characterizesthese neck-riddles.To generalizeagain, it appearsthat the orien-
tation toward a dominanceof narrativediachrony(the articulationof plot) is
typicalof circum-Mediterranean and Romance languageneck-riddletraditions.
Most neck-riddlesfall somewhere between these two extremes, displaying
more ambiguousblends of folktale and riddlechronotopes.Perhapswe see the
almost equal participationof temporaland atemporalpoints of view in those
versions of the compounding deaths neck-riddlewhere severallargely uncon-
nected riddlesare strung together (# 6). At its genericcore, riddlesimply can-
not comprehendnarrativetime; plot is not a meaningfulcategory in riddle's
conception of reality.18The riddle sequence,however, can be seen as a deflec-
tion of riddle toward narrativediachronism, albeit a rather mechanicaland
superficialone. It should also be noted that the slight temporalizingeffect of
the riddle sequenceis achievedonly at considerableexpense to the overallnar-
rativity of the story framework.Eachriddlein the weakly connectedsequence
correspondsto an event in the seriesof experiencesthat constitute the body of
the tale. The stringing of riddlesin some sense producesan arbitrarystringing
of events, making for an episodic, temporallyenfeebledstory. Lackingthe im-
pelling force of narrativeconnectednessor motivation, it moves forwardonly
as a sequenceof separatemoments. The generic interactionin neck-riddlesof
this sort is a marriagein which the partnershave come to look a little bit alike.
The rhetoricof the neck-riddlecomplex, then, is partiallya rhetoricof tem-
porality confronting atemporality.At least symbolically,the content of neck-
riddlesrecapitulatesthis dialogue. The accidental,the absurd,the bizarre:these
dominantqualitiesof neck-riddlecontent suggest a world of purecontingency.
It is not just a world in time, but the existential world of random,
unrepeatableexperience;the indeterminateworld we articulateinto meaning
through our narratives.Riddles, however, usually trade in the common, the
typical, and the categorical.They involve the momentaryestrangementof the
taken-for-granted,that realm of experienceso habitualand familiaras to seem
inevitable (i.e., timeless). We can read the utter unsolvability of the neck-
riddleenigmas, I think, as a symbolicembodimentof two radicallyincompati-
ble, even diametrically opposed, qualities of temporal experience being
brought together to engage in a dialogue of mutual commentary.
Minor as neck-riddleis in the overallbody of Europeanfolklore,explorations
of some very fundamentalhumanissuesare developedimplicitlywithin it. The
grotesqueimagerysuggests that the sharpline we draw between life and death
is a mystificationof some deeperambiguity; the range of rhetoricalforms and
the very motif by which we identify neck-riddle-the posing of an inherently
unreadableenigma-suggest an almost philosophicalinterest in the nature of

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NECK-RIDDLE 425

experience. Perhapsthis speculativequality is present whenever genres come

together dialogically,as I have suggested folktale and riddledo in neck-riddle.
A measureof reflexivity is inevitable when free and equal voices meet.
The neck-riddledialoguebetween folktaleand riddleshows its full rangeon-
ly when we take the whole Europeanneck-riddlecomplex as our object of
study. Becauseit is an analyticalconstruct, this complex sits still while we ex-
amine it in highly abstractterms; and for the most part I have treatedit as a
timeless order in which all the elements are uniformly present. Such an ap-
proach is justified for the limited task I have undertakenhere: to addressthe
issue of internalgeneric dialogue using folkloric materialdrawn mostly from
contextless sources. But the abstractionsthat inevitablyresult obscuresome of
the most important implications of Bakhtinian genre theory. Bakhtin's
sociological poetics raises the issue of active intergenericexchange, but more
broadly, it points us toward a critical, dialecticalview of genres as positive
meansof ideologicalproduction. In other words, a sociologicalpoetics is also a
historicalpoetics, one which ultimately requiresus to view the active life of
genres in their relationto concretesocialand materialcircumstances.This rela-
tion should not be understoodas merely a static reflectionof social conditions
through generic points of view or as a generic modeling of social forces (e.g.,
Roberts and Forman 1971). Rather, it is a dialecticalrelationshipof mutual
determination.19
In practicalterms Bakhtin's sociohistoricalpoetics suggests that along with
the ethnography that inquires into such matters as who owns what genres,
when they areused, how they areperceivedby those who use them, how they
are marked, etc., we need a dialecticsthat considersthe relationshipbetween
genres and the largersocialforces at work in concretehistoricalcircumstances.
These two aspects of genre study, which correspond in some respects to
Bakhtin's external and internal orientations, circle one another in a constant
round of mutual implication;yet a theoreticallygroundeddialecticsof genre is
an unopenedbook in folklore studies. To open it would involve less a radical
departurethan a logical (and necessary)extension of the ethnographicenter-
prise alreadyso firmly in place.

Appendix
Seven Subfieldsof Neck-riddle
1. The hero saveshis neck with a riddlereferringto a tableauhe has seen: a
bird hatching its young (or bees hiving) in the skull or carcassof a cow or
horse. The riddle usually takes one of two forms:

(a) As I walked out,

As I walked out,
From the dead I saw the living spring.
Blessed may Christ Jesu be,
For the six [i.e., the birds] have set the seventh free. [Norton 1942:22]

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426 JOHN DORST

(b) Ten tongues in one head,

Nine living and one dead;
One flew forth to fetch some bread
To feed the living in the dead. [Norton 1942:28]20

2. The hero, or most often a heroine in this case, savesherselfwith a riddle

about what she has done with the body of her pet dog. In most versions she
has had shoes and/or gloves made from its hide. The riddleusually involves a
confusing use of the dog's name (cf. #6):

Love I sit.
Love I stand.
Love I hold
Fast in hand.
I see Love.
Love sees not me.
Riddle me that,
Or hanged I'll be.

The dog, named Love, has been made into socks, gloves, and a chair seat. [Norton 1942:
35-36]21

3. This subgroup revolves around the motif of "posthumous birth." A

Yorkshire example, like many others, includes an "earth-and-oak-leaves"
motif of absurdreversals:

There was a man sentencedto death, but he pleadedhard to be spared,and thejudge consented
to set him free if he could propound a riddle which he could not solve. The next day the man
offered the following for solution:

Under the earth I go,

Upon oak leaves I stand;
I ride on a filly that never was foaled,
And carry the mare's skin in my hand.

The explanationwas that he had put earth in his cap, oak leaves in his shoe, cut open a preg-
nant mare to obtain the foal, and made a whip of the mare's skin. [Henderson 1866:318]

Slightly different, but clearly related, are the stories where the hero cuts
open a pregnantsow and removes the farrow. He placesearthin his hat or on
his head and, while sitting up in a tree, eats one of the fetal pigs (cf. # 6). In
these cases the riddle takes a form like:

There I sat high in a tree,

Ate what was unborn
Deep under the earth. [Wossidlo 1897:1, 218]

4. A daughterwins her father'sfreedomby posing a riddlebasedon the fact

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NECK-RIDDLE 427

thatto keephimfromstarvingshehasnursedhim througha holein his prison

wall. The riddleis one of confusedfamilyrelations(cf. # 7):

Before I was the daughter,

Afterward I was the mother.
The son that I have
Is not the grandson of my father.
If you don't know what I've said,
Give me back my father. [Amades 1960:204-205]

5. The herowins the handof the princesswith a riddleaboutan oddoccur-

renceof compoundingdeaths:

There was a king who made it known that whoever could pose a riddle his daughtercouldn't
answer would have her as wife. A farmer's son and his servantset out to visit the king. The
lad's mother gave him some poison, but the servantoverheardthat she intended to poison her
son and knocked it from his hand when he was about to drink. It fell on the neck of the horse
and the neck swelled up. The animaldroppeddead on the spot. Three frogs came by and ate of
the dead horse, and they also died. The servanttied them up in a cloth. Next they came into
the company of seven robbers, who intended to kill them. But first the frogs were cooked and
eaten by the robbers and they died too. The hero presented himself before the princess and
posed this riddle:

One slew three, and three slew seven,

And the two of us were left alive.

She was unable to solve it. [Wossidlo 1897:I, 231]

The consistentlyrecurringelementsof this groupare:(1) the faithfulhelper,

(2) the poisonin a drink,(3) the poisonpurposelyspilledon or fed to the
horseby the servant,who knowsof the plot on the hero'slife, (4) scavenging
of the carcass,usuallyby crows, and(5) the poisoningof the robbers.Com-
mon in versionsof both group # 5 and # 6 is a concludingepisodein which
the princesstricks the hero into revealingthe answer. He countersthis
ploy with anothertrickor a secondriddle.The typicalsequenceof motifsin
this episodeis: (1) the princess'snocturnalvisit to the hero(oftenprecededby
the visitsof herservants),(2) herdiscoveryof the solutionthroughtrickeryor
in exchangefor eitheran articleof her clothingor her sexualfavors,(3) the
hero'sdisplayof the clothingnext dayto revealthe princess'streachery,or (4)
the hero'sposingof a secondriddlethattheprincessdoesn'tdaresolvebecause
it refersto her trickeryor indiscretion.This secondriddleusuallyinvolves
hunting imagery:

Myself and my gillie were on a day in the forest shooting. My gillie fired at a hare, and she fell,
and he took her skin off, and let her go; and so he did to twelve, he took their skins off and let
them go [the hero's servant is visited by twelve of the princess's handmaidensand each sur-
rendersher "plaid" in the attempt to find out the riddle]. And at last came a great fine hare

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428 JOHN DORST

[the princess], and I myself fired at her, and I took her skin off, and I let her go. [Campbell
1890-1893:11, 38-39]

6. This group also employs the compoundingdeathsriddlebut differsfrom

#5 in severalrespects. The hero is not accompaniedby a servant. The poi-
soned animal(more often a dog or donkey than a horse) has an unusualname
that figures in the riddle (cf. # 2). The poison is put in baked goods rather
than a drink. What really distinguishesthis group from # 5, however, is the
addition of events unconnectedto the compounding deaths, and from which
the hero constructs a string of extra riddles. Most typically these events and
their correspondingriddlesare:(1) the chanceshooting of an "unseen" animal
(usually a rabbit)that turns out to be with young ("I shot at what I saw and
hit what I didn't see"), (2) the eating of the "unborn" offspring (cf. #3)
after it is cooked over a fire made from a book ("I ate unborn meat roasted
with words"), (3) thirst quenchedwith some unusualliquid, e.g., water from
lamps, sweat from a horse, dew from leaves or grass ("I drankwater neither
from heavennor earth"), and (4) the tableauof a deadhorse floating in a river
and either bearingan animalor some birds (cf. # 1) or serving as a raft for the
hero ("The living floated on the dead," or "I crossed the river on an
unknown bridge").

7. The story of a hero conceivedincestuouslybetween a fatherand daughter

(cf. #4). The hero is cut from his mother's womb, either causingher death or
following upon her murder(cf. # 3). Later,he obtainsa horse that is also "un-
born." In some cases gloves are made from the mother's skin (cf. # 2). The
hero eventuallywins a princesswith a riddlealludingto his aberrantbirth, the
confusion of family relations in incest, and the gruesome article of clothing:

I am not born, neitheris my horse. I am the son of the daughterof my father, and I wear the
hands of my mother. [Bolte and Polivka 1913-1932:I, 196]22

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Folklore Society's 1982 meetings in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. My initial interest in neck-riddlewas encouraged by Alan Dundes, who aided
me with many useful bibliographicsuggestions. I am greatly indebted to Roger Abrahamsand to Frank
Proschan, both of whom offered extensive comments, general and specific, on a preliminaryversion of
this paper. Although I have not been able to use all their suggestions, I have incorporatedtoo many to
cite them individually. Specialacknowledgment is due to Samuel Schrager, whose assistancegreatly im-
proved the organization of the final version.
1 For the sake of convenience I treat this book as if it were simply authoredby Bakhtin, although it first

appearedunder Medvedev's name. The whole issue of authorship in the Bakhtin circle is complex (see
Wehrle 1978), but one point of general agreement is that Bakhtin himself was the motivating force and
the source of the key ideas.
say "largely" unacknowledged because there is a superficialsimilaritybetween Bakhtin's concep-
2 I

tion of genre and Andre Jolles's einfacheFormen.Working at more or less the same time as Bakhtin and
Propp, Jolles producea something like the idealist-Platoniccounterpartto Bakhtin's historical-materialist
conception of genre.

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NECK-RIDDLE 429

3In this respect Bakhtin can be associatedwith by now familiardevelopments in theories of social com-
munication, the social construction of reality, and the social genesis of mind and consciousness. With
regard to the last of these, George Herbert Mead's classic, Mind, Self, and Society(1934), offers striking
similarities to Bakhtin's philosophical framework.
4
No published English translationof this essay is availableat present. I am grateful to FrankProschan
for calling it to my attention and to Vern McGee for making his unpublishedtranslationavailableto me.
5 Again, the similarity to Jolles is superficial,involving a correspondenceof terminology but not of
concept.
6 These comments on the forms of interaction between
genres are analogous in some respects to
Volosinov's discussion (1973:119-122) of the forms of reported speech. See especiallyhis distinction be-
tween "linear" and "pictorial" tendencies in reported speech.
7
"Dialogue" is probably the most important unifying concept in Bakhtin's thinking (see Bakhtin
1973, 1981a).
8 The term was coined by Archer Taylor as a counterpartto the GermanHalslosungsratsel ("neck-saving
riddle"). There are parallelsin all the Scandinavianlanguages (BOdker1964:s.v. Halsl0sningsgade).
9 "Voice," like
dialogue, has special importance in Bakhtin's theoretical terminology. Michael Hol-
quist characterizesthis Bakhtinianvoice as "the speakingpersonality, the speakingconsciousness.A voice
always has a will or desire behind it, its own timbre and overtones" (1981a:434).
10
Happily, I don't have to begin from scratch to survey neck-riddletraditions. The "classical" canon
of this form, i.e., the neck-riddlesin standard19th- and 20th-century collections, has alreadybeen win-
nowed and classified. For the first four of my subfieldsI rely on F. J. Norton's exhaustive study (1942) of
AT927. Since AT851 appearsas #22 ("Das Ratsel") in the 1819 edition of Kinder-undHausmarchen, we
have at our disposal Bolte and Polivka's copious notes (1913-1932:I, 188-202). Even more helpful for a
survey of AT851 are Aurelio M. Espinosa's notes to the Spanish tale "El acertijo" (1946-1947:II,
79-88).
1 See Le Roy Ladurie(1979:189-192) for an interesting example of Land of Cockaigne reversalsin an
actual carnival.
12 Actually, this tale combines the incest and posthumous birth motifs from neck-riddle(Appendix # 3

and # 7) with the story of the murdered lover (see Appendix # 2 and note 21 below).
13 If neck riddle is itself a "minicarnival" of verbal
art, then its performancewithin a setting like bongo
is a case of carnivalwithin carnival. Such hierarchiesof integration, of genre and metagenre, of utterance
and event, indeed all the aspects of generic interaction, lead ultimately to the breakdown of our facile
distinctions between texts and contexts. Bakhtin's sociological poetics requires us to reconsiderall such
distinctions.
14 In a recent work of
literary theory much influenced by Bakhtin and of considerable interest to
folklorists, Gary Saul Morson (1981) develops the ideas of "boundary works" and "threshold
literature," that is, literaryphenomena subject to interpretationby more than one generic standard.I am
driving here at a much looser concept. In cyberneticterms, I am after the analog activity that is digitalized
in the contrastive distinctions between performancecategories.
15 The
inherently dialogic nature of language, Bakhtin argues, revealsitself preciselyin those areasleast
susceptible to formalist/structuralist techniques. Bakhtin would make paralinguistics, the catchall of
"secondary" language phenomena, central to his study of language as "utterance" (Volosinov 1973,
1976). For folklorists, the analogous reorientation would be to elevate the study of "texture," which
languishes on the peripheryof the tedious text/context debate, to a place of prime importance (see also
Bakhtin 1978).
16 Thomas A. Burns has
meticulously dissected this aspect of riddle (1976).
17
Of course the same distinction must be made between the external temporalityof the act of narrating
and the immanent temporalityof story. A second distinction important for this discussionis one between
the structuralelements of a genre and its unity as the typical form of whole utterances. Riddle as a genre
must not be confused, as it often is, with the "interrogative proposition" (or riddle image), a formal ele-
ment. As a genre, riddle is an interrogative unity of proposition and response.
These two distinctions allow us to say that although the act of riddling is temporal and although the
riddleimage and/or solution might depict temporalrelationships(e.g., might take narrativeform, as they
do in some neck-riddles),still, in its generic aspect as a whole utterance, riddle is extratemporal.

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430 JOHN DORST

18 This is not to say of course that time cannot be a riddle topic (e.g., Taylor 1951: #97).
19 The dialectic I am referring to here should not be confused with the "dialectic between genres and

performances"discussedby Hymes (1975b:356). More relevant is his considerationof metaphrasis, that is,
"the interpretive transformationof genre" (1975a:20). Also, although Roberts and Forman (1971) con-
duct their research in the functionalist terms that make genres the models of social relations, their
discovery of cross-culturalcorrespondencesbetween riddling and (1) strong responsibility training, (2)
large domestic animals, (3) high political integration, (4) more than one level of jurisdictional hierarchy
beyond the local community, (5) oaths, (6) ordeals, and (7) games of strategy is germane to a dialecticsof
riddle.
20 The similarity of the living-from-the-dead
imagery in neck-riddle to that in Samson's riddle to the
Philistine wedding guests (Judges 14:14) was recognized long ago (Petsch 1899:15): "Out of the eater
came something to eat, out of the strong came something sweet" (a beehive in the carcassof a lion). Fur-
thermore, the narrativeepisode in which Samson's riddle occurs conforms to the criteriafor neck-riddle
and is built from the themes of grotesque realism.
21
Reinhold K6hler has argued convincingly (1898-1900:I, 350-360) that this story of a dog fashioned
into various objects derives from the ancient tale of the murdered lover.
22 The motif of the unborn hero
may bring to mind Macbeth's having been "untimely ripped" from
his mother's womb. For a treatment of the connection between Shakespeare'splay and neck-riddle, see
Gorfain (1976).

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