RIDDLES AND ENIGMAS.

• Author: Thompson, George
• Position: Review

Much of the best research that has been done recently on fiddles and related enigmatic modes of discourse has been undertaken by folklorists, usually working with various non-literary or non-Western traditions, and developing a theoretical model of these genres that has been largely folkloristic in inspiration, i.e., largely taxonomic, with at least some attention to the language and the social function of riddles. The collection of essays reviewed here, which developed out of discussions held at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University during the academic year 1988-1989, makes a valuable contribution to the study of the fiddle-genre on two counts. On the one hand, it is clear that all of the participants have wrestled with the extensive theoretical literature on the riddle and related modes. As a result the essays in this volume present a sophisticated overview of the present state of the art, and in some areas advance discussion well beyond previous treatments. On the other hand, the theoretical discussions in the volume are enriched by a wide range of source material, including a good number of essays devoted to the classical literary traditions that are a major focus of this journal.

The collection is framed by a brief introduction and an afterword written by the editors, which provide the collection's general point of departure, as well as a summing up of the consensus of opinion among the participants at the close of a year's work on the subject of riddles. These will be discussed at the end of this review.

The first of the collection's five sections is devoted to general and theoretical issues. "Riddles and Their Use," by A. Kaivola-Bregenhoj, offers a lucid sketch of the "traditional true riddle" in Finland, and the contexts within which it functioned, before its virtual disappearance there by the midway point of the twentieth century. Kaivola-Bregenhoj's approach is straightforwardly folkloristic, in the venerable style of the Finnish school. Its material is drawn from the Folklore Archive of the Finnish Literature Society, a collection of "about 30,000 riddles and some 500 pages of descriptions of riddle occasions" (p. 12). In treating such topics as the social occasions for riddling, the expressive devices and formulaic language of riddles, and the dialogical relationship between the fiddle-question (with its concealing ambiguity) and the fiddle-answer (with its triumphant wit), this article demonstrates the continuing vitality of the methods of riddle analysis that have been developed by folklorists.

It is followed by a quite different sort of essay by D. Handelman, entitled "Traps and Trans-formation: Theoretical Convergences between Riddle and Ritual." Unlike Kaivola-Bregenhoj's essay, which is rooted in the study of a definite corpus of riddles, Handelman's is triggered by the observation that "fiddling and riddle contests are sometimes embedded in rituals in various parts of the world" (p. 37). In particular, the sort of ritual that Handelman has in mind is the "trans-formation" ritual (which, for reasons that are not quite clear, he distinguishes from the rite of passage). Of course, it has frequently been observed that riddling occurs, both in folklore and in ritual, on occasions that mark an individual's transformation or initiation: one frequently encounters fiddling at weddings, funerals, the consecration of kings, rites of initiation, public sacrifices, new year's celebrations, etc. (cf., e.g., Handelman's discussion at p. 49). In this paper, Handelman attempts to come up with a conceptualization of the riddle that adequately explains why this association between riddles and rituals of a "trans-formative" type occurs as frequently as it does. In the course of his discussion Handelman makes an interesting and novel distinction between riddle solutions that are "probabilistic" (i.e., that are inferrable or guessable, and open to interpretation) and those that are "deterministic" (i.e., that are known in advance, or predetermined). The discussion of probability and game theory that follows, as well as brief allusions to Zen koans, Iroquois "dream-guessing" (whereby the interpretation of a dream is treated as a riddle contest), and "the continuum of potential functions that are embedded in ritual structure" (p. 54), makes for often difficult and demanding, but always stimulating, reading that throws new light on all of these genres.

This first section of the book on theoretical issues closes with an article by R. Bauman, "'I'll Give You Three Guesses': The Dynamics of Genre in the Riddle Tale," which, as its title suggests, treats the riddle as a primary (or simple) genre that interacts with other genres to form secondary (or complex) genres, such as the riddle tale. Here Bauman, like Handelman, makes interesting use of Bakhtin's influential analysis of speech genres. Analyzing riddle-narrative texts recorded in Scotland in the 1950s, Bauman characterizes the riddle as a highly effective narrative device because of its basic question-and-answer structure (i.e., as "adjacency pairs," to use the suggestive jargon of the ethno-methodologists Schegloff and Sacks): fundamentally sequential and dialogical, the riddle naturally "lends itself to narrativization" (p. 69). This functional and structural compatibility of the riddle and the folktale results in the otherwise diminutive-seeming riddle-genre playing a rather large and conspicuous role in folklore narrative in general. I would also mention, in passing, the numerous incidental details that Bauman fruitfully scatters throughout this essay, such as the fact that the riddle is also called "joke" in the northeast of Scotland, as well as "rhyme," because of its decidedly unaggressive jocularity and its traditional preference for rhyme. Such incidental details frequently illuminate aspects of the genre as much as do the grand theoretical gestures commonly encountered elsewhere throughout the literature on riddles, which often ignore details that don't quite fit into their models.

The first chapter of section two, on Hebrew riddles, is a fascinating article by D. Pagis on literary riddles, in particular on what is called the "emblem riddle" (hidottsurah-ve-lo'ez) in various late Hebrew traditions (in medieval Spain, Italy, Holland, etc.). A very elaborate and refined genre, the Hebrew emblem riddle combines an emblem (e.g., a copper etching, or a woodcut, or an ink drawing, etc.) with a highly ornate riddle in the form of an extended, metrical, often rhymed, poem. This genre is marked by the use of "gematria" and...