Some Comments on Style in the Meanings of the Past

The Journal of Asian Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 1979, Pages 231-244

  Errington, Shelly ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84971971663     PISSN: 00219118     EISSN: 17520401     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2053416     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. See Sir Richard Winstedt's A History of Classical Malay Literature (1940;
2. rpt. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969). His main categories of hikayat are “romance” and “history,” but there are a number of “types“: those influenced by Java, “romances of the transition,” “Muslim legends,” “cycles of tales from Muslim sources,” and “Malay histories.”
3. For “historical” treatments, see O. W. Wolters, The Fall o/Srivijaya in Malay History (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970);
4. J. J. Ras, Hikayat Bandjar: A Study in Malay Historiography (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968);
5. A. Teeuw and D. K. Wyatt, Hikayat Patani: The Story of Patani (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).
6. Two philological studies of hikayat are S. O. Robeson's Hikajat Andaktn Penurat (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969)
7. and L. F. Brakel's The Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah: A Medieval Muslim-Malay Romance (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).
8. Translated passages appearing in this paper are my own, drawn from Kassim Ahmad's romanization of Hikayat Hang Tuah (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1968).
9. The original texts of Hikayat Hang Tuah were written in Arabic script, which does not use punctuation marks; nor did its conventions include paragraphing. In translating, I have used the minimal punctuation necessary to make the English comprehensible, but have not for the most part followed Kassim Ahmad's use of colons, semicolons, or divisions into paragraphs as they are, for my purposes, unnecessary stylistic divergences from the original. The Malay passages, taken from Kassim Ahmad's romanization, can most easily be found by consulting my dissertation, “A Study of Genre: Form and Meaning in the Malay Hikayat Hang Tuah,” Cornell University 1975.
10. See his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953)
11. A considerable scholarly literature exists on the subject of repetition in traditional forms of composition, but scholarship on Malay literature has been for the most part curiously untouched by it. Perhaps the basic works on this subject concern the Homeric epic, beginning with Milman Parry's The Making of Homeric Verse: the Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)
12. and Albert Lord, The Singer of Tala (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).
13. Another very suggestive work is Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).
14. The meaning of repetition is only one of the concerns in the continuing discussion about the difference, or lack of it, between oral and written compositions, a subject which has been important in Homeric scholarship at least since Parry's work and which has recently received a revived attention from literary critics and anthropologists. See, for instance. New Literary History, 8, No. 3 (1977)
15. which is devoted to “Oral Cultures and Oral Performances,” and Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968).
16. The fact that figures are not presented in traditional Malay works as idiosyncratic personalities with subjective characters has been remarked by John Bastin. See his “Problems of Personality in the Reinterpretation of Modern Malayan History,” in Malayan and Indonesian Studies, ed. J. Bastin and R. Roolvink (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).
17. Nancy Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970).
18. See especially Chap. VI of his Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago: Phoenix Books, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964).
19. See Clifford Geertz, “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols,” The Antioch Review, 17 (1957), 421–37.
20. An account of village story-telling which raises interesting issues, one of the few works of Malay scholarship which emphasizes the oral-performance nature of what is usually treated as written texts, can be found in Amin Sweeney's “Professional Malay Story-Telling: Some Questions of Style and Presentation,” in Studies in Malaysian Oral and Musical Traditions (Ann Arbor: Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, No. 8, 1974).