Considerations on Materiality of the Text

• In Event: Hidden In Plain Sight: Text to Image / Image to Text in Ancient and Colonial Mexico

Abstract

Sociolinguist Roger Chartier has argued that ‘form produces meaning’: the arrangement of a text on the page guides interpretation (2004). The process through which a reader attributes meaning to a text depend, consciously or not, on the semantic content of the text and the material forms through which the text was published, distributed and received (2004: 147). Format, layout, and text division all give a status to the text, constrain its reception, and control the reader’s understanding of it. Among the Maya, inscriptions appear on a variety of mediums--stone, pottery, jade, animal hide, and stucco--each of these surfaces presented the written word in a different format. Classic period stelae, for example, were public monuments with a strong connection to the royal court and its associated offices. Stone carving represented an enormous investment of labor and resources, and the medium and the format imposed on the sculptor certain limitations.
In their landmark paper on script obsolescence, Houston, Baines and Cooper argue that the ancient Maya writing system became obsolete due to a general societal collapse, which resulted in a shrinking script community (2003: 461). During this time, scribes produced far fewer carved dynastic inscriptions than painted calendrical texts, and generally eliminated verbs (2003: 462). The Yucatecan vernacular used in late ninth-century inscriptions in the northern lowlands, could be seen as symptomatic of script degradation and a truncation of the literate script community (Houston, Baines, and Cooper 2003: 461-466).
As we read we recognize formal and rhetorical clues that guide our reception and interpretation of a text. This paper will consider the impact that materiality of a narrative’s medium has on the reception of Maya texts. Rosalind Thomas emphasized the materiality of text for the ancient Greeks; each material carrying its own associations and (1992: 82). Perhaps, rather than seeing the preference for painted over carved texts as a sign of a shrinking script community we should consider a changing relationship between medium and message. This paper does just that looking to northern Yucatecan inscriptions and the eventual shift towards exclusively pictorial narratives of Chichen Itza.

Author

• Victoria I Lyall, San Francisco State University