I

The first example is the initial sequence of a clown act performed by Pierre Etaix and Annie Fratellini in a French context.3 It follows a traditional pattern according to which a very elegant and extremely articulate character—usually referred to as the "white clown" because of the color of his make-up—successfully performs tricks of magic or plays musical instruments, but is soon interrupted again and again by another character, who disrupts him and interferes with his schemes. The second clown epitomizes the exact opposite of all the qualities displayed by the first one; indeed, he exhibits an awkward gait, ridiculous garments and make-up, and nonsensical behavior. I have shown in another paper that these two types of characters can be viewed as embodiments —or signs—of the categories of nature vs. culture.⁴ In fact the attributes that characterize them are signs mutually defined by a systematic inversion of their components. Not only are these two clowns passive displays of those signs, but also they engage in complex social interactions and manipulations of artifacts—i.e., in semiotic operations—such as the ones that will be described now.

The white clown (Pierre Etaix) performs some tricks of magic with scarves of various colors. Then he announces that he will pour a pitcher of milk into a top hat and that the milk will completely disappear. At this precise moment, the other clown (Annie Fratellini) enters the ring, walks comically along the side until he arrives near his partner, pretends that there is a door between them, rings an imaginary bell (which actually produces a sound), looks through an imaginary keyhole, then opens the invisible door and enters the nonexistent room where the act of magic was going to take place. He rushes to the pitcher of milk and empties it in an imaginary glass from which he drinks,—i.e., he mimes the act of drinking. Once there is no milk left in the pitcher, he quietly exits from the ring, leaving his puzzled partner alone. Of course the apparent emptying of the pitcher is an illusionary effect, but this paper is not concerned with the technological aspects of the act.

Because the milk has disappeared, the white clown cannot perform his intended magic trick. He tosses the top hat on a chair before starting another manipulation, one that involves cutting a rope into pieces and restoring it to its previous integrity by sleight of hand. The second clown enters the ring again, carrying a box—something like a guitar case or a large briefcase—but built in the shape of a dog. He borrows the rope from his puzzled partner, opens the case, and puts "the leash" on an invisible dog, which seems to be pulling the rope until it becomes straight. The built-in device that makes the trick possible does not concern us here. After a brief walk with the dog, the clown takes the top hat, which had been left on the chair, and puts it on the ground. He shows the dog that it must urinate in the hat. He does this by miming a urinating male dog and pointing to the hat at the same time, while addressing the invisible animal. Then he pretends that he is watching the dog performing its act of urination until it is finished. He walks in the direction of the exit, but halfway there he hesitates, comes back to the hat, and empties it ostentatiously. Actually there was some liquid inside, which is spilled on the ground. Finally, he leaves the ring at a fast pace.

Some obvious formal features permit considering these two successive sequences as a whole. First, they show the same pattern of action: (1) interruption of a magic act, (2) appropriation by the intruder of an element of the act, (3) completion by the intruder of a different magic act involving a nonsensical element. Second, they both include a hat and some liquid in a symmetrical relationship :(1) a visible liquid, which was supposed to disappear into a visible hat, disappears into an invisible object (the imaginary glass); (2) an invisible object (the imaginary dog) produced a visible liquid in the hat in which the liquid appears. This involves two material transformations: (1) the liquid in the first sequence is milk and in the second one it is animal urine, (2) the liquid reappears in the very object (the hat) into which it was supposed to disappear but, in the process, it has been transformed as stated in (1).

Bearing this in mind, we can make some further remarks on other aspects of the act. First the initial action of the second clown was to stop in front of an invisible door (or threshold) and to apply a visible "normal" procedure for passing through it, i.e., ringing the bell, looking through the keyhole, opening the door. Remembering that the other features that characterize this type of clown are symmetrical inversions of the ones that define the "hypercultural" clown, we can hypothesize that "not to transgress an invisible (nonexistent?) boundary" is the equivaient of "to transgress a visible (existent?) one," and "to observe normal cultural procedure in the absence of cultural artifacts" is somewhat like "not to observe those normal procedures in the presence of these artifacts." This can suggest therefore that the first actions of the intruding clown qualify him as a transgressor, or at least as a semiotic manipulator.

Second, all the gestural items that are mimed during the two sequences are performed in relationship with actual (visible) artifacts and as such are not of the same kind as the one mentioned above in the initial action. Two typical behaviors are mimed: (1) drinking, i.e., ingestion of a liquid; (2) urinating, i.e., excretion of a liquid. The latter differs sensibly from the former because it consists of an "imitation performed as an invitation to perform" and is followed by the invisible action supposedly performed by the invisible dog with an actual result. However, as nothing is said to be closer to a man than his pet dog and as the act of urinating (although in the manner of a dog) is actually mimed by the man, it is possible to say that the liquid produced is the same as the liquid absorbed after it has been digested. Such a displacement can be explained by the fact that, contrarily to the crudeness of ancient circus clowns, contemporary clowns apply to their acts a certain voluntary censorship. The presence of the invisible dog is also necessary for reasons of formal symmetry. The dog case and leash and the clowns body occupy the central position. The two sequences can be read as diagrammed in Fig. 1. The mirror symmetry construction raises the question of the formal (poetic) principles at work in circus acts, which I have developed in my book Circus and Culture. ⁵

Third, this obvious syntactic ordering does not apply to empty forms but articulates a semantic content. By juxtaposing in succession milk and urine, the sequence exhibits the normal process of transformation through digestion of a nutrient liquid into excretion. An immediate interpretation of this operation could be that the strong disjunction between ingestion and secretion that governs our cultural behavior with respect to "natural functions" is exposed by means of its transgression. This is undoubtedly the case, but such an interpretation would be drastically reductive because it does not account for the presence of the other objects, whose selection can be assumed to be logically motivated. The top hat, for example, is a powerful sign in our society—both as a symbol of social formality and as a traditional crucible for the magician, who makes all sorts of animals and objects appear from it, disappear into it, or become transformed within it. A top hat, by itself, could suffice to signify highly elaborate forms of culture, in the cultural context of the place where this clown act was observed. Connecting it immediately (as container and content) with a "call of nature" constitutes a very strong statement. It is similar to a familiar trick sometimes performed by circus-trained chimpanzees in which one of the animals signals to the trainer that it has an emergency "call of nature," and after using the chamber pot brought to it in a hurry, the animal puts it on its head as if it were a hat.

Other elements are also culturally relevant. Milk, a powerful sign, is a product of nature—even of "Mother Nature"—which does not require (at least in theory) any transformation before it can be consumed, or rather it is a natural product that is already processed. It is therefore similar to honey and can be interpreted—as far as mythical constructs are concerned—in the light of Levi-Strauss's views regarding honey in its relationship to tobacco.⁶ These remarks allow a reformulation of the act's sequence: the white clown, a hypercultural figure, wants to make some milk disappear into a top hat, an emphatic symbol of culture. Therefore, the intended action can be considered as a negation of nature and an overaffirmation of culture. The other clown, who embodies all the reverse of his partner, disrupts the intended "statement" by introducing into the operation the natural process of digestion, which had been overlooked and eventually produces a counterstatement. The transfer־ mation of the top hat into a dog's chamber pot brings forth with maximal effect the "rights of nature." The semiotic operation of the clown act enunciates negatively the fragile balance of culture always threatened on the one end by the seduction of nature and on the other end by its own excesses. Something can be overdone to the extent that it disappears; this, in turn, can disrupt the system to the extent that the most basic cultural categories are overturned.

It is therefore suggested by this tentative analysis that the kind of "nonsensical" patterned behavior directed to an audience, which signals its understanding by laughing, is in fact "meta-sensical." The expression nonsense can be accounted for by taking into consideration that if we are dealing with the class of sensical items or instances that our experience comprises, whatever is situated outside this class is experienced as being nonsensical, but the class of nonsense may include both randomly disorganized behaviors and meta-semiotic operations. The problem of the conjunction of nonsense, humor, and laughter has been and still is a controversial issue, which has produced an abundant and frustrating liter ature during the last hundred years. My ambition is not to solve it but to focus on actual situations in which collective laughter takes place and to attempt a semiotic description of such events.

II

A semiotic description consists essentially, in my opinion, of translating messages from one code into another or, even better, into several codes successively. This is indeed the only way to set forth intelligible relationships that thus replace the mere juxtaposition of terms confronting us when we attempt to understand why and how any instance of symbolic interaction makes sense. In so doing, a meta-language is being developed. This does not mean necessarily that the ultimate goal of such an undertaking is to arrive at a final relationship endowed with absolute explanatory value. The reliance on mutually definable concepts such as Nature and Culture is a notational convenience, a sort of algebraic expedient that makes possible some groupings for the purpose of simpler formulations; the Nature vs. Culture relationship is definitely not an ultimate interpretant. The result of systematic translations is to elicit networks of relationships through which the "stuff" from which meaningful reality is made, is "woven." It should be pointed out also that a metasemiotic operation is not necessarily expressed through natural or artificial languages but can develop itself through means such as the complex multimedia "discourse" of a clown act. The immediate understanding (i.e., laughter) of the sequence that has been described earlier shows that the successive operations effectuated upon the relationship initially posited at the beginning of the act are decoded by the audience at a cognitive level that does not seem to involve any linguistic mediations but presupposes a cultural competence. This is true of all purely visual jokes. In the above example, the act performed undoubtedly would have been less effective if a neutral container had been used instead of a top hat and if the liquids used had not been qualified in the same manner. It is likely that it would have made some sense, but somewhat like an abstract formula "correctly" written, i.e., according to some formal rules. It is likely also that other contents could be semiotically manipulated through this formula with interesting impacts.

The analysis of a series of limericks in view of this general hypothesis will now provide some further instances of what I consider to be metasemiotic discourse. As I am not a native speaker of English and only partially competent with respect to North American culture, I benefit from the point of view of an outsider to whom limericks are not familiar, i.e., they have no taboo value whatsoever. For the student of semiotics, limericks are indeed fascinating cultural items.

A sequence of twenty-eight stanzas published in G. Legman's collection, The Limerick,⁷ will serve as an example for this tentative approach. I am aware that limericks usually come as individual, self-contained units of five lines, not as long narrative sequences. However, "The Misfortunes of Fyfe" (stanzas 835-62 in Legman's book) by the compilers of "Lapses in Limerick,"⁸ can reasonably be considered as an enlarged version of a single stanza, developing through the import of other classical limericks some details of the situation that is described. The resulting redundancy makes the analysis of this series somewhat easier than that of a tightly condensed stanza. Moreover, limericks tend to expand their narrative properties, first through infinite variations, second through narrative complementarity.

"The Misfortunes of Fyfe" can be summarized as follows: A man, named Fyfe, marries a virgin and gets ready for the honeymoon. His wife remains a virgin in spite of all his attempts to perforate her hymen. It is made clear that this unfortunate turn of events does not come from any inability or impotency on the part of the man. Fyfe tries several methods to palliate his misfortune: substitutive behavior, reliance on prostitutes, calls to other men for doing the job on his wife, etc., but everything fails either to relieve his tension or to perforate her resisting membrane. As she is becoming neurotic, he tells her: "You would jump at a pin." This expression gives her the idea of relying on "synthetic conception" in order to bear a child, and the action is done with a bodkin. She becomes pregnant. Fyfe takes advantage of her physiological modification and tries again and again to penetrate her, thinking that her resistance might have been weakened, but he fails to the extent that he loses his own body's integrity ("and scraped off a square inch of skin" from his penis). Eventually he dies of exertion at the very moment she gives birth to a son. Each of the twenty-eight stanzas provides either a comment about the situation or some information pertaining to the progress of the narrative. The abstract development of the story is logical but its content is largely nonsensical if the narrated events are taken literally. Provided that the tale can be contemplated from a certain cultural distance, it possesses a "mythical flavor." My hypothesis is that the meaning of this nonsense has its source in some other problematic situ־ ation, relevant to the contextual culture, than the one which is explicated, i.e., something else is coded in sexual terms. The task of this semiotic investigation is to uncover this "something else," to set forth the relationships that account for the cognitive value of "The Misfortunes of Fyfe."

A few salient aspects of the text might catch the readers attention and be given an immediate interpretation; for instance, the violation of the taboo regarding intercourse during pregnancy might be considered crucial for the deep understanding of the tale. But this would entail that stanzas 1 to 24 be only little more than mere preparation for the relevant situation. Moreover, the assumed transgression is rather an intention, an attempt to transgress, as Fyfe dies of exertion before having succeeded. One might also be sensitive to the familiar Oedipus triangle that seems to underly the narrative, but, in my opinion, this is a fallacy because there are too many inconsistencies with respect to such an interpretation that would have to be overlooked. For example, nowhere in the limerick is it said that Fyfe's semen is responsible for his wife's pregnancy; the expression used is "synthetic conception." It is also obvious that since the father dies as the son is being born there is very little room indeed for psychological interaction. Interpretations of this sort isolate a few elements that can be satisfactorily combined at the cost of leaving most of the material unaccounted for. The basic structure of a narrative such as this one can be elicited by eliminating the redundancies, not the semiotic information.

Once the painstaking work of analyzing the text word by word, according to some tentative directions, has been done, a hypothesis can be formulated. Without trying to reconstruct the underlying heuristic process, I will now present my interpretation of "The Misfortunes of Fyfe," and give some evidence to support it. My hypothesis is that these limericks deal with the culinary system of their contextual culture through a translation of the problems involved into the sexual code. In addition, it seems that the acoustic code plays an intermediary part in the process. To be more explicit, this narrative refers to the introduction of canned food in the culinary system of the industrialized age. This will be considered the crucial problem that is mythically solved through the tale of Fyfe. The "myth" indeed describes a pathological state, which eventually comes to an end. If we accept the idea that the expressed pathological state—an imperforatable virgin—stands for a difficulty that occurs on the level of the mythical conceptualizations of the extant culinary system, then this myth is a way to conceptualize a crucial semiotic change introduced into the system.

There is ample evidence that virginity can be equated with raw food. In colloquial French faire passer à la casserole (to fry in the pan) can mean "to deflorate a virgin." There are equivalents of this metaphor in other languages. A striking example of this semiotic value of raw meat can be found in an Irish legend in which uncooked meat is used as a message of chastity: "A man conducting a woman leaves uncooked meat behind each night of the journey as a sign to the husband following that she has not been touched."⁹ Conversely, it is possible to consider virginity as a sign of "uncookedness." In the limerick, Fyfe's wife is, by her obstinate state, a sign of an emphatic resistance of nature to being cooked. This can be verified in all the various ways in which she is qualified. In stanza 3, she appears as a nondeciduous tree. This is congruent, in the botanic code, with her basic value in the myth, since a nondeciduous tree is an evergreen, which resists the transformations caused by the seasons and is not defoliated in the winter. In stanza 5, she is said to be "hoarding her deep nest of honey." The fact that honey can have a sexual meaning in colloquial American English does not motivate the whole expression. The use of the verb "to hoard" stresses her obstinate position on the side of nature. After Lévi-Strauss's analyses of the myths dealing with honey, it is not necessary to expand this point. It suffices to point out that honey is a ready-made food provided by nature. Another metaphorical expression, "clam," refers also to food that can be consumed unprocessed, although this is not the obvious point made in stanza 7.

If this is correct, Fyfe plays the part of an unfortunate cook confronted with an uncookable meat that even manages to "uncook" him (cf. stanza 28, "he was undone"). Therefore he symbolizes culture in crisis, culture negated. Nevertheless, a son is born, and succeeds in his own way to bring to an end the pathological resistance of the woman. To simplify, the birth of the son expresses the advent of a new type of culture that cancels the one it replaces. In other words, a culinary system (i.e., what is referred to now as traditional cooking and honored in a quasiritualistic manner) is being replaced by another system (i.e., the ready-made frozen or canned food, which is still viewed by some people both as a sign of a "barbaric" way of feeding and as a fascinating way of life). Indeed, the introduction of a processed food, available for consumption without the time-consuming and painstaking efforts of gathering, preparing, cooking, etc., but in a way reminiscent of the instant gratification of a ripe fruit picked from a tree, can only have shattered the collective conceptualization through which the previous culinary code had taken shape.

There is also at play in "The Misfortunes of Fyfe" an acoustic system that is easily identifiable and that possibly serves as a mediator between the culinary and the sexual codes. In colloquial American English a female whose hymen is comparatively tough is said to be "tight as a drum." On the other hand, the well-known association of "fife and drum" as a symbol of military music, specially in the American tradition, may function as a determining formula in the general organization of the myth. The pathological situation, without which there would not be a narrative, is precisely the impossibility of producing any significant "music," i.e., the harmony of nature and culture is destroyed. This is all the more striking if one takes into consideration that the etymology of fife is the same as for pipe and that drums and honey are congruent in the myths analyzed by Lévi-Strauss. This makes it possible therefore to identify the opposition honey/tobacco as one of the organizing principies of this tale.

In the way myths speak (of) culture and attempt to solve contradictions arising from the experience of the environment (natural and/or technological), this sequence of limericks appears to deal with the everpresent problem of cultural changes for which it tries to account through the model of natural generation as a conceptual basis, modified according to the problems involved. The meta-cultural discourse of the historians and theorists of cultures often do exactly the same thing when they use concepts such as growth, maturity, decline, and death. In our example, the negation of a culinary system is expressed at the same time by an affirmation of nature that implies negation of culture and by the affirmation of the replacing culinary system. The passage from one system to another is expressed—in the language of the myth—by the negation of the first one in the form of an affirmation of its contradictory term. Note, for instance, that in the last stanza Fyfe is both "undone" and "done in." But, this pathological affirmation of nature is only a logical condition for its new negation in the form of a new culture, because after all Fyfe's wife became pregnant, even though it was through "synthetic conception." This may explain why we learn, even before conception took place, that there was a son to be born, i.e., an equivalent of the negated term.

If the hypothesis I have outlined in this paper is correct—the evidence presented above seems to be convergent—it would account at the same time for the ambiguous attitudes met by both clowns and limericks in our society. They are indeed dealing with very sensitive areas, not in the sense that they would touch upon taboo topics but to the extent that they manipulate delicate logical constructs that are the very foundations of our sense of rational reality. By necessity, any meta-discourse entails the relativization of its object. When this object is the "essence" of a culture, only the violation of the strongest taboos can adequately serve as metaphors for such operations to be acceptable. Discourses of this kind can only be experienced as nonsense by the members of the culture in which they take place, but, as I have tried to show, these nonsensical instances are highly meaningful meta-discourses.

REFERENCES

1. A. J. Greimas, Du Sens (Paris: Le Seuil, 1970), p.70.

2. P. Bouissac, "Clown Performances as Meta-semiotic Texts," Language Sciences 19 (1972): 1-7.

3. This act was observed and recorded in Paris and in Monaco during the winter of 1975.

4. P. Bouissac, "Pour une analyse ethnologique des entrées de clowns," Revue d'Ethnologie Française vol.I, 3-4 (1972):7-18.

5. P. Bouissac, Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).

6. С. Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes (New York: Harper and Row, 1973; English translation by J. and D. Weightman).

7. G. Legman, The Limerick (New York: Brandywine Press, 1970).

8. "Lapses in Limerick,^,י MS., oral collection (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1938-41).

9. S. Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), vol.5, T386.

APPENDIX

As a result of the discussions that followed this lecture, Professor Ivan Karp of the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University formulated his own interpretation of "The Misfortunes of Fyfe." I am pleased to reproduce here, with his kind permission, the text he wrote as a contribution to the issue of the semiotics of nonsense.

"SMART FISHERMEN TAKE CARE OF THEIR RODS"̊

An Analysis of Kinship in "The Misfortunes of Fyfe" Ivan Karp

The inspiration for this analysis derives from three sources. The first is Bouissac's skillful demonstration of the existence of a metaphor derived from a distinction between Nature and Culture to be found in thç imagery of the limerick "The Misfortunes of Fyfe." The second is an intriguing essay by Barnes (1973), "Genetrix: Genitor: Nature: Culture?" in which he argues that a major puzzle with which kinship systems deal is the connection between paternity and gestation. This is in contrast to the relationship between maternity and gestation, which is "natural" in the sense that the connection is discoverable through data that come from immediate sense impressions, much as the connection between heat and fire is one that arises from immediate experiences. The third source of inspiration is Schneider's (1968) account of American Kinship, in which it is shown that the American Kinship system is organized in terms of a distinction between relationships of law and relationships of natural substance. It was on the basis of this ethnography and theory that I was able to discern a kinship code in the sexual imagery and narrative progression of the limerick.

Bouissac has already demonstrated that the sexual imagery in the limerick is derived from two opposed domains. The male sexual organ is characterized by objects derived from the domain of culture, such as knife, gimlet, pencil, cork, pin, and so on. On the other hand, Fyfe's wife's sexual organ is characterized solely in terms of natural imagery. Her vagina is tight as a clam, a nest of honey, like a mole's hole, or a dense growth of hair.

A few further comments need to be made about this nature-culture opposition before I move on to kin and familial relations. First, I think that it is significant that the two major protagonists are named and unnamed. Fyfe has a named identity; while his wife, as is befitting a natural creature, as opposed to a cultural being, remains unnamed except for her identity as the wife of Fyfe. There are two factors involved here. Traditionally, women have had no identity of their own in the wider society. They were jural minors under the authority of their fathers and husbands. Certainly in our Judeo-Christian heritage, marriage was a transfer of rights over a woman from her father to her husband. She remained a jural minor in the eyes of the law. One of the major social developments of the modern industrial era has been the gradual emergence of women as legal persons. Hence the characterization of Fyfe's wife as a socially differentiated being only with respect to her husband reflects a long-standing tradition that has come increasingly into conflict with changing social conditions. This conflict is one that is acute in familial situations, particularly in the conflict between the image and obligations of woman as wife and mother and as jural and economic actor in her own right. A restatement of the differences between men and women that stresses traditional roles and identity attributes is singularly appropriate for limericks, whose normal context is exclusively male domains such as high school toilets and locker rooms.

The other aspect of the Nature-Culture imagery that deserves comment lies in the type of object that typifies the sexual parts of the male and female actors. The objects that provide the images for Fyfe and his friends' penises are not only cultural objects in the sense that they are manufactured. They are also cultural objects in a stricter sense. As pins, pencils, corks, gimlets, and weapons, men's penises are all instruments; that is, objects used to achieve some goal. They stand in stark contrast to the imagery for women's vaginas. A nest of honey, a mole's hole, a clam, and a wound are all found objects, which may or may not please the finder. The paradox, of course, is that the vagina, the found sexual object of the limerick, is the instrument of birth. It is precisely this paradox that forms the center of the narrative progression of the limerick and the thinking about kinship in it.

In the first stanza of "Fyfe," a kinship relation based on law is established. Fyfe marries his wife. Schneider has pointed out that marriage is symbolized by sexual intercourse and involves a legally regulated sexual relationship. Sexual intercourse, however, is a natural phenomenon, especially when undertaken for its own sake and not for procreation. This is particularly well illustrated by stanzas 14 and 15, where Fyfe goes walking in the woods in the spring and finds couples copulating. Presumably these acts of intercourse take place outside the marriage relationship. These naturally occurring acts are consummated much more easily than the sexual difficulties Fyfe is experiencing in marriage.

Fyfe's difficulties lead him to try to have his wife penetrated by a series of cultural objects in stanzas 9 through 14. All to no avail. Culture is defeated by Nature. In stanzas 14 and 15, the copulation in the woods episode, Fyfe's cultural frustration in the face of nature is highlighted. In stanzas 16 through 23, Fyfe's wife gets herself penetrated and artificially inseminated by a pin or needle and a syringe. We might interpret this as the triumph of Culture over Nature. The act of penetration is accomplished not by a penis, which is after all a natural object even if it is metaphorically classified as a cultural thing. It is accomplished instead by a pin and a syringe. Here we have an actual instrument being used to achieve what penises could not. A real cultural object, a syringe, effects what a penis described metaphorically as cultural object could not. In this sense, what man has wrought appears to be more successful than what nature has given men.

This triumph of Culture over Nature is short-lived, however. The final stanzas, 24 through 28, entail the reversal of the cultural triumph of the preceding eight stanzas. In these stanzas Fyfe appears at first to be able to penetrate his wife as a result of her artificial insemination. In stanza 25, he begins to enter. However, he encounters another source of resistance. The baby in his wife's womb, of whose existence he was unaware, is about to be born. His penis is forced out as a result of the birth of the baby, and he ejaculates and "a few minutes later" expires. In stanza 28 we are given his tombstone epitaph, "Shed a tear for poor Fyfe,/ His imperforate wife/ Did him in with the aid of their son."

Fyfe and his wife constitute a legal pair, a husband and a wife. Fyfe is destroyed by a natural pair, a mother and her son. Hence the relationship of law (and culture) that is marriage is overcome by a natural relationship between mother and son that is established by the act of birth. Note that it is the very act of birth itself that destroys Fyfe. The narrative progression of this limerick goes from the establishment of a cultural relationship of kinship, marriage, to its destruction by a natural kinship relationship, birth and the mother-child bond. The triumph of culture through marriage or artificial insemination is short-lived in the face of the facts of nature that culture cannot overcome. The conflict between natural kinship, based on shared common substance through birth and the immediately observable facts of gestation, and cultural kinship as a system of the distribution of legal rights is not resolved but simply restated at a non-empirical level. This conclusion is not entirely without its own paradox. Fyfe's epitaph says that he was done in "with the aid of their son [emphasis mine]." Nowhere in the limerick is there any indication that the semen used by Fyfe's wife in her act of artificial insemination was Fyfe's. In fact it is hardly credible that the semen could have been his since he was still unaware of the child in his wife's womb. Fyfe's son is his only in a legal sense. A marriage establishes legal paternity over a child no matter who the physiological father is. The limerick ends with an assertion of a right derived from a legal relationship in conjunction with a right derived from a relationship of shared natural substance. Perhaps this indicates an interdependence of cultural and natural kinship. From Fyfe's perspective, however, it is a very costly sort of interdependence.

REFERENCES

Barnes, J. A. 1973. "Genetrix: Genitor: Nature: Culture?" In The Character of Kinship, J. Goody, ed. London: Cambridge University Press.

Schneider, D. M. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

THE MISFORTUNES OF FYFE

1. There was a young fellow named Fyfe

Who married the pride of his life,

But imagine his pain

When he struggled in vain,

And just couldn't get into his wife.

2. Now the trouble was not with our hero,

Who, though no match for Epstein or Nero,

Had a good little dong

That was five inches long,

And as stiff as a parsnip at zero.

3. But his efforts to poke her, assiduous,

Met a dense growth of hair most prodiguous.

Well, he thought he might dint her

By waiting till winter,

But he found that she wasn't deciduous.

4. Now here was this fellow named Fyfe,

Unable to diddle his wife—

Which fact, sad but true,

Left him nothing to do

But bugger the girl all his life.

Reprinted from The Limerick G. Legman, ed. (New York: Brandywine Press, 1970).

5. For diversion this might have been funny,

And of course it did save him some money,

But it angered our Fyfey

To think that his wifey

Was hoarding her deep nest of honey.

6. He went whoring to find satisfaction,

But with whores, though accomplished in action,

He never could capture

That fine fucking rapture,

For the thought of his wife was distraction.

7. So here was our fellow named Fyfe

With a truly impervious wife.

She was not worth a damn,

Being close as a clam—

Why, he couldn't get in with a knife!

8. The problem that harassed his soul

Was: what kept him out of her hole?

Was her hymen too tough?

Was she stuffed up with fluff?

Was her coosie the home of a mole?

9. This was just what poor Fyfe couldn't tell,

For her prow was as sound as a bell.

He'd have needed a gimlete

To get into her quimlet,

And it made the poor guy mad as hell.

10. He applied to that fellow from Strensall

For help from his long, pointed pencil,

But Strensy's tool now

Was as blunt as the prow

Of a tug—he'd have needed a stencil.

11. Fyfe searched for the chap from New York

Who had punctured the hymen like cork,

But he was quite coy

For he now loved a boy,

And refused to help Fyfe with the stork.

12. Fyfe asked Durand how much he'd charge

(The fellow whose cock could contract or enlarge)

To drill his way in

With his prick like a pin,

And there make it slowly enlarge.

13. But Durand—though he'd fuck with no urgin'—

Warned, "Apart from the risk that she'll burgeon,

Your pride must be low

If you'll meekly forego

A crack at a genuine virgin."

14. In the spring in the woods Fyfe did wander late,

And saw couples preparing to copulate,

But he could not abide

The gay sight, and he cried

At the thought that the pigfuckers penetrate!

15. One couple he foolishly leapt on,

To examine the wound and the weapon.

One was rigid, one deep—

The snug fit made him weep,

And in shame and contrition he crept on.

16. In the meantime, Fyfe's wife, who had wed

With some thought to the pleasures of bed,

Was becoming depressed,

In fact damn near obsessed

By her terribly tough maidenhead.

17. She remarked, "When all joking is done,

What I honestly want is a son.

I would like impregnation

If not copulation—

But to wed and have neither's no fun."

18. She grew worried and nervous and thin,

Till Fyfe said, "You would jump at a pin!"

And these words, though unkind,

Put the thought in her mind

That a pin-point perhaps might get in.

19. Thus she thought of synthetic conception,

Which at first seemed like basest deception,

But her cunt was so sore

From Fyfe's trying to bore,

That she gave the thought better reception.

20. And indeed, though it's sad to relate it,

Her first fuck was so sadly belated,

That a poke by a pin,

Though ever so thin,

Was a prospect that made her elated.

21. To be brief, the great action was done:

There was artfully planted, a son,

Through a bodkin that filled her,

And wonderfully thrilled her—

More fun than a son of a gun!

22. This syringe, which was long but quite thin,

Left a hole that Fyfe coudn't get in,

But he kept right on busting

And jousting and thrusting,

On account of his excess of vim.

23. While she mused on this synthetic screw,

The sperm got well-planted, and grew,

And the great day approached

When her breech would be broached,

But Fyfe, the poor wretch, never knew.

24. One night, while in sheer desperation

He prodded and poked like tarnation,

His wife groaned with pain—

She gave way!! Would he gain

The goal of three years' contemplation?

25. The head of his dingus went in!

He felt sure he was going to win!

He thrust like a demon,

He spilt all his semen,

And scraped off a square inch of skin.

26. But despite all his trying, he found

He was losing, not gaining, his ground.

Though he clung to her thighs

While he tried for the prize,

Each push in caused a greater rebound.

27. The harder the poor fellow tried,

The more her hold filled, from inside,

Till he fell back quite spent,

His prick battered and bent,

And a few minutes later—he died.

28. As he passed, a new life was begun,

And his tomb tells how he was undone:

"Shed a tear for poor Fyfe,

His imperforate wife

Did him in with the aid of their son."

1938-1941.

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̊ Bumper sticker on a ear in Tulip Tree House Parking Lot, Indiana University.