The structural framework of the Māori quest story

Abstract

The realisation soon comes, to those familiar with the traditional narratives of the Maori of New Zealand, that the stories often contain repeated elements. The primary aim of this thesis is to investigate the morphological structure of the Maori oral prose narrative Ko Hotunui, written by Hoani Nahe in 1860. This story, concerning Maruttiahu's quest to find his father Hotunui, will serve throughout as the archetypical example of the Maori quest story. The method is threefold: first, to establish that Ko Hotunui and related quest stories retain, even when committed to writing, many of the characteristics of performed verbal art, that is, the characteristics of orality delineated by Father Walter Ong and others; second, to compare Ko Hotunui with two other versions of Marutuahu's quest, in order to demonstrate that any given text represents one of many possible renditions of a story, and to provide the reader with an insight into the provenance of the kind of stories that form the Appendix to this thesis; and third, to undertake, using a model based on the morphological analyses of Vladimir Propp and Alan Dundes, a structural analysis of the Maori quest story, drawing on Ko Hotunui as a base. The major finding resulting from this research is that the Maori quest story follows a conventional story-pattern which can be expressed as a sequence of five motifemes: Interdiction, Violation, Consequence, Lack, and Lack Liquidated. The most important conclusion is that this conventional story-pattern is entwined with the processes of oral transmission and oral performance, and that this is a further corroboration of the validity of the Theory of Oral Composition of Milman Parry and Albert Lord.