A Singer's Pause and Thematic Structure

At times during a lengthy oral performance, a singer breaks off his story to rest before continuing. Much has been hypothesized about the possible consequences of such breaks for the structure and texture of the Homeric poems,^[12] for example, and similar suggestions might be made about other ancient and medieval texts that have reached us only in manuscript. In the Yugoslav tradition, however, there is no need to resort to hypothesis, for the collected texts themselves provide hard evidence. Lord (1936, 106) has shown that the guslar , "when not interfered with by his audience, will pause at almost any point in the narrative to rest himself to put off singing to another occasion." But it is demonstrable that the singer will not resume his song at just any point; rather, as we shall see, he "backtracks" to the last traditional boundary and, after a brief proem for continuance, begins anew from there. This usually means reverting to the last thematic or subthematic structure and identifying it as a starting point.

To illustrate, consider Ibro Basic's^[*] rest in his two sung versions of the Return Song Alagic^[*] Alija and Velagic^[*] Selim . Here his break falls during an arming or dressing episode, in which the heroine Fata prepares herself to undertake the journey to Zadar and, eventually, to rescue her betrothed truelove, Alagic^[*] Alija (AA). In each version a sequence of subsidiary actions precedes her own preparations: in 291b AA's mother descends to the kitchen to bake food for Fata's ride, while in 6597 and 1283 Huso readies AA's horse for his mistress.

When he broke off the performance at 291b .960, Ibro had completed three lines of the dressing theme. After the boundary line (957), which served characteristically to identify Fats as the agent of the narrative unit to follow, he removed her to the location of the action of the next theme, just as he and other guslari often do in preparation for the onset of the succeeding episode.^[14] The requisite change of position effected, he then sang the "argument" of the theme in lines 959-60. In resuming his performance, Ibro first sings the standard two-line phrase to introduce continuation (961-62) and then turns to the same cluster of lines with which he began the description of Fata's dressing before the break. Although the fourth line shows incidental variation, the structural sequence of boundary line (a ), position change (b ), and argument (g ) is repeated exactly. He picks up the song, in short, by retracking to the last thematic boundary. The singer's thinking as he resumes is traditional in that he bases the continuation not simply on "the rest of the story" but rather on the narrative structure of the song. He may indeed stop his performance almost anywhere (here he halts within a theme), but in beginning again he respects the thematic structure of traditional narrative.

Texts 6597 (lines 1078-81) and 1283 (972-75) share with 291b the same four-line segment in the same initial position, with minor differences in verbalizaation.^[15] From this point on, however, the line-for-line verbal correspondence drops sharply as the primary unit of organization becomes not the formula but the single action, in whatever manner the action is verbalized.^[16] At certain junctures, either under the pressure of performance or because he feels he has reached a boundary, Ibro sings a line that may be described as the formulaic system Kad se curs ["When the girl"] plus a verb for "preparing" in the past tense. This line, represented below as XX, tends to occur at the same points in the sung versions, and to demarcate the same dusters of descriptive elements. The overall order of constituents in 291b and 6597 is as follows:

Text 1283 diverges significantly from the pattern of the two sung versions, and in just the manner we might expect of an oral-dictated text—with greater ornamentation. Besides some of the accoutrements listed above, we hear in 1283 of additional descriptive details: Fata's Hungarian braids, three crosses of gold, celenke , a leather arms belt with two English and two Venetian pistols, and so forth.^[17]

The three versions of the passage taken together offer a glimpse of the internal dynamics of the arming/dressing multiform. The four-line initiatory sequence shows little variation: the boundary line is highly structured, the second colon of the position change is a very stable phrase in Ibro's idiolect, and the argument is in three of four instances based on the sound-and-meaning relationship between "to doff" (svlaciti ) and "to don" (oblaciti ). No such constraints order the verbalization of the remainder of the theme, and the singer may be brief or lengthy, sparing or ornamental, in his rendering of the actions and objects involved in dressing/arming before he turns to the thematic coda, the golden coins.

Indeed, this example illustrates more than a singer's method of resuming an interrupted song, of re-starting his narrative: by its revelation of a thematic structure on which the guslar depends as he reconstitutes the pattern of the epic, it gives evidence of a traditional underlay, a unit that proves useful to the singer as he finds his way back into the flow of the performance and one that, we can extrapolate, may well prove just as integral to the compositional process in an uninterrupted performance. Ibro's retracking to a thematic boundary reveals the presence and shape of this unit; in this case we need not depend on visual apprehension of patterns of verbal correspondence—the capsular nature of the theme is implicitly identified by the singer himself in his choice of a new starting point. Although there is nothing in conversations with the Stolac guslari to indicate that they had even the faintest notion of our concept of narrative theme,^[18] Ibro's very dependence on these multiforms in the resumption of the song shows that he and his tradition "know" its nature and texture. As further examples will emphasize, the theme is one of

the singer's "words"; like the formula, or phraseological word, the theme—or narrative word—contributes through its multiformity an important group of entries to the traditional lexicon. And it would be a violation of traditional grammar and semantics for the guslar to resume his tale in "mid-word."