Summary

Through the foregoing analyses and examples I have attempted to show that the oral poetic language of Serbo-Croatian epic is a much more complex and sensitive instrument than has heretofore been realized. We have seen, in short, that all elements of phraseology—all traditional "words"—are not created equal. The wide spectrum of diction includes some units that are always repeated exactly, some that undergo only morphological change, so. me that admit regular substitution and can be meaningfully described as formulate systems, and some "non-formulaic" cola and lines that are best viewed as the inevitable issue of fundamental traditional rules. Nor does the traditional expression always assume one canonical length: units of colonic, linear, and multilinear dimensions have been shown to populate the Stolac referent. In the face of this heterogeneity and complexity, we have argued, it proves only logical to recognize the limitations of the concepts of formula and formulate system, and to understand that synchronic approximations that go far toward making evident the characteristic multiformity of the guslar's poetic language can also obscure its variety and richness. Our philological and critical imperative is consequently quite clear: we must come to appreciate this variety and richness as the basic character of the compositional idiom if we are to make informed and faithful aesthetic judgments about the works of art it figures forth.

Specifically, we need to concentrate on traditional rules as the most fundamental and pervasive influence on the making and re-making of diction. As illustrated in chapter 3, the deseterac verse form preserves the ultimately Indo-European features of syllabic count, caesura, and right justification. This third feature is expressed idiosyncratically in the decasyllable in a variety of ways: the initial shorter colon of four syllables followed by the longer one of six; preference for ictus at positions 3 and 9, then 1 and 5; shorter-before-longer arrangements of words and accentual groups in both cola (SBL); initially accented disyllables favored at positions 3-4 and 9-10 (IAD); medially accented trisyllables favored at positions 8-10 (MAT); and a generally greater flexibility in colon 1 and correspondingly greater fixity in colon 2. This combination of rules (and not simply the poor approximation of a trochaic pentameter and associated patterns) underlies the formation of all deseterac phraseology, no matter what more superficial process may aid in its creation and maintenance. In other words, while formulas and systems explain the poetic idiom inexactly as a dictionary of quantitatively equivalent but qualitatively different paradigms, traditional rules account for the entire spectrum of traditional phraseology—every line of every song-text.

And just as we see these rules in action in every line of every text, so we also see their formative influence on the series of second-level processes that further focus the expression of essential ideas in the poetic tradition. To put it

hierarchically, none of these focusing features can operate except within traditional rules; since each of the second-level features pertains to a very small percentage of the lines in a given sample, each can affect its limited constituency only if it works within the set of constraints that determines the shape of all lines in the wordhoard. At this second level, the formula and system are the most pervasive structuring devices in the poetry, but we must remember that these two terms refer to an enormous "dictionary" of actual units and that even the most generative of single phraseological patterns oversees a relatively modest number of cola and lines. In fact, even when a guslar makes a "new" phrase by analogy to a pattern he already knows and uses, he does so under the immediate influence of that pattern but within the much more far-reaching code of traditional rules. As we have seen, formulaic structure is a significant aspect of diction, and analysis by formula can lead us to understand the multiformity of oral epic phraseology in numerous interesting and valuable ways; nonetheless, formulaic theory is at its most powerful only when we also take into account its basis and continuing context in universally applicable traditional rules.

Other second-level or focusing processes also assist in the creation and maintenance of traditional diction, among the most important of which is sound-patterning. In Serbo-Croatian epic, assonance, consonance, and alliteration play large roles, often stitching together words, cola, phrases, lines, or even extended passages. The primary site for rhyme proves to be colon-end, that is, either at 9-10 in two successive lines (relatively less frequent) or at 3-4 and 9-10 in a single line (also called leonine rhyme and considerably more frequent). Both forms derive from the stress-emphasis at colon-end, which is in turn a reflex of right justification. Thus institutionalized internal rhyme constitutes another example of a synchronic echo of an ancient poetic characteristic.

Added to these focusing processes are the stylistic features of terracing or pleonasm, which actually promotes unnecessary enjambement in Serbo-Croatian, and of syntactic balance or parallelism, which can take myriad forms either within a single line or from one line to another. We may end this list, necessarily incomplete,^[72] with the feature of thematic focus, whereby, as in the sample text from Bajgoric^[*] , narrative structure to some extent marshals the deployment of certain phraseology.^[73] But I must stress that while all of

these processes, from formulaic structure through the thematic constraint, participate dynamically in the shaping of diction and therefore in the act of oral traditional epic composition, all are decidedly second-level features in that they affect only limited parts of the much larger body of deseterac phraseology. All of them operate on traditional diction that takes its archetypal shape from rules that in turn echo the prosody of the epic decasyllable and ultimately that of Indo-European verse.

One more step remains to be taken in our assessment of traditional structure in Serbo-Croatian phraseology, and in taking that step it is well to remember how our investigation has proceeded from establishing the general tenets of Indo-European prosody to a tradition- and genre-dependent view of the deseterac^[74] and on to the two levels of phraseological organization—traditional rules and a series of second-level focusing processes. Rules and processes as powerful as these, generating at the first level all lines in the Stolac referent and shaping at the second level much smaller but still significant groups of verses, must necessarily be generic enough to order the expression of a vast panorama of traditional ideas. For this very reason, they will also leave space for a guslar to place his personal (if largely ephemeral) signature on the wordhoard by making or re-making idiolectal phraseology employed, as far as can be determined, only by him. For the mediocre singer, the more general local dialect of the poetic language shared among the singers in his community will be the phraseological support used to buttress by far the greatest part of his individual performance. But the talented singer will depend somewhat less on the lingua franca of verse dialect and at least slightly more on his own idiolect.^[75] From the perspective described and advocated throughout this chapter, a guslar's idiolect consists of expressions unique to an individual and yet constructed in accordance with traditional rules; we shall see more evidence of the individual's signature on his tradition when we study thematic structure in chapter 8. Thus, to the lengthy lists of tradition- and genre-dependent factors that make for complexity and suppleness in the compositional idiom as employed by any given singer, we can add the "singer-dependent" phenomenon of a traditional idiolect.

What do we gain by tracing the guslar's words from Indo-European versification forward through the maze of compositional devices described in this chapter? And what do we make of the result—a complex, heterogeneous, ever-evolving collection of inequivalent elements overseen by rules and processes no singer ever consciously imagined? Briefly stated, what we gain, apart

from a philologically sound profile, is a foundation for aesthetic inquiry that is firm because it is faithful to the language and poetics of Serbo-Croatian epic. By formulating rules for the phraseological events we perceive as lines, we begin to restore a lost complexity to oral traditional diction; in effect, the point of view advocated in this chapter, and for that matter throughout the volume, allows us to "re-complicate" poetic composition, to take it out of the arena of lockstep simplicity and back to the realm of language—the most complex of human abilities and arts. On the basis of the observations made and the examples provided above, it should be more than obvious that the guslar is no mere assembler of pre-fabricated parts, no automaton mindlessly spinning lines of verse from a limited selection of movable counters.^[76] Rather, the Yugoslav oral singer is fully a poet who has come to be able to speak his native poetic idiom, with a fluency determined by a combination of his own talents and the bequest he has received from tradition. If we can restore this natural quality to traditional diction by understanding it not as a patchwork of remnants but as a highly complex weave accomplished by blending many different colors and textures according to fundamental rules of order and pattern, then we re-admit the possibility—even the necessity—of oral poetic art in its archetypal sense: the individual poiesis of tradition.