A Program for Reading Traditional Texts

In this section I shall gather up some of the points made above and attempt a brief codification. In the process it should be possible to posit a short program for confronting both unambiguously oral texts , such as the songs collected by Parry and Lord, and what I call oral-derived texts , that is, the manuscript or tablet works of finally uncertain provenance that nonetheless show oral traditional characteristics. This methodology must of course be preliminary and suggestive, for at this relatively early stage in the development of oral literature research no program can claim to offer more than a starting point for the poetics of oral and traditional works. But it can from a general perspective draw a few fundamental distinctions about the ontology of different kinds of texts, distinctions which have not been made and very much need to be made. What is more, even these first few steps can help to point the way toward the controlled, exacting comparison to be attempted in the succeeding chapters of these studies.

First is the matter of the term text , a concern purposely left undiscussed in my opening remarks. In using this term I mean to indicate a real, objective, and tangible score, an entity that exists both as a thing in itself and as a directive for its perceivers. In this second sense I take advantage of current

critical notions about the "activity" of a text, the dynamics or chemistry of its parts when brought together and to life by the reader.^[13] Both senses of the word are important, as we shall recognize explicitly later on: the text serves as an object and as a libretto for the reader's or listener's personal "performance" of the work.

In addition to the dual nature of the text as objective and subjective, I would also stress its special identity in relation to the oral tradition from which it derives, whatever the exact tenor of that relationship might be. For example, a "pure oral text," as described above, represents only one performance of a given song and song-type by a given singer, so that the generic levels of the performance multiply rapidly as the context is determined (see Lord 1960, chap. 5). These levels of generic form are the lifeblood of the tradition, for they insure its recurrency over time and over place. Using the word and concept text allows us to designate the particular object we desire to confront or analyze within this reduplicative series. Likewise, in the case of an oral-derived work, we can again specify the one version of a multiform to be confronted, or, if the manuscript poem in question is too far removed from the tradition to be simply one instance of a multiform, the term text can still designate the unitary document which in this case will be comprised of quite different elements. As we shall see, this final instance proves to be a significant one, for when a poem is informed by both a traditional and a non-traditional, learned aesthetic, there is very often a tendency on the part of critics to eliminate either the one or the other aspect.^[14] In an effort to make its poetics more straightforward, these critics would dismiss the vigor of such a hybrid text by miscasting its real nature or by characterizing it pejoratively as a "mixed" work. In this case the label text helps to maintain the centrifugal parts of the piece for resolution by a centripetal poetics.

A second step in our reading program would be the determination of whether a given text is actually oral or is in fact oral-derived. In either case, of course, we assume the work in question to be at least in part traditional because it exhibits unambiguously oral traditional characteristics. Further, and this point should be stressed, the minimal assumption of an oral-derived text does not automatically preclude true orality; it merely admits a degree of uncertainty about textual history and adopts a demonstrably valid position in favor of a likely conjecture.

For example, the Milman Parry Collection houses thousands of known oral epics, some of them recorded from guslari acoustically while sung, others recorded while spoken without the accompaniment of the single-stringed gusle , and still others taken from dictation at a much slower pace. As Lord (1953) has demonstrated, these kinds of texts are somewhat different in extent and

detail, though usually not significantly different in general structure. In the nineteenth century, however, before modern acoustical recording apparatus became available, Serbo-Croatian epics were committed to a fossilized textual form exclusively through the agency of a scribe or scribe-editor.^[15] In such a case we would want to know as far as possible the scribe's control over the performance and his subsequent or concurrent editing of the manuscript. In short, whatever intervenes between the spoken word and its apotheosis as a written record, whether during the performance or at some later time, contributes to the history of that oral text as part of its context. To settle for the most convenient (because most visible) stage of that process—the printed edition alone—is to misread the oral text.

Should we on the other hand be confronting a manuscript work whose certain orality we cannot prove, many of the same criteria for judgment and meaningful reading still apply. If we know only a few details about the recording or (let us say, in order to avoid ambiguity) the creation of a given text, we must nonetheless take them into account; while these few details may fall short of a complete description, they do contribute to context. In the case of an oral-derived text, many of these features will be paleographical in nature. For example, do the graphemics of the manuscript indicate anything about its character? Or does the codex which contains it offer a reading context of any sort? Perhaps we may be able to unearth some information about the manuscript history of such a text—for instance, about the vexed question of the Alexandrians' treatment of Homer. Again, as in the case of the certainly oral work, the oral-derived text demands as its context all that we can discover about what intervened between its formation as a text and the copy in our hands.

The judgment of either oral or oral-derived tells us in general terms what is to be expected in a given work. In the former case we can expect, with certain qualifications resulting from the circumstances of creation and transmission discussed above, a text whose poetics follow characteristic outlines best determined by an intimate acquaintance with the tradition from which the text takes its meaning. Reading as many works as possible within the tradition—that is, developing what synchronic linguists call a "competence" or ability to understand the "traditional grammar"—provides the most thorough preparation. With a known oral poem and a well-collected oral tradition, one can approach this ideal situation and develop an awareness of a work's traditional context.^[16] This experience will go a long way toward the formulation of a poetics for that text and tradition, and it will also provide the best possible

preparation for comparative work, especially in that large number of cases in which the literature to be compared is not certainly oral or well collected.

And, of course, not only are many known oral traditions not well collected, but almost all manuscript poetries with oral traditional features are very sparsely recorded.^[17] In such cases, in which the most immediate context is lacking, one would do well to supplement the investigation with a comparative context, seeking to elucidate one literature through an analog.^[18] This was in the early going Parry's and Lord's basic methodology, turning the observable realities of Serbo-Croatian oral epic back on Homer to illuminate the ancient Greek texts by comparison. In the instance of at least some of the Old English and Old French poems, however, such a comparison would obscure the differences between oral and oral-derived. As a corollary to the Parry-Lord procedure, then, I would suggest that scholars in search of analogs for oral or oral-derived texts look first to possibilities in the respective categories. It may turn out, as in these studies, that the criteria of tradition- and genre-depen-dence make comparison between and among texts from different categories especially attractive and promising, and that these primary considerations must override the secondary matter of oral versus oral-derived. But no matter what the particular situation, the object remains the most exacting, controlled, and productive comparison possible.

A third procedure in our program of poetics is the observation of the principle earlier termed genre-dependence . Many potentially fruitful comparisons have been to some extent qualified by drawing analogies between very different genres, such as between lyric (and non-narrative) panegyric and narrative epic. As a first approximation, genres in two or more literatures should be either narrative or non-narrative; that is, they should be either forms that involve the progress of a tale, such as is found in epic, or the kinds of momentary, brief song-types such as lyric which have no narrative dimension to speak of. More specifically, the works to be compared should be, as far as is feasible in separate poetic traditions, precisely the same genre. Of course, this sort of exact congruency is not always practically achievable, and even when it may seem from formal criteria that we have a close fit, often enough that is not really the case;^[19] nevertheless, by aspiring to fulfillment of the criterion of genre-dependence, we engage a given poem in as appropriate a cross-

traditional comparison as possible. In turn, the appropriateness of the comparison, and therefore of the object poem's comparative context, will help us to formulate its poetics most sensitively and to improve our competence as readers of the poem.

A fourth programmatic principle of approaching an oral or oral-derived text, that of tradition-dependence , itself consists of three smaller parts. In general we can say, as was remarked above, that literatures differ significantly from one another, most obviously in their linguistic properties but also, because they are dependent on linguistic realities, in their prosodic properties. A viable poetics must take account of these idiosyncrasies in assembling its textual profile. As principle 1, then, I would set as the first goal of tradition-dependence a close philological mastery of the tradition within which the given text emerges.^[20] The rigorous understanding of the text in its own language and its most immediate context would then make principle 2, a meticulous survey of differences as well as similarities between or among a text and its analog(s), a credible endeavor. Without both principles 1 and 2 we fall victim to the superficial gesture of the dilettante, uncritically remarking similarities at the expense of a faithful overall perspective. While this kind of rigor is certainly necessary for a successful reading of a known oral text (otherwise a false context is established), it is even more crucial to understanding the poetics of an oral-derived text, where the traditional features to be understood are not as unambiguous, and perhaps not as clear or as frequent, as those in the known oral text.

Principle 3 pertains mostly to the certainly oral work, but may as an abstraction affect the manuscript poem as well. It concerns the place of a given text within what may be called the "local tradition" (as opposed to the national tradition as a whole) and within the repertoire of the given singer. Again the Parry texts provide an illustration. As one becomes more and more acquainted with the Serbo-Croatian tradition, he senses increasingly the truth of Lord's caution that one must read the songs of a given singer and of his fellow performers in order to understand the local tradition and the individual guslar's role in it.^[21] Even though the poetic language of any region is multidialectal and "polychronic" (cf. Parry 1932 on Homeric Greek), containing archaisms alongside contemporary diction, it will nonetheless bear the characteristic imprints of its locale and also of its user's idiolect. The epic language at large is like a grand inventory of smaller, specialized sets of local diction, and these

sets are in turn divided into yet more specialized individual sets whose character depends on geography, religious affiliation, repertoire, and the influence of other singers. All of these factors contextualize the text by being aspects of its tradition-dependence.

The fifth and last theorem in our brief program is the question of the confluence or co-existence of synchronic and diachronic forms in the single traditional text. We may speak generally of textual activity on the synchronic level by describing a given text's digest of formulas, themes, sound-patterns, story-patterns, and the like. For the known oral text these elements have their reality in the act of text-making as it is carried on by the poet, the nominal author of the work and the particular author of the text at hand. Further study of his repertoire and of the community of singers in which he functions will create a synchronic context, a profile for the text. But it would be shortsighted to judge the process of contextualization complete with this profile. As indicated in the opening section, a text has also a diachronic context, a historical or evolutionary aspect which extends far back into the pre-textual history of a given work.

We know that tradition preserves what is of value to it from the past, and we also know that that preservation is not a consciously designed undertaking but rather a reflex of the tradition itself.^[22] For example, archaeologists have pointed out the chronological strata in Homer (e.g., Shodgrass 1971); however, the poem apparently senses no flaw in what we would see as an anachronistic juxtaposition of elements or beliefs. From another point of view, Gregory Nagy (1974) has shown that the roots of the Homeric formula kleos aphthiton are, along with its Sanskrit cognate sráva(s) áksitam , to be found in Indo-European mythology; again it is diachrony, in this case of great depth, that fills out an important part of the poem's context.^[23] In fact, of course, these two examples have reference to materials and ideas that are anachronistic only from our decidedly synchronic perspective of post-oral and post-traditional thinking. Tradition simply finds no discrepancy here; elements from different eras, even vastly different eras, are held together in a diachronic suspension unique to traditional texts. We need to take more careful account of this historical or evolutionary perspective, even when its traces are difficult to interpret either because they exist only as fragments or suggestions or because we must ferret out new information; and we need to look for its contextualizing influence in both oral and oral-derived texts.