Sale, 'Singer of Tales in Performance', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9512
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9512-sale-singer
@@@@95.12.20, Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance
John Miles Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance.
Bloomingon: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. xvi, 235. $14.95.
ISBN 0-253-20931-5 (pb).
Reviewed by William Merritt Sale -- Washington University (St.
Louis)
This book (hereinafter STP) is the last work in a trilogy that
begins with Traditional Oral Epic (Berkeley: California
1990), hereinafter TOE, and continues with Immanent Art
(Bloomington: Indiana 1991), hereinafter IA; the trilogy's
Prologue is the final chapter of The Theory of Oral
Composition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana 1988),
hereinafter TOC. Probably this third volume can be read on its
own, but it has (and needs) so many cross-references to virtually
every page of its two predecessors that it cannot possibly be
evaluated on its own; and so I shall review the entire
trilogy.
In TOC 109-111 F. sets out preliminaries for the future study of
the subject: all comparisons should take into account
text-dependence (whether a text is oral, oral-derived--that is,
writing has entered into the compositional process--literary,
etc.), genre-dependence (whether we have oral epic, oral praise
poetry, oral lyric, etc.) and tradition-dependence (whether it
was composed in Greek, South-Slavic, Anglo-Saxon etc., different
languages with different poetic meters and prosodies). TOE quite
naturally goes on to set forth the different prosodies and
traditional rules for epic poetry composed in the three languages
just specified, and shows how (because these rules are different
for each tradition) the formulae, themes, and story
patterns--called collectively phrases, integers or "words" as the
trilogy proceeds--differ from one tradition to another.
Actually, the phrases, themes and story-patterns of Greek and
South-Slavic turn out to be quite similar in nature; but
Anglo-Saxon differs significantly both in prosody and traditional
rules, as well as in phraseology. The former languages preserve
the Indo-European features of syllabic count, caesura and
right-justification (less flexibility at the end of the line of
verse), while the latter introduces a stress-based meter with
alliteration. All three, however, lay heavy emphasis for their
phraseology upon the localization of words and word-types in the
line of verse, and this fact is one of TOE's most exciting
contributions.
IA concentrates on the development of an aesthetics--mostly a
method of interpretation--suitable to oral and oral-derived epic
poetry; it takes up Iser's and Jauss' Receptionalism into the
Oral Theory, identifying thereby an implied audience, one
that is steeped in a given tradition and is trained to fill in
the gaps necessarily left by any given performance (or
oral-derived text); it finds that the formulae, themes and
story-patterns in any given work are synecdoches for their
counterparts in the tradition, so that to recognize the
traditional referents of these metonyms is to fill in the gaps.
As a result, the phrase "swift-footed Achilles" reaches beyond
the referent of a given line in the Iliad, and beyond the
swiftness of Achilles' feet, in order to invoke the traditional
Achilles, his "identity in all its magnificent entirety" (IA
143); the Feast theme in Iliad 24 calls to mind the
traditional Feast and its function as a harmonious conclusion to
episodes of tension and struggle; and the details of any Return
song arouse expectations based on our awareness of the entire
traditional Return pattern. Such an aesthetics obviously will
not work without the concept of a tradition and a listener or
reader trained in it: we must be able to recognize a formula,
theme or pattern. At one or two points we may therefore become a
little uneasy. We have been impressed by the discussion in TOE
of how the Anglo-Saxon formulae differ greatly from the
Serbo-Croatian and Greek, and now F. invites us to use the latter
formulae to guide us in Anglo-Saxon (IA 195, 197). But this
remains a theoretical uneasiness as we follow with pleasure F.'s
discussion of mg Hygelaces, tht ws god cyning et
al. The differences between Anglo-Saxon formulae and the others
may be less than we thought; at least they are not so great as to
weaken the interpretive analogy among the traditions.
STP seeks to generalize further, by setting the Oral Theory as
wedded to Immanent Art into the context of Dennis Tedlock's and
Dell Hymes' Ethnopoetics and Richard Bauman's Ethnography of
Speaking. These are disciplines dedicated to the recording and
analysis of entire speech acts, including gestures, intonations,
and so forth; they single out especially those speech acts we
call performances. Any performance has an arena, a place where
it occurs, but more importantly a set of assumptions and
expectations created by such a place; a register, a particular
language game (including appropriate paralinguistic features as
well as words) belonging to a particular arena; and communicative
economy, the ability to speak swiftly and elliptically to an
audience that knows the register and is familiar with the arena,
without the need of words and stage-directions that a written
text would require. To assist this further generalization F. now
goes beyond oral epic, to include Serbian charm-songs, the
Homeric Hymns, and an Anglo-Saxon translation of the life of St.
Andrew. He locates their varying arenas, registers and economy
while continuing to call attention to how their structures, their
"words," are metonyms for their various traditional referents.
He sums up his procedure in a proverb: his subject is word-power,
which "derives from the enabling event of performance and the
enabling referent of tradition" (STP 213 et al.)
The whole process is worked out with such elegance and such
powerful logic that it is almost impossible to find fault with it
on its own terms; to have brought so much material together with
such a positive result is a magnificent achievement. We are
being offered an interpretive tool that rests on a carefully
worked out philogical foundation, and that is highly sensitive to
certain realities often overlooked: the differences between one
tradition and another, one genre and another, one performance
arena and register and another, and between oral, oral-derived
and written texts. Interpretation must, F. argues, take account
of all these differences, or it is irresponsible. Interestingly,
F. feels this irresponsiblity much more keenly when
interpretation sees too little meaning in oral-derived texts than
when it sees too much; the text-bound literary criticism that he
contrasts with his own interpretations falls short much more
often than it goes too far. This is good strategy for F, since
in the long run there is little danger from over-readings: they
usually simply fail to persuade and are forgotten, while if a
work is under-read, there is a terrible loss. F. is
consistently, and admirably, pushing us to see more, not less.
He has shown how oral poetry can be complex, and heard as
complex, in its own performance arena, and not merely in the
scholar's study.
Interpreters of Homer and Beowulf especially will welcome
this result; the oral poetics of Albert Lord and others have
seemed to impose unacceptable strait-jackets upon scholars who
were offering interpretations that were actually far from
extravagant. Indeed Walter Ong told me recently that F. had led
him to see much more opportunity for deep interpretation of oral
epic poetry than he had previous thought possible. Especially
rich is F.'s reading of Iliad 24, already singled out for
lengthy discussion by Charles Beye in his review of IA for these
pages. I had always accepted the old view that Achilles was
angry with Priam for shattering a previous harmony between
them: they had reached a deep sense of common humanity symbolized
by the Myth of the Urns and reflected in the love between father
and son; now Priam suddenly cries, "Take this ransom, that is
what you value," and an out-dated and more impoverished view of
their relationship intrudes violently; naturally Achilles is
badly upset, and for an Achilles, even now, upset is translated
into anger. In the course of making several interesting
observations, F. says that Achilles is angry because Priam is
rejecting a future harmony, the peace of the Feast, the
first step of which is Achilles' offer of a chair. We know this
because, as an audience prepared for this performance, we are
familiar with the Feast as a traditional theme. The two
interpretations are different; but they resonate well, and we
want both.
It is true that many of F.'s interpretations, even of previously
unfamiliar texts (such as the Serbian charm-songs or the
Andreas), seemed to carry me no further than I had got by reading
the cited passages with alert and questioning literary-critical
attention that was familiar with oral and religious traditions.
This by no means led to disappointment; all readers are surely
gratified when our readings are supported by the conviction that
audiences in far away places or the distant past must have been
hearing what we hear. And some of F.'s readings are very hard to
arrive at through literary criticism alone (see IA 244-46).
Whether it adds to our sense of a text, or simply confirms it,
F.s reconstruction of audiences, real or imagined, carries
immense conviction, as he lets us see these listeners bringing
their awareness of traditional registers to bear upon
performances. At times we may want more than F. gives us, but we
never want less.
Two groups of readers will remain critical of some aspects of
Foley's edifice. Some radical Scripsists require for the poet a
learned and leisurely mode of composition that appears to defy
analogy to the singing of tales. They may long for more
complexity of interpretation than F. gives us, and feel that only
the assumption of a fully literate poet can justify it; they will
want to divorce the texts of Homer and Beowulf from the
performance arena altogether. And there are Parry-Lord
Conservatives who may feel that Foley has gone too far beyond the
founding fathers in certain places. Some of these, indeed, may
find F.'s interpretations too complex, though I suspect
that most of them, when they demur, will do so over technical
questions concerning how the poems were composed. The more
thoughtful members of these groups might argue that F.'s thinking
appears to rest on certain axioms that could be called into
question.
Axiom 1. The closing statement of STP speaks of a "spectrum
model for oral traditional works, from the now rare situations in
which writing has played no part whatsoever through the myriad
intermediate cases where oral tradition and literacy intertwine
in fascinating ways and on to the works composed by literate
authors that nonetheless owe some debt to an originative oral
tradition" (STP 211). This seems to imply an axiom, that the
entire spectrum of oral-derived texts can be interpreted as
performances in some sense. How, then, do we criticize Virgil,
Apollonius, or especially Quintus of Smyrna? All three can
imitate Homer well when they want to, and indeed Quintus'
students find it very hard to distinguish his style from Homer's.
Clearly these poets "owe some debt to an originative oral
tradition." Indeed we might reasonably speak of Virgil's
Aeneas Anchisiades or Quintus' Tudeos huios as
invoking the traditional characters in all their magnificent
entirety, to echo F.s language. And yet the epic registers of
these poets, their formulae and themes, have as their traditional
referents not an oral tradition but the written texts of a number
of authors, especially Homer himself. In fact Quintus' ironic
eummelies Agamemnon seems actually to reject the
traditional character--even as it acknowledges the Homeric source
for character and epithet separately. And what of pius
Aeneas? Does the adjective not move us away from the
traditional complex character, and concentrate us upon his
pietas, even as we recognize that here we have a
frequently-employed, a "regular," formula, an imitation of the
very device that--used as frequently as Homer uses it--is our
best evidence that Homer was an oral composer and not merely a
superb imitator of the oral style? Meanwhile Turnus, the
Italian, but the more romantic hero, lacks formulae almost
entirely.
The Parry-Lord Conservatives and Scripsists might here agree that
F.'s statement at the end of STP should be slightly modified, and
the P-L Conservatives, at least, might suggest that criticism of
poets at the far end of the spectrum could fruitfully borrow from
F.s oral-traditional aesthetics without identifying these poets
as singers of tales in performance. F. in personal communication
indicates that in fact he did not intend this identification, and
that a modified form of oral-traditional aesthetics is indeed
appropriate here.
Axiom 2. The discussion of phraseology throughout TOE implies
that formulae are derived from the traditional rules particular
to each tradition, and may differ considerably from one tradition
to another. This is an exciting proposition, representing a real
break from Parry-Lord Conservatism, which continues to hold that
Parry's definition of the formula, though based on Greek and
South-Slavic, "still stands, for any poetry that uses words and
has some form of 'metrical conditions'" (A.B. Lord, The Singer
Resumes the Tale [Ithaca: Cornell 1995] 130). Greek and
South-Slavic prosody are not only very close to each other, but
are not far from mediaeval French, so that the Parry definition
works well for the chansons de geste; it also works
excellently for the Cantar de Mio Cid, even though the
Cid's prosody is still largely a mystery to us; and it
appears to work equally well for pre-Islamic Arabic, the Arabic
Sira, and Khazak oral epic, with their highly varied
prosodies. F. argues that it works less well for Anglo-Saxon,
whose traditional rules are quite different from the South-Slavic
and Greek. This makes excellent sense, and may well be right,
though a Parry-Lord Conservative might wonder whether, in arguing
this, Foley has taken into account all the many modifications in
the concept of the formula that Hainsworth, Lord in his last
writings, and others have brought about. Reading through F.'s
formulaic analysis of Beowulf 702b-730a (TOE 207-233) and
sticking to noun-phrases (noun-verb as well as
noun-epithet), I found that almost everything F. calls a formula
or formulaic system would be counted as a formula by my own
modified Parry-Lord-Hainsworth criteria, and never would I call
formulaic a phrase that he does not. Our analyses often
part company; our results coincide. But the P-L Conservative
cannot use this as an argument against F. We are a long way from
knowing why the Parry-Lord-Hainsworth definitions work--when they
do--across traditions, across cultures, and across at least some
prosodies; and until we do we should not impose those definitions
upon traditions where experts are uncomfortable with them.
The P-L Conservative can make a different point with suitable
modesty. I do not think that any of F.'s interpretations in the
second two books of the trilogy really depends upon our attitude
toward this axiom. The concept of traditional referentiality, as
F. employs it, requires that there be formulae in the tradition
as well as the individual poem; but it does not require a
specific theory of their origin. Albert Lord might have resisted
F.'s interpretations, but he would have needed grounds other than
his disagreement with axiom 2.
Axiom 3. The radical Scripsists might well ask how we know that
Beowulf, e.g., is oral-derived; F. answers that it has
oral-traditional characteristics: it demonstrates "a formulaic
phraseology, an inventory of typical scenes, and so on" (TOE4).
The underlying axiom here appears to be that a tradition that
abounds in formulae and themes is necessarily oral-traditional,
and its poetry necessarily oral or oral-derived. But now the
Scripsists could point to Quintus. Here is a poet rich in
formulae, seemingly as rich as the South-Slavic poets, yet quite
divorced from oral tradition. We can call him "oral-derived" in
only a very special sense: he does not recreate an oral
performance, but merely imitates the style of a text that happens
to be the work of an oral poet. How do we know that
Beowulf was not produced by such an imitator (of a now
lost work)? Here the Parry-Lord Conservative can offer the use
of comparative statistics; but those statistics are based on the
assumption that Anglo-Saxon formulae are Parry-Lord formulae such
as we find in Greek and South-Slavic; and this appears to
contradict axiom 2.
All this may remind us of the only really valuable point made by
Jeff Opland in his unfairly negative review of TOE,
(Comparative Literature 45.4 [1993] 370). Opland speaks
of F.'s "inward-thrusting complexity" as "suffocatingly
claustrophobic"; a strange metaphor, since we expect
"agoraphobic," but he means that F. makes him, Opland, feel
claustrophobic: he is complaining that F.s "panacea of
fundamental traditional rules" (369) vary from one tradition to
another and thus isolate the traditions from one another: they
preclude the cross-cultural comparisons that enable us to
identify a style as oral. He goes on to maintain that Foley is
in fact applying his techniques to literate texts, for such is
the Old-English Andreas (370). Opland is presenting us with much
muddle and injustice here, some of which F. implicitly and
successfully answers in his analysis of the Andreas as
oral-derived in STP; but there is a real problem as well. If the
concept of the formula really is tradition-dependent (axiom 2),
then in theory the presence of formulae in one tradition,
known to be oral--the South-Slavic, for instance--is no argument
for the orality of another tradition--the Anglo-Saxon,
say--however many formulae of its own kind the latter may
possess. If axiom 2 is right, should we accept axiom 3? When
Lord and Magoun first claimed that Anglo-Saxon poetry was oral,
they were using the Parry-Lord concept of the formula, the same
concept that Benson used when arguing against them. If these
scholars are mistaken, if Anglo-Saxon formulae really are that
different, then we seem to need some other argument to back the
assertion of Anglo-Saxon orality.
I think that F. would say here, first, that he does not consider
Anglo-Saxon formulae entirely different from the others: out of a
"tradition-dependent background of traditional rules" there
emerges a phraseology that permits a "broadly comparative concept
of formulaic structure" (TOE 239). My results concerning the
formulae in Beowulf mentioned under axiom 2 certainly bear
this out. Since F. sees formulae as the product of traditional
rules, he naturally adds that a basis in oral tradition is
ultimately ascribed to these rules (personal communication, and
see axiom 4 below). And he would no doubt argue that the
dynamics of Beowulf's language involves traditional
referentiality so deeply that we cannot speak of a mere imitator,
an Anglo-Saxon Quintus (see axiom 5 below). But axioms 2 and 3
will continue to be debated, either by disappointed Parry-Lord
Conservatives such as Opland, or by determined Scripsists among
Anglo-Saxon scholars.
Axiom 4. The traditional rules that F. uncovers throughout TOE
are rules of oral-traditional poetry; this is axiomatic for him,
since he does not offer comparative analyses of strictly literate
poems. But his critics may well ask here, "What if Virgil etc.
also follow these very rules? And especially--what if Lucan or
Statius follow them? Is it not possible that F. is simply
uncovering rules for composing epic--oral or oral-derived or
written--in a given language?" If it should turn out that a
Lucan slavishly obeys the same traditional rules as Homer, but
without producing or employing formulae in the ordinary sense, we
seem to be thrown back on the formula-argument if we want to show
that a given composer can be called oral or oral-derived. In any
case, we need to know whether strictly literate writers follow
the same rules.
Axiom 5. In response to the "what-ifs" just evoked, F. might
respond with another axiom: the dynamics of traditional
(metonymic) referentiality as set out in IA and STP characterize
oral-traditional and not strictly literate art. Since we are
able to interpret *Beowulf* in the same way as we interpret Homer
and the South-Slavs, we can be confident that that they are
oral-traditional in approximately the same sense. F. does not
give us extended analyses of fully literate works here, to show
us that traditional referentiality will not work; but the points
I made under axiom 1, if developed more fully, will move to
confirm his view. That is, as we apply F.'s aesthetics to Virgil
and feel at once the need for modification, we are acknowledging
the validity of axiom 5; so marked is the difference, indeed,
that we may be able to speak no longer of an axiom, but an
established principle.
Axiom 6. In IA, F. asserts that "formulaic density is not a
reliable measure of orality" (14n.30). It is not clear to me how
important this axiom is to F.'s overall position; certainly our
acceptance or rejection will not affect our appreciation of his
interpretations in IA and STP. But it would not be accepted by
the Parry-Lord Conservative: in deciding that the *Roland*
was oral, for example, Joseph Duggan (The Song of
Roland [Berkeley: California 1973]) compared its density to
other poems in its own tradition, and found it much more
formulaic than poems known to be literate. He then applied the
results cross-culturally, arguing that because the Cantar de
Mio Cid showed about the same formularity as the
Roland, it should be considered orally composed (Joseph
Duggan, The Cantar de Mio Cid [Cambridge 1989] 136-39).
Lord's Harvard seminar applied, over the years, statistical
measurements of formulaic density to medieval poetry with
interesting results, including the likelihood that Beowulf was
marginal between oral and literate--it was distinctly less
formulaic than Havelok the Dane or King Horn, thought to be oral,
but more formulaic than formulaic texts known to be literate
(Oral Tradition 1.3 [1986] 479). Lord considered
formulaic density a "necessary criterion, a fundamental
characteristic of orality," though he conceded that its evidence
"alone may not be sufficient to determine orality" (ibid.
481, emphasis added) and should be augmented by studying larger
syntactic and semantic units. My own statistical analyses are
considerably more sophisticated than the formula-density test,
but they certainly bear out Duggan's results; I have not applied
them to Lord's.
Density tests and other statistical approaches are intended to
tell us something about how poems were composed, and thus about
history; they do not speak directly to poetic criticism, but
reach it only through poetic biography. If we accept F.'s
assurances that the poetry he interprets is orally composed or
oral-derived and close to the oral roots, we need no tests to
support his interpretations. We might, of course, want to argue
that since some if not all of the oral-derived texts F. discusses
entailed the use of writing in composition, we should feel free
to add to F.'s analyses any techniques of literary interpretation
that we might hesitate to apply to oral performances; and we
might feel happier doing this if a statistical test assured us
that a given text did indeed entail writing by the composer. We
could then go on to see whether statistics can be of any
assistance in establishing the whole spectrum referred to in #1
above, from the strictly oral poets to literate authors whose
debt to oral tradition is pretty well confined to imitations of
written texts. We have already suggested that interpretations at
the far end from the oral will be somewhat different; also,
measurements of just how closely the thorougly literate poets
imitated their oral predecessors can shed light on how they want
their readers to use these predecessors.
There are a few omissions of less moment that nonetheless deserve
mention. During the middle years of this century especially,
there was an impasse between oral poetics and literary criticism,
and some scholars have embraced Scripsism only because they
thought oral poetics too confining. It is one of the most
gratifying features of F.'s work that his criticism does not
confine, but expands; still, he is so anxious to show what
traditional-oral aesthetics adds to our interpretive
possibilities that I was left unclear on the question of how much
a literary-critical interpretation of a definitely oral work is
free to add in turn. F. indicates in personal communication that
a very full literary interpretation, e.g., of the character of
Tale in Avdo's Wedding of Meho, Son of Smail is a welcome
complement to the portrait that he draws from tradition on pp.
32-41 of STP; but in future work it would be useful to have him
take a passage from an oral poem and show where the limits of
interpretation might be be reached. At what point will he say,
"No performance-audience could ever have heard that meaning"? (A
propos of Tale, let me in passing express my regret that Foley
did not discuss Georg Danek's very helpful article, "Polumetis
Odusseus und Tale Budalina," in Wiener Studien
104 [1991] 23-47.) I wish, too, that F. had said explicitly
whether an entire poem in every tiny part of its fabric can be
part of the traditional referent--not just its formulae and
themes and story-pattern, its familiar techniques and openings
and closings, but each word. Suppose I (as a reader) know that
version A of a certain poem is later than version B, and I note
that (though the structure, characters, events and details of the
action remain the same) its wording differs somewhat from B's, at
this point and at that. Put the matter this way: suppose a
singer says that he sang the song exactly as he always did, that
versions A (later) and B (earlier) are the same, but we in the
audience notice certain verbal differences. Can we say that B is
part of the traditional referent, that the difference in
wording, not merely the wording of A itself, is part of the
interpretant of A?
Let me leave this list of omissions on a puzzled rather than a
critical note. From the point of view of a literary historian
and critic, given to close reading and to supporting historical
judgments and literary interpretations with poetic biography
reinforced by statistics, F.'s books are forcefully argued,
learned, and enjoyable to read, well-suited to the delight and
instruction of humankind. The proverb of his third volume is
that word-power derives from the enabling event of performance
and the enabling referent of tradition. The proverb of the
second is that the integers of the register, the formulae,
themes, and story patterns, work metonymically, so that each
occurrence of any integer recalls the total meaning established
by all its occurrences. The proverb of the first, I venture to
say, is that these integers are produced by prosodic rules that
are particular to a given tradition, a given genre, and even a
given text depending upon its location on the spectrum from oral
performance to literate imitation of a written oral or
oral-derived text. The whole trilogy aims at its last sentence:
"Most fundamentally, the singer of tales in performance selects
and uses a 'way of speaking' not metri causa but artis
causa." An astonishing aim, given that the founder of the
theory rested so much of his case for the orality of Homer on the
premise that the formulae existed for ease in versification
(The Making of Homeric Verse [Oxford 1971] 35, 317, et
al). Perhaps the founder's views need not be abandoned; but they
certainly needed to be supplemented by just such an account as F.
has given us.