Powell, 'Singer Resumes the Tale', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9601
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9601-powell-singer
@@@@96.1.9, Lord, The Singer Resumes the Tale
Albert Bates Lord, The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. 280. $39.95. ISBN
0-8014-3103-4 (pb).
Reviewed by Barry B Powell -- University of Wisconsin
(Madison)
powell@macc.wisc.edu
Lord was not like other scholars. By the time of his death in
July 1991, he had attracted to himself almost a cult of devotees.
I recently attended the 4th annual Albert Bates Lord Conference
in St. Petersburg, Russia, whose participants were mostly
scholars who had known Albert Lord in the flesh, and his presence
dominated the conference. Most were Slavicists, unknown to
classicists, but whose research was guided by what we might call
the teachings of Parry/Lord. But the mystery of the greatness of
A. B. Lord will always be bound with the mystery of the poet
Homer, whose very old stories of war and home have fascinated the
whole world. More than any other, except for his master Milman
Parry, A. B. Lord elucidated just how such poems came into being.
A. B. Lord's The Singer of Tales (1960) presented an
epoch-making model for Homeric composition based on the greatest
collection of oral songs ever made in the field. I should think
that The Singer of Tales is the most influential book
published in Classics in this century. L.'s model has endured
sustained and sometimes angry attack, but remains today intact.
L.'s posthumous The Singer Resumes the Tale, written in
precise and admirable prose, was intended to be a sequel to
The Singer of Tales, but contains additional material
based on his papers. The whole is expertly and lovingly edited by
his wife Mary Louise Lord and handsomely published in Gregory
Nagy's Myth and Poetics Series from Cornell. The two
principal topics are "the theme," a technique of composition and
one of the proofs that Homer composed orally; and "the
transitional text," a bugbear in oral studies. For the first
time, L. also discusses lyric poetry and the ballad.
Chapter 1,"The Nature and Kinds of Oral Literature," begins with
definitions. Before writing, there is "oral literature"; generic
distinctions appear only after writing. "Oral literature" appears
to be a contradiction in terms, but by "literature" we mean words
crafted artfully. We have, then, singers and listeners, but
nothing in writing. "Oral performance" takes place in a
"traditional" context, where the singer knows his listeners and
they know him. Some are themselves singers and they have heard
him before. According to L.'s South-Slavic experience,
performance may take place in a house in a village where
neighbors gather. Feasts and weddings also offer opportunities
for oral song, as do coffee shops. But always singer and
listeners share a tight communal life: such is "traditional
performance," so that "oral" and "traditional" are not
interchangeable terms, the origin of a good deal of confusion in
the literature. We classicists will envision parallel conditions,
mutatis mutandis, for the Greek Iron Age, and in fact
Homer's own descriptions place oral performance in similar
contexts.
When applied to song, "tradition" means all the performances of
all the songs the singer ever sang or the listener ever heard. It
is wrong to say that Homer "made use of his tradition," because
he was in the tradition, a part of it. Though traditions of song
begin who knows when, and go on forever so long are there as
singers and listeners, they change constantly. Singers (not
scribes) and their listeners preserve the tradition.
"Traditionality" consists of several elements: (1) the place in a
social order for story telling; (2) the art of composing songs in
a special language with "formulas"; (3) traditional content,
story patterns and the like; here L. also includes such
nonnarrative genres as lyric (but is this content?); (4) specific
songs, such as Marko Kraljevic and Musa the
Highwayman, which have no original version but consist of the
sum of all their variants; (5) oral poetics, standards for
judging achievement, for not all songs are equally complex or
skillful.
L.'s category (2), the art of composing, which includes formulas
and themes, has been the subject of enormous work in oral
studies. L. emphasizes that formulas and themes exist as aids to
composition in performance; that is why they are there. "Formulas
do not exist to make memorization easier, but rather they make
memorization unnecessary" (11).
If a song has no fixed text, what, then, does the singer
remember? He remembers the story, what happened next. The common
pattern (a) absence, (b) devastation, (c) arrival or return, (d)
restoration of order can be found in many oral tales, including
the Iliad and the Odyssey, but for the singer,
unlike ourselves, such patterns are never separable from the
story itself. Such patterns may depend on mythic prototypes and
in any event arouse deep-seated human sympathies.
Thus traditional epic entertains through appeal to the serious
concerns of the listeners (even as today, I think, powerful
cinema affirms deep moral preoccupations). For L., myth comes
first, patterns of death and rebirth, and history comes second,
an Achaean expedition against Troy. Myth is the subject, really,
and history is the background, a distinction that many students
of Homer seem unable to learn. There are secular patterns too,
for example, the feud in medieval Irish legend.
Lyric and ritual songs offer other "subject matter" for oral
nonepic song: when a lover asks a series of riddles, or lovers
bewail the coming of day.
L.'s category (5), the poetics of oral literature, presupposes
that oral literature not only changes, but evolves. Once songs
were simple, then they became complex through the achievement of
singers of distinction over the generations. Much of what we
admire in Homer will depend on this evolution: his elaborate
descriptions of objects and scenes, organization through ring
composition and chiasmus, and such rhetorical tropes as anaphora.
Homer's predecessors have invented these devices, not Homer, and
they have been passed on and elaborated still further because
they enhanced the power of performance. All such traditional
devices were passed on to written literature eventually, but they
did not originate there.
But the poetics of oral and written literature soon diverge;
written literature, for example, eschews close verbal repetition
as inelegant, while oral poetics enjoys repetition. Such
differences have suggested to scholars that the artistry of oral
literature is less than that of written literature, but such
prejudgments cannot withstand scrutiny (what literate poet ever
surpassed Homer?). An important issue (rarely taken into account
by Homerists) is the editorial reshaping of an oral text once it
is written down to make it look more like a written text. A good
example is found in the collection of Luka Marjanovich in the
19th century, who in editing written versions of oral South
Slavic texts omitted lines or blocks of lines, adjusted the
meter, removed repetitions and combined two lines into one.
Homer's texts must have undergone just such editing, placing us
in an awkward position when evaluating his poetics on the basis
of the Alexandrian vulgate.
Chapter 2, "Oral Traditional Lyric Poetry," turns to the
composition and transmission of oral traditional nonnarrative
songs. Here, if anywhere, we should find evidence that verbatim
repetition of oral songs actually does take place, for lyric
poems are short enough to be remembered verbatim and the ritual
context in which often they are performed might encourage such
repetition. For a case study, L. turns to the Latvian dainas,
quatrains sung during work and festival, to show how, though very
short, there are nonetheless innumerable multiforms of any one
song. Serbo-Croatian lyric women's songs in the Milman Parry
Collection at Harvard offer similar patterns of variability.
Parry's collection is superior not only in quantity and breadth,
but because he and L. took down the same song several times from
the same singer. Here L. examines in detail riddling and
boasting songs to show how the singer works with blocks of lines
intermediate between the formula and the theme. He shows how
there is a stable but not fixed core of lines to which additions
can be made. The concept of a memorized text simply cannot
explain such multiforms, which appear to issue from the same
technique of composition-in-performance that produces oral epic
verse.
In an addendum, Mary Louise Lord gathers remarks by Parry and
others about ancient Greek lyric and epic which support the
thesis that Greek lyric and elegy were created in the same way as
Latvian dainas and Serbo-Croatian women's songs--that is, as
multiforms without the aid of writing (but at some point, of
course, were written down). I only wish she had faced the problem
that Greek lyric and elegy are by Alcaeus, Sappho, and Solon,
while the songs L. studies are anonymous and never written down
by those who sang them. Did Alcaeus write down his own songs? If
so, why? Did Solon compose in writing, or orally to dictation, or
compose orally then write down his own words? Or did different
poets behave in different ways? In my own mind, such questions
remain.
In Chapter 3 "Homer and the Muses: Oral Traditional Poetics, a
Mythic Episode, and Arming Scenes in the Iliad," L. faces
the criticism, once much heard, that Homer's oral style precludes
an appreciation of aesthetics in his poems. L.'s kicking-boy is
Paolo Vivante, who seems to have thought that Homer was Wallace
Stevens and in The Epithets of Homer (1982) applied to
Homer a myopic vision of the nature of poetry. Vivante is
something of a straw-horse, for his book was never taken
seriously, but his sentimental attitudes are an extreme form of
an initial response to Parry: that formulas are cogs and machines
are not beautiful (and build themselves, no doubt). Vivante even
denied mythical patterns to the Iliad, and L. wonders what
about the war of the gods, then, well known from Mesopotamian
myth, and what about the mythic almost-death of the hero, a
pattern in South Slavic oral song too.
As for language, Homer's was like what we speak, though metrical;
yet who would deny verbal creativity to a speaker of English,
just because he must observe rules of grammar and employ a common
vocabulary? The modern poet, by contrast, attempts to create an
individualistic language, seeking new ways of thinking and new
ways of saying things. Such forms of poetic communication were
unknown in Homer's day (and depend on writing), and to ignore
this fact is to remain muddled about Homer's poetic achievement.
L. presents a close reading of the four arming scenes in the
Iliad to show how Homer has skillfully altered a
type-scene to enhance the present drama. His discussion, which
contains some earlier published material, is a locus for
understanding the flexibility of the oral style and the
creativity of a traditional poet working with traditional
material. Through such comparison we can understand the
aesthetics of Homeric composition.
L. was not a classicist, but a comparatist, and his scholarship
was built on mastery of unrelated but parallel traditions. In
Chapter 4 "Beowulf and Oral Tradition," L. describes how
in the Old English tradition meter was tonic, not syllabic like
the Greek, employed alliteration and formulas, and used blocks of
lines and repeated themes to build the narrative: such blocks and
themes were not "memorized," but "remembered." Presumably, L.
argues, such texts were dictated (as were the Homeric poems), and
he criticizes sharply scholars who have misunderstood what L. and
Parry meant by "improvisation," that is, composition in
performance. There's deja vu here, but medievalists naturally
think in terms of texts composed in writing, as well they might,
and L.'s discussion illuminates how Parry's theories apply to an
oral tradition different in its mechanics from the Greek.
So how did Beowulf come into existence? L. flirts with the
notion that the Beowulf poet, under the influence of reading
Virgilian epic in a monastic environment, might himself have
recorded the poem; the thesis would satisfy those medievalists
who admire the poem's artistry, on the assumption that oral poems
are artless. The issue touches on the hard fought question of the
"transitional text," to which L. will later return. In any event,
Beowulf is built on an ancient and powerful mythic
pattern, the monster-slayer, according to our expectation that
oral compositions not only entertain, but inculcate deeply held
values and concerns. L. shows how this primordial pattern
incorporated parallel Judeo-Christian traditions about the
creation and threats to It, for oral poetics loves repetition as
a way of driving home a point. In a fine editor's addendum, MLL
rejects attempts to prove or disprove the oral origin of medieval
English poetry through examination of the orthography of early
manuscripts, when poems known to be oral and those know to be
written share the same conventions. Stylistic analysis remains
our best guide to deciding on a poem's orality.
Chapter 5, "The Formula in Anglo-Saxon Poetry," explores features
of oral-traditional style in Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon
poetry. L. enters the controversy about formula-density in such
poetry, which leads to the controversy about the nature of
"formula," "formulaic expressions," and "systems" of formulas. L.
defends Parry's words, "an expression regularly used, under the
same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea," and
shows how this definition of formula works for Anglo-Saxon
poetry. So much blood has been spilled, but L.'s chapter reminds
me of the critical importance of establishing clear definitions
as a first step in drawing historical conclusions. We are arguing
over definitions--what is oral poetry? what is a
formula?--because we classicists want to know what kind of poet
Homer really was.
Chapter 6, "The Theme in Anglo-Saxon Poetry," turns now to the
theme, for important scholars have denied that the theme, "a
repeated passage with a fair amount of verbal repetition," exists
in Anglo-Saxon poetry. L. agrees that such repetition does not
work in the way it does in Homeric poetry, but that it does
occur, identifiable through elements of single words or lexical
units.
Oral theory has concentrated on epic, but what about the shorter
forms, ballad and lyric? L. already considered lyric (Chapter 2),
but examines ballad in Chapter 7, "The Ballad: Textual Stability,
Variation, and Memorization." Placing side by side different
versions of "Barbara Allen," L. shows how the unit of composition
is the couplet, which comes and goes and shifts around very much
as do Homeric formulas. L. considers South Slavic examples, too,
and concludes that there is no fixed text of a ballad even for a
single singer. While singers recognize that a song has a
recognizable "text," so that when you say "Please sing 'Barbara
Allen,'" that means something (L. calls this a "sense of
texuality"), still there is no fixed text and, contra the
influential views of some English scholars, no rote memorization.
Chapter 8, "Rebuttal," addresses specific complaints and
misunderstandings. To straighten the muddle, L. distinguishes
three "schools" of approach to oral theory. The first is the
"philosophical," concerned with illiterate and preliterate
societies and the "oral mind" (e.g., E. Havelock, J. Goody). The
second school means by "oral" nonwritten, so that if someone
memorizes Vergil (or a written copy of Homer), he is an "oral
poet" (e.g., Ruth Finnegan). The third school consists of those
who examine with great care the words and groups of words, the
actual texts, of oral poems, to see how they were put together.
These are the philologists, like Parry and L. himself, intensely
concerned with poetic quality and the understanding of
traditional meaning. Such distinctions need always to be kept in
mind in discussing "oral theory," a phrase which L. thinks a
misnomer. Parry's descriptions do not constitute a theory as
such, but are conclusions based on fact and not on supposition or
plausibility.
With such distinction in mind, L. places various critics in this
or that camp and shows how their views and misunderstanding
derive from unspoken points of view. Of great interest is L.'s
demonstration that rhyme does not assist memorization, but
actually interferes with it.
In Chapter 9, "Two Versions of the Theme of the Overnight Visit
in The Wedding of Smailagic Meho," L. set out to show the range
of variation in the presentation of a single theme within a
single work, how the oral singer can produce long or short
versions of song as the narrative commands.
Chapter 10, "The Transitional Text," faces one of the thorniest
problems in oral studies. We must always deal with written texts
in attempting to understand the past, but how can we tell which
were composed in writing and which were composed orally? In
earlier writings, especially The Singer of Tales, L.
denied the transitional text: the poem is sung and taken down by
dictation, or it is composed in writing from the start, one or
the other. On the one hand you have a fluid tradition; on the
other you have a fixed text and the concept of the fixed text.
But here L. retreats from his earlier position and admits that we
can speak meaningfully of transitional texts.
We must deal, first, with the problem of editorial adaptation of
oral material, for example Italo Calvino's retelling of Italian
folktales, sometimes called a "transitional text," but of course
without verse or formulas. Calvino translated these stories into
standard Italian from dialectal versions taken from
story-tellers. We might, then, expect a "transitional text" to be
a doctored text, whose style and expression has been altered
according to a literate editor's fancies about what is crude or
appropriate. Oral poetics are different from written (surely it
is depressing to read in very modern commentaries how this or
that line of Homer is "inelegant," "crudely constructed," or
"unworthy of the poet"). The Grimms, whose Hausmaerchen might
also be called "transitional," altered the original style still
more than Calvino did and created the genre of the literary
"folktale." In a similar way, in Old English poems translated
from the Latin, poetics derived from oral English epic shape the
expression. Still, when you subject such poems to rigorous
examination, the evidently oral style begins to look mechanical,
as if composed by an amateur in the art of oral verse making.
In coming to grips with the issue of the transitional text, you
must distinguish between two classes, insiders and outsiders. The
first are the traditional group, including the oral poets; the
second class falls into three subcategories: (a)
collector/editors, (b) retellers, (c) and imitators. To (a) first
belong Calvino and Parry. Retellers and imitators, if they use
traditional material may, however, create poems that closely
resemble oral poems, and can be hard to distinguish from them.
L. gives three examples from the South Slavic tradition, whose
poems would appear to be truly "transitional." In one example,
the poet began as an oral traditional singer, became literate and
wrote songs imitating oral style, then wrote fully literate works
with nontraditional subjects and motifs.
Such examples, however, L. is careful to observe, cannot inform
us about the Homeric poems, which were certainly not transitional
texts. Homer's world was utterly different from that of medieval
or early modern society, where written Latin and its ancient
traditions were always nearby.
Only as comparatists will we unravel the mysteries of the Homeric
poems; taken by themselves, they remain a puzzle. L. was a
comparatist above all. His method is to state a problem, cite
scholars whose views have defined the problem's terms, then turn
to original texts to show how the problem can be solved. The book
is a remarkable defense of theses first advanced in The Singer
of Tales and a natural companion to that seminal work. Not
only every Homerist, but every scholar wishing to understand the
roots of culture will read it eagerly. It is a deep well, and a
heady draft.