Literature, Nonliterature, and Oral Tradition

Abstract

OR THE GENERAL STUDENT of literature and literary criticism (if my own case can be taken as typical), an entry into the subject of oral literature is most conveniently made through Eric A. Havelock's study, Preliteracy of the Greeks. By and large, literary scholars are still in bondage to the prejudice of modern culture against illiteracy. Great works of literary art cannot, in the common opinion, be composed or transmitted without a system of literacy very much like the one we all know. If, however, that opinion could be made to accept Havelock's conclusion that Greek literary culture was in fact an oral culture until the last third of the fifth century, that writing was used only to transcribe texts that had been composed and transmitted through the rules of oral art and memorization, then the literary scholar will have been given an overwhelming incentive to discover what those rules might have been. In Havelock's opinion the rules were essentially rhythmic. This important point is amply illustrated from another culture by Harold Scheub's article, Body and Image in Oral Narrative Performance, in which nonverbal, bodily rhythms are shown to contribute to the sensuous experience of oral narrative by both audiences and performers, an aesthetic experience which in turn creates significant relationships among elements of the narrative that do not exist on the verbal level alone. Because Havelock, like most literary scholars, works from the rhythmic relicts of written texts, his use of evidence goes, first, toward discovering whether such texts were or were not products of a literate culture, and only secondarily toward an attempt to present the kind of full analysis of rhythmic systems that are perceptible to scholars possessing film and tape recordings of many oral performances. In Dell Hymes's article on Discovering Oral Performance and Measured Verse in American Indian Narrative, we have a provocative study illustrating how the investigator's awareness of the importance of rhythmic structures in oral narrative can lead him to discover still others, even from performances that have not been taped or filmed. The role of mousike in oral cultures will, I suspect, continue for literary scholars to be primarily one of demarking oral from nonoral composition. But this is not putting the matter in quite the right way. What for the literary scholar is more interesting than a text's orality is its relationship to the culture it occurs in. The more we can learn, for example from studies like M. Ngal's essay on Literary Creation in Oral Civilizations, about the role of the performer in relation to his or her tradition, the better idea we will have of how to talk about the nature and function of traditional narrative. Oral