Memory on Canvas: Commedia dell’Arte as a Model for Homeric Performance

Abstract

When Albert Lord began introduction to work in which he would synthesize and analyze material that he and his teacher, Milman Parry, had collected in South Slavic world, he stated that was needed most in Homeric scholarship was a more exact knowledge of way in which oral epic poets learn and compose their (1960:3). For Parry and Lord, their knowledge came from performances of guslari, traditional singers of heroic material, both Muslim and Christian. In songs of such guslari as Salih Ugljanin, Sulejman Fortic, and especially Avdo Medjedovic, two saw what they believed to be a convincing parallel with what appeared to be compositional techniques of Homer--the use of basic building blocks of standardized elements such as the formula and the theme. These, however, were just that: basic blocks. A poor, inexperienced, or mediocre singer could take a traditional story in skeletal form, and, with aid of blocks, flesh it out into at least a modest entertainment of a few hundred lines. A talented singer could go far beyond that, making elaborate songs of several thousand lines or more.1 This was clearly not simply a matter of memorizing and then performing--although a singer in training would indeed tend to learn blocks.2 Instead, it was a matter of combining such blocks with spontaneous creativity at moment of performance to make something new that was both traditional and improvised simultaneously.