On the Analysis of Oral Literature

Abstract

Heda Jason's article A Multidimensional Approach to Oral Literature (CA 10:413-20) is an intellectual tour de force; her grasp of the international scholarship is unsurpassed, and she synthesizes very effectively. This is just the sort of theoretical study that the field of folkloristics has needed for some time. Yet I find myself strangely unexcited by the implications of the piece, and for some time I've been trying to figure out just why. Essentially what is presented to us is a model of analysis, and like all models it must be judged by its utility, by its ability to make diverse data more coherent. Jason's model doesn't do this for the kinds of data that I'm most familiar with (incidentally, the same range of materials which Reisman discusses in his CA* comment). This lack of satisfaction on my part is almost certainly due to the fact that I am much more interested in a performancecentered, rather than an item-centered, approach to oral literature. I therefore find the analytic model of literature and society of Burke (1941, 1950), as well as Hymes's (1967, 1968) sociolinguistic perspective, more appropriate to my needs. These approaches, it seems to me, more fully permit analysis of art forms both within specific cultures and across cultural boundaries. Most important, they dispel (or at least severely question) the notion that there is a necessary distinction to be made between literature, oral or otherwise, and the real world. Further, the perspectives of the new ethnography, dismissed so easily here, would lead Jason to a more flexible model than the one she presents. In my field experience in Afro-American communities, for instance, the performance of a tale is regarded not as Jason describes it, but as real life, a heightening of reality, a heightening which occurs not because of the distance and perspective which this stylized experience brings about, but because of the opportunity it provides for the group to channel energies more economically and communicatively than in other communication acts or events. Though Jason covers and interrelates the majority of the features of an oral performance which are of greatest concern to me, the rigid Western and sophisticated notion of the separation of art from life (underlined by her downplaying of the cultural, social, and psychological determinants) renders her model of analysis less useful than those of Burke or Hymes, who regard oral literature as communication rather than simply as art. This is not to say that artifice has nothing to do with the construction of the item of oral performance. Indeed, among the crucial features of any traditional art are the expectation pattern that is carried by the performer and the audience into the event and the means by which this pattern is given articulation and judged as an effective or ineffective performance. But these expectations, these conventions, are related in many ways with the pattern of life style, especially in the realm of decorum, the rules of personal interaction. Though I agree with Dundes that Jason's eclecticism is to be judged ultimately by how much experimental fieldwork and analysis it stimulates, I am a little worried about the direction such work might take. It seems a great deal too visual and linear to me, too Western and sophisticated. This is betrayed in the static, visual terms used in such analysis -model, structure, textureas well as in the already discussed separation between art and life and, by extension, between subject and object, appearance and reality, and so on.