Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry ed. by Mark C. Amodio

Abstract

REVIEWS MARK C. AMorno, ed. Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry. Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, vol. 13. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Pp. xii, 289. $45.00. The central irony of medieval oral studies-the quest for spoken words among exclusively written sources--offers the best explanation for the seeming redundancy of the title Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, rather than, say, Oral Poetics in Late-Medieval English Society. Presenting a Poetics and a Poetry with no other context for Oral, the title signals a working premise of many of its eleven contributors: that we can find and evaluate orality solely by examining what looks oral in the poem at hand-and thus justify confining the inquiry to individual texts confronted in hermetic isolation. In his introduction, Mark Amodio articulates several assumptions that crystallize the collection's strengths and weaknesses. 1. Middle English poetry has been relegated to "the periphery oforal studies" (p. 1). To the contrary, the first two essays of Amodio's book cite no fewer than fifty-three works that discuss Middle English orality, most of them published since 1980. Particularly in the realm ofromance, current authors seldom raise serious questions of audience and style without addressing orality. Thomas Hahn's superlative introduction to Sir Gawain: Eleven Ro­ mances and Tales (1995), for example, offers major observations on the oral styles and presumed performance contexts of the Gawain poems. Only if one considers orality in terms of the oral-formulaic model developed by Parry and Lord can one argue persuasively that Middle English verse lies at "the periphery of oral studies." 2. Middle English texts postdate the period of "high-context" orality, when poems were essentially re-created anew in performance by non/iterate artists. The mere presence of a textual passage that "looks oral" because it echoes the formu­ laricity of Beowulf does not in itselfconstitute evidence of "an active oralpoetics" (p. 11). Here Amodio usefully separates Middle English orality from the Parry-Lord model. 3. The unvaried metrical tradition of Old English poetry-which Amodio associates with "the oral tradition" (emphasis mine}-gives way to the "sudden appearance of different verse types following the Conquest" (p. 12). "Both before 167 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and especially after the Conquest, orality and literacy interact and intersect" (p. 21) in complex ways, creating mixed modes best conceptualized on a continuum between orality and writing. Amodio's recurrent phrase "the oral tradition" more than implies that there is only one form of pure poetic orality and that what is oral in Middle English verse derives from a unitary Anglo­ Saxon orality. Yet the notion of one pure antecedent is unsustainable. Co­ pious evidence of many kinds of oral performance-singing, reading, reci­ tation, tale telling-in monastic, courtly, and popular settings leaves no warrant for making "the oral tradition" a useful point of departure. Many Old English oral traditions-as well as many oral traditions practiced by speakers of Welsh, Latin, and Old French--demonstrably influenced Mid­ dle English poetry. Having judged the Parry-Lord model inadequate to explain the variety ofMiddle English verse, Amodio returns to the fiction of a monolithic golden oral age from which Middle English literature slowly differentiates itself. 4. Oral poetic techniques may survive in literature ifscribes andpoets use them "as a consequence oftheir experience with oral and oral-derived texts, whether they read, copied or took them down from dictation. Such conditioning occurred because the central affective, metonymic character of the oral tradition (something which insured its continued survival before the introduction of writing) does not vanish once the texts become encoded in manuscripts" (p. 19). Here, although Amodio again invokes the oral tradition, he signals the book's major strength. Building largely upon the observations of John Foley's Immanent Art (1991), the best essays invoke oralities not merely identifiable because they are formulaic and repetitive, but esthetically valuable in their own right because their repetitions and juxtapositions interact organically with the concerns and situations of a responsive audience. The most important aspect of any vital oral tradition is indeed meton­ ymy, but the crucial metonymic flow lies not within the text itself, or even...