Text and Performance in Africa

Abstract

seems self-evident. The text is the permanent artefact, hand-written or printed, while the performance is the unique, never-to-be-repeated realization or concretization of the text, a realization that 'brings the text to life' but which is itself doomed to die on the breath in which it is uttered. Text fixes, performance animates. But even in written traditions, as some of the papers in this special issue show, there are all kinds of different relations possible between a 'text' and its 'performance'. Very complex and obscure texts written for performance, such as those of Pindar in classical Greece, raise the question of what the audience apprehends, and how it does so, in the moment of listening (Rosalind Thomas), and suggests that there may be a further process of re-scanning a difficult text in the memory, after the event. Live poetry and drama may inspire written and visual texts in genres quite distinct from the performance genres, as in early modern Japan (Andrew Gerstle). Written texts can be cues, scripts, or stimulants to oral performance, and can also be records, outcomes or by-products of it. If, as is true in many traditions, text depends on performance, and performance on text, comparative literary studies should help us to conceptualize the nature and degrees of these varying relations of dependency. Even the modern Western literary traditions that tend to be treated as if they existed purely, or primarily, in the written sphere clearly have a performative dimension. One of the things literary criticism explores is the myriad devices and conventions by which written texts direct or stimulate one kind of' reading performance' rather than another. Some nineteenth-century realist novels loaded the narrative with clues about how to realize the text as an imaginative drama: whether reading aloud or reading silently, the reader's performance was heavily specified. The reading of some Ancient Greek poetic texts, by contrast, is barely specified at all: we do not know how to take these texts or what tone of voice makes best sense of them. We can only assume that at the time of their composition and circulation, they were embedded in conventions, now lost, which enabled their readers to interpret them. Critical theory has proposed widely different models of the way literary texts specify their own 'performance' in acts of reading. To the philosopher Collingwood, a true reading (whether of a literary text or a painting) was totally specified by the text, for it resulted from the reader's act of re-creation of the work of art,