Toward an Oral Poetics

Abstract

WE SHALL NEVER DEVELOP an effective oral poetics if we begin by reading Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey come to us already written down, edited, and recopied an unknown number of times. They belong to an era, stretching right up through Middle Ages, when large quantities of written literature were memorized and recited aloud. Some of this literature escaped into folk tradition, as bits and pieces of literature always do. The Yugoslav guslar may well be, in effect, a sort of distant, humbled descendant of ancient upper-class Athenian schoolchild (described by Eric Havelock) who was taught to recite a written Homer but not to read it. If so, guslar has elevated verse epic to an oral art it may not have been when it started: he is no memorizer, but is instead able to compose on his feet. To memorize a story is not same as to remember it. A metrical framework fitted out with matching formulas may facilitate memorization, as Havelock suggests, but it does not follow from this that preliterate cultures of eastern Mediterranean (or anywhere else) were heavily invested in metrical expression. There may be verse epics in semiliterate whether ancient Greek or modern Yugoslavian, but when we turn to what Walter Ong calls oral cultures, verse epic does not exist. The quasi-metrical patterns suggested by West African riddles and some North American Indian song texts are never sustained for more than two or three lines. There are sung epics in non-Islamic Africa, but their texts are not metrical.' If we turn back to ancient written records, we find that oldest known literary documents are Sumerian tablets antedating earliest Greek writing by a thousand years, and they are not metrical.2 Claims that Homeric and Vedic verse forms come straight out of a nonliterate past rest largely on Classical and Brahmanical tradition, and are to be taken in same light as genealogical lore of royal families. For most part, narrators in primary oral cultures do not sing stories but speak them. They do not memorize stories, but remember them. They are not talking digital computers, programmed to retrieve stored formulas in right order. The digital computer lacks what we call in English mind's eye: a good narrator sees his story, and such ready-made phrases as he may use are not the substance of his thought but an aid in rapid verbal expression of that thought, not internal equivalent of a written text but a bag of tricks.3 Even taken by themselves, these ready-made phrases are highly vari-