Tradition and the Collective Talent: Oral Epic, Textual Meaning, and Receptionalist Theory

Abstract

with a nagging and seemingly insoluble dilemma that has taken many forms and resists being held captive in any single, all-encompassing formulation. I mention as examples the academic jousting over analytical terms such as the phraseological "formula" and the narrative "theme" and the long debates over what is or is not a "motif. " The basic question amounts to this: can we agree on a grammar of compositional units and further, does our chosen model remain viable as we cross the linguistic line from one tradition to another? For the purposes of this essay and in order to speak directly to the concerns of this special collection of papers, I shall leapfrog both a bibliographical rehearsal of particular issues and the inevitable polemics involved, and instead concentrate on proposing a solution to the "unit problem" which, while perhaps rather radical in itself, finds its seeds in the writings of Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, Werner Kelber, Franz Bauml, Charles Segal, Robert Kellogg, and others. In concert with the general shift of critical focus from the text as object to the work as the reader's experience of that object, I suggest that we define the "units" of oral traditional discourse not strictly and exclusively as textual data, but also and equally as the necessarily subjective apprehension of those data by a reader or participant (whatever the prior experience of the reader or participant may be). I propose that we take as a starting point the idea of the work and its parts as processes rather than as an artifice and its discrete components, and that we stipulate that the unit of discourse-whether phraseological or narrative-cannot be understood as an object but only as a response. In other words, to summon the canonical Parry-Lord "oral formula" as an example, we need to realize that the phraseological unit consists not only of whatever chirographic avatar the highly literate reader uses as a reading mnemonic, but also and crucially of the informed but finally subjective response one makes to those "little black dots on the white page" in the larger context of the unexpressed (and inexpressible) reality of an oral tradition.