This selection of papers from the ninth conference on Orality and Literacy, held in 2010 in Canberra, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales. The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 is dedicated to pre-literate Greece (five chapters), while Part 2 presents the more literate interactive environments of later Greece and Rome (six chapters). Chapter 6, a description of an oral (but text-based) performance in contemporary India, bridges the two halves.
For classicists the most valuable gift of Parry and Lord's Oral Theory was ‘composition-in (or for)-performance’. This process explained (a) how an oral (illiterate) poet could recite and create a long epic poem in performance; (b) the repetitiveness of certain terms (‘formulas’); (c) the utility of metre and/or melody; (d) the process of transmission over time; and (e) the preservation of traditional motifs as well as a poetic language. Accepting the Parry/Lord thesis allowed scholars to move away from textual analysis – as practised by philologists until the 1960s – and step into the world beyond the poems: that of the audience and the performer, given that the shape and content of the poem(s) would have been the result of the interaction between the two. Moreover, it allowed scholars a peek into a pre-literate past.
All the chapters revolve around audience expectations and the resulting pressure on the (improvising) performer. The first five aim to discover how audience expectations may have moulded the poems in pre-literate times, and must therefore obtain their data directly from the poems. In Part 2 we see how, in spite of the presence of writing, oral practices continued (Chapter 6 stands alone). The authors of Part 2 get their information from contemporary written texts, and are therefore on more solid ground.
A. Kelly, ‘The Audience Expects: Penelope and Odysseus’, uses the repeated almost-recognition scenes in Book 23 of the Odyssey to show how a performer must go about keeping his (well-informed) audience interested, while D. Beck, ‘The Presentation of Song in Homer's Odyssey’, uses speech act theory to analyse the various performances depicted in Books 1 and 8. She uncovers how these performances-within-a-performance use ‘free indirect speech’, providing a distancing effect for the external audience.
The third and fourth essays refer directly to the work of Lord and Parry. J. Ready, ‘Comparative Perspectives on the Composition of the Homeric Simile’, finds evidence of Homer's orality by showing the originality of some of the poet's similes. A. Bonifazi and D.F. Elmer identify the ‘chunking’ units required by oral performance in ‘Composing Lines, Performing Acts: Clauses, Discourse Acts, and Melodic Units in South Slavic Epic Song’. For them: ‘[S]uch a strategy is arguably the truest way to realize the pragmatic design of a poetry intended for performance’ (p. 107).
R. Scodel addresses the noted problem of cohesion in Hesiod's ‘Works and Days as Performance’. How would an audience have dealt with the constant changes of addressee (Zeus, Hesiod's brother, the audience inside and outside the performance, etc.)? For Scodel, the shifting addressee provides access to the poet's ‘theatre of the mind’ (p. 125).
As is perhaps clear from these very brief outlines (which fail to do justice to the rich details and erudite sources outlined in numerous footnotes), each author accepts the Parry/Lord theory. Indeed, these authors sometimes declare their surprise at those who have as yet failed to see the light. Kelly puzzles over scholars who do not ‘believe’ (p. 4); Ready: ‘… my loyalties lie with the oralists’ (p. 55 n. 1); Bonifazi and Elmer: ‘… the performative dimension can only be inferred …’ (p. 104); Scodel: ‘… nobody doubts that its [WD] early reception must have taken place in performance …’ (p. 112). For these authors the Oral Theory itself appears no longer to be in doubt, and is indeed the foundation on which they built their arguments. This stance is all the more surprising since the opening chapter of Part 2 describes very neatly how oral composition and written texts can interact. This essay so clearly undermines the arguments of the first four chapters that one wonders if it was even presented at the same conference (it was).
M. Taylor, ‘Empowering the Sacred: the Function of the Sanskrit Text in a Contemporary Exposition of the Bhagavatapurana’, describes in full ethnographic detail how a written religious text can be, at the same time, the source for oral, improvised performances. Here, we see how a performer versed in ancient texts can give an oral performance in the vernacular, with some Sanskrit verses included to guide his account.
The remaining essays revert to the classical world, and assume that reading was a social practice, and took place among like-minded readers. This point is most convincingly made by M. Cambron-Goulet, ‘The Criticism – and the Practice – of Literacy in the Ancient Philosophical Tradition’. J. Henderson Collins, ‘Prompts for Participation in Early Philosophical Texts’, argues that the dialogic form of many philosophical texts encouraged readers to participate orally in the questions and answers posed in the texts. P. Marzillo, ‘Performing an Academic Talk: Proclus on Hesiod's Works and Days’, similarly shows how Neoplatonic authors used oral lectures and related written commentaries to spread Neoplatonic ideas.
Very much in the same vein is J. Lauwer's ‘Reading Books, Talking Culture: the Performance of Paideia in Imperial Greek Literature’. Orators of the Second Sophistic had to display their ‘abundant knowledge of traditional history and literature in front of large audiences’ in order to impress (p. 231).
No volume in this series would be complete without an essay by N. Slater: his ‘Eumolpus Poeta at work: Rehearsed Spontaneity in the Satyricon’ is the last essay, and the only one to examine orality in the Latin-speaking world. Slater shows convincingly that Eumolpus possessed a vast stock of poetic lines; Eumolpus, indeed, is a caricature of the performers described in Lauwer's essay. What stands out is the importance given to the appearance of being an oral (improvising) poet as late as the post-Horatian and post-Virgilian Age.
While the second half of the book provides credible evidence of oral performances in a literate environment, the first part, built as it is on the assumption that the Yugoslav model as outlined by Parry/Lord is close to universal, disappoints. Although today more comparative material is available, the Oral Theory persists as a fossilised fragment of early structuralist analytics. Taylor's Indic model could equally well serve to explore the topics tackled by the authors of the first part of the book – there is no need to claim a 100% oral Homer based on an analogy with poetry that itself had been in contact for centuries with literacy.Footnote 1 It is time to recognise that both illiterate and literate poets can improvise in performance, and use formulas and other tricks if so inclined.
