Oral Theory has come a long way since its early formulations. Starting in the 1930s, Milman Parry and Albert Lord sought to understand the formulaic nature of Homer’s epics—from phrases such as epithets to larger narrative patterns—by comparison with the practice of living Serbo-Croatian singers of tales. Like Homer, these singers composed their narrative songs in the very act of performing them, employing an oral poetics that had become traditional within a nonliterate culture. The early stress on formulas in this theory aroused heated controversy, especially among critics who felt that it threatened the originality of Homer and such other canonical figures as the Beowulf poet.
Equally controversial in developing oral theory was the concept of a Great Divide between (primary) oral and literate cultures. Such eminent scholars as Eric Havelock and Walter Ong promoted the idea that oral and literate cultures were not only divided from each other by their modes of communication, but even more fundamentally by the very different mental equipment in terms of which each culture lived, experienced, and understood its world. Moreover, this view presupposed an evolutionary model of cultural development that was irreversible. Once, it was argued, a culture developed “beyond” its oral, nonliterate experience, it entered into a new and essentially more “advanced” episteme.
During the last couple of decades, both of these early formulations have been altered, sometimes by their own authors, but more importantly by the research of John Miles Foley, along with such scholars as Alain Renoir, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and now Mark C. Amodio in his two important recent books, Writing the Oral Tradition (2004) and New Directions in Oral Theory (2005). For Amodio, the Great Divide has been replaced by a model in which “orality and literacy exist along a continuum whose termini, ‘primary orality’ and ‘pure literacy,’ ought to be recognized as the theoretical constructs they are and not mistaken for discoverable, accessible real world states. As theoretical postulates, the end points of the oral-literate continuum retain considerable heuristic value” (Writing, 4). This model enables him to carry out his research into the ways in which oral poetics functioned not only in Anglo-Saxon poems, but also—and this is his major contribution to the field—in the continuing poetic tradition after the Conquest, and well into the later Middle English period (and even beyond). Thus, while there is evidence that oral poetics and the art of writing existed within the same artistic space in medieval England, there is also evidence that they continued to interact, with very important changes, throughout the centuries from Cædmon’s Hymn to the time of transition from late medieval to early modern poetry.
At the outset, Amodio recognizes that he, like all researchers in oral poetics, must deal with the inescapable paradox that even poems that give every sign of having been composed orally, or at least within an oral tradition, have come to us as written texts. Thus, if oral poets composed their works in acts of performance, as Parry and Lord claimed to be the foundation of oral poetics, and if “the” poem does not really exist outside performance, then how does one study a written text as an oral composition? While this predicament would obviously apply to later Middle English poems, given their highly literate styles, structures, and treatments of sophisticated themes, it also applies to Old English poems. As Amodio convincingly shows, even (or perhaps especially) Cædmon’s Hymn, which has often been presented as evidence of the workings of oral composition, is a complex and ambiguous interweaving of orality and literacy. His solution to this predicament is to undo the connection between oral poetics and oral composition-in-performance. This is a crucial move, both theoretically and methodologically, since his goal is ultimately to discover and analyze the signs and functions of oral poetics in post-Conquest poems that were clearly not composed in acts of oral performance. But what, then, defines oral poetics? For Amodio (and others, such as Foley), there was no doubt some time in the distant past when nonliterate poets composed their songs while performing them, based on traditional forms of expression (e.g., epithets), type scenes (e.g., arming the hero), and larger story patterns (e.g., fight with a monster). But by the time poems came to be written down, someone, whether poet or scribe, continued to use the register of oral poetics in written versions of orally performed (or orally derived) poems. This register, or highly specialized language for poetry, continued to be employed by those who wished to compose poetry—and be recognized as doing so—even after poetic composition had become largely, or even entirely, a literate activity.
In order to ground his argument, Amodio provides some highly original and perceptive analyses of elements and functions of oral poetics. For example, in the case of Beowulf he not only explicates individual lexemes (e.g., “belgan[-mod],” swell with anger) and their traditional associations in great detail, but he also traces their contexts and functions in Middle English poems. So also with a larger narrative pattern, such as Beowulf’s fight with the dragon, a pattern that Amodio traces through the early Middle English poem, Layamon’s Brut, where the traditional form can still be seen, to the later Sir Beues of Hamtoun, where the now post-traditional form continues, though “fractured almost beyond recognition” (Writing, 161), and on to the still later Guy of Warwick, where it “is composed outside the compass of oral poetics” (Writing 180). Amodio’s concluding chapter traces “widely scattered bits and pieces of medieval oral poetics” (Writing 183) in the modern fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien and Roddy Doyle, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, and even the celebrated Western film High Noon.
All in all, Amodio has made an important contribution to oral theory, to research methodology in this difficult area, and to our understanding of the actual workings of oral poetics—not only in the earliest period of English literature, but even more significantly in the progress of oral poetics through the later Middle Ages.
In his edited collection, New Directions in Oral Theory, Amodio expands on his own contributions to the field, with his introduction and his own essay in the collection, and he has also provided a rich and most welcome variety of approaches to ancient and medieval oral poetics by younger scholars as well as established authorities. Among the latter is John Miles Foley, the most influential living oral theorist, who provides the lead essay in the collection, “Fieldwork on Homer.” Foley proposes the model of ethnographic fieldwork for research in oral poetics, stressing that one must go beyond the lexical meanings of individual items in Homer to the ways such items resonate within the culture being studied. He shows how formulas such as “boundless ransom” and “day of return” function to encapsulate larger narrative patterns within the cultural horizon of expectations of Homer and his audience. Next, Steve Reese’s “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey” challenges the dominant evolutionary model of Homer’s epics as developed in many embodiments over a long time in oral tradition. He contends that the contrary model of these epics being performed in a form close to what we have as text, perhaps through dictation to a scribe, solves more problems than the evolutionary theory. Daniel F. Melia completes the section on ancient theory with “Orality and Aristotle’s Aesthetics,” arguing that while Aristotle is usually regarded as “the poster boy for literacy,” both the Poetics and the Rhetoric are based on an underlying assumption of oral culture and the aesthetics of oral composition.
The next two essays are unusual in their explorations of oral poetics in medieval Latin works. Alexandra Hennessey Olsen’s “Proteus in Latin: Vernacular Tradition and the Boniface Collection” begins with Ong’s characterization of the period as one of “cultural diglossia” and challenges the idea that Latin influenced the vernaculars—but not the other way around. She provides evidence to the contrary, especially an eleven-line Latin poem that is clearly based on Old English models. Next, Jan Ziolkowski also stresses this diglossia in “Oral-Formulaic Tradition and the Composition of Latin Poetry from Antiquity through the Twelfth Century.” He cites several cases of medieval poets composing impromptu, and notes that students were required to give oral performances of Latin poetry.
Turning to vernacular tradition as such, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, in “Deaths and Transformations: Thinking through the ‘End’ of Old English Verse,” analyzes two poems of the mid-eleventh century, the “Death of Alfred” and “Death of Edward,” finding that the former moves away from Old English poetics while the latter shows how that poetics could still permeate a poem of the late Anglo-Saxon period and she provides exhaustive evidence in an appendix of this continuing tradition. Next, Mark C. Amodio’s “Res(is)ting the Singer: Towards a Non-Performative Anglo-Saxon Poetics” challenges the use of representations of oral performance—for example, in Bede’s story of Cædmon or the scops in Beowulf—as evidence of oral composition-in-performance. He argues that these are idealized images from a time gone by, but the traditional poetic register has continued in the works of literate poets.
Jonathan Watson begins the section on Post-Conquest poetics with “Writing Out ‘Óðinn’s Storm’: The Literary Reception of an Oral-Derived Template in the Two Versions of Layamon’s Brut,” arguing that while the more traditional Caligula version maintains “fluency” in this figure, the Otho version “writes out” some traditional associations with it for the new Anglo-Norman audience. Then Joseph Falaky Nagy provides a welcome extension of oral theory to Welsh in “A Leash and an Englyn in the Medieval Welsh Arthurian Tale ‘Culhwch ac Olwen,’” demonstrating that while a poetic passage embedded in Welsh prose narrative usually is consistent with the prose that frames it, in this context Arthur’s englyn introduces a creative tension with the prose narrative. Next, Lori Ann Garner’s “The Role of Proverbs in Middle English Narrative” studies the very different functions of traditional proverbs in two romances, Havelock the Dane and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. In Havelock proverbs give voice to timeless wisdom, whereas in Chaucer they are manipulated for the rhetorical ends of characters—most obviously by Pandarus. Finally, Tim William Machan’s “Writing the Failure of Speech in Pearl” shifts the analytic method of oral theory from studying the “residue” of oral poetics in Middle English to a strategy drawn from discourse analysis—specifically, the necessary and sufficient conditions for successful conversation as communication. He finds that communication between the Pearl Maiden and the Dreamer fails because they cannot meet those conditions since medieval theology dictated an unbridgeable gap between divine and human truths.
Once again, Mark C. Amodio has made a significant contribution to discussions of oral theory in this collection. Especially valuable are the explorations of research methods for analyzing oral poetics, and these explorations will no doubt stimulate important work in the field for years to come.
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[Review length: 1797 words • Review posted on September 19, 2006]