Those studying oral poetics within the history of English literature are always faced with the problem of evidence. How does one say anything about a primary oral culture when, by definition, no history, no written record, can exist? This problem is generally addressed either by drawing analogies with contemporary oral traditions that can be studied first hand, or by attempting to redefine oral poetics in a way that allows written evidence to be useful without obliterating the very notion of "orality." In Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England, Mark C. Amodio takes the latter route in tracing the lingering effects of oral poetics on the developing written poetic tradition in English through the middle ages and beyond. His approach requires us to consider oral poetics not primarily as a theory of composition-in-performance, but as an "expressive economy" that is preserved in the compositional habits of later, literate poets, and that produces specific effects in their readers similar to (if sometimes less potent than) those experienced by the oral poet's audience.
Amodio is remarkably well versed in the history and development of oral theory. His first chapter is an exploration and well-reasoned critique of oral theory to date, in which he challenges the idea that oral poetics can be simply opposed to literate poetics. The problem is putting too high a value on the notion of a "primary orality" that is irretrievably lost with the introduction of any technology of writing. Amodio would have us reconceptualize the terms orality and literacy not as opposed concepts but as interactive, if still chronological, parts of a transformative process: "Orality and literacy are parts of a subtle, complex, lengthy process of cultural change rather than sudden and (largely) unrelated moments of cultural evolution" (22). The technology of writing thus "muffles rather than throttles the continued articulation of oral poetics" (22).
Because for Amodio, oral poetics implies an "expressive economy" rather than a mode of composition or performance, his argument is not about the continuation of the practice of reading aloud in the middle ages, or about the trope of the talking book, or the other usual suspects when oral theory is brought into the later Middle Ages. Instead, in redefining oral poetics to follow its traces in later literate compositions, Amodio broadens the traditional focus on the formula in two directions. In one direction he heads towards the concerns of historical semantics, focusing on the development (or fragmentation) of specific lexical items. In the other direction lies the formalist and structuralist approach to folklore and the study of narrative "morphemes." Tying these wide poles of analytic units together is the term "affective dynamics," drawn (I believe) from psychological and reader-response criticism, which here means specifically the extra-textual, shared cultural resonance that certain words, phrases, or plot elements evoke in an audience. Amodio defines oral poetics as the origin of the value and power of such expressive resonances. Chapters two through five take up detailed analyses of a number of these lexical and narrative (or as Amodio generally calls them, "thematic") units, moving chronologically from the Anglo-Saxon period through the late Middle Ages, ending with some nods to the twentieth century.
In chapter two, Amodio begins by describing the surprising uniformity of Old English metrics and poetics, attributing this feature of Old English poetry to its close proximity to its oral roots. He argues that such uniformity is not constraining, however, showing how two very traditional themes, the comitatus and the beasts of battle, are used in flexible ways by different Anglo-Saxon poets. Taking up lexical evidence, Amodio then discusses the use of "(x-)belgan(-mod)" (i.e., "abolgen," "bolgenmod," "gebolgen," etc.) in Old English poetry. He argues that the use of the term in a poem carries with it a set of associations that resonate with the audience, priming them to be ready for a slaughterous event. This meaning goes beyond the usual semantics of the word, drawing its power from the unusually expressive economy of oral poetics. He then moves to narrative units that make up Beowulf's fight with the dragon, setting up later readings of comparable monster fights in post-conquest poems.
Chapter three and four follow various lexical and thematic units as their affective dynamics "erode" and then "fragment" with the literate culture's movement farther and farther from its pre-conquest oral roots. Amodio makes the intriguing argument that what are usually taken as signs of orality in post-conquest English poems--the references to "telling," to "hearing," to an "audience,"--are really just part of a rhetorical topos of oral performance and do not engage oral poetics as he uses the term. Instead, the aspects of post-conquest literate poetics that do survive from oral poetics draw on the affective dynamics of specific lexical and thematic units. Amodio's discussion of "aglaeca" makes for a particularly interesting case study. A particularly resonant word in Old English that implies a sense of awful terror and disturbingly liminal monstrosity, "aglaeca" becomes Middle English "egleche," a word often glossed as "brave" or "fearless." Amodio points out that in some contexts an awareness of the earlier resonance of "aglaeca"--a resonance he attributes to its oral poetic use--would lead to a slightly different gloss, one that tries to capture the sense of dread that adhered in the earlier use of the term. In some cases, however, as Amodio points out, "egleche" clearly does not imply anything beyond the positive attribute of bravery, and in these cases the affective dynamic of the term has been so fragmented as to be nearly lost. Such discussions of lexical items--"(x-)belgan(-mod)," "aglaeca," "helm," "beot"--in such poems as Layamon's Brut, the Owl and the Nightingale, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tend to be more compelling than the examples of thematics in demonstrating Amodio's thesis, but all the readings, including those of fights with beasts in Sir Beues of Hamtoun and Guy of Warwick, are subtle and interesting.
The final chapter is the most unusual in a study such as this, and works both to stimulate excitement about the possibilities of Amodio's ideas about oral poetics, and to generate a bit of skepticism. This chapter, called "Continuations," includes discussion of Seamus Heaney, J. R. R. Tolkien, Roddy Doyle, and Western movies. Amodio looks for lexical, thematic, and narrative units in twentieth-century productions that can be seen to engage the expressive economy of oral poetics. To illustrate a modern example of a culturally resonant term like "(x-)belgan(-mod)," Amodio turns to Seamus Heaney's discussion of his use of "thole" and other Ulsterisms in his translation of Beowulf. These terms resonate with an audience with the right background, but that audience is limited to the inhabitants of Heaney's memories of childhood and does not include the vast majority of the readers of the poem. Amodio uses this example to explain how a term can have roots in a powerful net of implications, but still not resonate with readers not prepared to see them. From here, Amodio moves to the standard "hero on the beach" theme, specifically the "shining object" motif, and finds examples of shining objects as portents of military slaughter in The Lord of the Rings (which is not surprising) and in Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry (which is surprising). Finally, he turns to the theme of the lone hero in the Western film High Noon to demonstrate how that theme remains viable even when the particulars vary so greatly from its expression in poems like Beowulf or Sir Gawain.
Here, however, is where some readers might begin to wonder if Amodio is broadening the concept of "oral poetics" so far that it becomes synonymous with "tradition." The issue is one of awareness. Amodio is at pains to stress that a writer need not be conscious of the older, resonant meaning of a lexeme or thematic unit to find himself using it. He also argues that an audience member need not be moved by the use of the old term or scene for us to claim a remnant of oral poetics is there. Regarding the appearance of shining objects he writes, "The link between shining objects and slaughter is one that our post-traditional hermeneutics cannot easily or satisfactorily explain. That the post-traditional authors who insert shining objects into their narratives and the audiences who encounter them in the texts they receive may well be wholly unaware that they are deploying and receiving a richly associative metonym whose affective dynamics has remained stable from the Anglo-Saxon period onward offers further evidence of just how deeply anchored parts of oral poetics continue to be within our contemporary expressive economy, whether we are consciously aware of them or not" (193). Here, Amodio argues that oral poetics can be found wherever certain lexical items or thematic units appear, regardless of why the authors put them there. In contemporary literary theory authors are often thought of as "author functions," but their ability to channel unawares culturally significant ideas is generally limited to their own contemporary culture, not significant ideas from a thousand years before. This becomes a tree falling in the forest question--an expression I do not use facetiously, but rather because Amodio relies on a similar metaphor himself. He points out, by way of analogy, that our sensory systems are able to perceive only a small amount of the light and sound in the world, but that our inability to perceive certain wavelengths does not mean they are not there. He continues, "In much the same way, the fact that traditional metonyms no longer regularly register on the radar screen of our post-traditional hermeneutics tells us more about the changes in our communal interpretive strategies than it does about the metonyms' functionality (or lack thereof)" (184). Such an argument makes sense when applied to a modern reader's inability to catch the resonances of certain medieval writers' words and scenes, but it becomes tenuous when applied to a modern writer and his audience. The argument requires that "traditional" or "oral poetic" meaning of a shining object be seen to adhere in the representation of the phenomenon itself, becoming more like a natural phenomenon than a matter of contingent, specifically human, meaning. A metonym, however, functions only within a hermeneutic system; to discuss its functionality outside a specific hermeneutic system, as Amodio does, suggests a kind of Platonism or universalism with which many readers may be uncomfortable.
Writing the Oral Tradition is most useful in offering a paradigm to understand eleventh- and twelfth-century English writing, offering a nuanced and suggestive program for following the interaction of oral and literate poetic traditions as the former gradually lost influence and the latter developed. In moving away from performance and towards semantics and thematics, Amodio opens a fruitful area of inquiry that may bring together pre- and post-conquest poetics in new and exciting ways.