标签： Homer Oral Poetry

Introduction: Homer and Oral Poetry Research

E. J. Bakker

Irene J. F. De Jong (eds.), Homer, Critical Assessments: Vol. I: The Creation of the Poems, London; New York: Routledge, 1999.

The Homeric Question
Milman Parry and the Discovery of Orality
The Oral Theory and Homeric Philology
Recent Trends in Oral Poetry Research

The notion of ‘orality’ as a sector of interest and research in Homeric studies has grown from tentative beginnings into a complex and multiform concept occupying many scholars in various ways. Its original form, Milman Parry’s hypothesis of the oral-formulaic composition of the Homeric poems, was met with sceptical curiosity, soon to turn into a genuine discipline spanning various fields, and acquiring the status of orthodoxy in Homeric studies. (P163)

In this chapter I will present a brief sketch of Parry’s approach and its consequences for Homeric studies. (P163)

The Homeric Question

From its earliest beginnings to the present day, Homeric scholarship, perhaps more than other sectors of classical philology, has been a field contested between the often opposed forces of historicism and humanism. (P163)

One particularly striking incarnation of the dualism was the debate between the Analysts and the Unitarians, which constituted the Homeric Question of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (p164)

Milman Parry and the Discovery of Orality

The work of Milman Parry in the 1930s dramatically changed this situation, at least in the Anglo-American world, recharging the debate in a most fruitful and coherent way. (P164)

From now on those who were interested in matters of form and style, as well as in cultural relativism, had in orality a new and powerful vocabulary in which to express Homer’s alterity with respect to the literary processes with which classicists were familiar. (p164)

The theory of oral-formulaic composition, as Parry’s and Lord’s (P164) 
insights came to be known, was applied to texts from many other cultures and periods: a methodology originating in the study of Homer had achieved ‘scientific’, cross-disciplinary status. (P165)

This success was due in no small measure to Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales.

It had all started with the central observation that Homer’s use of noun-epithet formulae was a great deal more regular and systematic than had been previously thought. (P165)

Building on the research of German scholars who had demonstrated an extensive dependence of Homer’s language - the so-called Homeric Kunstsprache - on the epic metre of the dactylic hexameter, Parry was able to show how the addition of epithets to names or nouns was constrained by the metrical dimension so as to yield systems of formulae: the well-known appellations of Homeric gods or heroes could be shown to be intimately connected with metre, in that recognizable metrical cola at the end of the verse turned out to be the locus for a whole range of such formulae, each dealing with a different god or hero. (p165)

Another crucial aspect of noun-epithet formulae was that each of the formulae partaking of extended systems turned out to be unique. (P166)

The system was thus economical, or, as Parry put it, 'characterized ... by great simplicity'; (P166)

The whole idea was based on a fundamental and systematic distinction between meaning and metrical form, where 'meaning' was defined by Parry as the essential idea of the formula.

The term ‘essential idea’ is the most prominent feature of Parry’s often quoted definition of the formula: 'an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express a given essential idea’.

The 'essential’ nature of an idea is further defined as ‘what remains after all stylistic superfluity has been taken from it’.

Thus, for example, πολύτλας δίος Όδυσσεύς and πολύμητις Όδυσσεύς would have one single same meaning or essential idea, namely Odysseus’. (p166)

All this was moving far beyond the work of the German historical linguists who had been working on the Homeric Kunstsprache.

Parry’s demonstration was virtually the introduction of modernist, structuralist linguistics into the field of Homeric poetic style. (p166)

the function of the epithets of Parry’s noun-epithet formulae was to create systematic differences with other formulae rather than to be ‘true’ to their meaning, or context.

Parry’s conception, unlike Saussure’s synchronic model, was distinctly diachronic: the notion of tradition played a key role in Parry’s proposal. (p166)

The first of these was a further extension of the concept of formula. (p167)

In an analysis of the first 25 lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey Parry argued that formulae are not limited to noun-epithet phrases, nor even to verbatim repetitions; his new analysis also allowed for repetition on the level of 'type'. (p167)

The notion of similarity and analogical formation had been introduced into the study of the Homeric formula; it was to be taken up and reformulated by later scholars.

The second development in Parry's research, directly related to the first one, was the replacement of tradition with orality as the key word in the explanation of Homeric style.

Formulae were now seen as an adaptive response to the specific situation of the oral poet (Parry spoke of ‘composition in performance'): in order to (re)compose the epic tale with any fluidity, the poet had to make an automatic use of ready-made building-blocks, a linguistic, formulaic system enabling the bard to say what he had to say, and to say it right, according to the laws of metre and prosody. (p167)

In a move with far-reaching consequences for what was to become the theory of oral composition, Parry and Lord went to Yugoslavia to study there the still living oral tradition of the guslars.

Their fieldwork yielded a rich collection of data that till the present day has been the main analogy for the study of Homer as oral poetry. (p167)

Their illiteracy and their avowed lack of need of writing led to the central idea that oral composition and written composition, orality and literacy, are mutually incompatible.

This dichotomy, in turn, strongly conditioned later commonly held ideas on the relation between the oral tradition and writing.

An oral poem could come to be written down, it was held, only through a special performance, the bard dictating to a scribe at the request of an outsider to the tradition. (P167)

The Oral Theory and Homeric Philology

Parry’s ideas, later referred to as the ‘oral theory’, or the ‘theory of oral composition’, led to a conception of Homeric style and poetics that amounted to a virtual denial of the ideological core of the philological profession, the written text and its transmission. (p168)

Oral style was set up in a sharp, binary contrast with written style, with the formula as the specific difference.

In being committed to writing, it would pass irrevocably into a stage of repetitive stupor, the creative oral singer yielding to the reciting rhapsode.

The intimate bond between the formula and orality, resulting from Parry’s and Lord’s understanding of the function of formulae in oral composition, put much pressure on the definition of the formula. (p168)

Thus on the basis of Parry’s original idea of analogical formation of formulae the new concept of structural formula was proposed by Joseph Russo.

The basic idea behind this concept was to combine Parry’s and Lord’s analogical formula formation with the statistics of O’Neill (1942) on the regularity of word-localization in the Greek hexameter:Greek words, especially longer ones, were shown to be strikingly ‘localized’ in the verse as to their metrical form (often only one metrical position was possible). (p168)

• the participle ούλομένην is of the metrical word-type — - - — which is typically placed at the beginning of the hexameter.

If we add the dimension of grammatical category ('participle’) to this metrical regularity, we get a conception in which ούλομένην and such frequent expressions as ἀχνύμενος, τειρόμενος, etc. are instances of one and the same formulaic structure. (p168)

The most recent discussions of the Homeric formula, by contrast, have focused on Parry’s earlier account, seeking to reinforce the basic insight of mismatch between the metrical form of a formula and its essential idea. (p169)

Another important modification of Parry’s conception was that 'stylistic superfluity’ as characterization of the epithet or peripheral element receded in favour of a more positive vision:

peripheral elements may be metrically useful, but they are never metrically necessary, and can in principle always be omitted when other expressions are more urgent in a given context. (p169)

But it also led to a perception of oral poetry research as the branch of Homeric studies mostly concerned with mechanics, structure and production, as opposed to the literary sector, where meaning, narrative and poetic intent were at the forefront of the attention. (p170)

The emergence of oral theory and its spread had important potential consequences for the original issues of the Homeric Question, unity and authorship,

Under the oral theory, style had become the domain of grammar and metrical context, rather than of aesthetics and the poetically motivated mot juste.

Authorship, ownership of the epic words was either shared between the poet and his forebears, the cumulative mass of the epic tradition, or made subservient to the medium in which the oral poet had to express himself, the metrical grammar of the oral tradition. (P170)

Oral theory quickly aspired to move beyond the formula into a realm of oral poetics, a new conception of poetry and literature deliberately opposed to the familiar Aristotelian poetics with its insistence on hypotaxis and coherent plot structure.

This new poetics, most characteristically formulated in an article by J. Notopoulos, privileged coordination over subordination and paratactic, serial structure over organic composition. (p170)

Instead of setting the terms in which Homer had to be interpreted, the new poetics became dissociated from the business of interpretation, which was taken up again with renewed energy in a revived Unitarianism. (p171)

Beside formula research and oral poetics, there gradually emerged a third aspect: the merger of oral and literary studies.

There was a call for a softening of the original Parryan viewpoint, authoritatively expressed by Ruth Finnegan in her comparative study of oral poetry, in which she argued against the ‘great divide’ between orality and literacy. (p171)

Recent Trends in Oral Poetry Research

The (p171) current intellectual climate of postmodernism, with its insistence on relativism and the questioning of basic assumptions, would seem to provide a suitable context for rethinking the foundations of the distinction between orality and literacy. (p172)

Let us begin with the term 'oral’ itself.

We may wonder to what extent this term, routinely used to modify such nouns as ‘poetry’ or poet’, describes an objective reality.

To arrive at a better understanding of oral poetry in its own right, we might want to pay attention to what has to be considered the basic form of discourse, in any society: speech.

Just as orality, speech has long been studied, if it was studied at all, from the point of view of writing (even when linguists made claims to the contrary). (p172)

In recent years, however, in a branch of linguistics commonly referred to with such terms as ‘discourse analysis’ or ‘pragmatics’, an awareness has grown that spoken discourse is not merely a simplified or impoverished form of written syntax.

Instead of defining speech in terms of writing, more and more linguists become interested in the opposite perspective, viewing speech as the basic form of language and (p172) 
the syntax of writing as the special case. (p173)

sentences in spoken discourse typically consist of shorter units that are, when taken by themselves, often far less ‘original' than the larger sentential structure or the discourse as a whole.

These units consist of separate words, but are often intonationaily one single coherent unit, representing an ‘idea', a moment of verbalization in the larger flow of discourse.

Such basic units of speech, called intonation units by Wallace Chafe, (p173)

we may see the verses and metrical cola of poetic traditions as enhancements, the stylization of the intonation units of ordinary speech.

Such a view has consequences for metre as a key concept in oral theory and the study of the Homeric Kunstsprache alike. (p173)

the study of speech in its natural settings suggests that the exclusive emphasis of the early oralists on the production of the epic tale is one-sided. (p174)

Epic poets need to speak metrically, and to that end metrically convenient formulae will develop in their idiom.

But epic discourse is not exclusively an act of versification: the compositional skills of the performer must in the last resort be in service of the act of communication that is the epic performance.

Insofar as they are repeated from previous discourses, they are the main vehicle of the poetic tradition as a universe of discourse, shared between the performers and their audiences, and enacted each time anew in the context of the performance. (p174)

In another sustained line of research related to the dimension of tradition, Gregory Nagy has redirected our attention to some central problems of the Homeric Question, addressing the question that is crucial for oral theory: the trajectory from orality to the Homeric text with its central importance for Greek culture. (p175)

The coexistence of the oral tradition and writing, used in medieval studies to account for the reception of poetry in performance, is here brought to bear on the creation of the epic text itself, (p176)

Nagy’s conception challenges the usual distinction between the creative, oral, αοίδός and the reciting, literate, ραψφδός; it also challenges, perhaps more fundamentally, our common notions of authorship when it comes to the study of Homer and oral traditions.

The combined effect of the recent trends that I have briefly reviewed here is a renewed interest in tradition, at the cost of orality in its narrow sense of oral composition.

And with a return to tradition comes a new understanding of performance as the centrally important cultural event in which the community’s connections with a meaningful past are shaped according to the conventions of the epic speech genre. (p176)

performance is now understood as a much wider phenomenon, encompassing many genres and serving as focal point of the social, cultural and poetic aspects that constitute archaic Greek song culture. (P176)

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