One of the most puzzling questions raised by the analogy of modern-day oral epic concerns the possibility of ‘‘new’’ epics, that is, of whether bards and traditions are capable of generating performed works outside their usual constellations of subjects, events, and characters. The same question comes into focus in the Odyssey (Book 1, line 352) when Telemachus responds to his mother’s disquiet over the bard Phemios’ account of the heroes’ returns from Troy by stating that audiences always value the newest (neotate) song most highly. Can an epic tradition, whose strength is usually perceived as adherence to a stock set of stories via a recurrent tale-telling idiom, also license and yield something unprecedented? Let us consider a few examples; once we give some thought to how they may be explained, we may see that ‘‘new’’ is anything but the antonym of ‘‘traditional.’’
The panoply of central Asian traditions, to take a very broad sample, offers a spectrum of bards from ‘‘reproductive’’ to ‘‘improvising.’’ New epic poems were assuredly within the ability of the improvising Kirghiz singer DZusiip Mamay, for example, since he could fashion epics from stories with which he was not formerly acquainted as well as convert prose accounts into poetic performances of epic (Reichl 1992: 223; also Lang 2001). Within the South Slavic tradition, epic story-patterns and other tale-telling stratagems have been pressed into service to chronicle a long series of modern-era events; these include the ‘‘partisan songs’’ that celebrate the heroic achievements of the resistance movement (often picturing the quite historical General Tito) during World War II and the epic dirge on John F. Kennedy’s assassination (Smrt u Dallasu, or Death in Dallas) (see J. Foley 1995: 103 n. 15). From medieval times we have the case of Andreas, a long narrative on the apocryphal story of Andrew among the cannibalistic Mermedonians that was transferred into the Anglo-Saxon epic register, a tale that even features an excursus by the composing poet as he contemplates his own capability of carrying on with his performance (see J. Foley 1995: especially 201-7). From my own fieldwork I can report the case of the Serbian guslar Milutin Milojevic from the village of Velika Ivanca, who fluently harnessed the epic idiom to describe what he had never before experienced - his photograph being taken (2002: 213-15).
What do these four examples have in common? We can start by recalling what the analogy of modern-day oral epics has suggested about the rule-governed pliability of epic language, and in particular about how ‘‘Oral tradition works like language, only more so.’’ Each of the instances cited above puts the lie to the text-based presumption that singers simply learn self-contained works, and that they would therefore struggle to create anything outside the purview of the tradition as a whole (if indeed they ever considered trying to do so). If we understand that oral epics persist because of their pattern-based flexibility, then the assumption of fixed, fossilized wholes - reproduced more or less ‘‘accurately’’ via rote memorization - will be shown to be inapposite. Each of the four examples features a bard who has mastered a tale-telling idiom, who is fluent in the specialized epic language from the level of the entire story-sequence through the ‘‘large words’’ of narrative action and phraseology, and who can therefore adapt the traditional medium to a new message. With this ability to ‘‘speak the register,’’ as it were, comes the opportunity to interpret recent or contemporary events and people by invoking an implied frame of reference. Thus the ‘‘new’’ figure joins the pantheon of traditional heroes, and the ‘‘new’’ event is inserted in the identity charter that epic so typically provides a culture.
In a real sense, these and other examples show that not only are ‘‘new’’ epics possible; to keep pace with a traditional but ever-changing cultural perspective, they must prove necessary. In other words, no matter how unprecedented the topic, tales told via the traditional idiom are never wholly unprecedented.
World History
