In the early days of studies in oral tradition, it seemed crucial to draw a hard and fast line between well-defined and mutually exclusive categories of orality and literacy in order to make a place for the (re)discovery of textless and non-literate phenomena. That era saw the establishment of the so-called Great Divide between oral and written, according to which general thesis investigators, working principally from the model of the illiterate South Slavic guslar, sought to determine whether ancient and medieval epics - the mute artifacts that have survived to our time - were in fact ‘‘oral’’ or ‘‘literate.’’ Without doubt, more heat than light resulted from the often acrimonious exchange between adherents from one camp or another, but with the advent of fieldwork on a wide variety of oral epic traditions the simplistic binary of orality versus literacy has receded into the background and more nuanced theories have arisen (see Finnegan 1977, 1988). We now know that not only a given culture but even a single individual can manage an extensive repertoire of expressive styles and media, so that a person who uses literacy and texts for other social activities may also harness the idiom of oral tradition. The relationships and interactions between oral performances and texts are myriad and fascinating, and currently represent one of the primary challenges to - and opportunities for growth in - the ongoing articulation of this comparative field (for a pluralistic model, see Foley 2002: 29-57).
Since generalization across the rich diversity of case studies would be misleading (a continuing theme of this chapter), I will cite a few samples of interactions between oral epics and texts in order to mark the overall territory with a few signposts. Parbu Bhopo, the literate singer of the Pabuji Epic from Rajasthan, describes the genesis of his epic as taking place among the high-caste poets known as Carans; after being written down in a book entitled Pabuprakasa, it eventually was learned by the Nayaks and fTom that point passed on orally by them (Smith 1991: 18-19). Of course, the ideology of ultimate textual origins may seem to contradict the fact of oral provenance, and not only here; witness the Tibetan tradition of ‘‘excavating’’ an actual manuscript book as a talismanic cue for oral performance (Zhambei 2001: 285-6), or the text of Mexican folk-drama that lies ready to hand on the stage during rehearsal but is never consulted (Bauman and Ritch 1994). Complementarily, consider the much-discussed Persian national epic called the Shahnama, which apparently reached its present canonical form through the work of a poet named Ferdowsi but which certainly owes an enormous debt to prior and contemporary oral traditions (see Chapter 18, by Davidson). As Ulrich Marzolph observes,
The relationship between written and oral tradition is further complicated by the fact that the oral performers of the Shahnama-recitations often employed as a written medium small booklets or rolls of paper (tumar). These tumars did not contain a text to be recited verbatim but rather supplied a comprehensive outline to be memorized. (2002: 282)
Both the Rajasthani and the Persian instances illustrate that literate singers may be involved with both oral epics and texts, and the examples multiply as one searches through the tremendous diversity of the world’s traditions (cf. Blackburn and Flueckiger 1989: 10-11 on oral and written epics across the traditions of India; of particular interest is the account of how the South Sumatran oral epic, the guritan of Radin Suane, made the journey from performance to transcription and translation (Collins 1998: especially 9-16)).
However, two additional cases must suffice for our present purposes, one involving an oral epic that is also a literary construction and the other illustrating how the ‘‘two worlds’’ of oral epic composition and the making of texts can merge in the very same person. The former case involves the intriguing and much-debated phenomenon of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, stitched together and augmented by its collector-editor, Elias Lonnrot. For some scholars Lonnrot’s gathering of parts into a postulated but hypothetical whole (3 percent of which was wholly of his own composition) amounts to falsification of a tradition, or at least interference. To others, however, the collector-editor was in effect ‘‘singing on the page,’’ using his earned fluency in the poetic idiom to continue (and perhaps to epitomize) the Karelian oral epic tradition (see Branch 1994; DuBois 1995; Honko 2002b). Our final example concerns Nikola Vujnovic, Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s field assistant and translator in the 1930s who later came to Cambridge, Massachusetts to transcribe many of the same acoustic recordings of South Slavic epic he had helped to collect. But the other side of Vujnovic’s expertise - the fact that he was himself a practicing guslar - has not yet been fully appreciated. During the process of re-auditing Halil Bajgoric’s performance of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Becirbey, I discovered that the transcriber-singer Vujnovic had in fact modified what I heard on the audio record of Bajgoric’s performance. In effect, he re-made the song as he wrote it down. Variant words, inflections, lines, and other features point to something very different from mere verbatim transcription; as a guslar himself, the amanuensis-bard had harnessed the epic language idiolectally to create his own page-bound performance (Foley 2004c: 145-91).
World History
