Oral tradition
Oral tradition or
oral culture is a way of transmitting
history,
literature or
law from one
generation to the next in a
civilization without a
writing system. An example that combined aspects of
oral literature and
oral history, before eventually being set down in writing, is the
Homeric epic poetry of the
Iliad and the
Odyssey. In a general sense, "oral tradition" refers to the transmission of
cultural material by means other than written records, and was long held to be a key descriptor of
folklore (a criterion no longer rigidly held by all folklorists). As an
academic discipline, it refers both to a
method and the objects studied by the method.
Oral tradition as a field of study had its origins in the work of the Serb scholar
Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (1787-1864), a contemporary of the
Brothers Grimm. Vuk pursued similar projects of "salvage folklore" in the
cognate traditions of the southern
Slavic regions which would later be gathered into
Yugoslavia, and with the same admixture of
romantic and
nationalistic interests. Somewhat later, but as part of the same scholarly moment, the
turcologist Vasily Radlov (1837-1918) would study the songs of the
Kara Khirgiz in what would later become the
Soviet Union.
Milman Parry and Albert Lord
Shortly thereafter,
Milman Parry (1902-1935), pursuing a degree in
Classics at
Harvard, would begin to grapple with what was then called the "
Homeric Question," usually framed as "who was
Homer?" and "what are the Homeric poems?" The Homeric question actually consists of a series of related inquiries, and Parry's contribution was to reconsider the foundational assumptions which framed the inquiries, a re-ordering that would have consequences for a great many literatures and disciplines.
Parry's further work under
Antoine Meillet at the
Sorbonne would result in his crucial insight into the "formula," which he originally defined as a certain fixed expression, used to convey an essential idea under the same metrical conditions. Furthermore, the formulas would be not the individual and idiosyncratic devices of a particular artist, but the shared inheritance of a tradition of singers, and useful not so much for enabling a verbatim repetition of what would amount to a
fixed (but unwritten) text, as to make possible an
improvisational composition-in-performance. The idea met with immediate resistance, because it seemed to make the fount of
Western literary eloquence the slave of a system of
clichés, but it accounted for such otherwise inexplicable features of the Homeric poems as gross
anachronisms (revealed by advances in
historical and
archaeological knowledge), the presence of incompatible
dialects, and the deployment of locally unsuitable
epithets ("blameless
Aegisthos" for the murderer of
Agamemnon, or the almost comic use of "swift-footed
Achilles" for the hero in conspicuously sedentary moments).
Parry was appointed to a junior professorship at Harvard, and during this time became aware of living oral traditions in the
Balkan region. In two field expeditions with his young assistant
Albert Bates Lord (1912-1991) he would record thousands of songs on aluminum disks. The collection would provide the basis for an empirical documentation of the dynamics of composition of metrical narrative in performance, including the patterns and types of variation at
lexical and other levels which would yield a
structural account of
multiformity â€" a phenomenon which could only be accounted for in standard literary
methodology (document-based, genetic
stemmatology) by concepts of "corruption" and "distortion" of a pristine, original "ur-text" or hypothetical "lost Q" ("Quelle", German for "source") â€" a development that would reduce the prominence of the
historic-geographic method in
folkloristics. Unscholarly or unsympathetic accounts of oral tradition as a discipline often render this moment, quite inaccurately, as reducing the great
epics to the children's party games of "
telephone" or "
Chinese whispers;" in fact, these games provide amusement by showing how messages are distorted through uncontextualized transmission, while Parry's theory showed how the tradition provided a rich, reinforcing context which optimized the
noise-to-signal ratio and thus improved the quality of transmission.
Tragically, Parry was killed in a pistol-accident. His work was posthumously published by his son
Adam Parry as
The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Lord, however, had meanwhile published
The Singer of Tales (1960), and even before that, had exercised great influence on other scholars, notably
Francis P. Magoun, whose application of Parry-Lord models to
Anglo-Saxon traditions demonstrated the explicative and problem-solving power of the theory â€" a process that would be repeated by other scholars in numerous independent traditions.
Walter Ong
In a separate development, the prominent and provocative
media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) would begin to focus attention on the ways in which
communicative media shape the nature of the content conveyed. He would serve as mentor to the brilliant young Jesuit,
Walter Ong (1912-2003), whose interests in
cultural history,
psychology and
rhetoric would result in
Orality and Literacy (Methuen, 1980) and the less-known
Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Cornell, 1981). These two works successfully and accessibly articulated the contrasts between oral and literate cultures, and made possible an integrated theory of oral tradition which accounted for both production (the chief concern of Parry-Lord theory) and reception. The most-often studied section of
Orality and Literacy concerns the "
psychodynamics of orality" â€" a series of descriptors which, on the whole, might be used to index the relative orality or literacy of a given text or society.
The theory would undergo elaboration and development as it grew in acceptance. For example, the number of formulas documented for various traditions proliferated, and while the concept of the formula remained lexically-bound, innovations appeared, such as the "formulaic system" with structural "
substitution slots" for
syntactic,
morphological and
narrative necessity (as well as for artistic invention). Sophisticated models such as Foley's "word-type placement rules" followed. Higher levels of formulaic composition were defined over the years, such as "ring composition," "responsion" and the "type-scene" (also called a "theme" or "typical scene"): a basic pattern of narrative details, some of which ("the arming sequence;" "the hero on the beach;" "the traveler recognizes his goal") would show evidence of trans-traditional distribution. Most importantly, the fairly rigid division between oral and literate was replaced by recognition of transitional and compartmentalized texts and societies, including models of
diglossia (
Brian Stock,
Franz Bäuml,
Eric Havelock). Perhaps most importantly, the terms and concepts of "
orality" and "
literacy" came to be replaced with he more useful and apt "
traditionality" and "
textuality." Very large units would be defined (
The Indo-European Return Song) and areas outside of
military epic would come under investigation:
women's song,
riddles and other genres.
John Miles Foley
In advance of Ong's synthesis,
John Miles Foley, studying with
Robert Creed (who had in turn studied with Magoun) began a series of papers based on his own fieldwork in Yugoslavia, emphasizing the dynamics of performers and audiences. His massive bibliographical enterprise would establish both a clear underlying methodology which accounted for the findings of scholars working in the separate linguistic fields (primarily
Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Serbo-Croatian) and more importantly, would stimulate conversation among these specialties, so that a network of independent but allied investigations and investigators could be established. Foley effectively consolidated oral tradition as an academic field with the issue of the first bibliography (1985) and the establishment of both the journal
Oral Tradition and the founding of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition (1986) at the
University of Missouri-Columbia. Foley's key works include
The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (1988);
Immanent Art (1991);
Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf and the Serbo-Croatian Return-Song (1993);
The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995);
Teaching Oral Traditions (1998);
How to Read an Oral Poem (2002).
The methodology of oral tradition now conditions an enormous variety of studies in literature, communication and folklore, including virtually every language and ethnic group, and conspicuously in
biblical studies (
Werner Kelber). Present developments explore the implications of the theory for
rhetoric and
composition,
intergroup communication, for
postcolonial studies,
popular culture and
film studies, and many other areas. The most significant areas of theoretical development at present may be the construction of systematic
hermeneutics and
aesthetics specific to oral traditions.
*
Folklore*
Intangible culture*
Oral law*
Oral history*
Oral Torah*
Secondary orality*
Traditional knowledge*
Patha,
Shrauta*
The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition*
The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature Online
