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Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
Title Pages
Jonathan L. Ready
(p.i) Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics (p.ii) (p.iii) Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics
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Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
(p.v) Dedication
Jonathan L. Ready For Ruthie
That ain’t no storm, Captain.
That’s just my hammer in the air, Lord, Lord.
That’s just my hammer in the air.
(Ballad of John Henry, traditional)
(p.vi)
Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
(p.vii) Preface
Jonathan L. Ready
The heroic world depicted in the Iliad and the Odyssey is one of constant competition, and my first book, Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad (Ready 2011), places similes in that agonistic setting. The book engages extensively with similes spoken by characters but also shows how similes presented by the Iliad’s narrator evince competitive dynamics. On occasion, I refer in that book to similes in modern oral traditions. My second book, The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia (Ready 2018a), takes up that challenge, investigating the Homeric simile from neglected comparative perspectives. In the first part of that volume, I consider similes in five modern oral poetries—Rajasthani epic, South Sumatran epic, Kyrgyz epic, Bosniac epic, and Najdi lyric poems from Saudi Arabia—and I review folkloristic scholarship on successful performances by other verbal artists, such as Egyptian singers of epic and African American singers of blues. By applying the results of those inquiries to the Homeric epics in the second part, I put forward a new take on how our Homeric poets crafted their similes, and I alter our understanding of how they displayed their competence as performers of verbal art.
Reading all those textualized versions of oral traditional works led me to explore what goes into making a written version of an oral performer’s presentation. Deep down in the history of folklore collecting, it occurred to me that I could use my findings to address the vexed matter of how the Iliad and the Odyssey came to be, and I published “The Textualization of Homeric Epic by Means of Dictation” in the journal TAPA (Ready 2015). This book’s Part II (Chapter3) is a revised, expanded, and more accessible version of that article. Looking into the history of the textualization of oral traditional works and seeing the roles played by scribes in those events prompted me to think more about scribal activity. I
found illuminating work on scribal activity in the fields of medieval studies and religious studies: those scholars speak of the scribe as a performer. Tasked with learning about performance, I turned to linguistic anthropology. PartsIandIIIof this book represent the outcome of that research. PartI(Chapters1and2) applies linguistic anthropology’s concepts of oral textuality and oral intertextuality to the Homeric epics. Chapter1offers a revised and expanded presentation of some of the issues I broach in “Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization in Homeric Epic” (Ready 2018b), a chapter in a volume I coedited with Christos Tsagalis (Ready and Tsagalis 2018a). PartIII(Chapters4 and5) argues for understanding as performers the scribes responsible for the texts in the so-called wild papyri of the Iliad and the Odyssey
Early on in The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives, I establish a nomenclature that I adhere to in this book as well (Ready 2018a: 6–8). I do not use the proper noun “Homer” except when quoting or paraphrasing scholars who do use that name. Instead I refer to the Iliad poet or the Odyssey poet (or the poet of the Iliad or the poet (p.viii) of the Odyssey). Both these poets are to be labeled Homeric poets: I call them “our Homeric poets.” They represent the tradition of the oral performance of Homeric poetry. Countless Homeric poets perpetuated that tradition of Homeric poetry, performing the Iliad and the Odyssey orally many, many times before the emergence of written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey and continuing to perform the Iliad and the Odyssey orally afterward. I imagine that the Iliad poet dictated his version of the Iliad to a scribe and that the Odyssey poet dictated his version of the Odyssey to a scribe. Those dictated poems—that Iliad and that Odyssey—served as the archetypes for the subsequent written textual tradition of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. The Iliad and the Odyssey are “the Homeric epics (or poems).” The Iliad is not the Iliad; the Odyssey is not the Odyssey. Rather, the roman font—the Iliad, the Odyssey— signals that one is dealing with a tradition in which performers present what they think of as the same story, not with specific written texts. When John D. Smith speaks of “the epic of Pābūjī” (1991), or Lauri Honko of “the Siri epic” (1998), or Aditya Malik of “the oral narrative of Devnārāyaṇ” (2005), or Nienke van der Heide of “the Manas epic” (2015), none uses italics. Homerists address this phenomenon in their own way. Andrew Ford refers to poets “who handed over their Iliads and Odysseys to alphabets” (1992: 137). Jim Marks speaks of the “‘Odyssey-tradition’” as “the notional, though irrecoverable, sequence of compositions-in-performance through which the Homeric text evolved” and “‘the Odyssey’” as “the text as we have it” (2008: 12–13). José González speaks of “recognizable Iliadic and Odyssean traditions” (2013: 418). Ultimately, the term “Homeric poetry” embraces the Iliad and the Odyssey (which, to be precise, really means the ancient and medieval written copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey) as well as all those performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey (or sections thereof) that were not written down.
In some ways, what follows in this book represents an attempt to continue this project of definition. In this case I want to look into the various agents and entities involved in and relevant to the oral performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey via a process of dictation, and to the written textual transmission of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
(p.ix) Acknowledgments
Jonathan L. Ready
I am grateful to Richard Bauman and Raymond Person for reading a draft of this book; to Karin Barber, Richard Martin, and Christos Tsagalis for reviewing early attempts at some of the arguments presented in PartI; and to Francesca Schironi for critiquing section5.1. Audiences at conferences in Atlanta, Bloomington, Chicago, and New Orleans helped with PartIII, and the Orality and Literacy group helped with PartIat the 2016 meeting in Lausanne. I thank Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute and Harvard University’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation for their support of this project in its later stages. In a remarkable act of intellectual generosity, one of the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press returned ten single-spaced pages of comments, saving me from numerous errors and infelicities. The other reader was more laconic but just as helpful. Once again it has been a privilege to work with Charlotte Loveridge and Georgie Leighton at the Press. As always, I owe my greatest debt to Margaret Foster for her encouragement and assistance.
I thank the University of Texas Press for permission to reuse in Chapter1 material from the following book chapter:
Ready, J. L. 2018b. “Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization in Homeric Epic,” in J. L. Ready and C. C. Tsagalis (eds), Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 320–50. © University of Texas Press, 2018. (p.x)
Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
Introduction
Jonathan L. Ready
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter first situates this project in the context of current discussions about the definitions of the terms “orality” and “textuality,” both of which have medial and conceptional senses. It then lays out three lessons from work on orality and textuality from outside the field of classical studies—from linguistic anthropology to folkloristics to medieval studies to religious studies—and reviews how the subsequent chapters apply these lessons to the study of Homeric poetry. It concludes by positioning this study in relation to previous work in Homeric studies and by suggesting which parts of the book readers from outside classical studies will find most valuable.
Keywords: orality,textuality,linguistic anthropology,folkloristics,medieval studies,religious studies, Homeric studies
Scholars use the phrase “the Homeric text” all the time. Yet one could not find this Homeric text (singular) in the library stacks or in digital form: rather one would come upon several Homeric texts (plural) (cf. Gurd 2005: 9). Helmut van Thiel’s text of the Iliad (2010) differs from, for instance, Martin L. West’s (1998a, 2000a). Thomas Allen’s text of the Odyssey (1917, 1919) differs from, for instance, Peter von der Mühll’s (1946). I merely scratch the surface in citing those four. Alex Lee surveys thirty-three printed Greek texts of poems attributed to Homer (2013), from Demetrius Chalcondylas’s 1488
ἅπασα to Eduard Schwartz’s 1923 edition of the Iliad and 1924 edition of the Odyssey. Even if each edition aims to be definitive, the existence of competing editions reveals the protean nature of the modern Homeric text. That the Homeric text remains a dynamic entity finds a neat parallel in the renewed
production of distinct English translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (McCrorie 2012; B. Powell 2014; P. Green 2015; E. Wilson 2018; cf. P. Young 2003: 84–158; Moser 2013: 99–206).
I leave it to others to critique the modern printed editions (Apthorp 1980: pp. xviii–xix; Nagy 2004: 15–17; Graziosi and Haubold 2015: 5–6) but will continue to take apart the phrase “the Homeric text.” This book’s five chapters query from three different angles—hence the book’s division into three parts—what it means to speak of Homeric poetry together with the word “text.” Scholarship from outside the discipline of classical studies motivates and undergirds the project. This research has deepened our understanding of the word “text”— above all, of what the fashioning of a text can involve—by exploring the relationship between orality and textuality. Let me first contemplate these two words.
Investigators from various fields define or employ these words—orality and textuality—in various ways. Egbert Bakker reminds the Homerist of two meanings scholars give to the words “oral” and “orality.” One often uses them “in a medial sense, meaning simply that something is spoken and as such is a matter of sound and the voice of the speaker” (1997a: 7, emphasis in original).
Seeing a title like Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent (Johnson et al. 1997), one thinks of oral performance, of oral in the medial sense. The medievalist and expert in Turkic oral epic Karl Reichl has medial orality in mind when he states flatly, “A poem is oral…simply because it is oral.…A poem is oral because of the way it has been composed, transmitted and/or performed” (2003: 255). In a book on the oral performance (p.2) in North India of poetry attributed to Kabir, Linda Hess writes, “I use the term ‘oral’…only for live, embodied performance”; “the orality I speak of requires the presence together of physical bodies, and the production and communication of sound” (2015: 78, 232; cf. 211; Niles 1999: 53; Finnegan 2015: 25, 81–2). For the Africanist Harold Scheub, an oral poem “loses its identity”—it can no longer be said to be oral—“when it is frozen in memory or writing” (2002: 83).
At the same time, these words “may also be a matter of conception” (Bakker 1997a: 8, emphasis in original). The linguist Wulf Oesterreicher defines orality as a matter of “style” and of “conception,” not medium: he chooses “the term language of immediacy (Sprache der Nähe) to designate the informal/oral type of linguistic conception” (1997: 191, 193–4; cf. Bakker 1997b: 287). Additional complexities emerge if one wishes to distinguish between the style evident in an oral traditional work, be it an epic poem or a folktale, and the style evident in everyday talk (DuBois 2012: 206; cf. Saussy 2016: 47). Once one stops thinking in terms of medium one finds that “a discourse that is conceptionally oral (such as a conversational narrative) is often medially oral as well, but it is also possible for such a discourse to be written” (Bakker 1997a: 8, emphasis in original; cf. Shuman 1986: 95–6, 112–13, 117, 176; Andersen 1991: 49–50; Assmann 2006:
111). Oesterreicher can offer “a typology of orality in written texts” (1997: 190), and the folklorist Lauri Honko can state, “It is not the medium as such but the oral style and written style which are at stake. Both media can accommodate both styles,…” (2002a: 20; cf. Alexander 2006: 17; Schellenberg 2015: 293; S. Miller 2017: 95). Another illustrative effort to get away from a focus on medium comes from the comparatist Haun Saussy. He defines “oral tradition as a poetic technology marked by collective composition, modularity, iterability, and virtuality” (2016: 72). That it can be voiced is “incidental”: “indeed many of the same features can be found in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary avantgardes” (73). This twofold understanding of orality goes some way toward mitigating the desire to toss out the term tout court (e.g. Scollon and Scollon 1995; cf. Finnegan 2015: 81–3).
To this nuanced understanding of orality can be added a nuanced understanding of textuality. Consider the titles of three collections of essays and their editors’ introductory comments. The editors of Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion note, “The larger part of this volume will focus on the ways in which oral and written transmission of these cultural elements interact within a context in which written transmission is more or less readily available” (Elman and Gershoni 2000b: 1). The editors of Listening up, Writing down, and Looking beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual refer to “the process of moving from embodied performance to a textual form, be it manuscript, print…” and identify as “text” “what is produced when orature is lifted out of the discursive environment where it lived” (Gingell with Roy 2012: 13–14).1 The editor of Orality and Textuality (p.3) in the Iranian World: Patterns of Interaction across the Centuries speaks of “orality and its patterns of intersection and interaction with the written word” and writes, “Each of the contributions provides important evidence of textual culture’s intimate, extensive, and ongoing interaction with the realm of orality” (Rubanovich 2015b: 3–4, 13). In these volumes, textuality refers to written texts and what goes on in written texts.
Others use text and textuality differently. A text can be “a species of social action” (Barber and Moraes Farias 1989: 3), and one can treat “social action as text” (Becker and Mannheim 1995: 239; cf. Titon 2003: 80; Assmann 2006: 123) or “any humanly constructed object” as text (Titon 2003: 76). I remain in the realm of language use. Textuality can indicate the presence of attributes that render an instance of language use a text irrespective of medium. One can speak of, for instance, oral or written or inscribed or printed texts. The anthropologist Karin Barber, who focuses on African praise poetry, stresses the continuities between the textuality evident in oral and written texts: “writing is not what confers textuality. Rather, what does [confer textuality] is the quality of being joined together and given a recognisable existence as a form”; “text…is utterance (oral or written) that is woven together in order to attract attention and to outlast the moment” (2007: 1–2). Carol Pasternack, who studies Old
English poetry, distinguishes the textuality of texts in various media. The textuality of the Old English texts preserved in manuscripts differs from the textuality “of both oral and printed compositions” as well as “written” texts (1995: 2). She uses the term “inscribed” to label the textuality of the poetry in the corpus she investigates “since they inherit significant elements of vocality from their oral forebears and yet address the reader from the pages of manuscripts” (2). The folklorist Amy Shuman would distinguish between “written and spoken texts” by looking to the “relationships between texts and contexts” (1986: 184).
I toggle back and forth between these various positions over the course of this book. So, with these distinctions in mind, I pick out three lessons from work on orality and textuality from outside the field of classical studies. First, one learns what goes into the production of oral texts, utterances capable of outlasting the moment, and how oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts. Second, one learns what textualization entails—the creation of a written version of an oral traditional work via a process that starts either with a scribe’s writing down a performer’s words or a collector’s using a recording device to a capture a performer’s words. Third, one learns what happens when scribes, living in a world in which the oral performance of traditional works thrives, copy written texts of those and/or related works. By applying these findings to the study of Homeric poetry, this book brings out the complexities involved in speaking about Homeric poetry and text in the same breath.
This interdisciplinary and comparative approach enables an investigation into Homeric texts from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods. Written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization after 150 BCE (Haslam 1997: 56, 63–4; Lamberton 1997: 44; Jensen 2011: 218; Schironi 2018: 42–3). Although not identical, our medieval manuscripts of the Homeric epics reflect that development. This book examines the Homeric tradition before that process of (p.4) standardization. By looking at oral texts, dictated texts, and wild texts, it illuminates the intricate history of Homeric texts long before the emergence of standardized written texts.
PartI, made up of Chapters1and2, explores the oral composition in performance of Homeric poetry. To say that Homeric poets composed in oral performance is to say that they worked with a toolkit of formulae, type-scenes, middle-range structures, and plots to fashion their poem in the act of performing before an audience (e.g. Edwards 1992; Louden 1999, 2006; Minchin 2001; M. Clark 2004; W. Hansen 2011; Kahane 2018). Memorization might have played a part when it came to certain segments of the poem, but the poets did not engage in wholesale prior composition, as other oral poets do (Ready 2018a: 22), only presenting the poem after they had memorized the whole thing. Similarly, some Homeric poets might have made use of written texts before or even during a performance, but the usual depiction of Homeric poets composing in
performance does not portray them as dependent upon written texts. As for a timeframe, when talking about the oral composition in performance of Homeric poetry, the majority of Homerists have in mind the Homeric poets of, at the very least, the early Archaic period. I stand with those who have in mind the poets of the entire Archaic period as well as the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Whatever one’s stance on this matter, one looks especially to the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves to reconstruct what those poets did in oral performance.
PartIargues that one should think about texts and textuality when considering the oral composition in performance of Homeric poetry—that is, irrespective of the presence of written texts. Linguistic anthropology teaches that oral performers generate oral texts through processes of entextualization—the “art” (Barber 2007: 93) of shaping utterances capable of outlasting the moment. Moreover, oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts. They look backward and forward as they interact with past and future texts, and performers negotiate an intertextual gap, meaning the relationship their own text has to other texts. Starting from that research, Chapters1and2consider how these two phenomena pertain to the Homeric epics.
Chapter1delves into a range of material, from the speeches Zeus entrusts to messengers to public laments over fallen warriors, from the narrator’s catalogues to moments in which the text engages in its own exegesis. I thereby explore the ways in which the Homeric characters talk about and craft oral texts and consider how the narrator text and the poem as a whole deploy mechanisms of entextualization. I conclude that our Homeric poets fashioned an utterance capable of outlasting the moment each time they performed, and that conclusion prompts revisions to how Homerists talk about texts.
Chapter2returns to episodes involving messengers in the epics. I touch on the anticipatory intertextuality evident in such episodes and then launch a detailed exploration of the messenger’s performance. I focus on how, as mediators, messengers negotiate the intertextual gap between the speech they are tasked with relaying and their own speech. This investigation reveals still more about the portrayal of oral texts in the world depicted in the epics, especially what can happen to oral texts in that (p.5) world, and sheds light on the representation of mediators in the poems. As I do in Chapter1, I conclude with some inferences about the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet. The poet characterizes himself as a mediator, but critically, as one who performs in his capacity as a mediator, and the poet seeks to craft an oral text that engages in particular ways with past and future presentations of the same story. By introducing the concept of oral textuality to Homeric studies and by working with a more precise model of oral intertextuality than Homerists have used heretofore, PartIilluminates both the verbal and oratorical landscape our Homeric poets fashion in their epics and what the poets were actually doing when they performed.
PartIIcomprises Chapter3. Scholars argue over how written texts of the work of Homeric poets, oral traditional poets, came into existence and, to be more specific, they argue over how and when written texts emerged that provided exemplars for the written textual traditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that one reads today. One theory, customarily termed the “dictation model,” envisions a poet, customarily placed in the Archaic period, dictating to a scribe. Another theory, Gregory Nagy’s evolutionary model, also involves poets dictating to scribes, starting around 550 BCE. These two models—the dictation model and the evolutionary model—differ from a third model, best articulated by M. L. West: Archaic-era poets wrote the poems down themselves. Dictation plays a part in two out of the three explanations, however much the two strive to distinguish themselves from one another, for how written texts came into existence.
One should query what it would have meant for a poet to dictate to a scribe. To do so, I focus on the numerous modern instances of the textualization of an oral traditional work. My investigation relies especially on the testimony of folklorists and ethnographers who engage in and study textualization. It emerges that the textualization of a modern oral traditional work by a collector results in a text that is the co-creation of the performer, collector, and scribe (if a discrete third party). I conclude that a written text resulting from a process that began when a collector had a poet dictate his version of the Iliad or the Odyssey to a scribe was likely such a co-creation (see the preface for the use of roman font). An excursus on the collector of oral traditional works as depicted in Herodotus’s Histories and on Herodotus’s own practices as a textualizer bolsters this conclusion. Previous investigations of the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by way of dictation have obscured the contributions of other parties involved in the textualization event beside the poet.
Finally, the Iliad and the Odyssey emerged, be it through the collaborative process of textualization by way of dictation or from the hand of a writing oral poet. The question becomes, what did the people who made copies of those written texts do when they copied? Part III (Chapters4and5) considers some of those copies as preserved in the so-called wild papyri of the Homeric epics from the Ptolemaic period.
As an example of one of the texts I investigate, I quote from papyrus 5 (TM 61226), dating from between 299 and 200 BCE and preserving what we label Il 11.788–848 and 12.1–9. In this selection, which corresponds to what we label Il. 11.794–808, Nestor urges Patroclus to enter the battle wearing Achilles’s armor (S. West 1967: 108–9). (p.6) Stephanie West, whose edition of the papyrus fragment I reproduce here, uses “the Oxford Classical Text” to supplement lacunae (1967: 10), which I take to mean T. Allen’s 1931 edition.
ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισ]ιάων.”
[ὣσ φάτο, τῶι δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθ]εσσιν ὄρινε·
[τεῖρε γὰρ αἰνὸν ἄχοσ κραδίην, ἀ]κ̣άχησε δὲ
[
But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus, silver-footed Thetis, daughter of the old man of the sea, …in the gathering place of the swift but let him send you out,…and urge the host of Myrmidons, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the Danaans.
…to put on,
to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war. And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied with battle back toward the city from the ships and the huts.”
So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast: for a terrible pain wore at his heart, and he was vexed in his mind; and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson, Achilles.
But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and place of judgment (p.7) …in front of the ships with tall sterns was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,2
The verses followed by a letter, known as plus verses, do not appear in the standard critical editions of the Iliad and provide the clearest evidence for how the texts in the wild papyri come in and out of contact with those standard editions. Compare van Thiel’s version of these lines:
But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus, well, let him send you out, and with you let the rest of the army of Myrmidons follow, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the Danaans; and let him give you his fair armor to wear into the war, to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war. And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied with battle back toward the city from the ships and the huts.” So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast; (p.8) and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson, Achilles.
But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and place of judgment was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,3
Much previous scholarship uses these papyri to establish the putatively original written texts of the Homeric epics. I encourage researchers to think about these papyri in their own right because they reveal the sorts of written texts that many people in the Classical and Hellenistic periods likely used. To think about these papyri in their own right requires not mischaracterizing the copyists’ work or unproductively disparaging it.
In order to provide a new way to think about the scribal activity that produced the texts one sees in the wild papyri, I seek guidance, as I do in PartsIandII, from outside classical studies. After reviewing previous research in Homeric studies on these texts, Chapter4introduces the model of the scribe as performer put to work by students of several literatures, such as Anglo-Saxon and Israelite texts. Per this model, the scribe performs in the act of copying, due in large part to the fact that he operates in a time when performers orally perform the work
he copies, or orally perform using other related written texts, or orally perform related oral traditional works. I demonstrate the model’s relevance to the study of the wild Homeric papyri and consider at what point in time people capable of generating the texts one finds in the papyri would most likely have been around —much rests on the extent of the oral performance of Homeric poetry in the Classical and Hellenistic periods—and who these capable people might have been.
Deploying scholarship on performance, especially that of linguistic anthropologists and folklorists, Chapter5fleshes out what it meant for the scribe behind the text of a wild papyrus to perform as he copied. Offering close readings of a number of the wild papyri, the chapter first applies the model of entextualization, familiar from PartI, to the papyri and then applies work on how oral performers show their competence by aiming for a maximalist presentation and one that evinces “affecting power.” Next, it considers three other components of the scribe’s performance: it touches on the scribe as an agent of tradition, introduces and applies the concept of traditionalization—the linking of one’s performance to other performances of the same tale—and goes back to the phenomenon of the intertextual gap broached in Chapter2. Switching gears, the chapter then explores how the production of a bookroll becomes a performance. The penultimate section rehearses the benefits of understanding the scribe as a performer for students of scribal activity, and the concluding section juxtaposes the model of (p.9) scribal performance with the alternative accounts surveyed in Chapter4for the distinct features of the wild Homeric papyri.
In brief, the book’s three parts argue that considering together the phenomena of orality and textuality clarifies the history of Homeric texts before the standardization of the written textual tradition after 150 BCE and the contributions of various agents to that history.
In summarizing my project design and the contours of my argument and findings, I have pointed out some of the ways in which each part differs from previous scholarship in Homeric studies. I hasten to add that Homerists have investigated the interactions between orality and textuality before, although one could think otherwise upon reading M. L. West’s admonishment “to shake the oralists off our backs” (2003a: 14). For instance, as we will see in Chapter2, Homerists consider the phenomenon of oral intertextuality. By contrast, I set aside at the outset two other queries common in Homeric studies.
To begin with, students of oral traditions continue to explore how oral performers interact with written texts (Jensen 2011: 187–94, 2017; Fox 2016: 368; cf. Broude 2011), and Homerists often focus on that question when they examine the interactions between orality and textuality. For example, Nagy envisions written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey appearing after 550 BCE (e.g. 2014). At first, they served as transcripts that could be used as aids for an
oral performance. Beginning in the later part of the fourth century BCE, written texts began to function as scripts that were mandatory for a successful performance. Investigating this shift from transcript to script, José González argues that “the cultural pressures that brought about the growing dependence of orators on the memorization of written speeches were also at work among rhapsodes” (2013: 7). Minna Skafte Jensen wonders how oral performers of the epics would have made use of written texts (2011: 216):
If we hypothesize that written texts were accessible to the rhapsodes and gave rise to new versions when they integrated them into their oral repertoires, this situation leads to the next question: How could these new versions make their way back into written texts as they must have done if their influence is found in the transmitted text of the two epics? Did the rhapsodes own manuscripts that they revised whenever they had a new good idea? That would have been a cumbersome and expensive process demanding frequent erasure and rewriting. In the case of a papyrus manuscript the relatively fragile material would allow for only a limited amount of changes. If, instead, the rhapsodes preferred waxed tablets, any number of changes would have been physically possible; but in that case the piles of tablets necessary for containing the two poems would pose other problems.
Jensen makes plain her doubts that performers of the Iliad and the Odyssey ever memorized written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey: “The Iliad and the Odyssey had no further life in oral tradition, I submit. They were not memorised by their two poets or by others and not reperformed in full or in part” (2011: 246; cf 164–5; 2017). I will give my own thoughts on this matter when my presentation requires it (introduction to Chapter 3 (pp. 103–4); section4.3(p. 202)), but I will not mount a systematic inquiry.
(p.10) I also stay out of the following. Like students of Rabbinic literature (Elman 1999: 58; Jaffee 1999: 12), Homerists ask, granted that Homeric poets orally performed, do our poems exhibit features that only the use of writing can explain? Do they reflect in whole or in part what linguists call conceptional literacy (Oesterreicher 1997: 194–5; Schroeder 2016: 82–3)? Take the discussion of ring composition among scholars of the Homeric epics. After an exhaustive investigation of the structure of the Iliad, especially its use of ring composition, Keith Stanley concludes that, although the Iliad was orally performed (1993: 265, 280), it cannot be attributed “to an oral poet dependent solely on oral technique” (282). Rather, it evinces “recursive structures of a complexity foreign to extemporized poetry,” and “a more relevant model for Homeric artistry can be found in the conscious literary parataxis of archaic and classical lyric and in fifth-century drama and historiography” (268). Others disagree and assert that one need not attribute even the most elaborate ring structures in the Homeric epics to conceptional literacy (cf. Arft 2017: 9–12). Starting from the premise
that the Homeric epics “reflect the compositional practices of oral poetry the world over” and endorsing the view that ring composition can operate at “any scale of narrative” (2014: 75, 81), Erwin Cook argues that the Odyssey is constructed via a series of rings. The subtext of his article is that this pronounced narrative pattern would have allowed a trained singer to learn the story of the Odyssey quite easily.
Both these subjects merit continued study, but the story of the interactions between orality and textuality in the case of Homeric poetry involves much more than if or how rhapsodes used written texts and involves much more than if the poems we have, be they the product of an oral performance or intended for oral performance or both, contain features attributable solely to conceptional literacy. This book tells three parts of that story.
At the same time, Homerists will find themselves on some recognizable terrain. They will be comfortable with one of the book’s main topics: the nature of oral performance. Richard Martin’s The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (1989) and John Miles Foley’s The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995a) showed the value of applying research on oral performance to archaic Greek epic poetry. PartsIandIIIof this book renew that endeavor. Above all, they apply to the Homeric tradition work in linguistic anthropology on how oral performers display their skill through, for instance, entextualizing, offering a maximalist presentation, moving their audiences, traditionalizing, and negotiating an intertextual gap. The application of this research to the scribes behind the wild Homeric papyri is a first, as is the application of research on scribal activity in other traditions to the wild papyri. But in general this book’s comparative and interdisciplinary orientation will feel familiar. In PartI, I join those who adopt comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives to illuminate the oral performances of the Homeric characters (e.g. Martin 1989; Lardinois 1997) or the oral performances of the Homeric bards (e.g. Bakker 1997a; Minchin 2001; Scodel 2002; Ready 2018a). In PartII, I join Jensen (2011) in taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the question of the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by way of dictation.
(p.11) I have written this book from my perch in classical studies and have framed it so as to address issues of concern to Homerists and their fellow travelers in classical studies. Researchers in other disciplines will find the book useful too. Linguistic anthropologists will benefit from PartI’s discussions of entextualization and oral intertextuality. Folklorists and other scholars of modern oral traditions will benefit from PartII’s exploration of modern instances of the textualization of oral traditional works. Finally, students of scribal activity in other cultures will benefit from PartIII’s systematic application of research in performance to the work of scribes. (p.12)
Notes:
(1) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines orature as follows (Baldick 2008): “a portmanteau term coined by the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o to denote imaginative works of the oral tradition usually referred to as ‘oral literature’. The point of the coinage is to avoid suggesting that oral compositions belong to a lesser or derivative category.”
(2) My translations of passages from the Homeric papyri look for the most part to Lattimore 1951 and 1965, Wyatt 1999, M. L. West 2003b, and Most 2007b. I aim to Latinize all proper nouns in all my translations.
Some authority has assigned each papyrus a number (Bird 2010: 62). The numbers used for the papyri discussed in this book are those recognized by these authorities. For the most part, I can refer to a papyrus by its Allen-Sutton or Allen-Sutton-West or West number. On the two occasions when such a number does not exist, I use the Mertens-Pack3 number (MP3) (http:// cipl93.philo.ulg.ac.be/Cedopal/MP3/dbsearch%5Fen.aspx). I also give the Trismegistos number (TM) in parentheses (cf. Depauw and Gheldof 2014): that online database provides the papyrus’s location and its inventory number as well as a link to the papyrus’s entry in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books that lists scholarly work on the papyrus.
(3) Throughout this book I use van Thiel’s editions of the Iliad (2010) and the Odyssey (1991), although I do not reproduce his lunate sigmas. For the most part, translations of passages from the Iliad look to Wyatt 1999, with frequent glances at Lattimore 1951, and translations of passages from the Odyssey look to Lattimore 1965. When I do not make such specifications in regard to other texts, the translations are my own.
Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics
Jonathan L. Ready
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter introduces to Homeric studies the concepts of oral texts— utterances capable of spiting the power of time—and entextualization—the process of making an oral text. It delves into a range of material, from the speeches Zeus entrusts to messengers to public laments over fallen warriors, from the narrator’s catalogues to moments in which the text engages in its own exegesis. It thereby explores the ways in which the Homeric characters talk about and craft oral texts and considers how the narrator text and the poem as a whole deploy mechanisms of entextualization. It concludes that our Homeric poets fashioned an utterance capable of outlasting the moment each time they performed, and that conclusion prompts revisions to how Homerists talk about texts.
Keywords: oral texts,entextualization,speeches,character text,Homeric poets,text,oral performance
Introduction
Most discussions of writing in the Homeric epics point to two verses as the sole reference to the phenomenon: Proteus sent Bellerephon to Lycia, “and he gave him baneful signs, / having inscribed (sēmata lugra / grapsas) many lifedestroying things in a folded tablet” (Il. 6.168–9) (Scodel 1992: 58; Bassi 1997: 325; Aloni 1998: 78; Jensen 2011: 197 n. 49; B. Powell 2011). Haun Saussy casts a wider net. In order to find writing in the Homeric epics, he “rework[s]” the concept and applies it to, for example, moments of scratching—Polydamas’s spear scratches (grapsen) Peneleos (Il. 17.599)—and incising—each Achaean
champion puts a mark (esēmēnanto) on his token for the lottery to determine who will fight Hector (Il. 7.175) (1996: 300–6, cf. 2016: 84). From this perspective, one can also “give the name of writing…to Odysseus’ identifying scar” (1996: 305). When a search of over 28,000 lines of poetry yields two verses or when scratching and incising become writing, one discerns how hard scholars work to detect writing in the poems.
That one must strain to see these instances of writing does not imply that the world depicted in the epics lacks texts or a concept of textuality. Rather, one comes across an abundance of texts in the poems if one follows the lead of linguistic anthropologists who investigate “the constitution of oral texts” (Barber 2007: 67) through processes of entextualization. This chapter explores the Homeric poems’ representation of these kinds of texts and what that representation suggests about our Homeric poets’ vision of their projects.
Section1.1surveys scholarship on mechanisms of entextualization—what performers do when they create an utterance capable of outliving the moment— in modern oral traditions and scholarship that, although it does not use the word entextualization, nevertheless sheds light on the subject. Endorsing Karin Barber’s statement that when it comes to entextualization “the questions that arise—the things to look for—can…be profitably drawn from one body of material and applied to another” (2007: 74), section1.2applies to the Homeric poems the findings on entextualization in modern oral traditions covered in section1.1. The section unfolds in four subsections.
(p.16) Subsection1.2.1observes that songs and tales seem to have an independent preexistence in the world constructed in the Homeric poems and circulate from presenter to presenter. What is more, these and other utterances possess an object-like status. These two phenomena suggest that our Homeric poets depict a world in which oral pronouncements endure and prompt an investigation into the creation of oral texts in the poems and the strategies of entextualization represented therein. Speeches meant to be repeated showcase the production of oral texts and bring out the importance of boundaries, cohesion, and coherence in entextualization (subsection1.2.2). Other speeches by characters exhibit additional means of entextualization (subsection1.2.3). I investigate the attaching of utterances to objects, the phenomenon of evaluating and explicating (paradigmatic) stories, and the practices of quoting previous utterances and of introducing generically distinct segments. Finally, the rendering of personal laments in the Iliad reveals non-discursive ways to place boundaries around and provide coherence to an utterance.
Subsection1.2.4begins by noting that stretches of verse in the narrator text (the portions between the characters’ speeches, themselves designated the “character text”) achieve entextualization in part due to their shifting to another generic mode distinct from that of the surrounding text and that the glossing of
difficult words in both the narrator text and the character text makes the poetry an object of commentary, another entextualizing move. Setting aside the distinction between character text and narrator text, one observes the positioning of the poetry as existing prior to its presentation and the objectification of the poetry: both argue for its endurance. Fittingly, the poet’s use of formal devices, such as parallelism and ring composition, across the entirety of his poem and his representing himself as one who quotes the Muse(s) reveal how he goes about the process of entextualization. The constitution of oral texts within the poem and references to the constitution of oral texts within the poem, the efforts to endow the entire poem with textuality—these moves encourage one to picture our Homeric poets as performers who entextualize, who fashion an oral text, as they perform. Building on the previous sections’ results, the concluding section1.3critiques how Homerists talk about texts.
1.1.Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization
The study of oral performance made great strides in the 1970s. First, Richard Bauman offered what would prove to be an enduring definition of performance: “performance as a mode of spoken verbal communication consists in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence” (1977: 11, cf. 2004: 9).1 (p.17) I will rely on this definition throughout this book. Second, scholars reacted against the excision of an oral performer’s words from the real-world context of their utterance. It would no longer do merely to study a written transcript of what a performer had said. As Richard Martin reviews, these scholars argued that “meaning emerges only through performance,” that “it is the performance, not the text, which counts” (1989: 7; cf. Scheub 1977: 349; A.-L. Siikala 1990: 9; Bakker 2005: 55; Finnegan 2007: 192, 2015: 92; Tangherlini 2013b: 218, 220; Edmunds 2016a: 33).
Not ready to dispose of text, other students of oral performance have sought to clarify this second point, dubbed the “performance is king” model by Lauri Honko (2000b: 13; cf. Finnegan 2007: 192). One may conceive of performance as an interpretable event and so as a text (Titon 2003: 79–80). I attend to another response—the oft-quoted manifesto (Finnegan 2007: 193; Jensen 2011: 119–20) penned by the anthropologist Karin Barber (2005: 265–6, emphasis in original ≈ 2003: 325):
In oral traditions, the co-presence of performance and text is of course more difficult to see, because there is no visible, tangible document to contrast with the evanescent utterance. Nonetheless, it is clear that what happens in most oral performances is not pure instantaneity, pure evanescence, pure emergence and disappearance into the vanishing moment. The exact contrary is usually the case. There is a performance— but it is a performance of something. Something identifiable is understood to have pre-existed the moment of utterance. Or, alternatively, something is
understood to be constituted in utterance that can be abstracted or detached from the immediate context and re-embodied in a future performance. Even if the only place this “something” can be held to exist is in people’s minds or memories, still it is surely distinguishable from immediate, and immediately-disappearing, actual utterance. It can be referred to. People may speak of “the story of Sunjata” or “the praises of Dingaan” rather than speaking of a particular narrator’s or praise-singer’s performance on a particular occasion. And this capacity to be abstracted, to transcend the moment, and to be identified independently of particular instantiations, is the whole point of oral traditions. They are “traditions” because they are known to be shared and to have been handed down; they can be shared and handed down because they have been constituted precisely in order to be detachable from the immediate context, and capable of being transmitted in time and disseminated in space. Creators and transmitters of oral genres use every resource at their disposal to consolidate utterance into quasi-autonomous texts.
Two points stand out. First, a tale is felt to exist independently of any one enunciation (cf. Finnegan 2011: 162, 2015: 102–3; Frog 2011b: 10–11). This formulation updates Peter Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson’s assertion in their classic 1929 article “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity”: “From the folklore-performer’s standpoint, the work is a fact of langue, i.e., an extrapersonal, given fact, independent of this performer” (1982: 38). We do not hereby return to the discredited superorganic theory of folklore, which “misinterpreted tradition as a static, superorganic entity that has a stable life of its own and is able to survive outside the minds of the people who create and perpetuate it” (Tangherlini 2013a: 4; cf. Shuman 1986: 139–40). Instead, and this is the second point, this phenomenon—the perception that a tale exists independently of any one enunciation—arises when oral performers craft something “that is woven together in (p.18) order to attract attention and outlast the moment” (Barber 2007: 2). Barber joins scholars from a range of disciplines in calling that something “an oral text” (2007: 1–2; cf. Doane 1991: 78; Sears and Flueckiger 1991: 1–2; Elman 1999: 76–7, 92–3; Ramanujan 1999: 535; Joubert 2004: 6 n. 5, 89–90; Blackburn 2005; Assmann 2006: 42, 121; Horsley 2010: 96; Thatcher 2011: 38–41; Müller 2012: 298 n. 8; Reichl 2015: 28, 34–5; pace Ong 1990: 7, 10). One need not speak, as Pietro Pucci does (1987: 27, 30; cf. Tsagalis 2004: 11), of oral performers “writing” in Jacques Derrida’s sense or, as Haun Saussy does (1996: e.g. 307), of “oral writing” to be able to say that oral performers produce texts. “Writing,” Barber avers, “is not what confers textuality” (2007: 1; cf. 101; Tsagalis 2011: 211). Oral performers produce oral texts.2 Observe that this use of the term “oral text” differs from the use of the term to refer to a written document that results from the textualization of an oral performance (Finnegan 2007: 10 with n. 9; Niles 2013b).
So performers make an oral text: they impart textuality, the attributes of an utterance capable of outliving the moment, to a verbal act. They make this oral text, they endow an utterance with textuality, through strategies of what linguistic anthropologists call “entextualization.” Entextualization is “the process of rendering a given instance of discourse a text, detachable from its local context” (Urban 1996: 21; cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990: 73; Wilce 2009a: 32–3).
Entextualization is what performers engage in when they give an utterance the ability to endure. Entextualization differs from textualization: the latter refers to the recording of the verbal component of an oral text in written form (see Chapter3). Although, as Barber observes (2005: 267), some scholars conflate the terms (e.g. A.-L. Siikala 2000b; McCall 2011: 23), the production of an oral text merits its own label.3 From among the numerous and varied strategies of entextualization (cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74; Barber 2005: 268), I highlight a select few.
In Bauman’s succinct formulation, entextualization requires fashioning an utterance that is “bounded off to a degree from its discursive surround (its cotext), internally cohesive (tied together by various formal devices), and coherent (semantically intelligible)” (2004: 4). In this case, to put boundaries around an utterance means to demarcate its beginning and ending. The famous keys to performance—special codes; figurative language; parallelism; special paralinguistic features; special formulas; appeal to tradition; and disclaimer of performance (Bauman 1977: 16)—are perhaps the most obvious ways to signal a beginning because they by definition herald the beginning of a performance. Falling silent is an obvious way to signal the end (cf. Bauman 2004: 148), but performers can do so with any number of verbal cues: Packy Jim McGrath, a northern Irish storyteller, signs off with “Aye” (Cashman 2016: 170, 177); we have all signed off with “happily ever after” (cf. Zipes 2017: 8–9).
(p.19) For heuristic purposes, I take cohesion to mean that the utterance holds together and has a discrete identity (cf. Scheub 2002: 95) and I take coherence to mean that the utterance is understandable. This distinction between cohesion and coherence is useful even if cohesion, that which holds an utterance together and gives it a distinct identity, helps provide coherence—in other words, helps make an utterance understandable—and even if formal devices, the mechanisms of cohesion, help provide coherence (cf. Bauman 1986: 68).
Investigating cohesion “from a formal perspective,” as Bauman and Charles Briggs note, “takes us into familiar territory”: they point, for instance, to parallelism as one frequently used device (1990: 74; cf. Wilce 2009a: 34; Tarkka 2017). As an example of how formal devices enable cohesion and so entextualization, consider a portion of a tale told by Howard Bush whom Bauman recorded in Nova Scotia (Bauman 2004: 121, suspension points in original):
He went hóme, he went to béd, and he had nó rést the whóle níght.
He coúldn’t gét asléep, he sáid.
He was pláying cárds with the dévil all níght.
He had nó rést at áll, he sáid.
He was…like it séemed he wás in a bláze of fíre.
“That séttled the cárd playing thére,” he sáid.
It séttled hím and it séttled it thére.
Bauman comments,
The passage is marked, first of all, by parallel syntactic constructions in the first six lines and the last two lines of the above excerpt, making for two parallel sets. This is not the hesitant, repetitive, insecure parallelism of the earlier examples; beginning with “He went home,” Bush’s voice becomes louder, more forceful, and higher in pitch, and in the seventh line the quoted speech of the uncle’s statement takes on a shift in voice, reenacting his emphatic delivery. Moreover, the lines display perceptible patterns of rhythmic stress, with a single beat in the first two lines and four in each of the remaining lines (in the sixth line, the four beats occur after the false start):…This is a breakthrough into performance, signaled, or keyed, by this confidently rendered, mutually reinforcing set of formal devices: syntactic, prosodic, and paralinguistic.
Bush breaks through into performance and moves to entextualize: “full performance seems to be associated with the most marked entextualization” (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74). In Bush’s telling, formal devices give shape to the utterance and endow it with textuality.
Although he does not speak of entextualization, David Rubin’s work on how “patterns of sound” aid the recall of oral traditional material offers a useful analogue here (1995: 70). He attends to rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and rhythm (72–88), stressing the last one above the others (177), but arguing that these factors best enable recall when they work in tandem: he notes the need for “multiple constraints” (176). Viewing them through the lens of entextualization theory, one would say that the (p.20) formal features Rubin analyzes provide cohesion to an utterance. Rubin’s book remains popular (cf. Eve 2014: 100–2;
Fabb 2015: 186), and Saussy’s application of his findings enhances an appreciation of the formal devices that contribute to cohesion. Saussy defends the claim that “oral tradition is an inscription on human minds” (2016: 159, cf. 59). He asks, “How have humans performed acts of inscription on the minds of their fellows?” (157). By way of illustration, he follows Rubin in reviewing the formal components of a children’s ditty—“rhythmic pattern…alliteration… rhyme” (157–8)—as well as the physical movements that accompany the utterance “to reinforce the patterning of the words” (158). “A highly organized whole” results (158). Saussy concludes, “The more densely the text is packed with pattern, the more securely it takes up residence in the prepared mind” (158). He restates this point in a slightly more expansive form a moment later (160):
Meaningful text with a maximal organization of linguistic and thematic features keyed to the habits of the audience (patterning of phonemes, syllabic regularities, melody, rhymes, stanzas, formulae, topoi, analogies, antitheses, coherence of action, and the like) should then have a much higher rate of retention,…
Saussy enumerates the formal features that impart cohesion to an utterance.
His discussion intersects with Jan-Dirk Müller’s consideration in an article on medieval German literature of how verse structure, rhyme, assonance, and the use of formulas make “oral texts more permanent” (2012: 298–301, quotation from 300; cf. Assmann 2002: 241; Fabb 2015: 185–7). Harold Scheub’s analysis of oral performers in South Africa also abounds in observations of this sort: for example, “a certain sound will dominate in a line, then give way to another that will dominate in a succeeding line, with a suggestion of this imbedded in the preceding line. This also provides internal linkages” (2002: 13, cf. 62).4 At the same time, Scheub adds another factor to the list of mechanisms for generating cohesion: “thematic parallelism is a major device, unifying the poem” (75, cf 77).
Oral performers entextualize by making their utterance coherent as well. At bottom, coherence means clarity, as Bauman’s gloss of “intelligible” illustrates. An article on oral textuality by Peter Seitel is useful for thinking about one specific way a performer achieves clarity.
Seitel begins by alluding to reader response criticism’s argument that a printed literary text is “dependent on a reader’s interpretion to achieve coherent meaning” (2012: 75; see e.g. Iser 1974; Eco 1979). With that model in mind, Seitel turns to oral texts and discusses “coherence that is created through understandings shared by performer and audience. These shared understandings consist of, among other things, indexical grounding, or references to the local cultural universe, and intertextuality, or references to
