Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry ed. by Mark C. Amodio

Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry ed. by Mark C. Amodio (review) Carl Lindahl Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 18, 1996, pp. 167-170 (Review) Published by The New Chaucer Society DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.1996.0006 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/660751/summary Access provided at 9 Jan 2020 05:26 GMT from Reading University (+1 other institution account) REVIEWS MARK C. AMorno, ed. Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry. Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, vol. 13. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Pp. xii, 289. $45.00. The central irony of medieval oral studies-the quest for spoken words among exclusively written sources--offers the best explanation for the seeming redundancy of the title Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, rather than, say, Oral Poetics in Late-Medieval English Society. Presenting a Poetics and a Poetry with no other context for Oral, the title signals a working premise of many of its eleven contributors: that we can find and evaluate orality solely by examining what looks oral in the poem at hand-and thus justify confining the inquiry to individual texts confronted in hermetic isolation. In his introduction, Mark Amodio articulates several assumptions that crystallize the collection's strengths and weaknesses. 1. Middle English poetry has been relegated to "the periphery of oral studies" (p. 1). To the contrary, the first two essays of Amodio's book cite no fewer than fifty-three works that discuss Middle English orality, most of them published since 1980. Particularly in the realm of romance, current authors seldom raise serious questions of audience and style without addressing orality. Thomas Hahn's superlative introduction to Sir Gawain: Eleven Ro­ mances and Tales (1995), for example, offers major observations on the oral styles and presumed performance contexts of the Gawain poems. Only if one considers orality in terms of the oral-formulaic model developed by Parry and Lord can one argue persuasively that Middle English verse lies at "the periphery of oral studies." 2. Middle English texts postdate the period of "high-context" orality, when poems were essentially re-created anew in performance by non/iterate artists. The mere presence of a textual passage that "looks oral" because it echoes the formu­ laricity of Beowulf does not in itself constitute evidence of "an active oral poetics" (p. 11). Here Amodio usefully separates Middle English orality from the Parry-Lord model. 3. The unvaried metrical tradition of Old English poetry-which Amodio associates with "the oral tradition" (emphasis mine}-gives way to the "sudden appearance of different verse types following the Conquest" (p. 12). "Both before 167 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and especially after the Conquest, orality and literacy interact and intersect" (p. 21) in complex ways, creating mixed modes best conceptualized on a continuum between orality and writing. Amodio's recurrent phrase "the oral tradition" more than implies that there is only one form of pure poetic orality and that what is oral in Middle English verse derives from a unitary Anglo­ Saxon orality. Yet the notion of one pure antecedent is unsustainable. Co­ pious evidence of many kinds of oral performance-singing, reading, reci­ tation, tale telling-in monastic, courtly, and popular settings leaves no warrant for making "the oral tradition" a useful point of departure. Many Old English oral traditions-as well as many oral traditions practiced by speakers of Welsh, Latin, and Old French--demonstrably influenced Mid­ dle English poetry. Having judged the Parry-Lord model inadequate to explain the variety of Middle English verse, Amodio returns to the fiction of a monolithic golden oral age from which Middle English literature slowly differentiates itself. 4. Oral poetic techniques may survive in literature if scribes and poets use them "as a consequence of their experience with oral and oral-derived texts, whether they read, copied or took them down from dictation. Such conditioning occurred because the central affective, metonymic character of the oral tradition (something which insured its continued survival before the introduction of writing) does not vanish once the texts become encoded in manuscripts" (p. 19). Here, although Amodio again invokes the oral tradition, he signals the book's major strength. Building largely upon the observations of John Foley's Immanent Art (1991), the best essays invoke oralities not merely identifiable because they are formulaic and repetitive, but esthetically valuable in their own right because their repetitions and juxtapositions interact organically with the concerns and situations of a responsive audience. The most important aspect of any vital oral tradition is indeed meton­ ymy, but the crucial metonymic flow lies not within the text itself, or even between texts, but rather between the text and the community from which it comes and whose approval the poet must meet in a richly reflexive process through which poet and audience together shape texts that contin­ ually reshape themselves and their responses. Attuned to this cardinal fact of orality, researchers can find ways of assessing Middle English orality, most markedly in instances of cultural or social translation, through which a poet transforms a received text to suit another social milieu. If both poems survive, and if we can establish a social context for one or both, then close comparison makes it possible to say something about the orality of at least one text. Such comparisons do not, however, dominate this book, half of 168 REVIEWS whose contributors confine themselves to what "looks oral " within a given text and sometimes offer broad generalizations about a posited audience. A case in point is John Ganim's "The Devil's Writing Lesson," which brilliantly examines orality as an image by contrasting the treatments of orality and bookishness in Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne. For all that Ganim says about the poem's imagery, he overlooks evidence for its socially situated orality. Because Handlyng Synne is largely a translation of a more bookish work, the Anglo-Norman Manuel de Pechiez, close comparative reading can reveal much about Mannyng's orality. The authors of both works announce their audience and intent: the Manuel pointedly addresses the upper classes (gent) while Mannyng speaks to "lewde men....That ralys and rhymys wyl blethly here." Mannyng thus makes not only a lin­ guistic but a social and contextual translation of his source,offering specific insights into the esthetics of an orally active stratum of the same regional society that produced the Manuel. Ganim fails to demonstrate that the orality he posits is either Mannyng's or oral,because he does not examine how Mannyng's French source treats the same tales. Two contributors do, however, apply interesting comparative meth­ odologies.A section of Amodio's introduction illustrates how La3amon's Brut re-oralizes Wace's Anglo-Norman original through a series of formu­ laic flourishes drawing upon the diction of native English traditions.Alex­ andra Hennessey Olsen examines ten texts of Robert of Cysile, arguing that both scribal transmission and oral recitation account for manuscript varia­ tions,and concluding that the orally derived variations,though more radi­ cal than the scribal, more often preserve a sense of semantic continuity. Two essays on The Canterbury Tales represent the book's strongest efforts to resituate Middle English literature in its oral surroundings. Ward Parks, noted for close oral readings,asserts logically that Chaucer relies on many oral traditions. Parks is the contributor most attentive to questions of performance; this focus requires him to cite instances from recently ob­ served oral traditions and to argue by analogy-a problematic but neces­ sary step toward the reconstruction of vanished contexts,for the only fully recoverable oralities available to us are those currently practiced.Leslie K. Arnovick's reading of the various kinds of learned and folk oralities poten­ tially at work in The Franklin's Tale offers substantial insights because she, too,ties Chaucer's poem to specific modes of oral discourse present in his milieux. The masterpiece of the collection is Nancy Bradbury's "Literacy,Orality, and the Poetics of Middle English Romance," which begins by uninten- 169 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tionally calling most of the remaining essays into question: "Regarding the oral survivals in medieval romance as one literary device among others . . . seems an inadequate response to the argument for the special significance even of residual orality" (p. 41). She moves on to make compelling argu­ ments for memorization as a major component of medieval orality-both by citing medieval testimony and by examining variant texts in which memorization provides the best explanation of certain transpositions. She continues with comparisons revealing differences between texts obviously copied from written originals and those that carry the marks of memoriza­ tion. Bradbury ends by using the concept of metonymy to demonstrate how the formulas of Gamelyn and the Robin Hood poems, long derided as signs of hackwork, can be read on their own terms as devices integral to structuring organic and sometimes complex wholes. Bradbury's is the only essay that seriously considers the crucial question, What is at stake in searching for oral effects in works that survive only in writing? The remaining essays either argue from oversimplified schemas that op­ pose orality and writing (e.g., Dave Henderson's examination of "tradi­ tional" and "nontraditional" heroes in three Middle English poems) or sidestep the avowed purpose of the book by treating orality merely as a literary theme (Seth Lerer's "The Romance of Orality"). Two strengths-1) the occasional insistence that oral verse be read on its own metonymic terms and 2) the close comparative methods sometimes used to help establish what those terms may be-make this an important collection despite the failings of some of its parts. Indeed, by juxtaposing thoughtful comparative and contextual approaches with reductionist schemas, Amodio's book demonstrates the major point of its best essays: until we recognize that the ultimate metonymy of oral verse is social and that late-medieval English societies used writing and orality in thickly interwoven ways, literary approaches to orality will remain trapped in over­ simplified intratextuality. "Pure oral performance" is simply unrecoverable, but textual variation responding to specific aural and social contexts offers a path to partial, often substantial insight. CARL LINDAHL University of Houston 170