Toward An Oral Poetics
Toward An Oral Poetics
Toward An Oral Poetics
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extend access to New Literary History
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Toward an Oral Poetics
Dennis Tedlock
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508 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
A certain Assiniboine, a very handsome youth, with weaselskins on his coat and on
his breeches, with beads on all his clothes, and weaselskins also on his toque, and
horns, beside, on his headgear, he, standing right close to the fight, took yet no active
part in it, for he was awaiting his father, holding in his hand a lance and a tomahawk,
and a bowie knife; with his lance he had already transfixed two Blackfoot on the way
hither, and had tomahawked one, so that he had slain three, taking a part of each one's
scalp, in the thought, "Later I shall give them to my father," and taking also two of
their horses.7
As for the Chinookan stories reworked by Dell Hymes, it may still be that
live performances before Chinookan audiences were as terse and choppy as
the dictated texts left by Melville Jacobs. If so, Chinookan storytelling was
unusually rigid and formal, more like oratory and prayer than like the
storytelling found over much of the rest of North America. But even given
that the wording of these texts may not be far from that of former live perfor-
mances, we still have very little information as to how the full powers of the
voice were used.
In the case of living traditions the tape recorder should change all this,
linguists carry on almost as if it had never been invented: they listen to th
tapes with the same old alphabetic ear. From the point of view of sound, w
is published in the new Native American Texts Series of the Internationa
Journal of American Linguistics is not substantially different from texts t
in dictation by the founders of descriptive linguistics. When I myself f
went into the field in 1964, a linguist advised me that as soon as I h
transcribed my tapes of Zuni stories, I might as well erase them.8
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TOWARD AN ORAL POETICS 509
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510 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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TOWARD AN ORAL POETICS 511
II
Although several of the authors in this issue of New Literary History seem
to be writing from within the bound universe of structuralism, each of them
allows openings or gaps which from a strictly structural point of view are
contradictions. Claude Bremond, although much of what he writes and charts
runs along orthodox structuralist lines, suggests that the "symbolic reso-
nances" of the "clandestine ox" motif help account for the fact that it main-
tains its popularity even when the internal structure of the enveloping story
does not make its import clear. He thus allows this motif to refer to or to
"resonate with" something outside the closed system of the story. But at this
point he resembles Don Antonio, the schoolteacher discussed by Fernandez:
as an "apostle of Castilian high culture," Don Antonio finds Asturian folk
poetry to be gross rather than refined. Bremond, for his part, barely allows
himself to mention, as if in embarrassment, that The Clandestine Ox motif
implies a return to the womb. As if to elevate his whole discussion in ad-
vance, he named this motif after a modem French novel.
Harold Scheub sees a "fully fleshed story" as "dictated" by an "underlying
formal set of relationships," and like most structuralists he fails to quote so
much as a single sentence from an actual text. But when he allows the closed
story a relationship to the outside world, he lets slip a contradiction: "The
ancient images, when joined to images of the contemporary world, provide a
profoundly traditional context for perceiving the objective world; this pro-
cess endows that world with a design and therefore a meaning that has no
existence outside the work of art." He came within a hair's breadth of allow-
ing meaning to exist between the story and the world, but then drew quickly
back into "the work of art," where "meaning" comes only from internal
"design." The aesthetic implied here is identical with that governing much
contemporary Western art, but it is clear even from Scheub's work that the
Xhosa understand stories to be something more than "pure form."
Dell Hymes declares himself to be a structuralist, but the paradox is that he
lets us look at the full text (though a dictated one) and a full translation. His
analysis literally runs alongside the text: he does not commit the fatal act of
allowing "scene i, stanza B, verse 4" to replace "Shush! Your uncle's wife!"
as part of some final algebraic reduction. He even admits that the pattern he
describes is "a little loose," but then he closes back in by adding, "I can only
say that it is flexible in keeping with specific narrative situations, but ines-
capable."'6 He has a tendency to want the text to fold back only upon itself,
which is why he finds it difficult to "assign closings a place" in his
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512 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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TOWARD AN ORAL POETICS 513
opposed metrical:nonmetrical
first writers to do this, said i
the OED).
When I first made my claim
it) has no existence outside the
better understood as "drama
written prose fiction, I did no
found a way (radically differe
narrative into lines.19 What I
contains patterned repetition o
lel phrases to whole episodes, an
we call "poetry" and "song" th
stantively was that spoken nar
them, and that the content of s
cal (as opposed to prosaic). The
delivered, and in Zuni narrativ
purely formal considerations
whole sentences) in a single b
from predicate (or even a noun
extreme.20 These syncopated
which correspond to the gro
dramatic in a suspenseful pa
sentence becomes five lines:21
Even the longer pauses that sometimes accompany so large a formal bound-
ary as a shift of scene are frequently syncopated, falling after the narrator has
already started the first sentence of the new scene.22
If we wish to clear some breathing space for an oral poetics, the contem-
porary notion of "prose" can have no place in it except as a source of confu-
sion. Oral cultures no more have an oral equivalent of written prose than
they have motor-driven pipe organs. What they do have is poetry. Poetry in
the Aristotelian and in the pre-seventeenth-century English senses, and
poetry in a sense that Charles Olson was beginning to recover.
That brings us to George Quasha, who presents the poetics of a post-
modern poetry that works back toward the oral. Even Quasha lingers within
modern structuralism when he says (with Charles Stein) that the "processual
poem" of a poet like Robert Kelly is "measured by itself, and ultimately
referential to nothing outside its own embodiment," and when he says that
the poetic act is "language in the act of being true to itself." But as Ricoeur
has it, human discourse by its very nature "refers backwards and forwards,
to a speaker and to a world."23 If the poet writes in the first, second, or third
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514 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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TOWARD AN ORAL POETICS 515
III
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516 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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TOWARD AN ORAL POETICS 517
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
NOTES
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518 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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TOWARD AN ORAL POETICS 519
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