The Interaction Between Orality and Literacy in the Basque Country A
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The Interaction between Orality and Literacy in the Basque Country A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Vanesa Arozamena IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adviser: Ofelia Ferrán June 2010 i Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been written without the help of many people. First of all, I have to thank my committee members, Ofelia Ferrán, Ana Forcinito, Francisco Ocampo, Antonio Dorca and Joseba Gabilondo, for all their support. Ofelia, thank you for reading my dissertation chapters so carefully and for giving me so many useful comments. Francisco, thank you for allowing me to audit your pragmatics class and for all your input on Linguistics. Ana, thanks for all you help with feminist theory. Toni, thanks for having agreed to do a directed reading with me, and for your help with publishing my article. Joseba, thanks for having agreed to be on my committee and for believing in me, even before you met me. Thank you for reading some of my chapters and for having shared your article and information on Basque studies. I also want to thank René Jara for encouraging me to do my PhD, and to write about the Basque Country, as well as for all the conversations we had. I have been very lucky to meet two of the authors I write about in my dissertation, Kirmen Uribe and Bernardo Atxaga. They both came to Minneapolis, and I was able to attend their reading sessions. I want to thank both of them for having kept in touch with me, answering my questions and sharing articles with me. Without my friends’ help, I would not have been able to finish my dissertation, so I want to thank them. Thank you, Sara Mack, for having started our “club de escritación” and reading my first outlines. Thank you, Marcela Garcés, for reading some of my chapters and working with me in Folwell 401 and at Common Roots. Thank you, Adriana Bradford, for always believing that I could do this, and for offering to help me practice every presentation I have given in the last years, including my defense. Thank you, Liz ii Lake, for being such a good friend and always listening to me, and for the Club de Lulú. Thank you, Luisa Bejarano, for all the fun times. Thank you, Alejandro Enríquez and Julie Lynd for encouraging me to do my Ph. D. Thank you, Naomi Wood for all our conversations and dances. Thank you, Mandy Menke for all our conversations and lunches in 401. I also want to thank Matt Desing and Deyanira Rojas-Sosa. Thanks, both of you, for being such good roommates. Matt, thanks for all our breakfasts, coffees and conversations together. Deya, thank you for all your patience with me while I was writing, for working in coffee shops with me, for reading parts of my dissertation and giving me all those valuable comments, and for calming me down every time I was too nervous. Thanks to my friends from Spain: Ainara and Aintzane Dolara, for being such good friends “desde los cero años”, and the twelve girls from Galdakao, for being so good at keeping in contact with me after I moved to Minnesota. Thank you, Carmen Herrera, for spending all those summers in Las Rozas. Finally, I want to thank my family: abuela, mamá, papá, Graciela, Katxo and Manoli. Abuela, thanks for being such a good person and for visiting me in Minneapolis. Mamá and papá, thank you for bringing me up to believe that I could do more than I thought I could, for respecting my decision to come to Minnesota, and for encouraging me to do my Ph.D. Graciela, thank you for your sense of humor and for visiting me in Minneapolis three times. Thanks for coming for my commencement ceremony and your birthday with Andrés. Katxo, thank you for helping me with my homework every day when I was a kid. Manoli, thanks for these years after you married Katxo and for visiting me in Minneapolis. I love all of you very much. Finally, I want to thank Jay Gopalakrishnan. Jay, thank you so much for so many things: for always listening to me, iii for believing in me, to encourage me to keep going, for making me laugh, for everything. I love you. ¡Gracias! iv Abstract In the last decades, many authors have started choosing Basque, originally an oral language, as the language in which they write their literary works. Basque culture prizes oral manifestations, like improvised verses, legends and storytelling. The value placed on orality has an influence on recent texts written in Basque in a variety of manners, as authors use the same techniques that are usually utilized in spoken language, insert oral traditions or orature in the written works and get ideas for them from stories they were told orally. At the same time as oral traditions are influencing written texts, higher levels of literacy among verse improvisers is impacting many aspects of oral manifestations. Therefore, we can say that while oral tradition has an influence on novels written in Basque, literacy affects Basque oral manifestations. The Basque culture has traditionally been perceived as a rural and uncivilized one, partly due to the fact that it has been a predominately oral culture. In present day Western societies, literacy tends to be linked to civilization, whereas orality is often associated to lack of it. While some forms of Basque oral traditions and forms of orature started having prestige only when their performers began to be educated, Basque writers often use their literary works to undermine this polarized idea about literacy and civilization and orality and lack of it. Even though it has not always been like this, nowadays, Western societies rely on the written text in order to store and transmit information, as it is seen as permanent and invariant, while the oral text would be invariable and ephemeral. Basque forms of orature, oral traditions and written literary works often show us that the written word can easily disappear, while the oral word can remain over time. In conclusion, we cannot understand orality and literacy, v civilization and lack of civilization, and permanence and impermanence as opposed to each other, as all these concepts interact with each other. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i Abstract -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- iv Table of Contents -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- vi List of Figures ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ vii Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Chapter 1: Oral Traditions, Written Literature, and New Technologies ------------------ 58 Chapter 2: The Role of Women in Basque Oral Traditions and Written Literature ---- 113 Chapter 3: Questioning the Relationship between Orality and Lack of Civilization, and Literacy and Civilization in Basque Orature and Literature ------------------------------- 170 Chapter 4: Breaking with Assumptions: Questioning the Permanence of the Written Word and the Evanescence of the Oral Word ----------------------------------------------- 214 Conclusion --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 243 Works Cited ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 256 vii List of Figures Orality/literacy continuum --------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 1 Introduction This dissertation studies how the Basque Country has evolved from a predominately oral society into one that privileges writing. Throughout this process, oral traditions remain present, influencing written production, while, at the same time, those same oral traditions are influenced by the written word. Thus, we cannot understand orality and literacy as mutually exclusive. As Finnegan affirms: […] ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’ are not two separate and independent things; nor (to put it more concretely) are oral and written modes two mutually exclusive and opposed processes for representing and communicating information. On the contrary, they take diverse forms in differing cultures and periods, and are used differently in different social contexts and, insofar as they can be distinguished at all as separate modes rather than a continuum, they mutually interact and affect each other, and the relations between them are problematic rather than self-evident. (175) The present day Basque Country exemplifies how orality and literacy, far from being two independent poles, inevitably interact with each other, as I study in my dissertation. I also examine how both Basque oral traditions and literary works written in Basque reflect on certain assumptions related to primary oral cultures, often undermining them. Among these assumptions, there is the widespread idea that peoples who privilege orality are culturally inferior, lacking the capacity for abstract thinking. Finally, I also study how certain assumptions about the characteristics of both oral discourse and written 2 texts are questioned in literary works written in Basque. In order to approach these issues, it is necessary to define some terms. Definition of Terms Before starting my discussion about the interaction between orality and literacy in the Basque Country, I find it necessary to define and discuss some terms and concepts that are related to orality and literacy as they have been discussed by various critics. These terms can be placed