JOHN MILES FOLEY

ORAL TRADITION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

This chapter focuses on the modern rediscovery of ancient Greek and its implications for the study of Homeric epic. It will thus be concerned not only with the demonstration of the poems' oral traditional nature-an interesting and important phenomenon in itself- but more fundamentally with the question 'So what?' If Homeric verse emerges from an unwritten art of poetry and is com­ mitted to text only quite late in its development, how does this cultural, historical, and technological circumstance affect the way we read the and Oc[yssey? The discussion will consist of four sections: (I) a brief history of the early research conducted by Milman Parry and ; (II) a sketch of the most prominent features of the so­ called Oral Theory; (III) significant replies to and revisions in the Theory; and (IV) the implications of oral tradition for 's art. I

TIe Modem Rediscovery if an Ancient Technique

When the American classicist Milman Parry came on the scene in the mid-1920s, the had two basic answers, nei­ ther of them definitive. One faction, much the stronger and better organized, argued for what amounted to many : these Ana­ lysts treated the Iliad and Oc[yssey as a kind of archaeological dig, searching for textual strata of different authorship and assuming a

I I limit my remarks primarily to the Oral Theory (also called the Oral-Formu­ laic Theory), which was developed in Homeric studies and which, with the spread of this approach to more than 100 language areas, has become much more than theoretical. In doing so let me also note the important contributions of E. Havelock (esp. 1963 and 1986), W. Ong (esp. 1982), and others who have treated the 'oral culture' of ancient Greece. Since an exhaustive bibliography and history of Oral Theory already exists elsewhere (see respectively J. M. Foley (1985), with updates in the journal Oral Tradition, and Foley (1988), rpt. 1992; J. Foley, ed., Teaching Oral Traditions (New York, Modem Language Association, forthcoming), the first section will be relatively brier See especially M. W. Edwards's three-part essay on 'Homer and Oral Tradition' (1986b; 1988; 1992). ORAL TRADITION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 147 master editor who joined the originally separate pieces together into coherent wholes. On the other side stood the Unitarians, who main­ tained a firm faith in a single gifted individual solely responsible for creating both poems. While one school utilized apparent discrepan­ cies in language and narrative logic to map the edges of supposed 'tectonic plates' in the extant poems, the other submerged such minor infelicities in a theory of unitary authorship and composition. Parry's great achievement was to offer a third alternative that rationalized the disparate evidence presented by both factions and moved the discussion to a new level. That alternative was the hypo­ thesis of a Homeric oral tradition, a generations-old technique of verse-making that was the collective inheritance of many singer­ poets, or aoidoi, in ancient Greece. The poems as we have them, he reasoned, were neither the pastiches of the Analysts nor the modern, free-standing products envisioned by the Unitarians; rather they rep­ resented the culmination of a process that brought the stories from probable roots in the Mycenaean period through the textless Dark Age to their eventual recording. Their most impoitant vehicle was neither tablet nor papyrus, he contended, but the spoken word. Parry began his research by ascribing the Homeric poems to a tradition, an important emphasis to which we will return below. That is, his first approximation, as presented in the 1925 M.A. thesis and the two doctoral theses of 1928,2 contained no mention of the 'oral' term in the equation, but concentrated exclusively on establishing the inherited compositional technique behind the Iliad and Otfyssey. Basing his conception of the poems' pre-textual origin and dynamics on a meticulous study of the texts, Parry demonstrated the system­ atic nature of much of the diction, pointing out the degree to which Homer (and now his tradition) depended on familiar, repetitive phrases such as 'much-suffering divine Odysseus,' 'swift-footed Achilles,' or 'gray-eyed Athena.' Such phrases he caHedfimnulas, defining this unit of phraseology as 'an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea.'3 Formulas-under­ stood as 'chunks' of language-recurred because they were useful to the composing poet, because they were part of his poetic tradition.

2 'A Comparative Study of Diction as One of the Elements of Style in Early Greek Epic Poetry,' M.A. thesis (University of , Berkeley), 1925, first pub­ lished in Parry (1971) 421-36; 'The Traditional Epithet in Homer' and 'Homeric Formulae and Homeric Metre,' tr. by A. Parry, op. cit. 1- 190 and 191-239. 3 In 'The Traditional Epithet in Homer' (1971) 13.