This post is inspired by an episode of
The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a daily 4 minute radio broadcast produced by the University of Houston's radio station, KUHF. The episode, entitled "
Revisiting Stirrups" explores the notion of the paradigm shift, as first articulated by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As Dr. Lienhard notes in the episode, Kuhn demonstrated that "science develops, not by
accretion, but by replacement -- by
paradigm replacement." In other words, we can't
make a scientific breakthrough unless we can somehow step out of our
own paradigm and conceive of a new one. Lienhard goes on to talk about
how many have attempted to point out flaws in Kuhn's bold assertions,
but no one has been able to undermine their fundamental validity. In fact, "[a]s Kuhn's detractors
have gone at him, and stripped him of his original
hyperbole, they've left him much stronger." Finally,
Lienhard compares the attacks on Kuhn's work to the criticism levied
against Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution: "I'm astonished by people who try to refute natural
selection by going back to Darwin himself. Never
mind that we've spent a century and a half weaving
the connecting tissue of evolution by natural
selection. You'd think Darwin had written the
last word on the subject, not the
first."
As I listened to this episode, I could not help but think of the
paradigm shift caused in Homeric studies caused by the fieldwork of
Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the former Yugoslavia. Parry's 1928
doctoral dissertation on the traditional epithet in Homer is a brilliant
demonstration of the economy and traditionality of Homeric diction, but
even Parry himself did not grasp the implications of this work
initially:
"My first studies were on the style of
the Homeric poems and led me to understand that so highly formulaic a
style could be only traditional. I failed, however, at the time to
understand as fully as I should have that a style such as that of Homer
must not only be traditional but also must be oral. It was largely due
to the remarks of my teacher (M.) Antoine Meillet that I came to see,
dimly at first, that a true understanding of the Homeric poems could
only come with a full understanding of the nature of oral poetry. It
happened that a week or so before I defended my theses for the doctorate
at the Sorbonne, Professor Mathias Murko of the University of Prague
delivered in Paris the series of conferences which later appeared as his
book La Poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle.
I had seen the poster for these lectures but at the time I saw in them
no great meaning for myself. However, Professor Murko, doubtless due to
some remark of (M.) Meillet, was present at my soutenance and at that
time M. Meillet as a member of my jury pointed out with his usual ease
and clarity this failing in my two books. It was the writings of
Professor Murko more than those of any other which in the following
years led me to the study of oral poetry in itself and to the heroic
poems of the South Slavs." [The Making of Homeric Verse, 439]
It was only when Parry went to Yugoslavia to observe the still
flourishing South Slavic oral epic song tradition that he came to
understand that Homeric poetry was not only traditional, but
oral—that
is, composed anew every time in performance, by means of a
sophisticated system of traditional phraseology and diction. For Parry,
witnessing the workings of a living oral epic song tradition was a
paradigm shift. Suddenly, by analogy with the South Slavic tradition,
the workings of the Homeric system of composition became clear to him.
Parry planned a series of publications based on his observations
and subsequent analysis of Homeric poetry which were never completed.
His surviving writings have been incredibly influential, but he died at
the age of 33, long before he had a chance to realize the many
implications of his fieldwork. It became the work of his young
undergraduate assistant, Albert Lord, to brings these ideas to the
world.
Albert Lord's
The Singer of Tales, was published in 1960, just two years before Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but nearly three decades after
his and Parry's initial fieldwork. In the intervening years, Lord not
only went to graduate school and became a scholar in his own right, he
was undergoing his own paradigm shift.
Albert Lord (1912-1991) went to Yugoslavia for the
first time at the age of 22, from June 1934-September 1935. Parry
described his activities as follows:
"…my assistant, Mr. Albert Lord, is shortly leaving for a month in
Greece. His help has been altogether indispensable to me, and I may say
that I have done twice as much work since I had his very able
assistance. He has relieved me altogether of the very long labeling and
cataloguing of the manuscripts and discs, has helped me with the keeping
of accounts and the presentations of reports, has typed some 300 pages
of my commentary on the collected texts, and most particularly he has
ably run the recording apparatus while we are working in the field, this
for the first time leaving me free to be with the singer before the
microphone, and to oversee and take part in the putting of questions to
the singers […] I myself feel the greatest gratitude to him for the help
which he has given me and the expedition is under the greatest
obligation to him." (From M. Parry, “Report on Work in Yugoslavia,
October 20, 1934-March 24, 1935,” Milman Parry Collection of Oral
Literature, p. 12. )
Albert Lord took photographs throughout the trip and kept a record of
his experiences with a view to submitting them to a popular magazine
such as
National Geographic. The essay that he wrote, dated March 1937,
was entitled “Across Montenegro: Searching for Gúsle Songs” and was
never in fact published. We can see already in this early essay a
fascination with two singers in particular that would shape much of
Lord’s subsequent professional scholarship on the the creative process
of oral tradional poetry and the analogy between the South Slavic and
Homeric song traditions. The first is known as Ćor Huso (“Blind Huso”), a
singer of a previous generation who was credited by many of the singers
Parry interviewed as being the teacher of their teacher, and the source
for all the best songs. Lord recounts one of these interviews
(conducted by Nikola Vujnović) as he describes their initial attempts to
find singers in Kolashin:
"In Kolashin we got to work. During the last century this was the home of
one of the greatest singers. The name of old One-eye Huso Husovitch was
a magic one in those days, and still is among the Turks (Moslems) in
the region further east where the old masters of Kolashin now dwell. We
sought eagerly for every trace of his tradition. What was he like? How
did he sing? How did he make his living? How did he die? And so on. We
had heard of him first from Sálih Uglian [sic] in Novi Pazar. From Huso
Salih had learned his favorite song about the taking of Bagdad and its
queen by Djérdjelez Aliya, hero of the Turkish border. In Salih’s own
words, caught by our microphone, we have a bit of the tradition of the
blind singer’s way of life.
Nikola: From whom did you learn your first Bosnian songs?
Salih: I learned Bosnian songs from One-eye Huso Husovitch from Kolashin.
N: Who was he? How did he live? What sort of work did he do?
S: He had no trade, only his horse and his arms, and he wandered
about the world. He had only one eye. His clothes and his arms were of
the finest. And so he wandered from town to town and sang to people to
the gusle.
N: And that’s all he did?
S: He went from kingdom to kingdom and learned and sang.
N: From kingdom to kingdom?
S: He was at Vienna, at Franz’s court.
N: Why did he go there?
S: He happened to go there, and they told him about him, and went
and got him, and he sang to him to the gusle, and King Joseph gave him a
hundred sheep, and a hundred Napoleons as a present.
N: How long did he sing to him to the gusle?
S: A month.
N: So there was Dutchman who liked the gusle that much?
S: You know he wanted to hear such an unusual thing. He had never heard anything like it.
N: All right. And afterwards, when he came back, what did he do with
those sheep? Did he work after that, or did he go on singing to the
gusle?
S: He gave all the sheep to his relatives, and put the money in his purse, and wandered about the world.
N: Was he a good singer?
S: There could not have been a better."
(Trans. by Milman Parry)
Lord later wrote that for Parry Huso came to symbolize “the Yugoslav
traditional singer in much the same way in which Homer was the Greek
singer of tales par excellence.” He continues: “Some of the best poems
collected were from singers who had heard Ćor Huso and had learned from
him” (Lord 1948b:40). Interestingly enough, Parry and Lord do not seem
to have questioned the existence of Huso, though, as John Foley has
demonstrated, he is clearly legendary or “at most… a historical
character to whom layers of legend have accrued” (Foley 1998:161). So
taken was Parry with the analogy between Homer and Huso that before his
death he planned a series of articles entitled “Homer and Huso” which
Lord completed based on Parry’s abstracts and notes.
The second singer highlighted in the essay is the one whose picture would grace the cover of
The Singer of Tales, that is to say, Avdo Međedović.
The Singer of Tales,
which publishes the results of Parry and Lord’s investigation of the
South Slavic song tradition and applies them to the Homeric
Iliad and
Odyssey,
was Lord’s fulfillment of Parry’s own plan to write a book of that
title. The singer referred to in the title is of course generic, because
much of what was groundbreaking about Parry and Lord’s work was their
demonstration of the system in which traditional oral poetry is
composed, a system in which many generations of singers participate. But
Lord’s essay makes clear (as does, to a lesser extent,
The Singer of Tales)
that there is also a particular singer behind the title that Parry and
later Lord used to denote their work. That singer is simultaneously Avdo
and Homer himself.
Just as Ćor Huso embodied for Parry the Yugoslav traditional singer,
Avdo was for Lord on a practical level a living, breathing example of a
supremely talented oral poet to whom Homer could be compared. Lord’s
Singer of Tales
is remarkable for its straightforward expostion of the practical
workings of the traditional system in which poets like Avdo composed
their songs; it is no surprise therefore that he found a great deal of
power in the concrete example that Avdo provided. Avdo dictated songs,
was recorded on disk, and was even captured on a very early form of
video called “kinescope.” After their initial encounter in the 1930’s,
Lord found him and recorded him again in the 1950’s. He was in many ways
the test case for Lord’s theories about the South Slavic (and by
extension the Homeric) poetic system.
The photograph of Avdo that was featured on the cover of
The Singer of Tales
was one that Lord had taken on his first trip to Yugoslavia and was
included among the images that were to accompany his unpublished essay
(see image above). The caption reads: “Avdo Medjedovitch, peasant
farmer, is the finest singer the expedition encountered. His poems
reached as many as 15,000 lines. A veritable Yugoslav Homer!”
Here is Lord’s fuller description of Avdo in the essay:
"Lying on the bench not far from us was a Turk smoking a
cigarette in an antique silver “cigárluk” (cigarette holder). He was a
tall, lean and impressive person. At a break in our conversation he
joined in. He knew of singers. The best, he said, was a certain Avdo
Medjédovitch, a peasant farmer who lived an hour way. How old is he?
Sixty, sixty-five. Does he know how to read or write? Nézna, bráte! (No,
brother!) And so we went for him… Finally Avdo came, and he sang for us
old Salih’s favorite of the taking of Bagdad in the days of Sultan
Selim. We listened with increasing interest to this short homely farmer,
whose throat was disfigured by a large goiter. He sat cross-legged on
the bench, sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. He sang
very fast, sometimes deserting the melody, and while the bow went
lightly back and forth over the string, he recited the verses at top
speed. A crowd gathered. A card game, played by some of the modern young
men of the town, noisily kept on, but was finally broken up. The next
few days were a revelation. Avdo’s songs were longer and finer than any
we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them
reached fifteen or sixteen thousand lines. Other singers came, but none
could equal Avdo, our Yugoslav Homer."
In these excerpts I think we can see how important Avdo was for Lord’s
earliest conception of Homer as oral poet. Whereas Parry’s never
completed articles comparing the South Slavic and Homeric traditions
focused on the hazy figure of Ćor Huso, Lord, when invited to give a
lecture on
La poesia epica e la sua formazione, entitled his talk
“Tradition and the Oral Poet: Homer, Huso, and Avdo Medjedović.”(See
Lord 1970.) As early as his 1948 article, “Homer, Parry, and Huso,” Lord
links Avdo directly with Parry’s Huso: “During the summer of 1935,
while collecting at Bijelo Polje, Parry came across a singer named Avdo
Međedović, one of those who had heard Ćor Huso in his youth, whose
powers of invention and story-telling were far above the ordinary.”
Lord’s
comments about Avdo, especially in these earliest descriptions of him,
focus on his excellence as a composer (despite the weakness of his
voice), his superiority to other poets, and the length of his songs. It
is not insignificant that in his unpublished essay Lord misestimates the
length of Avdo’s song at 15,000 to 16,000 verses, the approximate
length of the
Iliad, whereas in fact the longest song that Avdo
recorded was 13,331 verses long. By 1948 Lord was careful to report the
accurate total of Avdo’s verses, but he was also careful to point out
how extraordinary the length of Avdo’s songs were in comparison with his
fellow singers, whose songs averaged only a few hundred lines. Clearly
it was Lord’s first impression that Avdo provided the answer to the
still hotly debated Homeric Question.
It would be
easy to criticize Lord's youthful essay, and few people would find
it necessary to do so. And even if we jump forward, decades later, it
seems obvious that Lord conceived of the paradigm of a dictating oral
poet Homer because he was imagining him in Avdo’s image. The technology
used to record Avdo was cutting edge at that time, and Lord would never
have been so anachronistic as to suggest that Homer was recorded on
audio disk. But to assume the technologies required for writing (pen,
ink, loose or bound sheets of readily available paper, skilled scribes,
etc) for “Homer’s time” is an equally anachronistic projection. As much
as Lord’s work is responsible for the paradigm shift in Homeric studies
that has allowed many scholars to abandon the Homer as original genius
genre of criticism, he himself had his blind spots on this crucial
point. Lord could have his Homer and his oral tradition too.
Few people seem to be aware, however, that Lord all but retracted his dictation thesis in his 1991 collection of essays,
Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. There, together with the 1953 article, he included an addendum, from which I quote here:
"As I reconsidered very recently the stylization of a passage from Salih
Ugljanin’s “Song of Bagdad” that was found in a dictated version but not
in two sung texts, I was suddenly aware of the experience of listening
to Salih dictate… the pause interrupted neither Salih’s thought nor his
syntax… One might think that dictating gave Salih the leisure to plan
his words and their placing in the line, that the parallelism was due to
his careful thinking out of the structure. First of all, however,
dictating is not a leisurely process… I might add that not all singers
can dictate successfully. As I have said elsewhere, some singers can
never be happy without the gusle accompaniment to set the rhythm of the
singing performance."
Lord himself as far as I am aware never, in print, discussed the
implications of this important revsion of his 1953 argument. (Lord died
in the same year that
Epic Singers and Oral Tradition was published.) But it is also true that Lord never speculated about the historical circumstances under which the
Iliad and
Odyssey
might have been dictated. For Lord, the question of the text fixation
of the Homeric poems was not essential; rather he was concerned with the
dynamic process, that is to say their on-going recomposition in
performance.
Parry, on the other hand, did not get the chance to
rethink his earlier work, or to conduct further fieldwork or spend
decades studying the the South Slavic tradition and the Homeric poems as
Lord did. His early writings on the economy of Homeric diction are a
brilliant first step towards an entirely new way of conceiving of the
composition of the Homeric poems, but they are only the beginning. Like
Kuhn or Darwin, Parry's work has been assailed by many as mistaken in
this or that particular, or not sufficiently thorough so as to have
worked out all aspects of the system it seeks to describe in detail. As Mary
Ebbott and I discuss in our recent book,
Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush,
much scholarship has been devoted to refining Parry’s initial findings
about the economy of Homeric diction and the nature of the Homeric
formula. There is strong resistance among those who feel that Parry’s
work somehow minimizes the artistry of the poems or that the principles
he outlined restrict the creativity of poets composing in this medium.
Thus even those who accept Parry’s findings often seek to amend
significant aspects of his arguments. We feel that the scope of Parry’s
and Lord’s insights has been ignored, misread or misrepresented, or
dismissed too quickly. Some (though certainly not all) efforts to revise
Parry and Lord are built on a misunderstanding of the principles they
documented in their fieldwork and a lack of awareness of, or at least
appreciation for, the kind of meaning made possible by an oral poetic
tradition. That is not to say, however, that our approach and
interpretations in our book have not also greatly benefited from the
work of scholars who have sought to better understand such essential
concepts as the Homeric formula and the complex relationship between
orality and literacy in ancient Greece. There is, however, a significant
difference between scholarship that expands the central insights of
Parry and Lord’s work, even while modifying certain notions or
definitions, and scholarship that sets out to “prove” Parry (more often
than Lord) “wrong” in order to conclude, usually with no further
justification, that Homer wrote, or somehow “broke free” of the oral
tradition of these epics.
These criticisms, like those
cited by Dr. Lienhard against Kuhn and Darwin, seem to me to react to
Parry as if he had "written the last word on the subject, not the
first." As Dr. Lienhard concludes at the end of the episode:
Kuhn, White, and Darwin are fine reminders that
nothing is finished in its first incarnation. Did
the Wright Brothers get it wrong because they put
the tail in front? Was Edison wrong to record sound
on a wax cylinder instead of a CD? I suppose if we
need only to be absolutely right we'll shy away
from any of our important progenitors. But, if we
want to see creative change in full flower, we have
to go to the delicious flawed beginnings.
Bibliography
Lord, A. B. 1936. “Homer and Huso I: The Singer’s Rests in Greek and South Slavic Heroic Song.
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 67:106–113.
–––. 1938. “Homer and Huso II: Narrative Inconsistencies in Homer and Oral Poetry.”
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 69:439–445.
–––. 1948a. “Homer and Huso III: Enjambement in Greek and South Slavic Heroic Song.
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 79:113–124.
–––. 1948b. “Homer, Parry, and Huso.”
American Journal of Archaeology 52:34–44.
–––. 1953. “Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts.”
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 94:124–34.
–––. 1960/2000.
The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass. 2nd ed., ed. S. Mitchell and G. Nagy.
–––. 1970. “Tradition and the Oral Poet: Homer, Huso, and Avdo Medjedovic.”
Atti del Convegno Internazionale sul Tema: La Poesia Epica e la sua Formazione (eds. E. Cerulli et al.) 13–28. Rome.
–––. 1991.
Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y.
–––. 1995.
The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ithaca, N.Y.
Parry, A., ed. 1971.
The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford.
Parry, M. 1928.
L’épithète traditionelle dans Homère: essai sur un problème de style homérique. Paris. [Repr. and trans. in A. Parry 1971:1–190.]
