| The Future of Literary Studies |
Dell Hymes
I would like to suggest that literary study of the future will have oral narrative as a branch.
Why? Because spoken narratives are being found to be, not paragraphs, one after the other, as usually presented, but sets of lines, one after the other. To be coherent in terms of implicit patterning of such sets. As organized sequences of lines, they are a kind of poetry. Often they reward attention to their development, line by line.
This is known for a a number of narratives in English that I, my wife, and students of ours, have studied (some of them students in this department). It is true not only for stories, but also for at least some sermons, for William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, for stories told by Bill Cosby and Garrison Keillor.
Such patterns, like many of those in grammar, are something speakers use fluently, but mostly do not articulate. There is implicit patterning of lines, and of groups of lines, patterning mostly out of awareness. There are levels of patterning. There are lines that can be called verses, groups of verses that can be called stanzas, groups of stanzas that can be called scenes, groups of scenes that constitute acts, sometimes groups of acts that can be called parts.
This has been found in texts in some eighty languages. In relation to many such texts, English has a special place. The artistry of narratives in many languages will be known to future generations through English. The artistry of narratives in many Native American languages, for example. To be sure, there are efforts to maintain such languages, even to revive them. Yet even if children acquire speaking acquaintance with a language of their heritage, that seldom includes command of traditional stories in it. And there are impressive narratives in languages unlikely ever to be spoken again. Here literary scholarship can be a kind of repatriation, restoring something of traditional heritage to those from it came, in a form in which it can be theirs (and ours as well).
Some find it hard to think of finding form without hearing. And to be sure, in heard stories tone groups are the starting point. But the implicit form of transcribed stories can be recovered, so that we and future generations can recognize and share their artistry. Some of you know that parts of the Hebrew and Greek bibles increasingly are presented, not just in paragraphs, but in lines. In English Beowulf is a parallel. The manuscript goes from margin to margin, word by word, not verse by verse, but verses were found. There are no recordings, of course, but persuasive performances are possible. 1
One motto, then, is NOT PARAGRAPHS, BUT LINES. Find the lines and the relations among them. There are a number of kinds of cues. Change of place, change of time. Turns at talk. Initial particles such as ‘Now’, ‘Then’, ‘So’.
A surprising fact is that languages appear to choose between two general modes: three and five step relations, two and four. But communities may differ. Three and five step relations are characteristic in English in the United States, so far as is known, but in Irish English relations of 2 and 4 appear. Other possibilities may be discovered. I thought there were only two, but when I tackled a Mohave epic, it insisted on relations of 5 and 2. And where one type is characteristic, the other may enter to express gender.
Relations among lines are always more than a matter of counting. They involve ‘arousal and satisfaction of expectation’ (Kenneth Burke). In Chinookan, for example, onset, ongoing, outcome is a common pattern.
A second motto is TEXTS FIGHT BACK. If coherent relations among lines are not found, the fault is probably with the analyst, not the narrator.
In short, oral narratives are organizations of lines, a kind of poetry. Of course, there are oral narratives whose lines have internal measure, meter. In many places, perhaps everywhere in the world, oral narratives consist of lines sharing external relationships. One can speak of metrical verse and of measured verse (apologies to Dr. Williams). Such measure is one aspect of what Roman Jakobson (1960: 368-9) called ‘equivalence’).
An element of visual performance enters in presenting such texts (see Drucker 1998). There are choices to be made. When I first published oral narratives as lines, I did so as a scholar who felt compelled to account for everything. At the left of a page I put letters identifying each successive verse, each stanza. On the right side I put a number for every line. I wanted to convince other scholars that what I took to be there was indeed there.
Now I address readers, wanting them to enter into the story, I subordinate apparatus. On the right, a number only every fifth line. Indication of stanza and scene ont the right as well. Reading from left to right, the first thing one sees are the words. One could read the whole narrative without attending to analytic indications. (I do add a profile thatdoes accounting.)
Once an analysis into sets of lines is available, others might experiment further with visual performance.
[At the talk two handouts were exhibited to show the difference between a traditional mode of presentation, and one in terms of lines, verses, etc.] The text is the Sun’s myth, told in 1891 to Franz Boas by Charles Cultee. The first page is a xerox of the Kathlamet (and English) of the last page, published in occasional paragraphs. Two stapled pages show the Kathlamet and the English in verses, stanzas, and scenes, and as the VI to the right indicates, the final act. The myth consists of relations of three and five until the end. There it has two final stanzas (B, C). Each stanza has two verses. Those of the woman (Sun) each begin with ‘Now’. Those of the man (a chief) each have ‘there’. (Like many Biblical couplets, the second line of each verse adds something.)
{I read the the two stanzas].
1. Knowing that the Beowulf manuscript was found on pages written margin to margin, I once tried to find the name of the person who recognized that what was written actually consisted of lines, alliterative lines. That person would be the patron saint of the kind of work I have been doing, No luck. Presumably Thorkelin recognized what was going on.
| TEI markup by John Unsworth |