University of Oregon

Review: Defining the Characteristics of Oral Style

Author(s): Jeff Opland
Review by: Jeff Opland
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 361-371
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771599
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 REVIEW ESSAY

JEFF OPLAND

Defining the Characteristics

of Oral Style

TRADITIONAL ORAL EPIC: THE "ODYSSEY," "BEOWULF," AND THE SERBO-CROATIAN RETURN
SONG. By John Miles Foley. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1990. xi, 424 p.

EPic SINGERS AND ORAL TRADITION. By Albert Bates Lord. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1991. xii, 262 p.

An admirer of Lawrence of Arabia, Milman Parry was cut from the same romantic
cloth as Heinrich Schliemann. Imbued with a peculiar conviction by their scrutiny of
the Homeric texts, both men sought vindication in the field, Schliemann in Turkey,
Parry in Yugoslavia. The photograph of a dapper Parry swathed in native costume
and sporting ajaunty cigarette holder recalls the photograph of a somewhat uncom-
fortable Sophie Schliemann draped triumphantly by her husband with the jewels of
Helen. Both men altered the course of Homeric studies: Schliemann revealed the

walls
tion. of windy Troy; Parry produced a credible Homer and solved the Homeric Qu.es-

A seminal figure in the scholarship of folklore and the folklore of scholarship,

Parry was accompanied on his extended Yugoslavian field trip in 1934 and 1935 by
his student assistant, Albert Lord. One of those whom the gods loved best, Parry died
too young in December 1935; for over 55 years, Lord served as a living link with his
legendary mentor.
Parry's papers were collected and edited in 1971 by his son Adam, a classicist tragi-
cally cast in his father's mold. Adam Parry's introduction to the volume offered an
assessment of his father's work and its influence. "The mantle of Parry," Adam wrote,
"has especially fallen on Lord" (p. xlvii). Lord trod faithfully in Parry's footsteps: in
1960 he published his classic comparative study The Singer of Tales, taking as his title
the title Parry had chosen for the book he had intended to write. For John Miles
Foley, bibliographer and historian of the scholarship initiated by Parry and Lord,
The Singer of Tales "will always be the single most important work in the field, be-
cause, simply put, it began the field as we now know it" (Theory p. 41). With the
appearance of Lord's first book since the publication of The Singer of Tales, with the
appearance of Foley's first extended theoretical statement, and with the death of
Lord in 1991, it seems appropriate to ask whether Parry's mantle has now passed
from Lord to Foley.

As Adam Parry's introduction to his father's collected papers makes clear (see es-
pecially pp. xli-xliii), Milman Parry's ideas evolved in the course of his short career.
His influential conclusion, proposed in his M.A. dissertation (1923) and demon-
strated in his French theses (1928), was based solely on textual analysis: for Parry, in
his son's formulation, it became "the fundamental axiom of Homeric study: the de-
pendence of the choice of words and word-forms on the shape of the hexameter
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

line" (p. xix). Later he perceived that traditional necessarily meant oral, broadened
his comparative perspective, undertook his fieldwork in Yugoslavia, and proclaimed
a dichotomy between oral and written literature: "The one part of literature," he
wrote in 1933, "is oral, the other written" (p. 377). His Yugoslavian field experience
shifted the focus of his attention from formulas to themes.

Adam Parry's characterization of Lord's role as Parry's disciple bears implications

of crusade and missionary zeal: "the primary action" of the scholarship of Lord and
another disciple,J.A. Notopoulos, he wrote,
has been a reassertion of the fundamental theses of Parry's own work. They
have insisted on the correctness and the revolutionary usefulness of Parry's
views, have reiterated and publicized these views to student and scholarly au-
diences, and have zealously defended them against doubters and unbelievers.
In the history of Homeric scholarship since 1935, they must appear largely as
the Defenders of the Faith. A notable feature of Lord's book, The Singer of
Tales, is its apparent assumption much of the time that the reader knows noth-
ing of Parry's concept of oral poetry and consequently must be sedulously
indoctrinated. (p. xlviii)
Milman Parry came to formulate his aim and the central thrust of his research into
oral poetry in these terms:
The purpose of the present collection of oral texts has then been made
[sic] not with the thought of adding to the already vast collections of that
poetry, but of obtaining evidence on the basis of which could be drawn a se-
ries of generalities applicable to all oral poetries; which would allow me, in
the case of a poetry for which there was not enough evidence outside the po-
ems themselves of the way in which they were made, to say whether that poetry
was oral or not, and how it should be understood if it was oral. In other words
the study of the Southslavic poetry was meant to provide me an exact know-
ledge of the characteristics of oral style, in the hope that when such
characteristics were known exactly, their presence or absence could definitely
be ascertained in other poetries, and those many large and small ways in
which the one oral poetry differed from written poetry for its understanding
could be carried over to the Homeric poems.
A method is here involved, that which consists in defining the characteristics of
oral style. (p. 440)
As late as 1985, Lord stood defiant guard over Parry's corpus by asserting of this very
passage, "I still maintain that Parry's statement quoted above is an admirable and
significant one, and that nothing in it needs to be changed. The name of the game of
all this writing is actually to define 'the characteristics of oral style"' ("Nature," p.
326). To this end Lord devoted a life in scholarship.
Epic Singers and Oral Tradition consists of 13 essays produced by Lord between
1952 and 1985, two of which are published for the first time. The volume, prefaced
by a 14-page introduction, includes justly admired favorites, like his eulogy to the
greatest singer he and Parry encountered, "Avdo MededoviC, guslar," and treats a
spread of traditions from Central Asia to Anglo-Saxon England. Just as Parry's inter-
est seemed to shift from formula to theme, narrative patterns rather than formulas
form the preoccupation of most of the essays: "Homeric echoes in Bihad," "The
Kalevala, the South Slavic epics, and Homer," "Beowulf and Odysseus," "Interlock-
ing mythic patterns in Beowulf" "Notes on Digenis Akritas and Serbo- Croatian epic,"
"Narrative themes in Bulgarian oral-traditional epic and their medieval roots," "Cen-

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 REVIEW ESSAY

tral Asiatic and Balkan epic."

The polemic defense of Milman Parry that Adam Parry noted as characteristic of
Lord's work is a prominent feature: in his introduction, Lord writes that despite the
controversy aroused by his 1953 essay "Homer's originality: oral dictated texts," "I
continue to believe firmly in its basic tenets" (p. 4), and notes that a previously un-
published conference paper originally read in 1984 was designed "to correct some of
the misunderstandings of Parry's 'oral theory' " (p. 5); "Formula density," he contin-
ues to assert in 1985, "is still a reliable criterion for oral composition under certain
circumstances which need further review" (p. 26). However, despite his heroic pos-
ture, upraised sabre swept on high, astride the steed of the oral theory, Lord came to
qualify the orthodoxy of Parry as formulated in The Singer of Tales in a way that calls
into question the very validity of the theory.
Central to Parry's method is a search for universals, an attempt to define "the
characteristics of oral style." This presumes that the concept "oral style" is capable of
definition, that it is quite distinct from "written style," and that once defined
(through a study of traditions yielding full data) it will be recognizable in other tradi-
tions, especially those for which details of performance context are lacking. The
"living laboratory" of Yugoslavian epic song could yield a set of oral characteristics;
the presence of such features in the Homeric texts would lead to the conclusion that
the Homeric epics were, like the Yugoslavian songs, products of an oral tradition,
and that an illiterate Homer composed his oral poetry just as the Yugoslavian guslar
does.

Initially at least, Lord enthusiastically engaged in the quest for universals. Oral
style was sought in all forms of oral poetry, and all genres of folklore: his introduc-
tion to Merlin Ennis's collection of Angolan folk tales, published two years after The
Singer of Tales, proclaims that "the techniques and processes at work in the
Ovimbundu tales, the patterned mingling of themes and thematic sequences that we
have just been describing, is the same as those seen in oral epic among the Southern
Slavs and in such cultural masterpieces as The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer"
("Comparative analysis," p. xxix). In the face of critical responses to the oral theory,
however, Lord steadily retreated. As conflicting data from diverse traditions
emerged, Lord became more sensitive to generic distinctions: at the same time as he
welcomed the application of the theory to Chinese lyric poetry, he did not expect its
fruitful application to non-narrative African praise poetry ("Perspectives," pp. 5-6).
Confronted by critics with varieties of oral style and of oral composition, Lord came
to write in Epic Singers and Oral Tradition of "oral-traditional epic" rather than "oral
epic"; "improvisation" was not "free improvisation" but "composition by formula and
theme." The boundless horizons of a universal oral style shrank to the particular oral
style of the Yugoslavian tradition.
The elements of Parry's theory are tightly interlocked. An illiterate singer learns to
master a poetic diction that has been forged in the crucible of venerable tradition.
He learns to express the ideas essential to his narratives within the traditional meter
so that he can compose metrically correct lines as he performs them, for he com-
poses his songs in performance. Thus there is no "correct" version of any one story in
song, only discrete actualizations of it by singers within the tradition; different per-
formances of the same song, even by the same singer, will thus be verbally distinct
despite recurrent similarities, since the singer never consciously commits a text to
memory. He has no concept of a fixed text, no need of writing. Indeed, the ability to
write and the ability to compose oral poetry are mutually exclusive: there can be no
"transitional" texts, exhibiting the characteristics of oral style but composed by a

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

literate author steeped in the tradition. An oral poet could dictate his text to a scribe,
but he would not himself be able to write it down since acquired literacy would de-
stroy his oral art. Thus the Homeric poems were oral dictated texts, transcriptions of
unique performances by a singer who participated in an ongoing traditional trans-
mission of composition and recomposition.
Enabling the singer to perform, to express himself anew with each successive per-
formance, is a battery of tools essential to his art: the formula, a ready-made metrical
word or phrase; the formulaic expression, a word or phrase modeled on an existing
formula; and the theme, a unit of narrative. The presence of these characteristics of
oral style in significant proportions marks a text as oral; their absence just as clearly
marks the text as a literate production. For Parry, once the characteristics of oral
style are known exactly, "their presence or absence could definitely be ascertained in
other poetries, and those many large and small ways in which the one oral poetry
differed from written poetry for its understanding could be carried over to the
Homeric poems." For Lord, for whom "There is nothing in the [oral] poem that is
not formulaic" (Singer, p. 47), "An oral text will yield a predominance of clearly de-
monstrable formulas, with the bulk of the remainder 'formulaic,' and a small
number of nonformulaic expressions. A literary text will show a predominance of
nonformulaic expressions, with some formulaic expressions, and very few clear for-
mulas" (Singer, p. 130). Hence the Parry-Lord theory came to be known as the oral
theory, or the oral-formulaic theory, with formula analysis as one of its principal
methods.

Lord tenaciously asserted the details of this oral theory. The inclusion in Epic Sing-
ers and Oral Tradition of his 1952 paper on oral dictated texts testifies to his
persistent belief in the dichotomy between oral and written style: "the oral poet, if he
is at all literate, can have only a smattering of writing, if he is to remain an oral poet.
Had he enough facility in writing to record 21,000 lines of text, his style could not be
that of an oral technique, which Homer's demonstrably is" (p. 45). Yet even in The
Singer of Tales cracks appear in the- smooth facade. The statement that "In making
his lines the singer is not bound by the formula. The formulaic technique was devel-
oped to serve him as a craftsman, not to enslave him" (Singer, p. 54) admits that the
formula is not essential to the oral poet, a concession confirmed by the claim that
"We should not be surprised to find a fair number of nonformulaic expressions in
such a talented oral singer as Avdo Mededovi&. It would be fantastic to expect that a
gifted poet who has thought in poetic form all his life should not have sufficient
mastery of that form to be able not only to fit his thought into it but also to break it at
will" (Singer, p. 131). Apparently an illiterate traditional singer was not utterly de-
pendent on formulas, and the text produced by an oral poet could be relatively free
of formulas.

The central assumption of the oral theory is the rigid dichotomy between oral and
written literature: there is a definable oral style distinguishable from the style of a
literate author. Yet alongside Lord's dogged defense of this dichotomy in Epic Sing-
ers and Oral Tradition, there appear essays that concede the existence of transitional
texts. The eighteenth-century Franciscan monk, Andrija Kaitid-Mio'ii, "could write
in both oral and written styles" (p. 27), admits Lord, asserting in the same breath the
dichotomy of styles; a literate singer who copies a fixed text "makes changes, tending
to express some lines in the formulas to which he is most accustomed in his own
singing. Even as copyist he remains to some extent a traditional singer" (p. 185).
This is a point argued by Lord's critics for many years, a point steadfastly resisted by
Lord but finally conceded in detail in a significant essay published in 1986 ("Merg-

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 REVIEW ESSAY

ing," not included in the volume under review). The implications of the concession
for the oral theory are grave. If a literate text can reveal a high proportion of formu-
las-or if an oral poet is not bound to employ formulas-then the incidence of
formulas in a text can reveal nothing definitive about the origin of the text, and the
tight chain of method and theory, with this link missing, falls to the ground.
For many this will come as old news. But although the Parry-Lord theory in the
strict sense may no longer be valid, other concerns of Parry, pursued by Lord, still
constitute grist for a lively debating mill. Parry hoped that a definition of oral style
would enable him to say of a text "whether that poetry was oral or not, and how it
should be understood if it was oral." We may not be able to say whether a text was
oral or not, but the problem of how to understand it as an oral text continues to
exercise scholars. John Miles Foley's first book-length theoretical statement seeks to
prepare the ground for just such an approach, for "that is precisely the legacy and
challenge of oral literature research to date: namely, to attempt the untried trajec-
tory from structural explanation to a unified poetics for these texts" (p. 1).

The first chapter of Foley's Traditional Oral Epic offers a "reading program" for
oral or "oral-derived" texts. However, the implications of this program are left to a
separate book (Immanent Art): since "the implementation of the reading program
can proceed only after a firm foundation in the comparative philology of oral epic
poetry exists, the present volume will concentrate on the various levels of structure
in comparative oral epic" (p. 1). Foley acknowledges the weakness of the oral-formu-
laic theory, and admits transitional texts. "The formulaic test as it has generally been
carried out cannot prove oral provenance" (p. 4), he writes. On the oral/written di-
chotomy espoused by Parry and Lord, he is equally explicit: "If we must then leave
some of our manuscripts in an intermediate category, let us make sure that we opt
for that more accurate (if finally indeterminate) characterization rather than set-
tling for the apparently simple but imprecise model of 'oral versus written' texts" (p.
5). Foley proposes the term "oral-derived texts" for "the manuscript or tablet works
of finally uncertain provenance that nonetheless show oral traditional characteris-
tics" (p. 5). The oral/written dichotomy is discarded, yet the quest for the
characteristics of oral style continues.
Lord equivocated on the genres to which his theory applied; Foley is quite firm. As
a matter of principle, generic distinctions obstruct comparative study:
What must be observed rigorously in every comparative undertaking, how-
ever, is the integrity of genre. One simply cannot expect a cogent analysis to
come out of a comparison of, for example, riddles and epics; the generic as-
sumptions implicit in the forms must be at variance, and this variance
seriously reduces, if not actually invalidates, the legitimacy of the proposed
comparison. If we wish to include a number of genres in our survey of an oral
culture, we need to proceed in our analyses along methodological lines which
respect the principle of genre-dependence. (p. 3)
In a second caveat, Foley urges caution in the comparison of traditions:
This simple principle of tradition-dependence, that is, of respect for a given
literature's linguistic and prosodic integrity, has consistently been ignored by
comparatists eager to achieve what may seem like ground-breaking results but
which are actually based on flawed assumptions from the start. Along with
genre-dependence, this attention to language-dependent features would
clear away much of the confusion which presently impedes progress in oral
literature research. (p. 4)

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The tendency of both these two principles is centripetal, an impulse diametrically

opposed to the universalizing tendency of Parry and Lord. Foley's theoretical and
methodological stances complicate rather than facilitate comparison.
Foley's reading program advocates a consideration of the nature of the text and its
status as oral or oral-derived, and sensitivity to the principles of genre-dependence
and tradition-dependence. Under the latter heading, he proposes an assessment of
the text in its original language with respect for its philology, an appraisal through
both comparison and contrast with other traditions, if possible on national, local,
and idiolectal levels. As a fifth and final item on the program, Foley urges a reading
of the text in both synchronic and diachronic contexts (p. 11). This program, in
many ways a response to the methodological excesses of earlier proponents of the
oral theory, is rigorous and complex. Yet often it leads to a denial of a basis for
quantitative comparison.
Chapter 2, for example, looks at "the comparability of the documents themselves
[that is, the Homeric texts, Beowulf and 13 sung and dictated return songs collected
by Parry from three guslari in the Stolac region] in order to assess as exactly as pos-
sible what authority each has in presenting its oral or oral-derived poem" (p. 19).
The conclusion of Foley's illuminating exposition of the transmission of the
Homeric texts must come as something of a surprise to fans of Parry and Lord: "while
the Serbo-Croatian material is unambiguously oral and presents the welcome oppor-
tunity to measure a living oral tradition quantitatively, the Homeric poems as they
have come down to us are oral-derived and simply cannot be equated with the
[Serbo-Croatian] epske pjesme for the purposes of comparison" (p. 30). A similar ex-
amination of the Beowulf manuscript yields a similar conclusion: "since the Homeric
and Old English manuscript records remain mysterious and idiosyncratic, no scholar
interested in precise and sensible analysis can feel justified in quantitative compari-
son of these two remnants of two great traditions" (p. 38). Undaunted, Foley moves
confidently inward to tradition-dependent analysis, "to invoke the remainder of the
Old English poetic canon as a context (with proper calibration)" (p. 38). As he ex-
plains, his purpose in the book is not to attempt a quantitative assessment but rather
"to clarify the tradition-dependent character of formulaic phraseology in each tradi-
tion" (p. 30). Foley can still invoke "the universal theorem of formulaic style" (p. 53),
but the comparisons between traditions that Parry and Lord facilitated are severely
restricted, and the quest for universal characteristics of oral style is considerably
complicated.
Presumably the "universal theorem of formulaic style" is Parry's conviction that
oral style is necessarily formulaic. But Foley argues against a meaningful comparison
of the Old English and the Homeric formula. Acknowledgment of "the tradition-
dependence of prosody" (p. 65) implies admission that "meters must be as different
and idiosyncratic as the languages that spawned them" (p. 68). So a tradition's for-
mulas must be examined in the context of that tradition's prosody: a highly complex
70-page discussion of outer and inner prosody in the three traditions constitutes
Foley's third chapter, which concludes: "we have discovered in the present chapter
that each epic tradition has an idiosyncratic, tradition-dependent prosody that we
may expect to exist in symbiosis with a correspondingly idiosyncratic and tradition-
dependent phraseology" (p. 120). And, as we have come to expect, the conclusion
rejects comparison between traditions: "the phraseologies in symbiosis with these
prosodies cannot be universally comparable; a blanket concept of the formula, for
example, fails to take account of the inherent variety of what are finally different
natural languages fostering different prosodies" (p. 127).

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 REVIEW ESSAY

The principles enunciated in these three introductory chapters find practical ap-
plication in the seven that follow, before Foley sums up his argument briefly in a
four-page conclusion. Three chapters are devoted to a study of traditional phraseol-
ogy in each of the three traditions, and three more to thematic structure; a study of
story-pattern in the Serbo-Croatian return song concludes the sequence. The isola-
tion of each tradition in separate chapters is in accordance with Foley's insistence on
the principle of tradition-dependence. Despite his constant reference and deference
to them, Foley characterizes the assumptions and methods of Parry and Lord as sim-
plistic, and offers in their stead a more complex mode of analysis.
"Let us say at the outset that, if all great literature is more complex than the naive
reader can suspect, it is equally true that this complexity, once discovered, can be
rendered in simple terms": thus Frederick C. Crews in The Pooh Perplex (p. 4). For
Foley, the characteristics of oral style are more complex than anyone has suspected;
but that complexity can apparently be rendered only in appropriately complex
terms. The difference between his position and that of Parry and Lord is the differ-
ence between analytical simplicity and complexity: "formulaic diction in
Serbo-Croatian oral epic does not amount simply to a collection of equivalent units
but is most faithfully understood as a complex and responsive spectrum of phraseol-
ogy" (p. 172; my italics). Indeed, Foley valorizes complexity: "By formulating rules
for the phraseological events we perceive as lines, we begin to restore a lost complex-
ity to oral traditional diction; in effect, the point of view advocated in this chapter,
and for that matter throughout the volume, allows us to 're-complicate' poetic com-
position, to take it out of the arena of lockstep simplicity and back to the realm of
language-the most complex of human abilities and arts" (p. 200). Complexity is
identified with artistic excellence: when his formulations result in a failure to deter-

mine the boundaries of themes, Foley announces that this is "no doubt as it should
be: no poetry worth the name should be too readily dismemberable" (pp. 254f). To
this dictum is appended a footnote: "Among the Yugoslav poets recorded by Parry
and Lord, it is a truism that those whose texts are easiest to analyze in terms of for-
mula and theme are also the least accomplished artists" (p. 255). In his conclusion,
Foley offers his book as an illustration of "how the generalization 'oral literature'
requires further articulation-or, in effect, complication--in order to differentiate
among the myriad forms we presently group together" (p. 389, my italics).
Foley's theoretical stance complicates comparison, and transforms Parry's and
Lord's concepts into creatures of such complexity that they defy definition: his ex-
amination of the greeting theme in the Odyssey leads to the conclusion that
"thematic structure is not all of a piece. Like traditional phraseology, traditional
thematics cannot be captured or accounted for by one exclusive definition" (p. 265),
and the chapter as a whole concludes that thematic structure in the Odyssey "cannot
be forced into a single narrow definition or a restrictive category" (p. 276). And this
too, no doubt, is as it should be, for the theme in Foley's conception of oral tradition
is an elusive will o' the wisp lightly evading the grasp of intrepid scholars in search of
simplistic definitions:
To insist on a uniform texture for thematic structure is to construct an unreal-

istic model, one that is untrue to the multiformity of oral tradition and
reductive of its art. Thematic structure means a complex aggregate of units
and phraseology in the service of a traditional idea, and its shape-shifting
form extends from the language in which it is expressed to the sequence of
actions that defines its role in oral epic tradition. (p. 312)

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Parry and Lord argued that formulas, formulaic systems, and themes were essen-
tial to the oral epic poet composing in performance; these characteristics of oral
style, useful and necessary to the oral poet, could readily be recognized by their per-
vasiveness. This is too simplistic a view for Foley. The formula, for example, is not a
readily recognizable traditional phrase, but a complex "spectrum of phraseologies."
Parry and Lord pointed the way ("Lord's formulaic theory provides an excellent first
approximation of this many-sided, multiform phraseology," p. 172), but the simplic-
ity of their analysis is misleading: "Lord's theory, although illuminating certain
aspects of the multiformity of the guslar's poetic language, homogenizes its inherent
complexity and deemphasizes the fact that phraseology is not a static collection of
items but a dynamic inventory ever in a state of flux or evolution" (p. 172). Accord-
ingly, Foley argues, the oral-formulaic test is invalid and obstructive:
For Lord, then, the synchronic model provides a way of illustrating multifor-
mity in the guslar's language, but it blocks the path to further understanding
because it does not account for the observable fact that all formulas are not

created equal. Likewise, the same discrepancy among units goes a long way
toward invalidating the formulaic-density test for orality; if we are testing for
identical phraseological units, and if what we actually have in the texts is a
spectrum of decidedly unequal elements, then our analysis cannot bear fruit.
(p. 173)
Thus Parry's and Lord's formulas and themes are obstructive distractions in the ap-
preciation of oral style; the limitations of their simplistic techniques are revealed
when confronted by the complexity of Foley's analysis: "In the face of this heteroge-
neity and complexity, we have argued, it proves only logical to recognize the
limitations of the concepts of formula and formulaic system, and to understand that
synchronic approximations that go far toward making evident the characteristic mul-
tiformity of the guslar's poetic language can also obscure its variety and richness" (p.
197). Although Foley claims to be "building on the firm foundation of Lord's theory"
(p. 172), Parry's and Lord's enterprise is vitiated.
Of course Foley is free to find weakness in Parry's and Lord's theory while at the
same time acknowledging its influence on his work; the foundations of his complex
structure can be securely established on the rubble of his predecessors' perceived
limitations. But in Foley's more complex world, definitions are elusive. Time and
again lengthy discussion leads to conclusions that are no conclusions at all: "What
these findings indicate, then, is the impossibility of capturing the protean reality of
thematic structure in the net of a single model or definition" (p. 327). Complexity
results in obfuscation. We might well ask, with Foley,
What do we gain by tracing the guslar's words from Indo-European versifica-
tion forward through the maze of compositional devices described in this
chapter? And what do we make of the result-a complex, heterogeneous,
ever-evolving collection of inequivalent elements overseen by rules and proc-
esses no singer ever consciously imagined? (p. 199)
And we might be excused for wondering what looking-glass world Foley has led us
into when he offers as an answer to his own question the virtue of complexity, the
ability "to 're-complicate' poetic composition" (p. 200).
Foley embraces a philosophy of complexity, a view that excuses him from the re-
sponsibility of defining with exactitude the concepts he discusses. In place of the
simplicities he finds in Parry and Lord, Foley offers us a deeper level of analysis be-
neath the level of diction. What formula and theme were to Parry and Lord, "tradi-

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 REVIEW ESSAY

tional rules" are to Foley. The "most fundamental point" about Homer's diction is
that "it was formed under traditional rules" (p. 157). Our goal in analysis is "to un-
derstand the dynamics of traditional diction through an understanding of the effect
of traditional rules on the expression of ideas" (p. 137). Foley argues that "the for-
mula and system are second-level, or focusing, processes and do not represent the
fundamental level of phrase structure" (p. 176); "Establishing formulaic structure is
an important, even invaluable part of the study of traditional phraseology, but in
order to be fully understood that structure must be interpreted against the back-
ground of traditional rules, which govern all Homeric lines" (p. 154); traditional
rules are "the most fundamental and pervasive influence on the making and re-mak-
ing of diction" (p. 197). In place of Lord's analysis on the level of formulaic diction,
Foley offers fundamental rules as the heart of the matter: "In other words, while
formulas and systems explain the poetic idiom inexactly as a dictionary of quantita-
tively equivalent but qualitatively different paradigms, traditional rules account for
the entire spectrum of traditional phraseology-every line of every song text" (p.
197). Traditional rules are the keys to Foley's kingdom.
The concept of traditional rules derives from Foley's principle of tradition-depen-
dence in the study of oral tradition; the rules, extrapolated from a diachronic study
of a tradition's prosody, generate the diction. At the conclusion of his chapter on
traditional phraseology in the Odyssey, Foley dismisses simplistic approaches to
Homeric diction and touts the complexity of the "spectrum of phraseology" he has
adduced:

The "common denominator," as it were, of this complexity is furnished by the

universally applicable set of traditional rules appropriate to (because derived
from) the prosody of the hexameter; these are primarily word-type localiza-
tion and right justification. No matter how intractable phraseology may seem
from the point of view of formulaic theory, these rules provide a way to ex-
plain the traditional structure of the line without having to resort to the
necessarily partial explanation of formulas and systems. In this sense, diction
can be understood as traditional even if classically defined formulas and sys-
tems cannot be demonstrated, since the rules are the primary laws under
which all phraseology-even the formulas and systems themselves-comes
into being. (p. 156)
If oral poetry in Parry's and Lord's conception never quite became 100% formulaic,
tradition-dependent oral poetry yields itself totally to explanation in terms of Foley's
traditional rules. Every line can be admitted as traditional whether or not it displays
traditional diction. Accordingly, in his analysis of a Homeric passage Foley can claim
that "Line 156 shows very little that could be interpreted as formulaic, although it
does obey traditional rules for formation" (p. 254); and from a table displaying the
formulaic profile of 28 lines of Beowulf Foley argues that "what should be empha-
sized about Table 21 is the absolute consistency of traditional rules; not a single verse
is left unexplained by this more fundamental level of structure, while the formula/
formulaic system model leaves more than a quarter of the passage unexplained as
traditional phraseology" (p. 233); and a Homeric theme can be traditional even
though it "has no particular phraseological component, the only conventionally as-
sociated diction being at the level of two single words" (p. 276).
But Foley's panacea of fundamental traditional rules is nothing but a placebo. Of
course they will explain every line in a tradition, because they are extrapolated from
lines in that tradition: the argument is entirely circular. We might as well conclude
from a study of Gray's Elegy that all lines tend towards five units consisting of an
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

unstressed followed by a stressed syllable and argue that since, despite their differ-
ences on the level of diction, all lines in the poem on the level of prosody conform to
this "traditional rule," the poem is traditional and therefore either oral or oral-de-
rived.

Foley might just as well be analyzing Gray's Elegy if he analyzes oral-derived texts,
or texts like Andreas, which seem less traditional than the very literate Greek original
from which they are translated. If Foley's techniques can be applied to literate texts,
then just what is it he is revealing about oral style? The features Foley adduces as
traditional at the "second level" for Anglo-Saxon poetry (p. 238) are widely recog-
nized as characteristics of Old English poetic style by commentators who make no
reference to the oral origins of the poetry-and his primary traditional rules (p. 237)
and the statistics buttressing them strain credulity. Ultimately, through his insistence
on the principle of tradition-dependence, Foley shows us only that Old English po-
etry is uniquely Anglo-Saxon. Or, as Larry Benson put it some time ago in a classic
article that long remained a thorn in Lord's flesh, Old English poets used formulas
"not because the demands of the meter or the pressures of oral composition prevent
the poet from pausing to select some more suitable phrase but because this phrase is
suitable, is part of a poetic diction that is clearly oral in origin but that is now just as
clearly a literary convention" (p. 339). Foley succumbs to Lord's stumbling-block: if
we have transitional, or "oral-derived," texts, then we do not have a dichotomy be-
tween oral and written style, and the search for oral characteristics in a literate text
becomes as dubious an enterprise as that of the Homeric analysts.
Foley set out to "concentrate on the various levels of structure in comparative oral
epic" (p. 1); all he is doing is attempting to map out a grammar of a variety of lan-
guage, to produce a prosodic syntax that will explain oral style in any one tradition.
Such an enterprise is not idle, but as Foley has amply demonstrated in his book,
there is nothing about the technique that restricts it to the study of oral texts. Foley's
term "traditional rules" invites association with oral tradition; but you might as easily
call them syntactic rules and distinguish their level of analysis from a semantic level.
There is nothing new about semantic patterns fitting syntactic rules. "As
stylisticians," for example, Crystal and Davy also "approach a text with various levels
in mind" (p. 20). They discuss three possible methods of description that relate style
and grammar: interestingly, they reject their first method-formulating a set of sty-
listic rules that generate a particular variety of language which is then described in its
own terms-because "it makes comparative study difficult" and because "its ultimate
value is very limited" (p. 42).

Foley's inward-thrusting complexity is suffocatingly claustrophobic. In their classic

writings, lucid and expansive, Parry and Lord brought an oral tradition to life, drew
daring and illuminating comparisons with classical and medieval traditions, and
showed us as never before the kind of poet that Homer might have been. Their work
may have been naive or romantic, an expression of an outmoded structuralist per-
spective, but therein lies its magic and power: it exhibits sufficient dash and bravura
to attract and inspire, however'questionable some of their assumptions may have
proved to be. For one brief shining moment, the grail seemed worth achieving, but
the old order has changed, yielding place to new: can the quest continue with the
passing of Arthur and Lancelot?

Charterhouse

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 REVIEW ESSAY

Works Cited

Benson, Larry D. "The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Formulaic Poetry." PMLA

81 (1966): 334-41.
Crews, Frederick C. The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook. New York: Dutton, 1963.
Crystal, David, and Derek Davy. Investigating English Style. London: Longmans,
1969.

Foley, John Miles. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
---. Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1960.

---. "A Comparative Analysis." Umbundu: Folk Tales from Angola. Ed. Merlin
Ennis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. xiii-xxix.
---. "Perspectives on recent work on oral literature." Oral Literature: Seven Es-
says. Ed.JosephJ. Duggan. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1975. 1-24.
. "The Nature of Oral Poetry." Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Me-
morial for Milman Parry. Ed. John Miles Foley. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1985.
313-49.

-- . "The Merging of Two Worlds: Oral and Written Poetry as Carriers of Ancient
Values." Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context. Ed. John Miles
Foley. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. 19-64.
Parry, Adam, ed. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

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