McLuhan Program - Toronto School of Communications (original) (raw)

Toronto School of Communication

by Twyla Gibson, Ph.D.
Senior McLuhan Fellow

Milman Parry: The Oral-Formulaic Style of the Homeric Tradition

We move on now to consider one of the most significant contributions in this century to our understanding of ancient Greek literature. This came from a Homeric scholar, Milman Parry. Before Parry, classical scholarship was preoccupied with what was commonly called the "Homeric Question." That is, with the problem of who "Homer" was and what exactly his Iliad and Odyssey represented. Parry formulated a new answer. His reply was that Homer was "one of a long tradition of oral poets that . . . composed wholly without the aid of writing."[1] His answer opened a new field of inquiry which is known (by the oxymoron), "oral literature."[2]

Parry maintained that the compositions of an oral tradition have a very different style and form from written compositions. Through his analysis of Homeric epithets - such as "divine Odysseus," "wine-dark sea," or "gray-eyed Athena" - he demonstrated that Homer's language was a total structure built up from stock phrases he called "formulas." He defined the formula as a "group of words regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea" (Parry 1971: 272). He pointed out that many lines and fragments of lines in a given passage of Homer were reproduced word for word in one or more other passages. This repetition of ready-made expressions, he argued, meant that the written versions of the epics must have originated as oral works.

In contrast to the literate poet who writes out lines, Parry reasoned, the oral poet cannot take time during a performance to think of the next word, make changes, or read over what he has just written before going on. The phrase which will fall easily into the verse in the right place is a difficult thing to make up. Since his poem is created impromptu, the oral poet cannot think critically phrase by phrase. To tell his story, he chooses expressions from a vast number of stock word-groups - a poetic diction - which he has heard in the poems of other poets and memorized. Each pre-fabricated phrase expresses a particular idea in words that conform to a given length of verse. It is made up of parts of speech that fit into a section of the hexameter and connect with the formulas that go before and come after it.

Each formula is made in view of the other formulas with which it is to be joined; and the formulas taken all together make up a diction which is the material for a completely unified technique of verse making (329).

Using this traditional system, the oral poet "sews together" (rhapsode means sewer of songs) his composition as he goes along by remembering "these innumerable devices which enabled him to combine words and expressions into complete sentences and lines of six dactylic feet embodying the ideas proper to the narration of the deeds of heroes" (195). The singer's memory functions not by committing the lines of the poem to memory verbatim. Rather, he extemporizes by linking together traditional phrases and expressions "into the mold of his verse after a fixed pattern" which is easy to remember under the pressure of performance (268). The storehouse of expressions and events, together with the principles for combining them in a composition, constitute this unified oral traditional system.

Parry maintained that the poetic diction could only be the cumulative creation of many generations of oral poets over centuries (330). The scope and economy of the diction is so complex, he argued, that it could not have been constructed by a single poet. No one singer could create a system with so many metrical alternatives and so few non-functional variations. The traditional system is so extensive because countless poets helped make it up; it is economical because less useful phrases were eventually eliminated. When one poet came up with a phrase that worked well, others took up its use and passed it on so that, over time, versions that were not as functional or pleasing were forgotten and the new one became the optimal way to express an idea in a particular length of verse. Individual poets learned by hearing and by word of mouth to recite verses by drawing from a traditional diction which "time had proven to be the best" (330). Since it was difficult to top a time-tested formula, individual poets could at most make only slight alterations to the tradition. They could perhaps put formulas together in a different way or they could make a new one on the pattern of the old. To create a formula to express a new idea, the bard chose an existing expression similar to the notion he wished to convey, and then he proceeded to model the new one after the original. It was by imitation of an original pattern that the formulary was built up. If the formulas in any one part of the Iliad and Odyssey imitated those of any other part, he argued, this repetition was proof of imitation (8). Indeed, remarks Parry, the role of imitation and resemblance is crucial in the creation, use, and survival of epic formulas. A resemblance between expressions is not the result of mere chance; it is the work of generations of singers elaborating on the traditional system (197).

While the poetic diction is accessible to modern readers only by way of long study, it was familiar in every way to both the bard and his audience. The poet knew this technique "without being aware that he knew it, because it was dependent on his memory of an infinite number of details" (20). The poets used these phrases so often they forgot to think about the meaning in them (391). The audience heard, again and again, the long performances of epic poetry always composed in the same style. After singing and hearing the epic verse countless times, both poet and audience became indifferent to the meaning of repeated expressions that did not carry the story (129-130). In a way that is difficult for literates to comprehend; what the words and phases lost in meaning they gained in a kind of "charm" that pleased the poet and the spectators. The rhythm in the poetry became a kind of music, conveying a mood rather than a meaning, Parry asserted, and the audience became lost in the incantatory charm of the heroic (375).

Even though the oral diction was the creation of countless poets, each telling of the tale was the "performance" of a single poet. Said differently, while the Iliad and Odyssey are constructed in conformity with the conventions of the oral tradition, within these parameters, they are most probably the monumental compositions of a single hand.[3] Each composition is created through a kind of unity of poet and tradition, as the individual sews a story together from material that has been fashioned collectively. Even though certain metrical irregularities in the elaboration of themes and contradictions of detail in the narrative provide evidence that the Homeric verse belonged to an oral tradition, Parry argued that there was also a unity of style that pointed to the work of a single poet. According to Parry, if an analysis of the narrative structure reveals inconsistencies and illogicalities that cannot reasonably be accepted as the mistakes of a single creator, but which could have come about through the imperfect combination of contributions from more than one source, then it must be accepted that the whole work is not the creation of one person. At the same time, the work may well be the composition of a single person making use of the traditional system. Thus, argued Parry, the vocabulary and the overall style indicate that

the Iliad and the Odyssey are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer; though whether they are both the work of one singer I do not yet know. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the Odyssey sat and dictated his song, while another wrote it down verse by verse . . . (451)

Parry's final contribution was to carry out field expeditions to Yugoslavia. He and his assistant, Albert B. Lord, tested theories developed from the ancient manuscript tradition by comparison with the Serbo-Croatian oral epics of the Yugoslav guslari. These studies of a living tradition, completed by Lord following Parry's early death, demonstrated that techniques similar to Homer's - though not as elaborate - have been developed in the oral poetry of other societies.

Parry lived long enough to extend his initial definition of the formula to include larger word groupings and phrases. If certain actions with many of the same details and the same words recur again and again, he said, then they may be seen as belonging to a common "type." Types are patterns of formulas that proceed from beginning to end treating each principal stage in a nearly identical order. Particular instances of the type merely tone down or embellish the basic pattern. What is essential to the type is that which remains constant in all repetitions (357). If certain formula types occur regularly under similar circumstances, then, according to Parry, we can assume that these are part of the traditional system (64). The definition was expanded still further by Albert Lord to include a stock element he called the "theme." Themes typically involve actions or events such as journeys or wars. They entail subthemes, for example, getting ready for a voyage or preparation for a battle. Lord defined themes and subthemes as "groups of ideas regularly used in telling a tale in the formulaic style."[4] Even though the words and phrases might vary in different sections of the composition, types, themes, and subthemes involve the repetition of an identical order of events, acts, and objects. Every journey, for instance, repeats a consistent order in the formal and ideational sequence of loading, embarking, disembarking and unloading of ships.

Parry emphasized that the oral style demands an entirely different kind of understanding from the written style. It is not easy to put aside the literary prejudices of our own time in order to conceive that the oral poet "marked his works with genius not because he was able to model the words on his own thoughts, but because he was able to make use of traditional words and expressions" (144). As early as the time of Aristotle, wrote Parry, the age of the old oral poetry was passing and Homer was condemned as a mere "imitator." The failure to see the difference between written and oral verse was, according to Parry, "the greatest single obstacle to our understanding of Homer . . . and above all, we shall find that many, if not most of the questions we were asking, were not the right ones to ask" (269). Parry's answer to the "Homeric Question" was to become one of "the twentieth century's single most important critical perspectives on Homer and a fundamental theoretical fulcrum in the study and comparison of numerous other ancient, medieval, and even contemporary literatures."[5] His answer was also a basis for the theories developed by many of the University of Toronto scholars.

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[1] M. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. and trans., Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 1-239.

[2] Here, I make use of a distinction established by Berkley Peabody, where the "continuing process of oral composition is called an oral tradition. The recorded phenomenon of an oral tradition (which is where writing inevitably enters in) is called oral literature. An oral tradition is a highly sophisticated socio-linguistic institution that plays a central role in maintaining the continuities of the culture in which it occurs. This stabilizing function is often taken over by records, when writing becomes established in a society; but the shift in medium from utterance to record affects the way such an institution works . . ." [The Winged Word: A Study in the Technique of Oral Composition as Seen Principally through Hesiod's Works and Days (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), pp. 1-2 and 70]. See also Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), pp. 17-20.

[3] This observation has been confirmed by subsequent studies that have applied the procedures of narrative theory to the epics in an effort to separate the conventional from the individual and to discriminate the traditional from non-traditional elements. In this search for the individual poet, the "Homer of the Homeric epics," the analysis concentrates on the outlook and organization of the whole construction (by the use of prefabricated structural elements and patterns), rather than on the language and style of the work [see Joachim Latacz, Homer: His Art and His World, trans., James P. Holoka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 11; I.J.F. De Jong, Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad (Amsterdam: B.R. Gruner, 1987); J. Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Scott Richardson, The Homeric Narrator (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1990)].

[4] Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 68.

[5] John Miles Foley, Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985), pp. 11-12.