Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

SOME PSYCHODYNAMICS OF ORALITY 59
idiosyncratic. But essentially, the materials, themes and formulas,
and their use belong in a clearly identifiable tradition. Originality
consists not in the introduction of new materials but in fitting the
traditional materials effectively into each individual, unique
situation and/or audience.
The memory feats of these oral bards are remarkable, but they
are unlike those associated with memorization of texts. Literates
are usually surprised to learn that the bard planning to retell the
story he hasheard only once wants often to wait a day or so after
he had heard the story before he himself repeats it. In memorizing
a written text, postponing its recitation generally weakens recall.
An oral poet is not working with texts or in a textual framework.
He needs time to let the story sink into his own store of themes
and formulas, time to ‘get with’ the story. In recalling and retelling
the story, he has not in any literate sense ‘memorized’ its metrical
rendition from the version of the other singer—a version long gone
forever when the new singer is mulling over the story for his own
rendition (Lord 1960, pp. 20–9). The fixed materials in the bard’s
memory are a float of themes and formulas out of which all stories
are variously built.
One of the most telling discoveries in Lord’s work has been that,
although singers are aware that two different singers never sing the
same song exactly alike, nevertheless a singer will protest that he
can do his own version of a song line for line and word for word
any time, and indeed, ‘just the same twenty years from now’ (Lord
1960, p. 27). When, however, their purported verbatim renditions
are recorded and compared, they turn out to be never the same,
though the songs are recognizable versions of the same story.
‘Word for word and line for line’, as Lord interprets (1960, p. 28),
is simply an emphatic way of saying ‘like’. ‘Line’ is obviously a
text-based concept, and even the concept of a ‘word’ as a discrete
entity apart from a flow of speech seems somewhat text-based.
Goody (1977, p. 115) has pointed out that an entirely oral
language which has a term for speech in general, or for a rhythmic
unit of a song, or for an utterance, or for a theme, may have no
ready term for a ‘word’ as an isolated item, a ‘bit’ of speech, as in,
‘The last sentence here consists of twenty-six words’. Or does it?
Maybe there are twenty-eight. If you cannot write, is ‘textbased’
one word or two? The sense of individual words as significantly
discrete items is fostered by writing, which, here as elsewhere, is