Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind

Bellerophon and His Tablet

actually sing the last few lines of never-before-composed oral poems along with their composers. In a vital sense both OT groups are collectively surfing the pathways of a living network, cocreating the performed poem. Their interactions are positive and mutually reinforcing. Everyone is playing by the accepted rules of the oAgora. For another instance of working together, please visit the Response node (Response), which briefly presents my reaction to the reader reports on the Pathways Project as commissioned by the University of Illinois Press. Disapproval But what about the negative side of things—criticism? What about the equivalent of the harsh morning-after reviews of Broadway plays that mercilessly pan the production? Or critics’ scathing indictments of an opera, ballet, or symphony performance? Is there any outlet in the oAgora for audiences to disapprove or at least to query what the performer or group is doing? One answer comes from Matija Murko,11 a Slovenian scholar and fieldworker who studied then-thriving South Slavic oral epic traditions in the early decades of the twentieth century and offers us this amusing firsthand report: The audience listens to the singer with maximum attention, interest, and sympathy for the heroes, and is sometimes extremely moved by the whole of a poem or by certain episodes. During pauses for rest, the members of the audience make various remarks, question the singer, and critique him, to which criticism he does not fail to respond. One time I reproached a singer for having given a favorite Moslem hero, Hrnjica Mujo, four brothers instead of the two he is credited with elsewhere; he retorted in a bitter tone: “That’s how another told it to me; I wasn’t there when theywereborn!”Thereisonemodeofcriticismthatdoesnotlackoriginality:when the singer is absent during a pause for rest, someone greases the string and the bow of his instrument with tallow, which makes it impossible for him to continue. It’s one thing to feel the sting of a bad review, quite another to have your string greased! L Bellerophon and His Tablet It’s endemically difficult to comprehend in our present tAgora-dominated environment , but letters and pages and books didn’t always have the upper hand (Texts and Intertextuality). They didn’t always represent the trump technology, the medium through which all other media had to be interpreted. Nowhere is this more evident than in a tale from Homer’s Iliad, a perilous episode that at first sight may seem like unexpected evidence for writing within the oAgora. 50 . Audience Critique The story concerns the victimization of the Greek hero Bellerophon, who incurs the wrath of Proitos’s wife by denying her advances. His refusal so infuriates her that she spitefully reports him to her husband as the instigator, causing Proitos to attempt a kind of vicarious, long-distance revenge (which eventually fails, by the way). In short, Proitos sends Bellerophon to the Lykian king with a “folding tablet” bearing the encoded message to “kill the bearer.” Homer calls the kill-code sêmata lugra, literally “baneful signs,” and it’s hard to argue with that description. But Homer and his tradition, good citizens of the oAgora, weren’t simply defaulting to the tAgora here. The logic runs the other way. By calling the written message a series of signs, Homer was explaining that inscription, a technology he doesn’t use, amounts to a species of sign language, an OT technology that he does use. He is characterizing the momentous communication in the only way that he can—as a species of the expressive signals known within his tradition as sêmata and used to describe such phenomena and objects as divinely inspired omens, tomb markers for heroes, and Odysseus’s and Penelope’s olive-tree bed. And Homer is absolutely consistent in his media dynamics. Wherever these sêmata occur in the Iliad and Odyssey, and for whatever specific purpose, they share one principal function: they serve as symbols rife with hidden meaning that can be discovered in no other way. As such, these dedicated signs (Accuracy) remain as mysterious as they are powerful, as superficially opaque as they are effective. In other words, Homer interprets the tablet and its murderous code from within his own oAgora by comparing the written message to a meaningmaking strategy that lies at the heart of his OT craft. Homer does not struggle to escape the ideology of texts. He does not suffer from the modern plague of agoraphobia. He’s many...