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Textualization and the Newest Song Oral poets usually perform for audiences whose tastes and responses they can hope to predict. Often, the audiences are local, and a poet may perform many times for the same individuals and come to know their tastes precisely. In some traditions, much of the liveliness of particular performances comes from spontaneous interaction between the poet and members of the audience.1 Even when the poet does not personally know the audience, each audience is like others he has known. The poet can use his knowledge of the audience’s social standing, wealth, family connections , political afµliations, and gender, as well as of the particular occasion for the performance, to render his performance appropriate and acceptable . Often, there is a single patron, whose satisfaction is paramount. Performers therefore have special problems when they face unfamiliar audiences. The dhalang faced with a request he could not fulµll at least knew what kinds of plays his audience liked. In his own district, a performer can introduce innovations gradually, relying on the conµdence his audience has in him and developing their taste along with his own. Of course, sometimes poets fail, not because they are incompetent in their traditions, but because they do not achieve rapport with a particular audience. Devlal’s performance of the Candaini epic discussed in the preceding chapter failed because he and his (unfamiliar ) audience did not share expectations. The Homeric poems are often called “Panhellenic” in orientation. They address no particular audience and were thus available for all Greeks. Composed as texts, they were created to be performed and reperformed for audiences widespread in space and time. Homeric epic thus confronted not only the challenges inherent in a developing genre but the even greater challenge of a large and unknown audience. 42 1. The audience of Alha sings along at verse end (see Blackburn et al. 1989); ïAdwallah teased individual audience members as part of the performance (see Slyomovics 1987). It is not possible to discuss the audience for which the poets composed without trying to decide what the circumstances of composition were. The older form of this issue was the Homeric Question, the debate over whether each epic was the product of a single author or of a process in which poets incorporated and adapted earlier texts. Oral theory transformed the Homeric Question. The question became whether the poems are genuine oral compositions and, if so, how they became written texts. If the poems’ view of their audiences is in question, however, the real issue is not the technology by which the poems were composed but how and why they came to be stable texts, particularly at the level of story. Pabuji is textualized without being written; the episodes and their order are µxed, and even the couplets are standard; variation appears mainly in inclusion or omission.2 The Serbo-Croatian Muslim tradition was less rigid, with frequent variation in the actual narrative.3 Still, singers could list the songs that they knew, and many performed the same song on different occasions with some variation at the verbal level but none at the level of story, while they repeated many passages exactly . The crucial moment, then, is the one at which these poems existed as recognizably the Iliad and the Odyssey. From outside, it is impossible to know just how divergent songs that were recognized as “the same” could be, but not every song of Achilles’ wrath was an Iliad, not every version of Odysseus’s return an Odyssey. We cannot think of a performance as (proto-)Iliad or Odyssey unless it included the episodes that the relevant epic now includes, in the order in which they now stand. One can imagine the basic textualization of the epics as happening in various ways. The fundamental question is whether each poem was created at one time by one person or through a gradual process. A single poet could have composed such a work by either writing or dictating it. Alternatively, he could have composed it in performance at an extraordinary occasion. A widely accepted theory of the origins of the epics sees them as originally performances at a festival (e.g., the Panionia ) where celebrants came together from several cities.4 A bard could have created a monumental epic for a stable, local audience listening to a long series of performances over many evenings. Any hypothesis that Textualization and the Newest Song 43 2. See Smith 1991. 3. See Parry, Lord...

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