Immanent art: from structure to meaning in traditional oral epic (review)

144 Reviews A few quibbles! Rabbi Meir Abulafia (Ramah) was from Toledo, not Barcelona, as Chazan wrongly states. An appendix, discussing the identity of Astrug and Bonastrug de Porta, shows that only the latter could have been Nahmanides. O n the other hand, it does not follow, as Chazan assumes, that if he was not Astrug, he cannot have been closely connected to the de Porta family that exercised such influence at the Aragonese court. The leading Jewish families in Spain consitituted large kin groupings rather than small nuclear families. This book marks a useful further step forward. It would have been rendered still more valuable had the author included an edition of the two disputation texts that he cites so frequently, together with the authoritative commentary of which he is so eminently capable. David Abulafia Gonville and Caius College Cambridge University Foley, John M., Immanent art: from structure to meaning in traditional oral epic, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xviii, 278; R.R.P. US$39.95. Milman Parry and Albert Lord's identification of the formula and the theme as the structural mechanics of oral-traditional material, or 'oral-derived', to use Foley's preferred phrase for any but primary oral cases, has been one of the most exciting and controversial developments of twentieth-century literary studies. However, investigations have all too often become bogged down in the identification of those mechanics, for example, counting formulas or listing themes, and in using these to argue over the composition of poems that demonstrate these features. In many language areas this is the point at which discussions have become bogged down and somewhat sterile. Foley, on w h o m the mantle of Parry and Lord has descended, has set himself the task of putting the study of oral-derived material on a more rigorous and intellectually sound footing. He has founded the journal Oral tradition, a forum for discussion of all varieties of orally-based material, and is attempting to provide a basis for future work in a series of books (notably, The theory of oral composition [1988], on the history of the methodology, and Traditional oral epic: the Odyssey, Beowulf and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song [1990]). This present study is a companion to the 1990 volume and overlaps it to some extent. It summarizes possible approaches to such texts and then gives long exemplifications of the analytical process that Foley recommends. Many of the criticisms brought against texts that have been identified as containing oral and traditional material have had to do with a perceived lack of originality, a mechanistic and hackneyed use of themes combined with banal and Reviews 145 repetitious language. Such features have been emphasized by work inspired by Parry and Lord. It has been plain for some time that these charges are the result of the use of aesthetics developed for texts composed in a writing culture, where the status of the 'author' and the demands of the audience are not those of a traditional society. In this book Foley is attempting to develop an aesthetic that would be relevant to such a society, but without necessarily favouring any one of the currently fashionable stances adopted by literary theoreticians, in particular any post-structuralist positions. His case is carefully thought out and subtly argued. To put it at its most basic and in a formulation that does it scant justice, Foley argues first that an oral-derived and traditional work has to be referenced against the relevant tradition in its entirety, whether analysis is made at the level of the whole work, plot motif, or individual word, and second, that (in a development of reader-response theory) the presumed audience has to play its part in interpreting the material presented to it, inconsistencies, incongruities, and all. Foley is fully aware of the difficulties of defining a tradition. His discussion moves from texts taken from the more or less contemporary and living traditions of Serbia (the Muslim and Christian songs demonstrably recorded by various means in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries) to texts that survive as written examples only (in this case, the Iliad and Beowulf). For these...