Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (review)

240 Reviews Harris, Joseph and Karl Reichl, ed., Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1997; cloth; pp.436; R.R.P. £40.00, c.US$70.00. In keeping with its title, Karl Reichl and Joseph Harris's compilation offers an extensive view of prosimetrum. Conceptually, the term is broadly defined so as to include all blendings of verse with prose. Temporally and geographically, the chapters encompass Classical tradition, medieval French literature, insular Celtic literature, Icelandic sagas, German Romanticism, Occidental folk narrative, African epic, biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts, classical Arabic literature, medieval Persian literature, Turkic oral epic poetry, recent Mongolian oral literature, Chinese literary tradition, Archaic Indian mythological and ritual texts, and classical Japanese narrative. A chapter by chapter survey would be impracticable here. Instead, I shall mention just a few sample chapters, preliminarily to considering the book as a whole. In his 'Prosimetrum in Insular Celtic Literature' Proinsias M a c Cana achieves a well-judged balance between on the one hand a necessarily intricate discussion of the extant literary monuments and on the other a formal/ aesthetic analysis of insular Celtic prosimetra. W . E H. Nicolaisen's chapter on "The Cante Fable in Occidental Folk Narrative' provides a thorough conspectus of texts and a thoughtful analysis of correlations between speaker and discourse type. At the other extreme, notably superficial was Lee Haring's treatment of African epic: the discussion of Malagasy poetry might more strictly, at least in linguistic terms, have supplied part of a contribution on the literatures of Oceania, whose absence the editors rightly regret. Acknowledging the 'strong descriptive bias' within the constituent chapters (p. 13), the editors explain their book as Reviews 241 undertaking a 'charting [of] the largely unexplored territory of prosimetrum in world literature' (p. 2). In practice the description within chapters often goes off on a tangent, compromising the specific focus on the 'mixed form'. While Joseph Harris provides a commendably thorough survey of relevant scholarship in his "The Prosimetrum of Icelandic Saga and Some Relatives' he devotes too much space tofine-spunarguments concerning lost redactions and sagas. In Michael Witzel's chapter on 'Origins of Prosimetric Exchange in Archaic India' the content, though fascinating in itself, seems to have been determined more by the contributor's interests in mythology andritualthan by the objectives of the total volume. Witzel's analysis of liminality within his prosimetra could conceivably have been extended into a consideration of their form, but the author does not take that step. The question has to be asked, then, 'Is this book more than the sum of its parts?' It is fair to say at the outset that no reasonable person could expect a key to all prosimetra. Nor should w e necessarily hope for broad formalistic hypotheses, such as Peter Dronke essays with his invocations of Bakhtin in Verse with Prosefrom Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form (Harvard, 1994). There is likewise no attempt to correlate prosimetric textuality with economic m o d e of production. Certain more modest goals, however, are met. Prosimetrum has attracted more than its share of strained theories about origins, for instance those propounded by Ifor Williams for Welsh, Myles Dillon for Irish, and Bjarni Einarsson for Old Norse/Icelandic. The distinctive appearance of extant prosimetra is apt to encourage radical misconceptions which need firm correction. The careful reassessments to be found in this book of evidence from the different literary traditions often point to the form as a late development, sometimes with no clear model or precedent. Prosimetrum emerges as protean and highly labile. As 242 Reviews M a c Cana observes, the very reduction to writing of a prosimetric performance m a y have affected the proportions of prose and verse within it. Similarly, those proportions might well have shifted within a succession of oral realisations, as Harris notes. The very demonstration, so amply furnished by this book, that the form has such an extensive incidence m a y usefully discourage future scholars from genetic speculations. Attempts, for instance, to build genealogies linking the Icelandic sagas of skalds and the Provencal razos look delusory when one registers...