Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World XII

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The meeting aims at exploring to what extent different conditions — regarding the context of enunciation, the audience, the medium (oral or written)— define the manner of how a story is told and structured.

For example, in a narration executed under the conditions of a ‘composition-in-performance’ (Lord) and in traditional societies, we can expect other features than in literary fictions that highly sophisticated authors compose as literature for a readership of connoisseurs. We can think of what Foley coined ‘traditional referentiality’, when narration in an oral poetics as ‘traditional art’ follows a pars pro toto or metonymic relation: behind and between the signs is a diachronic dimension that opens up the totality of possibilities – alternative narrative routes, different exits and instantiations. Moreover we want to study how myths and rituals as well as the occasion inscribe themselves into the performance of an oral narration. As Nagy pointed out, in ‘small-scale’ and traditional ‘societies’ myth and ritual in interaction and correlation constitute a marked discourse so that we can speak of a ‘mythic-ritual poetics’ (Bierl). The cultic setting or ritual occasion of the performance, moreover, frames not only the heroes’ mythic narration in an idealized past but also the poetic language itself since there is a close interconnection between the conception of the past and the metrical form. Narration can thus be understood as myth, while figures inside the story tend to emphasize their speech-acts through mythic examples. In addition, numerous myths (or stories of the past) come from the infinite web of tradition, and the performer metonymically alludes to and partakes in this mythic galaxy through elliptical forms. Myth shares with traditional narrative the feature of being authorless. Both are also transformed through endless variation and combination with a stable nucleus of motifs. In many traditional narrations we encounter variations of death and rebirth, disappearance and reappearance, search and retrieval, separation and reunion, hiding and epiphanic arrival. On the ritual side, we can highlight the ephebic pattern and initiation motifs, theoxeny, scenarios of the Other, relapses into the primordial or atavistic, new year and king ritual, agonistic reversals, elements of supplication, lament, marriage, choreia and dancing, feasting, sacrifice, prayer, epiphanies, remnants of solar imagery, burial and hero cult. Socio-political and cultural changes, also on the spatial axis of local to larger entities, act on all these elements so that they can almost disappear behind a new, realistic veil. Yet they remain operable in an implicit fashion through allusions or anticipation. Occasion and the ritual context of a performance may also influence an oral narration, not only its argument, but also its linguistic form and length.

Under written conditions myth and ritual do not cease to inscribe themselves into literature. We believe that myth and ritual are not separated from ancient literature understood as l’art pour l’art but interact with literary texts and their plots. We can extend our questions from traditional and Homeric epics and popular tales to other genres where performed narration is an issue: E.g., how do myth and ritual influence and shape traditional historia, the novel and any other traditional and fictional tales? To what extent are also lyric songs and drama relevant for a study of traditional narration? How can an episode be marked by superimposing certain rituals and myths? Can we talk about a mythopoeia of these tales? Why were the Greeks so pleased to repeat the same myth or episode of their history in so many different ways and forms?

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