Resynchronizing the event
About 200 years ago William Wordsworth put it this way in a poem he entitled “The Tables Turned”:
Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: --
We murder to dissect.
A serious charge: “we murder to dissect.” Exactly whom or what was he accusing?
From the beginning of the poem on, the principal object of the poet’s criticism is in fact none other than the book, which he unconditionally disparages as a source for wisdom. Wordsworth’s complaint against books was part of his program for composing poetry, which he felt should depend more on the simple experience of walking through nature – the source of “spontaneous wisdom” – than on the scholarly page-turning of his immediate predecessors.
Our advocacy of the eEdition as a vehicle for oral tradition springs from similar concerns and a parallel history. For all of its myriad benefits, the book has done to oral tradition exactly what in Wordsworth’s opinion it did to poetry: murdered a living entity by vivisection. The once-vibrant event or experience becomes a corpse, and though an autopsy may bring knowledge of this or that aspect of its former function, the price is the very viability of the subject under study.
We know how such euthanasia proceeds in the case of oral tradition. During the early days of “collection” (note the insulating jargon), fieldworkers struggled to extract dictionary-certified words from the messy reality of multimedia performance and to exhibit their elusive quarry within the approved museum space of the printed page. When what this procedure yielded fell below the threshold of an acceptable text, editors felt no compunction about “correcting” what their informants “meant” to say. Thus the Grimm Brothers and their highly expurgated tales, for example. The exclusive goal of this cultural text-hunt was to convert the performance to a document, which collectors and editors ideologically assumed was the heart of the matter. Many of us still make that assumption, occasionally with a polite but perfunctory nod toward the perhaps 50-70% of the performance that’s discarded in the process (the intonations, pauses, vocal music, instrumentation, dance patterns, and so many other facets of performances that get conventionally suppressed in conversion to texts).
Audio and video recording raised our awareness, to be sure, making it possible to reach beyond textual remains and glimpse other dimensions of oral traditions. Still, however, the published yield of most field recordings is finally only the celebrated but ever-silent transcription; even when audio or video is made available, it’s rarely listened to or watched along with the text (or translation). Cultural and linguistic context is likewise segregated – relegated to an appendix or the equivalent – if provided at all.
In short, our default method for representing oral traditions has been to convert an event into an item. We dissect the engaging, emergent whole that demands our attention right now, at its own pace and on its own terms, and we produce a pale reflection of that immediacy, comfortably static and distanced. We generate an asynchronous artifact.
eEditions, on the other hand, hold out the promise of resynchronizing the event, of reconstituting the experience, of putting the parts back together to create at least a reasonable facsimile of the original whole.
Consider the eEdition of THE WEDDING OF MUSTAJBEY’S SON BECIRBEY AS PERFORMED BY HALIL BAJGORIC (www.oraltradition.org/zbm), referred to in my March 18th posting. With the text and translation reconnected to the audio record, and with the commentary, dictionary of idioms, and other materials hot-linked to the onward-moving performance script, readers become more than mere readers. To an extent they become part of the audience for that long-ago performance, only now (necessarily) removed from the day (in June of 1935) and place (Dabrica, in the Former Yugoslavia) of its original occurrence.
What’s so different? Well, through the agency of the eEdition the performance is once again continuous and multi-faceted. Sure, you can stop it by pausing the audio or simply closing the website utility altogether, just as you can close a book and go make a cup of tea or check your e-mail. But as long as the eEdition is open and all of its systems are active, the potential exists for the “reader” to attend the performance in real time and, to the degree that the hot-linked resources restore at least some of the cultural and linguistic context, in real space. Halil Bajgoric performs again: the story evolves, the vocal and instrumental melodies that support his performance arise, the cultural and linguistic background expected of a fluent audience presents itself. The event happens, again.
Is this e-experience “the same as” the original? Of course not, but it’s the next best experience we can manage, and far more faithful to the original than fussing over the book-bound corpse and trying vainly to imagine what it must have been like while alive.
posted by John Miles Foley @ 2:49 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
We lose, of course, some of the synchronicity of the event--I can't respond directly to the performer; I can't smell the ambient odors or hear much of the ambient noises. We gain, however, a measure of convenience--I can witness the performance at 4 AM if I choose; I can listen wherever my wireless laptop will take me.
What I'd like to see next is the opportunity to virtually attend a performance simultaneously with colleagues from far-flung places and then enter a chat room where we can share our immediate responses. Even if we cannot communicate with our performer directly, we can recapture some of the spirit of the communal audience, all but lost in the world of the book.
There seem to be several limitations still in place that are difficult to overcome. The first is the fact that no one can really experience an oral performance in another language in the same way as those who know the language. In order to know the meaning of what is being sung, a person must rely on reading a translation.
The other problem is the lack of background and depth of experience. Hearing/reading a single performance merely provides a small cross-section of the actual oral tradition. One really isn't able to gain a full understanding of the story itself and the ways in which it can vary. I think our knowledge of the Iliad an Odyssey is severely limited by having essentially only one performance or collected edition of performances. We don't have access to the variations. Unfortunately it seems some things are lost beyond regaining.
To take a minute to respond to the comments posted by Bonnie Irwin and Austin:
The suggestion that colleagues, scholars, enthusiasts, critics, and local experts would be able to participate in a virtual discussion, unlimited by time and place, after attending an electronically linked performance, is without question a desideratum, and no doubt one of many avenues that await the future of traditional performance. An excellent suggestion.
As for Austin's reservations about the limitations of potentional audiences who lack local and linguistic expertise, the first thing to say is that of course s/he is correct: real-time verbal artistry rooted in local traditions requires an extremely high degree of knowledge, familiarity, and preparation -- еven, in some cases, for members of the language and tradition in question.
AT THE SAME TIME, one must always keep in mind that this sort of expertise exists within a *continuum*. The notion that there is a communal audience who will experience the performance event each in the same way and who will agree on its precise meaning and artistry -- this is manifestly unrealistic, even fantastic.
A few examples may help to clarify what I mean:
When I had the opportunity to question local audiences in Mongolia in the summer of 1999 about the epic traditions still living in the countryside, I often encountered the following (paraphrased) response from the urban citizenry: 'Yes, of course, the oral epic (tuul) tradition still lives in the countryside, and as a child I was able to understand it. But today it is very difficult for me to follow with complete fluency. The language is old and a challenge to comprehend in actual performance; I am no longer immersed in the language of the local songs; but my grandparents understand and love it in its entirety."
I encountered the same response from urban denizens in Croatia.
Now, let's take the example of a hip-hop performance in the United States. There will be those who belong to the tradition -- in the case of hip-hop, there will be MCs, deejays, producers, promoters, afficionados, and others who will possess an extremely high level of understanding of both the living performance and the tradition from which it came, from a technical *and* a traditionally rooted perspective. Yet at the same time these same listeners will disagree on various points of the performance's highlights and meaning. There may be also in attendance listeners who occupy a slightly different position within the continuum of the traditional audience: say, a hip-hop music critic who knows the history of the genre from an insider's position, who has listened to thousands of recordings and performances, yet who still has virtually no technical knowledge of how a sampler works, how to program a drum machine, how to mix records on a turntable in live deejay performance, how to use music software for composition, to say nothing of the verbal virtuosity which marks the entire genre. Quite simply put, there are different nodes and different levels of expertise within the continuum of any tradition's audience.
The point is simple: complete and full understanding of the moment of performance by all members of the audience is at best an ideal and at worst a chimera. This realization has consequences for the scholar.
To continue along this line of thought for a moment, one can certainly imagine the case -- and I have experienced this firsthand in my fieldwork in Croatia and Bosnia -- that the expert members of the audience who were in attendance at the same performance will disagree about the meaning of the song or the skill of the performer. Audiences at a hip-hop show will have different responses and different interpretations concerning any number of details however small or large. And so on.
And so with this in mind we return to the idea of the continuum. The sheer irreducible singularity of the living performance is both the reason why we flock to see/hear the live event but also why that same event will provoke multiple responses. There is no one, single, definite, isolateable interpretation of the live musical event. Yet at the same time each traditional performance refers to, adduces, and draws its resources from an immanent and stable tradition shared by any number of audience members. A complex phenomenon indeed!
But we need not fear this complexity. In fact, this multiplicity may be what lurks at the heart of oral traditional, or at least fieldwork, research. It may be the reason why a scholar would publish not only a transcribed text, but a translation, a commentary, a series of essays, and even an electronic multimedia version of the text - in order both to do justice to the work but also to open a future of analysis and appreciation hitherto unavailable if provided merely in textualized form.
I would conclude by suggesting that the singularity of the performance phenomenon is precisely that which requires the mobilization of all possible techniques of reception, interpretation, understanding, and appreciation. For today's scholar of oral tradition this means, potentially, that we owe it to the works under discussion to solicit as many technologies and modes of encounter as possible. On one end of the continuum there is the dilettantish consumer who seeks only momentary entertainment, on the other end there is the elderly member of the tradition, or the erudite scholar, who brings decades of knowledge to bear on the meaning of the event. What we as audience members and scholars can attempt today is to be mindful of the numerous possibilities of encounter and to reflect constantly upon our own positions as audience members, our modes of access, and even our own skill, in order to produce the most methodologically attentive and traditionally sensitive scholarship possible.
Thanks, Aaron, for your reminder about the multiplicity of reception. We somtimes get so involved in the analysis of the multivocality of performance that we neglect to contemplate the geometric progression of interpretations.
We know that by reading an English translation of an ancient Greek performance, we only get a sliver of the true experience and meaning of that event, but it pays to remember that no one in the poet's contemporary audience had what we might term a comprehensive understanding of the event either. The "immanent" poem exists only in the combination of all these performances and receptions.
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