Orality in writing

2.1 Orality in writing

Prior to Milman Parry’s thesis becoming known, a number of authors had already looked at the topic of the conflicting relationship between orality and writing. It is curious to observe that the most interesting contributions come from written literature, specifically the novel, which, at the beginning of the XX century, found itself immersed in a deep crisis, partly due to the social changes and terrible historical events of the period, and also due to the challenge presented it by the new medium of representing reality, the cinema. Alfred Döblin pointed to the writing on the wall:

Döblin had on his part made it clear that in his view the time of the traditional novel with its focus on the hopes and despairs of an individual (possibly attempting to write a novel or spending his time in the seclusion of a magic mountain) had run out. A depiction of the experiences which many face in modern urban environments required a different style of writing, possibly a different genre altogether(40).

Curiously, in its search for a new narrative form suitable to the new reality at the beginning of the XX century, the novel discovers the similarity between the two extremes which, on the surface, have nothing to do with each other, such as the Homeric epic on the one hand and, on the other, cinematographic technique:

Not accidentally had he therefore called for a modern epic and had named his Berlin Alexanderplatz an epic work. This implied several things at once: a reference to oral storytelling and the high proportion of oral composition which Döblin developed, a method of composing his work in a paratactic, episodic fashion. Homer was one of the examples he referred to as a model of his construction principle. The first impetus, however, that initiated the discovery of this principle, came from the cinema(41).

Regarding the theoretical aspects of the novel at the beginning of the XX century, the most interesting contributions are those of Walter Benjamin. It is no coincidence that he was the author of a brief but highly interesting introduction to Berlin Alexanderplatz by Döblin in 1930 (i.e. almost at the same time as Milman Parry’s theses became known). Nevertheless, Walter Benjamin had already (in 1913) introduced into his literary theory, the concepts of “cinematographic style” and “montage”, understanding this to mean paratactical organisation of previously prepared elements.

In a parallel manner, the formalist critic, Boris Eikhenbaum, introduced the term skaz, in an article about Gogol, published in 1919. In a later article, Eikhenbaum defined skaz in the following way:

By skaz I mean that form of narrative prose which in its vocabulary, syntax and choice of speech rhythm displays an orientation towards the narrator’s oral speech.(42)

Unfortunately, this manner of understanding the relationships between orality and writing did not have the same echo amongst us as did the formulations, much less varied and valuable, of oralist theory.

Although the object of study in this book is improvised bertsolaritza, we should not be unaware that the work of Benjamin, Eikhenbaum and others are invaluable to us for the analysis of non-improvised bertsolaritza, i.e. that written bertsolaritza of the bertso-paperak, our own, particular written popular literature.

It would be absurd to think that, in the work of these and other authors, we are likely to find all the answers to fathom a genre which proclaims itself oral, although its public expression is in the written medium, what it consists of and how it works. Dealing with written modes of expression of an oral literature and ignoring what has been written about the theme is nothing but a waste of time discovering what has already been discovered in the past.