Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts

Abstract

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts is a masterful work by an outstanding scholar. This book is a rich resource that I recommend to anyone interested in orality, writing, and how their interaction relates to contemporary ways of thinking about “texts” in society. It offers the best discussion of “scribal performance” available. The work centers on Homeric poetry, its transition into a written medium, and what happened to these written texts when they were manually reproduced. A nuanced and thorough investigation aims to elucidate the agents and forces behind the text-artifacts of Homeric poetry and their countless verbal and formulaic variations. Ready balances extensive and detailed reviews of scholarship with theoretical perspectives and empirical analyses, moving comfortably between broad, synthetic perspectives and philological detail. His discussion is oriented to Homeric scholars, yet his aim is to raise their awareness of relevant research in other fields, which gives the entire work an important interdisciplinary dimension and simultaneously opens the work's accessibility to readers of other backgrounds. This is a book of tremendous value to several fields.The book is organized as a triptych, with three parts, a total of five chapters, and a short introduction and a conclusion. It paints a series of three portraits that render aspects of the Homeric epic tradition, beginning from the image of oral texts as things, followed by a portrayal of the transition of these oral objects into things of writing, and finally a rendering of the life of those written things as they are reproduced by one hand after the next. Each part argues for a comparative model and its application to the Homeric poetry, while the conclusion is a programmatic postscript advocating Homeric scholars to take advantage of multidisciplinary research for approaching traditions and social processes behind the texts.Part I comprises two chapters. The first offers a valuable overview of how oral texts operate as things in the world and how this relates to their reification through writing. Foregrounding the concept of “entextualization,” Ready examines texts attributed to characters as direct speech within the Homeric epics, exploring the metadiscourse of poetic representations as evidence of how texts as things were imagined in the tradition. The second chapter then explores texts presented by one epic character to a second that are then mediated by that character to a third, focusing on variations between them. When the empirical studies come forward, the level of detail may get rather heavy for readers not interested in the technical side of poetics.Part II comprises chapter 3, which is a revised and expanded version of a 2015 article. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the documentation of oral epics. Ready offers an extensive survey of the documentation of epics across especially the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although its scope is limited by not including documentation processes initiated by the performer. The survey is excellent, but I would have appreciated a critical discussion of how modernity has structured the comparanda, since its polarization of literacy in the construction of the “folk” required outsiders to document traditions for them to be considered authentic. Ready argues that the most reasonable model for the documentation of an ancient, long epic is dictation. When exploring the inevitable difference between dictated and traditionally performed text products, Ready's survey brings into focus the role of the person writing, both as an interactant and also as a mediator, selecting, representing, and editing what is dictated.Part III comprises two outstanding chapters that explore and significantly develop the concept of “scribal performance.” The term “scribal performance” describes how knowledge of an oral tradition becomes mediated through writing and especially how such knowledge affects variation in copying oral-derived texts. Ready offers a thorough and critical overview of research addressing this phenomenon, building on the previous chapter's discussion of the writer as mediator. He synthesizes the diverse spectrum of earlier scholarship and significantly advances it by integrating theoretical perspectives on performance and entextualization in relation to competence. His discussions of cohesion, coherence, and completeness provide valuable points of reference when considering a copyist as simultaneously a receiver and a reproducer of a text. Copyists work on a spectrum from mechanical reproduction to full engagement with the source text. Ready offers a nuanced view of a copyist's potential to take responsibility for tradition in the manner of a performer before an audience, yet working as an artisan in a material medium situated in a sociohistorical context of markets for text reproduction.For readers interested in Homeric studies, Ready's volume proffers valuable insights and arguments concerning ideologies of what the epics were as things in the world, the echoes of ideologies of text reproduction encoded within the texts themselves, and the processes by which the epics entered into writing. His archaeology of early written text transmission concludes that copyists of the Ptolemaic wild papyri took an active role as mediators responsible for the representation of that tradition in the contemporary market at a time when the oral performance tradition of Homeric epics was still thriving. It would have been nice to hear more about the similarities and differences between these and variants in medieval manuscripts, divorced from oral performance traditions by centuries, that occasionally “resemble those in ancient manuscripts and sometimes even coincide with them” (p. 222). The question of competence based on a contemporary oral performance tradition versus that based on reading an archaic language has been left to future research. Ready takes pains to thoroughly secure the model he develops in relation to alternative proposals of other scholars, which makes for an engaging discussion.Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics is a substantial and worthwhile volume with much to offer. Part I is an important contribution that engages the current rise in interest in oral texts as “things”’ in the world. Part II explores what happens in the transformation of these things from oral presentations to written text-scripts in a process of dictation, drawing into focus the impacts of the person doing the writing. Part III makes significant advances in theorizing scribal performance. The three parts form a triptych in which the parts refer back and forth to one another, inviting the reader to step back and reflect on the vision as a whole.