Between the Oral and the Literary: The Case of the Naxi Dongba Texts

Abstract

Shafts of sunlight stream through the crooked rafters, piercing the heavy smoke from the fire. Before you sits a dongba ritualist. He reads from the beautifully written manuscript in his hands, singing of the Naxi ancestors and their encounters with spirits—good and ill. He closes his eyes, lost in memory. He has stopped reading, but he keeps on singing. This dongba ritualist, unlike the Tibetan paper singers, is fully literate; and unlike a priest reading a sermon from the Bible, he is versed in the craft of oral poetry. The book in front of him can, unlike the prop of the paper singer, be read, for it is a receptacle of the written word; but unlike the Bible, it can never be read with the same two combinations of words. Research into oral traditions has long been centered on contrasting what is perceived to be “oral” with the “literary,” as if the two stand on opposite sides of some unbridgeable chasm. This began in earnest with the work of Milman Parry,2 who divided literature precisely into these two forms: “the one part of literature is oral, the other written” (1933:180). Even today, after Derrida’s opening up of the oral versus written dichotomy, and in spite of research on living oral traditions in cultures that use writing for other social interactions, the two forms are still perceived as essentially separate. They can co-exist, but can they co-exist within the same text? If so, how? And what if there was a tradition of literature that could be shown to bridge this divide? It is my argument that not only can the ritual texts of the Naxi3 people of southwest China be proven to be demonstrably oral in nature, but that they also exist in a realm of potentiality that occupies the uncontested territory between the two extremes of oral and written: they are truly Oral Tradition, 32/1 (2018):27-52