ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: FOLKLORE
Volume 11
THE ORAL STYLE
THE ORAL STYLE
MARCEL JOUSSE
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY EDGARD SIENAERT AND RICHARD WHITAKER
First published in 1990
Original title: Le Style oral rythmique et mnmotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs 1981 Association Marcel Jousse
This edition first published in 2015
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1990 Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker
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ISBN: 978-1-138-84217-5 (Set)
eISBN: 978-1-315-72831-5 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-138-84360-8 (Volume 11)
eISBN: 978-1-315-73086-8 (Volume 11)
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The Oral Style
Marcel Jousse
Translated from the French by
Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker
1990 Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker
All rights reserved
Original title:
Le Style oral rythmique et mnmotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs
1981 Association Marcel Jousse
23 rue des Martyrs
75009 PARIS
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jousse, Marcel.
[Style oral rythmique et mnmotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs. English]
The oral style / by Marcel Jousse; translated from the French by Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker.
p. cm. (The Albert Bates Lord studies in oral tradition; vol. 6) (Garland reference library of the humanities; vol. 1352)
Translation of: Le style oral rythmique et mnmotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0824068920 (alk. paper)
1. Oral tradition. 2. Gesture. 3. Mnemonics. 4. Folk literatureHistory and criticism. 5. FolklorePerformance. I. Title. II. Series. III. Series: Garland reference library of the humanities; vol. 1352.
GR72.J6813 1990
398dc20
903320
CIP
Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
The purpose of the Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, as of its companion the journal Oral Tradition, is to bring before an interdisciplinary constituency monographs and collections that, in focusing on one or more oral or oral-derived traditions, offer insights that can be useful for investigators in many of the more than one hundred language areas now influenced by this field. Thus the first three volumes have treated, in order, orality and the Hebrew Mishnah (Jacob Neusner), Beowulf and shamanism (Stephen Glosecki), and the Hispanic ballad (Ruth Webber, editor). Future books in this series will include studies of the folk ballad Count Claros, Central Asian oral epic, Middle English romance, and identification in Homeric epic. The overall aim is to initiate and to sustain conversations among scholars who, because of the categories according to which we are segregated in modern academia, seldom if ever have a chance to talk to one another. With this goal in mind, we extend a warm invitation to new voices to join the conversationboth as readers of these and other volumes and, one hopes, as authors with contributions to the ongoing discourse.
In this sixth volume in the series, Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker offer the first English translation of Marcel Jousses crucially important work, Le Style oral rythmique et mnmotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs, originally published in 1924 in Archives de philosophie (cahier IV, 1240) and reprinted a year later by Gabriel Beauchesne in Paris. As the translators observe, this study fired the imagination of contemporary intellectuals in Paris soon after its publication and decisively influenced the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. It deserves, in short, to be better known than it is, especially at a time when we are beginning, thanks to a recent spate of publications, to better understand the roots of the Parry-Lord Oral Theory.1
Parry came upon Jousses book shortly after it was published, but its emphasis was felt most strongly as the classicist started to realize that the Homer he viewed as a traditional poet, one who employed a diction and a scenic idiom developed over generations, must also be an oral poet. In his groundbreaking 1930 article on Homer as an oral poet, and later as well,2 Parry showed his awareness of Jousses psychological explanation of oral composition, as well as of the substantial bibliography on living oral traditions that Le Style oral had brought to his attention. As Parry turned from the texts of Homer to the ongoing oral epic tradition of Yugoslavia, Jousses insights played an ever more important role in his overall conception of oral performance as a cross-cultural phenomenon.
Sienaert and Whitakers graceful, patient, and knowledgeable translation makes these and other points best at its full length, but we may consider just a few features of Jousses thinking that have obvious reverberations in the work of Parry and Lord. For one thing, he refers in a quite matter-of-fact way (in 1924!) to the oral origins of the Homeric epics, calling them history rather than epic and highlighting the role of the rhythmic schemes that enabled their composition and transmission. He finds the same rhythmic templates characteristic of other oral works from all over the world and in fact distinguishes between the Iliad and Odyssey on the one hand and Virgils Aeneid on the other, on the basis of the oral and mnemotechnical style of Homer. Such insights as these, along with the remarkable range of oral traditions to which Jousse refers, make The Oral Style a delight to read as well as a cornerstone of modern studies of oral tradition.
The translators who have happily shouldered the considerable burden of making an English version of this complex and exciting book are perhaps uniquely qualified for the task. Edgard Sienaert, originally from Belgium, is a native speaker of the source language, French, and has worked for many years on medieval French and South African oral traditions; in addition, he is director of the Oral Documentation and Research Centre at the University of Natal. Richard Whitaker is a native speaker of the target language, English, who specializes in classics, particularly ancient Greek. Together with Dr. Sienaert, he edited the 1986 proceedings volume,
