Devices of olden times serve well for oral tales
Lost Arts
If a talesman wants to learn how to compose tales to recite and be heard, in what we could call today the audiobook model, where can he look? For centuries the best talesmen have composed with text, print, and reading in mind. They meant their novels and short stories to be read. For much of a century now, even poets have forsaken the musical root of their art, and have composed for the printed page, poems to be read and not chanted.
So we must look earlier.
Poetry
Poetry was the last of the recited tales to yield to print. It may not have happened until the 1920s. So poetry gives us the latest, most recent tales composed in the West for reciting and hearing.
A narrative poem of course has other advantages over prose. Poetry, as I deem, was created as an aid to memory, and as such developed most of its particular features to help the reciters repeat the poem and pass it on without error.
So we can look at such things as
- Rhyme
- Meter
- Alliteration
- Assonance
- Notes and vowel sounds
to use in our oral tales. Today, these tools are disparaged in prose literature, probably (I’m guessing) because they call too much attention to the words qua words, and will lead to what is thought to be prose that is overly mannered, artificial, and ‘precious.’ Modern art in general likes a good helping of ‘noise’ or randomness in its surface. In the West this has been the case since 1918, when Europe died and western artists of the first rank, along with the leading critics, turned away from the old ideals that had helped bring about the slaughter of European civilization.
So, if the talesman of tomorrow will compose prose tales to be recited and heard, he should avail himself of these poetic devices, but use them sparingly.
Rhetoric
Rhetoric has an ancient tradition; it springs from the campfire and meeting-grounds at the dawn of what we might consider ‘politics.’ The art of Rhetoric is the art of winning a group of listeners over to your point of view. It wouldn’t seem to have much to offer a talesman. But it does.
In the first place, the finest rhetoricians and politicians know the value of allegory, and allegory is but a tale after all. Rhetoricians also know that appealing to the senses of their listeners, to their right brains, their deeper selves, their sight and smell and taste and feel, can bring them to a state of trance. Men are more easily persuaded when they are in trance. And abstractions are dry, after all, and will bore men, and cause their thoughts to stray to their next meal, a girl they fancy, the weather, or other things.
In the second place, the grains of rhetoric are not that far from poetry. In rhetoric also we find use for alliteration, assonance, meter, and the musical notes of the chosen words. This also induces trance, but beyond this, these devices are aspects of lovely-sounding speech, and the aim of the speech-maker here is to enchant his listeners at least by the sounds he makes, so as to hold their attention in the hope that the sense he makes will also be heard.
Where to Look
So we must look to narrative poems of the past, in their native tongues. This limits us to those poets who composed in tongues we know. We must also look to rhetoric of the past, again in its native tongue. The rhetoric of the present is rather weak in America, but I imagine there is some power that yet lingers in British Parliament.
What to do with these gems, as we find them, is to speak them out aloud, learn them well enough to recite them from memory, record our recitals, and listen to them played back.
(Composed on keyboard Monday, May 12, 2008)
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