...through divide with his work on Rudolph Zacharias Becker, an Enlightenment educator of the masses, and his citations of countless instances of reading aloud in towns and villages.

The mediation of literary information via a literate person (schoolmaster, pastor, or chapbook seller) who read aloud to people who were unable to read for themselves can be termed a semiliterate process. Repeating material read in a periodical or an almanac to others can be called a semi-oral process. Both reading aloud and repeating material previously read create events where literary and oral culture meet and mix. A group that had heretofore communicated exclusively from mouth to ear absorbs particulars of literary culture via the medium of those who are able to read. For the spread of literary knowledge, the significance of this phenomenon cannot be valued too highly (Schenda, "Canali").

The Invasion of Printed Materials and Communicative Mixtures

The concept of "oral literature" has made itself at home in English and French scholarly language. With the terra "litterature orale," the written component is strongly foregrounded. But Walter J. Ong has called "oral literature" a "monstrous concept" and a "preposterous term." He demonstrates our utter confusion when faced with the job of imagining a heritage of "verbally organized materials" (by which he means, above all, the oral transmission of heroic epic in a "primarily" oral culture) as anything other than variants of the culture of writing, even in cases where those materials have nothing to do with writing. Just as inappropriate, Ong says, would be defining a "horse" as "an automobile without wheels." Horses would then be something that they aren't: automobiles (11).

In the same way, a mouth that prattles is not the same thing as a pen that scribbles. Quite so! But if one considers (as Ong does in the course of his multifaceted reflections) how many ways Europe's oral culture has been bound up with the written and printed word in the early modern period--in other words, from the 1500s onward--the distinction no longer seems clear-cut and correct. An inverse concept of "literary orality," oralite litteraire, would be closer to the phenomenon of intercultural interlacing described here. Discussions of human communication have maintained and upheld the dominant notion of from-mouth-to-ear--that is, a (nonliterate) speaking person communicating with a (nonliterate) listening person--right into the early twentieth century (Ong 11). And yet a contrary fact has been sustained directly or indirectly: the visual culture of reading ever since the early years of imprints for mass consumption in the 1500s, each one of which was produced in the hundreds. Since then, human memory has received increasingly vigorous assistance through material and institutional storehouses of knowledge, such as published materials, encyclopedias, libraries, academies, archives, phonograph records, magnetic recording devices, and electronic data retrieval (Rossi). That also means that narrative acts have expanded in the number of their genres as well as in their type and motific richness. Such a variety of narratives has never been told, printed, and repeated since the middle of the nineteenth century. (1)

It is certain that in the first instance the sources of narrative streams lie in individual and collective memories, but this memory storage would have slowly been emptied, just as communal water vessels were, if they hadn't been repeatedly refilled with a flow of oral and written narrative traditions. Similarly, our own personal life memory would be a much poorer one if we weren't able to refresh it repeatedly with memory bytes from other memory banks, such as the collective memory of family members, letters, picture postcards, diaries, photo albums, and souvenirs.

Regressive Speculations

Certain kinds of studies are privileged among narrative researchers who work both in oral tradition and in printed literature--namely, those that prove the survival of popular tales in world literature. Along with questions about the interdependence of literary texts, these studies open inquiries about processes of "ascent," of ascendance, and of the vertical mobility of fairy tales, burlesques, and legends. Thus Maxime Chevalier, a Hispanist at the University of Bordeaux, examined thoroughly Lope de Vega's early seventeenth-century dramas with reference to popular narrative types and discovered that de Vega had included more or less completely, or had made reference to, the following tales: "Griselda" (ATU 887), "The Nun Who Saw the World" (ATU 770), "Donkey Skin" (ATU 510), "The Woman with Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Children" (Grimm, Deutsche Sagen 584; ATU 762), "The Old Man and Death" (ATU 845), and "The Local Moon" (ATU 1334; Chevalier, "Cuentos folkloricos"). Chevalier was able to squeeze an equally large amount of folklore out of other texts of Spanish high literature ("Cuento folklorico" [sic]). Now, it is imaginable that Siglo de Oro authors had their ears right next to the mouth of the folk. However, it is also imaginable that the reverse process took place--namely, that over time the Spanish folk absorbed their classic authors' published stories into its collective oral repertoire.

The scholar Marc Soriano similarly wished to prove oral sources for Charles Perrault's fairy tales. To do so, of course, his argument chiefly had to anticipate nineteenth-century collections. Reasoning a posteriori he projected texts of later centuries back...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Marvels & Tales
The prologue tale.(TEXTS & TRANSLATIONS)(Short story), April 01, 2007
Fairy Tale Review.(Book review), April 01, 2007
Le Figuier magique et autres contes algeriens dits par Aouda.(Book rev..., April 01, 2007
Madame d'Aulnoy: Contes des Fees, suivis des Contes nouveaux ou Les Fe..., April 01, 2007
The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen.(Book review), April 01, 2007

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