Orality and Literacy in Modern Italian Culture

Michael Caesar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367604158
• eBook ISBN: 9781351196017
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"In our highly literate culture, orality is all-pervasive. Different kinds of media and performance - theatre, film, television, story-telling, structured play - make us ask what is the relation between improvisation and premeditation, between transcription and textualization, between rehearsal, recollection and re-narration. The challenge of writing down what is spoken is partly technical, but also political and philosophical. How do young writers represent the spoken language of their contemporaries? What are the rules governing the transcription of oral evidence in fiction and non-fiction? Is the relationship between oral and written always a hierarchical one? Does the textualization of the oral destroy, more than it commemorates or preserves, the oral itself? Twelve wide-ranging essays, the majority on contemporary Italian theatre and literature, explore these questions in the most up-to-date account of orality and literacy in modern Italian culture yet produced. With the contributions: Michael Caesar, Marina Spunta- Introduction Michael Caesar- Voice, Vision and Orality: Notes on Reading Adriana Cavarero Arturo Tosi- Histrionic Transgressions: The Dario Fo-Commedia dell'Arte Relationship Revisited Gerardo Guccini- Le poetiche del 'teatro narrazione' fra 'scrittura oralizzante' e oralita-che-si-fa-testo Richard Andrews- Composing, Reciting, Inscribing and Transcribing Playtexts in the Community Theatre of Monticchiello David Forgacs- An Oral Renarration of a Photoromance, 1960 Alessandra Broccolini- Identita locali e giochi popolari in Italia tra oralita e scrittura Marina Spunta- The Facets of Italian Orality: An Overview of the Recent Debate Kate Litherland- Literature and Youth in the 1990s: Orality and the Written in Tiziano Scarpa's Cos'e questo fracasso? and Caliceti and Mozzi's Quello che ho da dirvi Elena Porciani- Note su oralita e narrazione inattendibile Marco Codebo- Voice and Events in Manlio Calegari's Comunisti e partigiani: Genova 1942-1945 Hanna Serkowska- Oralita o stile? La trasmissione orale e le modalita narrative ne La Storia di Elsa Morante Catherine O'Rawe- Orality, Microhistory and Memory: Gesualdo Bufalino and Claudio Magris between Narrative and History"

Part I
Orality, Literacy and Performance

Chapter 1
Voice, Vision and Orality: Notes on Reading Adriana Cavarero*

Michael Caesar

1. Orality and the voice

'Orality' is a necessary yet over-determined term whose potential sphere of reference includes any or all of the following:¹

• — oral tradition in general, sometimes overlapping with such terms as 'folklore' and 'popular culture';
• — oral culture and its sub-divisions (primary, secondary, mixed, mediatised);
• — the work of oral production, transmission, reception, conservation and (usually) repetition;
• — the marking of features bearing on oral culture or practice in written texts.

At the same time as embracing these multiple fields of meaning, 'orality' works hard to define itself by opposition, though the truth is that, in terms of cultural history, it is far from easy to agree on what the oral is not. The long accredited pair 'orality and literacy' is faithfully reproduced in the title of this volume, though many of the contributions draw attention, explicitly or otherwise, to the inadequacies of that distinction. Orality/textuality? But it is common practice to refer to oral poems, for example, also as 'texts'. One thing that is clear is that the oral embraces a reality far greater than its primary meaning might suggest: it is not limited to sound or even the spoken language. While the invention of writing systems marks an undoubted break in the history of orality, the bulk of human cultural history accommodates an 'impure' orality, one that is implicated one way or another with other forms of signification and communication, whether written or iconographic or a mixture of both.

The notion of 'voice', which, over the past twenty years, has attracted philosophers, psychoanalysts, literary critics, anthropologists and cultural historians may have tempted those specifically interested in oral culture as well because it held out the prospect of filling the gap left by the very dispersiveness of the term 'orality': voice might be perhaps what was most oral about the oral. The question in my mind — immediately to anticipate the main point of this contribution — is whether in filling the sap the suggestions coming from the study of voice do not exclude too much.

For Paul Zumthor, who was the first to call for 'a science of voice' in his classic Introduction à la poésie orale of 1983, its purpose would be to 'provide a theoretical base for the study of oral poetry where at present there is none'.² The direction in which Zumthor was headed was powerfully endorsed by Walter J. Ong in his foreword to the English edition, where the work was hailed as a pioneer 'in its linkage of voice not merely with social structures, but chiefly with the depths of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the person, where the physical and psychic merge' (Zumthor 1990, p. xii). Indeed, Zumthor's multi-layered imaging of voice, especially in the dense opening chapter of his book, 'The Presence of Voice', is focussed on ideas of potentiality and desire homed in the 'matrix' of the body. Voice 'is the desire to say what you mean as much as a desire to exist'; it is 'the locus of an absence that changes into presence when used' and, as such, it 'modulates cosmic impulses that cut across us'; it is 'an unutterability suited to clothing itself in language'. Voice is a thing, having materiality. It 'lodges in the silence of the body, as the body does in the womb', but unlike the body, 'voice returns to its matrix, immediately and constantly erasing itself as speech and sound' (Zumthor 1990, p. 5). Zumthor takes the voice down as deep as he can into the body, as part of the instrumentation of existence itself, but pays less attention to the 'upper' level of the voice, that is to say, the point at which sound (phonè) becomes speech (logos), voice becomes word before being swallowed back down again.

Yet the phonè/logos boundary comes up repeatedly in the discussions on voice, and bears directly on the relation between voice and orality. In a ground-breaking study that was admired by Zumthor, Corrado Bologna insisted in Zumthorian terms on the distinction between voice and word: 'La voce è una pulsione che tende ad articolarsi, ma che nell' articolazione medesima si annulla in quanto "pura potenzialità", generando la parola differenziata e significante'.³ The rhetoric of these assertions has aroused the suspicions of those who see the pattern described by Zumthor and Bologna as repeating, wittingly or not, the assumptions of Western logocentrism: it is the word or language which in the end commands our attention; the voice, having performed its function, returns to deep, concealed, silence. There have been interesting recent attempts, not so much to negate as to re-balance the relation between voice and word, notably by Vincenzo Cuomo, drawing on Agamben and Lyotard in his search for 'una chiarificazione filosofica della phonè che eviti sia il suo semplice soggiacere al logos che il suo semplice opporvisi'⁴ and by Adriana Cavarero, who invites us to focus on the continuity between voice and word: 'il proprio della voce non sta nel puro suono, sta piuttosto nell'unicità relazionale di un'emissione fonica che, lungi dal contraddirlo, annuncia e porta a destinazione il fatto specificamente umano della parola'.⁵

It is to Cavarero's recent work that I now turn in order to carry this discussion forward, acknowledging immediately that some of the arguments and observations advanced in her recent essays are what have most stimulated this contribution. 'Stimulated', no more and no less, for I have neither the space here nor the competence to engage with her essays at the level which they demand, or to do justice to their sheer brilliance. More modestly, I shall concentrate on just two points which seem to me to bear importantly on orality. The first has to do with the exclusivity of the vocal. Cavarero argues, in a manner that is both just and difficult, for the recognition equally of the uniqueness of the individual voice and the pluralism of voices, rather than that we should go on talking about 'voice' in general; we have already seen her constructing a bridge across the gap between voice and speech. Relationality is a key concept in her understanding of voice. Yet this relationality seems to apply only within the closed circuit of voice and sound (including the spoken) and, by implication, the hearing of these. 'La relazione vocale-acustica ha la forza di una catena magnetica,' she writes in her essay on Plato's myth of the cave, 'e la seduzione poetica è essenzialmente una seduzione fonetica, nella quale l'occhio non gioca alcun ruolo'.⁶ Shortly after, we see the connection with the fundamental experiences of every infant, 'nella relazione primaria del bambino con la madre, [che] mostra che gli esseri umani sono dei sé relazionali in quanto appartengono all' orizzonte costitutivo di una condizione acustico-vocale' (p. 326). No one could possibly deny the supreme importance of sound either in the early weeks and months of a child's life, in the womb and outside it, or in the pleasure of poetry, whether it is 'sounded' externally, as in an oral performance, or internally, as in a private reading. But this primacy of sound cannot be exclusive. The infant hears, but watches its mother's lips as well, listens, but also mouths. And, as I hope to show in a moment, the oral transmission and reception of poetry too, contrary to what one might imagine, is a visual as well as an oral and aural experience.

Cavarero does battle, also in the name of voice, with the visual bias of Western thought, its perception of truth in terms of what is evident, clear, distinct — and in this she has to take up arms with Derrida who perversely reads the supremely 'visual' myth of the cave as proof of Plato's logocentrism — but it can lead her argument up what, for students of orality, must be a blind alley. 'Voglio sottolineare l'affermazione: al contrario del discorso, la scrittura implica il vedere' (p. 330). No, one wants to retort: they are two different ways of seeing. Or rather, both entail both hearing and seeing, though in different measure and in different relation to each other. But perhaps the rigid distinction just enunciated is itself informed by a metaphysics of sight. The sight which sees the written word is a very specialized kind of sight. Oral culture, or discourse, entails its own kind of sight which registers all manner of evidence about the story or narrative being performed: the actual presence of the singer, the relation to his inspiration and his material which may be indicated by facial expression or gesture, the authenticity of his telling (in the days before mediated, e.g. electronic, orality), all the things which make the song pleasurable, which are in large measure acoustic but not exclusively so. I would go so far as to say that the oral performance is not possible without sight: the singer may be blind, but not the audience.

Along with the hypostasization of sound at the expense of all other sensory channels, there exists the problem of where voice is to be situated along the continuum of sound. There is a tendency in Cavarero's argument to shift the boundary between sound and speech slightly downstream. The relational continuity between the two (as well as their essential difference) having been asserted (Cavarero 2003, pp. 20—21; and see above), the boundary re-emerges as a separation between voice (p. 143), or voice and the orality of the maternal scene (p. 146), and the 'semantic' — an habitually gendered distinction as in the misogynistic formula jokingly proposed towards the end of a marvellous analysis of Calvino's Un re in ascolto as ' Women sing, men think' (p. 12); or again, under the aegis of Kristeva, as the distinction between voice-ness ('vocalità'), which is 'la parola, anche quella scritta, [...] indagata nella sua matrice sonora', and 'textuality', in which the acknowledged presence of sound is seen to lead language back to this matrix while challenging the claims of language to control signification in its entirety.⁷ For better or worse, it is the fate of 'voice' in Western culture to be de-semanticized.

That this separation also has the historical form of an expulsion is clear from Cavarero's treatment of the Sirens episode in Book XII of Homer's Odyssey (Ίl destino delle Sirene': Cavarero 2003, pp. 115—29). The consequences of her argument for a history of orality are very important, for it would follow that, at a relatively early stage, it was possible for a primarily oral culture to imagine pure voice that was also meaning-bearing, before the massed weight of Western thought separated voice from word and despatched it to the lower depths, the animal-like, the pre-rational, below and before the utterance of sense. In the remainder of this essay, I propose to examine her argument more closely, to introduce the 'forgotten' dimension of the visual by way of support, but also as a means of suggesting just how exceptional the episode of the Sirens is in comparison to other testimonies to the power of voice, principally drawn also from the Odyssey. While respecting the exceptionality of the episode, I hope also through this analysis to reinforce our sense of orality as a form of communication and signification which is seen as well as heard.

2. Hearing and seeing in the episode of the Sirens

The episode of the Sirens, as Cavarero rightly notes (2003, p. 117), though brief in the telling, is also the most memorable of the adventures which Odysseus recounts to the Phaeacians before he begins his final journey home.⁸ Drawing in part on already existing folk tradition, it has itself undergone significant transformations in the long history of its reception. Following the studies of Pietro Pucci,⁹ she reminds us strongly that the Sirens do not just 'sing', they sing a song with words, and these words are those which must most appeal to the passing sailor whom they have instantly recognized: 'For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth' (12.189—91). It is not surprising that Odysseus 'dies' to hear these words, or would die, for it is the story of the Iliad with which and in which they seek to entrap him.

None of this, Cavarero argues, survives in the reworkings which the story undergoes in the Western imagination. If'la vocalità non annulla [...] la parola' in Homer (relational continuity reaffirmed), 'la storia dell'immaginario occidentale decide [...] di non tenerne conto' (2003, p. 115). The Sirens attribute to themselves the qualities of the Muses,'as melodious singers, as bestowers of pleasurable song, and as being omniscient' (Pucci, p. 6). Their song is audible even to the humblest sailor, while the Muses' song is vouchsafed only to the poet, and they induce forgetfulness and death. But they share with the Muses both the quality of being female, and that of narrating in song. They are, in Homeric terms, the source, or a source, of epic poetry Cavarero insists on the point that in Homer the female voice, which is a guarantee both of the truth of the song and of its seductive power, is not simply 'voice': 'Non si tratta di pura voce, possente e melodiosa, oppure acuta e animalesca, preumana, in ogni caso, divina. Si tratta appunto di una voce narrante, ossia di un canto dove la vocalità e l'oralità stanno insieme nella musicalità della prestazione' (pp. 117—18). The epic content of the Sirens' song disappears over time, but the seductiveness of these female presences does not; instead it takes on other forms. The creatures themselves, who appear on Greek vases as birds with human faces, perhaps in homage to their singing, but with Harpy-like attributes according to some scholars,¹⁰ morph into fishtailed human women who, in the inverse direction to Darwinian evolution, descend from the shore to the sea, and thereby acquire their mysterious allure. The mystery is compounded by a beautiful song which now really has become pure voice, 'saying' nothing, emptied of its content.

It is invaluable that the later myth of the Sirens with which most of us are familiar should be relativized and the Homeric version restored in all its fullness. But in a move which if anything detracts from her argument, Cavarero goes on to complement her discussion of voice with references to visibility and sight in the episode which are perplexing.

'Del resto,' she writes, 'tracce di una corporeità pronta a invadere la scena delle Sirene c'erano già in Omero. Dopo tutto, al contrario della Musa, le Sirene sono mostri tremendi e micidiali. Creature ibride, nelle quali la donna si mescola all'animale, esse si contornano di cadaveri di marinai, ovviamente maschi. Il loro aspetto repellente ha comunque una funzione precisa ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: ORALITY, LITERACY AND PERFORMANCE
• PART II: WRITING ORALITY
• Bibliography
• Index