7 Key excerpts on "Oral Narratives"

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  Orality and Literacy

  30th Anniversary Edition

  • Walter J. Ong(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although it is found in all cultures, narrative is in certain ways more widely functional in primary oral cultures than in others. First, in a primary oral culture, as Havelock pointed out (1978a; cf. 1963), knowledge cannot be managed in elaborate, more or less scientifically abstract categories. Oral cultures cannot generate such categories, and so they use stories of human action to store, organize, and communicate much of what they know. Most, if not all, oral cultures generate quite substantial narratives or series of narratives, such as the stories of the Trojan wars among the ancient Greeks, the coyote stories among various Native American populations, the Anansi (spider) stories in Belize and other Caribbean cultures with some African heritage, the Sunjata stories of old Mali, the Mwindo stories among the Nyanga, and so on. Because of their size and complexity of scenes and actions, narratives of this sort are often the roomiest repositories of an oral culture’s lore.

  Second, narrative is particularly important in primary oral cultures because it can bond a great deal of lore in relatively substantial, lengthy forms that are reasonably durable – which in an oral culture means forms subject to repetition. Maxims, riddles, proverbs, and the like are of course also durable, but they are usually brief. Ritual formulas, which may be lengthy, have most often specialized content. Genealogies, which can be relatively long, present only highly specialized information. Other lengthy verbal performance in a primary oral culture tends to be topical, a nonce occurrence. Thus an oration might be as substantial and lengthy as a major narrative, or a part of a narrative that would be delivered at one sitting, but an oration is not durable: it is not normally repeated. It addresses itself to a particular situation and, in the total absence of writing, disappears from the human scene for good with the situation itself. Lyric tends to be either brief or topical or both. And so with other forms.

  In a writing or print culture, the text physically bonds whatever it contains and makes it possible to retrieve any kind of organization of thought as a whole. In primary oral cultures, where there is no text, the narrative serves to bond thought more massively and permanently than other genres.

  ORAL MEMORY AND THE STORY LINE

  Narrative itself has a history. Scholes and Kellogg (1966) surveyed and schematized some of the ways in which narrative in the West has developed from some of its ancient oral origins into the present, with full attention to complex social, psychological, aesthetic, and other factors. Acknowledging the complexities of the full history of narrative, the present account will simply call attention to some salient differences that set off narrative in a totally oral cultural setting from literate narrative, with particular attention to the functioning of memory.

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  Narrative Analysis

  • Martin Cortazzi(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Opposite ideas about narrative are found in different cultural groups. Among the Gbeya in central Africa it is believed that no one is a good storyteller (Hymes, 1977, p. 127), whereas among the Limba it is held that anyone is a potential storyteller and it takes no special training to give a good performance of a narrative (Bauman, 1975, p. 299). When she compared the narratives of Greek and American women, told after viewing a film, Tannen (1980) concluded that the Greeks seemed to be ‘acute judges’ who recounted events and interpreted them, ascribing motives to characters and offering judgments. In contrast, the Americans were ‘acute recallers’ who gave more detailed, objective reports and showed concern with time reference. While Americans focussed on content, Greeks focussed on interpersonal involvement.

  Such variations in ways of speaking are commonly seen as reflections of cultural differences. However, speaking is itself a part of cultural behaviour and it partly shapes and mediates the whole (Hymes, 1977). Language is both cultural, as a form of symbolic organization of the world, and social, since it reflects and expresses group memberships and relationships. ‘It is discourse which creates, recreates, modifies, and fine tunes both culture and language’ (Sherzer, 1987, p. 296). Narrative, then, is a discourse structure or genre which reflects culture. It is a central medium of cultural expression, organization and learning. Furthermore, it also creates cultural contexts. Staffroom storytelling among teachers is thus a cultural context which comes into being as a story is told and appreciated. This cultural context has its own ways and carries its own meanings, and these may be quite different from the investigatory or analytical ways involved in doing research.

  The Structure and Function of Narrative in Different Cultures

  There have been numerous anthropological and folkloristic attempts to analyze the structure and function of Oral Narratives in particular cultures (Colby and Peacock, 1973; Clement and Colby, 1974). Many of these are second or third generation developments of Propp’s work (1968/1928), yet this research has not shown cumulative development. Each investigator has tended to invent new terms, units and levels of analysis to develop taxonomic or generative models rather than develop or refine a generally accepted model (Jason and Segal, 1977, p. 4). An example is Colby’s model of narrative analysis.

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  Narrative

  • Paul Cobley(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  White is hence led to ask whether events in the world always appear to us as mere sequence, one thing after another, or as narratives with beginnings, middles and ends (White 1981: 23). For him, the narrative impulse, both in fictional and historical accounts, might encapsulate a deeper human desire for a ‘moral’ representation, a sequence with an outcome. Yet even if this is mere speculation, it provides a clue to the purposes for which narrative became so important to early cultures.

  ORALITY, LITERACY AND NARRATIVE

  In referring to the mimetic qualities of narrative, above, it is not insignificant that White stresses the role of written discourse in recording history. As opposed to the archaeological record, the historical record predominantly exists in linguistic form and, within this form, written records far outweigh oral records. The obvious reason for this latter point is the superior ability of writing to survive in its physical manifestation and to be passed on from epoch to epoch, either as noon-narrative artefacts such as account books, bureaucratic registers of such events as births, marriages and deaths, and annals, or as narrative artefacts such as contemporary histories, biographies, non-fictional accounts of current events and even avowedly semi-fictional accounts such as myths or ballads.

  The capacity of written discourse to be stored, intact and safe in its original form to be scrutinized again and again, bestows an advantage that oral discourse cannot enjoy. Oral discourse relies on the faithfulness and memory of its transmitters and receivers, neither of which can be perfect as means of recording events. The imperfections of human memory and faithfulness palpably undermine any attempt by oral discourse to render the totality of events without resort to a high degree of compression and omission.

  At first sight this seems to suggest that oral discourse is automatically inferior, or even to grant immediate prestige to the written sign. However, it should not be forgotten that written discourse is equally doomed to compression, to present some events and not others, to render in a record only that which is appropriate to that particular written form, while omitting or playing down those things which do not offer themselves quite so readily for representation. Indeed, the superiority of written discourse in history has not always been readily accepted. Ong argues (1982: 96–101) that oral culture was so strong at various stages in the past that the now commonly assumed authority of the written word continued to remain in question during its early stages of adoption as a means of recording events (cf. Lord 2000: 124).

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  Towards a 'Natural' Narratology

  • Monika Fludernik(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Natural narrative and other oral modes

  The relationship between the practice of everyday storytelling, on the one hand, and the writing of novels, on the other, has on the whole eluded narratological research. There are various reasons for this state of affairs. For one, there exists a plural consensus that oral narrative and the novel have nothing or very little in common.1 Narratology, except for its structuralist origins in folk-tale analysis (Propp 1968), has concentrated on fictional narrative, mostly on the eighteenth- to twentieth-century novel, with some subsidiary consideration of the short story.2 Recently, there has been a new trend to consider medieval narrative, and narratological insights are currently being brought to bear on the epic.3 The novel and the epic, as art forms, seem to be considerably more sophisticated than conversational narrative, although work on oral poetry suggests a close link between oral literature and the chansons de geste, the early German verse epic, and equivalent English forms (Bäuml 1985; J.H.Fisher 1985; J.M.Foley 1985a). To exclude the analysis of oral narrative from narratology is therefore quite unjustified. Formulaic oral poetry, it has been demonstrated, frequently preserves some of the formulaic features and many of the structural and compositional aspects of the oral language on its way from orality to written composition (which originally entailed oral performance). On the other hand, the status of epic formulae in the written epic is arguably different from their original function in the still entirely oral literature. Whereas the formulae in oral poetry enable composition in performance, in the (written) epic an imperceptible and gradual shift has occurred from the status of an intrinsically compositional factor to that of a stylistic or literary device.4

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  Everyday Hinduism

  • Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  2 Oral and Visual Narratives and Theologies

  Hindus rarely learn or know religious narratives, such as those related in the previous chapter, by picking up a book and reading the stories privately, although there are hundreds of religious texts available in written form. Rather, Hinduism is primarily an oral and visual tradition; Hindus know their stories primarily by hearing them performed and seeing them through a wide range of visual mediums. Religious narratives are sung or recited by performers in village squares and temple courtyards or dramatically enacted at particular festivals; they are danced in classical Indian dance and dramatic forms such as Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, and Kathakali; they are painted on scrolls and carved onto the outside of temple towers, walls, and gateways. Ubiquitous brightly colored lithographs of deities often layer different narrative episodes of a deity into a single montage. Religious narratives are also frequently the subject of commercial films and television serials and may be referenced in advertisements for or labels on consumer goods as various as match boxes, packets of butter and milk, rice, and saris. This chapter focuses on how Hindus know the stories of their gods and goddesses and their theologies.

  Most audiences attend religious narrative performances not to “learn” the story nor to find out “what happens” – they already know the story – rather, they attend performances in order to gain merit, as an act of devotion, and/or to participate in a social event. V. Narayana Rao distinguishes between narrative performances that “communicate” (that is, tell the story for content) and those that create “communion” with the deity and/or the narrative community (oral communication). Audiences attend performances to relish the experience of a particular narrative rendition and its unique performative qualities and to establish communication and a relationship with the divine, and/or for religious merit.1

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  Understanding African Philosophy

  A Cross-cultural Approach to Classical and Contemporary Issues

  • Richard H. Bell(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6.Narrative in African Philosophy Orality and Icons

  [S]tories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history…. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging is very important to culture and imperialism….

  —Edward Said1

  Just as we said that Africa’s interface with European modernity is itself a philosophical text to be read, critically appraised, and understood—as part of “postcolonial African philosophy”—so, too, African literature is a central part of that text. We share in forming and expressing our particular life-worlds through our narratives, as Said says. It is through such narratives that we see both the uses and abuses of power and human identity. Out of the liberation struggles come the poetry, the stories, the telling of Africa’s suffering and indignity. From the cries of injustice, the memory and narration, come a new and broader sense of justice and the hope of the transformation of communal values to engage modernity. This “telling” from these “texts” is part of the narrative enterprise that is the “memoir” and “diary” for philosophy. Philosophy takes account of the contexts in which the conversations of human life take place. It is this aspect of philosophy that is expressive of varied ways in which human life is articulated—the values, ideologies, and truths of individuals and communities. It is the narrative aspect of philosophy that ties it to a culture and gives it its existential texture. It is also the narrative aspect of philosophy that preserves it from abstraction.

  Among the central kinds of narrative texts in Africa and of particular importance to philosophy are those to be found in its oral traditions and in its recent literature and art. Furthermore the development of civil society in particular African nations needs to be tied as much to patterns found in local council structures and the rational dialogues of village palavers as to either one party or multiparty democracies or to Western social engineers. To call forward traditions of orality alongside art and literature and explore how these contribute to an African philosophy may be anathema to some like Hountondji, but I believe they are essential to grasping the present African reality, especially if the grasp is from outside the African context.

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  A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature

  • Shirley Chew, David Richards, Shirley Chew, David Richards(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  During the progression from the oral to the written, literary forms tend to lose some of their formal features and cultural identities, and, at the same time, to acquire some new ones. To that extent, a distinction can be made between the two linguistic manifestations of a society’s creative imagination. Oral literature, unlike written literature, is not an exclusively verbal or lexical art. It is inevitably intermixed with song, music, dance, ritual and craft. The objects one identifies as craft are not produced in a given community for aesthetic pleasure alone. They form an integral part of the community’s daily life. Often, such objects carry with them an imprint of the supernatural as conceived in the imagination and myths of the specific community. The shapes, colours, and forms of these objects reflect the fears, anxieties, aspirations and fantasies in the community’s collective unconscious. The rituals, with which the objects are linked, reflect the complexities of the collective memory, and the cultural norms and thought patterns from which emerge the linguistic forms of oral traditions. As a community move from an ‘oral’ to a ‘written’ form of expression, what has been ‘craft’ within that society starts to be seen as ‘production’ or ‘product’; and, at the same time, quite imperceptibly, the boundaries between ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ in that society start shifting. Thus, the move from the oral to the written is also a shift in the culture’s aesthetic sensibility.

  The aesthetics of adivasi oral traditions

  While some of the ‘main’ languages of India started getting printed during the early years of the nineteenth century, a large number of languages spoken by the forest-dwelling adivasi communities remained untouched by print technology. As a result, the oral traditions of these communities have to this day continued to exist and Oral Narratives and songs continued to be produced. Though the historical and economic contexts for the two kinds of language communities may be largely identical, the literary aesthetics of the two show a marked difference. The most striking difference is to be seen in the manner in which the linear sequence of time is interpreted, and the formation of space is perceived.

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