Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual

By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

6

The Speech-Music Continuum

Paul Dutton

In “The Speech-Music Continuum,” sound poet and sound singer Paul Dutton offers an account of his own experiences along a sonic spectrum that stretches from verbal or syntactically coherent poetry at the one end through drum poetry at the other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781554583935

Book preview

Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond

Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond

Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual

Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy, editors

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Listening up, writing down, and looking beyond : interfaces of the oral, written, and visual / Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy, editors.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued also in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-364-5

1. Performance art—History and criticism. 2. Performance art—Social aspects. I. Gingell, Susan, 1951– II. Roy, Wendy, 1957–

NX456.5.P38L58 2012        700.1        C2011-907605-5

––––

Electronic monograph in PDF format.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-392-8

1. Performance art—History and criticism. 2. Performance art—Social aspects. I. Gingell, Susan, 1951– II. Roy, Wendy, 1957–

NX456.5.P38L58 2012        700.1        C2011-907606-3

© 2012 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Cover design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design. Front-cover image: Wîhtikow pîsim/wîhtikow sun (2002), a painting by Neal McLeod. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Patrick Altman. Text design by Angela Booth Malleau.

This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Opening the Door to Transdisciplinary, Multimodal Communication

Susan Gingell, with Wendy Roy

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Bring Da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi young and Oni Joseph

George Elliott Clarke

the storyteller’s integrity

d’bi.young.anitafrika (only at http://drc.usask.ca/projects/oral/)

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage: Insights from Slam

Helen Gregory

Poetry and Overturned Cars: Why Performance Poetry Can’t Be Studied (and Why We Should Study It Anyway)

Hugh Hodges

Echohomonymy: A Poetics of Ethos, Eros, and Erasure

Adeena Karasick

Dialect Poetry and the Need for Performance: The Case of William Barnes

T. L. Burton

The Speech–Music Continuum

Paul Dutton

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa: The Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng

Gugu Hlongwane

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion: Orality, Gender, and the Granuaile Aislingi

Naomi Foyle

pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts: Inferring Pronuntiatio and Actio from the Text of John Donne’s Second Prebend Sermon

Brent Nelson

The Power and the Paradox of the Spoken Story: Challenges to the Tyranny of the Written in Contemporary Canadian Fiction

Wendy Roy

What’s in a Frame? The Significance of Relational Word Bundles in Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow

Mareike Neuhaus

Toward an Open Field: The Ethics of the Encounter in Life Lived Like a Story

Emily Blacker

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Becoming the Storyteller: Meaning Making in Our Age of Resistance

Waziyatawin

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature: Photographs in The Days of Augusta

Cara DeHaan

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in Neal McLeod’s Writings of the Oral+

Susan Gingell

A Nexus of Connections: Acts of Recovery, Acts of Resistance in Native Palimpsest

Kimberly M. Blaeser

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgements

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) provided a standard research grant with release time that helped Susan Gingell to develop the idea for The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media conference, which was further supported by a SSHRC conference grant. The eVOCative! festival was also generously supported by the Canada Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board. The pair of related events was the original impetus for a number of the papers in this collection, and we are grateful to those who helped organize these events: Azalaea Barrieses, Kevin Flynn, Neal McLeod, Brent Nelson, and Ella Ophir, who joined Susan and Wendy on the conference committee, and Theresa Cowan, Holly Luhning, Neal McLeod, and Steven Ross Smith, who joined Susan on the festival organizing group. We also thank graduate student assistants Kristen Warder, Natasha Beeds, and Amelia Horsburgh, as well as the many graduate student volunteers. Without the integrated work of both organizing groups, the conference and festival would never have taken place and this book would have been the poorer.

We acknowledge and thank the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the grant through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program. We also acknowledge and thank the University of Saskatchewan and a number of people there who helped ensure the success of each stage of this project. We are grateful to the University of Saskatchewan for a Publishing Subvention from the University Publications Fund. We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Jon Bath, Meshon Cantrill, and Jeff Smith of the Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan for website assistance in relation to the conference and festival and for help creating the website supplementary to this book. Thanks are also due to the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan and its former Head, Douglas Thorpe; Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Peter Stoicheff; Sabrina Kehoe, Research Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity; the Co-Directors of the Humanities Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan, Len Findlay and Marie Battiste; and Dwight Newman, former Dean of the College of Law, all of whom provided crucial support to the conference at critical times. We extend further thanks to colleagues who helped vet papers but must remain anonymous. Our gratitude also goes out to the readers and editors for Wilfrid Laurier University Press, whose comments helped us markedly strengthen the book. Finally, to all of the contributors who worked so diligently and patiently through the multilevel editing process, our warm appreciation and respect.

Introduction

OPENING THE DOOR TO TRANSDISCIPLINARY, MULTIMODAL COMMUNICATION

Susan Gingell, with Wendy Roy

An Urging and an Invitation (r.s.v.p.)

Word up, dear reader: open the door to transdisciplinary, multimodal communication as widely as you can. This book and the website you will find if you look and listen beyond this volume’s pages to http://drc.usask.ca/projects/oral invite you to move away from what stl’atl’imx poetscholartheorist¹ Peter Cole, in Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing: Coming Home to the Village, calls the dysauditory linguistic space (102) created by visuocentricity (111). Book and website issue this invitation while cherishing the gifts of sight and reading, as, indeed, Cole does, in balanced relationship with the other senses. The urgings here are to participate in a levelling of the established hierarchy of written over oral, and to make sense of experience in new ways by joining in a sensory rebalancing in perceiving and responding to the world, including the discursive spaces of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual. The rebalancing requires you to ignore any signs that suggest listenaries (101) need not apply; to avoid zeroing in on the eye and its orbit/uary (Cole 111); and to open the multisensory channels of perception with which humans are endowed. If you reckon with Cole that there’s been a whole lot of seeing going on, that maybe we could use some of those other senses the creator gave us to shake up the sensory hierarchy of Western tradition, and that you got to use all your givens including your hunches (101), maybe you can even develop a little trickster rap port (87). Then you might sense upon entry into the conversations of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond a movement toward a more fully embodied knowing, a knowing that issues from attending to the complete sensorium and thus pleasures the knower with a knowing that doesn’t forget to have fun. Yes, and all this we urge even though our work/play in this project inevitably falls short of the articulated ideal.

We might be guided, too, by Euro-Canadian poetcritictheoristcomicsartist bpNichol. His playful essaying into the territory of Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics (a realm beyond the metaphysical) results in The ’Pata of Letter Feet, or, the English Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, in which Nichol formulates the kin(a)esthetic interrelatedness of the three elements of the present book’s main title, listening, writing, and looking, in combination with the element of the oral from its subtitle. Nichol’s essay maintains that it is at the interface between the eye, the ear and the mouth that we suddenly see/hear the real ’pata of poetic feet (Meanwhile 354). He calls the kind of writing at this interface notation, describing it as the conscious act of noting things down for the voice. Such writing entails instructing the eye on the movement of the tongue for the pleasure of the ear. We have here, then, writing directed by and to the listening ear, the speaking mouth (and tongue), and the looking/seeing eye.

A precursor text to the present book in featuring the oral, written, and visual in its title, Marshall McLuhan and Victor Papanek’s Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations, includes the same elements as Nichol’s formulation but to quite different effect. The book emblematizes the chief argument of the work by presenting the image of a human face with an ear below the eyes and above the mouth. The fixity of this grotesque emblem suggests an unnatural reordering, and, more particularly, that the triumph of the visual over the auditory, of literacy over orality, has produced gross distortions in our understanding of and relationship to the world. By contrast, Nichol’s articulation effects an integrative, aesthetic movement, a kin(a)esthesis.

Nichol is first and foremost a poet, and so brings his understanding of notation to his criteria for good poetry. He recognizes the genre as an embodied, multiplex, and interactive co-creation of the poet and one whom we might, by expanding on and adapting Simon Ortiz’s concept of the listener-reader (151), call a listenerreaderkin(a)esthete. The expansion is necessary to do full justice to Nichol’s take on good poetry, because he says such poetry gets the writer’s tongue in your ear, breathes into it, & makes the whole body squirm with the pleasure of it (354).

On academic terrain, the project that anthropologist of communication Ruth Finnegan identified in her 2003 essay ‘Oral Tradition’—Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity? continues apace. She remarks in that article that rather than pursuing the differences between the oral and written, contemporary scholars are explor[ing] the overlap and interpenetration of oral and written (their intermingling with other media too—music, dance, material displays, electronic options) and look[ing] … to historical changes and multiplicities (to changing genres, to new media interacting with established themes, to contemporary forms [of the oral] not just ‘traditional’ ones) (84). The present collection continues in this line.

Explaining Key Terms

Before we can join the lively conversation outlined by Finnegan, we need to define and elaborate on some of the key terms that are creatures of the discursive ecologies of such verbal exchanges, namely the terms orature and orality; performance, speech, and sound; audience; text; textualized orature and orality; and storytelling.

Although the central pair of terms in the present context is orature and orality, their definition rests on that of performance. Disciplinary usage of the term performance varies across the humanities and social sciences, the former set of disciplines tending to emphasize the aesthetic qualities of performance, and the latter focusing more closely on its social functions. However, scholars of performance, whatever their disciplinary location, generally recognize both elements. The account of performance offered here draws on the work of both social scientists—most notably anthropologists Ruth Finnegan (especially Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts), Richard Bauman (Verbal Art as Performance), Bauman and Charles L. Briggs (Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life)—and humanities scholars—most prominently literary critic John Miles Foley (especially How to Read an Oral Poem) and Performance Studies professor Deborah Kapchan (Performance).

This account is also derived from years of attending performances: of plays in theatres; of poems at poetry readings and dub poetry events, music in concert spaces, and dance in a variety of locales; of storytelling occasions, some carefully planned, others spontaneous; of rituals in churches, in Hindu temples and kirtan (sacred chanting) locales, and in Cree spaces from the sweatlodge to First Nations University; and of other forms of Indigenous orature. Because of these experiences and my training as a literary scholar with particular interests in poetry and the literatures and oratures of decolonizing contexts, and because this book’s centre of gravity is the verbal arts at the interfaces of the oral, written, and visual, the definition of performance offered below pulls toward expressive culture.

Foley stresses that performance is an event that occurs within a tradition that enables methodological variation within limits (How 183). Tradition enables both fluent composition of the performance and fluent reception of it, but tradition is elastic enough to allow for adaptation to the demands of the specific performance context and some individual shaping of the performance. The degree of that shaping depends on the genre; oral genealogies and sacred orature are forms that have less elasticity than praise poems, for example. In the context of discussing performance as one of the Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, Deborah A. Kapchan notes, There is an agentive quality to performance, a force, a playing out of identities and histories (121). Because to perform is to act on, she notes, performance has the potential to be transformative (134). Such observations suggest how central performance is to humans’ sense of themselves and their social relations, but Kapchan also remarks that performance is so intricately bound up with the nonverbal attributes of sound, taste, shape, color, and weight that it cannot be verbally mapped (134). Thus she points to performance’s fully embodied quality, its engagement of the full human sensorium.

Despite her position that performance cannot adequately be represented in words, the present project requires a working definition in which verbal communication is central. I therefore offer the following five-part one, and a follow-up comment:

1 Performance is an embodied event recognizable as distinct from other action because performers frame their communication with heightened verbal and body language and other elements of display to invite and maintain focused attention.

2 Performance unfolds over time in specific social and discursive contexts.

3 It is a forum in which histories and social identities are negotiated.

4 It is a display of communicative competence to an audience (Bauman 11) embedded in particular genres specific to the cultural context in which it occurs.

5 It is the co-creation of a primary performer or performers with an audience (about whom, more later).

As Foley succinctly summarizes performance theory’s view of the performative event, ‘being there’ makes a difference (How 173).

Of course the variety and complexity of performance as it is explicated by Finnegan in the Observing and Analyzing Performance chapter of Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts make the working definition above an inadequate answer to her question in Oral Poetry, What is to count as ‘performance’? (21). Thus, I shall add a wrinkle to the overly smooth definitional dress I’ve drawn over the live body of performance by following up on her observation that a performance need not involve an audience (21). Finnegan cites the case of Sudanese Nilotic herdsmen singing to their cows to back her claim, but do the herdsmen really have no audience? I would argue there are at least two, their cows and themselves, because both can take pleasure from the singing. But how Finnegan builds on her (mis)perception is of real interest because she goes on to entertain the possibility that reading aloud and even the related process of hearing the sound of a poem in one’s head while reading it (21) might be varieties of performance. She thus cracks open the window to the idea of silent verbal performance. It’s a window that Caribbean poet-critic Edward Baugh, writing about performance and page-based poetries, swings wide open when he writes, The moment a pair of conscious eyes engage with [a poem’s text on the page], those words begin to get up off the page and to perform (43). Baugh lets a breath of fresh air into the discussion of performance with his move, which amounts to rejecting an absolute distinction between performance in an external social arena and one in the private forum of the head. Instead, he opts for a continuum of performance possibilities. For working at the oral/written interface, conceptualizing continua has, in general, proven more helpful than conceiving binaries, but Baugh invites us in his statement to think of another person’s disembodied words as performers, and so the performance becomes metaphorical. Perhaps, then, we’d do better to refer to what’s going on in silent reading as a literacy event, as Paul Goetsch does in The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (14). By doing so, we can acknowledge that silent reading is an activity, while preserving the important distinctions in terms of embodiment between oral and written modes of communicating, and keeping our concept of performance live in the popular sense of the term.

Orature is a kind of performance in which the live voicing of words is the central mode of meaning making. The portmanteau word orature (oral + literature) was coined on analogy with literature, the OED recording first usage in 1976 in the context of Black Studies, when J. W. Ward wrote of societies in which ‘orature’ not ‘literature,’ and speech not writing are the primary mode[s] of communication. In such societies, communication through orature is said to be via oral transmission and aural reception – that is, via the mouth and ear; however, much of the communication that occurs in the performance of orature takes place outside the mouth and beyond the ear. What linguists call the paralinguistic elements of communication (those that go along with the words)—elements like posture, gesture, facial expression, and the quality of movement (jerky, flowing, aggressive, gentle, frenetic, and so on)—convey a great deal. Clothes and costumes, musical and dance elements, and proxemics (the primary performer’s or performers’ distance from or nearness to the audience) can tell audiences much, too.

The term oral masks the multimodal elements of communication, then, and insofar as oral is one of the etymological parents of the term orature, the latter’s many modes of meaning making are similarly obscured. When we want to signify the co-functioning of paralinguistic elements with speech and other vocalizations, however, the partialness of the term oral can be signalled by following it with a superscript plus sign: oral+. We re-sign the oral rather than resigning from using the term altogether because its use has enabled so much. However, the unmarked word orature needs to be understood as a portmanteau carrying the signs oral+ and literature in its etymology, and we invite you when reading the introduction to hear the silent plus sign in cognates of the word oral, like re-oralization, and in its compounds, like oral tradition. We have not used the plus sign in these contexts to avoid cluttering the page and tiring the eye, thus weakening the force of marking oral in this way. However, the effacing of the integrated, multimodal creation of meaning is but one dimension of the partialness of the sign oral, because what gets called the oral is further inseparable from the aural. Thus oral+ needs to be read as shorthand for oral+/aural+. With the partialities of the sign oral acknowledged, and the resulting partialities of orature recognized, it remains to be said that despite orature being in some ways an analogue of literature, it is not a thing,² but an event, a performance of embodied words functioning with their paralinguistic elements to communicate meaning. Orature is an artful voicing of embodied words and other sounds in which audience members are co-creators, with whom the primary performer(s) work(s) in self-reflexive concert, attending to audience members’ responses, or lack thereof, as cues. However, orature is not just a technology of communication; it is also a socio-cultural event because it entails the reproduction of cultural codes and sound patterns, and is at different times an enactment of remembering, of transmitting collective memory, of accounting for the present, and of envisioning the future.

Much ink has been spilled contending over the alleged appropriateness or inappropriateness, and advantages and disadvantages, of alternative terms to orature, which include oral literature or oraliture, unwritten literature, and oral verbal art. Distinguished scholars and artists line up on opposite sides of the debate, sometimes rather fiercely staking out and defending their namings. In general, social scientists tend to be less concerned than humanists with the self-contradictory nature of the words comprising the term oral literature, a term that bothers humanists in no small part because the root of the word literature lies in the Latin word for letters, litera. As a result, the contemporary word literature indicates that letters are constitutive elements of this form of cultural production.

Beginning with Oral Literature in Africa (15–25), and again in Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (16) and Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (9–10), Finnegan has repeatedly affirmed the usefulness of the term oral literature. Finnegan argues that its efficacy for preparing people who have a scriptist bias—Roy Harris’s term in The Origin of Writing (46), not Finnegan’s—to receive oral literature as sophisticated art trumps the problems with the term’s etymology. She goes so far as to say that it is an excess of pedantry to worry about the etymology of the word ‘literature’ (16). But humanists’ objection to the term oral literature arises, we contend, not from an overdeveloped concern merely for etymological consistency—humanists know as well as anyone that the meaning of words changes over time—but because we understand oral communication to be a different matter from the kind carried out when writers arrange letters into words and build words into sentences or other segments of meaning. Perhaps, too, humanists have been inclined to keep our disciplines pure, unsullied by the messy and difficult business of dealing with the people who perform orature, because we fear the complex and time-consuming negotiation of the ethical issues that arise when working with human subjects.

In considering the defence of the term oral literature, we might also listen attentively to the views of someone who is a practitioner of both orature and literature, Jeannette Armstrong. She argues in Aboriginal Literatures: A Distinctive Genre within Canadian Literature that words do not have to be written to be literature and that to define literature solely in terms of the written tradition diminishes and subverts a wider definition of artistry in words (180). Thus the term literatures, as she uses it when writing about the place of Aboriginal verbal arts in relation to Canadian literature, can be broadened to include artistic discipline contained in words—through perspective, subject, and contextual experience—encompassing all forms of Aboriginal oral tradition as a distinctive genre within Canadian literature (181).

Why, then, use the term orature in preference to oral literature? Partly the decision results from the persuasive power of Walter J. Ong’s argument in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word that the term oral literature reveals our inability to represent to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing, even when they have nothing to do with writing at all (12). Though his rhetoric seems to us overwrought when he calls the term oral literature monstrous and strictly preposterous (11), he memorably figures it as being rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels (12). Our naming practice also rests on the belief that we can honour the spirit informing Finnegan’s and Armstrong’s arguments without observing their letter. We use the term orature to recognize and respect artful voiced performances for themselves, as sui generis, but do so in the context of reaching for the umbrella of W. R. Bascom’s term verbal art (Finnegan, Oral Traditions 10), spreading it out to make space for literature proper (i.e., artful writing) underneath it and placing literature on the same footing as orature in that space.

Defining orality in binary relation to literacy, as is the common discursive practice following Ong’s Orality and Literacy, is a fundamentally ideological operation that situates orality as a set of skills and practices inferior to those of literacy. As Margery Fee explains, the distinction is deployed to favour particular classes, cultures and interests (27). Moreover, just as James Paul Gee argues that literacy is not a single skill applicable across all discourses, but a set of concrete social practices embedded in specific social contexts crosshatched by the operation of ideologies (61), orality, or more properly, oralities, are inseparable from the ideological ecologies in which they are formed and operate. We have, therefore, chosen to use the term orality as a very plural noun, to borrow Foley’s formulation of oral poetry (How 128), and employ it principally to refer to the speech and other oral+ practices of specific social groups or cultural communities, whether those communities be constituted by ethnicity, class, gender, or other socially differentiating forces.

Speech may seem like a word that scarcely needs explication, but it, too, proves complex in this context. From a physiological perspective, speech is constituted by articulation (the language-specific ways in which sounds are produced), voice (use of the vocal folds, breath, and articulators such as the lips, tongue, teeth, and palate to produce sound), and fluency (including rhythm, with its elements of speed and hesitations). We use the word speech with an awareness of these constitutive elements, further meaning it to cover the full range of vocalized verbal dynamics—in other words, the range in delivery of vocalized words from whispered to shouted as they are employed in meaningful stretches of discourse within or across speech communities. Moreover, following the speech act theory of John L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, speech can be understood at three levels: as an utterance, or locution, with phonological, syntactic, and semantic elements; as intended meaning, or as having illocutionary force; and as effect, or as perlocutionary force. The performers of orature thus use their voices to articulate locutions that have both intended and received meanings, though the two are not necessarily identical even within a speech community, let alone across communities. In addressing their speech to an audience, primary performers can be said to seek to act on audience members. Skillfully framed and heightened speech can make things happen, especially when uttered in community, as we are reminded by the ability of political orators to move their audiences for good or ill. A further distinction useful in our present context is one that sociolinguists such as Nessa Wolfson make between natural speech, produced in the normal course of participation in conversations, and what Cole calls fauxvrais s(t)imulati (16), speech produced when speakers know their utterances are being studied. The performed speech of orature can also be usefully distinguished from natural speech because while not a fauxvrais s(t)imulation, it is a framed and heightened, or artful, usage. Such usage sounds out its difference from natural speech as performers organize it according to the generic conventions of their societies, conventions that help fluent audiences (Foley, How 221) identify that performance is taking place as well as helping them make sense of what is being said.

One could argue that having added a plus sign after oral and its cognates, we should do the same with speech, since it, too, is an embodied, multimodal form of communication. But quite apart from the argument about not wanting to tire the eye, speech does not carry the same ideological baggage that oral does in its frequent collocation with colonized or otherwise subjugated groups; thus continuously marking its reduction seems to us less imperative.

The word sound must also have a special place in our vocabulary. Among Ong’s memorable formulations in Orality and Literacy are his remarks about sound as ephemeral and indicative of power. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence (32), he writes, encapsulating an idea that helps explain why orature is never exactly repeatable, even when exactly the same words are repeated, at least in the opinion of literates. Differences in context, audience, and nuances of performance, both vocal and otherwise, account for the irreproducibility of any performance of orature. Ong’s other sound-related maxim, Sound cannot be sounding without the use of power (32), reminds us that sound is an energy, and as energy needs to be respected for its power. The idea that sounded words can move people thus returns to us in this aphorism.

As Jonathan Sterne points out in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, the phenomenon of sound … rest[s] at the in-between point of culture and nature (10), because without human and animal abilities to hear, sound would not exist in the world, only vibrations (11). The historian of sound reproduction technologies also makes a productive distinction between hearing and listening, explaining that hearing is requisite for listening but is not simply reducible to it (19). As a directed, learned activity, hearing is decidedly a cultural practice and therefore variable across cultures. As readers of textualized orature, we will therefore produce the best readings when we understand the culturally specific parameters of listening to specific forms of orature. One instance of such a parameter is responseability, a concept that Anishinaabe poetscholaranthologist Kimberly Blaeser argues is part of North American Native oral and written storytelling (54). Her term implies a form of active listening that entails not only attending to sounds, words, and phrases, but also trying to perceive the context, meaning, and purpose (Ortiz qtd. in Blaeser, Writing 55) and to add to the exchange in this and other ways.³

Even more concrete in its delineation of listening parameters is Foley’s discussion of the highly responsive, rapt sectors of an audience of a Serbian singer of oral epic, a guslar whom Foley identifies only by the name of the place where he performed, Tršić. Foley reports, The most involved of the singer’s audience responded by calling out alternate or additional lines, or by loudly offering observations about the action of the saga unfolding before him (How 83). However, Foley also acknowledges that some audience members, unmoved by the performance that others found so engaging, wandered away. The lack of sanction by other members of the audience or by the guslar suggests that such behaviour is not a violation of listening parameters in the specific cultural context of the performance, which was not on the festival stage in the village but under a tree outside the ancestral home of the celebrated guslar in whose honour the festival was being held.

The importance of knowing how to listen when reading textualized orature and/or orality, of being an enculturated listenary, to recall Cole’s term into the discussion, is a common implication of several of the contributions to the present project. These include George Elliott Clarke’s discussion of White critics’ disparaging responses to Black textualized orality; the explanations provided by way of introduction to T. L. Burton’s performances of William Barnes’s poems in the video Dialect Poetry and the Need for Performance; and Mareike Neuhaus’s elucidation of a recurrent stylistic feature of Cree poet Louise Halfe’s book-length poem Blue Marrow.

To speak of listeners is of course linked to speaking of audience, a word whose etymology designates those who hear, but in practice most often means those who listen in culturally influenced ways. Because the audience of orature, as we have pointed out above, always does more than hear (receive auditory stimuli), more even than engage in the culturally conditioned act of listening, perhaps audience ought also to be designated by the suffixing of the plus sign as audience+. However, having marked the term here, we will follow the practice used in relation to cognates and compounds of oral+ and its related term aural, allowing the sign oral+ in our text to prompt recall of how often other aspects of our vocabulary related to verbal artistic performance are reductive.

What we do need to make explicit, however, is that while the term audience can suggest a homogeneously responsive group all functioning and responding in the same way, variables in audience constitution include the degree to which members are active or passive; what roles they play in performance and when; and whether they are primary, secondary, or tertiary audiences.⁴ The varying proximity of audience to primary performer(s) is perhaps the aspect of audience most unfamiliar to non-ethnographers or those not engaged in Performance Studies. Thus, an example central to Emily Blacker’s essay in this collection may be helpful here—that of Tagish-Tlingit oral storyteller Angela Sidney and her multiple audiences. Concerned to pass on the wealth of her stories to her grandchildren and subsequent generations of children, Sidney told the stories to ethnographer Julie Cruikshank so that the latter could write down and publish them in various venues and in varying forms—community newspapers, broadcast readings, and illustrated booklets (such as Tagish Tlaagú / Tagish Stories) for use in schools, language revival projects, and other community-based purposes. In this circumstance, Sidney’s primary audience is Cruikshank, and her secondary audience is community members, even though there is an important sense in which her community members are more culturally proximate than Cruikshank and the ones for whom the perlocutionary force of Sidney’s speech acts is ultimately the most important. But Sidney, along with two other storytellers, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned, granted permission for Cruikshank to publish their stories in a scholarly text, which appeared as Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders, thus creating a tertiary audience primarily of academics and their students, but including an educated public. Members of this tertiary audience can hear the stories in their mind’s ear, reconstructing the original storytelling from the cues to performance in the Yukon elders’ texts and from the information provided in the critical apparatus with which Cruikshank supports the texts. Audience is, then, far from the simple concept it may appear to be, but it is nonetheless a necessary word in the vocabulary of those studying textualized orature.

I have coined the terms textualized orature and textualized orality,⁵ minting the first from the conviction that to call what appears in books orature or works of oral tradition is distorting and even damaging.⁶ The second I formulated by analogy, but also with the recognition that when speech-in-writing or simulated speech is the actual referent, referring simply to speech can be problematic, especially when the speech is that of marginalized groups and/or is in non-standard language, and even more so when that speech is created by someone from outside the speech community of the alleged speaker. Print textualized versions, which lack the dynamism of actual orature and orality, can, when judged by strictly literary standards rather than with an awareness of oral+ aesthetics, seem pale, sickly, and boring poor relations of their apparently more vigorous, engaging, and rich literary kin. Worse, the language of those who speak a low-prestige version of the language, if not sensitively textualized, can make the speakers appear laughable, even ridiculous, as is too often the case with textualized dialect. When textualized orature is presented as just another type of literature and read using literary criteria, and/or when the textualized orality of politically and socially marginalized groups is read with ethnocentric and class-centred criteria for proper speech, something political happens. Readers’ lack of requisite information and knowledge of how to read textualized orature and orality gets refigured as textual inadequacy. For example, many if not most readers are ignorant of the way both oral+ and literary aesthetics are tied to what is requisite for successful communication in those respective contexts. The vaunted economy of literary poetry, for instance, is directly related to readers’ ability to re-read passages whose meaning escapes them on the first pass. However, repetition serves effective communication in oral situations in which a cough, a baby’s crying, or a listener’s moment of inattention to a speaker means that irrevocable words have been spoken but not heard. Such extra-textual considerations will not save textualized orature from the charge of repetitiousness, however, unless readers have been instructed in oral+ aesthetics either by teachers or textual apparatus. Similarly, without pedagogical intervention, the simulated speech of the poor relations in printed texts buttresses the deficit model of marginalized groups (for example, Indigenous peoples lack development/civilization; women lack a penis) that sustains and justifies the dominance of the powerful. It is instructive to note that just as Freud argued that women have penis envy, Ong maintains that those in cultures supposedly without writing want literacy passionately (15) when they become aware of its power.⁷

The term textualized orature signals that orature has undergone a process of de- and re-contextualization that fundamentally changes the oral+ verbal art, making it into what Jamaican critic Carolyn Cooper calls the neo-oral (6). This process of remaking orature can entail transcription, translation, digitizing, other forms of technological mediation, or some combination of the foregoing. Textualized orality is, by analogy, the technological mediation of a social or cultural group’s ways of communicating orally in combination with any idiolectal speech characteristics—that is, those specific to an individual’s language variety.

Certainly the process of moving from embodied performance to a textual form, be it manuscript, print, audio or audio-visual, or digital, is always in some measure reductive and alienates the original from the context in which it lived. What Kamau Brathwaite in History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry called total expression (18) becomes in textualized orature and orality partial expression. This reduction and alienation occurs even when the result serves positive purposes in its new environment, such as preserving language and cultural teachings for young people who are uninterested in listening to stories of the old days while their Elders are still alive. Textualization impairs the communication of sense in terms of the performers’ and readers’ abilities to make meaning; it does so precisely because textualization reduces sensory processing. Were this reduction, alienation, and impairment not part of the textualization process, Foley would not have had to devote an entire book to teaching readers the skill named in the book’s title, How to Read an Oral Poem. But learning both some generally applicable skills to help us read textualized orature as a genre and skills specific to the culture from which the orature comes is possible, and the rewards are multiple. Many of the essays in the present collection serve a pedagogical function by modelling the exercise of such skills, and also manifest the rewards of learning them.

The terms textualized orature and textualized orality rest with varying degrees of physicality on an understanding of two of the usual senses of the term text in literary studies. The first is the kind of material object that has pages, a codex, the kind that appears, for example, on the textbook list for a university course. In this sense, a text is something we can see, touch, smell, hear (when we handle it, turning pages), and taste (should we be unaccountably prompted to do so). The words of such a text have a degree of fixity that is great, but not complete, as anyone can tell you who has ever had a book invaded by a non-human species of bookworm, doodled on enthusiastically by a child, scorched by fire, or dropped into water. The second meaning of text in literary studies is the words the poems, short fictions, novels, and plays comprise, which words we can see and may even be able to feel, but which are otherwise literally insensible to us, though by active and imaginative reading we may restore auditory, olfactory, and gustatory elements of what the text represents. The words of this kind of text can change from edition to edition as the result of conscious authorial or editorial interventions, or accidentals, those unintended mistakes that occur so often when humans processs text. (Yes, I have intentionally created a mistake to exemplify unintentional ones.)

In the field of oral-written studies, however, text is what is produced when orature is lifted out of the discursive environment where it lived, thus decontextualizing or decentring it, and reifying it when it is then carried across into a new medium and discursive environment, thus also recontextualizing or recentring it. In this view, text is not solely the product of processes such as incising, writing, printing, or digitally processing words; it can refer just as readily to films, video, records, compact discs, and digital audio files. Moreover, in the Bauman and Briggs view—and theirs is the one we take here—text is not a word we can use to designate the spoken/sung/chanted/whispered or otherwise articulated vocalizations of an oral+ performance itself because those vocalizations are embodied constituents of a performance event, inseparable from the other constituents of performance. Bauman and Briggs remark the irony, however, that the very signals of performance that mark performed speech off from the flow of natural speech—signals like frequent use of heightened language—by making a display of speech, in some measure objectify it. Thus stretches of discourse [are rendered] discontinuous with their discursive surround (73–74), thereby facilitating their extraction from their context and their transformation into text.

Storytelling is a word often used without marking the differentiation between a particular form of orature and a process enacted through text. In the script-centric world of the academy, literary scholars rarely feel a need to designate what they study as literary storytelling to mark its descent from oral storytelling, though in many instances the medium is made clear by the context. However, Wendy Roy in her essay in this collection makes the useful distinction between spoken story and written story, and we further recognize that visual culture is another locus of storytelling, as is dance, though the idioms are of course quite different. If differentiating medium and mode when discussing storytelling brings precision to the discussion, differentiating genre in culturally specific ways also strengthens critical practice, as Julia Emberley has pointed out in Thresholds of Difference by citing the difference between the Cree sacred stories (âtayôhkêwina) and everyday stories (âcimowina) (180n1).

The immediacy of live storytelling and dance performance as compared to the distances across which written and painted storytelling or videotaped dance can occur is an important difference related to media. The feedback loop between the audience of live storytelling and the primary storyteller is, for example, far more direct and immediate than that related to textual forms because response in live storytelling takes place within the event and thus helps constitute it, as well as potentially continuing beyond the event. In contrast, critical response in reviews, readers’ communications with authors, integration of texts into curricula, and the commercial success of books and other forms of storytelling texts is not actually part of the storytelling to which they relate, though they may well shape future editions of that storytelling or brand-new storytelling by artists who work in those media.

The Conversational Circle of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond

Equipped with a shared vocabulary, you can more easily join the conversational circle of this book and its related website. The circle shares the purpose, with the authors of Orality and Literacy across Disciplines and Cultures, a 2011 collection of essays