On Fri, 25 May 2007 12:04:50 -0400
David Wilson-Okamura <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Steven J. Willett wrote:
>> Augustan poetry was written for recitation, not silent reading, and
>> even centuries after Vergil's time, it was like Homer studied by
>> recitation. Synesius of Cyrene has a delightful passage, in one of
>> his letters, where he describes a summer afternoon in the garden when
>> his son and a friend were practicing their Homer by reciting passages
>> to each other. The application of a spatialized technique to such
>> works will inevitably distort them, no matter how practical it may be
>> for padding the CV.
> I've often wondered about this. But let's not get trapped by our own
>metaphor, which spatialization is. The question, I think, is whether these
>works were made to be read, as Carol Kaske says, "concordantially." My
>sense, from reading ancient commentary, is that there was LESS of this, but
>far from NONE. For us, "close reading" is bread and butter, but for
>Servius, it's just another thing you can do, and not always the most
>interesting or most persuasive.
>
> As for oral recitation: the recitation of passages back and forth was not
>necessarily linear. The person who knows Virgil by heart can mentally flip
>back and forth between passages much more agilely than the one who only
>reads him on the page. I.e., memorization and recitation can facilitate
>concordantial reading, even when it's not "spatialized." Cf. the ancient
>Virgil centones, or Vegio's Supplementum: the people who can write these
>sorts of things know the Aeneid backwards and forwards, but they don't
>reproduce the text in the same order they encountered it in.
>
> If you doubt this, dig up a student who knows the Bible very well. (These
>are getting harder and harder to find, even here in the so-called Bible
>belt.) My "Bible as literature" students were a good lot this semester, but
>they weren't used to reading a book straight through; instead, they
>interpreted a verse from Mark by citing another verse from Paul. Where did
>they get that other verse? My guess is, not from Bible reading but from
>sermon listening.
>
> Orality lives on, and its operation is often non-linear.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
> English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
> East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
When one European diplomat leans over to another and says, in Latin, during
a negotiation, "I fear the Greeks bearing gifts," he represents the remains
of the culture David Wilson-Okamura and Steven Willett's Synesius of Cyrene
speak of. Those catechized Bible students, likewise, are true not only to
the bi-columned Bibles that are printed with that gutter of cross-references
down the center of the page, but to the Bible itself, perhaps the most
self-quoting text ever put on paper. If you read all the cross-references,
and all the further cross-references at those cross-references, you would
eventually read the whole Bible. And you might be reading it in the right
way, or one of the right ways. And, I once would have argued, you would be
reading "against the grain" of the ordinary notion of "the Bible as
literature."* -- Jim N.
*As a regular self-quoter himself wrote long, long ago (he wrote
polemically, and would not adhere to all of this today, and admits that the
Bible as literature has become a virtually canonized term, with proven
benefits in the curriculum):
The phrase in question contains a problem. It means, "the Bible / also
literature." "As" is a form of the word "also," one of a large number of
words ultimately derived from the Indo-Europena root al-, from which we also
get the word allegory. The Bible, an allegorical literature. The stoyd of
the Bible as literature, it could follow, pertains not to the BIble, but to
literary works having an allegorical realtion to it. ¶ We often teach our
subject as it they were soemthing "else," and it is easy to belive that the
Bible belongs to the gospel of the humanities. The Bible's old rival, Saint
Socrates, is also Saints Calidroe and Quixote. Erasums' Folly commends
those who have made themslves foolss for the gospel, and an iroic comparison
of Quixote to Satin Pual implies the the Done has made himself a fool for
the gospel of romance. Courses on the Bible as iterature seem rather
quixotic too. Their very title may be a contracition in terms. No doubt
muct that is useful can be done with thie contradition, once we turn it into
a comparison. But we cannot do this without first having learnt something
about the Bible as the Bible. [Fin.]
[Ab init.]
... In literature it is the individual work that exhibits homogeniety, while
literature as a whole seems to seek to multiply diversity. The genres of
literature signify, in part, this generativity. In the Bible the
homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies actually coincide, difficult as
this is to understand at first. The result is that while literature remains
a molecular aggregate, the Bible has beocme an atomistic unity. The chaos
in literature is centrifigal, of the sort produced by all things falling
part; the chaos in the Bible is centripetal, the kind produced by all things
merging. ¶ The canon is homogenous, but the actual biblical text, so often
being compounded of many texts, is a kind of pastiche, like the dialect of
Homer. In literature, where the individual text is pure and individualized,
the canon is the pastiche. (This beocmes expecially clear in attempts to
prescribe it.) The Bible, something tells us, ought to have a form, but it
will have to be the kind of form that abosrbs and digests other forms. The
Bible lacks the normal partiality of form to perfection and selectivity, at
least until its accumulation is arrested by the fixing of the canon; at that
point, its inclusiveness reverses itself to become exclusiveness. Canon, it
seems, is actually given us in lieu of form. The exclsuive unit in
literature, in contrast, is the individual work, with its many indications
of its postulate of autonomy or separateness. The Bible contains no such
completely individualized works; books like Ruth and Job are easily isolated
for literary-critical scrutiny, of course, but they have a curious and
symptomatic tendency to treat isolated personalities outside of Israel, and
those to locate these personalities in the buffer-zone of a book. On the
whole, the collective personality Israel has produced a collective
literarture: one produced by schools. ... ¶ ... We may begin with our
principle that the Bible has no genre. What has it in genre's place? The
forms of literature exist to liberate its meaning, to allow that meaning
free play, as it were. This liberalism contrasts with the conservatism of
Scripture, which is the opposte impulse to fix not the form, but the content
of withess. With the abridgement of categories of form consequent upon the
Bible's own form being that of a collapsed literature, a literature
incapable of fully isolating and articulating individual forms, the place of
genre is taken by a variety of pre-generic modes of discourse that only
latterly have become un-literary. These include wisdom ... wisdom with its
gnomes, and precepts; saga with its genealogical interest and its anecdotal
style of episode; law with its nuclear dictates, its strings of statutes,
and its repertory of judgments; prophecy with its oracles and its
abgbreviated style of delivery; cult with its local legends that, apart from
cult, seem incomplete; history with its chronicle entires and its lists of
reigns; oral teaching with its sayings, logia, and paradigms for easy
remembrance; hymnody with its sequences and reiteration; hagiography with
its disconnected miracle stories; sacred history proper with its pericopes
and epiphany stories; genalogy itself, with its list of begats: what do
these all share? ¶ All these forms are essentially brief, even granulate.
Becuase the units are small, the strength to survive partly comes from
numbers. Thus the Bible is not void of forms, but like the prophets, with
their appetitie for all the forms that could possibly teach or exhort or
arrest attention, it is somewhat 'beyond formalism.' Being short, the forms
I have mentioned are often agglutinative or gregarious or inclined towards
catena, codification, and anthologization. There is perhaps an only
somewhat facetious comparison to made here between Western and Eastern
cuisine. The Western meal arrives in courses: it is sequential and
differentiated, and its recipes, like good scientific experiments, are
repeatable. Our genres are somewhat similar. In the Chinese cuisine the
meal arrives pretty much at once, and typically forms a dense, particulate
mass; and no recipe is supposed to be wholly repeatable. We could say that
the Chinese meal has lost a distinction between the inter-textual and
intra-textual, and basically that is true of the Bible also. ... Not only
does the Bible collapse the relation of this text to itself with its
relation to other texts, it also collapses a literary history. This process
is seen in the constant adoption of materials into larger wholes, with no
senes that this activity violates the integriyt of a text. The result is
roughly the assmimlation of the text's 'reception history' (the history ot
the text's reception by early and late audineces) to its 'redaction history'
( the history of the production of a text from earlier versions or more
predecessor texts than one). All that we presently have was received: the
evidence is our having it. As for how it was received, the various versions
and combinations thereof--the redactions we now have--tell us discrepancies
and duplications were alway tolerable wherever the quotient of witness might
be augmented. ... The equivalent to the ending of the liteary work, for a
collapsed litearture, is the closing of the canon, and it is clear that
Deuteronomy iin some way aspired to close the 'in-canonic' unit of the canon
which we know as the Pentateuch. We may pause here and inquire how a
collapsed literature in fact comes into being. Is the logic internal or
external? ¶ If it were internal, the form should come about through the
fulfillment of a design, in this case a design implicit in the saving
history. Or repletion might merely be the result of a process of an
accumulation of material. One might compare the stone tracery of the gothic
ceiling filling up until it reached a staruation-point, when it could
accommodate no further variation or redundancy. Another example would be
the elaboration of the form of the fuge in the work of Bach, with whom the
form more less complicated itself out of existence. A completely dense
pattern is a texture, not a structure, and at the point such density is
reached, figure oscillates into ground, and space for a new form is created.
The hypertorphy of form in Finnegans Wake is conceived in terms of this
effect, and is close to bieng the book's theme." ¶ The Bible does seem to
be written over and over-written in this way, and, by many times abridging
the separateness of the literary work, has left little room for reworkings,
apart from the invention of a new national history. That was not to be,
which brings us to the external logic making for a collapsed literature.
The literature of a faith-community knows of no sharp distinction between
producer and consumer. But when the faith-community ceases to exist,
successor communiteis can only approriate the literature in question by
canonizing it, and establishing principles for its interpretation. The
producers are gone, the consumers remain, and rationing begins. ("On
literature and the Bible," Centrum II:2 [1974/76], 5-43--originally a
lecture given in 1974, and known to be going to be followed by a dinner
hosted by Prof. Geoffrey Hartman at a Chinese restaurant in New Haven).
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
