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Add to the list the Odyssey. Couldn't be less linear. Onthe real-time telling of folktales, as opposed to liteary redactions, see Cinderella: A Casebook (I don't remember the pub details, and I'm away from home with limited computer time). There's an account of what really happens in the telling of the tale, recorded in a farming community in Italy--all the interruptions, comments, corrections, etc, which anyone who's ever told a story to a child will recognize. Mark -----Original Message----- >From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> >Sent: Aug 7, 2009 5:16 PM >To: [log in to unmask] >Subject: Re: "incapacity"/New Formalism > >I was thinking of gypsy tales, Eulenspiegel, Gilgamesh, folk tales... >(I'll pass over the "oral traditions are not literature" question, >which is very wobbly - there's lots to learn about story telling from >oral tales). > >I'd say the primary shape of epic is circularity. And Sappho's "How >like a god he seems to me" is a narrative as much as Homer is. > >I can't see that that the structural demands of story in prose and >poetry are very different. You have to tell a story in a way that >commands attention. I ended up thinking that was a primarily question >of rhythmic control, in the sense of large movements and at the level >of the sentence/line. > >I've never got linearity as applied to story, unless it means one >thing after another moving forward in literal time, as Hal suggests; >in which case lyric is definitely linear too. Every story goes >backwards and forwards, because it reflects how memory works - I can't >think of a single epic poem without divagations and distortions of >imagined time - the lnvocation of the muses in the present that begins >the Iliad or the stories of the gods, the bizarre leaps back and forth >in Beowulf, Aeneas's visits to the dead, Milton's sudden moving >description of his blindness in Paradise Lost, etc etc. > >xA >> >> "simplest kinds of story telling (oral tales, say) are often far too >> fragmentary" - depends, I suppose, what you're thinking of. Marko the >> Prince and other oral epics of Serbia - very straightforward and Homeric. >> Likewise Gilgamesh, probably based on oral tales. And then the crucial term >> is "based on." I was talking about literature, not oral traditions. >> >> Vergil: Augustus and Rome. Tasso: aristocratic Catholic Europe. Camoes: >> imperial Portugal and expansionist Europe. Milton: the radical Reformation. >> Nazim Hikmet: the international proletariat. Tribes. >> >> The inherent requirements of narrative poetry are very different from those >> of the novel. "[Moving] forward and backward in space and time in ways that >> are not straightforward at all" gets in the way. Linearity (I'll drop the >> quotes), coherence, relentless cumulative power, are needed. Their absence >> - a refusal to differentiate between narrative and lyric - makes Walcott's >> Omeros unreadable. Their presence makes Glyn Maxwell's Time's Fool >> lastingly enjoyable and useful, despite the relative triviality of its >> theme. >> > > > >-- >Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au >Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com >Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com