In this article from 2014, author Hana F. Khasawneh provides a detailed dissection of the nature of the Irish oral tradition, the difficulties in its definition, and in the delineation between the oral and literary traditions. She also explores the power struggles/hierarchies of reception between oral performance and literature, arguing that “[in the Irish tradition]…Orality and literacy are not two opposing entities but two ends of a continuum”.
Dr Hana F Khasawneh is an associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Yarmouk University, Irbid-Jordan. She teaches a wide range of literary courses with particular focus on Irish studies. She earned her PhD degree from the University of Sussex in 2008 has numerous publications related to Irish literature and culture.
Hana F. Khasawneh, ‘The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 103, No. 409 (Spring 2014), 81 – 91. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24347743
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Irish oral tradition inevitably interacts with literary culture. It is the integral relationship between orality (sound) and literacy (print) that is the main focus of this article. The relationship between oral and written culture is complicated by their coexistence and interdependence. The oral tradition remains influential on written literary genres and is influenced in turn by the written word. The printed text is not the only way in which this happens; there are many literary genres, including popular stories, songs, old sayings and legends that can be found in written form. Thus, we cannot understand orality and literacy as mutually exclusive. Monika Fludemik speaks of ‘pseudo-oral discourse’, defined as ‘the evocation of orality in literary narrative’. She lists some features through which the impression of orality can be achieved in written texts. It ‘can be based on the combination of several techniques. In English literature, it requires the avoidance of literate vocabulary and complex syntax. Thus, pseudo-oral narrators…are often garrulous, repetitive, contradictory and illogical. They keep interrupting listener or audience familiarly; they seem to have an intimate rapport with the fictional world, to which they apparently belong and also do not shy away from expressing their feelings and views empathetically, thus setting themselves off from the typical narrators of literary texts – aloof, bland, reliable, neutral’.
The Irish oral performance occupies a middle space between oral and literary forms and it is certainly one of the most well-known of this type. Central to oral tradition is its performance, that keeps it alive. Irish oral tradition involves visual and auditory dimensions that tend to heighten its emotional and dramatic impact and bring a high degree of audience participation. This is also vital to the performance, essentially a communal experience. It brings oral literature closer to dance, music and drama, which are more enjoyable than the fixed written forms of literature.
Orality deals specifically with culturally defined forms of speaking, not with speaking in its everyday sense. Walter Ong points out that ‘oral cultures concern themselves with doings, with happenings, not with being as such: they narrativise their own existence and their environment’. Irish oral culture is more likely to contain borrowed elements, due to its ease of transmission and retention by memory. Ong is reluctant to use the word ‘literature’ when discussing the narrative form of the oral tradition, using ‘text’ instead, for its rich association. ‘Text’ suggests the act of weaving, while literature signifies the physical inscription of alphabets. He observes that there are two types of orality: primary orality, untouched by literacy; and secondary orality, which depends on writing and print for its existence.
Language, understood in terms of images and words chosen can be said to represent artistic expression. Used in a particular way, they echo Ong’s concept of ‘oral culture’. Similarly, Ruth Finnegan says that ‘Orality and literacy are not two separate things; nor (to put it more concretely) are oral and written modes two mutually exclusive and opposed processes for representing and communicating information. On the contrary, they take diverse forms in different cultures and periods and are used differently in different social contexts and, insofar as they can be distinguished at all as separate modes rather than a continuum, they mutually interact and affect each other and the relations between them are problematic rather than self-evident’. According to her, it makes sense to consider artistic production that relies on the oral language as oral literature. ‘When one reads – or better, hears – some of the oral literary forms in such [oral] contexts, one cannot help but admit that expression of insight and understanding by no means necessarily depends on writing’.
While the connections between oral and textual traditions in Ireland have been the focus of much scholarly work, less consideration has been paid to the theoretical concept of orality and the corresponding significance of oral texts in modern Irish culture. Ireland’s rich and varied oral traditions have had important influences on its modern culture. Whether through song, folklore or in the performance and transmission of music, the oral mode has played a vital role in the past, which continues to resonate in the present, including in the work of Irish visual artists. However, it would be incorrect to separate the literary and oral in any absolute manner. Indeed, the oral mood is connected with the literary in Ireland, a country with one of the oldest vernacular literary traditions in Europe. The oral tradition destabilises the existing grand written narratives. It prefigures a public sphere that is textual, yet it acknowledges that there are alternative forms of knowledge and cultural transmission outside that sphere.
The Irish oral tradition is significant for what it stands for and for what it actually is. It is unique in that its literary tradition and oral forms have intersected. Like most oral traditions, the Irish form has its roots in a primary orality which, as in many cultures, either remained purely oral or has been replaced by a literary performance culture. The oral narrative tradition functioned in pre-Christian and medieval Irish society and in modem Ireland and could be found among Gaelic-speaking peasants and fishermen who bore vivid testimony to a long-lived tradition of stories and narrative techniques.
The medieval narrator was a professional storyteller and member of a professional group of poets known as filid who – along with the musicians – constituted a wider class of the people of arts. The filid had relied on oral transmission but, after the coming of Christianity and the Latin alphabets, they came to articulate literacy and learnedness. The oral tradition becomes a national storehouse for folk customs. On the one hand, it becomes authoritative through its survival outside the print tradition. On the other hand, the only way it can be appreciated is to be recuperated from being merely a venerable deposit through the authority of the written word.
What constitutes an Irish oral tradition is hard to define. The term ‘oral tradition’ had been used in the first half of the seventeenth-century to denote church practices outside the strictly religious. Its modem sense comes from the late-eighteenth century, when the distinction broadens to embrace popular practices and written authoritative discourses. While the term retained some of its associations with Catholicism, it broadened into a general term describing the transmission of the practices of an illiterate rural populace. George Denis Zimmerman points out that John Brand was one of the first writers to use it in is his republication of Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares to describe the customs and beliefs of such a populace. Penny Fielding writes: ‘The oral is never simply one thing and what orality signifies in nineteenth-century writing cannot be understood without considering its uses as an agent in the creation and re-creation of cultural norms and values. The oral is always the other: of writing (speech), of culture (the voice of nature), of the modem (a pre-modem past). James Hogg recalled a meeting between Sir Walter Scott and Hogg’s mother. Responding to Scott’s interest in whether a particular song had ever been printed, she scolded his interest in printing ballads that were orally transmitted: ‘[There] war never ane o’my sangs prentit them yoursel’, an ye have spoilt them aawthegither. They were made for singin’ an’ no for readin’; but ye hae broken the charm noo, an’ they’ll never sung mair’.
John Brand sets the oral tradition over against a more public authoritative written word. He claims that ‘These [folk customs], consecrated to the Francies of Men, by a Usage from Time immemorial, though erased by public Authority from the written Word were committed as a venerable Deposit to the keeping of oral Tradition‘. His distinction between print and oral tradition is a good starting-point to discuss oral culture in Burns’ poetry, as well as Melmoth the Wanderer. Brand claims that the written word has a greater claim to public agency and yet is fundamentally unable to erase all forms of popular tradition from the national record. The written word prefigures a public sphere that is textual and yet it also acknowledges that there are alternative forms of knowledge and cultural transmission outside that sphere.
Colin Graham observes that Yeats’ Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry is useful for observing the relationship between the authentic folk-tale and the authorising medium in which it is presented to the public: ‘Yeats’s ambiguous control over the authenticity of his material reveals in its triple-level of authentication (tales, storytellers, folk-tale collectors) that authenticity thrives on the textuality and substance of its medium…Textuality seems to provide the material existence which authenticity needs in tandem with its resistance to definition – its mystique is maintained and evidenced, while what is actually “authentic” is filtered through further authenticating process (folk-tales are themselves authenticated democratically by their tellers, then approved and re-authorised by their collectors/editors’.
Peasant culture plays a distinct role within the modem social sphere. By writing and publishing oral folk materials, it preserves both an organic base for the national community and, in its appropriation by the written medium to which it is seen as a counterpoint, it gives the nation a sense of its modernity. The incongruity of such positioning between the organic tradition and modernity is only apparent. An amorphous body of stories, songs, stories and practices can only become an oral tradition that is uncontained by commercial modernity through its definition in print. Diarmuid O Giolláin notes the relationship between folklore and nationalism: ‘There was a liberating and validating dimension to the discovery of folklore, legitimising the traditions of a population that had usually been denigrated, giving them the status of culture and allowing ordinary people to participate in the building of a nation. Folklore archives were ideologically informed but represented the cultural production of the common people and formed a unique body of documentary evidence, which by their very existence offered an alternative to a view of history and culture as the work of great men’.
The introduction Burns provided for his poem locates the peasant’s desire for knowledge of the future in the rude state of society, showing the influence of Scottish Enlightenment social theorists: ‘The passion for prying into futurity makes a striking part of the history of human nature in its rude state, in all ages and nations; and it may be some entertainment to a philosophic mind, if any such honour the author with a perusal, to see the remains of it, among the more unenlightened in our own’. He presents these practices as a-historical, thus recovering folk practices for an enlightened historicity.
The early twentieth-century saw the publication of autobiographies by members of the Irish-speaking community living on the Great Blasket Island. Oral tradition is not static but dynamic. Careful attention must be paid to the ways in which both the oral and the literary are utilised in a Blasket autobiography to assert the agency of its author. There are moments in The Islandman that reflect the shift in communicative method from orality to a type of literacy. These moments are genuine occurrences, not presented in service of a theory of communications but not unconscious either. While many accounts of the Blaskets are at pains to emphasise the oral modality of communication, Tomás Ó Criomthain was literate and in his work he was operating in some sort of literate mode. As Ong has observed, the transition from oral to literate allows for increased self-awareness and this gives Criomthain a vantage point from which to survey his life: ‘Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness…Writing heightens consciousness’. Ong never distinguished between his religious sensibility and his scholarship. He claims that listening is an activity closer to the divine than seeing and concludes that ‘the mystery of sound is the one which in the ways suggested here is the most productive of understanding and unity, the most personally human and in this sense closest to the divine’. He argues that thinking and its manifestation in communication is related to the word, both as a linguistic word and as an incarnation of the Second Person of the Christian Trinity.
There has been a tendency to marginalise the oral in favour of the written. Oral tradition is classified as a sub-tradition that encompasses inferiority rejected by the literate class. Graphic representation makes words appear similar to things, because we think of words as the visible marks signalling words to decoders. Written words are a residue, while oral tradition leaves no such residue or deposit. Gearóid O’Crualaoich stresses that Irish culture has ‘always been embedded, so to speak, as a set or archipelago of interconnecting and interrelated islands in a surrounding sea of orality’.
Irish orality has had something of a vexed and uncharted intellectual history. Harold Innis maintains that ‘The oral tradition emphasised memory and training. We have no history of conversation or of the oral tradition except as they are revealed darkly through the written or printed word. The drama reflected the power of the oral tradition but its flowering for only a short period in Greece and in England illustrates its difficulties…A writing age was essentially an egoistic age…Richness of the oral tradition made for a flexible civilisation but not a civilisation which could be disciplined to the point of effective political unity Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers’.
A major aspect of orality, particularly evident in the Irish oral tradition, is that of interiority, that is the meaning derived from the subject’s own existence and experience with the sound of words. There are other sensory influences, depending on association, but interiority is primarily an aspect of phonic experience, an integral part that renders Irish oral performance effective. Interiority is related to sound and the way sound can be immersive. Ong says that ‘the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word’.
Most Irish folk tales begin with ‘once upon a time, a long time ago’, or something similar. The musical quality of Irish dialect must be considered when discussing interiority. The melody with which the story or song is heard and received is influenced by dialect which is related to interiority. Richard Bauman classifies Trish orality as ‘verbal art’ that cannot be classified as ordinary speech. Irish oral performance is not necessarily a performance in which there is a performer and a listener, as these roles are troubled in Irish performance. The effectiveness of storytelling lies in the unconventional relationship between the performer and the audience.
The trustworthiness of oral tradition was questioned due to its reliance on memory and intergenerational transmission. Irish orality possesses a utopian function similar to written culture. What is peculiar about Irish orality is that it is a generally unrecognised compromise between orality and textuality. This observation deepens our understanding of orality and textuality by stressing that history is not always textual nor are oral genres always forms of story-telling. The term ‘orality’ refers to the structures of consciousness found in cultures that do not employ the technologies of writing. Ong’s work reveals that despite the success of written language, the vast majority of languages are never written and, even in a country such as Ireland where writing has a venerable pedigree, ‘the basic orality of language is permanent’. He describes primary orality as the purest form, in which the oral is used as the primary communication and literate forms are not used for communication. Emphasising the need to recognise this, he insists that ‘Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings’.
In the oral mode, there is no fixed text which can be repeated word for word. This reflects the manner of composition – an oral poem is in constant performance. Ong observes that neither individuality nor originality are admissible in an oral culture. What is forgotten will be lost permanently: ‘Since public law and custom are of major importance for social survival but cannot be put on record, they must constantly be talked about or sung about, else they vanish from consciousness’. Writing exteriorizes memory and stores knowledge in letters and words. In an oral culture, it is not possible to separate meanings, as they exist in particular situations among human beings. Oral poetry, in contrast to poetry disseminated by print or electronic media, presupposes a homogeneous community of restricted size. Oral poetry can never be ‘world literature’, as oral poets have more powerful roles than do poets in literate societies. This reflects a new relationship between the poet and the audience.
Jerome Rothenberg observes: ‘Among us the poet has come to play a performance role that resembles that of the shaman…The poet like the shaman typically withdraws to solitude to find his poem or vision, then returns to sound it, gives it life. He performs alone…because his presence is considered crucial and no other specialist has arisen to act in his place. He is also like the shaman in being at once an outsider, yet a person needed for the validation of a certain experience important to the group. And even in societies otherwise hostile or indifferent to poetry as “literate”, he may be allowed a range of deviant, even antisocial behavior that many of his fellow-citizens do not enjoy. Again like the shaman, he will not only be allowed to act mad in public, but he will often be expected to do so’.
Ong had the most elaborate theory of orality in the tradition with his key ideas of the sensorium, the transformation of the word from its oral to written and beyond, the impact of print, the rise of secondary orality and the presence of sound, the interaction of sound, culture and thought and the polemic bias of oralism. His coinage of the ‘second orality’ became the most important means for characterising electronic communication. Although most of our daily communication is carried out orally, writing is accorded the highest authority and provides the norm not only for the evaluation of discourse but for value-judgments in general. Written texts will have to be related directly or indirectly to the world of sound to yield their meanings. Reading a text means converting it to sound aloud or in the imagination. This attitude towards writing has for a long time prevented due consideration of orality. The use of oral language is not restricted to spoken utterances nor to the literate language employed in written texts.
It is possible to find formal, quasi-literal language used in free oral discourse, as in scholarly discussion. This new approach has produced an extraordinary interdisciplinary exchange and new alliances in research. Since it was assumed that writing simply represents spoken language in visible form – an assumption that underlines Ferdinand de Saussure’s postulate of the primacy of oral language – the difference between speech and writing has largely remained uninvestigated. Saussure calls attention to the primacy of oral speech which underpins all verbal communication, holding that writing has simultaneously ‘usefulness, shortcomings and dangers’.
Subsequent writers attempted to evoke the authentic Irish voice not only in narrative and dialogue but also in some cases to capture in writing the tradition of oral story-telling. The idea of imposing a truth on these Irish stories and folktales was of little importance, as the reality of these magic tales and fairy spirits was very different. In Ireland, the traditions of storytelling and oral performance date back to pre-Christianity, when storytellers, or filidh, for whom memory was necessary, were part of a privileged class. When literary traditions emerged, these oral artists were forbidden to write down their stories to preserve their art and the value of memory. Some residual authenticity is established because the authenticity of those performances remains in the cultural memory. Once literary forms began to infiltrate Ireland during the Middle Ages, the role of storytelling and orality shifted. A fili was not only an oral performer but a man of reading and learning. These traditional tales were interlaced with legendary, legal and genealogical allurement that it was the fili’s responsibility to transmit. This transition led towards the integration between literary and oral forms. It is because of this intersection that Irish oral performance is both literary and oral.
With the rise of Christianity, oral poets disappeared but the filidh managed to survive and they became repositories of knowledge. Given the difference between oral and written language, the challenge was to transfer features of speech to the written page. How well the illusion of speech was evoked on paper is an often overlooked achievement of the author’s art. A number of Anglo-Irish writers attempted to create authenticity by glorifying the effect of the Irish tradition of oral story-telling. Anglo-Irish literature relied heavily on oral story-telling, an important social activity in traditional Irish life. This event of story-telling is called céilidh. Padraig Colum states that the céilidh is an evening entertainment, ‘told in the professional way, with the timing, the gestures, the stresses that belong to an ancient popular art’, stories told in the setting most appropriate for such narratives, ‘a tumbledown cabin lighted only by a candle but more often by just the peat on the hearth’. Henry Glassie claims that the stories themselves are ‘narratives artfully ordered to do the serious work of entertainment, pleasing their listeners in the present, then carrying them into the future with something to think about’. He says that such narratives are not quite prose and not poems but poetic stories shaped for the ear rather than for the eye.
The founders of the Abbey Theatre, William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and John Synge attempted to connect their drama with Irish oral traditions by adapting Irish folk-tales and legends. Yeats believed that the invention of the printing-press had severely damaged literature. In his essay ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, he proposed to turn the theatre into a place in which the revival of an oral presentation of literature could be started. Apart from the performance of plays, this project also included storytelling: ‘We must have narrative as well as dramatic poetry and we are making room for it in the theatre in the first instance, but in this also we must go to an earlier time. Modern recitation is not, like modern theatrical art, an over-elaboration of a true art, but an entire misunderstanding. It has no tradition at all […] We must go to the villages or we must go back hundreds of years to Wolfram of Eschenbach and the castles of Thuringia. […] Their reciter cannot be a player, for that is a difficult art; but he must be a messenger and he should be as interesting, as exciting as are all that carry great news. He comes from far-off and he speaks of far-off things with his own peculiar animation and, instead of lessening the ideal and beautiful elements of speech, he may, if he has mind to, increase them. […] His art is nearer to pattern than that of the player. It is always allusion, never illusion; for what he tells of, no matter how impassioned he may become is always distant and for this reason he may permit himself every kind of nobleness. In a short poem he may interrupt the narrative with a burden which the audience will soon learn to sing’.
The drama of Lady Gregory focuses on problems of the authority and continuation of traditions. The ballad is the paradigmatic form in which Irish oral culture appears in plays like The Rising of the Moon and The White Cockade. The ballad is a communal form that can be sung easily and passed on with comparatively little loss in form and content. The form of Lady Gregory’s plays indicates an unwillingness to interrupt the course of action with longer narratives or songs. Ong argues that drama was the first literary genre whose structure was made possible by written communication: ‘The unity of action in conventional drama, its continuously ascending plot with a climax and a denouement, could not be constructed before the invention of writing. Oral cultures are not able to tell longer stories in a linear temporal sequence. Oral narration is non-chronological, episodic and repetitious’.
To conclude, a distinction should not be made between oral and literary transmission. It is hard to break the habit of considering Irish literature in terms of fixed texts that are written and read. Orality and literacy are not two opposing entities but two ends of a continuum where the oral and written words interact with each other. Our fixed glance at letters has made us unable to appreciate the difference between oral and literate cultures. The Irish oral performance is an effective storytelling medium. It produces powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic work which are no longer even possible once writing has taken their visual possession. Writing turns out to be a device for preserving the oral tradition and learned men as filidh come to depend upon the written word.
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