Teaching

Orality and Performance in the Core Classroom

An image from Platos Phaedrus: the lovely Phaedrus invites Socrates to walk with
him outside the walls of Athens and to read the text of speech recently given by Lysias.
Socrates shows himself to be intensely suspicious of the written word, which, cut off from
the speaker, cannot be questioned, interrogated, argued against. Like Lysias speech, the
written text of ancient, classical, and medieval works is also a kind of orphan. It most often
appears to modern readers as a printed book, a codex, a familiar and safe form that makes
sense. The book makes sense phenomenologically, in that we understand how to hold and
read this object. It weaves together fragments of papyrus, clay tablets, or transforms
scrolls, the interior walls of a pyramid, the inside of a bronze vessel.
This expression make sense is essential, because, in the case of the book, it is
literal: the book participates in creating the meaning that it seems to transmit. The printed
text not only transmogrifies material experience, but also compresses time, suggesting,
even if unintentionally, Homers Iliad as original, as a creation belonging to Homer, even
while the text the book offers comes down from many generations after the historical
Homer, if any such person existed. If translated into a language that we can read, the book
makes sense linguistically.
None of these precisions is meant to denigrate the printed, edited version of texts,
which are indispensable as tools for students and for scholars. Nonetheless, when teaching
ancient, classical, and medieval texts in the core or survey classroom, where books and
printed materials are generally the means of access to texts, how can we encourage
students to situate these works in context? Furthermore, how might we suggest that the
material, phenomenological, and linguistic transformations of texts must be interrogated in
order to multiply not reduce inflections of meaning? Digital editions and archives have
begun to restore a sense of materiality and multiplicity to the reading experience, while
also creating a new kind of reading. Large-scale digitization projects like the Roman de la
Rose Digital Library and UCLAs Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative have incredible
research and pedagogical power, but such archives remain primarily visual and textual.
I have endeavored to incorporate the experience of orality and performance in my
ancient and classical world cultures class in several ways. Below, I will address two
approaches to introducing concepts of orality and performance of poetry through the use
of audio, one pertaining to public, oral performance of Sapphos lyric poetry and the other
to pronunciation and homophony in the Chinese Classic of Poetry. In both cases, the
essential goal is not simply to contextualize, but to invite students to take possession of
texts.
When studying Sapphos Aeolic poetry, my students and I begin by reading a brief,
humorous account of the historical Sappho from Mary Barnards translation: The
biographical tradition, which is full of contradictions, says further That her birth date was
about 612 B.C., or earlier, or later; That her fathers name was Scamandronymous, or
Eurygyus, or Simon, or Euarchus, or Eryctus, or Semus and so on (96). This introduces
the all-important uncertainty principle to our study of Sappho.

We then engage directly with Barnards versions of the poem, discussing form and
imagery, themes of love, sexual desire, and poetic immortality. Sapphos voice, the poetic,
individual I, is so seductive, and meshes so well with images of the lovelorn Romantic
poet that it can be difficult to imagine a second Sappho not a better, more accurate image

of the poet as she composed (how could we know for certain?), but another realm of
possibility.

At this point, I suggest to students that Fragment I, Prayer to my lady of Paphos in
Barnards version, may have been a marriage hymn, performed publicly for an audience
with a chorus of other women. Following Gregory Nagy, I sketch Sappho as leader of this
band of worshippers, praying to Aphrodite in a literal way, and then embodying Aphrodite
as an avatar and representative of the goddess. We view images of the lyre and pectus and
listen to a fragment of the poem read in Aeolic. We are then able to discuss the poem from a
new set of perspectives, without abandoning the image of Sappho as a poet of the personal.
Connections with contemporary pop music and the idea that a musician might present not
only a personal expression of emotion but also a second persona of the self an I and an I
further clarify one way that we might view Sappho. The phenomenological point of view
is essential here: instead of imagining Sappho as composing alone, pen in hand, a solitary
genius at a desk or on green grass under a tree an image codified in part by the printed
book we can imagine a public composer, with lyre in hand, participating and performing
with other professional entertainers. The shift in the experience of the poetry from the
little white book of translated poems to hearing and imagining the oral performance is
essential to this change in perspective.

Teaching orality in the Classic of Poetry also consists in designating a field of
possibility that is not entirely recoverable. The Confucian classics were composed during
the Zhou dynasty in China (c. 11th-7th century BCE), but the Chinese logographic system
was not regularized until the period of Han rule (c. 220-206 BCE). This is also when the
works were set down their earliest known forms, so our experience of these works
depends in large part on Han era interpretation and hermeneutics. The question, for me,
was how to best communicate this temporal shift to students.

One question that arises in studying works in Classical Chinese is that of
pronunciation while Chinese served as a kind of lingua franca in Asia at this time,
allowing people from many regions of China as well as surrounding countries to
communicate via writing, pronunciation varied drastically from one area to another. Thus
when scholars study Plop go the plums, or (Piao You Mei), the poems
homophonic components are largely lost. Yet early Chinese, due to the limited nature of the
logographic system, possessed extraordinary possibilities for homophony.

To underline this feature of Chinese for my students, we listen to recordings of the
poem read in Mandarin and Cantonese. The differences in pronunciation and rhyme
structure are immediately clear even for those among us who do not speak any dialect of
Chinese. The image of the plums then multiplies infinitely, permitting a range of
interpretations engendered by the experience of the audience (or reader). To further
underscore the role of the audience, I play a clip from the Radiolab podcast on
Translation, in which cognitive scientist and translation scholar Doug Hofstadter
expounds on the unlimited translatability of Clment Marots Ma mignonne, suggesting
that every experience of poetry is an experience of translation.

To conclude, I find that judicious incorporation of audio resources can serve to
clarify and underscore issues of interpretation more forcefully than simply reading about
the conditions of performance in ancient Greece or Han hermeneutics. In combination with
a consideration of historical conditions and context, the experience of hearing poetry not

in the original, but as we know it or as we are capable of representing it can multiply

possibilities of interpretation by establishing a (fertile) field of uncertainty.

Suggested resources:

Chinese Text Project: http://ctext.org/pre-qin-and-han
In Our Time Podcast, BBC radio: Sappho:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqsk4
(I recommend In Our Time as a teaching tool in general the episode on Sappho is
particularly excellent, and includes an oral reading of Fragment I and a heated
discussion about the personal I.)
Radiolab Podcast, WNYC Radio: Translation:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/translation/
Sappho, trans. by Mary Barnard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958 and
1986).