Lost and Found

Dear Joni Mitchell reminds us that, “Something’s lost and something’s gained/In living life each day.” So our question for today: just what was lost when man became literate?

It is a question considered in Hearing Homer’s Song, by Robert Kanigel. The hook that sells this volume is its subtitle: “The Brief Life and Big Idea of Millman Parry.” How can you pass on a book about somebody named Millman? Worth checking out, although it requires a very big idea indeed to make a slight life worth publishing. In fact, one finds two tracks, a scholarly analysis of Homer (much noted for the Iliad and the Odyssey, very famous) set in the context of the biography of a Classics scholar working in the early twentieth century.

Let us dispose of the personal as largely uninteresting. Except for the bits about Yugoslavia, of course.

I don’t mean to dismiss the Parrys, they were from all accounts perfectly nice people. You’d be glad to have them living next door…in fact, they may be your neighbors, their personal lives are that unremarkable. Born in 1902, Millman grew up in Oakland, CA in a family that moved around a good bit. He attended UC-Berkeley, first as a pre-law student, then with some interest in medicine, took anatomy…undergraduate dithering at its finest. He met Marian Thanhouser, whom he dated, impregnated, and married. Millman’s enthusiasm for fatherhood was muted: “That’s the end of me!” he apparently said on receiving the news. The two made a marriage, although the Kanigel takes the position that Marian felt neglected raising the children while her husband climbed the ladder of academia.

Perhaps the most interesting biographical note for the Parrys involves family names. “Millman” came into the mix, we are told, when an ancestor Parry pursued (and seemingly lost) one Miss Millman, of whom we are told nothing. But her charms must have been considerable, since thereafter there would be at least one child named Millman in each generation. They kept it up, too…Kanigel winds up interviewing Millman’s nephew Millman. And of course, “our” Millman and Marian made matters worse: they had a daughter whom they named Marian after her mother, and a son whom they named Millman after his father. Dreadfully confusing for all concerned, a genealogist’s wet dream.

It was at Berkeley that Millman started reading Homer seriously and first hit upon his Big Idea.

In his reading of Homer, Parry began to question our notion of authorship, and specifically the way that concept is bound up with written language. We see a poet, pen in hand, writing lines and then considering, backtracking, and revising; all to find the perfect, unique expression of his idea. And as a corollary, at the end of his task, you have an authoritative, written text of the work. Parry considered what the process of artistic creation would have been like before written language, before literacy. Homer troubles some scholars because he repeats things and has certain stock phrases that keep recurring, all very wooden and rote if your model is someone writing and revising. Parry’s thesis was that Homer came from an older, oral tradition of composition, one that predated a mere alphabet. Oral composition means you are composing in front of an audience in real time: there is no backtracking, the narrative has to keep moving forward. Homer composed in dactylic hexameter, a demanding metrical foot, and it became clear to Parry that if he composed orally, the repetitions and the stock phrases not only made sense, they were required to allow the poet to keep his tale moving forward while preserving the beat of the meter.

Several other ideas attend the notion of oral composition. Perhaps the most important is that it is composition: the work is created anew each time, it is not a performance of a standard text. And therefore “deviations” from the text make no sense: it is simply a different creation of the underlying story. Heretically, his work implied that there was no single, historical Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey were part of the Greek culture, songs that would have been sung my many singers in many variants. Our received, written version is a transcription.

Since you and I were taught by teachers who read Parry, none of that discussion sounds revolutionary to us. But to academia in the 1920s, Parry’s idea was hot stuff.

For Millman’s doctorate, the Parrys moved to Paris, although they wound up taking a gap year of sorts, mainly wandering around deciding where to live and spending too much money. They did tend to dither. But at the Sorbonne, Parry logged some serious academic work. His Berkeley thesis on Homer had been based on a brilliant hunch and was as much directional as it was analytic. In Paris, he set about proving his hunch with data. Using counts and tabulations, and generally besmirching the humanities with statistical methods, Parry was able to prove his thesis rigorously. So rigorously, in fact, that he honked off his academic committee: with all the statistical data, it was a slog to get through Millman’s paper. They awarded him the highest degree for his work, although with a few digs for having had to consider mere statistics in the humanities.

Newly degreed, Parry arrived at Harvard as a faculty member. Actually, he first promised himself to a midwestern college, then bailed when Harvard offered. Not quite dithering, but still. At Harvard, Parry set to confirm his ideas about oral composition by doing field research in countries where the oral tradition still survived. Yugoslavia, for example. Which is where Parry and his graduate student, Albert Lord, decamped to record local singers. (If you missed Yugoslavia, it was a post-World-War-I nation that is now just post-.) There was no thought that these songs themselves had any link to Homer or the ancient Greeks, but Parry’s idea was that the technique of composing and presenting orally was similar. Significantly, all of the singers, the guslars, were illiterate. He recorded the Yugoslav songs (field recording equipment was bulky in the ‘30s) and their variants, and he noted the singers’ performance technique.

Sadly, most of the analysis of that field work fell to Parry’s graduate student, Lord. Parry himself was shot to death at age 33…not in Yugoslavia, but in Los Angeles.

Millman’s mother-in-law had moved to L.A., had begun to live beyond her means, and seemingly had fallen in with rough trade of some sort or another. At his wife’s request, Millman made a hurried trip to California with a loaded revolver in his suitcase. One afternoon, with Millman and Marian getting dressed in their hotel room, the revolver went off and shot Millman dead. The police finding was that the incident was accidental, the gun had been entangled in a shirt with the safety off. Kanigel actually tries to spin the tale into more of a murder mystery — L.A. in the ‘30s with a shooting death, it’s tempting for any writer to make the tale into a piece of noir — but in the end the police finding of accidental death seems correct.

Albert Lord made a career out of the work he started with Parry, extending the notion of oral composition beyond the Greeks to seemingly-unrelated genres such as medieval English epic (Beowulf) and German folk legend (the Nibelungenlied). So entrenched are their notions that we speak of “Parryism” or the Parry-Lord hypothesis. And in true academic fashion, a contra movement has arisen, attempting to challenge their work. It seems to have made little inroad. Rather, Parry and Lord opened an entire field of academic research into the oral, rather than written, tradition in literature.

So why do we care?

Because the written record only goes back to 2500-3000 B.C., whereas human civilization dates back to 7500 B.C. or so. We know from people like the Old Kingdom Egyptians and the Harappans that prehistoric societies could be quite sophisticated, with major construction, trade specialization, and city planning. Absent an alphabet and writing, how was that information preserved and transmitted? Parry’s work opened a window into that wider and older world of human experience.

We, of course, are complete snobs, likely due to the literacy movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “You can’t believe anything his says, he’s illiterate!” Parry’s work proves the opposite, that a man who has learned a song and creates it orally possesses it and its culture far more fully than a man who simply performs a text. The former embodies his culture, whereas the latter merely reads about it.

Consider that fact the next time you google something that you really should know…it is, after all, your culture that is disappearing into the internet.