MANUSCRIPT BOOK LINK 4: Recording Oral Narratives

The Zuni people of New Mexico (they call themselves the Aashiwi) have a complex social organization that includes twelve clans, thirteen medicine societies, a masked dance society, a series of rain-bringing priesthoods, and a secular government of elected officials. A primarily agricultural people, they closely link their day-to-day activities to their religion and mythology. But the Zuni have no sacred texts like the Bible, Torah, or Koran. In place of a written record, the memories of the older men of the society preserve the complex and sophisticated oral narratives upon which their culture is based.

In 1964-65, anthropologist Dennis Tedlock tape-recorded, transcribed, and translated many Zuni tales, collecting them in his book, Finding the Center. When working to write down the oral narratives, Tedlock found that traditional methods of printing and layout did not communicate the full poetic and dramatic features of the stories, features Tedlock thought essential to their comprehension. He therefore devised a transcription system that would indicated the many pauses, changes in intonation and volume, and dramatic effects found in the tales. The resulting manuscript looks strange to eyes accustomed to standard page layouts. Here is an excerpt from the story The Boy and the Deer:

SON'AHCHI

(audience) Ee-----------------so.

LO-----------------NG A

SONTI GO.

(audience) Ee------------------so.

VIL HE'

THERE WERE LAGERS AT SHOKTA

and

up on the Prairie-Dog Hills

the deer

had their home.

Words in all capitals are said loudly, and syllables above a line are intoned with a higher pitch ("VIL" for example, is said both loudly and high-pitched). In other passages, Tedlock uses smaller fonts to indicate whispered words or phrases.

Tedlock's libretto or script is difficult to read at first, but when performed aloud it gives some idea of the dramatic nature of the Zuni narratives (even though the stories are translated from the original language).

Like Tedlock's transcriptions, medieval manuscripts are often difficult for modern readers to understand, even when they are written in languages known to present-day readers. Medieval scribes did not divide words in consistent places, they used little punctuation (and what they did use is not consistent from manuscript to manuscript), and they did not observe line-breaks in poetic texts. Many--if not most--medieval documents were intended to be read aloud rather than silently. How might this fact explain the lack of word spaces or sentence markers?

To get an idea of some of the difficulties faced by scholars when dealing with medieval manuscripts, look at the "Diplomatic Edition" of the Dream of the Rood, a SEAFARER text. Consult the Oxford Companion to the English Language for an explanation of different types of text editions.

1. Why is a certain type of edition called "diplomatic"?
2. What does this word choice suggest about the ways texts are prepared and presented?
3. Think about what information is recorded in a medieval text versus that recorded in Tedlock's script. What methods do we use to present information about the speaker's voice in 20th Century writing? [Hint: If you use a word-processing computer program, what types of choices do you have about the appearance of your writing?]
4. How have these techniques been related to technical aspects of printing or writing?
5. Do you have any methods by which you indicate emphasis or emotion in your own writing?
6. In what types of writing are you more likely to use these techniques?
7. Along with his book, Tedlock also published a phonograph record of the Zuni narratives. What information was presented by the record that might be left out by a text, even a text like Tedlock's?
8. What would the difference between the information contained in a videotape, versus and audio-tape, versus a transcription?
9. To link these concepts with SEAFARER and the Middle Ages, go to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages and the Oxford Companion and investigate writing, oral tradition, and punctuation. When did punctuation begin to be used to indicate pauses or tones of voice?
10. Why do you think it (and spelling) became standardized, and what does this standardization tell you about the use of punctuation in cultures that are more oral than our own?
11. Finally, think about the relationship of a text to an oral presentation. What steps have to be gone through before an oral performance becomes a text? What steps take a text back to an oral performance?
12. What information is lost or gained at each of these steps?
13. Assuming you could read and understand Old English, would your reading the Dream of the Rood aloud be the same as a monk reading the poem to his brothers in Anglo-Saxon England? Why or why not?

For more information on Zuni oral narratives, see:

Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

For punctuation, see:

Parkes, M.B. Punctuation, or Pause and Effect in James J. Murphy, Medieval Eloquence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

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