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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 4, 2010
Word of mouth
Like most who read, and retain anything at all from the experience, I find as I grow older that my mind has been filling with tested, pregnant phrases. The same goes for those who don't read -- or better, can't read, as I discovered years ago in rural Asia.Those who can read but who don't have the worst of both worlds -- they have lost the wonderful native human ability to "audit" and retain the spoken word. But among those who could never read -- a constituency that includes the great majority of our ancestors -- I found an amazing ability to recall things said with precision of word, and even of moral tone and emotional inflection. This is why I believe the "text" of Homer, as that in many other oral traditions, could be passed down through the generations accurately. For it was memorable, and addressed to people who could remember. And in the structure of verse and rhythmic prose, we find the ability to repair faults and mistakes that have occurred -- to recover poetry, and even fact, before it has sludged. It happened to Shakespeare, among others. When Stanley Wells and associates at Oxford undertook the biggest and most thorough textual revision of the greatest English writer, in the later 20th century, they found themselves "restoring" lines and scenes that had "drifted" from the earliest written sources. They were doing honest and exacting work. Yet in almost every change I found that "folk memory," and the editorial instincts of previous scholars, might actually have "improved" upon the earliest authenticated written version. Interviewing Prof. Wells once, I confronted him with this thought: "Why have you done this? Why couldn't you have left well enough alone? Why do we need to be bothered by, for instance, two versions of King Lear, with our favourite passages missing from one or the other? How is this helpful to a received text, sanctified by time? Is this not like scouring the patina off an old, beloved, and perfectly serviceable kitchen pot?" A fine and accurate scholar, as I say: Prof. Wells looked back at me in complete incomprehension. My questions amounted, he dryly noted, to a confrontation with the whole modern world (unprepared as it is to sit still, or let anything sit still). My esthetic instincts were no match for Wells's encyclopedic learning: he went on to make polite, but very short work of my ponderous objections. Embedded in my reasoning was an assertion so subtle that it was never addressed. It was an argument that in some cases the oral tradition may in fact be more authentic than the written; and may therefore be used at a later point to correct the written version. Anyone who has ever read a newspaper account of an event, at which he was present, may deeply suspect that this is often the case. We rely, in reading the Bible, on "editors" of a sort, quite unlike modern editors who are trained to technocratic norms in our better university faculties. They were not therefore dishonest, nor conspiring to advance special interests. The process of arriving at the Biblical canon spread across factional (and fashionable) boundaries. Moreover, there were living and likely very precise oral traditions to work with. And by this I mean not just oral versions of the texts, but oral versions of the events to which the texts refer. Our modern, over-literal minds, forget there are things deeper than texts. Which takes us down another layer, into an argument that seems crazy to people I characterize as "post-modern de-humanizers." (De-humanizers at least in the sense that they can read something addressed with burning sincerity to their heart and mind and soul, as if it were merely printed on an advertising flyer.) What if the events described actually happened? What if the testimony of a dozen apostles, and many others -- who ran and hid at Christ's impending Crucifixion, but became faithful quite literally unto death after the "Resurrection" -- was given for some better reason than to "formalize" an abstract, modern, bloodless "perception" of a "quasi-event"? As even some contemporary Biblical scholars are prepared to argue, the most likely explanation of an event, as counter-intuitive to the ancient world as to the modern -- yet insisted upon repeatedly by numerous witnesses through mockery, torture, and execution -- is that it actually happened the way they said it did. And that they thought this truth important. I mentioned last Easter, for instance, the extraordinary forensic synthesis of sources both Christian and non-Christian, by the Anglican scholar, N.T. Wright -- utterly vindicating the "received" account of the first Easter. Finally, and most subtly, let us suppose Wright right, and the balance of the evidence -- as might be upheld in any solid court of law -- holds for the defendant. In other words, let us suppose Christ actually Resurrected, and -- "behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and of death." Well, that would overturn a number of our modern assumptions. * P.S. I'm off on annual leave through the next four weeks. Gentle reader is instructed to miss me. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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