In 1966 I reported inconclusive results of an inquiry into the functionalism of another part of South Slavic tradition, the ubiquitous tale of the Two Brothers. Partly because that initial study197 gave equivocal results from a functionalist point of view, I was subsequently more deliberate and exhaustive in my search for social usages and social experience at any period in the South Slavic world that might help to explain the curious, and curiously recurrent, Green Tree scene. For indeed an imposing body of data is at hand concerning the social attitudes, customs, life, and behaviour of peoples in the Slavic Balkans which is quite independent of the oral narrative traditions that have been collected from them. That information is particularly rich for the modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), but there is an additional valuable advantage for the functionalist who studies the Balkan peoples in that many elements of their culture are also historically attested in considerable detail from as early as the Hellenistic Age. Much of the evidence about modern social life in the Slavic Balkans is scientific ethnography and social history, and even the material from previous centuries is often of a similar kind. Because the South Slavs were throughout their recorded history a subject people first of the Byzantine and later of the Ottoman Empire, or else restlessly disturbed the sensitive peripheries of those and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their ways of life were of constant interest to others than themselves, and hence much has come down to us about them from the past.
Thus it was all the more perplexing to me that nowhere in all that copious record of the South Slavs and their ‘real’ (i. e., non-fictitious, non-narrative) social relations or other culture could I find any sound explanation of the Green Tree scene. After more than a decade of dedicated searching for possible social cognates of that persistent narrative element, I was at last forced to conclude that there just were not any features of social experience or social relations specific to the South Slavic world that (to use Benedict’s words) “tally with” the Green Tree scene. Perhaps the fault was in me, but how could even the most inept student fail to find the social ‘function’ of anything so obvious and essential in the South Slavic oral tradition as the Green Tree scene, if only it had such a function? Remember that no Captivity tale in the Slavic Balkans was complete without that scene, and that Captivity tales abounded in every district of the Slavic Balkans where oral epic was sung—a large tract embracing thousands of square miles and millions of peoples throughout the historical period since Napoleon.
After all that Benedict had said about senescence in folklore, and especially about the “cultural lag” of European traditions in sloughing off the “cultural survivals of earlier ages” that are “embalmed in folklore,” I had carefully to consider also that the Green Tree might be just such a survival whose only rationale in real South Slavic social life might belong wholly to some past age. But the cultural history of the South Slavs, available as it is, yielded no such rationale.
Benedict had said, “Folklore often remains current and can be adequately collected when it is no longer a living trait... . A living folklore...reflects the contemporary interests and judgments of its tellers, and adapts incidents to its own cultural usages.” But what of a folklore that had evidently never been a “living” one in Benedict’s sense (yet all the more enduring for that)? And what if—to invert Burridge’s dictum—the general structure of the narratives is not governed by the logic of social relations? Or was it really sound thinking and a valid analysis of known facts to suppose that those things in oral fable that happen not to reflect present social life are on that account merely senescent—outworn reliques of a defunct past society just waiting for replacement by something better suited to modern manners, morals, and customs?
Adopting that way of thinking, would it not be equally logical (and equally wrong) to say, for example, that coniferous trees are a senescent form of plant life because they retain their foliage in winter, past the time when it serves for photosynthesis? Or should we not be obliged to say also that horses and cattle and mankind and indeed every modern form of bird and mammalian life on earth are all senescent creatures because they retain skeletal traits that first arose in the evolutionary adaptation to their environment of the bony fishes? But the truth is that, like the bony skeleton, oral fable has not only survived but also facilitated myriad of other adaptive changes which have not fundamentally changed it, because it already is, as it is, a uniquely necessary and useful structure that requires no basic alteration—much less any replacement—to go on being useful and adaptive indefinitely.
By this course of reasoning I have come first to doubt and finally to reject the sufficiency of functionalism to explain what is in oral tradition. For if there are key elements of oral fable that have no communally significant ideational counterparts in the society that sustains it, or even in that society’s reasonably distant past, then who is to say whether any present social value attributable to some part of the tradition was its original value? For what does the present utility of anything in human culture, or anywhere else in the evolution of life forms, really tell us about that thing’s genesis or its residual potential for further utility? And if this is indeed the crucial question which I believe it is, then the further question presents itself: to what extent do societies ever actually invent, or desire to inherit, or simply act as hosts to oral narrative traditions, and does any of that really determine the uses to which they do or do not put any parts of such a tradition, or what does or does not survive in the tradition?
I perceive the elements of oral fable, including the topoi of Green and Dry trees, as biological processes not significantly different from the evolved physical structures of the human organism. And as Julian Huxley wrote in 1940, there are three aspects of biological fact:198
First, there is the mechanistic-physiological aspect; how is the organ constructed, how does the process take place? Secondly, there is the adaptive-functional aspect: what is the functional use of the organ or process, what is its biological meaning or value to the organism or the species? And in the third place, there is the historical aspect: what is the temporal history of the organ or process, what has been its evolutionary course?
...in all cases the three aspects are distinct; each must be investigated separately by appropriate methods, which may have no relevance to the other aspects; and discoveries concerning any one aspect can only be of limiting nature, and not decisive or essential, with regard to the other two aspects. They represent three separate fields of discourse, which may overlap, but are of fundamentally different natures.
Functionalists such as Ruth Benedict and Kenelm Burridge eroneously supposed that merely understanding what Huxley called “the adaptive-functional aspect” of an oral narrative tradition at an “ethnographic present” moment in time was the sole useful procedure. I saw that it was not.
Needless to say, one could not even begin to formulate the answers to further needful questions without interrogating the narrators themselves in an oral tradition. For while it is certainly true that, as Benedict said, every tale “is always the tale of one particular people,” it is even truer that at every given moment, every tale is always the tale of the particular storyteller who narrates it. If any discarding, remaking, invention, inheritance, embalming of cultural survivals, ‘hosting,’ subordination to the logic of social relations, or statements of positive experience actually take place in an oral narrative tradition, that must happen in the specific practice of individual story-tellers as they ply their personal arts of narrative composition.
Such issues are however notoriously unaddressible to oral traditional fabulators in any direct way, and even such dedicated functionalists as Benedict and Burridge have found it easier to rely upon their own rather than their informants’ estimates of what the informants do in practice. Thus, while they give great weight in theory to the oral fabulist as an agent of self-expression for the larger society around him, functionalists have systematically neglected to report actual interrogations of story-tellers that would prove that hypothesis. For this reason too functionalism has often sprung more from a prior dedication in principle to the study of social functions than from any objective evidence that oral fable’s possible correlations with those functions are also its causes.
I have pursued my investigation of the South Slavic Green Tree scene’s social function(s) with particular attention to the storytellers’ own recorded comments about themselves as agents of narrative tradition, and I have myself published as a preliminary to the present treatise a substantial part, for example, of Avdo Međedović’s own comments upon himself, his narrative art, and his society in both their original language and in English translation.199 As I wrote in summary at that time,
Another impressive feature of Avdo’s talk is the extraordinary irrelevance of chronology throughout his comments on his songs. By the time of this conversation in 1935 he had been singing epos for nearly half a century. Now a man of sixty, he nevertheless made no distinction between the tales which he had learned in his early adolescence and those...acquired more recently. The persons of many singers whom he had known and from whom he had learned appear grossly anachronous in his descriptions of them. Some, like his father, were long dead; others were in their dress, in their customs, or in their economic habits virtually antediluvian; still others had long since emigrated away to Asia Minor and so become mere souvenirs of an unsung, lost former time. Like his own autobiography, Avdo’s shadowy vignettes of their lives are filled with the sense of elapsed time, but the lives of the epic songs which he shared with them lie under no such rule. The tales which he knew from the men of the past were enduring parts of his present mental life, parts of him one dares despite his sixty years to think even more secure and less alterable by any accident or effect of time than even his own mature character. His epic repertory was the one stable, timeless, and uniformly beneficial component in an unpredictable lifetime of mixed fortune.
To appreciate exactly what the force of oral literary tradition is and how much more durable it is than other traditions, one must witness it as it appears here in the life of Avdo Međedović. His experience was filled with traditions of many kinds—traditions of social order, of economic relationships, of political processes, and so forth. He can and does talk freely about the workings of such traditions; the very uncertainty about their operation and durability—their perpetual vulnerability to uncontrollable external influences—makes them good conversational topics. But Avdo’s epic repertory belongs to an entirely different order of culture. It is the one completely governable and secure traditional scheme of ideas which he possesses. As such, it is separated from mundane, debatable behavioral traditions by such a complete hiatus that he does not even possess the logic that might enable him to enter into dialogue about it. A superbly developed and sufficient rational system in its own right, the epic tradition was thus well insulated against ephemeral tampering and banal deflections. Those who imagine that oral literary traditions are simple functions of the everyday social and economic life in small-group societies should read Avdo’s talk well not only for what he says, but also for what he does not, and cannot, say.
Međedović was admittedly the greatest South Slavic oral poet recorded in more than a hundred years of continuous collecting by many dozens of collectors all over the South Slavic territory. But he was not at all untypical in the insulation of his narrative repertory against invasions by the various social usages and changes of his lifetime. I think one must reach a similar conclusion from a review of the corresponding conversations with Salih Ugljanin, a more ordinary fabulator than Međedović, or with any of the many other recorded South Slavic bards.
The implications of this evident hiatus between contemporary social awareness and the oral narrative tradition are far-reaching. While oral traditional fictions do clearly serve society as a fund of organizing ideas for which that society may find many and varied uses, it does not follow that the tradition somehow owes anything genetically to the society. Avdo Međedović himself perceived models of social organization in his own stories with respect to both his own family—understanding and controlling the father-son relationship was a major issue for him throughout his life—and with respect to the larger complex of mature male affiliations upon which he perceived that public tranquillity and prosperity were grounded. But at the same time he did not invent or construct his tales out of those aspects of contemporary social life. He got them instead from the bygone generation of other oral poets who had preceded him in an earlier age with its different social order and its different cultural concerns, and so on in an infinite regression into the past. And that was the fundamental fact about the tradition—that it was already so constructed before it came to Međedović or Ugljanin or any of the myriad other latter-day South Slavic oral fabulators that it could serve their later society in its ever-changing cultural circumstances without topical tampering no less usefully than it had served earlier societies in earlier ages. The functionalists’ postulation to the contrary is the intellectual equivalent of Lamarckism in the field of biological genetics.
The effect I describe is not really an unfamiliar one. It is the same effect whereby the oral traditional poetries of earlier ages preserved in writing have, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, continued to serve other, later societies in other and later times without undergoing any changes in themselves. Such changes are not necessary, and can be indeed only deleterious. The society where Homer sang in the Archaic Period in ancient Greece was by any reckoning a radically different one from those which know and value Homer as literature in the present age, and if anything the social value of his tales has grown rather than diminished. To speak of Homer as a senescent survival which because of cultural lag we have thus far neglected to discard is to understand nothing about either society or the narrative tradition, and to preclude the very possibility of such an understanding. The same is true whether we speak of ancient Greek, modern South Slavic, North American Zuñi, Tangu of New Guinea, or any other culture where an oral tradition of fiction has been found.
Another writer, following T. S. Eliot, has called this effect “the permanent contemporaneity of past works.” A tradition so finely wrought and tested in past time as to achieve a ‘permanent contemporaneity’ must needs be insulated by custom against distortions which, though possibly of momentary use, nevertheless lack the enduring adaptive value that makes a tradition worthy of those special skills and energies its conservation demands. At times in many recent human societies, skull bones six inches thick would have had considerable functional utility in mature men, as in times of war, but the genetic tradition of mankind conserves a lighter specification, for it has over long ages proven its greater value under a greater variety of conditions. Similarly, oral fable conserves forms of the greatest proven general adaptive utility, and this conservatism is no less powerful or effective for being unconscious.
As Edward Gibbon remarked long ago, it is an ancient prejudice in Western thought that all habit is by nature superstitious and incoherent, while only conscious reasoning is enlightened and capable of good results. It is accordingly only the most generous of motives that makes anthropologists in the Western intellectual tradition like Ruth Benedict and Kenelm Burridge want to depict their Zuñi Indians, their Tangu, and their other exotic small societies as having a maximal inventive control over their own traditions. Human life may be regarded as everywhere noble, and the attribution of conscious, reasoning control over their culture consequently ennobles description of primal social groups to Western minds.
But my evidence suggests that, far from being incoherent or stupid, the unconscious, learned habits of oral traditional fabulators may actually be much more efficient and capable of good results than any system of conscious reasoning. No doubt it gratifies a generous sensibility in the Western way of thinking to posit for exotic societies a simpler kind of cultural ownership than we can readily claim for ourselves. It is comforting, and eases the work of description in the absence of good historical information, to think of those societies as both the creators and the outright owners in fee simple of all their manifest cultural assets. They are not really so any more than we.
Contemplating the copious available information about how recently living Balkan and African oral traditional fabulators have learned their arts, I have often been struck, and in being struck had a feeling uncannily compounded of awe and admiration, how like a parasitized host—or better, a symbiont in zoology— a really good oral bard is. Born with a superior facility for rhythmical speech, the storyteller-to-be also displays at an early age an exceptional capacity for prolonged attention to the enchainment of images in a purely verbal medium. This combination of ready verbalism and attentiveness renders the subject especially vulnerable towards other storytellers about the time of puberty, when he or she begins consciously to ‘collect’ stories from accomplished performers. After this period of ‘infection’ with a variety of tales during the second decade of life, the bard will typically remain interested in learning still other tales throughout his active career, but tends with age increasingly to assimilate stories that are new to him in terms of his own established habits of narrative composition. In this phase of his career he is highly infectious towards the young of his kind, although he does not ordinarily perform especially for them. Meanwhile others of all ages remain as immune to the contagion of active participation in the tradition as they would be if they had actual antibodies in their bloodstreams to protect them against it.
Thus a tradition continues not by any analytical teaching nor by reference to anything outside itself, but solely by the voluntary renewal of storytelling habits from generation to generation in a small fraction of a given population. In this way the tradition is scarcely the possession of the whole society, but rather of that minority that is at puberty mentally vulnerable to its contagion. The uses of the material in the tradition may be everyman’s, or levitical, or princely, or otherwise distributed and restricted in all manner of socially idiosyncratic ways, but the tradition itself belongs to that limited number whose minds are actually its hosts. Or perhaps it is better, because in time those minds wane and die, to recognize from the outset that in a very real sense it is the tradition that owns its human hosts while they live and practice their storytelling art, moving from mind to mind across the generations as an intangible and invisible but nonetheless living thing in its own right. Their is no present reason to suppose that it was ever otherwise.
What are nevertheless the limits, and what has been the history of this peculiar ideational symbiote of man which we call oral narrative tradition? Must we indeed try to traverse a million-year regression of human generations to find its origins, and hence its primal meanings? And if neither cultural universals nor yet the cultural idiosyncracies of the societies that support an oral narrative tradition can be called upon to explain it (while it continues everywhere to explain culture to society), how then is it to be explained? Must we in the absence of reliable external control on our critical procedure (such as a systematic reference of narratives to the rules of social relations) fall back upon a kind of Cartesian subjectivity, already too familiar in conventional literary criticism and in the humanities generally, wherein any man’s opinion of what oral tradition means is as good as any other’s provided it be clever?
The problem snaps into focus when projected upon a specific element of oral tradition such as the Green Tree scene. Finding no credible rationale or genesis of that basic South Slavic (and world-wide) narrative element in Balkan society past or present, I maintain that it had an inherent ideational value sufficient to assure its indefinite survival in Southeast European tradition not through any connection with other cultural requisites whether universal or local, but simply in itself.
I need make no supposition of my own however as to what that value was, nor do I need to draw upon any tentative analogy between the alien Balkan story and anything in my own ethnic or national or personal culture to provide a starting-point for interpretation. The ideational value of the South Slavic Green Tree scene is thus no mere figment of my own mind untested or uncontrollable by means of objective verification. For the Green Tree is not any one single thing; it is rather a multitude of different things or multiforms that may be objectively compared one with another, as earlier in this Epilog I compared just four of its multiforms. So the intrinsic ideational value which I say is the real root of the Green Tree scene’s obvious and probably old persistence in South Slavic tradition need not remain a mystery, nor is there any mystique about the procedure for discovering it: that value is just the common denominator of all the multiforms of the Green Tree scene that have spawned in the innumerable ongoing acts of story-composition that are the tradition. In the same way that the traditional conteur knows what to tell—solely through the stability of recurrently exercised habit—in that same way have I gone to seek the meaning of his habit.