Resynchronizing the Event

Wordsworth had it right

About 200 years ago William Wordsworth put it this way in a poem he entitled “The Tables Turned”:

Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

A serious charge: “we murder to dissect.” Exactly whom or what was he accusing?

From the beginning of the poem on, the principal object of the poet’s criticism is in fact none other than the book, which he unconditionally disparages as a source for wisdom. Wordsworth’s complaint against books was part of his program for composing poetry, which he felt should depend more on the simple experience of walking through nature – the source of “spontaneous wisdom” – than on the learned, page-turning craft of his immediate poetic predecessors.

Em-booking oral tradition

Our advocacy of the eEdition? as a vehicle for studying and representing oral tradition springs from similar concerns and a parallel history. For all of its myriad benefits, the book has done to oral tradition exactly what in Wordsworth’s opinion it did to poetry: murdered a living creature by vivisection. The once-vibrant event or experience becomes a corpse, and although an autopsy may bring after-the-fact knowledge of its former functions, the deed is done. And the price exacted by the culturally approved em-booking process? Nothing less than the very viability of the subject under study. A steep price, to be sure, but one that the ideology of the book has conveniently hidden from view. We assimilate the “other” medium to our default and self-identifying medium.

We know how such euthanasia proceeds in the case of oral tradition. During the early days of “collection” (notice the insulating jargon), fieldworkers struggled to extract a dictionary-certified, printable text from the messy reality of multimedia performance. The object, of course, was to exhibit their elusive quarry within the approved museum space of the printed page . When the results fell below the threshold of an acceptable text, editors felt no compunction about “correcting” what their informants “meant” to say. Thus the Grimm Brothers and their highly expurgated tales, for example [ref – One Fairy Tale Too Many]. The exclusive goal of this cultural text-hunt was to convert the performance to a document, which collectors and editors ideologically assumed had to be the heart of the matter. Many of us still make that assumption, occasionally with a polite but perfunctory nod toward the perhaps 50-70% of the performance that’s discarded in the process (the intonations, pauses, vocal music, instrumentation, dance patterns, audience reactions, and so many other facets of performances that conventionally get suppressed in the course of conversion to texts).

Audio and video recording raised our awareness, to be sure, making it possible to reach beyond textual remains and glimpse other dimensions of oral traditions. Still, however, the final published yield of most field recordings is usually only the celebrated but mute transcription. Even when audio or video itself is made available, it’s rarely listened to or watched along with the text (or translation). Cultural and historical context is likewise segregated – relegated to an appendix or the equivalent – if provided at all.

In short, our default method for representing oral traditions has been to convert an event into an item. We dissect the engaging, emergent whole that demands our attention right now, at its own pace and on its own terms, and we produce a pale reflection of that immediacy, comfortably static and distanced. We generate an asynchronous artifact. In Wordsworth’s sense, we effectively murder the living reality of the performance.

Saving performances’ lives

eEditions, on the other hand, hold out the promise of resynchronizing the event, of reconstituting the experience, of putting the parts back together to create at least a reasonable facsimile of the original whole.

Consider the eEdition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey as performed by Halil Bajgorić. With the text and translation reconnected to the audio record, and with the commentary, dictionary of idioms, and other materials hot-linked to the onward-moving performance script, users become more than mere readers of texts. To an extent they become part of the audience for that long-ago performance, only now (necessarily) removed from the day (in June of 1935) and place (Dabrica, in the Former Yugoslavia) of its original occurrence.

An eExperience for an eAudience

What’s so different? Well, through the agency of the eEdition the performance is once again continuous and multifaceted. Sure, you can stop it by pausing the audio or simply closing the web page altogether, just as you can close a book and go make a cup of tea or check your e-mail. But as long as the eEdition is open and all of its systems are active, the potential exists for the “reader” to attend the performance in real time and, to the degree that linked resources restore at least some of the cultural, poetic, and historical context, in real space as well. Halil Bajgorić performs again: the story evolves, the vocal and instrumental melodies sound, some of the background expected of a fluent audience presents itself. The event happens, again, and you become its audience.

Is this eExperience “the same as” the original that happened in 1935 Dabrica? Of course not, but it’s the next best immersion we can manage here and now, and far more faithful to the original than fussing over the book-bound corpse and trying vainly to imagine what it must have been like while alive.

At the very least, the eEdition avoids the unforgivable crime of murder by dissection.