From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling

The telling of tales is often thought to be characteristic of all human dis­ course, and it is fashionable to speak of narrative as a universal form of ex­ pression, one that is applied both to the life experiences of individuals and to the dramas of social interaction. Storytelling in oral cultures in turn is seen as the foundation on which the novel is built in literate ones, and the activity is regarded as the focus of much creativity. Blind Homer was the model, putting all his nonliterate imagination into the epic. In discussing storytelling we are clearly leading into the topics of fiction and the novel. But not all storytelling is fictional; it can also involve personal narratives. However, although typically it is associated with oral cultures, with “the singer [or teller] of tales,”1 in his article on the subject, Walter Benjamin sees the storyteller disappearing with the arrival of the novel, whose dissemina­ tion he associates with the advent of printing, and no longer directly linked with experience in the same way as before.2 The timing of the appearance of the novel is subject to discussion. Mikhail Baktin uses the term novel (or “novelness”) in a much more extended sense. But in dealing with origins more concretely, he traces three types: the novel of “adventure time” back to the Greek romances of the second century C.E., the novel of everyday time in the story of The Golden Ass of Apuleius, and the “chronotope” centered on biographical time, although this does not produce any novels at this period. All three forms are harbingers of the modern novel.3 That is basically a product of the arrival of printing in the late fifteenth century, but as we see from these early examples, the nature of story­ telling had already radically changed with the coming of writing. Indeed, I want to argue that, contrary to much received opinion, narrative (already in 1566, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, used for “an account, nar­ ration, a tale, recital”) is not so much a universal feature of the human situa­ tion as one that is promoted by literacy and subsequently by printing.