But what got me a 'thinkin' is the simple act of a solitary man or woman telling a story. A story weaving several storylines, multiple characters, switching from one point-of-view to another, using different vocal characterizations along with a neutral narrator's God-like dispassion.
It is a tradition as old as mankind. It may be in eclipse as we reorient - on a neurological level - to more visual forms of storytelling, but it still exists, both in traditional societies, and in unlikely forms here in the developed world - stand-up comedy, for instance. The wayang is an example of the traditional model - its unrivaled continuity over generations makes it a rarity. It uses music and visual aids, however. Simpler ancient examples - relics from bygone days, are the bhopa of Northwest India - which are discussed in a fascinating New Yorker article. Their ability to memorize the equivalent of thousands of pages of text is a freakish skill that puts them as outliers in the realm of human capacity - like Kenyan long-distance runners, Sherpa mountaineers, and Keith Richard's tolerance for controlled substances. There are also the bissu of Sulawesi - a very odd transvestite/shaman/storyteller who memorize what is thought to be the longest text in the literary history, La Galiago. (BTW, This was the subject of a Robert Wilson piece. )
Homer, is the obvious Western touchstone, legend has it that the Iliad and Odyssey were originally spoken from memory. Homer used epithets:
"a combination of a descriptive phrase and a noun. An epithet presents a miniature portrait that identifies a person or thing by highlighting a prominent characteristic of that person or thing... fleet-footed Achilles, rosy-fingered dawn, wine-dark sea, earth-shaking Poseidon, and gray-eyed Athena. The Homeric epithet is an ancient relative of such later epithets as Richard the Lion-Hearted, Ivan the Terrible, and America the Beautiful. Homer repeated his epithets often, presumably so the listeners of his recited tales could easily remember and picture the person or thing each time it was mentioned."
I suspect that epithets may be common to all the above-mentioned traditions - they certainly exist in the wayang kulit. Epithets have a mnemonic purpose for the storyteller and audience - they help you keep the character's straight. Others have analogized them to musical leitmotiv - or what a comedian calls a "call-back", or screenwriters call a "catch-phrase" - they identify a character but also provide connective tissue in a wide-ranging narrative.
These kinds of epic stories were (are) open-source. Anyone is allowed to tell the stories, personalize them, make them relevant. The stories evolved over time, certain episodes dropped, others given greater emphasis. They were work-shopped over generations and centuries. As oral traditions, the narratives evolved in an organic way. Without a codified, official, written version, there could be great regional variation- farm team versions that beta-tested themes, plot twists, and characters. The best ideas - what Malcom Gladwell would call the "sticky" ideas, would get incorporated into the corpus. These would be passed down generation to generation. The bad ideas - the ones that didn't meet with popular approval (see "Jar-Jar Binks") would wither away - pruned from the narrative tree.
As narratives morphed from open-source to intellectual property, and from oral narratives to visual narratives, cognition changes came about in the human mind.
More to come...
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