by Derek Neal
Read Part 1 here.
In The File on H, Ismail Kadare shows his appreciation of epic poetry and attempts to incorporate aspects of orality so that the form of the novel reflects its content. The plot is relatively simple: two Harvard scholars (modelled on Parry and Lord) travel to Albania to record singers of epic poetry in the 1930s. The local townspeople are suspicious, suspecting some sort of espionage, but also intrigued, leading to a series of outrageous situations—the governor of the small town has two spies track Bill and Max, while the governor’s wife imagines a steamy affair with one of them, then the other. After they record a couple of poets in Albanian, a Serbian monk hatches a plan to destroy the tapes. The epic singers fear that if they are recorded, their voices will be “walled up,” and they will no longer be able to sing. On the surface, these are amusing tales, but they get at deeper truths—the paranoia of Enver Hoxha in communist Albania, the appeal of the exotic foreigner, the deep historical and political tensions between Serbia and Albania, and the impact of technology on art, communication, and identity. The plot unfolds as a sort of oral and textual history, with certain parts written from a close third person point of view, while other sections are presented as reports from the spies, newspaper clippings, transcribed dialogue, journal entries, and oral speech as one would see in a filmscript. In this way, Kadare filters his novel through an oral prism—when we are reading, it is almost never “primary” text but frequently a version of “hearsay.” We might read one character’s written summary of what another character said verbally (like a spy report that transcribes overheard dialogue), or it might be speech that Kadare visually presents like a play or filmscript, and that speech might include things the character has overheard from others. It sounds confusing, but when you read it, it’s easy to follow and hugely entertaining; Kadare is a master storyteller who can move between many different registers.
The first page of the novel mentions a “covering note” that accompanies the visa applications for Bill and Max. On the note, they are described as both “folklorists” and “alleged folklorists.” “Everything else about them was rather sketchy,” the narrator, inhabiting the consciousness of one character, tells us. Immediately, as readers, we are destabilized. Can we trust the text in front of us? In Kadare’s interview with The Paris Review, he makes a comparison between oral poetry and literary text:
For a long time literature was only spoken, and then suddenly with the Babylonians and the Greeks came writing. That changed everything, because before, when the poet recited or sang his poem and could change it at every performance as he pleased, he was free. By the same token he was ephemeral, as his poem changed in oral transmission from one generation to the next. Once written, the text becomes fixed.
It’s true that text is more fixed than an oral poem, but it’s also true that the text can be changed; this usually leaves a trace, however (the red pen, white-out, the marginal note). After the Minister of the Interior receives the covering letter, he then writes a message to the governor of the city where Bill and Max will be staying, warning him of their arrival. He repeats the details of the letter but changes text saying there is “the possibility that the two visitors are spies” to “apparently, these visitors are spies.” A possibility hardens into a fact in the rewriting process, and unless the governor is made aware of the first letter, he won’t know any better. The text is not fixed, not absolutely, but on the other hand, Bill and Max are bringing along “weird, previously unheard-of contraptions that [are] called tape-recorders,” which, as we know, can “fix” oral speech and prevent it from changing “from one generation to the next.” Much like writing, in fact, a tape recorder allows for a poet’s song to be identified with its performer and for the song to be performed even after the poet has passed away, which is a quality we usually associate with writing, considering that we have the texts of dead authors. With each new piece of technology, the characteristics of orality and literacy become blurred, changing not just the way people communicate, but their very consciousness. This is why the real Parry and Lord went to great pains to record illiterate poets—these poets were able to not only perform oral poetry, but compose it on the spot, whereas literate poets could only perform poems they had learned by heart from songbooks. In the transition to literacy, much was gained, but other abilities were lost forever. Lord writes,
The songs [oral poems] have died out in the cities not because life in a large community is an unfitting environment for them but because schools were first founded there and writing has been firmly rooted in the way of life of the city dwellers.
Oral poetry, like reading and writing, is a cultural technique, and if it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it will disappear.
There are still more examples of the features of orality and literacy in the first few pages of The File on H. The Minister, thinking about how he’s always given “sleazy business,” whereas other ministers get “glamorous jobs,” decides that once he catches Bill and Max spying (a fantasy, as they aren’t spies), he’ll blackmail them into writing “a biography of the king.” And why does the king need a biography? Because “once written, the text becomes fixed,” and the king can be memorialized as a great leader. That’s the idea, at least. The governor’s wife, ecstatic that two young men are coming to town, calls all the women in town to let them know and prepare themselves—“through the dripping rain the telephone wires would soon carry the news.” It’s as if Kadare wants to overwhelm us with technological inventions (the letter, the tape recorder, the book, the telephone) to show all the ways that communication and culture are intertwined.
In the next chapter, Kadare switches form. He’s been hopping (as the narrator) from one character to the next and inhabiting them—first the Minister, then the governor, then the governor’s wife. Now we meet Dull Baxhaja, who is known as “The Eaves,” the best spy in the town of N— and one who is particularly known for his proficiency in listening, or eavesdropping, compared to Pjetër Prenushi, the other spy of N—, who is known for his skill in “the ocular branch.” This chapter is presented as Dull’s written report to the governor, and because of this, exhibits a flowery, verbose language, with phrases such as, “Notwithstanding the aforesaid,” “the author of the present report has failed to mention,” and “your honour will pardon me.” This is then immediately contrasted with transcribed eyewitness accounts that make up part of the report. The most memorable is from the porter who carries Bill and Max’s suitcases (containing the mysterious tape-recorders) and who makes frequent grammatical mistakes, saying things like, “them suitcases,” “heavier than lead, they was,” and “that were modern folk.” Another witness, the manager of the hotel where Bill and Max are staying, reports that, “They spoke a language that was, how shall I put…like it had cooled down.” What the manager means becomes clear in the next section, when we return to a more traditional narrative mode and Bill introduces himself to the governor’s wife by saying, in Albanian, “Fair lady, to thee I bow, thy servant Bill Norton.” Examples of the differences between orality and literacy continue to pile up, enriching the novel while also making us question just what a novel is.
As we learn more about Bill and Max’s journey, Kadare also informs us about Homeric scholarship and includes information that matches up with Lord’s in The Singer of Tales. The townspeople are shocked to learn that Bill and Max will be travelling to the “Buffalo Inn,” which is “a very old inn indeed, and so far away from anything that even telegrams take four days to get there,” according to one townsperson, but as we know from Lord, the country inns, or “hans,” are one of the places where singers of epic poetry may gather. Max and Bill do meet an epic singer, or a rhapsode, who is passing through, and they record two of his songs. When they listen to the recordings, they notice features of his song that Lord also identified in his factual recordings. For example, they eventually identify four different versions of the same song, indicating that in oral, illiterate cultures, an epic song, like the Iliad or the Odyssey, would have changed on each telling, depending on both the audience and the performer himself, “until Homer came along and chose one of the variants.” This explanation is Kadare’s, as articulated by Bill in a journal entry.
Kadare also shows that the performers of epic poetry are not “mere performers,” as Lord refers to singers who memorize tales word for word from songbooks; instead, they compose their poems as they perform them, not from scratch, of course, but by drawing on the tradition of which they are also preservers and creators; they learn “formulas,” or “ phrases which express in the several rhythmic patterns the ideas most common in the poetry” (Lord), and through practice and imitation of other singers, they begin to perform and create their own style, expanding one part of the tale, contracting another, giving a happy ending, or a sad one, depending on what they wish to convey. Kadare explains this idea, by way of Bill’s notes, as the ability to “forget.” Bill writes:
Apparently the issue is not just a question of memorization. It is also related to a fundamental aspect of oral poetry—the mechanism of forgetting, which in its turn is not really just a matter of forgetfulness, but a much more complicated business […]. An alleged slip of memory justifying a new interpretation of the song…
It now seems obvious that the question which formerly seemed fundamental for explaining the Homeric phenomenon, to wit, how many lines could a rhapsode commit to memory…needs to be replaced with a different question: how many lines may a rhapsode wish to forget? Or rather: can a rhapsode exist without a capacity to forget?
Bill’s question can alternatively be understood, if we think of writing as external memory, as: can a literate rhapsode exist? The answer, from Lord, is no: “when writing is introduced and begins to be used for the same purposes as the oral narrative song…the older art gradually disappears.” This is the challenge that Kadare takes up in The File on H; even though epic poetry has more or less died out, what if it was resurrected via the novel? Bill notes in another journal entry that, even after recording the same song multiple times by the same poet, “none of the re-recordings is identical to the first versions,” but he realizes this is “the serum that will protect the ballad from time’s attrition.” Because there is no text and no original, the changing of the epic is essential to its perpetuation, and ironically, it’s when the oral poem becomes text—becomes fixed—that its demise is ensured.
At the same time as Bill and Max are discovering the truth of Homeric composition, another plot point is unfolding—the loss of Bill’s eyesight. This seems to happen as he enters deeper and deeper into the world of epic poetry, almost as if, by fully immersing himself in the oral world, he can no longer exist in the literate one, which comes to seem like a pale imitation of something more primal and real. The novel ends with an echo of Albert Lord and Milman Parry’s journey. When they left Yugoslavia in the 1930’s, a singer composed “The Song of Milman Parry,” a new oral creation to commemorate their trip. The dream of Bill and Max is to witness what they call an “epivent,” meaning a new oral composition of recent events. In the novel, they note that the “epic machine” had produced a few lines in both 1878 and 1913 (important dates in Albanian history), but nothing since. When they open the newspaper on their ship back to America, however, they discover that a new song has been composed about their attempt to record poems with the tape recorder. In keeping with the mixing of orality and literacy throughout the novel, they are forced to read this poem rather than hear it. Bill, however, cannot read due to his poor eyesight, and after hearing Max read the poem, something strange happens. Bill assumes the pose of the epic singer, does the “majekrah,” which is the way singers hold one hand to their head, and begins to sing. In The File on H, there is an alternative history, one in which epic poetry lives.
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