REVIEW ARTICLE

J. A.LOUBSER jloubser@pan.uzulu.ac.za

UNIVERSITY OF ZULULAND

09/11/98

Jousse, Marcel 1997. The anthropology of geste and rhythm, studies in the anthropological laws of human expression and their application in the Galilean oral style tradition, ed. Edgard Sienaert and translated in collaboration with Joan Conolly.  Centre for Oral Studies: Durban, South Africa. 750 pages. Price: Unknown.

 

The 12 essays represented in this volume date from 1931 to 1952. Together they not only comprise Jousse’s field work but also his profound reflection on the phenomenon of oral style and culture. The only remaining documents of his oeuvre not reflected in this volume are his lectures and the material he dictated toward the end of his life.

 

Collecting, editing and translating the monumental work of Jousse in one volume is a most daunting task for any academic to undertake. In doing this, Sienaert has presented the English speaking world with a first comprehensive look at the work of Jousse, the father of oral studies. The value of the publication is greatly enhanced by the addition of a glossary, an expanded table of contents and a comprehensive index at the back. Jousse’s works are also preceded by an illuminating foreword by the editor and translator.

 

The book is divided into theoretical and practical sections. In the first theoretical part the psycho-physiological laws of human expression and memorisation are explored under the subsections of ‘mimism,’ ‘rhythmism,’ ‘bilateralism’ and ‘formulism’. In the second part these theoretical laws are applied to the Galilean (gospel) tradition. The themes focus on issues related to the oral style in which the message of Jesus was cast and the practice of memorisation that it implied. This is consecutively illustrated with reference to the relationship between rabbi and disciples, the sacramental character of the rabbi’s message, the oral style of the Our Father, the Trinity (emphasis on the prologue to the Gospel of John) and a brief reflection on the Judaean background.

 

Jousse’s legacy.

In none of the recent theological dictionaries that I have consulted could I find any mention of Jousse, leave alone a short summary of his important theory on oral style. He is also remarkably under-represented on the Internet. This is a hiatus in contemporary scholarship that stands to be corrected.

Though most of his work consisted of field work and original analyses, Jousse builds on the foundation of a number of French scholars who published in the 1920s and 1930s on the anthropology of language. He mentions names such as Barat, André Ombredane and especially Morlaâs (a psychiatrist who concentrated on gestes). In his writings he mentioned some recognition that he had received from his contemporaries. Judging from the institutions where he lectured, and his endeavour to educate a whole generation of young anthropologists to carry on his method, one can deduce that his contribution had considerable impact in the first part of this century. Thus the foundations were laid for further studies in orality by Parry and Lord, and later by Walter Ong and subsequent scholars. Recent articles linking his work to James Joyce (Finnegan’s Wake) show that his legacy lives on.

 

From an anthropological point of view, Jousse departed from the valid point that culture had to be studied ‘globally’ (at that time ‘holism’ had not yet become a technical term), and that language was an integral part of a broader cultural strategy that included ritual, custom and social convention. Jousse came from an oral background himself and he also had experience of the Amerindians when he was instruction officer in the USA in 1917 — he writes about this in The Oral Style (published in 1925, English translation 1990, Garland).

 

Jousse’s theory

In a time before transformational-generative grammar, Jousse’s theory of ‘gestes’ reached back into the psychological dynamics that structure language.  According to him, the basic building block of language is a three-fold propositional geste, correlating to our conventional idea of a kernel utterance with a subject-predicate-object scheme. In his words, it consists of ‘an acting one’-‘acting on’-‘an acted upon’. These three elements each consist of a ‘mimeme’. This latter concept ‘mimeme’ is fundamental to his anthropological theory as a whole and has to be understood if one is to make any sense of Jousse’s work.

 

For this theory he draws on Aristotle, who proposed that humans are mimetic beings. He remarks that humans have a mimetic gift and recounts that: ‘For many years I have … studied … gorillas, chimpanzees, orang-utangs. All these “apes”, so “aping” by repute, have a disappointingly poor “aping” ability.’ Humans, he found, alone have a ‘mimismic gift’ that uniquely enables them to recall in the absence of the object of recollection. He therefore coined the word ‘mimism’ to distinguish it from a more general ‘mimesis’. For Jousse then, humans as unique ‘mimismic’ beings co-exist by constantly ‘mimisming’ the world, i.e., replaying the perceived movements of the outside world through integrated body-mind expressions. Under ‘mimism’ he understands a spontaneous and subconscious process that precedes conscious imitation. Thus through ‘mimisms’ humans continuously ‘intussuscept’ (i.e., internalise) information from their environment and express it with their whole bodies, structured as ‘gestes’.

 

Language as such is thus the result of a complex process of ‘mimismological’ intussusception which is then expressed in ‘gestes’. In this, language does not differ fundamentally from any other human activity. In his theory, Jousse approaches Gestalt theory, though he never mentions it by name.

 

Style

His anthropological theory is rigorously applied to the phenomenon of style. Because human beings are bilaterally structured, each propositional ‘geste’ is replayed by a next one in a form that is either identical, analogous or antithetical. Thus a single ‘geste’ will trigger another one that balances the first in form and content. He explains that: ‘These two or three semantic balancings will form a living, dancing, logical unit, a kind of binary or ternary Rhythmic schema, the influence of which will be apparent universally manifesting even in our current literary and pedagogical problems.’ By this explanation Jousse believed he had arrived at the ‘very root of the creation of style.’ The biological base for this structuring predominantly in binary units, is the human body that is itself bilaterally structured. If humans had, e.g., three hands or three feet, human expression would have been radically different.

 

By this theory involving mimemes being structured and expressed in propositional gestes and eventually giving rise to balancing units, Jousse explains the phenomenon of style. From this point of departure he not only explains human behaviour, but he also develops in some detail a variety of other theories touching on the fields of  psychology, linguistics, literary science,  music and didactics.

 

Data from Palestine.

Because of its rich orality the Palestinian milieu of the gospels lends itself to a study of the anthropology of geste and rhythm. Focusing on the concept of ‘breath’ (rouhah or spirit), he develops a theory that can be seen a the precursor of what is today known as the theory of the corporate personality. Human emotion, as well as thought and intelligence, emanate from the nose, throat and whole being in an immediate manner, and holistically involves the individual and world.

Jousse also pays much attention to the relationship of rabbi and disciple, which is described as a total, holistic unity. Disciples are required to become their teachers by ‘eating’ them (which is the true sacrament). This means to digest the master’s teaching by memorisation and performance of his words and deeds. For this purpose the teaching of the master is transmitted in rhythmo-pedagogical form. It may be the lasting contribution of Jousse to Biblical scholarship that he analyses a wide variety of gospel texts to this effect, showing that they were cast in melodious, rhythmic form, intended to be memorised. A disciple was per se someone who gained the competence to perform the master’s words. Modern scholars may feel that Jousse had forced the meaning of some passages in order to demonstrate this, but the wealth of evidence is convincing, at least to this reviewer. So, e.g., the whole of the Our Father prayer is divided as follows into a series of binary, balancing units, intended for memorisation: 

Abba of ours who is in Heaven                        Hallowed be the Name of you

MAY COME the Malkoûtâ of you                   May the Will of you be done

As in Heaven                                                             So on Earth

The Bread of our that IS COMING                                  Give us to eat this day

And remit to us                                                         As we remitted

the Debts of us                                                         to our Debtors

And will not make us COME to trial              But free us of Evil

The balancing units is phrased to reflect the original Aramaic as closely as possible, while the capitalised words indicate further intrinsic balancing elements in the rhythmo-melodic text. Though the units are rhythmically and semantically balanced and often display assonantal and alliterative rhyming patterns, Jouse rejected any suggestion that the text should be scanned metrically or rhymed conventionally.    

 

Romanticism.

As a man of his time, Jousse indulged in romanticising the oral style of peasant peoples. This style, he maintained, was the true and original expression of humanity, and had to be salvaged in order to restore our humanity. Peasant culture, especially as manifested in the Palestinian milieu, represented humanity at its best. He therefore conducted elaborate studies of the Aramaic Targoums as the true source of the New Testament, in which as a Jesuit, he was most interested. Jousse also perceived a direct cultural link between the oral culture of first century Galilee and the Celtic (Gallic) culture that preceded Roman and Greek influences in France, as it was still preserved in the peasant culture of that country. Thus, he argued, by a re-appraisal of Palestinian peasant culture, a European people such as the French, can retrace and salvage their own pre-literary heritage.

In his writings he constructs an elaborate dichotomy between the Graeco-Roman heritage and the Palestinian heritage. Whereas the former had become estranged from such oral roots as it posessed in Homeric times, the Palestinian heritage still preserved it.

 

Jousse also struggles with the referentiality of words at a time when the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure had not yet begun to make itself felt in linguistic and anthropological studies.

He constantly looked at language as the vehicle of original ‘gestes’. In this regard he was fascinated by Chinese characters and the purity with which they reflected such original ‘propositional gestes’. The same applies to his fascination with the phenomenon of onomatopoeia. Here, he felt, were the roots of language, to which ‘paysan’ (peasant) culture, with its overt ‘oral style’, was much closer. He says: ‘Our writing mummifies everything and makes us lose touch with Life to a degree we do not even suspect.’ His constant interest was with what happened to ‘gestes’ in later developments.

 

In this regard he observed a constant process of ‘algebrisation’ (a form of abstraction shaped by writing). ‘Algebrisation’, which amounts to expression through writing, can become divorced from its concrete referents, in which case he saw it as a negative ‘algebrosation’. He deplores this false kind of abstraction as leading to a stage where, in modern languages, an almost complete destruction of orality is observed. For this he blamed modern ‘philology’, which has to be understood as ‘the attachment to bookish culture’ (exemplified by Alfred Loisy) rather that the present discipline known under that tag. Thus Jousse did not reject writing as such, but its alienation from orality.

 

Though much of Jousse’s work has become dated, it is of more than pure historical interest. In the light of  present developments in orality theory and media criticism, it is certain that there will be a wide interest among scholars of hermeneutics, philosophy, anthropology, biblical studies, and communication science to refer back to the work that is foundational to these disciplines.

 

A mistake that a contemporary reader consistently might want to make when examining the work of Jousse is to note what is not there (and perhaps unconsciously to blame him for it). However one has to bear in mind that his monumental work preceded the influence of De Saussure, Chomsky and Levi-Strauss, and indeed to a large extent prepared the way for it. If he had access to our present information regarding the referentiality of language and the nature of metaphor, he undoubtedly would have formulated much differently. The same can also be said of recent developments in media theory. He lacks a sophisticated understanding of how the development of media technology enabled new modes of expression, although he greets the advent of the motion picture and voice recording technology with immense fascination because of its capacity to enable a study of gestes. With reference to his biblical applications, one has to note that  the severe dichotomy he observes between the Greek and Palestinian milieus, has been proven wrong by subsequent scholarship. Although his focus on the Aramaic background and sources of the gospels was shared by a whole generation of scholars, this line of investigation soon lost popularity because of the lack of sufficient data to reconstruct an ‘original’ Aramaic text.

 

Because of the size and technical complexity of Jousse’s work, this is a work for the serious scholar. Some passages only become comprehensible after repeated reading and re-reading. Only a persevering reader is able to crack his peculiar taxonomy. What is required now, is that competent scholars revisit and unpack the work of Jousse, ‘digesting’ it into more accessible forms. Perhaps Jousse would have called this the ‘algebrisation’ of his work (his word for reducing concrete expressions in a more abstract manner)! Nevertheless it is a challenge undertaking.