The Guslar and the Dalang

Timothy W. Boyd (University at Buffalo, SUNY)

Since the pioneering work of Parry and Lord in the South Slavic oral tradition, Homerists have had a huge amount of comparative material to help them to better understand the construction of Homeric verse in all of its various facets. A difficulty, however, lay in the fact that, whereas Homer’s work was contained in two long poems, the guslari, the traditional singers of heroic poetry in the South Slavic world, sang songs which, at best, could only be seen as very long ballads and, therefore, although they might tell scholars much about verse-making, they had much less to tell about larger questions of epic construction and performance. Parry was aware of this and attempted, on at least one occasion, to encourage one of his best singers to sing at much greater length than he--or any other guslar--was accustomed to. The result was still much shorter than either Homeric poem, looked like nothing more than a very expanded ballad, and temporarily incapacitated the singer.

In order to deal with these larger aspects of Homeric composition and performance, I propose, in this paper, to offer a comparative parallel from a different tradition, that of Southeast Asia. Here, performers from dancers to actors to puppeteers bring to life, among other works, the two great epics of India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, epics which have much in common with Homer. Within this tradition, I look specifically at the work of the dalang, the puppeteers of Indonesia. Unlike the guslari, they act within the bigger context of an entire epic, sometimes performing long segments at a time, sometimes single episodes, and their performance combines elements of fixed text and improvisation--all of which we might imagine the rhapsodes to have done in reciting Homer.

The dalang is not a replacement for the guslar as a model for epic performance: rather, he is a possible key to understanding more of the world beyond the line, the type scene, and the epithet in Homeric performance.