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ALBERTO CASADEI, Poetry and Fiction: A Necessary, Historically Verifiable, Combination

tion of orality depending on the purposes and contexts in which
singing and acting were born. 13
The texts which would then acquire a literary value were origi-
nally ritual songs, religious invocations, mythical proto-tales, which
we can now trace back, if only vaguely, through language: it is not by
chance that terms such as the ancient Egyptian hosiu, and perhaps the
ancient Chinese ’u, and later the Greek epoidè, and Latin carmen, all
14
refer to both the poetic and the magical semantic sphere. Although
it is correct to emphasize that the specific value assigned to the poetic
song depended on the context in which it was used (e.g. a shamanistic
ritual), it should also be pointed out that it was thanks to those char-
acteristics that such a use was possible: the regular rhythm, the
anaphora, the strong assonance and consonance, for example, created
a regularity which made reception easy and the subject ma er a rac-
tive. The talent of chanting the language of the community in such a
way was perceived as a divine gift, to the extent that it generated the
legendary notion of ‘inspiration,’ which would accompany other skills
that the shaman could acquire, and all this would in turn benefit the
entire community. In actual fact, we should rather think of it as a skill
comparable to that of the proto-painters, who could make the most of
the mimetic potential, and by gradually enhancing that, they reached
higher-level skills. The sacred component a ributed to religious po-
etry was bound, however, to contribute to its prestige, its memoriza-
tion and hence its preservation and development, as we can guess
from the preservation of magic formulas within the various episodes
of the Gilgamesh or The Egyptian Book of the Dead.
On the other hand, a long and complex narrative appears to be
the result of an ability of the second degree, conceivable in a late phase
of orality or, more likely, after the advent of writing as a tool to aid
memory and as a testimony, but mostly as an extension of our mental

13 See John M. Foley, How To Read an Oral Poem (Champaign: Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 2002), 22-123.
14 For many examples, see Thomas M. Greene, Poésie et magie (Paris: Julliard,
1991).

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