And now for something completely different. I’m going to knock the “repetitions” pillar on the head.
Olrik confirmed from his studies that narratives which transmit orally and have more than one incident, may have duplicate incidents. Olrik explored the roles that repetitions play in oral narratives, and they have several functions. Torah has a type specific to itself that Olrik did not discuss but then, he wasn’t studying Torah specifically.
Some repetitions help a narrator maintain credibility with the audience. After telling the fantastic part of the narrative that is crucial to its denouement, he might add a less fantastic incident which has a similar result. An example in Torah is the two incidents that lead to Yaaqov naming a given place Machanaim , “two camps.” One is a camp of angels seen in the same place as the camp of humans that included Yaaqov’s family. Another is the two camps into which Yaaqov split his family with the very rational explanation that he feared an attack from his brother and hoped that one camp would escape destruction.
A second form of repetition calls the audience’s attention to the importance of an incident. Something that happens only once in an oral narrative is a throwaway. Something that happens twice is part of the point of the narrative. An oral narrative will never say “this is important”; that is descriptive. What it does is repeat the action, which preserves vividness and avoids memory stress. Yosef’s two sets of two dreams each is a tipoff that dreams will be important to his fate.
Another type of repetition has a direct connection to the fantastic incidents of an oral narrative. If the narrative reaches its denouement in more than one episode, the later episodes may be more extreme. This is the Law of Ascents from the Epic Laws. When Yosef, an ordinary boy in the Holy Land, has two dreams, that is nothing; when two court officials have dreams in Egypt, and Yosef interprets them, that is important; when Pharaoh has two dreams and Yosef interprets them, that is the signal for the denouement.
A fourth type of repetition is the “derived doublet,” as the translators put it. Olrik’s description is that incidents are repeated, in less “verbose” wording, to give a character more stage time. The narrator will get to a certain point in the story and then remember an incident in another story that would give his character more stage time, so he tells about that incident next. But since it isn’t an organic part of the current story, he tells it with less detail or vividness than its normal setting. This “languishing” feature is the identifier for a derived doublet. It also occurs within the cycle of stories for an individual character; an incident early in the cycle can be followed by one or more events, and then the derived doublet later in the cycle. The “languishing” nature of the repeat episode distinguishes a derived doublet from the Law of Ascents and from an “importance” repetition.
The last repetitive element in Olrik’s principles (although the discussion comes somewhere in the middle of the book) is the parallel doublet. Parallel doublets represent conflation, during oral transmission, of two narratives that originally had lives as oral narratives separately from the conflation and also separately from each other. Two such narratives have the same goals, but they may reach them with different casts of characters, at different locations, and for different motives. Both narratives might have the goal of making a person a king; the motive in one might be to replace a bad king, and in the other to restore a lost prince.
I’ll finish this discussion next week because I’m running long and parallel doublets have been misunderstood by people used to calling all repetitions “doublets”. You have seen that Olrik does NOT regard all repetitions as doublets, and that he has strict definitions of what doublets are. Next I’ll show that Olrik has strict definitions of how parallel doublets function differently from other repetitions, and I will also show that he has strict standards for determining whether a parallel doublet exists at all.
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