Thoughts and Questions about Miner's Comparative Poetics and Finnish Folklore

Earl Miner’s Comparative Poetics (Intro and Chapter 1) relating to Finland’s folklore—comments and questions:

•      “Aristotle’s founding his Poetics on drama illustrates the validity of the very concept of drama…all other examples of poetics are founded not on drama, but on lyrics. Western literature with its many familiar suppositions is a minority of one” (Introduction, pg. 8)

o   Finland folklore is founded also on lyric, not drama: shaman incantation runes, stories were told in the form of song. Written culture nonexistent until long after the oral; even then, it was written in lyrical form (Lönnrot’s work with the Kalevala)—so is Finland “western literature”? How should it be categorized? It certainly is not Eastern either== seems to exist in its own marginalized space?

•      “Names designate authors of works that are identifiable, separable from those by other named authors, from anonymous writing, and from other writings not deemed autonomously literary. Until such distinction of authorship and kinds of knowledge are reached, a poetics is infeasible. That is also to say that a poetics presumes the existence of other distinct autonomous kinds of knowledge.” (Comparative poetics, pg. 14)

o   Shows the work Lönnrot does (compiler [and in a way creator] of the Kalevala—Finns’ epic)

§  Prior to Kalevala, no published and circulated text of Finnish culture; it existed in oral tradition. When Lönnrot published work, it established the Finnish poetics, if only by the fact that it created a named distinction—something “identifiable, separated”—that otherwise was nonexistent in Finnish identity.

•       “Without a text, we have no evidence of the writer’s work…the reader can have access to the authorial creation only by means of a text, by which is meant here some physical coding, whether in our familiar black marks on paper, in the sound waves of a recitation and theater, or in the recollected memory of the poet or anyone else who can summon memory of the creation. The more often the physical text is multiplied, the more variations will be introduced…it is also evident that the multiplication of readers leads to the varying reception of what there is to know.” (Comparative Poetics, pg. 16)

o   This concept amplifies even more in the nature of oral tradition; with concrete text, multiple readers can refer back over time to some consistent thing-- objectively the same. As long as there exists an “original manuscript” of the writing, the variants come only through the interpretations of the readers. However, orally, the reciter applies small nuances in each retelling of the rune, and adds an entirely new source of disparity. I now wonder how this aspect of oral tradition changes after the written publication of Kalevala?  Now that a solid, tangible “archive” is added to the discourse, will oral tradition become more or less fluid (continuing to develop off the base of previous oral stories along the same trajectory, or trying to adhere to [or even adjust to] the canonized standard of the newly defined Finnish culture)?