For many years, the conventions and existence of epic poetry from the pre-literate age were explained as repositories for information.  A well-known story, usually involving a hero that embodied the virtues of the society who told the story, engages in battles, quests, etc.  As the epic is spoken to an audience, the hero’s actions and the way they are described impart the audience with information and teachings.  The information the listeners received is thought by some to be analogous to a modern day textbook lesson, in which students learn mathematics, grammar, and law, all by the written word. So is the contention of Homeric scholar Eric A. Havelock.  As Hobart and Schiffman state in Orality and the Problem of Memory,

       Everywhere he looked in Homer, Havelock saw a wealth of instruction.
      For instance, the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon at the
      beginning of the Iliad embodies for him a wide range of subliminal
      “teachings.”  It lays out the rules for disposition of captives, the etiquette
      of making and receiving ransom requests, the reverence due to priests,
      the respect accorded to kings by powerful warriors, and the symbols
      of public authority…(19).

Havelock believed the nature of the epic was to verbally hand down a type of classical social contract, so that society could remain stable based upon the information that the speaker’s gave audiences of the Iliad.  Integral to the audience’s reception of these teachings was a willingness to become participatory in the communication of the epic.  According to Havelock, this is not a choice, but a necessity for a pre-literate listener.
 
    Havelock contends that a pre-literate society has not developed a critical sense for examining what is spoken to them.  Because the listeners lack an alphabet and therefore lack a written account of the spoken word, they are not able to take a step back from the poem and abstractly think about it as an object.  Words flow immediately, giving little time for reflection. The pre-literate mode of understanding the poem was to place oneself in the action itself.  Hence, “Although they might have recognized and rejected deviations from the traditional tale, they (the audience) could not criticize it’s subliminal teachings,” (20).  Simply put, Havelock believes classical audiences did not think about a character like Achilles, they thought within him.  They were Achilles (20).
 
    The major fault Hobart and Schiffman find with Havelock’s premise is the assumption that spoken epic poetry is a teaching device, a container for knowledge.   “We moderns regard memory as a container filled with information…” (Hobart & Schiffman, 23).  The modern concept of memory is a storage concept, which is facilitated by books and other forms of storage such as computers.  Without any kind of storage technology other than direct experience, the pre-literate memory must be different than the storage type of memory we understand.  Hobart and Schiffman argue that our modern literary sensibilities cause us to view books and similar materials as containers for knowledge, and consequently, that understanding is being grafted onto a culture in which books and similar materials did not exist.  “Oral literature” is an oxymoron and should be held suspect as a medium whose main purpose is to act like as a medium (the book) that would not be invented for years to come.

    The concept of memory Hobart and Schiffman believe spoken epic poetry reinforces is social memory.  Defined, social memory, or commemoration, is a recollecting process. “In the world before writing,” according to Hobart and Schiffman, “memory is the social act of remembering,” (15).  For instance, the group nature of a song, can probably be safely argued to have more in common with oral tradition than a written account (at least in terms of function) of the same spoken words. The two different uses of the word memory denote different kinds of memory. Storage is one type, recollection is another.

    “The Star-Spangled Banner” is more like the spoken Iliad than a written account of the Iliad.  The specific words sung are more attuned to the metrical nature of the music than they are apt tools for imparting the singer with specific knowledge about a single battle.  “The Star-Spangled Banner” is an example of modern commemoration. If we were to read it as it was originally written, as a poem, then we would probably think of it as a series of images describing a naval assault on an American fort, and as a singular, historical event.  The poem’s lines would become information.  Yet in song form this is not the case. The point of the song is not for each individual to remember a certain night in American history; the point is for a group of singers to remember the notion of a nation, more specifically, the United States.

    Hobart and Schiffman theorize that each oral presentation of the Iliad was a different for its audiences as the situations in which we might hear the national anthem. For instance, we sing the national anthem at baseball games, but we also heard it after the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001; besides being group events, these cases have little in common.  The type of memory that we use when sing the song together is the commemorative type.

    Another example describing the differences in the concept of memory that Hobart and Schiffman refer to can be found in computers. Memory on a computer describes how many tasks a computer can do at once; for example, as I write this, my computer’s memory is running a word processing program, is burning a CD, and is downloading emails I have received over the past six hours.  In terms of the human brain, RAM is more analogous to cognitive ability than brain size or storage capacity. Disk space, or storage space, refers to a quantity of space on my hard drive. According to it, I can store thousands more essays on it this length before it becomes full. In terms of a human brain, disk space would be the actual area of the brain where I store the memory of say, my first kiss.  Disk space is a type of memory, something like a diary. Of course, the two types of memory on my computer are then obviously very different.  One memory processes what it is told, and more or less participates in all the information that passes through it, as did Havelock’s conception of the pre-literate mind. My computer’s disk space memory stores the information in a place removed from the other type of memory, that memory that actually allows me to access stored data.  This memory is much like a book, like a dictionary storing a list of words and definitions.

    What is important in Hobart and Schiffman’s essay is the idea that the purpose of oral epics is radically different than what has been traditionally thought.  Our modern concept of memory is a very personal experience, as is for the most part our learning styles.  Books are intimate and stress the individual interpreter of them; their pages are filled with information that in the reader’s hands might be hundreds of years removed from the time they were written.  Yet with spoken epics, the only way to experience them was in the flesh, listening in a group to the speaker.  It was a nominally individual process, but did include information as a print culture knows it. In the present day, perhaps the immediacy of the performance nature of pre-literate work is overlooked when so many written words flash before our eyes on pages.