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Betty Neyhart
In a word, Gregory Ulmer has recommended heuretics. As the paradigm that we have come to know as "literacy" shifts to something else, which Ulmer calls "electracy," heuretics is a readiness strategy. It is more than that, certainly. But from the start, I want to emphasize that heuretics is a way to prepare for writing in - both in the sense of "ushering in" and "working within" - an emerging digital culture. It is a practice - an orientation or attitude toward texts - worth trying out now.
Before I practice heuretics to write about rap, let me briefly explain the word. It originated in the Middle Ages as a theological term, the flip-side of "hermeneutics," in structuralist terms its Other. One could interpret scripture, filter it through a hermeneutic, an institutionally established and sanctioned grid that enabled literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical readings. Doctrine would result - verifications of truth - or the application of doctrine in the form of lessons or homilies. One could also employ scripture as a means of invention. Which is to say, one could read it heuretically (Ulmer, 1989:15). Such "readings" might seem revelatory ('Eureka!'). Conversely, they might seem heretical, depending on how interpretive communities responded to what was invented (see the case of Joan of Arc). The point is, hermeneutics yielded "readings" that seemed discoverable in scripture. They seemed to have been placed there. The interpreter showed his audience what the text (and, by implication, its author and its ultimate Author) said. Meaning was not imposed upon the text; meaning arose from the text. Or at least that was the general idea - contested and critiqued now for a few hundred years. Heuretics, then, was hermeneutics that failed or sounded dubious. Such a reading practice seemed a lot like writing. It generated the sneaking suspicion that "readings" were not recovered; they were made - made from the text. The interpreter (consciously or not) had used the text to say something - used it as a pretext for his own purposes. In effect, hermeneutics turned into heuretics - turned reading into writing - any time an interpretation was received or regarded as an invention.
Hundreds of years ago, the term "heuretics" dropped out of usage. Who needed it? It appears that we do. In Teletheory (1989), Ulmer reintroduced "heuretics" as a concept and practice useful for reading and writing in electronic culture. He suggested that interpretation pushed to a place where it became invention was ideally suited for the development of electracy. In Heuretics (1994), Ulmer explored and detailed the 'logic of invention,' going so far as to demonstrate a heuristic for heuretics (when he labeled the CATTt). Implicit in his writing and in the writings of those influenced by Ulmer is the assumption that tomorrow's writing would necessarily seem avant-garde today. Accurate or not, this assumption is useful. It generates willfully experimental writing. Its problem is scope. The myth that today's avant-garde is tomorrow's mainstream unnecessarily restricts the reach of Ulmer's audacious ideas. They are equally applicable to writing that we might consider ordinary. As a mild corrective or, better, as an attempt to balance a larger equation, I want to model writing familiar to a print-oriented audience. It does, however, proceed according to an illogic of sense, and it is designed to function in (and as) electronic media. What follows is an extended - and false - etymology (a particularly electrate "genre" worth developing). It expands a couple of shorter items I wrote for popular music publications: one, originally, introduced a guide to rap recordings; the other examined hate-filled song lyrics (Jarrett, n.d. and 2001). It is mutated journalism, my response to specific assignments and, as such, a blend of dictions. The essay points toward a hybrid form of writing that we might label the "theoretically informed feature" or the "popular experiment." It is heuretics, then - interpretation pushed around. Gangsta writing, then. The connection between rhapsody and rap is an invention. It is grammatologically motivated; predicated on what Ulmer calls a "puncept." The goal of such alignments or, at least my goal, is to create knowledge (or even truth and eureka) effects. Treat any type of writing - in this instance, the etymological essay - heuretically, and it will function as theory.
A few thousand years ago, there was no such thing as writing - no blazes on trails, no diagrams scratched in sand, no paintings on cave walls, and no totem poles or bas-relief murals that told stories of days gone by. I am not sure about songlines. But people definitely did not write books. Libraries didn't exist. There weren't any music guides. People were "illiterate." Aimed at your last boyfriend, illiterate might mean "stupid." More historically, the word was a print-based way to say that oral cultures were "unfamiliar with literature." Go back far enough, and none of our kinfolk wrote. But they read all the time: worry in the eyes of a child, reassurance in the kiss of a lover, husbandry in the sweetness of a fig, warning in the blast of a horn or the clang of a bell, a promise of rain in the smell of a spring breeze. A pile of feces could tell you everything there was to know about a person - past, present, and future. In oral cultures people lack not the ability to read, but technologies for recording. They lack all means of fixing memory. They can't "graph" the past - not as chirograph, photograph, phonograph, or cinematograph.
In Greece, where alphabetic writing developed, what label was assigned to epic poems such as the Iliad and the Odyssey? Answer: 'Rhapsodies.' And who threw down dactylic hexameters and was a sex machine to all the chicks? Homer. He "rapped odes," which literally meant he wove or stitched together songs (Ong, 1982: 2). He did not invent poems whole cloth. The poems Homer recited had been passed down for centuries (and 'set down in the new Greek alphabet around 700 - 650 BC'). Rather, Homer reworked and preserved set expressions - what we would call prefabricated parts, mnemonic formulas, set phrases, or clichs - according to metrical purposes associated with particular performances. Tale-stitching bards were the MCs of the ancient world. Their job was to praise or to blame. They were prophets, venerated not for compositional ability or originality - both print-based concepts - but for verbal agility. They could string together metrical units like beads on a copper wire. And they kept it real with crowd-pleasing stories bolstered by spiraling body counts, gratuitous obscenities, and treacherous women. '[S]tandardized formulas were grouped around equally standardized themes, such as the council, the gathering of the army, the challenge, the despoiling of the vanquished, the hero's shield, and so on and on' (Ong, 1982:23). Even so, street-level credibility did not guarantee memorable, dramatic performances. Words had to flow. Bards, across the globe, were duty-bound to rock a house party at the drop of a hat. Their skills and exploits were later documented in printed accounts such as The Mwindo Epic (West Africa), The Tale of the Heike (Japan), the Bible (for example, in both the story of Balaam and the Song of Deborah), and Iceberg Slim's Pimp.
Archilochus and Aithirne the Importunate are still notorious for free-styling lethal rhymes. Robert C. Elliott tells their stories in The Power of Satire. Archilochus was a Greek rhymer of the seventh century B.C. He is credited with inventing iambic verse, 'the measure in which "ruthless warfare ought to be waged"' - and with using words to draw blood. His father was a priest of Demeter and a politician; his mother was a slave. As the story goes, Archilochus was betrothed to marry Neobule, but right before the wedding, the bride's father, Lycambes said, 'Let's call the whole thing off.' Archilochus went berserk. At the festival of Demeter, he chanted iambics against Lycambes and Neobule. They promptly hanged themselves. Archilochus, for his part, went on to establish 'a towering reputation as a poet' (Ong, 1982:7).
And then, there is Aithirne - Aithirne the Importunate. Equally despised and admired, he is the most celebrated rhyme slinger in Irish saga: a bad ass of truly global proportions. People cowered in terror whenever Aithirne made an unannounced stop during one of his "bardic tours" of the Emerald Isle. (It is helpful to picture him riding on a rock 'n' roll tour bus.) Aithirne and his two sons used to travel 'lefthandwise from kingdom to kingdom,' exacting outrageous favors. Their weapon of choice was the glm dcind, a metrical malediction with magical powers. When they rocked the mic, everybody ran for cover. For example, when Aithirne rolled into the town of Connaught, he was met by the one-eyed King Eochaid. The king figured he would appease the poet. Legend says, he offered 'whatever his people had of jewels and treasures.' '"There is, forsooth," saith Aithirne, "the single eye there in thy head, to be given to me into my fist." "There shall be no refusal," saith Eochaid...So then the king put his finger under his eye, and tore it out of his head, and gave it into Aithirne's fist.' Later, in Leinster Aithirne took a notion to get very down and intimate with the queen. He shared this reasonable fantasy with the king. For 'honor's sake' and to avoid a verbal beatdown of epic proportions, the king agreed to grant Aithirne his wish. (What the queen had to say is not recorded.) Finally, Aithirne got wind that another king, a fellow named Conchobar, was engaged to marry Luaine. Aithirne and his sons planned to crash the wedding party, drink a few pints of stout, and cop some cash. Complications arose when they spied Luaine. They were smitten and 'besought her to play the king false.' She refused. In retaliation Aithirne 'made three satires upon her," and 'the maiden died of shame.' The story does not end there. After the funeral, King Conchobar and his posse followed Aithirne the Importunate. They tracked him to his compound, walled up his crib, and set fire to the place; toasted the poet and his entire family - shock and awe. And get this: local poets were pissed senseless. Imagine the king's disrespect! Had he forgotten the magic power of words? (Ong, 1982:27).
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