ABSTRACT
Participation comes necessarily in the verbal telling-and, so, where there is wordlessness, the people might say, there is only absence of story. True, the feasting, laughing, and drinking that nominally occur in the same setting as the storytelling-the mead hall in Beowulf's case, a banquet in the Odyssey's-may suggest a certain superficiality in the extent of the listeners' participation. Sometimes, however, the people are fortunate enough to find oral epics where an actual audience's vocal participation in the story has been included as part of the transcription. Many of the people who exist today in industrialized societies have lost touch with this aspect of theatrical performance, except perhaps in the sanctuary of the sports arena. Heckling characters, shouting at the screen, commenting publicly on the narrative as it proceeds: All these are activities in keeping with orally inflected participation.
