Welsh, 'Essays on Homeric Epic', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9409
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9409-welsh-essays
Colby Quarterly. Essays on Homeric Epic. Volume XXIX,
Number 3. September 1993. Colby College, ME. Pp. 290.
ISSN-1050-5873.
Reviewed by M.E. Welsh -- Carleton University
This issue contains essays of varying quality on Homeric epic.
The guest editors, Hanna M. Roisman and Joseph Roisman, hope the
essays will "provide the reader with a sense of the multitude of
conceptualizations and interpretations that modern scholars use
in dealing with the Homeric epics." Walter Donlan and Donald
Lateiner approach the epics from a sociocultural perspective,
while Michael Lynn-George, Richard P. Martin, Michael N. Nagler
and Pietro Pucci adopt a more literary approach, studying the use
of repetitions and of individual words. Carol G. Thomas proposes
to alter the metaphor from which we approach the text. It is not
clear what "reader" the editors have in mind: some contributors
seem to be addressing an academic audience, others the
uninitiated. Some readers, therefore, may find themselves awash
in the mire of scholarship and contemporary literary theory.
How the expectations and response of Homer's audience should
influence our interpretations concerns Donlan in "Duelling with
Gifts in the Iliad: As the Audience saw it." He makes "a
sociocultural reading that puts the original audience in the
foreground and tries to imagine the action as they might have
imagined it" (155). He feels that the epics are about status and
power relationships. Therefore a sociology of Homer is necessary
so that interpretation may come not "from an artificial, totally
self-contained poetical universe", but "from the empirically
verifiable institutions of the living society" (158). He finds
it remarkable that critics have preferred the former. Among
reasons for doing this would be, I think, scepticism about the
reconstructions of archaeologists, distrust of the theories of
anthropologists and hesitation before a sociology extracted from
texts which themselves so self-consciously look to the past. The
verities of these disciplines are hardly more certain than those
of literary criticism. Here there is the added difficulty that
Donlan asks us to imagine what his reconstructed audience would
themselves imagine. Elaborating on Redfield, he argues that
Homer's audience would have judged Achilles the loser if he had
accepted Agamemnon's superficially generous offer made through
the embassy and that Achilles' refusal of the warrior's role is
an affirmation of the heroic code. Donlan thinks Achilles'
extravagant gift-giving at the funeral games confirms this. Thus
his sociology is justified. But do we need the help of a
sociology to explain why a man whose woman has been taken from
him by a lesser warrior should be angry? Homer makes it quite
clear that it is the excessive anger of Achilles that motivates
the poem. What counts is that Achilles' angry withdrawal is a
denial of his obligation to fight. Is not the question whether
he is following "the code" or denying it really only an example
of scholarly narcissicism?
Lateiner's paper, "The Suitors' Take: Manners and Power in
Ithaka", builds on Ian Morris's statement (CA 5 82) that
the institutions, modes of thought and social behaviour were
ultimately derived from the world in which Homer and his audience
lived. It looks then suspiciously as if Lateiner is to follow a
similar path to Donlan, particularly when he begins to apply the
jargon of sociology to the Odyssey. Later, however, he
qualifies this: "We should only cautiously surmise ideology from
(assumed) contemporary expectations, since we confess ignorance
about the composition of Homer's audiences" (188 n 46). His aim
in the paper is "to provide suitable social context for the
suitors' comedy of manners" (173), "particularly inverted
management of rules of heroic reciprocity" (174) and faulty
nonverbal behaviours. He shows how the suitors' behaviour
perverts the heroic paradigm of the Iliad. Telemakhos and
Odysseus show up the blunders of the suitors who "exist to prove
the heroes' merit, courage, prudence, and martial skill" (193).
Regrettably Lateiner's language catches the attention more
readily than the content: "ballistic footstool" is tolerable
once, its repetition tedious. What is gained by referring to
Kalypso as "Goddess second class" or having Telemakhos "shunted
aside" or referring to the suitors "as a team with obvious
coaches and directors"? His use of quotation marks is
mystifying. Then there are sentences such as "Mightily does this
display of affect override verbal communication in the ensuing
lethal interaction" (196), a sentence which could serve as a
judgement on his own paper.
In "Aspects of the Epic Vocabulary of Vulnerability"
Lynn-George inverts the concept of the Iliad as a poem of
force. The use of chraismein at Iliad 1.28
spotlights, for him, right at the beginning "one of the most
pervasive concerns of Greek society, literature and thought: the
basic primordial need for help and protection as a fundamental
condition for survival" (198). He sees significance in the use of
the verb "to roof over" for Chryses' roofing of a temple for
Apollo (Il. 1.39) and for the thatching of a hut for
Achilles (Il. 24.450). As the hut also protects Priam,
Lynn-George can state that an arch of protection spans the epic.
The need for protection is reflected in the final image of
Priam, "a figure whose uncertain survival serves to magnify the
fragility of all human existence" (207), emphasizing the
"profound futility" Lynn-George finds in the poem. He continues
"If this persistent note continued to haunt Greek literature, it
was because, like the epic in its conception, that literature
sought to meet a profound human need, to confront the silence of
emptiness without surrendering to the knell of futility". He has
moved from the use of one word in the Iliad to a
generalization for all Greek literature.
Lynn-George then investigates the vocabulary of vulnerability
elsewhere in Greek literature. He concludes "we might state that
the epics do not so much assure and preserve an existence as seek
to protect, in their constitutive vulnerability, those premises
from which human existence derives significance and value--to
protect, to celebrate certainly, and, quietly, to justify" (221).
Lofty thoughts indeed. How different Lynn-George's reading of
the poems is from that of first-time readers for whom violence is
the Iliad's outstanding feature.
In "Telemachus and the Last Hero Song" Martin tries to bridge
the crevasse between scholarship and the common, uninformed
response. He reminds critics about the importance of Homeric
poetry as "the product of a living, oral folk art" (223). Modern
"Analysts" and "Unitarians", although they may work from "an
informed literary-critical perspective", avoid two issues "Why
the poem is shaped, overall, in the way it is, and how the poem
relates to the world of oral composition-in-performance" (223).
He finds Jasper Griffin's "commitment to taste and sense as the
standard for judging our literary impressions" inadequate because
it provides "no usable understanding of technique, or any
explication that would aim for a much needed 'unified field'
theory of Homeric poetics" (227).
Martin boldly confronts contentious issues: the formula,
characterization, performance and the responses of Homer's
audience. He thinks we can replicate the audience's experience
by using mechanical searches because Homer's listeners each had,
he believes, the mental equivalent of a CD-ROM containing
recollections of previous performances. These recollections
lead to a sensitivity to repetitions that justifies arguing for
the meaning of a scene to be drawn from a repetition of a few
phrases in, say, Book 1 and then again in Books 20 and 24.
Telemachus is the centre of his search. Here Martin faces the
problem of characterization: the theory of the Analysts that
there can be none contradicts one's awareness at first reading of
"three-dimensional, deeply felt characters" (226). For him the
solution is that "the 'character' of any given person is not
constructed anew in each performance, but neither is a set value
known to all in the audience" (228).
Martin, concerned that Homer, a traditional poet, makes
Telemachus say "People celebrate more the song which comes latest
to hearers" (Od. 1.352), also observes that Telemachus
does not become a trickster-hero like his father, and he feels
that Homer's audience would have noted this. For them then the
poem would speak of the end of a tradition: "the metapoetic
reading" shows a "poet concerned about the very social conditions
that might (but eventually, in fact, failed to) allow epic art to
grow. Telemachus is the emblem of that ending" (240). On the
other hand, Homer may have thought one trickster-hero sufficient.
In "Penelope's Male Hand: Gender and Violence in the
Odyssey" Nagler dips his thumb into the Homeric pie and
pulls out a plum: "Really to assert her influence against the
ruinous paradigm of competition, to proclaim the priority of life
over all social roles, identities, and constructs, woman would
have to be rebelliously and dangerously herself. In this highly
realistic, sophisticated, and compelling poem, that does not
happen" (257). His method is very much that of the preacher
taking at random a text as a source for an unrelated sermon.
Nagler sugars his sermon with patronizingly platitudinous
references to contemporary politics: to McCarthyism, to "teflon"
Presidents and to "what is now euphemistically called the
'Department of Defense'". In the end one learns more about
Nagler's views than about Homer.
For the rest, Nagler concerns himself with a leader's use of
violence against members of his own community which he sees,
wrongly, as "the central ethical topic of the Odyssey"
(241). He passes on to the test with the bow and Penelope's
suggestion at 21.337-42. Then he considers those passages in
which women are remanded to their places. Penelope's "thick"
hand (Od. 21.6) is seen as "almost physically"
masculinizing her. It is easier to sympathize with his
idealization of women as instruments for peace and with the
repugnance he feels for violence than to find justification for
his search for these views in the Odyssey.
Pucci in "Antiphonal Lament between Achilles and Briseis"
calls attention to some unnoticed points of contact and
difference that illustrate an unsuspected relationship between
the two in Iliad 19. He makes some thoughtful
observations about oral performance. He explores the impact of
repetitions in greater theoretical detail than the other
essayists. In discussing Achilles' repetitive emphasis on
"heart" Pucci points out that while repetitions can have an
enriching emphasis, the opposite can also be true, so that they
become "a mere ornament," leaving it up to the reader to choose
the stronger or weaker reading (267). The effects of repetition
have to be activated to produce a full and meaningful reading.
Pucci demonstrates that both lamentations "move from a posture of
marginality, express an intense emotional force, and point to the
mourner's own death." Achilles' lament also emphasizes his
earlier marginal position in the poem, his "relative detachment
from the political allegiance, his commitment to kleos
rather than time and his unique leaning to private
attachments" (272).
Carol G. Thomas in "The Homeric Epics: Strata or a Spectrum"
tries to find the rainbow in the Homeric Question (273n). She
begins with a survey of the strands which, interwoven, make up
the Homeric Question. She wants scholars to see these not as
"layers" as archaeologists would, but as hues of the rainbow.
This would help prevent the disappearance of "poetic beauty"
which results from too much emphasis on the "layers" of the poem.
The superiority of this rainbow metaphor rests "in its
appreciation of the relationship of a single entity to its parts"
(278). To support her views Thomas adduces three pages of verse
by John Woodson Stewart.
What then would a reader discover from this collection?
Inevitably there is no consensus as to how to read the poems:
the theoretical problems raised by orality for composition,
performance and consequently for the criticism of the texts have
not been solved. Some scholars see the evidence from other oral
societies for performance and audience reaction as being
important. The essayists offer insights into sections of the
poems. They are eager to supply interpretations that lie well
behind the surface meaning of the texts. Some use the texts to
display their own interests and emotional responses: it is
noteworthy that despite the detail and narrow focus of their
arguments they manage at the same time to see in the epics
universal themes which reflect problems of our times:
vulnerability, the break-up of a traditional world, the control
of violence, life at the margins.