Holoka, 'Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9506
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9506-holoka-singers
@@@@95.6.14, Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey
Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 244. $34.50.
ISBN 0-8014-3041-0.
Reviewed by James P. Holoka, Foreign Language --
Eastern Michigan University
fla_holoka@emuvax.emich.edu
Charles Segal's most recent book on Homer is a blend of old
and new, with pieces ranging in date from 1962 to 1994. Nearly a
third of the volume reproduces (slightly updated) essays that
first appeared in the mid-1960s: a lengthy Arion article
on "The Phaeacians and Odysseus' Return" (Chapters 2 and 3) and a
sequel (originally in La Parola del Passato), "Transition
and Ritual in Odysseus' Return" (Chapter 4), with "thematic
affinities" to it. These discussions of the transitional
qualities of the Phaeacian episode in the Odyssey are good
examples of perspicacious and refined explication de
texte. (In the '60s, classicists, always a bit behindhand in
adopting critical philosophies, were just beginning the third
quarter of New Criticism, while students of modern literatures
were nearing the end of its final overtime period.)
Segal notes that the narrative of Odyssey 9-12
describes a fantastic realm, "a constant source of inspiration
for poets, from Stesichorus in the seventh century B.C. to today,
and it continues to draw readers in whom the spark of imagination
is still alive" (14). He sets out to explain this appeal by
exploring the "aspects of the poem that involve the broad human
experience of change, generational passage, loss and recovery"
(14). Though he calls his approach psychological, this is true
only in the broad sense that he has interesting things to say
about what motivates Homer's characters and how their behavior
and attitudes resonate in the minds of modern readers.
In his illuminating discussion of the transitional aspects
of the Phaeacian episode and of the Great Wanderings narrated
within it, Segal shows that Odysseus "is on his way back to
mortality but not yet fully involved in it and hence can reflect
on and review his experiences in the nonhuman, 'unreal' world
before reentering the reality of Ithaca" (18). Segal's forte is
thematic analysis (cf. his exemplary Theme of the Mutilation
of the Corpse in the Iliad [Leiden 1971]) grounded in careful
assessment of language and imagery. Thus, in discussing the
theme of "suspension and reintegration," he demonstrates the
contrast of loneliness and isolation on Ogygia with community and
city on Scheria generally, but also examines the symbolic domain
of repeated words for "joy" (terpsis and compounds) and
"pain" (pema, pemainesthai)--meticulous concordance
use here and throughout. Other topics include "Mortality and
Hades," "Sea and Land," "Images and Death," "Recognitions," and
"The Bow and Victory." Chapter 4 adds useful treatments of the
recurrent motifs of sleep, the bath, purification, and the
threshold.
Chapter 5, "Kleos and Its Ironies" (1983; originally
in Antiquite Classique), concluding Part One of the
volume, is devoted to the ironies implicit in the notion of
kleos, a term designating both the great deeds of a hero
and the fame heard among men in the songs of bards. Segal shows
that the older, Iliadic conception of kleos is
anachronistic in the Odyssey, where achievement through
dolos rather than battlefield prowess is often the norm.
There are further complexities: in presenting Odysseus as singer
of his own klea, Homer forges very ironic associations
between, for example, lyre (instrument of kleos in its
celebratory sense) and bow (instrument of kleos in its
dynamic sense of heroic action). This chapter is especially good
on the Sirens, whose song is shown to embody "a ghostly imitation
of epic" in many ways. Segal maintains that the ambiguities of
kleos that inform the epic are calculated: Homer
"deliberately plays off against one another different
perspectives on the heroic tradition" (109).
Chapters 6 (published 1992), 7, and 8 (both previously
unpublished), comprising Part Two of the book, investigate
aspects of story-telling within the Odyssey. In Chapter
6, "Bard and Audience in Homer," after observing that "The
Homeric poems repeatedly depict audiences listening to singers"
(113), audiences ranging from deities (Il. 1.602 ff.) to
grape-pickers (Il. 18.561-72), Segal reviews the contexts
of tale-telling in the poem with particular attention to the
disparate postures and reactions of audiences (especially the
Phaeacians, Penelope, Eumaeus, and the suitors). The differences
in the responses of audiences (rated for the quality of their
attentiveness) reveal much about both the moral worth of various
characters and the extent of their participation in the communal
values reflected in and inculcated by the narrative. But, in
addition to this intrinsic purpose, "The Odyssey's
embedding of narratives that have different relations of
closeness to or removal from a 'mythical' world forces the hearer
to become aware of the work's construction of its fictionality or
mythicalness and thus of the disjunction between different levels
of 'reality'" (123). Thus, Segal discloses a distinctly
self-reflexive property in Homer's rendering of narrative
performances in the Odyssey.
Chapter 7, "Bard, Hero, Beggar: Poetics and Exchange," sets
the performance of narrative against the background of socially
meaningful rituals of bestowal and acceptance of gifts. The fact
that the bard typically receives signs of respect (scil., food)
in banquet settings indicates a double orientation of the
performer: "In receiving these conspicuous tokens of honor at a
feast ... the bard approaches the status of a hero or noble (cf.
8.471-83 ...); but in the wholly alimentary nature of this token,
he approaches the beggar" (154). Segal analyzes a number of
scenes that play on this twofold status, concluding that, in his
"sustained triangular comparisons of beggar, bard, and hero"
(159), Homer is indicating the vagaries that beset the individual
in a world of abruptly changing fortune; he seeks "to ennoble the
bard but also to protect the privileged status of the heroes"
(162).
In Chapter 8, "The King and the Swineherd: Rags, Lies, and
Poetry," Segal narrows the focus of his inquiry to the relatively
neglected books 14-15. In general, he sees a transitional
function in both the mise en scene and the subjects of the
hero/beggar's conversations with his servant Eumaeus: "Eumaeus'
hut stands between the Phaeacians and the suitors and so is the
right place to introduce the hero to the prosaic details of his
daily life on Ithaca, the smells, sights, and sounds of his
island" (166). In a penetrating discussion of the two life
stories, Segal highlights such recurring themes as false
appearances, shifting identities, and return and renewal. In the
many ironies pervading the situation and the tales of Odysseus
(the wandering liar who speaks and performs the truth in various
ways) and Eumaeus (the putative slave whose probity attests an
aristocratic moral sensibility), he detects "a self-referential
allusion to the mixture of falsehood and truth that constitutes
much of the pleasure ... that the poem as a whole conveys" (182).
Part Three of the book comprises two essays originally
published in 1992 and 1993. Chapter 9, "Teiresias in the Yukon,"
examines changes Homer rings on "The Story of the Sailor Who Went
Inland." Segal traces the contribution of Teiresias' prophecy of
Odysseus' ultimate demise to major themes of the epic,
particularly divine vengeance. Homer's rendition of the motif
possesses a depth and aptness unexampled in its purely folkloric
transformations: the disparity in perspective between Teiresias,
who takes a long-range, eschatological view of the course of a
human life, and Odysseus, who is more interested simply in
speaking with his mother, "belongs to the poem's large concern
with the nature of mortality ... expressed in the different
attitudes of a shade in Hades and a living man from the upper
world" (191).
Chapter 10, "Divine Justice: Poseidon, Cyclops, and Helios,"
addresses the thorny issue of the nature of divine justice in the
Odyssey. Segal begins by noting the much discussed
discrepancy between the "higher" morality of Zeus (enunciated
especially in the proem) and the "anthropomorphic vindictiveness"
of Poseidon and (seemingly) Helios. He then argues that this is
not a symptom of artistic inconsistency, grist for the Analysts'
mill. Rather Homer deliberately accentuates the differences in
moral premises and the shift from the primitive ethos of
vengeance to the more evolved justice of Zeus: "The
Odyssey as a whole tries to bring the polycentric,
polytheistic world order under the unified morality of Zeus"
(204). Segal concentrates here on the particulars of Odysseus'
involvement with the Cyclops, the Phaeacians, and Helios on
Thrinakia, offering detailed analyses of specific images and
verbal and thematic repetitions. He is most compelling on
Odysseus' reactions to Polyphemus's atrocities; the hero's boast
and the monster's curse; the Phaeacians' ambivalent relations
with Poseidon; the differences between Helios' wrath and
Poseidon's; and Odysseus' bloodlust in book 22 and his failure to
adapt fully to conditions of the justice of Zeus at the very end
of the epic. Throughout, the presence of "morally recalcitrant
elements" fosters a certain tension, "a disturbing but also
dynamic force in the poem" (225).
Taken as a whole, the essays in this book furnish very
astute, unswervingly literary interpretations of key
themes in the Odyssey. Segal says in his preface that
"readers ... may find it interesting to observe how a single
interpreter's work may undergo changes in method and emphasis
over a period of scholarly activity that moves from New Criticism
to structuralism and poststructurialism" (xi). Perhaps so, but
the author has not moved very far from New Critical categories of
analysis in these particular essays. He characterizes Chapters
2-4 as evincing a "more individual-centered psychological
orientation," but does not explicitly invoke the theories or
terminology of, say, Freud, a la Bennett Simon and others, or
Lacan, as in Thomas MacCary's ingenious Childlike Achilles
(New York 1982), or anyone else. And, too, the later chapters
are "social and anthropological" in approach only in a very
general way (passing allusions to Gernet, Vernant, et al.).
In the context of twentieth-century Homeric scholarship,
there is a somewhat old-fashioned air about Segal's reading of
the poems. For example, in his brief introductory chapter, "The
Landscape of Imagination," he takes Erich Auerbach to task for
his celebrated but oversimplified representation of the lack of
depth in Homeric narrative, something already done by others;
see, for example, Adolf Koehnken, "Die Narbe des Odysseus. Ein
Beitrag zur homerisch-epischen Erzaehltechnik," Antike und
Abendland 22 (1976) 101-14, reprinted in J. Latacz, ed.,
Homer. Die Dichtung und ihre Deutung (Darmstadt 1991)
491-514, with a "Nachtrag 1990." On another front, Segal makes
the mandatory acknowledgement of oral poetry theory and sometimes
alludes to the peculiarities of formulaic composition, citing
Albert Lord (but not Milman Parry). He takes no account,
however, of the indispensable revisionist work of Adam Parry or
Anne Amory Parry or, in more technical areas, of A. Hoekstra,
Bryan Hainsworth, and more recently, David Shive (in Naming
Achilles [Oxford 1987]) and Edzard Visser (in Homerische
Versifikationstechnik. Versuch einer Rekonstruktion
[Frankfurt/Bern/New York 1987]). Thus, Segal sees a "latent
tension between the formulaic language of the Odyssey on
the one hand and the richness of the hero's experiences and the
fabulousness of the poem's farflung geography on the other" (67),
as if the two things were still thought incompatible at a time
when the titles of studies of the Homeric epics include terms
like "indeterminacy," "intertextual," "focalizers," "difference"
[a la Derrida], "semiotic," "gender and internal audiences,"
"bricolage," etc.
Despite (or because of) its somewhat dated literary
theoretical posture, Segal's book provides refreshingly
straightforward criticism of a consistently high order, written
in a style that is, apart from rare inelegancies
("mythicalness"), both pleasing and undisfigured by jargon. A.E.
Housman, in his 1911 Cambridge inaugural, claimed that literary
critics appear at intervals longer than the period of revolution
of Halley's Comet. While that is an unduly cynical reckoning, we
must be grateful to be witnessing Charles Segal's course in the
firmament of twentieth-century literary criticism. His finely
modulated studies always enhance the reader's understanding and
enjoyment of classical literature as literature.