Homer

The Poetry of the Past

Andrew Ford

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501740664
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Andrew Ford here addresses, in a manner both engaging and richly informed, the perennial questions of what poetry is, how it came to be, and what it is for. Focusing on the critical moment in Western literature when the heroic tales of the Greek oral tradition began to be preserved in writing, he examines these questions in the light of Homeric poetry. Through fresh readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and referring to other early epics as well, Ford deepens our understanding of what poetry was at a time before written texts, before a developed sense of authorship, and before the existence of institutionalized criticism.

Placing what is known about Homer's art in the wider context of Homer's world, Ford traces the effects of the oral tradition upon the development of the epic and addresses such issues as the sources of the poet's inspiration and the generic constraints upon epic composition. After exploring Homer's poetic vocabulary and his fictional and mythical representations of the art of singing, Ford reconstructs an idea of poetry much different from that put forth by previous interpreters. Arguing that Homer grounds his project in religious rather than literary or historical terms, he concludes that archaic poetry claims to give a uniquely transparent and immediate rendering of the past.

Homer: The Poetry of the Past will be stimulating and enjoyable reading for anyone interested in the traditions of poetry, as well as for students and scholars in the fields of classics, literary theory and literary history, and intellectual history.

CHAPTER 1

THE GENRE

Traditional Definitions of Epic

Defining an Oral Art

Ideally we should not speak of “poetry” in connection with Homer at all, for it may be prejudicial to ask Homer what “poetry” is when that good Greek word is not attested before the fifth century; it seems that it was only in that enlightened critical culture that sophists and other philosophers of language began calling what Homer and his fellows did “making” (poiêsis) and the performer a “maker” (poiêtês).1 Such terms imply a quite different activity from that in the word “singer” (aoidos), which Homer would seem to have used for himself. Asking the question in our terms, then, may be misdirected. Instead, let us leave the categories “poet” and “poetry” open for the time being and ask the same question less categorically: What makes a poet or “singer”? What is it exactly that he does? After we have an account of what is involved in epic “singing,” we may move on to more abstract questions such as how does the singer of themes we call “epic” differ from other singers, and indeed from nonsingers? In this way we may construct from Homer’s terms the “genre,” or special kind of speaking, to which epic belonged.

It is surely a delicate, even paradoxical business to define a genre of poetry that stands on the verge of orality and literacy, for closely attached to any literary description are notions of texts, forms, and authors that may well be irrelevant to the “song culture” of archaic Greece: at a time when few, if any, people would read poetry, the text of a song was a rare thing, and always of less importance than the vivid but fleeting and variable performance.2 In such a context “genres” will be defined not by rules of art but by the protocols of socially constructed occasions. Such occasions may indeed prescribe aspects of the performance that we would assign to the “literary”: in burial songs (thrênoi), for example, singers would be expected to strike certain themes and to interact with their audience in certain ways. Hence it is possible to think of distinct, defined, and named kinds of singing in a song culture provided that we remember that such kinds were not constructed from the rules of an autonomous art of poetry but belonged to the entire organization of social life.3

When texts are made out of such performances, the words gain permanence and may be subjected to precise formal analysis and classification, but at the price of being severed from the contexts that gave them their fullest form and meaning. The words we read, when spoken in performance, belonged to a larger context that vitally depended on the mood of the audience, the persona of the poet, even the day of the year. We would like to know just when and how the Homeric poems passed from the oral performances out of which they grew into the monumental texts we now have, but we are pitifully in the dark; it may have been as late as the sixth century or as early as a manuscript or dictation by Homer himself.4 But it is clear that as they made this crucial passage they retained marks of their oral heritage in many features of so-called oral style and structure and also in the way they present themselves as poetry. I think they did so in part because a text-based conception of poetry and critical terminology did not spring up overnight, and, perhaps more important, because it would have been foolish to dispense with what was familiar, proved by long use, and perhaps even considered the ritually “right” way to go about things. Hence the writer who wrote down the Iliad began “Sing, goddess,” and the entire Homeric corpus refers to epic poems basically as aoidê, “singing,” an action noun, a word that names poetry not as text or aesthetic object but as activity and performance.5 What singing had been before Homer and what it remained to some extent for performers like him and their audiences may have been very different from what it was for the scholars and bibliophiles from whose hands we have received the texts and so much of our basic literary terminology. Indeed, Albert Lord has suggested that our very conception of poetry as literature is completely alien to Homer’s milieu: “The traditional oral epic singer is not an artist: he is a seer. The patterns of thought that he has inherited came into being to serve not art but religion in its most basic sense. His balance, his antitheses, his similes and metaphors, his repetitions, and his sometimes seemingly willful playing with words, with morphology, and with phonology were not intended to be devices and conventions of Parnassus, but were techniques for emphasis of the potent symbol. Art appropriated the forms of oral narrative.”6 I think Lord makes a fundamental and valid point: what we have in Homer need not be an idea of poetry fundamentally like our own once it has been stripped of its religious and other nonliterary aspects; we should allow for the possibility that Homer had a completely non- or preliterary way of defining that activity. Nevertheless, one would not want to speak of Homer as a naïf in the nineteenth-century sense, and it should not be thought that archaic oral epic was wild, unsponsored, and free or so “naive, strange and earlier than any rules of art” that it had no conception of itself as one among other forms of song.7 The tradition of poetry that matures in Greece with Homer had by his time developed, if not a theory of art, at least a steady and sure way of going about its business and, moreover, had evolved ways of referring to itself and presenting itself to its society. Long before Homer, in fact reaching back to his Indo-European ancestors and the ancient cultures of the Near East, poets had set apart some forms of speech that we now call poetry and had spoken about its nature, its way of proceeding, and even its structure and organization.8 Hence, while I recognize with Lord that our ideas of literary art may well be inappropriate to oral epic (and even that they are a sort of detritus of these incantations), I cannot accept his wholesale reduction of the poet to the seer, for the Greek poet at least had his own title, aoidas. An aoidas, literally, a “singer,” is not just any singer but only a professiona1.9 Anybody can “sing” (aeidein)—goddesses on earth or on Olympus (Od. 10.254; Il. 1.604), men at arms, a boy in the fields (Il. 1.473, 18.570), or a reveler after too much wine (Od. 14.464); Achilles can even sing the “fames of men of old” to a lyre, just as Homer does (Il. 9.189). But none of these singers is ever called an aoidas.10 In addition, the singer was set apart by having his own patron deities, the Muses, and a special range of themes. We can therefore legitimately attempt to define the singer’s activity in terms of genre, as a kind of speaking that is somehow set apart from that of seers and other nonpoets; and we may ask generally what is the “art” of a poetry so defined.

Evidently, to recover the ideas of what singing was and was not we must turn to the texts with a cold eye toward too-familiar literary categories. In defining the genre of epic, for example, it is necessary to avoid the reductions of formalism and its appealingly “objective” way of defining genres in terms of meter, diction, figures of speech, and so on. There is little warrant in Homer for making formal considerations so significant in defining kinds of poetry. It is more fruitful to be attentive, as the first Greek critics were, to the “ethos,” or persona, presented by the poet as a way of announcing and constituting his genre. This will help us place epic in relation to a larger category of hexameter poetry I will call epos, defining this term somewhat more narrowly than is now common. Epos may refer to “speech” of many kinds, and Homer’s project is that subclass of epos that offers a Muse-sponsored presentation of the past. I define his work not metrically (though most epos was in hexameters) or musically (though epos was normally not sung); rather it was a combination of a certain subject matter, the past, presented with a certain ethos.

After I have assembled the poem’s descriptions of itself as a kind of epos, it will be necessary, before attempting to translate these statements into our terms, to bear in mind the ubiquitous danger of anachronism, assuming that certain concepts now fundamental in the Western critical tradition are universally valid and significant when of course they have a history of their own (and usually one that goes back no further than the fifth century B.C.E.). It is of course impossible to have no preconceptions; so I have sought mine in the negative poetics of Lord, Havelock, and Walter Ong, that is, the constant challenge they offer to certain fundamental ideas we may wish to thrust onto the text. I take them, together with the reservations expressed by Ruth Finnegan, not as dogma to be applied a priori but as salutary warnings that this poetry may work differently from how we expect.

The conclusions that such a vigilant reading leads me to in this chapter are in the first instance negative, for it is necessary to clear away persistent but inappropriate readings of many key passages. We cannot continue to describe Homer’s idea of the poetic art in rhetorical terms, that is, as an art of form and content; on Homer’s account, poetry is not a rhetorical effect, since the past is valued for itself, not for the way it is told, and the poet presents himself not as a proprietor or craftsman of words but first and foremost as a performer and enchanter. Nor can we convert this “unrhetorical” poetry into a kind of history, for its declared aim is always and only pleasure. This pleasure needs special definition, for to convert it into aesthetic contemplation would be as anachronistic as the other views rejected here. Understanding this pleasure permits us to define epic as the presentation of the past, without moralizing; it was a pleasure simply to represent the past “as it was” and still is for the Muses, without pointing to the presence of the performance. Lord seems to be right in saying that ...