Future Fame in the Iliad

Epic Time and Homeric Studies

Yukai Li

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350239227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire ancienne et classique

When Homeric heroes think about the meaning of their actions, they expect this to take the form of kleos, 'fame', in a future song. This volume explores the consequences of this mode of thinking in the Iliad in particular, and argues that the form of kleos and the interposition of a gap of time between event and meaning produces widespread effects, not only for the thought and psyche of the heroes, but also for the nature of poetry and Homeric scholarship. Is epic time continuous, perpetuating the fame of the heroes in the flow of poetic tradition, or does a gap intervene to put into doubt the self-identity of meaning and the possibility of memory? This question connects the poetic logic of fame for the heroes and singers of epic to the implicit temporalities of Homeric studies. Alongside the analysis of literary figures from the Iliad, such as narrative, objects and similes, this volume reads modern scholarship on Homer – including oral theory, neoanalysis and traditional referentiality – as forms of reception which have produced distinct responses to the temporality of ancient epic. The participants in epic kleos – heroes, poets and scholars – encounter each other through a tradition that joins the memories and presentiments of a past that did not happen and futures that will never arrive.

1

A Different Poet of the Same Name

If we are to consider the Homeric poems and Homeric scholarship on the same plane, as I promised, we quickly run into the obvious problem that these are very different kinds of texts and discourses. We can state this problem more specifically in the following way: if a particular problematic logic of kleos-as-difference can connect Homeric poetry and scholarship, as I am arguing, it is still the case that this logic of kleos is not expressed in the same figures, objects or images in the different kinds of texts with which we are working. The Homeric poems expresses kleos-as-difference in various figures of fame and rumour, as well as, we will come to see, in its forms of meaning-making; these are very different from the problems of oral tradition, historical transmission and social and performance conditions that are the preoccupations of scholarship. This presentational problem of the heterogeneity of the texts might be overcome if we already had a clear and strong conception of what kleos-as-difference is and how it functions, but this is precisely the goal of these initial chapters, and not a starting point; kleos is not yet a well-defined concept for us at this stage.

One point of convergence offers a place to begin weaving together the heterogeneous concerns of poetry and scholarship. John Miles Foley, through his theory of traditional referentiality, presents a version of signs and signification in traditional oral poetry. The traditional reference is, for Foley, a special type of sign that links, for instance, the naming or description of a hero directly to the full weight of the traditional stories and attributes of that hero. The traditional reference is thus the way in which a particular instance of performance, in the here and now, is able to epiphanically evoke the timeless authority and plenitude of tradition. Foley often calls these oral signs or traditional references by the Homeric word sēma, and by putting Foley’s traditionally referential sēmata next to the Homeric instances of the sēma, we can produce a first concrete confrontation of oral theory and the Homeric poems. The sēma as a special kind of sign presupposes a specific kind of linguistics. Is the linguistics of traditional reference adequate to that of the Homeric sēma? We begin with Foley, then, because traditional referentiality offers us the link between poetry and oral theory in the form of the sēma, as well as because his work develops the assumptions of oral theory with a particular rigour and explicitness and carries those assumptions to a certain logical terminus. We will see that Foley presents in clear and bold strokes the ideals of continuity and identity that inform oral theory in general.

One further reason for beginning with Foley is the fact that, while he espouses the oral theoretical ideals of continuity and identity – what I will sometimes call the major image – he also supplies us with the figure of the legendary guslar which we described in the introduction, and which begins to chip away at the explicit ideals of continuity and identity. This figure, let us recall, is reputed to be the creator of the songs in the South Slavic oral singers’ repertoire, but is frustratingly elusive for anyone who hopes to meet him; he is always in the next village, or has just left, or is otherwise inaccessible.¹ The elusiveness of the legendary guslar reflects something of our difficulties with Homer: after oral theory, any notion of ‘Homer’ as the origin of the Homeric poems is something that we displace and disavow but cannot quite exorcize. This is the logic behind the joke of this chapter’s title, which, in its most common version, claims that Shakespeare was not the author of Shakespeare’s plays – they were by a different poet of the same name. The joke makes us aware that, although we usually assume that proper names are ‘rigid designators’ tied to a specific, substantial object, in the case of the Homeric tradition, the name ‘Homer’ covers a shifting, self-differing conception of origin, while still naming something.² The joke would be defused if we were perfect nominalists who are entirely happy with the conception of names as mere convention and if we did not still, on some level, believe in ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘Homer’ or the legendary guslar. Something that we cannot yet identify escapes nominalism here. What remains, what survives the shifts and displacements that can no longer be covered by the notion of ‘Homer the monumental poet’? I will suggest that what survives is a logic of kleos as difference itself, as an essential dérive or mouvance.³

The legendary guslar is thus a figure of an internal resistance to continuity and identity in the major image of oral theory. The legendary guslar is not simply the name corresponding to some empirical person or object, but instead implies a whole set of questions and assumptions for how we think about oral tradition: the figure of the legendary guslar corresponds to a structured problematic. These kinds of figures and objects which imply specifically structured ways of thinking about problems are important for our discussions of both the Homeric poems and Homeric scholarship. They are objective correlates, that is, objects which correlate to or express an implied structure. The legendary guslar who is never where you look for him, for instance, helps us talk about and make palpable the sense of elusiveness and displacement we feel when encountering oral traditions, even though we cannot yet isolate that feeling in a definite concept. He is one of a minor series of such figures, which can be extended into the Homeric poems themselves, which is where we rejoin the nodal figure of the sēma: whereas Foley’s traditionally referential sēma expresses an ideal of continuity and identity, the Homeric sēmata link up with the figure of the legendary guslar in a minor series that resists such an ideal.

This chapter will begin by describing Foley’s notion of traditional referentiality as a response to problems within Milman Parry’s theory of orality. We will then examine the nature of the sēma in Foley and in the Homeric poems, in particular the enigmatic wall of the Achaeans which is built overnight and ends up disappearing without a trace. By reading traditional referentiality and its implicit linguistics in contrast to the way signs, sēmata, work in Homer, we can begin to see how Foley’s understanding of Homeric poetics contrasts with how Homeric poetics understands itself. We will also see internal tensions within Foley’s work, which coalesce in the figure of the legendary guslar who plays an exemplary role in traditional referentiality, and yet can be read against traditional referentiality itself. The guslar, the Achaean wall and the sēma are the conceptual figures of a form of a failure of memory and an interruption of tradition which will lead the discussion here into the following chapters.⁴

* * *

Foley traces the origin of traditional referentiality to the aftermath of Milman Parry’s theory about the traditionality of Homeric language, and the assertion that such traditionality must imply that the Homeric poems were composed orally rather than with the use of writing. Parry’s original insight was that the Homeric poems were traditional, in the sense that they were the product of a long tradition rather than the creation of a creative individual poet. Parry supported his claim by demonstrating the systematic nature of Homeric language. A major part of this demonstration was the fact that the repeated noun–epithet combinations found in the Homeric poems, which provided ways of fitting names in various grammatical cases into different positions of a hexameter verse, were so distributed that, in most situations, there existed at least one noun–epithet combination for the requirements of case and metre. Parry called this the property of extension: the noun–epithet combinations formed a system that extended over all the needs of a poet. Parry further demonstrated that, in most situations, there did not exist more than one noun–epithet combination for each situation. This was the property of economy or thrift: the system did not have much redundancy. On the basis of the extension and economy of the system of noun–epithet combinations, Parry argued that it was beyond the ability of any one poet to create in its entirety, hence a long succession of poets must have been at work, which therefore merits the name of tradition. Parry gave the noun–epithet combination the name ‘formula’, defined as ‘a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’.⁵

To this point, Parry’s demonstration of Homeric traditionality met no resistance.⁶ It was the next step Parry took that became crucial in the critical divisions which followed, and out of which Foley developed his theory of traditional referentiality. Taking further the results obtained from the demonstration of traditionality, Parry sought to show in addition that Homeric traditionality necessarily entailed that the Homeric poems were the result of oral composition, composed and performed in the same moment, the moment of composition-in-performance.⁷ As the centrepiece of this demonstration, Parry presented the openings of the Iliad and the Odyssey with all the formulaic sections underlined.⁸ Since the use of formulaic phrases was taken to have the function of making fast composition easier during performance, the density of formula was taken to demonstrate that the poems were composed under the duress of time and therefore orally, during performance.

Going even further, Parry argued that the oral composition of the poems meant that the singer lacked time for thinking, which must therefore be a decisive consideration in how we read and interpret the poems. Thus, along with the belief that he had discovered in the formulaic system the psychological mechanism of oral composition, Parry also laid out a set of interpretive strategies for recreating what the oral poet must have intended in the moment of composition-in-performance, a moment in which the lack of time was thought to have excluded significant conscious deliberation. In the study of noun–epithet formulas, for instance, there arose the question of whether some epithets can be particularized: can a particular occurrence of an epithet carry meaning specific to a situation, such as irony when the epithet ‘smiling’ accompanies Aphrodite in pain? Parry advises that no such particularized interpretations should be entertained, and that one should ‘firmly exclude any interpretation which does not instantly and easily come to mind’.⁹ This position rules out a large part of what is usually thought of as literary interpretation, and sets off a series of controversies, on which we will not dwell in detail.¹⁰ We can briefly observe that, in this strong form, Parry’s theory of orality uses the quantitative determination of the oral nature of Homeric poetry – the systematicity of extension and economy – in order to decide qualitative interpretive questions of how we read. Parry’s theory also strongly alienates the poet from his language, in the sense that the poet as an individual is, in performance, bound to the essential ideas and instantaneous interpretations which the epic language makes available.

This, then, was the general state of the question. The problem, for Foley, is contained in an opposition between ‘mechanism and art’, between the seemingly intentionless technical utility of Parry’s conception of Homeric language and the particular artistic intention that is thought, by Parry’s critics, to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Different Poet of the Same Name
• 2 The Breaking of the Present
• 3 The Dream of the Instant
• 4 Sutures
• 5 Three Syntheses of Time
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright