A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald
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There are difficulties with such a story. For one thing, the oral tradition would mitigate against the recognition of a remarkably different version of a traditional story, although certainly audiences would have said they liked one singer or one song more than another. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a tradition moving from formulaic composition to memorization in one generation.
At the other extreme is the idea of a Homer who, heir to and master of the oral-formulaic tradition, lived when writing was becoming more common. It was Homer then who had the brilliant idea of writing down his own versions of the traditional songs. This theory would have the virtue of guaranteeing that in our texts we have something close to the authorially authenticated written versions of a representative, perhaps the last, of the oral tradition. But participants in a living oral tradition are allegedly unable to conceive of the poems they sing ever being forgotten and thus needing to be written down. A slight modification of this version introduces another individual into the equation, which has the advantage of keeping “the consciousness of Homer” untainted by knowledge of the craft of writing. It is this other individual who will have learned the skill of writing and has taken down the epics, with the cooperation of the poet (by dictation) or on his own. In either case, the assumed primitive state of writing and writing materials would have made this a daunting task. If there was any shorthand at this time, we do not know of it, and many scholars regard dictation as not merely unlikely but impossible.
Gradually, as oral formulaic has matured as a theory and the number of those who would deny that oral poetry has anything to do with the Homeric poems has dwindled, scholars have been able to take more tempered views. One need no longer be a radical proponent or opponent. Among the important advances is the study of the oral-written complex in Archaic and Classical Greece. While living traditions of bardic poetry have been highly suggestive as analogies, we now believe that the devastating effect “literate” culture seems to have on modern oral traditions ought not be posited for ancient Greece. First of all, oral and literate subcultures often coexist in the same society. Moreover, it is one thing when written culture erupts as an explosion of newspapers and books imported from long-literate cultures elsewhere into a society heretofore without writing. But the situation in Archaic Greece would have been different. Modes of exchange were not such that eighth-or seventh-century B.C.E. Greeks were suddenly overwhelmed with copies of Phoenician (or other Semitic) or Egyptian texts. Rather, writing probably began to enter their cultural world at the margins (in Cyprus, perhaps) and then only gradually loom larger in their consciousness. It is also likely that it appeared in relatively limited contexts at first, perhaps in inventories and religious dedications.
Eric Havelock has gone so far as to suggest that the nearly unique interrelation of literate and oral culture in this time and place was largely responsible for the form and quality of Greek literature from Homer to Plato.9 His argument is worth considering. We don’t have to decide whether he is right in order for us to agree with him, and others, that when writing was incipient, tentative, and experimental, there might well have been a moment for the old oral traditions and the new writing to interact in a benign rather than a destructive way. Not yet aware of the paradox formulated by Plato that writing destroys rather than prolongs memory (Phaedrus, 274C–275B), perhaps the poets of the eighth century B.C.E. were able to entrust their memories to the new medium without anxiety.
We can carry this speculation—and it is only that—a step further. Maybe it was the medium of writing which inspired one or more singers to create tales of a dimension and structural complexity hitherto unattempted. We will never know. What we do know is that both The Iliad and The Odyssey are monumental poems and that their author (on the singular, see the following paragraphs) was already admired in ancient times for the economy and craftiness of the structure of the poems. It has often been observed, and I will have occasion to do so many times in the Commentary, that The Odyssey shows a particular artfulness in structure, with the “Telemachy” at the beginning, the flashback of Books IX–XII, the paired scenes in Hades, and so on. Other critics and schools have found all or some of these to be “problems” rather than the artful devices I take them to be. These complex emplotments may just show the impress of letters, which can stop and double the flow of narrative as easily as animal skins, papyrus sheets, or even clay tablets, can be shuffled and recopied.
There is not likely ever to be an answer to the mystery of how the Homeric poems were “translated” from the oral to the written state. I would like, however, to point to one aspect of The Odyssey which needs to be weighed in our consideration of whether its final assemblage occurred wholly within the oral tradition or over the threshold of a new literate age—not that this can lay the matter entirely to rest. In the second half of the poem, Odysseus tells a famous set of lying tales. As others have noted and as I detail in the Commentary, each of these accounts involves subtle differences from the preceding versions. At each retelling, the narrating Odysseus carefully adapts his tale to its context and to his listener or listeners. This is certainly not the achievement of a poet, oral or otherwise, who thinks all versions of the same story are the same. Are these subtle variations perhaps more characteristic of a culture that knows the fixed form of the written word and hence can track variants and compare versions? Or is it conceivably the final gift of an oral poet consciously at a late point in his tradition, who knows not only that different themes require different stories but—and this he will have learned from his experience as a wandering minstrel—that the same story must be presented differently, to different audiences, and even to the same audience on different occasions? In either case, it seems to me, we have a Homer who is aware of the layers and levels of other and earlier songs to the point that he can play with them, even to the point that we might call him an “archeological poet.”
Homer may be singular in this regard, but that very singularity leads us to another question: did the same poet write The Odyssey and The Iliad? As early as the Hellenistic scholars there were “separators,” i.e., those who argued that the poet of The Iliad and the poet of The Odyssey were different individuals. The arguments of separators and later “analysts”10 are transfigured, but not necessarily totally transcended, once we accept, as I and most Homerists now do, that the Homeric poems are in some sense the product of an oral tradition. As a scholar I tend to the view that The Iliad and The Odyssey are the creations of two different poets. I base this not on matters of style or the distribution of hapax legomena (literally “once said,” the technical term for words used but once in either or both poems) and not even on the radically different tone of the two epics, which the choice of theme could go far to explain. Many comparisons with more contemporary writers are dredged up, usually to bolster the unitarian side of this debate: if you didn’t know it to be the case, would you dare attribute both Love’s Labour’s Lost and King Lear to the same poet? Most poets change over the courses of their careers, others do not. Already the ancient author of the treatise On the Sublime (“Longinus” he is called, although we do not know his name) proposed to solve the problem by having Homer write the fiercer and more concentrated Iliad as a young man, the more episodic and romantic Odyssey at an advanced age. But while some poets grow more diffuse and sentimental with age (e.g., Wordsworth), we can easily think of many more artists who grow both subtler and stronger with advancing years (e.g., Horace, Vergil, Dürer, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Verdi). Such analogies will never help us answer the question, because there are too many variables for the equation. Nor would I base my argument on what I have described as the more complicated, more artful structure of The Odyssey, for that very structure may, for all we know, come with the theme of Odysseus’ homecoming.
Ultimately, I see the difference most clearly in what, with conscious anachronism, I would call the “theological.” The gods of The Odyssey are not the gods of The Iliad. They have, to be sure, the same names, and they
take the same sides in traditional quarrels. And there is a great deal of overlap, which is not surprising, since the two poems emerge from the same culture. However, in the main action of The Odyssey, the gods seem more concerned with ultimate justice. On the whole they exhibit less of the “furious self-absorption” which characterizes, as Bernard Knox so well describes it, the gods of The Iliad.11 This can also, of course, be argued as a consequence of a different theme. But this difference inclines me to believe they were likely composed by different authors.
This division proposed and debated by scholars nevertheless can and should fade into relative unimportance for us as readers of either poem. What is important is to realize how the poet of The Odyssey depends on The Iliad and what differences obtain between the two. The Odyssey certainly presents itself as post-Iliadic, just as the story it relates is subsequent to the action of The Iliad. As the Commentary will frequently note, the characters and predicaments of The Odyssey are regularly presented against a backdrop we know best from The Iliad. (We can only speculate on the shape of many of the other epics then circulating.) The Helen of The Odyssey must be read against the Helen of The Iliad. The same goes for Akhilleus, whose appearance and words in Hades take their very point from their distance from those which characterized the hero of The Iliad. Scholars may or may not want to “separate” the author of The Iliad from that of The Odyssey, but, considering the cumulative and communal working of oral tradition and the intertextual relationships between the two poems (i.e., the allusions and references from one to the other), we are well advised to read them as the products of one Homer.12
HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
It is in light of the archeology of the Homeric poems that the archeological reader must approach the history and geography represented in them. History and archeology can tell us much about the worlds in which the poems took shape, but to go back from the world described in The Iliad or The Odyssey to reconstruct a coherent picture of Homer’s time is not possible. I noted earlier that Parry’s oral-formulaic theory outstripped the discoveries of archeologists as a source of insights into the world of Homer’s poems. These discoveries are real, but as our understanding of Minoan-Mycenaean and other first-and second-millennium B.C.E. Mediterranean civilizations has advanced, it has become clear that the relationship of the Homeric poems to the actual history and everyday reality of these cultures is one of fictional representation, indeed, layers of fictional representation not unlike the layers of an archeological site. Commentators occasionally still claim to find “memories of Mycenae” in the Homeric poems, in other words, references to artifacts such as a boar’s-tooth helmet or the Mycenaean features of a floor plan. Traces of distant memories they may be, but we must remember that for Homer and his poems they were in no sense “Mycenaean”: he and his audience had a generalized sense of the glories of their forebears, but this had not yet been given a specific time and locale through the work of archeologists and historical linguists.
Likewise, in an age when travel was difficult, and when no one had the bird’s-eye view of the Mediterranean we get easily today from maps and satellite photographs, none of those in Homer’s audience would have been able to say where Homeric geography diverged from that of the real world. Indeed, given the localization of knowledge which would characterize such a culture, audiences in different places would react differently to the representation of the world. To judge from the areas which are described fairly clearly, it would appear that the Homeric audience knew the Greek mainland and the Aegean basin, including the western littoral of what we now call Turkey (parts of which were “Greek” into the present century—the evacuation of Smyrna/Izmir dates only to 1921, and possession of Cyprus, just outside the Aegean, is still hotly contested). West of the Greek mainland, the geography seems to have become uncertain very quickly. Even the precise assignment of Ithaka and its fellow islands in Homer to the actual landmasses northwest of Greece in the Ionian Sea engages scholars in controversy, and despite the clever arguments of many students of Homer, I have no confidence that “Homer” ever laid eyes on Ithaka. I am confident that most of his audience had not, and thus would not have cared about the “accuracy” of his descriptions of features of the Ithakan landscape (e.g., cave of the nymphs, bay) that frequently exercise commentators. Still less would they have striven to locate the land of the Kyklopês or the Laistrygônes; we must imagine that even the directions such places evoked in Homer’s audiences varied depending on whether they lived in Boiotia or in Pylos, to the north or to the south. By the same token, Homer’s audience would not have presumed that his geography was not accurate: the point is that accuracy measured by our standards was not and could not have been an issue. To a listener who had never left his mountain village in Arkadia, an accurate description of the currents in the Dardanelles might sound more fantastic than the most outlandish tale of gigantic shepherds living in what would otherwise be a familiar landscape.
Earlier I suggested an analogy between the layers of historical representation or memory in Homer and the multiple horizons of an archeological dig. In the poems, however, the layers are often mixed, unconsciously of course, to a degree that would give a professional archeologist nightmares. Homeric implements and weapons are at times bronze, at other times iron, simultaneous in Homer in a way that does not reflect the revolution in technology and warfare that the introduction of iron actually meant for Mediterranean cultures. The contradictory customs of bride-price and dowry coexist in a manner unparalleled in any culture known to anthropologists. But while Aegean archeology and anthropology cannot explain such features, the archeology of the poems and the anthropology of their performance can. It is common to cite as a comparable case the rewriting of history which the events of 778 C.E.—for which we have testimony in several contemporary or near-contemporary chronicles—underwent in the process of making the Chanson de Roland. Neither contemporary witnesses nor modern historians doubt that it was the (Christian) Basques who attacked the rearguard of Charlemagne’s Franks as they passed back into France after campaigning against the Moors in Spain. But for reasons of narrative economy, and even more clearly of ideology, the Old French epic has simplified the story, making the “infidel” Moslems responsible for this treachery.
It is important to recognize that casual anachronism and lack of concern for historical and topographical accuracy are by no means limited to prescientific cultures. We may again compare contemporary forms of popular entertainment, which in our world happily coexist with scrupulously historical academic studies widely available in bookstores and libraries. If two or three World War II movies were all that survived from the twentieth century, how accurately could the thirtieth century reconstruct the history of the war, much less all of twentieth-century history? Parts yes, but the reconstruction would be neither complete nor balanced. Such representations become even less reliable as the events or cultures they purport to depict recede into the past and the genre takes on a life of its own. How accurate a picture of the Old West do most westerns provide? Popular entertainment gives a greatly stylized view even of contemporary institutions, processed according to the narrative demands and internal logic of the genre. Police thrillers give a highly glamorized picture of actual police life. Likewise, from watching countless courtroom dramas on television one would not have a very good chance of reconstructing our judicial system with accuracy. How accurate a picture could members of a later culture hope to get?
Such comparisons are not intended to discourage students from research into Bronze or Iron Age archeology, or the study of ancient history or geography (see also Troy, in Who’s Who, p. 346). It is important to know as many certain details as possible so that we can better appreciate the complex way the Homeric poems exhibit traces of cultures from the fifteenth through eighth centuries B.C.E. Indeed, in some cases, yet older cultures are likely present in the shape of some inherited stories.13 The poems “exhibit traces” only to the historically conscious archeological reader, for whom
such texts are revealed as palimpsests. Strictly speaking, a palimpsest is a manuscript from which an original text was scraped away so that another, very different text could be written on the newly bare surface. For the bulk of the medieval tradition, it was usually a Classical text that made way for a Christian one. By the use of chemicals and now ultraviolet light we can often make out the words of the original text. Such artifacts are so suggestive of the impact history has on texts that the term palimpsest is currently popular among literary critics to describe a text (i.e., the content rather than the physical book itself) that exhibits multiple historical layers or thematizes the workings of history on the text. The Homeric poems are palimpsests in this sense, as are, by various interpretations, works as diverse as Petrarch’s lyric poetry, Shakespeare’s history plays, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. I do not object to so suggestive a usage, even though we know perfectly well that students of paleography, the field where the term is originally at home, are intent on deciphering two very different texts whose coincidence on one sheet of parchment is, as far as the reconstruction of the original texts goes, entirely accidental.