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Overview
For a particular audience at a particular moment, "tradition" is what it believes it has inherited from the past—and it may not be particularly old. The boundaries between the traditional and the innovative may become blurry and indistinct. By rethinking tradition, we can see Homer's methods and concerns in a new light. The Homeric poet is not naive. He must convince his audience that the story is true. He must therefore seem disinterested, unconcerned with promoting anyone's interests. The poet speaks as if everything he says is merely the repetition of old tales. Yet he carefully ensures that even someone who knows only a minimal amount about the ancient heroes can follow and enjoy the performance, while someone who knows many stories will not remember inappropriate ones. Pretending that every detail is already familiar, the poet heightens suspense and implies that ordinary people are the real judges of great heroes.
Listening to Homer transcends present controversies about Homeric tradition and invention by rethinking how tradition functions. Focusing on reception rather than on composition, Ruth Scodel argues that an audience would only rarely succeed in identifying narrative innovation. Homeric narrative relies on a traditionalizing, inclusive rhetoric that denies the innovation of the oral performance while providing enough information to make the epics intelligible to audiences for whom much of the material is new.
Listening to Homer will be of interest to general classicists, as well as to those specializing in Greek epic and narrative performance. Its wide breadth and scope will also appeal to those non-classicists interested in the nature of oral performance.
Ruth Scodel is Professor of Greek and Latin, University of Michigan, and former president of the American Philological Association.
"Ruth Scodel's Listening to Homer proves it is still possible to explore the workings of epic without recourse to a battery of jargon or technicalities. This is not a 'one big idea' book but a rich . . . set of reflections; it makes refreshing reading . . . ."
—-Greece & Rome
"This is an important book, putting the receiving rather than the sending side of the performance of the Homeric epics center stage. The many observations on narrative technique are often new and worthwhile."
—-Irene J.F. de Jong, Gnomon
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472033744 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 06/02/2009 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Listening to Homer
Tradition, Narrative, And AudienceBy Ruth Scodel
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2002 University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-03374-4
Chapter One
What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Tradition?
No term appears more often in the study of Homer than tradition. But what exactly is tradition, and why does it matter? Most Hellenists have long since accepted that for many generations before the Homeric poems were composed, Greeks had listened to the tales of heroes as bards—[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]—sang them. In a tradition of this kind, performers neither memorize fixed texts nor improvise freely. An aspiring performer learns stylized diction, performance style, themes, and the outlines of narratives and recombines them before audiences. Milman Parry and Albert Lord found a living parallel for Homer in South Slavic epic, and many cultures have had such performance traditions. The balance between preparation and memorization, on one side, and spontaneous recreation, on the other, varies among cultures, genres, and individual performers.
The hypothesis of a tradition of composition-in-performance accounts superbly for a variety of otherwise mysterious phenomena in the epics. The poems are in a mixed dialect nobody ever spoke—a special poetic language—and contain many archaisms. The same poetic language, with modest variation, appears in the Iliad, which was probably composed in Asia Minor, and in Hesiod's work, composed in Boeotia. Formulae—for example, Homer's "swift-footed Achilles" and "ships with painted prow"—are ubiquitous. Homer's formulae, however, are not a mere collection of phrases. For an important character, Homer has a formula that fits each of the important divisions of the verse (extension, in Parry's terminology) and usually only one formula for each metrical shape. To be sure, the formulaic system is less crudely economical than Milman Parry thought, since his study of how Homer names heroes did not, for example, include their patronymics. An important character turns out to be not one "essential idea," since, especially in speeches, the character's social roles give him or her identities that the basic formulae do not. Formulae are not just metrical filler, and the rules that govern their use (or their absence) are far more complex than metrical necessity. Even the fixed epithets serve larger poetic, rather than narrowly metrical, functions. Nonetheless, it is a system, though a flexible one, developed under the practical pressure of composition-in-performance. Further, the epics retain traces of Mycenaean material culture, such as the use of bronze weapons (instead of iron ones), and of the Mycenaean landscape, especially in the Catalogue of Ships, even though the social world of the poems is utterly unlike that of the palace bureaucracies of the Linear B tablets. The Odyssey represents a working bard who is praised for his ability to sing capably on a specific subject on request and thus probably impromptu. All this has no reasonable explanation except that whether or not the poems themselves were composed in performance, their poetic language and narrative style were developed by poets who re-created and adapted their material at each performance. Thus, whether our texts of Homer are the result of dictation, the memorization of a gradually ossified performance, or the work of a literate poet or poets, they are grounded in an oral tradition.
The Homeric poems are directed toward performance, even if they were composed in writing. Solitary reading did not become a common way of experiencing poetry until the late fifth century B.C.E., long after the Homeric epics were canonical texts; and even then, performance, formal or informal, was usual. Earlier poets may have used writing and hoped that written texts would preserve and transmit their work (as they did), but the written version was a support or a supplement for oral performance. The earliest complete copies of the epics were intended not for readers but either as aids for professional performers or as treasures and sources of authority in performance.
This book identifies narrative strategies by which the Iliad and Odyssey promote their own authority and render their narratives both intelligible and pleasing to their audiences. The audiences treated here are implicit in the poems, but the discussion rests on the assumption that the poets were experienced, professional epic performers. They based their rhetorical and narrative strategies on their experience of real performance audiences in a traditional genre. By looking at epic performances in other cultures, we can better evaluate how such traditions work in practice, so we can estimate what expectations the poets had of their audiences.
Scholars have debated the term formula; often, those who use it define what they mean, knowing it is problematic. The term tradition, though, goes relatively unexamined. In Homeric scholarship, it refers diachronically to the history and process of transmission—to singers learning songs and teaching them to other singers. It refers to the rules of the genre and to such conventions as the poetic dialect, the formulae, and the meter. It also frequently means the themes and, indeed, the actual narratives themselves. In this sense, the tradition constitutes a canon. Since this canon could be known to archaic Greek audiences only through performance, the evidence from living oral traditions is essential in trying to understand how audiences hear traditional stories in performance.
Considering tradition as canon, as an inherited repertory, opens questions in many directions. How should our awareness of tradition affect our understanding of what the epics meant for their earliest audiences and how they meant it? One school of English Homerists finds oral theory and the study of the tradition unhelpful for interpretation and pay it little attention, even though they accept the oral background of the epics. Some reductive prescriptions by oralists, making tendencies rules, have perhaps contributed to this rejection. W. Ong lists the characteristics of oral thought and expression, generalizing both from Homer and from oral compositions from various cultures. K. Stanley then argues that the poems cannot be oral, because they do not show these characteristics—in particular, because they are critical and conceptual.
How much does tradition matter? The epic stories were an important repository of the distant past for Greeks through the classical period. So did tradition serve as a guarantor of truth, and if it did, in what sense did it do so? Are the Muses hypostases of tradition or separable from it? How did audiences reconcile different versions of stories in different performances? It is hard even to understand what we agree and disagree about until we specify what we are talking about when we talk about tradition.
Instead of defining tradition, Homerists tend to reify it. One form of reification operates by ignoring audiences completely and looking only at the process of composition. The school of Homeric studies known as Neo-Analysis is a particularly clear example. Scholars have imagined a Homer who modeled his narrative on earlier texts or, as oral theory became more orthodox, on earlier oral versions. Yet they have not thought much about how audiences received these parallel versions. While this neglect of the audience does not affect the validity of the arguments, it omits an important dimension essential to understanding the aesthetics of Homeric borrowing. The death of Patroclus imitates the death of Achilles in a way that is thematically important in the Iliad. Patroclus dies wearing Achilles' armor. When Thetis then responds to her son's grief as if she were mourning his death, these details invite even a listener who had not heard a song about Achilles' death to guess at what Achilles' death rituals must have been. There is obvious narrative profit in recognizing the parallel. However, it is hard to say whether the poet hopes for listeners who know more than he tells. For example, at the moment when Apollo knocks off Patroclus's armor, it may be an advantage to know that Apollo will also participate in the death of Achilles. However, the narrator has Hector predict Apollo's role in Achilles' death just before he himself dies (Il. 22.358–60). He thus provides potential narrative pleasure, a small shock of recognition, for the hearer who only at this moment sees this particular similarity between Achilles' death and his friend's. In contrast, when Diomedes rescues Nestor, the listener who remembers that Antilochus died saving his father might be disappointed by this unpathetic imitation; yet the recollection that Nestor is traditionally rescued makes the story seem right and appropriate. Once the reception of a particular version of a typical story is at issue, it becomes clear that remembering is not an either-or activity.
The reified tradition is a box containing a finite number of items—including multiforms of tales—although the number imagined is very large. A particularly striking example is Richard Martin's comparison of the tradition to an electronic database.
The more we learn about actual oral poetries, from Central Asian to Arabic and African to South American Indian, the more obvious it becomes that the traditional audience of an oral performance, the "native speakers," as it were, of the poetry, have, all of them, the mental equivalent of a CD-ROM player full of phrases and scenes. Reading Homer with the aid of a computerized lexical searching program enables one finally to replicate the average experience of the audience Homer had in mind.... I would go further and say that the full "meaning," and the full enjoyment of traditional poetry, come only when one has heard it all before a hundred times, in a hundred different versions.
The electronic database is a misleading comparison because human memory relies on context. Whether in oral societies or the contemporary world, people do not remember in the way of databases searchable with Boolean operators. In a database, everything is equally accessible all the time—whether it appears frequently or rarely, in a memorable passage of story or in a list—whatever the searcher's reasons for conducting the search. When hardware and software are working properly, there is never any question whether a given item of information is part of the database or not. In human memory, the accessibility of an item depends on complex forms of embedding, and there is no pure information.
The rhapsode challenged to provide all the ways he could say "Achilles" in the nominative could surely not have succeeded, because the narrative context and the meter brought the appropriate phrase to mind; he learned to sing but did not memorize the chart of formulae. Different information is available on different occasions. A CD provides fixed storage, while audiences in living oral traditions never stop acquiring new experience and never stop forgetting. Jan Vansina has identified the usual pattern for oral history: three generations accurately remembered, a telescoped extended past, and a mythic time of ancestors. The system is homeostatic: additions drive out the old—though not perfectly so. To be sure, Greek saga, with its roughly three generations of heroes placed between the recent past and the beginnings, does not fit this pattern. Still, we should be wary of treating our few snapshots—the surviving corpus of archaic epic poetry—as if they represented a stable state.
A more serious issue is the romanticization of the relation between bard and audience. Richard Martin is not alone in postulating a supremely competent audience, which has heard many epic performances and paid extremely close attention to them all. In stressing the previously neglected role of the audience, performance theory makes the audience a collaborator in the performance. An excellent performer must then imply a superb audience, and the Homerist easily slips from reconstructing an ideal experience into assuming that this experience was not only real but universal. Perhaps we imagine the audience thus partly because we are nostalgic for the intimacy and fullness of meaning that the most successful traditional performances possess. Probably more important, students of oral poetry also feel a residual need to defend their subject against any assumption that nonliterate culture is primitive.
A self-questioning anthropology has surely helped folklorists fight against condescending attitudes toward oral culture. However, this recognition of depth and complexity can easily drift into an admiration that patronizes at a more subtle level, by denying oral culture its imperfections. Everyone knows that audiences within our own culture are never perfect. People fail to understand novels and fall asleep in movies, not always because the offering is inferior, but because we as audience are lazy or tired or because the particular cultural product is not exactly what we want at the moment. The product may even have been directed at precisely our own social group, at an audience not much less homogeneous than that at an epic performance in rural Rajasthan. Our neighbors may understand the novel without difficulty and find the film enthralling. Being present at a performance does not mean learning all that it could teach.
J. Flueckiger's account of an unsuccessful performance of the Candaini epic (from Chattisgarh in Central India) is revealing. She sponsored a public performance by a performer named Devlal, who was well known in his own village but not in the locale of this performance. Most of the audience left after less than an hour and a half. Since such performances normally last several hours (although members "may come and go, drink tea and talk, and even fall asleep"), this performance was clearly a failure. Devlal's performance was unusual. He chose an episode other than the elopement of the hero and heroine (by far the most popular), and his audience did not know this part of the story. He also performed unusually. Candaini is performed in two distinct styles: one sung (git), with emphasis on the story; the other (naca) danced, and much influenced by Hindi films. Devlal, however, dislikes naca, claiming that its performers do not have to know the story and that its audiences cannot follow the story even if they want to. He attempted to include dancing in a git performance, but the audience was dissatisfied because they expected a naca performance. Such a failure reveals the imperfections of real performances and real audiences. A deviation from the style that the audience expected left them confused and dissatisfied. However, nobody objected to the unfamiliar content.
As scholars, we tend to idealize the Homeric poems' audiences, because we are nervous about attributing complexities and subtleties of allusion and meaning to the poems unless we can believe the original audience recognized and understood them. Since the original audience, whatever the exact circumstances, was a listening (and not a reading) public, we need extraordinarily competent listeners. The Odyssey makes this task easier by depicting a world in which listening to epic performers is a supreme pleasure, all performers are highly capable, and the audience is utterly attentive. In general, we assume that the bard cannot survive economically unless he can please his audience and that the audience will demand transparency. W. Wyatt offers a clear statement of the common assumption.
Had there been any lack of comprehension among his hearers, Homer would have known of it and would either have changed the phrasing of his remarks, or provided more introduction to them, or have later offered an explanation of the confusion. He simply was not in a position to allow perplexity in an audience which would have denied him payment if themselves denied of comprehension and thus satisfaction.
When we examine these assumptions, common sense and the reports of fieldwork should cause us to question and modify them.
Oral traditions can survive without being especially popular with audiences, if social conditions or institutions perpetuate them. An extreme case is the shadow-puppet theater of Kerala. Most of its performances have no audience except the gods and the troupe itself. Nonetheless, the performers are paid, both by major sponsors and by large numbers of one-rupee contributors who pay to be mentioned during a blessing in the course of the performance. Of course, this tradition is not a good parallel for Homeric epic. Performances without audiences are a common Indian phenomenon; they are possible because those sponsoring them acquire merit, but the merit does not depend on the sponsors' participation or on the presence of an audience. Performances are not always entertainments. The Kerala shadow theater, with its endless commentaries and digressions, perfectly addresses its real and authorial audiences—the performers themselves. Homeric epic, though, was relatively secular, and Greek religion operates on different premises from Hinduism: the Greek gods enjoy the same spectacles as mortals, so human entertainments take place at their festivals. Greek epic presents itself as popular: Penelope calls the contents of the poet Phemius' repertory [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "enchantments" (Od. 1.337), and Odysseus praises the delight of listening to a bard at an abundant feast (Od. 9.2–11). In the classical period, Plato refers to an audience of "more than twenty thousand" for the rhapsode Ion (535d).
Still, it is well to remember that oral performances reveal a broad continuum of relationships with their audiences, varying from tradition to tradition and even from village to village. Some present the intimacy between performer and audience that Martin describes as the norm. In such traditions, most members of the audience know the stories and the style, and can appreciate even minor variants. Others depend less on this prior knowledge. 'Adwallah, a Bani Hilali singer in Upper Egypt, often discussed the genealogies and background of the epic with the audience before the performance, because the audiences were not thoroughly conversant with the information. Another study of the same tradition, however, found that villagers criticized a performer they had heard on the radio (a superb musician) who had used a rest pattern they did not recognize between lines and who did not follow the story correctly and clearly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Listening to Homer by Ruth Scodel Copyright © 2002 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Tradition?....................1Textualization and the Newest Song....................42
Homeric Rhetorics: Traditionality and Disinterest....................65
Homeric Exposition....................90
Abbreviated Narrative....................124
Narrative Teases....................155
The Social Audience....................173
Works Cited....................213
General Index....................225
Index of Passages Cited....................229