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To this day, the most captivating research project I've ever engaged in was the very first one. It centered around the Homeric Question.
I was a sophomore in college, a student with literary aspirations (albeit perhaps a bit misplaced), who had just elected to major in anthropology. By that point, I had at least implicitly decided that I wanted to become a professor. Ahead of me lay the vast and uncharted ocean of academia. What was the safest means of traversing that forbidden wine-dark sea? Research.
I enrolled in a reading project with an anthropology professor. Although I was too naïve to perceive it at the time, he was a man thoroughly disenchanted with his job. Fortunately for him, he was on the verge of retirement. His world-weariness manifested as a complete and guilt-free indifference to his teaching duties. Maybe that's why I liked him so much. I envied his ability to seemingly care so little about professional advancement. That was precisely what I desired.
In any event, I now had to come up with a research topic. I had just switched majors and thus had little understanding of what typical anthropology research projects entailed. And because my advisor was so indifferent, I received no guidance from him. The entire burden rested squarely on my shoulders. One night, as I half-heartedly perused Wikipedia pages, I stumbled upon something truly fascinating, something I hadn't even considered before.
Who is Homer? Nobody knew. Nobody could know. The man—if indeed he was a man—was lost in the abyss of time. No trace of him remained. We couldn't even determine the century in which he lived. And yet, we have these magnificent poems—poems that lie at the heart of our history, the roots of the Western literary canon. The stories of the Greek Gods had intrigued me since childhood; Zeus and Athena were as familiar to me as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. The fact that the person (or persons) responsible could be so completely lost to history both baffled and intrigued me.
But I wasn't majoring in literature or the humanities. I was in anthropology, and so I had to undertake a proper anthropological project. At the very least, I needed an angle.
Milman Parry and Albert Lord duly provided this angle. The two men were classicists—scholars of ancient Greece. But instead of remaining in their musty offices poring over dusty manuscripts, they did something no classicist had done before: they attempted to answer the Homeric question through fieldwork.
At the time (and perhaps even now?), a vibrant oral tradition thrived in Serbo-Croatia. Oral poets (known as "guslars" there) would tell elaborate stories at public gatherings, some of which even approached the length of the Homeric poems. But what was most fascinating was that these stories were apparently improvised.
In our decadent culture, we have a distorted view of improvisation. Many of us believe that improvisation is the spontaneous outpouring of creative energies, resulting in something entirely new. Like God shaping the Earth from the infinite void, these imagined improvisers fashion their art from nothing. Unfortunately, this never occurs.
Whether you're a jazz saxophonist playing a Coltrane tune, a salesperson dealing with a new client, or an oral bard telling a tale, improvisation is achieved through a playful recombination of preexisting, formulaic elements. This was Milman and Parry's great discovery. By meticulously transcribing hundreds of these Serbo-Croatian poems, they discovered that—although a single poem may vary from person to person, place to place, or performance to performance—the variation occurred within predictable boundaries.
The poets' minds were filled with stock phrases ("when dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more"), common epithets ("much-enduring Odysseus"), and other formulaic verses that enabled them to quickly assemble their poems. Individual scenes, in turn, also followed stereotypical outlines—feasts, banquets, catalogues of forces, battles, athletic contests, and so on. Of course, this isn't to say that the poets weren't original. Rather, it's to say that they were just as original as John Coltrane or Charlie Parker—individuals working within a tradition. These formulas and stereotypical scenes were the raw materials with which the poets worked. They allowed them to compose material quickly enough to maintain the performance and not disrupt the rhythm.
But could poems as long as The Odyssey and The Iliad have emerged entirely from an oral tradition? It seems improbable: it would take multiple days to recite, and the bard would have to pick up where he left off. But Milman and Parry, during their fieldwork, managed to allay our fears. They found a singer who could (and did) compose poems equal in length to Homer's. (I actually read one. It's called The Wedding of Smailagic Meho and was recited by a poet named Avdo. It's no Odyssey, but still entertaining.)
All this is impressive, but one question remained: how could the oral poems be committed to paper? Did an oral poet—presumably Homer—learn to write and copy it down? Not possible, according to Alfred Lord in his book The Singer of Tales. According to him, once a person becomes literate, the mindset required to learn the art of oral poetry cannot be attained. A literate person thinks of language in an entirely different way than a non-literate one, and so the poems couldn't have been written by a literate poet who had learned from his oral predecessors.
According to Lord, this left only one option: Homer must have been a master oral poet, and his poems must have been transcribed by someone else. (This is how the aforementioned poem by Avdo was recorded by the researchers.) At the time, this seemed perfectly plausible—indeed, almost certain. But the more I think about it, the less I can envision an oral poet submitting himself to sit with a scribe, writing in the cumbersome Linear B script, for the countless hours it would have taken to transcribe these poems. It's possible, but seems unlikely.
But according to Ruth Finnegan, Alfred Lord's insistence that literacy destroys the capacity to improvise poems is incorrect. An anthropologist, Finnegan found numerous cases in Africa of semi-literate or fully literate people who remained capable of improvising poetry. So it's at least equally possible that Homer was an oral poet who learned to read and then decided to commit the poems to paper (or whatever they were writing on back then).
I present this lengthy overview of the Homeric Question because, despite my usual arrogance, I can't even fathom writing a "review" for this poem. I feel that would be equivalent to "reviewing" one's own parents. For me, and for everyone alive in the Western world today, The Odyssey is part of my very being. Marvelously sophisticated, fantastically exciting, it is the beginning and end of our tradition. From Homer we sprang, and unto Homer shall we return.
[Note: I'd also like to add that this time, my third or fourth time through the poem, I decided to listen to it via audiobook. Fortunately for me, the Fagles translation (a great one if you're looking for readability) is available as an audiobook, narrated by the great Sir Ian McKellen. It was a wonderful experience, not only because Sir Ian has such a beautiful voice (he's Gandalf, after all), but because hearing it read rather than reading it myself recreated, however faintly, the original experience of the poem: as a performance. I highly recommend it.]
I was a sophomore in college, a student with literary aspirations (albeit perhaps a bit misplaced), who had just elected to major in anthropology. By that point, I had at least implicitly decided that I wanted to become a professor. Ahead of me lay the vast and uncharted ocean of academia. What was the safest means of traversing that forbidden wine-dark sea? Research.
I enrolled in a reading project with an anthropology professor. Although I was too naïve to perceive it at the time, he was a man thoroughly disenchanted with his job. Fortunately for him, he was on the verge of retirement. His world-weariness manifested as a complete and guilt-free indifference to his teaching duties. Maybe that's why I liked him so much. I envied his ability to seemingly care so little about professional advancement. That was precisely what I desired.
In any event, I now had to come up with a research topic. I had just switched majors and thus had little understanding of what typical anthropology research projects entailed. And because my advisor was so indifferent, I received no guidance from him. The entire burden rested squarely on my shoulders. One night, as I half-heartedly perused Wikipedia pages, I stumbled upon something truly fascinating, something I hadn't even considered before.
Who is Homer? Nobody knew. Nobody could know. The man—if indeed he was a man—was lost in the abyss of time. No trace of him remained. We couldn't even determine the century in which he lived. And yet, we have these magnificent poems—poems that lie at the heart of our history, the roots of the Western literary canon. The stories of the Greek Gods had intrigued me since childhood; Zeus and Athena were as familiar to me as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. The fact that the person (or persons) responsible could be so completely lost to history both baffled and intrigued me.
But I wasn't majoring in literature or the humanities. I was in anthropology, and so I had to undertake a proper anthropological project. At the very least, I needed an angle.
Milman Parry and Albert Lord duly provided this angle. The two men were classicists—scholars of ancient Greece. But instead of remaining in their musty offices poring over dusty manuscripts, they did something no classicist had done before: they attempted to answer the Homeric question through fieldwork.
At the time (and perhaps even now?), a vibrant oral tradition thrived in Serbo-Croatia. Oral poets (known as "guslars" there) would tell elaborate stories at public gatherings, some of which even approached the length of the Homeric poems. But what was most fascinating was that these stories were apparently improvised.
In our decadent culture, we have a distorted view of improvisation. Many of us believe that improvisation is the spontaneous outpouring of creative energies, resulting in something entirely new. Like God shaping the Earth from the infinite void, these imagined improvisers fashion their art from nothing. Unfortunately, this never occurs.
Whether you're a jazz saxophonist playing a Coltrane tune, a salesperson dealing with a new client, or an oral bard telling a tale, improvisation is achieved through a playful recombination of preexisting, formulaic elements. This was Milman and Parry's great discovery. By meticulously transcribing hundreds of these Serbo-Croatian poems, they discovered that—although a single poem may vary from person to person, place to place, or performance to performance—the variation occurred within predictable boundaries.
The poets' minds were filled with stock phrases ("when dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more"), common epithets ("much-enduring Odysseus"), and other formulaic verses that enabled them to quickly assemble their poems. Individual scenes, in turn, also followed stereotypical outlines—feasts, banquets, catalogues of forces, battles, athletic contests, and so on. Of course, this isn't to say that the poets weren't original. Rather, it's to say that they were just as original as John Coltrane or Charlie Parker—individuals working within a tradition. These formulas and stereotypical scenes were the raw materials with which the poets worked. They allowed them to compose material quickly enough to maintain the performance and not disrupt the rhythm.
But could poems as long as The Odyssey and The Iliad have emerged entirely from an oral tradition? It seems improbable: it would take multiple days to recite, and the bard would have to pick up where he left off. But Milman and Parry, during their fieldwork, managed to allay our fears. They found a singer who could (and did) compose poems equal in length to Homer's. (I actually read one. It's called The Wedding of Smailagic Meho and was recited by a poet named Avdo. It's no Odyssey, but still entertaining.)
All this is impressive, but one question remained: how could the oral poems be committed to paper? Did an oral poet—presumably Homer—learn to write and copy it down? Not possible, according to Alfred Lord in his book The Singer of Tales. According to him, once a person becomes literate, the mindset required to learn the art of oral poetry cannot be attained. A literate person thinks of language in an entirely different way than a non-literate one, and so the poems couldn't have been written by a literate poet who had learned from his oral predecessors.
According to Lord, this left only one option: Homer must have been a master oral poet, and his poems must have been transcribed by someone else. (This is how the aforementioned poem by Avdo was recorded by the researchers.) At the time, this seemed perfectly plausible—indeed, almost certain. But the more I think about it, the less I can envision an oral poet submitting himself to sit with a scribe, writing in the cumbersome Linear B script, for the countless hours it would have taken to transcribe these poems. It's possible, but seems unlikely.
But according to Ruth Finnegan, Alfred Lord's insistence that literacy destroys the capacity to improvise poems is incorrect. An anthropologist, Finnegan found numerous cases in Africa of semi-literate or fully literate people who remained capable of improvising poetry. So it's at least equally possible that Homer was an oral poet who learned to read and then decided to commit the poems to paper (or whatever they were writing on back then).
I present this lengthy overview of the Homeric Question because, despite my usual arrogance, I can't even fathom writing a "review" for this poem. I feel that would be equivalent to "reviewing" one's own parents. For me, and for everyone alive in the Western world today, The Odyssey is part of my very being. Marvelously sophisticated, fantastically exciting, it is the beginning and end of our tradition. From Homer we sprang, and unto Homer shall we return.
[Note: I'd also like to add that this time, my third or fourth time through the poem, I decided to listen to it via audiobook. Fortunately for me, the Fagles translation (a great one if you're looking for readability) is available as an audiobook, narrated by the great Sir Ian McKellen. It was a wonderful experience, not only because Sir Ian has such a beautiful voice (he's Gandalf, after all), but because hearing it read rather than reading it myself recreated, however faintly, the original experience of the poem: as a performance. I highly recommend it.]
