A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (5 page)

These analogies are instructive. However, a peculiar and rather obvious problem presents itself when we analyze the Homeric poems as the products of an oral-formulaic tradition.
They were written down
. The essence of the oral tradition is that the participants, singers and listeners, believe in its inviolability, its unchanging nature, so long as it is oral. In the absence of recording equipment, it is not possible to compare two oral accounts by the same singer, and
thus not possible to prove the fact of variation. Modern studies of singers in this century, conducted by scholars with tape recorders, have proved that there is a wide variation in subsequent as well as distant performances of the “same” story, just the sorts of differences the entire system of oral composition might predict. But the singers always believe that they are singing the story unchanged.

Two centuries ago F. A. Wolf, in his epoch-making
Introduction to Homer (Prolegomena ad Homerum
), tried to reconstruct the state of writing that could have been known to Homer and his contemporaries. And the introduction, or rather the reintroduction, of writing into Greece is also at the heart of the “Homeric problem.” Reintroduction because, as archeologists in this century have made it known, in the later Minoan and Mycenaean periods (roughly 1500–1200
B.C.E
.), Greek was written widely around the Aegean, both on Crete and on the mainland, in the script known today as Linear B. Linear B is a syllabary, that is, it represents each syllable by a different character. While a considerable advance on earlier systems of pictographic writing—which represent entire words or concepts by ideograms or hieroglyphs—a syllabary is less efficient than an alphabet, which assigns to each sound, in no matter which combination, a single sign. Nonetheless, despite the comparative inefficiency, Linear B functioned well enough for the purposes of the Minoan and Mycenaean overlords who employed it, or trained scribes to employ it. Granted, the range of texts for which the script was employed was limited—inventories, public inscriptions, commercial documents; there are no literary texts. The very mode and material of writing would make the preservation of literary texts of any length difficult, although despite comparable difficulties a rich and highly evolved literature is extant in contemporary Sumerian, Babylonian, and Akkadian, also written in syllabaries on clay tablets.

Literacy was the province of a trained elite, a caste of scribes, as in ancient Egypt, China, and many other cultures. There was not a broad class of educated persons which could form a “reading
public.” With the collapse of Minoan-Mycenaean culture, the needs for which the script had been used disappeared, and with them writing itself. The fall of this civilization is often treated as a fascinating mystery, something akin to (and at times linked to) the disappearance of Atlantis, but as in the case of the much later “Fall of Rome,” the transformation was likely more gradual. There were certainly wars, there may have been massive invasions and movements of peoples, there may even have been devastating earthquakes and volcanic explosions. But a healthy culture can rebuild and recover from any of these. What clearly happened, over several centuries and under the pressure of these occurrences, is that the old patterns of rulers and ruled, creditors and debtors, importers and exporters, changed.

Nor was the Aegean basin immune from changes in adjacent areas. Crete became less important relative to Egypt and to the new forces setting out from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. There can hardly be more eloquent testimony to the importance of Phoenician culture and trade than the Greeks’ adoption of an alphabet clearly derived from the Phoenician characters. The first examples of writing in what we now call the Greek alphabet date from the last half of the eighth century
B.C.E.

  It is of course a long way from scribbling a few words to writing down the whole of
The Iliad
or
The Odyssey
. Moreover, the idea of doing so would have to occur to someone, and it would not be likely to occur to an oral poet at the height of an oral tradition. This is the gap over which bridges of various sorts have tentatively been built. According to one argument, in the late eighth or early seventh century
B.C.E
. an artist, perhaps called Homer (unless that be the name, then already traditional, of some outstanding singer at an earlier stage of the tradition), sang versions of the story of Akhilleus and the homecoming of Odysseus so remarkable, and recognized as such, that at once the practice of oral tradition changed. Instead of learning to re-create epics afresh at each new sitting, the younger
generation, recognizing the monumentality of Homer’s versions, memorized the poems. Figurative “sons of Homer” (
Homeridae
) and then the rhapsodes described earlier continued to recite the Homeric poems by rote at least into the fifth century
B.C.E
., by which time writing had been so well established that scribes were able to take down the poems, the texts of which are the ancestors of ours today.

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.