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Homer: The Very Idea

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 105; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.105.3.0380

2161-6302

Peter Makhlouf,

Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself working on the 1688 medical dissertation by Johannes Hofer in which the word nostalgia was coined. What was bafflingly unclear was why Hofer had formed the term the way he did. Words that end in -algia (from the Greek algon, “pain”) typically name in the first half of the word the localization of the pain. Thus cephalgia means a “headache” (kephalos = head). Nostalgia would mean a pain in the nostos (homecoming). Surely that can’t be right. One day, while musing on the problem, I heard echo the lines:πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.Deep in his heart, he suffered many pains (algea) at sea,striving for his life and the homecoming (noston) of his companions. Odyssey I, 4–5In the proem of the Odyssey, nostos and algea appear in subsequent lines, in proximate metrical positions. It would only have been fitting that the word was derived from the poem dedicated to Odysseus, the classic paradigm of the nostalgic. The proem would have been known by heart by any humanist of the seventeenth century especially one as learned as Hofer. The proems are metonyms for the study of Greek, the study of Greek a shibboleth for the entire humanistic culture of classical antiquity.At the Jesuit high school that I attended, to memorize the proem in Greek was de rigeur. We began our Greek courses each and every day with a recitation of the proem of the Odyssey—out loud, as a group—after we had finished praying the Hail Mary (also in Greek). Homer and the New Testament were our two creeds: Antique-Greek and Christian-Catholic humanism(s) arrayed in perfect balance. In our final year, the top Greek students were given the privilege of studying in the “Homeric Academy” where large swaths of the Odyssey were read. (The middling students were sent to read the prosaic prose of the New Testament’s koinē; I leave that here without comment.)The substantial cultural weight lent to the Homeric poems from archaic Greece through to our day forms the study of James Porter’s new book, which is a kind of meta-archeology of the idea of Homer through the centuries. The tension between the Judeo-Christian and the Homeric (i.e., classical) heritage is one with which Porter is well familiar. Along with being one of the most impressive classicists working today, he is one of our finest interpreters of Erich Auerbach whose magnum opus, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, had much to say about the tension between representational styles in the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian world respectively. Many will recall the book’s opening chapter, which pits the gravitas of the sacrifice of Isaac against the garishness of Homeric superficiality.That Auerbach began his investigation of Western literature with Homer was deliberate, for in doing so he was simultaneously responding to and continuing the propensity to take Homer as the mystical origin of our culture, the fountainhead of our secular canon. And yet, who is this Homer, this “absolute chiffre” (2), of whom we know nothing, of whom nothing can be known, of whom the declaration that he existed is as imprecise as the declaration that he never existed? For even if we acknowledge that there was no blind bard with an overgrown beard who alone composed the poems, the alternatives often descend into their own reifications: the Homeridae, the “oral tradition,” even “Nature itself” as the brothers Schlegel once wrote. If, as Wittgenstein once said, our theoretical problems can be clarified by making them linguistic ones, then the Homeric problem—as Porter points out—is reduced to that which French linguist Émile Benveniste termed the problem of the shifter: what does it mean for the poet of the poems to say “I”? What is this deictic, which points, which gestures, but which never perfectly identifies?It is a problem that already appears from the very first lines of the poem: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man [. . .].” I cite Robert Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, not simply because his is the finest but because the redoubling of the Greek “moi” as “in me” and “through me” underscores the dissipation of the poet through Calliope’s mythical machinations. If the precondition of the Muses’ dictation is a poetic kenosis, an emptying-out of the poet’s subjectivity in order to better serve as the Muses’ vessel, then already from the outset the poet’s personhood is negated. Indeed, one must ask whether it is even appropriate to use the proper name “for ‘Homer’ is a slippery five-letter word for a complicated concept” (8). Porter will make use of it (as I will) but with the caveat that it refers to what we do not know:The story is well known. Odysseus, trapped in the cave of the Cyclops, initiates the ritual guest exchange, which the latter has already perverted by eating his guests, and gives the monster undiluted wine. “Pour it up,” says the Cyclops, “and tell me your name, so that I might give you a guest gift.” “My name,” Odysseus responds, “is Nobody.” The nonname dooms the Cyclops. For after Odysseus has driven a stake through his eye, he calls to his neighbors: “Nobody has blinded me, Nobody is trying to kill me,” at which point they curtly tell him “may the gods help you” and depart.The Homeric poems are fixated on the status of the name: its currency, its epithets, its genealogical weight, and its magical powers. It is for this reason that the characters in the poems know when to reveal their names and, perhaps more importantly, when to conceal them. The far from merely nominal problem of Homer’s status as nobody is thus already thematized in the poems themselves. Indeed, as Porter will point out time and again, many of our questions about Homer are actually interpretative problems internal to the poems themselves.Homer’s “nothingness” does not preclude any cultural claims about him. Au contraire: the void of Homeric identity is the very ground upon which all sorts of generalizations arise. Nietzsche, delivering his inaugural lecture in Basel in 1869, posed the question whether a person had been made out of a concept or a concept out of a person. As Nietzsche well knew, concepts are strategic things that tend to conceal subjective claims beneath the veneer of facticity. For centuries, to take Homer as a given meant to schlep around a variety of cultural baggage, the majority of which had to do with the idea of Homer as a kind of cultural unconscious.A psychoanalytical lexicon lurks everywhere in Porter’s book, whose patron saint is undoubtedly Freud. The book serves as a kind of case study for a cultural logic of disavowal that often structures our most affect-laden ideas and ideals. “The elements of disavowal” form one of the book’s four explicitly identified thematic cornerstones along with: “the persistent classicism of Homer,” “the sheer allure and inaccessibility of Homer,” and “the doubts and exasperations that plagued the uncertain identification of Homer” (11–12). The four fit together seamlessly under a Freudian rubric. The mystery of Homer is the ground for our attraction (sheer allure and inaccessibility), which fuels our continued attempt to establish the vaunted fiction of origins (persistent classicism). And yet, the fact that our cultural cornerstone is not secure can only be a source of anxiety (doubts and exasperations).What results is the structure of disavowal: I know that between the cultural pillars of the Iliad and the Odyssey there is no Homer, but I generate a fetish to gloss over this lack because to not do so would be to face a truth too painful to acknowledge. And thus, I disavow what I know so that the entire cultural edifice that is built up around that origin stays in place. Porter’s book goes beyond saying that by studying the attachment to Homer we can learn about our own processes of identity formation, although that is true. The deeper recesses of the cultural unconscious, which he sets out to probe, are those of a society that has as its object of original affection a cipher. Homer is nobody—what then does it say about a society that its foundational figure is an arcane enigma?Of course, all culture is dependent upon the fiction of origins. But this only amplifies the need for reading Porter’s study as a case study, one that might make us more sensitive to the illusory backdrop that frames the scenography of tradition’s dynamics. Porter gives us a model of classical reception but even more broadly a model of cultural reception. The task this book sets itself is not to solve the mystery of who Homer was but to understand how and why the idea of Homer arose, the various forms it took, and why it has exerted so great a fascination for so many centuries: “What accounts for this persistence?” (11). The book remains clear of enervated culture wars but for a very specific reason. If one accepts the book’s premise, there can be no culture wars that rage around the figure of Homer, for who is this Homer to whom the Great Books crusaders and the iconoclasts alike refer?The Homeric poems themselves exhibit a cultural anxiety about absent origins, not about the mystery or idea of Homer but rather that of the Trojan War. The traumatic wound of the Trojan War mars every hexameter of the Homeric poems (as we will soon see) and had already in the Archaic era unleashed uncertainty about Troy’s relative antiquity, its greatness, the destruction of its traces, and other questions that exercise our own imagination today. From the “childhood” of the ancient world through to the maturation of the modern era, Homer functions as a primal scene à la Freud: we don’t know the facts, don’t even know if it really happened, but even if it is but a fantasy, its effects are felt. Troy functions in a similar manner for Homer; Homer functions in a similar manner for us. The overlaying of the cultural dynamic of Homeric reception onto the civilizational dynamic of the events at Troy lies at the center of the book.One may recall that Freud’s biography is suffused with archeological interest, his writings with archeological metaphors. Psychoanalysis, like philology and archaeology, speaks constantly of strata and substrata. Palimpsestic revisions afflict the psyche, the Homeric poems, and the site of Troy alike. In some of Porter’s finest pages he lets the archeological evidence play against the poetic evidence in such a manner that their mutually unsatisfactory claims come to light. Scholarship has typically either sought to locate a Troy from the archeological strata that corresponds to the Troy of the poetic data or fallen back on the argument from multiplicity (the poem retains an image composed of various “Troys”). Porter attempts another route altogether:Porter gives us an update of Baudrillard: The Trojan War Didn’t Take Place. To be precise, his claim is that some sort of destructive event certainly did take place in the area we call Troy sometime around 1200 in what has been termed the theory of Bronze age systems collapse. But the ideological overlay is so heavy that one can scarcely distinguish the very real event from the mythological representation that has accreted to it. This is a classic example of that logic of disavowal. The Homeric poems do not commemorate the fall of a great civilization but a nonevent, a destruction so total that it is not even preserved in typical markers of cultural memory: “Even the ruins [of Troy] have perished,” Lucan would write centuries later in his Civil War. If loss is unbearable, then the loss of loss is certainly too, too much. And so that absence is covered over with the myths of Troy that have arisen over the centuries. Like the nonevent of Troy, the nonidentity of Homer has suffered much the same fate.Across the Mediterranean world, wax and clay tablets have been discovered that preserve school exercises for young children: “Homer is a god, not a man” written over and over again. But canonicity and inviolability are not the same thing. From the very moment that the Homeric poems appeared codified in their (initially) full written form, they and their purported poet were the subject of both praise and attack. In most cases, Homer was an object of criticism precisely due to his canonical status. To follow or to rebuff him was to carve out one’s place in tradition. Many of our earliest testaments chose the route of rebuff. Writing in the sixth century BC, Xenophanes declared that “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among men,” while his contemporary Heraclitus called for Homer “to be expelled from the competitions and beaten with a staff [rhapizesthai],” punning on the word “rhapsōidoi,” that is, the rhapsodes who usually sang the Homeric poems. Many readers will be familiar with Plato’s expulsion of Homer from his proposed republic; fewer will be aware that Plato’s opinion is par for the course rather than an aberration.In the literary sphere, Homer’s presence in the history of epic from Virgil and Milton through to Pound and Walcott would be matched by his presence in mock epic from the Battle of Frogs and Mice and Swift’s The Battle of the Books through to Pope’s Dunciad and The Rape of the Lock. Whether Homer should be praised and imitated or mocked and flagellated were questions that first intensified in the Renaissance but came to a head during the seventeenth century Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which at one point was even termed “The Quarrel over Homer.”By seeking a return to the ancient dawn of European culture, the Renaissance was condemned to seek a source from which they were radically severed. Debates about “imitation” intensified and turned on the idea that we moderns require an external model, whom we can imitate toward the goal of cultural self-fashioning. In Porter’s account, it remains unclear what one is to make of this contestation in different historical epochs. He speaks for instance of both “ancient and modern culture” (86) as generated by identification with and opposition to Homer. But is it really the case that Homer’s place in a Greek culture that spoke (a version of) the poems’ language, performed his verse publicly, and even worshipped him in cults, is no different than his place in a culture that had only just won back a complete Greek text of the poems, had a minimal knowledge of the language itself, and explicitly knew itself to be divorced from immediate contact with Greek antiquity? Here, a touch more historicization would be welcome not least because the question of how the idea of Homer functions in our own era would depend on such a distinction.For every Homer enthusiast over the centuries, there has been a detractor. From Xenophanes through to François Hédelin and Samuel Butler, many reproached Homer for being a “bad” poet, whether that meant he was poetically weak, religiously corrupt (blasphemous), or some combination of the two. Stupidity, gullibility, and plagiarism were other such charges. Perhaps most important is the claim of deception, of being a fabulator. For just as the status of Homer as mainspring and genesis of the Western tradition renders him a loadstone for any and all anxieties about that tradition, so does his status as origin of our literary tradition loose our culture’s age-old unease about fiction itself, about language that does not issue in the soothing lucidity of the apophantic.If the status of fiction or poetic language was one point of contention, the kinds or genres of fiction were another. “A big book is a big evil,” Callimachus is reputed to have said, in clear reference to Homer. Homer wrote epic and thus the debate around his legacy often came in the form of a generic battle around the relative superiority or inferiority of epic in relation to a range of other genres, lyrical and otherwise. The famous “cup of Nestor,” dating from around the eighth century, is inscribed with a terse inlay that may refer to the cup of Iliad II, but the similarities end there. For the cup’s slender tercet is at evident odds with epic reach. The cup’s inscription is paradigmatic in that it shows how contestations around Homer are contestations around what modern philologists term the problem of scale or scaling. The question is not simply “why is a given scale chosen for a given artwork?” but also “how does the question of scale effect a spring from the quantitative to the qualitative?”1For in Homer’s case, epic breadth is implicated in substantial cultural weight due to its sheer reach. Over the centuries, choleric polemicists and deft humorists alike have parried Homer by “cutting him down to size.” Already with Plato do we have an early such example in the Republic when Homer is literally belittled. Socrates offers an abridgement of Iliad I, which has as its two characteristics prosification (“I’ll do it without metre, for I’m no poet,” he says) and minimization (the whole of the first book summed in a few lines). There arose in Alexandria an entire genre, the hypothesis, which consisted of a prose plot summary of the Homeric poems, which was later joined by the slightly larger epitome, and which persists in our day in the form of the SparkNote.The late Hellenistic (possibly Augustan) mock-epic the Battle of Frogs and Mice (= Batrachomyomachia, lit. “Frogmousebattle”), though typically attributed to Homer, in fact ridicules the stature of epic by the scaling of the object. The great personae of the Iliad are reduced to miniscule animals. These little creatures make a reappearance at the foot of the poet’s throne in the now most renowned visual representation of the idea of Homer that we possess: Archelaus of Priene’s relief sculpture Apotheosis of Homer, which served as an inspiration for Ingres’s identically named 1827 painting. In Archelaus’s depiction, two mice gnaw away at the end of a papyrus scroll—does it contain Homer’s poems or a parody of them? In either case, Homeric grandeur was ever susceptible to being nibbled away by the aesthetics and poetics of the miniature.This is surely nowhere more evident than in the apocryphal story of Homer on the island of Ios. Finding himself before a group of boys on the shore, the bard asks whether they have caught anything, to which they respond: “The ones we caught we left behind, while the ones we missed we are carrying with us.” The key to the riddle is lice. The lice they caught they were sure to leave behind, but those they didn’t see they carry with them. Homer then recalls a Delphic oracle he received years earlier to beware of the young boys’ riddle and the island of Ios where his life would end. Distraught, he collapses into the mud where he dies three days later. The riddle uses a creature so small it is nearly invisible to ridicule the great progenitor of epic verse (all 28,000 lines of it). Downscaling, indeed. But the riddle also serves to expose Homer for his physical and mental blindness. In Heraclitus’s version, the riddle is given a philosophical exegesis, which “was meant to indict Homer for being hopelessly blind to the reality of appearances” (90).Among the many qualities ascribed to Homer and his writing that have come down to us over the millennia the bard’s purported blindness and the vividness of his vision form perhaps the most intriguing pair. There arose early on a persistent association of Homer’s poetry with enargeia, an ancient rhetorical term that literally refers to a quality of clarity or vividness but was often defined as representing something as if before the eyes—eyes that in Homer’s case were said to be unseeing already in classical antiquity. In the ancient Greek world, enargeia bore particular import in public venues such as the assembly or the courtroom. For enargeia, being a rhetorical means, impels consent. It makes an ethical or political claim on the listener or reader, compelling them not only to see what the speaker or writer wants them to see but also to identify with the particular perspective from which it is seen. The vividness that is classically associated with Homer’s poetry thus becomes a fraught field of identifications.Over the centuries—particularly in the twentieth century with its dispensation of mass death on a scale previously unimaginable—the role of the visual aesthetics of the poems became implicated in a series of broader questions: “What perspectives on war do the poems invite us to see? Is Homer sanctioning, ennobling, or condemning war? How clear, unclear, or just ambivalent are his views?” (175–76). Enargeia metamorphoses from a stylistic principle to a model of readerly response. For if we are invited to inhabit a certain viewpoint due to the poem’s vivid imagery, we can also resist that identification; in the interstice runs a crucial current in the history of Homeric reception. The fact that the Homeric poems are in the last instance devoted to war, its perils, and its gruesome afterlives, makes these texts—yet again—an exceedingly strange object of cultural veneration. To Herder’s assertion that “in Homer one can slumber [. . .] pleasantly and enthusiastically” the attentive reader can only retort: what in the world are you reading?When Auerbach began his Mimesis by condemning the glossy surfaces of the Homeric world, he was really condemning a vein of German thought that remained enamored of the surface and thus was able to easily appropriate and caricature Homer for various ends, a threat all too present in the German world of 1942, when Auerbach was writing. However, others have responded to the vivid phenomenality of the poems differently. In her 2011 book Memorial, in which she seeks to come to terms with the manifold deaths in the Iliad, British poet Alice Oswald refers to the ancient association of Homer with enargeia, which she stunningly (mis)translates as “bright, unbearable reality.”For all their brutality, the Homeric poems are unwavering in the recognition that war ravages the conqueror and the conquered alike and are committed to the possibility of an ethics in the face of unceasing brutality. But the case is even more complicated, for the Homeric poems are fundamentally irreducible. To say that they glorify war or that they lay bare its brutalities would be to fall into the comfort of a one-sided reading, which, no matter how upsetting a worldview it might present, would at least assuage with its univocality. To be housed in the domain of the “right reading” is far more comforting than the ambiguity that is the truth of the poem: “Wrath sing goddess,” begins the Iliad before continuing, “and its accursed devastation.”Visual unease extended to the question of what Homer saw, if anything, an anxiety that was focalized in the legend of the poet’s blindness. For his poems served as a kind of premodern Baedeker. It was unthinkable that the Homeric poems did not correspond to an actual Troy or that the actual Troy did not correspond to the Homeric depiction. And while it remains of course untrue that the poems offer an accurate description of Troy, the converse is equally simplistic. Rather, Homer’s capacities for visualizations are so pronounced that he is able to make that which never existed appear as if it did through a kind of reality effect: “He achieved this effect of the real through the sheer brilliance of his visualizations and by embedding a virtual onlooker into his scenes. [. . .] Deliberate if skillfully achieved poetic illusion produced an ‘as-if’ knowledge of the epic world” (139). The ascription of both blindness and vivid representation were two ways of managing the discrepancy between myth and history through the poetics of disavowal. Blindness eased the tension by relieving Homer of any direct responsibility as witness (whether that was then displaced onto the Muses or not) while enargeia excused the tendency for the Homeric poems to make one believe that they represent reality.Visualizations of the persona of Homer himself have equally been structured by this mythical and historical tension, which has resulted in an intriguing iconographical tradition. Porter avails himself to great effect of the fiction of the “king’s two bodies”—famously excavated by Ernst Kantorowicz—according to which the physical body dies but a mystical body lives on in the form of a fiction (72). Porter’s reference is more fitting than he knows. For in the circle of young men around the poet Stefan George where Kantorowicz’s ideas first developed, Homer played a central role in the development of this fiction. In 1939 brothers Robert and Erich Boehringer, the former a wealthy amateur and the latter soon to be president of the German Archeological Institute, published a massive tome replete with over 120 full-page reproductions of nearly all plastic representations of Homer from antiquity as preserved in busts, coins, reliefs, and more. As the two note in their introduction, the “true” image of Homer does not lie in any one representation—veracity or authenticity is not at stake—but rather in the interstices. The plastic representations do not testify to true physical resemblance but rather to a spiritual, physiognomic fantasy.Porter’s approach finds an interesting resonance in the most recent theoretical work on Homer’s image in classical studies. Since 2009 Dietrich Boschung, a prominent Cologne scholar of classical archaeology, has led the project Morphomata: Genesis, Dynamics and Mediality of Cultural Figurations, which has been devoted in large part to investigating the interplay between individual representation and abstract typology in ancient portraiture, culminating in Boschung’s 2021 book Effigies.2 In Boschung’s account, the ancient tradition of representations of Homer offers a kind of limit case for the concept of the morphoma, defined as the physical realization of intellectual processes. Whereas other famous portraits such as those of Alexander the Great or the Roman emperors evince a reciprocity between particular features and ideological typology, the busts of Homer can only be said to incarnate the latter. In other words, the tradition of plastic visualizations of Homer could be reconceived and redepicted as vivid visions not of Homer but of his idea.Fictional afterlives are perhaps nowhere more insistently at stake than in the Homeric poems themselves. At the poems’ center lies the question of kleos, the immortality of glory granted through cultural transmission that exists in the no-man’s-land between fact and hearsay (kleos containing both meanings). The poem’s characters are all fretfully aware that kleos is like an Iliadic war or an Odyssean peregrination: subject to being constantly contested and buffeted about on the world’s seas. Kleos is by its very nature legible and thus the figures in Homer’s world are persistently apprehensive about the possibility of revision at the hands of history’s vicissitudes. Already the Odyssey is ensnared in its fear of epigonal status (vis-à-vis the Iliad) and thus one finds in the poem’s foreground the entire apparatus of bards, patrons, festivities, and performances (both scripted and improvised) that make up the empire of kleos. Which is to say, the laws of cultural transmission that determine who is remembered and how and why are not post facto responses to the Homeric question, nor are they “reflected” in the poems, rather they are the poems, for the Iliad and Odyssey are both kleos itself and documents of kleos’s persistent lability.The great open secret of what over centuries has come to be called the Homeric question is that eternal remembrance is predicated on volatility: “Immortality had its costs, and Homer paid for it dearly” (107). But this is also the lesson of the poems and thus it is only fitting that the phantasms of Homer that have materialized from time eternal correspond in some inevitable way to the dialectic of fame—its glories and its pitfalls—which structures the poems themselves. In our celebrity-obsessed age where the headline or the image is worth more than a pound of flesh, we are perhaps too keenly aware of this fact, living as we do in a society where there is no such thing as bad publicity. And while this is the result of historical circumstances, Porter’s book is to be recommended as an apt reminder that the vicissitudes of glory or the life consumed by its afterlife are part of the eternal dynamics of culture itself.For Homer is the sum of his interpretations. When we recite “Sing,” “Sing in me, Muse” it is not the blind bard who speaks but ourselves. Homer has dissipated into his idea, which is, in other words, to say: into his readers, across the centuries.