Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

ORALITYAND LITERACY 19
From the beginning, deep inhibitions have interfered with our
seeing the Homeric poems for what they in fact are. The Iliad and
the Odyssey have been commonly regarded from antiquity to the
present as the most exemplary, the truest and the most inspired
secular poems in the western heritage. To account for their
received excellence, each age has been inclined to interpret them as
doing better what it conceived its poets to be doing or aiming at.
Even when the Romantic Movement had reinterpreted the
‘primitive’ as a good rather than a regrettable stage of culture,
scholars and readers generally still tended to impute to primitive
poetry qualities that their own age found fundamentally congenial.
More than any earlier scholar, the American classicist Milman
Parry (1902–35) succeeded in undercutting this cultural chauvinism
so as to get into the ‘primitive’ Homeric poetry on this poetry’s own
terms, even when these ran counter to the received view of what
poetry and poets ought to be.
Earlier work had vaguely adumbrated Parry’s in that the general
adulation of the Homeric poems had often been accompanied by
some uneasiness. Often the poems were felt to be somehow out of
line. In the seventeenth century François Hédelin, Abbé
d’Aubignac et de Meimac (1604–76), in a spirit more of rhetorical
polemic than of true learning, attacked the Iliad and the Odyssey
as badly plotted, poor in characterization, and ethically and
theologically despicable, going on to argue that there never had
been a Homer and that the epics attributed to him were no more
than collections of rhapsodies by others. The classical scholar
Richard Bentley (1662–1742), famous for proving that the socalled
Epistles of Phalaris were spurious and for indirectly
occasioning Swift’s antitypographic satire, The Battle of the
Books, thought that there was indeed a man named Homer but
that the various songs that he ‘wrote’ were not put together into the
epic poems until about 500 years later in the time of Pisistratus.
The Italian philosopher of history, Giambattista Vico (1668–
1744), believed that there had been no Homer but that the
Homeric epics were somehow the creations of a whole people.
Robert Wood (c. 1717–71), an English diplomat and
archaeologist, who carefully identified some of the places referred
to in the Iliad and the Odyssey, was apparently the first whose
conjectures came close to what Parry finally demonstrated. Wood
believed that Homer was not literate and that it was the power of
memory that enabled him to produce this poetry. Wood strikingly