Abstract
It was with a technical term from the theatre (eisagein, ‘to bring on stage’) that Aristotle defined the dramatic aspect of the epic narrative in the Poetics:
Homer has many other claims to our praise, but above all because he alone among poets is not oblivious of what he should compose. Namely, the poet himself should do as little of the talking as possible. … [Homer] … after a few words of preface, immediately brings on stage a man, a woman, some character or other.3
The sense of the ‘stage’ has survived in Homeric criticism: ‘Homer, particularly in the Iliad, is above all things dramatic. Half the poem consists of speeches and all the rest is put before us as though upon a stage — in fact, Homer invented drama before the theatre was invented to receive it’.4 This conception of drama ‘before its time’ was ultimately to be construed as the deficiency in the epic’s dramatic art when compared to the Attic tragedy which followed. In his useful analysis of Aristotle’s criticism of Homer, Hogan concludes the argument on this question: ‘It was Homer’s misfortune to have been born before that time when his genius would have found the genre to match it.’5
To discover the vast play of language contained once more withina single space….1
…afragile tent of words2
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Notes
M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, tr. A. Sheridan (London, 1970) p. 307.
J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr. A. Bass (London and Henley, 1978) p. 69.
Aristotle’s Poetics, tr. G. F. Else (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1967) p. 60a. See Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass., 1957) p. 620, for the ‘technical term from the theatre’; see further J. C. Hogan, ‘Aristotle’s Criticism of Homer in the Poetics’, CPh, 68 (1973) 95–108.
E. V. Rieu in the Introduction to his translation of The Iliad (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1950) p. xiii.
Cited in T. Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore and London, 1979) p. 312.
R. Barthes, cited in A. Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (Cambridge, 1980) p. 207.
J. T. Kakridis, Homer Revisited (Lund, 1971) p. 127 n. 6.
G. Genette, Narrative Discourse, tr. J. E. Lewin (Oxford, 1980) p. 165.
The Iliad of Homer: Books I-XII, ed. M. M. Willcock (Basingstoke and London, 1978) comment ad loc.
On the relation between these passages in books I and IX and for a general survey of modern treatments of this problem, with bibliography on the question, see C. Segal, ‘The Embassy and the Duals of Iliad 9.182–98’, GRBS, 9 (1968) 101–14.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1983) III, 1062.
Bertolt Brecht, cited in S. Heath, ‘Lessons from Brecht’, Screen, 15 (1974) 103–28 (p. 126).
A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (New York, 1965) pp. 11–12.
M. Parry, ‘Ćor Huso: A Study of Southslavic Song’, in The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford, 1971) p. 439. Further references in this chapter to the papers collected in The Making of Homeric Verse are where possible given within the text, using the following abbreviations assigned by Adam Parry
From the letter of 4 January 1894 in F. de Saussure, ‘Lettres à Antoine Meillet’, ed. E. Benveniste, in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure: revue de linguistic générale, 21 (1964) 89–130 (p. 95).
F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, tr. W. Baskin (London, 1973, and Glasgow, 1974) pp. 73, 71. Further references to this work will be given within the text.
J. Derrida, Positions, tr. A. Bass (Chicago and London, 1981) p. 20.
Matthew Arnold, ‘On Translating Homer’, in On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960) p. 168.
Ibid., p. 103.
The work also acquired a different title in the transmission of the legend that Parry had actually proved the ‘orality’ of the Homeric epics. E. R. Dodds, for example, referred to this dissertation for ‘the decisive proof that the poems are oral compositions’. ‘The essentials of his proof are contained’, he wrote, ‘in his Paris thesis, L’épithète traditionelle chez Homère’ — ‘Homer’, in Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship, ed. M. Platnauer (Oxford, 1954) pp. 1–17 (p. 13).
Similarly G. S. Kirk, who in The Songs of Homer (Cambridge, 1962) asserts that Parry ‘demonstrated beyond doubt that Homer was an oral poet’ (p. 59), cites ‘Parry’s classic study’ ‘L’Epithète traditionnelle chez Homère’ (pp. 63, 387, 392 n. 1). The legend, with this title, has been relayed as far afield as P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1975) p. 238.
J. R. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977) ch. 8 (title).
J. Cohen, Structure du langage poétique (Paris, 1966) pp. 32–5.
D. A. Russell, Criticism in Antiquity (London, 1981) pp. 129–30.
Homer’s Odyssey: Books XIII-XXIV, ed. D. B. Monro (Oxford, 1901) p. 327.
J. Derrida, ‘Limited Inc., abc …’, Glyph, 2 (1977) 162–254 (p. 232).
S. E. Bassett, The Poetry of Homer (Berkeley, Calif., 1938) p. 116.
Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà (Paris, 1973) p. 175.
J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore and London, 1976) p. 109.
Ibid., p. 112.
Andrew Marvell, ‘To his Coy Mistress’, ll. 1, 3, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. Macdonald, 2nd edn (London, 1956) pp. 21–2.
V. Bérard, Introduction à l’Odyssée, 3 vols (Paris, 1924) I, 174.
E. A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, NJ, 1982) p. 11.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, tr. J. E. Irby, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. D. A. Yates and J. E. Irby (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1970) p. 66.
Stéphane Mallarmé, cited in J. Derrida, Dissemination, tr. B. Johnson (London, 1981) p. 57.
R. Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Berkeley, Calif., and Cambridge, 1958) p. 6.
F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1982) p. 5.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London and Boston, Mass., 1975) p. 594.
‘Le “Livre” de Mallarmé’, cited in I. Stoïanova, Geste-texte-musique (Paris, 1978) pp. 125–6.
For this interpretation of parex hala (IX.7: ‘casts out along the shore’), see The Iliad, ed. W. Leaf, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1971), comment ad loc.
The form printed, for example, in The Iliad of Homer, ed. W. Trollope, 2 vols (London, 1827), following Heyne, and to be found in Pope’s translation.
M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, tr. I. Cunnison (New York, 1967) p. 18.
G. Stein, cited in S. Spencer, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel (Chicago, 1971) p. 120.
F. Nietzsche, cited in F. Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ, 1972) p. [i].
T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, ll. 178–82, Four Quartets (London, 1959).
J. B. Hainsworth, Homer, G&R New Surveys in the Classics, 3 (Oxford, 1969) pp. 39–40.
A. Parry, ‘The Language of Achilles’, TAPhA, 87 (1956) 1–7
repr. in The Language and Background of Homer, ed. G. S. Kirk (Cambridge and New York, 1964). Further references to this article (1956 publication) in this chapter will be given within the text. See also A. Parry, ‘Language and Characterization in Homer’, HSPh, 76 (1972) 1–22, and, among others, M. D. Reeve, ‘The Language of Achilles’, CQ, 23 (1973) 193–5; D. B. Claus, ‘Aidôs in the Language of Achilles’, TAPhA, 105 (1975) 13–28; J. C. Hogan, ‘Double πϱív and the Language of Achilles’, CJ, 71 (1976) 305–10; P. Friedrich and J. Redfield, ‘Speech as a Personality Symbol: The Case of Achilles’, Language, 54 (1978) 263–88; G. M. Messing, ‘On Weighing Achilles’ Winged Words’, Language, 57 (1981) 888–900; P. Friedrich and J. Redfield, ‘Contra Messing’, Language, 57 (1981) 901–3; and S. Scully, ‘The Language of Achilles: The ‘Oχθήσας Formulas’, TAPhA, 114 (1984) 11–27.
J. Derrida, La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au delà (Paris, 1980) p. 382.
‘The result of having, what we express by the terms, a world within himself’ — S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Lectures of 1811–1812’, Lecture XII, included as an appendix in William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, ed. E. Hubler (New York, Toronto and London, 1963) p. 192.
The translation given here is adapted from Lattimore’s and that of J. Redfield, in Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago and London, 1975) p. 14. On nomos see R. J. Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, new edn (Norman, Okla, 1963). Further references to this lexicon, in this and subsequent chapters, will where possible be given within the text.
On nomos see R. J. Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, new edn (Norman, Okla, 1963). Further references to this lexicon, in this and subsequent chapters, will where possible be given within the text.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, tr. M. Holquist and C. Emerson (Austin, Tex., 1981) p. 418. Further references to this work in this chapter will be given within the text.
J. Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris, 1967) p. 361.
J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, tr. D. B. Allison (Evanston, Ill., 1973) p. 50.
J. Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, Glyph, 1(1977) 172–98 (pp. 185–6).
J. Derrida, ‘Préjugés, devant la loi’, in J. Derrida et al., La Faculté de juger (Paris, 1985) pp. 87–140 (p. 134).
J. Derrida, La Vérité en peinture (Paris, 1978), p. 377.
Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect; H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. by H. Stuart Jones and R. McKenzie (Oxford, 1968).
M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, tr. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Oxford and Ithaca, NY, 1977) p. 59.
Albert Camus, The Rebel, tr. A. Bower (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1971) p. 107.
J. Lacan, The Language of the Self, tr. A. Wilden (Baltimore, 1968) p. 63.
See, for example, K. F. Ameis and C. Hentze, Anhang zu Homers Ilias (Leipzig, 1882) ad loc.
E. Valgiglio, Omero: il libro IX dell’Iliade (Rome, 1955) ad loc.
similarly D. Motzkus, ‘Untersuchungen zum 9. Buch der Ilias unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung der Phoenixgestalt’ (dissertation, Hamburg, 1964) p. 89 n. 3.
A. Wilden, Systemand Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd edn (London and New York, 1980) pp. 23, 25.
R. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, tr. Y. Freccero (Baltimore, 1965) p. 266.
M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, rev. edn (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1972) pp. 135–6.
See, for instance, E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1951) pp. 17–18.
J. Kakridis, Homeric Researches, tr. A. Placoteri (Lund, 1949) p. 32.
Cited in the apparatus criticus of Homeri Opera, I: Iliad I–XII, ed. D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1920) ad loc.
W. S. Allen, Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek (Cambridge, 1968) pp. 18–19.
J. M. Rabaté, ‘A Clown’s Inquest into Paternity’, in The Fictional Father, ed. R. C. Davis (Amherst, Mass., 1981) p. 74.
J. Kristeva, ‘Approaching Abjection’, Oxford Literary Review, 5.1–2 (1982) 125–49 (pp. 130–1).
See J. Strachey’s note on the English translation of ‘The Uncanny’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, general ed. J. Strachey, 24 vols (London, 1964) XVII, 222 n. 2.
S. Kofman, ‘Un Philosophe “unheimlich”’, in L. Finas et al., Ecarts (Paris, 1973) p. 109.
Ibid., p. 179.
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© 1988 Michael Lynn-George
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Lynn-George, M. (1988). The Epic Theatre: the Language of Achilles. In: Epos Word, Narrative and the Iliad. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07335-1_2
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