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"Vico's Homer and the "Oral Versus Written" Dilemma" Steven M. Berry

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"Vico's Homer and the "Oral Versus Written" Dilemma" Steven M. Berry Note: The author is in the process of revising this manuscript and welcomes suggestions and corrections. Please email him at [email protected]. VICO’S HOMER AND THE “ORAL VERSUS WRITTEN” DILEMMA by Steven M. Berry, Ph.D. Verisimilia namque vera inter et falsa sunt quasi media. “For indeed, probabilities (things that seem true) are midway, more or less, between true things and false things.” My translation — Giambattista Vico, De nostri temporis Studiorum Ratione (1709) Tutte l’antiche storie profane hanno favolosi in princìpi. “All the profane stories of antiquity were originally recited orally, as fables.” (my translation) §122. It is . [a] property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand. —Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova (Bergrin and Fisch translation) 1 INTRODUCTION The inspiration for this study has come from the enthusiasm which Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classics at Harvard University, has shared with me over several years regarding the insights of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) into the true nature of Homeric transmission. Vico’s appeal for Nagy, and for most Vico specialists, as well, resides in the Neapolitan’s visionary realization, at least in places throughout his opus, that the common image of the “blind singer” as it has come down through the European tradition is a distortion, because it has consistently presented one supreme, universally lionized yet existentially elusive “oral poet who” left to posterity a pair of epic masterpieces which were eventually transformed into “texts.” In these loci Vico describes a group of blind, destitute singers wandering throughout Greece. Vico had empirical paradigms available in his personal memory for the possibility of such figures as illiterate alternatives to the storied literary genius “Homer.” Meanwhile, this latter static icon serves as an authority supporting Vico’s theories of history. Hence the salient aspect of Vico’s perspective on Homer, whether taken as conceptual augury or inconsistent problematic, is its ambiguity. Regarding his own response to Vico, Professor Nagy has said to me, “I find 2 him so intuitive.” In this vein he has written: If we adopt a teleological view of the Iliad and the Odyssey as the culmination of a long tradition, then the intuitions of Giambattista Vico on Homer will prove to be more fruitful in this regard than the labors of l’abbé d’Aubignac or even F.A. Wolf.1 Nagy thinks along the same lines as Isaiah Berlin, who heads his chapter titled “The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico” from his great study Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) with an 1830 quotation from the French social philosopher Pierre-Simon Ballanche: “Singulière destiné que celle de cet home! Lui qui fut si intuitif, il sort du tombeau lorsqu’il n’a plus rien à nous dire” (p. 21, my emphasis). I translate: “What a singular destiny for this man! He was so intuitive, yet he emerges from the grave at a time when he has nothing more to tell us.”2 Thus does Berlin establish perhaps the major critical conundrum regarding Vico when he quotes Ballanche the underachieving French Romantic prophet trying to pull the rug 1 Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 2 Ballanche’s disdainful “il n’a rien plus à nous dire” may seem gratuitous unless we remember that the historian Jules Michelet “imported” Vico into French literature with an abridged translation of the Scienza Nuova. It was published in 1824, three years before Victor Hugo’s Romantic play Cromwell. Hugo’s declaration in his ebulliently latecoming, doctrinaire “Préface” that “la poésie a trois âges” leaves no doubt that Michelet’s Vico impressed him. And just to show how far forward this idea reverberated, James Joyce, who “appropriated” the Vichian triplet as a thematic element of Finnigans Wake, recommended the Michelet abridgement to his friends who could not read Italian. Significantly, Michelet also translated Vico’s Seventh Oration, known as the De nostri, which I will be taking up shortly. 3 out from under Vico the underachieving Italian “pre-Romantic” prophet. Such a characterization of “belatedness” (Harold Bloom’s general critical term), which tacitly indicates the discovery of his work in Romantic Age Europe nearly a century after his death, demonstrates how soon Vico’s original Kassandra-like reception became a part of his legacy, somehow bringing van Gogh to mind. As I shall be explicating in detail, no aspect of Vico’s work reflects this critical ambivalence better than his entry into the “Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns.” And his intuitive powers are nowhere more evident than in his pluralistic understanding of “The Homeric Question,” which was a major subcategory of the Quarrel. In “Idea of the Work,” Vico’s introduction to the 1744 edition of the his masterpiece the Principij di Scienza Nuova d’intorno alla commune Natura delle Nazione, or Scienza nouva, he reveals that he considers the conventional literary view of “Homer” fundamentally misguided: §6. Unknown until now, he [= the image of the Homer who “wrote”] has held hidden from us the true facts of the fabulous [i.e., “preliterate”; hence also. “pre-record”] period among the nations, and much more so those of the obscure [my emphasis] period which all had despaired of knowing, and consequently the first true origins of the things of the historic period.3 Concepts that one can associate with the Ursprung of an oral-evolutionary poetic 3 Thomas Goddard Bergrin and Max Harold Fisch, translators, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 5. I shall be referring to this standard edition throughout. Hereafter I shall not cite by the page; initial numbers refer to paragraphs. Except where indicated, I cite the translation verbatim. 4 model are right there before us: “Unknown until now”; “fabulous period” (that is, reflecting an oral tradition); “first true origins”; plus a contrastive “historic period.” If one were to try to characterize most of today’s oral-evolutionary poetic models with a “pseudo-Vichian” thesis statement, one might reasonably turn to §6 as a template, with a result that would look something like this: “Before Parry and Lord did their pioneering fieldwork among the South Slavic gúslars, the obscure origins of Homeric oral composition were virtually hypothetical, having, at best only a slim empirical basis. Ironically, this erstwhile obscurity has also led to controversies about Homeric composition and transmission.” As Vico’s inveterate use of the singular “Homer” throughout most of the Scienza Nuova indicates, one is ultimately forced to view him as ambivalent. Vico does not even launch full-bore into his theory of oral Homeric poetics until he reaches the middle of his greater argument, in Book III. In other places Homer serves Vico as a sort of “child of alphabets,” an historian, an auctoritas whom Vico calls upon to legitimate his tripartite, recursive theory of history, for which he has already laid the groundwork in preliminary parts of the work. In this alternative treatment, Homer takes “his” place at the head of all the other sublime “authorities” of the so-called “Classical corpus.” The reader should bear in mind that I am deliberately using this inexact term passim to emphasize that 5 Vico was actually quite a credulous receptor of ancient testimony and opinion. This is anaphora (“referring back”; “repetition”) on my part meant to emphasize that Vico’s “scientific evidence” for his “vero Omero” was divided between the testimony that the ancient Greek and Latin authors provided him on one side, and more "modernist" anti-authoritarian models, both intuitive and empirical, that he “discovers” in Book III of the Scienza Nuova on the other. Vico’s dualistic portrayal of Homer represents more than equivocation driven by iconoclastic intellectual zeal. It is also the legacy of a body of knowledge (sapienza), a true, sincere epistemology. in which, as Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples, Vico was expected to be proficient. I digress here to make the essential point that Vico’s confidence in the authority and historicity of the Classical corpus also accounts for his rejection throughout his works of the ground principle René Descartes (1596-1650), expressed in his 1637 Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), that literature and history, indeed the traditional humanities in general, are entertaining but philosophically useless. As he says at the very start about his intellectually misspent youth: . [J]e croyais avoir déjà donné assez de temps aux langues, et même aussi à la lecture des livres anciens, et à leurs histoires, et à leurs fables. Car c'est quasi le même de converser avec ceux des autres siècles que de voyager. Il est bon de savoir quelque chose des mœurs de divers peuples, afin de juger des nôtres plus sainement, et que nous ne pensions pas que tout ce qui est contre nos modes 6 soit ridicule et contre raison, ainsi qu'ont coutume de faire ceux qui n'ont rien vu. Mais lorsqu'on emploie trop de temps à voyager, on devient enfin étranger en son pays; et lorsqu'on est trop curieux des choses qui se pratiquaient aux siècles passés, on demeure ordinairement fort ignorant de celles qui se pratiquent en celui-ci. (“. I thought I had already devoted enough time to languages, and also to reading the ancient books, and their histories, and their fables. [cf. the first quote on my title page]. For it is almost the same thing to converse with people of other centuries as it is to travel.
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