DAVID E. BYNUM Formula, Theme, and Critical Method
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
DAVID E. BYNUM Formula, Theme, and Critical Method The not infrequent occurrence of mistakes and inconsistencies in oral epic traditions-what has quaintly been called Homer's "nodding"-has often been commented upon. Critics in recent times have also come increasingly to use that reality as an excuse for dismissing from further consideration many things in such traditions which they do not understand. Difficult passages and nexus are thus taken to be mere accidents of confusion on the part of poets, and many a genuine challenge to the sufficiency of various critical methods has thus been evaded. The occasional unhappy accidents of poets in oral tradition, which in fact are not so frequent as they are sometimes supposed to be, are not however the only accidents of oral composition that critics abuse. Lately it has become even more fashionable to notice other, equally fortuitous moments in oral traditions that happen to have pleasant, symmetrical, suggestive, or other- wise happy consequences, and because of them to attribute to some poets in the tradition a deep cunning and conscious poetic intentions which in truth they do not possess. This procedure has enjoyed a particular vogue in Homeric criticism. But if we are rightly to understand what really are the "intentions" of oral tradition, and to discriminate properly between them and their many merely-coincidental side-effects in particular compositions, it is necessary to be more meticulous in testing critical hypotheses than has often been the prac- tice in modern criticism of oral and early literatures. What is taken to be de- sign is too often only chance, and the means of discriminating between them are imperfectly appreciated. A performance of traditional oral epic in Serbo-Croatian is sometimes begun with a prologue that is like the prologues to the Iliad and Odyssey. These typ- ically consist of two parts, a first part or invocation which concerns deities and their powers, and a second part about the deeds and troubles of men. The lliad begins with an invocation to a goddess of song, whom the aoidos or minstrel asks to tell through him certain acts of men that were brought to pass by the will of a great male deity, Zeus. Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastations, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.1 The same framework of invocation and acknowledgment of the omnipo- tence of gods informs the prologue of the Odyssey. Only the list of human events is different, and the male deity who shapes human affairs is said to be Helios, although omnipotent Zeus, who avenges Helios in the actual story of the Odyssey, finds a place in the prologue as the muse's father. Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea, struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions. Even so he could not save his companions, hard though he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness, fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God, and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story.2 The acts of men which a divine lady is implored to sing in the two Homeric prologues are nominally different from each other. In the Iliad, they are the acts of Achilleus and his society of fellows before the Fall of Troy, while in the Odyssey they are the acts of Odysseus and his fellows after the Fall of Troy. But within the prologues themselves, these acts of men are cast in iden- tical categories and in a pattern common to both the prologues. In both, the troubled world of men is briefly summed up in a subordinate system of ideas within the larger structure of appeal and deference to deities. This sub-system is plainer in the prologue to the Odyssey, which is a little longer than the Iliad's. First in time of the human acts enumerated in the Odyssey is the sack of Troy, an event of war and public commotion that encompassed all men. Then follow the personal troubles of one man, Odysseus: the physical weariness of his far journeys and his cares of the spirit. Next in the progression are the weaknesses of human nature in Odysseus' immediate society of everyday companions, and finally come the disasters which those faults of character cause. Thus, in the part of the prologue that concerns men's affairs, there is a 1. The translation is Richmond Lattimore's in his The Iliad of Homer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951). 2. The translation is Richmond Lattimore's in his The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Doubleday, 1965). .