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Utgivna Av Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfondet I Lund

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Utgivna Av Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfondet I Lund MALCOLM WILLCOCK NEOANALYSIS Neoanalysis is a tenn invented by the late J. T. Kakridis, the leading Greek Homeric scholar of this century, to denote a new approach to the interpretation of the Iliad. Its reception by western scholarship has been bedevilled by a number of accidental circumstances: the war (for Kakridis' book, expanded from articles dating back into the 1930s, was first published in modern Greek as 'O~TlPUCf:<; "EPEUVE<;, in 1944); the fact that the English version, Homeric Researches (1949), which ought to have had a massive impact on readers, for it is among the most attractive books ever written about the Iliad, was relatively inaccessibly published in Sweden, vol. XLV in a series called Skrifter utgivna av Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfondet i Lund; take-over by powerful voices in the Gennan tradition; misunderstanding by re­ viewers and critics, even by proponents; apparent conflict with the emergent and expansive American oral poetry industry. It is best therefore first of all to define neoanalysis, then to sketch the history of its development and reception in the last fifty years, then to con­ sider its position in present-day Homeric studies and what it has to offer to general consensus and understanding. D¢nition Neoanalysis is consciously and explicitly unitarian, starting from the belief that the Iliad, virtually as we have it, is the work of one great poet. It was a reaction against the century-long German tradition of analytical scholarship, separatist in its view of the authorship of the epic. However, neoanalysis is not simply unitarianism under another name, for it too analyses the text and draws conclusions from con­ sideration of the details. Its essential approach is to see behind some of the incidents of the Iliad into the content of pre-Homeric poetry in the belief that it can be shown that 'Homer' consciously or sub­ consciously reflects scenes from that broader background. The most obvious and central example of this is to be found in the mourning for the dead Patroclus, especially at the beginning of Iliad 18, where NEOANALYSIS 175 there are apparent echoes of that far more important moment in the Greek war against Troy when the body lying on the ground and mourned by Thetis and the Nereids was not that of Achilles' friend Patroclus, but that of Achilles himself. I Neoanalysis is an attitude of mind. What makes it exciting is that it brings us close to the thought processes of the poet Homer him­ self; we feel that we are looking over his shoulder, nel lahoratorio di Omero, to use a fine phrase created by V. Di Benedetto for his im­ provements to the Parry theory of formulaic composition. When the learned scholar A. Heubeck wrote his survey of twentieth century Homeric research in 1974 (Die homerische Frage), he divided the ap­ proaches to the Iliad into four categories: Analysis, Neoanalysis, 'Unitar­ ismus,' and (set against these three) Oral Poetry Research. (For the Orfyss'!)', he used the other three categories, but not Neoanalysis.) There is nothing inherently inconsistent between neoanalysis and oral poetry theory; indeed the two attitudes could quite easily be assimilated. Yet this important approach has had little impact on the English­ speaking world; we must see why. The First Stages (Kakridis and Pestalozzi) In 1945, one year after the Greek version of Kakridis' book, but completely independent of it, there appeared in Switzerland H. Pes­ talozzi's Die Achilleis als Qy,elle der Ilias. Short (only 52 pages), and attractively written, it provided the direct impulse of much of the neoanalytical writing that followed. Pestalozzi, who of course was unaware of the term 'neoanalysis,' differs from Kakridis in concen­ trating specifically on a single model for the Iliad, an 'Achilleis,' which had some connection with the cyclic Aithiopis. This introduces the Epic Cycle into the equation, the succession of poems which in due course provided a continuous treatment of the Trojan War story from the judgement of Paris to the death of Odysseus-y,przi.z, Iliad, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Iliupersis, Nostoi, Ocfyss,!)" Telegorry, for the lost poems of which we possess a prose summary by Proclus' accessible to the present day reader in numerous publications.2 From the time of Pestalozzi I Kakridis (1949) 65-95. He had written on this subject years before, in 'ASJ,v1l 42 (1930) 66-78. 2 For example, Vol. V of the Oxford Classical Text of Homer; the Loeb Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica; Kullmann (1960) 52-7; Davies (1988). .
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