Experiencing Hektor: Character in the Iliad by Lynn Kozak. London: Bloomsbury. 2017. Pp. 307.

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 393 Experiencing Hektor: Character in the ILIAD. By Lynn Kozak. London: Bloomsbury . 2017. Pp. 307. Comparisons between the way the Iliad tells its story and cinematic narrative techniques have been made before. Lynn Kozak’s innovative project compares the poem not with cinema, but with the long serial narratives of television that are hugely popular today. It is a project which focuses attention on the capacities of an audience to engage with a long and complex story, and on the role of characterisation in eliciting and maintaining audience allegiance. The parallels drawn between the orally-derived epic and the modern medium in terms of “serial poetics” depend on a hypothetical performance time for the Iliad of anything between fifteen and thirty hours and an unknown number of performance breaks—Kozak works with an average of twenty hours drawn from a recent performance of her own translation in English. It is this balancing of the episodic and the continuous which, according to Kozak, marks out the serial as a generically distinct form, and she spends part of the introduction tracing its genealogy. The discussion revolves around the likely responses of “the audience,” which is projected as a collective, trans-historical entity that recognises, processes, and interprets the clues provided by the narrative. Thus, the probable loyalties and emotional reactions of the Iliad’s audience can be inferred from observing the behaviour of television viewers. In this regard, the premises of the book resonate with the approach to storytelling by cognitive psychology which attempts to explain the effectiveness of popular motifs and plots with reference to the enduring cognitive and affective processes of the human mind. The Introduction with its sub-title “Binge-Watching the Iliad” sets out the crosscultural model of comparison which underpins the discussion that follows. It is lively and engaging and pulls no punches in terms of its commitment to the idea that thinking about serial television can illuminate epic performance. For Kozak, there is no hierarchy of narrative form; the pleasure afforded by immersion in a story-world can come just as easily from an ancient performance of the Iliad as from The Walking Dead or Hannibal. The idea that people become so immersed in a story that several hours pass without the need for respite is surely uncontroversial at a time when, according to the 2018 Deloitte Digital Democracy Survey, Millennial and Generation X consumers are accustomed to viewing about seven episodes of a TV series in a single sitting.1 The question that arises from this section is more about whether the identification of TV and epic as nonliterate narrative forms is enough to underpin a comparison which tends to downplay the dissimilarities between them, such as, for instance, television’s use of visuality and actors, as well as the commercial considerations which determine the length of each episode. On balance, the insights that emerge more than compensate for the lack of attention paid to contextual differences and, in particular, Kozak’s account of the ways in which an audience learns to recognise individual characters when encountering them in the first episode of a multi-peopled serial like HBO’s Game of Thrones significantly illuminates what it might have been like for an audience to deal with the opening of an ancient epic in medias res. In the conceptual framework he creates to describe this activity, Jason Mittel (Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling [New York 2015]) emphasises three 1 https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/industry/technology/digital-media-trends-consumption -habits-survey.html. 394 PHOENIX processes an audience uses to develop a relationship with a character: recognition, alignment , and allegiance. Tracing how these processes might also work for those listening to the Iliad, Kozak draws attention to the way that neither television nor epic depend, for the most part, on having access to a character’s interior life. Rather, the cultivation of the audience’s sympathy or hostility is enabled through explicit narrative statements and external markers of differentiation such as appearance, repetitious behaviour, and description . In this sense, there is a greater kinship between performed poetry and popular television than between epic and the novel...