Homer: A relational mnemohistory

Abstract

This article proposes to extend the prevalent short-term and presentist frameworks of research on transcultural memory and to consider its dynamics across long-term relational mnemohistories. After more than two and a half millennia, “Homer” and the Homeric epics still resonate in memory cultures across the world. But they are often erroneously cast as “European heritage” or “foundations of the West.” This is the result of what I call a tenacious “Homeric genea-logic.” Highlighting three moments in the relational mnemohistory of Homer, this article shows, first, that already during their emergence in the archaic age, the Homeric epics were relational objects; second, how during the Middle Ages Homer could arrive in Petrarch’s Italy only as a product of relational remembering between the Roman and the Byzantine empires; and third, how twentieth-century literature (Joyce, Walcott) developed conscious modes of mnemonic relationality connecting diverse cultural memories. Relationality thus emerges as a key term for a reflexive memory culture today, a tool to overcome exclusive memory logics (“Homer as the heritage of Europe”) while enabling the articulation of meaningful long-term transcultural memories (“Homer as relational heritage in Europe”).