Homeric Technique Research Articles

Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema Marc Furstenau (bio) Russell J.A. Kilbourn. Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema. Routledge. xi, 276. US $39.95 What is the relationship between cinema and memory? This is Russell Kilbourn’s basic question in his wide-ranging account of movies and remembering. A preliminary answer seems obvious. The cinema has developed a particularly compelling technique for the representation of memory, visualizing what it must be like to remember in the form of the ‘flashback’ – the ‘external’ depiction of the otherwise ‘internal’ act of remembering. But is it an adequate representation? Kilbourn contrasts the flashback in classical ‘Hollywood’ film style, which functions primarily to maintain temporal, spatial, and narrative coherence, with the flash-back in modernist ‘art cinema,’ which tends to disorient the viewer, producing the effects of uncertainty and incoherency. The flashback, then, as a model of memory, is presented by Kilbourn as the formal battleground for competing accounts of the act (and art) of remembering. And the cinema is presented as the key medium to consider when we ask what memory is. From one perspective, though, we should say that all narrative representation is, in a manner of speaking, a ‘flashback.’ Stories, whether fictional or factual, are typically a recounting of events, registered by the use of the past tense (which, some literary historians have argued, is the most common tense of narration). This ‘temporal duality,’ as Gérard Genette has described it – this distinction between ‘story time’ and ‘narrative time’ – is, it should seem, a natural one: the time of recounting is the present; the time of the recounted is the past. ‘Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.’ The Homeric invocation, which begins the Iliad and which (let us say) inaugurated the Western literary tradition, is a call for a recounting of the past – it is an appeal to memory – but it is also a demand that memory be given a manifest form, to make the past available to those in the present. The past (Achilles’s angry acts, which ‘brought countless [End Page 764] ills’) and the present (when the goddess is asked to ‘sing’ about that anger) are contrasted but also combined, in a manner that has made representation one of the central problems of Western thought: a seemingly natural distinction, between the past and its present recounting, is made to feel unnatural by the formal and technical act of narration. Homer’s poems were spoken (or sung), given form by the human voice, generating the sense that the past was located in (the minds of) individuals in the form of ‘memories.’ As such, past events have come to be seen as ‘retrievable,’ available for present expression, for re-presentation, in some form or other. This has had the effect of blurring the distinction between present and past. Eric Auerbach famously argued, in Mimesis, his classic history of realistic representation, that Homer’s epic poems, while recounting past events, were presented with such force and immediacy that one could imagine that the events were occurring at the moment of their telling – made present in a somewhat confounding fashion to those listening. Auerbach describes Homeric prose effects: ‘Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear – wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor – are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.’ Homeric technique, Auerbach argues, is ‘an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses.’ We may, on this telling, draw a clear line from the ancient birth of realism in Western art to the cinema. Kilbourn is sensitive to the historical aspect, but he argues that the problem of memory has become especially acute in the modern era, characterized by technologies of representation that seem to reproduce the past in especially vivid form. He claims that memory has been ‘de-ontologized,’ by which he means that it is now primarily artificial, ‘constituted, legitimized and “naturalized” through and by means of primarily visual media, most significantly...

Divine Inspiration and Narrative Technique in the <i>Iliad</i>

Divine Inspiration and Narrative Technique in the <i>Iliad</i>

The Ending of Iliad 7: A Response*

This article replies to an attempt by P. J. Finglass (The Ending of Iliad 7, Philologus 150, 2006, 187–97) to cast doubt on the authenticity of Il. 7. 466–77, by addressing his arguments on Homeric technique and language, and placing the passage within the broader social and economic contexts of the epic world.

Neoanalysis, Orality, and Intertextuality: An Examination of Homeric Motif Transference

Neoanalysis, Orality, and Intertextuality: An Examination of Homeric Motif Transference Jonathan Burgess University of Toronto As with other schools of thought in Homeric research, neoanalysis has experienced experimentation and change. 1 Neoanalysts have slowly become aware of points of contact between their methodology and an oralist approach, and recently some oralists have enthusiastically accepted the compatibility of the two schools of thought. Intertextual theory can also provide much insight into the phenomena uncovered by neoanalysis, particularly motif transference. A central concept in neoanalyst methodology, motif transference involves the use of non-Homeric motifs within Homeric poetry. Neoanalysts have persuasively identified examples of motif transference, but their explanation of its mechanics and significance has been lacking. An oralist perspective modifies our understanding of how motif transference is produced and received, and intertextual theory can help explain the possible significance of Homeric reflection of non-Homeric material. Three levels of narrative are posited for this examination: A) cyclic myth, B) cyclic epic, and C) Homeric epic. Level B (cyclic epic) is an epic version of Level A (cyclic myth). 2 Level C (Homeric epic) exists as a self-conscious [End Page 148] extension of Level A (cyclic myth) and Level B (cyclic epic). Levels B/C (cyclic/Homeric epic) are both manifestations of level A (mythological traditions) that share the same form (long narrative in dactylic hexameter), but Level C (Homeric epic) is a more complex manifestation. While Level B (cyclic epic) presents the narrative in Level A (cylic myth) directly, Level C (Homeric epic) plays off "cyclic" myth and epic in an allusive manner. In the sense that Level C (Homeric epic) employs Level A (mythological traditions) and Level B (cyclic epic) in order to implement its full meaning, we might say that Homeric epic is "metacyclic." 3 Homeric poetry is commonly portrayed as an overwhelming replacement of pre-Homeric tradition, but it is instead a respectful and dependent outgrowth of earlier myth and epic. The traditions from which the Iliad and Odyssey stem are both assumed and appreciated by Homeric poetics. Motif transference is the transposition of motifs from elsewhere into a Homeric context; the Homeric manifestation of the motif should be recognizably derivative and therefore considered secondary. In my analysis motif transference is not a passive accumulation of influences but an active narratological tool that evokes Trojan war material. Correspondence between Trojan war motifs and their secondary manifestations within the Homeric poems will therefore have implications in terms of meaning. For an audience informed about traditional Greek myth, the secondary Homeric motif will evoke the non-Homeric context, functioning as a subtle yet powerful allusive device. Motif transference so defined would appear to be a distinctive aspect of Homeric poetics. But it is not unrelated to typology and repetition in oral poetry, and it is comparable to such poetic phenomena as mythological exempla, or paradigms. Homeric motif transference is therefore an example of how Homeric technique extends oral poetics yet is not independent of it. [End Page 149] Neoanalysis Neoanalysis is a methodology that employs analyst technique in pursuit of a unitarian interpretation of the Iliad. It assumes the influence of pre-Homeric material on Homeric poetry and attempts to discover indications of this influence within Homeric poetry. Trojan war episodes that fall outside the narrative boundaries of the Homeric poems have usually interested neoanalysts, especially material concerning the death of Achilles. The Iliad and Odyssey directly refer to many events in course of the war, but it is the inexplicit reflection of these events that has been explored in neoanalysis. As a source for the pre-Homeric tradition of the Trojan war, neoanalysts have primarily used the Epic Cycle. Though the poems of the Cycle are now lost, what we know of them provides important information about the tradition of the Trojan war. Reconstruction of the cyclic tradition can be difficult, and using it as an indication of the pre-Homeric tradition has been controversial. But it is revealing that early Greek artists reflected...

Alegorična eksegeza Homerja, pripovedni suspenz in metapoezija v Vergilijevi pripovedi o Aristaju (Georg. IV 315-558)

Intertekstualno funkcijo štirih homerskih epizod, ob katerih se zgleduje sklepna pripoved Vergilijevih Georgik (Il. 1 in 18, Od. 4 in 8), je mogoče povezati z moralizirajočimi interpretacijami Homerja, izpričanimi zlasti pri Plutarhu (De aud. poet. 19f-20a), Horaciju (Epist. 1,2) in v Vergilijevi zbirki Bucolica (Ecl. 2). Klimenin spev (Georg. 4,345-7), ki so ga dosedanji interpreti povezovali predvsem s kozmološko alegorezo Homerja, posnema homersko tehniko prefiguracije; ta značilni pojav pripovedne poezije pa v novem zvrstnem kontekstu dobi močan filozofsko-didaktični naboj.

Reformulated repetitions in Homer

The subject of this paper is the Homeric technique of adaptation, studied on the basis of the reformulated repetitions, i.e. passages that are repeated in a slightly modified form to fit a new syntactical context. It is shown that strained grammar, narrative inconsistency, and anomalous word forms can sometimes be ascribed to the rephrasing of preexisting lines.1

Categories of Homeric Wordplay

Wordplays comprise a significant part of Homeric technique. The thematic O;t5; / gi'j-t; associations in Odysseus' encounter with Polyphemos and the repeated linkage of his name and *0bvjcjojat are but two famous examples. While commentators have noted the frequency of wordplay and its importance in particular episodes,' we can establish broader patterns regarding its use. This essay presents a rough system of classification for the phenomenon. By a deliberately broad and neutral term (cf. pun, calembour, paronomasia, and the like), I mean the following: a connection between two similar-sounding words which invests the relationship between them with additional meaning. Although words of similar sound may be attracted to each other in the Homeric poems for a variety of reasons, such as the generative process of reformulating phrases and formulae,2 the historical tendency of Archaic Greek to cluster together words from the same root, and even chance, I shall focus on how the poems make literary use of such wordplay, a central concern of Homeric compositional techniques. My emphasis is more on an empirical than theoretical analysis of the data. I do not claim particular explanatory power for the structure I present but hope to open a window onto some of the prevalent formations found in Homeric epic. Section I delineates three broad categories of wordplay. Section II shows how such classifications can provide an interpretive tool for individual passages, for characterization, and for larger thematic issues.

Homeric Technique

There have appeared in recent years a number of books on Homer which encourage the hope that the spirit of Homeric criticism is undergoing a change. It is not that the controversy is settled, or that the Unitarians have won, but the realization seems to be creeping in that after all the Homeric Question has very little to do with the poems. Mr. Bowra puts the case thus: “Both sides have begun to agree on the opinion that, whatever the authorship of the Iliad may be, it is still in some sense a work of art and has undergone some formative influence from a single poet. This poet may have composed the whole poem or he may have transformed independent poems into a unity, but in either case the poem may, and indeed must, be considered as a single work of art.” And Professor Woodhouse more pointedly: “Nothing can alter the fact that the Odyssey stands in the world just as it is, and not otherwise. The function of criticism, here at any rate, is not to teach the poet a better way, but to endeavour to realize at full value just what he has chosen to give, in the way in which he chose to give it.”

On Homeric Technique

On Homeric Technique