Why Homer Matters (14 page)

His professors at the Sorbonne told him something he hadn't quite grasped: everything he had been pursuing was a sign that Homer was not originally a written but an oral text. This formulaic composition was the mark of a sung poem, so dependent on preshaped elements that a singer could compose it as he performed it. Such songs were neither monstrous feats of memory nor improvisations, invented from one moment to the next, but tales told with the help of ancient formulas, devised long before, which the singer could rely on as steady metrical elements in his lines. He did not have to learn any poems, but he had to learn what the tradition could teach him, the ability to make poems on the hoof.

This may seem a presumptuous comparison, but it is clear to me that anyone who has ever stood up in front of an audience, of any kind, and made a speech, knows what is meant by composition-in-performance, particularly if you have made the speech before, or over the course of a few months had the chance of making it a few times to different audiences, in different atmospheres and for different purposes. You know, in essence, the stories you have to tell, the morals you would like to draw. You know the moments where pathos is available and those where people will laugh. You know what has worked before and what has died as it left your lips. You know, above all, but just how you know is difficult to know, how to establish a kind of gut-dialogue between you and the audience, to feel them feeling what you are saying, to understand point by point what might be the right development of the tale.

It is not improvization, because you know at least where you might be going. You have your formulas, conscious, semi-conscious, unconscious, the tics that make you who you are, that are your inheritance. You have passages that run in familiar ways, that allow the intuition to consider the shape of what you are making, the way you might go next, the goal it must aim for. And you have your ingredients, your set terms, the passages where you need not invent, where you can say what was said before, and those passages where invention seems to come easily to the mind, not in the sense of making up a new substance for the story, but in finding words that will work for it. All this is easier when there is some darkness in the room.

This is not to say that I speak in hexameters or devise complex reflective schemes and ironies, that I keep in train a thousand characters over 14,000 lines. But at a very basic level I understand that between memory, the present moment and the spoken word, is a kind of three-part dance. When my children were small, we used to play this Homeric game. Last thing at night, I would tell them long rhythmic poems about our lives and our holidays, the little adventures we had in boats or trains, all designed to send them to sleep. Nothing was repeated more often than the story of taking the night train to Scotland, feeding off the atmosphere of excitement and anticipation we got from it every summer and Christmas. The poem was never quite the same from one telling to the next, but it used all the easy techniques of repetitive phrasing and a thumping rhythm which, as Milman Parry said of his own storytelling to his children when they came with him to Bosnia, are the overused recourse of the bad epic poet and almost untouched by the good.

But this is epic verse as it is made today in England, in the evening, upstairs in the bedroom, traditional, formulaic, with lumps of the culture embedded in it, full of memories, lullingly soporific. I never wrote anything down at the time, and I have typed this now straight onto the keyboard as it came to mind, nothing predetermined, except the formulas and the memory of having done something like it often before.

That was the night and it was very very dark

That the children found their way to the station

and there at the station waiting in the dark

was the long long train that they knew from before.

Dark was the train and wonderfully shiny

the lights from the station shining on its flanks

and the lights in the cabins glowing inside

and there as the children stood in the station

watching the train that was dark in the night

they said to each other Can we climb aboard?

Can we find our way to our beds in the train?

And their father said No to them, No not yet.

Wait till the guard opens the doors.

So they stood in the cold and longed for the warmth

Of the long night train as it made its way north.

Together they stood and huddled in the dark

Waiting for the moment when the doors might open

and then at last they heard far away

The banging of doors and the shouting of men

as each of the guards got out his big key

and opened the doors for the night to begin.

I usually fell asleep before they did, lulled by my own pump-engine rhythm, but this is Homeric in its parataxis, its telling of the story with no subordinate clauses, accumulating one detail after another, its rapidity, its formulaic phrases taking up reliable positions in the pattern of the lines, its cherishing of memories and heroizing of the ordinary, its love of the shared experience between speaker and listener, its cavalier way with facts.

What can you say? Only that this sort of rhythmic, inherited storytelling is part of the human organism, and that the world in which the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
began was an outgrowth and fulfillment of this basic capacity, one in which the telling of your own great tales was not something done by a father at bedtime but in the gathering of people for whom these stories were the foundation of their lives, the thing that might last when everything else might not.

*   *   *

Between 1933 and 1935, prompted by his Parisian professors, Parry made his journeys through the remote mountain villages of Yugoslavia. It was quite a caravan: his assistant, a Harvard student, Albert Lord, several typists and interpreters, and Nikola Vujnovi
ć
, a singer himself from Herzegovina, who would ease the way with the people they met. They met and listened to over seven hundred singers, each with their
gusle
, the single-stringed violin that accompanied the words. Almost 13,000 separate songs were written into eight hundred notebooks, and hundreds more recorded on 3,500 twelve-inch aluminum disks. When he returned to Harvard, Parry delivered to the library almost exactly a ton of archive material.

The excitement was real. Here was the past made flesh and blood, stubble and cigarettes, sawing out its epics in front of them. On market day they would drop in at a coffeehouse and make inquiries. Were there any
guslari
nearby? Were they good? Could they come? One morning at Bijelo Polje, a small town in the hills of northern Montenegro, they found, lying on a bench in a coffeehouse, a Turk smoking a cigarette with an antique silver cigarette holder. He was Bégan Lyútsa Nikshitch, “a tall, lean and impressive person” who spoke to them like a warrior from the depths of the past.

Bégan Lyútsa Nikshitch, a Turkish bard from Montenegro, “a tall, lean and impressive person.”

Bégan knew a certain Avdo Me
édovi
ć
, a peasant farmer who lived an hour away, and he was insistent that the Americans had to hear him.

Finally Avdo came, and he sang for us … We listened with increasing interest to this short homely farmer, whose throat was disfigured by a large goiter. He sat cross-legged on the bench, sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. He sang very fast, sometimes deserting the melody, and while the bow went lightly back and forth over the string, he recited the verses at top speed. A crowd gathered. A card game, played by some of the modern young men of the town, noisily kept on, but was finally broken up.

The next few days were a revelation. Avdo's songs were longer and finer than any we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them reached fifteen or sixteen thousand lines. Other singers came, but none could equal Avdo, our Yugoslav Homer.

The
guslari
always sang their long epic songs of battle and disaster with a kind of hard energy, loud, at a high pitch, the singer's whole frame gripped with the effort. This was no smooth crooning but a passionate engagement of mind and body.

It takes the full strength of the man to sing in this way. The movement of the body in playing the instrument, the laboring of the lungs needed for the breath needed for the volume of song, the strain on the muscles of the throat and mouth that go to forming the words, make the singing a toil, and a good singer after a half hour of his song is drenched in sweat.

Nothing about the sound of the
gusle
is charming, and the way in which the poems are sung has little apparent melody. The string of the instrument screeches from one line to the next, the
guslar
chants his lines without any attempt at a flourish or grace notes. This is not an exhibitionist performance. It is more serious than that, the voice of concentration, as he composes with his formulaic phrases and passages, the meter heavily emphasized in every phrase he uses. It is the words that matter, their recounting of tragedy and suffering. But the unbroken presence of the instrument is there not for its tune but for its strangeness, the signal it makes that this is another world.

Each singer sang usually for between twenty and forty minutes, sawing away at the
gusle
on his lap, singing up to twenty lines of his song every minute, more slowly at first, speeding up as he reached the crisis of the tale and then stopping for a cup of coffee, a cigarette, a glass of burningly fierce plum raki or simply for a break. They didn't always get to the end of their song before the session tailed off into the night. Some singers did not even know the endings of their songs, and when they did come to the last part, they were always more various than the beginnings.

In June 1935 Halil Bajgori
ć
, a thirty-nine-year-old stockman from a remote mountain village in Bosnia, sang them a long song about a young and resourceful hero, called “The Wedding of Mustajbey's Son Be
ć
irbey.” Even as he began, after a thirty-second introduction on the
gusle
alone, setting the rhythm, establishing the meter in his mind, it was clear that Bajgori
ć
's tale was driven along by the formulaic pattern, not only at the level of individual phrases but in the shape of scene after scene.

Bajgori
ć
's epic is simple, but it shares many things with Homer. First, as in Homer, the adventure begins with the break of day and the waking of the hero.

Oj! Djerdelez Alija arises early,

Ej! Alija, the tsar's hero,

Near Visoko above Sarajevo,

Before dawn and the white day

Even two full hours before dawn,

When day breaks and the sun rises

And the morning star shows its face.

In epic, it is not enough to say “One morning…” It needs expansion, space opening out around the story, the luxury of time expanding around the singer. And it can joke about that need for a little more time.

When the young man gets himself up,

He kindles a fire in the hearth

And on the fire he puts his coffee pot;

After Alija brews the coffee,

One, then two cups he pours himself—

One, then two, he feels no spark,

Three, then four, the spark then seizes him,

Seven, then eight, until he has enough.

Finally, its hero sufficiently stoked with caffeine, the formulaic sequence can begin: the preparation of “a long-maned bay horse” for the journey, the horse made beautiful with all her trappings, “Like a careless young shepherdess up on a mountain/Clothed in her hood and motley jacket,” the fitting of the hero with his beautiful equipment, his swords and daggers, his elegant pistols, one from Venice, one from England, to the point where he can set out on his journey, swim a great river while still mounted on his precious mare—she knows what he wants without him saying so—until at last he arrives at the city where “He quenche[s] his thirst with dark red wine/And he smoke[s] two pipefuls of tobacco.”