Why Homer Matters (15 page)

Translate the Homeric situation to the valleys of early-twentieth-century mountain Europe, and the poem translates itself. That is Parry's point: this poetry was the product not of a unique glowing genius but of a world in which the spoken epic is the vehicle that carries the meanings of the past into the present and in which the need to tell the poem again and again is itself the most powerful force in its shaping. Formulaic verse is a response to social need.

Parry was entranced by the world he had stumbled on. “The moment he cherished most,” his student Albert Lord wrote later,

occurred toward the end of one of his earliest days in the Serbian hills, during the summer of 1933. They had settled at an inland village and at length come across a
gouslar
, the first epic poet Parry had ever known, an old man who claimed to have been a warrior in youth and to have cut off six heads. All afternoon he sang to them about his battles. At sunset he put down his
gousle
and they made him repeat a number of his verses. Parry, very tired, sat munching an apple and watching the singer's grizzled head and dirty neck bob up and down over the shoulder of Nikola, the Herzegovinan scribe, in a last ray of sunlight. “I suppose,” he would say, in recalling the incident, with crisp voice and half-closed eyes, “that was the closest I ever got to Homer.”

It is as powerful a moment in the history of Homeric understanding as the evening when Keats and Cowden Clarke peered into Chapman's Homer, or when Carl Blegen in the summer of 1939 found the smashed fresco of the singer, destroyed in the fire three thousand years before. Parry, listening to these men and their grating instruments, their sawing voices, heard in them the transmission of epic across the generations, the thousands of years. It was the moment in which the vacuum of life before the written word had suddenly acquired a substance.

Through Nikola Vujnovi
ć
, the Herzegovinian singer, Parry asked Halil Bajgori
ć
where he had learned his songs. All came from his father, he said. But how had he actually learned to sing and play when he was a boy? Halil described how he would sneak the
gusle
away from his father, and in another room, when his father was sleeping, he would sing a little.

NIKOLA:
But why did you feel the need to sneak the
gusle
away from him?

HALIL:
Because I wanted to know how [to play], I saw there was a place for him among the people because he knew how to sing. He'd come there, when there were gatherings among us, when there were weddings, some celebrations, and I'd go with him. And he'd come there, and there would be a lot of people, and the people all made room and said, “Singer, come on up to the front and sit by the man brewing coffee.”

NIKOLA:
Aha.

HALIL:
Then, by God, I too wanted to learn to play the
gusle
.

This is how it must always have been: the father at the center of the listening circle, the boy on the edge of it seeing his father in a different light from the usual man at home with his breakfast, the current of the heroic recognized by the boy, the stirring of ambition to have that scale of existence in his own life, the tentative beginnings in secret, his imagining of the audience, his first attempts in public, the increasing confidence with which the formulas might become his own, that miraculous sensation when he felt he could divert the stream through his own life and mind.

“The verses and the themes of the traditional song form a web in which the thought of the singer is completely enmeshed,” Parry wrote later, establishing the primacy of the tradition over the individual poet. “The poetry stands beyond the single singer. He possesses it only at the instant of his song which is his to make or mar.” “His to make or mar” is the idea in the mind of the young Halil, practicing with his father's
gusle
in the hidden room.

They asked one singer called Ibrahim Ba
Å¡
i
ć
, known as Ibro, a seventy-year-old woodcutter from central Herzegovina, where he got the words for the songs. If he told a tale a second time, did he repeat it word for word? Yes, Ibro said, word for word.

NIKOLA:
What is, let's say, a word in a song? Give me a word from a song.

IBRO:
Here's one, let's say, this is a word:

Mujo of Kladusha arose early, / At the top of the slender, well-made tower.

NIKOLA:
But these are lines.

IBRO:
Well yes, but that's how it is with us; it's otherwise with you, but with us that's how it's said … But here's one, let's say this is a word: “Mujo of Kladusha arose early”—that is a word for “arose early”; “Before dawn and the sun is arising”—that's also a word for “arose early.”

Words are not individual, separated lexical objects but poetic lines, half lines, formulas, metrical units and story units that can slot into the song. This is building a wall not brick by brick but panel by panel. Getting up with the dawn, preparing the chariot, arming the warrior, equipping the ship, rowing for the wind, swift-footed Achilles, much-suffering Odysseus—these are the words in which Homer speaks. To repeat a song “word for word” is to choose any one of these formulas as they come to mind. The tradition is not a fixed object like the written text of
Paradise Lost
or the
Aeneid
; it is a braided stream of possibilities pouring into the present out of the past, essentially multiple, recomposed from its given elements every time it is sung, and in that retelling conceived of as remaining the same. It is a curiously Platonic conception of a story, as if the epic's essence were in a pure, immaterial, preexistent form, of which the actual words that are sung are an almost incidental bodying forth into our mundane reality.

“Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/ Upon a ghostly paradigm of things,” Yeats said, and you could say the same of Parry's Homer
:
Homer thought his poem but a spume that played upon the ghostly truths that came from long ago.

Parry was convinced that he had pushed the modern understanding of Homer back beyond the eighth-century
BC
horizon at which writing arrived in the Greek world. He thought he knew that in the formulaic composition-in-performance of the Yugoslav
guslars
he had heard the way in which the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
had been composed. Homer was clearly the most extraordinary practitioner—the songs from the Balkan mountains were thin and empty compared to the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
—but this was the practice of which Homer was the master.

“The more I understand the South Slavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem,” Parry wrote late in his life,

the clearer it seems to me that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer … I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the
Odyssey
sat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even in the way that our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse.

Parry had crossed the boundary into the mental world occupied by Homer. He was thirty-three when he returned in triumph to Harvard with his ton of notebooks and aluminum disks. A life's work stretched ahead of him, but in December 1935, on a visit to his mother-in-law in Los Angeles, he died in a stupid accident when a revolver mixed in with his clothes in a suitcase went off and killed him. Something resembling the book he was planning to write about Homer and the
guslari
was written much later by his assistant and student Albert Lord, after a long and fruitful career spent fulfilling the promise of the visionary man who had once led him to the Balkans.

*   *   *

A rainy early-autumn day in the Hebrides, the cloud down low over the islands, a sheen of wet on the grass. We have been gathering sheep for the September markets. The sea around us is bruised by the wind. Hardly a word has been spoken all morning, as the four of us have been strung out in a line across the hillside half a mile long, two or three hundred yards between each of us, our arms flailing at the gloomy and reluctant sheep. The sky is torn into shreds and patches. The only words have been the violent insults thrown at the dogs.

Now the lambs are down at last in the pen on the beach, ready to be taken off by dory and fishing boat tomorrow morning. The sheepdogs nip at them through the bars. The shepherds, Kennie, Nona and Toby, are all leaning on the hurdles of the pen and discussing the animals in front of us, their fleeces shriveled and lank in the rain. They are not as good as anyone had hoped.

NONA:
It was the wet spring that did it.

TOBY:
That was what kept them back.

NONA:
Aye, and the dry summer.

TOBY:
Aye, that would have kept them back too.

NONA:
And it's been cold these last few weeks.

TOBY:
That wouldn't have helped.

NONA:
No, they are not as good as they might have been.

TOBY:
But there are some big ones in here.

NONA:
Monsters some of them.

TOBY:
There's some good lambs in there.

NONA:
Look at that horned ewe with her twins.

TOBY:
There's some very heavy lambs here.

KENNIE:
It'll be heavy work getting them into the dory.

TOBY [TO HIS DOG]:
Come into heel, will you.

NONA:
You are not going to get that quality every time.

TOBY:
No, not every time, that's right.

KENNIE:
No, not every time. You can't hope for it every time.

This was a chat, a break from work, with a roll-up and a cup of tea and caps on the backs of heads, but it is the talk that has been had since the Neolithic. Its buried musicality, the repetition of its phrases, the antiphonal give and take of each repeating gesture—all of that presses up under the surface of the words. Perhaps this is the natural way we have of speaking, just hesitating on the lip of the musical, but it is a quality of language that is usually shut down and denied in a written culture.

*   *   *

Parry's new understanding of the Homeric poems undoubtedly pushed them into the preliterate centuries before 800
BC
. Homer comes from an oral and aural world, a world of public speech and shared listening. But how far back? And how much of that ancient world could survive in the telling and retelling? Can one really reach back through the words of Homer to that moment in about 1800
BC
when the Greek-speaking people, whatever they were called, came south to the Mediterranean world of sailing ships and stone-walled cities?

There is a real difficulty: the reliability of these storytellers. They inherited the past, they were conscious of that inheritance, but how much did they transform what they had been given? Milman Parry and his team asked the Serbian singers if their stories had any truth in them, a question, it soon became clear, that did not entirely make sense to them.

Ibrahim Ba
Å¡
i
ć
, the
guslar
known as Ibro, answered casually enough: everything in his songs was true, except for details he added to make them more fitting. His stories might have required heroic furniture—swords, horses—to sound right, but that didn't make them any less “true.” It might even have made a story “truer,” more like the heroic past Ibro had in mind. These songs were epics, extensions of memory over deep reaches of time. They weren't history. They celebrated a heroic ethos, and their purpose was not to preserve events. They existed in the “now,” standing as a bridge between the present moment and the distant past.

There is one extraordinary discovery from Crete, made by the American-Greek scholar James Notopoulos, a follower of Parry and Lord, that relegated the question of historical truth in ancient epics to a category that was at least moot. Notopoulos was a professor in Hartford, Connecticut. His father had been a poor Greek immigrant from the Peloponnese who became rich by building and operating theaters in small-town Pennsylvania. At Oxford, James had become entranced by Homer and Parry's discoveries. An intense romantic, he was remembered by his students gazing dreamily at the ceiling through clouds of pipe smoke during Greek classes in Hartford. But he was also a precisionist, capable of “making the wince into an art-form” when a pupil failed to pronounce the Greek properly or get the meter right.

In 1953, with a Guggenheim scholarship, Notopoulos traveled to the far west of Crete, one of the most heroic landscapes in Europe. In the wild and stony mountain province of Sfakia, gorges are sawed thousands of feet down into the barren, dry White Mountains. I have seen fences around sheepfolds there held up with the rusted barrels of old machine guns, and have sat eating my lunch in a café while at the table next to me a man first cleaned his automatic pistol and then fired it out of the door to see that it worked.

Notopoulos arrived only eight years after the end of a war in which the Cretans had maintained bitter and heroic resistance against the German occupiers. He found Sfakia in a “ferment” of song. Everywhere the American ethnographer went, men were singing about the 1941 airborne invasion, the cruelty of the Germans, their burning of villages, their shooting of the innocent, the heroism of the Sfakiots themselves, the sons no less heroic than their fathers and grandfathers, and the bitter reprisals carried out by them against their own traitors and fifth columnists. The long island tradition of daring manliness, the kidnapping of brides, the maintenance of unforgivingly violent blood feuds and of loathing for the outsider—Roman, Arab, Venetian and Turk—was pouring out in this new generation of song. It is a suggestive connection: are the years after a war the great moment for epic? With the dreadful realities of the crisis over, can the miasma of epic descend?