Sunday, February 22, 2004

Book report (or first chapter of a book report):

Homeric Questions by Gregory Nagy. Lordy lordy lordy, I hope the man lectures better than he writes, because this book hit me like a gallon jug of Nyquil (turns out it's worse than I thought - the book is actually derived from an address he gave to one of the major philological conventions; and yet I hear he's supposed to be a very popular teacher here at Harvard!), and I happen to be one of the subset within a subset who likes to read scholarly about Greek and moreover is terribly interested in Homer and the so-called "Homeric Question" concerning the composition/authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey. So what happened? In a nutshell I think it's because I'm coming at Homer from a completely different angle than he is. Nagy is less interested in Homer qua Homer and more interested in the process from which the epic form arose, thereby marginalizing the individual genuis of "Homer", whoever he actually was historically. Whereas I'm from the Great Man camp. I think not only is it possible that the Greek poetic forms were each the innovation of one particular man or woman - a belief which has fallen out of vogue somewhat these days among classicists - but that the analogy from American music styles practically makes it a certainty. If you read the history of bluegrass, for example, you will find a not the description of an impersonal force giving birth to this style but the inspiration of one person (Bill Monroe, the "Father of Bluegrass"). Follow this thought into the evolution of the form and you will find at every step the innovations that spawn new methods of playing - such as increasing the number of strings on a banjo - are the direct result of individuals, not processes, and moreoever are the very same innovations that lead to the birth of the various Greek poetic forms. These days we in Classics snigger when we read the old histories of Greek Literature that say that a man named Thespis single-handedly invented what we called tragedy (hence the term "Thespian"), but why? I'd like to believe that our civilization might just be the accumulation of the insights of geniuses over time, and not the aggregate of forces that arise from nowhere and yet are somehow responsible for nothing else than all of human achievement to date. Doesn't the rest of intellectual history bear out the former anyway? Where is electricity without Franklin, vaccination without Pasteur, the Model T without Ford? Must these things have been discovered anyway without the individuals who discovered them, or is it possible that without the right person at the right time, the opportunity is lost - perhaps even forever.

I have always intended to make an exhaustive study of the Greek poetry/American folk music parallel, which I find more and more compelling the closer I look at it, but right now my lack of time and expertise in bluegrass is getting in the way. More as I dig into this one!

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