What is Homer's style of writing?

Answer 1

In the Homeric epics we have a text created within a highly traditional

diction, a special poetic language, for performance before a large public

situated entirely within that tradition. We do not have poetic language in our

modern sense, that carefully honed personal and private idiom meant for the

eye and (to a lesser extent) the ear of a small number of connoisseurs.

Therefore those who make up Homer's modern audience need to know if

there is a certain ideal way to hear, or read, and respond to certain stylistic

habits of his that our experience of modern literature has not prepared us to

understand very well. That is Question One, and the important one to

answer if we are interested in experiencing Homeric poetry in its full

complexity and idiomatic richness.

Are the Iliad and Odyssey genuine oral compositions? That is

Question Two, which I believe it is not, and may never be, possible to

answer with absolute certainty. For all the disagreement and verbal combat

over this issue-from Parry's earliest critics in the1930's to the pages of the

New York Review of Books from March 5 to June 25, 1992-the fact is that

recovering the exact genesis or technique of Homer's composition will

always be beyond us. Therefore knowing exactly how he composed, just

how much of his verse came from improvisation while performing and how

much from prior memorization, and whether the newly available skill of

writing was used to any degree, should be less important to us than

appreciation of the distinctive and sometimes almost odd rhetoric found

throughout his poetry, and of an underlying aesthetic that can make sense of

both the distinctiveness and the oddness. Almost twenty years ago, at a

comparatists' conference on Oral Literature and the Formula (Stolz and

Shannon 1976), I suggested we shift from emphasis on oral to aural style 372 JOSEPH RUSSO

in an attempt to pursue the aesthetics of this style rather than its genesis.

While it is still theoretically possible to doubt that Homer is an oral poet,

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it

remains beyond doubt that he is "aural" in that he composes in a style

guided by the ear and meant to be heard, a style that pleases through verbal

play based on an aesthetic of repetition and variation, and of relaxed fullness

of expression wherever the context allows it. And yet while not discarding

that emphasis on the style itself, I now believe it is fruitful to return to the

issue of orality in connection with some salient but non-formulaic features of

this style, seeking to understand all of them as counterpart phenomena to

formulas per se, and some of them as most likely generated by composition

in the act of performance as described by Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales

(1960).

It is significant and perhaps surprising that none of these features of

an oral-derived style has to do with the employment of formulas as such.

For decades the definition and analysis of the formula dominated the

argument over Homer's orality, but the presence or density of formulas in a

text has proved ultimately to be an insufficient basis for arguments in favor

of an oral Homer.

2

At this point in the history of Homeric scholarship, our

understanding of Homer's technique may be best served by describing

certain favorite devices or tropes and explaining their shared aesthetic.

3

1

The safest position is to describe the Homeric texts as "oral-derived." See Foley

1990:5-8 and passim; 1991:22.

2

Smith (1977) offers a classic example of a traditional epic text that is formulaic

but not orally (re)composed in the act of performance. For the difficulties in using

formula density to prove orality, see Hainsworth 1964, Russo 1976. For the balance

between formulaic and nonformulaic language and Homer's freedom to use both, see the

important study of Finkelberg 1989.

3

Of course various studies of this kind have been done before. Edwards (1966)

sharpens our awareness of Homer's style by presenting a survey of characteristic devices of

word (primarily adjective) position, enjambement, and sentence structure as these are

related to colon structure. His overall emphasis is on the many devices of linkage, and to

the limited extent that his study is aesthetic as well as descriptive, he does well to

emphasize "the peculiar smoothness in the progression of thought in Homeric verse" (148),

which is also my concern. Occasionally his aesthetic judgement lapses into apology for a

mere "filler" that "pads out the verse," a "meaningless grammatical link," and the like (see,

e.g., 144-47). Yet these stylistic features embody perfectly the principle of "epic fullness,"

a term coined by Bassett (1926:134). In an earlier study of devices of linkage between

successive speeches, Bassett (1920) illuminated a related aspect of the Homeric aesthetic, HOMER'S STYLE 373

Common Tropes of Extension

The bulk of my paper will be devoted to the description and

explication of certain rhetorical tropes that give Homeric style its peculiar

flavor, an archaic taste for redundancy and familiarity discreetly seasoned

with variation and ornamentation. When, following Parry's epoch-making

insight, we sought the key to Homeric oral style in the use of formulas, our

concern was to examine style in order to demonstrate the poet's technique

for producing verses rapidly in the act of performance. In moving from an

emphasis on the generation of language to an emphasis on the aesthetic

presentation of language, I am not abandoning my belief that Homer's style

is either oral or orally derived, but moving the focus of investigation to a

related question. Why is Homer's style is so uniquely pleasing, and how

may the sources of its charm reside in a variety of rhetorical features distinct

from formularity but related to it through a shared aesthetic?

It is interesting to note that scholarship on Homeric language and

compositional technique has often called attention to features that are the

opposite of charming and pleasing. Homer's awkward moments and

inconsistencies have more recently been regarded benignly as natural

products of oral genesis (Janko 1990; Willcock 1977; Gunn 1970, based on

Lord's prior demonstrations of composition by theme). But earlier they were

viewed as compositional gaucheries that would have been avoided by a

writing poet who composed more carefully (Combellack 1965), and still

earlier as clear evidence of scribal miscopying or imperfect conflation of

multiply authored sections (see almost any page of the editions of Leaf

1900-02, Von der Mühll 1946). I refer to such small-scale features as

redundancy, confused syntax and bad grammar, anacoluthon, traditional

phraseology awkwardly transferred to new contexts, verses out of place

(because of the performer's memory lapse or the copyist's oversight?),

awkward or abrupt transitions, and so on. And on the larger scale of theme

the "principle of continuity," which he pointed out was already well understood a century

ago by scholars like Bougot (Etude sur l'IIiade d'Homère, 1888) and Zielinski (Die

Behandlung gleichzeitigen Ereignisse im antiken Epos, 1901), with their principles of

"affinity" and "continuous narrative." My study differs from these predecessors in its

focus on a range of phenomena perhaps too diverse to have been accorded equally serious

attention in previous discussions of Homeric style, and in its attempt to describe these

seemingly unrelated phenomena as all emanating from the epic impulse toward

expansiveness, which is at the heart of the oral aesthetic. 374 JOSEPH RUSSO

and plot, comparable phenomena would be the various inconsistencies-

from unfulfilled predictions and unreconciled alternatives to outright

contradictions-too well known to need repeating here. It is indeed a

curious truth that the strongest evidence for Homer as an orally composing

poet comes from the existence of these stylistic and narrative infelicities,

which seem to suggest not that our text is inartistically composed or the

product of layers of authorship, but rather that it is the transcription of a live

performance (Janko 1990:328). We shall return to a detailed consideration

of some of these "negative" features.

We shall begin, however, with those more "positive" qualities named

above, features of style that are both orally (or aurally) inspired and

aesthetically pleasing and successful as narrative devices. Consider three

phenomena actively used in the construction of phrases and sentences,

which I shall call appositional, explanatory, and metonymic extension. I

suggest that the basic epic trope, what we might call the master trope of

traditional epic phrase-making, can be conceived in its simplest essence as

Item Plus. I am referring to the wide-ranging impulse toward repetition and

expansion that earlier scholarship has identified under a variety of names

referring to different but often related phenomena: the "traditional epithet,"

"hendiadys," the "adding-on style," lexi~ ei v rhme j nhv , "parataxis," and so

forth, as well as Bassett's principles of "continuity" and "epic fullness"

mentioned above (note 3). My own terminology attempts to identify a single

aesthetic impulse that issues forth in three varieties of rhetorical expansion.

In plain English, appositional extension means item + slightly different

aspect of the same, explanatory extension means item + aspect that

significantly widens its reference or image, and metonymic extension means

item + expansion that serves as a natural bridge to the next (closely related)

idea. It is my contention that underlying the various stylistic tropes and the

principles named variously by past scholarship as "affinity," "continuity,"

and "progression," there is one major unifying impulse that shows itself in

variety of ways. This is the fundamental impulse toward repetition and

fullness.

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Answer 2

Homer wrote epic poems; the most well known is the Iliad.