Howard W. Clarke

14. Homer's Readers : A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey by Howard W. Clarke
published: 1981
format: 311 page Harcover
acquired: borrowed from library
read: Feb 27 - Mar 13
rating: 5 stars

Clarke provides a compilation of the history of the intellectual response to Homer. He tells us up front that there is nothing new or original here, that he is just summarizing other works. But wow, he is summarizing a huge well of more and less significant and obscure historical show more information. It's really brilliant stuff. It's also some work and takes some dedication to get through.

He begins with the era when Homer was lost to Western Europe, but the idea of Homer was present. (It was preserved and apparently loved in the Byzantine Empire.) Then an era of the early criticism which struggled to understand these works that were so far from their Renaissance world. Readers dug deep into the text, interpreting everything as moral allegory (Chapman was one culmination of this). As the allegories lost their attraction, critical views replaced them, some loving and others hating Homer. The works played a central role in the mostly French Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns of the late 1600's and early 1700's. This was a bitter and public series a written (and spoken) arguments involving the likes of Charles Perrault - yes that Charles Perrault of fairy tale fame, who was a leading critic and hater of Homer. Alexander Pope seems to sum all of this up, closing both these eras, while defining the Neoclassical era of English literature. Pope's passing kind of marks the end of Homer as a prominent part of popular intellectual debate. What follows is an era of academic experts who progressed our understanding, but, however brilliant, remained divorced from most readers, and certainly far outside any popular debate. Homer was broken apart by concepts of multiple authorship, reduced and remolded and rethought. Heinrich Schliemann's finding Troy changed things a bit. Milman Parry's concepts of oral poetry, which was partially based on his careful study of generally illiterate Slavic singers in 1930's Yogoslavia, reframed how everyone looks at Homer and his creation. I haven't mentioned the geographic, anthropological or literary analysis. But are you still with me?

I just loved the first chapter, on the evolution of the various butchered versions of the Iliad. They follow such unpredictable and wonderful directions. Clarke covers these in quite some detail and they are absolutely fascinating if you don't mind that depth. Need a wikipedia binge? He covers Pindar, The Rawlinson Excidium Troie, The Seege of Troye, (also called The Batayle of Troye), Konrad von Würzburg’s Der trojanische Krieg, Dictys Cretensis, The Iliad of Dares the Phrygian. He more or less ends with Benoît's Le Roman de Troie (c1160) - whose hero is Troilus, a Trojan warrior, and his captured love interest, Briseida. This Briseida, whose name is from Briseis, Achilles prize woman in the real Iliad, becomes Cressida in later related works. And [Troilus and Cressida] is a title of a Chaucer tale and, later, of a Shakespeare play.

Seeing this all laid out, I couldn't help feeling that the actual Iliad and Odyssey surely were just another variation that by happenstance were the ones that got preserved. Troilus, the later hero, has one insignificant mention in the Iliad. And Briseis, who had become his Romantic counterpart in the form of Cressida, was a war prize for Achilles prize in the Iliad. She couldn't have any more Trojan contacts, as they, along with her family, were wiped out by the Greeks.

But what I should have noticed was the detail.

Clarke is still quite interesting with the allegorists. In "times when no other interpretation would have sustained his prestige as a philosopher and seer...It {allegorism} encouraged an imaginative (!) reading of the poems, responding to the universal sense that there is something more in a story than meets the eye and that that something more is deeper and truer and directly applicable to life. “

And he as a nice point about allegory today: “Homer is still being allegorized. The Iliad remains recalcitrant, but the Odyssey continues to deliver messages for our times. ...contemporary practitioners read the Odyssey as an allegory (a word they choose to avoid) of man's search for identity or struggle for self-awareness, this theme acquiring for many of Homer's current readers the vogue that moral didacticism had for the Renaissance“

But once he gets to the Quarrell of the Ancients and Moderns, of Perrault, Anne Dacier and Antoine Houdar de La Motte, it got to be too much for me. By the 19th century I was reading at about 5 minutes a page, enthusiasm waning under detail I can admire only a distance. After this Clarke summaries the 20th century with interesting, and at the time up-to-date takes on key topics.

I gave this five stars because I can only admire the amount of information that gets boiled down to fit these 300 pages. It deserved the rating. But that overstates my enjoyment. I loved the first chapter, but I merely survived the rest, with less and less enjoyment with each chapter.

2016
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