Kanigel: 'Hearing Homer's Song'

 Robert Kanigel’s Hearing Homer’s Song tells the story of Milman Parry, who was to Homeric studies what Darwin was to biology. Or so they say.

Before Parry it was possible to talk about Homer as a writer. Homer was a genius, of course. But he inexplicably wrote some things that wouldn’t pass anyone’s definition of genius. His famous list of ships has never been described as riveting.

After Parry, it was understood that Homer was not a writer of genius because he hadn’t written anything. The great poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were composed orally, before writing was common. The poems were transmitted orally, largely by illiterate singers. These singers changed them as they handed them down from generation to generation.

The so-called Homeric epithets put Parry on to his thesis. Athena appears almost always as “gray-eyed Athena,” and the sea is reliably “the wine-blue sea.”

As Kanigel puts it, repetition, stereotype and cliché are to be avoided in writing. But if you are reciting a poem — or listening to one — repeated lines, stereotypes and clichés help. They help both the singer and the listeners find their way.

A singer could drop in a “gray-eyed Athena” to fill out a line of dactylic hexameter. Where “Athena” or “the goddess” wouldn’t do, “gray-eyed Athena” worked.

Parry spent most of the last year of his short life in Yugoslavia, making recordings on aluminum disks of singers in isolated places. Like the singers of ancient Greece, the singers of the Balkans recited, created or re-created epic poems using memory and inspiration.

Parry’s work gets at what it is to compose. That’s interesting to me, whether we’re talking about composing an English sentence or a line of epic poetry.

I’m interested in how we know certain things about writing.

I’d say I know that Parry’s account of how the Homeric poems were composed is the correct one, although I wasn’t there. It’s possible there was person, as opposed to legend, who wrote, instead of recited, poems. It’s possible the traditional version of Homer existed, but I don’t believe it.

I think I can claim to know that Parry’s account is the correct one.

I think I can claim to know other things about writing, even though my claims are prone to error.

Consider these two sentences:

• John said the sky was blue.

• The sky was blue, John said.

In the second, the comma before the attribution isn’t optional. I’ve known writers who cannot, no matter how hard they try, see why that comma is needed when it’s not in the first sentence.

If you were, as I was, an editor in a newsroom, you could, by looking at a piece of writing, tell who wrote it. You didn’t need a byline. You could tell just by looking at the language. The language shows signs of use. And some people use language less gently than others.

My knowledge wasn’t perfect. I’d make mistakes. But I’d guess that an average editor would “guess” correctly 90 percent of the time, and an observant editor would do better. You wouldn’t want bet against those odds.

I’m interested in what we can claim to know by looking at writing. And the things that you can learn from ancient Greek texts have fascinated me since a patient professor taught me the rudiments almost 50 years ago.

And thanks to Alvin Sallee for turning me on to this book.

• Source: Robert Kanigel, Hearing Homer’s Song; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.