Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender (review)

Elizabeth Minchin's Homeric Voices is in many ways a continuation of and companion volume to her earlier study, Homer and the Resources of Memory (Oxford, 2001). In both books, she draws upon research from the social sciences that will probably be unfamiliar territory to many classicists: cognitive psychology, linguistics, and, in the volume under review, "discourse analysis." Minchin defines the latter as a "relatively new discipline" that "studies the ways in which people use language to communicate" (6). Discourse analysis will allow Minchin to add three other sub-disciplines to her toolbox: sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and philosophical linguistics. It is the depth of Minchin's research into these other fields that makes both volumes important additions to Homeric scholarship. However, the conclusions Minchin reaches using these impressive tools were, for this reader, disappointing.

Homeric Voices divides neatly into two equal halves of five chapters each. Part 1, "Discourse and Memory," focuses on types of speech acts in order to identify patterns and verbal strategies used by Homer's characters. This section expands upon Minchin's thesis in Homer and the Resources of Memory. There she argues that the poet had, thanks to various types of memory (episodic, auditory, visual, and spatial), a number of "cognitive scripts," or learned behaviors from everyday life—accepting or refusing a gift, for example—to draw upon as he composed his song. In Homeric Voices, cognitive scripts are replaced by "speech formats." Just as the improvising poet makes use of certain formulaic social behavior familiar to all, so, too, with particular kinds of verbal exchange that are also standardized and firmly fixed in the memory of both the poet and his audience. Minchin looks at three different types of speech formats: rebukes, declining an invitation, and questions and answers.

Minchin begins with rebukes in chapter 1. Here she posits a pattern whereby a Homeric rebuke consists of four separate components: (1) address/emotional reaction/words of reproach; (2) an account of the problem; (3) a generalization about appropriate action or a view of the undesirable action from a broader perspective; (4) a proposal for amends (28). Minchin then looks at six examples (from both the Iliad and the Odyssey), applying the four-part model. Next, she analyzes the rebuke of a contemporary mother to her child and finds the same pattern. Her conclusion: Homeric rebukes are remarkably similar to modern everyday-life rebukes. But where does this leave us? Minchin's final words on the subject are that, since the format of the rebuke was something the poet already had available to him in his memory, what he learned from his teacher was not the rebuke per se but rather "the special formulation of the rebuke for the purposes of oral song" (51). Chapter 2 follows an identical methodology as it examines how characters decline invitations, and it ends similarly: "In its recreation of everyday speech from his own time Homer's format is recognizable to us also, in another culture and another era" (73). While I am persuaded that Homer's speech formats replicate our own, Minchin has not succeeded in showing me how this similarity ultimately enriches our reading of the Homeric epics.

Chapters 3 to 5 are concerned with questions. Chapter 3 is organized along the lines of the previous two chapters and concludes that questions in the Iliad and Odyssey imitate habits of the everyday world (both Homer's and ours) in both their structure and function. Chapter 4 takes up the specific issue of hysteron proteron in questions and answers in order to demonstrate that, when two questions are asked, it is a natural and common feature of oral communication itself to answer the second question first. Therefore, Minchin argues, in the Homeric epics this rhetorical figure is motivated not by specifically poetic concerns but by "cognitive factors (to make effective use of the resources of memory at our disposal) and social factors (co-operativeness above all)" (115). Chapter 5 looks at three different types of questions: "deference-questions...