Orality, Masculinity, and the Greek Epic

The distinction between predominantly oral and predominantly literate societies is an important principle of cultural analysis in the West.¹ In anthropological and ethnographic accounts, it constitutes a value-laden dividing line between peoples, one which serves to validate and substantiate the domination of writers and readers over nonwriters and nonreaders. Recent work on the first encounters with the New World, for example, has shown how the Europeans assumed their superiority over the Amerindians not only by reference to this distinction in the abstract, but also by the proliferation of written documents and proclamations which legitimated their official acts of discovery and subjugation.² In literary studies, the distinction begins as a formal one, focused on Greek epic poetry as the product of oral composition and on the distinction between such poetry as the vehicle of preserving cultural muthoi and prose as a later, literate mode of recording cultural data.³ In both fields, these distinctions have often assumed a reductive and utopian view of oral culture, expressed most conspicuously in the notion of nonliterate noble savages found in earlier philosophical and anthropological work.⁴ Orality is thus uncertainly positioned in and by the West as a highly literate culture. On the one hand, an earlier and innocent time of pre-textuality assumes a muthos or story about what might have been—one which is necessarily undocumented, or rather is documented after the fact. In this muthos, what is called primary orality is an ever-receding object of desire, superseded over time by the realia of literacy: contemporary nonliterate societies become a footnote to this story since for them it is only a matter of time. As an ironic complement to this muthos, faith in literacy as a marker of progress is based on a proliferation of texts (historical, ethnographic, scientific, etc.) which document and substantiate that progress and which are themselves proof of the cultural superiority literacy affords.⁵ At the same time, however, this faith is undermined by a fundamental ambivalence towards writing as both the vehicle and usurper of an orally preserved past; another way of putting it is to say that a utopian view of oral culture is the defining characteristic of literacy's privilege. My purpose in this paper is to discuss the ideological implications of this ambivalence—with its interplay of faith and desire—in the context of Greek epic. I rely on two premises. First, that the domination of formal analyses in Homeric scholarship, together with an artificial distinction between orality and literacy, has generally overshadowed a broader cultural analysis of human communication in the epic narratives. And second, that gender-specific codes and hierarchies operate in every aspect of Greek cultural production.

As the exemplar of what was ostensibly the product of oral composition, Greek epic poetry has occupied a unique position in discussions of orality and literacy in the West.⁶ Eric Havelock put it succinctly when he said that, "The 'orality question' . . . from its inception in modern times, has been entangled with the 'Greek question.'"⁷ The "Greek question," grounded in Milman Parry's studies of the "acoustic mechanics of oral [or formulaic] verse-making," is characterized by debates over the paradoxical (or oxymoronic) nature of the Greek epic as oral literature and by the extent to which the process of transforming the epic into a written text may affect the formal properties which also make it oral poetry. Statistical analyses of orality and literacy in ancient Greek society and the historical problem of when and how the Iliad and Odyssey were committed to writing are essential to the "Greek question" as it has been traditionally formulated. The metrical, grammatical, and syntactical arguments that have created the paradox of oral literature and the statistical, historical, and philosophical arguments which follow from them have recently, and persuasively, been called into question.⁸ In general, the distinction between orality and literacy is less absolute than the Greek question has traditionally assumed; it has been shown, for example, that formulaic poetry is not necessarily the product of pre-literate cultures. The Greek question has also tended to ignore how...