Speech Presentation in Homeric Epic

Conclusion

187 We are now in a position to describe a “Homeric” speech presentation spectrum , a unified and consistent set of tools for presenting speech that operates in both the Iliad and Odyssey as well as across all narrative levels. While there are many variations in how speech is presented at different narrative levels, or between the Iliad and the Odyssey, none of these differences entails multiple speech presentation spectrums, or even different views of the fundamental properties of a given speech presentation technique. The many variations that we see in speech presentation in the Homeric poems result from the different themes and preoccupations of the various stories that the poems contain, and/or from the different ways that characters present speech in comparison to the main narrators. In no case does an individual poem, or a particular kind of narrator, present speech in ways that are unprecedented or unparalleled elsewhere in the Homeric poems. For example, the unique features of speech presentation for song in the Odyssey come about because song uses the consistent features of speech mention and free indirect speech in an unusual way, not because song is depicted with modes of speech presentation that are used just for song. Song appears often in the Odyssey but rarely in the Iliad because of the different concerns of the two stories, not because the two poems have fundamentally different approaches to presenting speech. In just the same way, the Odyssey has only three vaunts, whereas the Iliad has 31. This is because there are few occasions in the Odyssey where vaunts are likely to be spoken, not because of fundamentally different speech presentation techniques in the two poems . The remainder of this section describes the consistent properties and the common uses of each speech presentation technique in the Homeric poems. Taken together, these different modes of speech presentation complement one another. Each has a necessary and unique job to do in creating the narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Direct quotation offers vividness, expressivity, and length. Although it CONCLUSION SPEECH PRESENTATION in HOMERIC EPIC 188 is used for the majority of speeches presented by the main narrators (1,223 of 1,473, 83 percent), and the vast majority of speeches in direct quotation are presented by the main narrators (1,223 of 1,374, 89 percent), direct quotation presents a much lower proportion of the speeches presented in the Homeric poems overall (1,374 of 2,410, 57 percent). Since direct quotations are much longer on average than other modes of speech presentation, direct quotation takes up by far the most room in the Homeric epics, yet it presents a smaller majority of the total instances of speech in the poems than one might expect. Direct quotation is most closely associated with very expressive or strongly conversational kinds of speech, such as emotive speech acts, reactive moves, and questions. The vividness and detail provided by direct quotation is also used when the propositional content of the speech and the intent of the speech differ markedly, as in lies or implicit speech acts. When direct speech presents speech acts or move types that are not themselves strongly expressive or conversational in character (such as initial orders), even the most apparently brief and colorless orders virtually always contain expressive features. These include vocatives, rationales for obeying the order, adjectives describing something in the order, and so forth. A directly quoted order differs from one presented in indirect speech or speech mention because it includes such expressive features. These basic characteristics have powerful implications. First, expressivity and conversational interchange are closely related in Homeric epic, since they are the two qualities that are conveyed most consistently by direct quotation. Second, given the range of ways to present speech, the prevalence of direct quotation for speech presented by the main narrators should be seen as a choice, not as a necessity or a default. The oral medium of the Homeric poems and the different norms of character-presented speech partially explain how much direct quotation the main narrators use. At the same time, what appear to be approximately contemporary oral hexameter poems have very different approaches to speech presentation. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter has nearly as many instances of indirect speech as it does of direct quotation;¹ in Hesiod’s Theogony, non-direct forms of speech presentation decisively outnumber the eight direct quotations.² Moreover, if we...