Formular Economy in Homer: The Poetics of the Breaches (review)

Once a productive subfield of Homeric studies, the examination of formulae to prove or disprove Milman Parry's theses has largely fallen out of vogue. Into this silence bursts Rainer Friedrich's polemical reevaluation of formulaic economy. Friedrich sets out to compel his reader to examine whether Homeric language squares exactly with Parry's theories as they were originally articulated. His argument is that the number and quality of the violations of economy render the complete orality of our Homeric epics impossible and point instead to a "third way" between Parryist orality and a literary Homer.

One of this book's problems is its selective use of relevant scholarship. Friedrich's obsession with Parry, Albert Lord, and the so-called "Neo-Parryists" (Gregory Nagy appears frequently as one of Friedrich's straw-men) indicates some challenges to applying orality to Homer. The advent of Parry's and Lord's work not only inaugurated the field of oral poetry but also saved Homer from dismemberment at the hands of the Analysts. Friedrich does not give the work this context nor does he engage with new and important views on Homeric language and dialects, such as the proposals of E. J. Bakker (Poetry in Speech [Ithaca 1997]) or even the older, problematic, but no less intriguing presentation of Michael Nagler (Spontaneity and Tradition [Berkeley 1974]). Similarly, Friedrich appears to ignore trends in linguistics that have developed since Parry and Lord wrote, such as generative grammar and grammaticalization, that may offer further support for a language that contains prosody as one of its aspects.

Homeric scholarship has been poorly served by its obeisance to one type of orality. Written poetry is conditioned by cultural differences; from one language to the next, the aesthetics of written poetry can be radically different. Why the same should not be true for oral poetry has not been addressed sufficiently by many oralists. This is one of the points worth making about the scholarship that has followed Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Unfortunately, this is not one made by Friedrich who largely passes over studies in comparative orality.

Friedrich divides his book into two parts. In part 1 he presents an in-depth, although far from exhaustive, overview of Parry and Lord's theories. In part 2, he examines the breaches and proposes various "avenues" for understanding them.

In his introduction to part 1, Friedrich is concerned both with explaining what is at stake when dealing with formular economy (it is one of Lord's four tests for orality) and what Parry meant or did not mean with his principle of thrift. Accordingly, Friedrich defines Parry's "principle of economy," "formula," and types of epithets. Friedrich's main interests are whether or not there are breaches of the principle of economy in Homer (there are) and to what extent they exist (a very wide one).

Overall, Friedrich illustrates clearly that Parry's formulation of the principle of economy does not work perfectly, but his emphasis on Parry's definition as being the test of orality is narrowly construed and, because of his repetitions and tone, sounds like a partisan stump-speech. Friedrich does sharply point out that there is a difference between "proving" oral theory and "proving" an oral Homer, but, in his sweeping refutation of orality based on the inconsistency of the system, he may make the same type of mistake that he identifies in Parry and Lord.

Friedrich ends this introduction by focusing on another attempt to disprove the economy theory, namely, that of David Shive (Naming Achilles [Oxford 1987]) and by providing a series of tables of noun-epithet combinations for Achilles and Zeus (36-39, all five cases!). Following this, he offers extensive tables of all of the breaches of economy he has detected in Homer in name-epithet phrases, noun-epithet phrases, and verb phrases (48-65). While he seems to be aware of the controversy over the so-called analogical formula and the...