Pseudo-Intimacy and the Prior Knowledge of the Homeric Audience *

Many Homerists tend to believe that the narrative method of the poems should be transparent. Within oral studies, recent work, influenced by anthropological/folkloric performance theory, has emphasized the extent of audience involvement in the creation of oral poetry and narrative. ¹ The narrative can come to seem almost a collaboration. ² Scholars are uncomfortable postulating a level of poetic sophistication that would exceed the capacity of the original audience, or many members of the audience, to appreciate it. ³ Hence, many assume that if the Homeric poems make sophisticated use of traditional language, manipulate traditional patterns, or play in interesting ways with the traditional stories, we must suppose that Homer’s audience had extensive knowledge and understanding of both the formulaic technique and the traditional stories. ⁴ Since the Homeric poems, and indeed oral epics in other traditions, clearly do represent what J. M. Foley calls “immanent art,” in which the individual performance achieves meaning through its place in the tradition, scholars assume that poet and audience both knew the entire tradition extremely well. Extremely compressed subordinate narratives, and obscure elements in the main narrative, invite the same assumption. If the narrative was immediately comprehensible to everyone, everyone must have known these stories already, because nobody who lacked prior knowledge could understand them.

It is certainly true that some paradigmatic narratives in Homer would be quite unclear to anyone who did not already know the stories. In considering potentially difficult elements in the main narrative, we should consider that modern novels often show a sharp distinction between the “authorial audience,” the audience to which the text actually addresses itself, and the “narrative audience,” the one for whom the text would be true, the one which knows exactly what the text takes for granted and does not already know what it explains. So, for example, 1984 speaks as if we already knew about Oceania, Big Brother, telescreens, and so forth. ⁵ The narrative audience often knows more about the imagined world of a fiction than the authorial audience (sometimes it also knows less). As competent readers, we quickly use the clues the text provides to infer what these unfamiliar phenomena must be. Sometimes in a narrative such an element needs to be “held” for some time before enough information is provided to explain it. A name can be used repeatedly, for instance, before we learn enough to identify how this character is connected with others—rather as we “hold” morphological elements in a long periodic sentence until we have enough information to decide which possible syntactic pattern is actually in use. Exposition may be entirely scattered through a narrative or extended expository passages may appear after a more dramatic segment has piqued audience curiosity. Classical scholarship, however, tends to assume that authorial and narrative audience are effectively identical in Homer. In this view, exposition is not really necessary for comprehension, but is part of the traditional style; hence the narrator often repeats what the audience knows already, but never pretends that they already know something they do not.

Richard Martin’s recent paper in Colby Quarterly illustrates this trend at its most extreme. ⁶ Martin discusses the familiar fact that the Odyssey talks about “suitors” without any explanation. At line 18, we learn that the hero (still unnamed) had troubles even after reaching Ithaca. At 88, Athena announces that she will inspire Odysseus’ son to call the assembly in order to give notice to the suitors, who slaughter his cattle. Martin argues that such a remark, taking familiarity with the suitors for granted, implies prior knowledge of the story by the audience. Martin makes very strong claims for the audience’s ability to recognize minute variations in different versions of the tale. He comments: “Reading Homer with a computerized lexical searching program enables one finally to replicate the average experience of the audience Homer had in mind,” adding that “the full ‘meaning,’ and the full enjoyment, of traditional poetry come only when one has heard it all before a hundred times, in a hundred different versions.” Even allowing for some hyperbole, this...