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Epic Remains Seeing and Time in the Odyssey Karen Bassi I. What the Singer Sees When we think about the various visible objects that comprise the landscape of the ancient Greek epic, the first to come to mind are the Shield of Achilles, the scepter of the Achaians, and the bed shared by Penelope and Odysseus. These objects—whether unique or of a general class—are like snapshots in the epic narrative. Individually, they have been the focus of extensive scholarship on the poems, principally in terms of their metonymic relationship to the narrative at large (ecphrasis), their expression of vividness (enargeia), or their function in the exposition of character and social status. But the question of how visual perception is the basis of “evidence” about the past in the epics remains open. The fact that the appeal to “evidence ” in this context is obviously anachronistic exemplifies the issues that frame the discussion. For in what sense do descriptions of visible phenomena in archaic poetry prefigure the criteria by which historical and archaeological evidence come to be defined as such?1 In more general terms, what is the relationship between visible phenomena and temporal categories in the epics and how does this relationship contribute to our understanding of the dominance of visible (i.e., empirical) “evidence” in Western thought? The idea that the past is a culturally shared phenomenon is an operating principle in the Homeric poems. Scholarship on this aspect of their content has focused primarily on the ways in which the poet gives enargeia (vividness) to the events he narrates, i.e., on the linguistic and formal strategies by which he makes the past “come alive” in the present of the oral performance. Egbert Bakker, for example, describes the past in the epics as “not so much an event referred to as a state of mind in the present.”2 And he goes on to make the case that epic performance challenges and collapses the distinction between the past time of the events narrated and the present time of their verbal enunciation: Miller 1 :Whats minta 1 9/3/08 4:40 PM Page 25 With regard to this experience of the past as something-to-beperformed , our usual notion of past tense, geared as it is to reference , the correspondence between language and facts in the past, is particularly inappropriate. If the past is something that is remembered, it does not exist in recorded form but owes its existence to the verbalizing, introverted consciousness of the performer that draws it into the present. The past, in fact, becomes “present,” both in a temporal and a spatial sense: it is turned from “then” and “there” into “now” and “here” within the context of a special social event and through the actions of a special, authoritative speaker. The natural and frequent consequence of this situation is that the performer adopts the stance of an eyewitness or sportscast reporter, one who verbalizes things seen, staging the participants in the performance as spectators of the epic events from the past. Epic discourse strives to overcome the gap between the natural, visual icon and the arbitrary sign that is language, producing a sustained attempt at enargeia (vividness).3 Bakker’s arguments are suggestive and persuasive, especially his discussion of the relationship between the conceptualization of time in the epic and the development of the past temporal augment in the Greek language. It may be true that the common absence of the augment in Homeric Greek is evidence for Bakker’s conclusions that “Epic discourse … is to a certain degree, tenseless” and that “temporal reference is in fact irrelevant for the epic singer.”4 It may also be the case that oral performance demands a kind of “vividness” that is produced out of bringing past events into the present moment of the performance. But it is also the case that this reading comes out of the rhetorical tradition on the epic. We can ask, for example, to what extent its explanatory power answers to a desire (in the present) for an original epic performance that can transform modern readers into “spectators of the epic events.” In other words, is this appeal to vividness simply a conditioned response to the predicament of confronting the oral epic as a literary artifact?5 And to what extent—or in what sense—is a “visual icon” any less arbitrary than a linguistic sign, especially when the icon is itself a product of narrative description ?6 In sum...

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