Modern Theoretical Approaches to Homer

[380] ‘Modern’ and ‘theory’ are notoriously imprecise terms. Before attempting to define their use in the present essay, it would be naive not to draw attention to the inevitable impermanence of any study with the word ‘modern’ in its title. When the present New Companion has aged as much as Wace and Stubbings’ original Companion to Homer now has, what critical shifts will have taken place to render this essay passé, and will the Iliad and the Odyssey continue to float somehow intact above these sea-changes? Let me insist that any despondency engendered by this eventuality is misplaced, as I hope to show in my discussion of the postmodern condition and its unabashed distrust of the search for permanent verities. Wace and Stubbings contained no chapter remotely corresponding to the present one. That volume itself had been first conceived, and some of its chapters actually written, more than twenty years before its publication in 1962. During that entire period between conception and publication what would have passed for ‘contemporary theory,’ at least among the community of classicists, would have been what we call New Criticism and archetypal criticism inspired [381] by Jungian psychology. But these influences would be all but overshadowed by the most important development in Homeric studies in the twentieth century. For Wace and Stubbings as for most homerists of the period, Milman Parry's investigations of Homer's work as oral poetry, slow to merit much attention or to catch hold in the United States, was now the thing to be looked at, for it seemed to offer a defensive profession the chance of taking a giant step in its aspiration to become a ‘hard science’ and to forswear the soft belletrism and impressionistic aestheticism that had characterized so much of its literary appreciations. Few literary analysts would be able (or perhaps even willing) to match the way in which Cedric Whitman, in Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958), blended an appreciation of Parry's findings with the sensitivity to verbal texture, symbol, image, structure, ambiguity, and irony central to the New Criticism. Despite the brilliance with which he managed this, many, if not most, homerists believed the devices designed for the interpretation of written literature simply incompatible with Parry's theory of Homer as oral