Homerus vindicatus

OK, this one is for the sheer silliness of it, nothing more. But it was an idea that came to me about a week ago, when I emailed it to Marie. Her reply was more or less, Gosh, Hosea, that's nice. And then she never mentioned it again. Oh well. But maybe you'll find it entertaining. What follows is pretty much exactly what I wrote to her.

I just read -- "just" means I finished it maybe 5-10 minutes before starting to write this note -- an essay by Joan Didion about why she doesn't like short stories but wrote three of them anyway. ("Telling Stories," 1978.) The essay meanders, the way Didion's writing not infrequently does, but the gist of her complaint about short stories is that they are short. (Shocker, that. Who would ever have guessed?) She writes -- and you'll have to take on faith that the context makes sense here, because otherwise I'd have to type a page and a half to give it all -- as follows:

I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture.

OK, fine. And certainly it has been a commonplace among Western writers over the last two-to-three hundred years that the novel is quintessentially the medium for capturing "life," for capturing "the world itself." Right? Isn't that what we tell each other? Isn't that, after all, the whole point of the novel? And really, what else could vie with the novel for that role?

Just because I'm feeling contrarian, I'd like to suggest at least one other form that can do the same thing at least as well: the Homeric epic. Like the novel, it can be as vast and sprawling as "the world itself." Like the novel, there is room for multiple subplots: this is another way that both of them are adapted to containing the world. But let's look at a couple of the ways that the epic is different from the novel.

The Homeric epic relies on blocks of description that are repeated at regular intervals -- not just once or twice, but over and over: "And he fell thunderously, and his armor clattered upon him." In a novel, that kind of repetition might be allowed once, if you want to make a very special kind of point. To do it five or ten times is considered bad writing. But isn't that how we live, in real life? Don't we actually circle around in little repetitive loops, where we repeat the same actions over and over? It's easiest to think about the habits of the day or the week: get up, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, feed the cats, eat dinner, go to bed. But even people whose lives are dramatically less predictable than that -- because they are homeless, or refugees, or just pathologically restless -- will have smaller rituals that they repeat routinely: rituals related to coffee, or to the bathroom, or to sex, or to something. Repetition is fundamentally how we learn to do anything, and it's how we structure all our actions in the world. In this respect, Homer is truer to life than any novelist.

The Homeric epic relies on epithets that describe characters in a small handful of fixed ways: "godly Achilles," "crafty Odysseus," "laughing Aphrodite." Novels, again, try to avoid such stale repetition, and have the freedom to describe people in a variety of subtle ways, showing them from all sides so that we (as readers) can get a full, three-dimensional understanding of them. But how often do we do that in real life, when we're not enmeshed in reading a novel? How many real people, in the course of our lives, do we ever understand with even half the complexity with which we understand the characters in a good novel? Two? Three? Maybe four, if we live long enough? Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong. But if you want to capture the way that we really think about the people that we really meet in the world, ... can anyone really argue that Henry James does a better job of capturing our thoughts about Other People than Homer does? Isn't Henry James (or fill in your favorite author) actually too subtle when it comes to the casual ways we really think about most people? Always excepting those special two or three or four, of course ... but I mean all the others.*

And then there are the similes -- my God, the Homeric similes! "Like when a lion is hunting a gazelle, and smells him far off in the forest, ..." and then Homer goes on for a whole blasted page about this lion hunting this gazelle, spinning the story out to almost interminable length before finally making his point and coming back the the matter at hand. Meandering, disconnected from the here-and-now, totally irrelevant. Right? But how do our inner thoughts work, really? Are we always focused on what's in front of us? Are we always thinking about the here-and-now? Hardly! Our inner thoughts meander as aimlessly as any Homeric simile. The thing in front of us can remind us of something that we saw fifty years ago, just because it has a special color or an odd smell. If you try to track the aimlessness of inner thought in a novel, you get a very edgy, experimental novel, the kind that people often wrote (but rarely read) between the World Wars. But with Homer that same aimlessness is normal.

I haven't talked a lot about external description here. If you want to describe in an external kind of way how something Really Was, novelistic prose might have the edge. All I claim is that Homeric epic is at least as good as the novel in capturing our inner experience of the world. But the whole traditional argument in favor of the novel has always been that it is so flexible in capturing inner experience. This should be the novel's home turf. If the Homeric epic beats it on this ground, do we even need to talk about any other?

Or perhaps I'm just being contrarian. Anyway, I hope you were amused.

__________

* Note added a few days later, on April 16. Long-time readers might guess that I came to this opinion by growing up with my father, who frequently reduced people to Homeric caricatures so that he would (in his mind) know what to expect from them. He put them in little boxes in his mind so that he could be sure to "say the right thing" ... and thereby somehow keep them placated. I talk about that habit here. The flip side of this same behavior is that he created caricature personae for himself too, as I discuss here. I don't know if it invalidates my argument to realize where it comes from. Since I didn't really mean the argument all that seriously, maybe not.