he Iliad of Homer
by Homer
Notes on the History of Fiction
A Review by E. L. Doctorow

1
Historically, there was something like a Trojan war, maybe even several Trojan wars in fact, but the one Homer wrote about in the eighth century B.C. is the one that fascinates us, because it is fiction. Archaeologists doubt that any Trojan war began because someone named Paris kidnapped someone named Helen from under the nose of her Greek husband, or that it was a big wooden horse filled with soldiers that finally won the day. And those particularized gods running the war for their own purposes, deflecting arrows, inciting human rages, turning hearts, and controlling history, might have kept the Greeks and Trojans at it for years and years, but they have no authority in our monotheistic world, and you can find no trace of them in the diggings in northwest Turkey where the archaeologists turn up the shards and bones and sling bullets of what might have been the real Troy.

But Homer (or the stable of poets incorporated under the name Homer) was either given to polytheistic fantasy or was the genius adapter of a system of cosmological metaphors that no one -- not Dante, not Shakespeare, not Cervantes -- has ever matched for sheer imaginative insanity. Read Homer's hexameters and you find gods made in the image of man -- jealous, mendacious, erotically charged, vengefully disposed, gender-specific know-it-alls, with empowering aptitudes that they wield as weapons in heaven as they do on earth.

But who would give up the Iliad for the historical record? Evidence suggests the Homeric epic was transcribed after generations of oral transmission. The historical facts came down through the ages fused into blinding bardic revelation.

2
Richard III Society in England (with a branch in the United States) would recover the reputation of their man from the damage done to it by the calumnies of Shakespeare's play. Shakespeare derived his portrayal of a misshapen serial-murdering king from Raphael Holinshed, whose chronicle was strongly influenced by the account of Sir Thomas More, a Tudor propagandist, among other things, the Tudors having brought an end to the Plantagenet dynasty, and to Richard himself, at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.

The Ricardians argue that their king was not the deformed creature portrayed by Shakespeare. They say that the murders attributed to Richard -- specifically those of his two nephews imprisoned in the Tower -- are not proven. They find evidence that this was a good king who ruled wisely. Yet whoever Richard was, and how unfairly mythologized, he is now, and has been for centuries, the dust to which we all return, and there is a greater truth for the self-reflection of all mankind in the Shakespearean vision of his life than any simple set of facts can summon. The enormous popularity of this Grand Guignol of a play, from its very first performance to the present day, comes of the reality it performs: that all men would claim for themselves a pre-emptive existence. We gain the knowledge, only half admitted in our strange fascination for this immensely vital, vengeful, murderer of men, women, and children, that his is the archetypal tormented soul that can never find shelter from the winters of its discontent.

What men will do for power, the monumental death and devastation they wreak in service of their malign monarchal spirits, is borne out by the events of this past century. So if Shakespeare's Richard III may not be heeded for the instruction it gives, his prophetic identification of this kind of human possibility is recorded by his inimitable language.

3
Napoleon, as a character in Tolstoy's War and Peace, is more than once described as having "plump little hands." Nor does he "sit well or firmly in the saddle." He is said to be "undersized," with "fat thighs ... short legs" and a "rotund stomach." And he holds court smelling of "Eau-de-Cologne." The issue here is not the accuracy of Tolstoy's description -- it seems not that far off from nonfictive accounts -- but its selectivity: other things that could be said of the man are not said. We are meant to understand the incongruity of a warring imperator in the body of a fat little Frenchman. Tolstoy's Napoleon could be a powdered boulevardier putting a pinch of snuff up his nose -- and that is the point. The consequences of such a disparity of form and content can be counted in dead soldiers strewn across the European continent.

It is a stratagem of the novelist no less than of the playwright to symbolize physically the moral nature of a character. And it turns out that, as Tolstoy has it, Napoleon is a preening pompous megalomaniac. In a scene in Book Three of War and Peace, the Russo-French wars having reached the crucial year of 1812, Napoleon receives an emissary from Tsar Alexander, a General Balashev, who has come with peace terms. Napoleon is enraged: doesn't he have the numerically superior army? He, not the tsar, is the one to dictate terms. Having been dragged unwillingly into war, he will destroy all of Europe if his will is thwarted. "That is what you will have gained by alienating me!" he shouts. And then, Tolstoy writes, Napoleon "walked silently several times up and down the room, his fat shoulders twitching."

Still later, after consoling himself by parading before adoring crowds, Napoleon invites the shaken General Balashev to dinner: "He raised his hand to the Russian's ... face," Tolstoy writes,

and taking him by the ear pulled it gently ... To have one's ear pulled by the Emperor was considered the greatest honor and mark of favor at the French court. "Well adorer and courtier of the Tsar Alexander, why don't you say anything?" said he, as if it was ridiculous in his presence to be the adorer and courtier of any one but himself, Napoleon.

Tolstoy did his research, but the composition is his own.

4
Homer was Homer, a bard of the late Bronze Age. In the Bronze Age stories were the primary means of storing and transmitting knowledge: they were the public memory; they preserved the past, instructed the young, and created communal identity. So we're prepared to make allowances. We do that also with those other writers of the era, the writers and redactors of the Hebrew Bible. For them as for Homer, there was nothing like a purely factual discourse; there was no learned observation of the natural world that was not religious belief, no history that was not legend, no practical information that did not resound as heightened language. The world was perceived as enchanted.

In the Iliad there are many gods; in the Bible, the one God to whom the biblical writers cede authorship. But under many gods or one God, the stories told during this time were presumed to be true by the fact of being told. The very act of telling a story carried a presumption of truth.

We make allowances for Shakespeare, too, but for the reason that he is Shakespeare. By the time of the Elizabethan Age religious inspiration was becoming distinct from scientific fact, truth was something to be proven by observation and experiment, and the aesthetic event was a self-conscious production. Reality was one thing, fantasy another. God was institutionalized, and in a world deprived of enchantment by rationalism and empirical knowledge, stories were no longer the primary means of knowing. Storytellers were recognized as mortal, however immortal some of them would come to be, and a story might be believed, but not simply because it was being told.

Today it is only children who believe that stories, by the fact of their being told, are true. Children and fundamentalists. And that is the measure of the 2,000-year decline in the story's authority.

more at: http://www.powells.com/review/2006_07_18

Bot- A little knowledge is dangerous and therein lies the problem. Oral history was dependant upon two things- the reputation of the story teller and whether or not your audience was educated. Oral tradition was passed down until writing became the instrument of telling and even then it was only the "learned" who could translate, most of the masses were illiterate. Similar to telling a story to children- they have little knowledge in adddition are taught that you do not question adults, specifically your parents as this is a show of respect. The same thing applies to religion- your not suppose to question the Bible, fundamentalists believe the good book is "gospel" and they can't seem to explain the 600 year lag in between writings, still the audience was ignorant.Then along came Giotto who painted little angels crying and the visual became more important than the written word...people started to question...hope i didn't miss the point.

If the History channel show on lost kingdoms is accurate, then cultural origin seems to have an influence on how oral vs written history is viewed. In an episode on Ramses II the other night, they described his battle with the Hittites as being, at best, a draw. But Ramses II created a large monument describing the events as a decisive victory. The Historian said that 'in the (Egyptian) mind, writing their version in stone created a new reality and changed the events that had transpired. If cultural background can really alter how people deal with events, then far more than education and veracity of the teller are involved.

This would also seem to be reinforced by the positron emmision tomograpy studies done a decade or so ago and shown on the PBS series on the brain. If I recall correctly, researchers let their subjects view a series of objects and mapped the sequence of electrical activity in different parts of the brain. They found that - regardless of shared racial/genetic background, people who shared a 'birth language' with each other shared a pattern in brain region activation. Showing a picture of a tree to Australian English speakers showed a shared pattern that was different from people who had learned other languages as their birth language - even different from people who had learned Canadian or US English. The studies also said that throughout the world, men and women had different brain region activation patterns from each other when viewing the same object, even though they shared the same cultural background and native language. This gender difference was found in every country they tested, as was the native language difference. So a Japanese language native speaker in Japan, for example, had a pattern that was shared with other Japanese who had learned Japanese as their first language, regardless of where they had been born in the world, provided that they were the same gender.

If this research held up, then it may very well be that 'perception is reality', and oral and written history are really His Story.

__________________
John

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one day i will be able to afford cable....

There is so much truth in this statement, and very well put. How often is history re-written?...every day, by who? those who want to change your perception of reality in oder to create a new reality.

For fun, go to some old book stores, use the internet to acquire old history books, try to space them out about 30 years or more between prints and focus narrowly on the topic, say US history. Read the descriptions of same events in time and note down key facts, or lessons stressed. Then compare across your line, within a 90-100 year time span, I bet you going to find quite a few discrepancies, so imagine the discrepancy in say 6000 years of recorded history

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This is refered to as "hermeneutics." One must understand the nature of the literature before them in order to correctly discern its meaning. There is a glaring lack of this among religious fundamentalists (I once lived among great numbers of them, so I know what I'm talking about).

If you read a fictional account of something that intends to convey important truths, you must not get hung up on the characters' names , the dates, and the places. If you are reading a historical account, then you SHOULD pay attention to the names, dates, and places.

The term "myth" is often equated with "fiction" or even worse, "false." Myth is very powerful and is a driving force in most of our lives whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Read The Hero With A Thousand Faces or watch Bill Moyer's interview with Joseph Campbell.

Our culture seems to be simultaneously infected with a great deal of cynicism and naivete. The results of this range from merely disappointing to down right tragic at times. Witness the misguided efforts of many of our elected officials (on either side of the aisle) as proof of this.

Okay, NOW I have to get back to work! Thanks, Bot. Your posts are always thought-provoking and insightful.
Sincerely,
Diego del Fuego

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

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I found this thought provoking. It's Scientific American.

Bot

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July 24, 2006


Folk Science
Why our intuitions about how the world works are often wrong


By Michael Shermer

Thirteen years after the legendary confrontation over the theory of evolution between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce ("Soapy Sam") and Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog"), Wilberforce died in 1873 in an equestrian fall. Huxley quipped to physicist John Tyndall, "For once, reality and his brain came into contact and the result was fatal."

When it comes to such basic forces as gravity and such fundamental phenomena as falling, our intuitive sense of how the physical world works--our folk physics--is reasonably sound. Thus, we appreciate Huxley's wry comment and note that even children get the humor of cartoon physics, where, for example, a character running off a cliff does not fall until he realizes that he has left terra firma.

But much of physics is counterintuitive, as is the case in many other disciplines, and before the rise of modern science we had only our folk intuitions to guide us. Folk astronomy, for example, told us that the world is flat, celestial bodies revolve around the earth, and the planets are wandering gods who determine our future. Folk biology intuited an élan vital flowing through all living things, which in their functional design were believed to have been created ex nihilo by an intelligent designer. Folk psychology compelled us to search for the homunculus in the brain--a ghost in the machine--a mind somehow disconnected from the brain. Folk economics caused us to disdain excessive wealth, label usury a sin and mistrust the invisible hand of the market.

Folk science gets it wrong because we evolved in a radically different environment.

The reason folk science so often gets it wrong is that we evolved in an environment radically different from the one in which we now live. Our senses are geared for perceiving objects of middling size--between, say, ants and mountains--not bacteria, molecules and atoms on one end of the scale and stars and galaxies on the other end. We live a scant three score and 10 years, far too short a time to witness evolution, continental drift or long-term environmental changes.

Causal inference in folk science is equally untrustworthy. We correctly surmise designed objects, such as stone tools, to be the product of an intelligent designer and thus naturally assume that all functional objects, such as eyes, must have also been intelligently designed. Lacking a cogent theory of how neural activity gives rise to consciousness, we imagine mental spirits floating within our heads. We lived in small bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that accumulated little wealth and had no experience of free markets and economic growth.

Folk science leads us to trust anecdotes as data, such as illnesses being cured by assorted nostrums based solely on single-case examples. Equally powerful are anecdotes involving preternatural beings, compelling us to make causal inferences linking these nonmaterial entities to all manner of material events, illness being the most personal. Because people often re-cover from sickness naturally, whatever was done just before recovery receives the -credit, prayer being the most common.

In this latter case, we have a recent scientific analysis of this ancient folk science supposition. The April issue of the American Heart Journal published a comprehensive study directed by Harvard Medical School cardiologist Herbert Benson on the effects of intercessory prayer on the health and recovery of patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery. The 1,802 patients were divided into three groups, two of which were prayed for by members of three religious congregations. Prayers began the night before the surgery and continued daily for two weeks after. Half the prayer recipients were told that they were being prayed for, whereas the other half were told that they might or might not receive prayers. Results showed that prayer itself had no statistically significant effect on recovery. Case closed.

Of course, people will continue praying for their ailing loved ones, and by chance some of them will recover, and our folk science brains will find meaning in these random patterns. But for us to discriminate true causal inferences from false, real science trumps folk science.

I wonder if prayer was developed as a way for kin to focus on a potential change in family status, and attendent financial implications, without violating social norms about appearing greedy or predatory? Although attending a modern will reading sure indicates that these days there is precious little inhibition over appearing greedy!

__________________
John

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