10 - Coda: Some Homeric Futures

Summary

We have noted how the First World War provided one significant terminus for what Russell described as the ‘whole foul literature of glory’. While it is true that the War made the survival of the epic view of martial and imperial history difficult to sustain, we should not simply accept that the remainder of the twentieth century had no ways of negotiating and carrying forward the generic legacy of epic. In this final chapter, I suggest some of these ways: how the disputes over the understanding of epic in the nineteenth century were renewed and transformed in the twentieth. The problematic of epic primitivism, with all its accompanying themes and aesthetic challenges, has not been superseded: twentieth-century modernity has resolved these challenges in ways which sometimes resemble closely, though they sometimes depart from, their resolutions in the nineteenth century. The following provides hints only, brief discussions of a few exemplary instances where the persistence of that problematic can be seen most clearly.

MILMAN PARRY AND THE RESOLUTION OF THE HOMERIC CONTROVERSY

The major figure in twentieth-century Homeric scholarship was undoubtedly Milman Parry, whose work both carried forward the problematic of epic primitivism and did so in such a way as to resolve many of the outstanding aspects of the Homeric controversy. In particular, Parry transcended the nineteenth-century distinction between analysts and unitarians (those who wished to break down Homer's poems into their constituent lays, and those who emphasised their creative unity) by the notion of a traditional and then an oral poet: the peculiarities of the Homeric style could all be explained as characteristic of an oral tradition evolved over several generations, marked by repeated formulae and larger narrative themes.