Vol. 14 No. 7 · 9 April 1992
pages 12-14 | 5009 words
Agamemnon, Smith and Thomson
Claude Rawson
- Homer: The ‘Iliad’ translated by Robert Fagles
Viking, 683 pp, £17.95, September 1990, ISBN 0 670 83510 2
- Kings by Christopher Logue
Faber, 86 pp, £4.99, March 1991, ISBN 0 571 16141 3
At the end of Book Two of the Iliad, in the famous catalogue of the Greek and Trojan forces, the Carians, allies of Troy, led by their chief Nastes, are referred to as barbarophonoi, literally ‘of barbarian (i.e. non-Greek) speech’. Since barbaros (an onomatopoeic term suggesting babble, which does not occur in Homer) meant ‘one who does not speak Greek’, Homer’s compound word – the only occurrence in the Iliad of any derivative of barbaros – is pleonastic, or perhaps overemphatic or fussy (according to G.S. Kirk’s Commentary, it is also ‘surprising’, because the land of the Carians was inhabited by Mycenaean Greeks toward the end of the Bronze Age’). Not speaking Greek might signify other forms of outlandishness, including primitive habits and wild or uncivilised behaviour, and the subsequent history of the term ‘barbarian’ in various languages has been ethnocentric in a sense which tended to link civilised status with possession of the approved dominant language (first Greek, then Latin, followed by the various world-languages of later imperial hegemonies). ‘Barbarian’ and ‘barbarous’ are now typically used to suggest the savage or uncivilised without any strong consciousness of a linguistic factor, but the history of modern encounters with ‘primitive’ peoples, from 16th-century Amerindians to the various subject races of more recent colonial perspectives, shows that the barbarian has continued to be conceived as speaking a non-speech or ‘jabber’. And those who, like Montaigne, adopted the traditional ‘anti-colonialist’ or relativist counter-argument that the barbarians were less barbaric than their conquerors were fond of suggesting, in a table-turning appeal to etymology, that Amerindian languages resembled, or might have been related to, Greek.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 9 · 14 May 1992
From Matthew Leigh
Claude Rawson (LRB, 9 April) hates the ‘vacuous lyricism’ of Christopher Logue’s Kings; no less the enthusiasm with which it has been greeted by Classicists. The latter concern is perhaps more understandable. Professor Rawson seems stricken with a form of that adolescent horror of bringing home friends only for one’s mother to engage in excruciating discourse on the ‘groovy’ and ‘kicking’ qualities of Cliff Richard’s latest 45. It is implied that Classicists, feeling trapped in a hopelessly dusty profession, latch onto the Logue remix and treat it as a lifeline to the modernity they have abandoned. The admiration felt is, however, based on rather firmer foundations than those suggested.
The primary object of Rawon’s scorn is Logue’s ‘pseudo-intimate sleeve-pulling’, as exemplified by lines such as ‘Think of the east Aegean sea by night.’ To describe this as ‘vacuous lyricism’ is to suggest the belief that the epic narrator should stay ‘like the God of the creation … within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’. Well, this is an aesthetic of epic narration propounded by Aristotle and Schiller, and often seen as exemplified by Homer. However, it is also the case that at II. 4.223 and 429, 5.85, 15.697 and 17.366 Homer addresses his audience directly to tell them what ‘you would see’ were you there. Once the epicist has thus created the problem by creating the relationship between narrator and audience, we can no longer talk in terms of absolutes, but instead examine how and to what extent he exploits the creative possibilities which arise. Logue’s solution is radical: but so was that of a number of ancient poets, all of whom were in their own way producing a ‘version’ of Homer.
The poet of the Iliad keeps his distance from his audience, but occasionally acknowledges the relationship. Similarly, it is rare for him to mention his temporal relation to the action, but when he does (‘and he picked up a stone which two men of our day could not lift,’ etc), it is to stress the grandeur of the world, the generation, lost between then and now. It is essential to the sensibility of all ancient epic that it describes a world either fundamental for the development of, or lost to, our own. Logue’s lines on Skopje give his feeling for the means and potential abruptness of that loss.
Rawson holds to rules for the behaviour of the epic narrator. Critics set rules to control situations, to suppress anxieties, but rules can only inadequately express the possibilities offered by a given form. Of course, it is the convention of Homeric narration that the poet keeps his distance, but it is a convention which acts to enhance the impact of those points at which an alternative posture is adopted. The Patrocleia without apostrophe would be a far poorer creation. Equally, ancient epic without the more radical solutions of Apollonius and Lucan would be a far duller form. Christopher Logue, like them, as much reacts to Homer as reproduces him and he does it rather well.
Matthew Leigh
University of Pisa
Vol. 14 No. 11 · 11 June 1992
From Claude Rawson
Mr Matthew Leigh (LRB, 14 May) attributes to me a collection of opinions I don’t recognise myself as holding. I don’t believe in ‘rules’, or share the views he ascribes to Aristotle and Schiller. I don’t object to authorial intrusions, even in modern imitations of non-intruding authors. I disliked Logue’s sleeve pulling, which I described as sticky with self-regard, as distinct from Byron’s, in the comparable example I quoted; and also from those brief Homeric intrusions Mr Leigh rather desperately comes up with, showing that he hasn’t the slightest idea of what I was on about. I suppose I should also spell out that I don’t object to ‘lyricism’, though I found Logue’s vacuous. Mr Leigh doesn’t, and he sounds to me like one of the Classicists I spoke of as being poor judges of English verse. I know many Classicist who aren’t.
Do I gather that Mr Leigh thinks Kings is a version of (the Patrocleia?
Claude Rawson
Yale University
