Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:
Homer's audiences KNEW the
characters & endings and BELIEVED the stories; the Gods and Goddesses,
mortals and semis were REAL not mythic.
CHW wrote:
Some portion
of Homer’s audiences knew the stories and their endings. But every story, like
every old joke, was once new to everybody at some stage in their lives. As
for the Greeks implicitly believing that the Gods, Goddesses, mortals and
semi-mortals were real: I very seriously doubt that. It is, imho, a bad mistake
to take it for granted that early or ancient man was more stupid than modern
man.
SKB answered: Charles: you are right (here and there!). In
the interests of list brevity I oversimplified the Homeric experience! I had in
mind the difference between reading VN, where the characters & plots may be
BELIEVABLE but only within their own fictional framework (and, of course, the
endings are often surprising even after nth re-reading!) and the Homeric
situation — almost the BIRTH of Western Literature and therefore requiring
insights independent of our contemporary views of fiction, authorship, and
readership.
There is really SOLID evidence that Homer’s audience either
believed in its Gods or carefully behaved according to such beliefs (how else do
you establish what people really believe?) — we do know of the occasional
skeptic but, in general, life revolved around the rituals of devotion, regular
sacrifices to one’s particular choices of deity — recalling that the
POLYtheistic Greeks were remarkably TOLERANT to other religions/cults and their
choice of deities. It was those damned, boring MONotheists who invented
the murderous aspects of HERESY!
Jansy Mello, still quoting others (a thoughtful
parrot, perhaps?): Eliot "dramatized in his playscript Becket's death
for an audience who would sit not fifty yards from the place where Becket died.
So had Joyce, staging the first scene of Ulysses, atop a tower any Dublin reader
would have known how to reach by tram". Eliot, "By way of that he had
called the Mythological Method,was attempting an extended derivation from
Ulysses, the book...he boldly exploited what had been in Periclean times its
central convention, that everyone sitting in the theater knew the unchanging
myth, knew what must happen.." ..." That men shoud learn to merely look
and listen, that attention to what was and was not evidence might deliver the
methodiz'd mind from self-deception, etc..." ( Hugh Kenner, Joyce's
Voices, 1976 prefatory)
I picked up Kenner's book today, since I wanted
to find where the author had used the word "stage" in at least four
different meanings in only one paragraph. Then I realized I had forgotten most
of his arguments and decided to read it all over,from
scratch.
I agree with SKB about the Greek's belief in their Gods.
These may have continued metamorphosing until now since we still have
moments of epiphany that get lost by lack of reverential awe ( less
than by the absence of rituals). Also, as G.Steiner noted, we hate those that
tried to rob us of the wonders of polytheism...
SKB, have you ever read H. Heine's texts written in Paris
( he was in exile there, wasn't he?) where he attempted to
explain German Romantism and fairies, to the
French?
Jansy-in-the Jungle