Speak, Memory

[jporter]

While I tend to agree concerning Benny, and the GR opening (but more on
aesthetic grounds- since by now, you must all recognize, that I enjoy as
many different interpretations of pynchon as possible- the Baudy Benny and
the GR Holocaust opening are just not to my taste, although I accept them as
someone else's). The Odyssey is a horse of a different feather, however, and
by its very nature seems to resist being lumped with those two written
works.

When did the Homeric epics become reduced to the certainty of the written
word? 

In their original productions/performances they were purely mnemonic, were
they not, even the invocation of a particular muse, by a particular
author/performer, would have been a mnemonic act, no? Any possible audience
irritation over which muse might have been conjured at a particular telling,
has to be conjecture offered from the luxury of the age of standardized
reproductions, does it not?

If the performer invoked the daughter of memory by chanting a name, and the
tale was well received, did the audience believe it was the muse which was
supplying the tale, or the performer's memory?

The invocation of Muses was, I'm speculating, not merely a convention at the
time of the origination of the epics. If that were so, did audiences of the
time really consider Homer to be The Author of the epics, or, just the best
medium of the time for conveying The Myths.

no expert, 

jody



> From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>

> Why, I'd even venture that it's a crime of the same order and
> magnitude as, say, "translating" (in terms vouchsafed by Derrida -- M.
> L'oeuf-tête himself -- anyway) Benny Profane's entrance in _V._ as a
> reincarnation of Baudelaire's poet-outcast from _Les Fleurs du Mal_, or the
> rocket scream which comes across the sky to open _GR_ as that of a Holocaust
> victim or group thereof. It does do "violence" to the original text, and
> flies in the face of that recapitulation of the invocation (to the "daughter
> of Zeus", at lines 11-12), just as those attempted "translations" of Pynchon
> fly in the face of the immediate textual recapitulation and elaboration (let
> alone whole text readings!) of the character or incident. What's more, such
> "translations" -- interpretations, really -- which attempt to construct an
> idiosyncratic meaning *in opposition to* the textual data do violence to the
> *spirit* of the text; I'm reminded of the way the Nazi intelligentsia
> similarly "translated" and then enlisted selected excerpts from Nietzsche's
> works to justify their conceptions of Aryan supremacy in the 20s and 30s,
> and the subsequent campaign of ethnic cleansing they put into practice.
> 
> best
> 
> 
> 

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