About early paradigmatic / nostalgic texts...

There's a provocative reading of Homer in Julian Jaynes' 'The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind', in which he argues
that in The Iliad there are NO acts of conscious volition, and that in many
translations words denoting volition are misapprehensions of the
greek.  When a character needs to decide what to do next,  a god or voice
usually appears and guides him.  So, Iliad is a record of pre-conscious
humanity.  The Odyssey, by contrast, is the first text we have which
expresses a doubtful 'I'.  'What am I doing here?' 'Where am I?' 'Why am I
doing this?' 'What do I think?'.  As such, his journey home is the first
written record of modern man, where will is located, not in a god or god's
voice, but in the self - the invention of the self as we understand it.  As
such, it's nostalgic for guidance.  The self nostalgic for its pre-existence.

The book gives a reading of the Psalms, too, as a record of the lament of
newly-conscious humanity bemoaning the loss of a guiding god-voice.  A
useful trick is to read the psalms as though every statement is
literal.  Banish metaphor, style, and read it as direct expression -
suddenly a stark picture of an earlier mind appears.

Whether any of this is accurate is another matter.  But perhaps the
nostalgia of these earlier texts is not for oral poetry itself, but for an
oral organisation of mind and society, which became lost in the paradoxes
of consciousness, in the 'I and I', as the Rasta man says.   And Bob Dylan
circa '83.

I realise this is hopelessly enigmatic, and I can't get further into the
murk of 'consciousness' right now, but let it serve as a trailer for the
aforementioned book, which is a breathtaking argument about how
consciousness developed, and gives writing a primacy in this which will
flatter most writer-readers (and possibly lead them to bathe in boiling,
gassy water so as to become once again oracular).  So the reason I went off
on that here is because I wanted to suggest that these early texts-of-exile
may be nostalgic not just for an early form of poetic delivery, the oral
state of composition, but for an earlier form of mind, the loss of which
startles our befuddled Odysseus.

The fields are burning, people are killing each other, there is disease,
the sky is not behaving as it usually does, and where has God gone? why
doesn't he tell me what to do? Where is he? I think that may be the
nostalgia driving the psalms, and it's possible that the lost oral
tradition was not one of delivery, but one of reception, whereby the
god-voice ran our wills for us.  Anyway - cf. Jaynes for further - it's far
out, but it's not wacko, dudes.

SJBx

At 01:39 PM 6/10/02, you wrote:
>Dear M.F.,
>
>I think the original discussions was about some statements by Nadezdha
>Mandelstam, where she attempted to characterize Osip M's sense of the
>"imperative command" of the poetic voice (muse?) as something different
>from what she called literature and fiction.  I tried to elaborate on that
>by pointing out M's own "charismatic" compositional process - he prided
>himself on "composing with the voice" rather than writing on paper, for one
>thing.  My point was that this is a case of the difference between oral
>poetry - embodied in the presence of an actual living person, singing - and
>writing, which imposes a distance and an objectivization (the book) between
>the poet and the poem.
>
>The Iliad and the Odyssey are not simply paradigmatic epic poems, but also
>paradigmatic fictions, instituting many of the narrative techniques that
>would later be used in prose.  Homer's genius was to make shapely fictions
>out of the matter & procedures of oral poetry.  Later epics like Virgil's
>Aeneid or Milton's Paradise Lost were models of oral poetry at a third
>remove - imitations of the Greek epics as the Greek epics were "imitations"
>of oral poetry.  It is in this sense that I think of literature as an
>attempted return to an original state of oral composition, a recursive
>process which is thematized again and again, beginning with the nostalgia
>of the primary texts (Bible, Greek epics), to the state of nostalgia/exile
>expressed in the later re-formations and imitations of these primary texts.
>
>The original state - the source of Mandelstam's sense of the "imperative
>voice" - is the process of improvised oral composition by a living poet
>before a living audience.  The "command" to the singer to respond musically
>in a situation of collective immediacy is diametrically opposed to the
>notion of the scribe writing in private.
>
>Henry



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