Dear Harry:
I'm afraid I was still in high school in the fifties, and
did not read the Iliad (as opposed to the Odyssey) until
1960, under Cedric Whitman. But in my lecture/s on it at
the end of the sixties I discussed the shield of Achilles
together w/ epic similes, & remembering a favorite Auden
poem from high school (as found in Oscar Williams' pb
anthology of Modern Verse). This lecture eventually got
published by my colleagues, as below.
Your'n, Jim
... In the meantime [after the killing of Patroclus],
Achilles has acquired new arms. These include his famous
shield, an art work within an art work. Homer's
description of the shield is recessively symmetrical. On
the periphery at the beginning and end of the
description, is found the cosmogenic milieu (elemental
bodies,; and Ocean River "whence men and gods arose").
Next come civic institutions--on one side the cities at
peace and war, on the other the human (or
design-producing) arts of architecture and choreography.
At the center are the georgic and pastoral arts, that is,
the physical basis of life in the domestication of nature.
(The pattern is ABCCBA.) Overall, the shield depicts
life in its major rations: war is only a fraction of the
total activity, whereas it is more or less Achilles' whole
existence. Thus it might seem that the shield is
precisely the wrong emblem for this erupting mankiller to
be wearing. The shield is more like an alternative to
Achilles than a representation of hi. We notice the same
paradox in the epic similes, which adduce a single,
striking similarity to something on the battle-field, and
then go on to develop a picture rather more divergent than
parallel. The shield is attached to Achilles like an
enlarged epic simile. The similes take one feature from
the natural milieu that turns up in human warfare and
restore it to its natural context. Thus the similes catch
the disturbing connection in our experience between
natural energy and human violence: in the unrelenting
biological compulsions of the natural world there is an
analogy for warfare, and the same energies that run
through the dancers at the harvest festival may at some
other moment be mobilized for making war. The shield also
serves to provide a minority report on the majority
opinions of the poet, namely, that war is man's
predominant natural condition. Like the similes, the
shield offers "epic relief": it gives us another version
of the alternative life back in horse-pasturing Phthia.
ALSO:
... All of the similes warn us that the combat [between
Hector and Achilles] is unequal. Hector has told
Andromache that he has _learned_ to be valiant, and in the
moment of crisis it is possible to forget what one has
merely learned. The predetermined course of the battle
reminds us of a certain sinister kind of sports event that
turns a defender into a victim: a contestant know as a
gentleman (Boris Spaasky, Floyd Patterson], through the
undermining of his psyche, becomes a siting duck for a
contestant known for his "killer instinct" [Bobby Fischer,
Sonny Liston]. There are no deals between lions and
lambs, as Achilles tells Hector when it is too late for
the knowledge to do him any good. "The lion only lies
down with the lamb when the lamb is inside it," and Book
24 tends to confirm this deduction.
-- Homer to Brecht, ed. M.Seidel and E.Mendelson (Yale UP,
1977), 20, 18 (with the contemporary personages dropped).
On Sat, 3 Mar 2012 09:04:02 -0800
Harry Berger Jr <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Epic simile as sociobiology. What a great idea! If Jim
>had told me that when I was working on Sp's epic similes
>(in the early 1950s?) it might have changed my life.
>
> On Mar 3, 2012, at 8:56 AM, James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
>
>> Yes, epic simile as sociobiology.
>>
>> [log in to unmask]
>> James Nohrnberg
>> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
>> Univ. of Virginia
>> P.O Box 400121
>> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
|
