Jonathan Ready, a classicist, embraces folklore studies with a convert’s zeal in this unusual hybrid volume focused on an intriguing device of Homeric craftsmanship. The rationale for his approach emerges clearly on page 191: “If a phenomenon arises repeatedly in the world’s oral traditions, I assume that Homeric poetry operated in the same way.” The overall results of this experiment in teasing out analogies are thought-provoking, though not consistently compelling. Homerists will benefit from Ready’s refinement of an approach to similes that builds on William Scott’s fundamental study The Oral Nature of the Homeric Simile (1974). Those working on modern traditions will see some familiar, long-held findings fruitfully extended. Connoisseurs of poetry will appreciate anew the complex artistry of archaic Greek verse-making.
The volume’s two parts investigate and deploy modern oral-poetic traditions to establish a background for examining Homeric similes. After a protreptic introduction encouraging Homerists to engage with varied oral traditions, and a keen-sighted overview of methodology, Ready scours five corpora recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the epics of Pabuji (Rajasthan), Radin Suane (South Sumatra), and Manas (Kyrgyzstan); heroic songs from the former Yugoslavia; and short lyric-style Najdi poems from Saudi Arabia. He pays attention to various aspects of similes in each set of works, noting their length and the relative positioning of tenor and vehicle (i.e., subject of comparison and phenomenon to which it is compared). One immediate gain: Ready can rebut earlier claims that Homer invented the long simile, since it is clearly an option in many unaffiliated genres. Most interesting cross-culturally is the frequent clustering of similes. Further fine-grained work remains to be done regarding the precise poetic logic involved in such associative chaining; Ready is satisfied noting the existence of this strategy.
A reader might imagine that subsequent chapters would explore the function of similes in the other literatures. Do they punctuate narrative? Provide relief for audiences? Involve different verse forms, registers, or dialects? Focus hearers on actions, anticipate plot events, highlight characterization? No comprehensive study has yet articulated this area, although some suggestive articles on Homer have used comparison to investigate one or another constituent question. Rather than fulfilling our expectations, chapter 2 leaps into a kettle of much bigger questions, with an extremely broad sampling of genres from Fijian song-contests to Turkish romances, Yemeni wedding verses, Texan prisoners’ songs, American blues, and Irish tale-swapping, even delving into the artisanal with observations by makers of duck decoys and ceramic mugs. All of this accompanies an analysis of the tired dichotomy between “innovation” and “tradition”--an intellectual relic that Ready, in agreement with almost all folklorists, concludes is seriously misleading.
The goal of his seventy-page survey of the “spectrum of distribution” is to distinguish how oral performers mix “idiolect” features with shared “dialectal” or even “pan-traditional” features of their craft. Here one might question the applicability of a number of non-epic genres, if Homeric usage is the hermeneutic target. For instance, Basque bertsolaritza privileges topical improvisation (95)--“idiolectal” in Ready’s understanding--while Fijian competitors only occasionally deviate from well-known compositions (108). But Ready’s larger point remains irrefutable: verbal artists “show their skill by deploying both idiolectal elements unique to their own performance(s) [my emphasis] and shared elements used by other performers in their traditions” (127).
Yet how does one leverage that point? After categorizing (chapter 3) the similes in his five chosen traditions according to their place on the spectrum, Ready in chapter 4 traverses well-trodden ground to locate the Homeric poet’s use of similes within a broader background of epic-internal discourses about skilled performance. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 provide the real payoff for all the painstaking parallel-collecting, when he argues that the Iliad and Odyssey, like modern oral corpora, display a range of “idiolect” and “shared” types when it comes to similes. In other words, while the poems often describe similar phenomena or persons by means of similar vehicles (troop movements like wildfire, attackers like lions), the Greek epics also feature unparalleled combinations of tenor and vehicle (like the reddened horse-cheekpiece used as a simile for the bleeding wound of Menelaus in Iliad 4.140-47). Thus, the Homeric poets, too, are showing off skill. Of course, Ready has to concede that the “newness” of such “idiolect” similes might be an illusion caused by our limited evidence. In the Bosniac material, the complexion of a young woman is compared to a snowball in songs by several singers, making the simile “pantraditional” (147). Would we make that determination, however, if we possessed only two poems (as in the case of Homeric epic), rather than the hundreds of songs collected over several generations by Parry, Lord, and many other fieldworkers? A forgotten singer of a lost Greek poem composed centuries before our surviving corpus may have crafted the cheekpiece simile and passed it down: is it still “idiolectal”? We are caught in the same problematic as bedeviled the twentieth century’s endless debates about oral-formularity: “uniqueness” is a matter of accidental attestation. Even if the comparative material does--solely through analogy--shore up the likelihood of uniquely “Homeric” similes, that conclusion only accords with the well-known axiom: tradition is the sum total of constant, incremental re-creations.
Ready’s unquestionable advance is the introduction (231-38) of Frame Semantics to clarify and deepen an approach to similes using typological family resemblances (rather than repeated diction). This accompanies an invaluable cataloguing of the major topics of Homeric simile in terms of action “scenarios” (201-30). One can recommend the book to graduate students as a paradigm for meticulous philological work on the epics, as well as a deeply researched, provocative attempt to integrate comparative studies. Finally, the book can be read profitably by those working in disciplines from art history to anthropology, for illustrating what is entailed by any attempt to distinguish “tradition” from “innovation,” “convention” from “originality.” As folklorists have known for generations--and Ready’s work may inform fellow classicists--to innovate is traditional.
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[Review length: 977 words • Review posted on August 30, 2018]