Adam Parry, Milman’s son, collected his father’s publications from the 1920s and 1930s in a volume titled The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford 1971). Homerists still regularly cite these writings and not simply for their historical interest. In the vast bibliography of Homeric studies, few entries from close to 100 years ago remain so useful. Parry’s legacy also stems from his work with singers and poets in the former Yugoslavia. This investigation heralded the comparative turn in Homeric studies. The Making of Homeric Verse contains one published article that explicitly advertised the comparative project in its title: “Whole Formulaic Verses in Greek and Southslavic Heroic Song” (1933). It was his student Albert Lord who built on Parry’s work and brought comparative analysis to the forefront of Homeric studies with his classic The Singer of Tales (1960; 3rd edition: 2019). Today one finds books and articles on Homeric poetry that look far beyond ancient Greece, from the ancient Near East and ancient China to modern India and Saudi Arabia. Not just Homerists learned from Parry’s research into Southslavic poetry: both his methods of collection and his findings influenced numerous other disciplines, from medieval studies to folkloristics. Then too there is the fascination with Parry’s death at the age of 33. This premature demise renders Parry the Jimi Hendrix of classical studies, dead at the age of 27 after changing the sound of rock and roll. (Adam Parry’s death at the age of 43 in a motorcycle crash prompts a different analogy: the Parrys were the Kennedys of classical studies.)
Robert Kanigel aims to teach us about this influential figure who died just as he was getting started. We follow Parry from UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Drake to Harvard. We head to Yugoslavia for his team’s fieldwork with guslars, the singers of songs about heroes. Kanigel traces the search for tradition bearers and the recording of their songs. The climax comes in Bijelo Polje where, running short on funding, Parry and his team meet Avdo Medjedovic, the virtuoso tale teller whose songs come closest in their eyes to Homer’s. Throughout this travelogue, Kanigel shows us Parry building his argument that Homeric poetry was traditional and oral poetry, and acquiring a deeper understanding of the two essential features of oral traditional works: their repetitions of and their departures from earlier renditions. The book’s penultimate chapter depicts Parry’s last days, and the final chapter offers a tribute to the importance of Lord’s contributions to the study of Homeric poetry and oral traditions more broadly.
Kanigel rightly stresses the evolution of Parry’s project. He first explored the traditional nature of Homeric poetry, and then he moved to argue that Homeric poetry was oral poetry. But Kanigel’s book can give one the mistaken impression that Parry proved Homer was an oral poet who composed his epics without the use of writing. Rather, Parry’s research cleared the way for the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey we have emerged from a tradition of orally performed Homeric poetry. The Iliad and the Odyssey did not come into being in the manner of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in 458 BCE or Apollonius’s Argonautica in the third century BCE. You can believe that one poet dictated to a scribe the Iliad and the Odyssey (or one poet dictated the Iliad and another the Odyssey), or you can believe that one poet wrote one or both poems. Whatever you believe about the emergence of our Iliad and our Odyssey, you recognize that the poet was trained in the traditional ways of producing orally performed stories about Achilles and Agamemnon and Hector, and about Odysseus and Telemachus and Penelope. I would contend, however, that Parry did prove that studying the Iliad and the Odyssey properly means studying modern oral traditions, especially poetry. But you can be a Homerist who grasps this fact and at the same time believe that Homer wrote.
Other formulations will bug the reader. Only six pages in we get an unreflective endorsement of Walter Ong’s cleaving the oral from the literate (8). Later, we read that “the Homeric epics were the work of a traditional culture” (158) and think, “Ugh, the specter of Alfred Kroeber’s superorganic tradition raises it head.” One cringes at the description of 1930s Yugoslavia as an “exotic setting” (161) or a reference to “the rude peasant world of guslars” (193), although, to be fair, it is not clear whose point of view features at these moments.
But come off it. This is a book that your father-in-law gives you because he saw it mentioned on some blog and that you read for fun. Be grateful that a writer of Kanigel’s skill devoted his time to this esoteric subject matter and aims to make it accessible to a wide audience. An academic can appreciate this biography about academic work and enjoy the moments of recognition it offers. We too produce drafts “hobbled by awkwardness and overstatement” (216). We too have ideas that stick with us for years and that we alternately nurture and wrestle with. Parry pondered the traditional nature of Homeric poetry already at UC Berkeley and then ran with that idea in Paris. When we are lucky, the precise subject matter to be addressed comes into focus. We feel ourselves there at Parry’s thesis defense in Paris when Antoine Meillet urged him to take the next step: Homeric poetry was traditional, yes, but it was likely oral as well. You can hear the voice in the back of Parry’s head getting louder as its suggestion that he seek out actual oral poets becomes a demand.
But another reality check, this time to ask, how did Parry get his trailblazing work done? Kanigel gives Nikola Vujnovi?, Parry and Lord’s fellow fieldworker, the credit he deserves. Yet it was his wife, Marian, who raised their two children. This invisible work enabled Parry to go to campus on Sundays and to travel around Yugoslavia for a year. Regrettably, Kanigel’s narrative arc occludes this contribution. After Parry died of a gunshot wound, the detectives at the scene declared it an accident. Kanigel drives toward the following conclusion: “Maybe it was an accident. But if not, that Marian killed Milman Parry seems far more likely than that he killed himself” (247). The thought most readers will be left with is not that Marian Parry contributed day in and day out to Milman Parry’s success—a verifiable fact—but that she may have murdered him in a fit of rage and then skillfully covered up her crime–an unverifiable charge.
--------
[Review length: 1088 words • Review posted on March 25, 2022]