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HOMER AND MEMORY

M.’s book furthers a recent approach to the Homeric poems that explains their oral or post-oral features in terms of ‘choice’ of the medium of quasi-spoken/ conversational language and not in terms of the ‘binding’ tradition of an oral culture still unaware of writing. This approach developed from recent scholarly interest in performance as a vital aspect not only for formal features but also for the genesis of much Greek archaic and classical poetry. Thanks to the works of Egbert Bakker, and their use of a terminology made easy for classicists, M.’s book is informed theoretically by the powerful interpretative schemes of the linguists’ psychology of spoken vs. written language, and promises to provide a more reliable idea of orality than the one proposed by Parry and Lord. Indeed, ‘conversational’ orality as a choice in function of performance may be synchronically coexistent with writing, and therefore ought to be immune from the doubts cast on the idea of a pre-writing orality both by the evident elements of advanced ‘artistic’ reμnement in the Homeric poems and by the ambiguous evidence provided by the comparativism of Parry and Lord about the poems’ supposed ‘oral’ origins. In any case, I personally believe that the synchronic and ‘historical’ interpretations of orality cannot be easily kept separate in archaic Greece, when culture either was oral or at least freshly post-oral: since, of course, ‘in illiterate societies, the only grammar is that of spoken language’ (S. R. Slings, CPh 87 [1992], 100), it is undeniable that for the author(s) of the Iliad and the Odyssey choosing the grammar of the spoken language—if they really felt this as a choice— was a much more historically conditioned ‘choice’ than it may be, for example, for a modern storyteller-in-performance. Following Bakker’s analyses of microstructural features of Homeric language in terms of oral speech (particles, appositional syntax, formulas as ‘tracking devices’ for the hearers’ attention), and of Homeric perception of verbal tenses in the perspective of a verbal actualization of the past into the present time of the performance, M. investigates some larger units of the narration: typical scenes (Chapter 1), catalogues (2), descriptive pauses (3), similes (4), invocation of the Muses (5), ring composition (6). Her task is to explore the dynamics of the storytelling-in-performance according to the ‘economy’ of the memory systems investigated by cognitive psychology. She assumes that ‘if memory guides the processes of comprehension, it guides also the processes of composition’ (p. 11), and seeks to prove that for the birth of the Homeric texts the memorization of a traditional techne of singing and of traditional contents of songs played a smaller rôle than the achronic strategies and the economies of memory in the practice of storytelling: ‘professional storytellers work not so much from memory, but with memory’ (p. 29). Instead of the comparative model of the Serbo-Croatian singers, or of    233