BLINDNESS AND LITERACY IN THE LIVES OF HOMER

Abstract

BLINDNESS AND LITERACY IN THE LIVES OF HOMER ALEXANDER BEECROFT 8 A reasonable objection at this point would be the (well-documented) cases of John Milton, James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, among others, whose blindness in no way prevented the continued composition of highly literate and highly text-based literature and, in Borges's case, did not prevent him from assuming the directorship of the National Library. Such literary activity presumes, of course, a considerable infrastructure of already existing textual literature, and a system of readers and/or amanuenses (Milton's daughter and friends; Joyce's friends including Samuel Beckett; Borges's mother) to accomplish the transfer from textual to oral in both directions; and abundant evidence testifies to the laborious nature of such proceedings. Our Lives of Homer, when they insist on Homer's blindness, have serious reservations about transcription as a legitimate mechanism for the transmission of verbal art. 9 All citations from the Lives will be given with page numbers from Allen's OCT edition. 10 M.R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore, 1981), 23; G. Gigante, Vite di Omero (Naples, 1981), 21. 11 See e.g. Lord (n. 2) on a poem performed by Avdo Međedović which ran to 12,000 lines, approximately the length of the Odyssey. Significantly, this poem, 'The wedding of Smailagić Medo', was learned by Avdo by listening to a recital from a printed songbook version, which was only one-sixth the length of the poem Avdo himself would later perform.

Audience reactions to the program notes of unfamiliar music

“…Five listeners mentioned the poet Homer. One listener noted Homer’s blindness (which is not universally accepted – see Beecroft, 2011) in relation to the “thin sound of the harmonics”. Another listener, shown below, quoted from Shelley’s 1817 sonnet Ozymandias , whose ruined statue is all that is left of a civilisation destroyed “by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history” (Sparknotes, 2015).…”

The birth of the author

“…In this essay, I leave that question aside to focus instead on how authorship is actually portrayed in the Exaltation . As argued by Barbara Graziosi () and Alexander Beecroft (; ), purportedly biographical anecdotes about ancient authors may reveal little or nothing about the actual lives of those authors, but that does not make those anecdotes any less important, because they can still illuminate broader notions that were prevalent in the ancient world about literary composition, performance, reception, and circulation. Ancient narratives of authorship are rich sources of information for what Beecroft calls the “implied poetics” of ancient readers, that is, their underlying assumptions about the nature and uses of literature (Beecroft, , 2).…”

“…Ancient narratives of authorship are rich sources of information for what Beecroft calls the “implied poetics” of ancient readers, that is, their underlying assumptions about the nature and uses of literature (Beecroft, , 2). Ancient debates about whether or not Homer was blind, for example, probably tell us nothing about Homer himself, but they do reveal differing notions among ancient writers about whether epic poetry was fundamentally oral or written, since a blind man could not have composed his poetry in writing (Beecroft, ). As Graziosi puts it, “the fictionality and popularity of the ancient material on Homer’s life does not warrant our ‘disregard’”—on the contrary, the possible fictionality of ancient accounts of authorship can reveal all the more clearly how literature was perceived (Graziosi, , 3).…”