A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald by Ralph J. Hexter, Robert Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page B

witnesses nor modern historians doubt that it was the (Christian) Basques who attacked the rearguard of Charlemagne’s Franks as they passed back into France after campaigning against the Moors in Spain. But for reasons of narrative economy, and even more clearly of ideology, the Old French epic has simplified the story, making the “infidel” Moslems responsible for this treachery.
    It is important to recognize that casual anachronism and lack of concern for historical and topographical accuracy are by no means limited to prescientific cultures. We may again compare contemporary forms of popular entertainment, which in our world happily coexist with scrupulously historical academic studies widely available in bookstores and libraries. If two or three World War II movies were all that survived from the twentieth century, how accurately could the thirtieth century reconstruct the history of the war, much less all of twentieth-century history? Parts yes, but the reconstruction would be neither complete nor balanced. Such representations become even less reliable as the events or cultures they purport to depict recede into the past and the genre takes on a life of its own. How accurate a picture of the Old West do most westerns provide? Popular entertainment gives a greatly stylized view even of contemporary institutions, processed according to the narrative demands and internal logic of the genre. Police thrillers give a highly glamorized picture of actual police life. Likewise, from watching countless courtroom dramas on television one would not have a very good chance of reconstructing our judicial system with accuracy. How accurate a picture could members of a later culture hope to get?
    Such comparisons are not intended to discourage students from research into Bronze or Iron Age archeology, or the study of ancient history or geography (see also Troy, in Who’s Who, p. 346). It is important to know as many certain details as possible so that we can better appreciate the complex way the Homeric poems exhibit traces of cultures from the fifteenth through eighth centuries B.C.E. Indeed, in some cases, yet older cultures are likely present in the shape of some inherited stories. 13 The poems “exhibit traces” only to the historically conscious archeological reader, for whom such texts are revealed as palimpsests. Strictly speaking, a palimpsest is a manuscript from which an original text was scraped away so that another, very different text could be written on the newly bare surface. For the bulk of the medieval tradition, it was usually a Classical text that made way for a Christian one. By the use of chemicals and now ultraviolet light we can often make out the words of the original text. Such artifacts are so suggestive of the impact history has on texts that the term palimpsest is currently popular among literary critics to describe a text (i.e., the content rather than the physical book itself) that exhibits multiple historical layers or thematizes the workings of history on the text. The Homeric poems are palimpsests in this sense, as are, by various interpretations, works as diverse as Petrarch’s lyric poetry, Shakespeare’s history plays, and Cervantes’
Don Quixote
. I do not object to so suggestive a usage, even though we know perfectly well that students of paleography, the field where the term is originally at home, are intent on deciphering two very different texts whose coincidence on one sheet of parchment is, as far as the reconstruction of the original texts goes, entirely accidental.
    The final turn in our archeology, however, brings us to note that nothing in the Homeric poems suggests that the author or authors intended the audience or audiences to have any such multilayered sense of the past. For the poet and his audience, the texture of the heroic past is one seamless web, both separated from and linked to the poet’s and audience’s present: separate, in that the heroes of thepast were greater