0.8 Response to gregory nagy, homer multitext project  (Page 3/6)

Such, I feel persuaded, is the kind of paradigm shift induced by the stance taken by the Homer Multitext project on the textual transmission it wishes adequately to recognize and deal with. The appeal to “orality” in the argument for the project's perspective on the Homeric text(s) thereby operates on three levels. Its gesture of polite refusal towards old-school textual criticism and editing, being mainly rhetorical anyhow, is its least significant aspect. Its value for handling innovatively the textual and transmissional situation in the specific case of the Homeric epics, heuristic in kind, is pragmatically useful and helpful. Yet it is the recognition of the nature of texts, the fresh sense indeed of textual ontology which the “orality argument” gives us, that truly promotes our understanding of principles, and has thus a theoretical dimension reaching out far beyond the Homeric “special case.”

In terms of processing the material traces surviving of the Homeric texts, the “orality argument” cannot but be heuristic, anyhow; for those traces are precisely material, they survive in writing. How, precisely, and by contrast, the oral traditions expressed themselves in performance is what remains hidden to our view or hearing on the dark side of the moon of material transmissions we see. The value of the appeal to orality therefore lies in sensitizing us to the nature of the texts.

Recognizing the orality dimension in the Homeric texts is, I take it, not new in Homer scholarship. To attempt to find an innovative basis in it for the editorial approach seems, however, to be so. Intriguingly, Gregory Nagy credits Aristarchus of Samothrace at the library of Alexandria, primus inter pares among the earliest editors of the Homeric epics, with having been the first scholar to have shaped his editorial strategy and methods to the orality nature of the transmission corpus. This already has deeper implications than the assessment by which I first learnt something about Aristarchus's methods. It was Hans Zeller, the German-Swiss textual scholar, whom I heard and read praising Aristarchus for having refrained from emending “the” transmitted text in the way modern editors do, but instead merely to mark readings as potentially “faulty.” (I hasten to add that Zeller specified, or I took in, next to nothing of the complexities of the transmission that we have now had brought home to us.) Aristarchus's strangely admirable procedure had, as Zeller put it, left the transmitted text as such intact and not buried rival readings in graves of variants. This had made later editors the true winners, for it had allowed them to reach different—better?!—editorial solutions for readings that Aristarchus had at least indicated might merit second thoughts. Or, if Zeller didn't at every point put the matter in quite such terms, obviously his frame of reference was essentially our modern-day understanding of our discipline, reflecting the norms set by an author's original composition, and the forces of textual corruption to which originals are inexorably exposed in transmission.