BMCR 2008.10.27, Rainer Friedrich, Formular Economy in Homer

Rainer Friedrich, Formular Economy in Homer. The Poetics of the
Breaches. Hermes Einzelschriften, 100.  Stuttgart:  Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2007.  Pp. 159.  ISBN 978-3-515-09065-0.  EUR 35.00 (pb).


Reviewed by Deborah Beck, Swarthmore College and Harvard University
([email protected])
Word count:  2380 words
-------------------------------
To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-10-27.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/10/20081027.html
-------------------------------

Milman Parry's work on orality and the Homeric poems is arguably the
most important development in classical studies in the last century.
Parry showed that the system of repeated phrases, or formulas, in the
Homeric epics were characterized by the property of economy, also known
as thrift.  That is, for any formula expressing an "essential idea"
(the bare-bones meaning of a given expression, without any poetic
flourishes or optional adornments like epithets), there should be just
one expression of a given metrical length.  This system is also
characterized by extension, insofar as there is only one way to say
each essential idea, but there are many different essential ideas that
the formulaic system can represent.  Parry pointed out that the
occurrence of the exact same formula for "Odysseus answered" one
hundred times in the Homeric epics bore no resemblance to the practices
of literate poets like Vergil or Apollonius, both of whom vary their
word choice more than the Homeric epics do and who also make free use
of metrical equivalents for semantically equivalent ideas.  This was
the basis of Parry's claim that the Homeric poems were oral.  After a
thirty-year period of inaction, the classical world took notice of
these ideas and of the work of Parry's student Albert Lord, and a
vigorous discussion began that has continued to the present day about
the implications of these findings.

One of the most central topics, and the most hotly debated, has been
the extent to which Parry's work is compatible with the kind of
individual creativity and subtle aesthetic effects that readers have
generally associated with "art" or "poetry" in general and with Homeric
poetry in particular.  Initially, the answer given by such scholars as
Combellack was "not at all," but it soon became clear that in fact this
was not the case.  Hainsworth and Hoekstra were the most important of
the first generation of scholars to robustly contest the idea that
formulas were immovable and unchanging blocks of artistic stone that
prevented a poet from saying whatever he might want to say. They
explored various ways in which formulas changed and evolved in response
to the surrounding language or the needs of the verse.[[1]] A number of
scholars such as Fenik, Nagler, Reece and Segal obtained excellent
results by focusing on the formulas for a particular activity or scene
and showing how the formulas varied with great subtlety and effect in
relation to the specific narrative contexts in which they appeared.
Often these variations were among different traditional elements, not
between a traditional formula and a unique expression, suggesting that
oral aesthetics consisted of a skillful use of traditional elements
rather than the invention of new material. These and other studies
persuaded most people that oral poetry and aesthetics could coexist, a
state of affairs reflected in the articles in the New Companion to
Homer (1997).  Thus, work in recent years has tended to focus on
exploring how orality and aesthetics coexist more than on whether they
do.[[3]]

Rainer Friedrich's monograph on the relationship between formular
economy and the orality of the Homeric epics is the latest in his
recent publications on various aspects of poetics and orality.  For
example, Friedrich has put forward a very effective reading of the
different vocatives for Agamemnon, showing how they both respond to and
shape the narrative in Iliad 1.[[4]]  Friedrich's main contention in
this volume, which is part of the Hermes Zeitschrift fuer klassische
Philologie series (Heft 100), is that the economy of formulas has been
vastly overestimated in previous scholarship. Therefore, we must posit
a post-oral Homer in order to explain the frequency with which
apparently formulaic language displays a kind of subtlety and
suitability to its narrative context that Parry's work had apparently
shown was incompatible with traditional oral poetry.

The monograph is divided into two parts, each of which contains several
sub-sections.  Part I, "Formular Economy in Homer. Observance and
Breach", first lays out Friedrich's view of what Parry and Lord's
theories say about formulas, thrift and economy, and the relationship
of these ideas to oral poetry. Then it gives a list of all the formulas
that in Friedrich's view violate the principle of formular economy.
Part II, "The Poetics of the Breaches", discusses these formulas from a
poetic standpoint. The conclusion, which forms the last sub-section of
Part II, argues that formulas in Homeric epic violate economy so
pervasively that the poems cannot be oral.  It suggests that the
Homeric epics occupy a middle ground between oral and literate poetry.
The work also contains a brief subject index and an index locorum.
Although this monograph is clearly the result of long thought and
attention to its subject, it bases its methodology primarily on
scholarship from the earlier stages of the oral aesthetics discussion.
This study is useful as a compendium of phrases in Homer that are
metrically equivalent and refer to similar ideas, and it puts forward
individual observations about many of these that readers will find
valuable.

Part I begins with a very brief introduction that describes the four
tests of orality that Lord advocated in his 1960 classic The Singer of
Tales, asserting that the test of formular economy "has never been
formally applied to the Homeric epics" (9).  The next section, "The
principle of formular economy," gives an extensive overview of these
terms of Homeric scholarship, primarily in reference to Parry, Lord,
and the first generation of scholars who grappled seriously with the
implications of their work, such as Kirk and Hainsworth.  I was
surprised that Nagler, Reece, and Visser were absent from the
bibliography, and that Mark Edwards' decades of outstanding
publications on these issues were represented only by two articles from
the late 1960s and by his volume of the Cambridge commentary on the
Iliad.  Gregory Nagy appears several times in the bibliography but --
like many other scholars working from an oralist point of view whom
Friedrich cites in his study -- Nagy's work is not as extensively
discussed by Friedrich as the magnitude of his contributions might lead
one to expect.  Moreover, the bibliography contains no items published
in the last ten years except for Friedrich's own publications and M. L.
West's recent work on the text of the Iliad. As a result, Friedrich's
view of formulas and oral poetry as presented here is more narrowly and
relentlessly "Parryist" than most Homerists today would find
reasonable.  It retains Parry's now superseded ideas about the relative
lack of meaning in formulaic epithets, and views as interchangeable
many pairs of expressions that are very different in meaning (see
especially pp. 23-26).

Subsection 3 of Part I, "The Breaches of Formular Economy in Iliad and
Odyssey" lists the different expressions for Achilles and for Zeus in
all the different cases, noting how many metrical equivalents there are
among them (Tables I and II).  Next, "I deemed it advisable to include
in Table III all instances that can formally pass for breaches
according to the criteria laid out in this study, irrespective of their
apparent relevance or irrelevance.  Thus the items of the table are not
all of equal weight, significance, or scope" (40, emphasis original).
I was eager for Friedrich to explain why he thought this was advisable,
both because that is an important aspect of his methodology and because
I found the tables somewhat difficult to use as a result of this
choice.  Because of its very inclusiveness, his list of formulas is
hard to make sense of: individual entries simply contain the relevant
formulas.  They do not say how many instances of them occur or where
they occur.  Thus, a pair of formulas listed in Table III looks the
same to the reader whether each appears once, one appears once and one
appears fifty times, both appear twenty times, or one of them appears
several times but only in one episode.  Moreover, individual pairs are
not always comparable:  some doublets of speech introductory verses
have the same name-epithet formula and different verbs of speaking,
while others contain both different verbs of answering and different
name-epithet formulas.  Although Friedrich analyzes many of the
individual examples in Part II, during which he discusses these
specifics, the table on its own is difficult to use without these
details.  Friedrich offers a brief conclusion to Part I at the end of
the list in which he asserts that "the breaches of economy occur in
Homer to a greater extent than has been hitherto supposed" (65).

Part II, "The Poetics of the Breaches," analyses the expressions in
Table III from an aesthetic or poetic point of view.  Section 1,
"Introduction. Three Avenues to the Poetics of the Breaches," offers
three explanations for what have been characterized in Part I as
breaches of formular economy: deliberate variatio, avoidance of
stylistic infelicity or contextual unsuitability, and (the flip side of
the previous explanation) affirmative desire for felicity or contextual
suitability.  Sections 2-4 examine specific examples of Homeric
language that Friedrich ascribes to each of these explanations, of
which Section 4 is the longest.  Individual discussions are headed by
the group of phrases from Table III that are being discussed and
generally do not relate to other discussions.  The goal of this section
of the monograph appears to have been to cover as many phrase groups as
possible rather than to discuss just a few of the most interesting or
important examples in detail.  This has the advantage of covering a lot
of material; the heterogeneity of the evidence discussed here, and the
lack of explicit connection that is made between individual examples,
give this material the tone of a commentary more than of a sustained
argument.

The sections discussing specific phrase groups offer a number of
illuminating and worthwhile points.  Friedrich discusses the clustering
of the expression "old Priam" in Iliad 24 (in Section 2, deliberate
variatio) and the contextual dependence of the metrically equivalent
name-epithet formulas for Hera (in Section 3, avoidance of infelicity)
and for Aphrodite (Section 4, pursuit of justness of expression).[[5]]
Other points, discussing in two or three sentences a pair of phrases
that appear once each, make less of a contribution to the reader's
understanding of Homeric language.  Section 5, "Beyond Schematization,"
discusses pairs of metrical doublets that are not breaches because one
of them does not refer to a specific person, such as
<greek>Phlei/wnos</greek> and <greek>paido\s e(oi=o</greek> for
Achilles in the genitive case.  This section concludes with Friedrich's
excellent analysis of the vocatives for Agamemnon, although he does not
cite his 2002 publication of this material in his footnotes to this
particular part of the monograph.  Finally, Section 6, "Conclusion.
Toward Schema-Free Composition" sums up the results of the study by
arguing that because all of Lord's four tests of orality have
inconclusive results when applied to Homeric poetry, Homeric poetry
cannot be considered oral and should instead be described as
"post-oral." Friedrich then speculates on how a post-oral Homer might
have operated.

In Part I, Friedrich consistently puts forward an almost hyperbolically
Parryan notion of the "essential idea," asserting that pairs of
metrically equivalent formulas should be considered semantically
interchangeable even when their meanings are extremely different.  For
example, Friedrich asserts that "if the law of economy strictly
obtained" (43), <greek>a)pameibo/menos</greek> could substitute for
other context-specific participles in speech introductory formulas
(such as <greek>meg' o)xqh/sas</greek> or <greek> o)ligodrane/wn
</greek>).  This seems to me, in contrast, to be a perfect example of
the widely accepted notion that Homeric formulas use expressions that
mean different things in a slot of a given metrical shape.  "Spoke,
answering" and "spoke, angry" are not the same essential idea.  And yet
in Part II, Friedrich very cogently and ably dismantles this extreme
position and instead puts forward the view that metrically equivalent
phrases do vary because of the meaning of the words in each phrase in
relation to the context.

At pp. 87-88, Friedrich quite appositely inquires, if epithets are
really as meaningless as Parry had proposed, why do not all heroes
whose names are metrically equivalent have the same epithets?   He
asks, "why have distinctive epithets at all, if their union with a noun
in the distinctive formula renders them meaningless?" (88).  This is a
concise and effective statement of a critical question in Homeric
studies.  I wondered why Friedrich had not started his book with it and
engaged in more detail with the numerous scholars who have explored
this very problem in the last thirty years.  His overview at pp. 89-90
of others working on the responsiveness of epithets to context is
rather brief and too much oriented toward older scholarship, but the
more important question is, does the approach that Friedrich takes here
to the relationship between meaning and context not vitiate the
strenuously hard Parry stance toward the "essential idea" taken in Part
I?  Does this not mean that much of the language in Table III is not,
in fact, violating formular economy, since Part II shows that many of
these expressions mean different things and are not semantically
interchangeable in the specific contexts in which they occur?
Friedrich never reconciles these two approaches to "essential idea," or
grapples with their implications for his claims about how widespread
breaches of formular economy actually are.

The conclusion once again positions Friedrich's argument that
widespread breaches in formular economy require a non-oral Homer mainly
in relation to Lord and Parry, with less attention given to recent
work.  Similarly, the conclusion consistently uses language that sounds
like that of a much earlier time in studies of oral aesthetics.  For
instance, Friedrich begins by saying that "formular economy is perforce
confining the diction and limiting expression" (137, emphasis
original), an attitude no longer held by most people working on Homeric
formulas and aesthetics.  A number of recent studies have shown that
literacy is not required to explain the artistry so fundamental to the
Homeric poems, and the traditional repeating language of formulas can
and does comfortably coexist with aesthetics. Friedrich's claim that
only writing can explain this state of affairs is significantly
undercut by his failure to sufficiently take into account the advances
in oral aesthetics over the last thirty years.

The book is well produced, with a small number of basically trivial
typos.  It would have been helpful if the subject index were longer and
more detailed.

------------------
Notes:


1.   Hainsworth, J.B., The Flexibility of the Homeric Formula (Oxford,
1968); Hoekstra, A., Homeric Modifications of Formulaic Prototypes:
Studies in the Development of Greek Epic Diction (Amsterdam, 1965);
more recently, on how formulas may be put together in different ways
depending on various contextual factors, see Visser, E., 1988,
"Formulae or Single Words? Towards a New Theory of Homeric
Verse-Making," Wuerzburger Jahrbuecher fuer die Altertumsvissenschaft
neue Folge 14 (21-37).

2.   Fenik, B., Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad:  Studies in the
Narrative Techniques of Homeric Battle Description (Wiesbaden, 1968);
Nagler, M., 1967, "Towards a Generative View of the Homeric Formula,"
TAPA 98 (269-311) and Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study of the Oral
Art of Homer (Berkeley, 1974); Reece, S., The Stranger's Welcome: Oral
Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene (Ann Arbor,
1993); Segal, C., 1971, "Andromache's Anagnorisis: Formulaic Artistry
in Iliad 22.437-476," HSCP 75 (33-57).

3.   Such as Beck, D., 1999, "Speech Introductions and the Character
Development of Telemachus," Classical Journal 94.2 (121-41) and Homeric
Conversation (Cambridge/Mass., 2005).

4.   2002, "'Flaubertian Homer:' The phrase juste in Homeric Diction,"
Arion 10.2 (1-13), discussing the vocatives for Agamemnon.

5.   Based respectively, as the notes explain, on Hainsworth 1976, Beck
1986, and Boedeker 1974.