Homer and Her Eye

Humours of the Homerist 6

We don’t know anything important about Homer himself. We do not know where he lived or what he knew, except that he knew a certain style of poetry inside out; and we do not know if he was male or female. I think that there are decisive reasons to believe that the composer of the Iliad was female. I shall give you some of these reasons, but first let me ask you to dwell a moment on the mere possibility.

Nausicaa revealed herself to Samuel Butler as the authoress of the Odyssey. But on Butler’s terms, a much better case could have been made that Helen was the authoress of the Iliad. In the movement of Homer’s extraordinary similes, we go from images of an almost unimaginable, cataclysmic war, where the cosmos also is in convulsion, to images drawn from peace and the farm and mountain pastures, ocean views from a headland and the varieties of cloud, wind and weather. This is a movement that pegs the unfamiliar queerly and boldly upon the familiar: it is the latter half of the simile that poet and audience knew. She did not need to know battle, but the minstrels’ battle poetry; not volleys of stones from ramparts, but the blanketing of a snow fall; not the view from the field, but from the battlements; and like Helen, she needed a room of her own to produce her work. She was not a warrior, or a heroiser of warriors: she knew very well what was fake and what genuine about heroic poetry, what worked and what didn’t, that glorifying was not the way to get at the truth about war and the hero, or at what was truly ‘epic’—worth the language, not merely praiseworthy or traditional but worthy of song. She had an extraordinary gift for conjuring the presence of a figure or an act. This composer was a poet who wrote a poem. If it helps you to meet this poem as poetry, by imagining the author as female, then please do so.

The Purunanuru of Tamil cankam supplies us a paradigm of high-caste poets, some of them women, who lived in higher rooms, but who were inspired by working bards and their idiom. The late A. K. Ramanujan comments on the Tamil poems that they

… are not the result of rapid composition like oral epics, but of subtle care and reworking ... Yet the authors were close to the stock-in-trade of bards and minstrels who were often their subjects and who were very much alive all around them.

This paradigm allows us to separate the poet from the bard, although both may have worked in the same musical genre. Consider that the Odyssey’s Penelope descends from her loft to critique the performance of a male bard among feasting men (1.328-44). Helen is depicted as the ‘composer’ of an Iliadic web that she has woven and is embroidering, with depictions of the struggles and combat waged on her behalf (III.125-8). And her famous expression to Hector in Book VI is a metapoetic vision of their worthiness to be sung about (VI.357-8):

δᾶερ, ἐπεί σε μάλιστα πόνος φρένας ἀμφιβέβηκεν

εἵνεκ᾽ ἐμεῖο κυνὸς καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρου ἕνεκ᾽ ἄτης,

οἷσιν ἐπὶ Ζεὺς θῆκε κακὸν μόρον, ὡς καὶ ὀπίσσω

ἀνθρώποισι πελώμεθ᾽ ἀοίδιμοι ἐσσομένοισι.

Brother dear, since it is you most of all whose

mind is beset with trouble,

Because of me, the bitch, and because of Alexander’s folly—

We upon whom Zeus has placed an evil fate, so that even in the hereafter

Of humanity we be sung about—songs for those yet to be.

It is precisely aristocratic women, in a warrior society at war, who had the time and the scope to produce and also to critique works of art, who are in fact depicted as doing so, whose view, like Helen’s (III.162 ff.) and Andromache’s (VI.433-9), was synoptic from the battlements and yet particularly invested—and who had rooms of their own.

Consider the simile that describes the pain of Agamemnon’s arm wound (XI.269-272):

As if he were a woman in labor

Struggling with the stabbing pain

Hera’s daughters dispense

When they preside at a childbirth.

As I have indicated, there is a cognitive movement from unknown to known in a simile that leaves both sides of the comparison transformed in the aftermath. Is it conceivable that a male poet could take us to the interiority of Agamemnon’s pain by comparing it to labour pain? What male poet would dare to bridge the unfamiliar to the familiar in this way? Contrast the use of this figure in the prophet Isaiah, who was perhaps contemporary, where the comparate is either psychological or physically interior: ‘Therefore my loins are filled with anguish; pangs have seized me, like the pangs of a woman in travail…’ (13:8; 21:3). The subject is understood to be reduced by the gendering to a shamefully helpless state. Homer’s simile, by contrast, moves to the Εἰλείθυιαι, the divinities who come to be present at childbirth: there is a dignity and a certain mystery in this movement. The simile forges a bond between a female poet and likely a feminine audience—albeit in the sympathy of a misogynist king. Male bards who sing (Achilles in Book IX, for example, and Phemius and Demodocus in the Odyssey) are a part of the tapestry in Homer. They are not necessarily his alter egos. I once knew a student in Chicago who had experienced both an arrow wound and labour pains. She said that they were not alike. What the poet of the Iliad knew was not arrow wounds, or flights of stones from ramparts in war: it was war poetry; it was blanketing snow falls; and it was labour pains.

Consider also the simile from Book XXIII, which describes the distance in a foot-race between the speedy Ajax, son of Oileus, and Odysseus:

ἄγχι μάλ᾽, ὡς ὅτε τίς τε γυναικὸς ἐϋζώνοιο

στήθεός ἐστι κανών, ὅν τ᾽ εὖ μάλα χερσὶ τανύσσῃ

πηνίον ἐξέλκουσα παρὲκ μίτον, ἀγχόθι δ᾽ ἴσχει

στήθεος: ὣς Ὀδυσεὺς θέεν ἐγγύθεν, αὐτὰρ ὄπισθεν

ἴχνια τύπτε πόδεσσι πάρος κόνιν ἀμφιχυθῆναι: (760-4)

very close, close as a fair girdled woman’s

breast is to a weaving rod, when she draws it skilfully in her hands,

dragging the spool past the warp, and she holds it right next

her breast; so close did Odysseus run, and behind

he struck the tracks with his feet before their dust had settled.

Homer then speaks of him breathing down Ajax’ neck. Note the perspective here: perhaps the performer himself looks down the barrel of his staff and draws it to himself. (The classical rhapsode was depicted as bearing a staff as his only prop.) We are looking intimately over the shoulder of the woman. Of course it is always possible for a simile to surprise and move us by comparing two very different things that are both, all the same, familiar. But if I had to bet between settling dust, breathing down the neck and other racetrack clichés, and the sharp rod drawn close to the chest, I would bet that this poet was a weaver, not an athlete.