Parataxis in Homer: A New Approach to Homeric Literary Criticism

Article published in the «Transactions of the American philological association» — 1949. — Vol. 80 — pp. 1-23This paper poses the question, do the same principles of literary criticism apply to both written and oral literature? The answer is no. Plato and Aristotle have fathered the concept of organic unity which ultimately arose in pre-Socratic philosophy and Hippo- cratic medicine. In view of the oral nature of the Homeric poetry is this criterion valid? A survey of the literature up to the middle of the fifth century reveals various degrees of unity involved, but indicates that the predominant type is a paratactic and inorganic flexible unity as observed in the Homeric poems. Parataxis of style and of structure began with oral poe-try and influenced the structure of post-Homeric literature, even if it was a written literature. If this is the case Homeric scholarship must realize that the time has come to lay the foundations of a literary criticism, non-Aristotelian in character and emanating mainly from the physi- ognomy of oral literature which differs in style and form from written literature. This paper is a prolegomenon to the formulation of such a non-Aristotelian Poetics, with an attempt to understand the grounds for parataxis in oral literature, the misunderstanding of which has led to Procrustean criticism of Homer in the past.