Hearing Homer's Song by Robert Kanigel

Author:Robert Kanigel [Kanigel, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

From time to time, Murko nodded to Homer and the Greek epics. He observed that likenesses between Homer and local epic tradition had been noted as early as the eighteenth century; that local blind singers had sometimes been compared to Homer; that the songs of Muslim singers especially tended to be long, sometimes needing two or three nights to sing, and that one of them filled forty-two pages of printed text—longer, he noted, than any one “book” (or chapter) of the Iliad or Odyssey.

If the variegated history, colorful folk cultures, and tantalizing nods to Homer in Murko’s book failed to conjure up enough of the exotic to whet Parry’s appetite, Murko’s photos alone would have been enough. They showed ruggedly handsome men with deep, hooded eyes, strong and proud. They sported extravagant mustaches. They wore fezzes, vests, and leggings. They posed beside stone walls or in village squares with their gusles, the rude one-stringed instruments they played as they sang. Together, these oral verse makers stood for the untamed countryside in which they lived. Theirs was a poetry not of writers stuck in studios and garrets but of real men, mostly illiterate, their songs and stories telling of warriors, horses, and duels, gorgeous overblown hospitality, female grace, manly feats of bravery.

Parry’s romantic streak left him susceptible. He had grown up with his father’s stories of the sea and of Japan, a taste for the odd and the alien; one among the family’s photos shows his father, in uniform, standing straight and tall beside a Japanese man in ceremonial kimono. In Berkeley, Alfred Kroeber and others among Marian’s anthropologist friends helped legitimize intellectual work in exotic settings. At Harvard, where Parry was remembered for the beard and beret he wore for a time, Harry Levin would picture him as a “scholar-gypsy whom no amount of composition papers and committee meetings could tame,” alive with wanderlust; certainly he was not one of those Americans who could journey abroad and come back as he had left, contemptuous of the world’s wanton strangeness, sure that American ways were best. Parry would be remembered for his fascination with Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence’s 1926 account of his part in helping the Arabs defeat the Turks during the Great War; indeed, Parry’s interest in Lawrence of Arabia suggested to Mrs. Parry’s interviewer Pamela Newhouse that maybe he was just “more comfortable in a primitive culture than in the civilized.”

Victor Bérard had been troubled by Parry’s determination to grasp the Odyssey through language alone. But now, Parry was cutting across old disciplinary lines; anthropological ideas and sensibilities were in the air and he breathed them in. His many anthropology courses at Cal led one scholar, Juan Garcia, to see Parry’s turn to Yugoslavia as an entirely natural response to ideas he’d absorbed from Kroeber. In Paris, according to another scholar, Thérèse de Vet, he may have been influenced by Marcel Mauss, the pioneer French ethnologist; years before, as part of ethnographic research in French

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