Apparently the issue is not just a question of memorization. It is also related to a fundamental aspect of oral poetry — the mechanisms of forgetting, which in its turn is not really just a matter of forgetfulness but a much more complicated business. There could be involuntary loss of memory, but at the same time, conscious memory loss is involved. An alleged slip of memory justifyng a new interpretation of the song...
The rhapsode is the main wheel in the machinery of the epic. He is publisher, bookseller, and librarian in one, and also rather more than that: he is a posthumous co-author and, in this capacity, has the right to amend his text. It’s perfectly legal, no one disputes his right, and no one criticizes him, except perhaps his own conscience.
It now seems obvious that the question which formerly seemed fundamental for explaining the Homeric phenomenon — to wit, how many lines could a rhapsode commit to memory (some say six thousand, others eight thousand, or even as many as twelve thousand) — needs to be replaced with a different question; How many lines may a rhapsode wish to forget? Or rather: Can a rhapsode exist without a capacity to forget?
We must stress, in this connection, that we still know very little about the world of the rhapsodes. What sort of people are they? How is their gift acquired? When is their art recognized publicly? On what does their reputation rest? What causes them to return to ordinary life? How are the contests between them held? What are the different styles, or schools, or rivalries between them within this strange universe of recitation? How are the mediocre performers filtered or weeded out? How are criteria of value established?
We’ll try to find out all that when we are there. With a bit of luck, we will manage to enter this universe, and then we shall understand how the yeast was made to rise in the ancient dough. As it always has done. As it did in H’s time.
Just as the governor was about to yawn, he lighted on a passage that had what seemed to him to be a rather literary touch:
For the second time this week, I’ve had a bit of trouble with my eyes. The first time, it was like a cloud in front of me. I thought it must be from too much reading and took no notice. Today it happened again, but it was slightly different. It was as if I was looking through a broken windowpane that would not stop wobbling. It felt as though the vibration was damaging my retina. After which my sight stayed misty for quite a while. I must go and see an optician.
As always in such circumstances the governor had the impression that he could smell his wife’s powder. He could see it sprinkled on her smooth belly, just where the pubic hair began but carnal desire instead of slowing down his breathings as it usually did’ filled his eyes with cruelty.
To ward off any evil imaginings, he struggled to focus his mind again on his utterly boring reading.
There are three hypotheses put forward by German scholars, who were the first to study the common motifs in the Greek and Albanian traditions, the migration of material from one mythology to another, its splicing, transferal, and cross-fertilization. The first view is that the process of the creation of epic poetry has come to an end in Albania. The second view is that the process is still alive. And the third view is a compromise; even if the age of the Albanian epic is effectively over, the embers are still hot and could throw out some last bright sparks. The same scholar, takes the view that even though the production of new epics is dying out, the foundry itself, however derelict it may have become, is still actually there.
So we must hurry. Make haste before the embers go cold! Before the foundry collapses!
“Before the embers go cold …,” the governor repeated to himself. In his mind, which had been shaped by detective mysteries “embers” summoned up images of sleepers, agents who had been put in place long ago., then of a nunnery, then of an old conspiracy, then, suddenly changing direction, it took his mind back to his wife’s sexual organ.
“Stop that now!" he exclaimed, and put his head down into the papers again. He would force himself to read them, even if they were in hieroglyphics!
How does living material, on more prosaically, inanimate raw material, bow does material in general enter the epic machinery that turns it into art?
That is another chapter, just as fascinating as the question of forgetting.
The Germans claim firmly that you can still find Albanian rhapsodes who convert contemporary events into epic poetry (who can Homerize modern life). It would be really extraordinarily good fortune to see such a miracle happening before our eyes.
Every time the question of this transformation arises, I think back to an old, long-abandoned tannery on the outskirts of Dublin, not far from where I lived. That’s how I imagine the ancient Homeric workshop.
When an event goes through those old rollers, belts, and vats of dark and sinister liquid, what happens to it? How do the rhapsodes' lungs, brains, fantasies, passions, and even their heredity contribute to the process?
It is all rather like an embalming process. Yet it’s not a corpse that is being treated, but a piece of life, an event, most often an unhappy one.
At bottom, epic poetry itself, seen as a whole, is no more than a kind of morgue. It’s no coincidence if the climate of the epic is always cold, indeed colder than cold. The temperature is always below zero. Moreover, there is a formulaic phrase that comes back time and again, like a refrain: This sun shines brightly but gives little warmth….
The governor reread the preceding passage and then underlined the words in the middle of the page’ dark and sinister liquid, trying all the while to keep his mind off Daisy’s body. But he couldn’t because the notes became once again’ just like a novel …
I can’t get to sleep. The lights of the city twinkle through the windowpanes. As they go out one by one, I feel as if I'm floating in the Milky Way.
There are billboards out there, one advertising ketchup and another vitamins that are good for the eyes. My optician prescribed that for me.
I imagine our two names, Bill Norton and Max Ross, alongside Homer’s (good God, like two assistants helping a blind man across the street!) in newspaper headlines and on the illuminated news display.
"Yes, go blind, then the two of you blinder than your hero!” the governor exclaimed and enjoyed the relief that he always felt when he uttered a curse.
"Well now …,” he said a few seconds later, as he came across the words happy day. “Let’s see what made our two dickey birds so happy."
Oh, happy day! Day of surprises. And of luck.
I could easily believe in divine intervention. Can’t be a coincidence that the magical elements magnés and phone,which make up the original word for the machine, seem to come from ancient times.
What has brought magic to this day, and to our forthcoming pilgrimage, and to our whole enterprise, is the word made up from magnetic and sound, the magnetophone, or, as the manufacturers call it for simplicity’s sake, the tape recorder.
It is a machine that records the human voice. That you can take with you, wherever you go. That not only records but plays back, as often as you want … Ifs exactly what we need! Like a gift from the heavens! Sent to us by providence! From Olympus!
Hmm … The governor stifled a cough. So that’s all their machine could do He had been imagining all sorts of things: a cinema camera, an oilfield detector a bomb intended to blow up Parliament…
Careful now! he warned himself as his eyes fell on the name of the king:
We are also learning more and more about Albania. A small country with an ancient population. Tragic history. To begin with, a European country. Then Asian overlords. Return to Europe in the twentieth century. Half of all Albanians live-outside the current borders.
Apart from the epic, which constitutes its principal treasure, in our view, Albania also has chrome and oil And a king, Zog, whose name means “bird.” King Bird the First.
I had another appointment with the optician. Got a fresh prescription.
Max is having problems with his wife.
We’re trying to get t
he money together so as to buy the tape recorder as soon as possible.
We are revising all our ideas in the light of the machine. Oddly enough, bringing a tape recorder into our work is no trouble at all The device fits our project so well that it seems as if we had designed it all from the start with the machine in mind. As if, subconsciously, it had preexisted its own invention …
The governor skipped through several more unutterably boring sheets. His eyelids were drooping but he sat up with a start when he came across the words minister and spy.
"You’re getting closer and closer, my friends," he mumbled as he reached for his cigarettes. "You’re walking right into the noose."
As he read on he said those words to himself over and over, but without really knowing whether the noose was the Albanian Legation in Washington or Albania itself.
We just got back from Washington, where we submitted our applications for Albanian visas. I can’t bide the fact that we were rather disappointed by the way the Albanian Legation treated us. Not at all warm. On the contrary, the atmosphere was all suspicion and mistrust.
The plenipotentiary, who saw us in person, took our breath away. The representative of this partly archaic and partly grotesque little monarchy turned out to be intelligent, crafty, and witty, to have an extraordinary knowledge of world literature, to speak all the main European languages (including Swedish). He was even the friend and patron of the French poet Apollinaire, and he pokes fun at everything, most especially at his own country and its people. Although we were trying to be as vague as possible about the reasons for our visit, we couldn’t help mentioning the name of Homer — and the diplomat interjected:
“Did you know that some people claim that in the first line of the Iliad, “Menin aeide, thea, Péleíadéo Achiléos” (‘Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, the word ménin, as you can see for yourselves, is the Albanian word meni, meaning ‘resentment’? Which means that of the first three or four words of world literature, the first and unfortunately the bitterest is in Albanian…. Ha ha!”
Then he went on talking about Albania with such cutting irony that in the end Max said to him:
“Your Excellency, I find it hard to know when you are speaking seriously and when you are joking. For instance, what you said about the word mení, which you find in Homer — is that a learned jest or is it… ?”
The diplomat’s eyes flashed with a fearsome mixture of intelligence, cynicism, bitterness, and malice.
“As far as the word is concerned, I believe that what I told you is in effect correct, and yet..."
He fell silent and his face darkened, with only a twinkle of humor left in the corner of his eye, while his pupils shone with a fierce glow. After the words “and yet,” there was a long pause, which became ever more menacing, so that for the second time, unable to bear this lapse in conversation, Max interrupted:
“And yet, Your Excellency?”
“And yet” — the diplomat came to the point at last — “the Albanians of today maybe have nothing at all in common with the way you imagine them.”
“We don’t imagine anything at all, I answered. “So far, you are the first Albanian we have ever met, and I can’t hide the fact that we are, well, overwhelmed."
The diplomat began to laugh again, while the consul, who had been present throughout without saying a word, stared at us with an obviously suspicious eye. When he glanced sideways at the maps that Max had taken out of his briefcase to show the plenipotentiary, I suddenly thought: Good God, of course — the consul takes us for spies!
“The consul assumed we were secret agents,” I said to Max as we walked away from the legation. “I realized that too,” he replied. “But what do you think of the plenipotentiary?”
"Amazing!"
"Amazing?" said Max. "That’s an understatement...”
The notes ended there. The governor rubbed his eyes. Funny business, he thought. His mind felt a complete blank.
Something attracted his attention to the window. It was the rain that the wind knocked against the pane from time to time. Dawn had risen on one of those really filthy days that give you somber thoughts, like a debt to settle next week or the fear of having a cancer you’ve not yet mentioned to anyone.
“'The consul assumed we were secret agents,’ I said to Max...” The governor read these words over and over, shaking his head. “What crooks!” he mumbled. “They think they can cover their tracks by planting words like agent and spy I Like pyromaniacs who give the first alert! What they’re trying to say is, As we are as white as the driven snow, we are not afraid to say the word. But they can’t pull the wool over my eyes! They must really be spies, and maybe far worse. All this nonsense about Homer and the rhapsodes is only camouflage, hiding their true, murky mission. They wrote those notes up on purpose and left them on purpose in their suitcases, so that even a dolt like Pjeter Prenushi would have no difficulty getting hold of them.
“You cretin!” the governor said aloud to himself, bursting with anger. “You utter idiot! You gave me the envelope, proud as Punch, as if to say, See what Í can do! Ah, you poor misguided fool! They ran rings around you, they took you for a ride, you blockhead! But it won’t work with me. Oh no. I can see that all these scribbles are just eyewash. Let’s wait and see what Dull has to tell us….”
As usual, the thought of Dull calmed the governor’s nerves. It was not for nothing that he liked to say Dull was his balm, the secret of his restful nights. Every time he felt a sudden anxiety, the kind of anxiety that is all the more troublesome for being without obvious cause, he would think of Dull squeezed into some chimney or squatting on some blackened beam, and his nerves would be calmed down. He is listening, the governor would think; he is tracking down evil….
"Whereas you, Pjeter, birdbrain that you are, you’ve swallowed it hook, line, and sinker!" The governor roared out loud. “They shoved a load of paperwork under your nose, and you said. Thank you, that’ll do nicely! Filthy spies! Bastards! …”
The governor was overcome with waves of anger, rising from his gut. He thought he could hear the shutters banging again, but it was the door, which had just opened. Startled, he saw that Daisy had come in.
Still warm from bed, wearing only her transparent nightdress, Daisy had crept up to him on tiptoe. Good God, what softness she exudes! He was right to tell her that she was much prettier half asleep than in any of her fancy outfits….
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
He covered up the documents with an almost automatic movement of his hand, even though her sight was still too clouded with sleep for her to make out any words.
“As you can see, I'm working …”
“You gave me a fright. Has anything happened?”
He stroked her hak “Go back to bed. It’s still very early in the morning."
The wind rustled and hissed outside. The governor watched his wife’s hips swing provocatively as she left the room, but his eyes glowed with an icy stare.
Somewhere in those papers there was an allusion to fecundity, or fecundation, something about getting on with it before it was too late. … There was even something about Homeric seed!
He riffled through the papers in a frenzy, Ah, there it was. He had remembered correctly, except that the word used wasn’t seed, it was marrow. But didn’t that come to the same thing, really?
Then he understood the real cause of his muffled fury. Every time he heard mention of sterility or fertility, he felt as if allusions were being made to his wife. Or even worse: he imagined that whoever used such words desired Daisy and was yearning to pour his own sperm into her. To make her with child … before it was too late … before menopause set in … before dusk.
Hadn’t one of those foreigners made eyes at her during the soiree? It was plain as a pikestaff, he realized, plain as a pikestaff. He was quite prepared to believe that they had come from the other end of the earth for the sole purpose of sleeping with his wife.
Curiously, the governor’s jealousy was tinged with a strange kind of desire, which welled up so strongly that he nearly fainted from it.
The distant bell of the Franciscans” chapel spread its gloomy resonance over the rain-sodden town’ as if to insist on its own repentance for some past failure. He imagined Brother Zef celebrating the morning service with eyes all red and swollen from a sleepless night; perhaps the image of one of the nuns had crossed his mind briefly. That would account for his having translating the Irishmen’s passionate language with such ardor.
The governor’s thoughts returned to Daisy’s alabaster body, which doubtless made him an object of envy. Surely people dreamed of possessing his wife and making her pregnant. …
He was disturbed by a feeling, different from his usual desires that ran through him from head to toe. Getting up from his desk, he went noiselessly into the bedroom and gazed at Daisy. She appeared to be sleeping peacefully again, and despite her seeming more desirable than ever he did not dare wake her.
Daisy was not sleeping. When she heard the door creak on its hinges, she shut her eyes and slowed her breathing. She must have had an erotic dream in the first light of morning; she still felt limp.
A gloomy day had dawned outside. Even the chapel bells sounded as if they were in pain.
She wanted to cross herself, but she was quite numb in the bed’s warmth and had lost all wish to execute the slightest physical movement. Instead of making the sign of the cross, her hand glided lazily over her breast and then her belly. She was on the brink of tears.
Bill, three hundred yards away, did cross himself. He was only half awake, but even though he barely heard the church bells, his hand moved automatically to his forehead, his chest, each shoulder…
It had been a truly hellish night for him. Only in the small hours had the anxiety that had racked every part of his brain finally subsided and given him some peace. In the faint light of dawn, he could make out the dull gray mass of the metal case containing the recording machine. Hi there, buddy, he thought, with a feeling of calm and joy. He liked the peace that the day’s dawning brought him. Even the bugs seemed to be drowsing; they were certainly less ferocious now.