It has been suggested that the in situ method limits the Sentence to the present and thereby excludes the past. This is not the case. The opening six books of the epic (Sleep, O, Light, U, Need, A) do not yet employ the method, which occurs for the first time in Revolution. The next book, Each, like Magic, Or and This (i.e., ten of the 26 books in the Sentence) eschew the in situ method for other techniques.
Even those works that do employ in situ description, however, are scarcely limited to, or by, it. Half a dozen books — those in HERMES — for example, interweave wisdom texts; another four — the even-numbered books of APHRODITE (Possibly, Renewed, Divine and This) — evoke “hypertexts”; in other words, they imitate the person and master work of the greatest — mostly western — authors of the past.
Second, my imitation of Homer and of Vergil’s demise, has been recast using in situ materials, but its “present,” as in Joyce’s Ulysses, is only part of the story. As with Vergil’s Aeneis, the literary past (Apollonius), present (Vergil himself) and future (Dante) are as important as the political (Egypt, Rome and Italy). To represent Sentence of the Gods as limited to the description of actuality is an error.
Recently Gregory Nagy has written illuminatingly about both Iliad and Odyssey. Perhaps some of his comments, which I will quote at length, may help the reader better understand my relationship to Past and Future. In a chapter called “Lyric and Greek Myth” Nagy has interesting things to say about the role of myth and ritual in Homeric epic, and his remarks are applicable to Sentence of the Gods as well.
Nagy speaks of the oral performance of Homer as “a ritual enactment of myth.” Her, the first book in HERMES, embodies Hesiod’s mythology; Second, its final book, enacts that mythology through its imitation of Homer. (Likewise the ritual enactment of the Homeric Second in the Hesiodic Her.) Of Homer, says Nagy, “to perform this epic is to activate myth, and such activation is fundamentally a matter of ritual.”
Taking Austin’s “speech act” in the sense of “doing something in the act of speaking of something,” Nagy adds: “In Homeric poetry the word for such a performative act is muthos [from which our modern word myth].” He then offers “a working definition of muthos as it functions within the epic frame: ‘a speech-act indicating authority, performed at length . . . with a focus on attention to every detail.’”
“Attention to every detail” characterizes the in situ description in Sentence of the Gods, especially its elaboration of Homer in Second,1&2. These two parts of the book deliberately emphasize the gods Ares and Hermes (Second concludes the ARES sequence and — in this progressive direction — initiates the HERMES; the two sequences here overlap). Nagy will show how Apollo and Aphrodite also affect Achilles.
But now he explains that Achilles “as an epic warrior is a therapon or ‘ritual substitute’ for Ares, by virtue of becoming identical to the war god at the moment of his death. In the Iliad the relationship between Achilles and Ares, however, is expressed only by way of an intermediary, in this case Patroklos.” Achilles’ dearest friend “is described not as the therapon of Ares but rather as the therapon of Achilles.”
“In a sense,” then, “Patroklos is not only the hero’s ‘attendant’ but also his ‘ritual substitute,’ since he actually dies for Achilles.” Achilles, Nagy concludes, “will die indirectly as the therapon of Ares through the intermediacy of Patroklos, who had died as the therapon of Achilles.” In my autobiographical re-rendering of Homer one might say that I too become Patroklos and, through him, Achilles, Ares and Homer.
Professor Nagy proceeds to argue that Achilles should also be understood as a therapon, or avatar, of Apollo, and Briseis, his girlfriend, as a therapon of Aphrodite. When Briseis, he notes, “begins to sing her choral lyric song of lament for Patrolos, she is likened to Aphrodite. In her lament she sings her bittersweet sorrow not only over the death of Patroklos but also over the death of her fondest hope.”
Since Patroklos, when he was alive, “had promised to arrange for her a marriage to Achilles, now that he is dead, the hope of such a promise is gone forever. So,” Nagy argues, “the Iliad pictures Patroklos as a ritual substitute for Achilles in courtship as well as in war.” As part of the cultural cornerstone of the Sentence, Second,1 accordingly looks forwards to APHRODITE and backwards to SOL (Apollo).
Nagy again: “What makes this destiny of Apollo so personalized is his special connection with poetry, a medium signaled as kleos aphthiton, ‘unwilting glory.’ The divine medium is Apollo, the god of poetry . . . conceived as lyric. To put it another way,” says Nagy, “this poetry is the form of epic that is not yet differentiated from lyric [cp. the lyric SOLUNA, written before the Sentence was conceptualized].
“Apollo is the god of an older form of epic that is still sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. [Correspondingly,] Achilles is the hero of an older form of epic. In this role, he is imagined as looking exactly like Apollo — beardless and wearing long hair [cp. the figure in 10 FINGERS, 7].” Like Apollo, Achilles is “a beautiful promise in the making,” the promise of a “telos or ‘fulfillment’ realized only in performance.”
Second, then, may be regarded as the fulfillment of SOL, and of LUNA as well, of the “pre-epic” phase, so to speak of the Sentence comprised by SOLUNA. What for Homer was “performance,” revision is for the modern epic writer. Nagy adds: “There is a visual signature of the shared role of god and hero in the Iliad [cp. MM as Sol Invictus, in Sleep, O and Light]. Homer represents Achilles, Apollo-like, as singing to the tune of a lyre that he himself plays.” Thus Homer = Achilles = Apollo = MM.
What is true of Homer’s identification with the hero in the Iliad is true a fortiori of his procedure in the Odyssey. If Achilles is the lyric poet of “pre-epic,” then Odysseus is the narrative master of “post-epic” as represented by his Odyssean tales. In telling his own story the hero tells Homer’s. In retelling Homer’s, MM tells his own. “The epic master myth,” Nagy says pointedly, “must be both heard and seen.”
For this reason in Second I liberally quote Homer’s epics, so that his voice (albeit in translation) may be heard. To revise his work I traveled to his world, so that its actuality might be seen. Though Vergil traveled to Greece four times and Ovid too may have visited, I traveled more extensively: I visited Turkey and Thrace, thence retracing Odysseus’ and Telemachos’ routes as recounted by Homer.
Neither Vergil nor Ovid — much less Dante or Milton — likely toured the Aegean or saw Sparta and Pylos, as did I. (Aeneas’ experience is but Vergil’s invention; Ovid’s retellings of Homer, a literary parody.) Later poets in the western canon are even farther removed from the geographical theater of Homer’s heroes, until, that is, Goethe and Byron visit Greece and Merrill takes up residence in Athens.
“The age of epic heroes,” says Nagy, winding up his second chapter, “is a sacred world of myth that must be set apart from the everyday world of the present.” Here the critic of the Sentence implicitly concurs. “The mythology of epic heroes must distance itself from the present by holding on to a past far removed from that of [a modern] auditor attending to the glories of heroes.” Hence my multiple registers.
“To hold on to such a past, this mythology must show not only that an age of heroes had once existed but also — and just as important[ly] — that such an age no longer exists.” (Joyce demotes Homer by transferring Bloom’s Odyssey to Dublin.) “It must privilege what is past over what is present, and it must remake that past into a sacred age of heroes.” Hence my reversion to the Homeric theater.
“Homeric poetry,” Nagy concludes, “as the primary epic mediation of myth, remakes the perceived past in such a sacred age by deliberately privileging realities perceived as belonging to a past age of heroes.” Without Homer’s sacred presence this would be impossible. “Such realities can be tested by comparing them with realities ascertained independently by empirical approaches.” Hence my research.