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Handlungsverläufe vollziehen sich im steten Wechsel von Wort und Tat. Diese sind die einzigen Ausdrucksmittel des Epos.
(Barck 1976: 32) |
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Homeric man, being objective, has no innerness. He expresses himself completely in words and acts, and is thus completely known to his fellows. He has no hidden depths or secret motives; he says and does what he is.
(Redfield 1975: 21) |
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A recurrent element in these quotations is the combination "word and deed". These scholars, recalling Peleus' words in Iliad 9.443 that a hero should be a 'speaker of words and a doer of deeds' ( ), imply that Homeric heroes only act and speak, and, accordingly, that the Homeric text consists only of actions and speeches.2 The most radical of the three scholars just quoted is Redfield, who claims that the Homeric hero "is completely known to his fellows" (my italics). To counter this claim one needs only think of Odysseus' many lying tales in the Odyssey. There are also expressions like ,3 etc. which all suggest that Homeric speakers were able either to speak out or to conceal their thoughts. Fränkel's statement is ambiguous. Does the sentence "er hat keine verborgene Tiefen" betray the same naive credulity in the sincerity of Homeric characters as Redfield's, or does he mean that the interior of Homeric characters remains no secret for the reader? This is at any rate the position of Auerbach in his famous Mimesis:4 |
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. . . Homer's personages vent their inmost heart in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. |
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However, this contention has not gone unchallenged either. In the first place, there is Beßlich's fine study on Odyssean silences, both those mentioned explicitly by the narrator, and those which the reader himself is left to infer. In the second place, there is Griffin's chapter on Homeric characterization in his Homer on Life and Death (1980), in the course of which he deals with places where the narrator himself "explicitly tells us of the psychology underlying the words and acts of characters" and others where the reader is |
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2 Cf. also Mattes (1958) 21, Whitman (1958) 118, Russo and Simon (1968) 478, and De Romilly (1984) 13, 26, 31, 45. |
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3 This expression has, I think, been convincingly analysed by Latacz (1968): the thoughts of a character do not become  , i.e. remain unexpressed. |
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4 Auerbach (1953) 6; cf. Schwinge (1990) 5: "Wenn der Erzähler aber nun . . . innere Vorgänge seiner Personen direkt benennt, so um dem Hörer auch in dieser Hinsicht das Geschehen in jedem einzelnen Fall transparant werden zu lassen; ihn keinen Augenblick einer möglichen Ungewißheit auszuliefern" (my italics). |
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