Epic Memory: 1953 and Today: a Connection with a Folklorist in Crete

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James A. Notopoulos was the Hobart Professor of Classics at Trinity College in the 1950’s. Between 1952 and 1953, Notopoulos, building on the work of Classicists Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, sought out contemporary examples of heroic poetry in Greece as a comparative basis for accessing the oral character of the Homeric poems. His study of contemporary poetic traditions led him to Western Crete where he recorded a number of epic poems, including The Song of Daskaloyannis, Erotokritos, and various portions of rizitika associated with the Allied withdrawal and German occupation during WWII. Notopoulos’ perspective relegated the oral performer to a secondary position as analog. In other words, the study of these contemporary forms was a means to a particular end: in Notopoulos’ case, ethno-historical comparison the modern epic tradition is utilized as a basis for a historical understanding of the penultimate prototypes of Homer.

As a folklorist, Notopoulos approached oral tradition from the perspective of historical continuity. In this respect, folklore was used as a means of validating a Modern Greek rural identity rooted in the classical past. Quoting Notopoulos:

"The Greek village is a society completely traditional and formulaic in all its activities. The peasant is born into a formulaic tradition of attitudes, beliefs, expressions whose roots go back ultimately to classical Greece and immediately to Byzantium which, inheriting the classical tradition, moulded it, along with other historical influences, to make modern Greece." (1959, 3).

This sentiment is a classic example of the “survivalist thesis”: rural Greek communities are held to possess social and cultural traits that survived from the classical past. Michael Herzfeld in Ours Once More set out a critique of the ways in which Greek folklorists “constructed cultural continuity” in support of their “national identity” (1981, 4). This is oral tradition made history, a history which serviced a dominant ideology intended to legitimate the Greek nation-state. There is a particular modality of history which binds itself to such temporal continuities. If, following the work of Pierre Nora, one holds history and memory as contradictory concepts, then these oral poetics need to be reassessed in light of memory. This is the notion of memory taken as multiple and as subversive. It works “against the effective (historical) illusions by which humanity protects itself” (Foucault 1974, 162). It provides a way forward.

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