Homère

Summary

Dominique Pagani sees Homer as a figure about whom little is known, an individual or a collective, the first to write down an oral tradition already sung by the rhapsodes, those "binders" of songs who stitched formulas together12. He stresses that in Homer poetry and music are not separate: a sung speech, accompanied on the lyre, which opens with the invocation to the muse, as with the griots. He also notes the absence of any individual detail in the Iliad and the Odyssey. He returns above all to the Odyssey, the matrix of Western literature: in his view it is not a happy ending, since it lies between two slaughters, the sack of Troy and the massacre of the suitors, which he links to the repetition compulsion34. Lastly, he makes it the model for the journey in Nerval's Angélique, a loop bent between Ilion and Ithaca5, and points to echoes in Ronsard, Nietzsche and Wagner.

1. 1Mythology and truth8 Aug 2015 · 6:59
2. 2#2 From Lévi-Strauss to Nerval, on music3 Dec 2020 · 1:10:50
3. 3#9.15 How can sciences of history be real?18 Feb 2021 · 53:26
4. 4#12 From Kafka to Proust, the dialectical passage from the intermezzo to the perpetuated edge7 Apr 2022 · 20:23
5. 5#9.23 “Ruled like music paper!” Bach, Nerval, Lévi-Strauss9 Jun 2021 · 2:19:31

Summary produced automatically from 54 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.