SOURCE: Rabel, Robert J. “Plot and Point of View in the Iliad.” In Plot and Point of View in the Iliad, pp.1-32. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, Rabel differentiates between the author of the Iliad and the epic's narrator, commenting on shifting modes of perception in the poem, particularly in relation to its treatment of the heroic code.]

[T]he term point of view refers most directly to visual perspective, the place from which an object is viewed. In the most literal sense of the term, only the Muse(s)-narrator and the characters of the poem have points of view. The poet lacks visual perspectives, as Homer himself acknowledges in his second prooemium in the Iliad, the invocation of the Muses preceding the so-called Catalog of Ships in book 2:

ὑμει̑s γὰρ θεαί ἐστε, πάρεστἐ τε, ἴστἐ τε πάντα,
ἡμει̑s δὲ κλἐοs οῒον ἀκούομεν οὐδἐ τι ἴδμεν.

(2.485-86)

[you are gods, and attend all things and know all things, but we hear only the report and have no knowledge.]¹

Visual point of view requires physical presence in the world of the story.² Thus the Muse(s)-narrator has personally witnessed and transmits to the audience through the poet a vivid account of the making of the great shield of Achilleus; similarly, Hephaistos, Thetis, Achilleus, and the warriors on the battlefield of the Iliad actually see the shield; however, the poet lacks a visual perspective.

Of course, it must be recognized that the vantage point and the act of seeing may both be metaphorical. In the second sense of the term, point of view is a figurative expression, referring to the ideology or conceptual system through which an individual filters facts or impressions. In this sense, the poet, as well as the Muse(s)-narrator and the characters of the drama, may also have a point of view uniquely his or her own. As we will see in chapter 6, Homer has a point of view on the meaning of the shield of Achilleus that seems to differ markedly from the views expressed in the text by either the Muse(s)-narrator or the characters. In this second sense of the term, which I will call conceptual point of view, the Iliad gives expression to a number of different ideas about the meaning of the “heroic code,” which plays such a large part in the development of the poem.

In a final extension of the term, we may speak of interest point of view, which designates the manner in which self-interest influences what is thought or felt. Thus both the poet and the Muse(s)-narrator lack personal involvement in what transpires within the Iliad. Their points of view are literary-aesthetic; they are concerned with producing a meaningful and beautiful story. In this regard, the Muse(s)-narrator engages in what we may call narrative-as-art. In contrast, when a character within the drama acts or tells a story, he or she acts or uses narrative for a number of practical purposes, reflecting a personal stake in what transpires. Stories told within the Iliad take the form of narrative-as-action. In Homer, narrative-as-action usually concerns itself with the performance of acts involving more than the telling of an aesthetically pleasing story. Just as importantly, narrative-as-action often entails a certain element of risk.³ For example, in book 1, the Muse(s)-narrator tells the story of Chryses and Apollo from a literary-aesthetic point of view, while later in the book Achilleus retells the same story with more practical intent. In the process, Achilleus tries to excuse his conduct during the assembly of book 1, condemn the actions of Agamemnon, and persuade his mother to seek the intervention of Zeus. Achilleus' interest point of view … greatly influences the shape that his story takes.

Though critics at least since the time of Plato have been accustomed to refer to the narrator of the Iliad as the poet,⁴ my failure to conform to common practice in this regard arises not only from a wish to maintain narratological precision.⁵ The distinction between the poet and his êthos, the Muse(s)-narrator, is essential, I think, for a proper appreciation of the pervasiveness and subtlety of the system of points of view in the poem.

When I speak of the “narrator” of the Iliad, I mean to designate the Muse or Muses, whom the poet directly addresses in various prooemia, seeking from them not inspiration, I think, but rather information.⁶ They are the primary tellers of the tale. The narrator of Greek epic is explicitly identified and invoked by the poet; thus she emerges as a more recognizable presence than the fictional, third-person narrator of the novel, whom theorists have always had a difficult time characterizing adequately: witness T. Mann's rather vague reference to the narrator of the novel as “der Geist der Erzählung” [the Spirit of Narration].⁷

The word narrative is being used in this book only in the technical sense employed by Aristotle in the Poetics, referring to what G. Genette has called “narrative statement, the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events.”⁸ Narrative requires the activity of a narrator;⁹ the speeches of the characters of the Iliad are not a part of the poem's narrative. Character speech in the Iliad is unmediated, direct discourse, as Aristotle saw.

When I speak of the “poet” of the Iliad, I mean not the flesh-and-blood poet or poets who created the work but rather the “implied author,” the official version of himself or herself that an author creates within a work.¹⁰ Chatman's description of the implied author of a novel can also be applied, with an important qualification, to what we may call the “implied poet” of the Iliad:

He is “implied,” that is, reconstructed by the reader from the narrative. He is not the narrator, but rather the principle that invented the narrator, along with everything else in the narrative, that stacked the cards in this particular way, had these things happen to these characters, in these words or images. Unlike the narrator, the implied author can tell us nothing. He, or better, it has no voice, no direct means of communicating. It instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices, by all the means it has chosen to let us learn.¹¹

The implied poet of Homeric epic differs from the implied author of a novel in at least one significant way. As we will see in the following chapters, implied poets actually speak. Thus Aristotle rightly directs our attention to Homer's various prooemia as examples of nonrepresentational poets' speech. We will make use of the utterances of the poet in the attempt to understand his own point of view as distinct from that of the narrator or the characters.

.....

In different ways both the Muse(s)-narrator and the poet manipulate point of view to discover and define the meaning of the Iliad, placing various ways of thinking in competing and complementary relationships with one another. For her part, the Muse(s)-narrator maintains an ironic distance from the attitudes and values of the world of the characters of the Iliad.¹² Her irony is “stable” in the sense defined by W. Booth; that is, she makes an implied claim for the superiority of her own point of view when discrepancies arise between her vision and perspective, on the one hand, and the words and deeds of the characters, on the other.¹³ The Muse(s)-narrator thus produces a sophisticated and compelling analysis of the tragic limitations of life in accordance with the heroic ethic. In this regard, we must note that she has structured the Iliad as a double-plotted work, with the wrath of Achilleus furnishing the major plot, and with the Trojan War unfolding in tandem within a subplot. …¹⁴ Both events are plotted in three similar stages that run in parallel tracks, and at certain points, as we will see, they reflect, reduplicate, or offer important commentary on one another.

In the case of the wrath, Achilleus becomes angry with Agamemnon in the assembly of book 1 and withdraws from the fighting, making no plans to return to battle for the foreseeable future. However, his initial anger over the theft of a woman only temporarily masks more difficult questions of heroic honor and proper compensation, and these come to the fore eventually in book 9, increasing the intensity of his wrath. In the second stage of his anger, which commences in book 9, Achilleus makes plans to return to battle, but only at the last moment, when Hektor is burning the Achaian ships. However, when Patroklos dies, Achilleus gives up his anger against Agamemnon in the formal assembly of book 19. In the third, most intense stage of his wrath, he directs an awful predatory violence against Hektor, seeking revenge for the slaying of Patroklos. Now he plays an active role in the fighting, as savior of the Achaian host rather than its destroyer. In the narrator's view, as we will see, Achilleus' course of action in each of the three phases of his wrath is determined by the influence of a different paradigmatic figure whom he interprets as offering an exemplum for his own conduct: in the first phase (in book 1), the figure is Chryses; in the second (in book 9), Meleagros; and in the third (in book 18), Herakles. In each case, however, conformity to his self-chosen paradigm proves fruitless in achieving his intended goal. Three times he surrenders to others an individual's prerogative of determining action in accordance with his or her own basic nature and assessment of circumstance. In other words, Achilleus repeatedly allows his fate to be determined by the external contingency of conveniently available models.¹⁵

The narrator uses the subplot to generalize from the story of Achilleus' wrath a diagnosis of the weaknesses common to heroic motivation in general.¹⁶ By interspersing it within the plot, the Muse presents the history of the Trojan War as following a trajectory and course of development similar to the story of Achilleus' wrath. The war is thus marked by the same ascending level of violence and bitter feeling that characterizes the wrath and also by the same lack of stable conviction in the choice of goal and purpose. Thus Helen serves as the object of contention between the two armies until the duel between Paris and Menelaos in book 3, the futile outcome of which cancels any hope of a quick conclusion to the war. Afterward, in a second and more bitter phase of fighting, the heroes, poised between total victory and ignominious defeat, ignore the question of the disposition of Helen and contend rather for honor and glory. In the process, they articulate from various conceptual points of view a number of personal codes of heroism throughout books 4-12. Taken together, these codes serve to enlarge our understanding of Achilleus' attempt in book 9 to formulate the poem's most complex and interesting version of heroism. Finally, a desire for revenge on behalf of friends and kin first emerges as a major motif in the poem within the subplot in book 16. This third, more bitter and climactic period of fighting nicely adumbrates and prepares the way for the final stage of Achilleus' wrath, when, though still fighting for honor and glory, he abandons all sense of heroic chivalry and directs an awful predatory violence against his foe. Plot and subplot are thus constructed to follow the same general lines of development.¹⁷

Within the subplot, the narrator sets the ideals and vocabulary of a competitive form of heroism against a more cooperative version of the code. Competitive heroism sets heroes against one another—and sometimes against their fathers—in a contest for the winning of individual glory. Cooperative heroism, in contrast, stresses that glory belongs to all the generations of a family and is won through the joint efforts of comrades supporting one another in heroic endeavor. The narrator's purpose, I argue, is to reveal the contingencies that lead heroes to adopt whatever version of the code they happen to espouse at a given moment. Victory or defeat on the battlefield serves as the major determinant of a hero's conceptual point of view regarding the meaning of the heroic ethic. In victory, the heroes of the Iliad speak the vocabulary of competitive heroism; in defeat, their thoughts turn to the need for joint endeavor. In other words, like Achilleus, the heroes of the poem's subplot determine their conduct and define their selfhood largely by the accidents of contingent circumstance rather than by any deeply held set of inner convictions.

Plot and subplot exist in a state of tension with each other. The complex machinery of the poem's double plot manifests itself most especially at the beginning and end of the story of Achilleus' wrath. Events within the subplot twice threaten to short-circuit the development of the major plot. First, the Achaians threaten to go home in book 2, abandoning the war entirely and thus frustrating Achilleus' plans for revenge. In book 3 their desire for closure seems to infect the Trojans as well, and the united will of both armies threatens to settle the main issue of the war, the disposition of Helen, through a duel between Paris and Menelaos. In both books, timely divine intervention is required for the continuation of the subplot and, therefore, of the plot itself. The proper consummation of the story of Achilleus' wrath demands not only that the war continue but that further attempts at compromise and reconciliation between the armies be effectively forestalled. “The subplot,” P. Brooks rightly says, speaking of the novel genre, “stands as one means of warding off the danger of short-circuit, assuring that the main plot will continue through to the right end.”¹⁸ The narrator of the Iliad is especially artful here in the development of the subplot, using it first to threaten the short-circuiting of the plot and then to guarantee its proper development.

Similarly, the workings of the double plot manifest themselves at the conclusion of the epic. As W. Empson saw, the double plot furnishes a convenient device for the telling of the same story twice with two endings.¹⁹ In book 24, the narrator presents Achilleus as achieving maturity and an autonomy of thought conspicuously lacking from his actions and deliberations earlier in the poem. Now he acts not in accordance with heroic exempla but with the dictates of his own good nature. The narrator seems to believe that in the end Achilleus proves himself a hero not by acting like Chryses, Meleagros, or Herakles but by being true to himself. The narrator's understanding of Achilleus' “heroic” achievement in book 24 is significantly enhanced as we contemplate the kinship in shared suffering that he achieves with Priam at the conclusion of the poem. The narrator's plot thus manages to find a peaceful resolution that cannot be achieved in the subplot, the Trojan War at large, which is fated to continue beyond the limits of the poem and to end finally in the destruction of Troy.

In the failure of the hero to profit from examples provided by others, the narrator, as we will see, constructs a radical critique of life lived in accordance with traditional views of heroism. … I will suggest that the narrator's analysis of the character of Achilleus bears a remarkable resemblance to the critique of so-called mimetic desire carried out in a number of recent works by R. Girard.

The narrator tells this story to an audience whom modern literary critics often identify as the “narratee.” Genette defines the narratee in the following terms:

Like the narrator, the narratee is one of the elements in the narrating situation, and he is necessarily located at the same diegetic level; that is, he does not merge a priori with the reader (even an implied reader) any more than the narrator necessarily merges with the author.²⁰

The gap between the narratee and the authorial audience of a work of literature seems to exist in direct proportion to the ironic distance separating the author from the narrator.²¹ … To the extent that poet of the Iliad can be distinguished from the narrator and manifest a unique point of view, he may choose to communicate a message behind the back of the narrator. This [essay] argues that the gap between the poet and the narrator is rather extensive in the case of the Iliad, that the message conveyed by the narrator to the narratee should not be confused with what the poet wishes to communicate to the authorial audience.

Like the author of the novel, the poet of the Iliad stands behind his narrator at a further level of ironic detachment from the beliefs and points of view represented within the story. His distance from the narrator is marked by a more thoroughgoing ironic perspective. While the narrator of the Iliad employs stable irony, the poet's irony is “unstable” in Booth's sense; that is, the poet “refuses to declare himself, however subtly, for any stable proposition.”²² The poet's more pervasive ironic vision even calls into question the Muse(s)-narrator's point of view on the meaning of the Iliad. Using his own brief prooemia and the interactions between narrative and speech, the poet suggests that the narrator's final word on the significance of the story is but the expression of a single point of view. The poet thus provides a demonstration of the extent to which reality in epic poetry can only be grasped and apprehended in images constructed from various individual perspectives. However, this conclusion remains a part of what M. Schorer has called “the author's secret world of value,”²³ which the author communicates to the authorial audience alone, working behind the backs of both the Muse(s)-narrator and the characters who live and die within the world of the story.

As S.S. Lanser has explained, a particular ideology (what we have called a conceptual point of view) will normally emerge as authoritative in a work of literature only when the point of view of the narrator is also expressed by at least one other major voice within the world of the story or is confirmed in some other way, “for example, through both the story's outcome and the comments of a narrating consciousness.”²⁴ However, in setting the system of value of the narrator to work against the norms represented in the story's direct speech, the poet refuses to sanction any such explicit hierarchy of values. In other words, the Iliad makes use of an oppositional arrangement of perspectives different from the counterbalancing structure that a number of critics have found at work in the poem.²⁵ Oppositional perspective “simply sets norms against one another by showing up the deficiencies of each norm when viewed from the standpoint of the others.”²⁶ Many evaluations of the meaning of the Iliad are possible, I think, because the poet refuses to identify himself fully with the voice and point of view of either the narrator or any of the characters. … [H]e also does not explicitly endorse either the narrator's or the characters' views of what properly constitutes the beginning or the end of the story of the wrath of Achilleus. …

Notes

1. The Greek text of the Iliad employed throughout this book is that edited by D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen, Homeri opera, 3d ed., vols. 1-4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920). Unless otherwise indicated, the translation of the Iliad is taken from M. Hammond's version, Homer: The “Iliad” (London: Penguin, 1987).

2. The conventions of epic poetry regarding visual point of view differ somewhat from those of the novel. In the novel, a third-person omniscient narrator lacks visual point of view. Thus, as Chatman, Coming to Terms, 141-42, points out, when the third- person narrator of Dombey and Son describes the younger Dombey as lying in a little basket and being toasted like a muffin, we are not to imagine the narrator as actually having seen the baby; rather, he merely reports the scene. Omniscient narrators in the novel do not actually see the events that they relate. Indeed, as S. S. Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 212, notes, the possession of visual point of view by a narrator in a novel “limits the depth of vision to words and gestures externally performed.” In Homeric epic, in contrast, the narrating agency, the Muse or Muses, has access to the consciousnesses of the characters but also visually witnesses the events recounted.

3. I borrow here from T. Todorov's description of what he calls “speech-as-action,” in his The Poetics of Prose, trans. R. Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 56.

4. See Republic. 393a6, λἐγει τε αὐτὸs ὁ ποιητήs, and passim.

5. Chatman, Coming to Terms, 83-87, argues convincingly that the narrator of a work of literature should always be distinguished from the author, even when no discernible ironic distance separates them.

6. See A. Lenz, Das Proöm des frühen griechischen Epos: Ein Beitrag zum poetischen Selbstverständis (Bonn: Habelt, 1980), 27. Some scholars, like M. Finkelberg, “A Creative Oral Poet and the Muse,” AJP [American Journal of Philology] 111 (fall 1990): 295, and J. Latacz, Homer: His Art and His World, trans. J. P. Holoka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 71, speak of the Muses rather as a source of inspiration for the poet. J. Russo and B. Simon, “Homeric Psychology and the Oral Epic Tradition,” in Essays on the “Iliad”: Selected Modern Criticism, ed. J. Wright (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 52, take more seriously than most scholars an idea central to this book: that the poet presents himself as the receiver of a song arising from an external source, that is, from the Muses. W. W. Minton, “Homer's Invocations of the Muses: Traditional Patterns,” TAPA [Transactions and Proceedings of The American Philological Association] 91 (1960): 292, claims that the invocations to the Muses are traditional elements in the oral poet's equipment, not genuine appeals, but rather “the ossified remains of such appeals.” Scholes and Kellogg, Nature of Narrative, 242, are probably closer to the truth when they note, “It seems highly likely that the invocation is a sophisticated feature which developed late in Greek oral epic as a manifestation of the creative impulse toward a more fictional kind of narrative.”

7. See T. Mann's Der Erwählte (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1951), 10-11; also, see R. Klesczewski, “Erzähler und ‘Geist der Erzählung’. Diskussion einer Theorie Wolfgang Kaysers und Bemerkungen zu Formen der Ironie bei Th. Mann,” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 210 (1973): 126-31.

8. G. Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. J. E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 25.

9. Of course, there are other senses of the term narrative, which I am ignoring. For example, it may refer more broadly to content rather than statement and may describe the whole series of events that constitute the plot of a story. In this sense, the narrative of the Iliad is the sum of all the events and speeches that together comprise the story of the wrath of Achilleus.

10. See Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, 70-77.

11. Chatman, Story and Discourse, 148.

12. As L. Hutcheon, Irony's Edge (London: Routledge, 1995), 49, points out, “distancing reserve can … be interpreted as a means to a new perspective from which things can be shown and thus seen differently.”

13. See W. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1-31.

14. M. Bowra, Tradition and Design in the “Iliad” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), 15, and Homer (New York: Duckworth, 1972), 98, similarly maintains that war and wrath are the two subjects of the poem and that in the last books they are united.

15. However, Redfield, Nature and Culture, 107, claims, “The crucial errors in Achilles' story … are the errors of others—of Agamemnon, of Nestor, of Patroclus.”

16. In other words, as M. L. Lang, “War Story into Wrath Story,” in The Ages of Homer, ed. J. B. Carter and S. P. Morris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 149-62, has argued, Homer has subordinated the war story to the wrath story.

17. At this point, it is important to distinguish my position on the evolution of the war from the seminal work of S. Benardete, “The Aristeia of Diomedes and the Plot of the Iliad,” Agon 2 (1968): 10-38. Benardete also sees the war evolving through three stages: revenge for the theft of a woman, the fight for glory, and revenge for the dead. However, in his view, these stages are mutually exclusive and purely sequential. In contrast, I think that the fight for glory, which comes to special prominence in the second stage of the war, motivates the heroes of the Iliad from the beginning to the end of the poem. My position differs from Benardete's in a second way also. I claim that these three stages in the war mirror and offer commentary on the three stages through which the wrath of Achilleus passes.

18. P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 104.

19. See W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), 86.

20. Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay, 259.

21. M. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 75, has made a convincing argument that author and narrator merge together in biblical narrative. Such is not the case, I will argue, in Homeric epic.

22. Booth, Rhetoric of Irony, 240.

23. Schorer, “Technique,” 7.

24. Lanser, Narrative Act, 220. The Odyssey, unlike the Iliad, seems to manifest a pattern of authoritative, authorial judgment because the narrator's point of view is confirmed both by the point of view of Odysseus and by what happens within the story itself: see Doherty, Siren Songs, 16.

25. See section I in this chapter.

26. Iser, Reading, 101.

Bibliography

Benardete, S. “The Aristeia of Diomedes and the Plot of the Iliad.” Agon 2 (1968): 10-28.

Booth, W. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

———. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Bowra, M. Tradition and Design in the “Iliad.” Oxford: Clarendon, 1930.

———. Homer. New York: Duckworth, 1972.

Brooks, P. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Chatman, S. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.

———. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Empson, W. Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto and Windus, 1935.

Finkelberg, M. “A Creative Oral Poet and the Muse.” AJP 111 (fall 1990): 293-303.

Genette, G. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. J. E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Girard, R. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Y. Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.

Hutcheon, L. Irony's Edge. London: Routledge, 1995.

Iser, W. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Klesczewski, R. “Erzähler und ‘Geist der Erzählung.’ Diskussion einer Theorie Wolfgang Kaysers und Bemerkungen zu Formen der Ironie bei Th. Mann.” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 210 (1973): 126-31.

Lang, M. L. “War Story into Wrath Story.” In The Ages of Homer, ed. J. B. Carter and S. P. Morris. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

Lanser, S. S. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Latacz, J. Homer: His Art and His World. Trans. J. P. Holoka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Lenz, A. Das Proöm des frühen griechischen Epos: Ein Beitrag zum poetischen Selbstverständis. Bonn: Habelt, 1980.

Mann, T. Der Erwählte. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1951.

Minton, W. W. “Homer's Invocations of the Muses: Traditional Patterns.” TAPA 91 (1960): 292-309.

Redfield, J. M. Nature and Culture in the “Iliad”: The Tragedy of Hector. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Russo, J., and B. Simon. “Homeric Psychology and the Oral Epic Tradition.” In Essays on the “Iliad”: Selected Modern Criticism, ed. J. Wright. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Scholes, R., and R. Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Schorer, M. “Technique as Discovery.” In The World We Imagine: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968.

Sternberg, M. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Todorov, T. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. R. Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.