Situational Rather than Abstract - Susan Watkins

(Reflection on Assigned Reading)

"Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld.... Parry (1973) made much the same point about the epithet 'amymon' applied by Homer to Aegisthus: the epithet means not 'blameless,' a tidy abstraction with which literates have translated the term, but 'beautiful-in-the-way-a-warrior-ready-to-fight-is-beautiful.'"

-Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy, p. 49

This passage caught my attention mostly because the last phrase is so heartbreakingly beautiful. That particular beauty, seeing a warrior in his element and fully capable of what he has been training and striving to do, is something that has always resonated strongly with me but I have rarely heard expressed by others. The clearest allusions to such beauty usually occur in texts or media where soldiers of some sort are going off to battle, and an onlooker experiences awe at the sight. Usually, though, I find that the awe is tied to some sort of regret because it is likely some of those soldiers won't return. It's rare indeed to hear someone describe soldiers' beauty as inherent, as lying in the physical fulfillment of what they were created to do.

All that being said, Parry makes an interesting point that oral societies use such situational description while literate societies tend to work more abstractly. To say that Aegisthus is "blameless" is to give the reader a simple, relatively clear description of part of his personality. Blamelessness is something he has retained above and beyond all the literal situations he has experienced, and in this moment is a quality of his completely independent of his physical context. However, Parry's extended epithet, "beautiful-in-the-way-a-warrior-ready-to-fight-is-beautiful," is absolutely connected to the immediate context and describes a much more difficult aspect of Aegisthus' being. In one way, it is much more specific and gives the reader an exact idea of what Homer means. In another, though, it references a concept that is much more easily felt than understood and cannot be summed up simply. Literate culture's love for efficiency rules out the extended epithet as impractical.

Literate cultures also prefer to be as objective as possible. To call Aegisthus "blameless" is to imply that some omnipotent third party, in this case possibly the narrator, has seen Aegisthus' life or at least his circumstances and judged him. To call him "beautiful..." is to appear much more subjective, as if some one observer has appraised Aegisthus and deemed him thus. I wonder if part of this is a shift in society, from a Greek perspective that war is necessary and honorable to the modern society where there are as many opinions on war as there are individuals. In ancient Greece, strong and noble warriors were almost universally considered beautiful, but today that is no longer a given sentiment.

I wonder whether this tendency towards abstraction and the loss of such subjective description in literature is a sign of more intelligent communication, or our losing touch with the real world. To sterilize situations may seem like the most reasonable way to analyze them, but we have much more difficulty drawing meaning from them. To know Aegisthus is blameless is not the same as feeling the deep and strange beauty of his preparation to go to war.