Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigyikes | Hacker News Reader

Someone in the video talks about Homer as though he were the author of the epics. My impression was that these epics came about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.

Maybe this idea was just put in my head by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? It’s a great book that was recommended to me by a HN comment last year.

Besides being all the more relevant in the age of non-conscious language models, the book also makes the case that Homeric epics were not created consciously. Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.

Anyway, the video is neat, and it makes me all the more curious what it would’ve been like to hear one of these in 600 BC.

View on HN

That was the theory of Milman Parry, who made visits to Yugoslavia and other areas of Eastern Europe where oral poetry was still widely practiced, and noted similarities between the form of the existing traditions and that of Homer.

I haven't studied it seriously since college, but among evidence to support this theory is the idea that many of the titles used to describe the heroes may have been formulaic mnemonic aids that the singer/poet could keep in their back pocket and pull out during improvisation to fit the required meter.

> Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.

There is nothing 'unconscious' about creating a long epic. It takes conscious effort especially if you expect it to be coherent and enjoyable. Besides, is there a connection between schizophrenia and metered speech? Wouldn't a schizophrenic epic be unmetered?

I kinda buy it. If you go back to Freud, he describes how impulses and desires are repressed and sublimated while the mind is functioning normally.

Tourette's is an example of the barrier between impulse and physical action being weakened.

Schizophrenia can be seen as the weakening of the barrier between impulse and belief.

Telling an epic story off-the-cuff requires weakening the barrier between your subconscious and speech

Personally, I think it's more likely that there was a collection of oral stories passed down by healthy people, each illustrating a specific real-life lesson, that got collected by one guy and stitched together. In the same way modern showrunners borrow scenes and references.

Like Achilles' heel is a warning against pride/arrogance, and the Cyclops and the sheep is a fun way to expose kids to possessive anger

Freud "decided" a lot of things, and a lot of them are pure inventions of his fairly unique mind

Why would you give me any credit to any of Freuds ideas? Im honestly astonished the guy has any kind of credibility.

this is quite hyperbolic. he has too complicated a legacy to dismiss this easily. some of the concepts he pioneered include talk therapy, transference, significance of early childhood on psychological development, the influence of the unconscious on behavior - all of which we accept today

Was Freud really the first person to suggest talking to people about your problems can be therapeutic, or that the way you raise children affects them dramatically? As far as I am aware, the actual contents of the therapy he proposed, psychoanalysis, is complete bunk and no more effective than other forms of therapy.

I have a whole gripe with the "unconscious", unless all we mean by it is "past events affect who you are and affect your behavior" in which case I cant imagine Freud is the first person to have believed this.

>My impression was that these epics came about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.

This is the current scholarly consensus.

>Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.

This is absolutely nuts. It could only be the result of someone reading Sperry and Gazzaniga's split brain experiments and deeply over-interpreting them.

To be clear Jaynes is pure pseudo scientist, I don't think there is a neuroscientist, historian, anthropologist, or a classicist in the world who thinks he has any value. It's an interesting idea for a sci-fi setting like Westworld, but it's rubbish.

>Someone in the video talks about Homer as though he were the author of the epics. My impression was that these epics came about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.

That the epics pre-existed is true, that Homer was a singular author with specific "voice" (not just someone who wrote them down) is debated (and favored iirc).

>Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.

Yes, that part is bs.

The claim of not being created consciously seems much more applicable to many of the scripts of recent movies than to the Homeric Epics.

The main plot lines of the epics, which are quite clever, must have been designed consciously and whoever did that should be considered the main creators of the epics. I am among those who believe that the main authors of Iliad and Odyssey must have been distinct, but they probably were members of the same family, e.g. the main author of the Odyssey might have been a niece or granddaughter of "Homer".

In any case while the main authors have devised the plots, they have expressed the plot using a huge amount of verse sequences, metaphors and similes inherited via oral tradition from their ancestors and the selection of a verse sequence appropriate for a certain point in the story might have been partially non-deterministic and unconscious.

Once the initial versions of the epics had been performed, it is likely that all later public performances by the main authors or by their descendants have never repeated completely identically, but with small variations in verse choices, until they have been fixed in writing. It is possible that multiple variants have been fixed in writing or the copists have made various mistakes, because the canonical variants known today have been edited in their final form only many hundreds of years later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com