Stories and the Snowy Mountain
A Podcast, and Some Similes, an excerpt from "Storylife"
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. I will return to regular Iliad posts next week.
Today the amazing Partial Historians released a special podcast (with a transcript). Their homepage is an amazing collection of resources for the discussion. Dr. G. and Dr. Rad ask amazing questions, but, I keep singing a similar song:
…the thing you just said about story, giving us the capacity to experience 1000 lives is one of the most important things to acknowledge about narrative, right? And so I think that one of the ways that people often talk about language and narrative is to think of it as a technology, right? If we imagine that narrative and stories are akin to our ability to use fire or, you know, to cook food and to things like that, then we can see it as something we that we use that facilitates culture, etc. But I think another way to think about it, and this is the one I’ll go back to, is the notion that stories actually do keep on living on their own.
This is an excerpt from Storylife (chapter 5), coming out next week.
When I was an undergraduate, exploring ideas for a senior thesis, I became fascinated by Homeric similes, especially those comparing heroes to people doing everyday things, as when the sides of the battle in Iliad 12 are compared to two men arguing over a boundary marker in their fields.[i] I remember pouring out theories about how these comparisons were more sophisticated than animal comparisons only to be stopped by my advisor, Lenny Muellner, when I claimed it was obvious that complex similes arose out of simple ones. Lenny asked gently why it could not be the other way around, that simple similes—e.g. “Hektor was like a lion”—did not contain within them the potential of much longer ones. And, further, should not we distinguish between what an audience listening to the Homeric poems likely knew and expected from similes and how they developed over time?
This conversation remained with me for over twenty years. I take two essential lessons from it: first, not to forget the difference between the development of a thing (here a simile) and an audience’s experience of it; and, second, how the ecology of stories contains relationships and potentials far beyond what is immediately seen. To stay with the case of similes for a moment, let’s take an extended one from Iliad 12. As the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans rages around the wall protecting the Greek ships, two captains rally their troops:
So those two yelled out to encourage the Greeks to fight
And just as waves of snow fall thick on a winter’s day
When Zeus the master of all urges it to snow
On human beings, showing them what his weapons are like—
And he reins in the winds to pour it constantly
So that he covers the high mountains and the jutting cliffs
As well as the flowering meadows and men’s rich fields,
Snowing onto the harbors and the promontories of the gray sea,
Even as the wave resists it when it strikes. But everything else
Is covered beneath it whenever Zeus’ storm drives it on.
That’s how the stones fell thick from both sides,
Some falling against the Trojans, others from the Trojans
against the Greeks and a great din overwhelmed the whole wall
Here, the weapons falling down from the Greek wall on the Trojan attackers are compared to snow. To a modern audience, a snowfall might seem peaceful or even romantic, but in Homeric poetry snow is dangerous. The comparison in this simile conveys a blanketing and overpowering blizzard of conflict, made clearer to us from a typological study of Homeric language. But contrast this with a shorter snow simile such as “Hektor went forward like a snowy mountain.”[i] This simile creates a tension between what it says literally and the meaning it conveys based on associations unarticulated at this moment. It is not that Hektor moves like some abominable snowman or stands immobile like a wintry crag, but that the ferocity of his attacks is like the blizzards raging around a mountain. Ancient commentators add that Olympus, where the gods live, is snowy and mountains are big like Hektor, while snow is terrifying.
Whether we are talking about an extended simile or a short one, there’s great potential for expanding upon what is given, for inferring meaning that is not obvious at first sight. And, as discussed in chapter 2, the framing of the simile invites audience members to integrate material from the outer narrative alongside their own lives. The compressed simile is in a way more interpretively complex: it demands an understanding of traditional meanings, of how they can be expanded and compressed, plus the inferential ability to see aggregate action over time. Thus, this poetic device provides a good opportunity to think about the biological metaphors explored in the last few chapters. A compressed simile is in a way the core material of a story, a narrative waiting to find the right environment for growth and expansion. The history of a simile type—whether we are talking about heroes as lions or weapons as snowfall—would record many expansions and compressions as the device adapted to different contexts and experienced success based on audience reception and replication. For audiences well-versed in the art form, any given image draws on this history for meaning while also relying on its overall narrative ecology for support. In a fully realized simile about snow, certain narrative aspects are ‘expressed’ while others are not, just as some genes only find expression in certain environments.
Lenny’s response to my assumptions about similes contains a kernel of a theory of narrative, of the importance of metonymy, and the crucial contribution audiences make to the creation of meaning. As discussed earlier in this book, metonymy–a part for the whole relationship—is key to oral traditional poetry and, indeed, language in general. It describes the relationship between a particular expression and its more general group. So, just as a few lines of heroic poetry evoke and also rely on a vastly larger and more complex tradition, so too an individual human being is at once a single expression of the species and a representation of the potential of the whole.
The same kind of logic applies to proverbs and traditional narratives, how scant details in a pattern are suggestive of a larger inheritance, once we learn to see the manifestation of detail for what it is: engagement with specific environments and expectations. So, in the simile pair we find material ready for comparison to the natural world: how a string of data expressed in one sample is compressed and latent in another, requiring a larger narrative ecology of minds to unpack, adapt, and evolve once more. As we read or hear these similes we open them up in our imagination and expand them, allowing them to combine with what we know or remember from other stories and our experiences to find their meanings. And just as living creatures change the environments they inhabit, so too do these narratives change us. We are hosts to replicating phenomena: we are part of their life cycles just as they are crucial to ours.
[i] Iliad 13.754.
[i] Iliad 12.421–426.
