See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
There is some debate as to whether Homer was an individual or actually a title used by multiple authors.
Who Is America's Homer?
161–170 of 261 posts
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#162Weird Al, obviously. He’s the only one capable of combining our oral traditions into a single coherent body of work.
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can write a poem in my head without ever writing it down on paper. I still wrote a poem, even if I just pass it along orally. If I write a song for my girl, I'm not going to hand her a piece of paper with sheet music and lyrics, I'm going to perform it for her. I may write it down, or I may not. Of course, composed is a more precise word, but everyone still knows what I mean if I replace it with write.
> I can write a poem in my head without ever writing it down on paper. I still wrote a poem, even if I just pass it along orally This is generalising the term writing to the point of uselessness. In your example, you thought of a poem and spoke it. You didn't write it.
Disagree, I think it's analogous to how we today use "fire" to describe the action of loosing an arrow or whatever the technical term is for a trebuchet, even though neither has gunpowder.
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#164Simpson
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#165Poetry has fallen out of favor in culture at large, so I think it’s more logical to expand the question to authors more generally.
In that case, I think The Great Gatsby is the most logical equivalent to the Iliad and Odyssey. To me it conveys the essential elements of the American character: obsessed with reinvention via commerce, but inevitably tied to the past. It’s also probably been read by the majority of Americans, or at least the story is well-known. Can’t say the same for Twain, Melville, etc.
For more recent authors though, I think Don DeLillo is the best chronicler of mid-late century America.
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#166I think one of the beautiful things about America is its formation as a country contains so many nations, and in a way America’s cultural history is inseparable from those nations it contains (newly formed) extensions of. America is a young country made from the offshoots of old countries. So in some ways, I think America’s Homer can simply be Homer, just as America’s Shakespeare can be - if an American chooses - Shakespeare. That’s a beautiful idea for a nation.
To think about the question less evasively, for me, it depends on which aspect of Homer is primary. I’m restricting myself here to widely read texts which I think have had vast impact on national character.
If it’s the idea of suffering, frontier, and the impossible but attempted journey, I find it hard to look beyond Melville. Not just for Moby Dick, but I would argue Bartleby, the Scrivener is an incredibly prophetic work about how regular people would come to experience the deep strangeness of modern American life.
If it’s a question of language - of how we write and speak to each other - so much of American language rests on Hemingway. This answer is unavoidable for me. In American communication, so much value is placed on clarity, and brevity, and the idea of “cool”.
If it’s Homer as an epic, sweet, sad, narratively-loose, arguably-multi-authored, and kind-of-orally-told document of American life, widely shared: Why not Homer Simpson? The Simpsons is art at its best, and has clear export and staying power for audiences.
I think the real answer is probably that it’s too early to say. Bob Dylan will probably be on this list in a century - but I think the ways his work is prophetic of future art and the broader future world have not quite formed into reality yet.
Scott Fitzgerald might be there if America’s 21st century experience is so defined by striving, (self) deception, and startlingly violent tragedy as its 20th century was.
Similarly, if America stays as strange and psychedelic and new as it has been in the 20th century, a case could be made for H P Lovecraft.
While I don’t personally enjoy Lovecraft’s prose, his ideas are increasingly prescient. In the 20th century, Americans walked on the moon. In the 21st, Americans have invented - in the consumer LLM - a thing for which the most tractable analogy is Cthulu, with its many-faces of a single entity, its cultists, and its nondeterministic and unknowable - or incomprehensible - non-human motivation or end-point, which can only really be described as a desire for its own momentum.
It may well end up being Lovecraft.
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#167Stephen King. Homer was not great literature at the time he his works were written. He was popular entertainment with a dose of folk religion. I’m not sure Homer existed. 1000 years from now people will say the same of SK.
...you think 1000 years from now people will wonder whether or not Stephen King existed?
Probably sooner, IMO. Absent radical life extension, even 200 years from now there'll be nobody's left who remembers the time before deepfakes, and history will be brought into doubt.
Though bluntly we've always had nationalistic narratives contaminating what's "approved" in school, both with literature and history. Stephen King could be anything from mandatory to forbidden for any reason at the same time in different places, even on that kind of timescale. The USA may cease to exist as a singular coherent entity, and it may be two or more successor states in parallel who have a culture war with each other over if Stephen King was real or not.
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#168I love this thread and this question. I'm going to argue that it's Francis Ford Coppola. His Filmography in the 1970's I think captures America, the myth and the realities, for both their glamour and horror, better than anyone else before or after.
1972 -- The Godfather -- This encapsulates the American Dream better than anything else. It captures the arc of an immigrant story, of fitting in with America, and what it takes to succeed.
1974 -- The Conversation -- Chronicles where America is going as technology and politics changes and the impacts on our culture, through one man at the center of it.
1974 -- The Godfather Part II -- The story of an America and the image that it's built up, and the bloodshed necessary to both get there, and to cleanse its hands from the past.
1979 -- Apocalypse Now -- The sins of a nation that's ascended, and how the rest of the world must deal with America, and what it does to the psyche of those charged with empire building.
There's a body of work there that captures America in its totality more comprehensively than what anyone else has done. If I had to reduce this down to one choice, then it's simply The Godfather.
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#169I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in. I could also see someone suggesting Hemingway, although I don't buy it. Hart Crane at this point in time seems somewhat secondary, so that was surprising. The Tracy Chapman thing seemed seriously like a troll, I could definitely agree to a black Homer, but then I guess it would be Langston Hughes or James Baldwin as my choices. To suggest someone though who has t…
Whitman was first in my mind, he invented free verse poetry after all, embodying the American wilderness in form before content.
If we are going to include musicians, Tracy Chapman indeed seems like a troll when have the significantly more impactful Bob Dylan, who dramatically altered the musical and political discourse at a key time in American history. Tracy Chapman... had a few good hits?
Re: Who Is America's Homer?
#170An odd question. America's "founding myths" are the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution. These are the Holy Scriptures, and - like the Homeric ones - have multiple authors but lack the obscurity of ancient history to allow that latter fact to be subsumed into the story as a single, blind bard.
Our founding myths are actually Paul Bunyan and Blue. There's a whole cast of figures like Tom Thumb and more, structured around railway construction across America. Sadly, those myths have rapidly fallen from modern awareness, but they at one time were deeply embedded in the American identity, at least in a hokey tall-tales sort of way.