Why is Homer blind? Homer the Blind and the Inner Night

There is a story abroad: one day, a scholar rushed into the dean's office of the College of Literature. "amazing discovery!" He shouted, "I have made an amazing discovery. You will be very excited to hear it!" " I found that Homer's epic was not written by Homer, but by another unknown ancient Greek poet! "

This is a joke, because Homer was originally a code name given to the unidentified authors of The Iliad and The Odyssey. For many years, Homer scholars have been trying to find out whether Homer really exists, whether these two epics were written by one person or several people, whether they were written in one breath, or whether they were revised and edited by generations over the years. On the other hand, if there were no epic texts, the word "Homer" would not appear. In the Dead Sea Scrolls Museum in Jerusalem, the scrolls taken out of a jar are illuminated by Chen Fang in the dim light: we perceive the role of history through words; In the text of Homer's epic, what we perceive is the identity of a poet.

But Homer also has a special identity: he is blind.

According to the "general theory" of critics, the blind singer De modoc in the Odyssey is Homer's self-reference, just like a painter in China painted a landscape painting and added his image to a small pavilion, a small bridge or a mountain road in the painting. George steiner also talked about his conjecture in the article Homer and Scholars in Language and Silence. He said that Homer was great because he was the first person in the West from oral to written. The earliest "Homer Manuscripts" were preserved by a group composed of Budd. Centuries later, these two epics were widely circulated in Athens. "He can dictate and let the scribe write for him ... I would rather believe that Homer has always been said to be blind in ancient times, which is related to this." Moreover, the rough parts of the two epics are connected with a crucial point in Homer's own cultural history, which makes people feel that if he is blind, it would be easier to explain.

Does this mean that Homer's rough writing is due to blindness? Let's just say that composers don't have to live after the deaf Beethoven. Homer's blindness seems to make people pay more attention to the hearing and imagination in the epic; In other words, it is precisely because Homer is set as a person with a closed visual system that the siege of Troy will be understood as a story that transcends historical facts and really enters the myth field, just as the Old Testament later crossed two hills of history and myth. At the source of written literature, written words are not only the result of the natural development of oral literature, but also the imaginary world. Since then, myth and history go hand in hand.

In fact, all the authors of epics in the world, whether forgotten one or Beowulf, can be regarded as blind. Hearing, dictation and imagination are their livelihood. The first English versions of Iliad and Odyssey were translated by Chapman, an English classical scholar in the 7th century. His contribution is not only to help these two magnificent epics spread to the English world as archives, but more importantly, he is considered to have translated the original author's voice. That's what john keats thought. He said Chapman's Homer Epic has a voice: "I didn't breathe pure peace in Homer's world until I heard Chapman's clear voice speak it frankly."

The charm of myth is that you can hear voices through words. Homer must be blind, otherwise, even if he "sings", he still can't be a "singer"-a person who can listen to his heart, and the premise of listening is to eliminate vision and get rid of the light and darkness of the earth; Using Freud's theory, the singer sings the voice of the subconscious, as Steiner said: "Myth is more memorable than history, and the myth editor (poet) is a historian who writes about the subconscious." Over the years, "Homer, a blind poet" has even become a fable. Its moral is that the five senses of human beings constitute a situation of energy conservation and mutual restriction. One sense will suppress other senses, when the importance of vision is so high (think of 4D movies, think of words and thoughts that some listeners have to rely on images, and think of information that reaches the public through various screens every day).

"Some things are invisible to the eyes"-I always remember this sentence in The Little Prince. The problem is that the "invisible" things are always less convincing and effective than the visible (of course, they can also be expressed in words). Love will eventually be consolidated by some symbols ("diamonds last forever, one will go bankrupt"), as if whether two people will break up depends on the meat cut worth hundreds of thousands and the resulting disappointment. When we enter the social and interpersonal network, we always rely on vision first, judge others with our own sight, and adjust ourselves according to others' sight. Good or bad, all decided by the "table".

I have always admired the profoundness of the author of The Saint. Masami Kurumada was familiar with all kinds of myths, religions and cultural themes, and turned them into a story of fighting ethics without the significance of Homer's epic. He asked Zilong to stab himself in the eye when facing the shield of Medusa loudly, close his eyes, open his heart, and "see" Athena in the light from his heart. At this time, the weakness and silence of the goddess only exist in the shadow of imagination ... all the features are symbolic, just like Cinderella in red dancing shoes.

The change from ignorance to ignorance is a desperate struggle in Zilong itself, but comics only tell us the great power of ignorance in the most direct and dramatic way. When the Cancer Palace was dragged into the world by Des Musca, Zilong's eyes saw the light again: there was no sunshine in the underworld, and the inner night was no longer needed. The outward door and the inward door were integrated. Masami Kurumada may have noticed the eighth chapter of Gulliver's Travels, or he may have been inspired by the analysis of "seeing" through the ages:

The wizard island in Gele Dazhui is equivalent to the underworld, and there are ghosts everywhere. Swift's protagonist met Alexander the Great, Caesar, Pompeii and Brutu here, and later, he specially arranged a day to meet Homer and Aristotle. "Homer is tall and handsome, and people of his age can walk straight." He wrote, "His eyes are the liveliest and sharpest of all people I have ever seen."