Homer and the Myth of the Author
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
When we enjoy a novel, we perceive it as an entity complete in itself. We don’t read early drafts or check the comments and corrections of beta readers, developmental editors, and copy editors. We don’t compare the final text with what came before and try to construct a new text.
We don’t think of a published novel as the work of a team of dozens (despite an author’s detailed acknowledgments). Regardless of how the work of fiction came to be, we view it as if it were the creation of a single author.
That feels natural because the characters come alive for us; they feel consistent and real. We visualize what they do and imagine what they would do in different circumstances. There’s an inner logic to the characters — their speech, their thoughts, their actions — that was clear to the people involved in its creation and is now clear to audiences. Violations are like striking the wrong key on a piano or playing a piano that’s out of tune.
A story with living characters is a meme, with a life of its own. The identity of the author is irrelevant except as a label, making it easy to find the work in a library or with a search engine.
Such is the case with The Iliad and The Odyssey. Regardless of how and when these stories were composed, they passed through many minds and hands, both orally and in written form. And they were translated many times. This is the reverse of the old truism about too many cooks. These works have gotten richer, thanks to the cumulative work of editors, translators, interpreters, and creative readers over the course of nearly three thousand years.
If you love these works, if they have become part of the web of associations that defines who you are and how your think, then you can say, echoing the followers of Spartacus, I am Homer.
