Visuality in Bosniac and Homeric Epic

Homeric poetry is an intensely visual art, as numerous studies have shown. [1] This intense visuality is a feature that Homeric poetry shares with many other oral narrative traditions. [2] The affinity of oral narrative for optically rich modes of presentation can be explained by the usefulness of visual techniques in composition and performance. Various writers have stressed the importance of visual and spatial information as facilitators of memory and recall: from the point of view of the oral performer, the cultivation of a detailed mental vision, which can then be scanned and presented in speech—what Albert Lord called “the living eye of the singer’s imagination”—is an essential support for the cognitively demanding process of realizing a traditional narrative in performance. [3] At the same time, visual cues are equally indispensable to the audience in the face of their own, equally demanding cognitive task. By fostering involvement in the shared vision communicated by performance, such cues assist the audience in tracking the movement of the unfolding narrative. The cognitive importance of visual elements to the successful realization and comprehension of the performance helps to explain the prominence and structural significance of visually intense moments in many narrative traditions. Visual imagery often seems to function as a kind of ‘motor’ of narrative movement, with important moments being heavily coded for visualization. [4]

It is this ‘architectonic’ function of visual techniques that we would like to explore in this paper, with reference to both Homeric and Bosniac epic. The fruitful comparison between these two traditions established by Parry and Lord has tended to focus on the utility of traditional formulas as expressions of traditional themes, but the comparison can be extended in any number of directions, including the one suggested here. We will suggest some convergences and divergences between these traditions by examining a Bosniac epic song performed for Milman Parry by the Albanian singer Alija Fjuljanin in 1934, with an eye to its heuristic value as a guide to the understanding of the visual strategies employed by Homeric poetry. [5] The value of Fjuljanin’s song as a comparandum for Homer consists in the fact that, as a much shorter composition—with a ‘mere’ 1,000 lines—it permits us to observe the use of compositional devices on a much smaller and more easily comprehensible scale.

We will begin by reviewing examples of some techniques deployed by Fjuljanin, and their Homeric analogues. These techniques relate to visuality at two theoretically distinct but practically interrelated levels. The first concerns the visual dimension of the narrative content: the visual aspects of the events themselves and the act of seeing as experienced by characters and narrated by the performer. Visuality at this level can be termed ‘propositional visuality’. The second level, which can be designated as the level of ‘pragmatic visuality’, relates to the way the narrator presents this content, that is, the way his language encodes and cues the visual processing of the narrative. These two levels are distinct both conceptually and in terms of the particular devices they involve. Their practical independence, moreover, can be detected in the fact that the ‘mind’s-eye’ experiences of narrators and listeners—the domain in which the effects of pragmatic visuality are felt—often exceed in richness of detail the descriptive content of a narrative. [6] Nevertheless, propositional and pragmatic visuality often work together. That is, the visual relevance of what is told may be connected to the visual relevance of how it is told.

Alija Fjuljanin’s song “Halil Hrnjičić and Miloš the Highwayman” tells the story of the kidnapping of a certain Hajkuna, sister of the Muslim heroes Mujo and Halil, by a Christian villain, and Halil’s subsequent rescue of her. [7] What we have termed ‘propositional visuality’ can be observed, at its most basic level, in any of the text’s many descriptive passages. Bosniac epic is a visually rich medium; it shares with Homeric poetry a preference for the accumulation of ornamental details. [8] Fjuljanin, however, has a noticeable tendency to draw attention to the visual content of his narrative, for instance by using semantic redundancy to make the action of seeing as explicit as possible (l. 348):

The ‘black one’ is Halil, who has been chasing after his sister’s abductors and just now realizes—after careful inspection of the grass for signs of passing horses—that they have made good their escape.

The Homeric poems likewise employ redundant expressions to emphasize the impact of visual experience on the characters. These mostly formulaic expressions typically combine the instrumental ὀφθαλμοῖσι(ν) ‘by means of eyes’ with a form of the verb ὁρᾶν ‘to see’, as in the formula

When considering the significance of these devices, it is essential to keep in mind the correlation between the visual perception of the characters and the mental vision of the audience. Every time characters are said to have seen, noticed, or spotted something or someone, listeners are invited to make the same object appear to their minds (and to their mind’s eyes). The narrative unfolds for the listener as a sequence of mental images that are largely coextensive with the characters’ visual experiences. Moreover, the links between these images, which is to say, the sequential steps that advance the plot, are often constructed precisely in terms of the act of seeing: in battle scenes, for instance, the narrative moves from killing to killing by describing how one hero observes another’s death, and so is motivated to seek vengeance. [11] In this way, the characters’ vision becomes the very force that drives the plot forward. We glimpse here already an initial indication of the interrelationship between propositional and pragmatic visuality. Insofar as it animates the listeners’ mental experience of the story—advances the frames, so to speak, of their mental film-strips—the propositional visuality of the characters’ experiences takes on a pragmatic dimension.

A special case of the interplay between the visual experience of the characters and the mental experience of the listeners is presented by the motif of disguise and recognition, which is as prominent and important a device in the Bosniac tradition as it is in the Homeric. Regardless of whether the disguised character is recognized or not, the special narrative pleasure of this device derives from the contrast between strictly visual phenomena and the extradiegetic knowledge with which the listeners are able to enrich their mental vision. In “Halil and Miloš,” Halil disguises himself as an unmarried girl and enters the palace of his enemies in the company of his helper, Ruža. The Christian ban (the potentate whom Miloš serves) is completely taken in by the deception:

Scenes such as these produce delight because they invite listeners to share in a vision that they know to be false, and simultaneously establish the superiority of the audience’s state of knowledge over that of the participants in the action. The Odyssey, of course, exploits this technique to the full, repeatedly presenting Odysseus to the gaze of unrecognizing spectators. Strategic usages of deictic or anaphoric markers heighten the effect by emphasizing the sameness of the referent ‘Odysseus’ even as he is visualized or recalled as a different individual by internal and external spectators. [12]

Considered in isolation from the propositional level, pragmatic visuality encompasses all the techniques employed by the performer in order to help himself and the listeners visually construe and/or process the ongoing narration. As the narrative unfolds and the visual focus switches from object to object and place to place, the performer must mark these shifts in focus in order to facilitate cognitive tracking of the story in progress. The linguistic means for performing this function is provided in both Bosnian and Greek by lexemes known as ‘particles’, which, though not in themselves necessarily visual, may nevertheless indicate varying degrees of discontinuity in the mental vision shared by performer and audience. [13] In Bosnian, for example, the particle ‘a’ marks the moderately discontinuous shift between two characters who are visualized sequentially, as in the following example, where the particle triggers a shift from the leader of the raiding party (Mujo) to the hero directly behind him (Osman):

Since both characters act within the same temporal and spatial setting, the shift from one to the other is relatively smooth—more like a pan of the camera than a cut. Homeric poetry employs similar means to accomplish the same task, as when the narrator of the Odyssey employs the particle αὐτάρ to accomplish the visual switch from Demodokos to Odysseus:

Here the camera shifts from Demodokos to Odysseus, and then continues to follow his gaze toward the setting sun.

A similar technique for marking visual discontinuity is deployed whenever a general description is followed by single details or a sequence of details. [15] In the next example, the image of a wounded hero is followed by a kind of zooming-in on the details of his frightful appearance; once again, each visual shift, each cut of the mental ‘montage’, is marked by a particle or interjection:

Homeric poetry offers many comparable examples, as, for instance, in the famous scene of Agamemnon’s arming in Book 11 of the Iliad. In this case as well, a broad descriptive statement (“he himself donned the gleaming bronze,” 11.16) gives way to a sequence of details about the individual pieces of Agamemnon’s equipment:

Each successive shift to a new detail in this description is linguistically marked by means of a particle (μέν, αὖ, ἄρα, δέ, δέ).

As mentioned earlier, propositional visuality and pragmatic visuality not infrequently converge. So, in the following example, the visual wonder of the character Mujo yields immediately to the visual surprise engineered by the performer, who uses a direct address to the audience to communicate a sense of amazement at the sudden arrival of a new character (Osman) on the scene:

The performer may also bridge the gap between the visual experience of characters and that of the audience by means of another strategy, which involves embedded visualizations—descriptions of the content of a character’s vision. These embedded visualizations fuse the characters’ attempts to perceive a remarkable event with those of the audience. In fact this device invites the listeners not only to share but also to re-live the perceptual and emotional experiences of the characters. The following excerpt, in which Mujo uses his spyglass to survey the landscape and look for signs of the danger that he fears threatens his city of Kladuša, provides an excellent example of this technique:

The redundant repetition of the verb gl(j)edati ‘to look’ in lines 139–141 lays considerable stress on Mujo’s anxious attempts to obtain clear visual information about what is happening. His efforts to see become a kind of figure or mise-en-abyme for the audience’s own drive to visualize events in anticipation of a major turning-point in the action. What Mujo struggles to make out turns out to be exactly what he most fears: Kladuša is on fire; it has been sacked by the Christian warrior Miloš. A certain dilation of narrative time intensifies the audience’s visual experience: the literal zooming-in on the mysterious cloud (through Mujo’s eyes) is emphasized by the retardation of the narrative pace.

In his lengthy study of Bosniac epic, the slavist Alois Schmaus draws attention to the way in which the Bosniac tradition develops such scenes of embedded visualization into a major compositional device that not only contributes to a more concrete and realistic ‘chronotope’ but also provides an important means by which singers structure their narratives. [16] Of the spyglass motif in particular, Schmaus notes that it functions as an alternative way of introducing into the narrative information about events happening at a distance. [17] In other words, it is a substitute for the various kinds of messenger-figures that appear throughout the Christian and Muslim epic traditions. This functional equivalence is in a sense made explicit in Fjuljanin’s song, when Mujo’s use of the spyglass leads directly to the appearance of Osman, who brings news of the attack on Mujo’s home.

Schmaus makes a further observation with significance for our discussion: he compares the embedded visualizations of the Bosniac tradition to the Teikhoskopia, or “Viewing from the Walls,” of Iliad Book 3. [18] In this famous scene, the Trojan king Priam, in the company of Helen, gazes down at the battlefield below and asks his daughter-in-law to identify the warriors he singles out. Priam’s vision structures this scene: as he directs his gaze at several visually prominent figures in succession, he directs the listener’s mental gaze as well. We will return shortly to the structural significance of Priam’s vision. For now it is sufficient to stress that, once again, a visualization from afar focuses attention on the enemy threat at a crucial moment in the development of the action by zooming in on a succession of details.

The spyglass episode allows us to take our argument a step further by evaluating the function of such devices within the overall narrative economy of the song. The visualization of the cloud over Kladuša occupies an important narrative position: it serves as the trigger for the complicating action. This corresponds to a broader storytelling strategy employed by Fjuljanin, who often uses propositional or pragmatic visuality to establish visual “landmarks” at narrative turning-points.

An outstanding example of the use of visual techniques in connection with narrative landmarks and emotional peaks is provided by the character Osman’s account of the abduction of Hajkuna. Fjuljanin employs an embedded flashback, a highly marked device, to record this crucial event, which must be fixed vividly in the listener’s mind in order to establish the character of the story’s antagonist. At the pivotal moment in the standoff between attackers and defenders, Fjuljanin’s Osman pauses to provide a detailed description of the villain’s mount. This description almost literally launches the action forward, by transitioning directly into the preternatural leap with which the animal carries its rider into the courtyard:

In a manner similar to the cinematographic “design for terror” discerned by Alain Renoir (1962) in Beowulf, the scene cuts from a vision of the villain on his terrifying horse to a sequence of shots of Osman and Hajkuna as they attempt to defend themselves. The singer’s effort to invest this visually intense sequence with an emotional as well as narrative significance is likewise evident in the use of a rhetorical question coupled with an expressive curse (“What was the horse like, may wolves devour him?”).

The initiation of the complicating action is by no means the only narrative high point that is singled out by means of visual devices. The denouement is similarly marked. The song’s concluding scene hinges on an embedded visualization that is also a visual deception—which is to say, a kind of variation on the recognition motif. Halil ‘disguises’ the disembodied head of Miloš as the whole, living person, and fools his brother into thinking that Miloš has returned to attack again. Note that redundant references to Mujo’s vision bracket the scene:

A number of narrative turning-points in Fjuljanin’s song are, in fact, accomplished by means of recognition scenes, a fact that attests to the satisfaction and pleasure produced by these moments of recalibration, when the visual experience of a character or characters is synchronized with the point of view of the audience. [19]

What new perspectives on Homer are opened up by this examination of Fjuljanin’s performance? The techniques on display in “Halil and Miloš” help to focus attention on comparable features of Homeric discourse at both the propositional and pragmatic levels, and on an instructive difference as well.

At the propositional level, Fjuljanin’s use of visually intense scenes to articulate his narrative suggests that we look for a similar “architectural” strategy in Homer. In fact, we can detect an indication of just such a strategy, played out in terms of propositional visuality, in a scene that has already been mentioned—the teikhoskopia. This scene—which is itself a significant narrative landmark—establishes a motif that plays an essential role in the subsequent development of the song. The motif centers on Priam’s visual observation of the enemy. One might expect the narrative complications leading up to Hektor’s fatal duel with Achilles to be focused on Hektor’s experience of his antagonist; in actuality, however, the progress toward Hektor’s death is articulated in terms of Priam’s experience of Achilles, as we see in the following two passages:

In the first of these passages, the king singles out Achilles from the wall: Achilles occupies the visual center of attention, the Trojans the periphery. More strikingly, in the second passage, from the beginning of Book 22, Priam’s vision of Achilles is likened to the vision of the evening rising of Sirius, the Dog-Star. [20]

The reason for this emphasis on Priam’s visual experience becomes clear when we situate these passages in the context of the overall trajectory of the Iliadic narrative. This resonant simile and, more generally, the emphasis on the fixture of Priam’s gaze on Achilles look forward to the climactic visual experience of the poem, the reciprocal gaze of Priam and Achilles that caps the scene of Hektor’s ransom in Book 24:

This moment of intense propositional visualization concludes one of the poem’s highest emotional peaks, as well as the principal narrative arc.

A masterpiece of late-sixth-century Athenian art, the famous hydria (water-jar) in Boston’s Museum of Fine Art depicting the dragging of Hektor’s corpse (MFA 63.473), may attest to the impact this architectural device had on early audiences. By an artful combination of pictorial motifs, the painter has integrated into a single image several distinct moments in the plot of the Iliad: Achilles’ initial disfiguring of the corpse (22.395ff.), the dragging of the body around the tomb of Patroklos (24.12–18), and the goddess Iris’ mission to bring about the ransoming of Hektor’s remains (24.159ff.). [21] These three narrative moments are synchronized, so to speak, by the visual engagement of the figures. Priam and Achilles, both painted with very prominent eyes, stare intently at each other, while Iris, approaching from the right and balanced by the figure of Hecuba on the left, gazes along the same line of sight toward the ensemble. Hektor seems almost completely unnoticed; the scene’s dramatic intensity derives from the ricocheting glances that originate with Priam at the far left of the image, but that never touch his son. In the words of Emily Vermeule, “the painter forces the parents … to stare into the eyes of the enemy who had just killed their son and they do not even see the head of dead Hektor as it passes along the ground at their feet.” [22] The pointed use of the figures’ interlocking gazes to coordinate this synopsis of the Iliad’s last books recalls the way that Priam’s sighting of Achilles articulates the Iliadic narrative. [23]

At the level of pragmatic visuality, Fjuljanin’s techniques reinforce the idea that the performance of epic poetry ought to be understood as a process of mediating between past and present. In his investigations of the ‘immediacy’ effect of the Homeric reenactment of the past, Egbert Bakker has demonstrated the many ways in which the Homeric performer may use the resources of language to bring it about that “the mountain comes to Mohammed”—that is, to bring the past into the present of performance. [24] Among the linguistic resources useful in this regard, Bakker includes the particle ara and the aorist tense, both of which are employed in the following example to render particularly vivid Penelope’s retrieval of a weapon that plays a crucial role in the plot [25] :

Fjuljanin ‘presents’ a similar moment—the retrieval and disabling of Miloš’s rifle by Anđelija, another of Halil’s helpers—with an even more explicit token of immediacy:

The deictic marker evo ‘here’ is a compressed version of a ‘presentation formula’, a device that enables Bosniac epic singers to summon events linguistically before their audience. [26] Elsewhere in the song a similar effect is achieved by means of the deictic marker sad(e) ‘now’. [27]

Even though Homeric narrative does not make use of spatial or temporal markers that are explicitly tied to the ‘here and now’ of performance, we may observe the use of linguistic strategies that appear consciously designed to bridge the gap between past event and present telling. Some of these involve the use of lexical items other than those noted by Bakker to heighten the vividness and immediacy of the narrative. In the following passage, for example, the collocation καὶ δή singles out a visual and temporal zooming-in on a new detail: [28]

This detail is not irrelevant: it provides a note of intense pathos in anticipation of the upcoming act of violence, and so contributes directly to the emotional immediacy of the event. Even more striking is the expressive potential of the grammatically-acknowledged ambiguity in the frame of reference of the deictic markers αὐτοῦ, αὖθι, αὐτόθι, etc. Words of this class can have both proximal (‘here’, ‘now’) and distal (‘there’, ‘then’) reference. We posit a deliberate exploitation of this ambiguity in cases in which the ‘there and then’ potentially merges with the ‘here and now’ of the performance, as in the following passage:

In his translation of this passage, Richmond Lattimore renders the αὐτοῦ of the last line as “there.” [29] His rendering reflects a very common (perhaps ‘default’) tendency to distance narrated events from the hic et nunc of their telling. We suggest that the Greek is actually more elusive, and therefore more open to an immediacy-oriented reading. [30]

This kind of studied ambiguity, however, is still a very far cry from the level of explicit involvement in the performance setting on display in Fjuljanin’s text. Fjuljanin establishes a direct relationship between himself, the events of his narrative, and his audience, as we can see from his use of the full version of the ‘presentation formula’:

The address to the listener that is implicit in the deictic marker evo ‘here’ becomes explicit when the formula is expanded to include the second-person pronoun ti (word for word, kad evo ti translates as ‘when here for you’). Fjuljanin also makes use of the functionally parallel formula a da vidiš (roughly, “you should have seen”), in which the second-person verb again makes explicit reference to the listener. These devices represent a widespread technique in Fjuljanin’s tradition for foregrounding new visual steps in the narrative. Audience address is in fact a prominent feature of very many performance traditions, so that its complete absence from the Homeric poems is justly cause for surprise. Although Homeric narrative has a variety of techniques for singling out characters and details, and otherwise directing the audience’s mental vision, the poems do not make use of this most obvious and perhaps easiest way to achieve that goal.

A similar point may be made with regard to the metanarrative comments such as:

The metanarrative comment in this case engages not only the audience’s attention, but also, more particularly, their mind’s eye, by introducing a visual description (of the horse’s haggard appearance). The Homeric epics, by contrast, do not include comments like these. The question is, why? We might speculate that some explicit reference to the performer-audience relationship—some form of “back-channeling”—was in fact verbalized at a certain stage in the development of Homeric poetry, but that such references were screened out of the text in the process of textualization, as the written text gradually became more and more independent of a particular performance. [31] At the same time, it must be stressed that previously undetected aspects of the Homeric strategies for conveying vividness continue to be discovered, and that scholars’ understanding of Homeric visuality will necessarily continue to evolve—perhaps so as to encompass precisely those features that appear on the surface to be absent. This paper is offered as a contribution to this evolving understanding.