https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii149/articles/fredric-jameson-agon-the-iliad

Fredric Jameson

Homer is today at many removes from us; a classic, foundational or canonical, whose original text or meaning no one seriously believes we can recapture. The interminable oral or McLuhanite arguments at best propose the idea of a reading which by definition they set out of reach; while anthropology is there to warn us against identifying its content with the same rages, points of honour, enmities, snap decisions, alertness to disrespect, burning ambitions, with which we ourselves are only too familiar. Are not these Achaeans (as I will henceforth call them) just as alien to us as the Aztecs or the Tupinambás, with their murderous gymnastics, their taste for blood sports, their vendettas, their never-ending ritual insults and inexhaustible self-promotions? The choice itself is anachronistic, inasmuch as such concepts of savagery and irrationality are modern and our own; and based on constructions of Western rationality and Greek classicality projected onto an archaic past rapidly turning into a Kantian Ding-an-sich before our very eyes.
1. misreadings of the secular

Only they are not archaic, these people. Despite the prodigious memory of their bards, the Homeric characters themselves at best remember recent grudges and distant ancestry. To be sure, there are moments in which the truly archaic breaks through. So it is that the shaman, his plea rebuffed, mutters his ritual curses and prayers for vengeance to a god much older than the Olympians (and is heard):

. . . He came as night comes down and knelt then
apart and opposite the ships and let go an arrow.
Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver.
First he went after the mules and circling hounds, then let go
a tearing arrow against the men themselves and struck them.
The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning.footnote1

This god has nothing in common with the Apollo of the same name who acts out his assigned role in what is essentially a comic subplot, the frivolous court drama of the Olympians, with their rivalries, their intrigues, and their apprehensive subservience to the Sun King. In a work which has little room for anything but the state of exception, the siege and the provisionality of the camps, the beached ships, the gods offer a glimpse of what used to be daily life: strong and assertive women, marital disputes, adulteries, seductions, days and nights. Here the Elizabethan double plot is inverted, and it is the transcendental realm, rather than that of peasant buffoonery, which affords comic relief. (To which we shall add shortly that Homer possesses a third register, namely the animal savagery of the similes.)

What is then the function of such deities, who still to be sure insist on the appropriate rites and sacrifices, in their too-human relish for the delicious fumes of broiling meat and fat? The answer is at one and the same time narrative and philosophical: they dispel contingency, they rationalize chance in those innumerable hand-to-hand combats, in which, inevitably, someone will live and someone will die, and yet in which there can be little satisfactory narrative explanation for the outcome. The gods replace it. Their intervention rarely involves the supernatural or even the improbable: Patroklos will still stumble, Hektor reach in vain for his second spear; but the gods lend a cover to the stumble, the unlucky throw, the damaged shield.