The long-lasting power of the Iliad over its recipients[1] is to be explained in significant part through the poem’s power to create a feeling of immersion in the narrative and identification with its characters; the time is ripe for a study of these two separate but overlapping mechanisms, as media studies and cognitive psychology have over the past few decades offered empirically based definitions on which our study of the text can now rely. This is the main thesis underpinning Jonathan Ready’s exceptionally rich monograph, which combines a wealth of close reading (with forays beyond the title and into the Odyssey and the Hymns) with detailed reviews of the psychological literature forming the basis of his definitions, as well as its parallels with the intuitions of ancient Homeric readers.
After a very brief introduction outlining some terminology and situating the book within current trends in Homeric studies (the name of Jonas Grethlein appears more frequently than any others here[2]), the book plunges directly into the first macro-topic, namely identification by recipients with characters. A second introduction offers a more specific literature review aimed at defining the types of identification that Ready is interested in and their textual features, as well as a thorough and interesting collection of ancient passages commenting on audience identification (the discussion of the role of identification in Aristarchus’ editorial decisions on pp. 42ff. is particularly remarkable). The following two chapters are mostly focused on close reading: chapter 3 lays the groundwork by highlighting how Homeric speakers elicit identification in their internal audiences, while chapter 4 applies these cues for identification to passages where Ready argues (always convincingly) for the recipient’s identification with mortal and divine characters (including Demeter in the relevant Homeric Hymn).
Ready’s close reading is an outstanding contribution to scholarship; for each passage discussed, no matter how briefly, I was left almost overwhelmed by the sheer amount of new insights and the quality of the understanding brought by his commentary. If anything, my main objection is that his analysis often stops too early: the discussion of Agamemnon’s aristeia in book 11 could have included the pregnancy simile in 11.267–72, the discussion of Hera in book 14 inexplicably stops before her seduction of Zeus, and the tantalising insights on Thetis as the focaliser of the whole Iliadic plot on p. 126 could have been pushed much further. The last section of chapter 4 (“The Politics of Identification”), which engages in depth with Lillian Doherty’s work on the gendered politics of the Odyssey narrative[3] before extending the analysis to emotional identification in tragedy as a potential way to support the Athenian status quo, is, while among the most interesting in the book, not really about the Iliad; it could productively have formed a conclusion, or the lead-up to a conclusion, for the whole monograph, rather than being confusingly shoe-horned here.
The second section of the book deals with the recipient’s immersion in the narrative. While it is slightly jarring that the introductory chapter starts with ancient perspectives rather than modern theory this time around, the texts Ready selects are helpful in consolidating the concept of immersion as the otherwise slightly nebulous textual effect that makes audiences feel like they are directly experiencing the events. (The inclusion of tragedy seems misleading here, since the component of staging must have been cognitively relevant.) After a review of modern debates about immersion, the next two chapters offer more excellent close reading of examples of spatio-temporal (chapter 6) and emotional (chapter 7) immersion. The choice to structure these chapters by type of immersion, rather than by highlighting the individual passages analysed as was done in chapters 3 and 4, is necessary due to the significantly larger amount of short examples, but some finer level of subdivision could have been considered (topics addressed in chapter 6 include the movement of people and objects, place names, motor resonance with people and objects,[4] internal focalisation, and speech presentation—a rich selection that would have benefitted from clearer signposting). Despite this minor objection, chapter 7 is probably the best in the book: Ready’s analysis of the types of suspense experienced by the recipient of the Iliad should be required reading for scholars trying to understand the interplay between oral tradition and audience response, and the long digression on types of similes offers an equally significant advancement to the whole field.
Instead, the book ends with a chapter on “Content and Form” before a short conclusion; the reader expecting a more focused discussion of oral technique in this chapter will be disappointed, as its analysis of various storytelling techniques is not significantly different, except for a very intriguing and rather technical section about sound and metre, from the discussion of immersive elements in chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 8 gives the impression of being a repository for anything that did not fit in the previous two chapters—a lack of organisation confirmed by the statement in the chapter’s conclusions that “four other components of immersion” (p. 237) have been introduced over what was, in fact, three subsections. Better examples of Ready’s ability to connect his discussions of immersion and identification to sharp observations about orality can be found on pp. 54–6, on the role of traditional linguistic elements as implicit cues for visualisation, or 76–7, on how traditional referentiality alerts audiences to understated emotional content.
The overall conclusion occupies just under 15 pages, moving from a cursory definition of the kind of audience who will best identify/immerse in narratives to a much better grounded review of what elements of the performer’s craft could have been particularly conducive to narrative immersion. The book ends with a discussion of the enduring impact of the Iliad and how “those of us who teach the Iliad in translation” (p. 251) can use students’ naïve intuitions about immersion and identification with characters in order to teach them that their instinctive engagement with texts is inherently valuable and can lead to more in-depth academic study. This is an excellent and refreshing approach to teaching, although perhaps some more discussion of how these teaching techniques can be relevant to those students who will not become academics themselves would have been welcome.
This leads directly to my main set of issues with what is otherwise one of the most provocative and insightful books on the Iliad I have ever read. Ready’s intended audience, as revealed by his final comments, appears to be scholars and university-level teachers; accordingly, his book’s dense argument and referencing style[5] makes large sections of the book a challenging read. The resulting stream of brilliant scholarly insights is often disorganised (I have tried to highlight specific examples in my summary), and the book would have significantly benefitted from greater consideration of its readability and structure.[6] Perhaps the worst issue is that references to secondary literature are regularly presented without any attempt at situating the author(s) in their disciplinary context; while this is confusing at best in the case of classical scholarship (on multiple occasions Ready enters into a debate without warning his reader that the debate existed in the first place), it is especially confusing when it comes to work in psychology and cognitive studies, where the reader is left floundering through entire paragraphs listing experimental studies and the contradictions between their results without any sense of whether these contradictions arise from research design, techniques, or theoretical disagreements. This is a disappointing shortcoming in a book that includes among its declared goals alerting Homerists to advances in psychology and media studies; the lack of context on classical scholarship also makes the book inaccessible to non-classicists, which is a pity when it argues so successfully for the Iliad’s place in the history of media.
For the reader who is willing to invest the time and patience to properly engage with Ready’s style and argument, this book is rich with endless individual observations, skilful close reading, and broader and better insight into the enduring power of the Iliad as a narrative than has been provided by other contemporary scholarship. With the reservations and cautions outlined above, and while I regrettably won’t be adding it to undergraduate reading lists, it should certainly become required reading for PhD students and researchers on the evolution of the Homeric text, audience response, and the position of classics in the wider field of media studies.
Notes
[1] Ready adopts the adroitly media-agnostic term recipient; the author mostly eschews “audience,” perhaps because it would distract from the focus on individual recipients’ responses (a very sensible choice).
[2] To Ready’s literature review on how emotional responses guide our reading of the Iliad (p. 5) should be added Luigi Battezzato’s excellent short book on the emotions and decision-making of Zeus, Hector, and Achilles (Battezzato, Luigi. 2019. Leggere la mente degli eroi: Ettore, Achille e Zeus nell’Iliade. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale).
[3] Doherty, Lillian E. 1995. Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
[4] The discussion of the agency of objects on pp. 178–9 is interestingly provocative and might have benefitted from referencing studies of prosthetic cognition from a disability- and trauma-informed perspective: see e.g. Weiberg, Erika. 2018. “Weapons as Friends and Foes in Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Heracles”, in Mario Telò and Melissa Mueller, eds. The Materialities of Greek Tragedy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 63–78.
[5] The choice of in-line references for anything under five sources does not, in my opinion, achieve its intended goal of limiting distraction: skipping long parentheses is cognitively taxing, and the irregular appearance of footnotes, a handful of which actually contain points about content while other obvious tangents and digressions are left in the text, is both unhelpful and gives the impression of inconsistency.
[6] The book is otherwise very well produced; the only significant typo I could find is agnōnian for the scholion’s agōnian on p. 37, which obscures the relationship with the discussion of the same term on p. 197. In the bibliography, I question the decision of citing two books by Ruby Blondell under different names; the older book could have been cited under the author’s current name, as is best practice, perhaps using square brackets as is done elsewhere for [J.] B. Hainsworth and D. [L.] Cairns.