Re: The Voices of the Gods

                   Wednesday, the 3rd of December, 2003

I said:
    It took me about two months to get over Jaynes. I do not
    now believe he reads Homer even remotely correctly.
David:
    And you do, in Homeric Greek?

Well, it depends on what you mean. I do not now, but I have done 
some. In particular, I have read 4 books out of the 48 total for the
Iliad plus the Odyssey in Homeric Greek (2 books in each epic---I 
remember that it was the first book and the last book of the Iliad, 
I can't recall which two we read in the Odyssey offhand). I did this 
in about 1992 in a 4-student class I sat in on in the classics 
department at the University of Waterloo. That was struggling 
all of the way---looking up every word, puzzling over every case 
ending, every verb form, every archaism (relative to Attic), sorting 
each sentence out into each possible arrangement, and stepping back 
10 feet or so (ala a Seurat painting) to see if I could then English 
it in any way that made sense, and then consulting English translations 
to learn, as often as not, that I had gotten it wrong. But, anyway, 
by a sort of throwing of myself into the deep end and a tough slog
at the dogpaddle, I learned I could do it. I also learned 
thereby that Lattimore's translation cribs the Greek almost 
word-for-word. Which is why Lattimore's is not the most exciting 
contribution to English poetry, but is the one version I'd recommend 
as canonically "Homer". 

As for Jaynes, I remember reading it sometime when I was
at Caltech (between 1983-1988) and finding it, as I said, 
startling, and I was enthused by it, and then, eventually, 
I mentioned my enthusiasm at the lunch table, and I experienced
having cold water thrown on it at that point. If I recall
correctly, it was characterized as "one of those books
that seem a lot better than they are---that make quite a stir
before they get thoroughly debunked" (I think the comparison 
with Erich von Daniken was suggested to me at that time).
I guess I still like Jaynes's meditation on what consciousness
is not, leading to a statement of what consciousness is
(the analog I), that opens the book. The idea that we humans 
can do a whole lot of stuff without consciousness---I buy that. 
The problem with the book seems to me to come when he makes 
his historical thesis about the evolution of consciousness. 
It's more or less built out of the absence of evidence---his 
"breakdown of the bicameral mind" comes at a point (conveniently, a
cynic might point out) before human literature. So, he's taking
several strangenesses he finds in the earliest written texts
and *interpreting* them archaeologically as evidence
for this human psychological shift. I remember specifically
the scene in the first book of the Iliad, during the quarrel
when Achilles is going to attack Agamemnon and Athena grabs
him by the hair and yanks back. I guess the question for me
is: Is this that strange? Is it enough on which to base
a whole thesis of humans having once been "bicameral",
and not conscious? To me, the striking thing about Homer
is how incredibly modern it is. And the gods' interaction
with mortals can easily be understood as metaphor for
conscious thinking---Achilles paused to think about what
he was doing. Or, the gods are just story in the same sense 
Gandalf and Elrond are story, and not vestiges of some 
primordial psychological theory.

I also recall the Jaynes' book was about 1/3 an essay on
what is consciousness, 1/3 his historical thesis of
the breakdown of bicamerality bolstered with interpretations
of a few examples of ancient literature, and 1/3 application
of this whole schema to parapsychology and "altered states".
The first third still strikes me as the most valuable,
and the last third the most forgettable. As for the middle third,
the scientist in me tells me we have approximately zero way 
of ever testing the hypothesis of quondam bicamerality.
I *will* say that about the only work of literature I
have ever read that could come near to convincing me of
a different human consciousness is The Egyptian Book
of the Dead. It is a fundamentally strange work to me, and 
I suppose that, given it's strangeness, Jaynes's suggestions 
are as good as any other.  

             Mike Morris
        ([EMAIL PROTECTED])