#i discovered goncharov (1973) two days ago and if anything happened to it I'd kill everything in this room and then myself

[smilerri]

goncharov and the homeric epics

as a classics student I honestly consider this whole goncharov thing to be a kind of breakthrough. for DECADES even CENTURIES people have been debating how the homeric epics were composed orally and I can't help but think that this is it? a community of people encounter a single piece of inspiration, in the case of goncharov a knock off label and in case of homeric society memories of a far-off war, and from it they build something beyond the imagination of any single person. with too much plot to ever fit into a 2 hour movie or two printed books, all communicated by bursts of words, art, and music.

naturally there is the issue that tumblr and the internet as a whole is far more permanent and far-reaching than forms of communication in archaic greece, but I still think that this provides us a feasible answer to the homeric question (that is, who is homer? a single man who composed two epics? a group of people? or is it an abstract term used to help us comprehend a societal phenomenon wherein oral communication and performance has permitted such epics to come into existence? (in case u can't tell I think it's the last one)). tumblr was able to creat goncharov within a matter of days because of the speed and reach if online communication. the odyssey and the iliad, however, we have no specific start and end date for. rather, the period in which they may have been composed stretches from the late 8th to early 7th centuries BCE (Before Common/Current Era) - what's to say it wasn't in the process of composition that entire time? slowly, very slowly, word would have spread from person to person, each adding their own ideas, characters, and themes, until a plot began to emerge, over the course of many, many years. then came the bards, the performers, who pieces together these floating ideas until they had something cohesive, which they then performed at festivals or privately or wherever, and then their audience would add their own ideas - to put in into modern terms, "fanfiction" and "headcanons" would make excellent equivalents.

or maybe the artwork came first. vase paintings, graffiti; anything to act as an outlet to preserve just a few of these ideas that otherwise would disappear as human memory fades. goncharov has an advantage in that way, as posts online are more accessible and, to an extent, immortal, while the spoken word is quick to dissipate and material items are perishable. for as long as tumblr survives (which it's proven itself to be very good at), those fanarts and posts will remain preserved in their original condition.

I'm no expert on all things goncharov but I checked out the masterdoc for the basic plot and one thing that stood out to me was the "debated scenes" section, because that's some thing that always bothered me about the epics. what is translated of homer is mostly drawn from manuscripts dated to around the medieval period, many many years after the epics were supposedly composed - meaning that, as oral tradition began to lose its popularity, the epics were recorded physically, and in doing so lost their flexibility. I have no doubt that there are hundreds, even thousands of different versions of the homeric epics, whether those are complete narratives - like goncharov, with it's "directors cut" and "private screening" versions - or individual scenes and stories that slot into the (arguably shaky) narrative we currently have, just like goncharov. I truly hope that, unlike this, no one tries to permanently tie goncharov down into one "correct" narrative, because what makes this phenomena so great, and what makes the oral tradition so great, is precisely it's flexibility.

there is a beauty in ambiguity, that is only emphasised by our yearning to find the "truth". for homer's epics, that ambiguity has somewhat (not entirely!) been lost as people settled with the narrative we have been given as the "true" version, but for goncharov, which has essentially been plucked from the air rather than dug up from under thousands of years of history, ambiguity is its main allure and the reason it has gained so much popularity - people saw the potential in its ambiguity, picked it up and ran with it. and, all those thousands of years ago, an ancient people very well may have done the same.

I could go on to talk about thematic similarities because it makes me laugh how society continues it's tendency towards homoeroticism to the point that, when a microcosm of a global (though primarily english-speaking) community is given the chance to create an entirely new piece of media with so little prerequisite they immediately saturate it with homoerotic subtext and, in some of the "debated scenes" they just make it fully homosexual which I respect so much you people are geniuses and the ancient greeks would be proud (also the parallels between goncharov and andery and achilles and patroclus are THERE and you bet I'm going to talk about them. just not right now lol). but unfortunately I have many essays to write on this very topic that I have been ignoring! so enjoy this rant I hope it's not entirely unintelligible!!