The Homeric Question: West vs the Oralists

In a blog post I published in February entitled Papyri of the Iliad; Also: Academic Conventions, I mentioned the late M L West (1937-2015) and the 1569 papyri of the Iliad which he consulted for his Teubner edition, which was published in two volumes in 1998 and 2000.

Back in February, I knew scarcely anything about West. Before this, he was, to me, above all one of the two editors of the selected fragments in my 1990 OCT edition of Hesiod. Since then, I've learned that West was involved in a debate over the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey which is very spirited, to say the least, and which has been going on for decades. (I know that you academics who are reading this know much more about this debate than I do. As I keep repeating, my blog posts about Classical studies are written by a layman for other laypeople.) West said that both poems were composed in the 7th century BC, first the Iliad and then the Odyssey, by two different individuals; on the other hand, scholars known as oralists, or proponents of oralism, assert that... let's see -- what exactly do they assert? I believe they're saying that no one person can be regarded as the author of either or both poems: that they were the products of oral composition and performance up until the moment, in the 6th century, when one version of each poem was written down. The oral performances continued for some time after this first written version, and account for the many of the discrepancies among the manuscripts. I believe that's more or less what the oralists are saying.

I know that I don't know anywhere near enough Greek to take an intelligent position on this controversy. To do so, I would have to be able to evaluate the textual variants in Homer, and decide whether I beleive that West or the oralists account for them more convincingly. All I can tell you is that I like the things which West wrote about it in English. Beginning with the first I ever heard about West's disagreement with the oralists: in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.09.06, answering reviews of his volumes of the Iliad by Gregory Nagy and Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, West writes:

"My critics are both (though it takes them in different ways) devotees of the Oralist faith, and they reproach me for not paying sufficient regard to the Good News."

That made me smile. West has had me from the moment I read that. Furthermore, unfortunately, Nagy, Nardelli and others representing the oralist standpoint actually do write, at least when they're writing in opposition to West's answers to the Homeric question, in a strident, dismissive, unpleasant manner reminiscent of religious fanatics answering the views of those who disagree with them.

I'm not saying that West is right and that the oralists are wrong. I am saying that West states his case much more persuasively in English than the oralists do. But, of course, English is ultimately not what this is about.