Carey's comment on the Homeric question

What is it about?

By using recognizable details from the raw material of the various myths of the Trojan War, in his short story, Concerning the Greek Tyrant, Australian author Peter Carey constructs a narrative that turns the well known Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey on their heads. He uproots the myth of the Trojan war from the “lost order of time” and by making it a story of “the here and now” he joins an almost three-thousand-year-long tradition while breaking away from it simultaneously. The present paper aims to examine a manifest duality of the textual actions in Concerning the Greek Tyran and argue that its historical plot appears to be a realistic adaptation of a few of the closing events of the war as reconstructed from a variety of sources on the one hand, and a narrative of how Homer suffers from writer’s block on the other. On the linguistic level of narration, however, the text is permeated by irony, a mastertrope (Burke 1945) whose dialectic nature further enhances the aforementioned duality, and helps the various dimensions of the text reflect and comment on each other.

Featured Image