Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Poetry heralds the departure of the gods from this world. All of the great miracles of the past now only appear in the form of the poetic. The direct contact with divinity of the so-called Homeric age has vanished and all that is left in its wake is the mediation of song. The drive that compels us to narrate has thrown up a great challenge to us moderns. For Paul Ricœur, the act of narration is the invention of a “narrative necessity” which transforms the contingent character of the event being recalled into looking as if it could be no other way. This contemporary discussion of narrative’s relationship to causality, necessity, and contingency might serve well to highlight the issue as it already appears latent in the ancient world. In the ancient tongue these notions appear as Chance and Fate, and what those ancient narrators (poets) do to them is anything but clear. This paper will think through the relationship between Chance and Fate in Homer’s Odyssey, alongside Seth Benardete’s reading that the Odyssey is a poem working toward “the occlusion of the gods.” As well as considering Charles Stocking’s recent work on co-agency and the Homeric subject. Ultimately making the case that the poets, in their view to the whole that blurs any distinction between Chance and Fate, usher in the potential of a new constitution of the subject that perhaps was not possible on the fields of Troy and perhaps create the very soil that philosophy itself emerges.