¿paisajes mediterráneos en la tradición homérica? (estereotipos paisajísticos para la educación en la antigua hélade)

Abstract

Keywords: Objectification, Homeric, resource, landscape and culture. The present thesis tries to approach a subject as complex as that of looking for the traces of landscape in the Homeric tradition. To this end and to make this approach, as well as facilitate the analysis of the landscape in the temporal development of Homeric literary narration, we approach to such heterogeneous sciences as painting or geography, in which the landscape fits with crystal clarity, but also to philology, psychology, cinema or theater, considered a priori as disciplines outside the subject of study. With a hybrid method —typical of both the landscape and the humanities— we consider that the fundamental objective of this research has been achieved: the identification of stereotypical landscapes or the use of nature or the Mediterranean cultural environment as a landscape expression in texts of the ancient Greece belonging to Homer and the so-called Homeric tradition and located at the beginning of Western Culture. We have been discovering that, in the language of ancient Greece, there was not even a word that forcefully expressed what we know today as nature and even —knowing that great authors have affirmed that the thought of the Hellenic people was alien to landscape approaches— we have dared to analyze a good number of those texts and we have ended up assuming that nature and the Mediterranean landscape, both physical and cultural, constitute powerful narrative tools of those first poets, logologists, historians, philosophers and scientists, who made up the Homeric tradition, which the Poet had started and whose fundamental objective was a moralizing education identified with landscapes. We approach the reading and analysis of Greek texts in the present time, after more than two thousand five hundred years since they were written, in an inheriting civilization, such as ours, but very distant due to the evolutionary process of the species. If we forget social, cultural or technological advances and think only about words, observing how they have been incorporated into our vocabulary —successively but in very long times— terms such as nature, geography, landscape and ecology, theater, contemplation, gaze and emotion. What intentions did the incorporation of nature into the narrative fact have now and then? Are they constructions of landscapes? They had neither the word nor the genre, but when we read those poems that invite us to contemplate, to look at those territories that we recognize as ours, as Mediterranean, without knowing where they are, we feel them close to us, doesn't it precisely begin in that emotion the landscape proper? In the first part, Homer's work is analyzed, identifying the selection that he himself makes of stereotypical natural or cultural spaces of the Mediterranean in order to express his ideas, transmit a message in a certain way and with a specific objective: to create Mediterranean geographic archetypes. Responding to his role as aedo-educator, he uses the archetypes of nature, geography, the polis, the Mediterranean landscape as a teaching and unifying program for the dispersed peoples of Hellas. The objectification carried out with the memory deposits themselves will base the creation and germ of the West. In the second part, in the works analyzed up to Apollonius (295–215 BC), objectification has brought us closer to painting with greater evidence. Perhaps in earlier texts such as those by Mimnermo or Safo and, evidently in the Argonáuticas, we would approach the «intention of provoking individual experiences of sensory immersion in concrete and significant landscapes». Because «the main objective of an expert reading of landscapes cannot be other than to offer spatial, territorial and perceptual keys to the environment in which they are found. The intention (of such a reading) is to provoke individual experiences of sensory immersion in specific and significant landscapes of that field to lead —through transmissible stories— to some in situ interpretations and possible visual artisations that underline the affective bonds and the ethical commitments of society with his / her landscapes» Without forgetting our rich language and according to the DRAE, the imagination —in its first meaning— is the "faculty of the soul that represents the images of real or ideal things." In literature, objectification is the analytical basis for the personal construction of a fictitious reality produced by the imagination based on our memory store. The results of this research work will be collected in order to conclude with the hypothesized statements and, remembering Edmund Burke — who after considering that «a man who crosses the surface of things, no matter how much he makes mistakes, opens the way for others, […]. As I am sensible, I have not arranged my subjects to endure the test of a malicious controversy, but of a moderate and even indulgent examination,…»—, saving the distances, I would request the same treatment.