Lyric Texts & Consciousness

Paul Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317761747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

First published in 1994. Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness presents a model for studying the history of lyric as a genre. Professor Miller drawls a distinction between the work of the Greek lyrists and the more condensed, personal poetry that we associate with lyric. He then confronts the theoretical issues and presents sophisticated, Bakhtinian reading of the development of lyric form from its origins in archaic Greece to the more individualist style of Augustan Rome. This book will appeal to classicists and since English translation of passes from ancient authors are provided, to those who specialise in comparative literature.

1

The Subject of the Text

Between the generality of the meaning of words … and … the uniqueness of the acoustic event which occurs when an utterance is proffered, there takes place a process that permits the linkage of the two, which we call enunciation. This process does not suppose the existence of two physical bodies … but the presence of two (or more) social entities.… The time and the space in which enunciation occurs also aren’t purely physical categories, but a historical time and social space.

(Todorov 1984: 39–40)

The poet’s audience, the readers of a novel, those in the concert hall – these are collective organizations of a special type, sociologically distinctive and exceptionally important. Without these distinctive forms of social intercourse there are no poems, no odes, no novels, no symphonies. Definite forms of social intercourse are constituent to the meaning of the works of art themselves.

(Bakhtin/Medvedev 1985: 11)

The purpose of this work is to present a model for studying the history of lyric as a genre. My specific claim about the nature of lyric poetry is that what is now generally considered lyric – a short poem of personal revelation, confession or complaint, which projects the image of an individual and highly self-reflexive subjective consciousness (see among others Schelling 1913: 1–3; Lukács 1973: 63–64; Frye 1971: 249–50; Culler 1975: 164–70) – is only possible in a culture of writing. Indeed it is the lyric collection which spawns the lyric consciousness as we know it. For only the collection, with its inherent potential for building up complex relational structures of reading and rereading, possesses the necessary flexibility in the temporal patterns of its reception to project the image of a self which is not merely a character in a presumed narrative, but rather the source of all possible narrative projections that would seek to account for a given set of texts. In this sense, the lyric collection would be the opposite of tragedy as Aristotle defines it, for in the lyric collection it is the projection of selfhood, ἦθóς, which makes the action, μῦθος possible, and not the other way around (Poetics 1450a 23–4). I shall also argue that this projection of a peculiarly interiorized and articulated consciousness, which defines the genre, is a historical phenomenon, that the precise nature of its structure will vary from period to period according to the ideological patterns on which it is based, and finally that there are certain periods when the projection of this consciousness is completely absent.

This projection of a complex and unique image of consciousness is only possible, as noted above, within the multi-referential and multitemporal system which writing, by allowing recursive modes of reading, makes possible. For lyric subjectivity exists not as a linear narrative, nor as a mirror of what physicists call the arrow of time, but rather as an interrelated series of temporal loops moving at various speeds and levels of consciousness. It proceeds not one day at time, but moves forward and back simultaneously, compulsively analyzing and reinterpreting the same multivalent experiences, even as it adds to them.¹ The link between the initial projections of such a consciousness and the shift from an essentially oral and ritualized presentation to the later graphic form was first noted by Northrop Frye:

The kind of formulaic, half-improvised poetry that, we are told, lies close behind the Homeric poems is a poetry of pure continuity.… If the poet does not read or write, the poem exists only in the one dimension of pure continuity in time, because such a poet is not thinking of lines on a page. If the poem is written, it appears in two spatial dimensions, across and down a page, as well as in time, and the crucial term “verse,” with its associations of turning around or turning back, becomes functional. The poem may still be continuous, but in “verse,” where we keep coming to the end of a line and then starting another, there is a germ of discontinuity. The more this sense of the discontinuous increases, the more closely we approach the lyrical area.

(Frye 1985: 31)

In this context, it is significant that it was not until the fifth century BCE that Greek schools began to teach reading and not until its last decades that mention of a book trade is made. Thus, although one can argue about when poets first began to compose with the aid of writing or produced written copies of poems composed orally, the actual diffusion and reception of poetry remained almost exclusively an oral and aural phenomenon² till the mid-Hellenistic period, when the first scholarly editions of the archaic poets were compiled. It is these late compilations, arranged generally according to metrical category or occasion of first performance by much later editors, which form the basis of the texts we have today of Archilochus, Sappho, Pindar, and the other poets of the archaic and early classical periods (Rosier 1983: 18; Thalmann 1984: xx; Santirocco 1986: 6; Graff 1987: 9, 26; Harris 1989: 29, 47–49, 57–59, 78–79, 84–85; Thomas 1989: 19–23, 30–31; 1992: 3, 6–8, 13, 50, 62, 92–93, 115). By the same token, the first archive was founded in Athens only at the end of the fifth century, while authoritative versions of the great classical tragedians were not established by Lycurgus until the second half of the fourth century, and even then the primary mode of their diffusion was for the secretary of the polis to read them out to the actors (Thomas 1989: 15, 38–41, 49; 1992: 48, 91). Publication and preservation of poetic texts during this period was assured by the public performances of professional rhapsodes and the private singing of young aristocrats at symposia who had committed the works to memory. The ability to transmit, largely intact, vast amounts of oral poetry is something we moderns find difficult to imagine, but as the tradition of Vedic transmission seems to indicate, it is possible to preserve a fixed text literally for centuries using only the mnemonic techniques that are available to an oral tradition (Harris 1989: 49; Nagy 1990a: 23, 54–55, 435–36; 1990b: 38, 40–41; Tedlock 1991: 6–7). In this regard, it is also important to recall that the most commonly used term for poet in the classical and archaic periods was not ποιητής, or “maker,” but ἀοιδóς, “singer” (Sperdutti 1950: 220). Hence, my contention will be that lyric, as most moderns think of it, does not begin with the archaic Greek lyrists such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, nor with the Hellenistic poets, but rather in the Roman period, more particularly the first century BCE.³ The archaic categories of iambic, monody, and choral lyric were, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 5, quite distinct phenomena.

Thus my argument is that the ego of Catullus, just as the “Je” of “Je est un autre” or the “self” of “Song of Myself,” must be rigorously distinguished in both its content and poetic function from the ἐγὼ of the archaic poets of Greece. Consequently, lyric as I have defined it is the re-presentation not simply of a “strong personality,” but of a particular mode of being a subject, in which the self exists not as part of a continuum with the community and its ideological commitments, but is folded back against itself, and only from this space of interiority does it relate to “the world” at large.⁴ To borrow the terminology of Bruno Gentili, we might say that the subjectivity presented by the early Greek lyrists is an “open field of forces,” whose boundaries separating it from the social world are extremely porous and fluid, while the consciousness of the lyric collection is a private space, whose relations with the external world are more overdetermined and discontinuous (Gentili 1984: 98; Ong 1982: 69).

Thus, though we may feel the presence in Pindar, Theognis, or Alcaeus of a unique poetic voice and personality, it is nonetheless, in the first instance, a public or paradigmatic one and not lyric in the sense we have defined it.⁵ Their poetry does not lack individuality in the sense of being interchangeable with that of another poet, but only in the sense of not projecting this image of a profoundly articulated interiority, with its internal complexities, ambivalences and contradictions. Nor could it project such an image, since the reception of oral poetry is necessarily linear and sequential. It is not possible to refer back to a previous passage, to reverse course and read the first poem in terms of the second or the second in terms of the first (Derrida 1976: 85; Ong 1982: 39, 99–100; Zumthor 1983: 40, 126–27; Peradotto 1992: 9). However, in a written collection it is. As Terry Eagleton writes:

Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair.… We read backwards and forwards simultaneously, predicting and recollecting, perhaps aware of other possible realizations of the text which our reading has negated. Moreover, all of this complicated activity is carried out on many levels at once, for the text has “backgrounds” and “foregrounds”, different narrative viewpoints, alternative layers of meaning between which we are constantly moving.

(1983: 77–88)

Likewise, Wolfgang Iser has given the following detailed description of the process of reading and re-reading, which the written text implies:

In every text there is a potential time sequence which the reader must inevitably realize, as it is impossible to absorb even a short text in a single moment. Thus the reading process always involves viewing the text through a perspective that is continually on the move, linking up the different phases, and so constructing what we have called the virtual dimension. This dimension, of course, varies all the time we are reading. However, when we have finished the text, and read it again, clearly our extra knowledge will result in a different time sequence; we shall tend to establish connections by referring to our awareness of what is to come and so certain aspects of the text will assume a significance we did not attach to them on a first reading, while others will recede into the background.

(Iser 1980: 56)⁶

The audience of an oral poem does possess a capacity to recall major themes and memorable phrases, but that capacity is necessarily so limited in comparison to the capability of the reader of a written text to reverse course and move backwards and forwards at will as to produce a qualitative change in the nature of the subjectivities the two types of poetry are able to project. The sort of tightly constructed, highly allusive poetry familiar to modern readers of poets such as Mallarmé or Eliot would be impossible in an oral society (Lord 1991: 17–18; Edmunds 1992: 46). The audience of an oral poem must quickly be able to perceive the gist of each passage, possessing neither the time nor psychic distance necessary to reflect on abstruse or idiosyncratic formulations. Private perceptions which do not correspond to shared social norms remain largely unintelligible (Adkins 1972: 5; Finnegan 1977: 129; Thalmann 1984: 28; Gentili 1984: 52; Kay 1991: 170).⁷

It should also be remembered that, within a largely oral society, poetry’s function is not only to provide aesthetic entertainment, but also to serve as virtually the sole medium for that society to store and preserve its necessary information (Havelock 1963: 29, 94; Thalmann 1984: 32; Gentili 1984: 53; Nagy 1990b: 41; Rose 1992: 57). Oral poetry, with its rhythmical chanting and recitation, becomes the primary means of education and social cohesion (Zumthor 1983: 224; Gentili 1984: 74; Nagy 1990a: 404; Lord 1991: 2).⁸ The object of the archaic Greek lyric poet was not to represent to his or her audience the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, recollected in tranquility, but to provide both entertainment and paradigms of personal behavior, the forms of deviance and the norm, of excellence, ἀϱετή, and inadequacy (Johnson 1982: 31; Zumthor 1983: 179; Bauman 1984: 15–16, 43–44; Gentili 1984: 3; Nagy 1990a: 368, 430).⁹ His or her task was, in short, the integration of the individual into the collectivity (Zumthor 1983: 235, 252; Gentili 1984: 4–5, 75).

Consequently, it would be a mistake to argue that the presence of the first person pronoun or the projection of an “individual voice” is sufficient grounds on which to label a poem lyric, in the modern sense of the term (Zumthor 1983: 231). Neither of these guarantees the production of the requisite discontinuity and interiority. Likewise, neither of these is a sufficient condition for the projection of what I shall henceforth call “lyric consciousness.” Thus, though the Vergilian and Homeric narrative voices are both unique, and in that sense personal, neither Homer nor Vergil is a lyric poet.

Even more fundamental than writing to the production of this multileveled interiority, which allows the projection of a lyric consciousness, is the advent of the poetry collection and the poetry book. Early poets composed for particular occasions, and performed their work in particular contexts, the individual poems existing largely in isolation from one another. It is only once the composition of ensembles begins that poems begin to refer back and forth to one another in terms of their collective participation in a complex and multi-faceted whole. With the advent of the written reproduction of texts and the creation of a reading public, poetry gains a new measure of autonomy, and comes to exist as an entity separate from the religious and communal practices which before constituted its primary “raison d’être” (Fraenkel 1957: 41; Finnegan 1977: 28; Zumthor 1983: 40, 147, 268; Rösler 1983: 10; Kurke 1991: 1). Indeed, Rosenthal and Gall have recently made an analogous claim for the poetic sequence and the creation of a lyric self, but have claimed it to be a new genre which arises out of late Romanticism (1983: 1–24). My argument is that the modern poetic sequence does not represent a new genre, but the lyric genre per se, though as it exists under modern conditions of subjectivity. Lyric, as we know it then, is dependent upon the existence of certain social and technical conditions, and hence is not the spontaneous outburst of song or the primal language of men, as it has been characterized since Vico, but a complex grid of writing and reflexive referentiality which makes the projection of a virtually autonomous, deeply interiorized consciousness possible through the advent of the lyric collection (de Man 1983: 168; Ong 1982: 78–105).

It is for this reason as well that this study has not concerned itself with the subjectivity projected by inscriptional poetry of the classical and archaic periods in Greece, a project admirably begun by Svenbro. These epigraphic poems, while certainly written, do not form part of a collection but are individual and site specific. Moreover, as Svenbro’s analysis has shown, the place of the ego in these poems, especially in the archaic period, is not that of the author or the author’s persona, but that of the object actually bearing the inscription. Moreover, this object-ego is only given life by the reader, who lends his (and readers at this time were almost exclusively men) voice to the inscription, making it come to life for his largely illiterate bystanders. The ego then is in no sense private or idiosyncratic, but very precisely paradigmatic, in that it is assumable by anyone capable of making it sound forth. As Svenbro remarks:

This use of the first person, of course, should not run up against a metaphysical conviction on the part of the receivers of the message, namely the conviction that the first person necessarily implies an inner life and voice. The very action of reading these egocentric objects encourages us to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Subject of the Text
• 2. Epos and Iambos or Archilochus Meets the Wolfman
• 3. De Generibus Disputandum Est
• 4. The Garden of Forking Paths: Catullus and the Birth of the Collection
• 5. A Poet’s Place: Sappho and the Melic Discourse of Archaic Greece
• 6. Sapphica Puella: The Triple-Faceted Object of Catullan Desire
• 7. Rome, Alexandria, and the Politics of Lyric
• 8. Horace, Mercury, and Augustus
• 9. Conclusion: Of Writings and Subjects
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Notes
• References
• Index