[B-Greek] poetry and agency (was Sophocles' Ajax (was "Voice matters again"))

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Mar 27 07:59:30 EDT 2009


On Mar 26, 2009, at 9:34 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

>
> On Mar 26, 2009, at 12:41 PM, Carl Conrad wrote:
>
>> But Sophocles is a poet, and no mean one at that. I hardly think
>> that this passage offers significant evidence regarding any sort of
>> standard practice of voice usage or modes of indicating agent.
>
> While I was out today I was thinking about this statement, mulling it
> over. In non-poetic text, it is generally assumed that an agent (or
> any participant) will be given a full noun phrase upon being
> introduced (or reintroduced) to the story and after that will be
> reduced to a pronoun or in the case of languages with verb inflection
> for person, reduced to a verb ending.  However, if we in run into a
> finite verb in the beginning of a text with no agent available from
> the preceding context, then one way out is to assume that the agent
> would be "accessible" from the shared cultural framework of the author
> and intended audience. If both of these tests fail, then we have a
> case of a missing agent (sounds like a spy novel). Has this agent been
> demoted? Perhaps s/he was "eliminated".
>
> A question about poetry, do all these assumptions simply not apply to
> poetic text?

I'm still suffering from a version of "sticker shock." I read through  
the incoming mail and starting mulling over this and John Sanders'  
fresh start on elucidating ancient Greek voice, realized that both  
called for some reflection before I should think about any serious  
response, and so went on to read the newspapers and blogs before  
coming back to these missives -- they are not lengthy but any serious  
response to them is likely to be lengthy. The "sticker shock" in this  
instance is the breadth of the question triggered by my innocent  
comment about Sophocles being, more likely, hard to pigeonhole in  
terms of the guidelines laid down by Strunk and White or in the  
ancient Greek equivalent of the Chicago Manual of Style.

"Sounds like a spy novel," you say. Sound, in fact, like many a good  
tale that sets forth, as Horace tells us an epic poem should, "in  
medias res." The Sophoclean work in question is not merely a poem but  
a play opening on a scene: a man skulking suspiciously by a tent near  
the Trojan coastline who is approached and addressed by a feminine  
figure whom we cannot definitively identify as the goddess Athena  
until the skulking figure responds to her. Perhaps the viewers' memory  
will recall the opening scene of Odyssey 13 where the same feminine  
figure approaches the same Odysseus on the coast of Ithaca, but I'm  
not sure that the opening lines of the play really make it very clear  
who these figures are. And that's often enough the case in the novel  
as well as in narrative or dramatic poetry.

I ponder the opening of the Iliad in terms of Elizabeth's question:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽  
ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι  
προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε  
κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο  
βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος  
Ἀχιλλεύς.
[MHNIN AEIDE QEA PHLHIADEW ACILHOS
OULOMENHN, hH MURI᾽ ACAIOIS ALGE᾽ EQHKE,
POLLAS D᾽ IFQIMOUS YUCAS AIDI PROIAYEN
hHRWWN, AUTOUS DE hELWRIA TEUCE KUNESSIN
OIWNOISI TE PASI, DIOS D᾽ ETELEIETO BOULH,
EX hOU DH TA PRWTA DIASTHTHN ERISANTE
ATREIDHS TE ANAX ANDRWN KAI DIOS ACILLEUS.]

Most ancient listeners to this text probably won't remember the first  
time they ever heard it, but just supposing that listening to it is a  
fresh experience: one learns at once that the song is about the WRATH  
of Achilles, the son of Peleus, but one is told a good deal about the  
baneful consequences of that wrath before one learns what occasioned  
it. Finally in verse 6 we learn about a quarrel between two persons,  
and "at long last" in verse 7 we are told who the principals are in a  
single line full of the two nominative subjects.

Novels often enough begin with descriptions of two (or more) parties  
in a setting. I think at once of Thomas Hardy's _The Mayor of  
Casterbridge_ or Charles Dickens' _Little Dorrit_; others will call to  
mind their own. The descriptions carry on at some length before we get  
much of a notion of who these persons are or what roles they are  
likely to play in the subsequent narrative. I guess the "shared  
cultural framework of the author and intended audience" sufficiently  
covers the siutations I've described above. Beyond that, I rather  
think that creative literary artists, whether poets or novelists or  
dramatists, or whatever, have discovered heretofore and will continue  
to discover ways in which to frustrate the ordinary reader/listener's  
expectation that the discourse attended to will ensue in an orderly  
sequential narration such as that promised by Luke in the opening  
statement of his gospel. I don't think that the Chicago Manual of  
Style and Strunk and White intended or succeeded at telling writers  
like William Faulkner or Sophocles or Ernest Hemingway how they should  
order the elements in their sentences.

I don't know that the question, "do all these assumptions simply not  
apply to poetic text?" has been answered. I do think, however, that  
it's fair to say that a poet will STRETCH the applications of all  
those assumptions, perhaps even to the breaking point.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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