Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse

POETRY IN SPEECH

Orality and Homeric Discourse

Egbert J. Barker

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1 Perspectives

1 The Construction of Orality

2 The Writing of Homer

Part 2 Speech

3 Consciousness and Cognition

4 The Syntax of Movement

5 Homeric Framings

Part 3 Special Speech

6 Rhythm and Rhetoric

7 Epithets and Epic Epiphany

8 The Grammar of Poetry

Speech and Text: A Conclusion

Bibliography

Index Locorum

General Index

Foreword

Gregory Nagy

Many of the books in the Myth and Poetics series center on the power of myth to make language special or specially formal: when language is stylized by myth, it becomes a culture’s poetry or song. Egbert Bakker’s Poetry in Speech approaches myth and poetics from another direction, asking how myth is shaped by poetics and, just as important, how poetics are conditioned by everyday language, language as it is actually spoken. Bakker calls everyday language speech, distinguishing it from the special languages of song or poetry (or even prose), and the word is aptly chosen, since the range of its meanings in contemporary English recapitulates the tendency of everyday language to become special in special contexts. In neutral contexts, as when we speak of the human capacity for speech, the word applies by default to any language situation; in special contexts, however, as when we speak of a speech delivered before an audience, the word refers to a special kind of discourse.

The criterion of everyday speech, it is essential to stress, is a cultural variable, depending on the concrete realization of whatever special speech or discourse is being set apart for a special context. In traditional societies, as the books in the Myth and Poetics series have argued in a variety of ways, the setting apart of such special discourse would normally happen when a ritual is enacted or when a myth is spoken or sung. The language of Homer is a prime example of such special discourse, as Richard P. Martin vividly demonstrated in the first book of this series, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad Homeric discourse is most sharply set apart from the reality of everyday language, no matter how we may reconstruct this reality for any particular time and place in ancient Greece, by its metrical and formulaic dimensions. Bakker traces these dimensions, which for Milman Parry and Albert Lord mark the orality of Homeric discourse, back to their sources in everyday language—a genealogy expressed in the book’s full title, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse.

Bakker has shifted the emphasis: poetry that is oral is in fact speech that is special, stylized by meter and formula. To put it negatively: it is not the absence of writing that makes oral poetry special. Nor is it the orality of oral poetry that makes it special, as if oral were a special category within a body of poetry that we generally experience in written form. From an anthropological point of view, poetry in and of itself is special speech. The real working opposition is the one between special speech—whether it be song or poetry or prose—and the everyday speech from which it derives. That derivation does not imply a binary distinction, of course, and the continuum that runs between everyday language and the varieties of special speech can be extended to include written texts. Speech that is written, because of the stylization involved, sometimes has a better claim to the special distinction than do any oral examples of special speech.

Understanding our inherited Homeric text as the reflex of a special language, Bakker transcends purely literary interpretation, refusing to be tied down by presuppositions of a text originally composed in writing and written in order to be read. In analyzing the principles of Homeric composition, he shows us how to rethink even the concept of the sentence and of the period, its classical analogue. Only in a text-bound approach, Bakker argues, can the sentence be considered the basic unit of speech. Following the methods of the linguist Wallace Chafe, he reassesses the building blocks of speech in terms of the speaker’s cognitive system as it actually operates in the process of speaking. Chafe resists the artificial super imposition of literate grammar on the analysis of everyday language. Bakker frees his own analysis of Homeric discourse from such superimpositions and defamiliarizes our textbound mental routines in the reading of archaic Greek poetry.

Bakker’s arguments about the shaping of the metrical and formulaic system of Homeric discourse by the everyday speech from which it is derived open many avenues for future research, particularly into the regulation of speech by this system at the posited moment(s) of performance in an oral tradition. The poetics of recomposition-in-performance, which are reflected in the patterns of wording and word placement within the fundamental rhythmical unit of the dactylic hexameter, can now be further examined from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Bakker’s own explorations of these questions mark a monumental advance in our understanding of Homeric discourse as a linguistic system. A striking example is his success in explaining the syntactic functions of Homeric particles like mén, mḕn, dé, dḕ, ḕtoi, ára/rhá, gár, autár/atár, kaí, all, οûn. In the wake of Bakker’s analysis, the classicist cannot help but read the Greek of Homer differently: the readers understanding of practically every verse is affected—and enhanced.

A vital question remains: why exactly is there a need for a special discourse in the self-expression of myth? The answers, which vary from culture to culture, have to do with the special contents of myth itself, which require special forms for their expression. In the case of Homeric discourse, as Bakker shows in minute detail, such answers can be found in the actual usage of the discourse itself. A case in point is the system of noun-epithet formulas. Through these formulas, as also through the deployment of evidential particles, Homeric discourse represents itself as the verbalization of a heroic world that is literally visualized by those very special agents of divine memory, the Muses. Whatever Homeric poetry sees through the Muses who witness the epic past becomes just as special as whatever it says through the Muses who narrate what they saw (and heard) to Homer. Homeric vision, as expressed by the metrical and formulaic system of Homeric discourse, claims to be something far greater than mere poetic imagination. The blind bard’s inner vision becomes the ultimate epiphany of the heroic past.

For Petra

Acknowledgments

The activities leading up to this book have taken some years, and it is a pleasure to express my gratitude for the help and support I received from people and institutions along the way. I have fond memories of a stay—one of the many pleasant things made possible by a Fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences—at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was a guest at the National Humanities Center in 1990. I profited from seminars on discourse analysis in the Linguistics Department, particularly those given by Wallace Chafe and Sandra Thompson, who also kindly read the embryonic proposals on Homeric speech that I produced at the time.

At a later stage, I had the privilege of spending part of the academic year 1991–92 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), where I wrote the earliest version of what is now Part 1. At NIAS the project benefited from my participation in an interdisciplinary theme group, Orality and Literacy. To some of the participants in particular I owe a debt: to Franz Bäuml (University of California, Los Angeles) for opening up the discussion of orality and literacy in the Middle Ages for me, and to David Rubin (Duke University) for his comments on my work from the standpoint of cognitive psychology.

In 1992–93 I was among the Fellows at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C., a stay that was made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Research. During this most pleasant and fruitful year I not only had the opportunity to work on earlier versions of what are now Chapters 3 and 6 through 8, but also to present my ideas to a number of patient audiences: the Directors and the Fellows at the Center for Hellenic Studies, as well as audiences at Columbia, Brown, Yale, Harvard, and Duke Universities. I thank Suzanne Saïd, Alan Boegehold, Victor Bers, Gregory Nagy, and Keith Stanley for their invitations to present my ideas in their departments.

Even though I was supposed to teach, not write, in the Department of Classics of the University of Virginia in 1993–94, I made much progress during that year, not least because of the graduate seminar I gave there in the winter of 1994, from which the writing of Chapters 4 and 5 gained momentum. I thank my colleagues at UVA for the opportunities they gave me to discuss my work with them. The work saw its completion, finally, at the Université de Montreal, where it benefited not only from a generous teaching schedule but also from a research grant from the university. In this final stage, presentations at the University of Ottawa and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies helped to shape my thought. I thank Denis Brearly and Franz Bäuml for their invitations.

Welcome advice and encouragement came from many friends and colleagues along the way. I thank Ahuvia Kahane and Ian Rutherford for reading parts of the manuscript in its final stage. Mark Edwards has always been willing to read the results of my projects, finished or unfinished. I thank him for his interest throughout, his faith in this project, and his personal support. I would like also to express my special thanks to Gregory Nagy, for the inspiration that his own work has given me, for the attentive way in which he followed my work from the beginning, and for his advice, both practical and theoretical, during various stages of the project. In the final stage, Terence McKiernan was a most helpful editor, whose criticisms and suggestions enhanced the final form of the text and the articulation of the argument.

Finally there was someone who was not always near but always present, and who in the end, with a logic untainted by too much Homeric special speech, saved the manuscript from some of its more glaring idiosyncrasies. This book is for her.

Egbert J. Barker

Montreal, Canada

Introduction

Poetry in Speech examines the poetic discourse of the Iliad and Odyssey in terms of spoken discourse or speech. Such a project needs to be justified at the outset. The most influential type of criticism of Homeric poetry in the twentieth century, the oral-formulaic approach of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, holds that text, the medium opposite to speech, is absent in the composition of the epic tale. And more recent research, focusing on performance, is reaching consensus on the idea that even if an archaic Greek poem has been written down, its text is at best a marginal factor in the reception and transmission of the poem. What, then, is new in the study of Homeric poetry as speech?

While most research dealing with oral poetry views orality as belonging to times and places other than our own, the orality that is the subject of this book is a less remote phenomenon. The performance of Homeric poetry in its institutional setting may be something of the past, of a culture different from our own with regard to the role and importance of writing; but the discourse that was presented in these performances had one very obvious property in common with something in which we all participate: it was a matter of speech and voice, and of the consciousness of the performer and his audience. This is orality too, but not in a historical sense. The difference here is not one of time or culture but of medium; speech as a medium other than writing. In treating Homeric poetry as oral in this medial sense, we leave, at least initially, the poetic or literary perspective and view Homeric poetry against the background of the spoken medium, considering it as speech or discourse. I have tried, where appropriate, to think of terms and concepts that apply to speech in its own right, rather than to speech as viewed from the standpoint of writing. Part 1 offers some thoughts on the opposition between the oral and the literate in this connection. Having argued in Chapter 1 against a conception of orality from the point of view of writing, I then proceed in Chapter 2 with a possible scenario for Homeric writing seen from the standpoint of speech.

The criticism of Homeric discourse as speech is the subject of Part 2. In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I discuss those features of Homeric style (such as parataxis, adding style, and ring composition) that I believe are better accounted for as naturally occurring strategies of speakers who present their discourse to listeners than as elements of poetic style that have to be characterized as early or primitive with respect to the poetic styles of later periods. My discussion of this Homeric speech syntax—which includes an account of certain Greek particles that differs from the usual descriptions based on classical, written Greek—is at the same time an attempt at establishing links between the level of syntax and higher levels in the flow and composition of the epic tale.

Yet such a discourse analysis of Homeric poetry does not ignore or diminish the importance of the difference between Homeric language and everyday speech. On the contrary, the speech perspective is meant to accommodate the common features of epic style, such as meter and formulas, providing a basis on which they can be studied: in the method that I have followed, the Iliad and Odyssey are not so much poetry that is oral as speech that is special, a matter of the special occasion of the performance. Thus in Part 3 (Chapters 6 and 8) I argue that poetic meter and formulas, rather than removing Homeric poetry from the realm of the ordinary and the everyday, derive from what is most natural in spoken discourse: the chunks that make up the adding style. I argue that meter and formulas entail the stylization of ordinary speech, rather than some inherently poetic principle.

Special attention is paid to the noun-epithet formula, the type of expression that plays a key role in the metrics as well as in the thematics of the Greek epic diction. I argue in Chapter 7 for a function of the noun-epithet formula in Homeric discourse over and above its evident metrical importance, as noted by Parry. Starting from the premise that speech is necessarily a matter of behavior, I analyze the noun-epithet formula as the characteristic articulation of a speech ritual specific to the epic performance: the privileged moment where past and present, heroic action and poetic action, find joint expression in the epithet as the principal bearer of the hero’s epic kléos ‘renown.’

Much of the effort that went into this book had to do with the apparent paradox posed by the study of Homeric poetry as speech: the Iliad and Odyssey are texts, and as such they firmly belong to the medium in which most of our scholarly discourse is conducted. Working within the speech perspective implied by my methodology and forcing myself to read Homer as the transcoding of one medium into another, a flow of speech through time that has become a transcript, I began to realize just how much of the vocabulary and the notional apparatus used for our study of language and style is overtly or covertly literate, pertaining to our writing culture, and thus perhaps more indicative of the perspective of the philologist than of speech studied in the form of a text. The result is an attempt to combine the concepts of Greek philology, stylistics, and linguistics with insights drawn from discourse analysis and the study of oral poetry, and most of all to remove the boundaries between these disciplines.

PART ONE

PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER 1

The Construction of Orality

L’oralité est une abstraction; seule la voix est concrète, seule son écoute nous fait toucher aux choses.

—Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix

In our culture, speaking and writing are distinct activities, with one often happening in the absence of the other, or even to the exclusion of the other. So we telephone instead of writing a letter, and increasingly we e-mail instead of speaking on the phone. It would seem that the two activities—speaking and writing—constitute a symmetrical contrast, in which either term can be used to define the other; but in practice this is not so. Often we use the one term, writing, as vantage point for our conception of the other, in ways that betray a distinct cultural bias. Our use of the term oral and related expressions is a case in point. We may speak of oral simply when a discourse is spoken; but more often we endow the term with a cultural value. So we routinely speak of oral poetry, not to characterize a given poem as spoken but to oppose it to the dominant form of poetry in our culture. And we speak of orality not to describe what happens when someone talks, but to label a period or a culture as different with respect to our own writing culture. Oral poetry and orality, in short, are abstractions derived from the property of not writing or being written, and as such they are literate constructs: they define speech as the construction of a writing culture that uses its own absence to define its opposite.

It may be useful, at the outset of this study, to put this cultural bias in perspective by distinguishing between two dimensions in which something can be oral. We may use oral in a medial sense, meaning simply that something is spoken and as such is a matter of sound and the voice of the speaker. In this sense, a neutral, medial opposition between spoken and written discourse obtains, the one being phonic, the other graphic. This neutral, medial opposition gets compounded by the fact that each medium comes with its own set of associations, and even its own mentality: speaking and writing are different activities that call for different strategies in the presentation and comprehension of a discourse. Thus oral may also be a matter of conception and may enter into an opposition—not so much with written as with literate—that is far less neutral than the medial one: whereas no one would question the simple existence of medial orality (speech), our acceptance of conceptional orality as a phenomenon in its own right is much less obvious. For it is here that we have to become aware of the inbuilt biases of our writing culture in order to arrive at real understanding.¹

In the conceptional sense, oral can designate the mental habits of persons who do not participate, or who do not participate fully, in literate culture as we know it, a phenomenon we associate with societies other than or earlier than our own. When applied to texts, oral in this sense implies that a given piece of writing does not display the features that are normal and expected in a writing culture: it came into existence without the premeditation that is usually involved in the production of written texts. Such a discourse has been written down and is graphic as to its medium, but it may be called oral as to its conception. In the conceptional sense, then, oral may denote the absence of characteristics of written language, whether a discourse is spoken or written. Thus even though the two senses of oral have a certain affinity to each other, it is important not to confuse them. A discourse that is conceptionally oral (such as a conversational narrative) is often medially oral as well, but it is also possible for such a discourse to be written. And a medially oral (phonic) discourse is often conceptionally oral, but instead it may be fully literate as to its conception (as in the case of an academic paper read out loud).

Finally, a third sense may be distinguished. The term oral has been used to refer not to a set of mental habits or to a mode of communication, but to a property of literary language and hence of literary texts. Parry is one of the first to speak systematically of orality as a property of literature, in opposition to the property of being written, a distinction that serves as the basis for a classification of literature in general: "Literature falls into two great parts not so much because there are two kinds of culture, but because there are two kinds of form: the one part of literature is oral, the other is written."² In this sense, oral denotes not so much an absence as a presence: that of the formula as the prime feature of the oral or traditional style. We shall turn later in this chapter to the notion of the formula. Here we simply note that the concept of oral poetry as a class of literature is insensitive to the distinction between medium and conception just made: it applies to both. The oral poem is considered a spoken discourse, but at the same time a text with properties that make it very different from texts in our culture. We shall have occasion later to consider the problems that this may cause.³

The relation between orality and its opposite seems to be unproblematic and straightforward in the conceptional and medial senses. Oral and literate in the conceptional sense can be considered prototypes, or opposite end points on a continuum: as properties that come in degrees, they need not exclude each other. Someone’s mental habits may be oral to a greater or lesser extent, and that person’s degree of literacy will be inversely proportional. Likewise, societies as a whole may be oral or literate in various degrees, and since the transition from a preliterate to a literate society in which writing is institutionalized is never an abrupt one, the notions of orality and literacy, though distinct, do not exclude each other, either diachronically or synchronically.⁴ The same point applies to orality as a textual feature: texts may be oral to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the nature of the conception underlying them.⁵ The notion of an oral medium, however, seems to exclude its opposite on first sight, in the sense that whoever speaks does not write, and vice versa. The exclusion is superficial, of course, since speech and writing as media are coexisting strategies, both of them being available to most members of a literate community and chosen according to the communicative needs and purposes at hand.

But what about oral in the sense used by Parry in the quotation above? As a subclassification of poetry, Parry evidently means oral to exclude written, thereby turning a mere opposition into what seems a contradiction in terms: for how can poetry like Homer’s be oral and therefore not written, if we experience it as a written text? By oral Parry means, as is well known, orally composed as against composed with the aid of writing, yet that does not really alter the picture, and by conceiving of oral in terms of form and style (i.e., formula) Parry and many researchers after him believed that oral could be made to apply to written texts, provided they have certain oral (-formulaic) properties.

Traditional Style and Homeric Kunstsprache

The dichotomy between oral style and literate style is not the original form in which Parry cast his conception of Homeric discourse. First came the notion of traditional style as opposed to the individual expression of later poetry, an idea that remained closely attached to orality throughout Parry’s writings. Owing to its formulaic nature, Homeric diction is traditional, by which Parry means that it cannot possibly have been the individual creation of any one single poet. The nature of Homeric poetry, he writes, can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.⁶ And again: "Oral poetry is formulaic and traditional. The poet who habitually makes his poems without the aid of writing can do so only by putting together old verses and old parts of verses in an old way."⁷

For Parry, the traditional nature of Greek epic diction is reflected in the distinctly systematic character of the Homeric formula.⁸ Going well beyond the usual treatment of Homeric diction in terms of gratuitous cosmetics or poetic style tout court, Parry introduces two key concepts that are central to his conception of the traditional nature of Homeric style: extension and economy.⁹ Economy is the one-to-one correlation of a given formula and a metrical form, or in Parry’s own words, the absence of phrases which, having the same metrical value and expressing the same idea, could replace one another.¹⁰ Extension, on the other hand, is the degree to which such a unique pairing of a meaning and a form applies to a whole class of formulaic expressions (a formula type), for example, metrically interchangeable expressions for a range of gods and heroes. Thus, according to Parry, a system of formulas is economical in that all expressions with the same meaning are different from one another in their metrical form (e.g., polútlas dîos Odusseús ‘much-suffering godlike Odysseus’ vs. polúmētis Odusseús ‘many-minded Odysseus’, both expressions having as their meaning Odysseus). And the system is extended, conversely, in that all formulas with the same metrical form are different as to their meaning (e.g., polúmētis Odusseús vs. pódas ōkús Akhilleús ‘swift-footed Achilles’).

The arrangement of formulas in systems is treated by Parry as an indication that the whole of Homer’s diction is organized in this way. An analysis in terms of economy and extension, in Parry’s view, can show the way to a better understanding of why and how Homeric diction in general has the specific form it does. For example, the systems of formulaic expressions for gods and heroes in the nominative case are for Parry not an isolated observation; they merely offer a clearer and more striking case of systematic economy and extension than do other areas of Homeric diction,¹¹ a case yielding proof that Homeric diction as such, not just some parts of it, is schematized, systematic, and hence traditional.¹²

This proof has been controversial,¹³ with much discussion, both inside and outside oral-formulaic theory, devoted to defining the formula. The debate, which took as leitmotiv Parry’s own definition of the concept (a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea¹⁴), tended to start from the intension of the concept (What is a formula?) and move to its extension (How much of the Homeric text is formula?). It was hoped that clarity as to the essence of the basic unit of oral composition would clarify the concept of oral composition as such.¹⁵ But this strategy made the definition of formula—in itself already more a definiendum than a definiens—dependent on each scholar’s position regarding the wider issue of oral-formulaic composition and created circularity problems that oral-formulaic theory has never satisfactorily solved.¹⁶ The question of systematicity and of the essence of the formula will be addressed in Chapter 8 below, where I will attempt to view Parry’s insights from the perspective developed in this book.

The participants in the debate on formulas are divided about how traditional and formulaic Homeric diction really is: from entirely or almost entirely traditional and formulaic, as Parry and Lord claimed, all the way to mostly or entirely nontraditional, except for the core of formulaic systematicity that Parry had established irrefutably for noun-epithet phrases.¹⁷ But whatever one’s position on this continuum, there was one thing that bound most participants in the discussion together. Most scholars took the traditional and formulaic as the phenomenon to be accounted for, the figure against the ground. Such a position assumes that whereas the definition of the formulaic (and so the traditional) may be problematic and the subject of inquiry, the definition of the nontraditional and nonformulaic is not.

We notice here the same perspective as the one with which this chapter began: Homeric poetry, whether under the aspect of oral or of traditional, is seen in terms of an opposition in which the one member (oral or traditional) is defined with respect to the other (literate) which functions as framework and norm. Language, we almost unconsciously assume, is written and individual by default, and it takes some special conditions for it to become the other with respect to these notions. This same perspective, again, is apparent in the third and last dichotomy we will discuss, that between artificial and natural.

Before Homeric style became traditional or oral, it was artificial. Philological criticism found in Homer an artificial diction that could never have been spoken in ordinary discourse at any time or place, a Kunstsprache, as it came to be called in the dominant publications on the subject.¹⁸ The notion of Kunstsprache originated in nineteenth-century historical and descriptive linguistics, the backbone of linguistic thought in philology, and was based on a thorough investigation of the morphological, phonological, dialectal, and lexicographic features that distinguish Homer from other authors. These features include the geographic and temporal mismatch of Homeric forms and the use of inherently artificial forms, words that do not exist elsewhere. As a simple example we may cite the accusative phrase euréa pónton ‘wide sea’, created on the analogy of the dative formula euréï póntōi, to replace the natural but metrically undesirable eurùn pónton;¹⁹ or the accusative form hēniokh a ‘charioteer’, created on the basis of the artificial form *hēniokheús (instead of the natural hēníokhos and its