Man in the Middle Voice ―――――――――― MARTIN CLASSICAL LECTURES New Series, Volume I The Martin Classical Lectures are delivered annually at Oberlin College on a foundation established by his many friends in honor of Charles Beebe Martin, for forty-five years a teacher of classical literature and classical art in Oberlin. Man in the Middle Voice ――――――――――――― NAME AND NARRATION IN THE ODYSSEY John Peradotto For Erin, Monica, Noreen, and Nicole ―――――――――――――― ζωάγρι’ ὀφέλλω “MSABU, what is there in books?” As an illustration, I told him the story from the the Odyssey of the hero and Polyphemus, and of how Odysseus had called himself Noman, had put out Polyphemus' eye, and had escaped tied up under the belly of a ram... “How did he,” he asked, “say the word, Noman in his own language? Say it.” “He said Outis,” I told him. “He called himself Outis, which in his language means Noman.” “Must you write about the same thing?” he asked me. “No,” I said, “people can write of anything they like. I might write of you.” Kamante who had opened up in the course of the talk, here suddenly closed again, he looked down himself and asked me in a low voice, what part of him I would write about. “I might write about the time when you were ill and were out with the sheep on the plain,” I said,”what did you think of then?” His eyes wandered over the room, up and down; in the end he said vaguely: “Sejui”--I know not. “Were you afraid?” I asked him. Kamante stood silent for a little while, his face became collected and deep, his eyes gazed inward. Then he looked at me with a little wry grimace: “Of Outis,” he said. “The boys on the plain are afraid of Outis.” —Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa CONTENTS Preface xi CHAPTER 1 Polysemantor: Texts, Philology, Ideology 3 CHAPTER 2 Polyainos: Myth vs. Folktale 32 CHAPTER 3 Polytlas: The Ends of the Odyssey 59 CHAPTER 4 Polytropos: The Naming of the Subject 94 CHAPTER 5 Polyarētos: The Unhallowed Name of Odysseus 120 CHAPTER 6 Outis: The Noman-clature of the Self 143 Bibliography 171 Index of Homeric Passages 183 Index of Greek Words 184 Index of Names and Subjects 185 PREFACE ποταµοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐµβαίνοµέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐµβαίνοµεν, εἶµέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶµεν. —Heraclitus, Frag. 49a DK Located at the crossroads oF diFFerent traditions (philosophical, loGical, and linGuistic), the concept oF subject is diFFicult to handle and Gives rise to numerous ambiGuities. —A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary If part of the argument in the following pages did not so vigorously challenge what Roland Barthes calls “the ideology of the person,” the conventional view oF the stable subject, of consistency and continuity of character, and of its actions and products, I would use conventional language and simply say “this book has been rewritten many times.” But even the unreflective language of convention here barely masks its own paradox: how can we refer to this book as “this book” iF “it” has been rewritten? What is the stable “it” which has come through the rewriting intact? Old fashioned philosophical questions, but to answer these questions here would be to anticipate a dense and difficult argument. At this point, let them merely stand, as bait to those who relish such questions and as irritant to those who do not, advance notice of the problems of naming and of narration that fiGure so largely in what follows. Yet, despite the inconsistency, I must say that this book has been rewritten many times. There is at least a useful fiction, a phenomenal truth here that must be stated. There has, indeed, been a continuous project, an identifiable folder in my file, however often its labels and contents have changed, for longer than I could mention without embarrassment. The labels and contents have changed with its author’s predispositions, and those predispositions with the conceptual ii PREFACE climate around him. The excursus on the discipline of classical studies in Chapter 1 attempts to deFine these chanGes and introduces the methodological framework for this particular reading of the Odyssey. But long ago the project began more naively, with very little of that intense reflection on the dynamics of text production and assimilation which characterizes current literary analysis. It began modestly and microtextually as a half-page note on the εἰς ὁ κε (“until”) clause in Odyssey 11.122 and the conditions which surround it in Tiresias’s prophecy. I wanted to articulate the deFinitive reading of this text, overturning and excluding what had gone before, an aspiration fostered in me by my philological training and by the winds then prevailing in the profession. Further reflection prompted a growing suspicion that the way this microtext was read could become a model mapped onto the whole, resulting in a picture of the Odyssey as a collision of empirical narrative traditions, one dominated by myth and another by Märchen. But even thus enlarged the goal was still a more or less prescriptive and univocal reading. I shall not here trace in detail the process whereby the word “definitive” faded from my critical vocabulary, or how so positivist an undertaking yielded to a more dialectical, theoretically open enterprise, or how that barren univocity was exchanged for a less domineering view of reading, but the reasons why it happened will be clear to see, especially in Chapter 1. This book has been rewritten many times. And if I had not stopped where this book concludes, it would have continued to be rewritten, again and again. Like its subject, the Odyssey in the readinG here advanced, it counterFeits a conclusion, but does not really end. As Paul Zumthor has said, “nothing in lived reality is closed,” and so a book which quietly contests stable subjects and obdurate definitions must also place in doubt the finality of endings (as it does most particularly in Chapter 3). In two fairly obvious senses at least, PREFACE iii this book does not end. It has engendered in its author a host of fresh issues organically connected to this study and readily inferable by other professional readers of the Odyssey, but left on the drawing board for future elucidation. In that sense, it records the prolonged refinement of a cutting instrument that has still left the surface little more than merely scratched. It will, however, or so it is my hope, provoke its readers to take its bare suggestions as a prompt either to counterpoise or to continue the reading they find here. This study may strike literary analysts outside the field of classical studies as less sophisticated than it could be, given the state of theoretical discussion. That is in part because it is designed largely for my colleagues in a profession long suspicious of theory and impatient, often justifiably so, with the self-indulgence and needless obscurity that too frequently blemishes its exercise. This book is, in part, a special plea for an enlarged definition of classical philology to include tools for textual exegesis not yet fully countenanced in the traditional repertoire, and so the rhetorical tone of this plea, guided by a genuine desire to communicate and to persuade, had to be chosen with utmost diplomacy. On the other hand, I have tried constantly to keep in mind the needs of non- specialists, whose theoretical disappointments with what they find here may be counterbalanced, I hope, by a reading that brings them a philologist’s heed of subtle and crucial discriminations of lexical and grammatical texture that will easily elude even the most scrupulous attention to gross narrative in a translated text. Writing of this kind, like life itself, takes place mainly in the middle voice. I feel less like author than congeries or conduit, so great is the host of family, friends, colleagues, students, and institutions with a part in the production of this book. If this book were perfectly consistent both with this realization and with its own misgivings about “the ideology of iv PREFACE the person” and the proprietary claims attending it, its author would have had to remain anonymous. But scholarly reading at its best is, I believe, a dialectical, ever incomplete social act; the name in this case functions merely as the locus of responsibility for a particular and partial view of the text. And its incompleteness implies an invitation to response. This book has been rewritten many times. It would have been delayed yet further but for the material assistance of the Andrew V. V. Raymond Chair in Classics at the State University of New York at BuFFalo. The main responsibility for liberating it from the curse of endless rewriting, however, lies with the Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lectures Committee At Oberlin College, chiefly with Nathan Greenberg, whose confidence in inviting me to lecture there forced design on flux. For this encouragement and for his and his colleagues’ matchless hospitality I am most grateful. The last three of those five lectures were later delivered at Princeton University. The last three chapters here owe that audience an inestimable debt for thought-provoking comments and suggestions, most particularly from Andrew Ford, Robert Fagles, Charles Segal, and, more than all the rest, Froma Zeitlin, in the host of whose intellectual legatees I count myself a charter member. Another unselfish benefactor of so many in the profession, Bernard Knox, supported me too, saw the fitful and ingenuous origins of this project during my days at the Center for Hellenic Studies, helped me shape it with his ever sound advice, and gave me and my generation a model of humane scholarship to serve as potent antidote in moments oF despair for the profession.