POETRY IN SPEECH A volume in the series MYTH AND POETICS edited by GREGORY NAGY A fu lllist of tides in the series appears at the end of the book. POETRY IN SPEECH Orality and Homeric Discourse EGBERT J. BAKKER CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1997 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1997 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bakker, Egbert J. Poetry in speech : orality and Homeric discourse / Egbert J. Bakker. p. cm. — (Myth and poetics) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3295-8 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-2276-9 (pbk.) 1. Homer—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Epic poetry, Greek—History and criticism. 3. Discourse analysis, Literary. 4. Oral formulaic analysis. 5. Oral tradition—Greece. 6. Speech in literature. 7. Poetics. I. Title. PA4037.B33 1996 883'.01—dc20 96-31979 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Contents Foreword, by Gregory Nagy V11 Acknowledgments Xlll Introduction I PART I PERSPECTIVES 5 I The Construction of Orality 7 2 The Writing of Homer 18 PART 2 SPEECH 33 3 Consciousness and Cognition 35 4 The Syntax of Movement 54 5 Homeric Framings 86 PART 3 SPECIAL SPEECH 123 6 Rhythm and Rhetoric 125 7 Epithets and Epic Epiphany 1 56 8 The Grammar of Poetry 184 Speech and Text: A Conclusion 207 Bibliography 211 Index Locorum 227 General Index 233 Foreword GREGOR Y NAGY Many of the books in the Myth and Poetics series center on the power ofmyth to make language special or specially fo rmal: when language is styl­ ized by myth, it becomes a culture's poetry or song. Egbert Bakker's Poetry in Sp eech approaches myth and poetics fromanother direction, asking how myth is shaped by poetics and, just as important, how poetics are condi­ tioned 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 fo r 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 fo r a special context. In traditional societies, as the books in the Myth and Poetics series have arguedin a varietyof 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, TheLan guage ofHeroes: 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 fo r any particular time and place in ancient Greece, by its ". Vll Vlll Foreword metrical and fo rmulaic dimensions. Bakker traces these dimensions, which fo r 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 fu ll title, Poetryin Sp eech: Orality and Homeric Discourse. Bakker has shiftedthe emphasis: poetry that is oral is in fa ct speech that is special, stylized by meter and fo rmula. 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 fo rm. 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 com­ position, 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 superimposition of literate grammar on the analysis of everyday language. Bakker fr ees his own anal­ ysis of Homeric discourse from such superimpositions and defamiliarizes our textbound mentalroutines in the reading of archaic Greek poetry. Bakker's arguments about the shaping of the metrical and fo rmulaic system of Homeric discourse by the everyday speech from which it is derived open many avenues fo r fu ture research, particularlyinto the regula­ tion of speech by this system at the posited moment(s) ofpe rformance in an oral tradition. The poetics of recomposition-in-perfo rmance, which are reflectedin the patterns of wording and word placement within the funda­ mental rhythmical unit of the dactylic hexameter, can now be fu rther examined from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Bakker's own explorations of these questions mark a monumental advance in our under- Foreword lX standing of Homeric discourse as a linguistic system. A striking example is his success in explaining the syntactic functions of Homeric particles like men, min, de, di, itoi, ara/ rha, gar, autar/ atar, kaf, alta, ot1n. In the wake of Bakker's analysis, the classicist cannot help but read the Greek of Homer differendy: the reader's understanding of practically every verse is af­ fe cted-and enhanced. A vital question remains: why exa(;,dy is there a need fo r a special dis­ course in the self-expression of myth? The answers, which vary fromcul­ ture to culture, have to do with the special contents of myth itself, which require special fo rms fo r their expression. In the case of Homeric discourse, as Bakker shows in minute detail, such answers can be fo und in the actual usage of the discourse itself. A case in point is the system of noun-epithet fo rmulas. Through these fo rmulas, as also through the deployment of evi­ dential 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 fo rmulaic 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. FO R PETRA Acknowledgments The activities leading up to this book have taken some years, and it is a pleasure to express my gratitude fo r the help and support I received from people and institutions along the way. I have fo nd 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 Thomp­ son, 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 fo r Advanced Studies (NIAS), where I wrote the earliest version of what is now Part I. At NIAS the project benefitedfr om my participation in an interdisciplinary theme group, "Oral­ ity and Literacy." To some of the participants in particular l owe a debt: to Franz Bauml (University of California, Los Angeles) fo r opening up the discussion of orality and literacy in the Middle Ages fo r me, and to David Rubin (Duke University) fo r his comments on my work from the stand­ point of cognitive psychology.