Greek Literature

Extract

Asya Sigelman can write spectacularly well. Recently I've been spending a lot of time with Longinus (a.k.a. almost anyone but Longinus), and there were points in Pindar's Poetics of Immortality which made me think: Longinus would have appreciated that! It helped that Sigelman's theme is immortality – which she rightly insists does not, for Pindar, mean indefinite temporal extension: it is realized in a perhaps momentary achievement of godlike excellence (2–3). And prophecy is ‘not simply accurate prediction’ but the ‘god-like vision’ with which poets, as well as prophets, are endowed (5), along with the ability to share that vision: ‘it is just such sharing that we encounter in Pindar's epinicians’ (6). Longinus, too, speaks of the vision of godlike authors (35.2). But the line of argument which reading Longinus had primed me to expect is not the one the one that Sigelman actually takes. She sets her face firmly against ‘extrapoetic’ circumstances and objectives (9), and insists on reading ‘intrapoetically’ (11). She is concerned with how all that is extrapoetic ‘becomes the stuff and substance of immortality within and by means of the ode, right before the eyes of the song's audience, regardless of which epoch this audience belongs to’ (10). (Note, in parenthesis, ‘eyes’: Sigelman only once remembers that audiences have ears [136]: a very un-Longinian oversight.) One might ask: can the conditions of reception really be disregarded? The question turns out to be otiose (or, rather, the prompt to the question turns out to be misleading), since Sigelman's poet, victor and audience are ‘exclusively…intrapoetic characters’ (11). From this we can infer that when she says that ‘Pindar structures his adjectives and myths in such a way as to keep constant focus on the song's ongoing work of crafting itself from within’ (14), she is not referring to Pindar, but to an intrapoetic homonym. Yet if the song is crafting itself from within, what structuring is left for the intrapoetic poet (a product, presumably, of the song's self-crafting) to do? ‘The epinician is always…structured as an address of the intrapoetic “I” of the poet to the intrapoetic “you” of the concentric, progressively widening circles of victor, family, clan, polis, and Hellas’ (56). The intrapoetic poet has a structuring function only as one of the structuring devices that the poem uses to compose itself. And the poem is strikingly self-obsessed: ‘the core underlying structure of Pindar's song is preoccupied with revealing and displaying the creative poetic effort whereby the song comes to be’ (83): that is (since this Pindar is ex hypothesi intrapoetic), whereby the song brings itself into being by means of its own ‘perpetual self-construction’ (84). When ‘Pindar lays bare and demands appreciation of his arduous poetic labor’ (85), it is not easy to believe that Sigelman is keeping her exclusively intrapoetic promise. But acquitting her of inconsistency entails convicting her of the ontological extravagance of a poem that is ‘a living creature engrossed in the ongoing process of creating itself’ (120), which, as Aristotle impishly said of Plato's Forms, is ‘empty verbiage and poetic metaphors’ (Met. 1.9, 991a20–2) or meaningless ‘tum-ti-tums’ (An. post. 1.22, 83a32–4). Nor, I confess, could I make much sense of her account of the semantics of attributive and predicative adjectives (22–3), which leads to the claim that

a story cast in the shape of an attributive adjective (i.e. as a relative clause) is not really a narrative. Semantically, such a story unfolds itself, much as how in the phrase ‘beautiful woman’ the beauty of the woman is not something we are informed about by an external agency, but something that the noun ‘woman’ discloses about itself. (27, emphasis in original)