Lowrie, 'Polyhymnia, The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse'
URL = hegel.lib.ncsu.edu
2.7.2, Gregson Davis, Polyhymnia, The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric
Discourse. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1991. Pp. xi, 282. $39.95 (hb). ISBN 0-520-07077-1.
Rev. by M. Lowrie
Gregson Davis' important book goes a long way toward filling a
gap in Horatian scholarship. In the nearly thirty years that have
passed since Bundy's rhetorical reading of Pindar, it is surprising
that he is the first to do Horace a similar service. D[avis]'s
rhetorical emphasis rightly targets the construction of individual
poems as "lyric arguments" (p. 2) that convey a message, whether
overt or implicit; the emphasis on discourse highlights the
importance of the communication of this message, often to a
specific addressee, always to a more generalized reader. In his
own words, "The building-blocks of these arguments consist of
motifs, topoi, recurrent metaphors, and rhetorical conventions
that, for the most part, are set forth paratactically" (p. 3).
Beyond tracing recurrent themes, D. always integrates the image or
topos into a larger rhetorical context within the particular ode.
He is particularly successful at elucidating the underlying links
between parts of odes whose surface connections are obscure
precisely because parataxis necessarily omits discursive
argumentation (e.g. his treatment of the Soracte ode). Like
Bundy's contribution to understanding Pindar, D.'s synoptic
approach to Horace's rhetorical strategies illuminates the common
thread between many odes. The construction of a "lyric argument"
transcends the individual poem to the construction throughout the
Odes of a lyric world view that privileges the symposium as the
locus of a mature attitude to life, love, death and poetry. But D.
avoids the reductive trap of Bundyism by focusing on the unity
achieved within the scope of each poem; D.'s Horace does not simply
reiterate the lyric message, he reconstructs it anew in each poem.
This book contains many new and convincing readings that are
stimulating to the professional without being inaccessible to a
general literary reader. D.'s writing is stylish and concise with
no loss of clarity; his translations display a fine sense of both
Latin and English. Many of the topics addressed are familiar to
students of Horace, but D. has a knack for making them fresh,
particularly with the emblems of lyric and the symposium.
In choosing his subject matter D. follows a principle of
selection that is unfortunately rare among Horatians. Between the
extremes of the close reading possible in an article and the
general interpretation of the Odes as a whole we find in most
full-scale books on Horace, D. strikes the golden mean: he gives
readings for the most part of entire poems--with an eye always on
the rest of the lyric corpus--but reads only those poems that fall
within the purview of his topic. While analysis of "the rhetoric
of Horatian lyric discourse" could presumably open new interpretive
venues to all the odes or epodes, D. concentrates on four Horatian
rhetorical strategies he calls modes, "assimilation,"
"authentication," "consolation," "praise and dispraise," one
chapter for each mode, each mode divided into subcategories. Davis
recognizes the legitimacy--even the necessity--of critical
perspectives besides his own (p. 243), but there is a sense in
which his approach is prior. Without understanding the
conventional function of a topos, it will be impossible to
understand, for instance, what this topos contributes to the poet's
social relation to the addressee.
"Modes of Assimilation" addresses Horace's techniques for
expanding the generic scope of lyric to include and subsume
material conventionally associated with other genres, whether on a
scale grander (epic) or less grand (elegy and iambi) than lyric
itself. D. focuses on the ploy that informs the recusatio and
compares it to the figure of praeteritio: "the speaker
disingenuously seeks to include material and styles that he
ostensibly precludes" (p. 11). D.'s term "generic disavowal" helps
pinpoint the parodoxical nature of "having one's cake and eating it
too"--a phrase D. uses in several contexts.
Within the broader topic of generic assimilation, D. isolates a
number of techniques. The grander genres are treated first.
"Generic remodeling" pertains to Epode 13, C. 1.7 and 2.4, where
Horace draws figures from epic into the world of lyric, largely by
means of the symposium. A less radical version of the same
technique is "Generic Pseudo-Imitation," whereby an epic topic
which already shares ground with lyric concerns is treated on the
grand scale, but from a different world view. The poem in question
is C. 1.15. Although D. does not intend to treat all instances of
every technique (p. 77), I cannot help being curious about whether
he would include the three grand mythic / historical narratives in
Roman Odes 3, 4 and 5 under this heading. I would be particularly
interested to know what D. makes of the paradoxical ending of C.
3.3, where the poet reasserts his lyric voice and retreats from the
grand manner after an epic digression occupying most of the poem.
"Assimilation by Trope" refers to the device best exemplified by
"proelia virginum" at C. 1.6.17. After disavowing martial proelia,
the poet concedes that he will treat battles but by specifying
those of maidens, he turns epic on its ear. The disavowed returns,
but transformed. C. 1.6 also illustrates "Assimilation by Parody."
Although it is well known that Horace botches his summaries of the
Iliad and Odyssey (the translation of Achilles' menis as stomachus
and Odysseus' epithet polytropos as duplex subverts their epic
dignity), D.'s category helps understand the double nature of
Horace's gesture. Epic themes are not simply rejected but
assimilated under a different guise.
Contrary to the strategy of cutting epic down to scale, Horace's
disavowal of elegy and iambi serves rather to prove the maturity of
lyric. Elegy is criticized for its intransigent sameness: Valgius
always (semper) laments (C. 2.9) and his genre can be summed up in
catch phrases (flebiles modi 9 and molles querelae 17-8). But
just as Horace truly does engage in the high style, so do elegiac
elements return. Under "Subverted Disavowals of Erotic Lyric," D.
treats the failure of elegiac disavowal to keep erotic desire at
bay (C. 1.19, 3.26, 4.1). Since desire falls as much under the
purview of lyric as it does of elegy, even here lyric emerges as
supreme. Horace certainly privileges his own genre over others,
and since D.'s topic is Horace's rhetorical strategies for
incorporating other genres within lyric without losing generic
control, he does not discuss the possibility that Horace might make
forays into other genres without disavowal. One wonders whether D.
thinks this possible and what the rhetorical effect of not marking
the generic intrusion would be.
"Modes of Authentication" refers to the way the lyric voice
establishes its own authority. In this chapter the influence of
Pindaric criticism is especially strong. Under "Autobiographical
Mythos" D. analyzes the way Horace presents his life qua lyric
poet. The question of the literal veracity of the events of the
poet's life is suspended in the face of their emblematic value for
the lyric genre. D's analysis of C. 2.13 as the poet's passage from
iambic to lyric poet is particularly satisfying; the invective
against the planter of the infamous tree yields to an epiphany of
lyric predecessors. The poet's escape from the tree and from war
(as in C. 2.7) symbolizes throughout the Odes the divine sanction
of his poetry. The identity of the particular god who saved him or
to whom he gives thanks is secondary to the inevitable poetic
associations of the various gods credited (p. 88). A high
concentration of authenticating gestures invests the poet with the
authority for his epic departure into Gigantomachy in C. 3.4.
Similar excursions into the grand style are marked by a strategy
diametrically opposed to disavowal. In C. 2.19 and 3.25 the poet
avows his aptitude for high themes by the language of ritual
possession; ekstasis justifies the departure from the genus tenue,
but the need for some apology underscores the norm. Further
authentication is brought about by what D. calls the
"'objectification' of the work of art through recourse to
prestigious lyric emblems," namely the wreath, the fountain, and
the sacrificial victim. In C. 1.26, 1.38, 3.13, and 4.2 the
emblem(s) stand for the poems themselves.
The chapters "Modes of Consolation: convivium and carpe diem,"
and "Modes of Praise and Dispraise" are devoted to the symposium.
D. rescues what he calls CD (carpe diem) poetry from the
trivialization that often afflicts it by elucidating the nexus of
ideas that underlies this poetic response. The first of these two
chapters traces motifs throughout a number of poems resulting in a
more comparatist reading than elsewhere in the book. In the
section entitled "The Carpe diem Ode: Rhetorical Schema," Epode 13
serves as the paradigm poem for a sequence of thoughts common to
this subgenre: a scene (description of nature) engenders a response
in which an insight gives rise to a prescription (p. 146,
italicized terms are used technically). C. 1.9, 4.7, 1.11 in
particular exemplify the irreconcilable juxtaposition of two types
of temporality, the cyclical belonging to nature and the linear to
mankind. Any time of year is a sufficient reminder of this
contrast and it is consequently mistaken to call such poems "spring
poems." "Forms of Indirect Prescription" considers less obvious
instances of poems conveying the CD "message" (C. 2.14, 1.4, 2.10,
3.29, 4.12). D. uses "illocutionary force" from the language of
speech act theory to show how a statement ("Your more deserving
heir will drink up the Caecuban vintage" C. 2.14.25) can function
as an exhortation ("Consume your vintage wine now before it is too
late," p. 160-1).
The final chapter, "Modes of Praise and Dispraise," looks at how
sympotic motifs confer praise on the poet himself or his friends,
who are either already part of or invited into the lyric world (C.
1.7, 1.17, 2.16), or conversely blame those who resist the lyric
agenda (Grosphus in C. 2.16, Lydia in C. 1.25, the puer in C. 1.5).
D. invents the useful, although admittedly cumbersome, "detractor"
and "detractandus" as analogous terms for laudator and laudandus in
the field of blame poetry (p. 216). It is in these poems that we
see the necessity of pinning down every sympotic motif in the
previous chapter. Each topos or emblem can stand as short-hand for
a series of related ideas. To fail in perceiving the topos is to
miss the poem's essential message. In the last poem analyzed at
length (C. 1.37) Cleopatra undergoes a surprising metamorphosis
from detractanda to laudanda. This conversion glorifies Caesar,
who is the agent of her change. The terms of both the blame and
the praise are those of the symposium: the poet's positive
symposium in celebration of victory contrasts with the negative
symposium Cleopatra engages in before she understands the nature of
her situation. Her elevation to heroic status via the Homeric
simile which implicitly compares her with Hector and her courage in
facing death (lyric sapientia) further glorify her defeat.
My schematic summary of D.'s arguments cannot convey the real
strength of the book, which lies in the detailed analyses. Some of
D.'s significant contributions, however, also cut across the board.
He isolates several poetic techniques that have not been recognized
widely enough in Horace. The "complementary" (better known as
"merism" or "universalizing doublet") emerges in numerous passages.
C. 1.7.19-21 "seu te fulgentia signis / castra tenent seu densa
tenebit / Tiburis umbra tui" conveys the complementary
conventionally expressed in Latin by domi / militiae (p. 197). D.
could have added that the contrast of the present with the future
tenses here universalizes in time as well as space, and that the
dazzling lights of the campaign over against the deep shade of
Tibur reinforces the public / private dimension of domi
militiaeque. A similar technique is Horace's use of the concrete
for the abstract and it is precisely this poetic gesture that often
hides the underlying structure of argumentation. D. refers to
Horace's "common practice of using proper names as tokens for
ideas" ("Salian" connotes sumptuousness, p. 235). As one would
expect of someone influenced by Bundy, D. uses the logic of the
priamel to good effect, particularly in the case of C. 2.13, where
Horace defeats our expectation that a list of vocations will be
capped by "me," and instead interposes portraits of Sappho and
Alcaeus (p. 84). Other Pindaric traits are the "voluntative"
future and the "self-fulfilling prophecy" (pp. 116-7).
In general D. overstates the case for unity. Since there is a
great need to recognize unity in Horace, this is hardly a sin.
While D.'s readings are convincing, I am not sure that a unified
structure on a deep level always completely erases or compensates
for surface discrepancies. D. treats the two sections of C. 1.7,
a poem traditionally accused of disunity, in different parts of the
book, and then brings the parts together after the fact. "Though
a superficial reading of the ode might suggest a contradiction
between the speaker's attachment to a unique place (Tibur) and
Teucer's radical dislocation, the contradiction dissolves when we
are made to realize that the convivium, as emblem of a mental
outlook, is inherently mobile; the lyric sapiens may put his
principles into practice wherever fortune places him" (199). A
good poem can contain contradictions; they do not need to
"dissolve." Each section of this poem offers a progressively more
complex notion of place, culminating in the paradoxical exemplum of
Teucer, who finds his home abroad. To that extent the ending
deepens the beginning, if it does not correct it outright. It is
the very tension between the apparent contradiction on the surface
and the underlying unity of purpose that in my view constitutes the
poem's appeal. I am similarly wary of seeing Horace's generic
appropriation of alien material as complete. Although Horace takes
pains, as D. well shows, to assert the superiority of his genre,
these other genres do keep breaking in. We should not lose sight
of the degree to which the alien material transforms lyric, just as
lyric transforms it in making it its own. But I am arguing as one
already converted. It is D.'s elucidation of Horace's paradoxes
that lets us add another twist.
Some quibbles. D. could strengthen his argument about the
association of perpetual lament with the genus tenue in his
discussion of C. 2.9 (p. 50ff.). Horace looks back beyond Vergil by
alluding to Vergil's source for G. 4.456-66, Cinna's Zmyrna M 6:
"te matutinus flentem conspexit Eous / et flentem paulo vidit post
Hesperus idem." Horace caps Vergil by reincluding the proper name
of the star "Vespero" (10). Although Myrrha is not singing, her
lament and the epyllion in which it is found belong to the same
semantic range as elegy. Since Vergil is also looking to epyllion
at the end of the Georgics, this only strengthens D.'s argument.
Horace displays interest in this genre in his own pseudo-epyllion
on Europa, C. 3.27, with allusions to Catullus 64 and "querenti"
(66), one of the catch-words for elegiac excess. Since D. makes
much of the Georgics background to C. 2.9 and of Orpheus in
particular, I am puzzled by his not mentioning C. 1.24, where
Horace advises Vergil against excessive mourning by reminding him
that not even Orpheus could bring back the dead.
On C. 4.1 (p. 69) D. ingeniously links Cinara's name, which is
Greek for artichoke, to the symposium. He cites Alcaeus 347 LP as
a source for the appropriateness of drinking wine when the
artichoke is in bloom. The different plant name in this passage is
irrelevant--Galen lists skolymos and kinara together under the
general category of edible pricklies (de alimentorum facultatibus
2.50-51) and Pliny confused the two branches of thistles (NH 20.262
with J. Andre's note [Bude 1965] informing us that the modern
artichoke results from the efforts of 15th c. Italian
horticulturalists). D. might have cited Pliny NH 22.86 for the
aphrodisiac effects of the comestible thistle when eaten with wine;
the reign of Cinara was erotic as well as sympotic. I am less
convinced by his associating Ligurinus' name with ligur(r)io, to
lick. The "gastronomic bagatelle" in Cinara's case is subordinate
to her function as a generic marker. Rather than dwelling on
gastronomy, Horace follows up the poetic imagery. Ligurinus
likewise evokes Greek: ligyros, shrill, high-pitched. The passage
Alcaeus 347 LP was imitating is Hesiod Op. 582-4: **hhmos de
*skolumos* t' anthei kai hcheta tettix / dendrewi ephezomenos
*ligurhn* katacheut' aoidhn / puknon hypo pterugwn** Hesiod and
Alcaeus
continue with references to female lustiness and lack-luster male
performance; the latter, as well as the paradoxically strong song
that accompanies such a situation, is surely relevant to C. 4.1.
The dog-star in the Greek passages may even give a reason besides
euphony for the switch from skolymos to cinara; Galen records that
people of refinement pronounced the latter **kunara**.
All in all D. does a great service to Horace, who emerges as a
clearer author than he is often credited. Although D. emphasizes
the rhetorical structure underlying many poems, he is just as good
at explicating the poetic techniques that obscure the
"philosophical" message. D. also does a service to Horatian
criticism. I expect that many will follow in his footsteps and
fill out the picture for the poems he does not discuss.
Michele Lowrie
New York University |
