La voix des monuments, l’écriture du carmen : l’élégie romaine entre histoire, littérature et anthropologie du monde romain

Abstract

Can Roman elegiac poetry be read from an anthropological standpoint? In general, the carmina of Properce, Tibulle or Ovid are the reserve of the ‘literary’ circle, officially recognized philologists heedful of the intertwining intertextuality with Alexandrine poetry, of the metrics, of the ‘elegiac’ motifs unfolded in these poems. Conversely, very few studies have pondered over what characterizes the writing of this type of poetry, and above all on the way in which the poetic fiction flirts with incorporating into its very writing, various scriptural practices, and in particular the epigraphic model. The work undertaken by anthropologists over the last thirty years has concentrated on writing in the ancient worlds, in the traditional societies and in our modern societies. This severed links with the evolutionist vision of a history of writing resolutely turned towards the advent of the alphabet, and demonstrated the diversity of possible usages for writing, its links with speech, and its interface with time. Above all, they have highlighted the symbolic dimension of the technical choices made; the adoption of a system of writing, the use of one physical material to write on rather than another, and the use of a specific tool. And if in the first instance, this focus on writing has strengthened if anything the traditional opposition drawn up between the writing societies and the so called oral ones, the ‘comparatist’ dimension of the anthropological work of someone like J. Goody, and the attention paid to ‘exotic’ practices, such as the testified usage in Greece and Rome of letting objects speak, have gradually encouraged researchers to take a fresh look at the ancient texts and generate new subjects to study, e.g. those concerning reading practices. These works have contributed in this way to decompartmentalizing sectors which up until now had been hermetically sealed, notably those of epigraphy and of literature. It is within this epistemological framework that the present study is founded : analyzing the exchanges that can exist between a practice largely used by the Roman Empire – epigraphic writing, and the fabrication of a literary masterpiece – elegiac poetry. What are the poetic and cultural issues of such exchanges? Roman poetry of the Augustan epoch seems to be a place for exploring writing’s multiple facets, its potentialities and its limits : it probes the effects of the permanence or impermanence associated with its use, the sometimes implicit games between the writer and reader, the fame that writing will bring the poet. But elegiac poetry appears on reading, to be the style that has the most exploited the poetic virtualities of written inscriptions; the epigraphic model, and even more the funereal epigraphy are found in all elegiac poetry. These inclusions obviously reflect very well on the topic of the elegy, but by its concision and synthetic character, the epigraphic inscription also serves the specific poetic note in the elegiac style, which sees itself as in constant opposition to epic poetry. The inscription’s very monumentality and durable nature is a fundamental issue in the poet’s use of this type of writing. But the insertion of carmina epigraphics within the elegy would also appear to be a sure way of programming how it will be read : by incorporating an expression addressed directly to the passer-by – viator – ‘reader of inscriptions’, the poet forces the person to verbalize the poem and to pronounce his name. This detour via epigraphic fiction thus means that the poet’s signature is ‘set in stone’, that the auctorial process is firmly rooted in an existing writing-reading process and that the reader who deciphers it becomes real. And this rooting in a place and within a special context of enunciation, the multiple references to the writing’s materiality and that of its support medium, the actualization of the reader’s presence and of his voice, all contribute to the performativity – the pragmatic effectiveness – of the carmen. What does the Roman poet do with the inscriptions? Far from being a simple literary artifice, a characteristic style or way of entering into the tradition of Alexandrine origin, the inclusion of epigraphic carmina within the poem’s framework bears witness to an original conception of Roman elegiac poetry; a non-ritualized poetry which works by recuperating an effective, pragmatic framework necessary to establish the reader as the special person to be addressed, a frame where the spoken word, the writing, the object-book and the physical presence of the reader are all tightly coupled. This dossier not only shows the benefits to be gained from an anthropological approach, but also the role borne by the linguistics of the enunciation in the field of ancient studies. The questions posed here concerning elegiac poetry merely reflect actual questions as to the function of literature in ancient worlds, the author’s status, the function of memory, and more generally, the question of the social signification of the act of writing, of reading, of citing, etc. Here, anthropology appears to be a way of taking a fresh look at those core and most commented texts in our university tradition, by spawning the essential questions, notably concerning the reception given to the texts in Antiquity. It will also go some way to attenuating the harmful consequences of disciplinary divisions, by showing the Roman world’s constant to and from movements between the various written models and the various writing practices.