Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Abstract

Reviewed by: Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips Joel Lidov Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips (eds.). Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 315. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-880582-3. The editors invite us to consider how we can appreciate the "literary" character of archaic Greek poetry. They open with a quote from Bowra that expresses his enthusiasm for the pleasure given by Sappho's artistry, emotional and imaginative power, and her exceptional character, and they suggest that, however out-of-date, it points our attention to the ways in which poetry fascinates, engages, challenges, and changes us when we experience it as audiences or readers. They urge such an appreciation as a complement to what they consider the now dominant "anthropological paradigm" (3; it includes the "New Historicism"), which focuses on the social function of performance and which they and other contributors associate especially with Bruno Gentili. Some contributors place themselves more in opposition to what Mark Payne defines as the paradigm's "characteristic hermeneutic position . . . the assumption that the discursive ambitions of Greek lyric poetry were so radically constrained by their original performance context that valid interpretation consists solely in relating them to that context" (257). The apologetics for different methods can seem excessive or unnecessary, but I found particularly valuable Anna Uhlig's extended critique (chapter 3). She starts from an analysis of the confusion of context and content in interpretations of Alcaeus's maritime poem as metaphors for the symposium, and then demonstrates the weaknesses of the scholarly justification and of the historicist argument in the allegorical mode central to Gentili's thesis. All eleven contributors respond to the editors' call for an investigation of the audience's encounter with lyric—the "event" of the title—with distinctive theses and emphases, and they select a variety of proof texts for illustration. Two overlapping procedures are recurrent. One looks at the internal dynamics of a poem: the relation among its parts rather than between the poem and its context, and the ways it draws the audience's attention to its status as a constructed object. The other rebuts a corollary of the performance paradigm, that a reperformance of a written text requires an interpretation different from the original. I will mention here the chapters I found most broadly useful. The first section of the book, "Occasionality," emphasizes the problem of context. Uhlig supplements her critique of previous theory with a "superficial" reading in which Alcaeus's attention to detail in imagined scenes creates a compelling "maritime aesthetics." The sea's mobility and the poems' lack of specific geographical position provide, by contrast and similarity, a means of expressing various experiences of terrestrial life. Gregory Hutchinson takes on the question of a poem's "setting," the internal placement often used as an index of its context. He demonstrates how writers in fact alter the setting within the poem as an expressive device, and illustrates this with insightful readings of Alcaeus and Horace. Somewhat oddly, he takes his readings as a prompt to propose that we [End Page 223] look for those "underlying features and forms" (132) that make literary analysis possible as if this were a new thing. The second section, "Conceptual Contexts," looks to implicit literary history. Henry Spelman's study, one rich in implications for the history of texts, takes on the core problem of reperformance. Starting with the poet's self-presentation in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, he demonstrates how it illustrates the way in which a lyric, even one which must have had an original presentation, presents itself as an instance in a tradition of performances, making the distinction between an original and later readings moot. Tom Phillips, in a dense reading, takes up the opening description of the terror of a past eclipse as if it were present in Paean 9, and the shift to a mythic narrative and prayer. He teases apart the multiple voices inherent in the poetic language that alert the audience to the paean's artistic expansion of the tradition of eclipse poems and to its own...