CHAPTER 11
Evert van Emde Boas
Introduction
As a concept in linguistics, deixis refers to the ways in which aspects of the context of utterance, particularly the time, place, and participants of a speech event, are encoded in language through grammatical or lexical means.1 The main linguistic items with a primarily deictic function (many others may be used deictically) are personal pronouns (in Greek, ἐγώ “I,” σύ “you,” etc.), demonstratives (ὅδε “this,” (ἐ)κεῖνος “that,” etc.), certain adverbs of time and place (νῦν “now,” ἐκεῖ “there,” etc.), and verbal markings of person and tense. The entities and actions referred to by such items can typically not be properly identified without relevant prior knowledge (or real-time perception) of the relevant context: in a sentence like “I was walking along here yesterday,” the referents of “I,” “here,” and “yesterday” depend on who utters the sentence where and when—they depend, in other words, on a given reference point, the “deictic center” (or in Bühler’s (1934) formulation, the origo).
Deixis is thus all about the relationship between language and aspects of the situation in which that language is produced. Given the established tradition of contextualizing or historicizing approaches to Greek lyric and the accompanying interest in the context(s) of (first and subsequent) performance(s), and given the even longer-standing interest in the identity and role of the “lyric I,” it is no surprise that such a phenomenon has attracted great deal of attention:2 “the appeal of deixis is no doubt its promise of return to performance” (Edmunds 2008: 89). Yet, as studies of Greek lyric deixis have pointed out from the outset, such a promise can be “delusive” (Edmunds, ibid.), because of the flexibility of deictics and the particular conventions of (various types of) lyric poetry. As I will argue at the end of this chapter, an alternative or at least complementary approach that focuses on the importance of deictics in lyric “world building” may eventually prove more fruitful.
Some Definitions
The main categories of deixis that are distinguished in handbooks (and amply represented in cross-linguistic studies) are person deixis (I, you), spatial deixis (here, there; come, go), and temporal deixis (now, then; tomorrow, yesterday). The speaker–hearer division is often at the heart not just of person deixis but of spatial deixis as well: for instance, the Greek tripartite system of demonstrative pronouns (ὅδε, οὗτος, (ἐ)κεῖνος) can be roughly described as consisting of one “proximal” deictic indicating physical or cognitive nearness to the speaker (ὅδε “this (here near me)”), one deictic indicating proximity to the hearer (οὗτος “this/that (there near you)”), and one “distal” deictic indicating that the referent falls outside of the immediate field of the speaker-hearer interaction (ἐκεῖνος “that”). (The system is controversial; for discussion see, e.g., Bakker 2010b: 152–161, Ruijgh 2006.) Other types of deixis that are frequently discussed are social deixis (e.g., the use of titles and honorifics), and the quite separate category of textual or discourse deixis. Discourse deixis locates referents not in the text-external speech situation (sometimes called “exophoric” reference) but in the discourse itself (“endophoric” reference: e.g., “the conclusion of this [i.e., the preceding] argument is that…”). Discourse deixis thus overlaps with the (itself hugely problematic) concept of anaphora, that is, reference to previously expressed textual elements; more generally, deixis is only one of various more or less context-dependent ways in which language can refer, including through definite expressions (the woman), proper nouns, anaphoric expressions (he, she, it), etc., all of which are relevant to a discussion of lyric practice.
Another distinction, which has been the focus of much discussion in work on lyric deixis, is that between gestural or ocular deixis (Bühler 1934: demonstratio ad oculos) on the one hand and imaginary deixis (deixis am phantasma) on the other. In the former, the referent of a deictic is physically present and perceptible in the speech situation, e.g., “this apple,” said when the speaker is pointing at an apple; the latter kind of deixis will have been at work for many readers of the first half of this sentence, who may have visualized in their minds an apple and a speaker pointing at it. The deictic “this” points now only to an imagined entity (incidentally, so does the definite noun phrase “the speaker”), and the deictic center to which the “this” is oriented is equally imaginary rather than present in any physical environment. Further subdivisions are possible: deictics may point to actual things that are nevertheless not visible and therefore have to be imagined (e.g., an apple hidden from view), or to purely fictional entities (fictive deixis). Imaginary/fictive deixis is closely related to our ability to interpret language from the perspective of an origo that is not centered on our own person and our own here and now: we can (partially) project our frame of reference to another place, time, and/or person, either real or fictional, and we indeed do so constantly when interpreting language—not least in the case of literary language. We can also frequently and relatively effortlessly move from one deictic center to another—so-called “deictic shifts.”
The fact that a word like “this” may be used for spatial deixis both ocular and imaginary, as well as for discourse deixis, is a source of difficulty for the interpretation of deictics in Greek lyric texts. In the first lines of Alcaeus fr. 129, for instance, when the speaker states that “the Lesbians founded this great shrine” (τόδε Λέσβιοι … τέμενος μέγα … κάτεσσαν, 1–2), how should we interpret the use of the deictic τόδε?
Is the opening demonstrative a matter of ocular deixis, with Alcaeus situated in or near this temenos and addressing persons who could see it? Was he, for an example, in some temporary shelter, an asylum, which the band of exiles had erected? Or is it imaginary deixis, intending to invoke the temenos in the mind of an audience physically remote from it? It is difficult to decide between these alternatives, although one is drawn to the former. For the re-use of this poem, in other times and other places, the deixis is per force imaginary, at first imaginary and accurately imaginable (by Lesbians and others who had visited the temenos …), then, with the passage of time, less accurately imaginable, and ultimately a matter of scholarly debate.
(Edmunds 2012)
In the next ten lines of the same poem, forms of ὅδε recur twice more, and raise similar issues: once the reference is to “this Dionysus” (τόνδε … Ζόννυσον, 8-9; Dionysus is one of the three gods with an altar at the temenos, together with Zeus and Hera, who is addressed with the second person σέ, 5), and once to “these troubles” (τῶνδε μόχθων, 11) from which Alcaeus begs release from the gods (this may still, though somewhat less straightforwardly, be interpreted as a case of either ocular or imaginary deixis; the possibility of discourse deixis is also relevant here). It is, of course, possible if not likely that this ambiguity is built in by design, precisely to allow for flexibility of performance setting: “the repeated use of deictic pronouns … and the whole opening section serve to conjure up the sanctuary setting wherever it was performed” (Budelmann 2018b: 94).
Spatial Deixis
Alcaeus’ sanctuary is a first example of how spatial deictics have been taken as clues to original performance contexts, and as the key for later audiences to perform imaginative reconstructions of such contexts. Most of the work done in this area has focused on texts which appear to anchor themselves in non-fictional (or at least not obviously fictional) performance setting, primarily Bacchylides’ and Pindar’s epinicians and Alcman’s First Partheneion (see especially Felson 2004a). In the case of epinician poetry, deictics are sometimes taken as straightforwardly relating to the context of first performances in the victor’s hometown or at the site of the games. But D’Alessio has rightly warned that such complex texts as Pindar’s odes “should not be read only from the deictic point of view of their performances,” remarking that “their pragmatic value is different from that of a straightforward everyday face-to-face communicative situation” (D’Alessio 2009b: 118). A good example of a victory ode which complicates a one-to-one identification of the deictic center implicit in (parts of) the text with any single performance venue is Olympian 8, which begins as follows:
στρ. αʹ Μᾶτερ ὦ χρυσοστεφάνων ἀέθλων, Οὐλυμπία,
δέσποιν᾿ ἀλαθείας, ἵνα μάντιες ἄνδρες
ἐμπύροις τεκμαιρόμενοι παραπειρῶνται Διὸς ἀργικεραύνου,
εἴ τιν᾿ ἔχει λόγον ἀνθρώπων πέρι
μαιομένων μεγάλαν
ἀρετὰν θυμωι λαβεῖν,
τῶν δὲ μόχθων ἀμπνοάν·
ἀντ. αʹ ἄνεται δὲ πρὸς χάριν εὐσεβίας ἀνδρῶν λιταῖς·
ἀλλ᾿ ὦ Πίσας εὔδενδρον ἐπ᾿ Ἀλφεῶι ἄλσος,
τόνδε κῶμον καὶ στεφαναφορίαν δέξαι· μέγα τοι κλέος αἰεί,
ὧιτινι σὸν γέρας ἕσπετ᾿ ἀγλαόν. (Pindar Ol. 8.1–11)
O mother of the golden-crowned games, Olympia, mistress of truth, where men who are seers examine burnt offerings and test Zeus of the bright thunderbolt, to see if he has any word concerning mortals who are striving in their hearts to gain a great success and respite from their toils; but men’s prayers are fulfilled in return for piety. O sanctuary of Pisa with beautiful trees on the Alpheus, receive this revel band and its wearing of crowns; for great fame is always his whom your illustrious prize attends.
(trans. Race)
The address to Olympia and to the district of Pisa, combined with the prayer that it accepts “this revel band” (τόνδε κῶμον, 10), would seem to suggest that the song points self-referentially to a performance at Olympia shortly after Alcimedon’s victory in the boys’ wrestling competition. But a few lines after this opening the speaker first mentions the victor’s hometown of Aegina (Αἴγιναν, 20), describes it as “(the place) where Themis is most venerated among men” (ἔνθα … ἀσκεῖται Θέμις ἔξοχ᾿ ἀνθρώπων, 22–23—still compatible with a performance at Olympia), and then uses the same proximal deictic ὅδε to refer to Aegina as “this seagirt land” (τάνδ᾿ ἁλιερκέα χώραν, 25). A reference to the Aeginetean progenitor Aeacus then introduces a mythical narrative (30–51), mostly set at Troy, but ending with Aeacus being led “here” (δεῦρο, 51) by Poseidon.
These instances of “this” and “here” cannot all be cases of ocular deixis oriented at one and the same performance venue. Various scenarios have been proposed to resolve this apparent conflict: some scholars interpret either the references to Olympia or those to Aegina as instances of imaginary deixis (with the relevant performance set at Aegina or Olympia, respectively); others posit a double performance; Wilamowitz argued for a performance at an otherwise unattested Olympieion in Aegina (for all these options, see Athanassaki 2010: 264–265, with references). It bears noting that the latter two “solutions” are only partial ones, in that in both scenarios there are still deictic references to locations other than the venue of the hypothesized performance. At any rate, this example is indicative of the “tendency of occasional poetry to ‘overload’ references to its own occasion, ‘so that all the given references could not possibly fit any one time and any one place of performance’” (Athanassaki 2010: 265, quoting Nagy). I will revisit this ode several times below, including in a final section, in which I will argue that a great deal imaginative work is involved no matter how close an overlap we assume between the textual deictic center(s) and the venue of any given performance.
As noted, investigations of spatial deixis have tended to focus on texts which are assumed to inscribe themselves in a (real, historical) choral performance. We may usefully contrast a text like Sappho’s fragment 31:
φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν᾿ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωναί-
σας ὐπακούει
καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν· τό μ᾿ ἦ μάν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόασεν·
ὠς γὰρ < ἔς > σ᾿ ἴδω βρόχε᾿, ὤς με φώνασ’
οὐδὲν ἔτ᾿ εἴκει,
ἀλλὰ κὰμ μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε, λέπτον
δ᾿ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ᾿ οὐδὲν ὄρημμ᾿, ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ᾿ ἄκουαι,
†έκαδε μ᾿ ἴδρως ψῦχρος κακχέεται†, τρόμος δέ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ᾿ ὀλίγω ᾿πιδεύσην
φαίνομ᾿ ἔμ᾿ αὔται.
ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον, ἐπεὶ †καὶ πένητα† (Sapph. fr. 31 Campbell, text Budelmann 2018b)
He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. But all can be endured, since … even a poor man …
(trans. Campbell, slightly adapted)
The first few lines of this song, too, have a demonstrative pronoun (κῆνος “that man,” 1) and other deictic elements (especially ἐνάντιός τοι “opposite you,” 2) that could be taken (and indeed have sometimes been taken) as spatial co-ordinates to be mapped onto the venue and the participants of a first live performance (e.g., at a wedding, with the addressee and the man being the bridal pair; for recent discussions of different views see Budelmann 2018b: 132–133 and D’Alessio 2018: 57–62, both with bibliography). But scholars have on the whole been much less eager in this case than in that of Pindar’s odes to assume such a direct mapping of the pragmatic variables of the text onto a real-life performance context. As D’Alessio points out (2018: 62), this state of affairs places Sappho somewhere in the middle of a scale; critics find it even “less difficult to acknowledge this liberty [i.e., to use deictics and other pragmatic devices independently from a live performance context] in so-called “sympotic” poems, allowing male poets to address distant interlocutors, to evoke fictional situations (impending waves, keeping the guard on a ship) and to express their feelings in abstract terms.” Thus, the Lesbian girl who scorns the aged speaker of Anacreon 358 PMG is only seldom identified with an actual hetaera at a sympotic performance, and the same poet’s Thracian filly (417 PMG), running away from the speaker, is universally taken as fictional and allegorical (although even in this case one could assume that the song was directed at an unwilling love interest at an actual symposium; for discussion of both poems with references, see Budelmann 2018b: 1–6, 196, 202–205).
Temporal Deixis
Temporal deixis raises a set of separate issues, although many of the same principles appear relevant. In general, here too the notion that the “now” of any given song can be straightforwardly identified with the moment of an original performance requires considerable modification. In a rich study of temporal deixis in Pindar, Bacchylides, and Alcman, D’Alessio (2004) has identified three separate scenarios exploited by these authors (sometimes within one and the same poem), differing with respect to the relative relationship suggested between the “coding time” (i.e., the moment of composition) and the “receiving time” (i.e., the moment of performance) of the poems: they can show “deictic simultaneity” (that is, the two moments are presented as co-occurring), or the receiving time is projected into the future immediately following the coding time, or (a particularly perplexing scenario) the poem represents its own temporal deictic center as immediately preceding the coding time. The latter two scenarios account for instances of the much-discussed “performative future” and other future-referring terms (imperatives, hortative subjunctives) in choral lyric (see D’Alessio 2004: 276–278 for references, and for discussion of the term). In Pindar’s Nemean 9, for instance, the poet begins with the self-exhortation “let us go in revelry” (κωμάσομεν, 1), and then, after a long parenthesis, again exhorts himself to “take up the lyre, take up the aulos” (ἀνὰ μὲν … φόρμιγγ᾿, ἀνὰ δ᾿ αὐλὸν … ὄρσομεν, 8), seemingly urging himself to begin the song which in fact has already begun. At the end of the poem (54–55) the speaker vows (εὔχομαι) to Zeus “to sing about that achievement [i.e., the victory]” (ταύταν ἀρετὰν κελαδῆσαι) and to “surpass many others in praising the victory in words” (ὑπὲρ πολλῶν τε τιμαλφεῖν λόγοις νίκαν). As D’Alessio observes (2004: 287–288), “[t]his seems to imply a moment prior to the actual song, and, strictly speaking, even to the moment described in the opening lines: the final sentence would, therefore, project the composition of the ode, not its performance, into the future.”
Compared to the future tense, the use of the present tense in lyric poetry remains somewhat understudied (but see Budelmann forthcoming, and more generally Culler 2014: 167–176, 2015: 283–295). Various aspects of its use complicate mappings of a text’s “now” onto that of any live performance, or even that of a fictional setting evoked by a poem. First, the present in lyric very frequently refers to generic and timeless truths: we have already seen ample examples of this above in Pindar’s Olympian 8.1–11, where the seers “test” Zeus (παραπειρῶνται), men’s prayers “are fulfilled” (ἄνεται), and great fame “always” (αἰεί) attends Olympic victors. Pindar’s odes frequently shift into and out of such a generalizing mode. In solo poetry, it is often difficult to distinguish such generic or timeless uses of the present from those which refer to single events presented as happening in the here and now of a song, and such ambiguity again regularly seems to be by design. The turnings-away of Anacreon’s girl and filly (358, 417 PMG) are on the one hand presented as a concrete events in the poems’ (imaginary) here and now, but on the other also seem to have a more timeless force. The characteristic opening of love poems with αὖτε or δηὖτε (“again”) make such a wider scope of an individual occurrence explicit, as well as linking to other performances (see for recent discussion LeVen 2018: 225–232). The complex blend of specific and generic in Sappho fr. 31 will be further discussed below.
A second “problem” is that the present tense in lyric is regularly used to express the speaker’s intense emotional states, which are presented as happening in a poem’s hic et nunc but seem at the same time hardly compatible with the composed performance of highly artificial poetic song. The lengthy sequence of presents and (present-tense) perfects describing Sappho’s symptoms in lines 7–16 of fragment 31, even though set up as generic occurrences by the indefinite temporal clause with subjunctive ὠς … ἴδω (“whenever I look,” 7; see further below), seems to portray the experience in vivid real time, but this is hardly compatible with a simultaneous performance by the same first-person speaker—the “paradox of the singer who says she cannot sing” (Budelmann 2018b: 135, see also D’Alessio 2018: 57). Such presents thus introduce an inherent tension between various “nows” and between various roles of the singing “I” (see below on person deixis).
Past tenses, too, play important roles in Greek lyric. First, just like the future tense in choral lyric can refer to a song’s own future composition or performance, past tenses can be used to refer to a song’s history, its composition already undertaken or begun. Thus, in Pindar’s Nemean 3, while the first twelve lines portray the performance as occurring in the future (imperatives and futures at lines 3, 9, 10, 12), the aorist ἔβαλεν (“struck (up)”) at line 65 presents the song as having begun: Ζεῦ, … σέο δ᾿ ἀγών, τὸν ὕμνος ἔβαλεν (“Zeus, yours is the contest which this hymn has struck”) (on this feature see again D’Alessio 2004, including discussion of Nemean 3 at p. 291, and a notable discussion of Olympian 10 at pp. 270–271, 292).
A more prominent role for past tenses in Greek lyric is, however, reserved for mythical and sometimes historical narrative. There is a good amount of lyric poetry set entirely or predominantly in this mode, e.g., Bacchylides’ dithyrambs, Stesichorus’ Geryoneis, or the “new music” of Timotheus’ Persians. Perhaps the more interesting cases are those where narrative and non-narrative passages are mixed, which raise with more urgency questions about the relationship between the world evoked by the narrative and a song’s projected here and now. Thus, looking again at Olympian 8, we have already seen that the first reference to Aegina is followed by a mythical narrative about its local hero Aeacus (30–51). As almost always in the case of narrative, the deictic centers at work are regularly shifted from that of the song’s performance: this is unquestionably the case with instances of quoted direct speech, such as Apollo’s address to Aeacus (42–46), where he notes that Troy is doomed to fall, “not without your children [i.e., Aeacus’ offspring, not that of the audience]; but it will begin [i.e., in the myth’s future, which is the audience’s past] with the first ones, and also with the fourth” (οὐκ ἄτερ παίδων σέθεν, ἀλλ᾿ ἅμα πρώτοις ἄρξεται καὶ τετράτοις, 45–46).3 Even outside of reported speech, however, deictic shifts will often be at work in narrative: readers/hearers often take a cognitive stance within the world of the narrative and then interpret the text from an internal perspective (this point lies at the heart of Duchan et al. 1995, a key work on deixis in narrative). Most intriguing about the case of Olympian 8, however, is that the narrative at its conclusion is explicitly connected to the here and now of the ode: Poseidon brings Aeacus “here” (δεῦρο, 51). As such, this is one instance of an apparent merging of the temporal levels of a myth and the song framing it—a frequent occurrence in Pindar’s odes and elsewhere (for an even more suggestive example see D’Alessio 2004: 292–294; on deixis in Pindaric narrative see also the contributions of Athanassaki, Martin, and Felson in Felson 2004a, as well as Nünlist 2007, Athanassaki 2009a, and Currie 2012).
Person Deixis
The study of person deixis in Greek lyric has a tradition long predating the use of the term: scholars have been debating the nature and identity of the singing “I” for many decades and in some cases since antiquity, asking “Who sang Pindar’s victory odes?” (Lefkowitz 1988, together with her earlier study of 1963) or “Who sang Sappho’s songs?” (Lardinois 1996). The debate about the Pindaric “I” is particularly rich and complex (for recent treatments with further bibliography, see D’Alessio 1994, Currie 2013), but it is mirrored in some form or another for really all extant lyric poets, and more generally this discussion touches on the wider debates in scholarship about the “lyric voice” (for a recent brief survey see Budelmann 2018b: 14–16).
There is no space here to survey these sprawling debates in all their complexity, but an example may lay bare some of the key issues. In Pindar’s Pythian 8 there is a mythical narrative (39–55) involving the Argive seer Amphiaraus and his son Alcmaeon (leader of the attack of the Epigoni against Thebes). The narrative ends with an oracle by Amphiaraus, and the ode then continues:
τοιαῦτα μέν ἐφθέγξατ᾿ Ἀμφιάρηος.
χαίρων δὲ καὶ αὐτός Ἀλκμᾶνα στεφάνοισι βάλλω,
ῥαίνω δὲ καὶ ὕμνωι, γείτων ὅτι μοι καὶ κτεάνων φύλαξ ἐμῶν
ὑπάντασεν ἰόντι γᾶς ὀμφαλὸν παρ᾿ ἀοίδιμον,
μαντευμάτων τ᾿ ἐφάψατο συγγόνοισι τέχναις. (Pindar Pyth. 8.56-60)
Such were the pronouncements of Amphiaraus, and I too am glad to pelt Alcmaeon with wreaths and sprinkle him with song, because as my neighbor and guardian of my possessions, he met me on my way to the earth’s famed navel and employed his inherited skills in prophecy.
(trans. Race, slightly adapted)
Who is the “I” here? Most critics have held that it must be the poet-performer, the same “I” who has earlier exhorted himself to praise the young victor Aristomenes “through my art” (ἐμᾶι … ἀμφὶ μαχανᾶι, 34). But others, most recently Currie (2013: 259–263), contend that the speaker here must be identified as the victor Aristomenes himself (with his voice portrayed mimetically, i.e., as if in quoted direct speech). Currie argues that this identification is necessary since it is the athlete who would seek prophetic assistance before competing in the games, and that the shift of speaking persona is made possible (even without a clear indication) by the deictic shift out of the narrative: “the deictic register of the mythical narrative (“he/they,” “then”) is brought starkly up against the contrastive deictic register of the present performative occasion (“I/we,” “now”), and this clash of deictic registers is accompanied by an effective blurring of speakers’ voices” (2013: 272).
Whether or not one agrees with Currie, the fact that so much uncertainty is possible gets at the inherent flexibility of the Pindaric “I” (and of the lyric voice more generally). It is more widely accepted that first-person references in choral lyric, whether singular or plural, can refer variously to the poet-composer or to the performing singer(s), and that “both possibilities are exploited to develop communicative strategies that may work as inclusive or exclusive toward the audience, who may or may not identify themselves with the speaking voice(s)” (D’Alessio 2009b: 120).
Less consistent attention has been paid, surprisingly, to the lyric second person. In Pindar, second-person pronouns and forms of address may refer to the Muses, gods and heroes, localities (e.g., Olympia/Pisa in Ol. 8, discussed above), the singer’s own θυμός (e.g., Nem. 3.26, Ol. 2.89), the victor’s family or ancestors, (frequently) to the victor himself, and in some cases to such figures as the victor’s charioteer (Ol. 6.22)—all such figures can also be referred to in the third person. There is no guarantee that any of these addressees (or, for that matter, the poet-composer himself) were physically present at original performances (although the victor’s presence seems plausible): the pragmatic conditions under which lyric poetry operates need not, again, correspond neatly to those of prototypical speech situations. As for solo poetry, we have already seen above various examples of poetic addressees that may or may not be mapped onto hypothetical addressees present at performances: the address to Hera in Alcaeus fr. 129, line 5, takes on different connotations if her altar is thought to be in view; Anacreon addresses a filly who might be (but is not often) supposed to correspond to a girl at the symposium. The “you” of Sappho fr. 31 has been reconstructed by some scholars as an actual addressee, physically present at the song’s performance; others have taken her as something of an allegory, a fictional model that Sappho uses to instruct her circle on how to overcome their grief (for discussion of all these points, see again Budelmann 2018b: 132–133, D’Alessio 2018: 59–62). In the case of the Sappho fragment, it is at any rate significant that there is no plausible scenario “on which all these deictic elements [i.e., the address to the beloved, the man sitting opposite her] would work felicitously together as part of an extratextual pragmatic context” (D’Alessio 2018: 59): if the addressee involved in intimate conversation with the man, it is difficult to see how she can serve simultaneously as the addressee of the speaker’s emotional outpouring; the paradox of the speaker who is incapable of speaking has already been noted.
As with spatial deixis and temporal deixis, no hard and fast rules or easy solutions present themselves, and it is important to remember that what may work or seem plausible in the interpretation of one poem will not necessarily work in the interpretation of another. To quote D’Alessio one final time:
The fact itself that the poems have been preserved suggests that in most cases the texts that have survived were capable of “working” in more than one context. What we have may range from the wholly fictional, to the stylised representation of the typical occasion, to the poem composed in order to “work” in a single definite circumstance, and even to the apparent transcript of an extempore poem.
(D’Alessio 2009: 117)
Words Building Worlds: Deixis in Text World Theory
Much of the recent work on literary deixis outside of classics—and gradually also within it—has been done under the aegis of Text World Theory (TWT), a cognitive-linguistic model of how humans process and understand discourse (of any kind) by constructing mental representations of it.4 TWT offers several productive avenues of approach to Greek lyric; since it has not yet regularly been applied to poetry meant for live performance, there is also ample scope for refinement of the theory by its application to the Greek material.5
The TWT model operates with a basic split between (i) the “discourse world,” the immediate situation surrounding the production and reception of language (the two may be split)—this would overlap at least in some instances with what students of Greek lyric would call the “performance context”—and (ii) “text worlds,” mental representations constructed in the minds of discourse participants, primarily on the basis of deictic information supplied by the text. Deictic (and referential) information provides the crucial “world-building elements” of a given text world, i.e., its temporal and spatial boundaries as well as any entities—“enactors” and/or “objects”—that populate it. Descriptions of events, actions, or states within a given text-world serve as “function-advancing propositions” that move the discourse forward and so advance a plot, argument, etc. Texts frequently give rise to “world-switches” (i.e., deictic shifts), from one text-world into another one with different temporal or spatial parameters. Other text-worlds are “modal,” and represent hypothetical scenarios and/or the content of enactors’ beliefs, thoughts, desires. Finally, TWT incorporates the notion of “conceptual blending” (cf. Fauconnier & Turner 2002),6 particularly but not only to account for such phenomena as metaphor. “Blended worlds” combine notions from two or more different conceptual spaces in a new mental representation with its own unique characteristics.
The basic architecture of the model is set out (in TWT’s typical diagrammatic fashion) in Figure 11.1:
Figure 11.1 A simplified typology of Text World Theory (Gavins 2016: 4477).Source: Gavins, J. 2016. “Text-Worlds,” in V. Sotirova, ed., The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics. London. 444–457. © Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Two basic cognitive principles underpinning TWT are greatly significant for the issues surrounding lyric deixis that have been discussed in previous sections. First, the theory relies heavily on the notion of “common ground,” which describes the “the sum of [speakers’ and hearers’] mutual, common, or joint knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions” (Clark 1996: 92).8 Hearers use this information to fill in and flesh out the information by the text; that is to say they use their background knowledge, their memory, and their imagination—insofar as they assume them to be relevant to the discourse and the aims of its producer—to supplement the information provided by the text. The second principle is that of “text-drivenness”: “the text itself defines which areas of background knowledge will be accessed by the participants in order to process and understand the discourse” (Gavins 2016: 448), and the text itself provides the new information in addition to such background knowledge that goes into the construction of text worlds.
The idea that the interpretation of Greek lyric texts depends crucially on the knowledge and beliefs of hearers in their different contexts (their “common ground”) has, of course, been much explored by previous treatments of lyric deixis (that said, the technical terms of “ground” and “grounding” would be useful additions to the debate). What has been less emphasized, and what TWT allows us to bring into focus, is that even in cases where there is a good deal of interaction between text worlds and the discourse world (such as, presumably, during the first performances of Bacchylidean and Pindaric victory odes, or Alcman’s Partheneion), lyric poetry still, inevitably, deals in text-driven mental representations of that discourse world, and is hugely selective in drawing attention to only a few features of that world and in adding others.
We may revisit now some of the examples discussed above, beginning with the opening of Pindar’s Olympian 8. The first eleven lines invite their hearers to construct, incrementally, what proves to be a dizzying array of text-worlds: Olympia is invoked as site of the games, but the locality is also portrayed metaphorically as a goddess who can be (and is) addressed by the poetic “I,” as a mother, and as the mistress of truth (1–2). This complex blended world is then further populated (2–3) with seers who, in an unbounded generic timeframe (note the generic present-stem forms παραπειρῶνται (“test”) and τεκμαιρόμενοι (“examining”)), offer sacrifices to Zeus, the reference to whom may invite the construction of another text world in which he hears the prayers. We then access modal worlds representing the seers’ anticipation (εἰ “to see if,” 4) and the content of Zeus’ possible omen (his λόγος, 4) about athletes. In the antistrophe, the discourse first expands (5) into a world of indeterminate, generic temporal, and spatial boundaries in which pious men’s prayers are fulfilled (ἄνεται), before refocusing on the text-world (or perhaps opening up a new one) situated in Olympia, or more precisely in the grove of Pisa on the banks of the Alpheus, which is metaphorically portrayed as being addressed and asked by the speaker to “receive this band and wearing of crowns” (τόνδε κῶμον καὶ στεφαναφορίαν δέξαι, 10). Another line-and-a-half widens the temporal scope once more (10–11): Olympia, still addressed in the second person, always (αἰεί) provides kleos to whoever prevails in its games.
What emerges from this brief (and probably incomplete) overview is how little of the world-building that these lines instantiate can be captured by a statement like “the deictics situate the performance during a comastic procession at Olympia.” On the one hand, as scholars have observed (at times to their frustration) the information about the physical performance setting that victory odes offer is in fact very thin and selective (so, in general, e.g., Carey 2007: 199): the invocation of Olympia and Pisa and the reference to the procession may be elaborate, they are certainly not rich in spatial (or temporal) detail. On the other hand, even if we suppose a hypothetical first performance at Olympia, and even if we allow that in such a performance the text taps quite directly into certain limited features of the discourse world (including, possibly, aspects of the identity and role of the poet/performer(s)), it is also clear that the text still asks a great deal of interpretative and imaginative work on the part of the audience (who are presumably not actually looking at priests sacrificing to Zeus, let alone the complete history of prayers and responses to them, or the complete set of Olympic victors). By forcing us in this way to see the immediate interaction between text and performance context as only a small part of the complex world-building game that the text plays, TWT invites us to focus on the qualities of the audiences’ imagined (mental representations of) contexts, rather than the purely physical ones of the first or any subsequent performance—even when there is an overlap between the two.
Such a focus on the role of audience imagination may offer clearer insights into the ways that texts make themselves suitable to reperformance and, eventually, the transition to written poetic texts: Phillips has rightly noted that that “deixis, self-referential discourse, and contextual references encourage an imaginative engagement with the situations the poems project” (2016: 19), to which I would add that such “projection” is part of any (including a first) performance situation. More generally, the TWT approach sits well in the trend in recent work away from strictly contextualizing or historicizing and toward more “literary” readings of lyric.9 In the case of Pindaric victory odes, for instance, TWT may allow further exploration of how his lyric voice, in Fearn’s words, “negotiates presence and absence, proximity, and transcendence, in the creation of a sense of subjectivity for the consumers of his poems” (Fearn 2017: 128).
Turning again to Sappho’s fragment 31, we see in this poem a similar “negotiation” between “proximity and transcendence,” or as Budelmann has recently described it (2018b: 133), a combination of “vividness—the addressee’s laughter and sweet voice, the speaker’s crippling physical symptoms—with reflective distance.” On a TWT-style reading this combination comes through not so much from the number of different text worlds that the poem shifts between, but from their indeterminate temporal properties, or rather, the particular way in which they blend the specific and the generic. The “enactors” that occupy the primary text world are the speaker, the female addressee, and a man who sits opposite that addressee. But the peculiar configuration of deictics and reference used to describe that man (κῆνος … ὤνηρ, ὄττις …, 1–2) renders him as an unusual mix of a specific individual and a generic class of men. The article in ὤνηρ (~ ὀ ἀνήρ) appears to refer to an individual man and “ground” him as a given part of the situation—i.e., he is assumed to exist simply by virtue of being mentioned as a definite referent.10 The distal deictic κῆνος could, as we have seen, be taken as spatial, a case of (presumably) imaginary exophoric deixis locating the man at a remove from the speaker and not part of the immediate “interaction” between speaker and addressee (an imagined interaction: the text makes it clear that the real, intimate interaction is going on between the man and the addressee). But the addition of the “indefinite” ὄττις-clause causes the man to be re-interpreted (or perhaps additionally interpreted) as an entire set of such men;11 the situation can, accordingly, be (re-)evaluated as a recurring scene, and κῆνος … ὤνηρ could be taken as a referentially “empty” cataphoric antecedent for the relative clause rather than as an exophoric deictic. The present indicatives φαίνεται “seems” (1), ἰσδάνει “sits” (3), and ὐπακούει “listens” (4), as well as the present participles φωναίσας “speaking” and γελαίσας “laughing,” each seem similarly concrete and specific while simultaneously allowing for a more generic interpretation. We may suppose that this ambiguity is, throughout, precisely the point, and frames the speaker’s concrete individual experience as part of a wider phenomenon. In TWT’s terms, we might analyze these lines as offering a single, blended text world, with a single set of enactors, whose spatio-temporal parameters blend a single “here and now” with a more generic set of repeated occurrences.
In lines 5–6, and then fully in line 7, the discourse centers on the modal world of the speaker’s thoughts and emotional experience, and remains there for the rest of the poem (although this depends, of course, on what has been lost at the end of the fragment). There is, as already discussed above, a further blend here of the specific and the generic: the temporal clause that introduces the litany of symptoms, ὡς … ἴδω (7), uses an indefinite subjunctive construction and thus presents the reaction as a repeated, habitual one. But as the symptoms (inability to speak, cold sweat, etc.) are portrayed at length and with great immediacy, they become more concrete and the generic nature of the description seems to fade to the background (see Budelmann forthcoming). This gives a similar temporal indeterminacy to the modal world of Sappho’s emotional experience as we saw in the text world describing the addressee and the man.
Various aspects have been drawn out in the preceding analyses of Olympian 8 and Sappho fr. 31 that could well serve as basis for further TWT-style analysis of Greek lyric poetry, and which that model could perhaps “isolate” as somehow distinctive of or even defining for (certain subgenres within) the corpus (without ignoring that corpus’ rich diversity, rightly stressed by Budelmann 2009b, 2018: 2–16, Carey 2009): the rapid and dramatic world-switches, the indeterminacy of the spatial and temporal boundaries of many text worlds, the prominence of (metaphorically and/or temporally) blended worlds, the frequency of and extended focus on modal worlds, and, indeed, the particular nature and flexibility of the connections between a song’s text worlds and the discourse world of its composition, performance(s), and reception(s). Such an approach would not fully divorce the study of lyric deixis from the “promise of return to performance” (Edmunds, cited above), but it would offer a greater promise in addition, namely that of a fuller understanding of the richly imaginative world-building processes that are at the heart of Greek lyric.
FURTHER READING
The earliest exponents of the continuing wave of work on deixis in Greek lyric are Danielewicz 1990, Felson 1999, and Bonifazi 2001 (although these are preceded by Rösler 1983). The most important publication is still a special issue of the journal Arethusa edited by Felson (2004a), with eight significant contributions (including Felson’s helpful introduction). All these deal (exclusively) with the choral lyric of Pindar, Bacchylides, and Alcman. More recent work, some of which also deals with other poets, includes articles by D’Alessio (2009, an incisive survey; 2018, on Sappho, and 2020, on person deixis in Pindar), Athanassaki (2009a, 2010, both on Pindar), and Edmunds (2008, a still useful “state of the question,” and 2012, on Alcaeus), and Gribble (2021, on Sappho and Alcaeus). Felson & Klein 2013 and Bonifazi 2013 are shorter encyclopedia articles, both not exclusively (though mainly) focused on lyric texts (again, primarily Pindar).
For applications of TWT to (primarily English) poetry, see the references listed at Gavins and Lahey 2016: 7. Applications to Greek literature are listed in note 4.
Notes
1 Useful handbook entries on deixis are, e.g., Levinson 1983: ch. 2; 2004, Sidnell 2003, Culpeper and Haugh 2014: ch. 2.
2 It bears noting that the growth of interest in deixis in Greek lyric poetry coincides with similar trends in the study of (e.g.) English poetry: cf. the “early” contributions by Green 1992, Semino 1992; see the Further Reading section for more references.
3 There are also examples in the corpus consisting exclusively of such direct speech in dialogue form, without any embedding narrative, e.g., Bacchylides 18, a discussion between the Athenian king Aegeus and Athenian youths.
4 Text World Theory originates in the work of Werth (1999), and has been much elaborated since, most fully by Gavins (2013). Useful recent introductory surveys are Gavins 2016, Lahey 2014. TWT is in fact only one model, if the most vigorously studied, among several stemming from different analytical traditions that are nevertheless “united in [their] view of language as essentially world-building in nature” (Gavins & Lahey 2016: 1; see their chapter for an overview). Until recently the TWT tradition was untapped by classicists (it was mentioned by Hutchinson 2012: 283 n. 11, and used fleetingly by Selter 2010); there is now something of a flurry of activity, however, with recently puhlished and in-preparation work by Hutchinson (2020), Gribble (2021),Vanessa Cazzato, and Il-Kweon Sir (I am grateful to Gribble and Sir for allowing me to read their work in advance).
5 See, e.g., n. 6 below. For a good example of work on Greek lyric deixis filtering into wider discussions of lyric poetry, see, e.g., Culler 2014, esp. 174–176.
6 Blending is applied to Greek lyric by Budelmann and LeVen 2014: see that piece for further bibliography.
7 The dotted line between author and reader in the discourse world represents a “split” discourse world scenario, with a text produced and received at different times and occasions. In the case of Greek lyric performances such a scenario can of course be considerably more complex (cf. D’Alessio 2004, 2009b: 115–120, 2018).
8 For common ground see, e.g., Szabó and Thomason 2019: ch. 8; for its use in Text World Theory, see esp. Werth 1999: ch. 3.
9 As evidenced by Fearn 2017, Phillips 2016, Sigelman 2016, and the essays gathered in Budelmann and Phillips 2018.
10 This is presumably an instance of pragmatic “accommodation” (for references see n. 8 above): the presupposition of the man’s existence only arises from the reference to him, but as soon as he is referred to, such a presupposition is taken as valid.
11 The syntax of the ὄττις-clause is notoriously disputed; see Probert 2015: 111–118 for a full discussion of the issues and suggested possibilities (with further references); Probert’s point that there are different kinds of (in)definiteness is important. The reading for which I argue is explicitly rejected by, e.g., Hutchinson 2001: 169–172; it comes close to Probert’s own suggested paraphrase “For any man x who sits opposite you, that man x seems to me to be equal to the gods,” but it strikes me as relevant that that paraphrase only really works if the ordering of relative clause and main clause is reversed. On my reading we should allow for a degree of incompatibility between the “definiteness” of the main clause and the “indefiniteness” of the subordinate clause.