SECTION ONE—
ON THE MARGINS OF THE SCRIBAL:
FROM ORAL EPIC TO TEXT
1—
Epic as Genre
Gregory Nagy
One of very few scholars who can speak authoritatively of both oral and written epic traditions, Gregory Nagy confronts the supposed divide between these traditions in this brief and suggestive exploration into the origins of the epic genre. In the spirit of his earlier work, such as The Best of the Achaeans, which demonstrated the impact of religious and political rituals on the Homeric poems, Nagy demonstrates that epos was even for the Greeks an elusive form whose generic expectations and demands changed considerably from archaic to classical Greece. In this rigorous philological reading of the term epos and its relationship to other terms such as muthos, Nagy cautions us to be sensitive to the varying cultural conditions that produce heroic poetry, arguing against a fixed definition of epic as such in order to encourage more flexible and inclusive models of genre.
In order to speak of epic as genre, we need a set of working definitions for three not two concepts: besides genre and epic, we need to define the concept of Homer as a prototypical exponent of epic as genre. This essay develops such a set, arguing that our received idea about epic results primarily from a narrow understanding of Homer as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the exclusion of other ancient Greek traditions, such as the so-called Epic Cycle. As we will see, it is Aristotle's Poetics that ultimately made this idea prevail, just as it is Aristotle who has been most influential in shaping the concept of genre in general. In his essay "Epic and Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin goes so far as to say: "Aristotle's Poetics, although occasionally so deeply embedded as to be almost invisible, remains the stable foundation for the theory of genres."[1]
A problem more fundamental than the definitions of genre and epic is the definition of poetry itself in social contexts where the technology of writing is involved in neither the composition nor the performance of any given poem or song. My invocation of the two factors of composition and performance implies a derivation of ancient Greek poetry from oral poetry, as defined through the comparative fieldwork criteria developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord.[2] From Lord's empirical study of living oral traditions, especially those of South Slavic heroic song, it becomes clear that composition and performance are aspects of the same process in oral poetry. In order to achieve a more accurate taxonomy of the earliest phases of the Greek song-making
tradition culminating in "Homer" and, ultimately, in our received notions of epic as genre, the two factors of composition and performance must be kept in mind. Only then may we arrive at a basis for considering the utility of a concept such as genre—and of a related concept, occasion.
In addressing these two factors of composition and performance, I propose to bring into play a crucial work that has taken them both into account, Richard P. Martin's The Language of Heroes (1989). Martin has pioneered an explicit connection between Lord's empirical observations about performance in living oral traditions and J. L. Austin's theories about the performative uses of language, as articulated in his book How to Do Things with Words (1962).
As Martin demonstrates, Austin's formulation of the performative, where you do something when you say something, meshes with Lord's formulation of performance as the key to bringing the words of a song to life. To use Austin's wording, song is a speech act, as Martin shows in detail with reference to Homeric poetry. Ironically, Austin himself resisted the idea that poetry could count as a speech act, and we can see clearly the reason for his reluctance: for Austin, poetry is a matter of writing, not speaking. For Austin, the dimension of oral tradition is utterly removed from his own conceptualization of poetry.
Martin's book demonstrates not only the self-definition of Homeric song as a speech act. It shows also that this medium is capable of demonstrating the function of song as "quoted" within its overall frame of song. That is to say, Homeric song dramatizes, as it were, the performative aspects of songs that it quotes. Ironically, the performative aspects of Homeric song itself are shaded over while the performative aspects of the songs contained by it are highlighted, including pronouncements of praise or blame, laments, proverbs, and so on. To put it another way, Homeric song specifies the occasion of songs that it represents, or even presents, while it leaves vague any potential occasion for its own performance.
I have used the word occasion here in referring to the contexts of speech acts "quoted" by Homeric song. In fact, I am ready to define occasion as the context of a speech act.[3] Further, I define genre as a set of rules that produce a speech act. In offering this definition of genre, I follow Tzvetan Todorov in chapter 2 of his Genres du discours; for him, genres are "principles of dynamic production" of discourse in society.[4]
Here I propose to build on this most useful formulation in three ways.
First, I hope to tighten up the notion of speech act, correlating it with the specific interweavings of myth and ritual in traditional societies and dissociating it from purely philosophical considerations that center on individual judgments concerning when a speech act is a speech act. For purposes of this presentation, a speech act is a speech act only when it fits the criteria of
the community in which it is being used. To determine the validity or invalidity of a speech act is to observe its dynamics within the community in question.
Second, I would observe that the genre, the set of rules that generate a given speech act, can equate itself with the occasion, the context of this speech act. To this extent, the occasion is the genre.[5] For example, a song of lament can equate itself with the process of grieving for the dead. A case in point is the Homeric use of the words akhos and penthos, both meaning "grief," as programmatic indicators of ritual songs of lament.[6]
Finally, I would note that if the occasion is destabilized or even lost, the genre can compensate for it, even recreate it.[7]
In view of these criteria for defining the concept of genre, are we ready to say that epic is a genre? Or that Homeric song is epic? I would suggest that the answer is "Not yet." Granted, we may say that Homeric song dramatizes genres such as pronouncements of praise or blame, laments, proverbs, and so on, but we can recognize those genres only because their performative aspect is represented by Homeric song. By contrast, Homeric song does not directly refer to its own current performative aspect, and so we cannot easily recognize it as a genre in and of itself. Further, we are as yet far from being able to identify Homeric song as epic.
For Albert Lord, in fact, the term "epic" is far too vague to be useful in his description of Homeric song—making—or of its counterparts in the South Slavic traditions:
The word "epic," itself, indeed, has come in time to have many meanings. Epic sometimes is taken to mean simply a long poem in "high style." Yet a very great number of the poems which interest us in this book are comparatively short; length, in fact, is not a criterion of epic poetry. Other definitions of epic equate it with heroic poetry. Indeed the term "heroic poetry" is sometimes used (by Sir Cecil M. Bowra, for example) to avoid the very ambiguity in the word "epic" which troubles us. Yet purists might very well point out that many of the songs which we include in oral narrative poetry are romantic or historical and not heroic, no matter what definition of the hero one may choose. In oral narrative poetry, as a matter of fact, I wish to include all story poetry, the romantic or historical as well as the heroic; otherwise I would have to exclude a considerable body of medieval metrical narrative.[8]
Despite the imprecision of the term "epic," we may still say with confidence that there are many oral traditions strikingly comparable to what we find in the "epic" of Homer. There has been a wealth of comparative evidence about oral "epics" collected over recent years in Eastern Europe,[9] central Asia,[10] the Indian subcontinent,[11] Africa,[12] and so on.[13] In this context, I cannot stress enough the abiding importance of the comparative evidence provided by the South Slavic tradition of "epic": although it is different in many ways
from what we see in the Homeric poems, this tradition, as Martin argues, "still has a claim to being one of the best comparanda."[14]
But the point is, what leads us to persist in referring to the South Slavic tradition as "epic" is the influence of received notions about Homeric poetry. My further point is that the classical Greek idea of epic, as presupposed by these received notions, needs to be situated in its own historical context. Once we see it in that light, this idea of epic may continue to serve as a useful point of comparison, but it cannot any longer be imposed as some kind of universal standard.
Applying comparatively the classical Greek idea of epic, one Africanist has developed a working definition, based on his experience with living oral traditions of Africa and elsewhere:
An oral epic is fundamentally a tale about the fantastic deeds of a man or men endowed with something more than human might and operating in something larger than the normal human context and it is of significance in portraying some stage of the cultural or political development of a people. It is usually narrated or performed to the background of music by an unlettered singer working alone or with some assistance from a group of accompanists.[15]
Although there is no need to impose classicist models like the classical concept of epic on indigenous African oral poetic forms,[16] and although Lord himself, as we have seen, has explored the inherent difficulties of defining epic in terms of living oral traditions,[17] the fact remains that there are striking empirically observable analogies in a wide range of African oral poetic forms to what any classicist would indeed classify as epic.[18] As one Africanist puts it, "The burden of explanation therefore rests with those scholars who, for reasons best known to themselves, bandy about phrases like 'epic poetry in the normal sense of the word' and contend that on the whole the heroic narrative traditions in Africa yield little more than 'certain elements of epic.'"[19]
What is needed, then, is an understanding of epic that accommodates comparative perspectives:
What is epic according to one definition may be excluded according to another. And, most important, a general definition of a genre will often violate the internal definition of genres inside a given society. Ideally, if oral epic were to be directly comparable from one society to another, it would not be enough that the epic genres themselves were similar; their place in the general spectr [um] of literary forms of the society in question ought to be similar too.[20]
Further, it is not enough to say that "epic" may or may not exist as a genre in the oral traditions of a given society. For epic to be a "genre," it has to have a functional relationship of interdependence or complementarity with another "genre" or other "genres." The principle of complementarity is key to Laura Slatkin's formulation of genre in oral traditions:
Genres can be viewed, like other cultural institutions, as existing in a relationship of interdependence, in which they have complementary functions in conveying different aspects of a coherent ideology or system of beliefs about the world. The crucial point about these distinctions or differentiations is their complementarity: they exist within, and serve to complete, a conception about the way the world is ordered.[21]
Thus genre is not an absolute.[22] We may apply the classical Greek model of epic for comparative purposes only after we succeed in defining epic as a genre in relation to other genres within the historical context of classical and pre-classical Greece.[23]
The earliest available evidence is the usage that we find in Homeric song, where the word epos is regularly used as a complement to muthos: as Martin has argued, muthos is a marked way to designate speech, whereas epos is the unmarked way—at least with reference to an opposition with muthos.[24] Martin defines the terms "marked" and "unmarked" as follows: "The 'marked' member of a pair carries greater semantic weight, but can be used across a narrower range of situations, whereas the unmarked member—the more colorless member of the opposition—can be used to denote a broader range, even that range covered by the marked member: it is the more general term."[25] The Homeric sense of muthos, in Martin's working definition, is "a speech-act indicating authority, performed at length, usually in public, with a focus on full attention to every detail."[26] This is the word used by Homeric song in referring to genres that are dramatized within Homeric song, such as pronouncements of praise or blame, laments, proverbs, and so on.[27] To this extent, muthos is not just any speech act reported by song: it is also the speech act that is the song itself, the "epic" of Homer.[28] The Homeric counterpart epos, on the other hand, is "an utterance, ideally short, accompanying a physical act, and focusing on message, as perceived by the addressee, rather than on performance as enacted by the speaker."[29]
As the unmarked member of the opposition, epos or its plural epea can occur even in contexts where muthos would be appropriate.[30] On the other hand, "one can never simply substitute the semantically restricted term muthos-meaning authoritative speech-act, or 'performance'—for the ordinary term epos."[31]
Whereas epos can be found in place of muthos in Homeric diction, the reverse does not happen: "In Homer, a speech explicitly said to be an epos, and not also represented as epea (the plural), is never called a muthos." Further, "epea can co-occur to refer to a muthos, but muthoi in the plural is never correlated with the singular form epos, to describe a speech."[32]
Even if epos designates "ordinary" speech when early Greek epic refers to speech, we must keep in mind that the unmarked category of "ordinary" speech is a "default" category: "'Ordinary' is a variable concept, depending on whatever is being perceived as 'special' in a given comparison or set of
comparisons."[33] Further, "the perception of plain or everyday speech is a variable abstraction that depends on the concrete realization of whatever special speech . . . is set apart for a special context."[34] In the case at hand, if it were not for the opposition to unmarked epos by way of marked muthos, the word epos need not designate speech that is "ideally short," nor need it be perceived as merely "focusing on message."[35] Even an adjective added to the plural of unmarked epos can achieve a marked opposite of epos in Homeric diction: as Martin shows, epea pteroenta, "winged words" is a functional synonym of muthos in denoting certain kinds of marked speech.[36] If muthos can designate song as performed, then so too can epos, provided that muthos is not contrasted with it.
We may see in the Homeric term, epea pteroenta, "winged words," a poetic expression that recognizes the semantic potential of the word epos to designate, in its own right, song as performed. This potential gets activated as soon as epos gets detached from its complementarity with muthos. Such a detachment, I suggest, is made historically permanent by the eventual semantic destabilization of the word muthos. In post-Homeric contexts, as I have argued elsewhere, the words alethes, "true," and aletheia, "truth," evolve in explicit opposition to the word muthos in contexts where true speech is being contrasted with other forms of speech that are discredited, that cannot be trusted (e.g., Pindar Olympian 1.29-30).[37] As the word alethes, "true," or aletheia, "truth," becomes marked in opposition to muthos, which in turn becomes unmarked in the context of such opposition, the meaning of muthos becomes marginalized to mean something like "myth" in the popular sense of the word as it is used today in referring to the opposite of truth.[38]
The marginalization of muthos, resulting from its relatively later opposition to aelthes, "true," or aletheia, "truth," may be pertinent to the earlier opposition of marked muthos and unmarked epos.[39] We may allow for the possibility that the unmarked member of this earlier opposition had once been the marked member in still earlier sets of opposition.[40] The semantic markedness of epos reemerges in post-Homeric contexts: as Martin points out, this word begins to appear in the specialized sense of "poetic utterance" and even "dactylic hexameter verse."[41] In other words, the semantic specialization of epos in post-Homeric contexts suggests that it had once been a marked word in opposition to some other unmarked word for "speech," and that "it had served as an unmarked word in Homeric diction only within the framework of an opposition with muthos."[42] In our own contemporary usage of the English words epic and myth, we see indirect reflexes of the later semantic specialization of epos, and of the later semantic specialization of muthos. As parallels to English epic and myth, we may look back and compare Aristotle's use of epe (the Attic form of epea ) in the sense of epic and of muthos in the sense of myth as "plot."[43]
Mention of Aristotle brings us full-circle, finally, to his own concept of
"epic," which he regularly designates as epe. Near the beginning of the Poetics (1447a14-15), he says: "The making of epe[epopoiia] and the making [poiesis] of tragedy, also comedy, and the making [-poietike] of dithyrambs, and the [making] of reed songs and lyre songs-all these are in point of fact forms of mimesis, by and large".
In the historical context of classical Athenian traditions, it seems preferable to specify that these genres are a matter of performance traditions, not so much oral traditions in a looser sense of the term "oral." In Athens, during a period starting roughly from the middle of the sixth century and running through the fourth, tragedy and comedy can be viewed as two complementary genres evolving side by side and becoming mutually assimilated as performance media within the framework of a major Athenian state festival, the City Dionysia. In the same historical context, we can see taking shape an analogous complementarity between tragedy and epic, evolving side by side and becoming mutually assimilated as performance media within the two complementary frameworks of the City Dionysia and the Panathenaia respectively, subsumed under the larger framework of the overall cycle of Athenian state festivals.[44]
Applying Aristotle's point of view, we may justifiably describe the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey as the genre of epic—but only in the historical context of Athens during the period just noted, starting roughly from the middle of the sixth century and running through the fourth. In a separate work, I have argued extensively that this particular phase in the evolution of Homeric song making represents but one of at least five distinct periods, "Five Ages of Homer."[45] During this particular phase, the equivalent of "period 3" within an evolutionary scheme of five periods, the very idea of "Homer" as author became restricted to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the exclusion of a vast reservoir of additional or alternative material known as the Epic Cycle.[46] For Aristotle, the "authors" of the Epic Cycle are clearly distinct from the Homer of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Poetics 1459b1-7). As we read the words of the fourth-century Athenian statesman Lycurgus (Against Leocrates 102) declaring that only the epe —which we may now confidently translate "epic"—of Homer could be performed at the Feast of the Panathenaia in Athens, we can be sure of what he means: for Lycurgus, only the Iliad and the Odyssey can be considered true epic.[47]
In sum, we may expect the criteria for determining the status of epic as genre to vary from culture to culture, even from period to period within a culture. When Bakhtin speaks of "epic" in his essay "Epic and Novel," he obviously has in mind the taxonomy of Aristotle. And yet, as valid as Aristotle's criteria may be from a classical and postclassical Greek point of view, they cannot be universalized or absolutized.
Even in the ancient Greek epics that we have, the Iliad and the Odyssey, we may detect patterns of complementarity that point to the need for genre distinctions that require subdivisions of Aristotle's notion of "epic." I would go so far as to say that Bakhtin's hermeneutic model of "epic," if we follow through on his criteria for distinguishing it from "novel," fit the Iliad only, to the exclusion of the Odyssey, which actually seems more appropriate to Bakhtin's hermeneutic model of "novel," not "epic."
If we take a broader view of ancient Greek civilization, there are still further possible criteria to consider. For example, in light of typological evidence for oral "epics" transmitted by women in various cultures,[48] we may see in song 44 of Sappho, "The Wedding of Hektor and Andromache," the traces of earlier Greek "epic" traditions that could cross back and forth between female and male performative conventions.[49]
In this connection, I invoke a distinction made by Joyce Flueckiger and Laurie Sears in their general formulation of epic: "Epic narratives exist both as oral and as performance traditions."[50] In terms of these shorthand designations "oral traditions" and "performance traditions," we may in effect distinguish between "a general knowledge of the 'whole story' (as summary) that many in the folklore community would be able to relate and the epic as it is performed in a marked, artistic enactment of that oral tradition."[51] That is to say, there is a gap between the notional totality of epic as oral tradition and the practical limitations of epic in actual performance:
Thus, although scholars have spent considerable energy recording epic stories "from beginning to end," counting the number of hours and pages required to do so, this is not how the epic is received by indigenous audiences. Further, certain episodes of the epic are performed more frequently than others; and there may be episodes that exist only in the oral tradition and not in performance at all.[52]
This insight may prove to be a key to understanding the inclusiveness of "epic" as a form, or even as a genre: if indeed epic can be realized informally as well as formally, it becomes the ideal multiform, accommodating a variety of forms. I draw attention to the inclusiveness, the notional wholeness, of Homeric poetry. Here is a genre that becomes a container, as it were, of a vast variety of other genres, realized in varying forms of performance and in varying degrees of formality in performance. Here is a repertoire shared
by men and women, replete with stories suitable for a broad spectrum of different performances, ranging from the songs of Sappho to the declamations of rhapsodes who claim, at the very start of their performances, to be Homer himself.[53] Here, finally, is a medium of discourse that sees itself as all-embracing of the society identified by it and identifying with it.
Works Cited
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Bauman, R.
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Verbal Art as Performance. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publishers.
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"Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres." In Folklore Genres, edited by D. Ben-Amos, 215-242. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Oral Epics in India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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Oral Cultures Past and Present: Rappin' and Homer. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: B. Blackwell.
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Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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2—
Performing Interpretation:
Early Allegorical Exegesis of Homer
Andrew Ford
Ethnographic accounts of living epic traditions show that "context" is a very complex thing that can extend to providing a social frame for the reception and evaluation of poetry as well for its performance. Andrew Ford's essay explores how far we may discern such traditions of performing epic interpretation behind the texts of Homer. Ford's focus is epic's very ancient connection with allegory, and he shows that even such an apparently textual affair as allegoresis can be fully understood only in the light of social and political contexts of interpretation. Ford turns to pre-Socratic evidence to argue that allegoresis becomes a part of the Homerist's arsenal a full century before the early sophists and two centuries before Aristotle's Poetics. Especially in the context of the archaic Greek city, the use of allegorical commentary allowed performers to constitute a select, elite audience, giving those with pretension to cultural leadership in the city a claim to authority based on having access to an exclusive meaning intended for an exclusive audience.
The study of living epic traditions valuably reminds readers of Homer that an oral poem is never presented to an audience "in itself" but always in the context of performative conventions, which can powerfully determine its significance.[1] Because the Homeric poems have for so long exerted their influence on Western criticism and poetry in the form of canonized texts—scrupulously reconstructed in Hellenistic academies and minutely examined in Greek and Roman classrooms—it may be difficult fully to appreciate that in their case, too, performative context was not something "extra" added to the "pure" text but was inextricable from epic as a social and cultural object. Among the ways in which context may shape a poem on a given occasion is by providing a structured forum for the evaluation and interpretation of epic as well for its performance. Some measure of what a text of Homer cannot give to modern readers is suggested by Dwight Reynolds's recent ethnographic account of Arabic epic poets in the Nile Delta:
In al-Bakatush one attends a performance of epic first of all to participate in and share a social experience and only secondarily to attend to the "text." In essence, the social action within the event is, in this indigenous "reading," the text. . . . The sarha [epic performance] is a stage for social interaction; though
epic singing may form the focus of an evening's activities, the accompanying discussions, evaluations, arguments, and storytelling constitute, in a very real sense, the heart of the event.[2]
Plato's Ion confirms the importance and antiquity of such commentary in Greek traditions of epic performance. Ion, a professional expert on Homer, has a double professional competence: not only can he give dramatic recitations from the poems, but he has also labored to acquire a stock of ennobling observations on their meanings or "thoughts" (pollai kai kalai dianoiai, Ion 530D). Indeed, he says, this has cost him more effort than mastering the poems themselves (530C). This aspect of Ion's practice is traditional and not decadent, for he claims to interpret Homer better than a host of contemporaries and "anyone who ever lived." Yet the Ion also neatly shows that in the fourth century B.C.E. exegesis and commentary were regarded as detachable from a notional text-in-itself: with some comic irony, Socrates politely but repeatedly declines the rhapsode's offers to perform (530D, 536D). All the philosopher wants from the rhapsode is that he reproduce pieces of Homer's text for Socratic analysis, and the dialogue ends with Ion's show of "embellishing" (kosmein ) or "praising" Homer (Ion 536D) indefinitely postponed.
The present study aims to recover more fully some of the interpretative practices and traditions that surrounded Homeric poetry when it was still circulating primarily in oral performances. Specifically, I will focus on a time when it appears that the exegesis of Homer underwent a radical change: histories of literature report that allegorical interpretation in the West can be traced back to Greek readings of Homer in the last quarter of the sixth century B.C.E.[3] A certain Theagenes from Rhegium in southern Italy is recorded as the first to have interpreted Homer in a way that, for example, would see beneath the battles between gods in the Iliad a coded description of the natural strife that prevails among the physical elements composing the world. In this he is supposed to have been defending the traditional gods against contemporary rationalizing critiques. I revisit this episode both because I believe that current accounts of this key moment in the construction of the Western epic tradition should be revised, and more generally to urge that purely rhetorical analyses of textual traditions remain inadequate to the extent that they do not consider criticism and interpretation as what Reynolds calls a "social act."
I shall first review the evidence for Theagenes, considering contemporary influences and possible precursors for his allegoresis (by which I mean allegory as an interpretative mode). In order to understand the scope and purport of his project, I shall reconsider the history of terms for allegory, focusing on a stunning example of allegorical exegesis from the fourth century B.C.E. This text will suggest that in its earliest phase epic allegory was understood on the model of a widespread and significant mode of speech in
archaic Greece, the riddling ainos. Clarifying the relationship between epic and ainos at this time will allow me to redescribe the aims of early epic allegoresis by considering it not abstractly as a problem of theology or signification, but functionally as a way of expanding the uses of epic and of discourses about epic in particular social contexts.
Theagenes and His Times: Sources of Allegoresis
Although the "extra-textual" discourses that situated Greek epic for its earliest audiences were not preserved when oral performance was converted into text, some of what rhapsodes, littérateurs, and schoolmasters said in explaining Homer made its way into early written treatises on Homer's life and poetry and eventually into ancient commentaries. These commentaries, being kept physically apart from the poems, were themselves lost, but a number of specific interpretative observations survived and fought their way back into the texts of the poems in the form of marginal comments and interlinear glosses preserved in medieval manuscripts. Hence it is that the late note of a scholiast is often our only link to ancient traditions of "embellishing" the Homeric poems with commentary.
The prime piece of evidence for Theagenes comes from one such scholiast on the Iliad. The passage to be commented upon is Iliad 20.67ff., in which the Olympians are set free by Zeus to descend to the Trojan Plain and fight each other for the fate of the city. When the poet begins to catalogue how Poseidon lined up against Apollo, the War God against Aphrodite, Hera against Athena, and so on—the scholiast remarks:
In general, [Homer's] account of the gods tends to be worthless and unsuitable, for the myths he tells about the gods are inappropriate. To such charges as this, some reply on the basis of Homer's way of speaking [lexis], holding that everything is said by way of allegory [allegoria] and refers to the nature of the elements, as in the passage where the gods square off against one another. For they say that the dry battles with the wet, the hot with the cold, and the light with the heavy. Moreover, water extinguishes fire while fire evaporates water, so that there is an opposition between all the elements composing the universe, which may suffer destruction in part but remains eternal as a whole. In setting out these battles Homer gives fire the name Apollo, Helius, or Hephaestus, he calls water Poseidon or Scamander, the moon Artemis, the air Hera, and so on. In a similar way he sometimes gives names of the gods to human faculties: intelligence is Athena, folly is Ares, desire Aphrodite, speech Hermes, according to what is characteristic of each. Now this kind of defense is very old and goes back to Theagenes of Rhegium, who first wrote about Homer.[4]
A good deal of caution is required in evaluating such information. This note has been traced to Porphyry, the Neoplatonist philosopher and commentator on Homer of the third century C.E. His account is thus some eight cen-
turies after the time of Theagenes, who is placed by another source in the last quarter of the sixth century B.C.E.[5] Porphyry depends on intermediary sources now unknown,[6] and it is these sources who may be responsible for the specific allegorical equivalencies listed; to Theagenes, Porphyry only ascribes the method of apologetic allegoresis of Homer as a whole. In addition, there are prima facie problems with this piece of history. Greek scholars had a penchant for "discovering" founding figures for any significant cultural practice, and one may doubt on its face any claim that allegoresis had a single founder or a definite starting point. After all, Homer and Hesiod offer allegories in their poems,[7] and Homer's characters even exhibit an aptitude for the allegoresis of divine and heroic names.[8]
If it is scarcely credible that Theagenes could have invented epic allegoresis single-handedly, it becomes difficult to specify what he did that was remarkable, especially if, as Denis Feeney suggests, he did nothing more than etymologize a few names of Homeric gods along the lines of equating "Hera" with "Air."[9] His fame may be due simply to the fact that he managed to leave an example of his interpretative practice in a written text, the one remembered as the first treatise on Homer. [10] Still, the text Theagenes expounded and wrote on was Homer's, and no one else was remembered to have done so earlier. Our sources then may be taken as indicating that in the later sixth century the traditions in which Greek epic were handed down and commented upon changed in the sense that at that time allegorical exegesis became prominent and was incorporated into the repertoires of recognized authorities on epic. The question is, Why?
Histories of criticism have understood Theagenes' allegoresis as a response to late sixth-century rationalist attacks on epic myth by the likes of the philosophers Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and perhaps Pythagoras.[11] Xenophanes in particular provides a suggestive context; this poet, performer, and savant spent a good part of his life in cities very near Theagenes' Rhegium and has left us remarkable poems that propound a new vision of divinity while criticizing the traditional representations of gods to be found in Homer and Hesiod. Declaring that "there is one god greatest among gods and men, / resembling mortals neither in bodily form nor in thought" (B23DK), he issued biting critiques of Greek anthropomorphism, saying that if animals could paint and sculpt, then horses would fashion gods that looked like horses and cows like cows (B15 DK). Devotees of Homer could hardly have enjoyed all this, and they may have felt rebuked when Xenophanes condemned those who sing about the battles of Titans, Centaurs, and Giants, the "fabrications of men of old in which there is nothing of value" (B1.21-23 DK).
Juxtaposed with the activities of this nearby contemporary, Theagenes' practice becomes comprehensible if we view him as a rhapsode or at least an expert on Homer. Evidence for Theagenes as a "Homerist" may be found in one other scholium that attributes to an unspecified "Theagenes" a vari-
ant form of an Iliadic half-line.[12] If this is Theagenes of Rhegium, he seems to have been capable of performing or reproducing epic lines himself, and so we may think of him as something of a rhapsode-cum-explicator who, like Plato's Ion, both performed epic texts or parts of them and offered observations on the poet's "fine thoughts." As such, he would have been strongly moved to reaffirm the poet's authority. On this view, allegory in its earliest phases would have functioned as it often has later, as a defensive measure for sustaining the authority of aging narrative traditions whose literal interpretation is becoming inadequate to new ways of thinking. By the end of the sixth century some recognizably stable form of the Iliad would have been getting on to 200 years old.
Xenophanes and Theagenes seem to make a neat historical fit as prosecution and defense, yet viewing the rise of Homeric allegoresis so abstractly no doubt oversimplifies the situation, for to explain the rise of epic allegoresis as a response to philosophical critiques of the poems says nothing about the basic and most intriguing questions of why allegoresis should have been hit upon as the way to meet criticism of Homer, and why such an outlandish method should have been deemed credible. Even if we can assume that Theagenes' motives were defensive, allegoresis does so by what is surely a very bold hypothesis that the poems are about something quite other than what they declare themselves to be on their face. One can hardly suppose that allegoresis was the only or inevitable option available to the challenged Homerist; the ancients developed, after all, many other, less radical ways of defending Homer against critical attacks, as can be seen from the résumé of such defenses in chapter 25 of Aristotle's Poetics.[13]
Moreover, our scanty evidence can as well be taken as indicating that allegoresis was originally a positive strategy, exegetical rather than defensive, and that it had already been developed among the early Greek philosophers, who "appropriated for their own use some at least of the mythical traditions which they could not help venerating."[14] A precursor for Theagenes has been claimed in Pherecydes around the middle of the sixth century: he is reported to have read Homer allegorically, and his own prose cosmogony includes a few passages that may readily be read as allegorical.[15] Others have pointed to the Pythagoreans flourishing in southern Italy at the time: at least at a later period, Pythagoreans certainly practiced allegorical exegesis of Homer, and with a moralizing slant very similar to the one in Porphyry's note.[16] There is in addition a strong resemblance between some allegorical equivalencies and the use of folk etymology among early Pythagoreans to derive cosmic truths from the sounds of certain words: the Pythagorean belief that the truth of incarnation can be glimpsed in the closeness between the words for "body" (soma ) and "tomb" (sema )[17] seems not far from the notion in Porphyry that "Hera" (Heran ) in the Iliadic theomachy conceals the element "Air" (aera ) [18] But magical etymology was by no means confined to Pythagoreans in archaic
Greece, and on such grounds it has been claimed that Theagenes also had precursors in early Orphic circles.[19] Indeed, as noted above, one can go yet further and find the sources of Theagenes' practice in the epic poets themselves, since Homer often plays upon the names of gods and heroes such as Zeus or Odysseus and, unwittingly or not, provides a paradigm for the popular Hera etiology as Air in a suggestively phrased line from his theomachy: "A deep mist of air Hera / spread before [the Trojans] to check their flight."[20]
In view of the above, it seems prudent to put aside the quest for a single source of allegoresis and to stipulate that Theagenes' approach must have had wider roots and ramifications, not all of which can we hope to trace in full. The significance of the tradition about Theagenes is that it points to a time in which heroic narratives (we should probably not yet speak of "literary" texts) were subjected to a new kind of exegesis not traditional in that form, though one that was perhaps already developed in certain philosophical or religious circles. We can posit that there was in the later sixth century, particularly in southern Italy, an environment in which mystical texts and language itself were being plumbed for hidden depths of meaning; it was here that the Homeric poems, now being regarded from a number of new angles, were first subjected to a kind of exegesis that had thitherto been used with esoteric poetry. Before we can understand the motives that led epic expounders to adopt or adapt such a method, we must clarify what it was exactly that they claimed to be doing. We can do so by turning to consider the vocabulary in which early allegoresis was conducted.
Lexical Evidence: "Allegory" and Ainos
Writing around 100 C.E., Plutarch says that the term allegoria is not very old and that what is called allegoria in his day had formerly been called huponoia.[21] Plutarch is borne out by our evidence. We do not find the noun allegoria securely attested until the first century B.C.E., though it is possible that it and related words go back to the Hellenistic period.[22] As for huponoia, "a thought or intention that lies below the surface," it is attested in a special sense of "under-meaning" in two significant texts of the fourth century B.C.E. describing exegetical practices of the fifth. In the first, Plato uses it to refer to allegoresis of the type attributed to Theagenes: Socrates rejects from his city stories about "the binding of Hera by her son, the casting out of Hephaestus from Olympus when he went to defend his mother from his father [cf. Iliad 1.591-3, 15.23-24], and all the battles among gods Homer has composed [e.g., Iliad 20.67ff.], regardless of whether they are composed with or without allegorical meanings [en huponoiais, aneu hupnoion]" because the young can't tell the difference (Republic 378D). The term is also significantly used in Xenophon's Symposium when Socrates and some sophisticates are discussing the value of Homeric poetry in education. The well-bred Nicera-
tus has been compelled by his father to learn the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart so as to become a gentleman (3.5). But the company agree that being able to recite Homer by heart is no worthy accomplishment in itself; rhapsodes, after all, can do as much, and this company is unanimous in viewing them as the most stupid of men because they "do not know the huponoiai." Niceratus therefore is to be congratulated because he has "paid a good deal of money to Stesimbrotus and Anaximander and many others so as to miss out on nothing of their valuable learning" (3.6).[23]
These texts establish that in the fifth century huponoia was in use in intellectual circles for the distinctive and subtle interpretations of poetry offered by certain Homerists and sophists, though not by rhapsodes. If a rhapsode expounded on the "fine thoughts" of Homer (kalai dianoiai ) an education in poetry could still be called incomplete without an acquaintance with the "under-meanings" (huponoiai ) available from a different class of experts. The etymology of huponoia suggests a rather intellectualist and even text-based conception of poetic meaning: hupo- puts the meaning in a depth and thus implies a surface, and the root -noia is the most important fifth-century word for "thought" as intellection and calculation rather than mere perception or recognition.[24]Huponoia is thus a good name for implicit philosophical or ethical theses that may be derived from a poem in the course of a sophistic discussion. Allegories belong to the class of huponoiai because huponoiai were by definition subtle and unapparent meanings. The term demarcated economic and social distinctions more precisely than rhetorical ones: in pointing out the noble thoughts the poet intended (dianoiai ), rhapsodes could win crowns and prizes from poetic guilds or state festivals; sophists, on the other hand, could sell to select students at considerable prices the unexpected huponoiai known only to a few.
In the fifth century, then, allegorical readings of epic could be offered as an intellectual commodity under the term huponoia. But we can reconstruct a yet earlier phase of this history by considering a piece of evidence that has not so far been adduced in this connection. This is our earliest preserved specimen of extended allegorical interpretation, the Derveni papyrus, discovered in 1962 and still not yet fully published.[25] This papyrus itself is dated archaeologically to the fourth century B.C.E., but its text may be earlier by as much as a century and in any case clearly derives from the ambit of pre-Socratic thought. The text is a commentary on an Orphic cosmogonic poem, a half-rationalizing, half-mystical exegesis that repeatedly resorts to allegoresis. Although many of these passages are only partially preserved, it is nevertheless clear that the proper term for allegorical writing in this author is ainittesthai, "to speak in hints" or "to speak enigmatically," and his word for "allegorically" is ainigmatodes, "in the mode of an ainos or ainigma."[26]
In the clearest passage—a textbook example of defensive allegoresis—our commentator puzzles over an Orphic phrase he misconstrues to mean
"Zeus ate the god's genitals."[27] He is quick to say that "since through the whole poem [Orpheus] is speaking allegorically [ainizetai] about things in the world, it is necessary to consider each word [or verse] individually."[28] This assumption allows him to allegorize "genitals" as the sun, since the sun is the source of generation; Zeus's alleged meal turns out to mean that the governing power of the universe also controls generation. This interpretation uses as its operative verb for "allegorize" ainittesthai, a word that occurs twice more in the same sense. In a more scrappy fragment the target phrase from Orpheus is the anthropomorphic expression "he [i.e., Zeus] took in his hands," and our commentator says the poet "uttered this as an allegory [enizeto ] "[29] Precisely what these hands signified must now be a matter of conjecture,[30] but the author is clearly proposing a hidden, nonliteral meaning, one to be distinguished from the construction put on that phrase by "those who do not understand" mentioned a few lines before.[31] Finally, he uses an adverbial form, ainigmatodes, perhaps to say that certain goddesses are described "allegorically"[32] and, in a very broken piece from the early and possibly introductory portion of the work, speaks of "allegorical" (ainigmatodss ) poetry.[33] Neither huponoia nor any of its cognates is used in the twenty-four columns so far available.
The Derveni papyrus thus shows that, outside the philosophical-rhetorical tradition of the later fifth century, which sought the huponoia of poets, ainittesthai and its cognates supplied the standard set of terms in which to discuss what was eventually called allegoria. Since this is our only direct pre-Socratic evidence for the early practice of allegoresis, we must hold that the operant term for expressing oneself allegorically was ainittesthai before it became huponoiein and then allegorein.[34] A passage from the late archaic poet Theognis places this vocabulary back in the time of Theagenes: Theognis concludes a fairly extensive allegory of the "ship of state" by saying: "Let these things be riddling utterances [einikhtho] hidden by me for the noble. / One can be aware even of future misfortune if one is skilled."[35]
The fact that the technical term for allegory changes is of more than philological interest. Recovering the language in which allegories were discussed before they were called huponoiai or allegoriai allows us to locate early allegoresis in relation to other contemporary forms of interpretative and expressive activity. The root of both ainittesthai and ainigmatodes can be traced to the word ainos, which named an important mode of riddling discourse in the archaic and early classical period. The ainos was a polymorphous but quite distinctive and important mode of speech, and one that interacted in significant ways with nearly all the major forms of Greek literature. It is my contention that the use of ainittesthai in the Derveni author, and presumably in his predecessors going back to the time of Theagenes and Theognis, indicates that early allegoresis involved a shifting of generic boundaries so that epic could be viewed as a specimen of the ainos. Thus, whatever the debts of
early epic allegorists to mystical traditions or to the epics themselves, their procedure announced itself as assimilating epic to this familiar form of ambiguous speech. We are thus obliged to look more closely at the archaic ainos.
Although the ainos assumed too many forms to be thought of as a genre, it is often used of animal fables such as we find in Archilochus[36] or Aesop. The prototypic example may be Hesiod's tale (called "an ainos kings will understand" at Works and Days 202) of a hawk that holds a nightingale (aedon ) in its clutches; this seems to refer in some way to the power the king has over the singer (aoidos ) Other early examples of ainoi refer more generally to any "fable or other story with an implied message in it for the hearer,"[37] such as the story Odysseus tells Eumaeus in the Odyssey: in need of covering for the night, the beggar-Odysseus tells the swineherd a story about a ruse the "real" Odysseus had once used to secure a cloak on a cold night watch. Eumaeus is quick to perceive the point of the story and, commending the ainos, offers his guest a cloak.[38] Whether it takes the form of an animal fable or a pointed story, the ainos should be regarded as a mode of speaking rather than identified with any particular kind or form of narrative.[39] Gregory Nagy defines ainos as an "authoritative speech: an affirmation, a marked speech act made by and for a marked social group,"[40] highlighting the fact that the selective audience may serve to rein in the polysemy of ainos: an ainos is decoded by those the speaker considers "wise" or "good," and so "akin" to himself (the sophoi or philoi commonly addressed in ainetic poetry). This select audience is thought to be capable of this decoding not through linguistic expertise but through an innate gift presumed to mark the truly noble, the agathoi. Thus, though an ainos may be analyzed thematically as an allusive tale or structurally as a coded message, in its Greek context it was defined as a message that had a special meaning for a special audience; it was a socially rather than rhetorically constructed riddle.
Another dimension of the ainos is brought out in Thomas Cole's fascinating Origins of Rhetoric, which suggests that the hinting ainos was an especially appropriate use of language in a context of social inequality. Cole notes that tradition recorded the slave Aesop as the inventor of the ainos, and points to a passage in Aristotle's Rhetoric in which ainos is associated with what Aristotle calls the "slavish" habit of talking around a point when addressing a superior.[41] On this view what is essentially ainetic about the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in Hesiod is that the subordinate singer tells an ainos "the kings will understand"; so too the cloak story of Odysseus qualifies as an ainos because a suppliant castaway must be circumspect in making demands on his host. The marked, oblique speech act known as ainos, then, may take the form of allegory when the situation calls for the most discreet self-presentation on the part of the speaker. Such occasions are reflected in the verse ainoi that were commonly sung within aristocratic coteries such as those addressed by Archilochus, Alcaeus, or Theognis. In such ainoi the encoding
allowed discretion in times of political uncertainty all the while reinforcing the solidarity of close-knit aristocratic groups.[42] But ainoi of course would also have been useful in wider contexts too, as in stories of Stesichorus's using animal fables to dissuade his fellow citizens from giving the strongman Phalaris a bodyguard: in predicting a tyranny one doesn't dare be too offensive to a powerful man.[43]
The significance of all this for epic allegorists depends on an important point, stressed by Nagy, that Greek epic is not ainos: though epic may incorporate ainoi, such as Odysseus's tale of the cloak, and though it may give us a portrait of a master of ainoi in "Odysseus poluainos," it does not refer to itself as ainos, nor does it ever declare it has a hidden meaning for the cognoscenti. Pindar will often characterize his odes to Olympic victors as ainoi, but not Homer.[44] In this case, it seems that for an allegorizing critic to say that the epic poet ainittetai this or that was to assimilate narrative epic to another form of discourse with its own special rules and ethos. In view of our lexical evidence, then, the rise of epic allegoresis may be reinterpreted as the assimilation of the Homeric poems to the ainos. It was not so much that the sixth-century allegorists concocted a bizarre new method of reading epic as that they transferred epic to a special and well-established form of speech act, one in which discreet self-expression requiring expert decoding was the norm. With this closer view of what allegoresis amounted to in the archaic period, we can turn to suggesting why the ainos might have appealed to Homerists as a model for their favored poetry.
The Uses of Hidden Meanings
In assimilating epic to ainos allegorists would have done more than appeal to a readily intelligible model of encoded speech or verse. The ainos defined not simply a special kind of message but also a special relation of speaker to audience and so brought in its a train a series of social implications that made possible a new use for epic poetry in the city. For a professional Homerist like Theagenes, the most important function of ainoi may have been that it was the customary way for poets, councilors, and wise men generally to address their most powerful and lavish patrons in the West. The tyrants and dynasts of Sicily whom Pindar served a generation later are repeatedly praised as "wise," "skilled" (sophos ) or "discerning" (sunetos ) and part of this ideal image of the tyrant involves being skilled in interpreting ainoi.[45] In this respect the situation at the Sicilian courts where Xenophanes performed in the late sixth century or where Pindar sent songs in the fifth had changed very little by the time Plato was trying to advise the unpredictable tyrant Dionysius. Plato's Seventh Letter says that he and his friends thought it best to communicate their doctrines about ruling justly "not by expressing them straight out—which was not safe—but through riddles [ainittomenoi] " (332D).
Like the poet before the king in Hesiod, or the beggar before his host in the Odyssey, the Homerist addresses the sixth-century tyrant or aristocratic coterie as a master of oblique discourse. To adopt this mode of address was thus both to respect one's proper station and also to adopt the ideology of the great ruler that depicted him as at once powerful and perceptive (sunetos ) To sustain a position of authority in this politically tumultuous period required not only force of arms but the ability to read signs aright so that one could, in the classic allegory of the time, steer the "ship of state" through the tempestuous waters of politics.[46] That the discernment needed to rule extended to the decipherment of obscure symbols may be illustrated in Herodotus (4.131-2). He tells us that when the Scythians were being attacked by Darius, they sent him messengers bearing a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. The messengers challenge the Persians—"if they are wise [sophos]— " to "recognize" what the gifts mean. Darius optimistically interprets the objects as symbolizing complete submission, "likening" (eikazon )[47] the mouse and frog to earth and water—traditional tokens of fealty—and the birds and arrows to the Scythian cavalry and arms, all of which he thinks are being handed over to him. But one of his advisers proposes a different reading: unless the Persians can fly like a bird, burrow like a mouse, or dive like a frog, they will not escape Scythian archers. The upshot, designed to warm the heart of any professional wise man, is of course that Darius read this allegory wrong, and he is soon planning a hasty retreat. The distance between Darius faced with such symbols and a Greek potentate who may hear about the air, water, and fire underlying the text of Homer may be not so great as appears at first glance. The Greek king or prince striving to catch the political import of every shifting wind is well advised to cultivate courtiers—his xenoi or philoi as everyone would politely put it—of equal discernment.
The first epic allegorists of the West, then, found their place in this culture of competitive interpretative expertise. A model for their role was afforded by the tyrant's circle of advisers-companions or, more distantly, by the Eastern king's viziers. Yet the allegorists seem not to have interpreted epic in terms of current events. Different book-bearing sophoi exploited these veins, such as the oracle-monger Onomacritus, whose readings of ancient prophetic texts he edited (and interpolated) led him in and out and back in favor with the ruling Peisistratids at Athens (cf. Herodotus 7.6). If we can judge from the kinds of allegory Plato rejects, with Theagenes or soon after, allegorists rather focused on epic scenes of theomachy and struggle between gods (as they long continued to).[48]
That allegorists should have been drawn to passages such as theomachies may be explained along standard lines as stemming from a desire to assuage outraged piety; but it is also worth noting that theomachy could serve as a mythic paradigm for destructive infighting among the nobility, as in Xenophanes, who rejects not only mythic accounts of fighting Titans, Centaurs,
and Giants but also songs of civil strife, stasis (B1.23DK).[49] Hence to discourse about theomachy may be to speak about the management of strife, the cosmic principle and social force that Hesiod's Works and Days had taught could be both beneficial and harmful. Allegorized along these lines, Homer presents a world in which both hierarchy (Zeus commanding the Olympians, the Olympians far greater than mortals) and conflict are naturalized. The tyrant who reads Homer this way may find an image of his own power, identifying himself with Zeus who sits atop a pyramid of battling that ranges from his own divine lords down to pathetic mortals. Hence if allegorists proferred timeless verities of cosmology and general ethics, their readings in context were yet themselves ainoi pointing to, without naming, the pervasiveness of social tension and the need for a stable hierarchy among aristocrats.
Allegoresis had another function apart from the particular coded message conveyed. In making Homer ainetic allegorizing critics gave a new and special use to the poetry. The very strategy of repositioning these stories as coded messages allowed allegorists to constitute a select audience who could distinguish themselves by their subtle understanding. This was all the more valuable in the sixth century, when rhapsodes were crossing the entire length of the Aegean giving public performances of Homeric epic, and some states were incorporating such performances into their city festivals, such as the Panathenaia at Athens. References to Homer, which begin to crop up at this time, take special note of the breadth of his appeal:[50] when Simonides says that "Homer and Stesichorus sang to the people," he implies a wide and perhaps undiscriminating diffusion of the poetry by using for "people" an epic term (laos ) for the army or citizen body as a whole as distinct from its generals.[51] Homer's critics concede something to the widespread respect in which he is held, as when Xenophanes says that "all men have learned from Homer" (B10 DK) or when Heraclitus calls Homer "wiser than all other Greeks" before going on to deflate that reputation (B56 DK). Heraclitus's rejection of the poets' doctrines is mingled with contempt for the witless de mos who use them as teachers (B104 DK), and he would ban poets from public contests (B42 DK).[52]
In the context of many archaic cities, then, allegorical readings of epic enabled certain experts to proffer and certain audiences to obtain an elite purchase on a kind of poetry that was increasingly becoming the possession of all Greece. Allegoresis of epic did for audiences with pretensions to cultural leadership in the city what the récherché interpretations of Orphic poetry or Pythagorean sayings did for those desiring to form exclusive communities at the city's margins: these groups too cherished and collected "texts" in which they found subtle meanings intended for the elect. Such were Pythagorean watchwords or symbola and the Orphic poems, one of which begins: "I will sing for the discerning."[53] Whether at court or in a conventicle, allegoresis confers a nimbus on a body of poetry that is to be penetrated
only by the wise or initiated. Applied to Homer, it forms inside the larger community within hail of a passing rhapsode's voice a smaller group of those who rightly understand.[54]
This use of allegoresis to create distinctive audiences became more extensive in the fifth century, when, as is indicated in the passage from Xenophon, some Homerists professed to offer invaluable huponoiai that were not available from the scorned rhapsodes. Then, as in the sixth century, traveling experts in traditional song could well have an interest in presenting themselves as possessing a hidden knowledge of poetry, one that was not so public as the declamation of a rhapsode, that was not controlled by guilds on Chios or Samos or broadcast by the Athenian state. In this vein we may understand the sophists' portraying Homer as one who "covered up" and "veiled" his wisdom so that only they are able to disclose it, even if they did not allegorize the texts at great length.[55] Suspicions about the method are voiced by Plato, as we saw, who found allegories dangerously ambiguous and regarded as trivial the games played by "those who are so clever about Homer" (Cratylus 407c). After him the way was clear for Aristotle to treat poetry as a problem of form and structure rather than one of theology or hermeneutics, and the tradition of formalist and rhetorical analysis of literature flourished at Alexandria, where "interpreting Homer from Homer" meant reading him in his own terms and not those of another system. Of course there were always competing views and backsliding, as in the allegoresis favored by Crates of Mallos and to some extent among the Stoics.[56] Epic's affinity with allegory both as an expressive and as an interpretative mode endured through the eighteenth century and formed a basic frame for conceiving the genre for such poets as Vergil, Spenser, Tasso, and Milton.[57] Since then, allegory has gone in and out of favor but has never been absent from the range of techniques deployed in Western literary, and especially epic, interpretation.
If we consider Theagenes' practice in the history of epic performance in its full sense, including the performance of commentary, he appears to stand not for the origin of allegoresis but for a change in the traditions of epic interpretation: however old allegoresis may be as an interpretative strategy, it came to cultural prominence only when it intersected with the wider Greek history of epic reception. Though epic had long called for and been accompanied by many kinds of exegesis, when allegoresis became available to the Homerist's arsenal—a full generation before the early sophists and nearly two centuries before Aristotle's Poetics —expertise in poetry could not only boast a command of the texts and of a tradition of lore about them and their author but also distinguish itself by offering wholly unexpected accounts of what these old and familiar poems really said. It seems that it was in only in the later sixth century that certain Greek readers and their audiences found that epic could begin to say something of value only when it began to say something other.
Throughout this long history, that protean thing called allegory always has involved social practices and institutions that define literature and criticism as well. I reaffirm this point in concluding, since to discuss allegory historically is problematic from certain points of view today, especially theories that would identify allegory with the workings of language itself. If one defines allegoria etymologically as "saying one thing and meaning something other,"[58] allegory may appear not simply as one mode of speech among others but as the figure of speech that most directly exemplifies the fundamental arbitrariness of language, its lack of any firm bond between signifier and signified. Allegory may then be said to attend any and every type of speech: all texts may be called allegorical,[59] and all interpretations insofar as they state the meaning of a text in other terms than those of the text.[60] These lines of analysis suggest that to give an account of allegory in historical and social terms is only to offer yet another allegory of allegory while evading its ubiquitous and uncontrollable character. After all, a recovery of true but concealed early meanings has been one of the favorite promises of allegoresis.
One might argue in turn that conceiving allegory solely as a trope rather than as the act of an interpreter is itself an interpretative strategy, which can be situated historically within the late and postromantic revival of allegory as a symbolic mode.[61] But the issue is whether it is adequate to define allegory solely as an affair of diction or reference. In my view, reducing allegory to operations on a linguistic plane cannot account for the extremely varied uses allegoresis has had, uses ranging from defensive recuperation of threatened traditions to their radical reevaluation. To attempt to historicize allegory need not be to quest after its chimerical origins but may allow us to see it as a practice whose semantic dislocations always take place within a culturally and historically specific context. I side then with ethnographers like Reynolds:
In seeking reactions to and interpretations of the epic, I found again and again that I was listening to evaluations not of an individual performance or event, but of larger social patterns and of the epic as a symbolic catalyst. To a great extent, evaluations of the epic were only extensions of the speaker's position vis-à-vis the social forces he or she saw the epic as representing.[62]
Viewed in this way, the ancient allegorist Theagenes suggests that we may understand epic allegoresis not only as a philosophical, theological, or hermeneutic position, but as a social performance within the cultural construction of "literature" in its time.
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3—
The Arabic Epic Poet as Outcast, Trickster, and Con Man
Susan Slyomovics
The heroic deeds of the Bani Hilal tribe—a tribe of Bedouin Arabs who migrated from the Arabian peninsula into North Africa during the tenth and eleventh centuries—are preserved throughout the Arabic-speaking world in a diverse cycle of narratives (both prose and poetry), including the oral epic of Sirat Bani Hilal. The epic is perpetuated in Upper Egypt by a class of poets who perform in public and are simultaneously regarded by the community as social and ethnic outcasts, as well as respected verbal artists and transmitters of cuture. Susan Slyomovics maintains that Hilali oral epic poets excel in rhetorical devices during performance, most typically puns or wordplays. She suggests that puns, the trope par excellence of Egyptian epic, serve as a poetic challenge to audiences to negotiate the ambiguities inherent in the outcast-poet of performance, the outcast-poet-hero of the narrative, and the discourse of both.
Across the folklore of virtually all cultures, the figure of the trickster stands out as a convergence of deception, disguise, and verbal ambiguity.[1] The trickster acts and speaks in a paradoxical fashion, one that Roger Abrahams characterizes as "combin [ing] the attributes of many other types that we tend to distinguish clearly. At various times, he is clown, fool, jokester, initiate, culture hero, even ogre."[2] Claude Lévi-Strauss has described the trickster as the expression of both sides of any binary opposition—life against death, chaos versus order, the sacred and the profane.[3] Such clownlike personalities are often culturally sanctioned characters, allowed, either in narrative or in performance, to reverse the rules of both language and society.
This essay explores several levels of the use of the trickster figure in the Arab epic Sirat Bani Hilal, a cycle of heroic tales recited throughout the Arabic-speaking world in the specific version I collected in Upper Egypt in 1983. What are the interconnections between the role of the Upper Egyptian outcast-poet in his society and the Arab trickster-epic hero in the epic narrative, and how do these connections mediate the relationship between the storyteller and his story in an enacted performance? I claim that at the heart of this configuration is an outcast-poet, on the one hand, a trickster-culture hero, on the other, with a third equally ambiguous and polyvalent feature
of Upper Egyptian performance, namely, the proliferation of puns embedded and improvised in live performance. I begin with a brief description of the life of a contemporary performer and reciter, the Upper Egyptian epic poet 'Awadallah 'Abd al-Jalil 'Ali, in order to relate the ambiguous, outcast position of this epic poet to the rich, multivocal role of the trickster-epic hero, Abu Zayd the Hilali.
The Epic Poet, 'Awadallah 'Abd Al-Jalil 'Ali
'Awadallah 'Abd al-Jalil 'Ali is an epic poet from the province of Aswan in Upper Egypt. He sings in the surrounding southern Egyptian marketplaces, in cafés, during public ceremonies, and at people's homes to celebrate births, weddings, circumcisions, a return from the hajj to Mecca, and Ramadan breakfasts. I have described elsewhere the complex status of the epic poet in southern Egypt—his role as an outcast yet at the same time the artistic bearer of his group's cultural history. In Upper Egypt, epic poets own no land, are ethnically designated as gypsies (everywhere an outcast group), and do not possess 'asil, the Upper Egyptian term for honorable character aligned with good, "clean" lineage. All these characteristics disqualify them from respectable social standing. But both audiences and poet see the poet at the moment of performance as the bearer of tradition and not as an individual, let alone an individual creative artist.[4] In performance, 'Awadallah's epic story is respected, though 'Awadallah the epic poet is not.
The Epic Hero, Abu Zayd—Outcast, Trickster, and Epic Poet
Abu Zayd the Hilali is the hero of the Arab folk epic Sirat Bani Hilal, the epic sung by 'Awadallah and the many poets of Egypt and the Arabic-speaking world. The epic hero Abu Zayd is in part a trickster figure, a characterization that is closely linked to the black skin he owes to a single word that almost accidentally governed his origin. In "the birth of the hero" sequence that is the first part of the traditional tripartitite division of the epic, the hero's mother, Khadra Sharifa, has been barren for eleven years.[5] In hopes of conceiving a son, she goes down to a magic spring in the Arabian peninsula. There she wishes upon a black bird, fierce and combative. She says:
Give me a boy like this bird,
black like this bird.
I swear to make him possess Tunis and Wadi Hama!
I swear to make him possess Tunis by the blade of the sword![6]
Her wish is granted, but divine interpretation of it is absolutely literal: her son is born with a black skin. When the Hilali Bedouin Arabs discover her
son's skin color, mother and son are banished to the desert. Abu Zayd is therefore of noble birth, but also black-skinned, in Arab epic a sure sign of servile status; he is a warrior by definition, but also by definition an outsider or outcast. The childhood and youth of this exiled hero are marked by the most approved occurrences and exploits.[7] He combats authority figures: he begins by killing his Koranic teacher, then he annihilates the Arabs responsible for humiliating his mother, and almost slays his own father. Eventually he manages to win reinstatement with the tribe, marry, father children, and acquire a great reputation as a warrior.
It is Abu Zayd's destiny to unite the warring Bedouin tribes for the battle for Tunis and the conquest of the Maghrib, the centerpiece of the epic narrative.[8] However, before embarking on the grand westward migration, as if to rehearse for the exploits ahead, the hero Abu Zayd must defend his tribe and his religion in the Arabian peninsula against two local enemies: first, a Jewish leader named Khatfa, and second, the evil Arab and Muslim king Handal, who has raided the holy city of Mecca, captured the Hilali women, and wounded the hero's father. It is the latter tale that will be examined more closely in this essay.[9]
The Pun as Outcast, The Outcast as Pun
According to Jonathan Culler, who called his introductory essay on puns "The Call of the Phoneme," puns are a reality of the language "where boundaries—between sounds, between sound and letter, between meanings—count for less than one might imagine and where supposedly discrete meanings threaten to sink into fluid subterranean signifieds too undefinable to call concepts."[10] Puns show how language, literature, and even social relations work by forging unexpected connections. Beyond serving as obvious linguistic wordplay and artistic ornamentation, the pun can expand into the narrative to generate plot, episodes, and even protagonists. Because of the ready availability of homophones in Arabic in particular and the ambiguous nature of language in general, frequent punning is a hallmark of much Upper Egyptian performance of epic poetry,[11] and the tale of king Handal versus the Hilali Bedouins, as it is told before Egyptian audiences, is a narrative in which deceit, trickery, and disguise propel the plot, and puns seem not only to govern the way it is articulated by the poet but also to generate the events and the substance of the plot itself.
We begin with the fact of a black hero whose black skin causes him to float between acceptability and rejection, much like the pun. He is accused of bastard origins, but puns are too. As will be seen, the black hero plays with identity the way puns play with language. This essay describes what unites ( ) the black epic hero, (2) the outcast Upper Egyptian epic poet who sings about the black outcast-epic hero, and (3) the language of the Arab epic song. I
claim that because the black outcast-epic hero disguises himself in the narrative as an epic poet, who in Egyptian society is coded as a social outcast, he therefore uses the language of the outcast, the double-talk and double meaning of puns, all of which points to the potential deceptiveness of language itself.
The Two-Faced Hero, The Double-Tongued Poet
The Arab epic hero Abu Zayd is two-faced, the Egyptian epic poet 'Awadallah is double-tongued. This points to a countertradition, an antirhetoric in the literary history of rhetoric. Indeed, Roland Barthes speaks of deliberate transgression, calling the use of puns "'a black rhetoric [ une rhetorique noire ] of games, parodies, erotic or obscene allusions . . . , where two taboos are circumvented, language and sex."[12] In other words, wordplay suits texts and characters that are not straightforward. Certainly, the Arab epic Sirat Bani Hilal frequently pronounces, in oral formulaic fashion, lines that speak to the hero's triumphs over the world. Some examples to describe the hero and his actions are taken from texts cited below: "Abu Zayd worked his trickery, / he mixed lies, he brought falsity"; "The hero Abu Zayd, who but him deceives the defenseless?" (ilbatal abu zed min giru yikid il'uzal ) and "I know him, Abu Zayd, the man of lies" (bta 'ilahyal ) —frequent epithets for the hero scattered throughout the epic.
In the episode of the evil Arab king Handal against the Hilali Bedouin, the range of punning and deceit has much to say about the role of epic poets in society and epic heroes in narrative. One device within the tale, for example, not only comments on the social status of the epic poet at the king's court but also exemplifies multiply embedded frameworks of disguise. The Handal tale turns on the witty syncopation of the hero Abu Zayd's disguising himself first as an epic poet and then as an old man who is also black. He assumes the poet's disguise in order to wander freely in the enemy court to entertain, to seek information, and to free his kidnapped womenfolk by slaying the enemy ruler Handal. (An important advantage of this disguise is that epic poets in Upper Egypt are permitted to associate freely with women strangers, another instance of the characteristics of the trickster converging to invert and subvert social beliefs.)[13] Thus 'Awadallah, the Upper Egyptian epic poet sings about a hero disguising himself as an epic poet (who presumably sings about an epic poet who sings about an epic poet and so on). The second disguise is that of a black slave who is the jailer of the black epic poet.
It is also noteworthy that the Handal story itself is introduced by an episode in which a mother and son meet in disguise and attempt to deceive each other. The hero Abu Zayd, while traveling through mountain and desert disguised as an epic poet with his musical instrument, the rababa,
slung over his shoulder, encounters his mother Khadra Sharifa. As if to prove that ambiguity and disguise are hereditarily acquired through the maternal line, Abu Zayd's mother has also put on a disguise; she too is dressed in the clothes of a despised black slave, the easier to flee Mecca with her wounded husband, the hero's father. Mother and son greet each other disguised as blacks and as slaves, assuming the precise trangressive characteristics that caused their original traumatic expulsion from the Bedouin Arab confederation. Abu Zayd, who is truly black-skinned, is able to pierce his mother's fake blackface, whereas the mother cannot recognize her own son disguised as an epic poet, even though one of the son's many formulaic descriptions declares that the hero is yoked, paratactically and genetically, both to his trickster status and to his mother: "(Abu Zayd), son of Sharifa, the trickster" (ibn sharifa bta' ilahyal ) where the description "trickster" can apply, by zeugma, to either or both of them. The mother has merely changed superficial attire, the first and basic level of disguise and trickery; but the son can both alter and divine appearances. He is even trickier than the mother: he deceives her for no apparent reason by announcing his own death to her in language full of ambiguities, as though to underline that the pun is the realm of the oblique, the sly, and the teasing. Then he laughs as she weeps and laments (56-65):
56: min ahd abu zed mitwaffa
57: tammit-lu sab'a -ttiyam
58: sufi -ddunya -lkaddaba
59: la damit li-basa wala sultan
60: bakit xadra bi madma' il'en
61: ana fann il'arayib HOZIN(A)
62: bakit xadra bi madma' il'en
63: ya ma fan il'arayib HOZI'ANA
64: ow'ani -zzaman w -ilben
65: 'ala kabdi 'annawah HAZINA[14]
56: "From the day Abu Zayd died,
57: seven days have passed.
58: See the world of deceit;
59: it does not last for a pasha or sultan."
60: Khadra cried tears from her eyes.
61: I, the art of Arabs, my possession / sorrowfully.
62: Khadra cried tears from her eyes.
63: Oh, how the art of Arabs is my possession / sorrowfully.
64: Fate and separation torment me.
65: Over my beloved [literally "my liver"] I mourn sorrowfully / my possession.
The word for "sorrowfully" (hazana ) can split into two words (hozi ana; "my possession" is hozana ) that are puns, cross-coupling the notion of art as full of sorrow even as the mother's beloved son is her possession and his death
is to be mourned in sadness. The multiple puns in this line also render the speaker indeterminate, allowing for ambiguity in line 61 about the art of the Arabs: do these sentiments belong to the epic poet 'Awadallah or to the epic hero Abu Zayd disguised as an epic poet, or are they the words of the mother? This pun recognizes that any of the three may be the speaker, thereby illustrating the instability not only of sounds to which different meanings can be assigned but also of meanings to which different nuances can attach in the mouths of different speakers.
Puns are about the deliberate cultivation of overlap, mess, and struggle; they emerge from language like the hero's laughter in response to his mother's laments. Laughter, a nonverbal physical reaction to one's own or another's puns and disguises, causes Abu Zayd to bare his front teeth to reveal his one unconcealable descriptor, the famous gap-teeth that forever mark the identity of the hero Abu Zayd in folk memory. His true identity is thereby revealed to his mother. While a dominant motif of this black Arab hero-trickster is his superiority of verbal wit and intellectual cunning, it is also the case that laughter, like disguise, resides in the body in an ephemeral way. Laughter acoustically emerges from the gap-toothed grin. Abu Zayd responds to this mother's laments at his supposed demise not with duplicitous punning words that exit from the hero (perhaps the poet's mouth); instead there is laughter, a nonverbal physical reaction to puns and disguises. Laughter resolves its owner's identity. Indeed, in this epic all products of the mouth are viable: the hero's laughter is revelatory and happily reunites the family. The hero's spittle, the magical liquid of his mouth, cures his father's wound. Finally, the hero's words, a vow to his father to return after twenty nights with the ninety captured Hilali maidens, set the action of the tale in motion.
The Plot of King Handal
The tale of Abu Zayd against the Arab king Handal properly begins when Abu Zayd arrives in Handal's orchards. There, he finds the Hilali maidens dressed in sackcloth and bearing the heavy waterskins (girba ) usually carried by men. The Hilali maidens are forced to attend the diwans, the public assemblies or gatherings of Arab men where females on public display are fair game for insults by passing Arabs. Abu Zayd, in his disguise as an epic poet, addresses in turn each of his beautiful maidens. In this way we, the audience, are introduced to the famous heroines of the epic, Jaz the woman warrior and herself a trickster; Rayya, Abu Zayd's daughter; Diyya, his niece; Na'sa, his wife, and so on. To each he insultingly addresses the epithet Jammasiyya. The Jammasa are an outcast tribe of Upper Egypt; to be associated with them is an insult. Yet they are in fact the modern lineal descendants of the same Bani Hilal who are the heroes of the Arab epic. In
the rest of the Arabic-speaking world, descent from the Hilali tribes is a marker of noble Arabian Bedouin heritage,[15] but in Upper Egyptian society, these subjects of heroic song are as ostracized and outcast as the poets who sing about them. In southern Egypt not just epic poets and epic heroes, but even membership in the Hilali tribe, there known as the outcast Jammasiyya tribe, reinforce the conflation and attribution of outcast status to tale, teller, and even topic.
Rayya, Abu Zayd's daughter, objects strongly to this abusive language by her father, though, in fact, he has named her what she is, a Hilali, but he has used Upper Egyptian pejorative terms. Rayya's reply yokes the identity of poet and warrior, a link altogether absent in Upper Egyptian ascriptions of social status to their epic poets. In lines 240-243 Rayya says to the epic poet who, unknown to her, is her father, the hero Abu Zayd:
My father is a poet like you—
he conceals himself, he pretends he's an artist,
he comes concealed, he pretends he's a poet,
—a bold valiant man, a horseman.
She urges Abu Zayd in his role as epic poet to make poems and give news about their predicament wherever he travels. Rayya's views of her father Abu Zayd resembles a dual-purpose metaphor of mobility: he is both epic poet and its social opposite, a horseman and a warrior whose contrasting epithets provide simultaneous, though competing, references in the same unit.
Abu Zayd then presents himself at Handal's court, where he is rudely ignored. Handal, who has heard of Abu Zayd, his black skin and his penchant for disguises, becomes the recipient or audience to Abu Zayd's multilayered characterizations. Handal instinctively recognizes the equation black outcast equals epic poet equals brazen liar as in lines 269-274:
He [Handal] feared he was the hero Abu Zayd,
lest he pretend to be an artist,
lest he with his rababa
open the doors of destruction
and take the Zoghba daughters:
"I know him, the man of lies [bta' bahtan]."
Abu Zayd begins by rebuking Handal for his ignoble treatment of visiting epic poets, and Handal apologizes. He asks Abu Zayd to play music while the Hilali maidens dance for his men. Abu Zayd fears such public display would insult his women. To delay, he insists that Handal arrange for the women to be bathed, perfumed, and beautifully attired before being presented to the Arab men. The Egyptian epic poet 'Awadallah describes in detail their enticing dress, which renders men delirious. Rayya, the hero's daughter, leads the other women. She describes their predicament in a pun: it is "bitter," the ex-
tended meaning of handal (derived from its literal meaning, "bitter colocynth"), and bitter due to a human cause, a king called Handal. This appears to be the simplest way to pun: an identity of sound that proposes complementary denotations according to a bifurcated but related context of a name and its meaning. Handal means "bitter," and the tyrant who bears this name exemplifies bitterness, thanks to a justifiable etymological basis. The relationship of a person to his or her proper name is taken up in order to draw out the important pun on the meaning or import of a personal name that also specifies the content, as in the following sequence where the words in parentheses propose the secondary meaning (11: 12-22):[16]
The young maidens, the daughters of Hilal,
women of kohl-darkened eyes,
they went out of the baths,
they have roses on their cheeks, glowing.
Rayya says: "O women,
my heart from sorrow is BITTER [HANDAL];
when he comes he brings hypocrisy,
he says to the maidens, that HANDAL [BITTER],
he says: 'Dance, O maidens.'
Beware of agreeing to any word:
the sword before the dance."
xaragu -ssabaya banat hilal
'ummat al'uyun ilkahayil
xaraju min ilhammam
lihum ward 'alxadd I sal
rayya-tgul ya niswan
galbi min ilhamm HANDAL
lamma yaji yijib dihan
yigul -ssibaya da HANDAL
yigul argisu ya sabaya
i'wa -tmasu-lu kilma
issef awla min irragasan
Rayya tells Handal his very name will not only forever stand for "bitterness" but will also be the linguistic sign for ignominy among the Arabs when word circulates via the epic poet that Handal dishonors Arab women by forcing them to dance and display themselves publicly. Handal strikes Rayya, and she falls to the ground. Her father, Abu Zayd, still disguised as the epic poet, is forced to witness violence against his beloved daughter; only then does he reveal himself to her in the secret language, the Najdi Arabic dialect they share. Until now, the Arab maidens' refusal to expose themselves and their bodies to strange men has been matched by Abu Zayd's insistence on concealment even from his closest family members. Only when the inviolate female seclusion is threatened by dishonoring public display does
Abu Zayd seek refuge in the play of secret language, where he can safely reveal himself. The suggestion is of secret subculture, set apart linguistically, perhaps on a higher level, and based on those few initiates who decode meanings. The trickster not only shifts among various human identities, but he is also the master of linguistic register ( 11: 84-95):
Abu Zayd the bold one saw her,
And his sound reason was lost.
Abu Zayd said: "This is folly.
I put difficulties behind, and I find them ahead."
His reason says unsheathe your sword.
His reason says patience is the model.
He spoke gibberish to the Hilali women
in the Najdi tongue, a foreign tongue;
he said: "Dance, O Rayya,
You whose lot is darkness.
Come, dance a little.
I am myself the Hilali, your father."
He said: "Dance, O Rayya,
Woman of earrings and coquettish.
I am myself the chief of war,
My father Rizg, my grandfather Nayil."
He said: "Dance, O Rayya.
I am myself your father, Salama."
(11: 84-95)
wi'i -lha -lmigdim abu zed
aglu -ssalim indar
abu zed gal di balawi
afutha wara w-algaha giddaam
aglu yigul ashab sfak
aglu yigul issabr istimtal
ratan banat ilhilaliyya
bi -Isa najd garib ya lisan
yigul argusi ya rayya
ya -lli layali nabuki
ta'ala 'argusi swayye
bi zat ilhilali abuki
gal liha argusi ya rayya
ya -mm ilhalag wa -ddalayil
bizati rayis ilgomaya
abuya rizg wijadd I nayil
In the end, Abu Zayd is unmasked by Handal's daughter, 'Ajaja, who is a sand-diviner. She is able to penetrate his disguise as an epic poet and singer because her power resides not in the identity transformations of a trickster but in her ability to read the truth about the present and the future in the
sands. Abu Zayd tries to forestall 'Ajaja's exposure of this identity by claiming that according to Arab custom women have no right to be present, let alone speak in Arab male assemblies; to deflect attention from her accurate reading of his form, he reproaches her with unveiling her own. This leads the evil king Handal, 'Ajaja's father, to accuse his own daughter of loving the epic poet, a dishonorable passion that leads to her dishonorable presence among men. Nonetheless, she speaks, connecting all Abu Zayd's disparate disguises and social meanings. Her words send him to prison.
In prison, Abu Zayd continues to proclaim he is merely an innocent wandering epic singer. Handal proposes to Johar, his black jailer, that he, Johar, travel to the Hilali homeland in Najd to verify whether the real Abu Zayd is there: a man, unlike a pun, cannot be present in two places, distant Arabia and Handal's jail, at one time. Johar's reward is to be Jaz, one of the Hilali heroines. Marriage to her would ennoble a black slave's children: Johar enunciates a rule of class and color ('abid ma 'awwiz 'abid ) "a slave does not want a slave," 13: 248). After a journey of seven nights, Johar arrives in the Hilali territory, enters their diwan, and pretends to be the sultan of Sudan. Jews have attacked his city, he relates, and he seeks help from the hero Abu Zayd to defend his people.[17] In other words, the black slave pretends to be a prince in order to investigate the identity of the black prince in his custody, who is pretending to be an epic poet and will soon—as will be seen shortly—pretend to be a slave. The two are even described in identical oral formulas, for example (xalat izzur wi jab ilbuhtan, " Johar mingled lies and brought untruths/slander," 13: 268).
The Hilalis truthfully inform him that Abu Zayd is at Handal's court on another mission—namely, to rescue the Hilali maidens. Johar returns successfully from his mission to inform Handal that the black epic singer locked in his prison is in truth the hero Abu Zayd. Handal resolves to kill Abu Zayd and again promises his slave Johar marriage to a Hilali maiden of his choice once Abu Zayd is dead.
At this point in the complicated crossing of class and color, cross-dressing, duplicity, and false identities, there is one character in the tale who voices a critique of puns, obliqueness, and also presentation. The imprisoned Abu Zayd had called for help from al-Khidr, his magic protector since he was born.[18] A figure with magical powers, al-Khidr insists Abu Zayd renounce disguise—in other words put an end to puns, ontological confusions, and attendant catastrophes. It is as if he insists: let there be uncomplicated likenesses, everyone be who they are, names fit their owners, and human behavior based on action not wordplay. He delivers his plea clearly, repetitively, and without any punning. Moreover, he insists, Abu Zayd must replace himself in prison with the character in the narrative (the black slave Johar) whose disguise Abu Zayd has donned, so that all actors are in their appropriate place for the ensuing events ( 11: 332-341):
al-Khidr said to him: "I bid you, O Prince Abu Zayd,
Come reveal yourself to people,
O Abu Zayd, come to me, revealed,
And I will make you victorious in every place."
He said to him: "The slave who brings you a tray,
shackle him in chains.
If you shackle him in your place,
your life continues till now.
If you don't shackle him in your place,
go dwell in a grave of sands."
Nonetheless, al-Khidr performs his magic on Handal's daughter, 'Ajaja: she becomes inexplicably stricken with concern for Abu Zayd's welfare. She orders the same black slave, Johar, to bring Abu Zayd a tray of food. Johar demands nights of passion in her bed as his price, and she agrees. Then Johar delivers food to the imprisoned Abu Zayd. By playing upon a shared black identity, Abu Zayd asks Johar to release one hand so he can eat from the tray. With only a single arm, Abu Zayd pounds Johar to the ground, shackles him, and escapes.
As this point in the performance, the Upper Egyptian epic poet 'Awadallah comments in an understated aside that again Abu Zayd "begins his trick anew" (jaddad ahyal, 12: 8), "mixing lies with untruths." Abu Zayd now disguises himself as Johar, Handal's black slave, and returns with the tray of food to Handal. Handal asks "Johar" (remember this is Abu Zayd in disguise) to bring Abu Zayd before him. In a rhetorical mode, it could be said that Abu Zayd is faced with the crisis of the pun forced to be put into explicit words, to disambiguate the uncontrollable in language.
Abu Zayd, alias Johar, calls for King Handal's ninety horsemen to enter the prison. Then, Abu Zayd, still as Johar, stations himself outside the prison entrance, sending the ninety horsemen into the dungeon in search of himself. When they emerge again, they encounter not Abu Zayd disguised as Johar but Abu Zayd the Hilali warrior, who proceeds to slaughter all ninety of them. Abu Zayd then returns to Handal, reverting to his disguise as Johar, to announce that Abu Zayd has escaped from prison. Handal goes to the prison and finds the real Johar, but at this point he no longer knows if the black man before him is Johar or Abu Zayd disguised as Johar. In the manner of tyrants, Handal kills the black man who is really Johar, reasoning thus: if the black man in his presence is indeed his slave Johar, then he, Johar, failed in his mission and deserves to die, and if it is Abu Zayd the enemy, he must be killed instantly.
There is a dead black body. The ninety fair Hilali maidens approach it, they see no identifying gap-tooth, and they rejoice in the knowledge that Abu Zayd still lives. In the meantime, Abu Zayd grabs a horse and takes refuge
in Handal's garden, where the Hilali maidens find him. Despite their urgings to escape, Abu Zayd stays to fight Handal. Abu Zayd sends two letters: one to Handal, announcing Abu Zayd's imminent arrival, and a second to the Hilali tribe encampment in Arabia. In his second letter to his Hilali kinsmen, Abu Zayd signs his missive with yet another identity, that of his enemy Handal. Again he repeats an earlier trick from other episodes in the epic: he writes to his fellow tribesmen in Handal's name that Abu Zayd has died, and they now owe tribute and wealth. His point is twofold: to test again his worth among his tribesmen and to ensure their presence in the final battle. Though his tribesmen weep and lament at Abu Zayd's death, the Hilali warriors quarrel over the need to rescue the maidens still imprisoned at Handal's court. They finally arrive thirty days later, engage the real Handal in battle, and are defeated. Only when the hero's own mother, Khadra Sharifa, prepares to join battle because she believes yet again that her son is dead, does Abu Zayd comes forward to stop her.
Finally, only in the last section of the Handal tale, do Abu Zayd and Handal, hero and villain, engage in the bloody, descriptively detailed, set battle piece on horseback so beloved of the epic genre. Handal is killed, and the tale concludes when 'Ajaja, Handal's daughter, a sand-diviner who saw through Abu Zayd's disguise, is, at her own request, brought under Hilali authority and protection.
Conclusion
Disguise, metamorphosis, multiple meanings, and the variety of effects achieved by the use of linguistic puns serve, I claim, to reestablish a serious hierarchy. Abu Zayd can play with becoming a black slave, but the corresponding reversal cannot be so readily effected; Johar, the genuine black slave, can never become a hero. So too puns have limits: they can uncover truths, and they can serve as cover-ups, but you cannot invent puns that are not already potential in the language. For this reason, Abu Zayd can disguise himself as an epic poet. He can add meaning, gain identities (even with a temporary loss of status in the narrative), and he can celebrate ambiguities. He can trick or mix with evil yet lose no honor. Punning can extend to a whole narrative and even misread an entire situation. Epic poets, whether they are Abu Zayd in the epic narrative or 'Awadallah in his southern Egyptian milieu, possess a high conception of poetic vocation. Though epic poets prefer multiple visions and meanings in the universe, nonetheless the everyday circumstances of social life in Upper Egypt ensure that, like Johar the black slave and unlike the black hero Abu Zayd, the epic poet 'Awadallah 'Abd al-Jalil 'Ali of Upper Egypt can never be seen as an epic hero—certainly never in his own society, but then not even in performance.
Works Cited
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Some Early Definitions of the Tawriya. The Hague: Mouton.
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Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticism. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
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erature: A Marriage of Convenience? Festschrift in Honour of H. T. Norris, edited by Farida Abu-Haidar and Jareer Abu Haidar. London: Curzon Press.
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The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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"Arabic Folk Literature and Political Expression." Arab Studies Quarterly 8: 2: 178-185.
4—
Epic, Gender, and Nationalism:
The Development of Nineteenth-Century Balkan Literature
Margaret Beissinger
Epic poetry has been a vibrant oral tradition in the Balkans since at least the fourteenth century and was perpetuated through centuries of Ottoman and other foreign rule. It provided a main source of entertainment in the courts of the local aristocracy as well as among the folk. Although the first published heroic songs were included in a Croatian literary poem from the mid-sixteenth century, the systematic collecting of epic among Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, and Romanians did not begin until the nineteenth century, coinciding with the rise of nationalism, aspirations for liberation, and the formation of national or revival literatures. Oral epic—a genre that, for the "nation builders," had come to exemplify the heroic resistance of the people thus became a model for poetic masterpieces, such as Petar Petrovic Njegos's Mountain Wreath. As Margaret Beissinger argues, however, these early literary epics, while inspired by the folk genre, also evoked strong nationalistic messages that served the political agenda of the male public.
The male-dominated political milieu of the nineteenth-century Balkan world—in which nations were asserting their own identities after centuries of Ottoman authority—was unsympathetic, if not indifferent, to the female voice for the dissemination of the nationalistic messages expressed in their burgeoning discourse. While oral epic recognized women in substantial ways, written epic—a genre that mirrored the oral genre and initiated the cultural revivals of the nineteenth century—ignored them. Instead, literary epic, which became an important means for forging a sense of nationhood in the Balkans, embraced a social construction of reality created effectively by men. As nation building developed in various communities in eastern Europe, gender became an objectified issue in the creation of culture and shaping of literatures. Women were subjected in this process to reified roles, particularly in the early literary epic of the nineteenth century. The female voice in this literature, emanating from the private and personal sphere, was actually more often than not the thinly disguised voice of the more public and collective male, ardently constructing culture and nation.
This essay explores the intersection between gender roles and national-
ism in nineteenth-century Balkan culture.[1] It examines gender and nationalism in oral literature versus orally inspired literature, and in particular how women were represented in epic poetry. Although women were rarely central figures in traditional Balkan Christian oral epic,[2] they were often cast in significant roles that were clearly necessary and vital to the integrity of the narratives. By contrast, the first modern literary works of the nineteenth-century Balkan world were nationalistic poems that relied heavily on oral epic and yet virtually ignored women in their narratives. These were works that despite whatever judgments we may make today of their literary merits played very important roles in the making of Balkan national consciousness. In this early literary epic, unlike in oral epic, women played very minor roles (or no roles at all) precisely because the authors of literary epic, acting in their role as "cultural entrepreneurs,"[3] crafted a literature that sought to appeal primarily to men, the main participants in nineteenth-century nationalist movements. This contrasts sharply with the art of oral epic poets, which reflected women's varied roles in society and whose intended audiences were multigender in character.
Romantic nationalism profoundly affected the cultural and literary revivals that mushroomed in the Balkans in the modern period. Johann Gottfried Herder's notion of the "Volk" was central to the larger currents of cultural nationalism that swept both western and eastern Europe. "Volk" was conceived of as a social collective or nation that was a patriarchal construction—much like a traditional nuclear family—where history, language, and culture are interrelated and shared. Implicit in this thinking was the authority of the "fathers" and other males of society.[4] Those who espoused romantic nationalism equated much of the perpetuation of society with the transmission of tradition and folklore. The "voice of the people," as found in their folklore, was considered the core of national culture. The desire to preserve the precious oral traditions of the folk resulted in an intense interest in the collection of oral poetry throughout the eastern European world during the nineteenth century. It also fostered—in its patriarchal discourse—national literatures that developed with necessarily male topics and agendas at the forefront.
Folklore played a central role in the formation and development of Balkan national literatures in the nineteenth century. Oral tradition, viewed as a cultural treasure that survived centuries of foreign (both Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian) domination, was seen as a source of expression of struggle against foreign influence. It was a vehicle through which ideals of liberation and national identity were expounded and promoted. Fully exploited in the creation of national consciousness, folklore was manipulated for political purposes.
Throughout the nineteenth century, folklore provided ideal ingredients for what Benedict Anderson has termed "narrative [s] of 'identity'"[5] —narratives
that validate the convictions and aspirations of nation building and that are, in fact, necessary in the creation of national culture. Folklore—as embraced by the literary public—exemplified an idealized past that became a vital component in the formation of national narratives, literature, and culture. As Roger Abrahams has pointed out, "The folk and their lore were enlisted in the nation-building cause." The manipulation of both folk and lore in this drive to create national culture was "the result of elitist social and cultural constructions. "[6]
The first broad stage in the development of modern Balkan literatures was the composition of literary epic. The genre drew heavily from oral epic that was extant at the time. Examples of such works include Gorski vijenac (The mountain wreath, 1847) by the Montenegrin Petar Petrovic Njegos II, Smrt Smail-Age Cengica (The death of Smail-Aga Cengic, 1846) by the Croat Ivan Mazuranic, Gorski putnik (Woodland traveler, 1857) by the Bulgarian Georgi Rakovski, and Dumbrava rosie (The red oak grove, 1872) by the Romanian Vasile Alecsandri. Each of these works was inspired by Balkan oral epic: each reflects aspects of the style, language, and narrative content of the oral genre. All of these epics were key in the development of national literatures in their respective societies.
Njegos, Mazuranic, Rakovski, and Alecsandri were all major literary figures in their respective communities, as well as keenly involved in the collection and dissemination of oral traditions. Furthermore, all of them were significant political actors in the nationalist dramas of the nineteenth century, some even holding formal political offices. The educated public of the Balkans during the nineteenth century had extensive contact with oral poetry. Major collections of oral poetry became influential among those who constructed national culture (including political activists) and shaped literary development. These were collections of folklore with which the writers of early national literature were familiar and which, in fact, inspired them.
The most prominent cultural figure in nineteenth-century Serbia was Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, often referred to as Vuk. Vuk was the most important champion of folklore, collecting and publishing voraciously throughout his lifetime (1787-1864). Vuk also was an eminent grammarian. He standardized the Serbian literary language and orthography, thereby providing the context for the development of the modern Serbian language and a national literature. Vuk published his first collection of oral poetry in 1814. His continuing efforts to record and publish oral literature culminated in a four-volume anthology entitled Srpske narodne pjesme (Serbian folk songs), which was published in Leipzig between 1823 and 1833 and later expanded and reissued in Vienna between 1841 and 1862. His collections were popular and widespread in the South Slavic world, not to mention known and appreciated by Jakob Grimm, Goethe, and others in western Europe. As Svetozar Koljevic has pointed out, "Owing to the work of Vuk Karadzic, [who] gained
international recognition, the folk traditions became the objects of literary cult and inspiration."[7] Vuk's publications of oral poetry were instrumental in the nineteenth-century development of literature in Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro. Indeed, as Albert Lord noted, "The popular poetry, especially the Vuk collection, . . . was widely imitated, and its form was influential in shaping the style of literary poetry, both narrative and lyric, throughout the century and even later."[8]
In the oral epics collected by Vuk, women play a variety of roles that are not trivial and even often instrumental in the narratives told. This analysis focuses on what Vuk termed the oldest heroic songs, that is, the contents of his second volume of Serbian Folk Songs ( 100 in all).[9] By and large, these epic songs are heroic and therefore are concerned with "male" narratives. They represent a deeply patriarchal way of life. Within this context, however, women frequently figure in remarkably significant and requisite ways.
Most of the female (as well as male, for that matter) figures fit into established patterns that are stereotypical throughout the tradition—a hallmark of oral literature. The most common female roles in South Slavic oral epic are helpers, clever or wise maidens, mothers, sisters, and wives of heroes, spirited women, otherworldly creatures resembling fairies, and victims. The female helper is an ancient figure, found in world epic from antiquity to the present. Female helpers typically facilitate the hero's passage. Sometimes they aid in the release of prisoners. Such helpers, often termed the jailor's daughter type, are widespread in the larger Balkan and Turkic continuum.[10] Other female helpers include the innkeeper's wife, who drugs the enemy while he is drinking and then releases the hero—also a widespread Balkan epic figure.[11] Clever and wise maidens also form a type. Sometimes they judiciously advise heroes; at other times they outwit the hero in a triumph of brains over brawn.[12] Mothers also surface frequently and are portrayed as noble figures who provide counsel to their heroic sons. The advice of the hero's mother takes on a near-sacred quality because of the wisdom that it reflects.[13] Accordingly, the proverbial "curse of a mother" is seen as the least desirable fate for a son. Sisters typically are seen as honorable and faithful to their heroic brothers.[14] Wives of heroes fall into two broad stereotypes: the relatively passive but eternally loyal mates, and the treacherous, unfaithful ones. Both are influential insofar as they propel the narrative forward in important ways. The quintessential faithful wife steadfastly awaits her absent husband in the traditional return songs that are widespread throughout the Balkans.[15] Her opposite, the deceitful wife, is found at times betraying her heroic husband in the interests of another man. She is usually punished, at times brutally.[16]
Other female figures in oral epic in a sense break out of the patriarchal mold and are what I term spirited women. They include both maidens and wives. Though stereotypical in profile, they nonetheless defy the patriarchal
conventions or requirements imposed on them (for example, in refusing to marry the husband chosen for them).[17] Yet another class of women in the epic songs are the "vilas," otherworldly female figures who inhabit forests and live near streams. They are beautiful, physically powerful, seductive, easily angered, naughty, or helpful. [18] Finally, female victims are utilized as a form of tax or are forced to marry against their will, to name a few of the most common types.[19] In other words, women played significant roles in the South Slavic oral epic from which literary epic drew inspiration. Indeed, many of the figures in Vuk's collection are found throughout the other Balkan traditions.
Female figures played significant roles in oral epic, but not always positive roles. Extolling the noble character of the oral poems that he collected, Vuk himself referred to the "masculine Serbian spirit" that they mirrored.[20] Indeed, one might ask how the various female characters in Balkan oral epic reflected nineteenth-century social reality. The women presented in these epics portrayed a variety of female roles in society, albeit within a highly patriarchal framework. To be sure, the oral traditional culture—unlike the more urbane, literary culture—acknowledged more fully the various roles that women naturally played in society. This implicit recognition is reflected in the diverse roles that women occupied in oral epic. In relating stories of relevance to the community, oral tradition embraced figures—both male and female—who represented a wide array of roles. It was the goal of oral epic poets to compose engaging narratives that resonated in the community, not to disseminate political messages. Furthermore, their audiences were—in the case of the Balkan Christian epic—multigendered.
Gorski vijenac (The mountain wreath), by the Montenegrin Petar Petrovic Njegos II (1813-1851) ,[21] provides an excellent illustration of literary epic that was inspired by oral epic yet served—unlike oral epic—to establish a burgeoning national literature and foster a sense of nation. Published in 1847, it is considered Njegos's greatest work and occupies a venerable position in the Serbian canon. It played an integral role in the forging of Serbian nationalist culture, serving as a sacrosanct text that formed a literary basis of the nationalist ideology.
Njegos met Vuk in Vienna in 1833, at which point a lifelong friendship and meeting of minds was established (Njegos saw Vuk for the last time shortly before his own death in 1851). Njegos avidly supported Vuk's various activities—from collecting oral literature to linguistic and orthographic reforms. Furthermore, Njegos, a native of rugged and isolated Montenegro, was steeped in the oral literature that was a part of everyday life there. The oral traditional milieu that characterized village life in Montenegro had a profound influence on him. As a youth, Njegos learned the art of oral epic singing to the gusle (a one-stringed folk instrument), continuing in the tradition that his father had also mastered. He later collected folk poems and published
several volumes of them; he also wrote "folk" poetry.[22] In other words, Njegos was constantly in contact with oral poetry. But Njegos was not only a cultural figure. Beginning in 1833, he was also the prince-bishop of Montenegro; holding firm to a nationalist agenda, he wielded considerable political power.
Loosely modeled on an oral epic that recounted the same subject, the literary epic The Mountain Wreath focuses on the theme of Turkish oppression and Slavic (Montenegrin) resistance. It powerfully moved nationalists in the nineteenth century. The Mountain Wreath depicts a meeting of Montenegrin clan leaders who must decide what to do with the Montenegrins who have converted to Islam. After much deliberation, it is finally agreed that extermination of the Muslim converts is the best method of combating the Turkish menace. Although the poem is constructed in dramatic form (complete with "stage directions"), there is virtually no action, only discussion of the problem and possible solutions. Bishop Danilo ("Vladika Danilo")—the bishop and Christian ruler of Montenegro—is the main character (and mirrors the person of Njegos himself, similarly torn between expedient and righteous postures in the mediation of the many Christian-Muslim and other tribal disputes in Montenegro).[23] He takes counsel with his various clan leaders throughout the poem, weighing the question of whether violence should be used as a solution in the desired "extermination of Islam," or whether other modes of reconciliation might be preferable. This all culminates in a decision by the Christians to proceed with a massacre of converts—an event that the reader does not witness per se, but that takes place and is reported on, after which the poem concludes. The parallels with ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia today are obvious.
The Mountain Wreath begins with the short "Dedication to the Ashes of the Father of Serbia," which is written in sixteen-syllable meter. It is followed by the narrative itself, a dramatic epic poem of 2,819 lines, composed in deca-syllabic meter, with a word break after the fourth syllable—that is, the meter of South Slavic oral epic. Njegos turned to spoken and vernacular linguistic forms in the poetry. The poetry abounds with proverbs, incantations, and sayings taken "from the folk." A folk round dance is employed as a type of chorus. Furthermore, oral literary genres (especially wedding song and lament) are embedded in the narrative at various points, as are numerous references to oral tradition, such as traditional Serbian weddings or family feasts (the "slava").[24] Finally, Njegos repeatedly utilized devices of oral composition—repetition, parallelism, pleonasm, and parataxis. In this way he created a poetic rhythm that imitated oral epic, thereby seeking to stir his readers. The Mountain Wreath reflects many of the characteristics found in oral epic, a genre with which nationalism identified more than any other because of its reflection of the "folk"—perceived as the soul of the nation—as well as its invocation of the glorious past and heroic ideals. Indeed, Vuk—the "father" of Serbian folklore—time and again called attention to the "sacred"
nature of Serbian oral tradition and the profound linkage between it and the Serbian nation and its history.[25] Njegos put these same powerful symbols to equally powerful political use.
Forty individual characters figure in The Mountain Wreath. Of these, only two are women.[26] The poetry relates a male story, with men as the central actors and speakers. The first woman in The Mountain Wreath appears about two-thirds of the way through the poem. She is the "sister of Batric," a young woman who grieves over the recent treacherous death of her brother at the hands of the Turks. Batric was a heroic ideal to his fellow Montenegrins. Batric's sister laments in poignant oral traditional style, employing the typical meter of death lament in the South Slavic tradition (an eight-syllable line followed by a four-syllable refrain). She addresses her deceased brother:
Where have you flown away from me, O my falcon,
away from your most noble flock, my dear brother?
Didn't you know the faithless Turks? May God curse them!
Didn't you know they'd deceive you, O lovely head?
My world is gone, forever lost, my brother, my sun!
My deep wounds can never be healed, my bitter wound!
My very eyes are plucked from me, light of my eyes!
Kuda si mi uletio, moj sokole,
od divnogajata tvoga, brate rano?
Da 1' nevjerne ne zna Turke, Bog ih kleo!
e ce tebe prevariti? divna glavo
Moj svijete izgubljeni, sunce brate!
moje rane bez prebola, rano ljuta!
moje oci izvadjene, ocni vide![27]
She mourns for fifty verses, then seizes her grandfather's knife and kills herself. The sister of Batric and her lament serve to underscore the tragedy and futility of young Batric's death. The sister does not have a name, nor an identity beyond her role as sister. Indeed, after she has expressed her lament, she surrenders herself to the world that has already snatched away her brother. Joining him, she denies her own existence. After mourning, she is no longer needed in this drama, so Njegos literally removes her from the scene in a gesture that reflects not only a sister's sentimental love for her brother (providing a quintessential depiction of the cult of the sister), but perhaps even more significantly an objectification of one of the only female characters in the work. Her role in Njegos's poem is primarily to articulate her brother's identity.
Why should Batric's sister exemplify the tragedy of the dead hero? In the traditional Balkan world, it is women, not men, who perform death rites. It is they who are the caretakers of the dead, from dressing and guarding the corpse to performing laments. Death rite is a female function and a female social duty. Women alone have the license to lament and communicate with
the dead in this traditional world. Thus, by the conventions of ritual, Batric's sister is the only person who can perform this function with the intensity that Njegos intends. The death rites in Montenegro traditionally have been particularly prominent among the life-cycle rituals. Laments that glorify dead heroes—sung by female kin—are especially rich. The lament sung by Batric's sister is an exemplary poem in this regard, bridging oral poetry and literary imitation of oral poetry.[28] Furthermore, her lament epitomizes the Balkan cult of the sister—a potent metaphor through which the tragedy of Montenegro is expressed.
The only other female figure in The Mountain Wreath, an old woman (the "prophetess-witch"), makes her appearance about 200 verses later in a gathering of the men. She forms part of a brief incident. After claiming that she is a witch and then answering a series of questions posed by the clan members, the old woman confesses that she was sent by the vizier (who has learned that the Christian Montenegrins plan to do away with their Muslim brothers). She claims that she was ordered to bewilder the men: "He sent me to confuse you," she tells the chieftains, "so you would be busy with your troubles." ("Pa me posla da vas ja pomutim, da se o zlu svome zabavite.")[29] The woman is saved from being stoned to death by the intervention of the chieftains.
The old woman is clearly an outsider. She is past childbearing age and thus is in some senses a symbolic male. She is "betwixt and between,"[30] neither fully female (because she no longer represents fertility) nor fully male (she is, after all, a woman). Furthermore, she is not from central Montenegro, but rather from Bar (on the Adriatic coast), and thus is very literally a stranger. A prophetess-witch was a perfect ploy for the assembled men—a figure who could pose as someone who deals in otherworldly matters. Furthermore, this "ploy" had to be someone who was vulnerable and easily duped. No better candidate could exist than an old woman—perceived as weak and vulnerable, as a result of both age and gender. In her confession, the old woman tells how the vizier threatened to imprison and burn her sons and grandchildren if she did not play his game of confusing the Christians. She herself says to the men:
It was this threat that did force me, brothers,
to sow discord 'mong you Montenegrins.
Ta me sila, braco, nacerala
to pomutit hocah Crnogorce.[31]
Because women were associated with powerlessness (and men with power), to succumb to such threats would be considered female, something that only women would do. The old woman from Bar became the vizier's puppet because of her twofold outsider status (both as a person not from central Mon-
tenegro and as a symbolic male—thus permitted to mingle in male public space) and because of her powerlessness as a woman.[32]
In addition to these two female characters, women are alluded to or mentioned on occasion by men in various dialogues in the poem. These references describe a number of female roles. Women are regarded as lamenters (such as the sister of Batric, who is herself a close parallel to the faithful sisters of oral epic). They mourn dead heroes—husbands, brothers, brothers-in-law, and sons. One male character, for example, declares to the bishop that "men bravely bear what women lament about" ("Ljudi trpe, a zene naricu")—an observation that pointedly juxtaposes the martial strength of men and the ritualized weakness of women.[33] Lamenters are often compared to the cuckoo bird (kukavica); the bishop, for example, is said to be "wailing just like some cuckoo bird" (kukas kao kukavica); the simile is meant to underscore his weakness (and thus femaleness).[34] Women are alluded to as having otherworldly connections (recall the old woman from Bar. Most notably, they are described as "vila"-like (bewitching) in their seductive powers: "She is prettier than any white vila! " ("Ljepsa muje od vile bijele! ")[35] Women are often also portrayed as seers of the future:
Why do you talk magic like old witches
or like some old women reading their beans?
Sto bajete kao bajalice
ali babe kad u bob vracaju?[36]
"Reading beans" is a reference to a traditional means of foretelling the future in the Balkans, typically performed by women.
Women are also referred to in perhaps their most important role in the nationalist cant—as those who give birth to Serbian heroes. They are seen as vessels that serve to bear male heroes. As Bette Denich has noted, in the Balkan context, "the only enduring social units are formed through the male descent line, and women are exchanged among these units to procreate future generations of males. . . .[W]omen serve merely as links between fathers and sons, and between male in-laws." Indeed, "only as the mother of sons does a wife secure a place in the group."[37] Speaking of one of the Montenegrin heroes, a group of male voices in Njegos's poem cries out:
Serbian woman has never borne his like,
since Kosovo or even before it!
Srpkinja ga jost radjala nije
od Kosova, a ni prijed njega.[38]
The mothers mentioned in The Mountain Wreath of course find parallels in the noble and wise mothers of oral epic. A mother's curse is also, as in oral epic, anathema:
The mother's curse thus fell upon her son,
and massacred was his entire army.
Stize sina materina kletva,
pogibe mu vojska svakolika.[39]
Finally, women are depicted as victims captured and violated by the enemy. For example, referring to the rape of Christian maidens by the Turks, a Montenegrin chieftain tells one of the Muslim leaders:
If there is a garland of flowers
to decorate the heads of lovely brides,
you harvest it at the peak of flowering.
Ili imah kitnoga vijenca
koji kruni celo nevjestama,
poznjes mi ga u cv'jetu mladosti.[40]
"Harvest" has a sexual meaning here; the sense extends also, of course, to the "rape" and "harvest" of Montenegro. The symbolic meaning of rape in this context is as powerful as the act itself. As Virginia Sapiro has pointed out, "The control over women's sexuality has often been played out in inter-group conflict through the dynamics of rape. . . . What we might call the 'politics of honor' [is] played out between groups through the medium of women's sexuality. The assault on the enemy involves a wide range of physical and psychological tactics, but one of the most notable means of assaulting the honor or pride of a nation or community is to assault the 'honor' of its women through rape."[41] Obviously, this continues to remain an important dimension of nationalist politics in the Balkans today. Rape is (and has been throughout the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia) a particularly powerful mode of warfare, because it not only attacks the honor of its female victims, as Sapiro notes, but it also shames and thus dishonors their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons.[42] Such men are humiliated in the face of other men. As Denich has remarked, the "prescriptions for male behavior" in the Balkans involve a "public image of warrior courage . . . linked with a self-image of indomitable virility and elaborated ideologically in terms of the value codes of 'honor.'"[43] Male honor is deeply connected to power and control over females. Thus, references to rape in The Mountain Wreath are in some senses a male symbol. As Cynthia Enloe has noted, "In the context of nationalist struggles, . . .. the abuse of women often seems recast as more a problem for men than women." Through rape, she notes, "the honor of the community's men has been assaulted."[44]
Of course, the works of Njegos represent the use of literary epic, inspired by and drawn from oral epic, for national and political expression. There were other contemporaries of Njegos throughout the Balkans whose literary epics were related to oral epic in meter, style, language, and content and
were powerful statements to the male public, imbued with the nationalist spirit of the nineteenth century. In Croatia, the most outstanding writer of the romantic literary movement during the first half of the nineteenth century was Ivan Mazuranic (1814-1890), whose literary epic Smrt Smail-Age Cengic ( The death of Smail-Aga Cengic ) was published in 1846.[45] Mazuranic was from a peasant family and had been fully exposed to traditional poetry. He was, like Njegos, thoroughly knowledgeable about Vuk's collections. Also like Njegos, he held a political office: "ban" (governor) of Croatia. The Death of Smail-Aga Cengic, Mazuranic's most famous work, is a poem of 1, 134 lines that relates one event in the continuing struggle between Turks and Montenegrins—the ambush of a Muslim champion, Smail-Aga, and his slaying by a band of Montenegrins in revenge for his slaughter of some Christians. Unlike the incident that Njegos related, the event that formed the basis for Mazuranic's epic actually occurred, and news of it was disseminated in the press. It created an immediate frenzy and became a type of popular metaphor for Muslim-Christian hostilities.[46]
In The Death of Smail-Aga Cengic, Mazuranic turned to oral epic for inspiration, frequently employing decasyllabic verse, as well as oral poetic and stylistic devices such as patterned repetition, parallelism, and fixed epithets. The narrative, like that in The Mountain Wreath, is about liberation and national identity. There is not a single female character in Mazuranic's poem. A few "vilas," a faithful wife, and Christian maidens who are regularly taken "for the night" by the Turkish tax collectors are mentioned in passing by men in the text. Stereotypes who are simply background are the token female "appearances," and once again the reference to rape is effectively a male statement. As passive victims, women provide a pretext for male discourse on warfare and honor; rape challenges men's power.
Georgi Rakovski (1821-1867) was an ardent Bulgarian nationalist who collected folk songs, issued newspapers, wrote literature, and in general devoted his entire life to the Bulgarian nationalist cause. Rakovski's Gorski putnik (Woodland traveler) was first published in 1857. The poem (928 verses) centers on Bulgarian freedom fighters ("hajduti") and their stories of struggle against the "Turkish yoke." It was a clear statement on nation and liberation and has been called "the first revolutionary epic poem of Bulgarian literature."[47] Although now generally viewed as minor literature, its impact on the Bulgarian public of its day was considerable. It was one of the most popular literary works of the Bulgarian national revival. The work idealizes the Bulgarian past and invokes it as a symbol of the power and liberation that was desired in nineteenth-century Ottoman-dominated Bulgaria. Rakovski, like his South Slavic brothers from Montenegro and Croatia, was an advocate of oral poetry and found inspiration in it for his own epic. Like Njegos and Mazuranic, Rakovski composed a narrative in which a political message dominated—a political message characterized by nationalist sen-
timent and a call to arms. Women do not figure in any significant way in Rakovski's poem.
A final example further illustrates the point. The Romanian folklorist and poet Vasile Alecsandri (1821-1890) wrote Dumbrava rosie (The red oak grove ) in 1872. It is a literary epic that narrates a struggle in the late fifteenth century between the ruler of Moldavia—Stephen the Great—and the Polish king. The message of liberation at the core of the epic was highly pertinent in the nineteenth-century context as the Romanian principalities (Walachia and Moldavia) sought to be released from all ties with the Ottoman empire, still a suzerain power at the time. The 859-line poem was an important work in its day. Alecsandri—renowned not only for his own poetry, but also for his pioneering work in the collection of Romanian oral poetry (especially epic) and his political involvement in Romanian nationalist activities—drew from oral epic in the creation of what he considered a Romanian national epic. Stephen the Great—a historical figure who was embraced in folklore and nationalist culture in the rhetoric of emancipation embodies heroic resistance to foreign invaders in Alecsandri's poem. Other male heroic figures also sing of liberation; however, the role of women in the epic is negligible.
Remarking on the gendering of nationalism among Romanians, Katherine Verdery has suggested that in the construction of a "national self" it has been a collective, implicitly male "self' that has dominated. This "entity" is characterized by "heroism, triumph, victimization, and sacrifice" and represents not only a "collective [male] individual," but also the avowed "nation that unites" this collective.[48] Prominent "individuals" of this "collective" who epitomize this heroic concept have been invoked throughout Romanian history and include figures such as Stephen the Great, viewed as a sacrosanct emblem of the "nation." Alecsandri exploited this forceful symbol—male, heroic, defiant—as he constructed his epic of Romanian nationhood, The Red Oak Grove. Women were entirely dispensable, because the epic expressed a theme that was intended to resonate among the men who formed the elite of nineteenth-century Romanian society. As Verdery has noted, "The image of a collective Romanian nation" was "reproduced without women's intervention."[49]
Speaking of the profound "linkage between gender and cultural identity," Sapiro has remarked that in some societies "the struggle for liberation has been termed a struggle for 'manhood.'" Furthermore, "the loss of manhood is culturally understood to mean one is being turned into a naturally weaker and less significant being: a woman."[50] I suggest that if the centuries-long state of foreign domination (be it Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian) in the Balkans in the nineteenth century is viewed as a state of powerlessness, or, by extension, femaleness, then the struggles for liberation were effectively struggles to gain or regain maleness (manhood) and power. Thus, in order
to move from powerlessness and oppression (the state of being female) to power and independence (being male), one strategy was to objectify women and femaleness and elevate men and maleness to the center of the various narratives that aided in generating "identity." This is precisely what Njegos, Mazuranic, Rakovski, and Alecsandri did. In their literary pleas for liberation and independent national identity, they constructed male worlds that were free of the emblems of oppression and emasculation, peripheralizing female symbols. Their epics spoke to the ardent romantic nationalist desires and beliefs that men held and espoused-liberation, regaining of power, authority, and control—all concepts or states that were seen as antithetical to the status of women. Men were the main audience of this literature in the nineteenth century because they were the principal participants in the nationalist movements in the Balkans. It followed then that men also had to be the main actors and mouthpieces in this literature.
As Enloe has pointed out, "Women haven't had an easy relationship with nationalism."[51] Nineteenth-century writers of literary epic in the Balkans were asserting a nationalism in their writing that lauded the liberation and removal of foreign oppression. These ideals were equated almost exclusively with male identity. The various literary epics discussed here were narratives primarily about manhood. When women did surface in them, they were token representations that furthered the male nationalist message: women as lamenters for dead heroes, mothers as receptacles for the birth of national heroes, women as objects in the potent national symbol of rape, and women as representatives of otherworldly connections, such as witches or "vilas." By contrast, the various roles women held in oral epic were not politically motivated in this way. Indeed, both oral and literary epic included—either actively or passively—female roles and references. Female kin, female victims, and otherworldly women all functioned in various ways, large and small, in these narratives—whether to propel the narrative forward (especially in oral epic) or to embellish the message of male-centered nationalism (as in literary epic). By comparison, the female helpers, clever maidens, and spirited women that figured (sometimes quite prominently) in oral epic were not present in the early literary epic of the Balkan world—precisely because they were not seen as effective vehicles for promoting or elaborating the nationalistic agenda.
Oral epic, as opposed to its literary imitations, reflected the greater diversity of roles that women played in traditional society and thus offered a multifaceted portrayal of womanhood. Literary epic had, after all, a political subtext. It either presented or alluded to women who could aid in the advancement of this subtext or neglected them altogether. Athough oral epic was used by nineteenth-century romantic nationalists to further their cause, it did not arise, as literary epic did, out of a need to advocate national and political convictions, but rather out of a need to relate the cherished
stories in which the deep mythic convictions of the community were expressed. By objectifying femaleness in the literary epics that they consciously constructed, writers such as Njegos, Mazuranic, Rakovski, and Alecsandri were able to embrace maleness—the essence of nationhood, liberation, and power.
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