Anglo-Saxon interpretative practices and the first seven lines of the Old English poem Exodus: the benefits of close reading

Anglo-Saxon interpretative practices and the first seven lines of the Old English poem Exodus: the benefits of close reading In this paper I am going to indulge in a little close reading of the first seven lines of the Old English poem Exodus. I say 'indulge' because it runs counter to most contemporary literary thinking to begin by paying close attention to the language on the page, on 'thetext',rather than focusing discussion on (say) the social and historical context of its production, including its intertextual and hence generic relations, and the social positioning of m y own subjectivity as reader. Does such an approach necessarily suffer the earlier illusions of socalled American N e w Criticism (thetextas independent object) or of French Structuralism (the text as object maintaining objective relations with other similar objects)?1 With proper post-structuralist positioning, I want to answer such questions with 'it all depends on your point of view'. M y point of view for looking closely at the lexicogrammar of the text—the choices of lexis, that is vocabulary, and the choices of grammar—is primarily positioned within the model of functional systemic grammar, as developed by M . A. K. Halliday and elaborated by others.2 In this model, higher order levels of social semiotic (such as ideology and genre) are 'realized' by linguistic levels of semantics, lexicogrammar and phonic and graphic substance (the linguistic being only one of the possible media of realization, of course). In complementary turn, as these linguistic choices are simultaneously social choices ('language acts are social acts'), the social semiotic is constituted by language behaviour, so that choices of lexicogrammar, and so on m a y either reinforce or reinscribe (displace) the higher order levels of the culture. In such theorizing, the focus is on language as process; with hindsight the lexicogrammatical record—the choices recorded in a written/printed text or, with twentieth-century technology, in a spoken text—can be discussed as a product of this process. Yet at the same time any attempts to interpret the text or to infer cultural values and practices from it must reinvoke the full model of language as process, with all its admissions of historical and personal contingency. Audrey Meaney first taught m e Old English, especially Old English grammar. She directed one's attention to detaU; she valued accuracy. M y own special interest in Old English poetry (and poetry in general) has led m e particularly to appreciate that habit of accurate grammatical reading, and to caution students new to Old English in their rush from lexical translation to 1 See, for example, chs. 1 and 2 of Theory into Practice: A Reader in Modern Litera Criticism, ed. K. M. Newton, London, 1992. 2 See, for example, M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic, London, 1978. P A R E R G O N ns 10.2, December 1992 52 R. Huisman interpretation. In the following discussion I especially look closely at choices of grammatical meaning, using the terms of systemic functional grammar.3 For convenience thefirstseven lines of Exodus are quoted here in full, from the edition of Peter Lucas: Hwaet we feor ond neah gefrigen habbafi ofer middangeard Moyses domas, wrasclico wordriht wera cneorissum— in uprodor eadigra gehwam aefter bealusioe bote lifes, lifigendra gehwam langsumne raed— haelefium secgan. Gehyre se be wille!4 The basic unit of grammatical meaning in English is typically realized in the clause; the experiential meanings of the clause cluster around the verb. In lines 1-7 we read a clause complex with two verbal groups, and so two clauses: line lb gefrigen habbad ('have heard'), line 7a secgan (literally 'to say/declare', though the Old English infinitive is often translated into a M o d e m English past participle 'said/declared'). The superordinate clause, with itsfiniteverb gefrigen habba6, could be understood as 'we have heard something'. 'To hear' in M o d e m English usually realizes a mental process of perception, and the mental process of hearing is associated with semantic roles for the associated participants of Senser ('we') and Phenomenon ('something'). The Old English verb gefrignan, glossed by Lucas as 'hear tell' and, with...