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CHAPTER 3. VISIBLE TYPES AND VISUALIZING STYLES IN ARCHAIC POETRY
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CHAPTER 3 VISIBLE TYPES AND VISUALIZING STYLES IN ARCHAIC POETRY Archaic poets conjoin taste or touch with visual effect to characterize elements of verbal style, which strike the ear as they strike the eye—a conceptual synesthesia that gives physical weight to the spoken word and persuasive force to concrete detail. This sensual characterization of verbal impact has its more concrete extension in the visible features of a speaker’s style. In literary depiction, the narrator may provide these details or they may be found in portraits deployed by adept and seductive performers themselves, who frequently offer visualizations of dress and deportment to flatter or entice their hearers. A speaker’s use of such images also helps to delineate his own verbal and visible hexis and thus should display his character. But these physical details may cloak rather than reveal character, which brings into focus the central problem with stylistic elements in the first place: that they are mutable, which means that the agile oral performer can change them like a suit of clothes. Indeed, the dress and deportment of the body may also operate as a distraction, masking identity or intention. This chapter explores the visible aspects of style and analyzes the sources of their perception as potentially deceitful, seductive, or overwhelming. Figures such as Pandora at one extreme and Thersites at the other highlight essential aspects of how the body signifies stylistically. But Helen and Odysseus illuminate subtler aspects of corporeal style, their elusive or changeable physical types matching their distracting or mutable verbal styles. The deportment and dress of these figures, as well as the significant objects and 82 Tseng 2002.10.14 08:53 6680 Worman / THE CAST OF CHARACTER / sheet 96 of 288 VISIBLE TYPES AND VISUALIZING STYLES IN ARCHAIC POETRY • 83 compelling images with which they are associated, thus raise more complex and disturbing questions about how one’s visible manner may profoundly affect one’s message. THE BODY AS PUBLIC MEASURE The body, especially in Homeric representation but also in Hesiod and the lyric poets, invokes ideas about order and proportion by means of concrete attributes. As an emblematic entity, it is thus essential to understanding the relationship between physical appearance and speaking style. Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued that archaic and classical representation measures the body in relation to the visible indications of one’s social stature. ‘‘The Greek body of Antiquity,’’ he explains, ‘‘appears in the manner of a coat of arms and presents through emblematic traits the multiple ‘values’—concerning his life, beauty, and power—with which an individual is endowed, values which he bears and which proclaim his timê, his dignity and rank.’’1 Vernant emphasizes that these bodies are situated within the visual field and measured along a continuum from light to dark. Just as the warrior’s gleaming armor may foreshadow his victorious forays on the battlefield (e.g., Il. .–), so do the Furies’ murky and blood-drenched forms mirror their grim role in death and retribution (e.g., A. Eum. ). Physical grace, which itself may effect a visual persuasion, is also conceived of as a bright, tactile thing. The beauty enhancer charis, for instance, which can be poured over the body like a shining, liquid gown (e.g., Hes. WD ), is associated in its Indo-European equivalents with light.2 There are also bodies in Greek literature that are categorized less by this public measure than by qualities that reveal their ambiguous places within the social schema. In their veiled or disguised forms, these sorts of bodies may invoke epistemological concerns similar to those that Froma Zeitlin has identified with bodies in tragedy: their visible presentations often call attention to the possibility of change, imposture, doubling, or otherwise eluding the eye.3 Their depictions may involve touch (from soft to hard) and smell (from perfume to stench)—more intimate measures of body type.4 When bright, a body’s high-status gleam sometimes serves to mask rather than to reveal its identity. Shining garments may call attention to it, suggesting its specially luminous aspect and sometimes revealing its alluring skin.5 Its possessor’s eyes may meet the onlooker with a flashing glance, so that the viewer is himself viewed and disarmed.6 Vernant does not differentiate in Tseng 2002.10.14 08:53 6680 Worman / THE CAST OF CHARACTER / sheet 97 of 288 [18.232.88.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:16 GMT) 84...