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6 Deixis Introduction: Helen in the Lyric ‘‘Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact,’’ writes Anne Carson (1986:169). This is arguably the essential plot of the lyric, reduced to its basic outlines. This chapter focuses primarilyon the role Helen plays in the works of the lyric poets Alcaeus, Alcman, Theocritus, and, above all, Sappho. The lyric Helen, I contend, always acts as a pivot or a point of articulation, as that ‘‘difference between’’ that constitutes the very possibility of the erotic narrative. This difference opposes not just lover and beloved, but also past and present, epic and lyric. Helen is both lyric’s superlative individual (most desired, most desirous) and a synecdoche for all Homeric epic (‘‘Helen’’ is always a reference to the Trojan war), so that putting her into a poem makes it both a ‘‘private’’ confession and a ‘‘public’’ or ‘‘intertextual’’ dialogue. By way of Helen, Sappho is both soldered to and sundered from Homer, so that Helen becomes the very emblem of what makes literary history—as continuity—both possible and impossible. What makes Helen such an effective point of reference for the lyric? On the most obvious—that is, thematic—level, taking Helen’s side allows the lyric poet to renounce the theme of war (Homer’s theme par excellence), and to do so by means of the very terms in which that theme has traditionally been articulated. This is lyric as recusatio. On the level of language itself, however—and it is this level with which I am most concerned in this chapter—Helen may be said to function in the lyric as one of its most reliable deictics. Deictics are signifiers that point (pronouns such as ‘‘I’’ or ‘‘you,’’ adverbs such as ‘‘here’’ or ‘‘now’’), and upon them lyric may be said to pin its success. What is distinctive about 84 Deixis 85 deictics is that while belonging to a preexisting system (that is, language, what Saussure calls langue), they have no meaning except in reference to a particular speaker, in the context of a particular speech act (again in Saussurian terms, parole). Helen is always part of Homeric language, that is, but to cite her is to give voice to subjective desire. Chapter 4, ‘‘Speculation,’’ has already demonstrated how lyric can be a form of graft to the extent that it refers back to a prior system of epic motifs, capitalizing, as it were, upon a Homeric commonwealth. This chapter suggests that lyric subjectivity (the lyric ‘‘I’’) is a graft in at least two senses: (1) it is fashioned from an intertextual splicing of an epic past and a lyric present, and (2) it is viable only when attached to a particular site and moment of enunciation—when, that is, it is spoken by a designated speaker. Implicit here is a view of Sapphic lyric that runs contrary to a number of longstanding critical conventions: (1) to read lyric poetry is to play at hearing the voice of a subject who speaks it; (2) early lyric monody (poetry sung by an individual to the accompaniment of a lyre) represents the emergent voice of individualism, the declaration of a now-differentiated subjectivity formerly dissolved into the communal expressions of cult and polis;1 (3) Sappho’s poetry is a personal record—whether of a private crisis or a public ritual—rather than a rhetorical script.2 The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature concludes its entry on her with this appraisal: ‘‘Sappho created a form of subjective personal lyric neverequaled in the ancient world in its immediacyand intensity’’ (Howatson 1989:507). These terms—immediacy and intensity—consistently govern interpretations of Sapphic verse. On the one hand, critics deploy these terms as if they were conventional feminine attributes; on the other, because within this convention the feminine is equated with the natural, these terms are constitutive elements in our definitions of subjectivity itself.3 The important point here is that the effect of these interpretations is to read Sappho out of history by inserting her back into it. Not only can lyric be said to graft the past onto the present, but critical approaches to lyric have always tried to graft the present back onto the past. Critics—including Denys Page (1955b), Anne Burnett (1983), C. M. Bowra (1936), and MartinWest (1970)—have tended to explain Sappho’s poetry by referring it back to a historical origin, treating the...

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