Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past

Notes

Notes Preface 1. In its emphasis upon imitation and the humanist tradition, Grafting Helen is indebted above all to Thomas Greene’s The Light in Troy (1982) as well as other works in medieval and early modern studies: Thomas Cave’s The Cornucopian Text (1979), Margaret Ferguson’s Trials of Desire (1983), David Quint’s Origin and Originality (1983). 2. In this respect Grafting Helen resembles a number of works that have followed specific mythic figures as recurrent tropes in humanist writings: John Hollander’s The Figure of Echo (1981), Stephanie Jed’s Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (1989), and Leonard Barkan’s Transuming Passions: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (1991). 3. The historian, Hayden White has argued, ‘‘serves no one well by constructing a specious continuity between the present world and that which preceded it. . . . we require a history that will educate us to discontinuity’’ (1966:134). Grafting Helen tries to be such a history. As such it reopens Paul de Man’s discussion of modernity as trope in Blindness and Insight (1971) and other works. 4. Grafting Helen seeks to participate in what Jonathan Arac calls the ‘‘most urgent agenda forcontemporary literary theory,’’ the forging of a ‘‘new literary history’’: ‘‘From Frederic Jameson’s slogan, ‘always historicize,’ to Michel Foucault’s ‘genealogies,’ to the critiques of traditional (teleological, periodizing, objectifying) historiography by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Hayden White, to British ‘historical materialism’ and American New Historicism, this is the message’’ (quoted in Hays 1992:82). 5. The teichoskopia is, as Norman Austin puts it, the ‘‘locus classicus for the traditional Helen portrait’’ (1994:17). 6. As in Clader 1976, Suzuki 1989, and Austin 1994. 7. One might compare these strategies to Harold Bloom’s revisionary ratios in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), defenses against the inevitable priority of the past. Both suggest a vision of history as repressed and recurrent agon. For Bloom, however, that agon is a psychological affair, a struggle between poets, while I see it as a textual affair, a struggle between poems. 8. The stock is: ‘‘a living plant or portion of a plant (as a root) designed or prepared for union with a scion in grafting . . . the original (as a man, a race, or a language) from which others have descended . . . a race, subrace . . . a sum of money . . . capital for in265 266 Notes to Pages xiii–7 vestment . . . principal as distinguished from interest . . . property that produces income’’ (Gove 1963). 9. A numberof earlier studies have focused on the figure of Helen of Troy in antiquity: Funck–Brentano 1935,Clota 1957, Lindsay 1974, Becker 1894.Others are surveys of the myth from antiquity to modernity: Oswald 1905, Newman 1968. 10. Culler cites the same passage in On Deconstruction and remarks: ‘‘What would such a treatise describe? It would treat discourse as the product of various sorts of combinations or insertions. . . . The fact that one has only thevaguest ideas of how to organize a typology of grafts indicates the novelty of this perspective’’ (1982:135). 11. Thus Grafting Helen is what Barbara Johnson (1987:116) calls an intertextuality study as opposed to a source study, the former emphasizing misreadings and violations, the second speaking in terms of legal transfers and borrowings. Chapter 1. Mimesis 1. On Helen’s undecidability, see also Austin 1975, duBois 1978, and Zeitlin 1996. 2. On Homeric epic as an oral-performative tradition with progressively authoritative claims to panhellenic status, see Nagy 1979 and 1990. 3. Bespaloff 1947:69 says of the elders at the Skaian gates: ‘‘They cannot help finding her beautiful. And this beauty frightens them like a bad omen, a warning of death.’’ 4. Liddell and Scott and Stuart Jones 1940. All definitions of Greek terms come from this edition, unless otherwise stated. On the notion of terror as essential to ainos, see Devereux 1982. On ainos as a form of encoded speech with polyvalent significance in Archaic lyric and epic, see Nagy 1990:427ff. 5. All translations of the Iliad are taken from this edition unless otherwise stated. 6. For example Bergren 1979. See also Samuel Butler’s 1922 work The Authoress of the Odyssey (Butler 1967). Robert Graves, on the other hand, wrote a novel, Homer’s Daughter (1955b), with the premise that the author of the Odyssey is Nausikaa. 7. See Clader 1976:6–11 on Helen as a weaving poet in Iliad 3, and Miller 1986 on images of...