Exile and the Poetics of Loss in Greek Tradition (review)

Nancy Sultan, Exile and the Poetics of Loss in the Greek Tradition. In the series, Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Gregory Nagy and Timothy Powers. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 1999. $49.00 (cloth).

Nancy Sultan writes this of her book's beginnings: "The topic of this manuscript originated ten years ago during late night music sessions with the (now defunct) Contemporary Greek Ensemble . . . , who were kind enough to share their songs and thoughts about xenitia with me" (xiii). Sultan certainly grasped the creative force of xenitía in those nightly sessions. She then gave the theme a diachronic scope. Exile and the Poetics of Loss in the Greek Tradition combines close readings of ancient, medieval, and modern poetry rooted in oral tradition in order to "highlight some of the common images of exile and loss within these poetic traditions, reflecting both the continuity and change that have occurred over time" (3-4). Sultan names intellectual precursors from a broad range of fields: Catherine Lutz and Deborah Tannen in comparative ethnology and sociolinguistics, Michael Herzfeld and Charles Segal in the study of language and culture, and Nadia Serematakis and Gail Holst-Warhaft on Greek women's laments head the list. At the forefront, however, are Gregory Nagy and Margaret Alexiou, both of whom have made substantial contributions to the study of Greek oral traditions. Sultan's two mentors carefully prepared the ground for her work.

Nagy's writing on the diction and themes of Greek oral performance tradition is a keystone. Building on the revolution in Homeric scholarship instigated by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, Nagy gives a secondary place to individual authors and brings to the foreground the processes of continuity and change in oral performance traditions. According to Nagy, individual performances derive authority precisely from their recollection of a tradition of performances: "For a performer, the most individual parts of his performance may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. In other words, the reperformed composer becomes the recomposed performer" (Poetry as Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996: 214). Like any user of language, however, the performer does not recover the complete sense of an "original composition," but instead, reconstructs an earlier phase on the basis of cognate forms. By studying "change in identity within the process of mimesis" (221), scholars can form a hypothetical cross section of both the synchronic function and the diachronic transformations of a thematic heritage (214-15).

Alexiou's scholarly work supplements Nagy's on three important counts. Like Nagy, Alexiou shows "how poets of different ages were able to draw on a common fund of ideas, themes, and formulae, frequently investing an old and well established convention with new significance" (Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974: xi). Like Nagy, too, she brings into view the dynamic interaction between popular and learned, oral and written poetry. But Alexiou provides a fuller picture on two counts. First, Alexiou's monograph adds the image of women alongside the commonplace one of men in the community of Greek singers. According to Sultan, "before Margaret Alexiou's book on Greek laments appeared in 1974, these singers were visualized primarily as a group of male professionals like Homer, Demodokos, and Phemios, or the hero as a singer himself... Alexiou introduced the scholarly community to the woman as one of these singers" (53-54). Second, Alexiou challenges anglophone classical Greek studies to expand its horizons by incorporating medieval and modern Greek oral poetry in the study of Greek performance traditions. The following quotation from Alexiou's essay, "Modern Greek Studies in the West: Between the Classics and the Orient" (Journal of Modern Greek Studies 4:3-15), suggests just how scholars of Modern Greek might take the lead in covering the historical range of Greek traditions:

Modern Greek no longer needs to identify itself in terms of the "continuity...