Pindar's Metaphors: A Study in Rhetoric and Meaning (review)

Patten's book, his first, is not really a study of metaphor. Rather, it takes metaphor as a starting-point from which to tackle the tension between the rhetoric or surface of language (its resistance to semantic closure expressed in tropes and figures: the way texts speak; "form"; "metaphor") and its meaning ("what the odes must mean if they are to be amenable to interpretation in its traditional, hermeneutical sense at all"; "content"; "communication"). Patten's project, grounded in his impressive and massively deployed knowledge of the post-structuralist tradition, raises questions (often quite profound) about the ways in which modern Pindaric criticism since Boeckh and Dissen has tried, by resort to this or that central concept (history, the "Grundgedanke," the lyric subject, "rhetorical convention," or the New Historicist allegory and critique of values and culture) to impose one clear meaning on the Pindaric text's resistant fabric. Pindar's uncanny victory odes take their place in the "uncanonical 'canon'" of post-structuralist theory.

The book tries ambitiously to meld three different discourses into one. The first is deconstruction's critique of "metaphysics"; the second is a thorough and thoughtful appraisal of movements in Pindaric scholarship; the third consists of close readings. The readings, which are excellent and clear, push the texts in the best tradition of deconstructionist lecture to the very limits of interpretability while preserving philological standards. Patten's chapter on the Mythenkorrektur in the first Olympian is one of the most probing brief accounts of that vexed passage; while the final chapters discuss how Pindar's texts transcend their (self-) appointed limits, both as works ("unity") and as moments of performed speech in time, and in terms of the self-subversion of the odes' speaking subject. These chapters are preceded by two others one of which presents a theory of rhetoric based on "figurality" and the trope of metaphor and the other the critique of modern Pindaric scholarship. The latter, which makes the aesthetics on which early German Pindar critics (Heyne, Boeckh, Dissen) based their interpretations accessible to an English-speaking audience, is a significant contribution to classical reception studies. Pindar's odes, read closely and with attention to their tensions of meaning and figuration, reperform or allegorize central concerns of deconstructionism's philosophical critique of the "metaphysics of presence"—the unity, integrity, and immanent meaning of the work as text; the criterion of "appropriateness" in interpretation; reference, truth, and authority; the presence/absence of an ultimately self-effacing speaking subject identified with the author or "father" of the work (Patten has nothing to say about song, or about performance and reperformance as contexts of mediated communication); φωνή vs. grapheme. Patten does not claim to refute the methods of traditional scholarship: rather, his readings trace each hermeneutic method to the point where, unable to transcend its own implicit "metaphysics," it inevitably swaps insight for blindness. The Pindar that emerges from these readings is both unsettled and unsettling. He is definitely a written Pindar. The odes are treated entirely as texts; modes of analysis, explication, or cultural contextualization that might help to explain or reconcile the contradictions revealed by deconstructive reading are neglected. The conclusions (to the extent that Patten, from his position of endless semeiosis, buys into the notion of a conclusion) are mostly negative, and there will be plenty for readers to disagree with and to learn from.

Patten opens with the remark that his book is something of an anachronism, considering the current tendency to bury "theory." He does, however, show that we (particularly Hellenists, who have always had a more ambivalent relationship to "theory") still have much to learn from post-structuralism. As a counterpoint to accepted methods of reading and a demonstration of how little we really understand, the book ought to be of immense interest. One fears, however, that its impact will be somewhat blunted by the intractability of the style. The extensive philosophical and theoretical sections are stifled...