|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Speech-Acts and Sprachspiele:
Making Peace in Plautus* |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
When, in Plato's Republic (607d608a), Philosophy anticipates the return of Poetry, pictured as a banished beloved intent on rekindling their affair, the imagined encounter echoes two kinds of utterance represented in classical love poetry: a lover's request to be taken back after a rupture, and a response to such a request. If poetics thus serves to keep poetry in exile, Plato (willy-nilly) provides early evidence for (what we might call) a poetic genre, the negotiation of peace between parted (or merely quarelling) lovers. Here I shall examine three Plautine examples and try to nudge Philosophy and Poetry back together again. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
No theory can provide a set of rules that would enable us to determine the force of an utterance in a complex classical love poem, nor, for that matter, of many utterances in natural language.1 Interpretation, whether of natural or poetic utterances,2 is not a science. But some general framework may help in the reading of classical love poetry. It is not enough to understand the meaning of words (surely they cannot be understood out of context) and the syntax and morphology of the language in question. Meaning, in so far as it can be determined at all, is a product of utterances, conceived of in |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
* Professor Alva Walter Bennett insisted in his classes at the University of California in the early 1970's that to understand a classical poem one has to figure out who is saying what to whom, under what circumstances, to what end, and stressed the importance of the social, historical and cultural context, the relative prestige of speaker and addressee, and so on. Thus, the concept of genre advocated here owes much to an oral tradition I was privileged to receive and does not derive from work in the various fields (philosophy of language, pragmatics, sociolinguislics, sociology of language, ethnography of speech, social psychology, etc.) which have developed similar approaches to natural language, even if that bibliography may be adduced in support. I would also like to thank Professor Peter Bing, of Emory University, who forced me to defend at such length (in the introduction to Games of Venus) my interpretation of Theognis 371372 and who argued (with learning, wit, and often overtaxed patience) with me about nearly every poem and fragment on my list. This is for them. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 Wittgenstein (1953) passim and (1969) 139140, 559. [All references to Wittgenstein refer to paragraph or section numbers, not pages.] |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 Cf. Steiner (1984) on arguments among the Russian formalists and members of the Prague Linguistic Circle over possible criteria for such a distinction. And see also Petrey (1990) 7085 for a discussion (with some bibliography) of the applicability of speech act theory to literary texts. Bakhtin (1986) stresses the interplay between speech genres and literary genres. |
|
|
|
|
|