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elsewhere exemplified would immediately be suspect.13 Theognis 371372 is a case in point. |
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Don't try to push me to the wagon, pricking hard, I won't go,
Kyrnos, though you draw me all too deeply into your love. |
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This utterance probably represents the rejection by a lover of a beloved's attempt to rekindle an affair, and not the rejection of an attempt to initiate one. The decisive argument, for me at least, is that whereas we can point to other examples in classical poetry of the former move, we have none of the latter.14 |
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The concept of a move may, then, be useful in the analysis of classical love poetry, but there are several problems: (1) By what criteria do we identify the move in an utterance? (2) How do we decide whether two similar but apparently differing utterances represent the same move or two distinct but related moves? (3) What is the relation between identifying a move and naming it? Doesn't the name, whether a word or a phrase, bring us back to the problem of interpreting the meaning of an utterance (our name)? Won't other utterances then qualify or fail to qualify as examples of the same move, depending on our name and how we interpret it? |
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13 It can be asked whether it is not conceivable that only a single example of a genre has survived in the extant corpus of classical love poetry. This remains to be seen. Wittgenstein, I think, would say that a Sprachspiel cannot be played only once (1953) 199: "Es kann nicht ein einziges Mal nur ein Mensch einer Regel gefolgt sein." Such an utterance would not be recognizable, and so would not be intelligible, certainly not to an audience. Two interlocutors might be able to invent and make use of a kind of utterance on a single occasion, but this could hardly be used in a literary text, whether intended for a live audience or for readers, since they could not be expected to recognize it. Jauss (1982) writes: "Just as there is no act of verbal communication that is not related to a general, socially or situationally conditioned norm or convention, it is also unimaginable that a literary work set itself into an informational vacuum, without indicating a specific situation of understanding. To this extent, every work belongs to a genre whereby I mean neither more nor less than that for each work a preconstituted horizon of expectation must be ready at hand (this can also be understood as a relationship of "rules of the game" [Zusammenhang von Spielregeln]) to orient the reader's (public's) understanding and enable a qualifying reception." |
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14 See Bing and Cohen (1991) 3035. Rejections of offers of reconciliation are represented in all three scenes of Plautus I shall be examining, as well as in: Archilochus P. Colon. 7511 = SLG 478 (cf. Bing and Cohen [1991] 4649); Theognis 599602, 12491252; Callimachus Pf. 44; Theocritus 6.3233 (and one may be referred to in Theocritus 1.83,85 [cf. Bing and Cohen (1991) 144, note 6]); Terence, Eunuchus 49; Catullus 11, (and possibly 107 and 109, both bitterly ironic in my view); Virgil, Aeneid 469474 (Aeneas may not be trying to rekindle the affair, but he is apologizing for considerable injury done to a beloved, and Dido's response is silence, then flight); Propertius 3.25.5. Ovid Remedia Amoris 689 advises those who have renounced not to let themselves be won back by tears (vv.601782 provide "specific precepts to prevent [love's] renewal" and 673692 deal with how to handle a chance encounter see Henderson (1979) xxi and his notes on these sections). |
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