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No wonder then that the stress on form, even on the pleasures of literature, was constantly combatted by different authors and for different reasons. Strabo takes issue with Eratosthenes' denial of knowledge to Homer, and therefore with the latter's opposition to the didactic function of literature. His espousal of pleasure as Homer's chief justification fore-shadows the better argued theoretical position of Philodemus.43 |
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If we go back to the four divisions used to categorize the chief concerns of different literary critics and theorists (Author, Text, World, and Audience), some further suggestive analogies can be drawn between ancient and modern criticism. |
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The author is curiously absent from the narration of events in epic, although the text may be that of the omniscient narrator. The tenuous status of "the author" is clear from the fact that he invokes a higher source for his narrative, not social formations or pressures, or even the bardic epic tradition (la langue, in Saussurian terminology), but the Muse(s) or some other divine source of inspiration (Hermes, Apollo or Dionysus). Little attention was paid to the personality of the author or poet, perhaps because of the very communal nature of artistic production in archaic Greece. The romantic view of literature as a form of self-expression was alien to Greek thinking, but the idea of some divine or daemonic inspiration that took over the poet dominated early Greek discussions of poetry: the speaker is not so much Homer as the Muse who speaks through him. Consequently early Greek criticism has little interest in authorial intent and looks to the text itself for critical illumination. Only later will some interest in the author's genius and individuality manifest itself, in Alexandrian chronological research, in the Peripatetic biographers, and in such later works as pseudo-Longinus' On the Sublime. And this interest was hardly salutary, since the biographers would use the literary works to draw crude inferences about the author's life and attitudes (hence the reputation of Euripides for misogyny and the strange views of Augustine about Apuleius.44) The more famous critics show little interest in the personality or motivations of the writer. The text therefore became the main object of concern in later literary criticism and theory, hence the unremitting analysis of formal features of oratory, prose and poetry: grammar, metrics, the study of tropes, metaphor, literary kinds, and so on. |
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As for the extrinsic referentiality of literature, the main concept around which the debate revolved in ancient literary theory was that of Mimesis. Like the modern "Picture Theory of Language" this concept of Art as an |
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43 On Philodemus, see Innes (1989) 215. |
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44 See Nagy (1989) and Slings (1990). The "I" in ancient literature is, as the Deconstructionist critic would say, highly problematic. The Pindaric "I" is not identifiable with the lyric poet who picks up his fee for a job well done for Hieron of Syracuse. For Latin literature, see Veyne (1964). |
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