Lamberton, 'Parole chez Hesiode', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9409
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9409-lamberton-parole

Marie-Christine Leclerc, <i>La Parole chez Hesiode</i>. Paris:
Les Belles Lettres, 1993. Pp. 350. ISBN 2-251-32643-X.
  Reviewed by Robert Lamberton -- Washington University

  In the recent literature on Hesiod there is general agreement
that speech, language, and specifically "the language of poetry"
(to borrow the phrase from Piero Pucci's title) are central
issues in the Hesiodic corpus, whether we view that corpus from
without, for the light it can throw on the evolution of archaic
Greek poetry, or from within, in terms of its internal dynamics
and thematics.  Hesiod proclaims the invention of the poet, the
individualized poetic persona.  He invents the poetic speaker and
repeatedly calls attention to the originality of that innovation.

  Not only is it inevitable, then, that any comprehensive study
of Hesiodic poetry come to terms with this aspect of the corpus,
but Hesiod's insistently self-referential diction, his poetry
that addresses the terms of its own generation, has been central
to most esthetic responses to the poems in this century.  By
singing himself singing his song, this bard (or tradition of
bards) introduces into hexameter poetry a complexity foreign to
Homeric epic, a play of interactions between poetic voice,
addressee, audience, and subject that situates the speaker in the
center of his fiction and so shifts the esthetic balance of the
poetry to privilege that complex of relationships.

  Marie-Christine Leclerc makes a very substantial contribution
to our understanding of these and related phenomena in her study
of Hesiod's language.  Her book came into being as a thesis for
the <i>doctorat d'Etat</i> and, true to the genre, foregrounds a
methodologically unimpeachable, deeply conservative approach to
the topic by way of a classification and analysis of the relevant
vocabulary in the <i>Theogony</i> and <i>Works and Days</i>.  The
flavor of the academic thesis is sustained in a number of
elegantly concise catalogues of the positions of earlier scholars
on a variety of problematic issues (e.g. poets and kings
[179-180], truth and lies [204-212], and Olympian vs. Heliconian
Muses [191-193]).  These are extremely valuable in themselves and
provide Leclerc with the foundations for her own, often original,
solutions.

  The book is organized with exemplary clarity into four
sections, each with a closing summary, followed by an overall
conclusion.  The opening section presents, in tabular form
followed by discussion, all instances of vocabulary designating
speech and related matters in the two poems central to the
corpus.  The reader has to wait quite a while for any real payoff
here and, the constraints of the genre of the philological
<i>these d'Etat</i> aside, much of this catalogue of data might
well have been relegated to an appendix, or to the deeper
oblivion of the unpublished accumulation of evidence from which
the study has emerged.  I do not mean this as gratuitous negative
criticism, but rather as due warning to the reader that what is
to follow is of far greater substance and interest, and as an
encouragement to persevere to reach the meat of the study.  Even
here, larger issues are set in relationship to the inquiry as
defined: the speech of gods and the speech of men are
distinguished and the latter defined as the locus of the moral
vision central to the corpus.  Speech emerges in the <i>Works and
Days</i> as an alternative, destructive or seductive, to the
industry to which the poem encourages its fictive and external
audiences.  The second section is built on a catalogue of the
instances of direct and indirect speech in the two poems, but
what emerges from the evaluation of these data substantially
advances the emergent theme of the distinction between human and
divine speech.  Hesiod's world, unlike Homer's, is one in which
these spheres of discourse are cut off one from another, one
where communication between men and gods is a matter for
specialists, namely the Muses and the poet (106-107).

  The third section sets out in search of a history (or an
anthropology) of human speech and though the Hesiodic text is
reticent on these matters, Leclerc concludes (126) that before
Pandora (or, one might say, before mankind was anything we might
recognize as such) human communication was "less opaque".  She
draws an interesting and original comparison between the two
Hesiodic versions of the Pandora story, observing that in the
<i>Theogony</i> we find a nameless female who brings named evils
into the world, while in the <i>Works and Days</i>  nameless
evils deprived of any voice are introduced by a named female,
herself endowed with a voice.  The Hecate "hymn" emerges
unexpectedly as a watershed in the <i>Theogony</i>:  of nine
mentions of human vocalization in the poem, humans are
represented as nominative performers of acts of speech only in
the portion of the poem preceding the Hecate passage.  Now it is
clear that Hesiod does not represent these matters in the context
of a historical (or temporal) sequence, but Leclerc proposes that
we may nevertheless recover an implicit sequence from the order
of presentation ("l'ordre du texte est porteur de sens" [253]). 
One may resist this notion, but the results are nevertheless
engaging:  what enters the world of discourse in the poem with
Hecate is prayer and from that point (in the narrative
organization of the poem and by implication in the projected
anthropology that results) "speech is inscribed in a hierarchical
order of the world" (154).  The great divorce between men and
gods at Mekone (expressed in Zeus' retribution in the form of
Pandora) is precisely what opens up the niche for the invention
of the poet, who will build there his "empire" as the great and
privileged communicator (156).

  The fourth and final section, by far the longest and richest,
focuses on the relationship of the poet and his Muses and the
installation of his privileged poetic discourse that mediates
between the mortal and the divine spheres:  the trajectory of
mankind toward progressive alienation from the gods,
characterized by further fragmentation and opacity of speech, is
countered by the "divine voice" of the poet, restoring the
prelapsarian fullness of speech characteristic of the age of
direct and immediate communication between god and man (181). 
There is evolution of the Muses themselves, Leclerc would have us
believe: from the very human and corporeal conception of the
Heliconian Muses (they bathe!) to the Olympian Muses "on the
immortal plane" (231), a progression in turn representing the
elevation of poetic speech to those realms, leaving behind the
Heliconian shepherds, those bestial, alienated GASTE/RES,
sleeping under the stars (231-232).  The final chapters (10 and
11) are again studies of vocabulary, but now the issue is not
representation of speech but the very act of naming--the "new"
common and proper nouns that form the building blocks of the
Hesiodic representation of the world of gods and men and of the
place of the divine voice of the poet in that divided sphere.

  This summary has, of necessity, been confined to a few
highlights of a study that pursues numerous lines of argument and
explores many issues, some familiar, some less so, in the
interpretation of the Hesiodic poems.  It is a study that rises
above its methodology and delivers a satisfying synthesis out of
parts that are sometimes disparate.  One might wish for more in
some areas.  There is, finally, no satisfying account of the role
of formulaic language and composition here--only a defensive
tendency to deny that a given phrase is formulaic, as if every
formula were an "empty formula" (e.g. on OU)K O)NOMASTO/S etc.,
263-264).  Her study might have benefited tremendously from the
incorporation or at least the acknowledgement of the sort of
analysis of speech and speech-acts in archaic poetry undertaken
by Richard Martin in <i>The Language of Heroes</i>, but most of
Leclerc's work was apparently complete before that suggestive
study appeared.  

  Finally, on the matter of indexing, the good news is that
there are both an index of "the principal citations" and a
general "index nominum et rerum", and for this we should be
thankful.  The bad news is that the latter is utterly inadequate,
with less than 70 entries, and selected according to no
recoverable principles (the only proper nouns are Apollon,
Helicon, Hermes, Mnemosyne, Muses and Orphee--you'll search on
your own for the scattered references to Pandora).  Moreover, the
absence of a Greek index to a work that presents itself as a
vocabulary study is incomprehensible.  These technical
shortcomings should not, of course, be laid at Leclerc's door. 
Perhaps we shall never meet each other's expectations in these
matters across the lines of language and culture.  But it is
clear to me that this would be a much more useful book if
provided with better tools to help the user locate or relocate
specific parts of the inquiry.

  This said, there is a great deal to recommend here.  What
begins as an all-too-modest vocabulary study blossoms into a rich
and extended meditation on the role of language in the
anthropology, theology, and poetics of the Hesiodic poems.