Maxwell A. Gray
On first glance, “oral-traditional signature” is an oxymoron. Only the literate in literary contexts sign their names on dotted lines, for example. And yet, Albert Lord gave credit to the “signature” of the oral poet (Lord 1960). I will explore this question of the signature of the oral poet and, working from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, elucidate the structure of the economy of oral-traditional signature through a reading of the ‘seal’ (σφρηγὶς) of Theognis, which after a series of divine invocations opens the corpus of some 1,400 lines of elegy known as the Theognidea.
Gregory Nagy and Thomas Hubbard represent two points of view on the seal as related to the naming of Theognis in the poetry. On the one hand, Nagy, who has argued that Theognis is a traditional narrative and that the Theognidea is a synthesis of a diachronic oral tradition (Nagy 1985), has written, “With his seal, the man who calls himself Theognis is authorizing himself, making himself the author” (Nagy 2004). On the other hand, Thomas Hubbard has recently worked from Lord in such a way as to read the seal of Theognis as a mark of poetic ownership in an oral-traditional context (Hubbard 2007).
I propose an alternative reading of the seal as related to the naming of Theognis in the poetry that works from the multi-vocal and cross-temporal nature of the naming itself: ὧδε δὲ πᾶς τις ἐρεῖ: ‘Θεύγνιδός ἐστιν ἔπη / τοῦ Μεγαρέως πάντας δὲ κατ᾽ ἀνθρώπους ὀνομαστοῦ,’ / ἀστοῖσιν δ᾽ οὔπω πᾶσιν ἁδεῖν δύναμαι: (22-24). Theognis is always already named in the voice of another and in the future (he is ‘not yet’ able to please all the astoi). Discussions of the performance of an oral poet like Theognis tend to focus their attention on the fragmentation of the oral poet’s identity through historical processes of oral-traditional transmission and reception. The textual scene of Theognis naming his own name—for the first and last time—in the voice of another in the future complicates this paradigm because its temporal status cannot be simply located either in the past, present or future of Theognis.
Much later in the Theognidea, Theognis’s suspension between life and death reflects this temporality: αἴθων μὲν γένος εἰμί, πόλιν δ᾽ εὐτείχεα Θήβην / οἰκῶ πατρῴας γῆς ἀπερυκόμενος (1209-1210). In the textual chain with which the poetry plays the ring of οἰκέω (‘to abode’) is as likely followed by that of οἶκος (‘house’) as by that of οἴκησις (‘tomb’). This moment of suspension is that in which Theognis names his own name in the voice of another in the future. In this moment of suspension between past, present and future as well as life and death alike, the decision between Theognis as poet and Theognis as tradition is ultimately undecidable, itself in a state of permanent suspension.