The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind. But more than one response is possible to the acute awareness of self that ensues from the reach of desire. Neville conceives it as a “contraction” of the self upon itself and finds it merely strange. “How curiously one is changed,” he muses. He does not appear to hate the change, nor to relish it. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is delighted: “One seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete; one is more complete.… It is not merely that it changes the feeling of values; the lover is worth more” (1967, 426). It is not uncommon in love to experience this heightened sense of one’s own personality (‘I am more myself than ever before!’ the lover feels) and to rejoice in it, as Nietzsche does. The Greek lyric poets do not so rejoice.
Change of self is loss of self to these poets. Their metaphors for the experience are metaphors of war, disease and bodily dissolution. These metaphors assume a dynamic of assault and resistance. Extreme sensual tension between the self and its environment is the poets’ focus, and a particular image of that tension predominates. In Greek lyric poetry, eros is an experience of melting. The god of desire himself is traditionally called “melter of limbs” (Sappho, LP, fr. 130; Archilochos, West, IEG 196). His glance is “more melting than sleep or death” (Alkman 3 PMG). The lover whom he victimizes is a piece of wax, (Pindar, Snell-Maehler, fr. 123) dissolving at his touch. Is melting a good thing? That remains am bivalent. The image implies something sensually delicious, yet anxiety and confusion often attend it. Viscosity is an experience that repels in its own right, in the view of Jean-Paul Sartre. His remarks on the phenomenon stickiness may cast some light on the ancient attitude toward love:
An infant plunging its hands into a jar of honey is instantly involved in contemplating the formal properties of solids and liquids and the essential relation between the subjective experiencing self and the experienced world. The viscous is a state halfway between solid and liquid. It is like a cross-section in a process of change. It is unstable but it does not flow. It is soft, yielding, and compressible. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it. Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness. Plunging into water gives a different impression; I remain a solid. But to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity. Stickiness is clinging, like a too possessive dog or mistress. (1956, 606-607)
Sartre’s high-pitched (“it clings like a leech”) and all but irrational (“stickiness is a trap”) dismay at self-dilution has its analog in the ancient poets’ response to eros. Nonetheless, Sartre believes that something important can be learned from stickiness, as from a dogged mistress, about the properties of matter and the interrelation between self and other things. In experiencing and articulating the melting threat of eros, the Greek poets are presumably also learning something about their own bounded selves through the effort to resist dissolution of those bounds in erotic emotion. The physiology that they posit for the erotic experience is one which assumes eros to be hostile in intention and detrimental in effect. Alongside melting we might cite metaphors of piercing, crushing, bridling, roasting, stinging, biting, grating, cropping, poisoning, singeing and grinding to a powder, all of which are used of eros by the poets, giving a cumulative impression of intense concern for the integrity and control of one’s own body. The lover learns as he loses it to value the bounded entity of himself.
A crisis of contact, like the child’s encounter with honey in Sartre’s example, evokes this learning experience. Nowhere in the Western tradition is that crisis so vividly recorded as in Greek lyric verse, and literary historians like Bruno Snell claim primacy for the archaic age on the basis of this evidence. It is unfortunate that, in making this claim, Snell neglects an aspect of ancient experience that cuts straight across his record and might have furnished compelling testimony for his thesis, namely the phenomenon of alphabetic literacy. Reading and writing change people and change societies. It is not always easy to see how nor to trace out the subtle map of cause and effect that links such changes to their context. But we should make an effort to do so. There is an important, unanswerable question here. Is it a matter of coincidence that the poets who invented Eros, making of him a divinity and a literary obsession, were also the first authors in our tradition to leave us their poems in written form? To put the question more pungently, what is erotic about alphabetization? This may seem not so much an unanswerable as a foolish question, at first, but let us look closer into the selves of the first writers. Selves are crucial to writers.
Whether or not it seems fair to ascribe to the archaic poets a “discovery of mind” such as Snell outlines, undeniable evidence remains, in the preserved fragments of their verses, of a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it. Such a sensibility is not given voice in the poetry we have from before this period. Perhaps this is due to an accident of technology. Lyric poetry and the sensibility typical of it begin for us with Archilochos because his poems came to be written down, we do not know how or why, sometime in the seventh or sixth century B.C. Perhaps there were many Archilochoses before him composing oral lyrics about the depradations of Eros. Nonetheless, the fact that Archilochos and his lyric successors derive from a written tradition marks in itself a decisive difference between them and whatever was before, not just because it gives us their texts but because it cues us to certain radically new conditions of life and mind within which they were operating. Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in love in the same way.
The archaic age was in general a time of change, unrest and reordering. In politics with the rise of the polis, in economics with the invention of coinage, in poetics with the study by lyric poets of precise moments in personal life, and in communications technology with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet to Greece, this period may be seen as one of contraction and focus: contraction of large structures into smaller units, focus upon definition of those units. The phenomenon of alphabetization and the beginning of the spread of literacy throughout Greek society was perhaps the most dramatic of the innovations with which seventh- and sixth-century Greeks had to cope. The alphabet must have reached the Aegean in the course of trade by the second half of the eighth century, date of the earliest Greek examples yet found. Its dissemination was slow and its consequences are still being analyzed by scholars.6 What difference does literacy make?
Most obviously, the introduction of writing revolutionizes techniques of literary composition. Denys Page summarizes the practical details of the change as follows:
The principal characteristic of the pre-alphabetic method of poetic composition is dependence on a traditional stock of memorised formulas which, however flexible and receptive of additions and modifications, dictate in large measure not only the form but also the matter of poetry. The use of writing enabled the poet to make the word, rather than the phrase, the unit of composition; it assisted him to express ideas and describe events outside the traditional range; it gave him time to prepare his work in advance of publication, to pre-meditate more easily and at greater leisure what he should write, and to alter what he had written. (Fondation Hardt 1963, 119)
At the same time, a more private revolution is set in process by the phenomenon of alphabetization. As the audio-tactile world of the oral culture is transformed into a world of words on paper where vision is the principal conveyor of information, a reorientation of perceptual abilities begins to take place within the individual.
An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self. The difference revolves around the physiological and psychological phenomenon of individual self-control. Self-control is minimally stressed in an oral milieu where most of the data important for survival and understanding are channelled into the individual through the open conduits of his senses, particularly his sense of sound, in a continuous interaction linking him with the world outside him. Complete openness to the environment is a condition of optimum awareness and alertness for such a person, and a continual fluent interchange of sensual impressions and responses between the environment and himself is the proper condition of his physical and mental life. To close his senses off from the outside world would be counterproductive to life and to thought.
When people begin to learn reading and writing, a different scenario develops. Reading and writing require focusing the mental attention upon a text by means of the visual sense. As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him. This constitutes at first a laborious and painful effort for the individual, psychologists and sociologists tell us. In making the effort he becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action. The recognition that such controlling action is possible, and perhaps necessary, marks an important stage in ontogenetic as in phylogenetic development, a stage at which the individual personality gathers itself to resist disintegration.
If the presence or absence of literacy affects the way a person regards his own body, senses and self, that effect will significantly influence erotic life. It is in the poetry of those who were first exposed to a written alphabet and the demands of literacy that we encounter deliberate meditation upon the self, especially in the context of erotic desire. The singular intensity with which these poets insist on conceiving eros as lack may reflect, in some degree, that exposure. Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self. To control the boundaries is to possess oneself. For individuals to whom self-possession has become important, the influx of a sudden, strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event, as it may be in an oral environment where such incursions are the normal conductors of most of the important information that a person receives. When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets record this struggle from within a consciousness—perhaps new in the world—of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.
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6 Eric A. Havelock broke this ground in 1963 with his Preface to Plato, and he has continued to pursue the matter ever since; a bibliography is assembled in his recent collection, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (1982). See also Havelock and Hershbell 1978; Cole 1981; Davison 1962; Finnegan 1977; Goody 1968 and 1977; Graff 1981; Harvey 1978; Innis 1951; Johnston 1983; Knox 1968; Pomeroy 1977; Stolz and Shannon 1976; Svenbro 1976; Turner 1952.