Shamans in Turtlenecks

Abstract

R EACH for earlier Greek literature chronologically, starting where it starts. Homer's two epics first, then fragments of the epic cycle, then Hesiod, then-always startling-early sixthcentury lyric poetry, Archilochos, Sappho, and Solon. The old carpet unrolling. Archilochos appears as a person in his poems, refers directly to himself both as a grammatical I, and more fully as a center of perceptions and attitudes. Come on this poet suddenly, in your passage back toward the present, and you are likely to be overwhelmed by the new verbal stance. But how do you know that stance is new? You see how hard it pushes back against what has preceded it, establishes what precedes it, as a precedent. The later text finds its presence in its act of resisting, or working against, and in combat "bringing out" the past. Or would we rather accept a compromise metaphor, to think of the present as illuminating the past? In either case the novelty of a particular instance-say Archilochos's poetry-is achieved by that poetry's working against its own immediate past. Any present's force has much to do with combat, with forcing the past to declare what it is. This combat operates clearly in a work of literature, as we can see in following the transition from the epic to the lyric achievement in early Greek culture. As we read him now, Homer is to us both what he is and what he is not. What he is not is the silent