The Heart of Helen in the Speakerly-ness of Aristotle

What if someone showed us very clear signs that key feminist concepts are at the heart of Homer’s patrilineage?

What if Aristotle’s Rhetoric were a grappling or an apparent grappling with that?

Shall we consider, FIRST, epic narratives of the man, Homer and his people, centered around the woman, Helen?

And, SECOND, can’t we re-view whether we’ve lost anything across shallow translation by refusing to read deeply enough of father Homer and mother Helen?

And, THIRDLY, might we reconsider treatise of father Aristotle written around (womanly) speakerly-ness (Περὶ Ῥητορικης)?

So, FIRST, in Odyssey (a titular play on words), we should hear (and read) Homer’s “Odysseus” (another word play), saying this:

εἰ δ' ἄγε δή, καὶ σῆμα ἀριφραδὲς ἄλλο τι δείξω,

ὄφρα μ' ἐῢγνῶτον πιστωθῆτόν τ' ἐνὶθυμῷ,

And, if we sit with Illiad long enough, we find this repeated five times:

ἀλλὰ τίη μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός;

But can we “get” their Hellenism (of events around Helen spoken of from around 1200 BC and written down first around 700 BC) through translation into our English (or perhaps even into modern Greek) now?

Are our problems really just time and space, orality and literacy, the “original” Greek and the “target” modern langauge?

Or might the issues be the quality of translation?

Couldn’t Homer’s patriarchy have been born of woman and her language? And might we not try a translation that is more Hellenistic, more polymorphic and not so dimorphic? Do you recognize Nancy Mairs’s language here? Would you mind re-reading all over again what she says, how she writes, in her Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer? She risks a dimorphic binary when she says to our dimorphic ears this:

The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halved engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites.

Which is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. Some theorists would claim that all subjects function thus. But as Julia Kristeva points out, female subjectivity, traditionally linked to cyclical and monumental time rather than to linear time, lies outside “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb, topic – comment, beginning – ending).” Possessing an “irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,” a woman may be driven “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.”

The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy. (40-42)

So we now, with Mairs, must unfold this further, must enfold the other into a translation of absolute radical alterity. The “original” Homer and Helen began this after all.

And, SECOND, here’s a re-view of Homer. Here’re those couple of lines from Odyssey (21.217 and 18):

εἰ δ' ἄγε δή, καὶ σῆμα ἀριφραδὲς ἄλλο τι δείξω,

ὄφρα μ' ἐῢγνῶτον πιστωθῆτόν τ' ἐνὶθυμῷ,

A pure translation by a “fundamental structure of patriarchy” is Samuel Butler’s translation (of Odyssey of 1900):

I will now give you a convincing proof [sêma]

that you may know me and be assured.

Can we view what gets lost by reducing / καὶ σῆμα ἀριφραδὲς ἄλλο τι δείξω / to / a convincing proof [sêma] /

and by truncating / πιστωθῆτόν τ' ἐνὶθυμῷ / to / be assured /. The really odd, maybe ironic, thing is that, in 1897, Samuel Butler speculated that Odyssey was not authored by the man, Homer, but by an “authoress,” a woman. Some think Butler was just a man trying for satire, for sarcasm; and his very abstracted English for Homer’s lines here suggest that this translator was no feminist. At least he was familiar with opposites, with the man / woman binary, with “the fundamental structure of patriarchy.”

So what more might an-other kind of translation, a more polymorphic, perhaps a feministic, translation find in the Hellenism of Homer?

Consider A.T. Murray’s translation (of 1919):

Nay, come, more than this, I will shew you also a manifest sign,

that you may know me well and be assured in heart,

Also consider James Huddleston’s translation (much more recent):

Come now, I'll show you something else, a sign, a very clear one,

so you'll know me well and trust me in your heart,

The quality of knowing and the passionate location of being assured and of trust are added. And there’s absolutely no need for a transliteration such as “[sêma]” to explain an abstract concept such as “proof” since “sign” is as “manifest” and as “very clear” as “σῆμα” is “ἀριφραδὲς.”

So before turning to Aristotle’s Hellenist language, let’s look a bit more at Homer’s and at what gets lost and found in our translations. Here’s that five-time repeated line in Illiad (11.407; 17.97; 21.562; 22.122; 22.385):

ἀλλὰ τίη μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός;

Butler, in 1898 or so, has the five different speakers saying the line in respective ways in English, “predicated on separation not relation”:

But why talk to myself in this way? / (Odysseus)

Why, however, should I thus hesitate? / (a son of Atreus)

But why commune with myself in this way? / (Agenor)

but why argue with myself in this way? / (Hector)

But why argue with myself in this way, / (Achilles)

But Homer’s characters vary their Hellenistic speech in context and in audience alone, and (we) his audiences “get” them and their internal declarations.

And A. T. Murray, around 1919, “gets” Helen’s Illiad too (in 11.407; 17.97; 21.562; 22.122; 22.385):

But why doth my heart thus hold converse with me?

Similarly Richmond Lattimore much more recently “gets” Helen’s Illiad too (in 11.407; 17.97; 21.562; 22.122; 22.385):

Yet still, why does the heart within me debate on these things?

They “get” Illiad as Mairs “gets,” as a woman, “a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it.”

From Helen, from Homer, from Murray, from Lattimore, from Huddleston, we see that Aristotle is never completely able to be differentiated from Mairs:

σῆμα is a sign (not simply some precise, technical proof [sêma] )

δείξω shews and may later show (but does not invariably force a con man’s convincing anything)

you may ἐῢγνῶτον or know well (and the good quality matters to me and you)

your πιστωθῆτόν is your belief (is hardly a persuasion, an assurance, a formal proof).

since an affectionate friend is φίλος who is to be personally acknowledged (not silent) even as part of me

as διελέξατο talks across, con-verses, and debates

(but does it “hesitate” as with the structured argument A plus B equals C??)

(and how does ἐνὶθυμῷ become a “dialectic’s rhetorical syllogism” aka “the enthymeme”)

since ἐνὶθυμῷ is where πιστωθῆτόν is embodied,

since the heart within me and you is where belief is incarnate?

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So, THIRD-LY, here’s a view of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, his third and fourth “definitions” of “rhetoric”:

Click here to re-view the elegance. (And see the contrast, the mere dimorphic binaries in translations by Freese, Roberts, Lawson-Tancred, and Kennedy. Though I’ve color-coded and rearranged their translations for comparison with Aristotle and with our feministic translation, these four translators have divided into separate paragraphs the two verses 7 and 8 of chapter 2 of Book I).

There’s hardly bi-nariness in these “definitions” of “rhetoric.” If a structure at all, Aristotle’s Hellenism is a polymorphiness, maybe triplets within triads of paragraphs:

• περι, περι, τρίτον περὶ (or around, around, thirdly around without the need to mention “firstly” or “secondly”)

note each of the three issues of ἕκαστόν . . . τω̂ν παθω̂ν

• τὰ μὲν δι', τὰ δὲ δι', τὰ δὲ καὶ δι', ἔστι γὰρ
• τὸ μὲν, τὸ δὲ, τὸ δε . . . καὶ, ἔστι γὰρ

There’re the πίστεις to begin, which Aristotle comes round to at the end. Are these really “proofs,” “persuasions,” and “pisteis” (as for Freese, Roberts, Lawson-Tancred, and Kennedy)? Might they not be believable things (for you and me, as for Homer, and the Septuagint translators, and the New Testament writers, and as for Murray and Huddleston and C. Jan Swearinger)?

Isn’t what’s φανερὸν what’s apparent at the start also apparent through and through? If later in the passage -- for Freese, Roberts, Lawson-Tancred, and Kennedy – it’s finally like a “Greek” phantom (in order to form the binary real vs. “apparent”), then how so initially “evident” and unmistakably “clear”?

How are περὶ τὰ ἤθη so different from περὶ τὰ ἤθη πραγματείας? How do “characters” differentiate from the “business of characters” – unless like Freese, Roberts, Lawson-Tancred, and Kennedy, one divides the latter into “science of ethics” or “ethical studies” or “study of ethics” or “ethical studies”?

Aren’t the types of conversing-ness similar, and doesn’t Aristotle show that and not divide them so?

τὴν ῥητορικὴν οἱ̂ον παραφυές τι τη̂ς διαλεκτικη̂ς

And don’t πίστεις come back around to the birthing of natural born triplets?

• a show: δεικνύναι (hardly the “employment of proof” or the “demonstrative proofs” or the “logical persuasion” of Freese, Roberts, Lawson-Tancred, and Kennedy).
• a showing by declarations of the friendly sort in Homer’s Illiad: παραδείγματα λέγοντες(hardly the precise “examples” and “paradigms” of Freese, Roberts, Lawson-Tancred, and Kennedy).
• and the inner heart (hardly the precise “enthymeme” of Freese, Roberts, Lawson-Tancred, and Kennedy).

So what can we find, in feminist translation, if not the heart of Helen and of Hellenism in the patrilineage of Homer and in the Speakerly-ness of Aristotle?