Hesiod’s Muses: A Study in Polysemy

Theogony 26-28
ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.


     The Theogony tells us that when the Muses appeared to Hesiod they told him, “we know how to say many false things seeming true, but we also know, when we like, to sing the truth.” Being divine, and artistic and female to boot, even in this personal epiphany, they are likely to have intended multiple meanings and to have implied more than they said. Sketching out the semantic field defined by these few lines is a task without the closure of a single direct answer. As in poetry in general, the reader or listener constructs meaning from data less prescriptive than suggestive.


1.
     Considering the insults in the line preceding the Muses’ statement in which they address the poet and his fellow workers with the words “shepherds of the fields, miserable disgraces, nothing but bellies,” they may seem to be simply teasing the wretched ground-grubbing human with his limitations. Able to do nothing but stuff his mouth, he cannot hope to discern truth from lie. Any revelations they may make are then of no use to him, mingled as they are with misleading falsehoods. Though one might take their appearance as a seal of authenticity, an assertion of the authority of revelation, coming as they do from “aegis-holding Zeus,” this warning undercuts the guarantee as soon as it is delivered. The theme would then be one familiar to readers of Works and Days which admits humankind’s wretchedness and ignorance.
     In Plato’s Laws a similar sentiment appears. “Let us suppose that each of us living creatures is an ingenious puppet of the gods, whether contrived by way of a toy of theirs or for some serious purpose—for as to that we know nothing.” (R. G. Bury’s translation, I 644d) Later Plato elaborates this notion, adding that, rather than feel despair over the darkness in which we must live, we should rather emulate the divine practice of play. “Man is contrived, as we said above, to be a plaything of God, and the best part of him is really just that; and thus I say that every man and woman ought to pass through life in accordance with this character, playing at the noblest of pastimes, being otherwise minded than they now are.” (VII 803c) Art, of course, is the most sophisticated form of play.


2.
     An element of poetic play entailed in every performance or publication is the author’s demand for attention. Anyone seeking an audience cannot avoid the arrogance inherent in the writer’s position. The implicit call of every text is in the first instance, “Give me a hearing. Dismiss all other voices from your mind and listen only to mine.” All writers are in fact saying what the poet of the medieval romnce Octavian says at the outset.


Lytyll and mykyll, olde and yonge,
Lystenyth now to my talking.


     In support of this claim on the attention of others, Hesiod’s Muses pointedly describe some poetry as false and by this warning imply that their own revelations bear the imprimatur of heaven.
     This universal poetic pretension may also bear traces of its immediate history. It may be that the specific circumstances surrounding this poem include a conscious campaign to reconcile the myriad alternatives and contradictions in Greek religion to establish a canonical version of the mythological system which must replace all competing versions. The authority of Hesiod’s version depends on denying all the others. The success of an all-Hellenic theogony requires condemning other poets whose versions may feature regional forms of deity and local patrons. Having experienced a theophany, Hesiod is presumably on good terms with the Muses, his work authenticated by his divine encounter, while only deceit is associated with authors lacking such a benediction.


3.
     The text is often taken to mean that some poetry contains truth while some expresses specious lies, an idea easily assimilated to familiar aesthetic value judgements. If discerning the one from the other were a simple matter of checking the data of poetry against the reader’s lived experience, everyone would be a competent critic, but the Muses suggest that distinguishing true from false may be elusive.
     This is, of course, the very issue that problematized poetry for Plato. While conceding the divine inspiration of some poetry and acknowledging the power of art, whether fostering truth or delusion, Plato takes the safer option of forbidding poetry altogether in his Republic rather than risking that the wrong sort might gain influence. (He seems to have entertained no such fear of erring philosophers.)
     A similar view of poetry might be taken by less sophisticated Roman Catholics to whom accordance with church dogma is a precondition of good literature or vulgar Marxists who insist on working class heroes. Indeed, every reviewer who finds a book does not correspond to preconceptions might consider it to be lies, a retrograde standard indeed. The same criterion is implied when a work is praised as insightful or true-to-life.
     Complicating this sort of judgement is the fact that every text contains countless details and thus innumerable links to lived experience. Must every one of these prove accurate for the work to be deemed true? What about ambivalent relationships between the text and perceived reality: could a poetic line be partially true? Both true and false or neither? Who is able to determine an accurate measurement of truth? Short of revealed scripture (and then only for the fundamentalist believer) surely every text occupies an indeterminate middle ground.


4.
     Given the difficulty of assigning a poem a truth value that will be accepted by all informed readers, it may be that the Muses had in mind a more modest assertion and meant to claim only that some texts seem real, while others seem to lie. In this case they simply distinguish between imaginative works that possess verisimilitude, whether in details of setting, psychology, or theme from those constructed with the use of other conventions. Sidney’s Arcadia could hardly be taken for the record of actual events, nor could Barthelme’s Snow White, but this is not because the authors were incapable of representing plausible events, but because their projects were altogether different. The Muses might in this sense be thought to be boasting about the range of effects of which they are capable.
     The writer’s choice is not binary. Often poetry is found in the borderline territory between apparent truth and seeming fantasy. In their division of labor for Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was to find the extraordinary in the mundane while Coleridge was to work on the recognizable within the exotic, but for both it is the contrast, the mixture that generates poetry. Though such a systematically self-conscious approach is exceptional, any number of combinations of the convincingly realistic and the conspicuously fabulous may be effectively used construct aesthetic texts.


5.
     The Muses’ formula may also be taken as a definition of literature, described with the unique quality of being at once both true and false. Every fictional story is, of course, false in the sense that it did not literally happen. Every poem as well might be read as fiction, as though prefaced with the words, “Imagine that a person were to say this . . .” Paradoxically, literature acquires its general truth, what critics call its theme, its application to lived experience, by avoiding faithfulness to the mere details of what has actually happened.
     Hesiod’s theme would then be similar to Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry in the Poetics), though Aristotle mentions only the use of typical or most likely human behavior, saying “By a ‘general truth’ I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily.” (W. H. Fyfe’s translation ix 1451b6-7) Due probably to his focus on drama, Aristotle omits therefore the poet’s depiction of non-psychological themes based on what seems likely, typical, or general. Aristotle here fails to comment on perhaps the most assertive form of rhetorical lying, the use of figures of speech such as metaphor which signify something other from what they say on the surface. Yet these, too, are aimed at shadowing forth a greater truth beyond mere facts.
     By facilitating lying and in general the ability to speak of things unseen, the development of language forty some thousand years ago fostered not only better organized hunting but gave birth to art and religion as well. (See David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave) A recent scholar has suggested that the Muses mean to say not that their propositions might be falsely taken for truth, but rather that poetry is, in fact, a quasi-truth. “Seeming true” is then misleading; a better rendering would be “in a certain way equivalent to truth.” (See Bruce Heiden, “The Muses' Uncanny Lies: Hesiod, "Theogony" 27 and Its Translators,” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 128, no. 2 [Summer, 2007].)


6
     The perverse coyness of Hesiod’s muses will perhaps recall to the contemporary reader certain French theorists of the later twentieth century. The denial of straightforward signification, the questioning of the subject and mystification of the object may have startled Of Grammatology’s early readers, but such gestures became not only conventional, they became clichés in major literary conferences by the ‘eighties.
     The muses themselves are presumably as authoritative even as a Sorbonne professor when they cast doubt on the reliability of poetic truth. The ambiguity upon which they insist sounds altogether consistent with différance, and their magisterial attitude has a good deal in common with the mandarins of Paris and New Haven.
     Enough! The webs of signification have no end, but must be cut, like the threads in Atropos’ hand. The possibilities here outlined are sufficient to indicate some of their trajectories. As well as describing poetry, the Muses’ declaration embodies it. Aesthetic language differs from other discourses by its exploitation of polysemy. Each of the options outlined above is plausible. Each is founded on the text and on the characteristics of poetry. None is the whole truth, though each is true.