Last time I described the use of the first person in a monument to Phrasikleia. The first-person narration adds yet a further dimension to the life force of the statue. The ancient Greek visitor would have read the inscription aloud because silent reading had not been invented yet. (Silent reading became widespread only in the early Christian centuries as a means of private devotion.) Throughout classical antiquity, people voiced the text in order to read it, and they often did so in the company of others. We can imagine a visitor standing in front of Phrasikleia’s monument as though meeting her for the first time. He sounds out the syllables to discover what they mean. The speech would seem spontaneous, of the moment.
The reader would thus voice the role of the statue, re-enacting its words as though he were an actor in a kind of miniature play who steps forward and delivers his line. In this way, the first-person inscription offers a mechanism for reviving Phrasikleia temporarily in the reader. The reader lends her a mouth, a tongue, a throat, lungs. Indeed, a whole body belongs once again to Phrasikleia. The reader becomes Phrasikleia. “I” is not a character who happens to narrate the story. We ourselves become the character and inhabit the story. It becomes our self at least for the moment.
The self of the statue and inscription does not substitute for Phrasikleia’s identity. It’s not a matter of resemblance even if we may assume that the statue looks like the human Phrasikleia did. Most visitors would never have seen the living Phrasikleia, so the soul or force of the monument that they feel consists of something else beside the echo of the living girl it might have evoked for her family and friends.
Indeed, they too never really knew Phrasikleia either, except as a self, that is, through the image or images she projected of herself. As in a dream, all selves exist on the plane of image, regardless of whether they are “real” (the girl) or “fake” (the statue). The viewer or reader experiences them the same way, and only subsequently do we attribute the self to life or art and assign different values to it.
The self comes from an act of linguistic creation. The Greeks and Romans imagined fate as an utterance. The gods observe humans and their actions dispassionately. At the critical moment, when the future of an individual hangs in the balance, the gods announce what will happen to him. The decree marks his character eternally. Hector will forever be known as the Trojan hero who was slain by Achilles and dragged around the walls of Troy behind a chariot. The gods made Hector’s fate manifest by pronouncing it. The act of speaking this fate equals the fate itself.
The word “fate” originally meant simply “that which has been said.” What had seemed unclear and indeterminate to humans one moment becomes clear and fixed the next, after the gods speak. We readers fashion our own fates through a similar act of pronunciation. An undifferentiated stream of words flows swiftly before our eyes and through our minds. At some point, like Creeley’s student, we cease to be passive observers and become the protagonist of our own dreams. We pick out a passage that strikes us. We start to hear rhythms in the text. We create something new out of them. That is who we are. That is our fate.
The Future of Reading 