The Problem of the Absent I Lyric Poetry and Deixis in ‘Mediated’ Communication

One of the greatest paradoxes of ancient Greek lyric poetry is its fundamental tension between the vivid evocation of a performance communicative context and the capability of the text to transcend the context itself. A key aspect of this is the way in which language can exploit both poles of this tension: the presentness of the performance and the transcendence of the text. This is a source of crucial interpretative problems, as well as of complex expressive potentialities. The focus of this paper is to examine some of the ways in which the shift of the use of first person indexicals serves the dialogue between text and performance, proceeding through three stages. In the first place I briefly analyze some different genres of discourse (drama, epistle, lyric) that in Archaic and Classical Greek display a complex use of indexicality calling attention to the ‘mediated’ nature of the communication process (§ 2). In the second stage I revise some examples of ‘mediated’ indexicality in Greek lyric in general (§ 3) and in Pindaric poetry in particular (§ 4). In the third stage I locate these cases within a wider comparative approach, exploring a suitable theoretical explanation of this important feature (§ 5).