The palinodic strain

Abstract

This study investigates the theoretical and poetic legacy of palinode. Palinode, meaning “recantation,” originates with a poetic fragment of the 6^th-century BCE Greek lyric poet Stesichorus, in which the poet recanted a prior take on Helen of Troy and for which the cult heroine had, as legend has it, blinded him. His palinode was his palliation. The ancient literary tradition which received Stesichorus also attributed to his palinode the creation of a “phantom Helen,” in order to accommodate both his and Homeric versions of this foundational myth. The first two chapters of this study establish the figure of Helen and the palinode within the Classical context by analyzing the work of poets (such as Homer, Stesichorus, and Sappho), tragedians (such as Aeschylus and Euripides), rhetoricians (such as Gorgias and Isocrates), and philosophers (such as Plato). In the second half, I argue for palinode as a broader paradigm that organizes and (dis)orients desire, memory, and revision within the Western literary tradition, as seen in the theories of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes and the poetry of H.D. and Anne Carson. I argue that, as a “recantation,” the palinode's conjoined modalities of retraction and reinscription in negotiation of a contested female figure articulate the ambivalence in the classical inheritance and its reproductions, whether inscribed in the personal or psychoanalytic epistemology or the cultural or aesthetic tradition. Palinode, which the poet Lisa Robertson has called “the extreme of reception,” is hereby a key to understanding how, per Roland Barthes, “History is hysterical.”