OK, I’m guessing a lot of people, unless they have intimate knowledge of genre theory, will have no idea what I mean by that, and even less where I’m going with it.
In short, I’m trying to decide what I mean when I call a wedding song a genre of Greek poetry. To reach that conclusion, I have to decide what I mean by ‘genre’. It’s most commonly used of a ‘form’ of poetry or prose: lyric, epic, elegy, bucolic, novel, epistle, etc…a Kreuzung (der Gattungen) is a term coined by Kroll in the 1920s to remark on the hybridisation of genres, particularly in Hellenistic/Roman poetry, that occurs when elements of one form appear in another.
Hybrid is an interesting term in itself, as a lot of modern scholarship that follows Kroll (see Barchiesi 2001) explores what kind of metaphors we should use to describe this ‘crossing’, particularly in genetic terms. These days, such crossings are seen as more positive than negative – adding new meanings by adapting old forms, rather than a degeneration of those forms through cross-breeding (mongrels are always more intelligent, etc…)
So where on earth does this leave us with the wedding song?
I think the main problem is in the question, ‘What is a wedding song?’ (How can we tell?) It’s easy when you have a song obviously performed at a wedding, or a travesty of such. But many of the Greek songs are fragmentary (so we can’t tell), and many use epithalamial imagery to recall a wedding or evoke the scenario without actually being directly connected with that context.
Initially, I had followed a different model of genre (Cairns 1972) which defined categorisation in terms of content, rather than form: each genre possesses certain primary elements, usually related to the identities of the speaker and addressee, the relationship between them, and the setting; and secondary topoi or themes. Given the variety of speaker/addressee allocations in the wedding song, I adapted this slightly so that the ‘primary’ elements should be the bride, the bridegroom, and the wedding. Key terms to identify an epithalamium thus became numphê, gambros (or cognate term), and gamos or hymenaios. As for the topoi…well, I have 4 sides of A4 listing the different themes and images used by the epithalamium, and in other ‘epithalamial’ songs: the most popular is natural imagery, but also lamentation, celebration, beauty, praise, invective…the list goes on.
This didn’t go down so well in my viva, however. My examiners agreed on the need for classificatory terms, but the problem with Cairns’ model is that it’s anachronistic, and imposes a concept of generic fixity (and timelessness) onto a cultural context that probably didn’t have one.
A popular modern perception of genre is that you only really need the concept in a literate culture which analyses and categorises its own literature as a scholarly exercise. Thus, in archaic Greece, a mostly-illiterate society, would they have known such concepts as ‘epithalamium’, ‘propemptikon’, ‘hymn’, ‘genethlios’, etc, as defined by Menander Rhetor, or would they simply have recognised ‘lyric’ as poetry performed to the lyre – that is, identified with a particular performative context – and known these ‘sub-genres’ of lyric as occasions, rather than literary categories. Does the occasion define your elements, or do you compose with particular elements in mind for a particular occasion?
The ‘performative’ model carries a lot of weight – basically, ‘genre’ is inseparable from ‘performance’: the context, singer and audience all combine to determine the type of song produced. ‘Genre’ as we know it, is then what happens when those songs become ‘literature’, become separated from their direct context of performance and become canonised and thus categorised according to both form and content based on the ‘original’ performance.
I’m not sure how to separate these models, to use the best one. Of course performative context is going to be indicated by the presence of particular elements. These elements, when they intrude into a different context (lyric wedding songs in tragic/comic plays, for example) are going to produce a Kreuzung. Perhaps it is best to adopt some of Cairns’ terminology, without embracing uncritically his assumptions. By this reasoning, the performance of a wedding song is going to be indicated by terms associated with the ceremony of marriage. When wedding songs, or topoi associated with them, cross over into other generic ‘forms’ (particularly in the pre-Hellenistic period), it may be that a) the (internal) dramatic context is associated with a wedding, and a wedding song is a natural corollary – much like the tragic lament; b) performative context is inherently fluid and allows cross-fertilisation from other types of oral poetry (this might, for example, be seen in some of Sappho’s lyric re-workings of ‘epic’ Homeric themes), or c) that archaic and classical poets deliberately mixed things up to create particular effects, acknowledging the specificity of performative context and the results of such mixis. Or indeed, all three.
