Greer's application of the phrase "male display" to poetry seems
derived (though I'm not sure she's aware of it) from recent theories
about the evolution of human language via sexual selection, which have
been described in popular science books by authors such as Matt
Ridley.
Very briefly, the idea is this: Though evolution has traditionally
been thought of as a slowly incremental process, there are examples of
evolution happening by leaps -- drastic changes in a species which
occur, in terms of evolutionary time, very suddenly. One theory is
that such sudden changes are driven by sexual selection. For example,
suppose in a certain species of birds females, for whatever reasons,
are more likely to mate with a male that has a red dot on its tail.
Thus males with red dots will have more offspring than those without,
and those male offspring will inherit the father's red dot. But also
-- and this is fundamentally important -- the female offspring will
inherit their mother's tendency to prefer to mate with red dot males.
Thus the next generation will have an increased number both of red-dot
males and of females who prefer them, and the generation after that
will have still more of both. The process will recycle and feed on
itself to quickly spread both male red tail dots and female preference
for them throughout the species. And if bigger red dots are more
attractive to females than smaller ones, the same process will
generate a rapid increase in the typical size of male red dots over
the generations.
Some anthropologists and prehistorians believe that human language was
such a sudden evolutionary leap. And it's been suggested that this
sudden leap, like others, was driven by sexual selection. If women
are more likely to mate with men who can articulate language, their
offspring will inherit both their father's articulateness and their
mother's preference for articulate men, and the prevalence and
elaborateness of that articulateness will rapidly spread through the
species.
Such at least is the theory, which of course has all sorts of things
wrong with it, and if you want to argue with it please note that
you're not arguing with me, since I don't claim it's true. But I do
think it's an interesting idea, and worth pursuing to see where it
leads. I want to preface the following remarks not with "Here's
what's true," but with "What if this were true?"
I'm not aware that any science writers have tried to connect poetry in
particular with such an evolutionary process, but the theory does fit
intriguingly with the fact that one of the two basic themes of poetry
is seduction (the other is mourning.) If the theory seems sexist
because it appropriates much of poetry as a male capability, it could
also be seen as being at least not incompatible with feminist concerns
about female voicelessness.
Men seduce by acting; women seduce by being. That statement is
offered as, and surely can be defended as, a description of the
cultural reality. Yes you there in the back. "But that's only the
cultural reality from a male point of view!" Well of course it is.
What other view can I take? Anyway: If seduction poetry is a
linguistic sexual display action, then it is essentially male, which
means that women can enter into the whole half realm of poetry which
is seduction display only by taking on a male voice. The problem of
finding a specifically female seduction voice remains to be solved.
It's interesting in this regard that the classic female seduction poem
in western literature, Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite (a translation of
which I posted here recently) consists entirely of an appeal to a more
powerful (though to be sure female) third party to effect the
seduction: the poet herself in this case performs no linguistic
action directly for the benefit of the desired person. Or does she?
Is the poem really addressed to an observer, the desired? I don't
know. As usual with Sappho, I'm left admiring and grasping.
--
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
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