Bloomsbury 2016 p/b 347pp £19.99 (ISBN 9781474260510)
Long ago we studied classics and hoped that we could get to know something of the lives and voices of the Greeks and Romans through what has survived of their culture. We were assured that one excellent reason why these old cultures were worth studying was that they had inspired the Renaissance in modern Europe with its rediscovery of ancient genres and artistic models. ‘The Classical Tradition’ was the name given to the exploration of how Greeks and Romans had inspired later ages to emulate them and there was a tendency to regard later writers as epigones of the ancients. This sort of trumpeting of ‘The Glory that was Greece’ (etc.) and view of classical cultural hegemony were later seen as no longer relevant in a post-colonial world.
Charles Martindale’s short book Redeeming the Text (1993) was a game-changer in the way in which many of us read the ancient world as we woke up to the new discipline of reader-reception theory. Deep Classics is the latest attempt to develop this enterprise. It voices some of the scepticism of a Martindale—unsure whether any reader can be said to be innocent when it comes to making judgements based on his/her own values and personal historical circumstances—and it also fixes its gaze on the middle distance, looking at how (e.g.) a Victorian scholar read the Iliad and why his reading is of interest in mapping the cultural history of recent times. The shadow of Kant looms behind the enterprise—we can never recover the inaccessible ‘thing-in-itself’ of the ancient text, and our attempts to discover the ancient world are inevitably in some senses the invention of a vision of our own. Obvious cases are Greek tragedy, where all we have is the libretto of the music drama, or Greek sculpture whose bright colours have long faded to paleness. Where reception theory (and now deep classics) takes this is into the study of the encounters themselves, putting our skills to the analysis of the act of interpretation and the ‘metalepsis’ (the act of association, strong or weak) which skips a millennium or two in linking the ancient with the modern.
This can sometimes lose sight of the actual Greeks and Romans; time moves forwards and not backwards, and so the focus tends to be more on the later rather than the earlier of the two. It studies Mrs Beeton and Nigella Lawson but does not actually look at the eggs and bacon. So, for instance, Shane Butler begins his essay with an interesting discussion of the meaning of oinopa ponton, reminiscent in a way of Taplin’s Homeric Soundings (1995)—a book which established the metaphor of marine soundings which this book takes as a motif. He then launches into an extended account of the sexuality of Achilles and how it was read by the Victorian scholar J.A. Symonds. This is obviously interesting material and engages well with the orthodoxy on asymmetric pederasty which is even today taken as axiomatic, but we are still left wondering why (if it matters) Homer left this question unspoken and unanswered.
Reception studies are by nature cosmopolitan in outlook, and Joshua Billings takes on the German engagement with the Greeks in an essay on the ‘Sigh of Philhellenism’. The essay inevitably bites off more than it can chew in such a short space: on the one hand it can only be a snapshot of the German attitude to the Greeks—he fails to make any mention of the greatest literary philhellene in German literature, Hölderlin, let alone Schiller’s Die Götter Griechenlands and Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie. On the other hand he makes too much of one passage in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris where Iphigenie (in character) longs for her Greek homeland as she is ‘immer fremd’. This to Billings is expressive of the complex mutual alienation between antiquity and the present, her sigh a ‘lingering doubt about the philhellenic project’ (p. 51) although there is no evidence for this in the play. He misses other open goals, too: if you want expressive sighs in German there is none better than Alkmene’s final word (‘ach!’) in Kleist’s marvellous play Amphitryon—but then Kleist is another author steeped in classics whom Billings could have used to good effect.
Similarly tantalising is the brief discussion of Rilke’s poem Archaischer Torso Apollos which Adam Lecznar sees as showing how ‘the narrator allows his presence in the current moment to outweigh his participation in a historical tradition of perception’. The statue is understood ‘both as a product of the historical context in which it was created and as a tangible part of the present in which it is observed’ (p.129), which is fine and very much in line with the ‘deep classics’ manifesto of seeing one’s seeing as an epistemological pose; but this does little for or with the text it prints, which is a deeply nuanced account of the impact of the stunted image of the god of healing ‘looking’ at the poet viewer: the final utterance of the poem (‘You must change your life’) is highly ironic and typical of the prophetic god Apollo, who for all his fragmentary state is still able to see the flaws in a physically complete viewer. Rilke (with his preoccupation with Orpheus, for instance) could have inspired a chapter to himself.
When this writer gets on to Nietzsche he quotes the famous passage from the Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen about excess of knowledge—what Nietzsche termed Erkenntnisekel. Nietzsche’s point was that knowledge on this scale has not been digested or internalised and that it impedes rather than empowers us. Lecznar’s take on this is that the knowledge is a problem as it has not been excreted, and this fits with his later emphasis on the anus. His reading of Joyce is (to me) somewhat flat-footed, failing to see the obvious bathetic irony in the passages he cites, where the high and the low co-exist in a wonderful mixture of style which challenges generic expectations rather than offering ‘an alternative mode of apprehending the world’ (p. 136).
The best chapter of the book for me is Giulia Sissa’s piece on ‘Medea’s Erotic Jealousy’, where the writer glides from Euripides to Aristotle to Seneca and back again in a wonderfully thought-provoking essay on just what sort of emotion ‘jealousy’ is. Sarah Nooter begins her piece on the Oresteia with a promisingly good reading of the end of the trilogy—before moving on to Pasolini and Fugard who rejected ‘the comforts of Aeschylus’ telos’ and whose versions of the play are more of a protest at its teleology than any sort of homage. Nietzsche could well have been brought in here—his famous remark in Die Geburt der Tragödie that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world be justified’ would have made a good place to start discussion of this trilogy—but that is perhaps a suggestion for another time.
Space prevents me from giving a full discussion of all the chapters, but there are several on the physical remains of the ancient world—Alex Purves gives a nice account of Polyphemus’ poor ram and the links between touch and emotion; Helen Slaney similarly discusses ‘haptic awareness’ as a way into our knowledge of the ancients; and Stephanie Ann Frampton uses stone as a record of the past in both geology and also inscriptions. There is also a chapter on ‘Etymological “Alterity”’ (by Joshua Katz) which uses the detail of philology to examine the ways in which etymology can provide a fertile source of linkage between past and present; and an exuberant article on ‘Queer Unhistoricism’ by Sebstian Matzner which looks at the challenge to chronological ordering formed by Queer theory – a process the author calls ‘dechronolization’ and which he illustrates with material from two modern novels which were new to me but now on my reading list.
There is a fascinating account by Edmund Richardson of the ghost-busting psychic work of such classical luminaries as Gilbert Murray and Professor E.R. Dodds—complete with the wonderful tale of Jackson Knight getting a séance to consult the ghost of Virgil as he was preparing his famous translation for Penguin Classics, while the imagery of ghosts is used to good effect by Davide Susanetti in a chapter on the ‘Circulation of spectres: ghosts and spells’. The use of the centaur in Algernon Blackwood’s novel of that name is explored by Mark Payne: this is one of the chapters which is predominantly about the ‘later’ with little overt reference to the ‘ancient’, but its analysis is thorough and detailed and this chapter said a lot in a short compass.
More discursive chapters are those on Borges (by Laura Jansen) and on ‘Cosmopoiesis’ by Brooke Holmes. In both of these the focus is on the act of looking and the limitations of our knowledge and vision, and these late chapters in the book above all show how the initial sceptical thrust of reader-reception theory has given way to a more nuanced celebration of the possibilities of ‘creative symbiosis’ between the ancient and the modern world. ‘We need to rethink the common denominator’ says Brooke Holmes, and one is tempted to agree but also to add that every generation (thinks it) is doing this.
The end-result of the cosmopoietic process is both exhilarating and daunting—a world where classics, like the imperium which Jupiter prophesies in the Aeneid, knows no borders in time or space but will embrace the whole world of history and culture—and even the stars; Laura Jansen’s final chapter nicely begins with the Epicurean mission to go extra moenia mundi (in Lucretius’ words) and contrasts the positivist view of philosophy here with the modern sceptical recognition that we are all in a sense like the Tiresias-like figure of Borges, blind in our partiality of perspective but seeing more clearly for it.
Some will not like this sort of thing. It takes the ‘classics’ out of classics in the sense that it tends to remove the cultural hegemony and centrality of the ancient world, and it also often takes the classics out of classics by starting out in the ancient world and then veering off into the modern world and not going back again (as with the chapter on the Oresteia). As a breeding ground of Ph.D. theses, this is wonderfully fertile soil, and I found myself constantly shouting suggestions for other areas to look at, but the main drawback with this book is that for a volume called Deep Classics it is sometimes shallow. Brooke Holmes puts it well (p. 279): ‘the fear is…of a picture pretty obviously limited by the interest, expertise and knowledge of its authors, a picture whose omissions are conveniently forgotten so that it can be offered up as a totality to reground the unity of “the classical” as Western’. The scope of the enterprise is limitless, and it is hard to do justice to these intellectual giants of the modern world in a few short pages. Too much is attempted in too short a span; and the bibliography is also disappointing, being mostly Anglophone and ignoring much of the work done on the continent on these (often continental) writers.
The book will strike some readers, for these reasons, as neither ‘deep’ nor ‘classics’. It is, however, entertaining stuff and opens areas where we may not have looked before: one could see it perhaps as a set of starters on a menu, offering a taste of what will certainly be fruitful and more substantial research in the future.
John Godwin