Classics rejected

The history of the study of Classics has become a fashionable topic to explore over the last few years (well, fashionable among professional classicists, that is). It’s a branch of what we have come to call “reception studies”.

Mostly we have concentrated on investigating the careers of our successful predecessors. Top of the list have been the likes of Sir Richard Jebb (in the picture), prolific commentator on Sophocles (his commentaries are still in use today after more than a hundred years), professor of Greek at Cambridge, member of parliament and self-interested dandy (“What time he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties” as the Master of his college nicely quipped).

Or there’s my own particular love-hate subject --  Newnham don, contrived eccentric and the first professional woman classicist in this country, Jane Ellen Harrison. When she was a student she apparently turned William Gladstone apoplectic on a visit to the college. Asked what her favourite Greek author was, she replied “Euripides”. Not enough to enrage a modern Prime Minister. But for Gladstone the right answer was always Homer, and Harrison – by choosing the radical and unsettling Athenian dramatist – was intentionally trying to needle the Grand Old Man. It worked.

But last Saturday one of our graduate students hosted an excellent conference on the other side of this story: those who didn’t make it, those who were squeezed out by the big guys, those who hated it. It was called “Classics rejected": the start, as one of the session chairs quipped, almost as nicely as Jebb’s Master, of a new science of “rejection studies”.

The day was full of stories of tragic and not-so-tragic rejection. Ed Richardson, the conference organizer, lingered on the life history of the Victorian Theodore Buckley, translator of enormous tracts of classical literature, alcoholic, opium addict – as well as  hammer of the bourgeoisie and of the establishment view of classical greatness. (He showed a great Buckley cartoon of the pitiful, tattered ghost of the murdered Julius Caesar ruefully eyeing up a  beautifully presented, imposing Victorian bust of himself.)

Others talked about A. E. Housman failing his degree (before going on the chair of Latin in Cambridge), about books that never got published, about reforms that never took off and about mavericks driven out of Oxbridge and forced to take refuge in “the colonies” (one suspects that they might have had a better time).

I’m not sure what the intended conclusion was. I came away with the sense that you could partly put the longevity of Classics down to the fact that it actually managed its dissidents rather well. Indeed the discipline thrived on tolerating and ultimately incorporating its own internal enemies into the mainstream. It was a broad church pretending to be a narrow one.

I also found myself wondering how far any of the people we had discussed really were failures (the proper failures don’t leave behind enough information to make material for a conference). Very few of our chosen subjects could count as the failures they sometimes made themselves out to be. The “successful” Jane Harrison is a good example of this. As a  woman, she was certainly a victim of discrimination of all sorts and made no bones about it;  but she ended up turning her own marginality to excellent career effect – becoming the doyenne of studies of Greek religion and culture.

In fact just these points were made, self-referentially, at the conference itself. One of the distinguished speakers ended the day eloquently (and theatrically) asking the assembled company whether the whole project we were engaged on was now worthless and time-expired. Hadn’t Classics really had its day? Shouldn’t we be going off and learning Chinese and Arabic? (More on my own progress in that area will come in due course). Shouldn’t we get real?

At first sight, tough talk at a conference of classicists. But I suspect that it’s just that kind of internal opposition that keeps the subject on its toes. They are doubts that have been raised, albeit with different nuances, for hundreds of years – cathartically. I don’t suppose that any of us, even the eloquent speaker, will actually give the subject up.

Comments

[ushekimi]

Your diary is entertaining. But this very topic raises a sidebar as to the purpose of your webblog except as a waste station of acadmic gossip. What indeed you see your own contribution now that the "Classics had its day," so to speak.

[Clayton Burns]

Rejecting and being rejected: quite interesting. I would like to see a study of those ejected from Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove," "The Beast in the Jungle," and "The Turn of the Screw." Among those thrown out of the novella we would have to include psychoanalytic readers. "When Dead Tongues Speak," edited by John Gruber-Miller, might be worth considering when examining the state of teaching of the classics. It puzzles me that Oxford and Cambridge put up with such wretched dictionaries and grammars for Greek and Latin. Why not apply and extend the COBUILD method? Their intermediate English grammar, especially the units on tenses, modals, and subordination, is the best introduction to the subject. Their advanced learner's dictionary is excellent, and the grammar and dictionary link well. The severe limitation is the lack of a grammar reader. If we chose 10 Victorian novels from "Oliver Twist" to "Jude the Obscure" as our database and taught past conditional hypotheticals, for example, with a wealth of example paragraphs from "The Moonstone," as one good source, we would help students a lot. We also need to have students practise transforming sentences containing reason, result, and purpose clauses into past conditional hypotheticals: "The houses were knocked down so that they could be replaced by condos and office blocks." "If the houses hadn't been knocked down, they wouldn't have been replaced by condos and office blocks." "If the condos and office blocks hadn't been built, the houses would not have had to be knocked down." Since Greek grammar materials are often old- fashioned, they may not promote language plasticity. One advantage of Greek and Latin, I suppose, is that so little literature has survived that it would be easy to tag every word so that any feature such as "metaphoric global" (as with Father Mapple in "Moby-Dick," impregnable in his "little Quebec") could be traced. Oxford and Cambridge would be in a good position to solve the indexing problem in texts in the humanities by asking the British government to set a legal requirement that every non-fiction book on classical subjects, as a pilot project, would have to have a true standardized analytical index that would have to be submitted and merged with other indexes on the classics to be posted on the Internet before the books appeared in bookstores or libraries. Within a few years, everyone would have accepted this system. If I were looking for a name or a concept, I would not have to take down every book in a section and look at the index. Audio for English literature is sometimes not especially good. Helen Vendler's oral rendition of Shakespeare's sonnet 43 is wrong because of her insensitivity to the sound patterns, so her written interpretation is imprecise too. Her analysis of "Ode to a Nightingale" is insensitive as well, so if I hear her reading the poem I will probably not be impressed. Similarly, actors seem to be happy enough to pretend to be acting in "Macbeth" without really grasping the bilabials. Can actors act a play if they can't understand it? Did the translation of "The Turn of the Screw" by Jean Pavans capture the meaning of James's novella, given that nobody has been able to decipher it? In my study of Greek literature, the oral qualities emerged only haltingly. Without powerful oral performances in ancient Greek of Sophocles's Oedipus plays, would it be possible to understand them? If one were to argue that Greek and Latin teaching must be revolutionized, how could that revolution be brought about? I suspect that a lot of the rejectionism is a distaste for ritualistic obsolescence in classics. It's a shame, considering the beauty of "autochthonous," "disaster," and "premonition." Will you ever be able to read "Leda and the Swan" without Greek?

[Candadai Tirumalai]

About Gladstone and Homer: the Grand Old Man not only published a book on Homer and the Homeric Age but argued that the way for Christianity was prepared more by the Greeks and classical culture than by the Hebrews and the Old Testament.

[Xjy]

Difficult to get a grip on this. But maybe the question "Shouldn't we get real?" is the key?

The reality is the passion and enthusiasm in each of us for learning and enjoying and sharing.

All the institutional ramifications society comes up with just provide an interface between our needs as a collective (still far from clearly articulated!) and our needs as individuals. If the collective and individual needs are in tune, the institution is all, and provides a great framework for enthusiastic individuals. If not, it ossifies and then either cracks up or explodes or jellies its way to some new incarnation.

Recognizing the real contribution to be made by institutionally "eccentric" but individually passionate outsiders is one way of jellying up the petrified bones of institutions. Softening a little the mind-forged manacles.

Right now too many passionate people are being shut out. Less jelly, more gelignite.