Download PDF | Simon Goldhill - Preposterous Poetics_ The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity- (2020).
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PREPOSTEROUS POETICS.
How does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape? What is the impact on literary tradition of the new pressures of religious thinking? Tracing a journey over the first millennium that includes works in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, this book changes our understanding of late antiquity and how its literary productions make a significant contribution to the cultural changes that have shaped western Europe.
Simon Goldhill. is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. He is one of the best-known writers on Greek literature and culture, publishing almost twenty books and numerous articles on texts and topics from the whole span of antiquity and its reception, especially in the Victorian era. He has broadcast regularly on television and radio around the world, and has been profiled in newspapers from Brazil to Australia. His books have won three international prizes and been translated into ten languages.
Preface
The ‘unspeakable’ Optatian has been repeatedly denigrated as the fourthcentury writer who most painfully embodies a corrupt or trivializing turn
to ‘pure form’ – where meaning threatens to become ‘secondary to the
display of surface artistry (played out on the level of the poetic line, word
and letter)’.
‘Unspeakable’ is Alan Cameron’s judgement, but I suspect
he did not intend the word to be as richly ironic as it now seems, for if
there is any poet in antiquity whose work challenges the usual rule that
poetry and prose are expected to be read aloud, it is Optatian, whose
oeuvre is literally unspeakable.
His poems take the form of grids of letters
(carmen cancellatum) which can be read – indeed are designed to be read –
in multiple directions, and which can also encode patterns of letters that
also spell out images of ships or the Chi-Rho symbol of Christianity in and
across the grid. (Even the Chi-Rho is made up of letters which spell words
that can be read – in this case, most bizarrely of all, Greek words
transliterated into Latin, adding another palimpsestic layer of readerly
engagement, another form of double reading, another temporality of
interpretation).
This is flamboyant visual poetry, beyond even the technopaignia of
Hellenistic cleverness, that must be seen, and seen in different directions,
over time. It sits between pictorial representation and verbal significance –
and challenges the temporality and the singularity of what can be said.
His poetry may talk in traditional terms of ‘song’, ‘music’ and ‘metre’, but
it cannot be turned into the linear performance such tradition expects. He
even writes a quatrain (poem ), where the twenty words can designedly
be shuffled to create further verses – so that one manuscript, following therules for expansion given by a scholiast, has expanded the four lines into
seventy-two hexameters. If the rules for such expansion that are laid down
in the scholia are followed, one modern scholar has calculated that in fact
, verses can be produced; if the rules are slackened so that the last
word of each line can also shift place, but the metrical shape of the quatrain
is maintained, another scholar (with too much time on his hands) has
determined that more than billion semantically coherent lines (some
more coherent than others) can be produced from the twenty words. The
expanding experience of continually shifting meaning, subordinate to the act of making sense (in all senses), is dizzying to the point that the artifice
of meaning production becomes the artwork’s meaning.
Yet this dizzying
does not merely demand wonder. The question of whether a Christian
message appears from these letters and shapes, and whether the Christian
message is also about how a Christian message emerges in and from the
fragments of the material world, is prompted by the very intermedial
materiality of the text’s form. Which way to read – how to read as much
as in what direction – becomes a foundational question in encountering
Optatian. A question, that is, of how form requires performance. The
form of Optatian’s artwork demands an intense and continuing form
of attention (or an instant act of dismissal), but he is certainly not to be
read aloud.
For generations of classical scholars, Optatian has had bad press.
Cameron’s insult may seem overdetermined in an amusingly unaware
manner, but it is nothing if not typical in its dismissiveness. Even the
fact that Optatian appears to have written a book of such poetry and sent it
to the emperor, Constantine, who wrote back, and indeed brought Optatian back from exile on the strength of the book, has not yet led to
Optatian taking up an iconic place in the history of the cultural politics
between the centre of power (il principe) and the elite artist (il poeta) in the
Roman empire. The failure of Ovid to sway Augustus with his elegiacs
from Tomis has always fitted so much more easily into the privileged
model of the doomed, romantic artist, suffering for his art (even when
Ovid’s poetry, like the late verse of Wordsworth, seems closer to sycophancy than speaking revolutionary truth to power).
The instrumental
success of Optatian’s unspeakable writing seems an embarrassment for
both art and power.
Yet, in recent years, Optatian has begun to find a more illustrious place
in critical opinion. In particular, for both Aaron Pelttari and Michael
Squire, and for the authors collected together by Squire and Wienand,
thanks to their careful reading and sophistication of argumentation, Optatian has been understood to raise a set of aesthetic questions that speak
sharply to modernity, and thus assimilate him to the most insistent issues
of contemporary theory: How to interpret? What is the physical experience of reading? How does reading relate to time and difference? What is the
link between the visual, material text and the production of sense? What is
surface meaning and how do we progress beyond it?
But, equally
importantly, Optatian also thus opens a vista on to the cultural politics
of late antiquity. The claim by Michael Roberts that the Latin poetry of
late antiquity is distinguished by its ‘jewelled style’ has been smartly
combined by critics with a heightened interest in a poetics of scale, and
further linked with the productive idea that just as spolia make monuments
out of the shattered fragments of the military past, so poetry of late
antiquity shores the fragments of past literature into a monument of
present spectacular self-assertion. Such a broad view of the poetics of
late antiquity can provide a frame in which Optatian has seemed a striking
limit case, and thus a fascinating paradigm of the key vectors of the artistic
activity of its era (rather than a vivid demonstration of freakish futility). In
short, Optatian’s commitment to ‘pure form’ fits well now with the
contemporary critical fascination with form.
The questions of the poetics of scale, the fragmentation and reconstruction of literary tradition, the temporality of making sense (and the making
sense of temporality), will indeed all return as thematic nexuses in this
book, along with the relation between surface meaning and interpretation
in a context where Christianity is arguing for its place at the cultural table.
Indeed, we shall also return to the importance of intermediality and
materiality in Christian discourse, a materiality that grounds humans in
the fallen fleshliness of mortality, but which longs for the transcendence of
spirit. But the reason for starting with Optatian stems precisely from the
question he poses so vividly of how to think about the politics and
aesthetics of form in late antiquity – my subtitle (the preposterous poetics
will have to wait for now...).
For it is not possible to appreciate the
purchase of these more recent re-evaluations of Optatian in terms of form
unless they are set against the modern history of the idea of form.
‘Form’ has a remarkably complex recent development as a critical term,
a narrative that is all but obscured in most writing about antiquity. But it is
certainly not by chance that at least some of the contemporary reevaluation of Optatian comes from scholars trained in art history. When
Roger Fry helped to introduce the notion of formalism from European art
circles to British audiences just before the First World War – a momenttaken as foundational in the journey towards abstraction – it is indeed a
juncture repeatedly seen as the triumph of ‘pure form’ (Fry’s iconic phrase,
the very words Michael Squire tellingly uses to cue such history in his
rehabilitation of Optatian). Immanuel Kant’s insistence in the Critique
of Judgement () that pure judgements of beauty were made ‘according
to mere form’, and ‘properly concern only form’ proved seminal for the
subsequent development of aesthetic arguments; but, through the late
nineteenth century (thanks in part to simplified readings of Kant), Kant’s
linkage of the form of art and aesthetic experience found radical and more
popular expression in the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement.
Fry’s appreciation of ‘pure form’ is explicitly an heir to these trajectories; and it privileges
a purely abstract art to match. The rejection of mainstream Victorian art in
favour of the Impressionists is part of this teleological journey towards
abstract expressionism. Formalism – or formalist modernism – is, in this
story, a necessary victory over mere representational fancy, or what Fry
called ‘an insistence on trivial verisimilitude’.
Fry was well aware of the
work of Riegl, whose idea of Kunstwollen was integral to his understanding
of formalism, and Riegl’s intensive and deeply influential work on late
antiquity brings the study of formalism in modern art history back to this
book’s central focus: the transition from classical to Christian art in late
antiquity is theorized to support modernism’s formalist vocation.
It is
within this history of the necessity – not the triviality – of formalism that
Optatian is valued now, precisely for his sophisticated engagement in the
space between the representational signs of language and the abstract signs
of the materiality of letters, lines, shapes. ‘Semantically meaningless units
of text acquire sacred significance to the contemplative reader’
: pure
form can thus become theologically meaningful. The focused use of letters
as disruptive signs in modern art, from René Magritte to Cy Twombly
(and its influence on music and other art forms) may be able to find a
distant, lost ancestor in the carmen cancellatum.
The late antique poetics of Optatian can now make specific sense within the agenda of modernism’s privilege of formalism.
Art history may provide one narrative of form, and the critics’ use of the
image of spolia for textual production is a token of the will to bring
material culture of late antiquity closer to its literary work.
In literary
criticism, however, a different trajectory comes into play. For our purposes
here, a rather longer and more intricate story can be said to culminate in
the late nineteenth century, which made form – in multiple forms – a
central term of cultural discourse across Europe. One trajectory can be
drawn, for example, from Shaftesbury’s marvellous expression, ‘the forms
which form’, which was translated into the German milieu by Hamann
with the language of Bildung, which in turn strongly influenced Eberhard,
who taught Schleiermacher; and it is against Schleiermacher’s – and
others’ – commitment to Bildung (and its institutionalized role in the
Humboldtian universities) that modern notions of Lebensform take
shape.
Yet Hegel, as ever for the nineteenth century, remains a looming
presence in this history, not least because of his hugely influential articulation of three art forms – symbolic, classical and romantic, a system in
which his privileging of Greek antiquity insists on ‘the authentic reality of
the idea of the classical art-form’.
This is an argument that makes the
link between art history and literary criticism pressing, as it makes the
transition from the classical a crucial turning point. (Thus Riegl’s art
history, influenced by Hegel, takes late antiquity as its prime test case.)
Indeed, so important was the idea of form for the nineteenth century
across Europe in the wake of Hegel that Georg Simmel could see the whole
project of literary modernism as ‘a struggle of life against form as such,
against the principle of form’.
Simmel had a case. As Angela Leighton
and Kirstie Blair have analysed most incisively, and Meredith Martin and
Yopie Prins have extended with regard to poetic metre, the notion of form
had become instrumental and normative in the interconnected regimes of
literary criticism, religious regulation, social manners and architectural
understanding – and even, through the idea of organic form, biological science. Indeed, the way in which form crosses these different territories
of cultural authority makes it especially labile as a critical term, a shifting
and linking way of perceiving, rather than the fixed structure it is often
taken to indicate. So, it seems evident to Charles Kingsley that firm faith
requires firm form in poetry, as it requires proper form in liturgy: ‘a poetry
of doubt ... can never possess clear and sound form, even organic form at
all. How can you put into form that thought which is by its very nature
formless?’
Walter Pater here is a paradigmatic figure: bridging literature
and art history, experimenting with form, discussing form – and fascinated, not least in Marius the Epicurean, by late antiquity’s transition
between the classical and the Christian, a move he conceptualized through
his deep reading of Hegel. So Pater wrote: ‘Form ... is everything.’
For
the Tractarians, the proper forms of worship required architectural transformation, which could in turn be regarded as a ‘form of poesie’, and
which transformed the cityscapes particularly of Britain but of France and
Germany too. ‘Forms of worship’ became an increasingly fraught source
of contention in Victorian Britain, as, indeed, architectural reform enacted
a transformation of the cityscape, and the forms of poetry, especially metre,
took on a new cultural insistence. To change the shape and organization
of a church went hand in hand with changing the order of service and thus
the spiritual life of the worshipper. When Tennyson said ‘I dread losing
hold of forms’, he was, as Blair notes, talking about religious order, for all
that his grasp of poetic form was iconic.
Through such changes, ‘good
form’ – how to behave in society – also became a heightened and
contentious arena, not to mention educational reform (what happens in
the form room), another major Victorian crisis. Form, that is, the key term
of my subtitle, comes trailing clouds of intense and productive dissension, especially from the era when our current institutions of literary criticism
were taking shape. Form, to use the language of the race track (or the
prison), has form.
In recent decades in classical criticism as in other literary domains, form
has again become a focus of attention. For many years, especially when
paired naively against content, a turn to form was troped negatively as
‘mere formalism’ (the influence of modernism here, as Simmel defined it,
is patent).
The inevitable and well-taken backlash against the opposition of
form and content has led to a recognition of how form and ideology are
mutually implicative; indeed, as Frederick Jameson insists, there is an
‘ideology of form’.
This has been particularly productive in genres that
have a strong institutional and generic identity, such as epinicean poetry or
tragedy in the classical city. Victoria Wohl, for example, has argued with
great acumen precisely for the political purchase of form in Euripidean
tragedy, as, for Leslie Kurke, Glenn Most, Evelyn Krummen and others,
the form of epinician narrative has itself been seen as part of the dynamics
of reciprocity and the construction of fame in a way that self-consciously
goes beyond the earlier and more restrictive formalism of Elroy Bundy.
Exploring the logic of digressions in Herodotus’ construction of the
politics of cultural difference and self-representation, as a mode of historical explanation, has changed the perception of the normativity of his
writing – as has the tension between the models of intellectual analysis and
the tragic narrative of Thucydides’ account of the defeat of Athens in the
Peloponnesian war.
This book, however, while it recognizes and builds on such criticism’s
ability to combine aesthetic and political argument, necessarily takes on a
more flexible and extended perspective on form. It goes beyond the focus
on single genres and institutions in two particular ways. First, it looks at
particular modes across different genres. So, in chapter , ecphrasis, which
is recognized as a mode of writing in ancient theoretical texts (that is, a
recognized form, if you will, but not a genre), and, with a different organization of ideas, in modern theory too, is analysed as it takes shape in
different genres and across different social and historical contexts. It looks
thus not just at the different enactments of a mode in different genres – the
formal aspects of difference, as it were – but also at the varied ideological
affordances that such a mode takes on in these different generic frames. In
the same way, what happens to the tropes of love poetry when they are
restructured in the form of an epyllion is part of chapter .
In these
discussions, the poetics of scale, and the temporality of making sense, also
come to the fore. Second, where much of the best work on form in ancient
literature has focused, as I have mentioned, on particular genres or particular works, in this book, however, I also discuss the interrelations between
different forms: how epyllion, epic and epigram take shape in dynamic
relation to each other and work self-consciously in the space between
generic affiliation and a look over the boundary to different forms. This
is not a question of the Kreuzung der Gattungen, a standard modern critical
recognition of Hellenistic poetry’s hybridity (which is also keenly relevant
to the polyphonous voice of tragedy in the city, which takes into its goatsong world different genres of singing and speaking), but rather a double
understanding that literary history is also cultural history, and texts are
formed within a broad – cross-generic – literary culture. Here, the fragmentation and reconstruction of literary tradition becomes a key issue.
This volume looks at prose and verse, in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic
and across a range of social and political contextualizations. It focuses
primarily on textual sources, but in many cases on textual sources that are
about material culture – sculptures, paintings, buildings: as with the
modern history of the category of form, the link between art history and
literary history is integral to the development of late antique culture. Form,
then, provides a central and linking question of the various chapters to
come: and for me it is essential to see how form is both an aesthetic and
political issue. Or, most simply, the question of form is a question of how
aesthetics has a purchase in the social and cultural issues of the day.
As we
will see, this is no simple matter.
In several of my chapters, texts that are not familiar parts of the canon
will be analysed and, indeed, made central to my arguments about the
politics and aesthetics of form in late antiquity. These recognitions or
rehabilitations are in their turn part of the contemporary re-evaluation of
the full range of writing of late antiquity. As Optatian has come into view, now differently because of the changing sense of form, so too texts
which have been treated by mainstream classical scholarship as marginal
to aesthetics (Paulinus of Nola, say; Joseph and Aseneth; the first four
books of the Palatine Anthology) require such re-evaluation.
This is not
simply a question of changing taste, or appropriating antiquity to modern trendy ideas. What I am seeking to do is to find a language of
criticism to talk of the poetics of late antiquity that is capable of
responding to the new social and political conditions of late antiquity
and its new styles of literary production – and which does not merely
reproduce the Hegelian teleology of the journey towards modernity, or
the less grounded avatars of such teleology that insist on the secondariness or belatedness of the post-classical.
Late antiquity, then, is the final term of my subtitle, and I will resist
defining it with as much design as I have resisted offering a definition of
form. Late antiquity, like form, is a critical term where the historicization
of its development is crucial to its significance (it is a modern term, of
course: no one knew they were living in late antiquity). It is well known
that the nineteenth century’s obsession with both classical Greece and
Republican Rome had the effect of creating a model of a literary and
cultural Golden Age, which constructed later literature as epigonal (‘silver’,
‘corrupt’, ‘degenerate’ and so forth).
The invention of the term Hellenistic
(a process in which the historian Johann Gustav Droysen was instrumental), and its application to a period of history created a stadial interstice
between classical and imperial Greek, in the same way as ‘Silver Latin’
became a foil to ‘Golden Latin Artistry’.
From the nineteenth to the
twentieth century, the increasing separation of classical studies and theology, and the concomitant ideologically charged and aggressively regulated
distanciation between the Christian texts of antiquity and the texts of
dominant Greco-Roman culture, institutionalized a double and doubly
distorted vision of ancient Greek and Latin writing. Such a vision – and its
normative basis is clear enough, if immensely complicated in its institutional praxis and intellectual functioning – drove a wedge between Christian or Jewish writing and other writing in the ancient city, and
oversimplified affiliations into ‘Christian’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Pagan’, where boundaries were in reality not only more fluid than such simple and rigid
terminology suggests, but also policed in quite different ways in different
times, places and communities. What is more, curricula – and the scholarly work that fed such curricula – put fences also between what came to
be ossified as the medieval and the ancient.
‘Late antiquity’ has developed most recently as a critical term in order
to cross those boundaries productively.
In terms of periodization,
although arguments have continued to simmer about its range of dates
and topography, late antiquity as an idea requires a recognition of a
continuum between the Empire, the gradually Christianized Empire,
and the medieval era (and the interactions that took place not only
across the Empire but also with a world beyond the boundaries of the
Empire). Particularly in the West, where Latin provides an unbroken
tradition through to the Renaissance (and beyond, it might be claimed),
rupture – even and especially in the Foucauldian sense – has come to
seem a modern imposition on more complex patterns of tradition,
inheritance and gradual transformation. Even in the Greek East too,
where as late as the twelfth century in Byzantium, novels were being
written in homage to the novels of the imperial era, themselves replete
with Homeric and other literary heritages, Byzantium’s rediscovery of
Hellenism is being seen as an intricate process of constructed tradition.
Equally importantly, the term late antiquity has allowed studies that
have reconnected the intermeshed world of the cities and literary cultures of the first six centuries of the common era. From Clement in
Alexandria negotiating classical literature for a Christian readership and
Christian writing for a non-Christian audience (or Philo, earlier, for
Jews), through Josephus bringing Jewish scriptures in a fully Hellenized
mode to a Roman audience, to Jerome struggling with his love of Cicero,
or Augustine with his passion for Virgil, or Synesius converting to
become a bishop but never deserting Plato, through to the Palatine
Anthology collecting Christian and very unChristian epigrams in tenthcentury Byzantium, the interfaces and interactions between intellectuals
of different and often complexly fissured affiliations have become a key
way of understanding the milieu of ancient culture.
The extremist,
separatist, ideologues – Christian, Jewish or pagan – are not so much the
norm, as a violent and loud cry against the mixed and fluid society in which they usually found themselves. Late antiquity is a polemical term,
then, designed to recalibrate a scholarly perception of the transformation of
the Roman Empire into a Christian institution, and its continuation into
Medieval Europe. As Herzog has outlined, how late antiquity has been
conceptualized is formed by a teleology of modernity, an Hegelian
inheritance.
I have given ‘late antiquity’ as a marker in my subtitle, partly because
the majority of the material discussed in the book is late imperial (to use a
traditional chronological schema), but it will become immediately clear
that late antiquity is used with an even more lax sense of temporality than
usual. The six chapters travel across much of Greek and Latin literature – it
is hard to write about any Greek without thinking about Homer – but the
primary focus of each chapter includes texts that may be as early as the first
century and run as late as the tenth century (as Garth Fowden encourages
us, my scope runs the millennium from ‘Augustus to ... Avicenna’
).
But
each chapter is also concerned with the construction of tradition, both in
the writing of a text and in its circulation – how texts are located in a sense
of time by writers and readers. It is for me important that a text such as the
pseudepigraphic Joseph and Aseneth, subject of the fifth chapter, which may
have been first written even before the first century, takes on its significance (also) as it is re-read and rewritten in different communities especially across the next six centuries, as it circulates and is reformulated; its
treatment by scholars in the twentieth century also reveals a great deal
about the continuing, ideologically inflected religious reframing of antiquity (the condition in response to which late antiquity became a potent
affordance of critical discourse).
So, too, the Palatine Anthology, a collection of the tenth century CE is replete with epigrams from the third
century BCE onwards, and in its palimpsestic reordering is thus also
layered with a history of aesthetics as well as its own contemporary agenda.
One difficulty – or delight – when working with these late antique texts is
that any attempt to specify a temporally bound cultural moment always
has to take a detour through the active construction of tradition, in
affiliation and distanciation from the texts and perspectives of the past.
The logic of spolia requires such a dynamic and shifting gaze – to recognize
a triumph of contemporary assertion that is nonetheless made up out of
the fragmentation and reconstruction of the privileged paradigms of the past. Late antiquity offers a particularly rich example of how being of one’s
own time demands such a complex positionality. I use the term ‘late
antiquity’ in my subtitle, therefore, not just to indicate the predominance
of later texts in this book, but also to mark the book’s commitment to
acknowledging the impact of a fissile and competitive cultural frame for
the production and consumption of these texts.
This is a self-positioning of
the book as a contribution to a reading practice informed not just by
Reception Theory but also by new studies of manuscript transmission and
the performativity of literary texts within divisive, dissenting and multiple
affirmative social and cultural frames. ‘Late antiquity’ is intended to cue a
world where Christians, Jews and so-called pagans cohabited in real or
imaginary proximity, and developed their thinking in (real or imaginary)
dynamic interaction between communities, and where affiliation – what
allows someone to be called or call themselves a Christian or a Jew or a
Greek or a Roman – can flare between aggressive and aggressively policed
self-determination and a far more labile and uncertain commitment,
normed by a long tradition of civic life, imperial structures, and the
exigencies of a society undergoing significant social, political and religious
transformation. Amid such a hybrid social mix, there were also groups who
formed or projected communities that were stridently separatist, culturally,
intellectually and physically (such as the Essenes in Palestine, say).
Yet even
in the case of the nascent rabbinical communities, the Jewish intellectuals
instrumental in the formation of the Talmud and represented in it, how
rigorously ignorant of the surrounding and dominant cultures their writing
can remain is a vexed issue, for them and for subsequent generations of
scholars, where all too often contemporary ideological understandings of
social or intellectual separation (or purity) affect scholarly analysis.
Many
of the texts to be discussed in this book are not regularly included in the
curricula of classics courses, even on late antiquity. Part of the aim of the
book is to see how such texts also contribute to our understanding of
the cultural politics of late antiquity – to see the poetics of late antiquity in
its full richness and variety.
The book is entitled ‘Preposterous Poetics’ after the fourth chapter,
which looks specifically at Nonnus. Nonnus of Panopolis – the most
influential Greek poet of the fifth century – captures much of what
excites me about this era. Nonnus wrote a forty-eight-book epic, the
Dionysiaca, which is a wild and rambunctious epic about the pagan god Dionysus. Its flair for interlocked and overlapping narratives, its bold
redrafting of Homeric idiom, and its sexy, aggressive, conflict-strewn
storyline was strikingly influential on later antique poetry – and is
fundamental for understanding the temporality of narrative in late antiquity. What makes such an epic all the more remarkable is that Nonnus’
other great work is a Paraphrase of the Gospel of John – into hexameters,
full of philosophical phrasing.
That is, Nonnus’ Paraphrase takes the
koinê Greek of the Gospels – the simple language of the people (a deeply
freighted idea, for sure) – and turns it into the highest cultural language
of Homeric verse, the highly artificial poetic tradition of , years
earlier, which he further recreates and re-versifies as the language of
philosophical thought. Nonnus typifies the cultural battles over the
registers of Christianity in late antiquity. How does Christianity relate
to what it dismissed as paganism, while relying on the institutions,
literature and language of the Empire it had taken over? How does the
privileged language of ‘paganism’ find a place within the new structures
of Christian cultural value?
How philosophical, how simple, is the
language of Christianity to be? How is his self-positioning, his affiliation,
enacted between an epic on a pagan god and a theologically informed
verse redraft of a Gospel? How, in short, is such literary writing to find its
place in time, and thus contribute to the cultural expression of the era?
The term ‘preposterous’ is used – it is a good example of the search for a
new language for late antique poetics – to indicate specifically how
Nonnus’ epic writing embodies a practice and theory of temporality. It
marks how – under pressure, I argue, from Christian theorizations of
time and practices of typological reading – Nonnus is prepared to
imagine a world where mythic narratives swirl into versions of each
other, where the chronology of these narratives becomes easily reversed
so that the stories of the before come after, and where what has not yet
happened is always already prequelled in the narratives of the past or the
here and now. Hence – with due regard to the etymology of the term –
the choice of ‘preposterous’.
The preposterous is, the chapter argues, a
mark of Nonnus’ specifically late antique Dionysiac poetics.
Nonnus, then, is a hero of this book. But in his case above all, it will also
be apparent that this book makes no claim to exhaustive or comprehensive
coverage. It is designedly essayistic: a short book on a large topic. Each of
the six chapters introduces and explores a particular, major problem of the
aesthetics and politics of form in late antiquity, and each does so through a
particular and selective range of texts – from what is, after all, by far the
biggest archive of Greek and Latin from antiquity. (There is more imperial Greek epic than epic from all other periods put together.)
There are,
however, also many links between the thematic concerns of the different
chapters. Some I have already mentioned. So, the poetics of scale – how
big or how small a poem should be, what is the aesthetic impact of such
condensation or expansion – returns in the relation between epic, epyllion
and epigram that runs through the first four chapters. If Homer can be ‘in
a nutshell’, what of a love story? How much culture do you need to be
cultured? What form of attention does the miniature demand? The poetics
of fragmentation – the dissolute poetics of the epyllion, the discrete refusal
of interconnectedness in an anthology, the disjunctive narrative argumentation of the Talmud – fragmentation, that is, as an exercise in form, links
especially Chapters , and . How coherent and thus formative is the
past?
The corollary effort to construct a cultural tradition and fit one’s own
work into it is an area of contested cultural self-assertion that is evident in
each chapter, and is especially important in the interfaces between professed Christian, Jewish and ‘pagan’ literature (where tradition becomes a
particular battle-ground for cultural dominance). The dismissiveness with
which much of the literature of late antiquity has been treated by modern
scholars is also prompted by the self-consciousness of the weight of
tradition demonstrated by the texts of late antiquity themselves, always
ready to see themselves in time: what makes the texts of late antiquity in
their own eyes modern is explicitly raised in Chapter , and the sense of a
fragmented and precarious tradition in and against which the performance
of self-positioning tales place, echoes through all the chapters. How
narrative time is reorganized by the vectors of Christianity and rabbinical
Judaism, even in texts which appear to eschew any direct gestures of
religious affiliation, dominates the last three chapters. That the organization of narrative time should follow from a heightened concern with a
fragmentation of tradition should seem self-evidently significant.
The
mode of ecphrasis, as alluded to earlier, becomes a fundamental form
through which the question of what perspective is to be taken on the
culture of the past is articulated in late antiquity: how to see, and how to
write what one sees, is a question of what perspective is to be taken on the
art-work: how to direct a vision of what matters. In each case of these
thematic nexuses, the question of the aesthetics of form leads directly and
necessarily to a cultural politics of form: this is how literary form becomes a
contributing and normative element of Lebensform. Form becomes an engaged performance of cultural self-positioning. Such literary writing
plays a crucial role, it is argued, thus, in the cultural and political transformations of late antiquity: this is how aesthetics and politics are mutually
implicative.
Preposterous Poetics: The Aesthetics and Politics of Form in Late Antiquity
aims, then, to use a specific lens – that of shifting ideas of form in late
antiquity (and in contemporary criticism) – to explore how literary works
contribute to the social and cultural transformations of the era.
The book
insists that the aesthetic and the political collaborate in such transformations: that literary form contributes to the making of Lebensform – not just
as a general claim, but specifically with regard to the developments of late
antiquity that have been so crucial to the ongoing history of Western
culture. That so many of the texts I will discuss have not been made fully a
part of the discussion of how late antiquity takes shape is regrettable
testimony, this book argues, to the impoverishment of the understanding
of it that has resulted from previous generations of disregard, especially of
the role of its Greek literature in such cultural transformations. These
essays are intended to contribute, then, to an ongoing debate about how
the culture of late antiquity develops and why literary form matters in such
a historical process.
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