Classics in Extremis

The Edges of Classical Reception

Edmund Richardson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350166264
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350017269
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Classics in Extremis reimagines classical reception. Its contributors explore some of the most remarkable, hard-fought and unsettling claims ever made on the ancient world: from the coal-mines of England to the paradoxes of Borges, from Victorian sexuality to the trenches of the First World War, from American public-school classrooms to contemporary right-wing politics. How does the reception of the ancient world change under impossible strain?

Its protagonists are 'marginal' figures who resisted that definition in the strongest terms. Contributors argue for a decentered model of classical reception: where the 'marginal' shapes the 'central' as much as vice versa – and where the most unlikely appropriations of antiquity often have the greatest impact. What kind of distortions does the model of 'centre' and 'margins' produce? How can 'marginal' receptions be recovered most effectively?

Bringing together some of the leading scholars in the field, Classics in Extremis moves beyond individual case studies to develop fresh methodologies and perspectives on the study of classical reception.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Edmund Richardson

For I am every dead thing,

In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

John Donne, ‘Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’¹

In the dying days of 2017, I found myself considering alternative titles for this volume. Classics in Extremis: A Survival Guide. Classics in Extremis: Reclaiming the Ancient World. Classics in Extremis: [insert controversy of the day here]. Classics comes at you fast, these days.

Accustomed to fighting off charges of their ‘irrelevance’,² classicists have often woken up, lately, to more relevance than they bargained for: daily updates on the colonization of their field by the torch-bearers of contemporary politics; death threats for scholars;³ white supremacists brandishing shields emblazoned with the Roman fasces.⁴ ‘The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.’⁵ And much (much) more in the same vein.

How we talk about the classical past, display it, teach it, adapt it, remember it and forget it (and who gets to be one of ‘us’, doing this) has always been charged and political. This volume is (more or less accidentally) a manifesto for those who seek to engage the highly politicized classics of today: it explores how such battles have been fought (and won), often against the steepest of odds, throughout the afterlives of antiquity. The questions at stake – about whom the ancient world ‘belongs’ to, and who gets to participate in classical discourse – turn out to have been in play for a very long time. There has rarely been a moment where the classical past has not been a battleground, a clashing of ‘extremes’. For many readers of, and contributors to, this volume, ‘classics is political’ may have a very different resonance than when this project was first conceived in 2014. But that is just another way of saying: classical reception happens to you, too.

Across the world, in recent years, antiquity has been appropriated to support radically different political agendas. Attempts within contemporary right-wing politics to lay exclusive claim to the ancient world⁶ have done battle with diametrically opposed visions of what the classics can (and should) stand for. (In this volume, Maarten De Pourcq explores a production of Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women, staged in Vienna in 2016. It was intended ‘to give voice to the fate of refugees’ – but was interrupted by members of the so-called Identitary Movement, who ‘squirted artificial blood, threw around flyers saying “Multikulti tötet” [Multiculturalism kills], and shouted the Spartan battle cry from Zack Snyder’s film 300’.)⁷ Many scholars have attempted to engage with and rebut such appropriations of the classics. In November 2016, the Society for Classical Studies put out a statement noting that ‘as scholars and teachers, we condemn the use of the texts, ideals, and images of the Greek and Roman world to promote racism or a view of the Classical world as the unique inheritance of a falsely-imagined and narrowly-conceived western civilization’.⁸ Donna Zuckerberg, writing in Eidolon a few days earlier, served the American alt-right with an eviction notice:

It is time for Classics as a discipline to say to these men: we will not give you more fodder for your ludicrous theory that white men are morally and intellectually superior to all other races and genders. We do not support your myopic vision of ‘Western Civilization.’ Your version of antiquity is shallow, poorly contextualized, and unnuanced. When you use the classics to support your hateful ideas, we will push back by exposing just how weak your understanding is, how much you have invested in something about which you know so little.⁹

Unsurprisingly, that eviction notice has not been heeded. The response from its targets was, if anything, gleeful. ‘If Zuckerberg et al. don’t want to help the alt-right explore and understand the great world of antiquity, that is perfectly fine’, as one writer put it. ‘We can do it ourselves.’¹⁰

To suggest that ‘extreme’ classics is a uniquely urgent topic today is to be somewhat guilty of self-indulgence. Long before the invention of the internet troll, the ancient world was the favoured tool of a wretched assortment of Nazis, slave-owners, apartheid supporters, misogynists and cheerleaders for every kind of oppression. Classics has been a very effective tool of repression, for a very long time. Rhetoric about ‘a narrowly-conceived western civilization’ has not, all of a sudden, just become dangerous. People on the receiving end of Victorian exclusion, or South African repression, or American enslavement, or Nazi extermination, have felt a classical jackboot many times before. As Lorna Hardwick notes, while the contexts are very different, these appropriations of antiquity share a similar agenda: ‘The feature common to all these examples is the aim of creating shared perceptions about antiquity that legitimised the attitudes and behaviour inculcated by dominant social and educational institutions.’¹¹ And such oppressive discourses have often been aided and abetted by classical scholars. In 1932, for instance, Kenneth Scott sung Mussolini’s praises in The Classical Journal:

‘Rome’, he [Mussolini] says, ‘is destined to become once more the city which directs the civilization of the whole of Western Europe.’ So much for the ideal of the leader of Fascism! But is it only an ideal which he has gained from reading the past history of his country? I think not. He found in post-war Italy a land impoverished, demoralized, dissonant, and torn by factious strife, weak in government, in national spirit, in foreign prestige, a land rapidly sinking into the abyss of communism. Where could he find a ‘parallel’ for this situation in his perusal of Roman History? The answer is in the Italy that Augustus Caesar had to deal with after the Social and Civil Wars which had harried Italy and the empire for a century … How History repeats itself! … Symbols of the past and its significance for modern Italy are everywhere in Italian life today – even on postage stamps, where we find Julius Caesar, Augustus, and the wolf of the Capitoline. Perhaps Fascist theory is correct, and the Roman Empire never really died but goes on in the New Italy and its premier.¹²

Classics has been made to stand for some horrible things. But it has also stood against them. Can the classics make the world a better place, even in the unlikeliest circumstances? Can those without power use the ancient world to effect change? For marginalized groups throughout history, the classical has not just been a symbol of repression, but a symbol of hope. As Andújar puts it, many have embraced ‘the potential of ancient Greek culture to change their present and shape the future’.¹³ That potential – the ways in which the ancient world could change the present, and shape the future, for marginalized or disempowered individuals and groups – has become arguably the central preoccupation of classical reception studies, in recent years. Recent work by Bradley, Greenwood, Goff, Vasunia, Williamson and the Network on Ancient and Modern Imperialisms has challenged the Western focus of classical receptions.¹⁴ The ‘Classics and Class in Britain, 1789–1917’ project, led by Hall, has prompting a wide-ranging reassessment of the social scope of encounters with the classical.¹⁵ The work of scholars such as Hurst and Ingleheart on gender and sexuality has likewise challenged the gendered ‘norms’ of the histories of scholarship.¹⁶ Meanwhile, fragmentary and uncertain acts of reception have become the focus for key recent studies: Leonard, Billings and Prins have explored, in different ways, how incomplete sources and unfulfilled desires drive engagements with the ancient world.¹⁷

Classics in Extremis aims both to take forward and to complicate this marginal turn in classical reception studies. It examines some of the most unexpected, most hard-fought and (potentially) most revealing acts of classical reception: it asks how the reception of the ancient world changes – and what the classical looks like – when it is under strain. It argues, as Hardwick puts it, that ‘classics in extremis is more able, rather than less able, to operate in situations of trauma, in social, moral and political extremis … In operating at “the edge”, classics has helped to redefine the edge’.¹⁸ Contributors explore a diverse range of ‘extreme’ contexts, characters and themes in this volume: its chapters should be seen not as parts of a monolithic intellectual project, but as an overlapping series of studies, with complementary (and sometimes contrasting) preoccupations and perspectives. The volume is organized broadly chronologically, beginning with a theoretical perspective on the questions in play from Hardwick, then tracing encounters with classics in extremis from the seventeenth century to the present day. It makes no claim to comprehensiveness, aiming rather to synthesize current debates, and map out key questions for future scholarship in the field.

One key part of this volume’s agenda also represents a shift in perspective. For many contributors to this volume, ‘extreme’ classics is not just what happens to ‘them’, to the subjects of classical reception studies. It is a discourse in which (for better or worse) we, as scholars of the classical past, are implicated. (Of course, that ‘we’ is also highly problematic.) And it is not a discourse which lends itself to the customary academic distance. It hits you over your morning coffee, with the latest news bulletins. Hence, that point again: classical reception isn’t just an academic practice which you, the reader of this volume, may be engaged in – it’s what takes place around you, what is done by you and what is done to you. We are always-already implicated (whether implicitly or explicitly) in classical reception; there is no such thing as a disinterested observer. (What this might mean for how we approach the field as a whole, I will discuss in more detail later.)

What, then, can make classics ‘extreme’? The archetype of the classical outsider was arguably fixed by Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: standing outside the locked gates of a Christminster (Oxford) college, hoping in vain for admittance. Here, it is (apparently) clear where the ancient world belongs; where power and authority over the past reside:

The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his pocket the lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote along the wall:

‘I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?’—Job xii. 3.¹⁹

What, then, is classics in extremis? A catalogue of frustrated Judes – of faint voices with little or no impact, characters glimpsed outside the gates? Far from it. Contributors to this volume seek to move away from that model, and to unsettle it. Fundamentally, the aim of Classics in Extremis is not to trace the edges of classical reception – but rather to complicate them. It engages with marginal case studies which problematize the notion of ‘the margins’; discourses where centre and margins, insider and outsider, cannot be located comfortably.

Obstacles to classical reception are at the forefront of many chapters. What happens to encounters with the ancient world in extraordinary situations: under censorship, for instance, or in times of war? Edith Hall explores the ways in which David Jones’s ‘harrowing epic’, In Parenthesis, ‘was a product of extreme trauma suffered in an extreme situation – a manmade death-trap of barbed wire, vermin, machine-gun fire and mud’.²⁰ Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis charts a very different wartime landscape, in her study of the remarkable recovery of Greek vases in Ottoman and Revolutionary Greece. Does the past become more or less valuable when access to it becomes fraught and dangerous? How is the ancient world read and understood differently, in such circumstances – and what new insights can such encounters offer us?

Extraordinary readers are at the heart of a number of chapters. Many have had to fight hard for access to knowledge of the ancient world – constrained by social circumstances, gender, sexual identity, race and national identity, among other factors. Why was antiquity worth fighting for, for them? How are their readings of the classics different from some of their more solidly situated peers? This is another way of asking: Who gets to talk about classics? And who listens to their voices – both at the time and in today’s scholarship?

The intersections between social class and classical reception have been a matter of long-standing interest, driven by Hall’s 2008 article, ‘Putting the Class into Classical Reception’.²¹ For working-class readers, building a connection with the classics, within a system inclined to deny them that knowledge, was no small feat. Working-class classics have been put through the factory, dragged up and down the coal-mine, grasped in fragments and understood no less powerfully, and no less significantly, for all that. They often, however, require the deployment of fresh interpretative strategies in order to be fully understood. For instance, the 1841 Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd recounts the author’s life in a factory – but the narrative terminates, unfinished, because at that point in the manuscript, a piece of machinery amputated William Dodd’s arm.

Significantly, the most well-known British working-class encounters with the classics are fictional. Jude Fawley has already been mentioned – but the lack of equally well-known historical working-class encounters with the classics is striking. Henry Stead notes that many working-class claims on the ancient world have gone unnoticed by scholarship for the simple reason that few have thought to go looking for them: located ‘so far from the centre of the historical and cultural maps of our time that their very existence is called into question’.²² But, just where we might not expect to find classical reception taking place, there it is. Stead’s study of British coalminers’ classics explores the ways in which the ancient world was accessed and received by miners who ‘worked at and indeed beyond the limits of our habitable world’.²³ The physicality of all these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Thinking with Classical Reception: Critical Distance, Critical Licence, Critical Amnesia?
• 3. Daphnis Transformed: Aphra Behn’s Politics of Translation
• 4. Local Engagements with Ancient Greek Vases in Ottoman and Revolutionary Greece, c. 1800–1833
• 5. The Hand That Shook the World: Daniel Dunglas Home’s Disembodied Classics
• 6. Picturing Antiquity: Photography, Performance and Julia Margaret Cameron
• 7. High Culture in Low Company? The Reception of Ancient ‘Homosexuality’ in the Pornographic The Sins of the Cities of the Plain
• 8. The Caribbean Socrates: Pedro Henríquez Ureña and the Mexican Ateneo de la Juventud
• 9. Beyond the Limits of Art and War Trauma: David Jones’s ‘In Parenthesis’
• 10. Classics Down the Mineshaft: A Buried History
• 11. Extreme Classicisms: Jorge Luis Borges
• 12. The Costly Fabric of Conservatism: Classical References in Contemporary Public Culture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint