Beyond genre.

I ran into a flash of perspicuity while reading Oswyn Murray's "Symposium and Genre in the Poetry of Horace," (1985, JRS 75: 39-50) a prefatory note to his thoughts on Roman reception of Greek sympotic verse--after all, it's a radical translation; imagine a hipster learning the tea ceremony. Murray writes,

Thus the genre is born of historical circumstances as they transform human needs; literature can be seen from this point of view as a form of ritual, a response to the human desire for regularities and for the communication of shared experience. As an expression of the mentality of a particular society the genre is therefore of fundamental importance to the cultural historian. But literature as ritual is a conservative force; whether by feat of oral memory or through the permanence of the written word, it becomes difficult to forget what has been created; most societies live in a universe of discarded mental forms. So alongside the living genre we must expect to find the dead genre, surviving as artistic form without context, as memory pattern. (40)

When classicists talk about genre they tend to have in mind a system of classification so stupendously exacting that I'm surprised the Germans didn't invent it first, and forty years after Cairns genre criticism has taken a fairly firm hold in the profession--although, bless G-d, not entirely without dissent. In my MA program this sort of thing was particularly admired, and trying to play to those expectations led me into some real absurdities--I think I once caused myself to discuss a couplet in the Heroides per the generic reference of its hexameter and pentameter, respectively. (I know, I know. They weren't impressed either.)

"A universe of discarded mental forms," though, really? It made me thrill. I like the concept of culture as accreted language, networks of concepts united by allusion and buried collocation--invisible hyperlinks.

What's the difference between a living genre and a dead one? Think of the pastoral--as far as we can tell, Theocritus practically invented it; three centuries later, Vergil write his Eclogues. Was it a living genre for him? What about for Milton? Is imitation, I mean self-conscious revival, the same thing as inhabitation? I'm thinking of Borges' story about the man rewriting Don Quixote word by word--my intuition says no, but my intuition also can't brush aside genre or the enormous, insurmountable, pestering ontological problems that hang onto it if we keep it around.

What's really remarkable is that the great genres of ancient literature seem to have been flashes in the pan--epic definitely died with Homer as an unselfconscious thing, Greek lyric seems to have been largely sui generis and seems even more so when you look at its lurchingly uncomfortable Roman revival--quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres, indeed. Tragedy had a pretty sorry time between Aeschylus and Shakespeare and it's absurd to even talk about unselfconsciousness in pastoral. All of Roman literature is mediated by the gleeful preciosity of Alexandria, and it took Don Quixote to give Europe a literary form independent from antiquity.

It's remarkable too that Western culture has produced exactly three viable epics, the last two being explosions of angelic genius that blew an exhausted genre up to new elevations and burnt all further possibility of development to a crisp--8th century to 19 BC is quite a wait, but it took us til 1667 to end epic forever with an apple and a snake. (We'll see about Kazantzakis. Indications are not good--Ἐχθαίρω τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικόν). At the same time, we've managed about a hundred really deathless novels in the last two hundred years; that's definitely a genre. Poetry, though--I wouldn't want to be the guy writing that dissertation.

Dr. Behrenboim:

My name is Meriwell Topher, and I would like to express interest in your adjunct position. I am 49 years old and ABD. Please refer to the contents of the enclosed semitruck, where you will find my unfinished dissertation Anglophone Verse Genre in the 20th Century, its Origins, Typology and Limits.

Please consider my unique talents and experience. I have not eaten in four days.

Sincerely,
M. Topher, M. A. (1982)

Do you feel elucidated? I don't. On my reading list--

E. Auerbach, Mimesis
G. Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry;
G. Williams again, Change and Decline

Postscriptum 4 April. In my enthusiasm--and on reflection--I callously passed over the Divine Comedy in my sneer about viable epics. Although I'm not sure we can call it an epic--it's certainly epic length, and certainly masterful, but I think the subject material and handling are all wrong--how about this: if you want to count it as an epic, let's agree that I said "four." If not, not.

How small a thought.

I've been reading a lot of Auden lately. His "Epigoni" runs through my mind as I drive between my university and DC; it treats the late Latin scholars on the eve of systemic collapse, their cultural diversions, their anxiety at the end of empire in the West. He speaks to my condition as an academic and the fragility too near to my vocation to be relinquished or ignore:

No point pretending
One didn't foresee the probable ending (10)
As dog-food, or landless, submerged, a slave;
Meanwhile, how should a cultured gentleman behave?

It's my dilemma, the dangerous poles of my life, the mandarin and the political animal--how should I behave? How can I? It's an impossible dichotomy. My life is divided between UVA and the capital, the classics and realpolitik, between a fading discipline and a power in decline. This tension, this double consciousness, has defined my self-concept and my anxiety throughout my adult life. Do I become a cultural conservative--that loud and bloody-minded creature--and lose my culture? Or do I live in mandarin quietism, tending Auden's garden of rhopalics and anacyclic acrostics, and plead nolo condendere as the republic degrades into something huge, shapeless and vile? Is it possible to be both cultivated and politically relevant?

My disposition is modernist; that feeling of hopeless fragmentation and irrecoverable loss probably prefigures my tastes rather than proceeds from them. I'm not even convinced that cultural relevance is still possible, not anymore, not in the postmodern period--but maybe it doesn't have to be like that. Maybe the treason of the clerisy can be mitigated, and maybe--in part--by me. Tyrtaeus writes that a man is unwelcome in his poems if he has every excellence except a fighting spirit; I understand this. I talk about uncertainty, but at the end of history I can't accept the hard alternative, can't concede the city of G-d in the name of graceful quietism. The answer is neither Roger Kimball nor the glass bead game: whatever my acceptance is worth, I accepted a moral stake in that answer when I entered the academy.

We came in our benched ships, carrying English common law and the humanists' genius for the misuse of classical antiquity; we spun wildly off course as our intellectuals turned the 20th century into an abattoir. Now, at the end of the postmodern period, we've run aground on the edge of a dark continent and have bought an oxhide with the murdered Jews of Europe. So monoculture is over; that was the cost of the Shoah, of empire, of the European civil war 1914-1989. So we--if that "we" means anything, now--we who loved liberty as an abstract and now must enact it in the marketplace of ideas, first as practice and only then as virtue ethics, we who have inherited the barbarous efficiency of Rome and self-immolating democracy of Athens, the mixed constitution of the American polity and the terrible abstract G-d of the second temple (Ark absent, kodesh haKodashim blown open, and Titus on his column)--we, whatever we are, whatever I am, are a faction, a small faction among many others, in possession of an oxhide on which to found a city. Well, the Carthaginian trick is old. We have knives unrusted in our keeping. I'm here to cut a strip of my own, if able.

I like using the byrsa as a metaphor because I think the project of liberalism in the 21st century will be one of roping-around and roping-in, a process of coalition-building in a disintegrated culture. I come from a double background, Classics and English literature: I'm a hybrid, not really a reception-studies classicist and not really a philological critic, either--so my sympathies are ecumenical. The humanities need a course-correction from economics and history; classically liberal policy, and policymakers, will be better able to achieve their goals in partnership with the legitimating voice of literary humanism.

The contemporary Republican party is a frustrating example of economic liberalism become illiberal and neurotic in separation from humanist convictions, its other systemic flaws and irrationalities only irritated by populism and the religious right; meanwhile, huge swaths of the academy fester in its long-standing romance with philosopher-kingship, casting a schizophrenic eye over the 20th century as they radicalize in toxic secession. I study classics in order to rope-in the modernism I love, to retie the frayed cords of continuity in the western literary tradition and claim it, or reclaim it, and in so doing reclaim them both; I do that because I love it, and because I believe that a free society begins in the republic of letters as much as in equal laws. Isonomia begins in the constitution--eunomia, the contemplative soul.

.שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.