“TOO MUCH EGO IN YOUR COSMOS”
—Rudyard Kipling
The use of the personal voice in scholarship and criticism has a long tradition. At the end of his monumental history, Edward Gibbon finished with the moving admission that “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candor of the public.” Indeed, what makes John Keegan the most widely read military historian of the present age is not just his mastery of language and knowledge of war across time and space, but also the occasional glimpses of himself in his formal narrative.
The personal voice, then, when used cautiously, economically, and without ideological bias, is a precious resource in the scholar’s limited arsenal for making history and literary criticism come alive. But what is so bothersome about the efforts of Professors Judith P. Hallett and Thomas Van Nortwick in their edited collection, Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship, is not the use, but rather the abuse, of this hallowed tradition. For as I point out in the following review essay of their book, in their hands the personal voice—angry, whiny, passive-aggressive—intrudes on almost every page. It brings in images and stories—sex, breakdowns, tenure decisions—irrelevant to scholarship and better left out on grounds of good taste alone. Who wishes to hear about the various authors’ clitorises or episodes of past sodomy?
The “I’s” and “me’s” convey neither experience nor insight, but rather are used mostly to complain about career disappointments and the general injustice of the university at large—predictably its purported unfairness to women and almost anyone other than the stereotyped oppressive white males.
Three other flaws of Compromising Traditions form the basis of my unease: the book is intellectually dishonest; it achieves the opposite effect of what is intended; and it has nothing to do with scholarship. First, the authors do everything but “compromise traditions”: all are academics sharing a fashionable posture of radical feminism, postmodernism, and general hostility to what they variously call “old boys,” “white males,” and “WASPs.” There is not a single dissenting opinion, not a conservative, not a traditionalist, not a poor soul in the book who might be anything other than an academic classicist who believes that white heterosexual males have made a mess of things. By choosing the title Compromising Traditions the authors compound their disingenuousness by suggesting that they are compromising something. They don’t. While it is unusual to include the pronoun “I” thirty to forty times on a page, their professed politics are now the mainstream on campus and echo all the cliches about race, gender, and class that we’ve become accustomed to in the last twenty years. A far better title would have been Timid Whiners Upholding Orthodoxy.
Second, for all scholars who use the personal voice—veterans who remark of their own experience in war when writing military history, architects who confess to the puzzles of engineering when discussing the great cathedrals, artists who remark on brush strokes when critiquing the Impressionists—this book is treasonous. Any fair-minded reader will come away so assaulted by the overuse of “I” and “me,” so put off by accusations of racism and sexism, and so bored with the tales of baby-boomer angst that they may well conclude that no one, at any time, should dare use the first person lest it degenerate into something like this book.
Lastly, the greatest untruth about the book was the inclusion of the word scholarship in its title. There is no extended literary criticism or historical analysis here, nothing about the ancient world that could benefit from the experience or insight of the authors, nothing at all really about the Greeks and the Romans. Compromising Traditions is not even an account about the use and method of the personal voice, but simply an embarrassing memoir of some very upset, upper-middle-class white academics who wish to talk about themselves, their graduate school horror stories, and their unhappy careers, rather than Sophocles, Plato, or Thucydides. Their time would have been better spent, and their anguish better ameliorated, by tutoring the underprivileged in Latin at local grammar schools. They are all far more concerned about themselves than about their field.
Yet, it came as a great surprise to see the authors suggest that they were somehow populists in their shared disdain for entrenched white male philologists. No better reminder of C. Vann Woodward’s caution about the misuse of the word “populism” exists than Compromising Traditions. One surely can object to elitism on campus, the avoidance of teaching, and the ascendance of careerism without sharing a single thought of the Personal Voice “populist” authors.
Even more so than when I concluded the review with a quote from Homer’s Odyssey (“may all perish who should ever do these things again”), I now feel that Compromising Traditions is a metaphor of what academia has become:
If personal voice theory, at least as it appears here, is to be the golden mean between narrow philological pedantry and incomprehensible post-modernist theory, then we classicists really are, and should be, through. This is all so very, very sad.
After publication of the following review, others in classics expressed similar concern—I know of not a single subsequent favorable appraisal of this nonbook. But most astounding was the response of coeditor Hallett herself, who chose not to reply in print, but rather took an entirely different tack, quite unexpected for someone who is a professed woman of the Left. Apparently—and I say apparently, because no one has yet quite figured out her behavior—the present essay had the unintended effect of sending her scurrying to the FBI for assistance. (See the epilogue for Professor Heath’s essay on the Unabomber incident.) In a notorious admission, Hallett confessed to calling the FBI to report the authors of Who Killed Homer? as possible terrorist suspects in the nationwide hunt for the Unabomber. But as Heath shows, at the time she asserts that she called the FBI hotline (October 1994), the Unabomber’s views were not known to anyone, nor had Heath and I even begun collaboration on Who Killed Homer?, in which Hallett is scarcely mentioned.
What, then, prompted her fantastic announcement of going to the FBI on a global Internet list-serve group (for her admission, cf. http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu)? One can only speculate, but many of us suspect she never did call the FBI and was instead brooding about this present review rather than Who Killed Homer? Again, when she claims that she called the FBI, the Unabomber had not published his manifesto, and we had not written a word of Who Killed Homer?
Confirmation of that suspicion may be found in her further admission to the Wall Street Journal. When asked for an explanation of her actions by Mr. Jody Bottum, the literary editor at The Weekly Standard, Professor Hallett strangely replied that “Victor Davis Hanson should acknowledge that I voluntarily went to a law enforcement agency and likened his and his collaborator’s view to that of a deranged killer when he is asked to assess my work and my life” (Wall Street Journal, May 28, 1999, WII). Again, Professor Hallett fails to acknowledge that at the time she claims that she contacted the FBI, John Heath and I had not even begun Who Killed Homer? nor had the Unabomber issued any of his public manifestos; but I had, just prior to her confession in spring 1999, published the following review—as she reminds us when she shifts from the plural to the singular, “when he [emphasis added] is asked to assess my work and my life.”
Of course, neither the FBI nor the CIA—see below—contacted either Heath or me, and we doubt Professor Hallett ever called them at any time—and we hope not, since innocent lives depended on the FBI’s ability to screen out crank calls like hers rapidly in order to glean real information that might lead to the killer. Rather, Hallett’s embarrassing confession was apparently designed to elicit some disclaimer from me in the future: from now on Hallett apparently wishes me to preface my reviews of her work with something like the following: “I cannot be fair since Professor Hallett called the FBI on me,” or perhaps better yet, “I must confess that Professor Hallett once called the FBI on me, and that’s why I unfairly criticized her otherwise excellently edited book.” To paraphrase Edmund Burke, in her fanciful explanations: “fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.”
To this day, Professor Hallett has offered no clarification of her contradictory chronology and says she is reluctant “to provide more information on why I decided to help the FBI in this instance because I’m not sure how much I can share publicly about my other interactions with them, and the CIA” (Wall Street Journal, May 28, 1999, WII). Nor has the American Philological Association officially reprimanded her, though it is often prone to issue statements about bothersome practices in society at large that appear sexist or homophobic to scholars.
In the meantime we all await the much-promised volume two of Compromising Traditions, said to be due out shortly.
For myself, I shall simply set down its nature, and explain the symptoms by which perhaps it may be recognized by the student, if it should ever break out again. This I can the better do, as I had the disease myself, and watched its operation in the case of others.
History of the Peloponnesian War 2.48.3, Crawley trans.
I.
IN Book Two of Thucydides’ history, the once-exiled author describes the horrific plague that struck Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian War. In his discussion of the disease’s origins and causes, Thucydides suddenly breaks into the first-person narrative to add poignant detail and empirical data drawn from his own illness. He returns to the use of the first person later in his fifth book, as he once more interrupts his rather solemn account to offer a more “personal voice” in his discussion concerning the length of the war.
I certainly remember that all along from the beginning to the end of the war it was commonly declared that it would last thrice nine years. I lived through the whole of it, being of an age to comprehend events, and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them. It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis, and being present with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs more closely. (5.26.4-5)
The personal voice in nonfictional, nonautobiographical critical writing, whether that be history, science, oratory, or political theory, is as old as the Greeks—even the purportedly detached Thucydides is not immune from the temptation of its use. The ancients did not believe that the occasional employment of the first-person pronoun, the excursus into personal remembrance, or the citation of individual expertise and experience was in anyway antithetical to objectivity, accuracy, or gravity.
But notice carefully why and how Thucydides uses the personal voice. He believes that he has had unusual experience that is germane to particular discussions—most of them scientific—within his history: his recovery from the plague allows him first-hand knowledge about the symptoms of the disease and projects empathy with its victims. The horror of contagion is heightened by the knowledge that not even the historian escapes infection. Thucydides’ exile after the setback at Amphipolis and his own relative youth, we now see, has given him an extraordinary opportunity to chronicle the entire struggle and to travel unmolested among the warring parties. Under the veneer of a detached and impersonal voice resides a man with enormous expertise about war and a wealth of tragic experiences.
That inclusion of personal information, then, explains a great deal in Thucydides’ history. The reader no longer wonders why he seems to learn so much from non-Athenians and over such a long period of time. Notice the tone of Thucydides’ remarks: matter-of-fact, grave, and restrained. Given the horrendous sequelae of the plague—described so vividly in the narrative—we should imagine that Thucydides himself must have suffered a variety of postinfectious maladies. None is recorded. No “I could not reach Melos because of my poor vision after the plague.” From what we can piece together from other sources and incidental detail in his own narrative, his exile after Amphipolis was at best unfair. Surely there was a host of personal agendas and generally disreputable behavior behind the Athenians’ decision to oust the historian from their society. Again, we are to hear none of it. No “My loss of office and exile were results of a personal vendetta engineered by Cleon.”
When the first-person voice enters the narrative of the Peloponnesian War, the sentence structure, the level of emotion, and the use of imagery remain unchanged. Thucydides is neither more angry nor more frenzied when his own circumstances are discussed, suggesting that he, too, like the dramatis personae of his history, is subject to the same cruel irony and fate that all humans alike must face. And so when the author’s voice leaves the narrative, we want to hear more, not less of Thucydides the individual—we are intrigued about what is left unsaid as much as about what is told. He is selective and guarded, not promiscuous, in his disclosures. His own person is, in short, tantalizing. We never know exactly when he will reappear to us as battle veteran, political infighter, traveler, or survivor of the plague. His personal voice is thus mysterious and subtle, and it possesses a certain dignity by the restraint in its use, the surprise of its entry and exit, and the critical and relevant expertise that it conveys. And while postmodernists and sophisticated theorists might laugh at the historian’s “fiction” of both professed objectivity and restraint, Thucydides’ purpose in using the explicitly personal voice is really more to assist the reader’s understanding of his ideas than to elicit sympathy for his own suffering.
Consider, in addition, the nature of Thucydides’ personal revelations: war, exile, plague—the traditional biblical host of abject catastrophes. Surely other problems arose in the historian’s life—petty discrimination, perhaps maltreatment as a result of his Thracian pedigree, financial setback, loss of public repute, his marginalization by a more liberal Athenian democracy, and vindictive treatment by demagogues. Yet, again, none of these is ever explicitly mentioned. In the historian’s eyes, such experiences are not relevant to the elucidation of his story. I would surmise that Thucydides felt such unfairness and maltreatment to his person to be inferior in magnitude to battle, disease, and forcible expulsion—to be, in other words, the relatively normal cargo of frustrations that we as humans all share in a frequently unpleasant, often tragic, and all-too-brief world, and hence of little value in adding either insight or information to his narrative.
II.
Far different from Thucydides’ practice is a recent movement among classical scholars to embrace the “personal voice”—the “explicitly autobiographical intervention within the act of criticism.” Judith P. Hallett and Thomas Van Nortwick have combined to edit a volume of nine essays, drawn from recent American Philological Association and British symposia and framed by their own introductions and conclusions, which seeks to change radically the way classicists interpret and present their scholarship.1 The personal voice is to be an inclusive tent, where feminists, postmodernists, and assorted theorists can go far beyond “academic discourse” to swap storytelling and thereby reinvigorate classical scholarship in its eleventh hour (23). We are reminded that personal voice theory is akin both to feminist scholarship, which emphasizes “the role played by gender, race and class in the production and reception of knowledge” and to poststructuralism, which questions “the validity…of the ideals of the detached scholar and impartial reader” (1).
As would-be revolutionaries manning the barricades and “compromising traditions,” the authors expect opposition from traditional philologists. Professor Hallett is ready for it and throws down the gauntlet: “Such discursive concessions to the conventions of professional acculturation not only loom large during our days as novitiates, but long after we have taken our final vows. By employing the personal voice as part of our classical scholarship—with the goal of creating a more expansive and authoritative form of classical scholarship, one which acknowledges the distinctive differences among its practitioners as vital sources of strength—we are at last seeking concessions from the other side” (emphasis added, 14-15).
Hallett is surely right that by past standards of classical scholarship this collection is rather bizarre and does compromise at least the Thucydidean tradition of first-person usage that many scholars have on occasion employed. Classicists as diverse as Bernard Knox, N. G. L. Hammond, Michael Jameson, W. K. Pritchett, and Vasily Rudich, to name a few, have drawn on their own experiences—battle, field reconnaissance, military service, life in China, political repression under the Soviets—to lend expertise to particular discussions of the military, topographical, colonial, or political life of the ancient world. I am equally guilty of the practice in occasionally comparing my own blunders as a farmer with the realities of ancient Greek arboriculture and viticulture as practiced in a similar Mediterranean climate. But perhaps Hallett and Van Nortwick, and most others whose work is included in the collection, would see such traditional usage as limiting, anecdotal fact-gathering, unduly restrictive of the full potentialities of the employment of “I,” “me,” and “my,” which should properly capture feelings as well as experience and thereby bring the irrational to the fore of scholarly discussion.
Whereas the Thucydidean tradition narrowly centers on the correlation between the special technê or experience of the author and the particular subject at hand in the narrative, the new version of “the personal voice” draws randomly on emotions and confessionals of all sorts, albeit overlaid with admitted orthodox “political agendas” (64; cf. 124, 173). And everything, we must understand, is now to be fair game for the classical scholar—drunken parents (19), midlife crises (16-17), tenure denials (121-22), gossip (94, 126), teenage sexuality and body appearance (41, 56), the clitoris (41), the penis/phallus (90, 107), sexual acts both heterosexual and homosexual (154-55), AIDS (177), mean boyfriends (26), mental breakdowns (91, 94), failed marriages (17), federal sex discrimination lawsuits (170), spousal abandonment (35), personal slights (122), insensitive former thesis advisors (39, 155), and far too many other topics to be summarized here, but which in their totality offer a literary and polished version of the more tawdry and rawer exposes presented daily for the less educated on the daytime television talk-show circuit.
There is to be no Thucydidean economy in this latest manifestation of personal intervention—it is not uncommon to find the first-person pronoun used forty to fifty times on a single page (cf. 17). So much for Susan Wiltshire’s assurance that “we will want to avoid intruding ourselves carelessly into our writing…. The purpose always is to call attention to our subject, not to ourselves” (178). Nor is there any of the suspense or unpredictability of Thucydides’ personal voice. The contributors are quite honest that this is to be a collection in which the author’s life, thoughts, and angst will be missing from scarcely a paragraph. Borrowing a line from postmodern theory, they believe “all writing is personal” anyway (170, cf. 70), so why not just come out and be honest, abandoning the myth of “the detached scholar” and “impartial reader.” Ostensibly these so un-Hellenic revelations will not merely elucidate the text, but allow readers to come to know the author not as a removed critic or unbiased observer, but as a real person like themselves. When we can emphathize with the travails of the modern classicist, we will at last empathize with the real Greeks. In the entire collection there is literally not more than a single page or two where “I” and its oblique cases are not found—the sincere, though naive, belief of the well-meaning authors is that their litany of disappointments and neuroses (what they call “confessing…shameful youth” [22]) will attract rather than repulse most readers. They are oblivious to Voltaire’s warning that “Le secret d’ennuyer est de tout dire.”
Sometimes the ego-disease can infect the embryonic sentence even before it can start out in life: “So it seems to me now, at this point in my thinking on this subject (which is not the same as twenty-two months ago, when I first started thinking about it, or as it will be twenty-two months hence)…” (49). Oddly, such halting personal prose in this case is offered to us as the author’s clear corrective to the dull “depersonified academic voice” (39) of scholars of “superior detached status” (40), who have contributed to the “removal of my idiosyncrasies, the individual stylistic variants of my prose, any hint that ‘I’ existed as a real flesh and blood person with feelings” (39). Ironies, then, abound throughout the collection.
There is also no recognition of, or perhaps no concern with, the embarrassment that the collective experiences of most academics who matured in the last four decades are, to be honest, not especially interesting, much less unusual or heroic to most readers. All these voices lack Thucydidean grafztas. There are no wars, plagues, exiles here, and no apologies for their absences, either. Instead of the ancient notion of pathos, we feel real modern bathos. The stress, pressures, and accompanying fixations of contemporary Western suburban existence in general and the melodramas of academic life in particular are now to be as legitimate as were Thucydides’ infection and expulsion. Instead of Thucydides’ first-hand encounters with rotting corpses and sinking triremes we read of journal articles rejected (161), tenure denied (121), and rude department colleagues who were inattentive listeners (94).
Again, do not expect in this book a recent returnee from Bosnia or Rwanda to explicate the insanity of stases at Corcyra, someone with jail experience in a federal correctional institution to ponder Socrates’ refusal to break out, a Vietnam veteran to talk of the “mile” run at Marathon, a journalism major to comment on Rumor, or even a former elected official to offer musings on the tumult of the ancient ekklêsia. Instead, the Sturm und Drang of a self-proclaimed, exclusively white, presently secure, self-conscious, mostly middle- or upper-middle-class, highly educated, well-traveled, urban professoriate—free from the horrors of war, revolution, grinding poverty, physical labor, mayhem, and hunger—are to elucidate, in a way classical philologists cannot, the lives, culture, and thoughts of a mostly agrarian and relatively poor ancient citizenry a harvest or siege away from ruin.
The authors, though, might retort that they think the use of the personal voice is critical for another reason as well—to identify the present political affiliations of a scholar (e.g., “the other side” [15]; “our own political agendas” [64]; “in honor of Bill Clinton’s inauguration” [124]; “at a small campaign gathering for Albert Gore, Jr.” [173]; “The Republican party, if it has its way…” [32]). Such honesty would end the sham of disinterested anonymity where “authors and referees are not supposed to be cognizant of or concerned with one another’s identity” (135). Co-editor Hallett presents a disturbing scenario in her critique of the supposedly anonymous and “‘objective’ assessment” of scholarly articles (135):
Here, for example, I have explained why I am a committed feminist who regards gender as a matter of major importance, and why I consider that my identity as a feminist scholar enriches and elucidates my identity as a classicist. I appreciate similar efforts at honesty from colleagues, direct acknowledgments of where they are “coming from,” because such efforts in turn help me assess those colleagues’ criteria for assessing others. (134)
There is, of course, some danger in explicitly politicizing the personal voice through “direct acknowledgments.” From the sad history of the twentieth century we all know where professed self-identification can descend. Ultimately the primacy of political correctness drowns out individuality, eccentricity, dissent, passion, and honesty—the only true stuff of art and literature. Long ago George Orwell—“if it paid better they would be fascists”—warned us that within such a politicized environment there would always be a rivalry to gain acceptance for ideas often of dubious worth by parading one’s purer affiliations.
In the context of publishing scholarly work, perhaps we could affix detachable I.D. stickers to our submissions that say something like:
Dear Co-Editor Hallett,
As a strong feminist and long-time admirer of your own work, who feels the need for progressive scholars to counteract the “objective assessments” of white male privileged elites, I hope you will appreciate the enclosed effort at providing a strong feminist, though often silenced, personal voice.
Then sympathetic editors could turn to their Rolodexes replete with potential reviewers’ “race, class, age, as well as gender” (cf. 128) to “help…assess those colleagues’ criteria for assessing others” (134)—for example, no to this “white, wealthy, fortyish, heterosexual reactionary” reviewer; yes to that “Pacific Islander, lower-middle-class, postretirement, feminist woman” reader.
But Professor Hallett is worried not so much about the wisdom of requiring self-identification (“honesty” and “direct acknowledgments of where they are ‘coming from”‘) as she is that others may not hear of it: “But are such efforts at honesty likely to become accepted professional practice? As the associate editor of a scholarly journal, I am frustrated by the reports of referees who find no fault with argumentation or the documentation of a submission, but dismiss its approach or choice of topic on the grounds that they are not ‘important’ or ‘interesting’” (134). According to this logic—that everything is always political—because the present reviewer finds Compromising Traditions neither “important” nor “interesting,” any criticism by him must be attributed to “where [he] is coming from,” that is, membership in a gender, class, race, or power structure different from that of the contributors. Could it not be simply because I find the “argumentation,” “documentation,” “approach,” and “choice of topic” (134) of this volume wanting?
Writers in Eastern Europe, Communist Russia, and Mao’s China all knew “where they were coming from” and they were as eager to use those “criteria for assessing others”; but the result of seeking such progressive solidarity was not literature, art, or honest criticism, but mediocrity, repression, intolerance, and, of course, far, far worse. Given that academics are not known for their bravery, we would soon not be reading of personal voices, but rather hearing a shrill howling as the pack cynically bounded after each new scent that promised career rewards.
Indeed, we already see far too much of that calculated orthodoxy and monotony in this present volume. Otherwise, why is there so much mutual back-scratching? The authors in this collection, quite apart from the formal introduction and response, constantly quote one another by name and refer to one another’s talks and work—not in the traditional and valuable manner of intravolume scholarly cross-references, but in a more grating sort of informal chit-chat and gratuitous back-patting (“If any Tom, Judith, or Susan can get published by confessing their shameful youth” [22]; “When Vanda was a student of mine”; “my Bristol colleague, Vanda Zajko, who was facing her PhD examination” [40, 38]; “A prestigious secondary school whose alumni include Professor Charles Rowan Beye” [120]; “Judith Hallett, whose paper at the conference and whose challenging questions during the discussions” [108]; “My excitement in discovering that my friend and colleague of many years Susanna Morton Braund” [107]).
But the authors, of course, warn those in “reactionary quarters” (129) ahead of time not to label as “unscholarly ‘whining’” (129, 132), “white male bashing” (130), or “lack of tact” (178) their revelations of “my pain” (16), “deep feelings of inferiority” (123), and “emotional scars” (132). We are not to react “with distress, or embarrassment, or anger, or a combination of these” (94) when we read such often lurid revelations. To do so is to valorize the old “depersonalized academic voice…which manifestly bore attributes of gender, race, and age: male, white, and middle-aged” (40). It was a sinister enough voice that supported the “hierarchical, competitive model for doing business in our field.” Its “anxiety about standards,” we are warned with Foucauldian frequency, “can be a device for hoarding power” (22). These students of ancient logic have forgotten the fallacy that the constant anticipation of criticism is not synonymous with its rebuttal.
Sadly, despite their claims of bravery and radicalism in “compromising tradition,” most contributors remain quite worried (15, 39-42, 59-63, 132-35, 178-80) about what those in the Old Guard might do when they get their hands on this book, hence the constant disclaimers and worries: “Most obviously, by revealing something about ourselves and why it is we ask the questions that we do, we contributors have compromised ourselves and our writing in one basic sense: that of exposing ourselves and making our writing liable to suspicion and disrepute” (2). None, however, goes as far as Charles Martindale, who gives us his heartfelt pledge not to engage in personal voice slumming again: “Nonetheless my own experiment with this approach is not one I would necessarily wish to repeat, or recommend to others” (94).
Before examining some of the individual essays drawn from this self-confessed “middle-class suburban world” (31), let me enumerate a number of contradictions in the collection.
First, the purported aim of the book is to bring us the past via the experiences and feelings of the present. Specifically, classical literature can seem relevant in 1998 through an empathetic demonstration of how it can still explicate and change our own lives. But how many of these authors actually discuss classical antiquity? Do any explicitly and at length connect a problem in ancient literature with something that they themselves have experienced? In fact, only two of nine do so—Judith de Luce in her analysis of the topos of abandoned female helpers and Patricia Moyer in her reflections on Euripides. The rest of the contributions are not really essays on the past, but are mostly revelations about the angst of the present by authors who just happen to be classicists and thus scatter about a few references to Odysseus or Virgil. The only genuinely shared themes of these personal memoirs are criticism of classical philology and the simple fact of authorship by academics.
Fair enough—let us not criticize the book not written, but rather turn to what we have, an unhappiness with traditional classical scholarship spiced with intimate details about the contributors’ lives. The central thesis of all of them is that traditional philology has left us with a grinding monotony in both approach and style. Who can argue with that? Anyone who has perused the program of APA talks, the table of contents of classical journals, or university press catalogues can agree. Too many classicists—sometimes both philologists and theorists alike—can be obscure, pedantic, distant, timid, and cold in their writing, and they are too often interested in problems that have little relevance for the typical college undergraduate, much less the average American. They teach too little and write too much for too few. But is the medicine offered here any better than the disease? Does this type of personal voice provide more engaging images, moving prose, and original themes and stories sure to make the ancient world come alive either in print or in the classroom? Thomas Van Nortwick asks, “What does knowing the metrics of Plautus contribute to the overall health of the Nation?” (186). Some might answer, About as much as being told that Mr. Van Nortwick (along with all too many millions of other Americans, including the present reviewer) is the son of an alcoholic. In other words, absolutely nothing in both cases.
The authors are confused about where such a true diversity of presentation might arise. To alleviate the boredom and repetition inherent in classical scholarship, aren’t we in need of great stylists, creative writers and artists, eccentrics who may come into the field late and leave early, men and women of action who have lived lives beyond the dorm, library carrel, and faculty lounge, or even the sometimes reckless who smile at, not cower before, the official rebuke of their more entrenched peers? Don’t we need idiosyncratic Schliemanns, Ventrises, and Parrys who seek to short-circuit academe and commune directly with ancient texts rather than with texts about ancient texts?
The writers of Compromising Traditions feel no such need. Diversity in this collection is apparently university, involving relatively small differences of religion, gender, rank, and education—“We are six women and three men, ranging in age from early thirties to mid-sixties and in rank from Lecturer to Distinguished Professor” (6). That one has a Ph.D. from Michigan rather than Harvard or prefers Virgil to Homer is presented—embarrassingly—as difference: “We are Latinists and Hellenists, gays and straights, Jews and Christians. We hold advanced degrees from Stanford, Tulane and Big Ten state universities as well as from Ivy League strongholds in the U.S., and from Nottingham, Exeter and Bristol as well as from Oxford and Cambridge in the UK” (6-7). In other words, we learn that a group of well-educated, white, upper-middle-class, liberal, and like-minded professors were not educated at the same schools and have different research sub-specialties within the tiny field of classics. And while being Jewish or homosexual might constitute real variance in Des Moines, it does not seem terribly disparate in the university.
Once our diverse and courageous rebels are identified, however, we can then unite and move on to round up and condemn the usual suspected enemies of storytelling. At the millennium we, of course, all know who he is. The nomenclature of disdain shared by the contributors reflects an eerie type of group-speak, as if they were all working from some commissar’s dog-eared script—though I was enchanted to learn that this toxic species is allowed to have slightly diverse subspecies. Sometimes he is the “WASP” (153) or “straight WASP male” (12), or even “that most detested of creatures in contemporary American academia, a WASP male of the monied class with a Harvard PhD” (153), more often the “white, middle-class male” (8) or “white, middle-aged, middle-class male” (43), not to be confused with the “male, white and middle-aged” (40) or “white, educated and heterosexual male” (64) of “white middle-class, middle-American style” (162), or “old boy” (133), “good old, straight old boy” (156), or just plain old-fashioned “privileged white males” (129) or mundane “male classics professors” (121). And he is responsible for all sorts of bad things, from “Newtonian physics” (185) to the “Boston Brahmin” (154) and “America’s ruling class” (157), keeping us out of his “masculine preserve” (189), “traditionally male preserves” (23), “traditionally male…world” (172), “male defined world” (169), and contaminating us with “traditional notions of masculinity” (14), “masculine reason” (189), “male-authored texts” (9, 61), “the male’s quest” (31), “male ideology” (9), the “male’s voice” (161), the “quintessential languages of masculine scholarship” (59), “male writing” (162), and “dominant male culture” (35) of “male reviewers” (48), whether really “male or their female clones” (161), and keeping us within “the purview of men” (169). He and his ancestors have made women feel “non-human” (34) and the equivalent of “the animal” (35), and he is an expert at “depersonalization” (39, 40, 41), this creator of “patriarchal culture” (33), “orthodox patriarchal assumptions” (23), “patriarchal lies” (61), and “modern misogyny” (189). All this stereotyping is somewhat surprising coming from a book whose professed aim is to inaugurate new idiosyncratic paradigms of expression outside accepted generalization.
But who are these horrendous pale monsters of America? Almost all the white middle-aged males I see out here in rural California are not elbow-patched, wire-rimmed, loafer-wearing, nasal-voiced, journal-article-rejecting, and tenure-denying chairmen and deans ready for pasture in the New England countryside, but of lower-middle-class status or already among the unfortunates of American life—filthy tractor caps, missing teeth, financially insolvent, and often dirty, disabled, and exhausted. Prior to being enlightened by this volume, I had considered such “white males” more the victims than the beneficiaries of the oppressive “post-industrial West” (190) these affluent, pampered, and tenured academics profess to despise. I wonder what the reaction would be should these self-proclaimed “courageous” contributors venture into the local auto parts store, cafe, or similar “traditionally male preserves” and inform the assembled “good old, straight old boy[s]” that there aren’t going to be any more “orthodox patriarchal assumptions.”
Can others play at this labeling game? If so, after reading this collection, I suggest we all agree on a new species of Anglo-American: the “white, upper-middle-class, well-paid, securely employed, summers-off, intercontinental-traveling, smug, frustrated, pouty, whiney—and mostly unhappy—desk-bound academic,” whose published work few read and whose classes most undergraduates increasingly pass by. That stereotype is about as crude and unhelpful a label for the hundreds of hard-working classicists in little-known undergraduate programs as the constant “white male” calumny is for millions of Americans.
But the white male miscreant turns out to be less toxic (and more frequently identified and named) when he either agrees with the approach of feminists (the work of John Henderson is a particular favorite [42-43; 74-76]) or publicly recants the “cultural baggage we do not want to carry” in apologizing for “orthodox patriarchal assumptions” (23). Mr. Van Nortwick is particularly paranoid in worrying that classicists are sometimes unjustly accused by multiculturalists who claim that when “we in the Classics department teach Aristotle, we must endorse his views on women and slavery, and so proselytize innocent minds.” Then he offers an inappropriate comparison to the Inquisition and the Nazis. “Do early modern historians endorse the Inquisition? Were Hitler’s biographers all Nazis?” (188). But how many of us really worry that a zealot in Ethnic Studies thinks assigning Aristotle means advocacy of slavery or sexual discrimination? And I find, as most others would, Van Nortwick’s further implication even sillier, if not reprehensible—that Aristotle’s philosophical prejudices are in any way to be placed in the company of those of terrorists and sadists like Torquemada or the Führer.
True, among classicists it may be difficult to find real diversity as most Americans define it—diversity born of some life intimacy with the brutality, monotony, danger, and tragedy of the workplace. But given the book’s showy promise of real variance, we might have at least expected to find here, if not the underbelly of America, then the voice of one right-wing nut, a Christian fundamentalist, or a millionaire capitalist—and there are actually a few such classicists—who could make the ancient cosmos of reactionary coups, extremist religion, or Athenian banking speak to contemporaries. But again the purpose of this volume is not to use personal experience or expertise to elucidate Greek literature, but apparently to complain about the “hoarding” of “power” by conservative elite classicists.
The authors make a terrible error in thinking that because academics’ left-of-center views are at odds with most of America, somehow they are also unorthodox, even radical or courageous (2, 24). They are not. Any diversity that exists in this volume is the intramural squabbling and petty rivalry of the lobster bucket, where claws and pincers snap at others in oblivion. The easiest, not the most courageous, stance in the world of the 1990s (and beyond) humanities department is for a professor to attack the “middle-age, middle-class, white, heterosexual male.” Alas, the voices here constitute a chorus of yes-men, not mavericks.
We miss, then, Danton’s revolutionary “De Vaudace, et encore de Vaudace, et toujours de l’audace!” The fact is, true radicals damn the torpedoes and press on full speed ahead. If they entitle their book Compromising Traditions, then we should expect these would-be brawlers to give up their easy straw “white” men and forgo “the nameless and the dead” (133) and the constant unsupported chit-chat. Rather we should expect them to cite examples, name names, quote abhorrent policy statements, and thus make the case that living, breathing, and identifiable white, middle-aged males in the APA, Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the think tanks marginalize women and people of color through their enforcement of WASPish forms of argumentation, bloodless expression, and their “aristocratic aversion to public exposure” (189). Do they not remember Thucydides’ “Men make the city not walls or ships without men in them”? As Frederick the Great said to his timid Guard, “Rascals, would you live forever?”
But I suspect many of us know why these tenured radical reformers parade the names of supporters (42-43, 74-76, 108), but leave mostly unnamed those culpable white men who have caused them such pain and anguish “and feelings of scholarly inadequacy” (127). Perhaps in a volume to come, we as a profession can ask who these dreadful white men are at Harvard and Oxbridge (“a pair of archaic institutions” [41]), and what those who “compromise traditions” are going to do to end their hurtfulness. If he is not named or quoted, can we believe the evil “white, educated and heterosexual male” really exists? Once authors such as these take up the language of invective (e.g., “outrageous misrepresentations and lies” [123]; “patriarchal lies” [63]; “most detested of creatures” [153]; “they have been a disaster” [167]; “philistine and ignorant” [166]; “lamentably incapable of even beginning to diversify the sorts of voices heard” [41]), then they have entered the arena and must play by the tough rules of the thrust and parry—and that requires names and quotations and citations if it is not to be cowardly or untrue.
So I am troubled over a revolutionary fervor that trashes the unfairness of footnotes and data collection—and then quite timidly gossips (121-22, 155); feints attack only to quickly hedge, prevaricate, and backstep (39-40, 62, 133); presents unsubstantiated rumor (126, 133) and unsigned e-mail (137); snipes at unnamed foes (94); ridicules now-retired dons (123); cites documents full of “outrageous misrepresentations and lies” but not their authors (123, 136); produces as evidence anonymous, unsigned questionnaires (142-48)—or promises not to do any of this again (94)! Professor Hallett’s disclaimer—“unless I am citing their published work, or they have given me permission to use their names, most classicists who figure in this essay are either nameless or dead” (133)—only emphasizes, not excuses, her pusillanimity and is itself the truly unprofessional stance, especially when she had argued for ending the practice of academic anonymity in peer review and for identifying scholars by their professed ideologies (134-35). When we are told that so many “patriarchal” published texts abound, why is it then necessary to attack unnamed or unpublished correspondence, or to make generalized sneers without citations? Again, this volume is not supposed to be a novel or even a memoir where anonymity is standard, but an “act of criticism” and a new method of “classical scholarship.”
There are plenty of living, breathing Ivy League males—powerful enough white heterosexual men in the field who sit on journal boards and graduate school admissions committees, referee fellowships, hold APA offices, and hire endowed professors, and who have written articles, policy statements, even whole books critical of feminists’ views, whom Professor Hallett (again, the professed advocate of ending anonymity in scholarly peer review) could identify, quote, and footnote at length as examples of pernicious “privileged white males.” Instead we get mostly ankle-biting on Professor Philip Ambrose of Vermont—a gifted, humane, and hard-working classicist at or near retirement, who has done as much as anyone in the country to encourage undergraduate education—for his liberal and elegant defense of internationalism and his justifiable worry over the bashing of foreigners (125-26, 140). In short, I find the targets of attack here misdirected and the studied exclusionary language of invective careerist, calculating, and, in the end, a very unpleasant sort of dissimulation. It is as if Demosthenes, in the secret hope of a spot on the royal Macedonian staff, were to rail endlessly to an in-house audience about all those anonymous hurtful “Northerners” without mentioning Philip or his accomplices in Athens by name.
And what are we to make of the constant smug dismissals of the anonymous white male when we read in Susan Wiltshire’s essay near the end of this book that “one of the most compelling arguments for recognizing and appreciating the personal voice in classical scholarship is that it keeps us from attacking personally others who do their work differently. Ours is a spacious discipline, with ample room for many different approaches” (180). After all of the anger, we are reassured that “we American classicists inflict enough, needless, [sic] pain on one another” (131). As the arsonists’ fires rage, can’t we all just get along?
At first, Judith Hallett asks “Who the hell cares?” about the silly pedantry of “mean-spirited British classicists” who have been hurtful to her (121-24). But then, after her “first reaction” passes, she gives us pages and pages of generic bombast that prove she cares very much indeed. All this anger leads to the obvious question that lies at the heart of this entire collection—are these “radicals” angry over a culpable system that rewards dullness and irrelevancy, that harms the daily fight to interest American students in the Greeks and Romans, or are they merely depressed and hurt that at midlife their own careers have not met the expectations of a tiny elite? Is not the real worry of these middle-aged—but seemingly perennial—graduate students the state of their own careers rather than the sinking ship of classics? At least the Ivy League grandee, secure in his patriarchal values and privileged position, does not suffer the wages of hypocrisy as do these sunshine patriots who profess martyrdom but fear the bullet. So much mock heroism in this volume, so little real courage.
Another implicit claim of this volume is that the language of the personal voice is accessible and egalitarian (22-24, 94, 132-35, 177-80, 184-87). But why do the authors believe their often ungrammatical sentences (45-47) and I/me/my/mine revelations of the most intimate details of their lives are any easier to read than (say) the Pauly-Wissowa? Sometimes their exemplary personal voices are hilarious and turn the argument of this entire collection on its head—as, for example, when they compare John Henderson’s prose with that of a traditional philologist. I shall let you be the judge of which voice is the clearer and more engaging by quoting the last two lines of the two respective texts offered to us for comparison by Charles Martindale (74):
David West: “Because Horace does not put his hand on his heart and sigh, his love poetry is usually underestimated.”
John Henderson: “Phew! There, that’s better. But…O scholarship, industry of avowal & deniability! Those men! They would say that, wouldn’t they?” (emphases his)
I will wager any of the contributors that the undergraduates of America will find West, not Henderson, the more comprehensible; the former seeks to pass on information and enlightenment, the latter, inside jokes and allusion among the tiny and chatty elite whose class the authors so vehemently denounce. And when an advocate of personal voice theory introduces the book with “discursive concessions to the conventions of professional acculturation” (14), we may legitimately ask against whose impersonal, dry, and lifeless language this movement should be railing.
Does the inclusion of dirty words at this late date really “contextualize” obscenity and offer a challenge to “those who wield power in our profession”? Susanna Braund compares J. N. Adams’s work with that of Amy Richlin and blithely remarks, “What is refreshing here, and throughout Richlin’s book, is that she does not shirk the relevant ‘four-letter words.’ She has broken with tradition in introducing words like asshole, cunt and fuck into her text” (48). What reactionary tradition is that in 1998? There is nothing compromising or untraditional, much less personal or “refreshing” about “four-letter words”—anyone can and, of course, does use them now in print. An author’s preference for “fuck” adds nothing that a contemporary reader does not already see and hear every day on television and the radio, tells us nothing about the author except that she is pretty much a product, like the other two or three billion on the planet, of the modern age. The issue is rather one of decorum and taste—in 1998 using “fuck” in print rather than “intercourse” is about as courageous, refreshing, and unusual as talking publicly about an alcoholic parent.
A virulent anti-British and anti-Germanic theme runs through the entire collection. Hallett, in response to an imposed metrical correction of one of her Latin poems, exclaims, “Let those mean-spirited British classicists write some Ovidian verses about their leaders-elegiacs about the lunchtime amores of Tory MPs, or hexameters on Prince Charles’ wished-for metamorphosis into a paper product for feminine hygienic use!” (124). Are we to laugh or weep? So much for Ms. Hallett’s earlier expressed anger over the unfairness of personal invective, the “disparaging remarks leveled at myself and others because of our gender” (11), which we all were supposed to deplore. Charles Beye then ups the ante: “When I once learned that the discovery of a ‘controlled substance,’ as it was called, in the pocket of a foreign national is grounds for instant deportation without a hearing, it took every ounce of Christian forbearance to prevent me from trying to improve the playing field for American classicists with this strategy” (167). A nativism that contemplates the commission of felonies, or an anti-Christian’s (166) embrace of Christ, to rid us of the English presents more irony. Not only did a few of the anonymous, refereed submissions to this book turn out in fact to be British, but the one genuine example of an Oxford don’s arrogance and cruelty-Kenneth Dover’s gruesome admission of near-complicity in the death of a colleague—is not condemned (65-7) but instead offered as a more or less positive inspirational model (54-55; cf. 2) of personal voice usage!
Hallett and Beye argue that the Brits cannot teach (often true). They take jobs away from Americans at the top research universities (I suppose so). They are not sensitive to the American muse (of course). And they often fire us and make fun of us (not always wrongly). But why then have the most innovative and popular contemporary classicists—Peter Green, Peter Brown, Bernard Knox, and M. I. Finley—been either British-born, British-trained, or British-employed? Perhaps it is the greater British tolerance of eccentricity—a trait sorely lacking in these essays—that encourages the rare and gifted to break away from the crowd. It is hard to make the argument that all British classicists are aristocratic and dull as a group when the most successful popularizers of our profession—such as Michael Wood or Michael Grant—are English. My own minor brushes in graduate school with snobbery here and abroad were mostly from American wannabe Brits, not the real thing; the latter (who once numbered nearly half the senior faculty at Stanford) were usually quite unconcerned whether their American students went to “a prestigious secondary school” (120) or grew up in the farming backwater of central California. The English professors in Palo Alto and Athens as a rule cared only whether we knew Greek—the prep-schooled and East-Coast-trained Americans cared more about who we were and where we were from.
Ms. Hallett’s and Mr. Beye’s academic nativism is a little hard to swallow when it is passed off as a sort of broad-based populism. If we are going to suspect Europeans, then why not go whole-hog—less hand-wringing and whining about journal articles rejected, Latin pronunciation corrected, and tenure denied, and instead more honest nativism and xenophobia in the good old-fashioned, paranoid American style that Richard Hofstadter once so ably chronicled?
But if we are to trust only in our own national voice and not worship foreigners, why then such a heavy reliance on French thinking (163)? Scarcely a page can be turned without the intrusion of the old gang of Barthes (52, 82-84), de Man (78, 86-87, 185), Derrida (78, 86-87), Lacan (107), the “French feminists” (60), Foucault (65-66, 69), and their numerous American acolytes. Yet French-inspired postmodernism has done more to squelch individualism, emotion, and spontaneity than all the British philologists, empiricists, and positivists put together. Quite simply, according to Mr. Foucault, there is no such thing as a personal voice, much less a need for its expression. It is simply a concocted fiction of no value at all. Indeed, our poor contributors are on the sharp horns of a dilemma: how to quote their beloved Gallic ontological nihilists and yet maintain that their own individual voices are in any way valuable and unique—anything other than the epiphenomenon of an arbitrary fictive discourse fashioned by the invidious machinations of power networks. Constant apologies over that predicament and a few contorted escape plans characterize the entire volume (1-2, 23-24, 60-61, 78-79, 102, 107-8, 185, 188).
Personal voice theory is purportedly at odds with academic capitalism, the pernicious system of hierarchy that puts such a premium on status, salary, rank, and influence (19-22)—“the race for money, prestige, and comfort” (22). The clear intent here is to suggest that these contributors are not one in spirit with the Ivy League and Oxbridge grandees who lust after “power,” “bigger salaries,” and “prestige.” Rather, the Compromising Traditionalists are normal folks in the trenches (128). They dance to a different tune than the Anglo-inspired elites and bravely write “not for any careerist reasons, nor for any admission into the patriarchy” (118). They have rejected “the race to bigger salaries and more prestige” (186) and sneer at “in-bred cliques, bent on reproducing themselves and so cranking out clones to feed the Dean’s relentless bottom line” (186). We are told by one of them that “I am not interested in the power games played by so many academics…. One of my strongest principles is social justice: equal opportunities and self-realization” (52).
The lady doth protest too much, methinks, for these critics of the Anglo-American rat-race in general and the academic scrabble in particular seem obsessed with publicizing prep schools (120, 133), department chairwomanships (43, 52), journal associate editorships (134), directorships of honors programs (169), Ivy League educations (18, 153, 155, 169), Distinguished Professorships (6), Ph.D.’s (6, 38, 62, 154), grants (175), prizewinners (3), praise of one another (22, 183), postdoctoral sojourns abroad (122, 129), presidential addresses (3), and conferences (4-5, 91, 123, 125). All that bumper-sticker identification has little to do with explication of the Greeks, but it might tell us a great deal about elitist professors’ own insecurities and real aspirations. Why do almost all the authors parade their own prior “pioneering” (3)—previously published work and conference papers (16, 21, 51, 125, 126, 138-39, 161, 173, 176)—and go on to explain the triumphs of their own “modest” careers (52)? For those who are so angry at British snobbery, why so many off-the-cuff and meaningless references, such as an association with George Bush’s boyhood academy (“a prestigious secondary school” [120]), or personal contact with the current vice president (“I noticed that Gore seemed somewhat distracted” [173])?
Consequently, even the artificial and contrived efforts to display populism inevitably succumb to unintended but hilarious aristocratic pomposity. Judith Hallett confesses that she started Latin “late” at thirteen (127). Take another example, Susan Ford Wiltshire’s pastoral, Wendell Berry-reading (174) image of herself thinking about her own book while propped up in an old rocker: “I finally gave up puzzling over the proper arrangement of the book and took some time off. As I sat in a rocking chair on a porch by a creek, thinking about something else altogether, I thought of the pas de deux in ballet” (174).
Leopards really cannot change their spots.
IV.
I shall end by summarizing four of the essays. By far the best effort is the penultimate response of Professor Beye (153-67): a crude, often funny and outrageous, but sometimes cruel rumination against Christians (166), heterosexuals (154-55), the British (166-67), and the tacky Americans in general (166). Beye, like Gore Vidal, combines the smug elitism of his upbringing (153-54) with a general, unapologetic, left-wing hatred of middle America (162, 166). He writes as well as any of his well-educated generation and lacks the stern joylessness of all the other aging and angry baby-boomers in the collection, whose lives and careers are not quite turning out as promised. As a modern-day Trimalchio who reviews his larger-than-life career at the table of his inferiors, this bon vivant relates his some thirty years of professional and sexual experience (e.g., 155) with the classical hierarchy. Of the Greeks’ interest in the young male and his own difficulty with the dispassionate restrictions of scholarly discourse, he chimes in with: “Can one imagine how perverse it is to speak in utterly neutral tones with a distanced sensibility about the institution of erotic physical contact between two males when the speaker is himself a veteran of more such encounters than he could possibly count?” (156). Beye is indeed fortunate that he managed to speak in “utterly neutral tones.” Had he revealed to his young students any personal-voice ruminations about his own “encounters”—much less acted on them—application of the many feminist-inspired speech and sexual-harassment codes on the present-day campus would have landed him in the academic pokey.
Nevertheless, this “veteran” has offered us a let-it-all-hang-out expose that is honest, funny, and unusually perceptive—and which does not really have much to do with the art of using the personal voice. How can it, when a serious literary critic is asked to respond to talk-show chit-chat? Some of his casual comments surely must have bothered the stern political correctness of the first-person sisterhood: “I personally could argue that as a gay male I much admire Odysseus’ capacity for lying” (158); “I sometimes found [one of his professors’] celebrated lunches…mildly titillating sexually, but most of the time an exercise in S & M that left me trembling” (155); “to the extent that the personal voice theory derives from the feminist movement and to the extent that women (in the USA at least) are acculturated to analyze other persons—what dismissive males call ‘gossip’—such endless speculation can perhaps please the one sex and repulse the other” (160).
Beye is far too honest a critic not to notice the general vacuity of the volume, and he is the only one astute enough to see the hypocrisy of his Compromising Traditions peers concerning matters of their own privilege (157). His fellow contributors, who are eager to identify males by their “class” (e.g., 8, 43, cf. 2, 128) and decry exploitation inherent in their own society, should examine carefully their own exclusive positions and material comfort—where they live, where they travel and vacation, where their children go to school, with whom they socialize—inasmuch as they are among society’s most highly educated and well-compensated elites. On a rare occasion the bounty and freedom of that hated Western culture provides a tad of embarrassment that must be quickly “efface[d]” away: “My own present position as an employed woman with financial independence and intellectual freedom would, in many contexts, make identification with the majority of women in the world seem distasteful. However, by choosing to efface certain differences and investing in a group identity, people the world over have become able to lobby for what they want” (63). Distasteful? Tap your slippers three times, Dorothy, whisper “Efface, efface, efface”—and presto, “contexts” disappear and “group identity” arises among the world’s veiled and circumcised in their mud huts and these Anglo university professors who “compromise traditions.”
It is just as cheap and easy to ridicule students’ interests in grades and security (cf. e.g., 22), but rather sobering to think that their indebted parents are subsidizing work like this present volume. Whatever the contributors’ complaints about their former thesis advisors, male professors, and “old boy” mentors, it is at least clear that they were offered a far better education at far less cost than the quite expensive but therapeutic and politicized “voices” given to today’s financially strapped and poorly educated students. While Beye confronts honestly these embarrassments of class, his own decades-long and commendable wars with the pomposity of the philologist and the smug European have left their scars, and so pull his heart where his mind otherwise would not go. I suppose someone so talented can be forgiven for endorsing so mundane a collection, if we keep the Arabic adage in mind that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Thomas Van Nortwick is the doyen of the school and at times he can write good prose. Thus the poverty of thinking evident in his two essays (16-24; 182-90) is especially sad, the more so as it is replete with all the standard cliches about power and marginalization from the guilt-ridden, white, middle-aged, middle-class male that will come back to haunt him and thousands of other trendies in the years to come. His contribution is not about a personal-voice explication of Odysseus’ journey, but once more about the idea of using his personal voice: thus very little Odysseus, very much Van Nortwick (“I have written and published five autobiographical responses to works of classical literature in the last eight years” [16]).
The only real interest here is Van Nortwick’s curious but doomed attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable notions of the therapeutic personal voice with postmodern nihilism, spiced now and again with flip slurs on the world of the old white guys. Thus we read (emphases added): “In the midst of my pain” (16); “my own journey from post-adolescence to middle age” (16); “painful changes in my own life”; “I was entering middle age and feeling…” (17); “theorists who made me feel inadequate” (17-18); “I was a fraud” (18); “I felt isolated” (19); “I was alienated from myself” (21); “When I was able to get help and begin to face my problems” (19); and on and on. This therapeutic soup is thick with postmodern crackers like “hierarchical, competitive model” (22); “constructing contingent selves to fit various communities of assent” (23); “ontological relativism of postmodernism” (23); “challenging patriarchal assumptions” (23); and “radical subjectivity that inevitably follows from postmodernists’ paradigms undermines any search for ‘real’ antiquity” (185). Finally, the entire melange is to be randomly peppered with “hierarchies” (184), “Newtonian physics” (185), the “privileged position,” the “post-industrial West,” and the “fragmenting of [the] Western social fabric” (190).
But the postmodernist rebel, nursed on authorless “texts” that are merely empty signifiers, the brave critic of the “hierarchical, competitive model for doing business in our field,” is in a quandary—self-identification and person-less fictive texts really do not mix (pace Hallett [1]). But in the end, the author of “five autobiographical responses…in the last eight years” will at least believe in signing his name and expecting something in return for it: “Odysseus—remember you heard it here first—was the first postmodern hero!” (23).
Odysseus is not, and we did not hear it from you first, Mr. Van Nortwick.
So, at middle age, Van Nortwick is troubled about where his personal voice will lead, as the leaden weight of personal voice theory is forcing him ever closer to the choppy sea of not pleasing someone, with one foot precariously on the old philological dock and the other stretched too far atop the unsteady and drifting postmodernist boat. Will he jump to one side, swim on his own, or simply drown? Who will win? The id, or the old elite that run things and hand out “goodies,” or the “courageous” postmodernist feminists? Unfortunately, all and none, sort of, and so he will slowly split apart—but only “for the moment”:
Then I must confront directly the implications of postmodernism for self-knowledge. I have struggled with these issues for some time, and here are my conclusions for the moment. I cannot get comfortable with the idea that I have no essential self to which I must be true. I harbor thoughts that would be considered unclean by a strict postmodernist: I think there is something called the meaning of my life, and I want to know as much of it as I can; I believe that the deepest essence of it is part of something that transcends my life and is larger than my comprehension; my struggle is to come to trust that what that larger truth gives me, though it is definitely not always what I want or think I need, is what I am supposed to have. (24)
Well, “for the moment” and “directly” we promise not to tell anyone about this shocking and “unclean” admission. Yes, Mr. Van Nortwick, there really is “something called the meaning of my life.” It might even be something more concrete than “something that transcends my life”—a soul perhaps, God, or—who knows?—even Hell. And, yes, it may even be the meaning of Life rather than just your life. It is tragic that an academic renegade, professing the courage to abandon the professional norms of an acknowledged tiny sinking profession (“the Dodo bird” [23]), must be afraid—notice the Clintonesque use of “for the moment,” “I think,” “that would be considered,” “cannot get comfortable with”—that a few Gallic provocateurs will now find him quaint. And, of course, they surely will. Thirteen personal pronouns in a single sentence may unfortunately answer Van Nortwick’s query whether his writing was “not theoretical enough” (24).
And you, parents, who might object that you advanced all that borrowed money to Oberlin for an education that should have included Homer, not Mr. Van Nortwick’s own personal voice confessions, beware! Your children, according to Mr. (“remember you heard it here first”) Van Nortwick, are really grade-grubbers who merely want “sorting devices in the business of handing out the world’s goodies” (22). You and they foolishly went into debt for the Odyssey, instead of properly instructive personal revelations from Mr. Van Nortwick about how corrupt we all are: “If we conduct our classes in a way that exposes for students the dominant assumptions behind our educational system—that what counts is acquiring accurately measurable skills by which they can compete in the race for money, prestige, and comfort—is that necessarily a bad thing?… If we want them to take the Odyssey seriously as a reflection of something important in human life, then we cannot insist that, having acquired some perspective on the competitive, hierarchical assumptions that govern the poem, they must automatically respond in a way that affirms those assumptions” (22). What spooky times we are in! Since it is impossible now simply to appreciate the beauty and learn from the tragedy of Western literature, we might as well explicitly indoctrinate our students about poetry’s “hierarchical” and “dominant” “assumptions.”
Judith de Luce (25-37) offers “Reading and Re-Reading the Helpful Princess,” the only example in the entire book of real personal voice theory and classical criticism. She is upset about the ubiquity of classical themes of heroic abandonment, especially those involving deceitful men like Jason, Theseus, and Aeneas. She wrestles with the dilemma of why there are so many of those rather “ruthless” white heterosexual privileged males, ancient and modern, who use young princesses to advance their careers—only to abandon them when they are out of danger. (Question: can someone guess where Professor de Luce’s personal voice is leading?)
Yes, the answer comes but a few lines later: “Like many women, I have found myself performing the role of the helpful princess too often” (26). Other stories follow—for example (and perhaps some of us have heard this particular one before), the anonymous hard-working woman friend of Professor de Luce who was abandoned after putting her yuppie, careerist doctor husband through medical school. But thanks to feminist thought, Professor de Luce was at last able to correlate the ancient motif with her own personal experiences. “It was while I was in graduate school that I first became involved in the growing women’s movement, however, and began to question that assumption of female sacrifice” (28). Thanks again to critical texts and a reexamination of these heroines—Ariadne, Medea, and Dido—de Luce at last discovered the truth of Julia Wood’s empirical study proving that “caring grows out of culturally constructed subordinate status rather than sex-role socialization” (33). Professor de Luce was thus saved by feminists from yet another “ruthless” white male—once she learned that a “culturally constructed” society, not her own hormones, made her do it.
There are two fatal shortcomings in de Luce’s essay, which even an amateur literary critic attuned to the difference between mythical motifs and literary portrayal could spot. First, of course, is the matter of characterization of the male hero. Since de Luce did not see these white men on vases, or hear folk stories about them, or read about them in public inscriptions, she must know that she finds these cads so distasteful precisely because authors like Euripides and Virgil have made them so morally bankrupt. Yes, authors do exist and they can more or less craft even traditional characters as they please. De Luce sees the male trait of spousal abandonment as reprehensible because ancient white male authors may well have wanted Theseus, Jason, and Aeneas to appear just that way. Incidentally, de Luce also fails to notice the irony that the shame culture of ancient Greece, even as it appears in sophisticated literary portrayals, puts the onus of public reproach squarely on the white male heterosexual scoundrel who did not honor his word. In our own narcissistic and guilt-ridden society, the “ruthless” male need only seek help for career angst and midlife stress, cite childhood trauma or repressed memory, blame his parents and teachers, or confess guilt over his race and gender—and society will understand if not approve of his misdeeds.
I leave the other obvious criticism of her discussion to the keen wit of Professor Beye. In his response, he reminds us that such encounters can become tragic if the quid pro quo is not honored—sexual favors and moral support for the male careerist in exchange for a chance for commitment and a share in future spoils (159). I agree and often have seen such abandoned princesses as shamefully maltreated as Professor de Luce and her friends once were. But I am also always curious why at least a few of the victims, even when they often have had an array of loyal, faithful, and dependable suitors, chose to forgo the more ordinary and staid men in order to share, if only for the moment, the excitement offered by the reckless, egotistic, and ambitious thug—who incidentally in both myth and actuality can be handsome, adventurous, royal, and wealthy. This is high-stakes courtship that involves the unpredictable and raw human spirit and, as Beye reminds us, has “been tragic since the beginning of time” (159). But melodrama (not tragedy), the evil of one sex (not the ignorance and manipulation of both), and female victimhood (not the tragic lot of man), are now the only stuff of feminist theory as it appears here.
I shall close with Professor Hallett, who is so very angry (1-15, 120-52). Since she has written by far the most in this collection—roughly a fourth of the book is hers—her wrath, along with Van Nortwick’s self-revelation, tends to define the tone and spirit of the movement in general. Her formal contribution, “Writing as an American,” has nothing to do with the ancient world directly. It is one of the most confused and unorganized essays I have ever read, but nevertheless it is also a strangely intriguing, weird, passive-aggressive confessional that alternates between real hurt and wild fury. The first four pages recount her graduate school tribulations, followed by an animated discussion of her dismissal from Boston University. The next eight are further personal recollections of past conferences, laced with references to her own published and committee work, the theme of which is her own unpleasant run-ins with British academics. Then we get an “Afterword” of over three pages where she suddenly posts afterthoughts about her revelations and replies to past criticism of herself that she has had a selective memory and has been unfair in both her presentation and analysis of the past twelve pages of recollections. I’ll skip yet more of the irony found here. Finally, an eighteen-page “Appendix” concludes, in stream-of-consciousness fashion, stitching together a series of quotations from published works, her unfavorable tenure report, signed and anonymous e-mails, the text of an Irving Berlin song she performed, a reader’s critique rejecting one of her Latin compositions, more quotations from her own published articles, anonymous responses from questionnaires, and, lastly, quotations from other critics of European classicists.
The apparent themes throughout revolve around the ubiquity of British academics, the power of male elites, the insistence on needless academic formality, the cruelty of white males in power, and the cumulative effect of all this to rob her of a professorship at Boston some eighteen years ago: “In retrospect I suppose I am thankful for those initial, and rationally groundless, expressions of little-to-no confidence in my professional ‘promise.’ They toughened me to survive various criticisms and dismissals of my pedagogy and scholarship in years to come” (121). If the reader thinks I exaggerate the centrality of her lasting hurt in this essay, then consider her appendix where her unfavorable tenure decision of nearly two decades past is quoted, or at least sort of quoted—it is heavily edited and does not identify its author. There is, as is true of the entire book, unintended irony here as well. Her inclusion of the tenure report is designed to offer contrast (in her favor): the white male philologist’s prejudices have unfairly denigrated the real quality of her work as we can now quite clearly see in the present article.
Let us take up the challenge and work from her edited transcript. I shall call the unnamed villain Chairman X.
• Professor Hallett, as she tells us, in costume recently invited the audience at an academic conference in Bristol to sing the opening lyrics (“in their best Bill Clinton accent”) of Annie Get Your Gun (123, 137, cf.163).
Eighteen years prior Chairman X wrote that Hallett was “shallow” and added that some students “deplore [d] the quantity of trivia’ she interjects in classroom lectures” and added that “she does not hesitate to sacrifice substantive comment for mere entertainment” (136).
• Professor Hallett writes frequently “of my feminist identity” (122),“race, class and age as well as gender categories of analysis” (128), “privileged white males” (129), her “identity as a feminist scholar” (134), the “white, middle-class male” (8), “theoretical (partly deconstructive and postmodern) perspective” (9), “misremembering” (132), “normalizing depersonalization” (8), and so on.
Eighteen years prior Chairman X wrote of “her insistence on terminology inappropriate for ancient Rome…and her use of fashionable jargon.”
• Professor Hallett, in her review of her own career, somehow has managed in a single article to mention Philips Academy in Andover (120), Bill Clinton’s inauguration (124), Wellesley College (120), George Bush (120), a postdoctoral year in England (122), APA conferences (130), an English and another unnamed conference (125), as well as her own past articles and reviews (138-41).
Eighteen years prior Chairman X wrote of “her constant attendance on professional committees (any committee), her developing of professional contacts…. She seems at every opportunity to try to cloud the intellectual poverty of her work with quantity, or just with names.”
• Professor Hallett writes passionately of “expressions of little-to-no confidence in me” (nearly verbatim three times in two paragraphs, 121-22), of an unnamed person who “devalued me as an individual owing to my gender,” of “deep-rooted and painful feelings of inadequacy which such insensitive and cruel treatment has instilled in me” (132), of the “outrageous misrepresentations and lies” of this report (123), and of a British prejudice against her education: “I am often regarded as comically inadequate” (124).
Eighteen years prior Chairman X wrote, “I noted that she conducted herself more like a teacher of early elementary school children than a college professor. ”
Professor Hallett is obviously a hard-working scholar, but she shares a troubling naivete characteristic of this entire book. Since the contributors continuously offer personal-voice-inspired compositions juxtaposed next to old-fashioned “detached” and “impersonal” reasoning and presentation, they should at least be sure that their stilted comparisons do not achieve the very opposite of the intended effect. Readers like myself, who do not know either Professor Hallett or her teaching, on the basis of the quoted evidence she has provided us (albeit heavily edited and incomplete), may well come to the opposite conclusion of the one she had intended. Out of politeness, I shall forgo that judgment, but I do add in closing that, whoever Chairman X was, it is clear that he was perhaps needlessly insensitive to Professor Hallett and even at times pedantic. But he was also intellectually honest, unafraid, forthright, and unapologetic—traits sadly lacking in most humanities programs in the last two decades.
V.
The authors of Compromising Traditions are rightly worried about the death of classics. But this volume, despite its extravagant claims for personal voice theory (“an embarrassment of scholarly riches” [4]), is yet more proof of why we are dying. All of the book’s initially promising claims fall by the wayside page by page: personal voice theory as it is presented here is not anticareerist, but career-obsessed. Its language is not clear, but jargon-laden and often incomprehensible. It is not a diverse and spontaneous voice, but tired, intolerant, and predictable. It is not a radical and courageous stance, but conservative and timid. It is not about being a lone wolf, but about joining the pack. It is not about enlightening the reader, but about parading the self. And it does not improve on the dullness of the impersonal and scholarly voice, but explains, as no philological zealot could, precisely why such a depersonalized and abstract voice arose in the first place and why, within general parameters of usage, it is so vital and so will surely continue. Whoever the icy seigniors in the Ivy League and Oxbridge are, they must be chuckling with glee over this volume. In contrast, reformers in classics must be wondering, with friends like these, who needs enemies? Errare malo cum Platone quam cum istis vera sentire.2
The authors here also fail to make the critical distinction between philology and a particular type of distasteful philologist: philology itself is noble; many of its practitioners are not. The use of the Greek and Latin languages to uncover and explicate the culture and literature of antiquity is the touchstone of classics, the common currency without which we cease to be a profession. The zeal here, then, should not be directed against philology per se, but should prompt a careful analysis of the practice of philology itself. The reference to philology should be one of deference, not condemnation, and so we miss especially here a nuanced argument over exactly how some philologists in their professional lives and published work have fallen short of their calling to embrace and advance a worthy profession—and that critique must consist of more than philologists’ being rude or hurtful to some contributors of this volume.
Retired Oxford don Hugh Lloyd-Jones is one of the rare few quoted by Hallett as a negative example of narrow philology and British bias against American classicists. But unfortunately, as is the case throughout this book, once more irony abounds: this volume offers confirmation, not refutation, of Lloyd-Jones’s clairvoyant warning about American faddists: “The enemies of exact scholarship can easily find an audience there, and gifted rhetoricians find it possible to set themselves up as local gurus, teaching a method which rapidly produces fashionable results” (137). And what are we to make of a collection that, in claiming to bring morality and humanity (179-80, 189-90) to the fore of scholarly writing, condemns Lloyd-Jones’s defense of tradition (122-23, 136-37) only to side step or excuse Dover’s ghoulishness (54-55, 65-67)? Somebody’s feelings are really not the same as someone’s life.
A real diversity, of course, is needed to save classics from both narrow word-gatherers and the French-inspired postmodernists, those smug theorists who cannot write anything readable and whose comfortable lives are at odds with the nihilism they profess. We desperately need classicists who are, or who have been, athletes, dancers, singers, poets, workmen, doctors, carpenters, soldiers—almost anything other than the traditional academic—to bring that diverse real expertise into their scholarship and present it in new and interesting ways to the general public. These true compromisers of tradition should welcome, not whine about, the ridicule of an entrenched elite who have watched classics die. They must feel it a badge of honor, not feel “inadequate” that a pedantic magnifico finds their real diversity irritating. It is a testament to how far we have fallen from the spirit of the Greeks to even imagine that this present volume is in any way populist or that its authors are renaissance figures at odds with the status quo. If the personal voice is to help us, then we need it in the style of Thucydides, not Athenaeus.
In the present culture of the academy, it would be cruel, but not unfair, to ask academics who insist in their scholarship on giving us the most intimate details of their personal lives that they at least should have had lives outside of the university. Whatever the general public or the undergraduates of America expect from their public intellectuals and professors, we can be sure at the millennium it is not more confessionals and psycho-melodramas from the desk-bound class. If our readers and students really do desire more public revelations of sex, mental instability, baby-boomer angst, and narcissism, they can get it with far more originality and panache from Jerry Springer and company than from what is found in these dull pages. After reading this collection, I think what is really needed is a thorough study of why (upper-middle-class guilt? self-loathing? sheer boredom? excessive affluence? too much leisure? suburban blues? voluntary segregation from the muscular and poorer classes? the angst of middle age?) so many well-compensated, white, suburban academic elites—with lighter work loads than ever before, with more travel opportunities than at any time in history, enjoying far more equality than any prior generation—are so unhappy and angry at the very material culture that they obviously take for granted, if not enjoy. Routledge would do far better to publish that book, rather than this embarrassing confessional.
In the end, the intimate details of these lives, heirs to the Hellenistic but not the Hellenic legacy, turn out to be nothing but boring, and they cannot sustain an extended analysis of ancient literature at all. By the conclusion of the book the repetitious litany of breakdowns, alcoholism, genitalia, professional slights, conference gossip, unkind British dons, corrected accents, bad boyfriends, hurtful white middle-class heterosexual males, broken marriages, and sexual trysts with other professors is monotonous and trite—less interesting than a philological excursus into the many uses of δε. If personal voice theory, at least as it appears here, is to be the golden mean between narrow philological pedantry and incomprehensible postmodernist theory, then we classicists really are, and should be, through. This is all so very, very sad.
