Classics in Performance Vassilis Lambropoulos

Classics in Performance Vassilis Lambropoulos Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 20, Number 2, October 2002, pp. 191-213 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2002.0030 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/21981 Access provided by University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor (12 May 2018 20:32 GMT) Classics In Performance 191 Classics In Performance Vassilis Lambropoulos Abstract This paper examines different ways in which ancient quotations are incorpo- rated in contemporary poetry, arguing that Greek writing has often freed itself from the interpretive demands of modernist classicism by adopting the position of a public, virtuosic performance. By cultivating the ethics of an agonistic relation with their ancient predecessors, poets today reinvent cultural literacy and fashion their unique place in literary and intellectual history. But, generally speaking, only through knowledge of the present can the passion for classical antiquity be acquired. Without this knowledge, where could the passion come from? (Nietzsche 1990:340) It has become commonplace today to worry about the decline of cultural literacy. We have all discussed documentations of the diminish- ing interest in our shared (Western or otherwise) intellectual, artistic, and scientific heritage. Educators, journalists, opinion makers, and politicians have diagnosed a gradually weakening transmission of humanistic culture to younger generations. That the public no longer has a well-rounded familiarity with literary masterpieces, artistic treasures, historical events, or civic achievements of the past puts at risk the liberal institutions of the public sphere. What binds us together in a common culture may too easily come undone. Here is an eloquent expression of this concern from the early 1960s: The continuity of the cultural tradition guarantees a certain community of general cultural horizons, if not of philosophy or attitudes toward life. It is proper to ask whether this common horizon has perhaps in the last half- century lost in significance and in relative cohesion and stability, and whether this loss has perhaps had a reciprocal effect on literary production and helped to shape its features. (Meyer 1968:20) Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 20, 2002. 191 192 Vassilis Lambropoulos Paradoxically, the growth of intellectual apathy has been accompa- nied not by the cultural amnesia that one would normally expect—a total forgetting of works, themes, dates, sources, and sites—but the opposite: the rapid cultivation of a different learning skill, the itemiza- tion and memorization of everything. Audiences may have grown less learned but at the same time they possess a surprising capacity to process and juggle references. Wherever we look today, we confront the need to identify and trace an overwhelming number of quotations. From film to advertising, from classical music to fiction, from architecture to fashion, producers of style and sensibility seem to borrow directly and uninhibit- edly from previous sources of any kind and period, and to expect the public to accept and appreciate the practice. Creators of high and low culture (from Alfred Schnittke with his “poly-stylistics” to the South Bronx rapper with his “sampling”) invite their audience to “catch the reference,” and in turn audiences are growing increasingly sophisti- cated, exercising gleefully their ability to scan mentally impressive stores of information and identify with obvious pride the origin of an image, tune, verse, title, slogan, theme, and the like. (Incidentally, this capacity is also extensively mobilized by the recent popular interest in lineage as well as the academic fascination with memory and testimony.) Much serious criticism, not to mention many copyright lawsuits, have been directed against indiscriminate quoting, which, though able to draw from vast data banks of memory, sensibility, and intimacy, appears to lack historical consciousness or a strong sense of debt. While the recognition of quotes can produce research on large quantities of disparate sources, many of them obscure or ephemeral, neither the sources nor their contemporary amalgamation seem to belong to or form an organized whole, a linear narrative, or an organic tradition. Such a generalized cannibalistic borrowing makes sources much more recyclable than recoverable. If everything is quotable, originals lose their quality of origin and become nomadic: they circulate but cannot function as a topos, a commonplace, a shared site of ancestry, feeling, and reference. As a result, at a time when everybody can quote, no one can comprehend, so the criticism goes. Of course, one person’s exhaustion is another person’s abun- dance. Mallarmé’s desperate opening cry in the poem “Sea Breeze” from the mid-1860s, “The flesh is sad, alas! And I have read all the books,” could be taken as Michel Foucault’s badge of erudition. One might look at the new literacy from the standpoint of Adorno and decry it as another sacrilegious marketing strategy of the culture industry, which puts a price on everything and is interested only in the profits of reproduction. Or one might look at it from the standpoint of Baudrillard Classics In Performance 193 and endorse, in the disregard for quotation marks (Garber 2002), the collapse of the market of quotes as fixed prices and rates. If quotation today refers more to the current quoted price of a commodity than to an established authority, is this bad because we can no longer relate to passages and their rites of reading, or is it good because we have grown more sensitive to proportional share, to quotas? We must therefore confront a paradoxical situation whereby one kind of literacy is replaced by another: to wit, humanistic literacy, based on a progressive view of history that sought to understand the past dialectically as an archive of organic cohesion, is now replaced by postmodern literacy, inspired by a non-linear, synchronic view of the past, which approaches history as a data bank of digital information that can be retrieved at will to answer present concerns. Literary, cultural, and social studies have analyzed this important shift under categories such as the anxiety of influence, appropriation, iterability, and intertextuality. These discussions often offer a wealth of insight but lack focus and rigor since they range quite indiscriminately from reference to allusion to paraphrase to parody to pastiche. In this paper, I would like to concentrate specifically and systematically on the instance of the quote, the exact repetition of part of a pre-existent work. Additionally, I would like to suggest a different angle on the issue by looking at recent quotations from the weightiest of sources, the Greek Classics—the most authoritative, for some, and oppressive for others, quotable source. Finally, I shall draw on Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy (specifically, her theory of action) to examine the performative dimension of quoting in Greek poetry. As we all know, Greek and Latin were a cornerstone of western cultural literacy for many centuries, to the extent that they often defined its chronological, aesthetic, and epistemological limit. Specifically in modernity, every time we debate our identity, we revisit the famous Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns and, like the French, use antiquity once again as a measure of comparison precisely because, by defining at the end of the 17th century the Greeks and the Romans as “Ancients,” we have entered a problematical relation with them. There- fore it would be instructive to examine their status and circulation at a time when quoting methods have broken the exclusive hold of the textbook and the anthology on learning and cultivation. If traditional literacy is in decline both in quantity (the syllabus and the Grand Tour) and in quality (the dialectical comprehension of history), who is reading the Classics today and to what effect? Do they have a place in the postmodern digitized library? In order to answer this question, I shall draw on Greek literature, an area which over the last two centuries has 194 Vassilis Lambropoulos exhibited a rare, if not unique, awareness of its belatedness and has been pulled recently along the same postmodern trajectory witnessed else- where. If by definition we must rely on the Ancients in order to comprehend our modern condition, it is hard to find a more intense involvement with questions of origin, descent, priority, or filiation than in the only field that bears its modernity in its very name: Modern Greek Studies. Let us first remind ourselves that quoting becomes an issue with modernist painting, music, and poetry. Before the early twentieth century, when a poetic work addressed an earlier one, the standard mode of citation was allusion: an indirect, covert reference. We can see allusion at work in a school steeped in its systematic use, Neoclassicism. The neoclassical poem has an explicitly mimetic character, but it is an imitation not of antiquity but of classicism. It adopts and reiterates the classical ideal by treating ancient sources as a repertoire of rhetorical figures and modes. Let us look at an excerpt from Andreas Kalvos’s 1824 ode “Zante” [O filÒpatriw]: The forests and shady hills of Zante once heard the message of goddess Artemis’ silver bow. And today the shepherds honor the trees and the cool fountains; the Nereids still wander there. The Ionian wave first kissed the body of Cythereia, and Ionian Zephyrs first caressed her breast. And when the sky kindles the Evening Star, and wooden barks sail laden with love and with the voices of music, The same wave kisses, the same Zephyrs caress the bodies and breasts of the bright maidens of Zante, the flower of maidenhood. (Trypanis 1971:8–9) The scene is unfolding in an atemporal space. Reference is made through disciplined paraphrase. Nereids, Zephyrs, stars, islands, boats, bodies—they all fly and float, suspended in time, always inhabiting the same place, without ever changing.

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