Nora Goldschmidt (Durham University)
Since Charles Martindale’s Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge, 1993), the idea that ‘meaning … is always already realized at the point of reception’ has become a mantra of classical reception studies. (Martindale 1993: 3; Hardie 2007; Martindale 2013: 1). The realisation that there is no privileged “original” ancient work to which we have access has liberated the field, shifting hierarchies of influence and allowing us to take later artistic productions seriously not just as continuators in a linear tradition, but as valuable perspectives on the ancient material itself. Empowered by the idea that ‘we cannot get back to any originary meaning wholly free of subsequent accretions’ (Martindale 1993: 7), reception studies has burgeoned to include a wide spectrum of readings, decentring and enriching the remit of classical studies and bringing new meanings to ancient material.
But what happens to reception when there quite literally is no original? What if a text or an image has not made it through the vagaries of transmission to arrive, intact, into modernity? In those cases, there is no ‘originary meaning’ because there simply is no original — or, at best, merely fragments and testimonia that suggest a putative ‘original’. In such instances, it is often not meaning that is created at the point of reception, but the failure to mean. Confusion, exclusion, lack of cognition are more likely outcomes than constructive analogies between ancient and modern.
This paper investigates what happens when the hermeneutics of reception are put under pressure by looking in detail at an example of non-meaning created at the point of reception. Focusing on the use of a fragment of Stesichorus in Ezra Pound’s Canto 23, I look at how Pound’s poem dramatizes the failures of textual transmission and the limits of interpretation. The ancient fragment, extracted from Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, is cut down in a new modern citation context, augmenting the processes which have alienated the original text from its modern readers. At the same time, through in-text signalling of the tools of philology (including the critical apparatus of Schweighäuser’s edition of Athenaeus and Liddell and Scott’s dictionary), Canto 23 also puts pressure on the value of the positivistic methods of nineteenth-century philology in bridging the hermeneutic gap between the present and the past. The final part of the paper moves outwards to discuss the ways in which our interpretations of ancient texts have been conditioned by the modernist ‘apotheosis of the fragment’ (Collecott 1999: 15). I argue that how we read, edit and understand ancient literature in and as fragments has been powerfully shaped by the modernist valorisation of the fragment form. The modernist fragment was created partly through a fraught dialogue with classical scholarship, but the resulting aesthetic by which ‘the fragment is king’ (as André Malraux put it) has, in turn, come to shape the ways in which classical scholars themselves interpret and present fragmentary texts, and it is only recently that we have begun to emerge from its grip.