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Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws ed. by Basil Dufallo

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/clw.2019.0049

1558-9234

Alex Dressler,

Classical Antiquity Studies

Reviewed by: Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws ed. by Basil Dufallo Alex Dressler Basil Dufallo (ed.). Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws. Classical Presences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 284. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-880303-4. The titular organizing principle of this well edited and well introduced collection comprises difference and imitation, in literary, artistic, cinematic, and psychoanalytic appropriations of Roman antiquity. It takes its bearings from Charles Martindale's well known axiom, "Meaning is always realized at the point of reception" (Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception [Cambridge 1993], 3, with Dufallo 8 and Wyke 215), but marks new ground by considering the moral dimensions of its own analyses: "error" denotes not just misprision and difference, but also moral failing. This includes the ambiguity with which we approach the moral and political differences between the past and ourselves, whether "we" comprise early to late modern literary authors (Montaigne in M. Bizer, Hugo in M. Lowrie and B. Vinken, Hawthorne in C. Edwards, and Henry James in J. C. Rowe), popularisers of Roman culture (the journalist Joseph Epstein in C. Williams, the founders of modern cinema in M. Wyke), enlightenment politicos (J. Connolly on the concept of revolution, M. Malamud on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slavery debates), or psychoanalysis (Sacher-Masoch and Kristeva in M. Formisano and R. Fletcher, respectively). In addition to the conspicuous moral failing of slavery (Connolly, Malamud, but also Edwards 132 and Formisano 171-74), other "errors" considered by the contributors include cultural belatedness and appropriation (C. Vout, Edwards, Rowe, Wyke), same-sex sexual dimensions of friendship and the homophobia historically elicited by them (Williams), Roman Catholicism (from the protestant perspective: Edwards), political participation (or its refusal: Bizer), political violence (Connolly, Lowrie, and Vinken), narcissism (Fletcher), and cruelty, male supremacy, and decadence (Wyke, Formisano, Edwards). Alongside the familiar early modern and Victorian "recipients" of Latin literature and the historical site of Rome, less common topics of discussion include C. S. Lewis (Williams), Deleuze and Kristeva (Fletcher), "the queer art of failure" (Halberstam in Dufallo), affect theory (or at least the affective dimensions of politics: "pathos" in Connolly), Manet, nineteenth century U.S. art (an extraordinary Romanizing portrait of "Joseph Cinqué: The Chief of the Amistad Captives," 102), and the early cineaste Louis Feuillade (with illustrations in Vout, Malamud, and Wyke, respectively). Aside from the uniform excellence of all the contributions in themselves, the great merit of the collection as a whole is to engage directly with the dual conception of "error" developed in the Introduction (Vout and Formisano passim; [End Page 367] cf. 75–76, 88-89, 150–51, 181, 184, 189–90, 231). The shortcomings are due, not to any individual contributor, but rather to the sub-field of reception itself or to classics as a field that bases claims to relevance on this inherently liminal subfield. One example of this is the non-classicist Rowe, who, drawing on Byron, the Shelleys, and early feminism in discussing James, writes, "So far the connection with the classical world in Daisy Miller is tenuous" (197), and then continues to discuss Byron, the Shelleys, and early feminism. This essay is necessary to the collection, because if classicists are making essential claims about the "classics" through reception (so Formisano 173), those claims should complement the work of specialists in other fields. But Rowe admits that this is not so. On the other hand, Vout's analysis of Greek "originals" and Roman "copies" outlines an early Roman recognition of the dynamics of "error" revealed by reception studies in general. But if the reception of antiquity by antiquity illustrates the dynamic of "error" as well as the reception of antiquity by modernity, then the relevance of the case-study approach represented here becomes less obvious. It is a credit to the collection, and to its editor, to consider this too (Dufallo, 12): "At a moment in classical reception studies . . . when it seems . . . as though case studies might be multiplied ad libitum . .. a wide-ranging study . . . has this conceptual contribution to make." While the antecedent of the demonstrative in that sentence is...