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Drawing on contemporary theory, including recent work in feminist criticism, Ancona provides close readings of fourteen odes, which are presented in English translation as well as in Latin. Through a discussion of the poet’s use of various temporal devices—the temporal adverb, seasonal imagery, and the lover or beloved’s own temporality—she shows how Horace makes time dominate the erotic context and, further, how the version of love that appears in his poems is characterized by the lover’s desire to control the beloved. The romantic ideal of a timeless love, apparently rejected by the poet, emerges here instead as an underlying element of the poet’s portrayal of the erotic. In a critique of the predominant modes of recent Horatian scholarship on the love odes, Ancona offers an alternative view that takes into account the male gender of the lover and its effect on the structure of desire in the poems. By doing so, she advances a broader project in recent classical studies that aims to include discussion of features of classical literature, such as sexuality and gender, which have previously escaped critical attention.
Addressing aspects of Horace as a love poet—especially the dynamics of gender relations—that critics have tended to ignore, this book articulates his version of love as something not to be championed or condemned but rather to be seen as challengingly problematic. Of primary interest to classicists, it will also engage the attention of scholars and teachers in the humanities with specializations in gender, sexuality, lyric poetry, or feminist theory.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822398820 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Sales rank: | 823,092 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Ronnie Ancona is Assistant Professor of Classics and Director, Master of Arts in the Teaching of Latin, at Hunter College.
Read an Excerpt
Time and the Erotic in Horace's Odes
By Ronnie Ancona
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1994 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9882-0
CHAPTER 1
Time, Gender, and the Erotic: Critical Orthodoxy and the Prospects for a Feminist Critique
The vast majority of recent commentary on Horace as a love poet falls into one of two categories: criticism informed by the privileging of a romantic version of love, or criticism informed by what might be called a notion of the poet as universal spokesman. In the first kind of criticism, what occurs is a deprecation of Horace's love poems for not according with the model of a Catullus, many of whose love poems seem to be a direct outpouring of emotion toward an idealized beloved with whom he wants a lasting relationship. In the second kind of criticism, Horace is hailed as a sober and wise man, with whom we should all identify, who "correctly observes" that love does not last. Thus in the first kind of criticism Horace is condemned for having the wrong approach to love—at least the wrong approach to be chosen for expression in love poetry—and in the second, he is endorsed for bringing a necessary realism to the area of love.
While these approaches at first glance appear to be radically different, they in fact share a common assumption, namely, that the proper focus of criticism is the reproduction of the poet's own conceptions of love. In the first case the result is a devaluation of Horace as a love poet for not producing a version of love characterized by the romantic ideal of timelessness. In the second, the result is a lauding of Horace for "correctly" perceiving romantic love as an impossibility. The problem with both positions, however, is that their effort to provide an accurate reproduction of Horace's view of love precludes any genuine critique of that view. The critics who devalue Horace because of his failure to accord with a romantic version of love assume that Horace's own views are self-evident, and thus do little to set the internal dynamics of the poems they discuss in relation to the romantic model of love that they privilege. While the critics who seek to defend Horace's view of love offer a needed corrective to such devaluation and also provide insightful explications of many of the love poems, their approach is limited, in turn, by an unconscious identification with the poet/lover, which produces a blindness to the problems that his male desire produces both for the beloved and for himself.
The critical approach to Horace as a love poet that privileges a romantic version of love is perhaps best exemplified by the statement of R. G. M. Nisbet: "None of Horace's love-poems (if that is the right name for them) reaches the first rank." Implicit in this remark is a judgment about Horace's love poetry that is based on an unstated assumption of what a love poem should be, yet Nisbet offers no clear and consistent notion of what would constitute a love poem, or more specifically, a good love poem. Nevertheless, the faults that he attributes to Horace as a love poet (lack of seriousness and involvement, artificiality, and unbelievability), and the poets with whom he compares Horace unfavorably (Catullus and Propertius), would suggest that the model that Horace fails to live up to is that of the romantic love poet. What Nisbet finds disturbing about Horace's love poetry is its remoteness from a romanticism that exhibits desire with the kind of directness and immediacy of, for example, a Propertius, whose poems (according to Nisbet) "are written with an earnestness and intensity that seem to be derived at least partly from real life." Thus, because Horace deals with desire in less overt ways than do romantic poets, he is unable to meet Nisbet's standards for good love poetry.
While somewhat less negative, the perspective of R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard on the love poems, as expressed in the introduction to their commentary on Book 1 of the Odes, retains the general sense of Nisbet's earlier criticisms. Their perspective is worth discussing at some length, both for the notions it contains, and for the influence that those notions have by appearing in the current standard commentary in English on the Odes. For them, the problem with Horace as a love poet seems to be his failure to produce the kind of love poetry with which they can be comfortable, that is, love poetry in the Catullan tradition. They assume that other present-day readers will have a similar response: "[t]he modern reader is apt to draw unfavorable comparisons with Catullus and Propertius, but they were intending something very different." What that "something ... different" is remains unstated, but one imagines that it has something to do with how Horace is perceived to handle the emotions of love: "Horace is not concerned with his own emotions; exceptions are embarrassing, however explicable in the context."
As far as the first part of this remark is concerned, what Nisbet and Hubbard do not seem to recognize is that "concern with one's emotions" need not be directly expressed. By the 1920s, literary critics outside of classics had already seen the problem with this reductive notion of what it means to deal with emotion, and it is worth recalling how fully New Criticism succeeded in exposing the inadequacy of reducing poetry to what is assumed to be the emotional life of the author. Thus, T. S. Eliot, in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), written in response to Romantic assumptions about poetry—most notably expressed in Wordsworth's description of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility"—attacks the notion that a poet in any straightforward fashion expresses his personality or his emotions through his poetry. Eliot argues that the poet works not in isolation but in relation to a literary tradition and that poetry is, in fact, in some sense "an escape from emotion" and "an escape from personality" although "only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."
Still further, I. A. Richards, in Practical Criticism (1929), had eloquently challenged the notion that emotion mediated by reflection is somehow "insincere." Thus irony, "where the feeling really present is often the exact contrary to that overtly professed," should not be viewed "as insincere as simple readers often suppose it must be." The classicist Archibald Allen, writing more than three decades later, addresses some of these same issues in "Sunt qui Propertium malint," published, interestingly enough, in the same book of essays on elegy and lyric in which Nisbet's negative comment upon Horace's love odes appears. Allen persuasively argues that the seemingly spontaneous expression of emotion commonly identified with Propertius, for example, and not with Ovid, is in fact not always present in Propertius. More importantly, he discusses the fact that an ancient audience would have identified sincerity as a function of style, not of personality, and that as a consequence, sincerity has more to do with the persuasiveness of the poet's style than with the relationship between the poet's style and his personality. Although Eliot, Richards, and even Allen are themselves now dated, their critique helps us to see how Nisbet and Hubbard, in claiming that "Horace is not concerned with his own emotions," rely upon discredited assumptions that a transparent relationship can be found between a poet and the emotions his poems express.
The real difficulty in relying upon such assumptions can be seen in considering the second part of Nisbet and Hubbard's remark, where we might ask for whom Horace's "exceptions" to concerns with his emotions are supposed to be embarrassing. Presumably they would be embarrassing either to the poet himself, to the poet/ lover, to Nisbet and Hubbard, or to other readers, but the notion that embarrassment has such a univocal content seems dubious. Presumably, for Nisbet and Hubbard these exceptions do not fit comfortably with their notion (or their notion of others' notions) of Horace or the poet/lover as somehow "beyond desire." The poet/ lover of Odes 4.1 (to whom they refer) is embarrassed by his continuing susceptibility to love, and the conclusion seems to be either that readers who have judged Horatian love as somehow transcending desire share the poet/lover's own embarrassment here, or that readers are embarrassed by the poet/lover's expression of his embarrassment.
But implicit in each of these kinds of embarrassment is the assumption that the poem itself reflects some Horatian "view," which exists independently of the poem, and we have noted how dubious such an assumption is. Still further, the belief that readers either can share an embarrassment that they find in the poem (regardless of whether the poem is itself a reflection of the author) or that they are embarrassed by their distance from what the poem expresses, assumes that readers themselves seek to identify with what they read. Such an assumption ignores both the complexity of how embarrassment might be constructed within a poem (with which of the elements contributing to embarrassment is the reader to identify?) and the heterogeneity of responses that the embarrassment might produce. The emotional expression that Nisbet and Hubbard presumably find embarrassing is the expression of a male lover for whom emotion poses a threat to autonomy. Insofar as autonomy is a feature of the dynamic of male eroticism, it seems fair to argue that embarrassment is itself gendered: a reader will identify with the embarrassment (will feel embarrassment) produced by Horace's emotional expression only if she is willing to identify as well with the perspective of the male lover.
In both the criticism of Horace's poetry for its separation from the presumed emotional life of the poet and the description of the "embarrassment" that some of the poetry is supposed to produce, we can see how Nisbet and Hubbard develop a critical strategy that seeks to circumscribe those aspects of Horace's poetry that are most distant from the Catullan model of romantic love. Their assumption seems to be that the romantic model comes closest to capturing the actual dynamics of erotic love, and thus that those moments in Horace's poetry that challenge this model are separated from such presumed actuality. Thus, the expression of erotic emotion is detached from what they presume would have been Horace's real feelings, or it is seen to produce an embarrassment whose source is finally the impossibility of imagining how such feelings might really occur.
This attempt to separate what is disturbing in Horace's poetry from the actualities of erotic love is perhaps clearest in their claim that Horace owes more to the conventions of erotic writing than to the realities of Roman life in the first century B.C.E. By positing an artificial separation between "art" and "life," they can dismiss as "merely literary" aspects of the love poems with which they are uncomfortable. For example, although offering evidence for the widespread practice of homosexuality in Horace's time, they declare that references to homosexual love "should not be over-literally interpreted," and, specifically in regard to Odes 1.4, that "the homosexual implication has no bearing on Sestius' actual behaviour, but is a conventional motif derived from Greek poetry." In addition, they cite Odes 4.13 and Odes 1.25 as examples of "Horace imitating] the more pungent side of Hellenistic literature," and then proceed to what seems to be their underlying characterization of Horace as a love poet: "Really serious [emphasis mine] notes, as opposed to this factitious realism, are rather rare."
The idea here seems to be that "serious" romantic poetry would somehow replace "factitious realism" with the emotional intensity that is presumed to mark actual erotic experience, and perhaps it is because such poetry is "rare" for Horace that Nisbet and Hubbard are led to the following (surprisingly sympathetic) summary of Horace as a love poet: "More normally he assumes a detached, ironic pose, which as far as love-poetry is concerned seems very original." What is worthy of note here is how the opposition between seriousness and detached irony leaves in place the assumption that the erotic feelings of the lover are the primary object of concern for the critic. If "detachment" and "seriousness" characterize not just the attitudes of the lover within a love poem, but also the emotional significance of the poem itself, then it is no wonder that Nisbet and Hubbard see the "detachment" of erotic feeling in Horace's odes as precluding the judgment that Horace was himself a serious love poet. The distanced, ironic stance, despite its acknowledged originality, is seen as automatically diminishing the odes' possibilities as love poems.
However, the error in such an argument is the assumption that the purpose of criticism is to reproduce whatever in the poem is taken to be the expression of the poets' own views. Nisbet and Hubbard assume that because the lover in many of Horace's love poems is detached, such detachment must also be taken as an expression of Horace's views, and they assume further that the only possible response to such detachment is to judge it as inadequate love poetry. Rather than working to discover why erotic feeling is expressed in an ironic, detached manner, Nisbet and Hubbard assume that Horace must himself have failed to understand the reality of erotic intensity that can be seen in a poet such as Catullus. But what such privileging of a romantic view of love precludes is seeing the relation between the ironic, detached pose of the lover and the world that he seeks to control. As we shall see, the lover's distance does not indicate an absence of erotic feeling, but rather indicates how fully the lover has responded to the beloved's threat to his own autonomy. In focusing so completely on the lover, criticism that accepts a romantic model of love must necessarily fail to understand the relational dynamics of lover and beloved, which Horace's "detachment" displays so fully.
While the critical responses that have challenged the type of criticism exemplified by Nisbet and Hubbard have taken many forms, they share, for the most part, a rejection of the notion of Horace as unconcerned with the emotions and instead propose what amounts to a Horace who can stand as a universal authority on love. Rather than judging the detached Horatian poet/lover as unsuitable for real love poems, they champion his posture with regard to love as sensible and realistic. In other words, they reject the romantic position that Horace knew nothing about love and substitute the universalist assumption that he knew all about love. But as we shall see, such an inversion of judgment leaves in place the centrality of the lover's perspective, which we have seen in the romantic view of love. In each case, the critic's job is to judge the adequacy of Horace's love poetry by examining whether or not the lover's expression of emotion is itself acceptable. The mutuality of erotic love is thus reduced to the perspective of a single desiring self, and that self is itself praised or blamed on the basis of its response to what it desires. Although it seeks to counter the tradition that privileges a romantic view of love by trying to show that detachment is as worthy of attention as passionate involvement, recent criticism that praises Horace as a love poet leaves unquestioned the assumption that the beloved's independent existence has meaning for the lover only as a difficulty that must somehow be surmounted.
We can see such a privileging of the lover's perspective in A. J. Boyle's essay on Horace's love odes, which argues that the "Romantic prejudice and myopic Philologie" and "Quellenforschungen" of previous criticism must be replaced by examining the "poems themselves" and "the poetic construct itself." Boyle's goal is "to further the critical understanding of the nature and quality of Horace's achievement as a love-poet," and he does profitably discuss such features of the love odes as Horace's "astute use of commonplaces, verbal wit, liveliness of language, metrical control, firmness of organization and structure, and ... gently ironic tone." However, he remains unaware that he does not simply look at the poems themselves—the very possibility of which most contemporary literary theorists would question—but rather, through an unacknowledged identification with the male poet's desire, takes the poet's themes and the way they are presented as human or universal.
In his discussion of Odes 1.25 (a poem I discuss in Chapter 2), for example, he rejects the approaches both of Collinge and of Nisbet and Hubbard as failing to account for what he characterizes as Horace's realism: "To regard it either as a crude and nasty piece of verse [Collinge] or as a conventional literary exercise [Nisbet and Hubbard] is to fail to perceive the poet's forceful and realistic presentation of the terrible consequences of time's passing upon a specific, and especially vulnerable, human individual" [emphasis mine].
But while Boyle succeeds here in taking this poem seriously, he fails in not acknowledging the extent to which the poem's so-called "realism" is in fact a construct of a male poet/lover's imagination, an imagination that then creates this particular image of the woman growing increasingly less desirable to him and to others. It is the poet/lover who determines the "terrible consequences of time's passing," the poet/lover who makes those consequences seem natural and universal: "the explicit nature symbolism of the final stanza [Lydia turned to dry leaves] ... places the personal devastation to be suffered by Lydia within the context of a universal law of nature." What Boyle is unable to recognize is that the association of Lydia's decline with that of nature is not realistic, but rather represents a strategy on the part of the poet/lover that supports his discrediting of Lydia. Generalizing Lydia's situation into an example of universal erotic decline over time shows a blindness to the significance of Lydia's gender.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Time and the Erotic in Horace's Odes by Ronnie Ancona. Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
One: Time, Gender, and the Erotic: Critical Orthodoxy and the Prospects for a Feminist Critique,
Two: The Temporal Adverb,
Three: Seasonal Imagery,
Four: Age and Experience,
Five: The Romantic Ideal and the Domination of the Beloved,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,
General Index,
Index of Passages Cited,