Metaphilology Ziolkowski 2005

Metaphilology
The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; Error
and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern by Seth Lerer
Review by: Jan M. Ziolkowski
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 104, No. 2 (Apr., 2005), pp. 239-272
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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Metaphilology
Jan
M.
Ziolkowski,
Harvard
University
The Powers
of Philology: Dynamics of
Textual
Scholarship. By
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
Urbana and
Chicago: University
of Illinois
Press, 2003. Pp.
viii +
93 $24.95.
Error and the Academic
Self:
The
Scholarly Imagination,
Medieval to Modern.
By
Seth
Lerer. New York: Columbia
University
Press,
2002.
Pp.
xii +
325. $52.50
(cloth);
$22.50 (paper).
THE RETURN TO PHILOLOGY AND THE NOT-SO-NEW NEW PHILOLOGY
Philology
can be
strangely polarizing.
Indeed,
both of the books under
review manifest a simultaneous attraction and revulsion for
philology
and
its
practitioners.
Nor are Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Seth Lerer
by any
means alone or
unprecedented
in their ambivalence toward
philology.
For
a term that carries the Greek root for "love" as its first
element,
the word
has
proved
to be
recurrently incendiary
for centuries and even
millennia,
periodically occasioning
discomfort and even
internecine strife between
literary
scholars and
linguists, literary
historians and
literary
theorists,
and
traditionalists or conservatives and innovators. Within the humanities in
colleges
and
universities,
the love of
logos
would seem to lie at the heart
of a
complex
love-hate
relationship.
But outside this one
quadrant,
or
quadrangle,
of
society,
the word holds
little or no
meaning.
The
average person
on
the
street,
and
perhaps
even
in academic
institutions,
may
well take
philology
as a
mispronunciation
of
falafel.
To
judge by my
own
conversations,
when such individuals do
have
any vague
sense of the
philological enterprise, they
conceive of it as
embodying
a
dry-as-dust preoccupation
with individual words?a
Wortphi
lologie put through
the
wringer
to
emerge
as no more than
simplistic
etymologizing.
Philology
was not a buzzword
during my
own
undergraduate
and
gradu
ate
years
in the mid- and late
1970s.
I heard the four
syllables
uttered in
classes
only
when a
professor happened
to touch
upon
the title of Mar
tianus
Capella's prosimetrum,
The
Marriage of Mercury
and
Philology.
The
invisibility
or
inaudibility
of
philology
did not result from a
conspiracy
of
silence so much as from broad trends that had diverted attention from
the various
"philologies"
(Germanic
Philology,
Romance
Philology,
Slavic
Journal
of
English
and Germanic
Philology?April
?
2005 by
the Board of Trustees of the
University
of Illinois
240
Ziolkowski
Philology,
Semitic
Philology, Comparative Philology,
and so
forth)
that had
held
sway
in the late nineteenth and
early
twentieth centuries and that
had
grown
ever less articulate about their
preconceptions
and ultimate
purposes,
let alone their theoretical
presuppositions.
The
1950s
and
1960s
had seen New Criticism move to center
stage
in
literary
studies in
general.
Also in the
1960s,
the so-called
Parry-Lord
theory
of oral-formulaic
composition
(named
after Milman
Parry [1902
1935]
and Albert Bates Lord
[1912-1991])
had caused a hullabaloo in
medieval studies.1 At more or less the same time a
major uproar,
almost
forgotten today,
took
place
in medieval
literary
criticism,
especially
in
the fields of Old and Middle
English
in the United
States,
over
what was
called
variously patristic exegesis, Neo-Augustinianism,
or Robertsonian
ism
(after
D. W.
Robertson,
Jr.
[
1914-1992]).2
The semiotic
system
of
structuralism wafted in like a
gentle
breeze,
and later the influence of
Jacques
Derrida
(1930-2004) began
to blow across the
ocean,
but the
gale
of
English
translations and American
disciples
had not
yet slapped
the Atlantic coastline with its full force.
But
philology? Although degrees tagged explicitly
"in
philology"
were
still
being
awarded,
as
they
are
granted
even
today,
at a
dwindling
number
of institutions in fields such as
Classics,
and
although
dozens of
profes
sional
publications
(not
the least of which would be the
Journal of English
and Germanic
Philology)
continued to have
philology
embedded in their
titles,
the word and
concept
were not
being analyzed,
debated,
or even
much mentioned.
The renewal of
philology's
stock was
prompted by
the unlikeliest of
promoters, namely,
Paul de Man
(1919-1983).
De
Man,
a
professor
at
Yale
University,
who
inspired impassioned loyalty among many
of his
prot?g?s,
was first a
key figure
in the
poststructuralist literary theory,
especially
deconstructionism,
that
swept
over
departments
of
Compara
tive Literature and French in North America in the
1980s.3
Later,
when
i. The best
starting point
for an
understanding
of the
theory
is Albert B.
Lord,
The
Singer
of
Tales,
2d
ed.,
ed.
Stephen
Mitchell and
Gregory Nagy (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ.
Press,
2000).
2. See D. W.
Robertson,
Jr.,
"Historical
Criticism,"
in
English
Institute
Essays 1950,
ed. A.
S. Downer
(New
York: Columbia Univ.
Press,
1951), pp. 3-31, repr.
in D. W.
Robertson,
Jr., Essays
in Medieval Culture
(Princeton:
Princeton Univ.
Press,
ig8o), pp. 3-20;
E. Talbot
Donaldson,
"Patristic
Exegesis
in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The
Opposition,"
in
Critical
Approaches
to Medieval Literature: Selected
Papers from
the
English
Institute,
1958-1959,
ed.
Dorothy
Bethurum
(NewYork:
Columbia Univ.
Press,
i960), pp.
1-26,
repr.
in E. Tal
bot
Donaldson,
Speaking of
Chaucer
(New
York: W. W.
Norton,
1970), pp. 134-53;
ancl ^- E
Kaske,
"Patristic
Exegesis
in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The
Defense,"
in Critical
Approaches,
ed.
Bethurum,
pp. 27-60.
3.
For a concise sketch and
bibliography
of works
by
and about de
Man,
see
Cynthia
Chase,
"De
Man, Paul,"
in The
Johns Hopkins
Guide to
Literary Theory
and
Criticism,
ed. Michael Groden
and Martin Kreiswirth
(Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins
Univ.
Press,
1994), pp. 194-97.
Metaphilology 241
his own anti-Semitic and collaborationist
publications
from World War II
garnered public
attention in
1988,
he
posthumously
elicited the
charge by
antideconstructionists that the denial of
intentionality
and the
emphasis
on
instability
of
meaning
were both
ploys by
their chief advocates to avoid
responsibility
for
nasty politics.4
At
approximately
the same
time,
a similar
reaction occurred as it became
general,
and
controversial,
knowledge
that Hans
RobertJauss (1921-1997)
had served in the Waffen-SS
during
the Second World War. In
Jauss's
case,
his wartime activities were seen as
forming part
of the intellectual
backdrop
to his
emphasis
on the
reception
of works rather than on their authors' intentions.
Eventually
the miasma
enveloped
Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976)
himself,
as his commitment
to the National Socialist movement became
indisputable.
So how did de
Man, who,
whatever other accusations he has
endured,
has never been
suspected
of
being
a
medievalist,
become a
founding
father of the New
Philology?
The
explanation
can be found in a
single
short
piece
that hit the newsstands in the Times
Literary Supplement
on De
cember
10,
1982,
in a
symposium
entitled
"Professing
Literature."5 This
brief
commentary,
entitled "The Return to
Philology,"
commences as a
rejoinder
to a
polemic by
Walter
Jackson
Bate
(1918-1999)
that had been
disseminated in Harvard
Magazine.6 Although
de Man's
essay
sets forth a
number of
points clearly,
it turns out to be
remarkably
thin and
blurry
in
the
light
that it sheds on
philology,
and this
vagueness
is
poignantly
(or
pathetically)
self-subversive,
since at least once
de Man
professed
to be a
philologist
himself.7 In
fact,
to be
philological,
"The Return to
Philology"
employs
the word
philology only
three
times,
the word
philological
once,
and
the word
philologist
twice. In the first instance of
philology,
de Man would
appear
almost to
equate
the term with
grammar
in the medieval trivium
of verbal arts
(alongside
rhetoric and
dialectic),
since he
writes,
"the
teaching
of literature
. . .
has
justified
itself as a
humanistic and historical
discipline,
allied to
yet
distinct from the
descriptive
sciences of
philology
and rhetoric"
(p.
21).
4-
The fullest
exposition
of the wartime activities of de Man can be found in David H.
Hirsch,
The Deconstruction
of
Literature: Criticism
after
Ausschwitz
(Hanover,
New
Hampshire:
Brown Univ.
Press,
Published
by
Univ. Press of New
England, 1991), especially pp. 69-79
and
97-117;
of
Jauss, pp. 143-57;
and of
Heidegger, pp. 80-96.
5.
In
"Professing
Literature: A
Symposium
of the
Study
of
English,"
Times
Literary Supple
mental^
(10
December
1982), pp. 1355-56, repr.
in Resistance to
Theory, Theory
and His
tory
of
Literature, 33
(Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota
Press,
1986), pp.
21-26. I follow
the
pagination
of the
reprint.
6. "The Crisis in
English
Studies,"
Harvard
Magazine, 85:12 (September-October 1982),
4?-53
7.
Stefano
Rosso,
"An Interview with Paul de
Man,"
in de
Man,
Resistance to
Theory, p.
118:
"I am a
philologist
and not a
philosopher."
242
Ziolkowski
Exactly
what de Man wishes to
signify
in the one and
only
instance when
he
deploys
the
adjective phitologicalis
elusive: "attention to the
philological
or rhetorical devices of
language
is not the same as aesthetic
appreciation"
(p. 25).
In
drawing
this distinction de Man
inadvertently misplaces
the
adjectives philological
and rhetorical. What he meant
(if
we
may
be
permitted
to assume that he had a
meaning
and that it is our
right
to seek
it)
was
probably "philological
or rhetorical attention to the devices of
language
is not the same as aesthetic
appreciation."
When he next resorts to the noun
philology,
de Man
equates
it with
linguistics:
"But,
in
practice,
the turn to
theory
occurred
as a return to
philology,
to an examination of the structure of
language prior
to the
meaning
it
produces" (p. 24)
.8 De Man's two
interjections
of the noun
philologist only muddy
the waters further. In
speaking
of Michel Foucault
(1926-1984),
de Man maintains that his first book "has
to do with the
referential
relationship
between
language
and
reality,
but it
approaches
the
question
not in terms of
philosophical speculation
but,
much more
pragmatically,
as it
appears
in the
methodological
innovations of social
scientists and
philologists."
Here de Man is
likely
to be
following
a
pre
dominantly European
custom of
treating philology
as a
synonym
for
linguistics.
But three sentences later he
says
that in
Foucault, Derrida,
Edmund Husserl
(1859-1938),
and Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913),
"the accent falls on Nietzsche the
philologist
rather than on Nietzsche
the existential nihilist"
(p. 24).
Given Friedrich Nietzsche's
(1844-1900)
own conflicted outlook
upon philology,
and in view of the differences
among
the four writers de Man instances and the absence of citations in
the
passage,
the risk would be
high
in
speculating
about what de Man
means
by philology
here.9
It would be
intriguing
to know who were the
practitioners
of the
philol
ogy
to which de Man wished
professors
and students of literature in the
1980s
to
return,
since the
only
one he identified
by
name was Nietzsche.
But the name that counted most was de Man's own. Whatever he meant
8. On the
relationship
between the
two,
see Witold
Man'czak,
"The
Object
of
Philology
and the
Object
of
Linguistics,"
in Historical
Linguistics
and
Philology,
ed.
Jacek
Fisiak,
Trends
in
Linguistics:
Studies and
Monographs, 46
(Berlin:
Mouton de
Gruyter, 1990), pp. 261-72;
Matti
Rissanen,
"On the
Happy
Reunion of
English Philology
and Historical
Linguistics,"
in Historical
Linguistics,
ed.
Fisiak,
pp. 353-69;
and
Mary Blockley, "Philology, Linguistics:
Should You Leave?:
1988-1998,"
in
Thirty
Years More
of
the Year's Work in Old
English
Studies,
ed.
Joseph
B.
Trahern,
Jr.,
Old
English
NewsletterSubsidia, 27 (Kalamazoo:
Medieval
Institute,
1999). PP-3-14
9.
On Nietzsche's views on
philology,
see William
Arrowsmith,
"Nietzsche on Classics and
Classicists
(Part II)," Arion,
2
(1963), 5-27,
and Friedrich
Nietzsche,
On the Future
of
Our
Educational Institutions: Homer and Classical
Philology,
trans.
J.
M.
Kennedy
(New
York: Russell
&
Russell,
1964).
Metaphilology 243
by philology,
his
advocacy
of a return to it sufficed in that
period
to make
the term chic and to
put
it into contention. De Man had
already
been in
the
limelight
in
literary theory
for a
while;
he had transcended
being
de
Man of the
year
to
become,
until his
death,
the don of the so-called Yale
Mafia.10 But if he and his deconstructionist
"family"
were
philologists,
what did that make the denizens of
Language
and Literature
departments
who held
degrees
in
philology
or who
published
in
philological journals?
Suddenly
all those
literary
scholars who had labeled themselves as
philolo
gists plain
and
simple
but had never made much of the fact found their
job descriptions being usurped by literary
theorists who
styled
themselves
philologists
not so
plain
and not so
simple.
The situation was electric.
My
first shock of this
high voltage
came in the
1980s
in the two
depart
ments in which I was
jointly appointed, namely,
Classics and
Comparative
Literature. Somewhat
insouciantiy,
I
performed
the
organizational equiva
lent of
wetting
my finger
and
inserting
it in a socket where a
100-ampere
fuse had
gone by mounting
a conference that took
place
in
1988
on the
topic
"What Is
Philology?"
The event allowed me to form
my thoughts
and also to
explore systematically?albeit only preliminarily?the history
of
understandings
and tensions about
philology.
The
day
of
dialogue
led
to the
publication
of a small book in
which,
in a
grand
total of
78 pages,
a
dozen scholars articulated their views on the
meaning
and
significance
of
philology.11
As chance had
it,
the conference initiated a succession of
collaborative considerations of
philology
that had
particular importance
in medieval studies.
Although
the
study
of literature from the Middle
Ages
did not
approach
being
the locomotive of
literary theory during
the
glamour days
of the
late
1980s
and
early 1990s,
sometimes it at least
played
the caboose and
benefited from the abundance. This short-lived
phase,
in which
philology
(not
normally
known for
being
a
very profitable enterprise) enjoyed
an
uncustomary vogue
for a few
years,
could be
designated
the
"philo-dough
period."
The train in which
philology brought up
the rear was
temporarily
the
gravy
train.
In the
Francophone
world the
surge began
with the articles and book
chapters by
Bernard
Cerquiglini
in the
early 1980s
that eventuated in his
book,
published
in French in
1989
and translated in
English
in
1999
as
?o. This
appellation,
which was heard in the
1980s
and
early 1990s, probably
was formu
lated in
response
to the
publication
of Deconstruction and Criticism
(New
York:
Continuum,
1979),
which counted
among
its contributors not
only Jacques
Derrida but also four
profes
sors who were at the time all based at Yale
University, namely,
Harold
Bloom,
Paul de
Man,
Geoffrey
H.
Hartman,
and
J.
Hillis Miller.
11.
Jan
M.
Ziolkowski, ed.,
"What is
Philology?" Comparative
Literature
Studies, 27:1 (1990),
reprinted
as On
Philology (University
Park: Penn State
Press,
1990).
244
Ziolkowski
In Praise
of
the Variant: A Critical
History of Philology.12
In the
Anglophone
world both
advocacy
and
rejection
of the movement took
place mainly
in
group
efforts. First came a
Speculum special
issue on New
Philology,
edited
by Stephen
G.
Nichols,
in
1990.13
Then there followed in
1991
a collective
volume,
edited
by
Marina S.
Brownlee,
Kevin
Brownlee,
and
Stephen
G.
Nichols,
entitled The New
Medievalism,
which left unresolved
the conundrum of what New
Philology represented
but which created
another,
even more
capacious
"New"
approach
in the
guise
of the New
Medievalism.14 In
supposed
contradistinction to Old
Philology (just plain
old
philology),
New
Philology
zeroed in not on the
stability
of
printed
editions that
presented
the collations of authoritative modern editors
but,
rather,
on the
moving targets (the
catchwords are mouvance and
variance)
of
readings
in medieval
manuscripts.
New
Philology
was not
greeted
with universal
enthusiasm,
even in the
English-speaking
world.
Many objections
were raised to the
very
name.
Concerns were voiced in
essays by
divers hands in the
1994
volume on
The Future
of
the Middle
Ages:
Medieval Literature in the
1990s,
edited
by
Wil
liam D.
Paden,
and to a lesser extent in the
similarly
entitled The Past and
Future
of
Medieval
Studies,
edited
by John
Van
Engen,
that came into
print
in the same
year.15
Outside North America the doubts were
expressed
more
sharply
and
vociferously,
with the
particulars varying
from field to
field,
but
being especially pronounced among
scholars of Old French and
medieval German.
Just by way
of
example,
I cite the collection of
essays
edited
by
Keith
Busby
in
1993
under the title Towards a
Synthesis?Essays
on the New
Philology.16
Closer to
my
own
specialization
in Medieval Latin
12. Bernard
Cerquiglini,
In Praise
of
the Variant: A Critical
History of Philology,
trans.
Betsy
Wing
(Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins
Press,
1999),
from the French
original, ?loge
de la variante.
Histoire
critique
de la
philologie
(Paris: Seuil,
1989). Cerquiglini
had broached the
topic
of the
1989
book in La
parole
m?di?vale:
discours,
syntaxe,
texte
(Paris: Minuit,
1981), pp. 116-23,
and later he examined similar
topics
in Le roman de
Vorthographe:
au
paradis
des
mots,
avant
la
faute: 1150-1694 (Paris: Hatier,
1996).
13.
"The New
Philology," Speculum, 65 (1990).
His own
contribution,
entitled "Introduc
tion.
Philology
in a
Manuscript
Culture,"
runs on
pp.
1-10.
14.
In this volume
(Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins
Univ.
Press,
1991)
I would mention in
particular
David F.
Huit,
"Reading
It
Right:
The
Ideology
of Text
Editing," pp. 113-30.
A
capstone
on the collaborative
publications
was formed
by
Medievalism and the Modernist
Temper,
ed. R. Howard Bloch and
Stephen
G. Nichols
(Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins
Press,
1996).
15.
In the volume edited
by
William D. Paden
(Gainesville:
Univ. Press of
Florida,
1994).
I would
single
out his own "Scholars at a Perilous
Ford," pp. 3-31,
and
Rupert
T.
Pickens,
"The Future of Old French Studies in America: The 'Old'
Philology
and the Crisis of the
'New,'"
pp. 53-86.
In the book assembled
by
Van
Engen
(Notre
Dame: Univ. of Notre
Dame,
1994), special
note
goes
to Lee
Patterson,
"The Return to
Philology," pp. 231-44,
which
contains considerable
analysis
of de Man's "Return to
Philology."
16. Note in
particular
Donald
Maddox,
"Philology, Philo-Logos, Philo-logica,
or
Philologi
conV
(Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1993), pp. 59-69.
Metaphilology
245
studies,
J?rgen
Stohlmann
posed
the
question
"What does New
Philology
offer us?"17 More
recently,
Richard
J.
Utz has
appraised knowledgeably
both North American and German
responses
to New
Philology, partly
by setting
them within the contexts of the
differing
attitudes toward the
relationship
between medieval studies and medievalism.18
Often the worries about the New
Philology
tied into
disputes
about edi
torial
procedures
that extended
beyond
medieval studies. Here the volume
published
in
1997 by
Martin-Dietrich
Gie?gen
and Franz
Lebsanft,
with
the title Alte und neue
Philologie,
is
particularly pertinent,19
as is an
essay by
Werner Schr?der in reaction to New
Philology
and its German reflex in
the
conception
(and
publication project)
of Modernes Mittelalter}0
Was what was ruminated and formulated
by
the
self-proclaimed
New
Philologists
so new? R. Howard
Bloch,
whose
essay
in the
Speculum
issue
has
been,
because of
vagaries
in the
reception history
of New
Philology,
the
most
harshly
scrutinized,
himself
questioned
the
validity
of the
adjective
"New" in the
phrase
New
Philology.21
We could snort "Plus
?a
change,"
but such a
grumpy
reaction would not be
entirely
fair. Yet I do
suspect
that the "new" was not
only
an intellectual
move
but also a
marketing
ploy:
Consumer
products
that are billed "new and
improved"
often
gain
a renewed lease on
life,
even if
they
have not been
changed
so much.
This is not a
stratagem
to which to resort too often:
Despite
the accelera
tion and
proliferation
of different
theories,
or at least names for
them,
the moment for New New
Philology
will
probably
not arrive
during any
of our
scholarly
lifetimes. But rather than
looking
forward to a
putative
17-
"Was
bringt
uns die
Philologie
nouvelle,"
in
Philologie
und
Philosophie. B?tr?gezur
VII.
Internationalen
Fachtagung
der
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Philosophischer
Editionen
(12. -14.
M?rz
199J
M?nchen),
ed. Hans Gerhard
Senger (T?bingen:
M.
Niemeyer Verlag, 1998), pp. 71-88.
18. Richard
J.
Utz,
"Resistance to the
(New) Medievalism,"
in The Future
of
the Middle
Ages
and the Renaissance:
Problems, Trends,
and
Opportunities for
Research,
ed.
Roger
Dahood
(Turnhout:
Brepols, 1998), pp. 151-70.
19.
Beiheft zu editio 8
(T?bingen:
Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 1997).
The volume contains
several
major essays: Gie?gen
and Lebsanft's own
introduction,
"Von alter und neuer Phi
lologie.
Oder: Neuer Streit ?ber
Prinzipien
und Praxis der
Textkritik," pp. 1-14; Philippe
M?nard,
"R?flexions sur la 'nouvelle
philologie,'" pp. 17-33;
Alberto
Varvaro,
"La 'New
Philology'
nella
prospettiva
italiana,"
pp. 35-42; R?diger
Schnell,
"Was ist neu an der 'New
Philology'?
Zum Diskussionsstand in der
germanistischen
Medi?vistik," pp. 61-95;
ana^
Dietmar
Rieger,
"'New
Philology'? Einige
kritische
Bemerkungen
aus der Sicht eines Liter
aturwissenschaftlers,"
pp. 99-103.
20. Werner
Schr?der,
"Die 'Neue
Philologie'
und das 'Moderne
Mittelalter,'"
in Germanistik
in
Jena. Jenaer
Universit?tsreden
1
(1996), 33-50,
and Karl
Stackmann,
"Neue
Philologie?"
in Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer
popul?ren Epoche,
ed.
Joachim
Heinzle
(Frankfurt
am
Main:
Insel,
1994), pp. 398-428
21. R. Howard
Bloch,
"New
Philology
and Old
French,"
Speculum, 65 (1990), 38-58.
For
criticisms of
Bloch,
see
Rieger,
"'New
Philology'?"
in Alte und neue
Philologie,
ed.
Gie?gen
and
Lebsanft, pp.
106-8; Paden,
"Scholars at a Perilous
Ford,"
pp. 13-16;
and
Pickens,
"The
Future of Old French
Studies," pp. 54-55, 65-69.
246
Ziolkowski
future,
let us look back to a real
question
about the
past:
Was the New in
New
Philology justified?
The few
years
of the brouhaha over the New
Philology
and the New Me
dievalism witnessed the advent in medieval
literary
studies of movements
that had occurred
long
before,
in
literary
studies of later
periods.
This
arrival
brought
with it an exaltation of the
manuscript,
the
predominant
medium of textual transmission in the Middle
Ages.
The
manuscript
was
an
important
constituent in what Nichols called the
"postmodern
return
to the
origins
of medieval studies." Nichols used the
phrase "manuscript
matrix" to
convey
"a
place
of radical
contingencies:
of
chronology,
of
anachronism,
of
conflicting subjects,
of
representation."22
The
phrase
"manuscript
matrix" bears a resemblance to
"intertext,"
in that it allows
for the
interplay
of different textual
codes,
but it
gives
a nod at least to the
particularities
of the codex as an
object
distinct from the
printed
book.
Placing developments
such as New
Philology
in a historical context
raises serious
challenges,
because the narrative of medieval
literary
studies
has
begun
to be drafted
only comparatively recently.23
Whereas
guides
to
classical
scholarship
have not
only
existed for a
long
time but have even
grown
in number
recently,24
the
corresponding
work for medieval studies
has been undertaken
only lately.
Scholars of Old
English
have been
tracing
the
history
of their
field,
scholars of Medieval Latin
theirs,
and
so
forth,
but the bits of fabric have not been stitched
together.
For
English speak
ers,
Helen Damico's three volumes offer a
much-appreciated assemblage
of material for future
progress.25
To
acquire
a
deeper
sense of the
genealogy
of
philology
and the re
lationship
of "old" and "new"
philology
within
my
own
specialization
of
Medieval
Latin,
I have had to hunt
up
facts about the careers of Romance
philologists,
classicists,
and Medieval Latinists.
Writing
introductions to
2 2. For a
critique
of this
formulation,
see Andrew
Taylor,
Textual Situations: Three Medieval
Manuscripts
and Thar Readers
(Philadelphia:
Univ. of
Pennsylvania
Press, 2002),
chapter
5,
especially pp.
200-8.
23.
On the
"history
of the
history
of
philology,"
see Pascale
Hummel,
Histoire de Thistoire
de la
philologie.
Etude d'un
genre ?pist?mologique
et
bibliographique
(Geneva: Droz, 2000).
24.
See,
for
example,
Rudolf
Pfeiffer,
History of
Classical
Scholarship 1300-1850
(Oxford:
Clarendon
Press,
1976);
Classical
Scholarship:
A
Biographical Encyclopedia,
ed. Ward W.
Briggs
Jr.
and William M. Calder III
(New
York: Garland
Publishing, 1990);
and Pascale
Hummel,
Philologus
auctor. Le
philologue
et son
oeuvre,
Sapheneia: Beitr?ge
zur Klassischen
Philologie,
8
(Bern:
Peter
Lang, 2003).
25.
In the
present
context the most relevant of the three is Medieval
Scholarship: Biographical
Studies on the Formation
of
a
Discipline,
vol. 2,
"Literature and
Philology,"
ed. Helen
Damico,
Donald
Fennema,
and Karmen Lenz
(New
York: Garland
Publishing, 1998).
The other
volumes vol.
1,
"History,"
ed. Damico and
Joseph
B. Zavadil
(New
York: Garland
Publishing,
1995),
and vol.
3,
"Philosophy
and the
Arts,"
ed.
Damico, Fennema,
and Lenz
(New
York:
Garland
Publishing,
2000).
A
synthesis
of a more
idiosyncratic
sort is
presented by
Norman
F.
Cantor,
Inventing
the Middle
Ages:
The
Lives, Works,
and Ideas
of
the Great Medievalists
of
the
Twentieth
Century (New
York: William
Morrow,
1991).
Metaphilology 247
reprints
or
translations of books
by
Erich Auerbach
(1892-1957),
Do
menico
Comparetti (1835-1927),
and
Dag Norberg (1909-1996),
and
researching
an article on the
place
of Ernst Robert Curtius
(1886-1956)
in Medieval Latin
studies,
enabled
glimpses
of
philology
in
bygone
times
that have
helped
me better to
gauge
the
present.26
When I started teach
ing
in
1981,1
was
profoundly
unfamiliar with the
history
of
scholarship
in medieval
literary
studies. More than a decade
later,
I remained ill-in
formed about much of that
past,
but I
began
at least to realize the
scope
of
my
own
ignorance.
So where is
philology
now,
and how does it fit with the
philology
of
yore?
How much new
philology
is
around,
how much old
philology,
how
much
philology
tout court?
Philology
is no
longer
as divisive as was the
case ten or fifteen
years ago.27 Mainly,
the
lessening
of tensions relates to
the
breaking
down of the artificial barriers between close
study
of older
languages,
texts,
and
manuscripts,
and extensive command of
literary
theory.
The dissolution of boundaries
seems all to the
good,
but the di
minishment of
anxiety
over
philology
results
partly
from the less
happy
circumstance that
many
branches of
philology
have withered. Here an
obvious fact merits
mentioning belatedly:
the rubric
philology
is
applied
almost
exclusively
to the
study
of older literatures. Even if we
could find
moments when the methods of
analysis being practiced
were identical
between an examination o?
Beowulf,
the sermons of Bernard of
Clairvaux,
or Wolfram's Parzival on the one hand and Samuel Becket's
Waiting for
Godot,
Salman Rushdie's Satanic
Verses,
or Toni Morrison's Beloved on
the
other,
the likelihood that the latter would be labeled as
philology
is
virtually
nil.28
The Cold
War,
the
passing
of which seldom elicits
laments,
held
together
26.
Jan
M.
Ziolkowski, "Foreword,"
in Erich
Auerbach,
Literary Language
and Its Public in
Late Latin
Antiquity
and in the Middle
Ages, Bollingen
Series,
74 (repr.
Princeton: Princeton
Univ.
Press,
1993), pp.
ix-xxxix;
"The
Making
of Domenico
Comparetti's Vergil
in the Middle
Ages"
introduction to Domenico
Compared!, Vergil
in the Middle
Ages (repr.
Princeton: Princ
eton Univ.
Press,
1997), pp.
vii-xxxvii;
"An Introduction to
DagNorberg's
Introduction,"
in
Dag Norberg,
An Introduction to the
Study of
Medieval Latin
Versification,
trans. Grant. C. Roti
and
Jacqueline Skubly,
ed.
Jan
Ziolkowski
(Washington,
D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America
Press,
2004);
and "Ernst Robert Curtius
(1886-1956)
and Medieval Latin
Studies,"
The
Journal of
Medieval
Latin, 7 (1997), 147-67.
27.
For a
graceful taking
stock of the state of affairs seven
years ago together
with several
exemplifications
of
philology
in
practice,
see Roberta
Frank,
"The Unbearable
Lightness
of
Being
a
Philologist," JEGP, 96 (1997), 486-513.
28. As the
exceptions
that
prove
the
rule,
note Carolivia
Herron,
"Philology
as Subver
sion: The Case of
Afro-America,"
in On
Philology,
ed.
Ziolkowski,
pp. 62-65,
and Dieter
Mehl,
"New
Philology
und die Edition der Texte von D. H.
Lawrence,"
in Zur
?berlieferung,
Kritik und Edition alterund neuerer Texte.
Beitr?ge
des
Colloquiums
zum
85. Geburtstag
von Werner
Schr?der am 12. und
73.
M?rz
1999
in
Mainz,
ed. Kurt G?rtner and Hans-Henrik
Krummacher,
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur:
Abhandlungen
der Geistes- und sozial
wissenschaftliche Klasse 2000,
2
(Mainz:
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der
Literatur,
2000), pp. 261-72.
248
Zio?kowski
a
system
that
inadvertently
benefited
medievalists,
who
engage
with a wide
spectrum
of
languages.
It
guaranteed
a level of attention to
European
languages,
with border
languages
such as German and Modern Greek
receiving funding
that trickled down to the reflexes of those
languages
in
the Middle
Ages.
What has
happened
since the fall of the Berlin Wall few
of us in the humanities seemed to
predict?but
we were in
good company,
since no one even in the
prognostic
fields of
politics
or economics seems
to have seen it
coming
either.
Although Germany
has
grown
into an even
larger
and more
important country
than it was before the Berlin Wall
came
down,
the
growth
of
English
as a
global language
and the
shifting
of attention in the United States from
Europe
to other
regions
with more
threatening political problems
have caused enrollments in German lan
guage study
to
plummet.
In both
desperation
and reflection of a
change
in the
prevailing
interests
among younger professors
in the
field,
the old
philological presumption
that Germanistik should
encompass study
of
history
of the
language
and of older Germanic dialects has
yielded
to an
emphasis
on
cultural studies.29
Although
medieval German could
(and
should,
for what
my opinion
is
worth)
have a
niche in German
Studies,
departments
are
tempted
to make
appointments
in film and to leave
retiring
medievalists
unreplaced.
In Romance
languages
the situation is even more
complex.
Enrollments
in
Spanish
have
grown,
while those in Italian have held
steady
and those in
French have
dropped.
I have the
impression
that often the French
wings
of Romance
languages
are under
pressure
to
relinquish teaching positions
to their
Spanish counterparts,
which sometimes have
pent-up
resentments
and
maybe
desire to achieve
payback
after
having
been treated as
poor
relations for
many
decades. Even when there is not an
impetus
to downsize
the French
sections,
the
dynamics
within French
departments
seem not
at all unlike those ascendant within German
departments,
where
given
a
choice between
making
new
appointments
in film
studies, feminism,
ethnic
and
minority
studies,
cultural
studies,
postcolonial theory, gender
studies,
or
queer theory, many colleagues
who work on nineteenth- or twentieth
century
literature show no
compunction
in
jettisoning coverage
of the
first third
or more of the
literary
and cultural
history they
are
supposed
to
profess.
The same
may
hold true even in
departments
of
English,
where
29-
On the situation of medieval German
literature,
see Elaine C.
Tennant,
"Old
Philology,
New
Historicism,
and the
Study
of German
Literature,"
in Lesarten:
M?thodologies
nouvelles
et textes
anciens,
ed. Alexander Schwarz
(Bern:
Peter
Lang, 1990), pp. 153-77,
an(*>
much
more
recendy,
Medieval German Voices in the 2 ist
Century:
The
Paradigmatic
Function
of
Medieval
German Studies
for
German Studies. A Collection
of Essays,
ed. Albrecht
Classen,
Internationale
Forschungen
zur
Allgemeinen
und
Vergleichenden
Literaturwissenschaft,
46 (Amsterdam:
Rodopi,
2000),
especially
in his
introduction,
pp. 7-42.
Metaphilology
249
the numbers of
positions
at stake run much
higher
as
English departments
move more and more toward
being
the locus for the
teaching
of
any
and
all literatures in translation.
My colleague
Dan
Donoghue,
in an article
that delivers
many pointed
observations about different
understandings
of
philology,
comments that "for a
variety
of reasons
philologists
have come
to feel more
marginalized
within
English departments, making
them more
likely
to turn elsewhere for
collegiality."301 suspect
that the reasons for
this sense of
marginalization
differ little from what
many
Old French or
Old and Middle
High
German
philologists experience.
Yet the clouds
hanging
over
philology
are
pierced by
not
just
small
rays
but even
great
beams of
hope.
Medievalists are
very
adroit at
joining
to
gether
across their
many departments
to lean on other
departments
and
administrations and to orchestrate
appointments
that
may
not seem at
first
glance likely
to be
approved.
Their concerted
pressure helps
to
get
positions
authorized and advertised. At the other
end,
many
of the
young
scholars who will determine the contours of all fields in the
coming
two
decades are
genuinely
eclectic in
positive
ways.
They
should be encour
aged
and
required
to seek out
knowledge
of
languages, manuscripts,
and
theories in the constellations that enable them to understand best the texts
and other materials with which
they
choose to work.
Interdisciplinarity
is
indispensable
not
only
for intellectual
growth
and new
findings
to be
achieved but even
just
for survival.
Not that
interdisciplinarity
lacks its
problems:
the
person
who
negoti
ates between too
many disciplines may
end
up having
none and
may
have no
job
either. The
images
of
falling
between chairs or of
serving
too
many
masters
may
not have been
inspired by any
academic
tragedy,
but
they
could have been. Both intellectual
honesty
and
discovery
lose if
we cannot defend our
arguments
without
switching
back and forth be
tween fields and
disciplines, leaving
one whenever the
going gets tough.
One
danger posed by
New
Philology
was that its
exponents
would frame
arguments
based on the
special
nature of
manuscripts
whenever
theory
failed
them,
or on
theory
when the
manuscripts
were not
forthcoming.
Another was that
they
would fetishize
manuscripts
without
actually spend
ing
very
much time
learning
to
decipher
them and to collate the results
with the
decipherments
of other
manuscripts.
There has been a
painful
irony
that the modishness of
"manuscript
culture" has coincided with an
era in which it has become ever rarer for
graduate
students to
acquire
30.
Daniel
Donoghue, "Language
Matters,"
in
Reading
Old
English
Texts,
ed. Katherine
O'Brien O'Keeffe
(Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ.
Press,
1997), p.
62.
Seeing
an endnote
number at the end of the sentence
cited,
I went in search of the documentation but found
none on this
topic?unless
it is embedded
ironically
and
implicitly
in the tide of the article
on "Old
English
Stress"!
250
Ziolkowski
grounding
in
palaeography
or
editing,
and ever harder for administrators
to
comprehend
the difficulties entailed in the
preparation
of an edition
based on
manuscripts.
For at least a
couple
of decades the secret
weapon
of medievalists has
been
pedagogy.
Those who teach
fairy-tales,
comic
books, films,
adver
tising,
detective
stories, thrillers,
and other such
genres
or
media
can
count on
drawing undergraduates
for whom
reading anything,
let alone
texts from a distant culture in difficult
languages,
is an arduous chore
associated with the classroom in
particular,
rather than life in
general.
But medievalists are well versed in the art of
fighting
for
spots
in
public
view. Whatever
help
we
may garner sporadically
from
J.
R. R.
Tolkien,
C. S.
Lewis,
Umberto
Eco,
or even
Harry
Potter,
on the whole we have
to
rely upon
our own
promotion
of medieval literature. In this
ongoing
campaign manuscripts may
serve a
function,
since the
individuality
and
the
multiplicity
of media
represented
in
manuscripts
can be
enormously
appealing
to students
today.
The New
Philology
and whatever other
approaches
succeed it
may
have
a role too in these
battles,
so
long
as
they
do not lead to either of the basic
human errors that often vitiated older manifestations of
philology.
One
of these mistakes is to allow the
learning
of
philology,
no matter how old
or
new,
to become an
impediment
to the humane
experience
of
reading
and
making
contact with the
past
that draws
many
students and
general
readers to the Middle
Ages.
In this
regard
I can do no better than
quote
words that E. K. Rand
(1871-1945),
himself no mean
philologist, pub
lished some
seventy years ago:
I
prefer
the
Virgil
that Dante lets me see rather than the
object
revealed
in the
scholarly pages
of Teuffel and Schanz.
Having
attained this
degree
of
audacity,
I will
go
further still. I
prefer
the
allegorized Virgil
of Bernard
Silvester to the annotated
Virgil
of some modern scholars.
Subjectum
est homo.
Really
that is not a bad
reading
of
Virgil. Subjectum
est
philologia
classica, or,
more
specifically, subjectum
est imitatio
Graecorum,?these
are
aspects
of
Virgil's
poetry
that
only
a
very highly philologized community
can understand. The
mediaeval
Virgil
is
nearer, after
all,
to the
simple
lover of
poetry.31
The other error is to
dupe
oneself into
believing
that
any single approach
or bundle of
approaches
can and will lead to a full statement of the truth
that renders all future
speculation
otiose. Here
again
I will
quote
a
great
medievalist,
in this instance Henri de Lubac
(1896-1991):
"Les meil
leurs
philologues
eux-m?mes ont ? se
pr?munir
contre l'illusion de croire
qu'apr?s
eux tout est dit."32
31.
E. K-
Rand,
"The Mediaeval
Vergil,"
Studi
Medievali,
n.s.
5 (1932), 441-42.
32.
Henri de
Lubac,
Ex?g?se
m?di?vale: Les
quatre
sens de
l'?criture,
vol.
4 (part
2,
vol.
2),
Th?ologie, 59 (Paris: Aubier,
1964), p. 244,
n. 2.
Metaphilology 251
METAPHILOLOGY
Near the end of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's The Powers
of Philology: Dynam
ics
of
Textual
Scholarship (2003),
there
greets
the
eye
a
paragraph
with
cardinal facts about the
author,
which includes a reference to "his more
than five hundred
publications,
which have been translated into nineteen
languages."
These numbers
may
be checked
against
the dust
jacket,
where
the count is
markedly
lower: "His more than four hundred
publications
have been translated into seventeen
languages."
How could such a
formidable
leap
of one
hundred
publications
and two
languages
have taken
place
between the submission of the
figures
for the
paratext
on the cover and that of the biodata in the book itself? Part of the
answer lies in work habits. The first
prose
in The Powers
of Philology
is the
acknowledgments,
which conclude with the
hope
that the dedicatee will
read the
pages
of the book "as if
they
were
yet
another
postcard."
Since
both
descriptions
of the author
begin by identifying
him as a
professor
at
Stanford,
a
professor
at
Montr?al,
and a
director of studies in
Paris,
it
is
quite
conceivable that the
writing
of this
eighty-seven-page
text took
place
in a manner
closely approximating
the
scrawling
of cards to a
family
member
or
friend. Then
again, maybe
it should be
compared
with the
kind of
"electronically produced running commentary
to the world" that
Gumbrecht characterizes as
"high-tech philology" (p. 52).
What remains
to be determined is how much his own book constitutes
philology
and
how much
"philo-blogging."
The
acknowledgments open
with an
expression
of thanks to Glenn
Most,
the initial auctoritas.
They
end
by invoking
a
dynamic
duo to
prof
fer additional
support,
when Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht describes himself
as "an admirer and an occasional student of the
great
classicist Manfred
Fuhrmann since the
early 1970s
and a
colleague
of the
great philologist
Karl Maurer since
1975."
The
gratitude
to Most turns out not to be lim
ited to warmth for intellectual
exchange,
since Gumbrecht's friend
(p. 4)
invited him to
participate
in five
colloquia
on "the five basic
philological
practices"
that were held at the
University
of
Heidelberg.
These five col
loquia
were themselves
published
in volumes that constitute useful
rep
ertories for classicists as well as
graduate
students in classics
proseminars,
as
they
are
being exposed
to basic
concepts,
methods,
and resources in
classical
philology.
Gumbrecht's indebtedness to Most also extends to
apparently having
been
granted permission
to reuse in
slightly
modified form contributions
to the series of five
colloquia
that Most
organized
and
published.
The re
lationship
of the
present
volume to those earlier five
published papers
is
nowhere made
explicit, although
in a footnote
(pp. 6-7
n.
9)
Gumbrecht
252
Ziolkowski
explains
how a line in his text had
given
him the title "for the earliest ver
sion of what has now become the
chapter Identifying Fragments.'"
How
many
other versions intervened between the earliest
one and the
present
one he does not
spell
out. Then he indicates that "The titles of
my
fol
lowing
four contributions to the
proceedings
of the
Heidelberg colloquia
followed the same
syntactical pattern." Finally
he furnishes
bibliography
relating
to those contributions.
Although
various moments in the book
gave
me an eerie sense of
d?j?
lu,
I was not shrewd
enough
to
figure
out
what was
going
on.
Since the author nowhere reveals that he lifted the
earlier
essays
almost verbatim into the
present
volume,
I went
foolishly
to the stacks to consult all five of them.33
Why
dwell on this matter?
Although purists
remain who
object strongly
to the reuse of material from articles in
books,
such
recycling
is com
monplace
and bothers me not at a
jot.
But I
gripe
at not
having
the rela
tionship
made overt. Not
only
would it
spare hapless
future researchers
the bother of
needlessly tracking
down
duplicates
of materials
they
have
already
consulted under the
misimpression
that
they
are
different,
but in
addition it would outfit future scholars of scholars with valuable materi
als for
studying
Gumbrecht's own intellectual evolution.
Furthermore,
the statement
"'Eating
one's
fragment!'
thus ends
up having
a double
meaning" (p. 23)
is
completely baffling
unless the reader
recognizes
it
to relate to the title of the
Heidelberg paper.
In what looks to have been
a
hasty
revision of the
originals,
Gumbrecht
equipped
the
chapter
with a
new name
but failed to excise a
now-incomprehensible
internal reference
to the old title.34
Even modest revision would have
helped
to make The Powers
of Philology
appeal
more
powerfully
to readers in North America or still more
broadly
to
English-speaking
readers. In
Heidelberg
an
unglossed
reference to
"the Conservative Revolution"
(p.
11)
makes
perfect
sense,
but outside
Germany
the
phrase requires
at least
passing explication;
in the United
States it sounds like an aside about the
Republican Party
or the
politics
of
33-
To save future readers the same
blunder,
let me
signal
the
following correspondences:
with
light retouching, chapter
i
"Identifying Fragments," pp. 9-23
=
"Eat Your
Fragment!
About
Imagination
and the Restitution of
Texts";
Chapter
2
"Editing
Texts,"
pp. 24-40
=
"Play
Your Roles
Tactfully!
About the
Pragmatics
of
Text-Editing,
the Desire for Identifica
tion,
and the Resistance to
Theory"; Chapter 3 "Writing
Commentaries,"
pp. 41-53
=
"Fill
up
Your
Margins!
About
Commentary
and
Copia"', Chapter
4
"Historicizing Things," pp.
54-67
=
"Take a
Step
Back?And Turn
Away
from Death! On the Moves of
Historicization";
and
chapter 5 "Teaching," pp. 68-87
=
"Live Your
Experience?And
Be
Untimely!
What
'Classical
Philology
as a Profession' Could
(Have)
Become."
34.
Another
irritation,
this one
pertaining
to the
prospective
rather than
retrospective,
is when
Gumbrecht,
using
two different titles in the
space
of two
pages (
The Production
of
Presence on
p.
6 and The Powers
of
Presence on
p. 7),
refers to a book of his that was forthcom
ing.
Metaphilology
253
talk radio.
Although
it
may
be sad to
say,
to declare that "the latest edition
of the Brockhaus defines
legal commentary
as a
specific type
of
interpreta
tion
(p. 49)
without a
bibliographic
citation will leave at a loss those not
familiar with the names of
foreign
dictionaries,
not even with
Germany's
equivalent
to Webster's. A related
problem
occurs when Gumbrecht
states,
preposterously,
that "no
dictionary
definition of the word
commentary
ever
fails to mention that
'running'
commentaries constitute the
norm";
the
footnote to substantiate this
generalization points
to one German diction
ary
of
literary scholarship
"as a
random
example."35
The issue of audience
comes most
assertively
to the fore in the
chapter
on
teaching,
in which
the
only
details relate to the situation of
higher
education in
Germany.
(Gumbrecht
does
glance
at "the American academic
debates,"
which he
leaves
unspecified except
in reference to "their
higher degree
of na?vet?"
[p. 69].)
The German discussion interests me
personally,
but it makes me
suspect
that the book will
play
better with a
university
audience there than
here.
As a medievalist who
aspires occasionally
to
ply
the trade of
philology,
I
would
say
that at least three of the five
pursuits
identified
by
Gumbrecht
in his five
chapter
titles accord well with
my
own
presuppositions
about
the basic constituents of the
discipline. Philology
is associated with
editing
texts and
writing
commentaries,
and
many
philologists
have
teaching
as
both a vocation and an avocation.
"Identifying Fragments" may
be of less
account for medievalists than for
many
classicists,
although
the
process
of identification still looms
large
in our
work.36
Furthermore,
juxtaposing
texts of the
past
to their own and our own historical contexts is a familiar
function,
if that is what is meant
by "Historicizing Things."
Gumbrecht's
prose
leaves much to be desired.
Among
the words and
expressions
that left me either
scratching
or
shaking
my
head are
(and
this is a
sampling,
rather than a full
listing)
"a historical text
curatorship"
(p.
2),
"a sometimes
naively
antiacademic auratization of the
imaginary"
(p. 23),
"more immanentist forms of
editing" (p. 27),
"let alone that
they
can avoid
producing subject
effects"
(p. 29),
"to
complexify" (p. 29),
"a
will to
complexification" (p.
62),
"psychoemancipatory" (p. 85),
and "a
new and
highly
auratic
concept
of
'reading'
that humanists
today
increas
ingly
use as a
positive
self-reference"
(p. 85).
Both auratization and auratic
appear exceedingly rarely
in
English,
outside translations from
German,
and even there the words are such newcomers as not to have wended their
35-
The onus is not on me to enumerate the dictionaries and handbooks that I have
consulted in which the word
commentary
is either omitted or else
appears
without a mention
of
"running"
commentaries.
36. Jacques
Berlioz et
al.,
Identifier
sources et
citations,
L'Atelier du
m?di?viste,
1
(Turnhout:
Brepols, 1994).
254
Ziolkowski
way
into the
Oxford English Dictionary. Although
the basis for
a
definition of
auratization
emerges casually (p. 63),
those two sentences come
belatedly
for
anyone
who
tripped
over the word
forty pages
earlier.
Complexify
and
complexification
are found in the
Oxford English Dictionary, although
both
senses of the former are
tagged
as "rare."
Psychoemancipatory
has eluded
my
grasp; although
I can surmise what it
means,
at first it made
my thoughts
turn to the release of a serial killer from
prison
or to the
liberating
effects
of
watching
Alfred Hitchcock films.
It would take me too
long
to
catalogue
the sentences that left me in
perplexity,
but here are a
couple
of
examples.
First is a
passage
that of
fers the most succinct definition of
philology
in the book
(p. 3):
"[T]he
identification and restoration of texts from the
past?that
is,
philology
as
understood in this book?establishes a distance vis-?-vis the intellectual
space
of hermeneutics and of
interpretation
as the textual
practice
that
hermeneutics informs." The discord between the
plural subject
and the
singular
verb warrants
noting,
but what
stumps
me is the rest. Could it
be reformulated
as
"Philology,
understood here as the identification and
restoration of texts from the
past,
distances itself from hermeneutics and
from
interpretation?"
Then comes a sentence on
p. 7:
"This
coemergence
of
imagination
with the desire for
presence
is
by
no means
random,
for
imagination
is a
comparatively
archaic
faculty
of
mind,
which
implies
that
it has a
specific
closeness to
multiple
functions of the human
body."
In
comparison
with what is
imagination
an
archaic
faculty
of mind? How we
can
verify
its archaism? Which
bodily
functions does Gumbrecht have in
mind?or does he refrain from
naming
them because
they
are not fit for
print? Possibly
the sentence
quoted
is
explained
in a
paragraph
on
pp.
20-21,
which covers some of the same
terrain,
but to be
honest,
I could
not follow it either. On several occasions I found
myself
unable to
parse
the
prose
of this book
successfully, owing partly
to its
syntax
and
partly
to its sometimes
needlessly
abstract
vocabulary.
A case in
point
would be
the
key passage
on
p. 33
that aims to differentiate between
literary
and
philological reading:
"In the sense of unredeemed?and
semantically
unredeemable?textual material
launching
a reflection on the text's for
mal
properties, literary reading
and
philological reading
have
something
more
specific
in common than the automatic
production
of author and
reader roles."
Beyond being sporadically impenetrable
in
style,
the book runs
long
on
assertion and short on documentation
(with
the
exception
of references
to Gumbrecht's own
publications,
such as the small
catalogue
that is re
peated
on
pp. 24
n. 1 and
56
n.
2).
In this connection it makes
frequent
recourse to straw
men,
without even
going
to the trouble of
identifying
them. Take for instance the
paragraph
that
begins
on
p.
26 and runs to
p. 27:
Metaphilology
255
Nonetheless,
some
philological
schools more
rigorous
than Men?ndez
Pidal's have
always postulated
that
editing
should be
independent
of the
editors' roles or intentions
(some
philologists
have even wanted to exclude
the author's intention as a
point
of
reference,
although,
on the other
hand,
the role of
subjective
decisions and even of
subjective
taste has been a
topic
in
philological
discussions since the
age
of classical
antiquity). By trying
to
prove
that
philological
decisions can be made within the
parameters
of a
strictly
textual
logic, they
have come close to a
practice
that Paul de Man
has described and canonized as "theoretical
reading"?even though
know
ing
about this
proximity
would have shocked some
philologists
more than
it
might
have shocked de Man.
From rhetorical and
logical perspectives,
this
passage
fascinates me. Foot
noted
only
with reference to de
Man,
it
inculpates
without
any amplifica
tion some
philological
schools,
philological
discussions,
some
philologists
(twice),
and an indeterminate
they.
Gumbrecht returns to
philological
schools later
(p. 37)
but is no more
forthcoming
about their location or
membership.
(Possible locations,
all of them German
universities,
with one
Belgian
addition,
are
given
much later
[p. 54].)
Does
overcoming
the resistance
to
theory
necessitate
developing
a
phobia
about basic
scholarship?
The
manner in which the
paragraph
ends is
telling. Having opened up
a can
of
worms, Gumbrecht
dumps
it on the
ground
and walks
away,
at least
temporarily (p. 27):
"As no
easy
solution seems to be in
sight,
I will re
turn to this
question
later on." Later he tacks back to de Man: "Given his
distance vis-?-vis
pragmatics
and
speech-act theory,
on which basis would
de Man have resolved
philological problems?" (p. 35).
I am not clear that
Gumbrecht returns to the rest of the
philology?all
those
wriggly specifics
that I called worms a moment
ago.
The Powers
of Philology
contained
many
observations that seized
my imagi
nation,
but more often than not I could not test their
validity
for the
simple
reason that the book's author refrained from
providing any
details. For
example,
the discussion of "the
neophilological editing style"
and the
qualification
of New
Philology
as
occupying
a
place
within text
editing
"like a
guild
within
a craft"
(p. 38)
left me
eager
for a
pointer
or two about
the editions Gumbrecht had in mind. So far as I have been able to
judge,
the New
Philology
was much more
productive
of talk about
editing
than
of editions themselves. Whether that
impression
holds true or
not,
I need
to be directed to a
specific
manifestation of "the
neophilological editing
style."
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
inaugurates
his book with an anecdote about
his
mother,
who
apparently
would refer to
elementary-school
teachers
by
calling
them the German
equivalent
of
"philologists" (p.
1).
This
usage,
which Gumbrecht cannot
explain,
enables him to make the transition to
remarking
that he finds his mother's habit no more eccentric than when
"some of
[his]
most
competent
American
colleagues" (p.
1
)
describe
256
Ziolkowski
Ernst Robert
Curtius,
Leo
Spitzer (1887-1960),
and Erich Auerbach as
philologists.
But are those
colleagues
so bizarre in their nomenclature?
Gumbrecht is
right
that none
of the three made a
mark as an editor
(although
Curtius did
produce
an edition as his
dissertation37)
and that
none
engaged
in such
traditionally philological
craftwork as
writing
a
full
commentary (what
Gumbrecht calls
oddly
on
p.
2 and elsewhere
"a historical
commentary"),
but all three of them
regarded
themselves
as
philologists,
not
necessarily wholly
but at least
partially.
Thus Curtius
in his best-known book avowed his reliance
on "the scientific method
which is the foundation of all historical
investigation: philology,"
stated
that "The accidental truths of fact can
only
be established
by philology,"
and declared further that "He who would
study European
literature has
an easier task than
Bergson
's
philosopher.
He has
only
to familiarize
himself with the methods and
subjects
of
classical,
medieval
Latin,
and
modern
philology."38
In the introduction to his
Essays
in Historical Seman
tics,
Spitzer
claims to "have worked in the belief that
English
and Ger
man as well as Romance
Philology
should be
brought
back to the fold of
the civilitas romana of the Middle
Ages."39
Auerbach
opens
his last book
(Literary Language
and its
Public, p. 5)
with the sentence "The situation of
Romance
philology
in
Germany
has
always
been
unique."40 Apart
from
the
self-designations
of the scholars in
question,
we have to contend with
the
problematic vocabulary
of
English,
where the term Romanist
(which
Gumbrecht elsewhere uses to describe these men
professionally)
would
give
rise to endless confusions.41 In
any
case,
in the face of Gumbrecht's
reservations about the use Americans have made of the
appellation philolo
gist,
it is not
entirely
consistent that he should himself characterize
(p. 24)
Ram?n Men?ndez Pidal
(1869-1968)
as a
Hispanic philologist
(which
is
a
potentially ambiguous phrase, especially
in American
English).
One word that does not occur with
any regularity
in the oeuvres of Cur
tius,
Spitzer,
and Auerbach is
power.
Gumbrecht confesses that
originally
he
intended to entitle his book The Poetics
of Philology,
but that
eventually
he
37-
Ei
Quatre
Livre des Reis: Die B?cher Samuelis und der
K?nige
in einer
franz?sischen
Bearbei
tung
des 12.
Jahrhunderts,
nach der ?ltesten
Handschrift
unter
Benutzung
der neu
aufgefundenen
Handschriflen,
ed. Ernst Robert
Curtius,
Gesellschaft f?r romanische
Literatur,
26
(Dresden:
Gedruckt f?r die Gesellschaft f?r romanische
Literatur,
1911).
38.
Curtius,
European
Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages,
trans. Willard R.
Trask,
Bollingen
Series,
36 (Princeton:
Princeton Univ.
Press,
1990), pp.
x, x, and
14, respectively.
39. Spitzer, Essays
in Historical Semantics
(New
York: S. F.
Vanni,
1947), p. 7.
40.
In the
essay
that he
published
in
1953
in
response
to reviews of
Mimesis,
Auerbach
placed
himself in the
lineage
of
philology
that ran from
Hegel
until the Second World War.
For an
English
translation of the
essay,
see Erich
Auerbach,
"Epilegomena
to
Mimesis,"
trans.
Jan
M.
Ziolkowski,
in Mimesis
(Princeton:
Princeton Univ.
Press,
2003), pp. 559-74.
41.
Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht,
Vom Leben und Sterben der
gro?en
Romanisten: Carl
Vossler,
Ernst
Robert
Curtius,
Leo
Spitzer,
Erich
Auerbach,
Werner Krauss
(Munich: Hanser, 2002).
Metaphilology 257
decided to
give
it the title The Powers
of Philology. By power
he has in mind
not the notion of Michel Foucault
but, rather,
"the
potential
of
occupying
or
blocking spaces
with bodies"
(p. 5).
He
expatiates upon
this
thought
by specifying
that this kind of
power
does not
necessarily
entail violence
but that it "must
always
be based on
physical superiority?and
that it is
therefore
inevitably
heteronomous in relation to whatever
can
be
regarded
to be a structural feature or a content of the human mind"
(p.
6).
Not all
of this
reasoning
makes sense to
me,
and even less of it convinces
me,
but
Gumbrecht left
me with the
impression
that his dream
philologist
would
bear more of a resemblance to Arnold
Schwarzenegger
in his
prime
as a
bodybuilder
than to
any
of the
philologists
who are named in this book.
Maybe
we
do not need to
go
so far as to visualize Curtius
on
steroids,
but
Gumbrecht's
fantasy Philologe
would seem to share likenesses with the
?bermensch of the
arch-an?philologist,
Nietzsche.
Those
practicing philologists
who are
drawn to this book
by
its title
may
find themselves
impatient,
since its
disquisition
is seldom cluttered with
signs
that its author examined
enough examples
of their work
closely
to be
qualified
to make
pronouncements
on the
topic
of
philology.
It
is
disconcerting
to
peruse
a
chapter
on
editing
texts in which de Man
elicits
considerably
more
space
than Men?ndez
Pidal,
the one
and
only
editor who is mentioned
by
name
along
with
any
of his editions.
(There
is a
huge irony
in the amount of
energy
that Gumbrecht
expends upon
endeavoring
to determine "on which basis would de Man have resolved
philological problems?" [p. 35]. Apparently
the intentional
fallacy
does
not
apply
when the auctores of
literary theory
are themselves under exami
nation.)
It is as if not
only
editions were
irrelevant to the consideration
but also the
very
substantial
body
of
significant
books about
editing
and
textual
scholarship
that has
grown up
over the
past quarter century.42
Karl
Lachmann
(1793-1851)
does wend his
way
into the index of this
book,
but
only
once
(p. 91 ),
by
dint of
having emerged
a
single
time
adjectivally
in the text
(p. 38);
far from
occupying
the
foreground
of Gumbrecht's
thoughts,
he and other editors are
barely
(or
not
even)
shadows
against
the
backdrop.
Although
Gumbrecht tried his hand at
editing
and
commenting
in work
on
Juan
Ruiz and Marie de France
early
in his career
(1972
and
1973,
respectively),
his
appetites
in
reading
and
writing
run
nowadays
in
entirely
different
directions,
as he mentions when he turns
(p. 31)
to the credo
that "certain texts are
capable
of
'speaking
to humankind in
general'"
42.
For a taste of this
scholarship,
see
Wolfgang
Maaz,
"Die editorische Macht der Philolo
gie.
Eine
Momentaufnahme,"
Mittellateinisches
Jahrbuch, 39 (2004), 113-117.
Maaz's review
article leads to much
bibliography
on this
particular topic
as well as on other
aspects
of cur
rent
philology
and
metaphilology, especially
with reference to Medieval Latin
philology.
258
Ziolkowski
and illustrates it
by referring
to "those situations in which
interpreters
ask
what
Jacques
Derrida,
Karl
Marx,
or
Jesus
Christ wanted to
say
to 'us'?as
if,
while
writing
and
speaking, they
had
kept
'us' in mind."
Just
as the
chapter
on
editing
texts is
nearly
devoid of reference to
editions,
the one
on
commentary
relies
entirely
on a
single example
of a
commentary:
"I
cannot
help associating
the
concept
of
commentary
with a
strong
visual
memory
of the
sixteenth-century printed
edition of Las Siete Partidas"
(p.
44,
with a
reprise
on
p. 46).
Even this
glancing
allusion to a sixteenth
century
book looks like a
sop,
since once
again
Gumbrecht's interests and
questions
lie
chronologically considerably
forward:
Commentaries should be
every
deconstructor's dream?and in
praise
of
both the deconstructive tradition and the discourse of
commentary (with
its
image
of
being
the
poor
relative
among
the
philological
core
exercises),
we
can
say
that deconstruction has
pushed
certain
principles
of the discourse
of
commentary
to its
possible
limits.
Jacques
Derrida bases his
critique
. . .
(P-49)
The two
pages
that follow made me feel
trapped
in a time
warp,
as if even
after all these
years
after the
vogue
of deconstructionism we would not be
allowed to
escape
from the
de-gravitational pull
of Derrida. But
maybe
that attraction is
greater among
the
literary
theorists or cultural critics for
whom this book
appears
to be
intended,
rather than
among
those who
would subsume themselves under the
heading
of
"philologist."
The Powers
of Philology
is as
unphilological
a book as one about
philology
could be.
Probably
it would be
right
to class its ambit and modus
operandi
as
metaphilology, although
other
possibilities
would be
paraphilology,
hypophilology,
and
pseudophilology.
Viewed
narrowly,
the existence of
this book
qua
book could be
explained
as the intersection between two
circumstances,
the first
being
the invitations from Glenn Most to
present
papers
in the five
Heidelberg colloquia
and the second
being
Gumbrecht's
indefatigability
in
publishing
and
republishing.
Beyond
the
happenstance
of the invitations and Gumbrecht's
prolific
scholarship
and even more
prolific journalism may
lie a
larger reality.
Whatever the
causes,
literature has
slipped
in cultural
importance
in com
parison
with other arts such as cinema and
music,
and the numbers of
majors
in
many
of the humanities as
opposed
to the social sciences and
sciences have
plummeted.
As a
consequence,
some
professors
of
languages
and literatures
may
well feel more
marginalized,
less
respected,
and more
insecure than
they
have in a
long
time. In the culture wars of the
1980s
and
1990s,
theorists
disparaged
traditionalists and vice versa. As a
result,
both critic and theorist
(and
perhaps professor
more
generally)
lost much of
the luster
they
once had. Not
everyone
wants now to be a
philologist,
but
many
have
good
reason to look
yearningly
at the term: Professors want
Metaphilology
259
to have
a name for what
they
do that will be taken
seriously.
Like de
Man,
if
they
cannot
pass
muster as
philosophers, they may
think of themselves
as
philologists.
Anything
that
requires explanation
to be understood
(and
so much
academic
prose
now tumbles into that
category, perhaps
for similar rea
sons)
must be taken
seriously. Consequently,
the
philologist
may
have
come back into
respectability, having
a name that sounds
impressive
and
handling
tasks that
may
be a
trifle
dreary
or
embarrassing
but that cannot
be carried out without
expertise
and that fulfill functions
only
an
expert
minority
in
society
is needed or
expected
to
perform.
Thus a
philologist
ends
up looking
like,
perhaps,
a
proctologist
(it's
dirty
work,
but
people
with "Doctor" as their title are accorded
special respect
and sometimes
earn handsome
salaries),
and erstwhile
misophilologists metamorphose
into
philophilologists.
SCRIBBLE ERRORS
In Error and the Academic
Self:
The
Scholarly Imagination,
Medieval to Modern
(2002)
Seth Lerer
investigates
how and
why
the
professionalization
of
literary study
and the
defining
of error as a central concern of scholar
ship
coincided. He sees the two as
having
intersected
particularly
in the
realms of rhetoric and
philology.
At the same
time,
he
argues
that the sense
of
wandering
that is embedded in the Latin error comes into
play:
"The
professionalization
of the
scholar, and,
in
turn,
the
pose
of the vernacular
rhetorician and
philologist,
was a means
by
which
?migr?s,
exiles,
dissent
ers,
and the social
estranged gained private
worth and
public legitimacy"
(p.
2).
As
such,
he
intends,
or
rather,
"this book
hopes" (p.
2),
to shed
light
on academic culture and
university disciplines.
In the first
chapter
Lerer demonstrates that in the humanism of Re
naissance
England
scholars came to make
erring
and the correction of
error,
as evidenced in their rhetoric about errors and
editorship,
a central
determinant of their self-identities. In its treatment of the
thinking
in
and behind errata
sheets,
this
chapter
bears
comparison
with
Anthony
Grafton's book on footnotes.43
In the second
chapter
Lerer trains his
sights
on Old
English
studies.
The first of his three
targets
is
George
Hickes's
(1642-1715)
Thesaurus
( 1703-1705),
which he
regards
as the first modern work of
Anglo-Saxon
scholarship.
Then he takes aim at
J.
R. R. Tolkien's
(1892-1973)
writ
43-
Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious
History,
2d ed.
(Cambridge:
Harvard Univ.
Press,
1997)
26o Ziolkowski
ings
as an
Anglo-Saxonist. Finally
he draws a bead on
Seamus
Heaney's
(1939-)
translation o?
Beowulf
{2000).
His
marksmanship
leads Lerer to
conclude that the answer for Old
English
is neither
philology
nor
theory
but rather "a return to the
poetry
itself"
(p.
101).
The third
chapter
is devoted
initially
to the fictional
figure
of Casau
bon in
George
Eliot's
(1819-1880)
Middlemarch
(1871-1872,
"a book of
errors,"
p. 129),
whom Lerer
juxtaposes
with the real-life
personage
of
James
A. H.
Murray (1837-1915),
editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary.
From Victorian
scholars,
the transition is made in the fourth
chapter
to
American
philology,
which Lerer sees as
overlapping considerably
with
rhetoric. Both American
philology
and American rhetoric Lerer views as
having
been
characteristically
ardent in their commitment to "a
memory
or a mission"
(p. 4).
The basis for the move to the fifth
chapter
was a little harder for me to
see. Identification of the
memory
or mission in the fourth
chapter
causes
Lerer to state that his "vision of American rhetorical
philology
thus cen
ters on
estrangements:
word and
meaning,
scholar and
home,
past
and
present" (p. 4).
The fourth
chapter
seems to hold
together internally,
but strain shows in the shift from a
general argument
that American
philology
is
(or was)
a
fundamentally
rhetorical
enterprise
to the
specific
contention that "American
philology
and rhetoric
preoccupy
themselves
with
estrangement
and
displacement:
with the
separation
of words from
things,
with the
fluidity
of
meanings,
with the
pursuit
of
political argument
through scholarly inquiry" (p. 176).
The
discovery
that
nineteenth-century
American
philology
and rhetoric had the same main concerns as
literary
theory
in the late
1980s
and
early 1990s
is not
unexpected
but
may
not
convince all readers.
The
cynosure
in the fifth
chapter
is Erich
Auerbach,
embodiment of the
?migr?
intellectual. In
situating
Auerbach,
Lerer broadens the
compass
of
erring
to include not
just being wrong
but also its
original etymologi
cal sense of
wandering.
Lerer relates the themes of
wandering
and exile
within the texts and
interpretations
of Auerbach's renowned Mimesis to
its author's own life and
identity
as a
transplanted philologist.
The core
of this
chapter
will look familiar to those who have read Lerer's
essays
on
Auerbach that were
published
in
1996,
in Nichols and Bloch's Medievalism
and the Modernist
Temper, pp. 308-33,
and in the volume on Auerbach he
edited himself.44
From
Auerbach,
Lerer turns in his
epilogue
to the
errings
of other
exiles,
?migr?s,
and dissenters in
universities,
with
particular
attention to
44- Lerer,
Literary History
and the
Challenge of Philology:
The
Legacy of
Erich Auerbach
(Stanford:
Stanford Univ.
Press,
1996), pp.
1-10 and
78-91.
Metaphilology
261
their roles in the
study
of
philology,
rhetoric,
literary
criticism,
and liter
ary theory.
The
showpiece
in this
segment
is a
reading
of the science fic
tion film Forbidden Planet. Lerer's
culminating argument
is that
estranged
scholars,
by distancing
themselves from
society
and
retreating
into
ivory
towers,
validated their
private
worth and
legitimated
their identities as
professionals?as professors.
Error and the Academic
Self
has
many appealing qualities,
one of which is
the
gentle irony
and even
self-denigration
its author sometimes evinces
on the
subject
of
scholarly slips.
In the face of such humor it
may
seem
churlish to find
fault,
but
as Lerer himself has
shown,
that
activity belongs
to both the otium and the
negotium
that define the scholar. Scholars fixate
on error because
striving
to avoid
it,
to
identify
it,
and to correct it is how
they develop
trust and build
knowledge.
However often one
may
hear
the statement "I would be
happy
to be
proven wrong,"
in
my experience
most
people
do not like to be
proven wrong. They develop strategies
for
coping
with their own
errors, and recent decades have seen innovations
in such
strategies.
The
opening paragraph
of the introduction to Error
and the Academic
Self
is a case in
point (p.
1
)
:
I do not think I have ever
published anything
that did not have an error in it.
Typos
have
crept
in and
escaped proofreading.
Miscitations and mistransla
tions have refused correction. Facts and
judgments
have,
at
times,
seemed
almost
willfully
in
opposition
to
empirical
evidence or received
opinion.
It is
the
duty
of
readers,
so it
seems,
to catch such errors. Referees for
publishers
and,
after
them,
book reviewers often
begin
well and
well-meaningly.
But
praise
soon shatters into
pedantry,
and
reports
and reviews will often end
with
catalogues
of broken lines and
phrases.
Lerer
begins
in the first
person,
which makes
sense,
since he is the au
thor,
the cover of the book
sports
his
name,
and
(as
he
points
out on the
same
page)
his
publications
and their
reception
affect "annual decanal
salary
reviews." But
simultaneously
he lives in a
post-posts
true turalist
age:
the author has been dead since
1968.45
That R.I.R allows Lerer to
segue
into
presenting
his own book as a text with a life of its
own,
and
any
of its
shortcomings qualify
as autonomous creatures with lives of their own: The
45-
Roland Barthes
(1915-1980),
"La mort de l'auteur"
(1968),
trans. "The Death of
the
Author,"
in
Barthes,
Image,
Music, Text,
ed. and trans.
Stephen
Heath
(New
York: Hill
and
Wang, 1977).
Since
1977
the
English
version of the
essay
has been often
reprinted
and
otherwise circulated elsewhere. The
essay by
Barthes has become
commonly
confused with
the related one
by
Michel
Foucault,
"Qu'est-ce qu'un
auteur?" Bulletin de la Soci?t?
Fran?aise
de
Philosophie, 64 (1969), 73-104,
which has been translated as "What is an Author?" in
The Foucault
Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinov
(New
York: Pantheon
Books,
1984), pp.
101-20. The
problematization
of the author as a
concept by
Barthes and his successors is studied in Sean
Burke,
The Death and Return
of
the Author: Criticism and
Subjectivity
in
Barthes,
Foucault and
Derrida,
2d ed.
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Univ.
Press,
1998).
262 Ziolkowski
typos
move on their
own,
the miscitations and mistranslations are refrac
tory,
the facts and
judgments
are
perverse?but they
behave in these
ways
of their own volition. Lerer's
closing trope
is to brand those who
respond
favorably
to his
writings
are well
meaning,
so
long
as
they praise,
whereas
those who
point
out flaws are
pedants.
Beyond
the self-centered desire to be
right,
the related
struggles
to avoid
errors and to locate them are
scholarly
courtesies. The humanities are
not the
sciences,
in that we are not
performing experiments
that must be
reproducible;
but nonetheless much of our
writing
continues to
rely upon
materials
produced by
others that we must reference at the
appropriate
instances so that our readers
may verify
for themselves what we have seen
and on what basis we
say
what we do.
Lerer's book
presents enough
errors of commission and omission to
engender
uneasiness about the
solidity
of the foundation for some of his
most
arresting points.
An
early
instance of
sweeping generalizations
on
the basis of
flimsy
evidence involves
taking
the
appearance
of an actor in
the science fiction film Forbidden Planet as a caricature of the
European
philologist.
The features Lerer isolates as
typifying
the
philologist (p.
4:
"dark,
brooding, goateed")
strike me as
being
far from universal
(even
Universal
Studios),
and over the
years
I, too,
have
lighted upon
dozens if
not hundreds of
photographs
of different
European philologists
on the
frontispieces
of
Festschriften
and elsewhere
(p. 370).
True,
Lerer reverts
to his
excogitations
on facial hair later
(pp. 270-71).
First he
compares
the
description
of the character with the
appearance
of Leo
Spitzer,
Erich
Auerbach,
and Ernst Robert
Curtius,
while not
confirming
whether
any
of
the three ever wore a
goatee during
their time in America
(the
second and
third did
not,
if
my
memories of their clean-shaven demeanors is
correct,
but I have not
yet
done a stubble check on
any pictures
of the
first)
and
not
pointing
out that the third was not
Jewish
(since
Jewishness figures
in the
larger argument
that
unfolds).
The documentation boils down to
Lerer's
library
work,
his own
reporting
of which fails to reassure: "I search
the
library
and
find,
almost at
random,
a clutch of illustrated
Festschriften"
(p. 270).
There is no
point
in
asking
what "almost at random"
means,
or
how
many
likenesses of smooth-faced
philologists
failed to
pass
muster.
What remains is a clutch of
only
three,
to
wit,
Wilhelm
Streitberg
in
1924,
Eduard Sievers in
1925,
and Albert Debrunner in
1954.
Was
any
of the
three a
Jew?
Did
any
of the three
immigrate
to the United States? Did the
screenplay
writer or writers of "Forbidden Planet" form their
image
of
the
philologist
from
seeing
similar
frontispieces,
or is there real evidence
that
many ?migr? philologists
in the New World
actually sported goatees?
Is this
any way
to construct an
argument?
The last
alleged symptom
of the
philologist
that Lerer isolates is not even
Metaphilology 263
in the movie itself
but, rather,
in its
novelization;
namely,
the word "Orien
tal"
(p. 4).
Even without the
insights
that Edward W. Said's
(1935-2003)
Orientalism has made
pandemic
since its
publication
in
1978,1
would like
to see
details to
underpin
the view that in
Hollywood
or
anywhere
an in
stant
equation
was drawn between the Oriental and the
European.
True,
much later in the book
(p. 270)
Lerer reveals that
by European
he
really
means
Jewish:
"But I cannot
help seeing
behind that word
'Oriental,'
once
again,
the code word of
Jewishness
that stretches back to Heinrich Heine's
formulation." In
my opinion,
there must be
place
for intuition in
literary
interpretation;
but how much of an
argument
can rest on
idiosyncratic
free-association? How do we know where we are or where we are
going
if
East means West?
The
place
of
Jewishness
in the
argument
of the book as a whole is some
what
mystifying.
Lerer
goes
out of his
way
to
put
on record
(p. 4)
that he
has been
preoccupied
for two decades with
Jewish identity.
The issue of
Jewish identity
could be relevant in
contextualizing
Erich
Auerbach,
who
is the
subject
of the
penultimate chapter
and
part
of the
epilogue
in this
book,
although
I would
stop
far short of
accusing
Auerbach of caricatur
ing
Leo
Spitzer
as "a
nightmare
creature of the
Jewish
other,
a
predatory
monster,
an invasive and
invading
id"
(p. 269).
Yet the introduction leaves
the
impression
that
Jewishness
will be more in the
foreground
of the book
than it turns out to be: "Wellek's tale stands as a nodal
point
for much
of what concerns me in this book: the idea of the
socially
defined
other,
what one
might
call the
larger
notion of the
juif
errant"
(p.
11).
On this
basis it would seem reasonable to find in the index the
categories
"other,"
"wandering Jew"
(and
incidentally, why
flourish the French
juif
errant when
the
English
would
do?),
or at least
"Jew."
But none of them
appears
there,
for the
simple
reason that none bulks
large
in most of the book.
Unsubstantiated
generalizing
about
categories
such as
Oriental,
Euro
pean,
and
Jewish
has led to troubles in the
past.
On the more mundane
level of
scholarship, making sweeping
claims without
undergirding
them
with evidence can be
irksome,
misleading,
and
confusing.
The
example
just
cited is far from isolated. Take as another illustration the averral that
"All its
[rhetoric's]
textbooks and
discussions,
from the
Gorgias, through
Aristotle's
Rhetoric,
through
the Rhetorica ad Herennium and the works of
Cicero,
through
the medieval artes and the Renaissance
arts,
begin
with
histories of the field"
(p.
8).
This assertion seemed so
noteworthy
to me
that I resolved to confirm it
by consulting
a few sources. First I checked
two medieval
artes,
to
wit,
John
of Garland's Parisiana
poetria
and
Geoffrey
of Vinsauf's Poetria nova. Then I went to the first late
antique
treatise,
by
Fortunatianus,
that is labeled an ars in Karl Halm's Rhetores latini minores
( 1863).
None of the three
begins
with a
history
of the field.
264
Ziolkowski
Lerer is
strong
on
demonstrating
how from the
mid-1980s through
the
1990s
conservative Old
English
scholars insisted in reviews on
identifying
"local errors and
global misunderstandings"
in books that were
"attempts
at
bringing Anglo-Saxon
studies into line with
literary theory,
cultural stud
ies,
or the broad
analyses
of the
contemporary academy" (p. 56).
What he
does not show is that attacks in the other direction went on and continue
to
go
on. He
critiques
the rhetoric of the conservatives without
appearing
to realize that he
engages
in rhetorical
sniping
of his own. An
example
would be his treatment
(p. 250)
of Alvin Kernan
(1923-).
Lerer
quotes
(p. 249)
a reminiscence
by
Kernan about Auerbach's Yale
years:
"Now
that he was at Yale he felt that he had to make use of the vast resources
of
Sterling Library. Ironically,
the result of riches was a
dreary
book on
rhetoric,
read and used
by
few." On this
passage
Lerer comments:
I have no idea
just
what
"dreary
book on rhetoric" is on Kernan's mind. Per
haps
he is
thinking
o?
Literary Language
and Its
Public,
the collection of
essays
assembled in the
1950s
and
published posthumously
in German in
1958,
though
soon translated into
English
and,
in
fact,
regarded
as one of the most
important
critical assessments of the
literary
culture of late
antiquity.
If Lerer has
no
idea,
then it should be
impossible
for him to
proceed
im
mediately
to the
speculation
in his second sentence. An endnote
(p. 313
n.
56) purveys publication
information on
Literary Language
and adds:
"The
only
other book
published by
Auerbach in his Yale
years
is
Typologische
Motive in der mittelalterlichen Literatur
(Cologne:
Petrarca-Institut,
1953),
a
work not
really
concerned with 'rhetoric' and
probably
so arcane that even
Kernan did not know about it." The reference to
Typologische
Motiveis a
red
herring,
as Lerer's own last clause
acknowledges
with its backhanded
implication
that Kernan would not have been aware of the
publication.
Though
in a
bibliography
of Auerbach's
writings
the title will be
italicized,
Typologische
Motive is not a book but a
printed
lecture,
the text of which
amounts to a
grand
total of
25
small-format
pages. Many
scholars
(myself
among them)
might disagree
with Kernan's
qualification
of
Literary
Lan
guage
as "a
dreary
book
on
rhetoric,"
but it is
disingenuous
and unfair to
imply
that
anyone
could be
seriously
confused about the volume Kernan
intended to indicate.
Rather than
diverting
his
energies
to undercut
Kernan,
Lerer would
have done better to deliver his own readers the most reliable text he could.
That has not
happened.
On the last
page
of the introduction Lerer sum
marizes what
an earlier scholar had concluded about the
impugning
of
Nietzsche's
scholarship by philologists
of his
day: "knowledge
of
linguistic
detail or historical fact alone is
enough
both to make and criticize and
[sic]
argument" (p. 14).
In the
conclusion,
Lerer writes: "Such
philological
state terror
hinges,
as we all
know,
on the
Newspeakers' ability
to make
Metaphilology 265
the old word seem is exact
opposite:
to transfer Peace to
War,
Love to
Hate,
Fact to Fiction"
(p. 264). Replacing
is with its
helps
to make this
sentence more readable. The
typos
in these two sentences
may
cause the
reader a second or two of
uncertainty. Beyond
that,
they exemplify
the
shortcomings
that make at least this reader wonder
just
how careful Lerer
has been in his work and how reliant others
may
be on what he
presents
as fact.
By emblazoning "philology"
in the titles of all but two of his
chapters,
Lerer invites examination of how he deals with
languages
and texts. The
results turn out to be worrisome. The first Latin
phrase quoted
in this book
is Guillaume Bud?'s
(1467-1540) "Agnosco
fateor"
(quoted again
on
p.
15
in
Latin,
p. 39
in
English),
for which Lerer uses D. F. S. Thomson's
translation "I admit I was
wrong" (p. 3;
the translation is not
acknowledged
until
p. 285
n.
77).
The two verbs would
usually
mean T
acknowledge,
I admit' or T
admit,
I confess' or
something
similar.
They
are
actually
notable for not
openly stating
error?for not
avowing,
as
my high
school
Latin teacher would
(but
needed
rarely
to) do,
'You are
right
and I am
wrong."
The first Latin word to be defined in Error and the Academic
Self
is,
un
surprisingly,
the verb errare
(p.
2).
The second is
corrigere,
of which Lerer
states
(pp.
11-12)
:
"Corrigerein
Latin means to draw a
straight
line." This
definition
caught my
attention,
since from
my
own
readings
I could not
remember a Latin
passage
in which the verb had this
precise meaning.
Accordingly,
I consulted the
Oxford
Latin
Dictionary,
which
gives
as denota
tions: "1 To direct
(a road)
in a
straight
line;
2 To make
straight, straighten
out;
3
To make alterations or
improvements
in,
amend
(a
piece
of
writing,
etc.)"
but includes
nothing
on the
specific meaning
Lerer instances and
that later he reiterates for
good
measure
(p. 129). Only
much later does
he,
when
repeating
it a third
time,
casually
enfold the standard definition
as well
(p. 177).
The difference
may
be
small,
but it is as
meaningful
as the
distinction between "two
points
determine a line"
(which
is a
commonly
stated
principle)
and "two
points
determine a road"
(which
I have never
heard
said).
The second Greek word that is cited outside of
parentheses (p.
8)
is
the famous noun
paideia,
well known from the title of a book
by
Werner
Jaeger.
Here it
appears
in the form
paedaeia,
which is tantamount to slid
ing
a marble lid onto the
sarcophagus
of the cultured erudition that
Jaeger
embodied. Is the bizarre
spelling merely
a
typo,
like
epidiectic
on
the same
page (p.
8)
or mnemonotechnics on the
following (p. 9)? (Typo
is
actually
an
interesting
word,
in that it
displaces responsibility
from the
scholar onto the
typewriter?now
the
keyboard?or typesetter.)
Those
readers
already
conversant with these words
may
not even be irritated at
266 Ziolkowski
encountering
three
misspellings
or
typos
in the
space
of two
pages,
but
what about readers not
previously acquainted
with the terms who come
away thinking
that these forms
actually
exist?
They
will not know
enough
to break into
elegaics (p. 195).
The mistakes raise
questions
about the
reliability
of the
scholarship
in
the book in
general,
since
unfortunately
the slackness in the
orthography
finds its match in the
supporting
material in the notes. Take the sentence
in which the last-mentioned word
appears:
"Mnemonotechnics?that
elaborate
system
of
constructing
artificial aids to
memorizing
and dis
playing complex
narratives?often
hinged
on
coming up
with what one
might
call
parallel
narratives: stories that could be used as
templates
for
remembering
information or a
sequence
of events"
(p. 9).
From
my
own
work on
memory,
I am inclined to
agree
with much of this
statement,
but
I and
anyone
else who reads it need to have more
precise bibliographical
information than
merely
a
gesture (p. 279
n.
15)
toward
Mary
Carruthers,
The Book
of Memory:
A
Study of Memory
in Medieval Culture in its
entirety,
without
any specification
of
page
numbers.46
Lerer
singles
out a
plea
that Politian
(1454-1494)
made in
1489:
"If
any
accents in the Greek words should be
missing
or
wrongly
written,
let
the well-educated restore or emend them
according
to their
judgment"
(p.
21
).
Apparently
Hellenism continues to hold
prestige,
because Greek
is invoked
sporadically
in this
book,
sometimes in the Greek
alphabet,
sometimes in
transliteration,
but with a
higher
rate of error than Politian
would have tolerated. Look at the
passage
from Pindar on
p. 67.
What
should read
xpuao? ai0?|J8VOV rr?p
is
presented
as
Xpvao?,
aiSopevou
ttu?. Maybe
the misidentification of the
passage
as
Olympian
1.2,
when it
is
Olympian
1.1,
is to be laid at the feet of
Hickes,
whom Lerer is
quoting,
or Hickes's
printer,
but the
shortcomings
in the Greek at least look to me
like
early-twenty-first-century mistranscriptions,
not the sorts of errors that
would have been countenanced in
1703-1705,
when Hickes's volumes
were
published.47
In
any
case,
why quote
Greek without
using
accents
and
breathings
(twice
on
p. 39?the
word seems to be
quoted
from Luke
1.1,
but the reference is not
provided?and
once on
p. 40),
rather than
simply transliterating?
And if the mistakes are
Hickes's,
then
why
not
signpost
them with a
"
[sic]
"
so that readers can know what is
going
on? A
study
of error is sure to attract readers who want to be able to trace the
46. Mary
Carruthers,
The Book
of Memory:
A
Study of Memory
in Medieval
Culture,
Cambridge
Studies in Medieval
Literature,
10
(Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ.
Press,
1990).
47. Just by
the
bye,
all the
catalogues
I have
consulted,
including
the entries on both the
printed
and the microfiche versions available at Lerer's own
institution,
indicate that the
Thesaurus was
published by
the Sheldonian Theater
["e
Theatro
Sheldoniano"]
rather than
the Clarendon Press
(pace p. 58).
Metaphilology 267
provenance
of
error,
even without the
provocation
that this broken line
offers
by representing
the Greek word for fire
(as
in
pyromaniac)
as if it
were the Yiddish-derived
slang
word
putz.
Twice in the first
chapter
Lerer draws
upon eight
words in Erasmus
(quoted
on
p. 53): "?eque
vero me
fugit plurimum
adhuc restitisse
mendarum." In the first instance
(p. 35)
he dwells
upon
the first four
words,
which he
quotes
in Allen's translation: "Not that I have failed."
Lerer instructs us to "Notice the Latin here:
literally,
not 'not that I have
failed' but
really
Tt has not
escaped
me.'" Fair
enough.
But in a second
go
at the Latin
(p. 53)
Lerer
wrings
from it a second literal
meaning:
"there
still remain some errors in his Seneca
that,
literally,
flew
away
from him"
Although
it would be feasible to wrest this
meaning
from
fugit,
the natu
ral
way
to translate the verb
literally
would not be "flew
away
from him."
but "fled
away
from him." On the basis of these same Latin words Lerer
declares that "Erasmus's
primary
word for textual mistake is mendum"
(p.
35),
with a note that cites a
dictionary
on three different words:
mendum,
menda,
and mendose. Is Erasmus's
primary
word mendum
(as
Lerer
states)
or
the
closely
related menda
(used
in the
passage here)?
The
bigger question
is how Lerer determined which word for textual mistake was
paramount:
Are we to assume that he toiled
through
all of Erasmus's
writings
to ascer
tain the
primacy
of
mendum,
that he had access to a lexicon or
database,
or that he arrives at this view
solely
on the basis of this one sentence?
Another short
quotation
in the first
chapter,
this time from
Bud?,
elicits
six sentences of
microscopic analysis (p. 39):
"Promuit librum tuum solutum adhuc et recen tern ab officina." Recentem can
mean "fresh" or
"young";
but it
connotes, too,
"whelped,"
or
"newly
foaled."
The book is
newly
born,
not even
bound, or,
more
precisely,
not
yet
severed
from the cords of birth. Solutum means
"freed," "loosened,"
"unattached."
The idiom
partus
solvere means "to
bear,"
"to
bring
forth,"
"to be delivered
of
offspring."
In other
words,
the book is
being
born
here,
much as the
friendship
of Erasmus and Bud? is
being
born.
And,
in both
cases,
Deloynes
functions as
something
of a midwife: the deliverer of
newly printed
books
but also the effective
helper
in the
making
of a humanist
friendship.
The form
promuit
at the outset of the
quotation
is not Latin but must be a
typo
for
promovit
or
(less
likely) prom(p)sit.
Recens can indeed mean 'fresh'
or
'young'.
The word
may
have been used in contexts
connected with
birth,
but I would like to see the evidence for its
carrying
with
any regu
larity
connotations of
"whelped"
or
"newly
foaled": This kind of assertion
warrants a reference to a
dictionary
or other
lexicographic
resources. Hav
ing
noticed elsewhere that Lerer relies on A Latin
Dictionary by
Charlton T
Lewis and Charles Short
(
1879),
I found that it
includes,
in the
entry
for
recens,
citations in the senses Lerer identifies?but both are drawn from
268 Ziolkowski
Varro's De re rustica. Unless Erasmus was a
passionate
Varronian,
or even
Varronomaniacal,
this is not a solid basis from which to
extrapolate.
The comments on solutus are even more
misleading. Just
as Lerer an
nounces,
when used as an
adjective
it can indeed
signify
'freed',
'loos
ened',
or 'unattached'. And the verb soluo can refer to
delivery through
childbirth. But
please
note: it is used of a female in
labor,
not of the infant
being
born.
Thus,
if this sense is
present,
the
passage
would not
justify
the construe "the book is
being
born here"
but, rather,
"the book is
giv
ing
birth here." The translation of the sentence
by
D. F. S. Thomson that
Lerer
quotes (p. 59)
is correct: "He
. . .
produced your
book,
still unbound
and fresh from the
printer."
The whole
interpretation
that Lerer himself
advances is far-fetched.
One
passage past
the middle of the book
(p. 214)
that
caught my eye
was a discussion of
Harry Caplan's (1896-1980) scholarship
in his valu
able edition and translation of the
pseudo-Ciceronian
Khetorica ad Heren
nium. In this subsection Lerer describes how
"There,
Caplan
offers
up
a
disquisition
on the
origins
of
'legal
custom'
(Latin 'iudicatum?
Greek
Guvr)061 a),
followed
by
another
daunting bibliography
of
German, Italian,
British,
and American scholars
(pp. 92-93)."
If Lerer is
going
to emulate
or even
just reproduce Caplan's
erudition
by citing
the Greek word in
the Greek
alphabet,
then it would be wise for him to
figure
out how to
represent
the eta with an accent
(n).
But
why
does he not transliterate
instead?
Although pointing
out the
bungling
of the Greek
may
be
punc
tilio of the
very
kind that Lerer
probes mockingly,
even a
passing glance
at his
handling
of
Caplan's
work uncovers an inattentiveness that extends
dismayingly
far
beyond
mere accent marks. The
passage
in
question
does
indeed include consideration of
"legal
custom,"
but the
corresponding
Latin term is consuetudo. That is the term for which
?uvrj?Eia
is the Greek
equivalent.
The Latin word iudicatum means
'previous judgment',
for
which the Greek is
KEKpi|JEVOV.
All of this is
plain
to see on the two
facing
pages
of
Caplan
to which Lerer refers. In other words
(and
they
are most
definitely
other
words!),
Lerer cites
English
that means one
thing
and
Latin and Greek that communicate another.
Lerer concludes that
Caplan's pains
to establish the
history
and
meaning
of terms used in the classical rhetorical tradition have been
disproven.
At
the end of the
chapter
he
quotes
a
passage
from the Rhetorica ad Heren
nium and
opines (p.
220):
This is the
very
view of rhetoric that de
Man?and,
by implication,
Park
er?would refute. And
yet
it is the
logic
of the Cornell
group,
the
logic
of
historical
philology
and stemmatic textual
criticism,
the
logic
of
Caplan's
footnote. It is the
logic
of
being
sure,
of
taking
a
stand,
the
logic
behind the
etymology
of "status" and
"
constitution
Metaphilology 269
Whoever the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium
may
have
been,
and
whatever we
may
think of his
qualities
of
mind,
my
bet is that his view of
rhetoric has not been refuted even if it has been
disputed. Caplan's
foot
notes exude the
logic
and standards of
scholarship, attempting
to seek
out and
appraise
evidence of both
primary
texts
(in
this case
especially
in ancient rhetorical treatises written in Greek and
Latin)
and
secondary
studies
(in
what were in his
day
the modern research
languages).
I have
a hard time
fathoming why Caplan's
meticulousness about
languages
and
texts should be seen as an ostentation of erudition and not as an enact
ment of
competence:
"These footnotes use the occasion of an
etymology
to write a
genealogy
of
scholarship. They place
the Americans on a
par
with the
Germans,
locate a
terminological problem
in their
English
lan
guage heritage,
make the ancient forensic relevant to the modern
legal"
(pp. 214-15).
The tradition in which
Caplan operated
continues,
as the
ongoing
production
of the
extremely
useful Historisches W?rterbuch der Rhetorik or
the
fairly
recent
English
translation of Heinrich
Lausberg's
Handbook
of
Literary
Rhetoric confirm.48 How much use
these treasure-houses will re
ceive on this continent if humanists cease to learn German or to
frequent
academic
libraries,
I cannot
guess,
but I would still
gamble
that a
hundred
years
from now
Caplan's
Loeb Classical
Library
volume of the Rhetorica
ad Herennium will sell more
copies annually
than
any reprint
of de Man.
Wagers
aside,
what is the
point
in
critiquing Harry Caplan
for believ
ing
that
(p. 219)
"this whole
process [Caplan's genealogy
of rhetorical
terms?]
is not about
indeterminacy
but about
security?" Caplan
was not
a deconstructionist or even a
poststructuralist
avant la lettre
(or
la
parole).
So what? Is it not
being
a trifle
totalitarian,
to
say nothing
of
being pass?,
to insist that the
only certainty
is
indeterminacy?
Regardless
of the theoretical inclinations that a
given
scholar
displays,
I for one
always
welcome evidence that a book or article can be trusted in
its
scholarship.
To me the number of mistakes in the book under review
is a cause for unease. To move
beyond
Greek and
Latin,
there are
slips
in the
quotation
of other
languages.
Most of the time these are
trivial,
with a letter omitted or added here and
there;
examples
in French would
include "combien ?taient erron?s et insuffisantes les id?es"
(p. 13:
the
mistake is in
erron?s)
and "aux
passage" (p.
311
n.
24);
in Italian errare for
errori
(p.
20);
in German "die
Lebensgeschichte jedes
einzelnene Wortes"
(p.
120),
"altmodish"
(p. 269),
"in der luft"
(p. 272),
and "So schwer
48.
Historisches W?rterbuch der
Rhetorik,
vol.
1,
ed. Gert
Ueding (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftli
che
Buchgesellschaft, 1992- ),
and Heinrich
Lausberg,
Handbook
of Literary
Rhetoric: A Foun
dation
for Literary Study,
ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean
Anderson,
trans. Matthew T.
Bliss,
Annemiek
Jansen,
and David E. Orton
(Leiden: Brill,
1998).
270
Ziolkowski
est ist"
(p. 308
n.
1).
When Lerer
quotes
a
passage
Eliot transcribed
from
Jacob
Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik
(pp. 131-132),
he
specifies
that
he
"reproduce
[s]
the text as Eliot transcribed
it,
without
correcting
for
spelling
or
capitalization" (p. 299
n.
76).
To hold back from
altering
the
original
text is
laudable,
since it would have been
customary
in Eliot's
time not to
capitalize
and to follow a
slightly
different
orthography
from
what is conventional
today,
but it would have been nice for Lerer to have
prefaced
a
parenthetic
or bracketed m or to have
appended
a sic if indeed
Eliot wrote
abwege
eiden rather than the correct
(and
intelligible) abwege
meiden. On the basis of other
mistranscriptions
in the
book,
I have
my
doubts as to who is
responsible
for this one.
Most of the mistakes in the
presentation
of modern
languages
have
no
impact
on the
interpretations being
advanced. Yet
they
do leave one
wondering just
how much confidence to have when Lerer is
grappling
with
foreign-language
texts,
especially
German,
that are not also available in
English
translation. He shows more ease in
grappling
with Derrida than
with der die das. To translate "einer
...
im
guten
Sinne
gebildeten
Pers?n
lichkeit" as "a
personality
. . .
brought up
with
good
sense"
(p. 243)
is
worrisome: A more correct and natural
rendering
would be "an educated
person
in the best sense of the word."
By
a similar
token,
the
closing para
graph
of the book
(pp. 274-75)
contains a
quotation
from Stefan
Zweig
that is translated into
English.
The
English
is
fine,
but the German of the
note does not
quite
match,
being
a sentence
longer
and
containing
the
(unavoidable?)
typo
"unvermeidlicher?weise"
(p. 316
n
28).
On first
happening
on Lerer's
pair
of
spelling
errors in the name of
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf
(p. 13:
the two are in "Willamowiz"?I
do not count his
using
an o-umlaut for the conventional oe in the
post
hyphenate part
of the the
name),
I
gave
him the benefit of the doubt
and wondered if he were
playing
a
game
with the
reader,
since the
topic
under discussion was a review
by
Wilamowitz that
"pinpointed every
factual
mistake" in Nietzsche's Birth
of Tragedy,
but
by
the end I realized that the
extent of the
misspellings, mishandlings
of
languages,
and other mistakes
was so
widespread
as to
plant
us in the realm of the ludicrous rather than
the ludic. The
garbling
of Wilamowitz's name can
be
explained
as a result
of the same
ideologically
ecumenical carelessness that elsewhere
gives
us
J.
Hills Miller
(p. 249).
Such errors are less
frequent
in Gumbrecht's
book,
although
even he once omits the von in Wilamowitz's name
(p. 83).
To
pass
from
reading
and
writing
to
arithmetic,
my
fears about the
reliability
of the dates in Lerer's book
began
when I read
(p.
262)
that
Forbidden Planetwas released in December
1956
and later saw it
again
dated
in
1956 (p. 273)
but remembered its
having
been described in the intro
duction as "the
1957
science fiction film"
(p. 4).
The first dates I decided
Metaphilology 271
to check were those of "William
Dwight Whitney, professor
of
comparative
philology
and Sanskrit at Yale from
1853
until his death in
1894" (p. 7).
What I found was that
Whitney
was
professor
of Sanskrit from
1854
and
professor
of Sanskrit and
comparative philology
from
1869. My gaze
next
fell
upon
the bottom of the
facing page,
where
appears
another date:
"As
early
as
1808?barely
a decade after Sir William
Jones
established the
grammatical relationship
of Sanskrit to the ancient
European languages"
(p.
6).
Since Sir William died on
27 April 1794, "barely
a decade" seems
hardly justified. Flipping
ahead,
I
happened upon
a
biographical
sketch
of Ren? Wellek that
began
"Born in
Prague
in
1905" (p.
10).
Wellek's
birth date was
1903,
his
birthplace
Vienna. As for the
grave
of this
prolific
and
painstaking
scholar,
he is
rolling
in it
right
now.
As Lerer demonstrates
ably, wandering
and error can
have their
good
sides and their bad sides. For me the two dimensions
are
crystalized
in
the
opposed expressions "knight
errant" and "arrant knave." The first is
a
knight
who roves in search of adventure. The second is an
egregiously
unprincipled
man. Both errant and arrant come from the
French,
which
derives in turn from the Latin errare and the Late Latin itinerari.
Pairing
the two
English phrases
here is a small
gesture
on
my part
toward
Wortphi
lologie,
which,
as I
speculated
at the
outset,
may
be the
aspect
of
philology
that comes most often to the attention of
nonphilologists.
Like much of
the rest of
philology,
it is an
undertaking
that can lead to adventure but
that
(and
make no mistake about
it)
requires principles
if the
quest
is to
eventuate in success and to deserve emulation. Lerer ends his book
(pp.
274-75) Dy usmg
a
couple
of sentences from Stefan
Zweig
to characterize
the
ego
and id of the
?migr?
and
philologist. Conspicuously lacking
is the
superego.
No doubt reviewers exist whose
joy
is to read for the
mistakes,
but I would rather have the authors of the books that come
my way
do
the
spell checking
and the fact
checking
beforehand so that I could con
centrate on their ideas?or on
my
own research and
writing.
Gumbrecht
refers to "the
philologist's duty
and
potentially
cathartic
experience
of
cleaning up
all too
subjective
and therefore anachronistic leftovers from
his
play
with the
imagination" (p. 23).
When a scholar tidies
up
after
himself,
such
activity
is
only
a fair
part
of the
process,
but we are not
sup
posed
to be
janitors
or housecleaners for others.
At a
juncture
when
many
academic
presses provide
less in the
way
of either initial reviews or later
copyediting
than was once the
norm,
it would be
nice?regardless
of whether we call ourselves
philologists,
compar?t(iv)
ists,
literary
critics,
literary
theorists,
cultural
historians,
me
dievalists,
or
anything
else?to achieve if not a return to
philology
then
at least a renewed commitment to care in
scholarship. Maybe
the convic
tion is
hopelessly
old-fashioned on
my part,
but I will utter it nonetheless:
272
Ziolkowski
Showing
concern about
words, facts,
and ideas alike is
something
we owe
to
ourselves,
to the divisions of
learning
and
thought
we
represent,
and last
but not
least,
to literature. If a
"rephilologization"
of studies on
language
and literature is
needed,
then we should
begin
with it in this ambit.49
Whether we are
philologizing
or
metaphilogizing,
let us love the
logos!50
49-
"Rephilologization"
is
my calque
on the German
Rephilologisierung,
which I encoun
tered first in
Maaz,
"Die editorische
Macht,"
p. 113.
Maaz refers to Horst
Turk,
Philologische
Grenzg?nge.
Zum Cultural Turn in der Literatur
(W?rzburg: K?nigshausen
8c
Neumann,
2003),
which offers the most exhaustive and recent theoretical tract in favor of
applying philology
within a
variety
of
disciplines.
50. Although my closing
sentence
may
succumb to the
very
sort of
cheery triviality
that
Gumbrecht attacks
(pp. 68-69),
li *s no ^ess
complex
or more
unnecessary
than his own
conclusion
(pp. 85, 87),
which is
mainly
that the vita
contemplativa requires
free time. I
happen
to concur with him
heartily
in that
closing
observation.

Metaphilology Ziolkowski 2005

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