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3-04-2015, 12:27

Conclusions

Reflecting on The Spinners, prompting as it does questions about the nature of perception and reality and about art and narrative, provides an excellent point of entry into Ovid’s metamorphic world. Velazquez had more than one translation of Ovid in his personal library, but we do not know whether The Spinners involved a direct response to Ovid’s text, or one largely or wholly mediated by the Ovidian tradition in the visual arts. Arachne after all was a well-known figure, and Velazquez could have found all he needed in works of art available in the royal collection. Claiming that the painting is an important reception of Ovid does not require us to resolve that issue. My point is rather that putting The Spinners and the Metamorphoses into conjunction with each other can produce, in the resulting pleasurable free-play of our mental faculties, what Kant, the philosopher of the aesthetic, calls ‘‘aesthetic ideas,’’ ideas, that is, which do not involve immediate closure or strict determination. Poem and painting can then mutually illuminate each other, suggesting interpretive possibilities without closing discussion down. This process may suggest to us something about Ovid, or Velazquez, or Titian in Velazquez’ reception of him, that we had not considered before. Titian’s Europa, like most other paintings after Ovid, shows us how one Ovidian story could be interesting. The Spinners, with its lack of clear linear logic, gestures towards how Ovid’s poem might be found exciting as a whole. It does this by finding an equivalent for Ovid’s subordination of story to story by means of its unusual spatial representation, with the curious Chinese-box effect of receding images (on four planes) that are hard to make sense of. The painting also encourages us to explore the links between art, and the reception of art, and metamorphosis. One great change that The Spinners depicts (one that recalls Pythagoras’ list of changes in the natural world in Metamorphoses 15) is the transformation of wool into a completed work of art; we see the beginning and end of that process (which requires a humble craft base as well as supreme artistry in execution), but there is no sign of loom or of anyone weaving the tapestry. The change is at once natural and miraculous, as extraordinary in its way as the change of caterpillar into butterfly, or ugly cygnet into swan. If we insist that the relationship of past and present can only be unidirectional, we shall miss much of the benefit that such ‘‘correspondences’’ (to use a word of the poet Charles Baudelaire) can bestow. But within a Jaussian framework of interpretation, The Spinners becomes not only the fable of Arachne, but also a fable about reception.

Reception theory provides a methodology for dealing with any body of material, from the past or present. But does reception have a special role to play within classics? I would argue that it does, for at least two reasons, the first pragmatic, the second a point of principle. The pragmatic consideration is that reception provides a way of compensating for the loss of so much of the archive. If we take the case of Sappho, only the tiniest fraction of her work survives, and that in fragmentary form. Yet the quality of some of those fragments is such that some have thought her one of the greatest poets of all time, including the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (no mean judge, as someone who regularly corrected the mistakes of Benjamin Jowett,

Master of Balliol, as he translated Plato’s Greek). Positivist attempts to give us ‘‘the real Sappho’’ in her original context founder, if there were no other reason, on the lack of reliable ancient testimonia; such attempts seem all too evidently fictions, fictions only lightly constrained by data, highly speculative in character, and with an unusually evident coloring of ideology. Much discussion centers round the issue of Sappho and sex; but that Sappho was a lesbian (or not) can be represented - precisely from a historicist perspective - as a modern invention, involving the assimilation of her sexuality (whatever that might have been) to current concerns, and one that is, in significant measure, the creation of Baudelaire and Swinburne. However, if we adopt a reception approach, a vein of great richness immediately opens up before us, with abundant material for us to work on and with. For much of antiquity one can write a reception history, or no history at all (so Prettejohn 2006 in connection with ancient art).

Even more important is the consideration of principle. Classics registers in its very title a claim that the products of antiquity are in some sense exemplary for Western culture; the word’s first recorded use in something like its modern sense is in Aulus Gellius, where it denotes a first-class and tax-paying author (not a proletarian without property), an author who endures. Gadamer catches the paradoxical consequences of this:

The classical preserves itself precisely because it is significant in itself and interprets itself; i. e., it speaks in such a way that it is not a statement about what is past - documentary evidence that still needs to be interpreted - rather, it says something to the present as if it were said specifically to it. What we call ‘‘classical’’ does not first require the overcoming of historical distance, for in its own constant mediation it overcomes this distance by itself. The classical, then, is certainly ‘‘timeless,’’ but this timelessness is a mode of historical being.... But understanding it will always involve more than merely reconstructing the past ‘‘world’’ to which the work belongs. Our understanding will always retain the consciousness that we too belong to that world, and correlatively, that the work too belongs to our world. (Gadamer 1989: 289-90)

It is precisely in the writings of Dante, Milton, T. S. Eliot, and the rest that Vergil remains a classic; among the best reasons for reading Homer is that one of the most important narratives of the twentieth century is Joyce’s Ulysses. Classicists who believe that their attention should be confined to antiquity ought in justice to rename themselves and their discipline. Gadamer’s formulation suppresses the issue of agency, but the agents in the process he describes are of course readers, and more readers can always join in. Classics has often been condemned as elitist (and Aulus Gellius’ ‘‘classic’’ obviously has class connotations), but, configured in this light as the constant (re)creation of readers, it can assert with pride its democratic credentials as well as its cultural value. In the words of the novelist Philip Pullman:

When you’re reading you are the equal partner in the making of meaning, we are in control of the speed process... .When we’ve finished reading, we bring away what we ourselves and the text have made together. If we don’t contribute, if we don’t take part, we get nothing. If we do, we get a world. That's what I mean by the democracy of the

Text and it’s why printing and publishing and libraries and literacy and booksellers and writers and books are more necessary than ever and why reading and democracy are not different things not even different aspects of something else; they are the very same thing. (quoted in Rebuck 2004: 35)2

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Conclusions