Philology and Greek Literature

As I write (in the spring of 2014), the American Philological Association is no more. The professional association of record for the study of classical antiquity in the United States has renamed itself the Society for Classical Studies. This is perhaps a recognition of the dwindling significance of philology as a profession within the community of scholars working on Greco-Roman antiquity; it may also be part of an attempt to brush up the image of Classics, to make it seem a little less dry-as-dust. Ironically, however, the move away from philology in classical studies occurred more or less simultaneously with a remarkable renewal of interest in philology on the part of scholars working within the sphere of comparative literature and the modern languages: major statements of theory and practice have appeared in journals and in book form, and more are surely on the way. The result is a curious and quite sudden historical revolution: classics, which as recently as the late 1990s still seemed the philological discipline par excellence, and which could therefore be offered as the diametrical opposite of theory-besotted comparatism, now appears to have repudiated the word, while comparatism has espoused it, in the process developing a new and rich articulation of its meaning and scope.

This recent efflorescence of reflections on philology has had a second effect: like all emergent philologies, it has significantly reformulated the field and its history.¹ The new perspective is global, cosmopolitan, and multilingual; within this context, Greek literature (and the specific variant of philology which underwrites it) is only one component of a much broader field and may even seem at a disadvantage, thanks to its long and sometimes unrepentant association with European centers of cultural imperialism.² The result is bracing, but inevitable: no serious assessment of philology today can start with the classical. It must begin instead with the major and significant body of writing emerging largely from other fields.³ This corpus, which begins with the fundamental statement of Paul de Man (a statement commonly contested but still of undeniable significance),⁴ has as its most high-profile representatives Edward Said, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Sheldon Pollock, Jerome McGann, Werner Hamacher, Emily Apter, and John Hamilton.⁵ The past projected by this movement has two distinct historical strata. The first, occurring at comparative literature’s moment of emergence in the United States, crystallizes around the work of Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer; a second, earlier moment of philological theory and practice has been identified especially with the work of Giambattista Vico.⁶ Readers will note a distinct absence of members of the canon of classical philology—not even Nietzsche rates very highly in these writings, at least as an explicit touchstone. Nonetheless the vision of philology in these writings is easily accommodated to classical scholarship. Among the many benefits brought by this new body of work has been a perspective from which textual criticism and ecdotics,⁷ paleography, papyrology, epigraphy, and the writing of commentaries—those disciplines defined by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht as philology under the general rubric of “textual curatorship”⁸—can be appreciated anew and in a fashion that accommodates them to other kinds of literary-cultural practice such as translation, interpretation, adaptation, and, yes, theorization. None of the traditional methods needs to be abandoned: indeed, all could be amplified, and they can certainly be supplemented. Nonetheless, a sense of the coherence between classical philology and the philology that has emerged in the last few years may require reinforcement; providing this is one of my goals here.

No surprise, really, that there are many clear affinities between the study of Greek literature and this new philological practice and theory: classics was one of its models, both explicitly (as in the case of Gumbrecht’s work) and implicitly (as with McGann, Hamacher, and Hamilton). At times Greek philology seeds crucial ideas for these voices; at other times their fresh perspective allows aspects to appear in Greek studies that might otherwise have passed unremarked. Demonstrating the congruence between classical philology and what is now emerging in other fields is valuable for another reason as well: as the renaming of the American Philological Association indicates, philology in classics is in crisis—in part because an extremely conservative and insufficiently theorized mode of scholarly practice, one that refuses almost all of the methods of interpretation commonly found in other humanistic disciplines and limits itself to an extraordinarily narrow field of play, has arrogated the term to itself and as a result made philology seem increasingly irrelevant to what most scholars actually do. Illustrating the congruence between philology in other humanistic fields and the classics may go some way to liberating classical scholars from this not particularly helpful conservative tradition. It may also allow us to discern the existence of a platform for enriched dialogues between students of Greek, Latin, and other world literatures and languages.

I point, in what follows, to six themes. After suggesting that philology today includes both textual scholarship and interpretation (this is slightly controversial), I turn to philology’s tendency to take place behind the scenes, then to its role as the site of literature; its inevitably self-critical procedures; its commitment to the concrete and to concrete models of analysis; and, finally, its use of figural rhetoric to generate strong meaning. One theme, perhaps, ties these elements together: a systematic but surprisingly productive refusal to overextend itself. Philology does not allegorize; it does not make grand claims; it does not contaminate its gaze with concerns drawn from the present—and yet this refusal produces literary texts as concrete objects and, through an almost infinite discretion, imbues them, paradoxically, with powerful contemporary significance (this last theme will only emerge in the final section of the essay). It seems to me that the merits of philology so defined are debatable; indeed, they may need to be debated more strenuously than hitherto. I would prefer not to initiate such a debate here. My goal is only to document and provide a serviceable synthesis.⁹

The genealogy I adumbrated above has been contested. In The Powers of Philology, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht denied that Auerbach and Spitzer were philologists in any meaningful sense (“neither Curtius, Spitzer, nor Auerbach ever achieved anything major as a text editor or as authors of a historical commentary”).¹⁰ There is, he argued, a clear difference between philology (“historical text curatorship that refers exclusively to written texts”)¹¹ and “the intellectual space of hermeneutics and of interpretation as the textual practice that hermeneutics informs.”¹² This distinction understates the power and importance of both “text-curatorship” and interpretation, and fails to acknowledge their many shared assumptions and operations. In one of the most important articulations of hermeneutic theory of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer specified the basic mechanism of interpretation as the “fusion of horizons” between a present reader and the historical period that produced a text.¹³ Meaning is thus fundamentally and inalienably historical and, conversely, historical consciousness is fundamentally a matter of making meaning; this, despite apparent disavowals, is a perspective Gumbrecht shares, as is evident, for example, in his observation that the more distant a text’s point of origin, the more philological its study becomes.¹⁴ Indeed, text-curatorship—editing, commentary, etc.—is already interpretation, and strong interpretation at that: Bentley’s Horace, to take one example, is the embodiment of a textual meaning. Every detail, from its specific emendations to its apparatus, makes a claim about the possibility and the limits of understanding a work.¹⁵ Commentaries, likewise, are acts of interpretation.¹⁶ The distinction between text-curatorship and hermeneutics, in other words, is porous at best.

In fact, the division between “textual curatorship” and other forms of literary scholarship was imposed on philology from without and for hostile purposes. Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, wrested the study of language from the comparative philology in which he himself was trained by robbing the latter of its name, allowing to philology only the establishment of texts on the basis of which properly linguistic analyses could proceed.¹⁷ Similarly, in the 1950s, Wellek and Warren dismissed the word “philology” as essentially meaningless but made it clear at the same time that it meant comparative linguistics and literary history—neither of which, they asserted, was concerned with the explanation of literature.¹⁸ But these negative definitions were never accurate. Since the time of Vico, philology has offered robust explanations of the literary fact. And yet after Wellek and Warren a certain philology seemed eager to adopt these reductive and dismissive definitions developed by hostile voices as its own. The result, for a while, was a kind of Bartleby-discipline, one that, faced with the enticement of a broader field, preferred not to.

But that view seems now to have been decisively abandoned. Nadia Altschul has proposed that philology be understood as a synthesis of ecdotics (or editing-related scholarly practice), on the one hand, and cultural studies on the other.¹⁹ Arguing, in a related vein, that the difference between “close reading” and “historical, grammatical, and textual criticism” is much smaller than commonly supposed,²⁰ Sheldon Pollock offers a working definition of philology capacious enough to encompass both “textual curatorship” and interpretation or close reading: philology, he suggests, is “the discipline of making sense of texts.”²¹

Despite a definition broad enough to account for many forms of interpretation, Pollock does resist some identifications of reading and philology. He objects strenuously, for example, to Paul de Man’s understanding of philology as attention to “how meaning is conveyed” rather than “to the meaning itself.”²² Pollock finds this perspective incoherent and self-contradictory, presumably because to speak of the emergence of meaning through a rhetoric of tropes, as de Man does, is to imagine a language-state prior to meaning. Pollock (and he is hardly alone in this) has trouble imagining how such a state could exist or, if it did, how it could be accessed. And yet it can at least be said in defense of De Man there is an intransigence in literary textuality: a moment, a node, or a tangle where texts refuse to yield up their meaning, where we stumble and encounter resistance. This intransigence is well-known among interpreters as precisely the place where strong readings take their start. The troubling detail is also where textual criticism begins: a critical edition is, among other things, a response to cruces and difficulties in transmission. Indeed, the explanation of a text—even at a most basic level—presumes that the texts need explaining, that, for someone, somewhere, at some point in time, they make no sense. By the same token, the fact that sense needs to be made—that there must be something like a discipline of making sense—is itself, it seems to me, a response to such kinds of textual push-back. But philology is also riven with such moments of intransigence, and at critical moments it resists meaning in its own way: when a text stops making sense, is it it, or is it us, failing to comprehend? Perhaps the intransigence that gets interpretation and textual production going is a moment when even the distinction between philologist and text begins to break down; the distinction is never easy to maintain, as we shall see. Be that as it may, it seems that Said is correct in identifying reading as “the indispensable act”²³ and in insisting that reading depends on a double attitude of receptivity and resistance: the “discipline of making sense of text” stems from a sharpened sensitivity to rebarbative elements in text and reader alike.

Reading, if that is at the core of the philological enterprise, is largely invisible. We read alone and in secret, and when we write we do not repeat all that we have read. This reclusiveness is characteristic of philology, which seems to have something inevitably crowd-averse about it. It is perhaps for this reason that statements concerning it tend toward the counterintuitive: those who attempt broad diagnoses of its scope and purpose are searching for a vocation that loves to hide. Thus Gumbrecht, observing classical scholars with the (perhaps slightly amazed) eyes of a nonclassicist,²⁴ became increasingly fascinated (his word) by

a layer of investment among the scholars involved, a perhaps preconscious layer of investment that seemed to contradict the self-image of philology as a laborious (not to say sweaty) intellectual craftsmanship.²⁵

Note that the gaze discerning this layer of investment seems to be piercing beyond the public, officially sanctioned image of philology, into something deeper, hidden, and even preconscious; something libidinal that “certainly counts as disruptive,” and that “will surface inevitably and independently of the individual philologist’s intentions.”²⁶ Gumbrecht is not alone in identifying an intimate, hidden core of philology. Leo Spitzer, too, writes of philological practices as a product of innermost experience:

The basic approach of the individual scholar, conditioned as it is by his first experience, by his Erlebnis, as the Germans say, determines his method: Methode ist Erlebnis, Gundolf has said.²⁷

There are many remarkable things about this passage, not the least of which is the fact that Spitzer goes on to describe the following autobiographical pages as his own Mein Kampf.²⁸ I want to focus on the fact that in invoking Gundolf’s dictum, Spitzer implies that the truth of method is accessible only through oracular means. For Gundolf, the statement “method is experience” meant that to understand an author, his biographer needed to access that author’s “originary experience” (Urerlebnis). This access comes through no rational method, but through divination and inspired insight: the Erlebnis that is Methode exists at a level so hidden that only divinatio can access it.²⁹ But Spitzer is talking about the philologist’s experience, not that of a text’s author: philology, as a result, is the site of an occulted productive capacity like that of literature. For Spitzer, languages are products of creative and clear-minded human agency (8), the understanding of which comes about not through “mathematical demonstrability” but through “a feeling of inner evidence” (10), which depends on the philologist’s experience and insight. Philology depends, in other words, on a singular, personal habitus; it is not a method but a matter of feeling.

Like Spitzer, who surreptitiously brings philologist and literary author into close proximity through the idea of Erlebnis, Auerbach brings philology into dialogue with the techniques of the high modernist novel. In Woolf, Joyce, and Proust “the great exterior turning points and blows of fate are granted less importance; they are credited with less power of yielding decisive information concerning the subject; on the other hand there is confidence that in any random fragment plucked form the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed.”³⁰ Auerbach links this emphasis on the enlightening detail to the perception that an unfolding of life in history cannot be represented by the careful charting of continuous “external” surfaces; there is too much for it all to be described. Instead, the strategy is adopted of letting a single moment reveal a life in blinding, if brief, intimacy: through it, we get access to “a process of formulation whose subject matter is one’s own self.”³¹ Likewise, says Auerbach, “certain modern philologists […] hold that the interpretation of a few passages from Hamlet, Phèdre, or Faust, can be made to yield more, and more decisive information […] than would a systematic and chronological treatment of their life and work.”³² We might expect such details to contribute to the explication of a text, as though the text were a consciousness akin to a novelistic character (see discussion in the next section on the importance of explication to philological practice). But Auerbach’s subsequent discussion makes clear that the philological detail is used, in fact, to reveal the substance of the philologist’s understanding and insight. Thus Auerbach finds “success and profit in a method which consists in letting myself be guided by a few motifs which I have worked out gradually and without a specific purpose, and in trying them out on a series of texts which have become familiar and vital to me in the course of my philological work.”³³  Mimesis—but not only Mimesis—emerges from this collision of the philologist’s developing sense of his theme and single, albeit well-chosen, texts and passages. The philological detail, like the novelistic, is chosen for its momentary role in furnishing an irritation around which consciousness emerges, like a pearl around a grain of sand.

So configured, that is, as a primarily internal act, a matter of fostering comprehension over the course of a lifetime of reading and contemplation, philology recedes from the surface of discourse: the “philological” text merely reports on work that takes place elsewhere. Indeed, there is a tendency (even in Auerbach) for luminous philological details to proliferate into heaps, for the narrative of a philologist’s insight to calcify into a nearly unreadable mass of data. Here understanding transforms itself in the very exposition of its materials. One consequence, however much it might spring from internal clarity, is external opacity, what Auerbach calls “uninterpretable symbolism.”³⁴

Thus it is, in Hamacher’s not-so-different series of formulations, that “every definition of philology must indefine itself—and give way to another.”³⁵ Philology’s desire, as Hamacher sees it, is for language, and thus (since, for Hamacher, philology is language) for itself as another. It is, consequently, the name of a schism within language through which is created something that declines and recedes from linguistic awareness. And so “philology is the name for the secret of language, for its secretum, pudendum.”³⁶ The occlusion of philology means that it can seem to lead to something other than philology, and something that, at times, can resemble its negation. Plato was aware of this possibility when, in the Phaedo, he gave to Socrates the insight that those who are too enamored of words risk falling into an equally extreme misology when words are proved untrustworthy.³⁷ Things today are more complicated: twenty-first century philology does not fall into misology so much as arise out of it. It even, at a crucial level, coincides with it. What the philologist hates in language, in this vision, is the empty, facile, common, or cynical use of words: today’s philology comes from a turn away from public language and a desire to trouble it from beneath. Writing of Pascal Quignard’s philology as “philology for its own sake, a philology that is intransitive, refusing to play the traditional role that has always been assigned to it, namely as the handmaiden of an interpretation that would dissolve the material specificity of words for the sake of immaterial sense,”³⁸ John Hamilton identifies a refusal in philology, one that marks its identity with the hatred of words:

What is despised is a trust in the viability of language, a faith that words can operate as an audible, but more importantly, transparent medium of sense. Consulting the lexica, disputing subtleties of meaning, arguing over points of derivation—all this turns communicative language into a problem.³⁹

The desire to make language problematic is articulated, as well, in Edward Said’s emphasis on the role of resistance in philological reading.⁴⁰ Said’s resistance, ultimately, is to the idols of the literary and academic marketplace: jargons, sound bites, an easy and cynical play with language all provoke, for the democratic critic, a desire to recede, if only in order to find a different way forward.⁴¹ More often than not, this way forward is through the materiality of language, as Gumbrecht emphasizes, or, in Hamilton’s paraphrase of Quignard, through a listening to the sound that is lost when language evaporates in the clear air of sense.

Gadamer thought it was significant that Dichtung (“poetry”) was derived from dictare, the frequentative stem of dico;⁴² poetry is speech that gives itself to be repeated. We can generalize: one of the distinguishing marks of literary language lies in its relationship to traditionality, its ability to recommend itself to others as worth saying (or writing) again. For Gadamer the repeating-foreword characteristic of the literary underwrites the meeting of historical epochs in the act of reading and interpretation: the “fusion of horizons” that is at the core of his approach is nothing less than the event of my accepting a poem in order to repeat it. We may risk the claim that the field in which literature is given and received to be repeated is philology: scribal copying, textual criticism, and commentarial practice are all acts of re-utterance, albeit each in its own way.⁴³

Awareness of the intimate association between literature and philology has probably never been lacking. But it became a central element of modern philological awareness when F. A. Wolf, who described himself famously as studiosus philologiae, published the Prolegomenon ad Homerum (1795).⁴⁴ In this hugely influential and controversial work, Wolf argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the product of multiple authors, with entire sections contributed by oral rhapsodes (who in their double function of performing and interpreting Homer can easily be described as early philologists), then with further modifications made by Alexandrian grammarians and textual critics. The consequence was that the epics appeared philologically mediated from beginning to end. Several figures had articulated the nonliterate status of Homer before Wolf, and the hypothesis would have been known to anyone who had read Josephus;⁴⁵ Wolf’s innovation lay in the proximity of his thesis to the Kantian revolution, which was taking place at about the same time. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued that human knowledge of the world was fundamentally regulated by human structures: space and time were cognitive rules that processed and made sense of sensation. Consequence: we had no unmediated access to things in themselves, and human cognition was the condition of possibility. Similarly, Wolf emphasized that philological activity was the Homeric epics’ condition of possibility.

Wolf’s insight is often radicalized to establish an identity between poetry and philology, or at the limit, between poetry, philology, and philosophy. Rudolf Pfeiffer, for example, developed a remarkable inversion of Wolf’s hypothesis through the suggestion that the philological tradition in Europe begins with Homer.⁴⁶ Such a claim has much more wide-ranging implications than are usually recognized: it licenses the well-known role of poets to act as linguistic curators, collecting, canonizing, and pruning the lexical resources of a language, to “give a purer sense to the language of the tribe,” as Mallarmé put it.⁴⁷ In scholarly practice, the result, which Craig Maynes ludically refers to as “the philologist philologizing the philologist,”⁴⁸ can be a dizzying series of mises en abîme. But it can also produce dissonances and juxtapositions that lead to fascinating amounts of information. Thus, for example, Leo Spitzer, tracking the tendency of characters in Don Quixote to be referred to by multiple names, and even for those names to be debated within the novel, identifies in Cervantes’ portraiture of Quixote “a caricature of the humanist who is versed in books and bookish names, but is unconcerned as to their valid relationships to reality;”⁴⁹ he finds in Cervantes himself a contrasting philosophy of language, one that is troubled by the relationships between language and reality and tends toward a perspective in which language is transparent only to God. Here we find Spitzer practicing philology and identifying the Quixote as itself a philological representation of philology. The result is that different perspectives run up against one another—Quixote’s inability to escape from the humanistic word-world, Cervantes’ celebration of the maker as grounding language in divinity, and Spitzer’s own historicist rewriting of Cervantes, in which novelistic technique provides access not only to a theory of poiesis but also to a moment in the history of language.

The abyss this seems to plunge us into is precisely the place where philology comes into its own as the discipline of making sense and thus the discipline that exists before sense, before the text. So Werner Hamacher derives philology from the inexhaustible productivity of language:

To be able to speak means to be able to speak beyond everything that has been spoken and means never to be able to speak enough. The agent of this “beyond” and of this “never enough” is philology.⁵⁰

Here philology comes very close to the receiving-in-order-to-repeat of Gadamerian hermeneutics, with the emphasis shifted to the difference that always coincides with repetition.⁵¹ As a desire for what is left to be said, Hamacher infers, philology has a family relationship to the act of prayer;⁵² a summoning of and a longing for a future speech that takes place in the margins of a past speech. This leads Hamacher to conclude that there is, indeed, an identity between philology and poetry: poetry, in fact, is “prima philologia.”⁵³ As both poetry and its explication, however, philology’s fundamentum in re (its grounding in the text) is an abyss: it is grounded in a longing for itself, that is to say, in the condition of not being (yet). Longing for the utterance that is still to come, and ultimately uncertain how it will come,⁵⁴ philology finds itself, as John Hamilton has emphasized, as care and insecurity.⁵⁵ Because the philologist comes from this space of fear and trembling, because every textual or interpretive decision is a cry de profundis, “Orpheus is a philologist when he sings” (74), as Hamacher puts it: his song comes from a kind of living descent into the underworld. Philology, Hamacher concludes, is a nekuia.⁵⁶

Despite a vast difference in idiom, Sheldon Pollock makes the same point when he insists on philology’s role in mediating culture. To such a degree is this the case, says Pollock, that the older a literature is, the more mediated, the more philological it becomes.

Philology grows in exile: the further away you are in space and time from the language the more intense your philological attention—and vice versa. That is why (spatially) Persian philology is an Indian phenomenon, why (temporally) Valla was concerned not with Italian but with Latin, and why Sanskrit—the eternal language of the gods—is the most philologized of any language on earth.⁵⁷

Pollock’s final appeal to Sanskrit is essential here not merely because he is himself a Sanskritist or even because Sanskrit is, indeed, an intensely philological language. More crucially, in Sanskrit the distance between philology and “origin” has achieved mythical status (at least to nonbelievers). In fact it is philology that designates its language as the language of the gods, and in doing so it stages its own role as intercessor, repeater, and interpreter, as, in other words, the location of literature.

Pollock proposes that philology may be one of the best candidates for entry into what he calls the “sacred precincts of twenty-first century disciplinarity.”⁵⁸ His reason is important: philology, he says, is constitutively incapable of remaining “arrogantly indifferent to its own historicity, constructedness, and changeability.”⁵⁹ Its inevitably self-critical stance comes from the fact that every act of philology is, in the last accounting, a critical history of philology: the scrutiny of textual details, for example, is a form of attentiveness to the calcified remains of previous philological activity. One cannot describe past philologies as erroneous without acknowledging the likelihood that one’s own certainties will one day fall under a similarly critical eye. So, observes Hamacher, “there can be no history of philology that would not be a history from philology. And no history of and from philology against which philology would not have its reservations.”⁶⁰

This knowledge has been part of the epistemic commitments of Greek philology at least since Aristarchus, who in his critical engagement with the text of Homer did not change the words of the epic as he found them in his texts, but rather annotated suspected lines with a critical mark. The obelus, as it was known, said as much about the critic as the text: it indicated a sensitivity to the limits of philological insight and an unwillingness to substitute the critic’s own certainties for the contingencies of textual tradition. Modern products of textual scholarship continue to embody this self-critical element. From the papyrological underdot (which dignifies the uncertainty of perception in deciphering ancient and damaged writing traces) to the square bracket (which marks a passage as not original but does not remove it) and the crux (which marks a passage as problematic but unresolved), critical texts are modalized texts, each letter and word coded with various degrees of probability according to the self-criticism of the editor. Techniques of page-design function similarly. Both the critical apparatus (listing variants at the bottom of the page) and the commentary (which separates the text from the meanings attributed to it) embody philology’s commitment to self-critique. Such elements prevent philology from becoming interpolation: the latter, in this light, appears as an essentially hubristic failure to anticipate future criticism.

Perhaps I have not pushed this idea far enough. I have spoken as though philology’s self-critical element compels it to remain in the margins of the text. This presumes that the text itself is a historical datum, a prior reality, to which philology pays credit. It is more accurate, however, to claim the opposite: philological self-criticism creates the text as an apparently independent entity. Here one might imagine how different is the work of an actor or performer, who is as committed to the text as a philologist but whose success or failure depends on an absolute appropriation: the actor “owns” the text, eliding the difference between his- or herself and the foreign, prescripted words he or she pronounces. By contrast, the philologist constrains himself and through this self-constraint creates the text as his other: the “independent” text is an object generated by the withdrawal, so to speak, of philology.

There is another Aristarchan principle: to elucidate a text only on the basis of what is in it or, as Porphyry put it, “to clarify Homer out of Homer.” It is similarly motivated. The principle depends (again) on an awareness that the interpreters’ claims are liable to later criticism. The principle disciplines philology by identifying the text as the sole locus and container of meaning and refuses any interpretation not so grounded. This principle, too, continues to be fundamental to modern philological practice. It is the basis, for example, of De Man’s variant of philology, which reads the text “prior to all meaning” and limits itself only to the text. In the study of Greek literature, the Aristarchan/self-critical production of the text has been most evident in work on Greek drama, where for nearly forty years discussions of performance were dominated by the dictate that no stage action not explicitly referred to in the text was theatrically relevant.⁶¹ To “clarify Aeschylus out of Aeschylus” is superb philology, but it is not good theater, which, as I have already suggested, depends for its success on a committed and thoroughgoing elision of the difference between text and performance and is perhaps the act of interpolation par excellence.⁶² At stake in philology is something different: philology secures itself by restraining itself and, through its contraction, conjures a text that seems objective, external, and the sole container of meaning, sufficient unto itself. Or so it seems; in fact, after all, even such a text is the product of philological activity. At risk of paradox, we might observe that the concrete text, seemingly independent of its editor, is a philological interpolation; it is the interpolation produced by a refusal to interpolate. But it is at least self-aware: the philological text knows that it isn’t secure.

Summing up his interventions in a series of colloquia convened by Glenn Most in the late 1990s, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argued that “all philological practices generate desires for presence, desires for a physical and space-mediated relationship to the things of the world (including texts).”⁶³ Philological practice, on this account, is a fundamentally material, tangible undertaking whose method and effect is as much a matter of physical interaction as it is of language. Elsewhere Gumbrecht uses presence as the basis for an advocacy of silent attention, a wordless erotics of literature.⁶⁴ I have hesitations about his invocation of silence, which seems to gesture toward something more like a negative philology; a philology that loves not language as other (as Hamacher would put it), but language’s other, its negation. But Gumbrecht has a valid point nonetheless: philology is concrete. In a superb and wide-ranging study, Gerard Passannante has traced early modern and romantic philology’s obsession with the material text to an accelerated uptake of Lucretian materialism in the fifteenth century. In a very real sense, the renaissance discovery of textual studies—the idea that texts can be corrupted, that they must be restored, and that both of these productions are fundamentally a matter of matter—is deeply conditioned by Lucretius’ analogy between atoms and letters. If Passannante is right, then philology is fundamentally, one might say inevitably, engaged with material, with those concrete moments when the world—or the text—refuses to yield to our desires to mold it.

It is its emphasis on the concrete that gives philology its enormous scope. Indeed, the word has long been associated with encyclopedic knowledge, from Eratosthenes (who was called philologos because of the many disciplines he studied) to Boeckh (who called philology “knowledge of what is known”) and Asmis (who placed philology at the intersection of languages, identifying it with polyglot cosmopolitanism).⁶⁵ Vast bodies of knowledge are brought to bear in philological interpretation, which nonetheless insists on obeying the Aristarchan principle of “clarifying Homer out of Homer”: commentary explicates (i.e., unfolds) what is implicit (i.e., enfolded) “within” the text. We find the same supposition in Spitzer’s description of philological method. Discussing the novelist Charles-Louis Philippe, Spitzer begins with an extremely close analysis of Philippe’s style, draws conclusions about his approach to causality, then expands his view to encompass early twentieth-century French culture. He describes his procedure as follows:

First, we grouped together certain causal expressions, striking with Philippe, then hunted out their psychological explanation, and finally, sought to verify whether the element of “pseudo-objective motivation” coincided with what we know, from other sources, about the elements of his inspiration. Again, a belief is involved […] that the mind of an author is a kind of solar system into whose orbit all categories of things are attracted: language, motivation, plot, are only satellites of this mythological entity (as my antimentalistic adversaries would call it): mens Philippina. The linguist as well as his literary colleague must always ascend to the etymon which is behind all those particular so-called literary or stylistic devices which the literary historians are wont to list. And the individual mens Philippina is a reflection of the mens Franco-Gallica of the twentieth century.⁶⁶

Spitzer attributes to the work what he finds in the world: he explicates, and thus seems to remain concrete. This example makes clear how and in what way philology is not historicism or antiquarianism. Historicism attempts to develop a representation of an epoch; it treats texts as evidence and deploys them as keys to their contexts. It aims for systematicity and comprehensiveness. Its view is from above. Philology may aspire to work with the whole inventory of historical knowledge, but it organizes this inventory from within a single perspective immanent to its text. Philology’s energy derives from the dense, hot, singular concretion that its text represents: historicism is its cold, entropic state.

But the clearest example of philology’s commitment to the concrete is not to be found in the practices of commentary and interpretation. It is to be found instead in its longstanding relationship with disciplines of the material text like paleography, codicology, and papyrology. These disciplines take their force and their pleasure from the embodied relationship of text and eye and hand. Their objects are not inert material: rather, like literary texts they are socio-historical nodes, points of critical density where philological practice acquires a concrete vantage point. Recalling Vico’s definition of philology as concerned with the human, cultural, and historical, Jerome McGann takes the basic insight of philology to be that “knowledge is inextricable from the network that enables it.”⁶⁷ This is language chosen to facilitate a rapprochement between analog and digital textuality, and it is good: seen from the right perspective, scrolls, codices, alphabets, and printed texts are all media embedded in a social network. As is also the case with the literary text, philology is the site at which these material practices congeal and acquire significance, resonance, and tangibility. Still, it should not be identified with its material “subdisciplines,” even if its means of procedure are entirely embodied in them, as McGann insists.⁶⁸ Rather, these “subdisciplines,” like reading, are starting points from which philology aims “to thicken what it knows and fill out its field of attention.”⁶⁹ This aromatic description, with its combination of Geertzian ethnography and culinary technique, gets to the heart of philology’s commitment to the concrete: a kind of reduction and intensification, philology makes more real what it encounters as (always already) real. It is a surrealism.

The Aristarchan principles—to “clarify Homer out of Homer” and to constrain judgment to the margins—have an additional consequence (the first is that they produce the text as a concrete, quasi-objective entity): philology’s main mode of achieving significance is by being figurative. That philology is figurative means that it generates meaning through the tacit positing of correspondences between real historical entities.

“To illuminate the text on the basis of the text alone” imposes a rigorous, one might even say crippling, constraint on interpretation: allegory is disqualified, to be sure, but so is any explicit claim of relevance for a text within a new historical matrix. Homer, quite simply, has not heard of us, and so cannot be explained on our terms. This represents a radical negation of any possible claim to contemporaneity. I leave for other contexts assessment of the relative possibility or impossibility of satisfying such a demand: what matters here is that philology’s commitment to interpretive immanence forces it to use an infinitude of discretion when it seeks to establish meaning.

Examples of the results are easy to come by. E. R. Dodds’ Bacchae, to take one, is not only a testament to the importance of the irrational in Greek life;⁷⁰ produced in the decade leading up to and including the second world war, it is also a witness to the rising tide of madness which consumed the middle of his century. Dodds does not say this—indeed, saying so would violate the principle of interpretive immanence. The relationship between the objectified text and the moment when it is produced by a philologist like Dodds is, rather, akin to the relationship between a figure and its fulfillment in Christian eschatology.

Here’s what I mean. In “Philology and World Literature” Erich Auerbach identified an overwhelming problem: too much had been written on the global literary heritage.⁷¹ It was no longer possible for a single scholar to master even the European tradition, let alone the literature of the world. Auerbach recommended, as a compensatory strategy, the adoption of small, simple motifs or questions which could be used to guide the scholar through literature’s bewildering wood. He is most well known for his development of one such starting point: that of mimesis, or the representation of reality in European letters.⁷² But the method is illustrated in a condensed form in the article “Figura,” in which the history of this single Latin word is used as a thread to trace and embody a crucial element in Dante’s poetics.⁷³ Auerbach’s argument in this article is minimalist to the extreme: it amounts to a read-through of the relevant columns in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, followed by a light-handed discussion of the differences between figurative thinking and other modes of interpretation. But this discrete technique allows Auerbach to reveal a central occupation for modern historical thought: signifying both material form (first in Lucretius), consciously arranged language (most importantly in Quintilian), and the real historical events which find fulfillment in Christological history (Turtullian and Augustine), the notion of figura posits rich and resonant connections between radically distinct historical events and contexts.

Figural interpretation creates a connection between two events or persons in which one signifies not only itself but also the other—and that one is also encompassed or fulfilled by the other. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but they both also lie within time as real events or figures. As I have repeatedly emphasized, both figures are part of the ongoing flow of historical life. Only the act of understanding, the intellectus spiritualis, is spiritual. But this spiritual act must deal with each of the two poles in their given or desired concrete reality as past, present, or future events, respectively—and not as abstractions or concepts.⁷⁴

Based as it is in a refusal of transcendence and allegory, figural interpretation is capable of powerful rhetorical effects: judicious and pregnant choice of materials, tactful criticism, and careful interpretation can together stage a juxtaposition between a historical text and the present of its philological production, which invites, if it does not make explicit, that “spiritual act” that perceives the past in a resonant relationship with the present. Walter Benjamin was thinking in a mode very much in harmony with this when he undertook the massive (and ultimately unfinished) study of the Paris arcades of the nineteenth century. At the time of Baudelaire the arcades were emblems of the latest in technological commodification; by Benjamin’s time they had lost their sheen. Benjamin’s goal in turning to the ruins of this lost age of capitalist fantasy was to use the “detritus of history” as a way to juxtapose capitalism’s utopian promises with its historical reality. This, Benjamin wagered, would produce “dialectical images” that configured “the structure of awakening”—provoking a recognition of the nonfulfillment of the past’s promise in the present. Benjamin could refer to the historical vision produced by this rhetoric of juxtaposition as “messianic time.”⁷⁵ But it was also philological time, as Adorno testily complained,⁷⁶ pointing accusingly to Benjamin’s desire to develop a technique of “citing without quotation marks”⁷⁷—just the philological discretion we have been tracing.

Benjamin was no classical philologist. But Rudolph Pfeiffer was, and we find him exploiting the same figurative rhetoric. The History of Classical Scholarship’s sense of historical time is shot through with a series of striking correspondences between ancient and modern predicaments. Plato’s seminal role in the formation of classical scholarship is repeated at every moment of philological recovery (“As Plato had paved the way for scholarship, so also in later revivals of what we call ‘humanism’ Platonism played its part, whether we think of Origen or the Florentine Academy or Erasmus or Winckelmann and Humboldt,” 65); the founding of the library and subsequent flourishing of scholarship in Alexandria was repeated “when in the Italian renaissance the ardent zeal of the poets and humanists from Petrarch to Politian led to the recovery of the Classics and the setting-up of great libraries” (103); the circle of poets and scholars of the generation of Zenodotus, celebrated as the Pleiad, prefigure the moment when “the Alexandrian name, Πλειάς, was intentionally revived and applied again to a circle of poets and scholars by the French poet Ronsard, the pupil of Dorat, in 1563, after Budé had called the newly founded Collège royal a new Μουσεῖον” (119); Eratosthenes, the first soi-disant φιλόλογος, “fully deserves to be honored as the founder of critical chronology in antiquity,” and his innovation is recaptured “at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century A.D. By J. J Scaliger” (163). Pfeiffer’s series of analogues mimes not only the substance but also the chronological order of contributions, so that the same sequence of events takes place in antiquity and in the early modern era.

This is a conscious and worked-out historical schema. “History rarely repeats itself,” he writes at the close of his narrative of Alexandrian scholarship.

But we shall see in modern times a sequence of three stages analogous, on a grand scale, to that in the third century B.C. First came the revival of Scholarship in the Italian renaissance during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D., led by great poets from Petrarch to Politian. Then an encyclopedic expansion followed in France and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which science played its part; ‘philologia’ acquired once more the Eratosthenian meaning, and Salmasius was expressly praised as the Eratosthenes of his time. But finally, when Bentley’s genius appeared, creative concentration on textual and literary criticism won the day, as it had when Aristophanes of Byzantium came after Eratosthenes in about 200 B.C.⁷⁸

Pfeiffer does not provide a theoretical explanation for these repetitions; but they seem to bespeak a philosophy of history in which the relationship between ancient and modern philological history is figural.

Another prefiguration, however, appears to insist against the large-scale correspondences just outlined. “The great Alexandrians were united,” he writes,

not by doctrine, but by the common love of letters, and every one of them was an independent individuality. We shall find only one parallel in the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D.: the living chain of freely associated masters and disciples through five generations from Petrarch to Politian, whose common love and labor restored scholarship from dangerous decline to life and liberty.⁷⁹

The emphasis (one) is his. Why now does he wish to take away the possibility of a complete sequence of fulfillments over the whole course of modern philology, to retract it and install in its place only the first part of that broader narrative, that is, the Italian renaissance? Some further correspondences, unstated but hard to pass over, provide clues. The generation of Aristarchus, which for Pfeiffer is the fulfillment and final flowering of the Hellenistic tradition of scholarship, is marred by political crises that lead to the scholarly abandonment of Alexandria and the end of the great epoch of its fruitfulness. Aristarchus, as head of the royal library at Alexandria, tutored Ptolemy VII, who was murdered by Ptolemy VIII.

All the friends of his murdered nephew, the ‘fautores pueri,’ were persecuted, including Aristarchus although he had been the usurper’s own tutor; he escaped to Cyprus where he is assumed to have died shortly afterwards […] Aristarchus’ best pupils and many other scholars of the younger generation fled to various places not under Egyptian rule, Rhodes, Pergamum, Athens. From this secessio doctorum the first crisis ensued in the history of scholarship.⁸⁰

This comes at the beginning of the chapter that ends with the italicized insistence that there was only one modern analogue for the Alexandrian tradition, and one wonders whether the secessio doctorum of Pfeiffer’s own time, and the historical catastrophe that ensued in Hitler’s Germany, does not glower darkly beneath the surface here.

Or perhaps he has something else in mind. Pfeiffer’s history of modern scholarship, the second volume of the History, concludes with Lachmann and a “definitive break.” After Lachmann, humanism ceased to be a driving force in scholarship, replaced, Pfeiffer argues, by a world presided over by the figure of Theodor Mommsen: “While still himself an admirer of Humboldt’s idea of the state, he yet did more than anyone else to further the forces of historicism and realism.”⁸¹ Humboldt’s idea of the state, which Pfeiffer sees as the political instantiation of German neo-Hellenism,⁸² insisted (among other things) on the free association of scholars to which we have seen Pfeiffer referring in his characterization of Alexandrian and Italian renaissance philology: remarkably, Pfeiffer juxtaposes it to the furtherance of historicism and relativism, as though the two were separate, even opposed. Equally interesting is the fact that both historicism and realism turn up at the end of the first volume of the History as well, in the context of a figurative prolepsis of nineteenth-century German scholarship:

The wide scope of original antiquarian research in Pergamum roused sincere enthusiasm in the nineteenth century when a so-called realism felt the ‘narrowness’ of critical and grammatical scholarship and looked for all the manifestations of spirit in the ancient world. Demetrius was justly praised, in so far as his realistic exegesis furthered the understanding of a special part of the Iliad. But in a case like his the poetry itself may get lost from sight behind the mountains of learned stuff heaped upon it. Five generations in Alexandria had been working to restore and to explain the literary creations of the past for their own sake. If the poems were to become merely sources for historical or topographical research, the objective of classical scholarship would be almost lost. This danger is for the first time apparent in the new Pergamene antiquarianism.⁸³

This provides a remarkably clear historical location for Pfeiffer’s own situation, and it further concretizes the impression that this history is a figural one. Writing in an age in which realist, historicist approaches to literature seemed to have begun to wither the work of restoring and explaining classical poetry on its own terms, Pfeiffer seemed to imagine his age as marked by the shipwreck of classical philology; a world in fragments, which, as it were, breathlessly awaited the next appearance of philologia perennis. Thus does Pfeiffer’s history of philology set up a triple set of figural correspondences, of which the third—like the soteriological event alluded to in Christian figural history—remains to come.