Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004

Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext

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Efrossini Spentzou and Don Fowler, eds.  Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature.  Oxford University Press, 2002.  viii + 312 pp.  Hardcover: $45.00.  ISBN: 0199240043.

Reviewed by

Constance Eichenlaub

Seattle, WA

            This collection of eleven essays is a tribute to the life and work of Don Fowler (1953-1999), a Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford, 1980 until his tragically early death in October of 1999 due to cancer.   He was admired for his enthusiastic contribution of interdisciplinary dialogue in the field of classics and to the humanities broadly and deeply defined.  In 2001 an Annual Lecture series in his memory was inaugurated at Oxford entitled “New Approaches to Latin Literature.”  Don Fowler’s spirit of openness to new methods of inquiry is the inspiration for this volume consisting of an original group of six essays (by Don Fowler, John Henderson, Micaela Jana, Penny Murray, Alison Sharrock, and Efrossini Spentzou) presented at a conference entitled “Cultivating the Muse: Power, Desire, and Inspiration in the Classical World” held at Wolfson College Oxford on May 4, 1996.  The remaining five essays were subsequently solicited by Don Fowler and Efrossini Spentzou from Ronnie Ancona, Adriana Cavarero, Ismene Lada-Richards, Andrew Laird, and Gianpiero Rosati.  The final editing of the collection was carried out by Efrossini Spentzou.

            The goal of the collection is to “unsettle and inspire” (Preface) and certainly this goal is achieved with a certain audience of readers.  Then again, there are always those who are sufficiently unsettled and inspired without the added impetus of further hermeneutic complexities.  But the volume provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in researching the history of ideas revolving around the theme of inspiration and its representation in classical literary allusions to the Muses.  The essays concentrate on a period of time stretching roughly from the late 5^th century b.c.e. (the Greek tragedians and Plato) to the 1^st century c.e. (Lucan, Statius) and everything in-between (Ennius, Callimachus, Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, Livy to name a few).1 Andrew Laird’s essay “Authority and Ontology of the Muses in Epic Reception” has a somewhat broader stroke as he tries to discriminate an account of the actualization of reception of the “ontological and hierarchical status” of the Muse in a historical trajectory of epic literature, which in this case includes Petrarch’s 14^th century epic Africa.  Laird’s project is perhaps the most challenging, as he explores the real and possibly undermining effect of the Muses on the rationalistic tendency to identify and adhere to ideologies of discourse.

            The founding group of six essayists establish the theoretical method of “listening against the grain” for the voice of the Muse unobscured by the constraints and obfuscations of vested interests–a type of post-modern activity, which according to Pietro Pucci’s earlier deconstructive reading of the archaic Muses in Homer and Hesiod is more characteristic of Hesiod’s questioning of the Muses versus a univocal and privileged access to truth characterized by the Homeric relationship to the Muses.  Both Claude Calame2 and Pietro Pucci3 are duly recognized in Spentzou’s introductory essay “Secularizing the Muse” as the progenitors of this type of analysis which probes the forces of power and individual subjectivity intrinsic to a paradigm shift from a sacred tradition to a rational and secular culture.  Add to the mix the significant influence of Jean-Luc Nancy whose Muse is the post-Lacanian hermeneutic of the Subject, and the stage is set for a carnival of “resistant” reading.

            The work of Don Fowler and John Henderson frame the section of essays addressing Latin literature and Roman culture.  Don Fowler’s essay “Masculinity under Threat? The Poetics and Politics of Inspiration in Latin Poetry” begins with a sketch of the gap between reality and poetic pretence exposed in Callimachus’ opening to the Batrachomyomachia, the “Battle of Frogs and Mice.”  Fowler enjoys repelling across the fissures of oppositions such as male/female,  inside/outside, rational/irrational, which may or may not have been completely consciously explored by the ancient poets.  The metaphors which embody the oppositions of ingenium and ars, the “wild” and the imperium of civilization, and which bear fruit in a hierarchy of genres (as represented in Horace), are Fowler’s focus as he analyzes passages in Virgil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Bellum Civile.   John Henderson’s essay, “Corny Copa: the Motel Muse” is a performative piece par excellence and the most playful in terms of opening the hermeneutic vista of language and sexuality as amply exemplified in the Vergiliana “Copa”, a poem which defines Carnevale.  

            The first section of essays oriented to Greek literature is introduced with Penelope Murray’s beautifully styled tribute to Plato’s appropriation of Calliope, Muse of Poetry/Heroic Epic, to philosophy.  Her essay, entitled “Plato’s Muses: The Goddesses that Endure,” is immediately followed and complemented by Adriana Cavarero’s essay “The Envied Muse: Plato versus Homer.”  Cavarero develops the shadow side of Plato’s appropriation of the Muse, a shadow which encompasses a Platonic jealousy of irrationality, entrancement, emotion, orality, wholeness, and the feminine (quite a heavy-duty shadow).  Cavarero adds Urania to Plato’s inspirational energies, a Muse of Astronomy and Kosmos, because she argues that Plato’s real challenge when incorporating his shadow side is not to lose touch with the generative power of the unified field of logos in the incarnated word.

            Ismene Lada-Richards explores the shift in the epistemology of knowledge as experienced by the tragedians’ relationship to the Muse.  She argues that the new knowledge imparted by the tragic Muse to the theatre audience is one of pathos:

The classical Athenian stage, then, turns the Muse into a tragic character whose penthos draws the audience’s empathic response.  To put it another way, within the heightened emotionality of the Athenian theatrical context, the archaic Muse has learned to feel. (82)

The emphasis on the developing human versus archaic, a-human qualities of the Muse is given a fully feminine identity in Efrossini Spentzou’s essay “Stealing Apollo’s Lyre: Muses and Poetic athla in Apollonius’ Argonautica ₃.”  Spentzou’s intricate analysis of Medea’s role as the ‘Other’ in the Argonautica interprets the human, feminine Muse as a prefigurement of a modern, feminist epistemology. Spentzou’s language is wonderfully instructive for an understanding of the subtleties of knowledge and power as experienced in modern culture.

As she acquires character, the human muse gets desired, cajoled, but also distrusted and even derided.  When left in mortal hands, knowledge is at the same time cherished, scorned, coveted, available, and also elusive…Knowledge is painfully and slowly gained and when ‘asserted’, it no longer addresses the community collectively as in the old times.  This is no longer a trustworthy point of reference for the community to look up to: its persuasive power is a private affair, as Jason and Medea’s furtive tryst suggests, one in   which authority goes hand in hand with, but also can be prey to seduction, and vice versa.              (115)

            Ronnie Ancona’s essay “The Untouched Self: Sapphic and Catullan Muses in Horace, Odes 1.22” is perhaps the only essay in the collection that does not work to make new connections because by its very “untouched” nature4 the premise is far too self-conscious to take a reader much further than the limits of tolerance.  Ancona’s goal is to juxtapose the speaker’s (Horace’s?) desire to exert “masculine control over the self in the love relation” with a destabilizing “‘voice’ in the ‘object position’” that threatens the “‘integrity’ of the speaker” (Spentzou’s commentary, 26).  This type of Bionian object relations analysis is hopefully more suited to dealing with a personal complex or dream material, as the subject’s source of angst has more to do with psychological rather than literary influence.  Micaela Janan in “The Muse Unruly and Dead: Acanthis in Propertius 4.5” covers some of the same ground in his resistant reading of the ghostly hag, Acanthus, as the voice of the poet’s alter who “waxes larger than mere ‘handmaid’ to the male poet’s work, and becomes his dissentient alter ego” (187).  Janan’s psychological approach is a little less narcissistic and describes the shadow side of the male/female opposition with interesting observations about the haunting effect of the omission of the feminine in an overly-male determined culture.

            The two essays that deal with Roman poetic angst in a more formalistic fashion are those by Alison Sharrock and Gianpiero Rosati.  In “An A-musing tale: Gender, Genre, and Ovid’s Battle’s with Inspiration in the Metamorphoses,” Sharrock addresses the Virgilian characterization of the epic Muse in terms of violence and Ovid’s very deliberate effort to transform this characterization into one of “relationship”.  The poet’s ability to radically reformulate the role of Muse is further developed in Rosati’s essay, “Muse and Power in the Poetry of Statius.”  Picking up on Sharrock’s formal analysis of Ovidian and Virgilian invocations, he analyses proemic passages in the epic Thebais and Statius’ ‘lighter’ poetic program in Silvae.  Rosati does a thorough analysis of Statius’ status as a professional, poetic poet, whose political and economic source of inspiration (the emperor Domitian) must be acknowledged, thus creating an existential tension between Statius’ persona as vates and poeta doctus versus his social role as poet-politician.  Rosati’s astute assessment of the dynamics of power outlines the growing complexity of the poet’s relationship to political patrons and to the power of the Muse(s), who now freed from the supernatural, is in turn able to liberate the poet from the imposition of secular power.

            So for readers who are looking for modern theoretical applications of literary analysis to the theme of inspiration and the Muses, these essays do provide resources.  The collection is perhaps not designed for readers who are looking for a historical continuum of ideas, although there are scattered, excellent diachronic elements that provide useful, comparative insights.