The New Greeks

Investigating the reception of the traditions of antiquity is an important area of research on Polish literature and Romantic culture. Much has changed in this field in the last quarter of a century with the publication of numerous valuable texts,¹ and we can assume that the importance of the traditions of antiquity will grow with the increasing interest in these writers, whose works document unique ties with the world of classical civilisations, and especially with the literature and history of Greece and Rome. It is in this direction that reception studies is developing in the United Kingdom, France, the United States of America, and Germany. This trend has been particularly pronounced in the United Kingdom, which in the early 1990s was the birthplace of a new way of writing about the reception of antiquity.

It was at this point that the concept of antiquity emerged – predominantly in the form of Greek and Roman literature – as a tradition used in various ways by people of different eras, languages, nationalities and social groups.² Studying the visions of antiquity from many historically different worlds, addressed to various recipients and on each occasion corresponding to diverse social needs, created an opportunity for renewed verification and interpretation of vast areas of world heritage. Wherever Greco-Roman antiquity reached and left its material traces, researchers of reception could now follow. In this sense, antiquity became a contemporary mirror located in the guesthouse of Euro-Atlantic culture, manifesting the unique characteristics of various conceptualisations of the past in accordance with sociopolitical needs. This is not an accidental metaphor, as it is something of an emblem of Jerzy Axer’s work on reception studies, which was especially important in the writing of this book.

The changing approach to the classical world resulted primarily from the shift associated with the dissemination of the influential and inspirational reception theory, widely referred to as the School of Constance, in the 1970s and 1980s. Hans Robert Jauss³ and his collaborators⁴ argued that the reception of a work is an equal subject of research, providing an understanding of how classical masterpieces were able to re-enter the literary and cultural circulation as a result of reception and influence.⁵ It is important to differentiate these concepts to emphasise the varying nature of the presence of classical works in contemporary literary circulation. According to Jauss, it is one thing to use various intertextual tools to recontextualise a motif, quotation, character or event from antiquity in order to verbalise meanings unknown to the ancients but present in the works of one writer. This is the history of influence (Wirkungsgeschichte), observed with the example of literary accounts where the contemporary writer uses an ancient author’s text. Influence assumes the need to go beyond the context of the individual literature and era, and its research is intrinsically focused on analysing monodirectional processes and tracing the links between different works. Something quite different is the study of the history of reception (Rezeptionsgeschichte). The objective here is to reflect on the presence of an author, work, motif or quotation in a given historical moment or over the centuries. Reception is a broader concept than influence and concerns various aspects of the history of the work, author, genre, or another phenomenon that can be identified after the work has been produced and published. Reception might address all relationships and outcomes of the phenomenon in question, from critical reviews via readings of the work among other artists or important historical figures to the reconstruction of this presence in the history of the entire national literature or several literatures of the era. Not by chance, one of the directions in which reception studies has developed is ‘comparative reception’ (Claude de Grève),⁶ which deals with the comparison and analysis of several national receptions of the same phenomenon to underscore the differences in the formation of national literary traditions.

The focus was shifted to readers’ reactions and the multiple possible readings caused by the changing horizon of expectation. It was this concept, the Erwartungshorizont, which Jauss borrowed from Karl Mannheim and Hans-Georg Gadamer, that proved to be the foundation of this change. The dialogue of the reader with the text, violating the previous customs concerning the understanding of the world and interpretation of literature, results in a fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) and modification of the views that preceded the reading, which leaves an imprint on the interpretation of the work itself.⁷

Researchers of classical traditions drew their own conclusions from the output of the School of Constance, which primarily contributed to transforming reception studies from an auxiliary discipline to a discipline at the forefront of studies on antiquity. Recognition of the reception of classical traditions was particularly associated with the links between the classics and transformations of national humanities in the 1990s. As Katherine Harloe points out, the interdisciplinary nature of this research and its connections with literary studies, historiography, film studies and theatre studies contributed to the democratisation of studies on antiquity, which had previously been confined to elites and relatively inaccessible even to researchers from other disciplines of the humanities. According to Harloe, this changing approach, along with the array of new challenges facing reception researchers, was related to the role played by the classical heritage in the history of civilisation (of course, not only European) in shaping various aspects of its functioning. Researchers of the reception of antiquity should aim to reflect critically on past and contemporary problems to attain the role of a humanist (in the Saidian sense of the word).⁸

As a result, the study of reception is no longer limited to investigating solely literary connections. Contemporary researchers may observe the influence of literature in historiography, philosophy, art, fashion, and education. They are permitted to examine entirely non-literary classical texts to show how they work in the literary space. The history of reception and the history of influence have created a new area of research in which the objective is to understand how old meanings have been used to create entirely new ones in a different historical setting and among different readers.⁹ At the same time, the new research space has become an important aspect of the activities of almost every academic institution that had previously dealt exclusively with antiquity. For over two decades, the development of reception studies has been accompanied by transformations of ‘classics’ departments and faculties, as a process taking place simultaneously with the crisis of classical education and the presence of the classics at universities. The reception of classical traditions has offered a brand-new research space to these institutions. These universities were previously hermetically closed to the methodological inspirations of twentieth-century humanities, also experiencing a decline after the events of 1968 and their reconstruction in France, Germany and the United States beginning at that time. Various justifications also emerged that could be used to explain the need to support classical studies in contemporary academia. In a sense, therefore, reception studies played (and continues to play) the role of a new legitimisation of (not only classical) philology.¹⁰

Since this new perspective on academic investigations was discovered, accepted and popularised, researchers dealing with reception have focused more on those who used classical texts in their own works, translated or paraphrased them, as well as on their readers’ ‘horizon of expectation,’ and less on antiquity itself. The classical heritage is treated rather as a palimpsest of hundreds – if not thousands – of readings, casting doubt on the existence of anything like ‘antiquity per se.’ This notion, treated radically, caused major disputes in the research community aroused by a lack of unequivocal agreement on methodological inspirations. The new approach also brought about one of the more interesting contemporary debates in the humanities, in which the fundamental doubt concerned the question of whether reception studies can be treated as a fully-fledged discipline and whether its popularity does not mean a loss of identity for the classics scholar – hitherto a philologist, historian or archaeologist. This dispute resulted in polarised positions but only strengthened the role of reception, causing a massive increase in the number of international scholars working in the classical tradition as well as new academic units,¹¹ research networks,¹² journals,¹³ series of publications,¹⁴ study programmes,¹⁵ and international specialist research projects.¹⁶ The list of monographs and thematic volumes published in various languages in recent decades would contain well over a thousand entries.

Charles Martindale, the author of a groundbreaking book on the reception of Virgil,¹⁷ took as his starting point the idea that the interpretation of literary texts is inextricably linked to their reception, as well as the notion that antiquity cannot be examined in isolation from its operation in later literature and culture. Among his inspirations, as well as reception theory, he also mentioned New Criticism, Derridean deconstruction and the theory of dialogue of Bakhtin and Gadamer. Martindale began by strongly criticising philosophical research that propagates the existence of an unequivocal intention of the author and meaning of the text that are completely independent from the reader’s activity, including their views, education and situation in a historical moment.

Such research, Martindale notes, is a distant echo of the historicism pursued by Friedrich August Wolf in philological research. In a letter from 9 January 1796, Wolf wrote to Christian Gottlob Heyne that the most damage in classical studies is done by views that strive to adapt antiquity to contemporary tastes, academic desires and artistic ideas.¹⁸ And yet, Martindale contests, these ‘certain points of view’ Wolf was warning about constitute an inextricable element of the historically formed tastes, knowledge and habits of the reader. The past leaves its mark on the present, just as Virgil and Milton left their mark on Homer. The historicity of the cognitive process is not something we can avoid in our wish to form a direct relationship with a distant work. Historicity, in line with Gadamer’s rules of hermeneutics, is a foundation enabling our understanding. Antiquity, in this case, is no exception.

Martindale makes two arguments – as he puts it – a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ one. The first entails an explication of the idea that classical texts reach us via translations, allusions, and diverse imitations that leave a mark on the way they are understood and interpreted. The second argument reinforces this idea. It is impossible to ‘encounter’ a classical text directly because the social and discursive practices that begin with socialisation in school mean that our attitude towards classical works has been irrevocably mediated by an array of later works and many interpretations from various periods. For a work to become comprehensible to us, it must be historicised, meaning that the path to knowing it leads through all later manifestations of its presence in culture, education, and research. Martindale thus leans towards the reinterpretation of reception theory in the spirit of Derridean dissemination.

I find Martindale’s findings important for two reasons. Firstly, I am certain that the way antiquity has been used and its presence in various eras of Polish culture mark a number of unwritten, or merely sketched, history pages of the Polish reception of classical traditions, and in this respect a great deal remains to be done. Secondly, I would like to emphasise this inextricable coincidence of the birth of modern classical philology and its various textual and academic practices with the development of a particular model of German ‘human sciences,’ to use Wilhelm Dilthey’s later expression. It is, I believe, possible to trace a significant relationship between the Polish reception of antiquity in the nineteenth century and the development and transformations of German philology and historiography. This is a relationship that is yet to be observed and described.

A decade after the publication of Martindale’s book, Lorna Hardwick echoed most of his fundamental views.¹⁹ However, she also noted that a scholar of reception in the early twenty-first century is sensitive to aspects of the classical heritage that did not necessarily play a prominent role in the writings of antiquity. An important trend in recent times has viewed the classical period as a world of slavery, marginalisation of women and devastating wars. The experiences of the twentieth century gave us a different perspective on ancient history, usually written by the victors, as classical models played an inglorious role in all twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies. This was particularly the case in fascist Italy²⁰ and Nazi Germany.²¹ In fact, Hardwick begins her book by quoting Hermann Göring’s speech of 30 January 1943, addressed to the soldiers of the Sixth Army fighting at Stalingrad. Göring compared the Battle of Stalingrad to Thermopylae and the German soldiers to the Greeks holding back the barbarian invasion.²²

The authors of the important book Reception and the Classics question the significance of Rezeptionsgeschichte for changes in classical studies, noting the long tradition of research on reception in the twentieth century, such as in the books of Gilbert Highet and Richard Jenkyns, as well as the importance of the development of reflection on the Renaissance.²³ Such an approach to the issue might be misleading. Polish literary studies also had its models in the guise of the numerous publications of Tadeusz Sinko, and yet mainly visible today are the differences between this previous search for classical traditions in literature and the current research trends. In the case of older and even entirely historical works, including nineteenth-century ones, it is important to remember that the cultural background was usually a strongly axiological attempt to create a community with a Mediterranean civilisation, and research was to prove that the literature and national culture in question were indisputably connected to the Mediterranean, and therefore belonged to the European civilisation. This was the case with the old works of German and French philologists and historians, as well as Sinko himself.

Martindale returned to the subject of his book numerous times,²⁴ and in 2013, in a thematic issue of Classical Receptions Journal, he summarised his views and outlined the history of his own evolution over two decades of research on reception.²⁵