Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome by Sean Alexander Gurd (review)

The New Critical approach to texts of Latin literature as well-formed artifacts comprehensible solely on their own terms has been in decline for some time now. Cultural critics have illuminated the ways in which literary texts intersect with a broad range of practices and discourses; increasing attention has been paid to the cognitive, conceptual, and emotional aspects of poetry and prose; even diehard intertextualists find themselves wondering how to connect literary texts with other communicative systems. Most such work, however, has taken the form of interpretation. Debates have been concerned with the relative weight to be given to internal and external factors in assessing the meaning and significance of texts, but rarely have scholars stopped to ask what is meant by “text” in the context of Roman verbal production. Indeed, critics who insist on the boundlessness of interpretation are among those most committed to the boundedness of the objects to be interpreted.

Sean Gurd’s new study reorients discussion of Latin literature by asking whether and when Roman readers and audiences came to regard a text as complete. His interest is still discursive, that is to say, he shies away from detailed discussion of the material practices evidenced in papyri and manuscripts, which in my view is a mistake. Nonetheless, his crisp, insightful examination of the way multiple Roman (and Greek) authors represent the process of textual revision and completion should force reconsideration of widely shared assumptions about the boundedness and autonomy of the texts that constitute the interpreter’s object of inquiry. On Gurd’s account, the familiar Alexandrian and neoteric concern with formal completeness is just one of many models of textualization available to ancient authors. Like Enrica Sciarrino in her recent study of Cato the Elder (Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose. From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription [Columbus, Ohio 2011]), Gurd manages to shake things up in part through the simple (and to this writer self-evident and long-overdue) move of including prose as well as poetry in the Latinist’s remit. Cicero and Pliny contribute as much to his account as do Horace and his Alexandrian predecessors.

Equally important, if less successfully handled, is Gurd’s identification of different models of craftsmanship implicit in a preference for complete as opposed to revisable texts. Gurd suggests that an Aristotelian model, in which the craftsman has a telos or ideal in mind to which the object is expected to adhere, has been allowed to dominate discussion of texts at the expense of other models, identifiable in the writings of Isocrates, Plato, Quintilian, and others, that allow for revision, by the author or by others, as part of the creative process. I agree, but think the connection between the Aristotelian approach and the literary texts that embody it could have been developed in more detail, as might the philosophical underpinnings of alternative approaches to revision. At the same time, Gurd’s pursuit of the Aristotelian lead through other philosophical writings (Stoic, Epicurean, euphonist) is unpersuasive and a distraction from his main story, which is the diverse uses to which authors assign the process of revision, as discussed in four compelling chapters that form the substance of the book.

The first of these chapters groups Isocrates, Plato, and Quintilian as promoters of textual revision as pedagogical strategy. For them, revision of a text is aimed at the improvement of the revising subject as much as the revised text. The ability to collaborate with others, especially apparent in Isocrates’ Panathenaicus, becomes predictive of political competence, while in the case of Plato’s Theaetetus and Euthydemus, revising a text is another means of revising the self. For Quintilian, revision, without entirely losing its Isocratean or Platonic aims, eventually produces a speaker who no longer needs to revise. The practice of criticizing and correcting, alone or with others, generates a substantive transformation of the student’s psyche...