Introduction: Through the Past Darkly: Elegy and the Problematics of Interpretation

In a well-known Bob Dylan lyric, a certain "Mr. Jones" wanders into a room clutching a pencil and fails quite spectacularly--to the accompaniment of the refrain "something is happening here, but you don't know what it is"--to comprehend the alterity of his new surroundings. Dylan's lyric stands as a powerful metaphor for the attempt to confront and comprehend the other. Only the most self-assured of literary critics has not felt at some point, on confronting an ancient literary text, the profound alienation of Dylan's "Mr. Jones." As investigators of a culture removed from us by a chasm of 2,000 years (a chasm that has been filled with the debris of subsequent history), we are all Mr. Jones wandering into an unfamiliar room, pencil in hand, trying to understand and work out a means of perception that renders the past comprehensible to our present.

Of course, as readers of texts that have been in circulation, albeit intermittently and narrowly, since their conception, we are not the first to enter this textual space. Our interpretative path to the text necessarily passes over the sharpened and splintered pencils of previous literary critics. In this sense, as Charles Martindale has persuasively argued, the object of investigation is inevitably not only the materiality of the text but, more widely, "all-the-forces-that-moulded-the-text-plus-its-reception" (1993.54). In other words, our object of concern is not merely the textual space itself, the room that Mr. Jones finds himself in, but also the planning that went into its architecture and the previous explorations of others.

Interpretation is thus a densely overdetermined business where our encounters with the text form a site of contestation between past and present motivated textual constructions and decodings. In such an interpretive arena, there is a veritable cacophony of competing discursive claims, synchronic and diachronic, to greet the critic. In the case of texts that have attained canonical or classic status, this situation is particularly intense, for as Martindale has also noted, a "classic" is "a text whose 'iterability' is a function of its capacity . . . for continued re-appropriation by readers" (1993.28). Thus "classic" texts facilitate the motivated interpretations of their readers in an on-going historical process through which the accretion of disparate critical analyses serves to bolster the reputation of the work rather than ultimately decode its potential meaning.

In this manner, the longevity of the appeal of the elegiac corpus resides in the potential polyvalence of the meaning of the literary language that is inscribed in its history and its continuing capability to respond to, and illuminate, the questions and imperatives that have been, are, and will be brought to it by various historically and culturally motivated interpretative strategies. One might, therefore, consider the relationship between canonical texts and interpretative critics to be a symbiotic process whereby both literary product and reader/reading method are validated as the text is confirmed as a site of continuing relevance, and the strategy of approach is confirmed as adding something to our knowledge of the work.

In a recent collection on Roman elegy, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter have argued that the study of elegy has shifted in recent times from "positivist and new critical approaches" to readings influenced by the paradigms of "feminism and poststructuralism" (1999.403). Supported by the readings of the contributors, the editors have cogently argued that "the aporetical nature of elegy . . . is systematic, and that any attempt to reduce the genre to a more easily resolvable set of interpretative problems necessarily involves a misreading of the polyvalent discourses out of which these texts are constructed" (1999.446). Thus the way forward in elegiac studies is presented as a form of epistemic rupture with past paradigms of interpretation. The Mr. Jones of the present, when confronting the apparently naked expression of an elegiac poet, uses a different epistemic sharpener in the hope that a lead thus tempered will stand the test of...