Anonymous: Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library (review)

This is a book whose dust jacket must not be discarded by librarians, and not only because on it one of their own number is portrayed in a style that instantly reveals the artist as the great Arcimboldo; it must be preserved because, by naming the author as Erik Gunderson, it sets up a creative tension with the first title page, which reduces him to the status of editor and proclaims the author to be "Anonymous," evidently not resting on his laurels after the success of Primary Colors. The second title page concurs, but (above the portrait of a nocturnal owl) changes the subtitle to Un roman historique du futur antérieur, that is to say the tense of j'aurai fait, je serai venu, known in English as the future perfect. Are we then to share in the exciting events of March 8, 1167, when certain men of Bergamo swore they would have imposed this oath on the rest by the octave of Easter (April 15): habebo factos facere hoc sacramentum, thereby paving the way for the Lombard League against the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa? No, we are in the presence of a ludic mystification, introducing a mystic ludification on the theme of Aulus Gellius, "a comic author and a lover of revelry" for whom "philology is a dance, a mystery, and a festival" (42).

Before reviewing this book, I must make two declarations: one that I have never been apprenticed to or initiated into the mystery (Homonymia be gracious) of Foucaulting and Bakhtining a text, the other that I myself have a part to play in the work, evident enough in the epigraph, which transfers the first verse of my own from the shades of Gellius to those of Domitius Insanus, and explicit in the Liber Septimus. I cannot complain of the manner in which I am treated; but I would not be accused of instantiating the proverb, manus manum lavat, or of suppressing my praises for fear of seeming so to do. To be sure, the laudations cited on the dust jacket from John Henderson and Jaś Elsner may be thought to have preempted those praises: the former not only looks for Nox Philologiae to become "one of those cult books loved by bibliophiles," but judges its "self-reflexive wit" to "capture the most thorough feat of thinking through the business of 'reading readers reading' ever attempted"; the latter finds it "a sustained jeu d'esprit of rare verve and panache" and "also perhaps the deepest and most perceptive assault on the complex world of Aulus Gellius's Noctes Atticae in modern scholarship."

Would he had not said "assault"! The word may encourage the staider-minded to translate the title as "The Death of Philology," or the spiritually inclined to invoke the Dark Night of the Soul. That would be unjust; the construction parallels rather "Night of Love," the night (in this case the lucubration, but also the παννυχίς) during which the object of the preposition is practiced; but in truth, this book is manifestly a labor of love, love no less of labor than of Gellius, if the latter be a compliment to one who finds judicious non-love in my epilogue.

There is not space here to pan the nuggets from the stream; but the reader should know that after a Praefatio, a Praefatio altera, and a Praefatio tertia, there follow the Capita rerum, namely the Latin headings prefixed to the chapters in the manner of Gellius' editions and taken from him, from others, or from the author's own litterarum penus, introducing eight books (divided into two tomes, again in the manner of editions) respectively entitled (in Tomus I) Auctoritas, Ratio, Vsus, Index Nominum uel Dramatis Personae, Index Rerum Potiorum (an index not ungrandfathered, as Aeschylus would say, of me and divided Anglice into indexes of Things, Names, Passages, Latin...