Two Years in a Poet

Time come for the yearly performance review: another local maximum of internal- and external-examination, nicely criss-crossed and synchronised into a dense moment of existential crisis. Every Michaelmas term (October-December) I must prove myself before a jury of the wise. And here we go again. The script is by now set. We all know each other too well. I'll go into that room to be told what I am to be told: 'Ok Tom. Lots of ideas here. Where's the philological rigour? Where are the footnotes? Where the sly sideswipes at the historical malpractice among editors of Juvenal? Where the opinions on whether the manuscript should read 'ideas are not everything' or 'sort yourself out already' in Satire 13 verse 29? Either way, you have your work cut out for you. Mediocre at best. Next.' This merciless technocracy will sign and stamp a sample of my year's work with a 'grudgingly accept'. And I shall press on into the abyss of kindled ambition that is impossible to burn through full and proper. Cambridge extracts your already unattainably high standards through your nostrils and dangles them a nose-hair out of reach. You poke your tongue out but it gets no further than your nose. You really want to touch those standards. You wiggle your ears. You point your navel. You strain your highest moles, even allowing the mole hairs to grow beyond the prescriptions of polite society, to get there. And then you look in the mirror and see that the person with your standards in his hands looks like a piece of collapsed furniture lying in a heap of off cabbage. You laugh that you ever bought into the delusion. So begins another year of shattered confidence, regained perspective, eroded perspective, no perspective: till the death, just you and me, PhD.

PhD blues make not for the best reading matter, so I'll try and jazz this up a bit. Reasons for bitching have recently congealed; so at least I can make the pessimism edgy as possible. In addition to the predictable review annoyance, things are looking grim at present for the simple reason that I signed up to give a paper at what is sure to be the most hilarious cringefest of my life: The Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association, World's Biggest Classics Conference, Walmart of Ancient Produce (including much off cabbage). If I were stepping in as an invisible observer, documenting the strange rituals of awkward handshakes and cut-price interest exchanges in the timber-panelled hotel lobbies, I'd be feeling mighty well primed by now. But the sad fact of my moral blackening is getting me down. I'll be an observer-PARTICIPANT, and that's putting it politely. 8.30 on the last morning of the meeting, I'll be picked out of the snarling crowd and forced to crumple my own cutting-edge findings into so much shrill fart. One bespectacled octogenarian will ask me whether I think Juvenal was Really exiled to Egypt. The second and last person in the audience will fumble over a question from which I'll only be able to rescue a few key words like 'Girard' and 'theoretical model'. Then the crickets will boo, and the tumbleweeds will hiss.

What I most resent about this process, to which I voluntarily signed myself away, is the censorship (i.e. cutting and packaging an argument in concise, palatable form), and what this censorship reveals in my own empty closet. The void is the most chilling point. I have to boil down a big idea of my PhD into something like 2000 words; and in the boiling I cannot help noticing that what this all boils down to is: there is not all that much to boil down. The fairest assessment of my PhD so far - which I'm sure will be another item on the second-year review agenda - is that it looks like a series of marginal notes run together under the umbrella 'cool things I like about Juvenal'. I'm at a point where that would actually be the most descriptive and accurate title. Chapter 1 might then be 'check out these sweet verbal echoes, they're all ambivalent and shit, and they show that J was a really complicated dude and he thought loads, you could even call him a philosopher, if you changed your definition of philosophy, but then you could say that about anything couldn't you? but shh, let's just jump over that and look! some more sweet verbal echoes what does that MEAN WO?' Chapter 2 might be the same watertight principle applied to a different poem.

In the likely event that the CIA captures me, tortures me, and tries to bleed a story from me under duress, however, what am I going to say? If they ask me what I'm working on, I'll have to say in all good honesty that I don't know. And this is perhaps the most scintillating fact of my PhD thus far. Bear with me as I take you through two years in a poet. Let us dock together in his intestines, and wait patiently for the next ship out. Could be another year - so get comfy.

Lately I've been dusting off that hoary question of biography: how much of a poet's life is in his/her poetry? And does it matter? 'Biography' is a filthy word in classical literary criticism nowadays, partly due to the nature of what we're working with: exiguous 'external' evidence means it is near impossible to reconstruct even the rustiest nuts and bolts of any ancient poet's life (bar what we can extract 'internally', i.e. from their own poetry). Also - and this varies widely across the great range of poetic genres - ancient poetry tends more towards the 'conventional' and 'impersonal' as we understand it. If I can try to imagine a vox populi lifted from a banker on the central line, he would probably say 'poetry is a deeply-felt medium of self-expression: always direct, always confessional. Sell!' Even if this were a law of averages for modern poetry, ancient stuff is a whole different game: highly formalised and bowing beneath tight restrictions of genre and metre, ancient poems have a habit of looking far more 'literary', as if the poet self-constructed from encounters in the library, and got nothing out of 'the world'. The artificial choice between biographical and literary interpretation is always hovering in front of the critic, especially when it comes to the more (relatively) personal genres of ancient poetry such as lyric. Two explanatory impulses when reading a Horatian Ode, for example: 1. Horace really was prompted to write this poem about a love affair he was having at the time. 2. Horace was reading a similar poem by some Greek and wanted to play around with his own imitative exercise. More specifically, same problem with Catullus 51: a love poem seemingly as sincere as anything this guy ever wrote, but we just happen to have the original Sappho of which the poem is a fairly close translation. Ok, so 'I love you' is always iterative, always a quotation - what of it? Quotations mean the most because they've been said the most times; and if there's one thing we classical scholars like, it's a good pile-up of quotations.

Orthodox now is to suppress any mention of 'biography' for fear of the never-ending hermeneutic knots it gets us all into - after all, many 'biographies' of ancient poets, often travelling down the centuries as the frayed ribbon around the poet's packaged corpus, look like no more than a feeble effort to reassemble the poet's life from fragmentary details in his work. And if you then reapply that same biography to interpretation of the work - well, madame/sir, have fun with your happy twirling. That is a very nice dance you have choreographed there. But on the other hand, chanting 'death of the author' stops no one being fascinated with the biographical conditions of literary production. One of the pet questions of the author interviewer worldwide is: 'how autobiographical is this bit?' We take it as read that novels, for example, are invariably 'based on' some kind of direct authorial experience. And thanks to Freud, even the remotest flight of imagination can always be replanted in the scum of autobiography and authorial psychology. A friend in English was telling me about a conference she attended on Joseph Conrad in Poland, the major refrain of which was that we need to start taking account of Conrad's Polishness in order to understand his work fully. Conrad never really mentions Poland in his texts; indeed, he seems to have gone out of his way to suppress any hint of Polishness (as I myself am still doing, 150 years after my Polish ancestors suddenly became Australian). No matter though. Absence is revealing as presence, concealment as revelation. That bit of sea he describes in Nostromo is, fact, directly based on that bit of sea he saw as a six year old child hanging at the Baltic.

So if biography continues to be one of the major ways in which we make sense of an author - even in the academy, which is always quick to smug out that it knows better - my favourite part of my poet Juvenal, and the one that makes him most difficult to anchor whenever I want to get him to shake hands with other friends, is the complete, utter, impenetrable darkness surrounding his authorial self. Roman satire, Juvenal's genre of choice, built itself on one of the strongest reality claims of any ancient poetry. Horace confesses to us in his own confessional satires that the canonical founder of the genre, Lucilius, transcribed his whole life onto the page - no editing, genital warts and all. And certainly, what makes satire seem so real, so autobiographical, is it's striking exposure of the poet's dirty bits, or, as we say in the factory, the 'bodily lower stratum': in Horace's Satire 1.5, for instance, we get a glance at Horace going to sleep after an abortive sexual encounter and waking up in a puddle of his own semen after a wet dream. Safe bet to win any teenage boy over to Latin literature, even one that is stuck in the body of a 26-yr-old man. But then my man Juve-daddy comes along and says: 'you ain't seen nothing yet, for the precise reason that you ain't gonna see me ever.' His mode is absolute eschewal of autobiographic or bodily revelation. Like some sort of hooded magician, he makes the self disappear beneath the thunderous cloud of his words. J aims for the voice of the crowd, the anonymous tail that could be pinned to any donkey you care to name. It's hard not to write satire, as he says in his opening barrage; these words could be the work of Quintus up on the Palatine as much as Furius down in the burbs. Muffling the identifiable mouth, he fans out to become the disembodied loudspeaker of Rome.

'So you like him because he's mediocre!' pipes up a voice from the contemporary crowd. Well, I like him because mediocrity is his main bid for survival. Bear in mind that in a competitive elite culture obsessed with literary immortality, everyone in Rome is trying to get their name on the good stuff. Horace confidently declares he has constructed a monument more lasting than bronze, and will live forever accordingly, thank you very much. Ovid blasts out positive predictions on the fame trumpet: after his own death, the better part (his own poetry) will survive. Authors of epic, that most impersonally grand of ancient genres, can't help attaching poetic signatures to the work that authenticate the product: 'I wrote this, yes I did - I, Spurius the Boring.' Chronologically closer to J, a poet called Martial starts making a name for himself in the genre of epigram - small pieces of a few lines length, usually containing a wimpy joke at the end. But attending him is the constant paranoia of plagiarism and misattribution, the fear of other poets stealing his stuff and passing it off as their own, or branding their own execrable poop with his priceless name. Assertion of authorial identity is one big rat-race.

But then the late great J bursts onto the scene and screams the deliciously thick paradox 'I don't want to be noticed.' No autograph. No name. The only strict autobiographical information he releases in his first satire is 'I had a rhetorical education' and 'I shaved my beard for the first time once.' Every elite Roman worth their salt had a rhetorical education and shaved their beard for the first time once. So that autobiography is no autobiography at all - or rather, it is the biography of a whole people soaked in depersonalised 'culture'. So J enters a street of literary kebab shops wherein everyone is furiously claiming, plugging and defending his own garlicky poetic property - and suddenly says 'I'm gonna look and sound like all of plural You.' An ambitious claim itself, if ever I couldn't see one.

J also blended into a societal background where self-effacement was a strategy for survival. Imperial Rome enjoyed its safety in numbers; best not to stand out in a political pool that only allowed one stand-out figure, the emperor himself. Satirists ancient and modern are quick to overplay the danger of the game: when you verbally attack people by name, watch out for the reprisals. It's the fashion in literary criticism to smirk at these assertions of the perilous precipice on which the satirist always thinks s/he is tottering. But J's blurry anonymity speaks to me in the clearest tones of what it meant to be a poet writing under an authoritarian regime. Hiding beneath Everyman was your best bet. The path to personal immortality was diverted and perverted into multiple reroutes through the generic. After two years in a poet, I still don't know who he is. But I'm beginning to appreciate the merits of an unrecognisable genius, the more I fail to see him.*





*Word to James Uden's (big kid at my school, now blazing the trail of Juvenalian studies way ahead of me; at least it's also fashionable to be late) recent thesis 'The Invisibility of Juvenal' for helping me see that darkness more sharply. Have a read here if I've piqued you some.