Annotations – o pietas animi

When Henry Jocelyn reviewed Edward Courtney’s Fragmentary Latin Poets (1993) in Hermathena (1995), a major vector of complaint was Jocelyn’s perception of the capriciousness of Courtney’s selections of material in the face of a theoretical “totality.” Jocelyn begins (p53):

“The title of this book and the advertisement on the dust-jacket appear to claim that all the surviving bits of the Latin poems produced between 743 B.C. and A.D. 476 and not transmitted to ourselves entire can be found between its covers.”

A brief history of the various attempts to make editions of “fragmentary Latin poets” follows, including: Antonio Agustín (whose 16th c. collection “remained in manuscript”), Robert Estienne printed by Henri Estienne (1564); Emil Baehrens (1886), subsequently iterated by Willy Morel (1927), Karl Büchner (1982), and, soon after this review, Jürgen Blänsdorf (1995). Amidst this unfolding genealogical documentation of omissions, excisions, and expansions, Jocelyn (p53) first critiques the failed totality of Emil Baehrens’ Fragmenta Poetarum Romanorum:

“This ought to have included everything cited by surviving ancient writers from poetic works which did not survive, but Baehrens behaved somewhat wilfully.”

The critique of Baehrens’ “willfulness” prepares the way for Jocelyn’s (p54) critique of Courtney’s “personal whimsy”:

“Edward Courtney keeps the inner structure of Baehrens’ FPR but toys with the superstructure more than Morel or Buechner did. Various slips (e.g. the reference to ‘DServ.’ and ‘codd.’ in relation to Cinna, fr. 6 on p. 218; the implication of a sentence on p. 251 that the ‘codex Illyricus’ of Festus was something other than cod. Naples, Bibl. Naz. IV. A. 3) indicate a less than total grasp of the sources of the material. No clear general design emerges from the preface or from the ‘fragments’ actually included in the volume. Personal whimsy runs free.”

Of course, the idea that an authoritative scholar (or anyone, for that matter) might zero in on our “mistakes” and thereby accuse us of not knowing what we’re doing is itself deeply chilling – and in this case evidences the rootedness of our scholarly practices in a culture of honor and shame (especially shame), while also showing the human side of scholarship (even the big names make “mistakes”!). It would be fruitful here to consider Tema Okun’s identification of perfectionism as a characteristic of white supremacy culture: “mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are – mistakes”; “ making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong.” The truth is that the outgrowth (iterating, versioning, re-versioning) of these fragmentary editions is ultimately motivated by the sense that our scholarly precursors were not quite correct in their editorial selections or the overall execution of the project.

But let’s think about what it means to get this “right.” Jocelyn’s initial statement that a book called Fragmentary Latin Poets ought to contain every “bit” of “not-entire” Latin poetry from the founding of Rome to the fall of (the western half of) empire indicates an underlying desire for fragmentary editions to capture an impossible totality. And when Jocelyn found mistakes in Courtney’s work, he saw this as evidence of a “less than total grasp” of material so massive that it essentially represents a disciplinary totality. Now, Courtney himself engaged in this kind of critique of fragmentary editions, for instance in his BICS (1984) review of Morel and Büchner (p131):

“Now a revision of the work by Karl Büchner (Teubner, Leipzig 1982), has posthumously appeared, which has corrected a good few of Morel’s errors and supplemented a number of gaps. But Büchner is no more impeccable than Morel; there are still gaps and errors in what he provides.”

Courtney, then, was also engaging in some theorization of totality in addressing “gaps and errors” (via the moralizing language of scholarly “sin”). But when Courtney (p72) replied to Jocelyn’s review in Hermathena (1996), he responded to critique by pointing out the ways in which Jocelyn’s own knowledge (or, performance of knowledge) was less than “total”:

“‘The title of this book…appear(s) to claim that all the surviving bits of the Latin poems produced between 753 BC and AD 476 and not transmitted to ourselves entire can be found within its covers.’ Consider now the title of Jocelyn’s only book (I shall return to that word ‘only’ at the end), The Tragedies of Ennius, the Fragments (edited with an Introduction and Commentary). We then find with astonishment that the last 100 lines of fragmentary text are left without annotation.”

Aside from the fact that the heightened and competitive severity of tone in these discourses of review might dissuade some from entering into such “debates” at all – and thereby produce the kinds of “shadow books” theorized by Kevin Young (2012): i.e. the books that “fail” to be written – I find it significant that the question of the fragment is so wrapped up in the concept of totality. Aside from the fact that “totality” is essentially beyond human comprehension, the “fragment” describes so many different kinds of “non-entire” cultural artefact that no collection, no Borgesian “library” will ever rematerialize the totalities we have imagined. At the same time, the perception that these editions are lacking in some way (the “lack” is baked in – no amount of scholarly annotation will remedy it, although that isn’t a reason not to annotate) means that we will probably never stop iterating these editions.

The more we attempt to approach totality, the more we inscribe ourselves into the fragments. (For it is no longer a “fragment” of whatever Latin poet or poem: but Jocelyn’s or Courtney’s – right?). Indeed, that was partially Jocelyn’s point: that Baehrens’ “willfulness” showed too much of his own personality, too much of his own “will” (as opposed to some theoretically “objective” selection process); that Courtney showed too much “personal whimsy.” The concept of totality presupposed is supposedly antithetical to the personal choice of an editor – but these choices will always be “personal” to some extent, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. (Modern selectiveness meets ancient selectiveness, though: perhaps the topic for another blog post is the fact that what is fragmentary is what has undergone, in many cases, the “personal whimsy” of ancient commentators.) More can be said about what a fragmentary edition intends to convey, and about what such a work presupposes about the possibility of “collection.” If totality is the intention, though, then the fragmentary edition is – in my view, anyway – committed to a conceptual impossibility.

“Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality – collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.”
Toni Morrison (1970/2007), The Bluest Eye, p34.

One of the challenges of working on fragments, and one of the rewards, is the pervasiveness of the concept. Although admittedly I know I am particularly sensitive to the word, and always on the lookout for it – indeed, always searching for scholarship, always seeking editions, and always feverishly taking down notes in my own journals on whatever fragments I find – the term “fragment” seems to appear in everything I read, no matter what it is. As I move outside and around the concept of “classical” fragmentation, which has certain particular and technical definitions (relating to material disintegration as well as textual integration – and a tense interrelationship between the filtering of the “mainstream” and “non-orthodox”), the idea of the fragment appears consistently within discourses of alienation, marginalization, and loneliness. Since the fragment (from Latin frangere – “to break”) presupposes an act of violence (from our historical vantage often invisible violence: we don’t always know how or why something “breaks,” “breaks down,” or “is broken” – although sometimes we do), we use this word of a variety of personal experiences relating to mental environments: memories, emotions, but also internal perception of external realities.

I am trying to bridge the gap between the ceremony and monumentalizing of ancient thought via fragmentary excerpts, and the broader metaphor of fragmentation which seems to represent so much of human experience. In the passage from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye quoted above, we find a horizontal model of fragmentation which is different from the verticality of some ancient fragmentary processes (which are: quotations of quotations of quotations – Seneca (Ep. 108.34) quoting Cicero quoting Ennius, for instance). Morrison’s use of “fragment” here relates to partiality: an understanding that there is a totality of experience within each individual which simultaneously indicates the difficulty of conveying that totality – and instead of meeting “eye-to-eye” (as it were – and, indeed, the “bluest eye” represents a gaze that cannot be met), we might meet, instead, at small (and fleeting) moments of convergence. But in that meeting, there is a mutual holding: “they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.” And mutuality is fundamental to fragmentary processes: even though the fragment is often packaged as an atomized, isolated phenomenon (buttressed by rhetorics of “loss”), pieces of things come into our hands because they have been held onto: they have not traveled alone (and here we might positively cite: Ennius/Cicero/Seneca). Morrison’s conceptualization of partiality here is actually surprisingly optimistic: partiality is not simply the limits of disclosure (beyond which we “lose” something), but the meeting point. In other words, the fragment is not simply a broken thing, but a node of interconnection.

* * *

I haven’t blogged in a long time. And in the interim, some things have changed for me. My book came out. I moved to a new institution. I was tenured. After five years in Boston, I’m back in Los Angeles – where I lived as a graduate student and where I still have deep roots. Inevitably, I find myself meditating upon that time, which in some ways seems so distant (given the massive upheavals which have taken place in the interim: elections, pandemics, disciplinary ruptures) but is now – as I revisit old haunts – also so present. Moments of major change hold within them the opportunity of self-reflection: to shed old habits, and to seek greater self-alignment. When I was a graduate student, I blogged casually and didn’t overthink anything. That’s when I first started to find community on twitter, too. (Although I have a much longer personal relationship with writing and the internet – reaching back to the online forum culture of the mid 2000s.) In major ways, our online communities have changed since I’ve been a part of them – in some ways expanded, but in many ways contracted. Some of our colleagues have kept a consistent blogging practice (and I am particularly inspired by Josh Nudell). But blogging has always been a complicated thing in the context of academic currency, as we are pressured to funnel our intellectual labor into the few sacralized spaces which theoretically increase or safeguard our scholarly authority. At this point in my career, however, I want to think carefully and deeply about where and how I use my own voice. Part of this relates to how I plan my next research projects (how to study the questions and texts which I remain drawn to), and part of this relates to how I convey my thoughts to different kinds of audiences. In sum (with the hopefulness that an intermittent blogger brings to each sporadic blog post), I hope to bring new life to this space – and to rekindle a casual writing practice relating to my scholarly work.

Category: Annotations

Limits of totality; fragmentary fragilities

Bridging the gap