The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer's Odyssey Book

Charles Martindale is not an iconoclast, but he writes under the impression that he is one. In terms of classical studies, I guess he is. Martindale's greatest contribution to the world of Classics is his untiring caterwauling about the importance of the hermeneutics of reception, an actuality that Classicists'for a few reasons, I suppose'acknowledge taciturnly, but ignore cantankerously. Centuries have been spent flagellating the Classics into the narrow focus they held in the mid-twentieth century. The grammars created by the Renaissance heroes increasingly replaced classical curriculum; reading comprehension for early Latin students'even today'is less important than identifying an ablative of time in which vs. an ablative when. A few decades ago, as Latin enrolment numbers began dwindling, departments started pedalling Latin as a language worth learning because of its centuries of tradition: the language of Newton! of Copernicus! of Europe! And yet, Classical Latin as we conceive it existed for just over 100 years. Anything beyond Flavian epic was "Late Antique" and specialised. The Golden Age of Rome was the only age of Rome. I don't think it's contentious to say that Classicists began mummifying their field at the same twentieth-century juncture that other fields deconstructed themselves. Interdisciplinarity was the new norm; the names we all know (and kind of tire of hearing) such as Althusser, Derrida, Barthes, and Batailles'all of whom developed new methods of reading'were considered barbaric: "We won't read the Classics that way. New Criticism's reign of terror won't enter our discipline."

Enter Martindale; by his name, principally, the University of Bristol became the Alexandria of interdisciplinarity. His weaving of literary theory and reception into the field of Classics wasn't revolutionary, but his finger-wagging at schools who shunned these hermeneutics of reception was. Redeeming the Text collects his ideas in one tidy, thin volume. Today it seems outmoded. The frustration Martindale feels, I think, was more understandable in 1991. How much yelping had to happen for Classics to come out of the ivory tower? If you've read 20th-century-theory in even the most cursory of anthologies, you'll find nothing new here, but the beauty of Martindale's argument is great fun. He's structured the thing around Eliot's "Four Quartets." It's kind of hubristic, actually. His continual use of the feminine pronoun with reference to an unknown gender is great. Everything about it is a middle-finger to people who probably get offended by middle-fingers.

Unfortunately, the book has a target audience that probably isn't listening. When I propose projects on reception, to my perennial frustration, I still find myself arguing with the powers that hold the purse strings. "Is this a Classics project…or a 20th-century poetry project?" "Is this truly about Aeolic poetry? You know the Lesbian poets knew nothing about linguistic relativity." Perhaps there is still reason to yell at classicists about the necessity of interdisciplinarity. This book is lucid, but not fresh (if you've ever spent time in other humanities schools); important, but not unique; fervid to a fault, really. I really wish I could have drinks with Charles Martindale. I hope I get to. He's such a puck.