Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I’m going to start by throwing down the gauntlet. You teach classics at Cambridge – in these recession-hit times, when students are struggling to get work, is a degree in classics still relevant?
Well, it depends what you think education is for. There’s a terrible tendency for the present government and some mums and dads to see university as some kind of professional training. Of course, there are some excellent subjects like that – say, medicine and law. But for me university is all about training the brain. With classics you are studying so many things, philosophy, archaeology, language, all of which help you in almost any job you want to go for. I know I would say that, but classics is inherently interesting and absolutely relevant!
Can you describe what your first book, The Greeks and the Irrational, is about?
This is one of the books that made me decide that classics was worth spending a lifetime on. It starts with this extraordinary anecdote which is very meaningful for many readers. Dodds was at an exhibition of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and he got talking to a schoolboy. The boy told him: “I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t really like this stuff – it’s all so rational.” Well, that got Dodds thinking about this common idea that the Ancient Greeks were all very cerebral, gliding about in white gowns. But was Greek culture so fantastically rational? So Dodds wrote the book to explore that idea.
But why should it matter to us if it is rational or not?
It mattered to me because in order to understand about us, we have to understand what was at stake in the past. What is interesting is that you can take one of the most formative intellectual cultures and show that just underneath that sparkling surface is a seething heart of irrationality that results in madness and murder. Dodds wrote this book just after the Second World War and I think one of the questions in his mind was, not just that nice encounter in the British Museum, but how could European Society have gone so mad that it did what it did. I wouldn’t say there are direct links between Hitler’s Germany and Ancient Greece but there are indirect links about where the non-rational elements are in any culture, and how they work, how you can understand them and what difference that makes.
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Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is the Classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog, A Don’s Life, which appears in The Times as a regular column. Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as “Britain’s best-known classicist”.
Now for the books of others, beginning with a look at the literature of antiquity. Tell us about ER Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational.
You asked me to list five books that continue to influence the profession. But, as I made clear to you, I'm not interested in that any more. I'm interested in the books that have influenced me and will go on influencing me – as I work and teach and write – until I die. Those books include The Greeks and the Irrational, which still has an ongoing influence on me, particularly in my study of Yeats, Hart Crane and other great poets.
The Greeks and the Irrational is an exploration of the daemon, which is Christianised and reduced to demons or devils. But the daemon was a concept, as Dodds makes beautifully clear, having to do with the creative forces in the individual, which are deeper and more pervasive than what you might want to call the mere conscious. Though it's not the unconscious in the Freudian sense, the daemon is the creative spirit. It is, as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson called it, “the God within”.
Dodds applied the psychological theories of the early 20th century to understanding Greek literature. You undertook a similar endeavour in The Anxiety of Influence. Give us a précis of the theory of literary evolution you developed in that book.
Dodds was profoundly influenced by Freud. I also was deeply influenced by Freud. And for many, many years I was writing a vast commentary on Freud called Transference of Authority. I gave it up because of the ambivalence I began to develop towards him. If I live long enough, I may go back to the manuscript, which is yellowing up in the attic. But at 81, one doesn't know how much time there is, and there are other things I'm writing and want to write.
The theory of literary evolution I developed (which is refined, broadened and made more understandable to the common reader in The Anatomy of Influence) is that literary inheritance, literary genealogy – the cavalcade that takes us from one writer to another, throughout the ages right down to the present moment – is by no means linear. It is based upon agonistic competition. I use the Shakespearean term "misprision", which is a kind of deliberate creativeness. The later work overturns an earlier work in order to get free of it. The new poem, new story, new drama or new novel is a creative misreading of the work that engendered it.
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The author of more than 40 books, Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, where he has been teaching since earning his doctorate in 1955. The theory of literary evolution he developed in his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence is considered seminal. His 1994 work Western Canon made Bloom a household name. One of America’s preeminent literary critics, Bloom has been translated into 40 languages, and is a MacArthur Prize fellow. He calls his new book, The Anatomy of Influence, his “swansong”
