What fascinates me and I think all the work here promises to give us a better angle on is a set of apparent aporias closely shared between classics and biblical studies. These used to go under the name of the Homeric Question but could equally have been called the Mosaic Question. Four are most striking: Multicultural works Scholars agree on the internal diversity of early Greek and Hebrew literature, indicating a variety of locales and variant versions. For example: “The Homeric epics we have are products of different cultures, different audiences, and often competing linguistic, political, and class ideologies over time. They are not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.” Multilocal works Both early Hebrew and Greek literature have local allusions being forged (in both bland and pointed sense) into unity, as in the constantly shifting tribes of Israel (with the earliest list in Judges not even including the later dominant Judah), the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah retroactively reimagined as one “Israel,” or multiple Greek sites later assimilated under a panhellenic “Athens.” A Mostly Undocumented Formation, the period of which spans from the early to late first millennium BCE Mediterranean. Both within a rough 800-300 year timeframe of undocumented preclassical/precanonical (where the Judean exile and the Peisistratid period represent an early cutoff for many though not all scholars) The Problem of Monumentalization and Nationalization. Was the Peisistratean Recension a charter myth or a historical event? By contrast what is the legacy of the once dominant, then lost and exiled kingdom of Israel in Judah’s bible, which narrates the story of a primordial people of Israel retroactively, in a language variety we know they never spoke? If the texts are inherently multicultural in origin, why do they exert such a gravitational pull after their canonization (or through it) towards homogeneity? Named after two of the prime sites of their homogenization, the contrast between ‘Athens’ vs ‘Jerusalem’ has become a rigid philosophical paradigm, opposing reason to revelation and critical inquiry to religious inspiration. Can we turn this abstract antinomy into an open historical question?
These are agreed on facts supported by the past two centuries of research in our respective fields but together they seem to do nothing so much as undermine and work against the reasons we are usually given for valuing them as classics or canon. Biale offers a way that we could see taking these accepted discoveries and revaluing them, asking new questions that tell a new story–a counterhistory as a way to reintegrate these questions. He describes it with respect to the study of Jewish mysticism, which was famously understood before Scholem as ‘the history of nonsense’ and after Scholem as perhaps the hidden unifying theme of the history of Jewish culture.
“I shall call Scholem’s historical method of unearthing the “hidden virtue” from the traditional histories of Judaism of the 19th century “‘counter-history.” I mean by this term the belief that the true history lies in a subterranean tradition that must be brought to light,…as Walter Benjamin spoke of “brushing history against the grain.” Counter-history is a type of revisionist historiography, but where the revisionist proposes a new theory or finds new facts, the counter-historian transvalues old ones. He does not deny that his predecessors’ interpretation of history is correct, as does the revisionist, but he rejects the completeness of that interpretation: he affirms the existence of a “mainstream” or “establishment” history, but believes that the vital force lies” in something beneath the surface.
As a preliminary hint at guidance I am going to suggest two factors that emerge from these papers. The first is the persistent—and for the philologist, infuriating—essential feature of our source material of appearing with many voices and in many versions. This is best known to us when we encounter the variants in separate performances, traditions, or manuscripts, from the oral “composition in performance” envisioned for Homer by Parry and Lord to the creative rewriting we encounter in early biblical manuscript traditions. But it rises to a positive cultural value in the drive towards variation in performance and creativity that the Medievalist Paul Zumthor identified as “mouvance.” And it reaches its most puzzling and for me fascinating extreme in the presentation of simultaneous variants of a melody or plot, known in music theory as heterophony, a “folk music” value which we can identify in both Mesopotamian and Hebrew philology.
Similarly, I am fascinated by the way that none of the elements in these works closely connected with the Iron Age or earlier seem to belong to any one unified culture. From the major work of historical narrative in Judahite Hebrew, whose earliest tribal list conspicuously omits Judah, to the suspiciously local elements of Home and Hesiod, they seem to be alien artifacts that were later assimilated into a uniform, nationalized culture. This is true even, or perhaps especially, of the later traditions that claim to continue them—the continuity between biblical Priestly ritual and language, the ritual language and assumptions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and those of the Rabbis that later claim them is far more tenuous and improvised than the later cultural nationalist histories of Jewish thought would admit.
This suggests the possible unifying elements of counterhistory within our aporias, the data that supposedly undermine or deconstruct the clean, unified picture of classic and canon. This is what I think of as their mulit-voiced quality, not yet finished pieces but a series of encounters and works that do not yet belong to any one culture, yet precisely because of this quality of polyphony and mobility lived beyond the monopoly of any one culture or power.
sethlsanders 