‘Against Interpretation’: Petronius and art Criticism

Abstract

For forty years a debate has raged in Petronian studies between the moralists and, for want of a better term, the anti-moralists. From Highet in the 1940's to Bacon and Arrowsmith in the 1950's and 60's, the moralists held a certain advantage. Whatever important divergences there were among these critics, all agreed on a Petronius who stood in some critical relation to his society. The dissenting voices have grown much louder of late. Ironically, the literary brilliance of Arrowsmith's New Critical reading of the Satyricon helped to turn the tide against the moralist viewpoint. The more apparent the literary sophistication of the Satyricon has become, the less willing late twentieth century readers have been to see a programmatic moral critique as its main purpose. Sullivan's view of Petronius as a ‘literary opportunist’ has come to dominate the field.With Graham Anderson's book, Eros Sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play, the retreat from the position of Highet is now complete. We have finally reached the logical, New Critical conclusion that the Satyricon is an entirely self-contained literary game without any message whatsoever; in effect we are told that, like any serious piece of literature, the Satyricon ‘should not mean, but be’. Anderson is eager to disavow ‘the unproven conviction that every work must have a message, however diffusely or perversely expressed’.