Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature ed. by Sebastian Matzner and Stephen Harrison

Abstract

Reviewed by: Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature ed. by Sebastian Matzner and Stephen Harrison Isaia Crosson Sebastian Matzner and Stephen Harrison (eds.). Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 320. $94.00. ISBN 978-0-19-881406-1. The starting point for Complex Inferiorities is a 1992 reflection by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: although many people claim subalternity, in protesting against the mechanics of discrimination to which they are or feel subjected, they should often consider themselves not “subaltern,” but participants in a hegemonic discourse. Whether one agrees with Spivak or not, the assumption of a weaker voice by speakers who are not forced into this position is an under-studied phenomenon in Latin literature. As Sebastian Matzner points out in his introduction, and as is ably demonstrated by the collection’s thirteen contributions, studying various Latin writers’ tendency to adopt a disempowered voice sheds new light on the (re)constitution of hierarchies of power: in ancient Rome, much as in 21st-century debates, inferiority is made to be empowering. William Fitzgerald opens the volume by detecting common strategies in Latin writers who stage a complex of inferiorities. An interesting but undeveloped claim made here is that, since the time in which postmodernists used to interpret weakness and decline in literature as tropes of laudable self-consciousness, critics have continuously struggled to make the weaker stronger, often imitating the same practice they detect in the authors they examine. The point could be pushed further: do we all (including the contributors of Complex Inferiorities) as contemporary critics tend to stage a complex of inferiority and refuse to simply back an author if s/he is perceived as inferior? If so, scholars who are well acquainted with rhetorical strategies built around notions of minority and subalternity may tend to overemphasize such notions in relation to the ancients, as postmodernists have (in this reviewer’s judgment) overemphasized certain writers’ self-conscious claim that the literature they were producing was un-golden, and hence in decline. Post-colonial inflected reading strategies inform Matzner’s interpretation of Horace’s Letter to Augustus and Amy Richlin’s study of blackface masks in Plautus’ Poenulus. Matzner clarifies the uniqueness of Rome’s complex inferiority toward Greece with a comparative (but general) description of modern colonization. Richlin, on the other hand, draws an intriguing parallel between the 20th-century American collapse of the color “black” into genealogy and the history of the Middle Passage and a similarly artificial oversimplification of “darkness” in the palliata, in which the alleged presence of blackface masks on stage evokes what is now obviously an unacceptable practice. [End Page 498] The three following essays, by Jean-Claude Julhe, Tom Geue, and Victoria Rimell, are closely interconnected and explore ways for Latin poets to reflect on shifting notions of power. Between Martial’s effort to vouch for his superiority in spite of socio-economic disadvantages (Julhe), and Phaedrus and Juvenal’s falsely modest self-erasure as the means to disparage elitist claims based on name, genealogy, and res gestae (Geue), of special interest is the middle ground propounded in the Ars Poetica (Rimell): the privileged Pisones lack such Horatian qualities as calliditas, Horace lacks what they have, and so nobody wins. Self-criticism in order to improve oneself is the only way to attain superiority, and Rimell shows that there is yet more philosophy to be discovered in the Ars. In a standalone essay, Ellen O’Gorman turns to historiography. Admirably analyzing key passages in Livy, such as the fable of the belly, to reassert Spivak, she appropriates Jacques Rancière’s idea that any sonorous emission understood as speech can be considered logos: the subaltern belly (or plebs) rumbles rather than speaking, yet prevails over the reasoning head as the ruling part of the Roman body politic. Thus the clamor of the people finds a place in hegemonic discourse. The same may be said of love elegists-turned-praecones in Dunstan Lowe’s study, which continues the reflection on empowered non- elitist social roles in the body politic (even though the relation to O’Gorman...