Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist by Ellwood Wiggins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist by Ellwood Wiggins Eleanor ter Horst Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist. By Ellwood Wiggins. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. Pp xvii + 319. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-1684480371. Ellwood Wiggins’s study of anagnorisis in ancient and modern texts encourages us to examine anew a term from Aristotle’s Poetics that has been extensively analyzed and explicated by literary theorists and philosophers, thus performing the very action (re-cognition, or knowing again) that it takes as the object of its observations. Indeed, the relationship between performance and anagnorisis is the major focus of the book, with Wiggins inviting the reader to view recognition not as a singular event in time, but as a process involving the give-and-take of improvised performance between two people. Wiggins uses key terms from Aristotle’s definition of anagnorisis to structure his book, which draws parallels between ancient Greek (primarily Homer’s Odyssey) and modern (Shakespeare as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German) texts’ exploration of concepts such as “the self (to auto),” “change (metabolē),” “knowledge (gnōsis),” “friendship (philia),” and “fortune (tukhē).” Part 1 of the book involves the ancient world and texts, part 2 the modern. All of these key terms appear in Aristotle’s brief but cryptic definition of anagnoris (Poetics II, 1452a, 29–31), which Wiggins translates thus, “Recognition, just as the name itself signifies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, into either friendship or enmity, among those bound for good or bad fortune” (21). Throughout the book, Wiggins displays an impressive command of ancient Greek, and shows a sensitivity to Aristotle’s syntax and use of language. While the term “the self (to auto)” is not to be found in this passage of the Poetics (the word, “tounoma,” which Wiggins translates as “the name itself” would be more literally translated simply as “the name”), Wiggins does provide an illuminating analysis of Plato’s use of the term to auto (“the self” or “the same”) in the Alcibiades. Wiggins’s ability to read ancient Greek as well as modern German- and English- language texts in the original languages enables him to draw significant parallels between ancient and modern modes of representation. Many of his detailed textual analyses yield original insights. For example, he shows how the character of Penelope in the Odyssey is essentially illegible to other characters, as well as to the readers of the epic: we are unable to discern when and how she recognizes Odysseus. Wiggins’s claim is that the opaqueness of Penelope’s knowledge and motives is key to understanding how both literary interpretation and the evaluation of other humans operate: an interpretation is both necessary and elusive. His readings of modern texts, like Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and [End Page 605] “Glückliches Ereignis,” and Kleist’s Penthesilea, are also original, convincing, and based on analysis of passages and key terms in the texts. One of his more surprising claims is the paradox that recognition is a process involving a theatrical performance of one’s identity for another, and thus includes an element of deception. Wiggins elucidates this claim with respect to the long process of testing and role-playing that occurs between Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey following the wanderer’s homecoming. He discerns a similar process at work in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, in the shifting interactions between Thoas and Iphigenie, which depend on her playing a variety of roles with respect to him, from object of his erotic desire to friend to daughter, in order to elicit his permission for the Greeks to depart, and his final, opaque pronouncement, “Lebt wohl.” Like Aristotle himself, Wiggins ventures beyond literary analysis into areas such as political theory and ethics. A key concept for this multidisciplinary venture is the term “friendship (philia),” which Wiggins uses to make a distinction between ancient Greek and Christian ethics. For ancient Greeks, ethical behavior involved helping one’s friends and doing harm to one’s enemies, while Christian ethics requires forgiveness of one’s foes. Wiggins...