In his new book Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome, classicist Tom Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time. Here, he discusses the history—and strength—of anonymous works of literature.
Back in the roaring ’20s, I. A. Richards, the plucky young father-to-be of modern literary criticism, did an experiment with his students at the University of Cambridge. He started circulating poems neat—shorn, that is, of any complementary information about who they were by, when they were written, etc.—and got his students to write responses to them. He then collated, synthesized, and analyzed everything to produce the classic book Practical Criticism (1929): an incredible snapshot of how a particular set of educated young things in 1920s Britain tended to talk about poetry.
Richards found that his flock were more or less beholden to pallid and predictable stock responses, fumbling to find any meaningful aesthetic language to formulate their experience of the “words on the page” in all their particularity. This empirical horror prompted Richards to start an educational crusade to transform students’ aesthetic sensibility. And thus—so they say—the discipline of modern English was born.
Something about this Cambridge don’s innocent little sport with anonymizing poems and probing reader response always fascinated me. I fantasized myself back into one of those classes, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed guinea pig scurrying to impress the prof: how intimidating it would have been to make something of all those high-flown yet completely unprovenanced words; how hard it would have been to face them down and pick them apart without the idea of an author or a date guiding my gut. But I also found it strange, because the poor students’ colorless responses to these poems under conditions of laboratory duress didn’t seem to do any justice to my own enthused experience of the authorless.
As a teenager, then a twenty-something wannabe intellectual with literary pretensions, I read and loved a lot of “classic” literature, and “classics” usually came with famous authors included. But some of the most moving poetry I found during these formative years, the words that really filled me up, were actually by no one. Bella Ciao, the haunting monologue of a nameless Italian partisan facing death, a poetic emblem of the anti-fascist international left, had no author; nor did the rough-and-ready rum songs of early colonial Australia cited by Robert Hughes in his gripping story of the genesis of convict colonialism, The Fatal Shore; nor, I found in the course of my university studies, did the early masterpieces called the Iliad or Odyssey, which everyone only pretended had an author called “Homer” so they could write essays on “him.”
These works were not temporarily deprived of their authors in the name of a pedagogical game, then restored to them swiftly after—as if literature without source were incomplete, licensed only for the carnival of the criticism lab. No, they never needed authors in the first place. Not only that: they were partly beautiful because they were name free, not in spite of it. The Iliad and Odyssey seemed so much bigger the moment I found out they were probably a collective product built over time, by everyone, anyone, and no one; just as Bella Ciao’s dying partisan directing their own burial under a beautiful flower floored me all the more because the song was without a single origin, indeed came already imbued with the shared mourning of a whole people, unhinged from the conditioning of the individual. Anonymity could serve the art.
And so, over time, I wanted to work out if and how the lack of name and uncertainty of date could actually help (rather than hold back) the literature of ancient Rome coming down to us under its own mysterious circumstances. Hence Author Unknown. The book treats a host of primarily anonymous literary texts from the first few hundred years of the Roman principate. For most of their history, these texts have fallen victim to a form of classical scholarship which is scared of the dark: a scholarship obsessed with resolving, or at least approximating answers to, the questions of authorship and date, as a prerequisite to handling the texts in meaningful ways. What’s more, in the kind of big-name culture of authorship we have inherited from the ancients, this anonymous literature has often been a target of simple benign neglect born of quasi-patrician snobbery: why read that two-bit unknown imitator of Virgil, when you can read VIRGIL?!
My project in Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome is an attempt at resisting this deep-set cultural habit of looking for the author and disparaging the work when one can’t be turned up. I try to redeem some of Latin literature’s minors to show that they are actually majors, many of them wonderful artifacts that depend on their anonymity to achieve certain stunning special effects. These works pack a punch because their authors will always be unknown. I. A. Richards wouldn’t have known what to do with them.
