BMCR 2009.05.25: Uhlig on Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry. Corrected and with new material. First edition published in 1972

Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry.
Corrected and with new material. First edition published in 1972.  Ann
Arbor:  Michigan Classical Press, 2007.  Pp. ix, 336.  ISBN
978-0-9799713-1-0.  $65.00.

Reviewed by Anna S. Uhlig, Princeton University ([email protected])
Word count:  1863 words
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The reissue of Francis Cairns' Generic Composition in Greek and Roman
Poetry last year in a "revised edition" from Michigan Classical Press
(on which, see below) offers a reminder of how the field of Classics
has changed in the thirty- five years since the book first appeared.

Generic Composition is divided into two main sections, the first,
"Genres and Topoi," establishes the conceptual framework of Cairns's
thesis and the second, "The Constructive Principles of Genre,"
explicates the mechanisms through which generic categories become
actual poems. Cairns's basic argument, set out with clarity in the
book's first chapter, is "that the whole of classical poetry is written
in accordance with the sets of rules of the various genres, rules which
can be discovered by a study of the surviving literature itself and of
the ancient rhetorical handbooks dealing with this subject." (p. 31)
After a generally favorable initial reception, Generic Composition has
been the object of a remarkable amount of criticism from numerous
perspectives and with varying objectives. To better understand this
criticism it is helpful, therefore, to delineate the three main areas
of study which Cairns seeks to marry in his overarching thesis:
rhetorical theory of the Imperial period (in particular Menander
Rhetor), genre theory, and "the whole" of classical poetry.

It is in the last area, the collective assessment of more than one
thousand years of Greek and Latin poetry from throughout the
Mediterranean, that the earliest, and most persuasive, criticism of
Cairns emerged. The extremity of Cairns's disregard for diachronic
change is best expressed by Cairns's "now notorious claim" that "in a
very real sense antiquity was in comparison with the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries a time-free zone." (p. 32).[[1]] Cairns is happy to
place Sappho and Horace in parallel analysis with almost no
acknowledgement of the differing periods and contexts in which these
poems were composed. Few of us share this view of the corpus of ancient
literature as a group of homogenized, transposable texts, and rightly
so. Indeed, in their introduction to the influential volume Matrices of
Genre, Depew and Obbink identify one of their main aims, in direct
response to Cairns, as an examination of "how the recognition and
conceptualization of genres changed from Archaic Greece to Augustan
Rome."[[2]]

Cairns seems to have anticipated this objection to his historical
flattening and he devotes a substantial amount of space to the idea of
generic "development" in ch.  2, but his primary concern is to show
that this "development" should not be understood in terms of increasing
sophistication. Offering examples of the syntaktikon (a speech
delivered on leaving a city) from Homer via Solon, Sophocles, Catullus,
and Juvenal and ending with Rutilius Namatianus, Cairns's only
concession to extra-textual historical factors is the claim that the
final example, though later than Menander, "is a pagan syntaktikon that
does not contain material of the kind which entered the genre in the
Christian period." (p. 47) More significantly, in focusing so closely
on the syntaktikon, he takes no account of the formal characteristics
found in the text framing the various passages under consideration-
such as the fact that Philoctetes' speech is delivered within the
wholly dialogic frame of tragedy while the Homeric speech is framed by
narration. However, while the basic premise--that diachronic change in
ancient poetry is relatively insignificant--is clearly untenable, there
is more subtlety, and more truth, to Cairns's position than is often
conceded. That the texts under consideration all exhibit a striking
structural similarity in formulating their syntaktika (whether or not
one chooses to use this specific term) is undeniable and this
similarity across such a wide historical and geographic range demands
some explanation. By approaching the question in purely formal terms,
Cairns nicely reflects how the same basic poetic tool-kit was employed
by Greek and Latin poets throughout classical antiquity and avoids an
artificial delimitation of the poetic horizon to our extant sources,
as, for instance, the intertextual approach is prone to do.

The question of Cairns's historical perspective cannot be fully
addressed without an examination of just what he means by the term
"genre," and this takes us into what appears to be the most complex,
yet is in fact the most straightforward, of the three areas implicated
in Cairns's thesis. In the years since Generic Composition first
appeared, genre has become the order of the day in Classical literary
criticism. Great developments in genre theory and the influence of
performance studies have brought an increased sophistication to our
understanding of the importance of genre in the ancient world. But even
by the standards of 1972, the concept of genre presented in Generic
Composition "flies in the face of modern usage," to quote the
time-traveling Alessandro Barchiesi.[[3]] When Cairns speaks of "genre"
and "generic composition" he is referring only to "classifications in
terms of content," not formal categories of poetry such as "epic,
lyric, elegy, or epistle." (p. 6) Cairns himself recognized the
potential for confusion in his peculiar usage of the term genre, and
confusion has indeed ensued. For what Generic Composition in fact
presents is a Propp-like morphology of the ancient poem, categorizing
the shared components out of which poems of diverse formal genres are
constructed and analyzing the transformation and manipulation of these
component parts in the hands of "generically sophisticated" poets.
Cairns does not consider poetic works in their entirety, and thus, as
noted above, he is uninterested in the text and context in which any
instance of a "genre" is located. That is, he treats neither the
essentializing, metadiscursive concept of genre nor the contextually
rooted formulation of generic status embedded in individual poems. It
is therefore unsurprising that so many scholars define their own
understanding of ancient genre in opposition to Cairns, as his project
is decidedly not about what most people think of when they think of
genre, whatever one's particular view of genre may be.

But if Cairns is not concerned with genre as the term is generally
understood, neither is he wholly a historian of rhetoric, as his strong
reliance on the theoretical works of Menander Rhetor might suggest.
Turning to this last element of Cairns's thesis, it is important to
note from the outset that Cairns employs rhetorical theory in
conjunction with other sources (genre is revealed through "a study of
the surviving literature itself and of the ancient rhetorical
handbooks"). Cairns readily acknowledges in his chapter on generic
categories that not all genres are rhetorical, and even rhetorical
genres are not always identified in the ancient theoretical treatises.
Cairns draws his theory of genre from the Imperial rhetoricians, but he
takes this structure to reflect a truth about all ancient poetry, a
truth which is not qualified by the specific e/poque in which he finds
it best articulated. His choice of Menander Rhetor as his guide is
influenced by a certain longe-dure/e sensibility (a reaction to "the
anachronistic applications of the out-of-date critical techniques of
other fields" p. 31) but is not, strictly speaking, historical. This
straddling stance has also landed Cairns in some hot water. Granting
that one is willing to accept a metadiscursive articulation of ancient
poesis, Cairns's position satisfies neither those, such as Heath, who
would seek the ancient interpretive model most proximate to their
object of study, nor again those, like Feeney, who reject the idea that
one should necessarily prefer ancient literary theory over modern. Once
again, the historical premise on which the project is based, the near
uniformity of "the whole of classical poetry," leaves Cairns with few
defenders.

The central position of Menander Rhetor in Cairns's formulation of his
theory of ancient genre has also brought Generic Composition into the
purview of students of ancient rhetoric, although, as already noted,
Cairns is not himself principally concerned with the history of
rhetorical theory. In fact, when Generic Composition first appeared it
was included in a thematic review of five books on ancient rhetoric in
the 1974 Journal of the History of Ideas.[[4]] But here too, Cairns's
repurposing of Imperial rhetorical theory to explain the poetry of the
preceding thousand years has led critics of all stripes to object that
Cairns misrepresents a text whose primary purpose is instruction in
epideictic oratory, and which is conditioned by the cultural milieu in
and for which it was composed.

With all of this theoretical tumult arising from Cairns's articulation
of his methodology, it is easy to forget that Generic Composition has a
second part, devoted to close readings of Cairns's ancient genres in
action. Here Cairns explores the dynamics of "inversion," "reaction,"
"inclusion," "speaker-variation," and "addressee-variation," the
mechanisms through which Cairns's genres of content are manipulated by
skilled poets, in five respectively named chapters. Often the language
of normative models and divergence therefrom can give the analysis a
mechanical feel, as though it were literary analysis by-the-numbers,
but Cairns's real aim in this comparison with an imaginary normative
exemplar is to expose, and thus enjoy, the artistry with which the
genres are adapted and transformed in the poets' hands, as when he
shows how the multiple characters and variant speakers in Theocritus
Idylls 6 and 7 exploit the standard scenario of a komos (the excluded
lover's song). Bracketing the question of whether Theocritus or his
audience would have been aware of this "deviation" from the model, the
reading points up much that is compelling in these sophisticated
shepherds' songs.

Finally, a note about the reissue by Michigan Classical Press. The
volume is advertised as a "revised edition," "corrected and with new
material," but differs little from the first edition, published by
Edinburgh University Press in 1972. The pagination remains the same
with typographical errors adjusted in the text and a handful of addenda
listed on p. ix. In addition, Cairns has appended a postscript (p.
333-6) in which he briefly reappraises the book and offers a
bibliography of his subsequent work on genre.

Despite the general similarity between the first and second edition,
the appearance of the latter is to be welcomed not least as one of the
maiden publications of the newly formed imprint. According to their
press statement MCP is a private press based in Ann Arbor with an
editorial board composed of senior faculty at the University of
Michigan "undertaking to publish important scholarly research in the
fields of classical antiquity, classical philology, and ancient
history." Until now the production consists of three second editions
(including Generic Composition) and an English translation of Franco
Ferrari's Sappho's Gift: The Poet and Her Community (Una mitra per
Kleis: Saffo e il suo pubblico), and more new titles are planned for
the future. The foundation of a new publishing venture for scholarly
work, one which seems to have found a viable business model, at a time
when so many presses are drastically limiting production is indeed
heartening. The quality of the Generic Composition volume, which I have
been thumbing over for a few too many months, is excellent; a well made
hardback, nicely printed on sturdy, acid-free paper with a sewn binding
at a lower price than is charged for many print-on-demand paperbacks,
and proceeds from sales are in part contributed to charitable funds
under the direction of the APA. What's not to love?


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Notes:


1.   Feeney, D. "Criticism Ancient and Modern" in Ethics and Rhetoric
D. Innes, H. Hine, and C. Pelling (eds.) Oxford 1995, p. 303.

2.   Depew, M. and D. Obbink, (eds.) Matrices of Genre: Authors,
Canons, and Society Cambridge 2000, p. 6.

3.   Barchiesi, A. "The Crossing" in Texts, Ideas, and the Classics S.
J. Harrison ed. Oxford 2001, p. 150.

4.   North, H. F. "Ancient Salt: The New Rhetoric and the Old" Journal
of the History of Ideas, Vol. 35, No. 2, (Apr. - Jun., 1974), pp.
349-356.