What is Deep Classics? Deep Classics (DC) is many things, but first and foremost it is perhaps two: brainchild of editor B. (in conversation with colleagues), and new direction – a new direction, the new direction? – in the field of classical reception. Coined by analogy with scientific notions of the vast or ‘deep’ abyss of time itself, DC aims to formulate a new, properly robust way of conceptualising the ways in which, and the reasons for which, we engage with Greco-Roman antiquity. Drawing on geological modelling and developing a sustained metaphor from it, the DC ‘rubric’ (p. 15) seeks to reorganise our thinking about the gestures and modes – much is made in the volume of the ‘pose’ of the Classicist – at stake in the ‘turn to antiquity’ (A. Lecznar, p. 141). In other words (with all self-reflexivity very much intended), it is interested in the ‘pastness’ of the past and in our interest in the pastness of that past.
As an approach to classical inquiry, DC thus seeks to relocate the site of interest not in antiquity itself but rather in the (f)act of reaching back towards it and, more to the point, in still doing so. The ‘still’ in the preceding sentence means not ‘even today’ (though it does also mean that) but rather ‘in spite of all’. DC aims, then, to make sense of – even to make a virtue of – the fact that we continue to pursue the study of classical antiquity against all the odds, in the face of formidable obstacles and full in the knowledge of the discipline's irreducible evidence problems. Questions about the ‘point’ of a field like Classics are thus short-circuited by foregrounding precisely these most pressing conceptual and methodological matters, inviting us instead – to borrow a phrase from J. Billings – to ‘reflect … on the gap’ itself (p. 50); on depth, on distance, on Derridean différance. Indeed, if required to sum up the collection in three words, we might borrow from the London Underground and say: ‘Mind the gap’. Cynics will say that this is simply making a virtue out of necessity; others will see it as enterprising, even paradigm-shifting. Moreover, though self-presenting in both (sub)title and introduction as above all an ‘intervention’ in the domain of classical reception (p. 15), its most powerful message is as a meta-disciplinary stocktake of the field of Classics itself.
The volume – the first full-scale publication to arise from the flagship conference of the same name held in Bristol in November 2014 – consists of sixteen pieces by an international (albeit, at least in an institutional sense, overwhelmingly Anglo-American) group of scholars. It is, for the most part, cleanly copy-edited: I noticed ten typos (plus a few inconsistencies), along with a couple of items cited in footnotes (e.g. footnote p. 203; n. 5 p. 308) missing from the bibliography. The collection is buttressed at the beginning by a hat-trick from the editor: acknowledgements, introduction and B.’s own contribution (pre-circulated to participants in advance of the volume's preparation), which together serve to anchor the collection, providing discussion of DC's development and – if one reads the collection sequentially – a lens through which to understand what follows. What follows is a series of diverse and absorbing chapters ranging in form from narrow(er)-focus case studies (e.g. M. Payne, S. Nooter) to wide-focus meditations on the state of the field. The pieces are thoughtful, often provocative, always thought-provoking. Subjects range from familiar ground to more unexpected areas: no fewer than three pieces feature ‘ghost’ in the title – E. Richardson's contribution points to particularly intriguing ramifications – suggesting that the spirit world is well equipped to thematise the same concepts of liminality, metalepsis and vertiginously telescopic time that the overarching geological metaphor also aims to render. Along with the pastness of the past, the volume is very interested in the many ways that the past exists in, or coexists with, the present. Indeed, one might say that one of the collection's major objectives – or outcomes – is the rehabilitation of the term ‘anachronism’: a charge often levelled at classical reception studies by its detractors, here redeemed and re-appropriated in the most positive and powerful sense. Instructive reflections on the material-cultural dimension (S.A. Frampton, A. Purves, H. Slaney), meanwhile, serve to destabilise our relationship with the book even as we hold it. Indeed, the volume as a whole has a perhaps above-averagely high incidence of what B. terms ‘“aha!” moment[s]’ (p. 32): moments when one feels a new vista open up, a new neural connection made and, even if only fleetingly, that one really does understand what it is all about.
But what is it all about? What, to re-pose the question, is DC? Is it a model, a manifesto, a metaphor? A method, a state of mind? Anyone hoping for a clear-cut answer by the end will, however, be disappointed, for no single unifying principle or coherent set of practices emerges from the collection. On the contrary, there would seem to be as many deep classicists as there are contributors (though a few ‘exemplary’ ones – nineteenth-century thinker John Addington Symonds, Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, even the Homeric Achilles – are offered by B. and by L. Jansen in the important pair of chapters with which the volume is bookended). Contributors range widely across not only topics and timeframes but also theory and methodology, from comparatism to psychotropism to queer unhistoricism (this last in the chapter by S. Matzner, one of the volume's most incisive and well-conceived contributions). Perhaps in the end, then, DC is best understood as a mode. The collection would thus function as a series of sixteen experiments in the nature of this ‘mode’; there are even – I refer again to the chapter by Matzner – experiments in discursive form itself. With perhaps one or two exceptions, the authors have made valiant efforts to engage seriously with the DC ‘rubric’ and to wrestle creatively, cerebrally and, to a significant extent, self-consciously – the volume's high levels of self-awareness (the pieces by B. Holmes and J. Katz are paradigmatic in this regard) is one of its most attractive features – with what it means to ‘do’ DC.
On the one hand, of course, eclecticism and experimentalism count among the volume's greatest strengths. However, when the aim of consulting the collection is specifically to discern, and perhaps to learn, the modalities of this freshly formulated approach, things become more difficult. The proof, then, will come in the replicability. Even after reading the collection cover-to-cover, even after so many ‘aha!’ moments, I must confess that, if setting out to engage in my own ‘DC-style’ venture, I would still not be wholly sure how to go about it. DC's elasticity is thus also its area of greatest vulnerability, and the collection is at its most unstable at those points when it is not entirely clear how, or that, the work of a given contributor is – save for perhaps a few puns on depth crowbarred in – very much different from what they would have written anyway. The major problem in terms of replicability is that the volume's own objectives on this front are not clearly articulated, with the work (or, rather, its editor) surprisingly cagey about the nature of its pretensions. On the one hand, the volume is emphatically not a ‘forward-looking programmatic manifesto’ (p. 16). On the other, it can hardly be anything but: it certainly does not mean to close the conversation (cf. p. 18). Indeed, B.’s own reference to the ‘set of practices’ which readers may, ‘going forward’, deem ‘worth … embracing’ (p. 17) suggests that there are certain principles which a receptive reader is supposed to be able to derive and implement. However, in its pains to avoid overweening statements of ambition and pretension, the precise nature of the proposition remains, in the end, oddly inscrutable.
On one level, then, one comes away from the collection in some senses none the wiser; in others, nothing if not enriched. As with A. Manguel's study of Homer (discussed in the introduction), while each individual ‘seam’ or chapter is certainly worth exploring, the book as a whole ‘add[s] up to a lesson more profound than that which any of them could offer singly’ (p. 2). Mind the gap.
