Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Warn Me If I Approach the Melody” HELAINE L. SMITH In the 1950s on Saturday night TV, Sid Caesar performed comic sketches for a full hour. In one sketch Carl Reiner played Edward R. Murrow interviewing Caesar as the jazz musician Progress Hornsby. At a certain point Murrow asks Hornsby, “To what do you attribute your band’s great success?” and Hornsby answers, “Well, we have special equipment that warns us if we get anywhere near the melody.” And so it must be with Nancy Worman and all those classicists who approach classics and literature as she does—special equipment to warn them whenever they get anywhere near a responsible reading of the text.* Her argument, cast in sentences whose words, like the amphisbaena, turn back on themselves or are unrecognizable as spoken or written English, boils down to (1) Greek men were colonialists and imperialists; (2) Greek tragedy celebrated men of this sort; (3) there arose, quite to the surprise and possibly to the consternation of its authors, women in their plays who were strong and violent rebels against the oppressive social order; (4) Virginia Woolf, whose feminism is not quite as pure as we’d like it, is not so bad after all because, if you look closely, pulling out the odd word here and there, decontextualizing it, inserting its decontextualized meaning elsewhere and mistranslating any Greek phrase that stands in your way, you discover—voila!—that she held views of Greece and Greek tragedy identical to those of radical feminism and shaped her novels, stories, and essays to reflect that view. Worman’s feminist audience, as familiar as it must be with feminist reception theory, would appear, from the unusual number of play summaries, elementary descriptions of the arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 *Nancy Worman, Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. xii + 152 pages. $102.00. 150 “warn me if i approach the melody” origin and structure of Greek drama, and serious mistranslations in her book, to be unfamiliar with ancient drama, with basic Greek, and perhaps with Virginia Woolf as well. Her book has from such scholars received copious praise. But for those who begin less thematically burdened and who, as a colleague of mine liked to say, “worship at the altar of the text,” Worman’s methods turn scholarly inquiry on its head, not because of what they conclude, but because her conclusions are reached the same way the Queen of Hearts insisted trials be conducted: verdict first, evidence afterwards. Nor does Worman’s text have any discernible structure. Material within chapters bears fleeting connection to chapter titles and subheads. Points appear, vanish, and reappear, like the Cheshire cat, suggesting prior academic papers, here combined. This overall disorganization weakens the book, as does the non-linear quality of individual points. The organization of this review, therefore, is not thematic but chronological : it addresses those works of Woolf’s to which Worman gives attention, and presents them by date of publication. A Room of One’s Own appears nowhere in Worman’s text, and To the Lighthouse receives only minimal attention. Medea is nowhere mentioned in the favored categories of proto-feminist and fierce woman. While The Trojan Women and The Birds would both have served Worman well in arguing that Greek theatre reflected Athenian imperialism, they too make no appearance in her text. Instead, she casts Sophocles’ Electra and Antigone as fierce women and their plays, together with the Agamemnon, as emblematic of Athenian aggression and patriarchy. And so, in the forced nature of Worman’s translations and in the reductiveness of her assessment of Woolf, we see the consequences of a determination to bend texts to serve popular theories. “a dialogue upon mount pentelicus” (1906) woolf’s views of Greece reveal the complexity of great writing. Woolf frequently satirizes classicists who take their Helaine L. Smith 151 learning to be a sign of natural excellence, those for whom knowledge of Greek is simply a marker of position and rank. But for those who love such things for their own sake, or come to love them, as the tourists eventually do in “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus,” she...