How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  How could this have happened?

  At the time of his death a few months after Same-Sex Unions first appeared, Boswell had secured the highest honors attainable in the academy: author of several learned tomes, A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale, chairman of his department—the university’s largest, as he himself reminds us in his Preface. These are very distinguished credentials. How could the scholar who earned them have produced a work characterized by such obvious and egregious flaws? On first examination, pretty much any explanatory road you take leads to an unpleasant destination. Either you know that Nero’s wedding wasn’t a shindig typical of Roman social life but you cite it anyway, thereby violating what you, as a trained historian, surely know to be the standards for scholarly use of historical evidence; or you don’t know that Nero’s shenanigans were atypical, which is of course just as bad if you happen to be writing a book that is largely based on evidence from ancient Rome. There’s just no way out.

  Yet Same-Sex Unions owes its failure to a deeper and more disturbing lapse, one that brings us back to our Wildean allegory about the dangers of forsaking philology for fame. For it was clearly the latter that seduced Boswell away from the former; to his credit he did not yield his virtue easily. Despite its frequent recourse to the dubious tactics I have already described, Same-Sex Unions occasionally bears witness to a troubled scholarly conscience. “It is not the province of the historian to direct the actions of future human beings,” Boswell rightly observes in closing, “but only to reflect accurately on those of the past” (281). But this observation is accompanied by a more typical tendentiousness, as when, a few lines earlier, the historian refers to his thesis as “historical facts” whose “social, moral, and political significance is arguable, but considerable.” Arguable but considerable? Such uneasy juxtapositions bespeak a conflict that is surely understandable in a scholar who was at once a gay man and a devout Catholic. How could he not have wished to find the philologue’s equivalent of the magic potion, an authentic text that would effortlessly reconcile those two ostensibly incompatible aspects of his own identity—that would, as he himself put it, allow people to “incorporate [homosexual desire] into a Christian life-style”? It is indeed possible to see Same-Sex Unions, along with its predecessor, as the professional expression of what was surely a fervent personal wish.

  But this is precisely the problem. The failure of Boswell’s book on so many intellectual and scholarly grounds forces us to question the extent to which the standards of scholarship can comfortably accommodate the exigencies of a private—or political—vision. In the case of Same-Sex Unions, this question is especially critical because the tensions between scholarly standards and personal goals become exacerbated when the latter happen to serve the interest of a much larger political agenda shared by millions who, unlike the professional scholar, are unlikely to feel burdened by the exacting standards of a “particular expertise.” Unfortunately, this audience is likely to attach as much importance to, say, Boswell’s prefatory announcement that many of his close friends died of AIDS, as to his less rhetorical utterances about material that is actually relevant to his argument.

  Indeed, it is Boswell’s attempt to go over the heads of expert readers that makes it that much more difficult to justify his work. In a heated attack on Brent Shaw and his negative appraisal of Same-Sex Unions, the classicist Ralph Hexter argued that it was inappropriate for Shaw to pass judgment on certain of Boswell’s arguments in the first place. Shaw, he declared, is neither an expert on early Christian liturgy nor on matters medieval, as was Boswell; Shaw’s knowledge of Greek, he went on—all-important for an evaluation of Boswell’s critical linguistic claims—is bound to be rooted in classical rather than medieval training. This credential-checking was accompanied by a boastful reference to Boswell’s great linguistic expertise, even in such arcane tongues as Old Church Slavonic.

  But Hexter’s attack on Shaw’s credentials inevitably leads you to question Boswell’s own credentials—the ones that actually matter, rather than the arcane fluencies that merely serve as rhetorical passementerie. For if you accept Hexter’s argument that Shaw’s discussion of late antiquity and the early Christian Church is handicapped by the fact that he was trained as a classicist rather than as a medievalist, then what do you do about Boswell himself—a medievalist who bases his radical claims on a lengthy discussion of classical culture, literature, sexual and social institutions, and history? The extent of Boswell’s methodological and interpretive errors in dealing with classical material makes it increasingly difficult, even for other gay scholars like myself, to dismiss doubts about his scholarship merely as instances of “institutional homophobia.”

  Much more significant is the way that Hexter’s backfired defense provides the basis for an even broader and unfortunately more devastating critique of Boswell’s book. For if Shaw’s alleged lack of expertise in medieval matters makes him unfit to judge Boswell’s book, how on earth are Boswell’s intended nonspecialist readers supposed to judge Boswell’s book? The answer is that they can’t, and the results have been depressingly predictable across the board.

  Some examples. In an admiring 1994 “Talk of the Town” piece commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a gay New Yorker editor staunchly defended Boswell, lavishly praising his “erudition,” “scholarly acumen,” and “linguistic dexterity.” (This last was followed by a suitably awed reference to Old Church Slavonic.) In a letter protesting a brief and critical review of the book that I contributed to the gay monthly OUT, a reader duly described himself as being “awed by the extensive erudition of the still youthful John Boswell.” But awe does not make for critical readers—something Boswell knew, and something borne out in my correspondent’s closing remark. “Boswell’s text admittedly is heavy with copious footnotes,” he went on, “[but] the author stated [that] readers can skip the technical footnotes included for others.” (But as we have seen, Boswell often hides the potential objections to his arguments in those very footnotes.) And then there’s the Washington, D.C., gay couple who, inspired by Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, were married using the adelphopoiêsis ceremony. You can only be thankful that Boswell chose not to write about human sacrifice.

  You can’t blame these people, of course. Between the rhetorical sleight of hand and the august-looking footnotes, how could they not be duped? As depressing as these uncritical endorsements of Boswell’s thesis may be, they do serve to demonstrate the effectiveness of his approach. And they make it clear that, until the audience for the classics journal Dioniso outnumbers the audience for Doonesbury, tendentious attempts to mainstream complex and technical material in a way that produces such results must remain a questionable strategy.

  Less easy to excuse than the deluded D.C. duo (who, for all we know, have unwittingly pledged to be well-behaved clan leaders, till death them do part), is the endorsement of Boswell’s book by people who should in fact know better. There is little point getting flustered by heated opposition to and feverish denunciations of Boswell’s book from right-wing political and religious groups, who clearly have a vested interest in resisting his thesis. But what does invite concern is the readiness with which some scholars and journalists of a more liberal temperament have knowingly suppressed discussion of the work’s intellectual failings in order to promote what they see as its broader political agenda. Or, in the case of Boswell’s publisher, to promote sales of a controversial book about a “hot” topic. (It’s interesting to wonder why Same-Sex Unions wasn’t brought out by an academic press: and whatever the answer to that question may be, it's not an appealing one.)

  An example. To review Boswell’s book, The Nation found a gay graduate student in comparative literature who readily acknowledged to me, when I contacted him about his review, that he is “not an expert at all in any of the fields that Boswell is.” What appears to have won him the assignment was, instead, his journalistic expertise in writing about “sexuality and cu
ltural politics.” (Small wonder that his review gratefully acknowledges Boswell’s inclusion of the Appendix of Translations: “general readers won’t have to worry about brushing up on”—what else?—“their Old Church Slavonic.”) Yet even with this stacked critical deck, The Nation couldn’t necessarily produce a winning hand for Boswell. “My review really didn’t reflect how critical I was of the book,” the reviewer told me. But you’d never guess as much from the finished review; it’s a rave. The Nation’s respectful review reflects its writer’s conviction that Boswell’s book should be defended from the “slanted treatment” he felt it was receiving in the popular press. If abandoning your intellectual standards to advance a political agenda isn’t slanted, it would be nice to know what is. But then, that’s what Same-Sex Unions is all about.

  In the era of the culture wars, the politicization of scholarship by both left and right is hardly news. But the failure thus far on the part of liberal and, especially, gay intellectuals to respond with an appropriately vigorous and public skepticism to Boswell’s questionable methods and tendentious conclusions is, I think, particularly distressing—not least because it leaves the liberals embarrassingly vulnerable. This silence is partly a matter of strategy—an interest in, say, promoting the work of once-silenced “marginal” voices such as those of openly gay intellectuals—but it is also a product of ideology: that is, a resistance to invoking certain standards of intellectual or aesthetic quality that is the legacy of a commitment to eradicate oppressive hierarchies and to demystify claims to authority.

  It is one thing to acknowledge that we are all of us, scholars, critics, philosophers, implicated in the social, political, and historical contexts we inhabit; that realization has precipitated considerable soul-searching on the part of Boswell’s fellow historians more than most. But it is entirely another matter to make this insight the basis for a wholesale abandonment of what one historian called the “noble dream”: a common standard of methodological and argumentative scrupulousness, if not actually some elusive “objectivity,” in historical, critical, and philological enquiry. Writing in 1934, Theodore Clarke Smith cautioned that

  a growing number of writers discard impartiality on the ground that it is uninteresting, or contrary to social beliefs, or uninstructive, or inferior to a bold social philosophy.

  It may be that another fifty years will see the end of an era in historiography, the final extinction of a noble dream, and history, save as an instrument of entertainment, or of social control will not be permitted to exist.

  Although Smith was writing at a moment when egregious distortions of history for the purposes of “social control” were already being committed by both left and right, his chronological estimate was depressingly accurate. In their potential for wreaking far-ranging epistemological and methodological damage, the various fashionable “posts”—structuralism, modernism, whatever—have far exceeded anything Smith could have imagined, even in the era of Soviet jurisprudence or Nazi medicine.

  This is precisely why the “noble dream” is even more indispensable for the left today than it is to right-wing intellectuals (who have successfully hijacked contemporary discussion of academic and aesthetic standards). The overt politicization of science and scholarship in favor of a “bold social philosophy” has, as we know, always been a totalitarian project. Now more than ever, when much of what the left values is in danger, liberal thinkers have, if anything, an even greater investment in espousing the impartial forms and rigorous standards of logical and reasonable debate, rather than constructing jerry-built appeals to dubious authority in order to support some foregone ideological conclusion—or indeed merely to vent political frustrations. (“Conservative religious groups deserve to be riled,” one Boswell supporter wrote in response to my OUT review. “They have dominated Western culture and thought far too long.”)

  All this is why Boswell’s defenders are as troubling as his book. In slavishly championing an ostensibly liberal (because gay-friendly) agenda—and in suppressing potentially contrarian voices—they have come to resemble their own ideological enemy. You keep hoping someone on the left will notice this and say something; but so far, the silence on the party line has been deafening.

  The list of gifted and prolific littérateurs who have been torn between the desire for seriousness and the desire to make it is a long one. Oscar Wilde is on it; as it happens, our Roman satirist, Martial, is on it, too. Indeed, the Latin poet’s ill use at the hands of the author of Same-Sex Unions is not only representative of this particular book’s shortcomings but stands, perhaps, as a symbol of the risks involved when Philology flirts with Fame. To the former, it always looks like a harmless enough fling; but the latter is a great seducer. That much, at least, we can safely glean from the classical past. On learning of Martial’s death, a saddened friend summed up his career: At non erunt aeterna quae scripsit: non erunt fortasse, ille tamen scripsit tamquam essent futura. “You will say that his writings were not immortal,” Pliny wrote to Cornelius Priscus. “Perhaps they weren’t. But he wrote them as if they would be.”

  —Arion, Fall 1995/Spring 1996

  PART FOUR

  Theater

  The Greek Way

  I

  Nothing to do with Dionysos!” So went the proverbial Athenian complaint about tragedy. And no wonder: after all, the annual theatrical productions at Athens—with their brilliant costumes and special effects, the rich musical accompaniment and complex choreography, the poetically sophisticated and intellectually provocative libretti, the keenly watched competitions for playwrights—seemed to have very little indeed to do with the quaint rural shindig in honor of the wine god Dionysos from which, if we are to believe Aristotle, Greek theater evolved. For tragedy (as he asserts in the Poetics) got its humble start as a festive choral song called the dithyramb, sung in celebration of the god’s birth; while comedy owed its origins to a genre that clearly had something to do with Dionysos’s role as a fertility deity, as we may infer from its rather louche name (“phallic songs”).

  Still, however far from its folksy holiday roots it may have strayed, Athenian drama in its heyday represented much more than an evening (or, more accurately, morning) of secular, private entertainment—the kind of experience we expect when we go to the theater. “Dionysos” was indeed present—nearly every extant work for the Athenian stage returns obsessively to the subject of religion—as were a host of other issues crucial to the city and its self-image. These matters were explored with a combination of intellectual subtlety and theatrical verve made possible by the genre’s natural affinity for the symbolic, abstract, and metaphorical over the naturalistic. Only in tragedy, where (for instance) women so often represent the domestic realm, and men the public, where a red carpet embodies a family’s bloody past, and a trial lawyer is an Olympian deity, could a family melodrama involving bad career decisions, spousal abandonment, child abuse, and retributive homicide become, as it does in the Oresteia, an allegory for the establishment of justice, of orderly civic life, of civilized culture. And indeed, the grand religious and civic ceremonials that framed the performances—the opening libations to Dêmokratia, democracy personified, the patriotic parades, the reading of the names of patriotic citizens, the sacrifices on behalf of the city, even the visible presence of fifteen thousand other citizens in the Theater of Dionysos—underscored, in a fashion impossible to reproduce in today’s theater, the sense that the plays being performed had much larger social, civic, ritual, and political resonances.

  “Nothing to do with Dionysos” would, on the other hand, be a fair assessment of most modern-day stagings of tragedy. Of the vast number of works composed for production at the annual Dionysiac festival in Athens—the three great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote nearly three hundred between them, and there were many more poets writing over a period of a couple of centuries, all of them together producing a total of perhaps a thousand works in the fifth century alone—only thirty-two survive. Of t
hose thirty-two, contemporary productions of tragedy have favored those that seem to be about recognizably contemporary emotions and dilemmas—subjects, in other words, that seem to be able to transcend the loss of the plays’ original contexts and speak to some larger, “universal” truths about human nature…or, at least, to early-twenty-first-century truths. At least part of the contemporary admiration for (say) Euripides’ Bacchae derives from the play’s affinity with Freudian notions about repression and libido; certainly a great deal of our admiration for Sophocles’ Antigone comes from the fact that it seems to be a sympathetic portrait of a hot-blooded young woman valiantly preserving her family against encroachments by the cold and anonymous State—a modern (and modernist) dilemma if ever there was one.

  How the Athenians would have viewed Antigone, and Antigone, is another matter; this is where context makes a difference. After all, they saw the play after also seeing the orphaned children of the war dead—and, perhaps more to the point, the tribute money from Athens’s subject-allies—paraded around the theater. How, in that situation, the audience would have looked upon the willful girl’s defiance of a man who is not only her uncle but also, as she herself acknowledges, the city’s stratêgos, “general,” is anyone’s guess. But it seems safe to say that without the formalities that accompanied the original performances, we have, at best, a partial sense of how the plays were understood; the evidence suggests, if anything, that their original resonances were very different from those that we associate with gripping drama. (It is entirely possible that, whereas we like courtrooms because they remind us of theaters, of “drama,” the notoriously litigious Athenians liked the theater because it reminded them of courtrooms.) Our discomfort with the idea of tragedy as essentially public, political theater is reflected, notoriously, in our embarrassment about what to do with the most distinctive feature of Greek drama, the chorus—that ever-present reminder on the Greek stage that the ostensibly personal decisions made by the individual characters are always made in the setting of, and always affect, the larger society.