The Authorial Lie:
how scholars fabricate authority by erasing their identities
You don’t normally expect to find much that’s exciting or memorable in the footnotes of a scholarly text. Footnotes exist to establish the scholar’s authority as a well-read member of the field and guide the interested reader through related scholarship on the topic. (In that order.) Aside from the occasional oblique insult to another scholar, footnotes rarely make for fascinating reading. So it was a surprise to me when, while studying for my Greek literature general exam five years ago, I came across this gem on page 18 of the introduction to Sir Kenneth Dover’s edition of Aristophanes’ Frogs:
“[I]t would be unwise, in the study of any culture, to underrate the power and violence of breaking taboos.”<22>
<22> I offer two modern instances. At one point in The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing alludes to the smell of menstrual blood. At that point my father ceased to read the book, would never again read anything by Lessing, and did not like to have any book by her in the house.”
I’ll spare you the second example.
The footnote stuck with me even though the works of Aristophanes themselves are often far more graphic than Dover’s anecdote. Looking back on it now, I think the most unusual aspect is the fact that he specifically mentions his father. Classicists never mention our family members, except perhaps in the acknowledgments, where we apologize for neglecting them for however long it took us to write that piece of scholarship.
Dover’s footnote doesn’t only describe a reaction to a broken taboo: it is itself taboo-breaking. It lifts the curtain on the Wizard of Oz to show you that someone with a family and a history created the book you’re reading. It turns the scholar into a person with a personality. And that is something that, in my experience, classicists are almost never willing to do.
Classical scholars are fascinated by the word ‘I’. In Greek literature, authors in almost every genre write in the first person, at least some of the time. Lyric poetry, like the works of Sappho, is almost always subjective, but even historians and epic poets begin their works by explaining to their audiences what they’re trying to accomplish. Thucydides writes about the plague in Athens from the authoritative position of having suffered through it himself. Aristophanes’ choruses step forward to speak from the poet’s perspective. The first four words of the Odyssey are ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, ‘Sing me a man, Muse.’
Classicists love to explore these I’s: are they easily identifiable with the author, or are they constructed and posed? (Usually the latter.) If the author uses the word ‘I’ throughout his or her works, is that I consistent or multiform? How do authors manipulate these pronouns to test and play with the conventions of their genres?
The amount of scholarship on these topics is staggering. In fact, most recent articles on authorial persona in the ancient world begin with an apology for revisiting such a well-worn topic.
So why is it the case that the classicists who are so willing to interrogate the authorial ‘I’ in ancient literature almost never stop to turn the lens on the meaning of their own scholarly ‘I’? We’re taught that occasional use of the first person — “I argue”, “I believe” — can be a powerful tool in our writing, presumably because it confirms the scholar’s authority by reminding the reader that the text in front of them came from the mind of an expert. But we aren’t really allowed to go any further (except in prefaces, introductions, and occasional footnotes) and let our personal histories and viewpoints into our scholarship.
The suppression of the authorial ‘I’ in scholarship is a rhetorical trick that allows us to assume a position of speaking objective truth. But this forced separation between scholar and scholarship is necessarily artificial, because our backgrounds always inform what we write. And that’s not a bad thing! Accepting and embracing that reality can help situate our unique perspective on a given topic.
My dissertation on Greek tragedy and comedy was shaped in part by my interests in fashion, feminism, discrimination against transgender individuals, and how public figures (like my brother) are influenced by criticism and mockery. It’s no accident that at the time when I decided to use the term ‘brand’ to mean the collection of unique tendencies and idiosyncrasies that characterize Euripides and Aristophanes to their audiences, my entire family was made up of people working in social media and social media marketing. And that’s just the influences that I can immediately recognize.
The word in both Greek and Latin for ‘I’ is ‘ego’. This seems significant to me: for most of the population, the word ‘ego’ refers to an overinflated sense of self-importance, but for classicists it also refers just to the self. (Although, since Latin and Greek both use heavily conjugated verb systems, the ‘I’ is already present in the verb itself. That means Latin and Greek writers who actually use the word ‘ego’ are laying extra emphasis on themselves.)
Scholarship itself sits also at this uneasy intersection of self-awareness and self-importance. On the one hand, it takes a tremendous amount of, yes, ego to confidently assert that you have something original, creative, and interesting to say about a text or object or event from 2500 years ago. (I’m often told that I’m both too tentative and too assertive in my scholarly voice. I’m too willing to use both equivocating phrases such as “it appears to be the case” and “it seems likely that” and also fighting words like “always” or “unprecedented”.)
But on the other hand, that self-importance is deflated by the unspoken message that although your ideas are important and exciting, you as an individual with a personal history and lived experiences outside of published scholarship are not important at all. (Especially if you’re a junior scholar.) You are important only in that your ideas can help illuminate a text to a reader, who is also not a person with a personality and a history. And so the cycle continues.
When I wanted to find the exact Dover citation for this essay, I googled ‘doris lessing menstrual blood classical scholarship’ (certainly one of my weirder searches in recent memory). Among the search results was a link to a review of Dover’s book by Simon Goldhill.
Goldhill is a brilliant scholar of Greek literature whom I’ve met a few times. I also cited him extensively in my dissertation. The essay ‘Comic Inversion and Inverted Commas’ in his book The Poet’s Voice is among the staggering quantity of scholarship on the authorial voice, and his take on the issue in Aristophanes’ Acharnians is sensitive and nuanced: he writes of “constant manipulations of levels of fiction and the difficulty of securely placing the play’s speaking voice” (p. 194).
The sensitivity and nuance that Goldhill displays toward Aristophanes’ first-person voice does not extend to Dover. An entire page of the five-page book review is devoted to the footnote I began with. Although Goldhill seems to approve in theory of the use of that kind of anecdotal scholarship, he writes, “Surprisingly, even this winning habit seems tired and ill-judged in this volume” (p. 89). He argues that a more conventional footnote referring the reader to the “voluminous” scholarship on taboo would have been more useful and argues that “the anecdote functions as an excuse for not thinking about an important problem.” Dover’s use of anecdotes, according to Goldhill, is a symptom of his general intellectual laziness. His final word on the subject (p. 90):
“D.’s anecdote—and not merely by refusing the reader bibliography, argument, or a position in and against the relevant modern and ancient discussions—is a barrier to developing an adequate critical perspective—even, indeed, of itself.”
In academic writing, that “even, indeed, of itself” is throwing a lot of shade.
Not all disciplines are as unwilling as mine to accept a strongly identified authorial ‘I’ in scholarship. Authorial positionality was quite the hot topic about 20 years ago. In the introduction to his 1995 book Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality, the enviably-named Michael Awkward wrote that “the question ‘How does your work reflect the politics of your (racial/gendered/sexual) positionality?’ may have overtaken the inquiry, ‘What is your theoretical approach?’ as the most popular conversational gambit at conferences and other sites of professional interaction” (p. 4). While the topic is too large for me to address here at length, many have seen the neutral authorial ‘I’ as a racist and/or sexist move that eliminates difference.
I don’t know why Classics hasn’t really embraced this perspective. I could give a few other examples similar to the Dover footnote, like Don Fowler’s passing mention of buying a Nissan in his seminal article about ekphrasis, but there are few (if any) examples of entire pieces of classical scholarship written in the style of personal narrative.
Maybe it’s because the texts we’re working on are so old and have been studied for such a long time. Or because we’re (barely) trained as historians in graduate school, and the rhetorical stance of objectivity is even more pervasive in history scholarship. I’m open to other theories as well. But when you study a discipline like Classics, in the eyes of the rest of the world you are constantly teetering on the edge of irrelevance. I’d like to think that writing as a real person living in modern society—letting the realities of my life bleed into my scholarship—might make my work a little more interesting and meaningful.
As I alluded to above, a strongly stated personal perspective can be especially powerful when the individual hidden behind the ‘I’ comes from an oppressed or underprivileged background. Scholars of color, queer scholars, trans scholars, scholars who have lived through poverty or sexual violence — these scholars can bring to their work something valuable by eschewing the traditional scholarly voice. The stance of objectivity contributes to the erasure of identity that such individuals face on a daily basis. (Although it might also be freeing to be able to write without constantly thinking about the politics of one’s own existence! But the choice to try to keep one’s life out of one’s scholarship should be just that: a choice.)
To that list of marginalized voices I would add one more: junior scholars. In her 1997 article ‘Gender, the Personal, and the Voice of Scholarship: A Viewpoint’, Suzanne Fleischman wrote (p. 1008):
“This [personal] turn in scholarly writing is gendered female and is, moreover, connected to a particular stage in a woman’s life and academic career. It is not a mode of writing one traditionally starts out with; graduate training, after all, includes an arduous apprenticeship in learning to write using the conventional academic voice.”
On the rare occasion when scholarly personal narrative is permissible, that permission is only granted to the established scholars who are acknowledged as experts in the field — in short, those with tenure. But junior scholars also have lives that inform our writing. Even more importantly, junior classicists these days must be deeply invested in their work. Nobody who didn’t care a great deal about Greek and Latin literature would stay in the field when faced with the abysmal realities of the academic job market. But why do they care so much, and how does it influence their writing? I want to learn the answers to those questions.
Of course, some scholars may simply not care where I (or anyone else) am coming from when I write my scholarship. That’s fine. And maybe the authorial ‘I’ has no place in traditional classical scholarship. But I think it does have a place in other media (like Medium). And even if we choose not to incorporate a strong personal narrative voice into our other work, self-awareness about our own positionality certainly can’t hurt our writing. It might even make it more interesting to people who share some traits with you—your sexuality, your gender or gender identity, your history of trauma or mental illness or what have you—but don’t happen to be members of the rarified world of academe.
I want to be able to write classical scholarship as myself. And I want to read more scholarship that embraces the authorial ‘I’. Even if it means more footnotes about the smell of menstrual blood.
