Forgetting Our Name, Remembering Our Mother

Author(s): Michael Holquist

Source: PMLA, Vol. 115, No. 7, Special Millennium Issue (Dec., 2000), pp. 1975-1977
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463620
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 115.7 ]

Forgetting Our Name, Remembering

Our Mother

MICHAEL HOLQUIST
YaleUniversity

T IS NOTORIOUSLYTHE CASE THAT THEREIS NO SATIS-

factory English equivalent for the GermanLiteraturwissenschaftor
the Russian literaturovedenie.On the cusp of a new millennium,we
are a profession that cannot say its name. This onomastic homelessness
is reflectedin the spate of recent books that mention bordersin their ti-
tles, such as the MLA's own Redrawing the Boundaries, edited by
Stephen Greenblattand Giles Gunn, or GiovannaFranci'sRemapping
the Boundaries. The suggestion in each is that the comfortable bound-
ariesof our old disciplinaryterritoryhave eroded:we have somehow lost
ourplace. If our professionwere a person,it would be an orphanin exile.
This condition is also legible in the currentbroadinterestin the history
of our profession'sformation.Thereis increasing-and increasinglyur-
gent-concern to know who we are andhow we got here.
Often this concernis translatedinto a searchfor parents.Thus, there
is a great deal of interest now in the extraordinarygenerationof Auer-
bach, Spitzer,Wellek, and others,who in large measurecreatedthe con-
ditions that led to the triumphof theory in the 1970s. These critics are
implicatedas well, of course, in the subsequentdemise of theoryand the
rise of the currentorthodoxy,culturalstudies of one kind or another.In
the searchfor a name for us all behindthe variousnames we now go by
(the multiple "studies"-postcolonial, gender, etc.), this turnto earlier
generationsis to be expected. We are in some measurelooking for a ge-
nealogy that will assign us a knowable place in a profession we hope
still has a family tree.
My suggestionfor pursuingthis searchis to ask, first,who could be
at the root of such a tree. It would have to be someone who could give
birthto multiplegenerations,a kind of disciplinaryequivalentof the pa-
leobiologists' Lucy. Asked in this way, the questionwould seem to have

? 2000 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 1975

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1976 Special Millennium Issue
only one answer: for thousands of years, the
study of language and literaturewas called phi-
lology. The name of our motheris philologia.
Many will balk at this genealogy.Philology
is widely thought to be dead. Moreover, her
corpse, like that of FatherZosima, gives off an
unpleasant odor. Her name has become a term
of abuse. "Philologist"is what you call the dull
boys and girls of the profession.It was long ago
discarded as a name we could call ourselves
with honor-or even accuracy.
There are severalreasons why our maternal
link to philology has become obscured. The
most importantof these, I believe, is that the in-
eluctable duality of philology has been over-
looked or suppressed.Philology is, at its heart,
both a historyand a task. As an entity with a dis-
ciplinary history, philology may indeed be said
to have died, and I will give a precise date for
the moment of its demise. But the task it prose-
cuted, and which for millenniadefinedit, is still
with us.
Any attemptto understandthat task will be
made easier if we briefly rememberphilology's
history, which can be said to fall into three
stages. There is a prehistorical period, charac-
terized chiefly by the attempts of pre-Socratic
philosophers and some of the older Sophists to
invent an abstract space in which relations of
various kinds could be imagined. Work during
this stage is sporadic, pursued by autodidacts
and originals who keep inventingthe bicycle of
primitive grammars,such as that of Protagoras
of Abdera. Plato's Cratylus and Timaeus are
included in the prehistorical period, which is
relatively short. The next phase is very long,
spanning the centuries from Hellenism and the
work of the great Alexandrianscholars, such as
Eratosthenesand Aristarchus,to the end of the
nineteenthcenturyin Germany.Throughoutthis
period there is a continuoustraditionof creating
scholia and other commentaries on ancient
texts, of studying ancient languages, of writing
dictionariesand grammarsaccordingto agreed-
on principles, of establishing editions, and of
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PMLA
many other activities, all having in common the
dual topics of language and literature.The as-
sumption that language and literatureare indi-
visible holds philology together as a profession
for the millenniaof its active life.
That link is broken in the nineteenth cen-
tury, when the study of language separates to
become the new science of linguistics and the
study of literatureturns to modern texts. Ger-
many was then the bastionof classical philology
but also where (perhapstherefore) the modern
discipline of linguistics was born in the work of
the "younggrammarians," such as HermannOst-
hoff and Karl Brugmann, who published their
major manifesto in 1878. At roughly the same
time, departmentsof literaturethat studiedmod-
ern texts began to open in universitiesthrough-
out Europeand the New World.By the time the
ModernLanguageAssociation was founded, in
1884, philology as a discipline was virtually
over. Since then, we have been in the third pe-
riod of the history of philology as a profession,
what might be called-in yet anotherlugubrious
belatedness-the postphilologicalphase.
At the end of this history, philology's task
remains. How shall we understandthat task? It
is first of all a way to conceive the transhistori-
cal aspect of philology. The task unifies work
done by Hellenistic compilers of scholia and
nineteenth-centuryhistorical linguists such as
Franz Bopp and JakobGrimm.Throughoutthe
millenniaof philology's history-and even after
that history ended-the discipline always did
the same work, though the laborwas differently
perceived at different periods. With the Prague
school, I assume that the history of a system is
itself a system. The system of philology's his-
tory is what I am calling its task.
Tasktrails meanings that WalterBenjamin
assigned in his "Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers"
("TheTaskof the Translator").However,I would
invoke anotherevocation of task. I refer to the
expression "die Aufgabe der Philologie," as it
was used by the classicist August Boeckh in his
Encyklopddie und Methodologie der philologi-
I 115.7
schen Wissenschaften(Encyclopedia and Meth-
odology of the Philological Sciences). Boeckh's
definitionof "theproper[eigentlich]task of phi-
lology" is a manifesto-like one-liner: "das Er-
kenntnis des Erkannten"("the knowledge of
what is known"; 10; my trans.). There is, then,
not only something partialin this definitionbut
something hopelessly utopian as well. What
leads Boeckh to make such an imperial claim
for philology is the central place of language
in it. "Linguista sum: linguistici nihil a me
alienum puto" (Jakobson 93) was the first of
Roman Jakobson's two mottoes, and it is this
sense, thatnothing humancan be divorcedfrom
its primordialbase in language, that Boeckh is
pointingto as well. Jakobson'sothermotto is in-
scribed on his tombstone: "Roman Jakobson,
russkijfilolog" (Rudy x).
The diversityof scholarlyundertakingsthat
have been historically nominated as philology
over the centuries are unified because of the
subject common to them all. Language shapes
attempts to know this subject, much as nature
serves as the outside limit constraining the
changing methods of the naturalsciences. The
unending task of philology is to be at all times
underway to language.
To be underway is not to be there.The task
situates philologists perpetuallysomewherebe-
tween,which is why theirpatronhas alwaysbeen
Hermes.Therearemanyversionsof this trickster
god, but perhapsthe one most appropriateto phi-
lology is the one invokedin Plato'sSymposium.
At the end of a long night of drinking and
talk, after each person except Socrates has had
his say on the subject of love, everyone eagerly
turns to hear the great teacher's opinion. But
Socrates, as usual, refuses to address the topic
directly,choosing ratherto recountanothercon-
versation he had, with Diotima of Mantineia,
"an expert in love, as well as in a large number
of otherareas,too ... on one occasion when the
Athenians performed their sacrificial rites to
wardoff the plague, she delayed the onset of the
disease for ten years"(Waterfield41).
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1968-2000 1977
Socratesis in an unusuallyhumbleposition
before Diotima. He asks the great dumb ques-
tion of all time: "Whatthen is Love?"And Dio-
tima answers serenely, "He is a great spirit, for
every spiritlike thing is intermediate between
the divine and the mortal." Socrates persists:
"And what is his power?""He communicates,"
she replies, "betweengods and men, conveying
and taking across to the gods the prayers and
sacrifices of men, and to men the commands
and replies of the gods; he is the mediatorwho
fills the chasm that divides them. For god min-
gles not with man, but through love all inter-
course and converse of god with man, whether
awakeor asleep, is carriedon" (Jowett26).
Thatspace of betweennessthe wise Diotima
lays out has everbeen the playgroundandbattle-
field of philologists, the tribe whose patronis a
Janus-faced Hermes, interpreterto gods of the
language of men and to men of the language of
gods. If ourmotherhas a face, it may well be Di-
otima's. And if we remember our own hour in
history,if we rememberour place between, phi-
lology may continue to be worthy of Diotima's
definition of love, not as a sentimentalemotion
but as the knowledge that things never cohere
with our words,that,as Diotima says, "god min-
gles not with man."If so, we might then at the
least defer,as Diotima did, the coming of the in-
evitableplague,if only for a shorttime.
WORKS
CITED
Boeckh, August.EncyklopddieundMethodologieder philo-
logischen Wissenschaften.Ed. Rudolf Klussman.2nd ed.
Leipzig: Teubner,1886.
Jakobson, Roman. "Linguistics and Poetics." Language in
Literature.Ed. KrystynaPomorska and Stephen Rudy.
Cambridge:Belknap-HarvardUP, 1987. 62-94.
Jowett,Benjamin,trans.Symposium.Symposiumand Phae-
drus.By Plato. New York:Dover, 1993. 1-43.
Rudy, Stephen. Preface. Selected Writings.By Roman Ja-
kobson.Ed. Rudy.Vol. 6. Berlin:Mouton, 1985. ix-xxiii.
Waterfield,Robin, trans.Symposium.By Plato. Oxford:Ox-
ford UP, 1994.