This collection of fifteen articles by prominent scholars of Tony Harrison's work aims to be an ‘appraisal’ of how the author has contributed to the reception of classical literature – ‘as popularizer, translator, adapter, director, producer, and above all poet’ (Byrne, p. 1). Related to this primary goal is the volume's second, more implicit intention, to bring Harrison's work into the fold of the sub-discipline (E. Hall, p. 30) of ‘Classical Reception Studies’, which, the editor and several of the contributors maintain, has emerged during the past decades as a critical response to ‘Classics’ in the traditional sense of the term. The latter is the discipline Harrison would have encountered first as a boy at Leeds Grammar School and later as a student of Classics at the University of Leeds. Most contributions to the volume associate this old version of Classics with conservatism and elitism, although without always spelling this out. Classical Reception Studies, by contrast, is seen to be aware of ‘the contradictions’ ancient literature ‘present[s] to modern liberal readings’ (Byrne, p. 2) and to be interested in exploring the potentialities of these texts creatively rather than recovering their inherent, unassailable ‘meaning’.
In the opening essay E. Hall enthusiastically outlines the disciplinary identity of Classical Reception Studies and asserts Harrison's role and place within it. She describes not only how Harrison's modernising adaptations of classical sources ‘anticipated’ (p. 31) a global trend for recovering the literature and drama of antiquity, but also how in the process he more or less practised Classical Reception Studies before the field even existed – essentially, as the title of her chapter emphasises, becoming its ‘founder’. Indeed, Harrison is an accomplished Classicist with an impressive ‘reservoir of classical learning’, as C. Latham writes in her contribution (p. 248), and it is this intimate familiarity that underlines his own claim that his adaptations of the literature of antiquity have ‘an ancient heart’ (quoted by Byrne, p. 16). The legitimate question arises, however, whether Harrison's work and the Classical Reception Studies it presumably represents are quite as pioneering as is suggested here, and do not rather represent secondary manifestations of a cultural and social context in the process of transformation. For an English Literature scholar like myself at least, Classical Reception Studies looks strikingly like a variant of the amorphous and ever-proliferating transdisciplinary research venture of Adaptation Studies, which – often inspired by an unquestioned adoption of the poststructuralist suspicion of reality and facts – is founded on the rejection of once incontestable principles such as historical accuracy and fidelity to the original source. Instead, Adaptation Studies (like the Translation Studies by which it is clearly influenced) favours an emphasis on creative transformation and the perspective of those doing the transforming. Scholars who beg to differ with such moving of the methodological goalposts might find the conclusions sanctioned by such shifting at the same time anachronistic, extravagant and disappointingly descriptive – criticisms that could be applied to some of the essays collected here.
Going beyond Harrison's humble claim that his adaptations are at heart ancient, the volume's editor, Byrne, maintains in the introduction that Harrison's work engages in a more reciprocal relationship with classical literature and thus ‘initiates and informs’ the ‘significant dialogue with antiquity’, which C. Martindale sees as the precondition for a modern adaptation to be of significance for the field of Classics (quoted by Byrne, p. 19). But not only is the notion of reciprocity entailed in the use of the term ‘dialogue’ debatable, given that texts from the past cannot feasibly engage with their later appropriations, several of the collection's investigations into Harrison's adaptations also – though probably unintentionally – draw attention to the thin line that exists between a creative adaptation and specious revisionism. Surely, the ‘prescient way’ of ‘receiv[ing] antiquity against the grain of colonial ideology, focusing unflinchingly on its darker role as the curriculum of European imperialism’ (Byrne, p. 19) that the editor praises in Harrison's work can only be monodirectional. She confirms this later in her article, in which she emphasises that she is not interested in ‘speculating’ about the historical meanings of tropes and concepts Harrison adopted from ancient drama, but intends to ‘show how they are deployed in [his] receptions and allusions’ (Byrne, p. 222). Similarly, when Hall applauds Harrison's versions of the Classics for being ‘sensitive to racism, sexism, and exclusionary class-hierarchical attitudes’ (Hall, p. 30), she favours a perspective shaped by contemporary sensibilities, not the realities or indeed concerns of the past. Such ‘presentism’, which goes beyond a mere acknowledgement of the divide that exists between past and present, has become widespread in the Humanities, prompting scholars deliberately to view the past rather narrowly through the lens of contemporary (usually political but often also personal) imperatives. The near ubiquity of such assumptions, however, does not make them any less troublesome.
All the authors rehearse the orthodoxy that Harrison is ‘a poet of political opposition’ (Byrne, p. 2) – which most of them have helped to establish and maintain –, but some do so more outspokenly than others. The focus, in several of the chapters, on the conspicuous political subtext of Harrison's writing produces predictable outcomes, as selected texts and commentators are caught up in the same ideological loop and mutually confirm each other. It is hardly surprising that the discussion of Harrison's film poem Prometheus (1998), his 1981 production of the Oresteia and The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990) yield evidence for ‘transhistorical class struggle’ (Hall, p. 47) and shed light on ‘the future of socialism’ (H. Stead, p. 202) as well as ‘international activism’ (G. Brodie, p. 135).
The more rewarding reads are those chapters that seek to go beyond this fixation on the political Harrison by zooming in on the processes taking place in his transformations of ancient sources and foregrounding his motifs and style. Whilst most contributions focus on Harrison's adaptation of Greek sources, S. Harrison's informative chapter shifts attention to the author's engagement with Latin literature, thereby revealing not only the relevance of poets that offer themselves to a political evaluation (Martial, Lucretius and Catullus) to his work, but also his knowledge and appreciation of Virgil. P. Bentley goes in search (and finds evidence) of the principle of catharsis in Harrison's Oresteia, although the poet hardly uses the term when writing about his work. H. Marshall considers the significance of the material world to Harrison's work from his earliest poetry onwards, investigating, among other things, how he connects the idea of ‘ruination’ with the topic of memory. Byrne shows how these traces of a set of recurring signs and symbols adopted by Harrison from Greek theatre provide his oeuvre with a persistent but flexible mainstay.
Other contributions approach Harrison from a more explicitly linguistic angle. L. Hardwick investigates how code-switching both within the English language (between accents and sociolects) and between English and classical languages can be seen as part of Harrison's political project of recusatio (‘holding to account’) and, in doing so, adds to an understanding of the linguistic richness and complexity of his writing. Latham's discussion of the sound effects of Harrison's National Theatre production of the Oresteia uncovers how he created a highly rhythmic, ‘curt’ and ‘muscular’ style, based on Anglo-Saxon and Northern English accents to approximate Aeschylus’ Greek (Latham, p. 251).
Despite the illuminating insights to be gleaned from these contributions, there seems to be a general avoidance of the frictions in Harrison's biography, oeuvre and political perspective. Even when incongruity and tension are acknowledged, these are repeatedly quickly reinterpreted as gestures of reconciliation and compromise. Although this attitude could be explained both as an attempt to save Harrison from his own negative reputation and as a proclamation of personal loyalty (many of the authors are his friends and fellow travellers, which shows up not least in the unusually personal tone of some of the contributions), it appears to obstruct whatever new critical avenues contributors might have opened. For instance, although Hardwick argues for the need to retain the ‘abrasions’ (p. 110) that result from Harrison's social and linguistic ‘double-consciousness’ (p. 99) because of their creative power, she ultimately defuses Harrison's recusatio by construing it as a subtle and playful Janus-faced activity. Likewise, the ‘characteristic racy wit’ (p. 66) S. Harrison ascribes to Harrison's adaptations of Virgil seems to be a coy code for aspects of Harrison's style some readers might simply find juvenile. Bentley's investigation of catharsis could potentially free Harrison from the burden of Brechtian anti-Aristotelianism and highlight the latter's inappropriateness; his argumentative strategy of neutralising cathartic emotionality by aligning it with anagnorisis, however, seems to assert Marxist aesthetics and reinforces its warnings against emotional purgation.
Particularly insightful leads for new research are provided by articles using archival material (both from private collections and from the Tony Harrison Archive at the Brotherton library in Leeds) to shed light on the intricacies of Harrison's adaptive work in progress. These might not, however, be immediately relevant for Classicists. O. Hodkinson's meticulous tracing of the drawn-out production process of The Labourers of Herakles (1995) depicts an author divided between the Classicist's desire to honour the sources and the political citizen's wish to ‘democratize’ ancient poetry (Hodkinson, p. 298). O. Taplin's autobiographic commentary on the production of The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990), based on his personal memories, diary entries and letters and postcards sent to him by Harrison, not only documents the Herculean efforts that went into the realisation of this project, but also shows that Harrison wanted these efforts to be remembered. Harrison's ‘calculated’ (Taplin, p. 294) textual strategies and authorial self-fashioning would certainly deserve further analysis, which could in turn produce a more differentiated portrait of the artist.
Although in the introduction Byrne asserts that ‘Harrison's work remains current, and Harrison himself remains news’ (p. 3), one wonders whether it is not precisely the collection's focus on Harrison's politics that disputes these claims. To comprehend a world in which notions of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are again experiencing a particularly acute definitional crisis, Harrison's reassuringly formulaic vision of politics seems oddly feeble. As neither apocalyptic doom-mongering nor antisemitism can be construed as the exclusive domain of the political right any longer, their incarnations in Harrison's work – Ronald Reagan in ‘The Pomegranates of Patmos’ (1989) (R. Huk, p. 196) and the skinhead character in his film–poem v. (Huk, pp. 182; 183) – appear like quaint relics from a more straightforward past. An appraisal of Harrison's significance for the contemporary world, as well as, indeed, for the field of Classics, requires a willingness to leave well-trodden scholarly paths and open new vistas on the author and his work – a change in perspective that this collection seems to manage only in parts.
