THE ‘WEAKER VOICE’ - (S.) Matzner, (S.) Harrison (edd.) Complex Inferiorities. The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature. Pp. xiv + 320, ill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Cased, £70, US$94. ISBN: 978-0-19-881406-1.

Abstract

(p. 253). Here, as throughout, G. stresses the 'compulsively rerun traumas and public discourse of the imperial period' (p. 254). On the Sublime is quite upfront in its ambition to speak for all time, which is the mark of sublimity itself. [Longinus'] promiscuous quoting 'renders all the passages he quotes radically timeless and authorless' (p. 263). Perhaps 'anonymity' in G.'s subtitle is the wrong word. This is a study of the power of anonymising, and G. gives us a penetrating analysis of two of its strategies: anonymising as an exercise of the poet's power to give or withhold, confirm or remove identities and anonymising as the aspiration to a literary timelessness or proverbialised voice of the people. In G.'s previous monograph, Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity (2017), he introduced us to a satirist who sees all but (unlike Horace) keeps himself out of the line of vision. Documenting the dangers of being conspicuous, this satirist disappears into a crowd from which his voice can emerge as something like a choral voice. G. has thought long and hard about literary anonymity and the challenge it presents to our scholarly practices, and his new book will repay the same thought on the part of its readers. The readings are close, illuminating and often brilliant, and the scholarship is scrupulous. The insistent colloquialism of G.'s style, engaging or annoying depending on your taste and mood, is anything but anonymous.