Ronald Flores

The theorists that I consider best suit the contradictory elaboration of the “contemporary” as opposed to the ancient, are Tacitus, Schiller and Cinthio. I am well aware that I do not cite them in their respective chronological order, but in doing so I pursue a different type of arrangement, a claim for the vivid incompleteness of the present.

Following Plato’s Symposium setting, Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory, addresses the issue of the decline of public-speaking in early Imperial Rome by contrasting contemporary practices versus those of the Republic. The discussion, as Shelley A Defense of Poetry for instance, even though it is presented as a critique on “letters”, it is also a critique of society.

Through his characters, which were also at a time his mentors, Tacitus explores the social conditions which have produced the decline in the art of oratory. Messala’s view is nostalgic for the roughness of the early republic time, in which orators sprung in the midst of the struggles between internal parties, rose in controversy, defending or attacking strongly felt causes, in passion, in turmoil, in disagreement, and were not the product of “oratory schools”, in which, it’s implied, the students learning is conducted by men who know how but not of what to speak. He contrasts that “ancient” and now “ideal” republican scenario with the present Imperial scenario in which there is not much room for debate, since the ruling elite seems to be rather in consent about what to do.

In a rather clever stance, Aper claims for a pluralist recreation of ancient times and argues that the past holds a variety of styles, in which no one seems to have held hegemony over the others. In Aper’s argument I find an interesting questioning of how the past is constructed to set one’s claim in the present, of how nostalgia works as an emotion that selects memories according to our desire.

There’s a discussion about how the expectations of the audiences have changed over time, which has to be thought in terms of a tradition that is developing, and an audience that is evolving with it. The guiding premise of this holds that the ancients were rough and unsophisticated and could pretty much be amused by anything. By contrast, modern audiences, which are the result of the ancient ones, expect “new” things when the “old” have not worked, and/or the recurrence of those things which pleased them once already.

Taste, therefore, evolves. The debate then takes a sharp turn. Massala now tries to explain the social conditions that lead to a decline in Oratory, of how history has affected art, of how the political context has affected the elaboration of “texts”. His argument is as conservative as one can find: youth is rather relaxed, parents are not so involved with raising their kids; Education is no longer what it used to, students no longer learn in the “battle field” but in “safe” settings.

The critique seems to land on the superabundant atmosphere of Empire, which reflects on the preference of Asiatic style, in contrast with the old stoic republican manners, which reflected on the preference of Attic Style. I have mentioned that his argument is conservative, mainly because it is nostalgic for the ways of the past that seems to be the driving force of his critique, and not particularly nostalgic for the future.

Schiller, in the other hand, is a nostalgic for a past set in the future. At least, that is how I read On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, an essay in which Schiller contrasts naïve, as ancient, natural, ontologically whole, childish, and sentimental, “modern”, reflective, idealistic, juvenile poets, not as styles that completely antagonize each other but out of which a “new” synthesis can be arrived at.

Contrasting them, though, helps Schiller not only represent the past as natural, wholesome, natural, and expose the present as a time of incompleteness, imbalance and artificiality, but sets him up to claim for a conciliatory future, in which ancient and modern ways will become one. In that way Schiller’s exploration of Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe, in contrast with contemporary texts also helps him construct his social reform argument.

After all, for Schiller, art can restore humanity’s lost wholeness. The poet has a role broader than the text; he is to act also in the context, since he is to become the guardian of nature; either to be nature or to seek lost nature. This is the ambiguous role of Schiller’s idyll, not only as genre but as a time achieved. Somehow, Schiller’s “modern” quest to be “natural”, as the ancients were, resembles Kleist’s comment of trying to enter Eden through the back door. Schiller’s nostalgia is ambivalent because it is a longing of the past in the future, an elaboration of how the modern is less than the ancient because it lacks “originality”.

Tacitus’ nostalgia for the way things used to be would be, for Schiller, sentimental, since it would lead one to be contemplative and, possibly, sad about the current state of affairs, leading away from “life”, but not more than that. Schiller’s nostalgia for the past in the future, however, is dynamic, it leads us back in to “life”, since it can serve to fuel a political movement that seeks to change the imbalanced current state of affairs in order to restore its “original” wholeness.

The risk though is to pursue something that never was. It is of interest to bring out Rousseau’s construction of the state of nature that influenced Schiller so much in this essay, because it is only hypothetical; it was based on a supposition, no more. However tempting it is to think of the past, in contrast with the present, which is always incomplete, as a “cosmos”, as something one can struggle for to bring order to the chaotic now, one can not avoid remembering that it is a possibility, a hypothesis, a retrospective and nostalgic elaboration, and not a certainty.

The present is something alive, in the making, new. Cinthio’s construction of the modern in contrast with the ancient has this rasa; it is an insurgency of the new against the old, a statement that life changes and that we have embrace those changes rather than cling to the old ways of viewing things, just for the sake of it. If it is a nostalgia, it is one for the present, for what is actually happening now, rather than one for the past, as Tacitus, or now for the past in the future, as Schiller.

I think there is no better way to examine Cinthio’s “loose” interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics than through his affirmation of the present as something alive and of tradition as something dynamic, in the making. It is of importance to highlight Cinthio’s awareness of and the importance that he gives to the audience, since however detached some authors and critics alike want to present the “texts” as having emerged in laboratory type of settings, “texts” arose from life, and are set in an specific place and type, with a particular audience in mind.

Cinthio’s concession to the audience, developing an argument for a tragicomedy, saying that a comic ending is also suited for a tragedy, serves as an insurgency against what the ancient said and tradition fixed. But it is Cinthio’s awareness of the non-Aristotelian epic which caused my attention, since it is the novel, the romance, that which I feel (I write feel, since I have found no reason to sustain this) closer to me.

His decision to dedicate time and thought to a genre that had been developing outside of what was considered canonical is a particularly example of an alternative role for a critic: based not exclusively in defending the old –because in it, we have projected an order-, but in holding a critical attitude that is open to the new, whatever it may be, a form, a genre, a style.

Tacitus’ construction of a “thriving” past as a critique on the “decadent” present, Schiller’s projection of a sublimated past in the future or Cinthio’s enthusiastic approach to his own time, place and audience in contrast with what the ancients had legislated, are all ways to define the modern with reference to the past, to their literary tradition and their history.

If I were to choose, I think I already have, I would lean towards Cinthio. In my representation of him, I do not claim for a gratuitous celebration of whatever is trying to pass of as new, but a reflective perspective on the fleeting and evanishing present, on life as it sustains and renews itself.

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