sehepunkte 11 (2011), Nr. 7/8

Ryan S. Olson: Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery

This stimulating book, a revision of the author's Oxford dissertation, examines the "poetics" of quoting letters practiced by Josephus. That the practice in some form has a long history is not in dispute. One locus classicus, with which the book begins, is Iliad 6.168f., a moment involving Proteus, Bellerophon, and Iobates of Lycia, in which Homer uses the embedded letter "to create a tragic scene, to allow his characters to convey authority, and to complicate his plot by creating a trick in the epistolary exchange" (2), and which Josephus, mutatis mutandis, reprises at Ant. Jud. 7.130ff. in a narrative involving David, Bathsheba, and Uriah, signaling there "a literary tradition; indeed, [...] the tip of a massive iceberg" (4). Thus the book's metaphorical object of scrutiny.

After contextualizing letter writing per se as a feature of the literate, elite culture in which Josephus circulated, and having already made clear that his aim is to focus on the effects of embedded letters on "readers" (9), Ryan Olson argues for a sensitivity to genre when coming to terms with this form, since this approach allows one better to grasp the ways in which an author plays on readerly expectations. Thus Josephus' embedded letters can be understood to embody an attempt to represent what happened and describe how it came about - an aim qualitatively different from an imaginative letter exchanged by fictional characters created solely by an author, say, Sappho writing to Phaon, for example, in Ovid, Her. 15 (20-21). And because there are over three hundred embedded letters in Josephus' works, seeing these moments as windows onto historical reality, so to speak, allows for a fresh perspective on Josephus' historical aims and vision (21-22). All of this by way of the introductory first chapter.

The ability of the "competent" reader, as Ryan Olson calls the same, to "apprehend the various ways in which embedded letters interact with their surrounding narratives," that is, the poetics of embedded letters, is the topic of chapter 2. This is in essence a survey of the particulars of the letter's function and an overview of those functions in each of Josephus' works. Ant. Jud. 16 helps to flesh out the possibilities: the letter is a device that develops the reader's understanding of character; while the letter's nature is complicated, because a letter is, or can be, in some combination, spoken, written, and read. Its boundaries must therefore be considered fluid and this porosity allows Josephus to introduce to his works a source unrelated to his own authority, while helping to sensitize readers to the complicated question of the "archive," since there is potentially a written record external to its presence in an historical work. Quite apart from its archiving, the letter is also a document, and this materiality serves to enhance the drama of the moment in which the letter is found, highlights situations that deviate from normal communication, adds also to characterization in the scenes in question in which letters function, and can serve to foreground the messenger who happens to deliver the letter in any given scene.

On the heels of these rich discussions, Ryan Olson turns to what he calls "basic epistolary functions" in chapter 3, in which he notices the ways in which Josephus embeds letters in order "to advance the narrative, either independently or in association with human characters [...] and to close spatial and temporal gaps." This is perhaps the most satisfying of the chapters, in that in it, the author attends carefully to the words of Josephus and contributes in fresh ways to our understanding of his historical vision and voice, making this reader wish to return again to texts he thought he knew well.

In terms of moving along the plot, Ryan Olson notices different registers of epistolary function. One is the way in which embedded letters can alter or continue relationships, often through some kind of collaborative effort - that is, authors can advance a narrative by using embedded letters between friends or enemies "to help or harm, establish allies, or fragment foreign relations" (106). As to closing gaps in space and time, the author suggests the ways in which Josephus draws on a rich tradition - in Nicolaus, Xenephon, Euripides, for example - in order to complicate or compress narratives. Here in particular the analyses that are offered - too many to summarize here - shine both for the literary contextualization the author brings to bear on them and for the ways in which, as readings, they demonstrate the richness and complexity of Josephus' vision and voice.

A perhaps less obvious use of embedded letters, that of attestation, occupies the focus of chapter 4. This is an issue of "reliability," of gauging to what extent one can rely on a letter's content and even on its status as an actual letter, although the term "reliable" eventually shows itself to be less than adequate when applied to Josephus' practices (205). Ryan Olson identifies "episodic" and "extra-episodic" attestation, the former designating those moments in which characters in Josephus' narratives employ letters to substantiate claims; the latter, those instances in which Josephus employs letters as evidence for his own interpretation of events (165). Here, too, the analyses are both convincingly contextualized within the traditions in question - classical, Hellenistic, Jewish, as the case may be - and cogently presented as expositions of Josephus' historical method. Not the least of the points Ryan Olson makes here is that, where attestation is concerned, generalized terms such as "deceptive" or "reliable" don't do justice to Josephus' practices, which can only be gleaned through a careful measuring of the letters in question read against the backdrop of the larger work in which it is embedded.

In the concluding chapter five, then, Ryan Olson wonders as to Josephus' motives in making letters so important an aspect of his historical project. One reason goes to the ways in which Josephus would have wished to insinuate his work into an historical tradition that already had created a place for epistolary material. Another motive goes to the ways in which Josephus wishes to "signal" Jewish cultural parity or even superiority (210). In any case, despite the negativity of some scholars respecting Josephus' abilities as a verbal artist, Olson demonstrates consistently that Josephus' narratives repay a literary reading.

While the quality of this book's production is high (only one error, a slip in agreement of subject and verb, caught my eye (143)), it nonetheless contains the foibles customarily associated with dissertations. The writing is prolix, the notes are overlong, and sometimes notes and discussions seem (at least to my mind) tangential to the main argument. One example would be the discussion of "signaling" theory in economics (209ff.) that Olson cites in order to articulate an aspect of Josephus' motivation in making use of letters; another would be Olson's discussion (62ff.) of Jonathan Culler's version of structuralism and of Derrida's thought in response to it in order to ponder the tension between speaking and writing inherent in letters. And what is to be done with sentences such as this: "However, the close context will not be adequate to understanding fully Josephus' use of letters, since those texts that are part of his context are part of a larger literary context on which the texts known to Josephus may have been based" (36). Yes, but there is surely an easier way to express this (important) idea.

These are quibbles. What is not to be disputed is that, in demonstrating the ways in which Josephus exploits the practice of embedding letters, Ryan Olson has advanced in a considerable way our knowledge of Josephus' historical vision and voice. Anyone working on Josephus will have to take into account the wily, complicated, powerful Josephus revealed behind - and as a result of - the embedded letters of his large output.