Last night’s world premiere of Ogresse at the Metropolitan Museum combined a stunning array of musical styles–from banjo-driven Americana to Parisian jazz–into a unified tale of loneliness, companionship, and revenge. Performed by lyricist/vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and composer/conductor Darcy James Argue, Ogresse tells the story of a beastly woman who “lived alone / with the birds and the trees / with her memories.” When a man goes to the forest with plans to murder the ogresse for devouring a girl from the neighboring town, they develop an unexpected love for each other and must sift through their hostilities.

Much richer than just a reconceived Beauty and the Beast, this one-woman song cycle is a dense, virtuosic showcase of musical talents of all stripes: vocalist, pianist, saxophonist, percussionist, and a dozen others. Paralleling the variety of the skills and instruments on stage, Argue’s score surveys a huge number of genres and textures, well beyond his earlier big-band recordings. Some songs in Ogresse call to mind the lyricism of Cole Porter tunes in the Great American Songbook, buoyed by foot-tapping arrangements:

She’s big
She’s bigger than a tree
She’s vast
She’s vaster than the sea
She opens her mouth
It’s the size of a planet
If you get too close
Then she’ll fit you right in it

Warren Wolf’s xylophone playing–both as backdrop and solo–stands out in many of these songs, as does Brandon Seabook’s work on the guitar and banjo, which drives Ogresse‘s narrative moments.

There is so much to say about Ogresse on its own terms, but as a classicist watching last night, I could not stop thinking about Theocritus’ Idyll 11, a poem that narrates the cyclops Polyphemus’ unrequited love for the sea nymph Galatea. I’m not sure if Salvant and Argue know Theocritus’ poem–if they do, they have beautifully reinterpreted this ancient bucolic through another woodsy outcast and (sometimes-)comically poignant melodies.

Back to Theocritus. Conscious of his one-eyed ugliness and isolated in his unpolished rusticity, Polyphemus finds solace in his wistful singing for Galatea (you can find a good, readable translation by Diane Arnson Svarlien at Diotima):

He often sat alone, awake at dawn
Among the piles of seaweed by the shore;
Melting with desire he sang to her,
Leaving his sheep to find their own way home.
Wounded deep, the barb beneath his heart
Of Aphrodite’s arrow, he found this balm;
From the high cliffs staring out to sea
He sang this song:

“White Galatea, whiter than cottage cheese,
Why cast away the one who loves you?
Softer than lamb’s wool, springier than the knees
Of a newborn calf, bright as an unripe grape,
Why come near when sweet sleep holds me still
Then disappear when sweet sleep lets me go?
I wake to see you bolting up the hill
Like the sheep who saw the gray wolf.

[…]

Delightful girl, I know why you run away.
My looks are frightening. I know it’s true,
One long shaggy eyebrow runs from ear to ear
With one huge eye below. My nose is flat
And wide. Yet, as I am, I keep a thousand head
Of cattle, and from them I fill a vat
Of the best milk to drink. All year round
I never run out of cheese, not even in
The coldest winter. My baskets are always full.”

[…]

And so the Cyclops shepherded the ills
Of his desire with song, the Muses’ salve,
More surely than he could with doctor’s bills.

There are moments in Salvant’s libretto that recapture this lonely, idyllic sadness. To take one example, Salvant’s ogresse echoes Polyphemus’ disgust with his own appearance and resignation to a life of solitude:

But who’s gonna love
A big black beast like me
Who’s gonna love me
But a freak like me

Ogresse‘s title character even reenacts Polyphemus’ attempts to soothe his longing for Galatea through song:

And now, when you’re gone
I try to soften the sting
By singing the songs that you sing
I sing to you, my darling

Salvant’s story is, of course, not a straight retelling of this Theocritean vignette, and in fact the conclusion of Ogresse takes a page from something like Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men rather than a serene Hellenistic idyll. But the perennial themes and complex character at the center of Theocritus’ poem suggest that Salvant and Argue have produced something not simply of the literary moment. Instead, they have captured the richness of the bucolic tradition and successfully coupled it with the sonic bustle of big city jazz.

Cécile McLorin Salvant and Darcy James Argue will perform Ogresse in Newark, Washington, and Princeton in November.

I have a new article out this week in Rhetorica on Lorenzo Valla’s use of the notion of certainty, specifically as the notion is theorized in the writings of Quintilian. You can find the official abstract at the above link, but since the abstract is written in German, I’ve posted an English version here, too:

At the center of Valla’s refashioning of dialectic as a rhetorical practice is a novel understanding of certainty taken from Quintilian’s handbook, an understanding of certainty rooted in what is agreed upon rather than what is objectively true. By separating certum from verum and by presenting dialectic as the practice of drawing out confessions rather than proving logical truths in his Dialecticae Disputationes, Valla recasts philosophical argumentation as a forensic project of crafting consensus-based certainties. In several other works, too, including his Elegantiae and marginal commentary on Quintilian’s Institutio itself, Valla consistently uses a set of vocabulary to link certainty with consensus, particularly the understanding of consensus at the heart of the ancient inventional strategy of status theory.

The Paideia Institute’s on-line magazine (In Medias Res) has published the introduction for our new volume on ambiguity in Latin literature, Quasi Labor Intus. Head over to Medium to read the entire essay.

(Or even better, order a paper copy of the whole volume for yourself.)

Here’s a snippet from the introduction on the various contributions in the whole volume–something like an expanded table of contents:

As a reflection of the various ways one might define ambiguity and its place in Latin literature, the essays in this volume span genres, periods, and even disciplines. Several examine lexical and syntactic ambiguities in literary texts, principally as they allow Latin authors to leverage the uncertainty of interpretation they introduce for humor or manifold meaning. For instance, Michael Fontaine draws out a trove of “unnoticed jokes in the play about disease, disability, deformity, diagnosis, and treatment” in Plautus’ Gorgylio. Peter Barrios-Lech probes the several grammatical formulas for requests in comedic texts to reveal how Roman dramatists use the ambiguities arising from these formulas to separate the meaning of what characters say from what they intend. Driving a wedge between speech and meaning reappears in Rachel Philbrick’s study of Ciceronian praeteritio, which she argues is a rhetorical strategy that “hinges upon an audience that is cooperative and willing to read ambiguity into a statement that is unambiguous.”

Other contributions underscore the productive evasiveness of ambiguity in Latin by focusing on questions of how the reader or audience finds meaning in a text. Jessica Seidman revisits a topic that will be very familiar to Foster’s students — Dido’s tears in the Aeneid. In showing how various scholars have interpreted and reinterpreted the ambiguous language of one of the Aeneid’s dramatic heights, she suggests the episode is “a testament to the continued relevance of these words, these characters, and this poem to very different people at very different times.” Looking to another Augustan poet, Jennifer Ferriss-Hill applies an ambiguous frame to the whole of Horace’s Ars Poetica, a work that one “may read as a cipher for how to live masquerading as a guidebook on how to write.” Taking the opposite approach, Stuart McManus points to a long-settled ambiguity in Cicero’s Brutus and casts doubt on one prevailing interpretation of a passage in which the Roman statesman allegedly advocates, though cryptically, tyrannicide.

The possibility that ambiguity can lead to various interpretations of texts is not limited to modern studies of ancient literature, however. As several essays in this collection show, authors in the intervening centuries were also aware of the pitfalls and possibilities of ambiguity. In her study of Peter Damian and his eleventh-century meditations on caritas, Kathryn Jasper argues for “the inadequacy of modern concepts like ‘charity’ and ‘love’ to accommodate the semantic complexity” of this virtue. Patrick Owens, by surveying Renaissance additions to the Aeneid, shows how “epics often do not resolve to a conclusion but rather to a dynamic end filled with uncertainty.” And Michael Sloan shows how Erasmus — one of Foster’s favorite humanist authors — repurposes Echo and her Ovidian habit of ambiguous, conversational wordplay to serve ethical lessons.

Finally, several essays examine the generic and conceptual questions that define ambiguitas and the circumstances in which it arises. In a discussion of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Curtis Dozier explores how the techniques of rhetorical persuasion might figure in an educational manual itself, blurring the distinction between didactic text and educational advertisement. Charles McNamara also includes Quintilian among rhetorical and grammatical texts in a study of the difference between the ambiguities of composition, which grammatical texts urge their readers to avoid, and those of interpretation, which an expert orator must learn to navigate. Even more fundamentally, William Short looks to the metaphors underpinning meaning and ambiguity in Latin, drawing attention to Latin’s “regular conceptualization of ‘meaning’ itself in terms of a linear spatial metaphor.” And Katherine van Schaik looks to Celsus as an author concerned not with the vagueness of texts but with the vagueness of bodies, where one might understand “medicine as the art of contending with ambiguity.”