John Freccero - Eileen Reeves, Princeton University

This reflection was originally presented as a talk during an online tribute to Robert Hollander (1933-2021) and John Freccero (1931-2021) presented by the Dante Society of America following its 140th annual meeting on May 7, 2022. For more information about the tribute, including a videorecording and links to the remarks given by other presenters, please see "Quel Savio Gentil: Remembering our Teachers," posted under the "Pedagogy" section of Dante Notes.

"Why, that fellow doesn't know his Plutarch from Petrarch!" And then, in a drier voice closer to his own, "You can put him on your Negative Reading List." These were not the first words I heard my mentor John Freccero say, but they came early in my acquaintance with him, in what passed for winter 1983 in Palo Alto. The referent was not anyone we his audience actually knew, some sad in situ icon of ignorance: more likely a distant critic stumbling over a crux. I suppose I recognized in the plosives, the internal rhymes, the gesture to an almost infectious ineptitude that this was not a serious assessment. My own grasp of the distinction was weak; I had begun to see Petrarch not as the lyrical lovestruck lounge lizard, but as the innovative linguistic idolator that he was, but Plutarch?

He, or rather an anecdote from On the Withering Away of the Oracles, soon came up in a connection I can no longer summon. Beginning with "You'll recall the story," which I then took to be a tactful way of including those for whom the tale was entirely new, and which I only now see as something between a command and a prediction, Freccero said that during the time of Tiberius, Epitherses was sailing from Greece to Italy when a voice from a nearby island rang out, calling for Thamus. As it turned out, this was the name of the Egyptian pilot; the unseen speaker urged him to announce, in sailing past another island, that Great Pan was dead. Thamus did so, and even as he was speaking, an immense roar of amazed sorrow arose. The story soon spread in Rome; Thamus was questioned by Tiberius; the singular event was verified by the emperor's philologists.

Freccero did not have a dog in this race: he was more interested in the array of interpretations. Some saw in the story Christianity's triumph over pagan gods and goat-like demons, others an allusion in that offshore oracle to the recent death of Christ Himself, while still others claimed that neither Pan nor pivoting Egyptian pilots had any place here, and that the garbled message and anguished outcry were actually a ritual call and response for the death of Adonis, whose Syrian name was "Thamus."

What seems to me typical in this vignette was Freccero's intense delight in the ways in which the same phonemes might be appropriated for an alien tradition, then boldly repurposed, and then identified as the robust repository of error. While he insisted that the critical resolution of any textual crux had to be a philologically driven "this way and no other," the horizon of all such work was the messier realm of multivalent, often mutually exclusive, cultural readings. That environment was also ours in Comparative Literature at Stanford, where he was then serving as Chair. His administrative touch was light: he once confessed that he could never recall our requirements, as if we had ever imagined it otherwise, he managed the care and feeding of his colleagues without the usual fanfare, and in all likelihood never bandied about wishes for "a productive summer."

But none of us ever had or would again encounter anything like his incandescent combination of intellectual energy and personal warmth. These two qualities --that sharp focus, that broad sociability-- were not successive postures of professorial work and play, but more of a continuum for him. At stake in his articles and lectures were both an implicit belief in various and evolving systems --linguistic, literary, religious, societal-- and a question of scale, or a signal to noise ratio. His task was to show how particular clusters of aberrant details --an odd rhyme, an unexplained plural, a false note, an insistent alliteration-- exposed, altered, and even compromised the workings of those systems. Scholars as different in their disciplinary location as René Girard, Michel Serres, and David Wellbery were interested in the applicability of systems theory to the literary domain, and while I think that Freccero would have resisted these voguish labels, he was the animating force there.

For all his accomplishments, he indulged in none of the Beacon-of-Genius business. Who else would say that as a husky kid he was disquieted by a reference in Silent Night to "round John virgin?" Or that his first and worst job was heaving cans of Dr. Pepper into the carts of unsuspecting shoppers, that he lasted less than a day, and that the breaking point came when some sweet old lady said, "No, thank you, Sonny... Gives me gas?" Or that when leaving the auditorium after giving an invited lecture, he overheard one student say to another, "I didn't understand a thing he said, but you've got to admit, he's well informed”? Or that when he and Robert Kaske arrived for a lecture at Princeton's Index of Christian Art, a staff member said, "Boys, just bring the truck around back”? These and other festive tales weren't a form of humble braggadocio; rather they signaled in the short term that the most mortifying moments had all the makings of excellent anecdotes, which was good advice for grad students, and God knows, better still for the assistant professors we hoped to become. In the long-term, they suggested that conversational genres, like their literary counterparts, had constraints and possibilities, that these emerged most clearly when put under pressure by matters out of place, that the swift impact of embarrassment and the frisson of eventual delight correlated with shocks to particular linguistic and social systems.

Despite his interest in the rules that governed various discourses, he offered little in the way of professional guidance. "Avoid vulgar careerism," he said on occasion, a context-dependent enjoinder that meant, when translated to the vernacular, either "Don't expect an instant letter of rec," or "Publish only when you have something to say." As for our seminar papers, it was "Don't get it right, get it in writing!" uttered in the blustery key of Plutarch-Petrarch; this was not about efficiency, but was instead the recognition that writing is real labor, that it takes time, that it is the threshing floor of thought, and where we had our last and best chances of getting it right.

When I was considering my dissertation topic, he did not say, as others did, "doesn't look too literary." He observed instead that Italo Calvino had described Galileo Galilei as the finest of Italian writers, and that when his audience had suggested that this was gibberish, a strange, possibly senescent slip of the lip, and substituted instead other and more plausible names, Calvino remained confident of his choice. That novelist's own account implies some wavering: when Carlo Cassola asked about Dante, Calvino changed the category to "Italian prose," and then confessed that Machiavelli might just muscle his way into the winner's circle. Either because he shared such hesitation, or for the sheer fun of it, Freccero tarted the story up, and it went something like this: "Oh no, Mr. Calvino, you must mean / Marino. / Mai! No! / Gabriello Chiabrera? / Hell no! Ma chi era?" and so on, Galileo crushing his peers and his successors, but never facing, much less vanquishing, his forerunners.

I would like to conclude with an antitype of the Great Pan tale, and a request. As we made our way through Purgatory in the winter of 1983, a tape recorder crept along the classroom wall, each week weirdly positioned a little closer to the speaker. Eventually a graduate student from English, someone "crazy smart" or perhaps just plain crazy, swept into the room, snapped a Polaroid of the blackboard, retrieved the recorder, and approached Freccero. With that awful admixture of obsequiousness and entitlement, so often our only idiom, she explained that while she had heard that his was an excellent course, it conflicted with another; she then urged him to speak loudly, and when at the blackboard, for greater contrast, to start with a clean slate, to move from left to right, top to bottom, and never to erase. E giovato sarebbe! He answered with economy, uncharacteristic embarrassment and blandness --"I see" or "Got it" or "Okay"-- and evidently bombed the Beacon of Genius Test, because neither the devices nor their owner ever returned. But what we would give now for those tapes, or even those pallid Polaroid postille! In the absence of such odd artifacts, I urge you to tell us more of the great man we have loved and lost.