So it is that the generation of authors who were writing before and immediately after World War II was thoroughly steeped in the classical tradition. At the same time, a renewed interest in Greek mythology brought the classical tradition to a wider audience. The excavations of Troy and Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann in the late nineteenth century had awakened people to the possible historical links between Homer’s epics and Greek history, while in a very different field, Freud had suggested the power of myth in his analysis of sexuality. Scholars such as Jean Seznec, working in the Warburg tradition, provided scholarly studies of the history of mythography (Seznec 1953).
It is in the world of the theater, however, that the classical tradition made its clearest mark in twentieth-century literature, not least because of the allegorical potential of Greek myth. Jean Cocteau’s La Machine infernale (The infernal machine) of 1934 takes on the story of Oedipus, emphasizing the inescapable nature of the tragic plot, but playing with modern, anachronistic allusions. Jean Giraudoux stages a debate on the merits of war and peace in the ironically named The Trojan War Will Not Take Place of 1935, while both Sartre and Anouilh take mythical plots for their wartime plays, in particular The Flies (1943, Sartre’s treatment of the story of Orestes) and Antigone (1942, Anouilh’s rewriting of Sophocles). The device of choosing a classical setting and retelling an ancient story allows the authors to deal with themes that, in Nazi-occupied France, might not otherwise have got past the censors. Though both writers are concerned with conveying their theories of existentialism, they also comment on the question of totalitarianism and individual freedom in a moving and convincing manner.
In other genres, classical sources continue to inspire poets; for example, Apollinaire’s Le Bestiaire, ou cort'ege d’Orphee (The bestiary, or the parade of Orpheus) of 1911, and his Calligrammes of 1918, modeled on the Technopaegnia of the Greek Anthology (poems formed to represent an object such as Pan pipes or an axe). Other writers such as Andre Gide use discreet allusions to classical literature in order to approach the question of homosexuality in their writing (for example in L’lmmoraliste of 1902), a device followed more explicitly in Christiane Rochefort’s Printemps auparking (Spring in the car park, 1969) with its allusions to Socrates and
Phaedrus. There is thus a sense in which classical intertextuality can act rather as it had done in Montaigne, to alert the careful reader to underlying themes.
With the postwar changes that education has undergone in France, the increasing prestige of science and mathematics, and the recent threats to the teaching of Greek and Latin in French lycees (where their position is now quite precarious), the educated general reader, whom writers in the first half of the twentieth century could rely on, is becoming a threatened species. Nevertheless, the classical past continues to exercise its charm, not least in the highly successful comic book figures of Asterix and Obelix, created by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo.
World History
