Well before the inventions of the postmodernists in the 1960s and 1970s, the classical component in Western culture had already been subjected by others to radical revisions that might have stimulated interest among artists. The old academic vision of the classics had been undermined and new meanings and values anticipated by powerful appropriations. Artists developed a whole range of responses to the classics, from the most immediate and idiosyncratic to those more typical of ideas, which became widely diffused, that were suggested (mediated if not dictated) by the cultural authority of others, proposed elsewhere and solidified into currency as compelling cultural myths - above all by Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, along with disciples of Freud such as Otto Rank and Carl Jung. Another key source of classical influence on artists is The Golden Bough (1922) by Sir James G. Frazer.
Nietzsche himself was a classicist, but too speculative and bold for most scholars. He burst the limits of academic discipline in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), which confidently posited a dynamic of Greek culture in terms of opposing tendencies of the human psyche, the Apollonian and Dionysian. The dichotomy proved unforgettable. It was to acquire mythic status in modern culture, all the while remaining controversial and problematic, especially among the classicists of his own time (Silk and Stern 1981: 88-9). Nietzsche’s analysis effectively undermined the cultural myth of serenity and rationalism in Greece, proposing instead a vision of conflict between rationalistic optimism and dark forces. Nietzsche dramatized the heroic role of the artist and more generally of creative will as a central and overarching value. His ideas had received a degree of fame in America by 1915, when Willard Huntington Wright wrote in his book What Nietzsche Taught that Nietzsche’s ‘‘adherents have already reached the dimensions of a small army’’
(Wright 1915: 10). Wright dedicated his work to H. L. Mencken, his friend and fellow journalist, whom he credited as, ‘‘The critic who has given the greatest impetus to the study of Nietzsche in America.’’
Nietzsche had a strong impact on European modern artists, especially the Italian Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), who grew up in Greece and whose early education was more philosophical than visual. In his early writings, de Chirico indicated that he perceived the importance of revelation from the philosopher:
When Nietzsche tells how he came to conceive Zarathustra and says, ‘‘I was surprised by Zarathustra,’’ all the enigma of a sudden revelation is contained in this participle ‘‘surprised.’’ When (in another case) a revelation is generated by the sight of a composition of object, then the work that is manifested in our thoughts is closely connected with the circumstances that provoked its birth. (De Chirico, quoted in Fagiolo dell’Arco 1982: 11)
De Chirico’s Hector and Andromache (1917), The Hall of Apollo (1920), The Departure of the Argonauts, and his Self-Portrait with the Head of Mercury attest to his engagement not only with classical themes, but also with classical forms.
Classical influence in the modern age arrived not only through Nietzsche, but also through Freud, who posited a dramatic conflict within the human spirit, although in terms that were destined to have even broader and deeper impact, albeit in simplified and popularized forms. Freud’s immense American reception was facilitated by a new climate of public opinion, which had begun to perceive medicine as a field where scientific progress was possible. The influence of Freud began to spread from Europe to America with his lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909.
Beyond scientific authority, Freud’s themes could reach everyone directly, notably his claim that dreams could be interpreted to reveal an unconscious, and that the underlying drive was sexual. In 1911, Forum Magazine featured Edward M. Weyer’s ‘‘New Art of Interpreting Dreams’’ with emphasis on what it meant for the individual, who now could acquire the ‘‘habit of picking the skeletons of his own dreams immediately upon waking in the morning,’’ adding that ‘‘The wealth of his own dream life will probably astonish him at first: then he will come to know himself as the proprietor of a busy theatre - owner, spectator, and critic in one’’ (Hoffman 1959: 50). The metaphors ring ironically in retrospect. The images of inner wealth and flourishing business seem idiotically insouciant, optimistic, in view of the mythic paradigms that Freud had transferred from classical tragedy to the psychic stage, most notoriously the stories of corrupt families symbolized by Electra and Oedipus.
Examples of classical reverberation could be multiplied for visual artists in the theater, fiction, poetry, dance, and music. Freudian readings of classical myth abound in literature. The intellectual fashion in the decades of the 20s and 30s saw the ideas of Freud play a leading part in transforming values. Opposition arose to everything that had been accepted before and during World War I. Among the young, it became fashionable to reject the standardization of society, assert the free life of the pagan, and confess to the psychoanalyst (Hoffman 1959: 60-1). In this cultural climate, the term ‘‘Puritan,’’ which had referred to a specific part of earlier American experience, underwent a powerful metaphoric expansion and assimilation to the Freudian perspective. Puritan became ‘‘separated from its historical context and extended to include almost all of the guardians of the nation’s morality and business,’’ as one observer remarked, adding paradoxically that it seemed as if the ‘‘virtues [not the sins] of the founding fathers had been visited upon their sons.... The nation had fallen victim to a serious moral illness - repression’’ (Hoffman 1959: 62). With this metaphoric expansion, critics began to reinterpret the very character and history of America in Freudian terms. Whether bold insight or audacious simplification, one paradoxical effect was to facilitate further and powerful reverberations of classical paradigms by American minds.
One reverberation suggested and justified by the expanded idea of puritanism transformed tragedy, a genre that could feed on the concept of a determining and perverse strain in the American character. ‘‘The busy theater’’ of the American psyche, as perceived by Freud’s early journalistic herald cited above, became a stage for forbidding psychological drama in which puritanical inhibitions destroyed innate spiritual freedom. As early as 1926, Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) began work on what would grow into the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), using no lesser model than the Oresteia of Aeschylus (525/4-456 bc). In O’Neill’s conception, puritanical meanness, raised to mythic dimensions in three generations of a rich and powerful New England family, becomes a curse even more destructive than the violent pride and hostile fate that destroyed the descendants of Atreus in the Aeschylean trilogy. Beyond the horror and vengefulness, Aeschylus had offered a vision of the hero’s redemption in the civic order of Athens, through the establishment of legal institutions. No similar affirmation lightens O’Neill’s American scene. After deaths by murder and suicide, O’Neill’s version of Electra turns away at the end from the hostile, puritanical society around her to immure herself in isolation with her memories of frustration, violence, and misplaced passions in the family’s ancestral mansion, which had been built in Greek revival style.
World History
