In what ways does the modernist discovery of the archaic differ from previous episodes of primitivism, influential since at least the eighteenth century (Boas 1973) and a major component of Romanticism?
First, sensational archaeological discoveries from the 1870s on transformed the contemporary understanding of antiquity. Heinrich Schliemann believed that he discovered the Homeric city of Troy in his excavations in 1871-3, and despite some scholarly skepticism a wide public enthusiastically greeted his discoveries, as they did later in the decade when he published his findings at Mycenae. In the 1880s British and German archaeologists began to investigate the Cycladic civilization more thoroughly than ever before (for an overview, see Etienne and Etienne 1992; on the archaeology of the Cycladic civilization specifically, see Doumas 1991). Lastly, toward the end of the nineteenth century and for the first quarter of the twentieth, Arthur Evans excavated at Knossos in Crete the remains of what he called the ‘‘Minoan’’ civilization. Previously, it was easy to believe that Greek art began with the Parthenon; now the art of three more ancient civilizations had been added to it. In addition, the status of Homer and Greek legendary stories was fundamentally altered, as a concrete historical dimension was restored to what had been mere myth (Graver, in this volume).
Second, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the interpretation of primitive religion became a central preoccupation of anthropological theorists (J. G. Frazer, J. E. Harrison, W. R. Smith, E. B. Tylor) in contrast to the more political and sociological concerns just after mid-century (Bachofen, Maine, Morgan). This shift in emphasis (Kuper 1988) brought attention to the various and controversial phenomena of animism, fetishism, ritual, sacrifice, and totemism. Anthropological attempts to synthesize this material prepared the way for the uses of mythology in major American and British modernists - Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Pound, and Yeats (Feder 1971; Manganaro 1994). Of all such attempts, The Golden Bough by J. G. Frazer had perhaps the greatest literary impact (discussed at length by Vickery 1973). The study, published in two volumes in 1890 and reaching 12 volumes by 1915, sought to identify a central pattern of ritual not only in classical antiquity but in mythology everywhere: the dying and resurrecting sacred king who embodies the spirit of vegetation. The work was unsettling not only for treating classical and primitive myths on equal footing but also for its implicit connection of Christianity and myth. Because of the work of Frazer and others, mythology seemed to have universal application.
Frazer held a fellowship at Cambridge, and partly due to his example a group of classicists later known as the ‘‘Cambridge Ritualists’’ introduced the anthropological study of religion into classical scholarship (Ackermann 1991; Calder 1991; and for a bibliography, Arlen 1990); the career of Jane Harrison, in particular, has been closely studied (Peacock 1988; Beard 2000; Robinson 2002). They were influential not only in insisting on the religious and ritualistic aspects of Greek culture but also, along with Nietzsche and to some degree Pater, in drawing attention to the darker, unenlightened, and chthonic phenomena of classical antiquity.
In German-speaking countries, a similar combination of classics and anthropology in the nineteenth century would come to influence modernist writers. In particular, the work of J. J. Bachofen, who began his career as a professor of Roman law but gained fame for his speculations in the 1860s about an original matriarchal society and about the Orphic mysteries, was much read in the 1920s and 1930s, influencing not only writers such as Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, Mann, Rilke, and others but also the political debates of the time and even the development of psychoanalytic theory (Davies 2005; Gossman 2000: 111-200; and Ryan 1999: 167).
Third, some of the most influential thinkers of the modern period - Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche - had a familiarity with classical antiquity that left a fundamental imprint on their analyses of the conditions of modern life (on Freud and antiquity, see Armstrong 2005; Barker 1996; and Gamwell and Wells 1989; on Marx and antiquity, see the bibliography by McCarthy 1999). Nietzsche is the most obvious case, since he began his career as one of the most promising classical scholars of his day, later abandoning the profession of classics to assume the mantle of the prophet of modernity. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he wrote, ‘‘And now the mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by all past ages, and digs and grubs for roots, even if he has to dig for them among the remotest antiquities’’ (§23, trans. Walter Kaufmann). In the last third of the book he celebrates the rebirth of German myth in Wagner, but already by the time of his next work, the aphoristic Human, All-too-Human (1878), he changes tack and instead of attempting to recuperate myth, embraces the possibilities opened up by the end of myth. His attitude would change again in subsequent works. Still, however it is interpreted, the exhaustion of myth as a condition of modern life is a constant theme in Nietzsche’s writings, one that anticipates and exposes the modernist self-entanglement with the archaic.
The imaginative forms of social solidarity that were evident in archaic societies provided a ground against which to diagnose the pathologies of modern life and to understand the radical pressures exerted on the social structures of the day by industrialization, positivism, Darwin, and the erosion of traditional belief. Even without classical training, other thinkers, notably French sociologists such as Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, and Mauss, had a wide influence on writers who were attempting to come to grips with the strained relations of past and present. The sense of strain became a sense of crisis with the world wars and the economic disruptions ofworld depression, and the relation ofmodern culture to its past became a question of great urgency. Under these conditions, T. S. Eliot, in his essay ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ (1919), gave a new emphasis to the word ‘‘tradition,’’ one in keeping with his own sense of the necessity of cultural and ritual survivals in modern life (in The Waste Land he is as skeptical as he is desirous of those survivals). Ezra Pound, although he did not have Eliot’s sense of tradition, shared his urgency about the past, attempting to reclaim what he saw as the essential texts and jettisoning others. The modernist attitude towards classics, generally speaking, was one of urgency, of rescue rather than reappraisal.
The most sustained literary engagement with the archaic may be Pound’s Cantos, a long work begun around 1915 and abandoned in the 1960s. It opens with a version of the ‘‘Nekuia,’’ Book 11 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus visits Hades. Pound believed that it represented the oldest stratum of the poem, and, in common with the anthropological turn of some of the classical scholarship of his day, he emphasized the ritualist and mythic dimension of the descent to the underworld (Pound 1971: 274; relevant passages by Jane Harrison are quoted in Bush 1976: 126-8). Yet Pound does not translate from Greek; instead, he uses Andreas Divus’ Latin translation of 1538. Moreover, he includes some archaic English words: ‘‘fosse’’ for ditch; ‘‘dreory,’’ a coinage meant to restore the etymological sense of ‘‘dreary’’ (dripping with blood); ‘‘bever’’ for drink; ‘‘pitkin’’, a coinage based on an obsolete diminutive, and others. The archaic vocabulary here is deployed only intermittently; he avoids the monotony of the more consistently archaizing diction of Morris, Rossetti, or Doughty, for example, reserving it for special effects. (Later, in the Pisan Cantos and the Confucian Odes, Pound shows himself the twentieth-century master of archaic diction.) The rhythm of the translation is largely blank-verse, but some lines are deliberately modeled on the rhythm of The Seafarer, with alliterative words in stressed positions. Canto I is meant to be triply archaic: the most ancient part of an ancient poem is translated from a Latin version of the Renaissance (which also served as the basis for Chapman’s Homer) into an English that recalls Anglo-Saxon.
The outward-directed artists and men of action whom Pound celebrates (Odysseus, Sigismundo Malatesta, Mussolini, and many others) constitute only part of his study. Pound seeks to identify primeval experiences that recur in history, to read history as myth. The descent into the world of the dead is necessary for rebirth and renewal, a return to the roots that sustain life. The experiences of ritual and initiation are represented on several occasions, in Cantos XVII and XLVII, as well as in the Pisan Cantos. Over the course of the latter, the sacred marriage of Demeter and Zeus celebrated at Eleusis is recreated elliptically,2 initially in fragments, with a more sustained affirmation toward the end of the sequence.
The Cantos grapples with what Pound believes to be the religious underpinning of civilization, where by ‘‘civilization’’ is meant the life, the political, economic, religious, and artistic life, in the great cities at or just before their prime. Canto I ends with fragments from the Homeric hymns to Aphrodite, in Latin and English; its reference to ‘‘Aphrodite, Cypri monumenta sortita est’’ becomes clear only later, when the vision is more fully articulated in the Pisan Cantos (‘‘the hidden city moves upward’’ in Canto LXXXIII, and a series of puns in Canto LXXXII culminates with ‘‘let the herbs rise in April abundant’’; see Carne-Ross 1985: 37-8). Pound is equally concerned to denounce the enemies of this organic vision; the denunciations take powerful poetic form in the ‘‘usura’’ Cantos (XLVand LI) but elsewhere are no more than anti-Semitic ravings against Jewish financiers.
The relation of the Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is more controversial than in the case of Pound’s Cantos. On a few occasions Joyce supplied a schema of the work (one of these was published in Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1930), in which each episode is given a title that recalls an episode from Homer. The Nekuia, for example, corresponds to chapter 6 of Ulysses, called ‘‘Hades’’ in the schema, in which Leopold Bloom attends the funeral for Paddy Dingham. Bloom’s thoughts wander: ‘‘The Botanic Gardens are just over there. It’s the blood sinking in the earth gives new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy’’ (Joyce 1986: 6.771; cf. 8.729). Ronald Bush, in a discussion of Pound’s Canto I, contrasts Pound’s technique with Joyce’s, noting that Joyce employs the Flaubertian technique of description mainly to represent how ‘‘the experience of death and renewal feels today for un homme moyen sensual’’ (Bush 1976: 130-1) - in sharp contrast to Pound’s attempt at a direct evocation of archaic ritual.
However, to describe in more general terms the relation between Homer and Joyce is difficult. Not only do the different chapters have greatly varying relationships to Homer and to myth, but critics are divided about how to interpret them. In answer to the question about which books on the Ulysses theme were studied by Joyce, his brother Stanislaus answered, ‘‘Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Fenelon, Tennyson, Phillips, d'Annunzio, and Hauptmann, as well as Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey and Berard Les Pheniciens et l’Odyssee, and the translations by Butler and Cowper’’ (Stanford 1964: 276n6).3 The translations are significant in that Joyce, for all his enthusiasm for Greek, did not read or pretend to read the language. Hugh Kenner emphasized in two respects the impact of Butler’s Homer on Joyce. First, Butler was ‘‘the first creative mind - Joyce’s was the second - to take the archaeologist’s Homer seriously’’ (Kenner 1969: 293). The archaeological context was one in which the concrete and everyday details of ordinary life were restored to prominence in a poem that most Victorians had treated as sublimely removed from the quotidian. Second, Butler’s translation into plain prose had the ‘‘texture of a naturalistic novel, the same texture a reader of Joyce encounters’’ (Kenner 1969: 296). The influence of Berard’s study on Joyce was fully explored by Michael Seidel (1976). The Homeric names of the episodes of Ulysses are the same as the chapters in Berard’s study, and the geography that he offered for Odysseus is carefully translated into the geography of Dublin. Moreover, he emphasizes a Phoenician, that is, Semitic, background to Odysseus’ wanderings, and so Joyce had an ‘‘archaeological’’ precedent for casting the Jew Bloom in the role of a modern Odysseus.
The links between Ulysses and the Odyssey are multifarious, cunningly made, and endlessly elaborated. But how should they be understood? In an essay of 1923, Eliot made a case for myth, arguing that Joyce’s continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity is ‘‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’’ (Eliot 1975: 177). Yet it remains an open question what kind of order, if any, is yielded by the intricate systemization. Other readings emphasize the parodic elements of the novel: the middling perceptions of Bloom, the inflated ‘‘epic’’ language of chapter 12, the Homeric framework itself as pseudoclassical in the way favored by the Irish Literary Revival (argued by Platt 1998: 98-127), and most centrally the illusions and self-deceptions of Stephen Dedalus. It may be that the novel offers neither myth nor a parody of myth, neither order nor a parody of order, but unsettles the difference between them. For Guy Davenport, Joyce’s labyrinthine symbolism is ‘‘a mimesis of symbolism: a dramatic perception, ultimately tragic, that man’s ideas, his art, his noblest configurations of sense, are no more than symbols. They are forgeries of meaning’’ (Davenport 1987: 60).
Homer was a major presence among the Greek modernists, for whom he was both an import of Western European Hellenism and a domestic legacy available, in however questionable a degree, in the Greek language, landscape, and folk experience. Nikos Kazantzakis’s Odyssey (1938) is in open competition with Homer, icono-clastically pitting ‘‘demoticism at its lexical extreme’’ (Ricks 1989: 3) against Homer’s poetic language and canceling the stable appeal of Ithaca by inventing a series of amoral wanderings after Odysseus’ return home. The title of George Seferis’s Mythistorema (1935) has its ordinary meaning, ‘‘novel,’’ but also insists on ‘‘myth-history’’; in Seferis generally, recent Greek history, in both its ordinary and tragic dimensions, coexists with a mythology from the ancient world. In Mythistorema, the connections to the Odyssey are looser than in Joyce’s Ulysses but perhaps more intense: David Ricks has called the rewriting of the Nekuia in the final poem of the sequence, so that it affirms the poet’s vocation as agent between the living and the dead, ‘‘perhaps Seferis’ most distinctive contribution to European poetry’’ (Ricks 1989: 137; see also Beaton 1991: 108-9). Angelos Sikelianos was most concerned with the mythological and cosmological implications of Homer’s world, as in poems like ‘‘Homer,’’ ‘‘Achelous,’’ and ‘‘Secret Iliad,’’ but more generally with a poetic recreation of ancient myth in which the poet acts as a kind of priest.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascination with the archaic included texts like Gilgamesh and the Egyptian Book of the Dead as well as the Greek kourosf which he celebrated in the sonnet ‘‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’’ (1908). A fifth-century funeral relief that he saw in the Museo Nazionale in Naples in 1904 inspired his poem ‘‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’’ of the same year; it is also recalled at the end of the second Duino Elegy (1912). The figure of Orpheus fascinated Rilke. He was attracted to Bachofen’s account of Orphism, and after his trip to Egypt he became interested in the similarities of Orphic mysteries with ancient Egyptian death cults. Such an attempt at comparative mythology was a common exercise of the time, and he read widely in it (Ryan 1999: 176-7), attempting his own synthesis of myth in the tenth Duino Elegy and many of the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922). Symbolists at the end of the nineteenth century often invoked Orpheus as the figure for the poet, and his mythology was further developed in the first half of the twentieth century by a large number of writers, artists, and musicians: Apollinaire, Benn, Cocteau, Dufy, Klee, Redon, Stravinsky, Tsvetayeva, and many others (Strauss 1971; Segal 1989: 155-98; and Brunel 1999).
The archaic becomes important at this time in another respect: the fragmentary writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers are evaluated anew, above all in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger after the publication of Being and Time (1927). From the 1930s onward, Heidegger abandons his previous attempt to give an a priori account of how Being becomes intelligible within human experience and instead seeks to give a history of Being. This history consists of distinct epochs that constitute a series of ‘‘falls,’’ marked by increasing Seinsvergessenheit (the forgetting of Being) that culminates in the nihilism of modernity. One critical event was the translation of Greek philosophical terms into Latin ones. In Introduction to Metaphysics (given as a lecture course in 1935 and first published in 1953), Heidegger writes that all the translations of Greek philosophical language into Latin destroyed ‘‘the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek’’: this translation was ‘‘the first stage in the isolation and alienation of the originary essence of Greek philosophy,’’ which would become definitive for the Middle Ages and modern philosophy (Heidegger 2000: 14). In other writings, such as ‘‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,’’ given as class lectures in 1931-2 and published about a decade later, Heidegger emphasizes the philosophy of Plato - notably the allegory of the cave - as the decisive rupture that would impoverish philosophy by reducing truth to no more than the agreement of language with reality.5
Wherever the fall is identified, for Heidegger the history of Being has its numinous origin in pre-Socratic Greece. Critical for Heidegger was the Greek word aletheia, which he understood, through a debated etymology, as ‘‘unconcealment’’ or ‘‘disclosure’’ (on the history of Heidegger’s understanding of truth in this sense, see Young 2002: 5-6). The usual translation of the word as ‘‘truth,’’ understood as the agreement or correspondence of propositions to facts, is inadequate since it depends on the existence of things in the first place, and facts about them, and propositions that refer to them. Truth understood as correspondence depends on there already being present a world, a disclosed horizon; it is, therefore, derivative of a more primordial truth. This more primordial truth was experienced above all in pre-Socratic Greece, uniquely open to the self-presencing of Being, in contrast to the subsequent reduction of Being to ontology, to objects reliably present (Young 1997: 112). Heidegger repeatedly turns to the fragments of pre-Socratic philosophers, in lectures, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, and in essays on Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides (collected and translated into English in Heidegger 1984; for Anaximander, see also Heidegger 2002: 242-81).
World History
