Anglo-American Perceptions of Hellenism
Anglo-American Perceptions of Hellenism
Edited by
Tatiani G. Rapatzikou
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING
Anglo-American Perceptions of Hellenism, edited by Tatiani G. Rapatzikou
This book first published 2007 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2007 by Tatiani G. Rapatzikou and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-248-8; ISBN 13: 9781847182487
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments............................................................................................ viii
Introduction.........................................................................................................ix
Tatiani G. Rapatzikou
Part I: English Hellenisms
Chapter One .........................................................................................................2
A Walpolian Anecdote: The Garden of Alcinous
Mihaela Irimia
Chapter Two.......................................................................................................15
Between “truth” and misrepresentation: Lady Elizabeth Craven in Greece
Vassiliki Markidou
Chapter Three.....................................................................................................28
Beware of (Phil)Hellenes bringing gifts: Lord Byron and Greece
Maria Koundoura
Chapter Four ......................................................................................................42
Empire politics and feminine civilization in Mary Shelley’s “Euphrasia:
A Tale of Greece”
Maria Schoina
Chapter Five.......................................................................................................55
A “Sense of Freedom” for the modern spirit: The politics of Walter
Pater’s “Wickelmann”
Yannis Kanarakis
Chapter Six.........................................................................................................69
Heroism and Loss: The rhetoric of Hellenism and Virginia Woolf’s Greekness
Lambrotheodoros Koulouris
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Seven ....................................................................................................82
Hellenism/Modernism: Reading T.S. Eliot and Constantine P. Cavafy
in Lawrence Durrell’s (Un)real City
James Gifford
Chapter Eight .....................................................................................................98
The Apollonian and Dionysian Clash of Wills and Values in Peter Shaffer’s
Equus and The Gift of the Gorgon
Ligia Pârvu
PART II: American Hellenisms
Chapter One .....................................................................................................116
“Expanding in the Sun”: Margaret Fuller’s Autobiographical Romance
and the Hellenic Poetics of Early American Feminism
Andrew P. White
Chapter Two.....................................................................................................129
Persephone Goes West: Environmental Anxieties in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
“The Pomegranate-Seeds”
Janet Dean
Chapter Three...................................................................................................144
Greek Classicism: Aesthetic Ideal and Ideological Reference
within the American Renaissance
Evie Savidou-Terrono
Chapter Four ....................................................................................................158
The American Vandal Abroad: Mark Twain’s Night Excursion
to the Acropolis
Eleftheria Arapoglou
Chapter Five.....................................................................................................171
Impressions of American Thought in Greek Magazines of the NineteenthCentury: The Case of the Greek Evangelical Magazines
Vassiliki Vassiloudi
Chapter Six.......................................................................................................186
Do You Believe in Line After Death? The Metaphysical Poetics of Walt
Whitman and Wallace Stevens
Christina Dokou
ANGLO-AMERICAN PERCEPTIONS OF HELLENISM
vii
Chapter Seven ..................................................................................................198
Songs from Cyprus: H.D. and Cypriot Hellenism
Nephie Christodoulides
Chapter Eight ...................................................................................................214
Why always the Greek dance? Edna St. Vincent Millay’s address to Sappho
Artemis Michailidou
Chapter Nine ....................................................................................................228
“Right” according to whome? Eva-Palmer Sikelianos and cross-cultural
dress and the University of Humankind
Lena Pangalo
Chapter Ten......................................................................................................241
Eudora Welty and Greek Mythology: A constructive symbiosis
Youli Theodosiadou
Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................252
The tragic elusiveness in John Ashbery’s The Heroes
Vasilis Papageorgiou
Chapter Twelve ................................................................................................266
Between East and West: Greece in the Asian-American literary imagination
Joy M. Leighton
Chapter Thirteen ..............................................................................................280
When the “sandglass” is overturned: Robert Wilson’s (mis)interpretations
of ancient Greek myth
Penelope Hatzidimitriou
Chapter Fourteen..............................................................................................291
The Asia Minor Disaster in American Literature: a symbiosis of fact
and fiction in Thea Halo and Jeffrey Eugenides
Anastasia Stefanidou
List of Contributors..........................................................................................305
Index ................................................................................................................311
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would initially like to thank all the contributors of this volume for having
embraced the present endeavor with great interest and enthusiasm throughout all
the stages of its completion. Also, special thanks go to Cristopher Gair,
Managing Editor, and Richard Gravil, Founding Co-Editor, of Symbiosis: A
Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations for their assistance and advice at
the primary stages of this project, as well as for having invited the School of
English at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, to host the 5th
Biannual Symbiosis Conference (June/July 2005), which served as the
intellectual stimuli for the development of the present collection.
Many thanks go to the following galleries and institutions for granting
permission for the use of copyright material:
The British Library for granting permission to reprint the “Constantine and
Euphrasia” image from Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and
Stories, with Original Engravings, edited Charles E. Robinson (1981).
The U.S Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens
National Historic Site, Cornish, NH, for the photo of the dress rehearsal for the
1905 “A Masque of ‘Ours’ or the Gods and the Golden Bowl.”
The Museum of the City of New York for granting permission to reprint
from its Theater Collection the photograph entitled “Edna St. Vincent Millay”
that Arnold Genthe took in June 1944.
The Visual Artists And Galleries Association, Inc. (VAGA) for their
permission to reproduce Thomas Hart Benton’s Persphenone (1939).
I would also like to extend my thanks to Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
and especially Amanda Millar and Andy Nercessian for their editorial
assistance.
Tatiani G. Rapatzikou
INTRODUCTION
TATIANI G. RAPATZIKOU
“One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs for that only place in
which one can be at home, because it is the only place one would want to be at
home: the Greek world. But it is precisely that direction that all bridges are
broken—save the rainbow bridges of concepts!”1
—F. Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtsausgabe
“To get rid of one’s ignorance, to see things as they are to see them in their
beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before
human nature; and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal, Hellenism, and
human life in the hands of Hellenism … are full of what we call sweetness and
light.”2
—Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
At a time when cultural consciousness is under the influence of the forces of
multiculturalism and globalization, it is essential that certain cultural concepts
are revisited and reconceptualized so as to rise up to another level of
appreciation, evaluation and understanding. Gregory Jusdanis in his article
“Acropolis Now?” comments on “the merit and usefulness of Hellenism today”3
by placing emphasis on the transhistorical and transcultural potential Greek
literary and cultural production is invested with. Also, he adds: “[T]he
contribution of classical and post-classical Hellenism to themes such as
polyethnicity, universalism and particularism, diaspora, self-governance, ethics,
civic participation, justice, and freedom should be considered today,”4 which is
probably where the “charm” and “light” quality of Hellenism, to use Arnold’s
own words, may be located.
Hellenism, since the eighteenth century, has been viewed and approacged
by American and British writers and artists as “an empty space to be filled in by
1
Nietzsche in Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 157.
Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 136.
3
Jusdanis, “Acropolis Now?” 186.
4
Ibid., 186.
2
x
INTRODUCTION
treated as a transient entity, able to expand beyond its ethnic boundaries so as to
intertwine and interact with other cultural models and traditions. As a result,
Hellenism has come to be regarded nowadays as a de-territorialized and
contingent term as well as a mosaic of cross-cultural influences, although it is
still invested with a sense of admiration and nostalgia due to its connection with
a glorious past. Simon Goldhill, in his book Who needs Greek? Contests in the
Cultural History of Hellenism, talks about the “essence of Greekness”6
constantly re-inventing itself as it stands between the past and the present. Also,
he states: “The image of Greece thus becomes bolstered by idealism and
fissured by lack and absence—a site of contention and difference as well as
value and authority.”7 In other words, it is the cultural malleability and historic
contingency that characterizes Hellenism as a concept, as well as the variable
and multifaceted perceptions and interpretations it opens up to that call for its
on-going re-evaluation and re-assessment.
In the present collection of essays, an attempt has been made to explore the
ways in which Hellenic culture has been appropriated, re-contextualized, and reconsidered in the works of a number of British and American writers and artists
throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. What the current
compilation of essays brings together, then, are various points of view—
cultural, political, philosophical—all generated within a literary and/or artistic
context, while exploring the extent to which the resurgence of interest in
classical scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic has facilitated the
interrogation of certain social and aesthetic attitudes in Britain and America in
the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century respectively. However, what is
of primary importance here is the inter- or trans-continental feel that the essays
attempt to communicate to the readers, as this further reinforces the sociopolitical complexity and global quality Hellenism is endowed with even in the
twenty-first century.
The essays featuring in this collection have been chronologically structured
as well as divided into two sections, enabling thus the readers to compare and
contrast the works discussed and analyzed in each part. The main purpose
behind such division is the sustenance of the conversation amongst the papers
included in the present volume and the reverberation of the ideas circulating in
them. In particular, Part I, entitled “British Hellenisms,” starts with Horace
Walpole and concludes with Peter Shaffer; while Part II, organized under the
title “American Hellenisms,” commences with Margaret Fuller and finishes with
Jeffrey Eugenides and Thea Halo. The variety of authors and artists one finds
included in this collection further delineates the multiple theoretical and critical
6
7
Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism, 11.
Ibid., 296.
ANGLO-AMERICAN PERCEPTIONS OF HELLENISM
xi
contexts—Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism—within which
Hellenism operates, highlighting in this manner its intercontinental appeal,
intellectual flexibility, and synthetic vision. In this light, none of the writers and
artists to be studied here has been subjected to gender or ethnic distinctions,
since what the present collection intends to achieve is the promotion of an intracultural dialogue and intra-cultural exchange. Mike Featherstone, in his study
Cultural Theory and Cultural Change, notes that “the challenge for
contemporary cultural theory is to theorize the conditions of possibility for this
shift in emphasis from conceptualizing universalism and unities to particularism
and diversity, and to investigate the possibilities for reconceptualization and
renewed syntheses.”8
In particular, in the first chapter of the first section, emphasis is placed on
Horace Walpole’s treatment of the Homeric episode of the garden of Alcinous.
This should be seen in conjunction with the literary aesthetic that had developed
in eighteenth-century Britain with regard to the appreciation of classical texts.
Taking advantage of the visual, layout, and versification potential that painting,
landscape gardening, and poetry were respectively endowed with, Walpole, in
his Anecdote editions, attempts a cultural and historical re-appraisal of the
Homeric incident mentioned above. As Mihaela Irimia notes in her essay,
Homer’s The Odyssey was translated into English by Alexander Pope between
1725 and 1726. However, Pope’s anglicized interpretation seems to be mostly
informed by his own poetic gusto. So what Walpole achieved with his writings
was to bring to the fore the visual diversity and cultural wealth of the Homeric
text even if this was transmitted to the reader via Pope’s erudite and
linguistically-balanced translation.
With the focus of the next paper still being on the eighteenth century,
Vassiliki Markidou’s analysis deals with a different issue, that of the formation
of the British female traveler’s identity. By focusing on Elizabeth Craven’s trip
to the eighteenth-century Greece, which, at the time, was under the Ottoman
rule, Markidou compares Craven’s travelogue to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s
so as to comment on the writing tropes both writers employed as well as on their
effort to combat the gender ideologies of their day in relation to the kind of
travel writings produced by male authors. Greece, as a locus of a glorious past
and a corrupted present, serves as a means through which the female writers
brought forward here confronted their own limitations and preconceptions as
regards the way they viewed the imperialist and masculinist background of their
own culture.
Furthermore, Maria Koundoura’s essay commences with Henri Lefebvre’s
realization that Greece does not constitute a homogeneous but an abstract entity
8
Featherstone, Cultural Theory and Cultural Change, viii.
xii
INTRODUCTION
against which culture and history realize themselves through the creation of
literary as well as historical totalities, such as those of Classicism and
Romanticism. She then goes on to examine the extent to which Lord Byron’s
Philhellenism was essentially anti-Hellenic, since it did not correspond to
Greece as it was but to Greece as it was imagined, an argument also employed
by Adamantios Korais in his attempt to persuade the French to help the Greeks,
as Koundoura writes in her discussion. By bringing forward examples from
Byron’s travels as well as from his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Koundoura
claims that Byron’s Philhellenism constitutes an example of re-historisization
due to Byron’s attempt to reconceptualize ancient Greece from a modern
perspective.
In addition, Maria Schoina’s article centers on how the narrative of Mary
Shelley’s “Euphrasia: A Tale of Greece” is structured: on the one hand, it feeds
off the sensationalism surrounding the Greek War of Independence in the
nineteenth century, as this was generated in the philhellenic writings produced
by Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, while on the other hand, it challenges
the gender politics of its time. Shelley’s story, as Schoina states, heads towards
the construction of a type of discourse which does not simply emanate the
political atmosphere and the romantic philhellenic views of that period, but it
adheres to the voicing of its predominantly female audience’s concerns. In this
sense, Euphrasia’s identification with Greece and her rescue from the Pasha’s
harem by her brother, Constantine, places emphasis on female oppression and
Eastern despotism rather than on the idealization of Euphrasia’s/Greece’s
condition, as it was the case with the texts written by the male romantic authors.
However, Yannis Kanarakis’s paper approaches Hellenism from a different
perspective: it concentrates on the cultural dominance of Hellenism, as this was
initially formulated in Germany in the eighteenth century and, then, in England
in the late nineteenth century, through the examination of certain works by
Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Walter Pater respectively. By fusing history
with narrative art, both writers shed light on particular aspects of the Hellenic
ideal and its transubstantiations: Winckelmann focuses on the Greek
conceptualization of freedom as a means of artistic creation, also linked to the
Romantic political praxis, while Pater views the “Greek spirit” as a response to
the problems of his time on the basis of partial/individual choice and
observation. What Kanarakis attempts to comment on here is the transition that
the Hellenic ideal had undergone from a notion of idealization to a notion of
“commodity choice,” as this was shaped by the emergent market place and
sexual politics of the time.
In his piece, Lambrotheodoros Koulouris passes on to the twentieth century
so as to discusses Virginia Woolf’s construction of a literary aesthetic which not
only reflected the socio-economic factors that led to the Great War, but also the
ANGLO-AMERICAN PERCEPTIONS OF HELLENISM
xiii
irrationality and the feeling of loss generated by it. Woolf’s response, as
Koulouris explains, should be seen as a reaction to the heroic ideal that had been
formulated in Britain towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth centuries, as a result of the preoccupation of the male scholars of the
time with the classical Greek tradition. Koulouris comments on the articulacy
and eloquence of the classical Greek heroes when they succumb to death,
which, in Woolf’s works, transforms into a “silent acceptance of futility and
final submission.” Moved by her own marginalized condition as a female reader
of Greek texts, Woolf is not interested in approaching death as a celebratory
condition but as an act of alienation in her attempt to portray the vulnerability of
her own literary “heroes.”
In the case of Lawrence Durrell’s work and the formation of his own sense
of Modernism, James Gifford’s study draws on Durrell’s interaction and
acquaintance with certain Greek modernist writers. Although Durrell’s British
publisher, Faber and Faber, wished to view his work in the light of T.S. Eliot’s
influence, Durrell himself seemed to be much more under the influence of
certain Greek Modernist writers, such as George Seferis and Constantine P.
Cavafy. What makes Greek Modernism differ from the Anglo-American one,
and in particular from the Eliotic modernist model, is the way in which the
former relates to the past and the present. In particular, the past is disjointed
from its historical tradition so as to re-transform into a living entity, existing in
parallel with the present moment. This is exactly the kind of feeling Durrell
builds into his own work, as it is evidenced in The Alexandria Quartet. By
focusing on how allusion works in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and in Durrell’s
The Alexandria Quartet in conjunction with Seferis’s discussion of Cavafy’s
poems, Gifford’s discussion illuminates the variable and palimpsestic path
Greek Modernism followed in relation to its Anglo-American but traditionbound counterpart.
The first part of the volume concludes with Ligia Pârvu’s article where
attention is paid to the Apollonian and Dionysian tensions which build up in
Peter Shaffer’s plays, Equus and The Gift of the Gorgon. Pârvu commences her
analysis with a close discussion of the Apollonian/Dionysian duality, as this is
formulated in Friederich Nitzsche’s, Sigmund Freud’s, Carl G. Jung’s, Norman
O. Brown’s, and Ihab Hassan’s works; in other words, she approaches both
terms from a modernist as well as postmodernist perspective, while, at the same
time, she familiarizes the readers with Apollo’s and Dionysus’ multifaceted
personalities by drawing on the diverse names used for them in Greek
mythology. She then goes on to explore Shaffer’s plays by focusing on the close
textual analysis of particular incidents. What she is trying to show is that the
Apollonian and Dionysian tensions and values attached to each one of them
continue being dominant even nowadays when the need to come to terms with
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INTRODUCTION
our repressed and unacknowledged feelings and desires is more prevalent than
ever.
The second section of the present collection opens with Andrew P. White’s
discussion of Margaret Fuller’s views on “natural childhood,” which developed
as a reaction to her own text-bound education as a child. Due to the
marginalized position of women in the nineteenth century, Fuller’s father
insisted on exposing his daughter from early on to classical education, that of
ancient Greek and Latin. For Fuller, ancient Greece identified with an
“imaginative space,” while Rome with domination and authority. As White
argues, this “duality” enabled Fuller to express her ideas not only about female
intellectual growth, but also about her parents and the patriarchal institution of
the time. Ancient Greece, in particular, served as an imaginative topos in which
women could “expand in the sun” away from the coldness of patriarchy that the
Roman literary influence represented.
Interestingly, Janet Dean focuses on the significance of the Persephone
myth, as this was explored in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s children’s story “The
Pomegranate-Seeds,” in her attempt to talk, in symbolic terms, about the
ravishing of the American landscape in the nineteenth century. By adopting an
ecocrtical approach, Dean views the destruction of the American landscape in
tandem with cultural and historical change, revealing, at the same time, the
power Greek myths have to address worldly concerns, succeeding in this
manner to attract the attention of a much more diverse readership.
However, Evie Savidou-Terrono’s essay takes a different turn by focusing
on the extent to which Greek classicism was appropriated by American art and
architecture during the period of the American Renaissance. As a reaction to the
mechanization and uncontrolled materialism that governed post Civil-War
America, Greek classicism featured as the only means through which Americans
could regain political and cultural stability. Savidou-Terrono’s analysis then
resorts to a number of artistic, architectural, and poetic examples in an attempt
to delineate the kind of works that were composed at the time under the
influence of Greek classicism, although all artists approached it from an
idealized perspective. In the meantime, she also discusses the inner tensions that
were created in America in the nineteenth century due to its socio-cultural
weaknesses and the need to reform itself.
The socio-cultural ills and attitudes of nineteenth-century America are also
touched upon in the next paper where emphasis is placed on Mark Twain’s The
Innocents Abroad in relation to the kind of travel culture that was formulated
then. By referring thus to the formation of a “new class of traveler,” termed by
Twain as “the American Vandal,” as well as to the Acropolis incident,
Eleftheria Arapoglou’s piece brings to the attention of the readers Twain’s
ability to uncover and criticize through his writings, under the guise of the
ANGLO-AMERICAN PERCEPTIONS OF HELLENISM
xv
author in addition to that of the narrator, the drawbacks of travel literature in
conjunction with the travel industry developing in America in the nineteenth
century. Actually, Twain uses the account on Athens so as to criticize the
parochial attitude of the nineteenth-century American tourists, who viewed
European monuments not for what they were but for what they thought them to
be on the basis of the obscure descriptions offered by their guide books.
The kind of viewpoints printed matter communicates to its readership also
constitutes the focal point of Vassiliki Vassiloudi’s paper. Specifically, this
centers on the Evangelical magazines that were published in Greece in the
nineteenth century, with the intervention of George Constantine and Michael
Kalapothakes, on the basis of certain Anglo-American Evangelical editions. The
significance of these magazines lies in the kind of social history that they
offered as regards the relationship as well as the adversity that had developed at
the time between the Greek Orthodox church, and the English and American
missionaries who took action in the Greek-speaking world. Although these
magazines indirectly promoted the Anglo-American evangelical ideology, they
also enabled the circulation of various English and American literary works in
Greek translation. Even though they were primarily destined for children, these
magazines, as Vassiloudi claims, attempted the spiritual, moral, and political
reformation of the nineteenth-century Greek society, whose geographical and
cultural position between the East and the West was still viewed as a “liminal”
one.
In the case of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” it is the liminal status of
death that Christina Dokou tackles in this essay of the volume. Particularly, she
deals with Whitman’s and Stevens’s unusual, for the American cultural
standards, gendered conceptualization of death. She primarily tries to explain
this on the basis of the notions of nature, intellectual and physical beauty, mortal
and immortal life that death as a concept is often identified with. However, this
can be more substantially explained if Whitman’s and Stevens’s acquaintance
with Plato’s The Symposium and especially their familiarization with Plato’s
writing techniques are taken into account. Specifically, in The Symposium, it is
Diotima’s wisdom and remarks which serve as a bridging point between
Socrates’s philosophical syllogisms. As a result, Diotima functions as a
procreative narrative trope that Plato invents in order to help his readers
recognize the “intellectual evolution” that philosophical thinking follows. In a
similar vein, in Whitman’s and Stevens’s poems death transforms into a
Diotima-like creative force functioning, therefore, as an intellectual threshold
rather than a terminal state.
In her article, Nephie J. Christodoulides focuses on the intellectual musings
of another American poet, that of Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), as these are recorded
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INTRODUCTION
in a series of six poems H.D. wrote under the title “Songs from Cyprus,” which
are included in her poetry collection entitled Roses for Bronze. H.D. must have
written these poems after having visited the island of Cyprus in 1920, although
this is not a widely acknowledged fact due to the doubts existing as to the
materialization of this journey because of the politically troublesome climate
that existed in Cyprus at that time. In H.D.’s “Songs from Cyprus,” emphasis is
placed on the making of these songs, on Cyprus-born Aphrodite, and on the
symbolic significance that the image of the rose plays in them, since it stands for
female vision and the female poetic voice according to Sappho’s poetic
influence. However, H.D. uses the rose not in an imagistic manner but as a
means through which she brings both the “Greek” and “Cypriot” Hellenism
together by conceptualizing the rose as either white or red respectively. In this
way, she manages to create a palimpsestic poetic vista through the co-existence
of various opposing notions, such as those of love and war, which prominently
feature in her poetry as well as shape and regenerate her poetic imagination.
In addition, Artemis Michailidou places emphasis on Edna St. Vincent
Millay’s appropriation of and differentiation from Sappho’s lyric poetry. Since
the 1990s, literary critics have once again been interested in tracing the links
that there are between Millay’s and Sappho’s poetic endeavors by looking
beyond the lyric potential of Millay’s poetry. Its homoerotic nuances and its
skepticism as to the making of poetry itself suggest new paths for the
interpretation and appreciation of her writings. Millay, in accordance with the
other female modernist poets of the time, does not resort to the classical past
uncritically, but it is through her collaboration with and diversion from it that
she attempts to formulate her own poetic style. Through the close reading of a
number of Millay’s poems, Michailidou attempts to acquaint the reader with the
“multi-dimensional” perspective of her poetry as well as with Millay’s effort to
preserve her poetic voice and sustain her literary reputation.
In her essay, Lena Pangalo focuses on Eva Palmer-Sikelianos’s costume
productions for two ancient Greek tragedies, Prometheus Bound and The
Suppliants, as well as on her endeavor to build up a cross-cultural context within
which these productions could be viewed and appreciated. Being a dress
designer and dress maker herself, Palmer-Sikelianos was carried away by her
own idealized way of viewing ancient Greek tradition. This combined with hers
and her husband’s, Anghelos Sikelianos’s, vision of creating a “University of
Humankind” in Delphi, Greece, marks their attempt to exceed their own
American and Greek political reality respectively so as to construct a universal
arena of cross-cultural intellectual exchange. Pangalo, through the adoption of
an anthropological point of view, reveals the insufficiency of such an effort and
the limitations of Palmer-Sikelianos’s view of the Greek cultural tradition.
ANGLO-AMERICAN PERCEPTIONS OF HELLENISM
xvii
In the case of Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, a short-story sequence
based on a number of Greek myths, Youli Theodosiadou comments on the
strong affiliation that there is between mythology and literature. Particularly,
Theodosiadou explores the way in which Greek myths are reworked into
Welty’s stories in her attempt to communicate to the readers the characters’
inner tensions and community-bound anxieties. Myths, in this case, enrich
Welty’s literary discourse with new meanings and interpretative possibilities for
viewing and understanding the world.
The dialectic potential mythology is endowed with is further elaborated on
in Vasilis Papageorgiou’s paper, which concentrates on the tragic awareness one
finds in John Ashbery’s play entitled The Heroes. Firstly produced by the
Living Theatre in New York in 1952, this play takes a negative stance towards
the staging of the dramatic peripeteia and catharsis, as this is experienced in
ancient Greek drama productions. By adopting what would one call a Derridean
approach towards the tragic, Ashbery is interested in the exposure and
reinforcement of his characters’ sufferings. Although the characters that he
employs, as indicated by their names, have been taken from a distant
mythological past, they do not seem to be complying with it and its principles;
what they experience throughout the course of the play takes them beyond the
boundaries of their ancient Greek dramatic composure. As a result, their
sufferings do not derive from their own tragic condition but from their
estrangement, if viewed from a postmodern perspective, from their external
reality and others.
With attention paid to the multidimensional possibilities of Greek
mythology, Joy M. Leighton approaches it from a multicultural perspective, as
this is shaped by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s novel Dictee. This is a collage-like
text, combining a plethora of information coming from Cha’s Asian-American
background with classical Greek mythology. In her attempt to criticize the
patriarchal and imperialist ideology of her day, Cha relies on the usage of
classical Greek female figures who she re-conceptualizes in her work so as to
challenge certain language and signifying systems of authority. In this manner,
Greek mythology does not only work for her as a source of inspiration, but also
as a means of interrogating certain aesthetic and political values. The subversive
quality of Greek myths enables Cha to come to terms with her own sociocultural position. However, her work encourages the contemporary reader to reevaluate Greek culture and appreciate it for what it really is—not as an idealized
but as a geographically liminal and constantly evolving cultural locus.
Penelope Hatzidimitriou goes on to talk about Robert Wilson’s postmodern
theatrical experimentations, especially with regard to ancient Greek tragedy,
which he approaches from a multicultural perspective. Moving beyond the
Aristotelian mimesis, Wilson places emphasis on the fusion of styles, cultural
xviii
INTRODUCTION
influences, and techniques so as to provide his audiences with alternative ways
of approaching and appreciating the ancient Greek tragic tradition.
Hatzidimitriou talks about Wilson’s “revisionist stagings of tragedy,” wishing to
elucidate not only Wilson’s sources of influence and innovative theatrical
interpretations, but also the development that the Greek theatre underwent as
well as the dilemmas that it faced in the last decade of the twentieth century.
In the final paper of this section, Anastasia Stefanidou tackles the ways in
which history and historical facts are presented or reconstructed in Jeffrey
Eugenides’s Middlesex and Thea Halo’s Not Even My Name. Actually, the main
historical events around which each one of the novels revolves are the burning
of Smyrna in 1922 and the Genocide of the Pontic and other Asia Minor Greeks,
Assyrians, and Armenians, which commenced long before 1919. Stefanidou
comments on how ethnic history is (re)presented in each case: in Eugenides’s
novel emphasis is placed on the “fluidity of memory,” while in Halo’s book
attention is paid to the exposure of certain historical truths. What matters here is
the extent to which the imaginative or realistic presentation of history influences
the formation of the diasporic identity and its historical consciousness.
As all the above descriptions testify, this book has been designed with
the general reader in mind who wishes to delve into a vast array of topics,
ranging from comparative literature, cultural history, history of the classical
heritage, and travel narratives to English and American romantic, modernist and
postmodernist writings. The diverse material that the current volume contains
moves beyond chronological, geographical, and literary boundaries with each
chapter functioning as a point of reference as well as a point of departure for
everyone studying, researching, or generally wishing to be informed about
Hellenism within a cross-cultural or even transatlantic context. In addition, the
volume includes black and white illustrations, and bibliographies to each essay,
hoping to enrich the already existing bibliography and to contribute to the
research carried out in the field of comparative literary studies with an interest
in English and/or American Hellenisms.
Without this being an exhaustive piece of research, it has multiple answers
or points of view to offer to contemporary readers by strengthening and
broadening their understanding of the Hellenic cultural heritage as a global
entity, enabling them thus to appreciate their own role in it. Ioanna Laliotou in
her study entitled Transatlantic Subjects states:
Depriving globalization of its historical depth and heritage presupposes that we
exclude from our consideration the histories of peoples who have been
experiencing and participating in the forces of globalization during the last two
centuries. Today, historicizing globalization and its theoretical and
historiographical articulations seems to be a necessary step in order to
understand the complexity of global forces and the diverse and often local ways
ANGLO-AMERICAN PERCEPTIONS OF HELLENISM
xix
in which the notion of globality has emerged in politics and culture during the
last two centuries.9
As a result, the juxtapositions resonating out of the variable trans-cultural
perspectives that the present volume endorses, they do enable readers to be
aware of “the meaning of their culture and the identity with which it endows
them, if only by pointing to something beyond their national borders,”10 which
is exactly what Hellenism as a concept anticipates and responds to. It is only
then that they “start thinking of themselves as inhabitants of a vast, unitary
system, the problem of what culture stands for, and what individual life stands
for within it.”11
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind, edited by M. McCarthy. Vol.2. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. [S.I.]: Elder, 1875.
Colecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic modernism: 1910-1950. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Featherstone, Mike, ed. Cultural Theory and Cultural Change. London,
Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992.
Goldhill, Simon. Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of
Hellenism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Jusdanis, Gregory. “Acropolis Now?” boundary 2 Vol.23, no. 1 (Spring 1996):
185-93.
Laliotou, Ioanna. Transatlantic Subjects. Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 2004.
Peyser, Thomas. “Globalization in America: The Case of Don DeLillo’s White
Noise.” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History
25, no. 3 (1996): 255-71.
9
Laliotou, Transatlantic Subjects, 95.
Peyser, “Globalization in America: The Case of Don DeLillo’s White Noise,” 265.
11
Ibid., 265.
10
Part I:
English Hellenisms
CHAPTER ONE
A WALPOLIAN ANECDOTE:
THE GARDEN OF ALCINOUS
MIHAELA IRIMIA
When, in 1758, Horace Walpole committed to paper his Anecdotes of
Painting in England, sent to the print in 1762, Alexander Pope’s translation of
The Iliad had made delightful reading in the cultural circles of the time for
roughly four decades (completed, as it was, between 1715 and 1720). The
Odyssey, in the same unmistakable heroic couplet, with occasional triplets
brimming over with poetic enthusiasm, or rather, technical versatility, had sat on
morning tea tables, salon cabinets, or club shelves for about thirty years (the
whole text being anglicized with verve and energy between 1725 and 1726).
The whole business of Homer being turned into an asset of refined NeoClassic elegance is too compendious a subject to be tackled in a single study. It
sits at the core of the classic education of the age, with both epics featuring as
compulsory items on any accomplished gentleman’s reading list. Qua cultural
badge, Homer raises fundamental questions. Some refer to aesthetic vision, as
they do to recommendable lifestyle, such as how to domesticate the roughness
of Homeric Greek and the Homeric Weltanschauung into the artifices of
aristocratic conventionalism. It is part and parcel of the celebrated Querelle
d’Homère, which had already accumulated into an opposition of principle
between geometry and history, when Pope had started to render the canonical
text of the canonical Troy war into a northern idiom. In 1714, La Motte had
taken pains to “civilize” the blind bard’s verse for the consumption of an
audience in love with “embellished” prosody. Just less than a century before,
comme il faut salon delicacy had been saved by ancient nude sculptures being
covered with chic underwear meant to put them in a fashionable gallant light.
In the same year, in 1714, when Queen Anne departed from this world in
London, Mme Dacier’s Des Causes de la corruption du goût in Paris defended
Homer’s simple, direct, and original manner and manners, on the assumption
that making him, it and them “reasonable” would only mean perverting them by
corrupting their historical naturalness. Here is the inception of periodization in
THE WALPOLIAN ANECDOTE
3
literary studies, something unknown before. Together with it the naming of
“classicism” is itself the offspring of the “querelle.” Homer becomes the object
of two different kinds of study: on the one hand, there remains the inertia of the
“classical” view of the model bard of the venerable antiquity—a canonical
homage all through; on the other hand, the “modern” view is held according to
which Homer is “investigated historically by literary scholars” of the so-called
“historical movement.”1
The struggle to retrieve the “historical Homer” also underlies the taxonomic
differentiation between the “classic” and the “primitive,” the polished and the
rugged, the finished and the accidental, which, in terms of imagologically tinged
aesthetic definitions, will play a crucial part in the opposition between the
French and the English garden patently sealed up by Mme de Staël in the very
early 1800s. The “true Homer,” it was felt in Mme Dacier’s camp, was by no
means the “silver poet” type identifiable in the Virgilian tradition. He was, on
the contrary, the “good savage” type of poet, like the Celtic or Scandinavian
bards of the “runic” tradition, on which Walpole’s rationalistic century was to
later build the “medievalism” of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William
Shakespeare, and other “primitive” Elizabethans. Back in Walpole’s times, the
typological divide established separated the Germanic from the Latin element—
the former felt as “primitive,” “romantic,” “northern,” the latter “refined,”
“classic,” “southern.” To the former, the figure of Shakespeare the “royalist”
was to be symbolically attached, in contrast to the “classic” and “republican”
John Milton.
To these central canonical pairs of writers we should add the disciplinary
separation occurring later in the century, with literature assuming the status that
it still has for us today, aesthetics coming into being, and literary criticism
becoming an independent intellectual occupation. Concurrently with the
“northern,” the “modern” spirit detaches itself from the received ideas of the
unquestioned past. Walpole reputedly builds himself “a little Gothic castle” at
Strawberry Hill and establishes a printing press to the benefit of his modern and
mundane maneuvers. But he also prints Anecdotes of Painting in England and a
Catalogue of Engravers in England, with an antiquarian’s zest. Nor are his
Grand Tour exploits, in Thomas Gray’s company, or his Parisian visits to Mme
du Deffand drastically split from the call of the antiquity. Like any respectable
gentleman of the time, he drops the anchor of self-fulfillment into the soil of the
fashionable present as he completes his European tour, and copiously reads the
ancients available in contemporaneous translations.
This brings us to his Anecdotes, a fairly successful genre in his day, at a time
of antiquarian passion. A copy of Anecdotes of British Topography, or, an
1
Forester, Homer in English Criticism: The Historical Approach in the 18th Century,
112.
4
CHAPTER ONE
Historical Account of What has been done for illustrating the Topographical
Antiquities of 1768, now a holding at the Lewis-Walpole library in Farmington,
Connecticut, carries the scribbling, in Walpole’s own hand, that one Mr.
Richard Gough has brought to light the hidden past. “These Anecdotes,” we
read in the Preface, “have informed and amused the collector”2—a classic
principle that has come down to us in Horatian Latin as “utile dulci.” Another
holding bears a symptomatic Germanic counterpart kind of title, that is, Modern
Anecdote of the Ancient Family of the Kinkvervankotsdarsprakengotchderns: A
Tale for Christmas 1779. It announces its reader that the tale narrated in its
pages is meant “to prevent people from suffering Ennui [which] tempts my
countrymen to suicide.”3 Yet another, Anonymiana; or, Ten Centuries of
Observations on Various Authors and Subjects compiled by A Late very Learned
and reverend Divine faithfully published from the original Manuscript with the
addition of a copious index, most likely of the mid-1760s, declares the delight of
combining “light reading and serious thinking.”4 This particular writing comes
so close to our diggings in cultural history, when it looks at customs and rituals
recurrent in various communities. One particular instance calls our attention,
because of its association with the classic Greek antiquity. “Bailler le bouquet,”
literally “to give the nosegay,” is the French expression to bid somebody do in
his or her turn what the others have done before them in company at some social
event. This, we are told, is rooted in the ancient Greek custom of the σκόλιον, a
song that went round at banquets, sung to the lyre by guests one after another,
each holding a myrtle branch (µυρρόην), which he passed on to anyone he
chose. Finally, Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books by the Reverend
William Beloe, translator of Herodotus, unveils the author’s joy to have been
offered a job at the British Museum. This will make it possible for him to spend
his working day in the company of “rare and curious books,”5 for which he
provides a list with what we now call English classics by the side of the
celebrated ancients, the Bible and Ars Memorativa.
In all the above-mentioned texts a certain desire, if not downright obligation
“to speak with the dead,” to use Stephen Greenblatt’s famous New Historicist
motivation, is the motive power in a way. The anecdote, as we have it today, is
one of so many diversions, a term of tricky nuances even now, and that not only
2
Gough, Anecdotes of British Topography, or, Historical Account of What has been done
for illustrating the Topographical Antiquities, xxxv.
3
Modern Anecdote of the Ancient Family of the Kinkvervankotsdarsprakengotchderns: A
Tale for Christmas 1779, ii.
4
Anonymiana; or, Ten Centuries of Observations on Various Authors and Subjects
compiled by A Late very Learned and reverend Divine faithfully published from the
original Manuscript with the addition of a copious index, i.
5
Beloe, Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books, xix.
THE WALPOLIAN ANECDOTE
5
because of its now forgotten etymology. Before it became a diverting story, it
was, indeed, what its Greek etymon indicates, namely, an unpublished narrative
for more or less restricted use. No wonder it came to be central in the New
Historicist jargon, with Joel Fineman signing a study of reference to its history
as a marginal type of writing in the dynamic relationship holding between “on
the one hand, what is called literature and, on the other, what is called history.”6
Precisely, at the juncture of the two rises the debate in which first-rank critical
minds have been engaged in the last couple of decades, from Jacques Derrida to
Hayden White. Where lies the border line between what we now call the
Aristotelian “has been” of history and the Aristotelian “might be or should be”
of literature?
Originating in ancient Greek culture itself, this is a major theoretical issue in
interdisciplinary approaches now, a stance taken as a matter of rule in the “age
of pagan Christianity” that the “age of Reason” has been called to explore.
Modern definitions of history still cannot circumvent the Thucydides-Herodotos
dichotomy with the former founding what the French mentalists were to call
“histoire événementielle,” and the latter anticipating their “longue durée” of
cultural history. The Thucydidean method of “taking historians” views, [yet]
distancing himself from previous chroniclers’ is the practical man’s who
explains events through immediate causes.7 The Herodotean, instead, is “the
cosmopolitan tourist’s, fond of myth-making,”8 betraying an anthropological
bent. It is the eighteenth-century, all-embracing view of human experience as
the myriad relations holding between public and private, ideal and material,
myths and mysteries accompanying the Grand Tourist overseas, as Walpole
himself experienced, intoxicated on antiquarian and intellectual curiosity and
curiosities open to speculations given to inquisitive drives.
We may read Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England in the track of the
Thucydidean attempt to historicize facts and come up with a sense of historicity.
Fineman insists on the “meta touto” of metahistory brought to theoretical
excellence by Hayden White’s collation of “structure and genesis.”9 As the New
Historicist explains, the “things necessary” (ta deonta), reconstructed by
Thucydides for the historically significant occasion, gain a probability and
plausibility, a likelihood and “generic types of situations,”10 able to shed on his
profession something of the light of Hippocrates’ medical occupation. Like the
doctor, the historian interprets signs of the case under study “for the sake of
6
Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” 49.
Southgate, History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern
Perspectives, 8.
8
Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder, 24.
9
Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote,” 53.
10
Ibid., 53.
7
6
CHAPTER ONE
diagnosis and prognosis, establishing contrapuntal symmetries, teleologically
governed progress, and an internal logic of events, ‘a nomological narrative or
meta.’ ”11 Briefly, Fineman discovers, even in the fact-abiding Thucydidean
historian, something of the myth-enchanted Herodotean anthropologisthistorian, namely a narrator putting his “logos, or principle” to the use of
ordering “the fact, the erga.”12
The divide between the “has been” and the “should be” is truly porous, just
like the Hippocratic coincidence of event and context, the “classic” medical
view of the old Greeks. The volatile and, consequently, rich border between
history and story is nowhere more exciting to analyze than in the case of the
anecdote, that “narration of a singular event [or] literary form or genre that
uniquely refers to the real.”13 Fineman detects something literary about it, as he
does its referential access to the real. This makes of the anecdote a “historeme,
i.e., … the smallest minimal unit of the historiographic fact.”14 Likewise, the
Walpolian Anecdotes are reminders to the contemporaneous and the
contemporary audience of so many and, quite often, anonymous characters
(ancient and modern, Western and Oriental, religious and secular), places,
events, customs and habits, cultural institutions, objects, and rituals. They share
the space of cultural history with a worth of “flowers of anecdotes” for the
“literary emporium,” “encyclopaedias” of notes, quotes, “bons mots” and “bons
contes,” “fascicula” of impressions, “tables talks,” “kaleidoscopes” of
aphorisms, or the very fashionable Anas.
The author announces on the flyleaf his indebtedness to George Vertue
(1684-1756), late engraver to the Society of Antiquarians of London. Vertue is
his model for the memory-geared enterprise that he himself embarks upon. The
lives and works of kings and queens, painters and literary people (William
Hogarth and Samuel Johnson, for instance) form the substance of his endeavor
to store the past and save it from oblivion. When it comes to Charles I, Walpole
acknowledges that more veracious stuff could be gathered from anecdotes than
from apologies. David Garrick, the peerless actor and theatre-owner, is
mentioned for borrowing Walpole’s Anecdotes equally out of curiosity and for
fun, Thomas Gainsborough is courted for inscriptions on the first edition, the
four volumes are sent to Mrs Hogarth as a special present, and Gray is recalled
as collector of artists for the Walpolian gallery of fashionable names. Most
interestingly, the Anecdotes committed to paper by Joseph Spence (1699-1768),
Pope’s friend, are briefly commented upon and described as being in the manner
of Plutarch’s Lives.
11
Ibid., 55.
Ibid., 55.
13
Ibid., 56.
14
Ibid., 57.
12
THE WALPOLIAN ANECDOTE
7
In effect, the “parallel lives” pattern introduced by Plutarch has served as the
prototype of “classic” literary histories, literature teaching, and literary study.
The “life and work” ingredient has been so copious until very recently in literary
departments that it is the more refreshing to find unorthodox ways of
approaching the literary text in the contemporary academe, wherever that does
happen. One of the most recurrent themes in Eighteenth-century Studies now is
the unfailing association of landscape, poetry and painting.15 The layout of the
one, the versification of the other, and the visual skills of the third were
perceived as skills standing on an equal footing among themselves in Walpole’s
times. So obvious in landscape gardening, this is observed in the words of a
celebrated “embellisher,” Capability Brown. Hannah More recollects him
explaining: “ ‘There’, said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’,
pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon:
at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a
parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’ ”16 Underlying
the Book of Nature metaphor, this modern secularization of the Book of God
brings in the exercise of human intervention as bettering of the divine project.
Book Four of Walpole’s Anecdotes actually does host the selfsame
assortment within its space: the first five chapters cover the history of painting
under George I and George II, contemporaneous architecture is dealt with in
Chapter VI, and “modern gardening” is treated in Chapter VII. Here, the refined
young gentleman who has completed his “classic” education at home with the
“modern” Grand Tour education deplores the scarcity of “good painters of
landscape” in “a country so profusely beautiful with the amenities of nature.”17
The bone of contention is precisely the fashionable mania of abiding by the
classic antiquity’s principle and examples, instead of looking out there into the
Book of Nature: “As our poets warm their imagination with sunny hills or sigh
after grottoes and cooling breezes, our painters draw rocks and precipices and
castellated mountains because Virgil gasped for breath at Naples,” he tells his
reader. And, he goes on, “[o]ur ever verdant lawns, rich vales, fields of
haycocks and hop-grounds are neglected as homely and familiar scenes.”18
But Walpole himself is ambivalent in his relation to the ancient models and
in his understanding of the models dwelling in nature. There is no doubt that he
takes Pope’s conviction to the letter. In An Essay on Criticism, we will
remember, the Virgilian epic is evoked as drawing inspiration “from Nature’s
15
See Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the
Eighteenth Century.
16
Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England,
80.
17
Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (1888), 333.
18
Ibid., 333.
8
CHAPTER ONE
Fountain” (l. 133). If we examine the Latin poet’s verse with meticulous care,
Pope maintains, we will discover that young Maro’s art was none but an
imitation of the ancients, “Nature and Homer” being “the same” (l. 135). And,
Pope carries on, exulting in a telling triplet:
Convinc’d, amaz’d, he checks the bold Design,
And Rules as strict his labour’d Work confine,
As if the Stagyrite o’erlooke’d each Line.
(ll. 136-8)
Thus was Walpole’s. With a historian and an antiquarian’s pleasure, he lists
the chronological sequence of gardening exploits that he deems fit for his
evaluation. Nor does he hide his propensity for theorizing on the samples
selected. Modern gardening has unfortunately persisted in “retaining its reverse,
symmetrical and unnatural gardens,”19 the French fixation, while, fortunately,
the English have favored the park and its rough naturalness. Quotes from Milton
bring in images of Eden with a fresh fountain springing in mazy motion and the
cedar forest anticipating the Romantic Kubla Khan effect, and the “woody
theatre” prefacing the Keatsian “sylvan historian.”
The modern inspector in the Strawberry landowner does not fail to praise
William Temple’s type of garden, following nature as “the” authoritative
instance and cultivating the grotto, fountains, and water-works. Its irregularities,
claiming the service of fancy rather than of judgment, recall the taste for
chinoiseries in the field: the Chinese garden “without any order or disposition of
parts”20 is whimsically varied, “a pretty gaudy scene, … the work of caprice … ,
a fantastic Paradise.”21 Charles Bridgman’s new “Romantic” style also attracts
him, “diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak though still within
surrounding hedges.”22 This “dawn of modern taste” or “reformation gaining
foot”23 he salutes with overt enthusiasm when he halts to praise “the destruction
of walls for boundaries, and the invention of fosses—an attempt deemed so
astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha’s!”24 In William
Kent’s bold use of landscape, Walpole sees “all nature [as] a garden,” with light
and shade, and groups of trees making up “the richest theatre,”25 as in restored
Greek times, yet insisting on the “living landscape.”26 Small clumps, serpentine
19
Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (MDCCLXXI), 127.
Ibid., 133.
21
Ibid., 135.
22
Ibid., 136.
23
Ibid., 136.
24
Ibid., 137.
25
Ibid., 138.
26
Ibid., 139.
20
THE WALPOLIAN ANECDOTE
9
rivers, winding banks, crooked forms all over the landscape are as much as
saying that “nature abhors a straight line.”27
What in Hogarth had been called the S-shaped “line of beauty,” in 1753,
Walpole adopts five years later as the “Gothic ruin [and] Chinese pagoda” line,
which he sets in significant contrast to the “Doric portico [and] the Palladian
bridge.”28 From our post-Nietzschean perspective, the Dionysian-Apollonian
opposition thus ensuing makes more taxonomic sense. “We,” Westerners, prefer
order and predictability, “they,” Far Easterners, go in for surprise. “They,” the
French, are the faithful preservers of Classicism, “we,” the English, opt for
Romantic taste. “They” are the contemporaneous Ancients of the contemporary
Moderns that “we” are.
Walpole had settled down at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, as early as 1747,
more than a decade before the composition of his Anecdotes and some twenty
years after Pope’s The Odyssey had made its way into the educated and
intellectual pockets of his society. As we turn the first page of Chapter VII, “On
modern Gardening,” we absorb the recluse’s observations intertwined with the
landowner’s: “Gardening was probably one of the first arts that succeeded to
that of building houses, and naturally attended property and individual
possession.”29 The proclivity for historical views is present here, too, in the
fascinating vicinity of atemporal locations. Culinary and, afterwards, medicinal
herbs must have been, he opines, the normal concern of the head of a family in
times of yore. The time did come though when “the earth ceased to furnish
spontaneously all these primitive luxuries, and culture became requisite.”30
Common sense underlies both views and, in an attempt to provide a common
denominator, he draws a first conclusion: “I am apprized that the prototype of
all these sorts [kitchen-gardens, orchards, and vineyards] was the garden of
Eden.”31
The Walpolian locus amoenus here on display is defined in the classic(ist)
terms of utile dulci, every tree in Paradise being “pleasant to the sight and good
for food.”32 The Fall then occurred and, henceforward, humans not being
allowed access into this hortus conclusus have busied themselves out of
necessity “to make improvements on their estates in imitation of it, supposing
any plan had been preserved.”33 As in so many imagological anecdotes of the
age, here we fall upon differentiations, like the Versailles-induced reading of
27
Ibid., 142.
Ibid., 145.
29
Ibid., 117.
30
Ibid., 117, emphasis added.
31
Ibid., 117.
32
Ibid., 118.
33
Ibid., 118.
28
10
CHAPTER ONE
Paradise by the French and the Gothic decrypting of the place by the English. A
crucial point is here reached with the garden of Alcinous in the Odyssey as “the
most renowned in the heroic times,”34 being brought to the forestage for at once
documentary relevance and aesthetic categorization. The Thucydidean meets the
Herodotean historian in the narrator Walpole, discussing the Homeric episode
while quoting the English translation by Pope. Where Paradise is imagined in
exotic Chinese lines and colors elsewhere in the text, here it is “the” Biblical
enclosure of prelapsarean times, albeit with ancient Greek contours.
A sequel of rhetoric questions enhances the special charm of this unique
topos, in which event-determined occurrence overlaps with type-molded
example. “Is there an admirer of Homer who can read this description without
rapture?”, or “who does not form to his imagination a scene of delights more
picturesque than the landscape of Tinian or Juan Fernandez?”35 An echo of this
will resound in John Keats’s On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, in which
the discovery of exotic lands is gauged by the yardstick of Homeric wonder(s).
Homer, as “the” measure of our commonly inherited dignified culture here in
old Europe, as well as the equivalent of extravagantly different times and places
traverses some of the “classic” texts of English identity, with the Romantics
holding pride of place. “[W]hat was that boasted Paradise,” Walpole goes on
“with which ‘the gods ordain’d / To grace Alcinous and his happy land?’”36 The
bit of rhyming coupled lines sends the erudite reader to the ample passage
anglicized by Pope in 1713, within months of the end of the Augustan age
proper.
Compared to a literal translation, take, for instance, the one signed by
Samuel Butler in 1944, the Neo-Classic version in iambic pentameter makes all
the difference. As Walpole himself acquiesces, “divested of harmonious Greek
and bewitching poetry,”37 the famous garden in Homer’s epic is but “a small
orchard and vineyard, with some beds of herbs and two fountains … , inclosed
within a quickset hedge. The whole compass of this pompous garden inclosed—
four acres.”38 The one passage that springs to mind, in a similar connection, is
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description of the dome of pleasure in Kubla Khan,
set in parallel to its inspirational source in Purchas his Pilgrimage. Like the
mellifluous “twice five miles of fertile ground” with “walls and towers girdled
round” (ll. 6-7), turning a boring ten miles stretch into poetic utopia, Pope’s
masterly juggling with the number two—his matchless gift of vision and
34
Ibid., 119.
Ibid., 119.
36
Ibid., 119.
37
Ibid., 119.
38
Ibid., 119.
35