In 1922, that annus mirabilis for modernist literature, T. S. Eliot published
a review of Ulysses. In it, he argued that what Joyce had achieved with his
interweaving of antiquity and contemporaneity was nothing less than a
transformation of the realm of ancient myth into a road map capable of being
patterned upon the chaos of the present. “Mr Joyce is pursuing a method
which others must pursue after him”, Eliot wrote. “It is simply a way of
controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”
Critics, of course, are always prone to recognizing themselves in works that
they particularly admire. Not coincidentally, perhaps, 1922 was the year
that saw that the publication of The Waste Land as well as Ulysses.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Eliot was indulging in something more than
special pleading. A fascination with the mirror that myth was felt to hold
up to an anguished modernity was indeed much in the air. Not only myth,
however: for the obsession was also with the shadowy realms that might have
served to give birth to the myths in the first place. In particular, as the
very title of Joyce’s novel served to suggest, the prime focus of interest
was the mysterious realm of pre-classical Greece: the presumed childhood of
a Europe now widely felt, post-Great War, to be sunk in its senescence.
That the heroes of Homer’s epics might indeed have inhabited a world no less
real than the Dublin of Joyce’s youth had been potently suggested by the
exploits of Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy and Mycenae. Yet it
was not only Agamemnon and his fellow warlords who appeared to have been
redeemed from the oblivion of the fantastical. So, too, from 1900 onwards,
had an even more primordial generation of heroes. Joyce, ever sensitive to
the zeitgeist, had made play with it by surnaming his fictional alter ego
Dedalus, after “the hawklike man” who had built, among many other wonders,
the labyrinth in which the Minotaur was imprisoned. The excavation of an
entire civilization on Crete, known as Minoan after the fabled king who was
said to have ruled the island at the height of its prosperity, had served to
reveal a wellspring for European civilization even more ancient than the
grim warrior city of Mycenae. “In my beginning is my end”: to fathom the
culture of Minoan Crete, so artists, historians and assorted prophets came
to believe, might be to catch a glimpse of the West’s future as well as its
past.
Yet this was to presume that there did indeed exist a solid bedrock of
historical fact capable of being discovered. In fact, as Theodore Ziolkowski
makes clear in Minos and the Moderns, his contribution to a series of
studies tracing the relationship between classical and contemporary culture,
even the notion of a specifically Cretan body of mythological lore owes as
much to modernity as to the ancients. Although Euripides’ Hippolytus had
served to inspire Racine’s great tragedy Phaedra, and although any number of
baroque painters had availed themselves of the titillating potentialities
provided by the theme of Europa’s abduction, no real attempt had ever been
made before the twentieth century to weave the various threads of Cretan
myth into a coherent whole. Its resurgence, therefore, “was not simply a
continuation of earlier treatments”. Far more than the narratives associated
with other legendary capitals – Troy, Mycenae, Thebes – “the matter of
Knossos” came with comparatively little baggage attached. No wonder, then,
that throughout the twentieth-century, this combination of a clean cultural
sheet with an undoubted archaic resonance should have inspired so many
writers and artists to jump onto the Minoan bandwagon.
Yet on the evidence of Ziolkowski’s own survey, the risk that confronted many
of them was of vanishing into a labyrinth of their own devising, and of
never re-emerging. Many of the novels, poems and paintings that he describes
in his book were veritable mazes of symbolism. So potentially resonant is a
figure like the Minotaur, for instance, and yet so lacking in culturally
sanctioned signification, that it seems that he can be made to stand for
almost anything. Indeed, perhaps it is precisely the ability to play
Theseus, to pin the monster down, to defy the tendency of the Cretan myths
to overwhelm all those who would handle them, that can serve as the mark of
authentic achievement. Joyce showed it, of course, and so too did Friedrich
Dürrrenmatt, who fashioned out of the story of the Minotaur a grim
retrospective commentary on the twentieth century’s experience of
alienation. Most potently of all, perhaps, there was Picasso, whose
masterpiece “Minotauromachy” (1935) is fêted by Ziolkowski, and by many
others, as “the finest graphic work of the twentieth century”. It is
telling, no doubt, that Crete was far from the only inspiration for
Picasso’s lifelong obsession with bulls. In painting after painting, of
which “Guernica” was merely the most celebrated example, imagery conjured up
from the Minoan labyrinth shaded into scenes drawn from the bullring of his
native Spain. Antiquity and modernity, as a result, often ended up
indistinguishable. “To me”, Picasso declared ringingly, “there is no past or
future in art”: a manifesto perfectly suited to the swagger of his creative
machismo.
As a manifesto for an archaeologist, however, and particularly an
archaeologist engaged in the painstaking exhumation of a civilization that
had lain entombed and unsuspected for millennia, it was, it might have been
thought, just that little bit less appropriate. And yet, as Cathy Gere
demonstrates in her fascinating and consistently entertaining account of the
discovery of the Minoan world, the boundaries between Cretan myth and
modernist neurosis were almost as blurred amid the dust of Knossos as they
were in the pages of Ulysses or on the canvas of “Guernica”. Arthur Evans,
the eccentric Englishman who led the excavations, was, if anything, even
more creative in his reconstruction of the Bronze Age than Schliemann had
earlier been. The fabulously ancient palace of Knossos enjoys, as Gere
points out in her arresting first sentence, “the dubious distinction of
being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the
island”. The complex of buildings gawped at by thousands upon thousands of
tourists every year owes less to the masons of the Minoan age than it does
to the example of modernist architecture. On Crete, the archaic and the
contemporary, both of them recreated in the image of the other, would end up
generating a cultural Möbius Strip. “Not only did the Minoan past provide
inspiration to the modern movement, it was itself a modernist structure,
enfolding past and present into a closed loop of aesthetic
self-referentiality.”
It is a tribute to the wit and clarity of Gere’s style that she is able to
explain all this without making the reader’s brain ache. Far more
extensively and successfully than Ziolkowski, she grounds modernism’s
obsession with Cretan myth and history in the cultural context of the late
nineteenth century – and particularly in the Sturm und Drang of the German
love affair with ancient Greece. Schliemann and Nietzsche, both of them
rebels against the bourgeois rationalism of their age, are revealingly
paired, as Gere demonstrates how it was Bronze Age archaeology that
succeeded in providing the most potent reification of Nietzsche's
mythological speculations. In the long run, of course, the identification of
the Mycenaeans as proto-moderns, and in particular as the racial forebears
of the Germans themselves, would bear appalling fruit – and make of Knossos,
safely across the sea from the Peloponnese, all the more pointed a contrast
for that very reason.
True, Evans as well had his odd lurch into political incorrectness. “I believe
in the existence of inferior races”, he declared flatly on one occasion,
“and would like to see them exterminated.” Pretty unambiguous, it might have
been thought; except that Evans’s racism coexisted with his no less
passionate conviction that the origins of Western civilization lay in
Africa, not to mention an almost vatic enthuisam for matriarchy, androgyny
and pacifism. Just as the Mycenaean world had been recreated in Schliemann’s
titanic image, so the Minoan was reconfigured in accordance with Evans’s
very different fantasies, “as an inverts’ paradise of female deities,
cross-dressing priests, and girl athletes”. Above all, suppressing the
substantial evidence that existed to the contrary, Evans fabricated an image
of the Minoans as having been quite without militarism. The result was to
cast the so-called childhood of Europe in a new and hitherto unsuspected
light. Crete’s minotaur-haunted labyrinth was recast as a fairy-tale utopia.
“That the ‘first Europeans’ were unwarlike quickly became a cherished myth.”
A myth, furthermore, that certainly did not confine its impact to the
dimensions of art and literature which provide the focus of Ziolkowski’s
survey. Joyce and Picasso appear in Gere’s book, but so too do Freud and
Jung, Jane Harrison and Marija Gimbutas. Indeed, it is testimony to the
potency and sheer strangeness of the world conjured up by Evans that it
could appear to psychoanalysts as an infant stratum long buried in the
European psyche, and to feminists as a prelapsarian locus for that
“thoroughly modernist female archetype”, the Great Mother. Nor did the
Minoans suffer any particular diminution of their symbolic potency as
modernism ran out of steam. In the 1960s, they were inevitably cast as early
exponents of flower power: “antiquity’s angel-headed hipsters”. In the 70s
and 80s, when Evans’s old argument that Greek culture had derived from
Africa was rehabilitated by Chiekh Anta Diop and Martin Bernal, they took a
starring role in the vanguard of Black Athena.
Clearly, then, the failure of repeated attempts throughout the twentieth
century to establish a paradise on earth has left us only the more desperate
to believe that one might indeed have existed back in the West’s archaic
past: “its false memory of a peaceful Cretan childhood”. Yet even that
consolation, slowly but surely, is being taken away from us. In the
twenty-first century, the evidence for Cretan militarism that was long ago
suppressed by Evans is being systematically resurrected by a new generation
of archaeologists, more scrupulous than their visionary forebear, and less
ideologically partisan. The Minoan world of today’s scholarship is one
scarred by factionalism, brutality and cannibalism. As a result, the culture
that served idealists throughout the twentieth century as a luminous
reassurance that civilization could indeed coexist with peace, the feminist
virtues, and a blissed-out hedonism is being reconfigured as a dystopia. It
is not only the future that seems to be darkening with each year. The
minotaur, it seems, is being resurrected, and we are all of us lost in the
labyrinth without a ball of string.
Theodore Ziolkowski
MINOS AND THE MODERNS
Cretan myth in twentieth-century literature and art
173pp. Oxford University Press. £29.99 (US $55).
978 0 19 533691 7
Cathy Gere
KNOSSOS AND THE PROPHETS OF MODERNISM
270pp. University of Chicago Press. $27.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley.
£16.
978 0 226 28953 3
Tom Holland is the author of Persian Fire: The first world empire and
the battle for the West, 2005, and Rubicon: The triumph and tragedy of the
Roman Republic, 2003.
