BMCR 2008.12.25, Theodore Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns

Theodore Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in
Twentieth-century Literature and Art. Classical Presences.  Oxford/New
York:  Oxford University Press, 2008.  Pp. xii, 173.  ISBN
9780195336917.  $55.00.

Reviewed by Constanze Guethenke, Princeton University
([email protected])
Word count:  2579 words
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Table of Contents (http://lccn.loc.gov/2007033607)

In this slim, elegant book Ziolkowski creates a panoramic map of Cretan
myth in the first half of the twentieth century and of its reception
across the arts. Building momentum from the observation that the
mythology accruing around Crete and its prehistoric and pre-classical
Minoan culture sees a remarkable peak in reception across Europe from
around the turn of the century, Ziolkowski catalogues a wide range of
artistic engagements with those Cretan figures, and links them back to
a straightforward exposition of Modernist aesthetics and its
programmatic interests. The main protagonists of this roll call are
Europa, Theseus and the Minotaur, the women of Minos's clan (Pasiphae,
Ariadne and Phaedra), and the pair of Daedalus and Icarus.

The Introduction first contextualizes Crete's newly discovered
materiality around 1900 and the fascination with those archaic figures
of Cretan myth as "a vehicle of thoroughly modern concerns" (24). It
then branches out to offer a well-wrought summary of the aesthetic and
historical concerns of Modernism and its relation to myth as a means of
giving shape and meaning to a contemporary panorama of anxiety, speed,
and anarchy. The tentacles of this artistic approach reach back into
the preoccupation of the late nineteenth century with the irrational as
a formative part of ancient Greek culture and by extension an operator
of Western civilization and its discontents; and they reach across to
the manifestation of such a pre-classical world in the spectacular
excavations carried out in Crete during the same period.

Heinrich Schliemann's excavations of prehistorical sites at Troy and
Mycenae in the 1860s and 70s, reported almost in real time to a wide
European audience, and the nature of their visually unusual finds had
predated only by a decade the beginnings of large archaeological
projects in Crete. Federico Halbherr's excavations there at Gortyn in
the 1880s were in turn followed by the work of Sir Arthur Evans at
Knossos. His work around 1900 came at a time when British imperial
involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean gave British archaeologists
ample opportunity and prominence to work on an island at the center of
a protracted power struggle between various European powers and the
Ottoman Empire. What is more, beyond the prominence of Evans'
archaeological work at home, the visual effect of his arguable
reconstruction of a Minoan high culture that combined aesthetic appeal
with social normativity, popularized his work and his finds across
Europe.

Ziolkowski briefly mentions the effect which Evans' excavations had on
classical and historical scholarship, particularly on the question of
the origins of Greek culture, but he makes little of the fact that
Minoan civilization, as a result of the highly visible and highly
interpretive fieldwork done by Evans, was almost immediately considered
"European", a factor that should tally well with Ziolkowski's overall
choice and arrangement of materials.[[1]] Archaeology, which in
Ziolkowski's account plays a not negligible supporting part, was in
itself a modern and Modernist practice, as was the Europeanism it
promoted, not something that is spelled out clearly here, which  is a
little disappointing when one considers Ziolkowski's exceedingly good
ear for the interplay of institutions, disciplines and literature,
shown earlier in his German Romanticism and its Institutions (1989).
Ziolkowski's study covers a wide spectrum of European writings (the
book really is about Cretan myth in twentieth century European
Literature and Art), thus deliberately deflecting from a focus on
Anglophone literature. One American writer, incidentally, whose account
of Knossos as a fantastic, mythic, Modernist and material site of
reflection would have fitted well with the issues suggested by
Ziolkowski, is Henry Miller, whose Colossus of Maroussi (1942) exerted
considerable influence, well beyond the US. A fair number of the
writings gathered here are deliberately engaged in thinking through
what it means to be Europeanliterature; Ziolkowski himself contents
himself with hinting, though it is an assured and knowledgeable
hinting, at the importance of Europe as an intellectual, artistic, and
political issue in the first half of the twentieth century,
particularly in the interwar period. [[2]]

Ziolkowski's study is not a systematic account of the European aspect;
nor does it return to the interaction between archaeology and
materiality on the one hand and literary and artistic production on the
other hand in the specific readings it undertakes. Instead, its asset
lies in drawing, in this first chapter, an intelligent, roomy roadmap
that leaves spaces to be filled in, and in suggesting, in the
subsequent chapters, a wide range of individual works and genres,
across several literatures, that exemplify the varied nature of
artistic receptions.

The power of myth lies to a large extent in its structural and
interpretive pliability, and the attraction of the myth of Europa and
the Bull, which Ziolkowski presents in his second chapter, is a case in
point. As the figure of the seductive and seduced noble foreign
adolescent, Europa connected to a modernist preoccupation with the
journey of sexual awakening, the exploration of desire, and the
fascination with animal nature. As the figure of Europe raped, the myth
could be instrumentalized, with greater or lesser skill and subtlety
and on opposite sides of the political spectrum, as a comment on the
threat Europe faced from the foreign, as much as the threat that came
from within, especially the seduction by the forces of fascism. The
implication, manifest though not clearly brought into focus throughout
the array of variations that make up the study, is that Modernism could
contain within itself artistic and political attitudes to myth that
spanned a broad spectrum from anarchy to extreme conservatism.

The tension between nationalism, internationalism, and a growing
interest in a Europeanism variously formulated is also one of the
characteristics of artistic Modernism and the European Avant-Gardes,
even though its collusion with nationalism has only recently been more
readily examined [[3]]; myth is inevitably a strong vehicle to link
these elements, while exploring the aesthetic dimensions of their
relationship. Most of the analytical forays Ziolkowski offers into this
set of issues introduce the detailed synopses of individual works that
make up a very large part of this chapter and the ones that follow it.
Ziolkowski is certainly masterful at the summary and paraphrase of
entire, often substantial works, works in addition that are often
neither known to an English-speaking audience, nor even well-known in
their country of origin (the German expressionist dramatist Georg
Kaiser is an example of the former, the poet Karl Leopold Mayer, also
German, an example of the latter)--though Ziolkowski usually gives
little guidance as to the relative importance of individual authors.
Europa and the bull also emerge as a particular pet subject of visual
artists and artisans, and Ziolkowski thumbs through a register that
includes expressionist painting, advertising, satirical journalism, and
porcelain manufacturing, stretching between the axes of erotic appeal
and political momentum.

Chapter three,  "The Minotaur: The Beast Within and the Threat
Outside", treats the figures of the Minotaur and Theseus as
interconnected, and even as triangulated by including Daedalus as the
artist who built the labyrinth around the beast. One way or another,
the myth of the uncanny and brutish, yet half-human, Minotaur enclosed
in an artefact invites reflection about alienation. It is mainly from
the 1930s onwards that the Minotaur enters public consciousness and
appears with some regularity across the arts. Ziolkowski alludes to the
confusion of the time, the foreboding of violence and the fear of
destruction that manifests itself in a political as much as a poetic
diction ("Like Sartre's hell, the labyrinth is the others: the world in
which we live" (85)). The urgency of the myth in a time of state
repression and politically sanctioned violence is one side of the coin.
Its obverse, in Ziolkowski's examination, is the urgency, articulated
across the Avant-Garde arts, which accompanies the often violent
break-up and deliberate confusion of artistic models. A brief section
on the Parisian Avant-Garde, multi-media journal Minotaure, published
between 1933 and 1939 by Andre/ Breton, Albert Skira and E. Te/riade
(the pseudonym of the Greek art critic Stratis Eleftheriadis), and
especially a long section on Picasso's life-long attention to the
figure of the Minotaur as a personal symbol, exemplify the artistic
affection felt for the creature facing alienation from the world for
being itself.

Friedrich Duerrenmatt's repeated returns to the Minotaur, both in
writing and painting and presented here in a sustained discussion, are
another instance of this conflicted sympathy for the outsider,
guiltless and guilty at the same time; Andre/ Gide's The/se/e (1946) in
its ironic demythologizing is put next to Mary Renault's
rationalization in the making of a historical novel, a form of
juxtaposition that organizes also a section on the Minotaur among the
poets, where for example brief mention of the American poet Robert Penn
Warren in the 1950s, talking about the politicization of the myth even
after 1945, is immediately followed by a turn to the Czech writer
Miroslav Holub to discuss, also briefly, the Minotaur as a key to
metaphor and imagination. Ziolkowski is surely right that each
interpretation of the theme has to be determined from artist to artist.
But there is a tantalizing thrift in how the rich materials are
organized. In this chapter, for instance, the plentiful examples are
categorized according to genre, broadly speaking (the Minotaur among
the poets, on stage, and in novels), with only a glimpse here and there
of how the particularity of genre may interact with the treatment of
myth.

Another surprising area of discomfort for an author as sympathetic,
sensitive and experienced as Ziolkowski seems to be the question
whether the treatment of Cretan myth by female writers has analytical
traction as a category. The present reviewer does not think that
feminist readings of myth or of writings on myth need to be given pride
of place in this context, but Ziolkowski himself brings up the issue.
He is brief and adamant that "regardless of their fascination and
validity, these theoretical excursions into the past as well as the
psychological, feminist and deconstructive ingenuities of recent
decades hold little relevance for the literary and artistic treatments
of the early twentieth century, with which we have been concerned"
(66). This does not only bundle the question of gendered reading into a
general broadside on quote-unquote theory of the late twentieth
century; more importantly, it seems to give short shrift to the genuine
interest displayed by the writers of the early twentieth century in
issues of the archaeology of the psyche, of the feminine (and a
quasi-cult of the feminine), of desire and the violence of art, to name
but a few.

In the Minotaur chapter, Ziolkowski makes room for the comment that
"[w]hile poets like Cronin, Holub, and Muir adduce the Minotaur as a
powerful personal and social image, it seems inevitable that the myth
would also experience a feminist re-vision. The Canadian poet Nicole
Markotic proposes in "the minotaur dreams" that "it is possible the
minotaur bull was female, pregnant, long overdue and desperate for
escape into a more temperate myth. An ache for religions more gentle
towards animals and virgins" (88-89). Quite aside from the fact that
this makes feminist interpretation sound like a head cold one would
want to avoid catching (it is easy enough to find extreme poetic
voices), but it means to set up a straw man (or straw woman, as it
were). It sits uneasily with Ziolkowski's detailed reading of Claire
Goll's Europa novel, for example, elsewhere, and it short-changes
writers such as Anai+s Nin, whose Seduction of the Minotaur (1961) is
mentioned in passing and by title only, or the quite detailed synopsis
of Marguerite Yourcenar's play To Each His Minotaur (1963), whose
"mystical meditation on two conflicting aspects of womanhood" (110) is
thrown out as bait yet not further elaborated on.

The last chapter, "The Other Cretans: Alienation, Invention,
Liberation", brings together under its roof Minos and Pasiphae; their
daughters Ariadne and Phaedra; and, most importantly and interestingly
to Ziolkowski, the father and son pair of Daedalus and Icarus. Ariadne,
in particular, is acknowledged as the Cretan figure most easily
recognized, in some ways; three pages only deal with her reception by
Giorgio de Chirico, Richard Strauss, and Darius Milhaud, as much as the
attention given to "Ariadne's Lament" by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
Dionysus closes with the "mysterious statement": "I am your labyrinth"
(120). As in every chapter, there are concise and far-reaching
insights, economically presented, and sadly not developed in greater
detail. Just as the introduction pointed out that the Cretan myths are
themselves a distinctly post-classical interest within antiquity, here
Ziolkowski concludes that figures like Ariadne and her sister Phaedra
appeared to be much more meaningful to periods earlier than the
twentieth century (126). Yet on why that is we are not given further
comment.

When it comes to Daedalus and particularly Icarus, however, Ziolkowski
strikes the balance, and strikes it well, which the study is missing in
some other sections. He situates the preoccupation with the master
craftsman in early twentieth century debates on the roles of science
and art in relation to each other (with reference to J.B.S. Haldane and
Bertrand Russell); the section on Icarus, by extension, gives a model
reading of the different factors that combine to make a myth the center
of a network of receptions. In this case, he links Icarus' resurgence
to Baudelaire's 1862 poem "Les Plaintes d'un Icare", as an influential
poetological statement for modern writers; in 1912, Pieter Bruegel's
painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1555) came to light for
the first time and, after successful public display and European
attention, was bought by the Muse/e des Beaux Arts in Brussels; lastly,
the early twentieth century fascination with aviation implicated Icarus
in the giddiness of new technology and its aesthetic appeal -- the case
study of choice here is Gabriele D'Annunzio, but also the less
well-known example of the Italian writer Lauro de Bosis and his tragedy
Icaro (1927). Especially when compared to the detailed attention given
to de Bosis, though, the overview of post-War Icaroi loses a little of
its drive, bringing a wide variety of critical writings, poetological
as much as political, under its wings, on only a short flight.

The brief conclusion on the modernity of myth summarizes the specific
circumstances of the twentieth century, in which the "awakening of a
new sense of sexual liberation, experience of totalitarian brutality
and the dream of European unity, and the hopes and hazards of modern
science" (167) all contributed to the rehistoricizing and unpacking of
myth in general and of Cretan figures in particular. What makes the
cast of figures special, in Ziolkowski's thoughtful and aphoristic
final comments, is their shared sense of urgency that does not hide
that most of them are largely acted upon rather than independent
actors, and that most of them fail to succeed in their actions. To what
extent this is a pattern inherent in most myth is a different question,
and Ziolkowski suspends further analysis. The panorama of varied
artistic reception offered in this study stays as unexpectedly open and
closed as the path through the labyrinth for which the author shows
intrigued and suggestive sympathy. Ziolkowski writes with the skill of
the connoisseur, but exercises just as much the connoisseur's knowing
silence.

The book has eleven black and white illustrations, keyed to some of the
discussions of specific artworks. Typographical errors are minor and
very few: for Jackson Pollack read Pollock (118), and for "Die
Mythische Method" on p. 15, n. 36, read "Methode".

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Notes:


1.   On the effect of late nineteenth-century large-scale excavations
on scholarship of the origins of Greek culture, be it Mycenean or
Minoan, see recently Yannis Hamilakis (ed.), Labyrinth Revisited.
Rethinking "Minoan" Archaeology, Oxford: Oxbow, 2002, and Yannis
Hamilakis and Nicoletta Momigliano (eds.), Archaeology and European
Modernity. Producing and Consuming the 'Minoans', Padova: Aldo Ausilio.
Creta Antica 7, 2006; in the latter volume see especially the chapters
by Roderick Beaton and David Roessel on Greek and English-language
literary reception, respectively. Further John Papadopoulos, "Inventing
the Minoans: archaeology, modernity and the quest for European
identity", Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 18/1 (2005): 87-149.

2.   A useful summary and bibliography on the inter-War "Europeanism"
as a real movement with its own organisational dynamic is found in
Luisa Passerini (ed.), Europe in Love. Love in Europe. Imagination and
Politics in Britain between the Wars (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999).
Passerini's account also includes the functional role of eroticism and
love in this context, with reference to Denis de Rougemont's account of
love as a particularly Western and European cultural concept, in Love
in the Western World (1940).

3.   For example Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (eds.), Locations of
Literary Modernism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2000;
Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000; Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics,
and the Avant-garde. Nation and Empire, 1901-1918, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000; Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics.
Joyce, Wolf, Eliot, Yeats, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.