BMCR 2009.07.72: Held on Guethenke, Placing Modern Greece. The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840. Classical Presences

Constanze Guethenke, Placing Modern Greece. The Dynamics of Romantic
Hellenism, 1770-1840. Classical Presences.  Oxford/New York:  Oxford
University Press, 2008.  Pp. viii, 276.  ISBN 978-0-19-923185-0.
$120.00.

Reviewed by Dirk t. D. Held, Connecticut College
([email protected])
Word count:  2138 words
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In the opening scene of Friedrich Hoelderlin's epistolary novel
Hyperion the eponymous narrator gazes from Acrocorinth across the
Saronic and Corinthian gulfs. Hyperion says his soul flits back and
forth between the seas and the glowing mountains, adding that he would
settle for even a single gulf could he have been there a thousand years
earlier. A letter from Hoelderlin opens Constanze Guethenke's rich and
informative study Placing Modern Greece. The Dynamics of Romantic
Hellenism, 1770-1840. In the letter Hoelderlin presents himself as
stumbling along behind the Greeks, "those unique people (einzigen
Menschen)" and says that like geese, he stands flat-footed and
powerless "in the waters of modernity" (in modernen Wasser) as he
contemplates flight up into the Greek sky.

Hoelderlin's work highlights two themes central to Guethenke's
impressive study. The first is the physical nature of Greece and its
landscape, what Guethenke calls its materiality. Probably the most
notable feature of the Greek landscape, overpowering even, is its
luminosity. For Hoelderlin, Greece was the realm of Apollo and the fire
of heaven. Lawrence Durrell on seeing the gleaming Aegean for the first
time, proposed that space, light and solitude needed to be
rediscovered. Even the contemporary visitor yet to scale the heights of
Acrocorinth can be astonished when traveling to the Peloponnese from
Athens. Leaving behind the auto supply shops on Athens' outskirts, the
cement works at Eleusis and the rusting vessels in Eleusis Bay, in due
course the driver comes round a turn in the highway to see in favorable
weather the dazzling Corinthian Gulf seemingly on fire beneath the
brilliant sun as it displays what Aeschylus called those "uncountable
smiles of the sea". It can be breathtaking even after numerous trips.

Like many who first stoked the fires of European Hellenism, Hoelderlin
never actually saw a real Greek landscape and founded his ideals on
what he imagined Greece to be. To be sure, he was familiar with and
drew upon writings of contemporary travelers to Greece such as
Choiseul-Gouffier and Richard Chandler, both discussed by Guethenke in
her book. Forgoing the particularities of travel writings, Hoelderlin
represented nature as an ideal. As David Constantine has pointed out,
the landscape of Greece offered a site of continuity which linked the
modern Greek (and European visitor) to the ideal past.[[1]] Guethenke
identifies this continuity as underlying the logic of Hellenism which
she says is dependent on the "frisson" emerging from interactions of
stable geographic space with the temporal change history introduces
into that space.

This ties in the second theme in Hoelderlin's letter: the vexing
relation between modernity and antiquity. In an unfinished essay "How
shall we see the ancient world?", Hoelderlin spoke of "the slavery with
which we have behaved toward antiquity. There seems indeed to be hardly
any other choice than to be oppressed by what has been appropriated and
by what is positive, or, with violent effort, to oppose as a living
force everything learnt, given, positive."[[2]] (The relation is
problematic still. One has merely to read Heidegger, in particular as
he addresses the poetry of Hoelderlin, to see how profound the problem
remains for moderns[[3]]). The contrast of Hellenic antiquity to
modernity revealed lost unities and underscored estrangements created
by Enlightenment thinkers: estrangements of human life from objectified
nature, reason from imagination, thought from the senses. The classical
Greeks were made into a form of human life in its highest mode, one in
which thought and feeling, self and nature were united. In contrast,
the discontinuities emerging in modern life revealed deep conflict.
Greek tragedy provided the greatest artistic expression of conflict and
became an object of intense philosophical and aesthetic exploration.
Schiller thought it the paradigmatic art form; it was a suitable
vehicle for grasping  the "self-divisions" of modern experience.[[4]]
In addition to these discontinuities was modernity's estrangement from
the past itself. Winckelmann's groundbreaking history of ancient art
had demonstrated that estrangement and alerted Herder, Goethe, and the
Schlegels to the profound rift which separated ancient from modern
culture.[[5]] The "Greek Ideal" was built on this rift.

The intersection of the Greek Ideal--imposed by non-Greeks onto Greeks
and their land-- with Greece's physical reality is at the heart of
Guethenke's book. She argues compellingly that Greece's materiality
cannot be separated from its ideality and demonstrates the link between
materiality and Idealist vision whereby representations of  Greek
landscape subsumed nature and culture alike. In a chapter entitled "The
Form of Greek Landscape", Guethenke sets the advent of Greece as an
autonomous political and territorial entity within the developing
discourse of Hellenism. Freedom was an important constituent of that
discourse ever since Winckelmann in both the Gedanken ueber die
Nachahmung der griechishen Werke  and the Geschichte der Kunst der
Altertum closely associated the excellence of Greek art with Greek
freedom. Guethenke points out that as the term "nature" in the
eighteenth century came to denote emancipation, Greece too became a
privileged topos of freedom. She advises the reader that nature and
freedom were elastic terms with moral, aesthetic, political, and
material dimensions. In terms of the Hellenic Ideal, the Greeks were
thought to have harmonized them. The harmony imputed to the ancient
Greeks made them the model of human development and of the Bildung
which Wilhelm von Humboldt's newly founded University of Berlin planned
to instill in generations of Germans through intense study of  Greek
culture.

To Winckelmannn, history in the form of political and social conditions
enabled Greek art to attain its much vaunted 'noble simplicity and
tranquil grandeur' (edle Einfalt und stille Groesse). Acknowledging
Winckelmann's dictum that good taste began its formation first under
the Greek sky, Guethenke proceeds to demonstrate that the relationship
between Greek culture and the natural environment is a recurring motif
in the imagining of modern Greece. The trend began with Robert Wood's
Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer with a Comparative
View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troad. It first appeared
in English and by 1773 a German translation was available. Wood
proposed that acquaintance with the real locales of Homer's poems would
prompt greater appreciation and understanding. Guethenke surveys the
works of several travel writers in addition to Wood, including Pierre
Augustin Guys, J.L.S. Bartholdy, and Choiseul-Gouffier. Greek travel
writing of the period is a body of rich and imaginative literature, and
sometimes completely fictional as in the case of the Abbe/
Barthe/lemy's widely read Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Gre\ce
published in 1788.  The overall effect communicated in the works of
these writers is Greek nature in an aestheticized form.

Guethenke's analysis of landscape comes to fruition in her
interpretation of  Hyperion.  She shows us a Hoelderlin who exemplifies
the challenge of visualizing an ideal spatially which required
establishing a correspondence between internal and external landscapes.
Since Hoelderlin had not experienced the reality of Greek landscape, he
had to create it in the realm of imagination. In Hyperion Greece
becomes a place of memory, a contemporary place where the past has been
superseded. Her analysis sets its reference point in Hyperion's
subjectivity as it is affected by the surrounding natural environment.
If Hyperion's modernity is to come into being it must be played off
against the non-modernity of the historical Greeks. The landscape
serves as metaphor for self-understanding.

The Greek War of Independence shifted the focus on nature to specific
locations that Guethenke says served as rhetorical and literal topoi.
This produced literature which aroused both admiration and derision due
in part to the politicization of natural imagery. Wilhelm Mueller's
poetry for example is described as catering to contemporary political
events by setting Greek speakers in their natural environment. The new
Greek state undercut the notion of Greece as a transcendent entity. The
lofty spiritual freedom celebrated by Winckelmann could descend under
the weight of political content to bluster about primitive Greeks
living free as the mountain streams and the soaring eagle. By 1821
Philhellenism had expanded beyond the high cultural valuation of Greek
antiquity to include support for Greek political aspirations. German
Philhellenism was different in that many supporters believed the
warrant supporting their own Bildung was provided by the Greeks.
Humboldt had even declared that the Germans were undeniably the first
to comprehend Greek Bildung, that is paideia,[[6]] and thus was in a
privileged position to offer it to others. Once Philhellenism gave
cover to modern political aspirations of Greeks, nature was politicized
and the hunt was on for national characteristics in Greece and its
landscapes.

Guethenke has interesting things to say about the role of folk song and
folk poetry, which were thought to evoke the authenticity and immediacy
of Greeks living in harmony with the natural landscape. Along with
translation of native materials came the memoirs of non-Greeks who had
contributed to the military campaigns. Guethenke includes a detailed
analysis of Wilhelm Mueller's Griechenlieder. He was a supporter of the
Greek cause and the poems typified German Philhellenism of the 1820s in
their blending of political, religious, and artistic concerns. Like
Humboldt, Mueller thought the German language better suited than any
other to capture the peculiarities of Greek. Like Hoelderlin, he never
went to Greece but he relied on the familiar motifs of classical
significance, mountains and the sea to provide physical reference
points for Greek freedom. Thermopylae and Marathon figure prominently.
Mueller also focused on the Mani, wild and remote even in the 1950s
when Patrick Leigh Fermour wrote his well-known book on its people and
terrain, and more so in the nineteenth century. Then, the Maniotes were
regarded as inhabitants of an untamed, rugged territory who were
fiercely freedom loving. They were also treated as the heirs of Spartan
courage, and were assigned the highly symbolic role, Guethenke
observes, of freedom fighters living in a natural fashion in the
mountains and able to descend rapidly to the plain in support of the
fight for Greek freedom. True to Winckelmann's thesis that the culture
of the ancient Greeks was due to their physical environment, the
Maniote spirit was believed to be supported by the natural environment
where they lived their daily lives. That environment it was assumed
activated the desire for liberation.

The closing chapters of Placing Modern Greece turn from German authors
to Greek writers and their response to European Philhellenism. First
Guethenke examines the effects of Philhellenism on Hellenic authors and
explores how the imagery of European Romanticism and Hellenism
functioned in Greek literature of the nineteenth century. Its themes
included the new Greek state and a new Greek literature. Guethenke
points out that Greek writers such as Alexandros Rangavis and
Alexandros Soutsos employed Greek settings for poems which endeavored
to visualize the contemporary Greek state. She stresses that the
authors of the new Greek literature were deeply ambivalent towards
models of their land inherited from foreign authors, though Greece
still seemed left in a limbo between its own antiquity and German,
French, and English modernity which accounts for the trope of
'belatedness' associated with Greek literature.

The final chapter presents Greece seen from the perspective of the
Ionian Islands which largely had been under Venetian control and hence
not part of the Ottoman Empire. The writers chosen for scrutiny are
Andreas Kalvos and Dionysius Solomos, both natives of Zakynthos.
Kalvos' Odes displayed a near mystical grasp of nature in daring
language. But Guethenke indicts Kalvos' poetry for compression and
involution to the degree that Greece is narrowed to the point of
invisibility. She says that his writings show the interplay of the
Greek Enlightenment with a neo-Hellenism characterized by archaism and
didacticism. Kalvos was closely attuned to Philhellenic discourse, and
his imagery borrows from Homer, Pindar, Romanticism and the Bible. The
result is that his native land is mirrored in an indefinite character
of style and genre.

Dionysios Solomos is viewed, as Guethenke observes, as one of the
founding poets of the Greek state. He was familiar with the writings of
Schiller and Schelling, absorbing at times their philosophy into his
poetry. The Early Romantic influence left a residue of tension between
the ideal and the real. Guethenke shows the presence of Schiller's
aesthetic ideas in Solomos' poetry in which he explores the relation of
art and nature, the divine and the mundane and which sublimates the
real to the ideal. Her contention is that Solomos's conjunction of real
and ideal breaks down the vision of Greece into vignettes of
compression and containment, which she illustrates through an incisive
analysis of Solomos' poem on Missolonghi which describes the heroic
exodus of the city's inhabitants, "The Free Besieged".

This is an original book, notable in its scope and the fresh scrutiny
brought to Romantic Hellenism. The publisher's price might lead one to
expect multiple illustrations when in fact there aren't any at all. Let
us hope that a paperback edition will be forthcoming soon to give
Guethenke the audience she deserves.


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Notes:


1.   David Constantine, Hoelderlin, New York: Oxford University Press,
1988, p. 94.

2.   T. Paul, edit., Friedrich Hoelderlin. Essays and Letters on
Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, p.39.

3.   See Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.

4.   Vassals Lambropoulis, The Tragic Idea, London: Duckworth, 2006,
pp. 30; 11. See also Dirk t. D.  Held, "Antigone on the Neckar: Tragedy
and Enigmas of the Modern", New England Classical Journal, 34.3, 2007,
pp. 207-216.

5.   Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of
Art History, New Haven 1994, p. 19.

6.   W. Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften , Berlin 1902, vol. 2, p. 184.