BMCR 2009.08.20: Momigliano on Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.  Chicago:  The
University of Chicago Press, 2009.  Pp. x, 277.  ISBN 9780226289533.
$27.50.

Reviewed by Nicoletta Momigliano, University of Bristol
([email protected])
Word count:  3405 words
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In this original, most readable, and at times mesmerizing book Cathy
Gere provides an historical and intellectual context for Arthur Evans's
discovery and reconstruction of Knossos and Minoan civilization. Above
all, she illustrates the interpretation, reception and appropriation of
Evans's Minoans by a glittering array of individuals, who shaped much
of twentieth-century intellectual history. Beside the usual
--archaeological--suspects (Heinrich Schliemann and Evans himself),
Gere's subtle and well argued analysis links Knossos and Sigmund Freud,
Pablo Picasso, Oswald Spengler, James Joyce, and Robert Graves, to name
just a few of the fascinating characters who people the pages of this
volume.

In the Introduction, the author explains that her aim is the opposite
of archaeological: she is not searching for the "temples built by the
people of the Bronze Age" but trying "to understand the temple builders
of the age of concrete --the archaeologists, architects, artists,
classicists, writers, and poets of the twentieth century A.D. who not
only reconstructed Minoan Crete in modernist materials" (p. 5) but also
"fashioned themselves as prophets" (p. 7).

The connection between archaeology, modernism, and modernity will come
as no surprise to many readers of this review, since these themes have
been discussed in a number of recent publications, including some
specifically devoted to the reconstructions (intellectual and physical)
of Minoan Crete as a modernist project, i.e. as a particular past "from
which modern Europeans should wish to imagine their descent".[[1]]
These desirable ancestors were largely recreated by Evans's pen and
what he called his "reconstitutions" of Knossos,[[2]] which truly
embody modernity in their use of that most-modern of building material,
reinforced concrete. Modernism and modernity can help us to understand
the production of archaeological knowledge at Knossos, but the
archaeology of Knossos (as well as Troy and Mycenae) can also help us
to understand the poetry of Graves and Joyce's Ulysses.

Modernist "prophecy", however, is an intriguing new prism through which
Gere examines the relationship between Knossos and modernity, and in
doing so she provides a captivating, charmingly idiosyncratic,[[3]] and
illuminating history of the rediscovery, reconstruction, and reception
of Minoan Crete.  Schliemann's and Evans's discoveries and, above all,
their writings appear to be associated with an oracular style, a
prophetic way of knowing the past, which also involved present and
future, and was close to the literary styles of some modernist writers.
To use Gere's words,  "Modernist prophecy was at once a neoarchaic
device for utopian world making, a visionary and intuitive way of
knowing, and a rhetorical strategy through which to dismantle and
reconstruct the Christian narrative of human origins...after the
Biblical chronology had lost its credibility" (p. 7). Evans, and
Schliemann before him, while unconsciously projecting onto the Aegean
Bronze Age the anxieties and concerns of their times, provided new
arenas in which modern utopias could be performed. Knossos, in
particular, became "a site across which some of the most urgent
political, spiritual, and aesthetic questions of the early twentieth
century were asked and answered" (p. 5), such as the emergence of a
post-Christian society, the relationship between genders, the rational
(Apollonian) and irrational (Dionysian) impulses and outlooks (i.e.,
the modernist questioning of the legacy of Enlightenment's
rationalism), the human desire for war and peace.

War and peace also arguably form the most important leitmotiv of this
volume, and help to divide its time-frame into four basic periods, each
structured around a war and its aftermath (namely the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870-1, the Cretan insurrection of 1897, the Great War, and
World War II), which are discussed over 7 chapters (and are preceded by
the aforementioned Introduction and followed by a Conclusion).

Chapter 1, "The Birth of Tragedy, 1822-1897", provides a prologue to
Evans's Knossos.  The story, rather conventionally for this most
unconventional book, starts with Schliemann's life and work --the
German businessman turned archaeologist, whose excavations, to use
Gere's words, "established the very existence of pre-Hellenic
civilization and inspired a school of archaeology that gave material
shape to mythical location" (p. 17).  Albeit as a marginal criticism, I
would argue that Schliemann's own work, and his very belief that Greek
myths contained a great deal of historical truth, are not as original
and as ground-breaking as is often portrayed in scholarly and popular
histories of Aegean archaeology,[[4]] a notion unfortunately reinforced
in this volume. Schliemann's achievement is perhaps best understood in
the context of the works produced by earlier scholars who had already
started to explore the pre-Hellenic past not only through textual
analysis (e.g. Karl Otfried Mueller in his Prolegomena zu einer
wissenschaftlichen Mythologie and Die Dorier) but also excavations
(e.g. Franc,ois-Se/bastien Fauvel and Georg Gropius).  Thus, by
starting with Schliemann's life and work, part of Chapter 1 treads on
ground that is most familiar to Aegean Bronze Age archaeologists and
Classical scholars alike, but Gere interestingly juxtaposes
Schliemann's archaeological exploits with Nietzsche's prophetic visions
of a post-Christian future of Dionysian neopaganism (Birth of Tragedy)
as well as "wars such as there have never been on earth" (Ecce Homo).
As she convincingly argues, Schliemann's excavations gave "flesh and
blood" to the philosopher's Homeric heroes and their healthy pagan
morality, his "blond Germanic beast" (p. 36), but it would be only
three decades after the Birth of Tragedy that his theories would be
used to interpret pre-Hellenic Greek religion, i.e. only when Evans's
excavations at Knossos would be used to provide a material background
to Nietzsche's Dionysian past and future. In short, Chapter 1 presents
Schliemann and Nietzsche as two of the great modernist prophets linked
to Knossos, because their works and appropriation by racial theorists
in Germany (e.g. the hailing of Schliemann and Agamemnon as
Uebermenschen) and by later classical scholars, artists, and writers
elsewhere prepared the background for the creation of a Dionysian,
ecstatic, and feminine Knossos as an antithesis to Mycenaean-Homeric
Teutonic militarism.

Chapter 2, ironically entitled "Stand-up Tragedy, 1851-1899", shows the
beginning of the Nietzschean Uebermensch's long (and, at times, comic)
journey into pacifism and femininity via the new stage created by
Evans's Knossos. This chapter, like the preceding, also partly explores
very familiar territory, namely Evans's life until the start of his
momentous excavations at Knossos, from his early upbringing and
intellectual relationship with his father, to his travels and work as a
political correspondent in the Balkans in his early youth, his marriage
to Margaret Freeman, his Keepership of the Ashmolean Museum, and his
first travels in Crete. It concludes with a discussion of the political
situation in the island at the end of the nineteenth century, namely
the 1897 insurrection and subsequent establishment of the Kretike
Politeia under a High Commissioner appointed by European powers.  The
main point of this chapter is to underline that Evans's militaristic
interpretations of Cretan archaeology of the mid-1890s were replaced by
a more pacifist stance after he witnessed the atrocities committed by
Christians and Muslims during the Cretan insurrection and its
aftermath: "out of the violent hell of the struggle for Cretan
independence was born the pacifist paradise of Minoan Crete" (p. 67), a
paradise dominated by a Great Mother Goddess, who turned out to be none
other than Ariadne --the most holy.

With Chapter 3, "Ariadne's Lament, 1900-1913", one enters less familiar
territory, especially with Gere's analysis of de Chirico's paintings
devoted to this Cretan heroine. As Gere rightly reminds us, Evans chose
Minos as the ultimate symbol of the Cretan civilization, which he was
uncovering and reconstructing at the same time, but he was equally
fascinated by Ariadne, whom he had even ventured to place, albeit very
briefly, on the famous Knossian throne, before restoring it to her
father (p. 77, citing Harriet Boyd Hawes). Evans's fascination with
Ariadne, and especially with her dances, runs side by side with his
belief in prehistoric matriarchy and monotheism centred upon a Great
Mother Goddess, theories that had gained wide currency from the
mid-nineteenth century.[[5]] Evans not only claimed to have discovered
Ariadne's dancing floor at Knossos, but also linked it, in his
characteristic evolutionary mind-frame, with the Athenian annual
festival dedicated to her husband, the Great Dionysia --thus setting
the scene for the fulfilment of Nietzsche's prophetic theories--as well
as to traditional peasant dances (pp. 82-5).  The Nietzschean Dionysian
implications of Evans's interpretations, however, were worked out not
by the British archaeologist himself, but by his contemporary, the
classical scholar Jane Harrison, and were even given flesh by the
dancer Isadora Duncan.  On the one hand, Harrison celebrated
irrationalism, the Great Mother Goddess, and the Minoan origins of the
cult of Dionysos in some of her most famous works, such as Prolegomena
to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis, in which this god became
"the descendant of a female principle that required not taming or
sublimation but rather reinstatement in all its Cretan glory" (p. 91).
On the other, Duncan embodied Nietzsche's prophetic theories in her
impromptu dance down the flights of the reconstructed Grand Staircase
of Knossos --her performance expressing the "post-Nietzschean
enthusiasm for the modernity of the Greek spirit" and showing how
"liberated femininity...could insinuate itself into the new tragic age
" (p. 95).   The chapter concludes with two sections: one on the
unification of Crete with Greece in 1913 and the Great War, and the
other on the aforementioned de Chirico's pre-war paintings of Ariadne.
Although de Chirico took drawing lessons in 1899 from one of Evans's
collaborators at Knossos, Emile Gillieron (pe\re), this was before the
Swiss artist started working for Evans in the Minoan capital: the link
between the Italian artist's paintings and Knossos is less direct and
at the same time, deeper.  Apart from the modernist look of some of the
buildings in de Chririco's paintings, which remind one of Evans's
restorations, it is really de Chirico's pacifism that links his works
and Evans's, for "de Chirico's Nietzsche is the Nietzsche of the
devotees of Knossos--not the philosopher of war or the inventor of the
Uebermensch, but the tormented prophet of modernism whose nihilism was
the antidote to an exquisitely painful moral sensitivity" (p. 101).

Chapter 4, "The Concrete Labyrinth, 1914-1935", can perhaps be
described as partly cultural history and partly psychoanalysis of some
of Evans's reconstructions both at the site of Knossos and in the pages
of his Palace of Minos, i.e. from the physical "reconstitution" of the
Throne Room, to the racial and racist implication of the reconstructed
Captain of the Blacks fresco in the pages of his magnum opus (Gere
interestingly reminds us here that the Black Athena thesis was
anticipated by George Wells Parker in his 1917 article "On the African
Origin of Grecian Civilisation"). This chapter also includes a
discussion of Evans's fanciful interpretation of other iconic Minoan
images (the "The Grand Stand", "Priest King", and "Taureador" frescoes)
and his acceptance of a number of fakes, such as the "Boston Goddess"
and the "Boy-God", all put at the services of his pacifist and
matriarchal vision of prehistoric Crete.  Other scholars have discussed
the notion that Evans's vision of a Mother Goddess-Boy God "dual
monotheism" (to use a term coined by D.G. Hogarth) was largely
influenced by nineteenth-century theories about matriarchy, Victorian
idealisation of motherhood, and the loss of his own mother at a tender
age.[[6]]  Some readers will not be entirely persuaded by Gere's
psychoanalysis, but to my knowledge no other author has attempted such
a precise juxtaposition and discussion of events in Evans's childhood
with his scholarly writing, and she should at least be given credit for
providing a more subtle and attentive reading of Evans's pages than
many archaeologists who have devoted much of their life to his
idolisation or character assassination.  In a similar vein, some
readers may perhaps feel that Gere's portrait of Evans as an
out-and-out pacifist is perhaps rather one-sided, and that a more
nuanced discussion of Evans's Pax Minoica could have been presented.
In other words, Evans, as Gere herself and others before her have
recognized, was man full of contradictions: despite his undeniable
pacifism, he was not completely oblivious to the militaristic and
imperialistic traits of his beloved Minoans, since, after all, he
believed that they had conquered and ruled much of the Aegean. Evans,
whose knowledge of ancient history was remarkable, modelled his Pax
Minoica on the Pax Romana, which he could hardly have conceived as a
peaceful enterprise.[[7]]  These, however, are minor points: it is
clear that Evans's pacifist message was the stronger and certainly the
most enduring. The chapter concludes with some original and intriguing
remarks about Evans's interpretation of butterfly depictions on Minoan
and Mycenaean artefacts, such as the "Ring of Nestor", in terms of
representations of the Minoan soul or "psyche".  Gere describes Evans's
writings on this subject as updated Keatsian romanticism, and
convincingly suggests that it was precisely Evans's archaeological
method and rhetorical style that made his work close to that of
modernist literature: it was his "combination of magic, mythology and
science, the distillation of sexual essences and symbolic archetypes,
the central obsession with the figure of woman--that left its mark on
the Dionysian art of the twenties and thirties" (139).

This forms the nexus with the following Chapter 5, "Psyche's Labyrinth,
1919-1941", which focuses on the relationship between Schliemann's and
Evans's work and modernist literature, art, and psychoanalysis --from
Joyce's Ulysses to Spengler's Decline of the West, and from
Merezhkovsky's The Birth of Gods to Kazantzakis's The Odyssey: a Modern
Sequel, via T.S. Eliot's essays, Picasso's paintings, and Miller's
Colossus of Maroussi. It is in this period between the two World Wars
that Crete's femininity and pacifism become more and more entrenched
beyond the archaeological world. The main focus of the chapter,
however, is the fascinating psychoanalytical encounter between Freud
and the American-born Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and their
reception and appropriation of Minoan Crete in their works.  For Freud,
on the one hand, Minoan Crete represented the earliest, pre-Oedipal,
mother-fixated phase in human history that corresponded to a stratum in
the brain: it was an important element in his theory of inherited
memory, which found its fuller expression in his Moses and Monotheism.
For H.D, on the other, Minoan Crete represented an archetype of the
soul's transformations and liberation of female sexuality (as discussed
in more detail in Chapter 6). The chapter concludes with the outbreak
of World War II, the battle of Crete, and Evans's death.

Chapter 6, "The Rebirth of Comedy, 1942-49"--thus entitled because the
late modernist reconstructions of Minoan society discussed here
"represent both a farcical and poignant distillation of Evans's
prophecies of peace" (p. 178)--traces in more detail H.D's Minoan
modernist pacifism and feminism in her unpublished manuscript "The
Majic Ring" [sic] and her epic trilogy of war poems; it also analyses
the Minoan elements and inspirations in Robert Graves's Seven Days in
New Crete and The White Goddess. For both writers Minoan Crete
symbolised the opposition to the atrocities of the present, "a
prelapsarian past pointing the way to a future utopia" (p. 178), and
with their pacifism and celebration of femininity they anticipated by
twenty years the pacifism and counter-culture of the 1960s.

Chapter 7, "The Birth of Farce, 1950-2000", traces the often
preposterous appropriation of Evans's Minoans from post-war times to
post-modernity, from flower-lovers to warlike Minoans, starting with
the archaeologist and art-historian Henriette Groegenwegen-Frankfort,
who, in her influential work, Arrest and Movement, celebrated Minoan
grace, spontaneity, and communion with the rhythms of life and nature,
and opened the floodgates to even more beatnik reinventions of
prehistoric Crete. The chapter continues with the Jungian classicist
Karl Kerenyi, who underlined the Dionysian character of the Minoans and
turned them into peaceful opium users a\ la de Quincey, a vision
largely shared by the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, who further
stressed their femininity and sexual liberation.  The archaeologist
Marija Gimbutas extended this matriarchal paradise to the rest of
prehistoric Eurasia, and Minoan Crete became a last bastion of
happiness before it succumbed to Aryan hordes of war-like patriarchs.
In this chapter Gere also makes brief reference to Evans's Minoans in
the Black Athena controversy, rightly noting that Evans's belief in the
strong Libyan and Egyptian links with the Cretan world do not quite fit
Bernal's European chauvinistic scheme.

With the last quarter of the twentieth and the early twenty-first
century Gere returns to the work of archaeologists rather than the
appropriations of artists, writers, psychoanalysts, etc., and charts
their revisions of some of Evans's most cherished ideas: his pan-Minoan
theory of Minoan domination of the Aegean till the end of the second
millennium BC (exploded by the decipherment of Linear B); the critique
of Evans's use of his own evidence (see, e.g., Palmer's half of On The
Knossos Tablets); the discovery of evidence suggesting that the Minoans
practiced human sacrifice and, worse, ritual cannibalism; and last but
not least, the challenging of the very notion of Minoan pacifism by
various scholars, including those involved in the ongoing "Minoan
Roads" programme. This project comprises in its investigations the
remains of roads and fortified buildings to which Evans had attributed
a military nature in the mid-1890s. The Minoans have thus come back
full circle to being the warlike people of Evans's early travels in
Crete, before they were turned into peaceful priest kings and
priestess-queens or flower-loving and drug-using hippies by the horrors
of the wars, which punctuated European and world history from 1870
until the Cold War.

The Conclusion curiously starts with what reads like an introduction: a
retrospective reflection on how this work emerged, a summary and
explanation of the unifying themes, partly repeating and partly
clarifying what has already been discussed in the introduction.  It
concludes, however, very appropriately, with a look at the past,
present, and future, and its own prophetic utterance, by offering this
work as a prehistory of the future, i.e. as an "attempt to reconstruct
a relatively benign ancestry for the twenty-first-century revival of
the essentialist synthesis" (p. 234).    In other words, in the late
nineteenth century, with the acceptance of Darwinian evolutionism,
human history came to be seen as "little more than an extension of
natural history" (p. 233). This attitude has seen a revival after the
discovery of DNA, and recent advances in mapping genetic codes and
histories: "evolutionary pressure", genetic and neurological data are
nowadays utilized more and more for reductive, deterministic
explanations of our complex social behaviour.  Will this new genetic
determinism be used to reinforce racist views, or will it be used in a
more liberal way? People like Evans, Freud, and H.D. used the same
essentialist material available to fascist ideology, but represent a
more "benign ancestry" because they championed opposite political ends:
pacifism, philo-Semitism, and feminism.

To sum up, this is a rich, brilliant, and well-researched volume, which
is also a pleasure to read. In describing Freud's work, Gere remarks on
his ability to create a system of correspondences between past,
present, and future almost like a "mystical totality of signs, a system
of correspondences within which any aspect of life was intelligible in
relation to a great web of parallels and resemblances..." (pp. 170-1),
which interestingly reminds one of descriptions of the Renaissance
Wunderkammer or Cabinet of curiosities as "ordered by sympathy,
allegory, and correspondence".[[8]] I think there is something of this
wondrous quality in Gere's ability to discover links, connections, and
underlying meanings in a dazzling array of archaeological, literary,
and artistic works as well as between past, present, and future.

>From an archaeological point of view, this volume complements and adds
considerably to a relatively new but growing body of more reflective
and multidisciplinary approaches to Aegean Bronze Age archaeology.[[9]]
While the focus is on Knossos, Evans, and his influential vision of
Minoan Crete, the author has interesting things to say also about
Schliemann, Troy, and the Mycenaeans.  For these reasons, and despite
the author's statement that her aims are not archaeological, this
volume should be required reading for any Aegean Bronze Age
archaeologist (whether established scholar or student) who pays
attention to the history of her/his discipline. It will also appeal to
Classicists with an interest in pre-Hellenic and pre-Classical Greece,
and their reception.

Factual errors are few and do not have implications for the overall
argument, such as the mistaken idea that the term 'Minoan' had not been
coined by 1895 and, by implication, was later invented by Evans (p.
65), while in fact it has been in use since the 1830s;[[10]]
typographical errors are more abundant (but the blame should rest with
the publisher, professional proof readers and copy-editors --not with
the author).


------------------
Notes:


1.   D. Preziosi, 2002. "Archaeology as Museology: Re-thinking the
Minoan past", in Y. Hamilakis (Ed) Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking
'Minoan' Archaeology (2002), p. 32. For some recent literature on
archaeology, modernity and modernism see e.g. J. Thomas, Archaeology
and Modernity (2004); J. Schnapp, M. Shanks, and M. Tiews,
"Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity", Modernism-Modernity 11.1 (2004)
1-16; J. Papadopoulos, "Inventing the Minoans: Archaeology, Modernity
and the Quest for European Identity," Journal of Mediterranean
Archaeology 18 (2005) 87-149; Y. Hamilakis and N. Momigliano (Eds),
Archaeology and European Modernity: Producing and Consuming the
'Minoans' (2006).

2.   A.J. Evans, "Work of reconstitution in the Palace of Knossos",
Antiquaries Journal 7(3) (1926): 258-267.

3.   Idiosyncratic in the sense that it reflects Gere's own choice of
primary sources, i.e. archaeologists, poets, historians, etc. and the
works (whether texts or paintings) to be discussed in this volume.
Other scholars writing similar histories of the rediscovery,
reconstruction and reception of Minoan Crete would, no doubt, make
equally idiosyncratic selections.

4.   See e.g. C.W. Ceram, Graves, Gods and Scholars (first published in
1949); P.M. Warren, The Aegean Civilizations (1975); W.A. McDonald and
C.G. Thomas, Progress into the Past: The Rediscovery of Mycenaean
Civilization (1990); J.L.Fitton, The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age
(1995).

5.   E.g. R. Hutton, "The Neolithic Great Goddess: A Study in Modern
Tradition", Antiquity 71 (1997): 91-9.

6.   C. Morris, "From Ideologies of Motherhood to 'Collecting Mother
Goddesses'", in Hamilakis and Momigliano (Eds) Archaeology and European
Modernity: Producing and Consuming the 'Minoans' (2006): 69-78; for the
term "dual monotheism" see A. Peatfield, "Minoan Religion", in D.
Huxley (Ed) Cretan Quests: British Explorers, Excavators, Historians
(2000): 141.

7.   On Evans's familiarity with Roman history see Joan Evans Prelude
and Fugue: An Autobiography (1964): 97.

8.   J. Thomas, Archaeology and Modernity (2004): 15

9.   E.g. J.F. Cherry, D. Margomenou, L.E. Talalay, Prehistorians Round
the Pond: Reflections on Aegean Prehistory as a Discipline (2005);
P.Darcque, M. Fotiadis, O.Polychronopoulou, Mythos: La pre/histoire
e/ge/enne du XIXe au XXIe sie\cle apre\s J.-C. (2006).

10.   See N. Karadimas and N. Momigliano, "On the term 'Minoan' Before
Sir Arthur Evans's work in Crete (1894)", Studi Micenei ed Egeo
Anatolici  46.2 (2004): 243-258. Other minor mistakes include the
following: (p. 1) the Villa Ariadne stands west and northwest, not
north of the palace; (p. 71) Chania, not Candia (modern Herakleion) was
the main administrative centre or 'capital' of Crete at that time; (p.
93) the "1976 Aerial Atlas of Ancient Crete" was in fact published in
1992, as correctly reported in the relevant notes and bibliography; (p.
105) suggests that Evans started writing The Palace of Minos at the
start of the Great War, but there is archival evidence showing that he
had started planning and indeed writing a draft of it at least 4 years
earlier: see N. Momigliano, "A note on A.J. Evans's The Palace of
Minos: a Comparative Account of the Successive Stages of the Early
Cretan Civilization as Illustrated by the Discoveries at Knossos",  in
P.P. Betancourt, V. Karageorghis, R. Laffineur and W.-D. Niemeier (Eds)
MELETEMATA: Studies in Aegean Archaeology Presented to Malcolm H.
Wiener as he enters his 65th Year (1999): 493-501.