In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (review)

What are the meanings and uses of Greece? Not long ago, classicists could probe the legacy of ancient Greece without discussing nationalism, the reign of King Otho, or the catastrophe of Smyrna. No more. Roessel covers 1770 to 1939 and beyond, up to the 1970s (in a conclusion that is more of a postscript), in English and American poetry and prose fiction, with some use of political pamphlets and travel literature. The book is masterfully sweeping, full of surprises, witty. Its guiding themes can be summarized as follows with brief comments.

From 1770 to 1833, literature about Greece was in the thrall of a Romantic Hellenism initiated by Winckelmann. Roessel calls this Apollonian: a belief in progress. The book begins with the failed 1770 revolt. Politically liberal philhellenism came to dominate idealistic Hellenism although the two often mingled in interesting ways. Byron was not the first in this genre; he exploited and best expressed already familiar themes. Indeed, I add, classicists must still come to terms with this legacy; it did not end in the early twentieth century, although many studies of the classical tradition do.

Roessel is largely interested in "Greece as a politicized space." A defining historical and political moment (usually involving war) is captured by a few geniuses and then echoed by unoriginal writers until the next major shift. Roessel remains jargon-free and moderate. Two examples of politics in the book: Greece confounds Orientalism by confronting us with imperialism of the East. Greece is feminized, although this means something not positive-sounding, i.e., that it was portrayed as a captive female, a helpless victim. Greek males are not heroes but glorified bandits.

From 1833 to 1913, writers echoed Byron: "[t]he discourse of modern Greece was fixed in the 1820s" (124), that is, in an antiquated politics which showed scant real interest in "the Kingdom which occupies the territory of ancient Hellas" (141). Greece did not yet allow the discovery of the individual or the "bourgeois interiority" of the novel. Artists do not behave like themselves when writing about Greece; this tradition explains, e.g., why Stephen Crane's Greek book is not realistic. Even English writers advocated the Megali Idea of a Greater Greece. Roessel is brilliant on Balkan issues. He sees the new notion of the Balkans (1870s) as exploiting an expanded philhellenic rhetoric of freedom. This raised and still raises the dilemma, how is Greece different? "Balkan had come to signify modern Greece's other half" (144).

Part 3 describes the escape from politics in writing about Greece in 1914 to 1939. The Smyrna catastrophe had a huge impact on modernist consciousness, for example, in giving shape to Hemingway's first collection of stories. Then as Italy became more politicized, the Mediterranean "antidote to civilization" moved to Greece. Cavafy, Durrell ("a woman, an island and a tree"), and Miller made it Dionysiac. Roessel provides many examples of the new importance of myth in modernism, but never notes the great influence of Nietzsche. Curiously, given the Cold War's battle to keep Greece Western, and the political interests pervading the literature studied throughout this book so far, Western writers no longer saw Greece as a mirror for the West but as a pastoral space for inhibition-free self-discovery. The emergence of Israel as a new messianic East/West battleground might be relevant here. Politics returned with the Colonels.

This rich book organizes an immense amount of material in a framework that can spawn future work by others on many topics. Put it next to R. Eisner's Travelers to an Antique Land (Ann Arbor 1991) and Greece: A Traveler's Literary Companion, ed. A. Leontis (San Francisco 1997).

We may add another factor in this entire tradition of thought, besides politics. The specter of Greece as an ambiguous sacred land is ever present throughout. Greece provides us with both the origins of...