Marguerite Yourcenar's Greek Earth

Perhaps because classicists are surrounded by scholars and students who still boast of their love for ancient Greek texts, we have not experienced as much as some the depressing disparagement of the Hellenic so ably described by Gregory Jusdanis (1996:187–189) in his analysis of the workshop that preceded “Whither the Neohellenic?” As everyone in both workshops would probably agree, it is possible to discern the “patriarchy, slavery, imperialism, and tyranny” underlying beloved texts (Shakespeare’s as well as Aeschylus’s) and still find inspiration and models therein (Jusdanis 1996:188, 190–191). Classicists as a group may find this more possible than others, and they may, therefore, be less likely than some to connect the decline of Modern Greek studies to a perceived disillusionment with classical Hellenism. What all academics share, however, is an appreciation of the modern intellectual’s estrangement from land—from geography. It may be that this estrangement is at least partly to blame for the decline.

It would seem that as long as the Greek land was seen as integral to the culture that produced classical Greek literature, modern Greek poets and writers would continue to be important to Eurocentric writers and readers. Artemis Leontis (1995:104–111) has brilliantly demonstrated how modernist European intellectuals moved toward such a geographic determinism in the 1930s after having first moved away from “imitation” of classical Greek art and poetics as well as away from a feeling that non-Greek Europeans, rather than the current inhabitants of Greece, were the true Greeks. The Hellenic remained important as one of the origins of Western culture, but there were two distinct ways of reaching it: via the romantic experience of Greece as “the site of myth: a noninhabitable space to which [one] may return to reflect on [one’s] own lost origins,” or via the ironic modernist view that one can recover “a certain sense of belonging to the Hellenic world . . . only through identification with the native modern Greek” (Leontis 1995:111). Marguerite Yourcenar wrote some travel essays ¹ in the mid-1930s that demonstrate a most interesting conflation of these two modes of relation. Composed during a period when her life, as she put it, “centered on Greece” (Savigneau 1993:92)—the physical space and culture of modern Greece as well as the classical literature that she had been reading in the original since her childhood—, these essays may reflect the influence of a new geopolitical aesthetic being forged by Greek intellectuals. I want to explore the geopolitics of two of Yourcenar’s romantic modernist essays as early examples of how a new current of neohellenic thought would spread into Euro-American circles from an intellectual center in Greece.

Yourcenar’s classical studies seem to have given her a vivid vision of Greek geography before she ever set foot on Greek soil. Readers of her first major piece of writing, a biography of Pindar composed in 1926, could not suspect that she had never been to Greece. ² Drawing on a multitude of historians, poets, and ancient and modern travel guides, she imagines a vivid physical world for Pindar to live in, complete with weather, landscape, and a mother who was “probablement” very young, blonde, chubby, submissive, and instinctive rather than intelligent (1991:1442).

Yourcenar’s biographer, Josyane Savigneau, tells us that Grasset’s editor André Fraigneau, who first read Pindare in 1930 when he had recently returned from a trip in which he had fallen in love with Greece, was astonished to learn that its author was not writing from first-hand knowledge. When he persuaded her to go to Greece in 1932, Yourcenar was as smitten as he had been and chose to live in Greece several months out of every year from 1932 to 1936. Most of these months were spent traveling around the country guided by a new close friend, the surrealist poet and psychoanalyst Andreas Embirikos. In 1936 she spent the summer in Athens collaborating with another Greek intellectual, Constantine Dimaras, on a translation of Constantine Cavafy (Savigneau 1993:92).

She would tell a correspondent in 1954 that Greece had revealed to...