Renascent Joyce

1. “Another victory like that and we are done for”: Return and Repression of a Greek Spirit in Modernism

1 “Another victory like that and we are done for” Return and Repression of a Greek Spirit in Modernism Philippe Birgy The term “Renaissance” is commonly understood to mean the renaissance of Hellenism. But the possibility of bringing back the spirit of a period presupposes a preliminary work of periodization, a process of cutting up, of incision and extraction. And to achieve this end, it is necessary, in turn, to minimize, not to say altogether repress, the persistent influence of Greek and Roman sources throughout the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, for clarity’s sake we propose to adopt as a working hypothesis this rather standard definition of the period, even if we have to deviate from it in the course of our demonstration. We will admit, then, that the term designates that particular construction projected by nineteenth-century historians on men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that it refers to that cultural spirit or intention specifically belonging to the period and whose main characteristics would be: —An affirmation of secular life and of the body meant as a reaction to pure and exclusive religious spirituality —A radical shift away from piety and toward secularism —A return to the cultural model offered by ancient Greece The reactionary or oppositional element is plainly visible in such a construction . The very concept of “civilization,” the historical idea that civilizations succeed one another, rests on it (we shall have to come back to this point at a later stage). 8 Philippe Birgy The Renaissance implies a possibility of returning to an original state or to whatever has come and gone before, a cultural past, that of a civilization. But ultimately the term designates the possibility of recovering something much more elusive: a vitality, a density of felt and moral life. Parenthetically, let us notice that what goes by the name of “Modernism” has a lot do with that intensity of life. One finds it in Pound’s and Woolf’s criticism as well as in the avant-garde manifestos where it is opposed to the dead forms of art consigned to the museum, and one may well suppose that it has also something to do with Stephen’s remarks in the Portrait about the “heaps of dead language” (P 179). If one envisages the concept of Renaissance in this perspective, one immediately thinks of Mulligan’s pseudo-Nietzschean project of a new Hellenism and its attendant rhetoric. But the historical perspective suggested here is equally conjured up in other chapters, such as “Aeolus,” for instance, where it appears in the debate in the form of a comparative study of Greek, Roman, Semite, and British civilizations—the whole argument functioning as an allegory of the Celtic Revival. (Here again, the rhetorical character of this discussion is quite explicit: this is a discursive construction, that is, a matter of phrasing things.) We also find the Greek and Roman element at the beginning of “Nestor,” where Stephen checks whether his pupils have learned their history lesson by heart and questions them on a particular event deemed to be crucial to the foundation of the Roman Empire and the defeat of the Greek civilization , namely, the battle of Asculum, which, although it was won by the Greeks, was so costly that it led to their domination by the Romans. The student’s ignorance of this official version leaves Stephen wondering about the inscription of such historical periods in our culture, the extent to which they determine the present and the alternative course history might have taken. ThispassageiscommonlyinterpretedasanexpressionofStephen’sdesire “to break away from the traditional view of the past as a collection of dead, unalterable moments” (Rickard 5) and as a recognition of the facticity of such history. This is because it is an authoritative and univocal narrative that leaves no space for creative vision, that is, an inferior form of storytelling that does not acknowledge its fictive status. Can one dispose of the past? That is certainly the question, but one cannot be sure that the text is a plea for liberation from the thralls of history . If history is a succession of different eras of civilization giving way Return and Repression of a Greek Spirit in Modernism 9 one to another and oriented in one decisive direction, with no possibility of reversing the movement, this means that what has passed is past and gone forever, so there is no reason to fear enslavement, unless...