Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art

M I N O S A N D TH E M ODE R NS Classical Presences The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece ...

Author: Theodore Ziolkowski

141 downloads 1074 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

M I N O S A N D TH E M ODE R NS

Classical Presences The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Minos and the Moderns Cretan Myth in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art

T H E O D OR E ZIOLKOWS K I

1 2008

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ziolkowski, Theodore. Minos and the moderns: Cretan myth in twentieth-century literature and art / Theodore Ziolkowski. p. cm.—(Classical presences) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-533691-7 1. Mythology in literature. 2. Art and mythology. 3. Crete (Greece)— In literature. 4. Crete (Greece)—In art. I. Title. PN56.M95Z55 2008 809'.9337—dc22 2007033607

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For William G. and Mary Ellen Bowen Old Friends and Fellow Lovers of Crete

This page intentionally left blank

Preface In the early summer of 2005 I was invited to contribute to a conference on “The Successors of Theocritus and Virgil: The Reception of Bucolic Poetry in Ancient and Modern Times,” arranged by Professor Michael Paschalis of the Department of Philology of the University of Crete at Rethymnon and scheduled to take place the following May. For my contribution I decided to focus on the reception of Virgil’s First Eclogue in the twentieth century. As I was preparing my talk and as my wife and I planned our trip to Crete, I came repeatedly across the ancient myths tied to that proud island linking eastern and western history and culture. Rereading those familiar stories, I began to think casually about their reception in the twentieth century. Several examples from the world of art, literature, and popular culture sprang instantly to mind: Picasso’s obsessive depictions of the Minotaur, for instance; poems by Auden and others based on Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus; the ﬁgure of Daedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and even the various European coins and currencies illustrated with scenes of Europa and the bull. As I explored the material more systematically, I began to realize how powerfully those myths re-emerged in the twentieth century. Why did this happen? This book is the result of my enormously pleasurable months of looking, reading, and wondering—a book enriched ﬁnally by the actual trip to Crete. Visiting the ancient Minoan sites—notably Knossos, Phaistos, and Gortyn, which are central to the myths—and experiencing the spectacular Cretan landscape with its mountains and gorges enabled me to relive more vividly in my imagination the myths with which I was dealing and to add, I hope, a bit of color and liveliness to my account. My title is meant to suggest not that Minos is the central actor in the chapters that follow but that he is the binding ﬁgure who connects the various myths attached to the island of Crete: as the ﬁrst son of Europa and Zeus, as the husband of Pasiphaë and stepfather of the Minotaur, as the father of Ariadne and Phaedra, as the tyrant

viii

Preface

whose actions bring Theseus to Crete, and as the possessive sponsor of Daedalus and Icarus. Even though his role in the various stories is usually peripheral, it is Minos whose name has been appropriated to designate the Minoan culture that characterized Crete at the time described in the myths and hence the governing ﬁgure of the age. His name, moreover, appears to be a familiar concept in twentiethcentury lore as well. A search among the more than ﬁve million hits offered by Google results not just in Minos wines and olive oils, Minos restaurants and hotel chains, but also in Minos computer games, handmade mosaics, and software packages—not to mention acronyms for a Mine Operating System and the Main Injection Neutrino Oscillation Search. The appropriation of Greek myth in modern literature has been widely and authoritatively appraised. Books and articles have analyzed the use of classical myths by various modern writers: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, André Gide, and Rainer Maria Rilke among others. Scholars have studied the adaptations of speciﬁc myths: for instance, Raymond Trousson’s Le Thème de Prométhée dans la littérature européene (Geneva: Droz, 1964); George Steiner’s Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); Kathleen Komar’s Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); and Inge Stephan’s Medea: Multimediale Karriere einer mythologischen Figur (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006). Others have produced such broader studies as Käte Hamburger’s Von Sophokles zu Sartre: Griechische Dramenﬁguren antik und modern (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962) or Werner Frick’s “Die mythische Methode”: Komparatistische Studien zur Transformation der griechischen Tragödie im Drama der klassischen Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998). But as I recalled my research for Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005) dealing with Ovid’s treatment of scores of mythological tales in his Metamorphoses, it struck my attention that conspicuously missing among the many studies of the subject is any discussion of the Cretan myths collectively. We get the Theban legends, the Mycenaean matter, the Trojan cycle, and the tales dealing with Prometheus and Medea; but the Cretan material is generally absent from the scholarly discussion despite its striking literary resurgence in the twentieth century, which has lately

Preface

ix

resulted even in books for young readers, such as Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief (2005). Some reasons for this early neglect and later resurgence are suggested in chapter 1. The following chapters then take up the reception of the major Cretan myths in the twentieth century, notably in literature and the visual arts but also in various musical genres. It is my twofold aim to explore, first, how Cretan myth was used during the early decades of the twentieth century as a mirror for modern history, society, and the psyche; and, second, how this new perception of myth permeated all the arts simultaneously, including literature, painting, sculpture, prints, opera, ballet, and the theater, as well as popular culture. My undertaking is based on the underlying conviction that the transfiguration of classical myth in general constitutes one of the principal characteristics of classical modernism, without a grasp of which that period of twentieth-century culture cannot be fully appreciated. Among these transfigured myths, none are more conspicuous than the matters of Minos. Stefan Vranka responded with gratifying enthusiasm to my initial inquiry at Oxford University Press. He sent my manuscript to two readers whose thoughtful reports provided several useful suggestions that have been incorporated into the ﬁnal draft. The editors of Oxford’s Classical Presences series, Lorna Hardwick and James Porter, followed up with some relevant bibliographical items. Brian Hurley has handled my frequent queries with patience and dispatch. I am grateful to Michael Paschalis for the invitation that catalyzed my casual reﬂections on Cretan myth. My wife, Yetta Ziolkowski, and my daughter, Professor Margaret Ziolkowski, accompanied me to Crete and responded intelligently, patiently, and with insightful suggestions to my early mythophilic ruminations as we crisscrossed that enchanting island. It is a pleasure to acknowledge my granddaughter, Saskia Ziolkowski, for reassuring me with professional competence on my understanding of D’Annunzio’s linguistic exuberances, but she is in no way responsible for any mistranslations on my part. (All translations, unless otherwise speciﬁed, are my own.) Jeff Saward, editor of Caerdroia, the journal of mazes and labyrinths (www.labyrinthos. net), contributed generously to my knowledge of modern mazes. As

x

Preface

so often in the past, Princeton University’s Firestone Library and the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin provided the rich bibliographical resources required for undertakings of this sort. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has generously supported this project, as it did an earlier one, through an extension of my Emeritus Faculty Fellowship.

Acknowledgments I am gratefully indebted to Marcus Albanus, of the Familie Marcus Albanus, for his generous and enthusiastic permission to reproduce the painting by Werner Peiner both in my text and, in color, for the dust jacket; and to Charlotte Kerr Dürrenmatt for her gracious permission to use the drawing by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. For their assistance in obtaining the illustrations for this volume, and the authorization to use them, I would like to express my appreciation to the following individuals and institutions: Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz of the Artist Rights Society; Nadia Ben Hamou of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium; Jens Dannehl of the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg; Laura Frischknecht and Laura Stalder of the Kunstmuseum Bern; Arie Hartog of the Gerhard Marcks-Haus, Bremen; Erica Maurer of Diogenes Verlag; Sabine Ohlrich of the Kunsthalle Bremen; and Karen Richter of The Art Museum, Princeton University. I thank the following individuals and publishers for permission to reprint: Lines from “Europa” from Collected Poems of Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. Lines from “Europa” from Collected Poems by William Plomer, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Lines from “Europa and the Bull” from The Poems and Plays of Oliver St. John Gogarty, ed. Norman Jeffares. © 2001 by Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. Reprinted by permission of Colin Smythe on behalf of V. J. O’Mara. Excerpts from “Preludes for Memnon” from Collected Poems by Conrad Aiken. Oxford University Press. Copyright © 1970 by Conrad Aiken, Reprinted by permission and Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. Excerpts from “New Year Letter,” copyright 1941 & renewed 1969 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc., and Faber and Faber, Ltd.

xii

Acknowledgments

Lines from “The Labyrinth” from Collected Poems by Edwin Muir. Used by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. Lines from Clue of Darkness by Jack Lindsay (London: Andrew Dakers, 1949). Used by permission of Meta Drinkwater. Excerpts from “The Cretan Woman” from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume 3, edited by Tim Hunt. Copyright © Jeffers Literary Properties. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. Lines from “Elegy of Icarus” from No Traveller Returns: A Book of Poems by Joseph Auslander (New York: Harper, 1935). Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction: The Modernization of Myth Europa and the Bull: Sex, Society, and Politics The Minotaur: The Beast Within and the Threat Outside The Other Cretans: Alienation, Invention, Liberation Conclusion: The Modernity of Myth

Index

3 27 67 117 165 169

This page intentionally left blank

M I N O S A N D TH E M ODE R NS

This page intentionally left blank

1 Introduction: The Modernization of Myth

C R E T E I N H I STORY The island-kingdom of Crete suffered a fate eerily foreshadowed by that of Icarus who launched himself from its windy cliffs to undertake his glorious ﬂight to the heights of the heavens—only to fall ignominiously, the prey of his own pride, into the dark seas below. So too the “thalassocracy of Minos,” the seemingly indomitable sea power to which the British empire in the early twentieth century was fond of comparing its pre-eminence, rose in the second millennium b.c.e. to become the greatest civilization of the Mediterranean world between those of Egypt and Athens before it sank into obscurity in the face of Grecian glory and Roman grandeur.1 How did this happen? In the mid-second millennium, wrote Oswald Spengler, two worlds faced each other across the Aegean Sea: the Mycenaean, slowly ripening toward the future, heavy with hope and drunk with suffering; and another that lay cheerful and fulﬁlled amidst the treasures of an ancient culture, reﬁned and buoyant, having left all great problems far behind: the Minoan world on Crete. We will never truly understand the phenomenon, which was moving into the center of scholarly research around 1920 when Spengler was writing, if we do not gauge the abyss of contradictions that lies between the two souls. People of that day must have felt it keenly without recognizing it. I visualize the reverent gaze of the castle-dwellers of Tiryns and Mycenae as they peered 1 For examples of the comparison, see Joseph Alexander Macgillivray, Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth (London: Cape, 2000), 195.

4

Minos and the Moderns

up at the unattainable spirituality of the customs of life in Knossos; the contempt with which that city’s cultivated populace looked down on those chieftains and their followers; and yet again a secret feeling of superiority among these healthy barbarians, of the sort that every Germanic soldier held vis-àvis the aged dignitaries of Rome.2

Somewhat less poetically, Arnold Toynbee numbered Minoan society among the handful of “universal states” the world has known. “The universal state is the maritime empire, maintained by command of the Aegean Sea from a base in Crete, which left a name in Greek tradition as the thalassocracy (sea-power) of Minos, and a mark on the face of the earth in the topmost strata of the palaces recently excavated at Cnossos and Phaestus.”3 For Toynbee the very fruits of success harbored the seeds of disintegration, which began with the overexpansion of Minoan might and the hypersophistication of its society. “The hall-mark of decadence is stamped upon all the material products of the Minoan culture dating from this third phase of the Late Minoan period, as conspicuously as these products outrange all previous Minoan products in geographical distribution. It looks almost as if a deterioration in quality of craftsmanship was the price which had to be paid for an expansion of output” (191). Toynbee elsewhere cites the disintegrating Minoan civilization as a “classic example of vulgarity” (465). Spengler, referring to the transition from culture to civilization when great metropolitan capitals emerge, was convinced that “becoming provincial is the fate of entire lands that—like Crete and Macedonia or, today, the Scandinavian north—do not lie within the radiation range of one of these cities” (45). In addition to the “national exhaustion” resulting from the expansion of Cretan culture, cited in one long-inﬂuential history of the period,4 several other factors contributed to the gradual decline that began in the mid-second millennium b.c.e. Speciﬁcally, an island perhaps weakened by some sort of natural

2 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 1963), 656 (= vol. 2, chap. 2, pt. 1). 3 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement by D. C. Somervell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 23. 4 H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis (1913; 11th ed., London: Methuen, 1950), 56.

Introduction

5

catastrophe—earthquake, volcanic eruption, or tsunami have all been suggested, along with a subsequent devastating conﬂagration—and a populace softened by centuries of power and proﬂigacy fell easy prey to the invading hordes of Achaean “barbarians” from the mainland and pirates from the surrounding seas. Within a few centuries, the former master of the Mediterranean became a vassal-state of the new Athenian empire and subsided into a peripheral role in history—ﬁrst as a Roman province, next as a Byzantine dependency, then as a Venetian colony, ﬁnally as an Ottoman territory, and in the nineteenth century as a pawn torn back and forth in a bitter struggle between Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims, until 1899, when the island became independent and autonomous with its own constitution and Prince George of Greece appointed as High Commissioner of the Great Powers.

CRETE IN MYTH As Crete was reduced in the ﬁrst millennium b.c.e. simply to another port within the Athenian maritime empire, it also lost much of its visibility within classical Greek culture and art. Plato, to be sure, opened his Laws with tributes to Minos, who was reputed, like Moses and the Table of Laws, to have received his laws directly from Zeus in the mountains of Crete, and to his brother Rhadamanthys, renowned for his administration of justice. The historian Thucydides, in whose rationalizing eyes Minos was a ﬁgure of history and not of myth, noted that Minos “controlled the greater part of what is now called the Hellenic Sea; he ruled over the Cyclades, in most of which he founded the ﬁrst colonies, installing his sons as governors after having driven out the Carians. And it is reasonable to suppose that he did his best to put down piracy in order to secure his own revenues.”5 But Crete played virtually no role in the Peloponnesian War; Thucydides mentions it only occasionally in passing—as a seaport and as a recruiting ground for skilled archers. 5 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1954), 15 (= bk. 1, chap. 1).

6

Minos and the Moderns

This neglect of lore associated with Crete is reﬂected in classical Greek art and literature although, paradoxically, its remnants are found only in Attic myths.6 In the preclassical period, Homer listed the Cretans among other tribes in the catalogs of the Iliad (bk. 2), where their leader Idomeneus calls Minos a son of Zeus and his own grandfather (bk. 13). In the Odyssey (bk. 11) Odysseus reports that, in the course of his wanderings, he saw the daughters of Minos, Phaedra and Ariadne, whom Theseus sought to carry away to Athens but whom Artemis slew at the behest of Dionysus.7 Minos occurs only some forty times in antique art, mostly as a secondary ﬁgure looking on, for instance, as Theseus slays the Minotaur—in contrast to some 322 appearances of Theseus.8 Europa with the bull shows up relatively frequently (226 examples)—no doubt because she represents another conquest in the series of Zeus’s love affairs. But the Minotaur is quite rare in Greek art after the sixth century b.c.e. Most of its seventy-two occurrences are found in Etruscan and Roman art—a popularity consistent with the rise, notably among Roman soldiers and traders beginning in the late ﬁrst century, of the mystery cult of Mithras. Depictions of the “tauroctony”—Mithras slaying a bull in a cave, which presumably had a soteriological meaning—provided the focal point in the hundreds of excavated temples (Mithraea) scattered throughout the later empire. The parallels to Theseus and the Minotaur are conspicuous.9 Similarly, the ﬁgure of Pasiphaë, infrequent in Greek art, occurs almost exclusively in Etruscan and Roman images. And while Daedalus and Icarus soar up ﬁfty-seven times, Icarus hardly ever ﬂies alone.

6 M. Nilsson, The Mycenaean Origins of Greek Mythology (1932), ed. Emily Vermeule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 180. 7 See Adele J. Haft, “The Myth That Crete Became: The Thematic Signiﬁcance of Crete and Cretan Topoi in Homer’s Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1981), 17–107. 8 I take my information regarding images from the Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae (LIMC), ed. John Boardman and others, 8 vols. (Zurich: Artemis, 1981–98). In this connection, see also Sarah P. Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 184–90. 9 See M. J. Vermaseren, Mithras, the Secret God (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963); and, on tauroctones speciﬁcally, Leroy A. Campbell, Mithraic Iconography and Ideology (Leiden: Brill, 1968).

Introduction

7

The myths associated with Crete do not ﬁgure in Pindar’s odes, and they are conspicuously absent from classical Greek tragedy of the ﬁfth century as it has come down to us. As a prominent scholar of classical archaeology has remarked, “there is no Minoan or Asianic blood in the veins of the Greek Muses,” who “dwelt remote from the Cretan-Mycenaean world.”10 This absence is no doubt due to a variety of circumstances: the economic irrelevance of the island by the ﬁfth century; the Minoan matrilineal culture based on a monotheistic religion of the Great Mother, which was alien to the male-dominated Pantheon of the Greeks; Crete’s genealogical association with the hated Trojans; the passive role of Cretans not as actors but as those acted upon in most myths; and the fact that the Athenian veneration of Theseus as its federalizing king caused its citizens to denigrate the various adversaries and victims in his adventuresome career. The extant dramas tend to focus on events revolving around Mycenae (the Atrides), Thebes (Oedipus and Antigone), and the Trojan War. Other famous works take place in Corinth (Medea) and in the mountains of Scythia (Prometheus Bound); but the only extant play even remotely associated with Crete is Euripides’ Hippolytus, which is set in the Peloponnesian city of Troezen. Popular indifference toward the material was probably a factor contributing to the loss of dramas on Minoan subjects attributed to Aeschylus (on Europa), Sophocles (on Daedalus and Minos), and Euripides (on Pasiphaë and the Minotaur), which have reached us only as fragments. Plutarch, in his account of Theseus, notes the Attic distaste for such tales as that of Pasiphaë and the bull and points out more generally that “Minos was always ill spoken of, and represented ever as a very wicked man, in the Athenian theatres.” Despite the favorable words of Homer and Hesiod “the tragedians got the better, and from the vantage ground of the stage showered down obloquy upon him, as a man of cruelty and violence,” although the historical evidence suggests that he was a just king and law-giver.11 In any case, Crete and its various myths were reduced to 10 Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Sagas in the Homeric Epics, Sather Classical Lectures 20 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 17. 11 Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden and rev. Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Modern Library, [n.d.]), 9–10. Morris, Daidalos, 182, proposes his association with infant sacriﬁce as a factor, and his displacement by Solon as the legendary lawgiver par excellence.

8

Minos and the Moderns

little more than episodes in the Attic legends surrounding Theseus, the uniﬁer of Athens. It was not merely indifference that marked the attitude toward that once great universal state. Cretans became proverbial as “always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons,” according to the saying cited by Saint Paul in his letter to Titus (1.12), whom he appointed to organize the young church on that island. As late as in Erasmus’s Colloquia (XLVIII: “Impostura”) one of the interlocutors sums up a joking dialogue with the proverb: “as they say, a Cretan is attacking a Cretan” (quod dici solet, Cretensis incidit in Cretensem); that is, “it takes a thief to catch a thief,” or “it takes one to know one”—a saying that Erasmus clariﬁes in his Adagia with the explanation that “perversity is dealing with perversity, treachery with treachery” (improbus agit cum improbo, perﬁdus cum perﬁdo).12 In the Athenian hostility toward the Cretans we also sense the lingering resentment of the upstart nouveaux riches toward the former cultural splendor of their one-time masters.13 It was no thanks to the Athenians but only to later Alexandrine Greeks and the Romans that the Cretan myths—of Europa and the bull; of Minos, Pasiphaë, and the Minotaur; of Daedalus and Icarus—were passed along to posterity: in such handbooks of Greek mythology as the ﬁrst-century b.c.e. Library (bk. 3. 1, bk. 3.15, ep. 1.12) commonly attributed to Apollodorus of Athens or the secondcentury c.e. Fabulae of Hyginus (nos. 39–43 and 178) and then notably in such literary masterpieces as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the various myths are recounted in detail; in Catullus’s epyllion rehearsing the lament of the abandoned Ariadne (Carmen 64); and in Virgil’s eclogue (6.46–60) with its account of Pasiphaë and the bull, as well as the Aeneid (3.94–146), where it is said that Crete is the “ancient mother” (antiquam matrem) of the Trojans and the “cradle of our race” (gentis cunabula nostrae)—the place where Aeneas and his

12 Erasmus, Adagia 126 (= I.ii.26–29). Elsewhere in the proverbs Cretans are invariably cited in a negative manner: e.g. a Creta raptus for perverse sexuality. 13 Haft, “The Myth That Crete Became,” 9–11, discusses various “topoi” or rhetorical commonplaces regarding Crete that were widespread in Greece: in addition to the notion that Cretans are liars, for instance, their reputation for archery and the repute of illicit sexuality.

Introduction

9

followers in their ﬂight from Troy initially, albeit mistakenly, believe they are ordained to settle and reestablish their lost kingdom.14 While artists of the Renaissance often drew on Ovid for their vision of such popular emblematic topics as Europa and the bull or Daedalus and Icarus, the earlier neglect by classical Greek poets was long assumed by scholars and aﬁcionados of classical Greek culture. Crete and Minoan art do not ﬁgure in the aesthetics of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose monumental History of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1764) established the view of an Apolline art characterized by edle Einfalt und stille Größe (“noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”) that dominated “the tyranny of Greece over Germany”15 and, more generally, European thinking about antiquity until Nietzsche. To be sure, Johann Jakob Bachofen devotes a substantial chapter of his great study of legal and religious gynaicocracy in the ancient world (Das Mutterrecht, 1861) to Crete, which he calls “the only land where people spoke not of fatherland (patris) but of motherland (mêtris)” and in whose mysteries female deities played a greater role than elsewhere.16 But Bachofen was an outsider to the academic establishment, and his work was long rejected by classical scholars until it was rediscovered by early twentieth-century anthropologists. By way of contrast, in his great cultural history of Greece (Griechische Kulturgeschichte; planned as early as 1869; published 1898–1902), Jacob Burckhardt mentions Crete only in passing, noting, for instance, that as the concept “Hellas” became increasingly tightened on the mainland, Crete got no major trading city; that on Crete “infamy [Verruchtheit] of disposition” was a given; and that a degenerate Crete, ruined by civil war, became piratical.17 Crete was not among the targets of the enterprising German archaeologists 14 On the Roman obsession with Greek myth, see Rebecca Armstrong, Cretan Women: Pasiphaë, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12–16. 15 E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Inﬂuence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers and the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries (1935; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1958). 16 J. J. Bachofen, Der Mythus von Orient und Occident: Eine Metaphysik der alten Welt, ed. Manfred Schroeter (Munich: Beck, 1956), 116–39, here 116 and 130 (§25 and §29). 17 Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, ed. Rudolf Marx, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Kröner, [n.d.]), 3:47, 361, and 375.

10

Minos and the Moderns

of the nineteenth century.18 And a similar neglect was evident in other countries, as is evident in Charles Kingsley’s mid-nineteenthcentury standard The Heroes, or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children (1855), where the Cretan material shows up only brieﬂy in the chapter “How Theseus Slew the Minotaur.” That neglect still prevails in Karl Kerényi’s Heroes of the Greeks (Die Heroen der Griechen, 1958) and such popular contemporary textbooks as Mark Morford’s and Robert Lenardon’s Classical Mythology (4th ed. 1991), where the Cretan material is squeezed into the section on “Theseus and the Legends of Attica,” or Hans-K. and Susanne Lücke’s Antike Mythologie. Ein Handbuch (1999) in the series of Rowohlt Enzyklopädien, which contains no mention at all of the Cretan myths.19 What brought about the change? Why, in the early twentieth century, do we ﬁnd Spengler acknowledging the unparalleled “spirituality” of Knossos while Toynbee includes it in his list of “universal states”? Why can Jane Harrison, echoing Bachofen, in her epochmaking Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) suddenly claim that the Orphic mysteries of the Mother originated in “matriarchal Crete”?20

T H E R E S U RG E N C E O F C R E T E A N D I TS M Y T H S The ﬁrst and most compelling reason can be seen in the spectacular archaeological ﬁndings of the late nineteenth century that revolutionized our understanding of the preclassical Aegean world.21 In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann, following his discoveries regarding ancient

18 See Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 19 Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth, 3d ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001), 418–43, does include a separate section on “The Myths of Crete,” which quotes extensively from Ovid and Catullus and reproduces both Picasso’s Minotauromachy and Bruegel’s The Fall of Icarus. 20 Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: The University Press, 1903; rpt. London: Merlin, 1980), 566–67. 21 For a popular account of Minoan/Mycenaean archaeology, see Leonard Cottrell, The Bull of Minos (1953; rev. ed. Stroud: Sutton, 2003).

Introduction

11

Troy at Hissarlik, began his excavations at Mycenae, which exposed for the ﬁrst time the monumental ruins of Mycenaean civilization. A decade later Italy’s Federico Halbherr almost literally stumbled across the stone blocks from the great court of justice at Crete’s Gortyn, whose chiseled inscriptions provided the world with the ﬁrst European code of law as well as its ﬁrst documented glimpse into preHellenic Aegean laws and social practices. Then in 1900, following twenty years of previous excavations of other Cretan sites and after six years of prolonged negotiations concerning the property, Britain’s Arthur Evans uncovered the palace of Minos at Knossos and its legendary labyrinth. While the earlier discoveries had stirred considerable scholarly note as well as controversy, Evans’s work at Knossos aroused widespread public interest, kindled in April 1900 by his cable to the London Times—a happy departure from the many depressing articles about the Boer War, famine and plague in India, and anti-British feelings abroad—and detailed in a series of succeeding articles. Evans took for granted the historicity of Minos, “the great law-giver” who “promulgated his famous institutions and . . . established a maritime empire. . . . Here Daedalus constructed the Labyrinth, the den of the Minotaur, and fashioned the wings—perhaps the sails—with which he and Icarus took ﬂight over the Aegean.”22 Evans elaborated upon his successive ﬁndings over many years in such scholarly venues as The Athenaeum, the Proceedings of the British Association, and the Annual of the British School at Athens. In his piece on “Crete” in the authoritative eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica he proclaimed with no false modesty that the excavations had “entirely revolutionized our knowledge of the remote past, and afforded the most extraordinary evidence of the existence of a highly advanced civilization going far back beyond the historic period.”23 The more general public fascination was reﬂected by articles in such magazines as Scientiﬁc American and Nature and even in the Nation and Fortnightly Review.24 22 Quoted in Sylvia L. Horwitz, The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos (New York: Viking, 1981), 101. I have been unable to ascertain the date or to verify the quotation. 23 I cite Evans’s piece according to the 13th edition of 1926, vol. 7–8:421. 24 For an account of the publicity and a complete bibliography, see Macgillivray, Minotaur, 169–241.

12

Minos and the Moderns

Minos’s palace captivated the popular imagination to an extent matched by few other works from classical antiquity, notably the Venus de Milo or the Nike of Samothrace. Edmond Pottier, visiting Evans’s site at Knossos in 1901 and catching his ﬁrst glimpse of the female ﬁgures—which may still be admired in the Archaeological Museum at Herakleion—in the Throne Room frescoes, exclaimed “Mais, ce sont des parisiennes!” The French savant confessed that he experienced a coup de foudre upon beholding the principal ﬁgure with her “rufﬂed hair, that provocative lock on the forehead, that enormous eye and that sensual mouth. . . . This Pasiphaë, who resembles a habituée of the Paris bars.”25 Almost immediately, to satisfy the widespread public demand, fake Minoan artifacts—intaglios, statuettes, seals, signet rings—began to appear on the international market.26 By 1907, according to Ronald M. Burrows, professor of Greek at Cardiff University, since Schliemann’s discovery of Agamemnon’s tomb in Mycenae “nothing in archaeology has made such a vivid impression on the popular imagination” as Evans’s excavations at Knossos.27 To satisfy “a need widely felt during the last few years, not only by classical scholars, but by the general cultured public” (v), Burrows published a generally accessible account of The Discoveries in Crete and Their Bearing on the History of Ancient Civilization, discoveries widely acknowledged as having revolutionized ancient history and archaeology.28 Indeed, in his piece in the Encyclopaedia Britannica Evans went so far as to promote Minos and Daedalus from myth into history, arguing that the Palace of Knossos, “executed for Minos by the craftsman Daedalus, has ceased to belong to the realms of fancy.” Evans’s

25

Quoted by Macgillivray, Minotaur, 205. See Kenneth Lapatin, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 2002), esp. 156–60. Lapatin traces the complicated history behind the forgery of the gold-and-ivory Snake Goddess in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. 27 Ronald M. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete and Their Bearing on the History of Ancient Civilisation (New York: Dutton, 1907), 1. See also G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913; rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Hill, 1959), 433, who numbers the discovery of an advanced civilization in Crete “among the most recent sensational episodes in the revelation of the Ancient East.” 28 H. R. Hall, Aegean Archaeology: An Introduction to the Archaeology of Prehistoric Greece (London: Warner, 1915), 1, speaks of the “revolutionary change” brought about by the discoveries of Schliemann, Halbheer, and Evans over the past thirty years. 26

Introduction

13

friend and colleague John L. Myers also treated Minos as at least semihistorical, calling him in his Dawn of History (1911) “a monarch who ruled the seas and terrorized the land, absolute and ruthless, if only because inﬂexibly just.”29 (Today it is generally assumed that “Minos” is not the name of an individual but a title bestowed upon a series of second-millennium rulers.) The fact that Evans’s restorations and theories have been widely criticized by modern scholars is beside the point in the present context because the writers and artists of the early twentieth century were usually reacting to the initial publicity, which was dominated by Evans’s romantic image of Minoan Crete. The chorus of enthusiasm was marked, of course, by a counterpoint of disagreement: some prominent classicists objected to expanding the ﬁeld of classics both backward in time and outward in space.30 Ulrich von Wilamowitz exempliﬁed those reservations in his belief that Schliemann’s ﬁndings, which posited a pre-Doric Greece in “Semitic” Asia, exposed a horrifying “chaos” that had nothing in common with the Greece of Homer’s epic.31 Sir William Ridgeway, professor of archaeology at Cambridge, prioritizing literary texts over archaeological evidence, maintained that Cretan art resulted from mainland Mycenaean inﬂuences and that the Mycenaeans, not the Minoans, originated Greek art—a view followed by most Cambridge scholars, while the Oxonians were generally persuaded by Evans’s arguments. This schism separating Minoan and Mycenaean “grew wider and deeper over time,” according to Evans’s biographer. In the long run, however, the Minoan argument prevailed, and Crete became the focal point of discussions on early Greek history and culture.32 Thanks mainly to Ovid, the myths of Crete had already enjoyed considerable popularity in certain periods and genres long before the rediscovery of Knossos. Ever since the sixteenth century the titillating

29 J. J. Myers, The Dawn of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), 184; quoted from Macgillivray, Minotaur, 256. 30 I take this information from Macgillivray, Minotaur, 211–13. 31 Ulrich von Wilamowitz, Homerische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), 415–16. 32 Morris, Daidalos, 183–84, offers a much more reserved view of the “modern ‘Minoan’ image” with its “romantic attachment to the unanticipated culture of Bronze Age Crete” and its exaggeration of “Minoan” elements for the sake of a continuity linking Europe to the Aegean past.

14

Minos and the Moderns

adventure of Europa and the bull provided an enormously provocative theme for painters—Dürer, Giorgone, Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese, Goltzius, Rubens, and Rembrandt among others—and occasionally for ballet, pantomime, and opera. Icarus spread and lost his wings frequently in the art and literature of the Renaissance as a moral exemplum for the dangers of audacity. Following Monteverdi’s Arianna (1608) almost a hundred operas, ballets, Singspiele, and travesties of Ariadne ﬁlled the stages of Europe. Phaedra provided the theme not only for Racine’s ﬁnest drama but also for several other works of seventeenthcentury French classical drama. But with a few notable exceptions those myths were conspicuously absent from the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century. So the striking resurgence of Cretan myth in the twentieth century was not simply a continuation of earlier treatments. Other factors contributed to the new and more sophisticated interest in myth that characterizes modern literature and art.

P R E C UR SOR S OF MOD E R N I SM The intellectual precursors of cultural modernism were classically educated men who used classical references freely in their writings as a necessary and convenient means of communication, although they belonged to generations preceding the Cretan excavations and do not often cite Minoan material. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was introduced to the canon of Greek and Roman classics as a schoolboy: Ovid, Cicero, Tacitus, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and Thucydides—names that occur frequently in his later letters and scattered writings on literature.33 At the University of Jena, Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy—The Difference between the Democritan and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature (Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie, 1841). And he subsequently appropriated the ﬁgure of Prometheus— “the noblest saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar”34—to 33

S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 1, 401. Karl Marx, Die Promotion von Karl Marx—Jena 1841, ed. Erhard Lange et al. (Berlin: Dietz, 1983), “Vorrede.” 34

Introduction

15

preﬁgure the modern proletariat, “riveted to capital more ﬁrmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock.”35 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), having received a splendid classical education at the renowned Schulpforta, went on to study classics at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig and, for his early brilliance, was named Professor of Classical Philology at Basel in 1869. Although he resigned his chair after only ten years, for reasons of health as well as disenchantment with professional philology, Nietzsche’s writings are heavily indebted to the classics. In his early path-breaking work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he famously used the terms “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” to characterize two basic modes of knowledge and life: chaos and harmony, disorder and form, ecstatic abandon and control, intuition and reason. The highest art is achieved, Nietzsche argued, when a precarious balance is achieved between these two opposing forces, and he saw that dialectical goal gloriously albeit brieﬂy attained in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. With his striking emphasis on the archaic and irrational aspect of classical culture Nietzsche overturned Winckelmann’s Apolline view of Greek antiquity, which had dominated Western thought for over a century.36 And with his turn to Germany in the culminating pages of the book—pages stating his belief in the Dionysian basis of the German character, exempliﬁed 35 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 799 (= vol. 1, pt. 7, chap. 25). Leonard P. Wessell, Jr., Prometheus Bound: The Mythic Structure of Karl Marx’s Scientiﬁc Thinking (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1984), 64, suggests that the myth of Prometheus’s fall, suffering, and ultimate redemption constitutes “the dramatic model underlying and informing Marx’s Marxism,” whose scientiﬁc logos is grounded in a religious mythos. The revisionist Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 408–16, maintains that “Prometheanism” provides one of the three principal motifs of Marxism, along with the Romantic theory of alienation and Enlightenment rational determinism. 36 See Werner Frick, “Die mythische Method”: Komparatistische Studien zur Transformation der griechischen Tragödie im Drama der klassischen Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), esp. 43–54. James I. Porter, “Nietzsche, Homer, and the Classical Tradition,” in Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2004), 7–26, points out the striking analogy between Nietzsche and Schliemann, as well as the resistance they encountered, in their independent efforts to “excavate . . . the unconscious and semiconscious layers of classicism” (23)—despite Nietzsche’s general indifference to the material evidence of archaeology.

16

Minos and the Moderns

by music from Bach to Wagner, from which he anticipated a rebirth of tragedy in his own day—Nietzsche showed dramatically how classical antiquity could be used as a vehicle to explore wholly modern issues. The classical background is everywhere evident in the works of another late founding father of twentieth-century thought, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).37 As a boy in Vienna, Freud attended the Sperlgymnasium, from which he graduated summa cum laude. From its rigorously classical curriculum he obtained a thorough training in Latin and Greek and an introduction to the principal works of antiquity. These ﬁrst contacts with a vanished civilization provided him with “a never excelled comfort in the struggle for life.”38 For the examination that Freud had to pass before entering the university, he was required to translate passages from Virgil and from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, passages that seem almost prophetic for his career. The title page of Freud’s epoch-making The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900) bore a sonorous epigraph from Virgil—ﬂectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo (Aeneid 7.312)—where Juno, enraged because Aeneas has succeeded in reaching the shores of Italy, summons the baleful Fury Allecto from the underworld: “If I cannot sway the powers above, I shall stir up the underworld.” The quotation adumbrates the murky realm of the unconscious that Freud proposed to explore in his study through the medium of dreams, a realm that he saw peopled by such mythic ﬁgures as Oedipus and Electra. It is well known, ﬁnally, that Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) took the title of his inﬂuential work The Golden Bough (1890) from the renowned passage in book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas is instructed by the Sibyl that he must acquire the shining branch from a tree sacred to Proserpine in order to gain access to the underworld. Of The Golden Bough (1890) it has been claimed that “perhaps no book has had so decisive an effect upon modern literature”39 and that “no other work in the ﬁeld of anthropology has contributed so much to

37 Richard A. Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005). 38 Ronald W. Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause (London: Jonathan Cape and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), 17. 39 Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture (New York: Viking, 1965), 14.

Introduction

17

the mental and artistic climate of our times.”40 The several volumes of the work are teeming with references to Greek and Roman literature (notably Virgil, Catullus, and Ovid), including importantly parts 3 and 4 on “The Dying God” and “Attis, Adonis, Osiris.” In his anthropological analysis of these various classical myths Frazer employed techniques and convictions common to the other major thinkers. With Freud he was fascinated by the role of sex in human consciousness. With Marx he investigated the nature of institutions as the product of irrational forces. And with Nietzsche he looked beneath reason to appreciate the power of the Dionysian in human affairs. While The Golden Bough amounts in some senses to the culmination of nineteenth-century anthropology, its impact on other ﬁelds has also been enormous.41 The work, expanded in progressive editions, was widely read and reviewed for decades, and not just in professional journals but also in wide-circulation periodicals in England, continental Europe, and the United States. Its inﬂuence is most apparent in publications by such fellow anthropologists as Bronislaw Malinowski and Emile Durkheim in their work on folklore and religion and among Frazer’s colleagues of the Cambridge School: notably the classicists Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and F. M. Cornford, all of whom explored the meaning of ritual and myth in early Greek drama. Freud acknowledged his own indebtedness to Frazer in Totem and Taboo (1913); while in his discussion of “Sacriﬁce” in Symbols of Transformation (1912), C. G. Jung centrally cites Frazer’s chapter on “The Dying God.” And we shall have occasion to observe his inﬂuence on important writers of the early twentieth century. The common point to be derived from these various examples is a simple but important one. Basic works by foundational precursors of modernism, while written too early to have made use of Evans’s Cretan discoveries, stress the irrational element in preclassical Greek culture and allude prominently to such mythological ﬁgures as Prometheus, Apollo, Dionysus, Oedipus, Electra, Attis, the Golden Bough, and others, using

40 “Editor’s Foreword,” The New Golden Bough, ed. Theodor H. Gaster (New York: Mentor, 1964), xix. 41 John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), esp. 68–105 (“The Intellectual Inﬂuence of The Golden Bough”).

18

Minos and the Moderns

them as vehicles for the exploration of thoroughly modern concerns. This fact alone ensured, at a minimum, that a body of fundamental and inﬂuential theories underlying twentieth-century thought and art, for better or for worse, entered the modern consciousness associated with classical images, regardless of the recipients’ own educational background.42 (How many people refer casually to the Oedipus complex, the Dionysian, or the Golden Bough without having read Sophocles, Nietzsche, or Virgil?) By extension, it led many thoughtful readers to the realization that the Greek and Roman classics remained vibrantly alive in the twentieth century as a rich source of analogy, allusion, metaphor, and ultimately of inspiration—a realization that was soon and easily enlarged to accommodate the new information pouring in from Crete and the myths associated with Minoan culture.

THE MODERN TURN TO ANTIQUITY The revitalized turn to antiquity in the early twentieth century can be attributed directly to the fears preceding and the subsequent effects of World War I, which generated an urgent search for principles of order to compensate for the chaos of the immediate pre- and postwar years. Writing in 1916, the critic Jacques Vernay foresaw that “With the formidable shock of a quasi-universal war, it is certain that unexpected forms, ideas, and aspirations will be born out of new efforts and out of tests lived through.”43 One response to the disruptions of the war—political, social, intellectual, spiritual—and the urgent quest for understanding was the new interest in history and, notably, such theories of history as were provided by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. 1, 1918), which attempted to make sense of history by introducing into it a morphological principle appropriated from Goethe’s theory of biological metamorphosis. H. G. Wells later explained the reasons that moved 42 For a classicist’s view of the use of the “monstrous” adjective “oedipal” in psychology, see Walter Burkert, “Griechische Mythologie und die Geistesgeschichte der Moderne,” in Les Etudes classiques aux XIXe et XXe siècles: Leur place dans l’histoire des idées, ed. Willem den Boer (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 159–99, here 182–87. 43 Jacques Vernay, “La Triennale, exposition d’art français,” Les Arts, no. 154 (April 1916), 25–26; quoted in Silver, Esprit de corps, 72.

Introduction

19

him to write his Outline of History (1920). “It was the last, the weariest, most disillusioned year of the ﬁrst World War. . . . Men felt they had come to a crisis in the world’s affairs.”44 But when they tried to read about these matters, they found “a wilderness of books.” “It was extraordinarily difﬁcult for them to determine the relative values of the matters under discussion.” So Wells undertook his massive work as “A Plain History of Life and Mankind.” Some people turned to religion or to political movements such as communism and fascism in the attempt to ﬁnd order and a sustaining meaning for their lives, while others escaped into art or utopian visions.45 Among the available sources of order the turn to antiquity was anything but self-evident, for the war had exposed the inadequacy of traditional European classical education to forestall its brutality and horrors. Wilfrid Owen was speaking for a generation that had been thoroughly grounded in Greek and Latin before being sent off to die in the trenches of World War I. In his poem “Arms and the Boy” (1918), he fashioned a cynical twist on the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid: arma virumque cano (“I sing of arms and the man”). Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood: Blue with all malice, like a madman’s ﬂash; And thinly drawn with famishing for ﬂesh.

The ﬁrst line amounts to an inversion of a line from Horace’s Ode 3.2: puer condiscat (“Let the boy learn”)—the same poem from which Owen took the ironic title and subtext of his equally ardent antiwar poem, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” (1917), proclaiming how sweet and ﬁtting it is to die for one’s country, which Owen calls “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” Accordingly, there was a conspicuous decline in the status of the classics in many countries.46 In France the literary historian Gustave Lanson felt that the classical education of the academic establishment 44 H. G. Wells, “The Story and Aim of the Outline of History” (1939), in The Outline of History, rev. Raymond Postgate and G. P. Wells (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 1. 45 Theodore Ziolkowski, Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 46 Robert R. Bolgar, “Latin Literature: A Century of Interpretation,” in Les Etudes classiques aux XIXe et XXe siècles: Leur place dans l’historie des idées, ed. Willem den Boer (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 91–117, here 107.

20

Minos and the Moderns

was linked to aristocratic presuppositions; and in England “it was the apanage of an economically privileged minority.” As a result, the classics began to lose their popularity as education became more widely available to a broader audience. In Germany the classicist Eduard Norden began a 1920 talk on the “educational values” of the humanistic Gymnasium with the acknowledgment that “Every revolution is hostile to tradition.”47 This rejection of the classics was often linked to a more general anti-intellectualism. Eduard Spranger noted in 1922 “in today’s youth a tendency to push aside disparagingly any thinking person as an ‘intellectualist.’ ”48 Yet even during the war this hostility was coupled with the sudden perception on the part of many writers and artists that classical antiquity, especially as seen in the light of the intellectual precursors of modernism and the new archaeological ﬁndings, had much to offer the postwar generation. In 1917 Paul Dermée stated programmatically in his journal Nord–Sud that “A period of exuberance and force ought to be followed by a period of organization, of classiﬁcation, of science, that is to say, a classical age.”49 Precisely this kind of orientation was taken by Aby Warburg in his ambitious project Mnemosyne—an “image atlas” recording the persistence of classical antiquity in art through the Renaissance down to the 1920s.50 These ideas did not remain without their aesthetic effect. In their manifesto Après le cubisme (1918) the painter Amédée Ozenfant and the architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) pointed out that the Greek triumph over the barbarians and the European domination of the world are due to the fact that the “savages” liked loud colors and noises that engage only the senses while “the Greeks

47 Eduard Norden, “Die Bildungswerte der lateinischen Literatur und Sprache auf dem humanistischen Gymnasium,” in his Kleine Schriften zum klassischen Altertum, ed. Bernhard Kytzler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1966), 583–607. 48 Eduard Spranger, “Der gegenwärtige Stand der Geisteswissenschaften und die Schule,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hans Walter Bähr (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969– ), 1:20–69, here 23. 49 Paul Dermée, “Quand le Symbolisme fut mort . . .,” Nord–Sud 1 (March 15, 1917), 2–4, here 3. 50 See Michael Diers, “Die Erinnerung der Antike bei Aby Warburg oder die Gegenwärtigkeit der Bilder,” in Urgeschichten der Moderne: Die Antike im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Bernd Seidensticker and Martin Vöhler (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 40–65.

Introduction

21

loved the intellectual beauty hidden beneath sensory beauty.”51 Three years later the former Futurist Gino Severini argued that it was time to return to classical principles of measure and restraint—not, to be sure, the artiﬁcial French classicism of the seventeenth century or to an unthinking imitation of the Greeks. Rather, in a sense almost Nietzschean, he equates the contemporary struggle between naturalism and spiritualism with the opposing camps of the Doric and Ionic schools in preclassical antiquity.52 While the humanists sought to reconcile the two tendencies, Severini believed that modern artists, rather than exalting Homer and Virgil in an attempt to attain a new paganism, should strive to emulate the preclassical Dorian Orpheus. Meanwhile, the cultural journal L’Esprit Nouveau, founded in 1920 by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, cited classical antiquity as the historical justiﬁcation and reference-point for the doctrine of Purism that it proclaimed.53 Le Corbusier’s article on car design (July 1921) used photographs of Paestum and the Acropolis to illustrate the difference in design between a 1907 Humber and the 1921 Delage “Grand-Sport.” During those same years Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky, Giorgio de Chirico and Ottorino Respighi, along with other contemporaries, entered the “classical” phase of their careers. The French were not alone in their appeal to classical antiquity. In 1922 T. S. Eliot hailed Joyce’s “parallel use of the Odyssey” as having the importance of a scientiﬁc discovery. “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . . It is simply a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a signiﬁcance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”54 A few years later Hugo von Hofmannsthal reminded his audience that the “spirit of antiquity” is our very thought, the foundation of the church, 51 Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Après le cubisme (Paris: Altamira, 1999), 75. 52 Gino Severini, Du cubisme au classicisme: Esthétique du compas et du nombre (Paris: Popvolozky, 1921), 121. 53 Silver, Esprit de Corps, 372–77. 54 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923) ﬁrst appeared in Dial; rpt. in Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O’Connor (1948; rpt. Bloomington: University of Indiana-Midland Press, 1959), 120–24.

22

Minos and the Moderns

the language of politics, and indeed the very mythos of European existence.55 In sum, modern thinkers along with writers and artists in every genre and form, stimulated by the modern way of viewing antiquity, refused to make a sharp break with a past that had long been co-opted by unthinking traditionalists. Believing that great art is eternal and therefore shows no historical progress, they believed in innovation rather than creation ex nihilo. Picasso rejected the whole notion of aesthetic evolution. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression. . . . Variation does not mean evolution. . . . The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting.56

M O D E R N I S M ’ S I RO N I C A DA P TAT I O N O F M Y T H The French scholar of “mythanalyse” and “mythocritique,” André Siganos, has proposed a useful distinction among “primary” myth, secondary or “literary” myth, and “poeticized” or “ironized” myth (“mythe littérarisé”).57 While primary myth designates a collective belief that was originally held by its adherents to be true and religiously sacrosanct, as was the case with most of the Greco-Roman myths in their earliest form, literary myths specify those that are clearly ﬁctional creations of more recent literary origin, such as Sophocles’ Antigone or such modern ﬁgures as Faust and Don Juan. Poeticized or ironized myth, in turn, marks later literary or artistic 55 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Vermächtnis der Antike” (1926), in his Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, Prosa IV (Berlin: Fischer, 1955), 313–18, here 316. 56 “Statement by Picasso: 1923,” in Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, ed. Alfred H. Barr (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 270–71. 57 André Siganos, Le Minotaure et son mythe (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), 23–33.

Introduction

23

treatments of primary as well as secondary myth: in sum, all modern adaptations of classical myth. Even by the time of the Greek historian Herodotus and the Roman poets, myth had been extensively rationalized and poeticized: it had become what we now call mythology. Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid were often ironic about the mythic stories they related. This ironic detachment of mythology from its underlying myth is even more pronounced today, alienated as we are by psychology and the centuries from primal myth. After Freud and Frazer, after Marx and Malinowski, myth inevitably became a subject to be treated ironically by writers and artists, even when within their works they attributed genuine belief to the individuals and peoples they were describing. Thomas Mann remarked to Karl Kerényi that his true element was “myth plus psychology.”58 “I have long been a passionate adherent of this combination,” he continued, “for actually psychology is the means whereby myth may be wrested from the hands of the Fascist obscurantists to be ‘transmuted’ for humane ends.” As the art historian Jean Cassou put it in 1936, we can no longer go back to the gallant Greece of earlier centuries. “We have tasted the fruits of knowledge, we have gone down into the depths of Hades. We know of the relativity of civilizations and that all of them—those of pre-Hellenic Greece like those of the age of Pericles, that of Crete like that of Scythia or of the Bantus—are explications of death.”59 Today we know another Greece, he continues, “Nietzschean and Dionysiac, a Panic Greece, reeling in funereal Bacchanalia—a German and sociological Greece that can no longer be adorned with rhetorical and courtly garlands. . . . Greece is tragic.” The writers, artists, and thinkers of the early decades of the twentieth century—essentially coterminous with the period between Evans’s discovery of the palace of Knossos in 1900 and the death of the ninetyyear-old archaeologist in 1941 and during the years when Crete was becoming an object of central interest to many scholars—discovered 58 In a letter of February 18, 1941; Mythology and Humanism: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerényi, trans. Alexander Gelley (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 100. 59 Jean Cassou, “Les Grèces,” cited from the journal Le Voyage en Grèce (1936) in Antiguitat/Modernitat, 48–49.

24

Minos and the Moderns

in classical, and speciﬁcally Cretan, myth a marvelous vehicle for the exploration and depiction of thoroughly modern concerns. Why Crete? Few artists of early modernism had any immediate and direct experience of the island and the Minoan culture that Arthur Evans had so spectacularly popularized. Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) was born on Crete, and although he spent much of his life elsewhere in Europe and returned home mainly for vacations to recover his energies, he regarded himself almost aggressively as a Cretan: two of his powerful novels focus on Crete’s people (Zorba the Greek, 1952) and on their heroic struggle against the Turks (Freedom or Death, 1956). His autobiographical paean to Crete (Report to Greco, 1965) is addressed to his countryman, the painter El Greco, who was “kneaded from the same Cretan soil.”60 During his lifetime of wanderings Kazantzakis carried a clod of Cretan soil close to his breast (17) as a reminder of his origins. He regarded the day when Prince George set foot on Crete, marking the independence of the island from Turkish dominance, as one of the “two supreme days” of his life (151). From the years of the earliest excavations he returned frequently to Knossos, where he was proudly reminded that his homeland was “the ﬁrst bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa” and “the ﬁrst place in a then totally dark Europe to become enlightened” (151). In the 1940s he journeyed imaginatively into the Cretan mythic past with his Theseus-novel At the Palaces of Knossos (written in the early 1940s) and his play Thésée (1949). Minoan Crete and its myths combined, as we shall see, a culture of elegance and sophistication with a barely suppressed undercurrent of animal violence and sexuality—a tension that seemed almost paradigmatically to foreshadow European civilization as unmasked by such thinkers as Nietzsche and Freud and by the horrors of World War I. An American contemporary of Kazantzakis learned to observe modern Crete with a similarly “poeticized” or “ironic” gaze. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II Henry Miller (1891–1980) spent a month on Crete, to which he devoted a lively chapter in his memorable travel book The Colossus of Maroussi (1941). Miller was principally 60 Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, trans. Peter Bien (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 15.

Introduction

25

captivated, like Kazantzakis, by the still vital spirit of antiquity that he detected in the men and women of contemporary Crete, to whom he devoted vivid portrayals. But he was also fascinated by the ruins at Knossos and Phaistos. “Knossos in all its manifestations suggests the splendor and sanity and opulence of a powerful and peaceful people. It is gay—gay, healthful, sanitary, salubrious,” he exulted. “In many ways it is far closer in spirit to modern times, to the twentieth century, I might add, than other later epochs of the Hellenic world. . . . Knossos was worldly in the best sense of the word.”61 Crete was brought back into the headlines and the public consciousness a second time by the invasion of German paratroopers in 1941 and especially by the daredevil exploits of Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British commando working with the partisans in the mountains. In 1944 Fermor and local guerrillas kidnapped a German general near his residence at the Villa Ariadne outside Knossos and for three weeks ﬂed southwest across the mountains with their captive, successfully avoiding the pursuing German troops, before evacuating him triumphantly by ship to Egypt.62 A few later writers we will encounter—for instance, the Australian Jack Lindsay and the Pole Zbigniew Herbert—also visited Crete. In general, however, the writers and artists of the early twentieth century have rarely experienced the place that obsessed their imaginations. They were attracted by “the myth that Crete became” (to borrow the title of Adele J. Haft’s dissertation) and not “the reality that Crete was.” Enchanted by a culture that appeared to offer striking analogies to the inner conﬂicts of modern civilization, they seized upon its myths in order to explore with ironic detachment such issues as the sexuality, the violence, the lust for beauty, that characterize both ancient Crete and the modern Europe. In the following chapters we will be talking about this conscious, ironic, and poeticized adaptation of myth as seen in its speciﬁc manifestation of Cretan material—not the Crete of history, but the Crete of myth. 61 Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1958), 121–22. 62 The adventure is recounted in detail by W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (London: Harrap, 1950), and by Fermor himself in A Time of Gifts (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

This page intentionally left blank

2 Europa and the Bull: Sex, Society, and Politics The myths surrounding Minos begin far from Crete, on the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean, where his mother was abducted by Zeus/Jupiter and carried away to the island-kingdom that prided itself on being the god’s birthplace.

T H E P O LY VA L E N C E O F M Y T H The story of Europa and the bull is one of the oldest and most widespread myths of antiquity, known from scores of early graphic representations—vases, mosaics, metopes, Cretan coins, and such wall paintings as several frescoes at Pompeii1—and mentioned in writings going back to Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Callimachus.2 It was 1 Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologicae Classicae (LIMC), ed. John Boardman (Zurich: Artemis, 1981–98), cites 226 images in antiquity. 2 On Moschus and his sources, see Winfried Bühler, Die Europa des Moschos: Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1960). For catalogues and reproductions of antique representations, see Bühler’s Europa: Ein Überblick über die Zeugnisse des Mythos in der antiken Literatur und Kunst (München: Fink, 1968); and Eva Zahn, Europa und der Stier (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1983). For the post-classical reception, see Mythos Europa: Europa und der Stier im Zeitalter der industriellen Zivilisation, ed. Siegfried Salzmann (Bremen: Kunsthalle, 1988); and Der antike Mythos und Europa: Texte und Bilder von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Francesca Cappelletti and Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich (Berlin: Mann, 1997). Annotated anthologies of relevant texts are available in Denis de Rougemont, The Idea of Europe, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Macmillan, 1966); and Mythos Europa: Texte von Ovid bis Heiner Müller, ed. Almut-Barbara Renger (Leipzig: Reclam, 2003).

28

Minos and the Moderns

transmitted to later centuries principally through three texts: a 166line Greek idyll by Moschus of Syracuse in the second-century b.c.e., the ﬁrst full account of the episode; Horace’s 76-line Carmen 3.27, which focuses on Europa’s lament as she thinks of home; and two passages from Ovid (Metamorphoses 2:833–75; and Fasti 5.603–18). Almost all later accounts go back to one or all of these three sources. Gustav Schwab’s retelling in Die schönsten Sagen des klassischen Altertums (3 vols., 1838–40), for instance, from which generations of German writers learned their mythology, amounts to a skillful interweaving of all three versions, as does the far more sophisticated treatment a century later by Robert Graves in The Greek Myths (1955). The familiar tale runs, brieﬂy, as follows. Zeus/Jupiter is smitten by passion for Europa, the beautiful daughter of Agenor (or, according to some sources, Phoenix), king of Sidon and Tyre on the Phoenician coast. Europa for her part has a dream in which two women symbolizing different areas of the world—Asia and a still unnamed territory—ﬁght to claim her. Zeus sends his courier Mercury to drive the king’s cattle herds down to the seaside where, transforming himself into a handsome white bull, Zeus joins the herd and approaches Europa, who is gathering ﬂowers with her maidens. Lulled by the bull’s gentleness and fragrance, Europa is emboldened to climb onto its back. At that point the bull trots down to the shore and, plunging in, bears Europa across the Libyan Sea to Crete, landing on the southern coast near Gortyn. There, beneath an evergreen plane tree that the credulous mythophile can still contemplate today, he reassumes his godly form—or, according to some accounts, the shape of an eagle—and ravishes Europa, consoling her with the thought that this hitherto unnamed third part of the world (after Libya and Asia, both of which were named for women) will henceforth bear her name. Having fathered three sons on her— Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon—Zeus marries her off to King Astereios of Crete, and moves on to the next of his many love affairs. Future centuries interpreted this enormously popular legend in various ingenious ways depending on their cultural concerns. The Greek historian Herodotus (bk. 1, chaps. 1–2), in an exposition current at least until the eighteenth century, read it euhemeristically as an image of the ancient enmity between Europe and Asia: Phoenician merchant-sailors kidnapped Io, the daughter of King Inachos of Argos; in return, the Greeks sailed to Tyre, abducted Europa, daughter of the

Europa and the Bull

29

king of Phoenicia, and carried her away to Crete. According to various Christian readings of the Middle Ages—for instance, the anonymous fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé (bk. 2, vv. 4959–5138)—Jupiter represents Jesus, who assumed earthly form in order to come to earth and redeem the human soul exempliﬁed by Europa. Boccaccio, in his chapter on Europa in De claris mulieribus (ca. 1350–60), rationalized the story: Europa, a beautiful young woman of unusual gifts, was kidnapped by Jupiter, the violent king of Crete, who carried her away in his ship sporting an iconic bull, the totem of Crete, painted on its bow. Other writers and painters understood the tale to exemplify the power of love, of Europa’s womanly wrath, or of Jupiter’s contempt for virginity; they wondered in words or images whether Europa was seduced or was herself the seductress. The adaptations exemplify the principal modes in which classical myth was reinterpreted by subsequent centuries: historically, religiously, and ethically. Down to the Rococo of the eighteenth century, the tale prompted countless treatments in literature, opera, painting, and sculpture.3 The age of Romanticism, for at least two reasons, conspicuously ignored this once popular theme. Generally speaking, Romanticism’s obsession with the Middle Ages and the Orient meant that the longtraditional images from classical antiquity now had to share the public imagination with new ones from other periods and cultures. This shift in emphasis lasted until the late nineteenth century, when Symbolism once again looked to the Greek and Roman past as a treasure horde of images. More speciﬁcally, in the case of this particular myth the growing nationalism that nurtured Romanticism in postRevolutionary Europe did not encourage cultural interest in a theme that took as its premise Europe as a supranational entity. In 1886 Friedrich Nietzsche concluded his discussion in Beyond Good and Evil of what he regarded as the “defeminization” (Entweiblichung) and “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of women in the nineteenth century with an apostrophe to the mythic woman, Europa, as the personiﬁcation of Europe: 3 For a summary, see Christiane Wiebel, “Mythos als Medium—Zur unterschiedlichen Deutbarkeit früher Europa-Darstellungen,” in Mythos Europa, 38–55; see also Alfred Lombard, Un mythe dans la poésie et dans l’art: L’Enlèvement d’Europe (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1946).

30

Minos and the Moderns

O Europa! Europa! We know the horned beast that always most attracted you, that ever anew threatens and endangers you! Your ancient tale could once again become a “story”—once again a huge foolishness could master you and carry you away! And underneath no god is concealed, no! only an “idea,” a “modern idea”!4

If we disregard the philosopher’s notoriously reactionary views concerning “woman,” his prediction that Europe as a cultural entity symbolized by the mythological Europa would in coming decades be seduced by a host of modern ideas turned out, as was so often the case, to be accurate. This “story”—the German word Geschichte can mean either “story” or “history”—in several of the “modern” variations that Nietzsche held in contempt can be traced vividly in the myth of Europa as adapted by dozens of modern writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians.

E U RO PA A N D SE X UA L AWA KE NIN G The paintings and sculptures both ancient and modern depicting Europa and the bull focus almost exclusively on the preliminary scene on the meadow or, overwhelmingly, the sea journey, and only rarely on the arrival on Crete.5 The story was treated extensively in earlier art— from woodcut illustrations of such works as Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus and Ovid’s Metamorphoses by way of paintings by Titian, Raphael, Guido Reni, and Veronese to the art galant of the Rococo. During the more prudish and nationalistic nineteenth century, the theme was largely neglected except in a few comic lithographs by Daumier and in works by Gustave Moreau, who treated it not only in eight paintings but also in watercolors and over ﬁfty drawings—so extensively, in fact, that his major painting on the subject was caricatured in the Journal Amusant under the heading “Le Boeuf à la Mode.”6 In the early twentieth century, interests shifted. Turn-of-thecentury Jugendstil artists, in their exploration of animal desire in 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (section 7, §239), in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (München: Hanser, 1954–56), 2:703–4. 5 See Bühler, Europa, 48–50. 6 See Anne Röver, “Gustav Moreau: ‘Le Boeuf à la mode’ und andere Zubereitungen des Mythos ‘Jupiter und Europa,’” in Mythos Europa, 56–75 and 210–25 (illustrations).

Europa and the Bull

31

Figure 2.1. Félix Valloton, The Abduction of Europa. 1907. Kunstmuseum Bern. Permission of Kunstmuseum Bern.

human beings and speciﬁcally the sexuality of females as recently exposed and analyzed by Freud, Weininger, and others, were fascinated by the topos of Beauty and the Beast, as reﬂected in the many paintings and poems featuring Leda and the swan, Ganymede and the eagle, as well as myths involving such man-beasts as centaurs and sirens and Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s crew into swine. The juxtaposition of nude girls with large hairy beasts, including bears, camels, pigs, and elephants, as represented par excellence by Europa with her bull, lent itself admirably to this obsession. At the beginning of the century Fritz Behn, who shared the sensibilities of his contemporaries, molded a Europa (in a lost terracotta ﬁgure) caressing her breast lasciviously and stretching in virtually pornographic ecstasy on the bull’s back.7 (A bronze group that he created in 1910 is much more sedate.) The sensuous-sexual aspect appealed to many artists, as in The Abduction of Europa (1907; ﬁgure 2.1) by the Swiss painter 7

Reproduced in Ursel Berger, “Europa in neuer Gestalt: Europa auf dem Stier in der Skulptur des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Verführung der Europa, 201–17, here 205 (ill. 207).

32

Minos and the Moderns

Félix Vallotton. Vallotton told a friend that he found the model for his painting in the vignette illustrating the entry on “Europa” in the Petit Larousse.8 But his painting more closely resembles murals from Pompeii and other sites, in which the nude ﬁgure seems to ﬂoat beside the bull swimming to the right and which Vallotton could easily have seen during his extensive travels in Italy (1906–8).9 In both cases the sensuality of the nude ﬁgure viewed from the rear is explicit but restrained. (It is clear from his many paintings of baigneuses that Vallotton was fond of painting voluptuous nudes seen verso and standing in the sea.)10 Sexuality and the sensuousness of the woman are more clearly evident in the etching by Heinrich Vogeler, although here the nude girl is seated almost Eve-like under a ﬁg tree and stroking the bull’s mane invitingly (1912; ﬁgure 2.2). This tendency toward sexuality becomes stronger and more explicit in the course of the decade. Lovis Corinth includes Europa in his series of eight sometimes pornographic lithographs depicting Loves of Zeus (1920): the bull is attended by two maidens while a third approaches in the background, but none is clearly identiﬁable as the princess.11 In an earlier series of eight erotic lithographs entitled The Chariot of Venus and based on Friedrich Schiller’s early poem Der Venuswagen, one lascivious image designated as “a nude girl on a white bull” appears clearly to refer to Europa (1919; ﬁgure 2.3).12 Many other artists, caught up in the atmosphere of sexual and moral

8 The text accompanying the reproduction in Mythos Europa, 234, assumes “without doubt” that the vignette was a reproduction of Titian’s Abduction of Europa; but Titian’s Europa is partially clothed and lying on her back upon the bull. In fact, the Nouveau Larousse Illustré of 1898–1904, to which Vallotton would have had access, reproduces a vignette “d’après P. Véronèse” (vol. 4, p. 367), in which a heavily clad Europe is seated sedately on a crouching bull. In the Pompeian murals as well as Vallotton’s painting, in contrast, Europa is nude and clinging face-down to the ﬂank of the bull, whose head twists around toward the girl. 9 For a catalogue of Pompeian ﬁgures, see Eva Zahn, Europa und der Stier, 170–71; and the many illustrations in LIMC, vol. 4. 10 See, for instance, his Baigneuse de dos s’essuyant avec un linge roulé (1908) and Baigneuse, ciel orageux (1916), both available at the website of Fondation Félix Vallotton. 11 Reproduced in Lovis Corinth: Handzeichnungen und Aquarelle, 1875–1925, ed. Anne Röver and Bernhard Schnackenburg (Bremen: Kunsthalle, 1975). 12 In the story of Pasiphaë, with which some commentators identify the lithograph, the woman does not ride the bull but is mounted by it.

Europa and the Bull

33

Figure 2.2. Heinrich Vogeler, Europa and the Bull. 1912. Privately owned. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

liberation of the postwar era were captivated by the theme.13 Gerda Wegener’s Abduction of Europa in her series on the loves of Jupiter (1920) depicts a group of four nude maidens, in the languorous style of Aubrey Beardsley, with lyre and garlands, waving farewell to a blond Europa astraddle her rather docile brown-and-white bull. That

13 For further examples, see Margret Kampmeyer-Käding, “Europa, das verführende Weib. Malerei und Graphik um 1900,” in Die Verführung der Europa, ed. Barbara Mundt (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1988), 188–99; and Luisa Passerini, Il mito d’Europa: Radici antiche per nuovi simboli (Florence: Giunti, 2002), passim.

34

Minos and the Moderns

Figure 2.3. Lovis Corinth, Nude Girl on a White Bull. 1919. Kunsthalle Bremen. Permission of Kunsthalle Bremen.

same year Henri Deluermoz painted a Europa and the Bull in which the massive spotted bull, wreathed in Art Deco style with ﬂowers and clasped by his nude and sensually nubile conquest, is on the point of plunging into a roaring tide. A different emphasis is evident in Pierre Bonnard’s Abduction of Europa (1919), where Europa is seated on a bull that is clearly becoming petriﬁed and at one with the earth while

Europa and the Bull

35

the maiden herself is reﬂected in the colors of the sea: a symbolic conjunction of earth and water. In 1921 Philip Franck created a series of etchings depicting scenes from the myth, in which a voluptuous Europa cuddles the bull with bacchantic abandon. We recognize the same mood of sexuality if we look at the dramatic poem Der Raub der Europa (“The Abduction of Europa,” 1913) by the poet Karl Leopold Mayer (1880–1965), a practicing judge who was later removed from ofﬁce by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrated to Argentina. When Europa comes rushing at dawn breathlessly onto the meadow “like a hunted doe,” she has just awakened from a dream— not the sedate dream of two contesting women, as in Moschus’s idyll, but a clearly erotic dream. “Who felt my limbs with so hot a hand,” she wonders, that her blood now “tosses and pounds and ﬂickers like a ﬁre?”14 Europa has been so profoundly transformed by her experience of sexual awakening that “I am no longer Europa” (2). Formerly “as light as down,” she suddenly feels a hot heavy metal in her veins. Trying to resist this strange new sensation, she prays for help to the goddess Eos. Awaiting the arrival of the dawn deity, Europa recalls her dream in detail (5). As she awakened—so she dreamed—the walls of her room expanded and glowed, its great doors opened, and the populace streamed in and approached her bed as though it were an altar. Then she heard the beating of wings announcing the royal eagle and suddenly saw beside her bed a hulking, ominous ﬁgure who swept her gown from her body so that she lay naked before him and the surrounding folk. As the dark stranger groped her limbs with bold hands, her dog barked and, awaking to reality, she ﬂed to the meadows, where she now asks Zephyros when Eos will appear. Eos arrives and sends Zephyros away, explaining that Zeus has come down from Olympus and is now striding unrecognized through the world of men: no breeze or wind must blow the mask from his countenance (6–7). Approaching the waiting Europa, she grooms the maiden’s hair, removes her gown, anoints her body—“Not like a sacriﬁcial victim,” she tells Europa, but like “the priestess of a deity”—and dresses her in a veil with a golden girdle and clasp. When Europa gazes

14

Karl L. Mayer, Der Raub der Europa (Berlin: Basch, 1913), 1.

36

Minos and the Moderns

into the mirror of the goddess’s eyes and sees her enﬂamed cheeks, she tries to deny the impression. But Eos tells her that her blood, glowing within her, is wiser than Europa herself. Europa still tries to maintain that she is a king’s daughter, a virgin, and ruler over her own heart, which she holds as fast in her hands as an eagle its prey—until the marksman shoots it down, Eos remarks. The goddess warns Europa to wake up from her somnambulistic state, as her blood has already awakened, because “the rainbow of love” is about to appear. Eos disappears and Europa’s three maidens arrive, agitated by disturbing dreams about Europa. Gathering ﬂowers in the meadow, they hear thunder in the clear morning. The other girls are frightened, but Europa welcomes the presence of Jupiter and, overcome by a strange new mood of excitement, whirls away across the meadow in a wild dance. As the other girls follow, they suddenly notice a great white bull standing near the woods. Reassured by its quiet, almost human gaze, which seems to know “the mystery of many mute things” (21), Europa kneels before the bull and sends her companions to gather grass and foliage to feed it. With a feeling that the bull understands her innermost being, Europa now “ignites the lights of my soul to you with trembling hands” (22). In fact, her soul, “distraught by its dreams, dances a dance of veils before you, casts off the veils, and exposes itself to you.” The bull, in turn, utters a restrained and almost human bellow, allows himself to be wreathed with garlands and gazes at the girls with deep eyes that seem to seize them in their grip. Unafraid, Europa mounts the bull, telling her companions that she never felt more at peace and secure than now. As the bull moves toward the shore with his eagle hovering overhead, Europa enters a state of virtually orgasmic ecstasy, urging her mount to go faster, to sprout wings and ﬂy. As the maidens look on in astonishment and dismay, Europa disappears with the words: “Abyss, I laugh at you! World, you vestment, glide from my body! Glory of the sky, wretched torches, pale before the light within me—” (29). The girls collapse on the beach, one lamenting that Europa has been abducted by a beast and another jubilant that she has been taken by a god. This parable of sexual awakening is typical of the age that had recently been shocked by Richard Strauss’s Salome (1906). Indeed, the dance of veils performed by Europa’s soul appears to be a direct reminiscence of Salome’s dance of the seven veils. Europa’s growing

Europa and the Bull

37

passion for the bull—the awakening, arousal, and fulﬁllment of sexual desire in the ecstatic bullride—anticipates the perversions of her future daughter-in-law Pasiphaë, whose couplings produce the monstrous Minotaur. The arousal of animal instincts represented by her passion for a beast reﬂects a pervasive theme of early twentiethcentury literature and art. And the central role of the dream reminds us that the verse-drama is a product of the age newly enlightened by the insights of Sigmund Freud. Since the work ends before Europa reaches Crete and the new continent to be named for her, the theme of a uniﬁed Europe is not yet apparent in Mayer’s poem, which focuses, like Valéry’s almost contemporaneous La Jeune Parque (1917), on the awakening of a female consciousness. The situation looks somewhat different when we turn to Georg Kaiser’s Europa (1915), which is designated in the subtitle as a “Play and Dance in ﬁve acts.”15 Kaiser (1878–1945), one of the best-known and most proliﬁc German Expressionist dramatists, had already written and published his masterpiece The Citizens of Calais (Die Bürger von Calais, 1914) as well as parodistic treatments of the biblical tale of Judith and Holofernes (Die jüdische Witwe, 1911; “The Jewish Widow”) and of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (König Hahnrei, 1913; “King Cuckold”). Europa belongs as the third to this trilogy of parodies but with its blend of drama, dance, and music constitutes one of his most successful works—a work whose character as opera buffa is signaled by the musical motto from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. The action takes place in King Agenor’s unnamed land, which has enjoyed an undisturbed peace for two long generations. With no enemies to the north or south, east or west, the king reports (48), his people have permitted their weapons to rust in the cellars. The men, having rid themselves of everything crude and coarse, cultivate dance as the highest level of civilization, as “the expression for the total moderation of impulses” (50). As the play begins, Jupiter and Hermes—who throughout has the delightful role of comic satyr commenting ironically on the action—materialize in human form from a cloud that settles upon a ﬂowery meadow. From their hiding place in a willow tree, they observe the appearance of a youth in yellow and blue garments with long ﬂowing hair and graceful terpsichorean 15

Georg Kaiser, Europa: Spiel und Tanz in fünf Aufzügen (Berlin: Fischer, 1915).

38

Minos and the Moderns

movements, who proceeds to drown himself in the sea, uttering the name “Europa!” He is soon followed by nineteen youths with similar dress and gait, who pick ﬂowers and weave garlands for themselves as they sing the praises of Europa, so sublime that she appears to be pure fragrance without form, breath without shape (24). When they notice the body on the shore, they lament their comrade Eumelos, who always led them in their dances before the paragon Europa. As they bear his body away, they are followed by Hermes and Zeus, who has fallen in love with Europa, sight unseen. Act 2 takes place in the palace, where Agenor is lamenting the loss of his son Kadmos, who left home years earlier on his eighteenth birthday and has not been heard of since. Hermes announces the arrival of his lord, who intends to ask for Europa’s hand. In a lengthy conversation, in which they largely talk past each other, Agenor speaks of his lost son, the history of his land, and his daughter’s stubborn refusal to accept even the ﬁnest dancer in marriage. When the men come in with Eumelos’s body, covered with ﬂowers, Agenor vows that he will force Europa to marry. Hermes reports that his lord is practicing his dance for the next day’s performance. The following evening Agenor, Europa, and the maidens take their places on a raised dais to watch the performance. But the ﬁrst two dancers, after entering, fail to begin; they have been intimidated, they say, by the brilliance of the stranger’s movements. Hermes, announcing that his master will perform three dances, accompanies him on the ﬂute. Zeus ﬁrst appears in a heavy blue cloak that impedes his movements so that he can reach only the ﬁrst step of the dais. Rushing out, he reappears in a shorter yellow garment, dancing more lightly now and proceeding halfway up the steps. For the third dance he wears only white tights and springs easily up the dais to bow before Europa—who bursts out laughing. Perplexed, Zeus dashes out as Europa collapses in a paroxysm of laughter. Act 4 ﬁnds Hermes and the rejected Zeus back at the seashore. They hide under the willow tree as Europa and the maidens dance in with loosened hair and skirts bound up. While Hermes plays his ﬂute, which she mistakes for a bird’s song, Europa dances around the tree, making fun of Zeus’s three dances of the preceding evening. Suddenly a bull appears—not the gentle white bull of tradition but an enormous mottled roaring beast with rolling eyes and a frothing mouth.

Europa and the Bull

39

The other girls run away in fright, but Europa stands calmly and chastises the bull, telling it not to frighten the little bird in the willow tree. She talks quietly, telling the beast that she likes its dance—“wild and brazen” (130)—much better than the stranger’s earlier. She ensnares it with a chain of ﬂowers, leans on its back, and snuggles in its hide. At this point the bull rises cautiously, gives a triumphant bellow, and races off to the shore with Europa, who is startled but unafraid. The next day the girls report to Agenor that Europa has not come home all night and state, falsely, that they last saw her hiding from the bull. As Agenor laments the loss of his second child, his guards announce the arrival of messengers from his son Kadmos. Utterly unlike the effeminate men of his kingdom, the powerful, bearded warriors with matted blond hair beat their shields when they recognize Agenor and tell him a remarkable story: they are a warriorrace that Kadmos reaped by sowing the teeth of a dragon. Since their kingdom lacks women, they have come to Agenor’s land in search of wives. When they leave to await Agenor’s response, a conspicuously changed Europa appears and immediately sniffs the air, sensing the rut of the warriors. Hearing of their mission and admiring their virility, Europa takes the leader of the warriors for herself and exhorts the other girls to join her. The leader tells her that, as a princess, she deserves a kingdom of her own, which shall be named for her. At this point, Agenor’s men enter the palace, their long gowns now trimmed to the knee and their loose hair knotted, each bringing with him a sturdy servant girl unlike the delicate maidens of the court. The earth is blooming again, they announce, because Europa is ﬁnally glowing. They intend to raise mighty sons who will in the future battle the sons of Europa and the warriors for power and control of the world. The work was ﬁrst performed in Berlin in 1920 with music written by Werner Robert Heymann—a sensual, operetta-like music that reminded at least one critic of a popularized Richard Strauss16—and actors who had spent weeks being trained professionally in their dance steps. Despite the scandalous “plebeian concert” that accompanied its 16 Berliner Börsen-Courier, November 6, 1920; cited in Peter K. Tyson, The Reception of Georg Kaiser (1914–45): Texts and Analysis, 2 vols. (Berne: Peter Lang, 1984), 1: 275: “popularisierter Richard Strauss.”

40

Minos and the Moderns

premiere—clapping, stamping, hissing, whistling, trilling17—the play enjoyed an enormous success, even though some viewers took it to be an anti-paciﬁst work proclaiming a militaristic mystique of war.18 Gradually, however, the work with its color symbolism, stylized movement, and pantomime has come to be recognized as typically Expressionistic19 and, moreover, as “the most ingenious and witty comedy of Expressionism with its clever representation of topical fashions (e.g., the modern Cult of Dancing and the Youth Movement) in classical costume.”20 Indeed, the years immediately preceding the composition of the play marked the highpoint of dance in Europe: the fad of the tango spread across the continent; Isidora Duncan fascinated the public with her re-creations of ancient Greek dances; and Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes conquered audiences with Stravinsky’s The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Rite of Spring (1913). When Kaiser’s intimidated dancers say of Zeus that “He hangs in the air” (98), they might well be speaking of Nijinsky. As one critic observed, watching the dancers “one recalled secretly the earlier Russian ballet.”21 The characterization of the men in Agenor’s kingdom owes as much to the contemporary Youth Movement with its enthusiastic pursuit of light athletics and outdoor life as does that of Kadmos’s warriors to the stereotypical image of the Germanic hero of Romantic-Wagnerian legend, as represented in Felix Dahn’s immensely popular historical novel A Battle for Rome (Ein Kampf um Rom, 1876). Yet ultimately this radical adaptation leaves its meaning open. One of the principal Expressionistic themes was the plea for the New Man, and in his 1920 program notes for his work Kaiser stated that “the sole project of literature: the renewal of mankind” is emphasized in

17

Berliner Tageblatt, November 6, 1920; cited in Reception of Georg Kaiser, 1:261. The mixed reception was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that the premiere took place on the very day when Kaiser arrived in Munich to go on trial for embezzlement. 18 See the reviews cited in Reception of Georg Kaiser, 1:261–78. 19 Ernst Schürer, Georg Kaiser (New York: Twayne, 1971), 58. 20 Richard H. Samuel, Expressionism in German Life, Literature, and the Theater (1910–1924) (Cambridge: Heffer, 1939), 59. 21 Hermann Kasack, Die Neue Schaubühne 2 (1920); cited in Reception of Georg Kaiser, 1:264.

Europa and the Bull

41

his play.22 But how is the New Man to be achieved? Though it appears to demand social change even at the cost of war—a view common in Germany and Europe generally until 1916, when the true cost of World War I could no longer be ignored—the play can hardly be invoked as militaristic propaganda, say, for a vigorous Germany versus an effete France. After all, both lands, Agenor’s and Europa’s, are headed toward a compromising synthesis in their offspring: Kadmos’s rough warriors civilized by the dainty maidens of Agenor’s kingdom and Agenor’s decadent dancers invigorated by the hearty servant girls they marry. (Kaiser is ironizing comically those ﬁn-de-siècle works in which lusty oversexed women, like Lou Andreas-Salomé or Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel, proclaim their desire for strong men.) As in most Expressionistic plays, the ﬁgures other than Europa are types rather than individuals. Europa, brought to life by her implied night of passion with Zeus, may be compared to the sexually awakened Europa of Mayer’s play. But the implicit political dimension and the irony are wholly missing in the earlier work. In 1926 Kaiser told The New York Times that he recognized only two immortals: Plato and Nietzsche.23 In its evocation of a Nietzschean vitalism in the form of a Platonic drama of ideas, Europa pays homage to the author’s two intellectual heroes. The itinerant German-Italian Expressionist poet and art critic Theodor Däubler is best known for his monumental epic poem Das Nordlicht (“Northern Lights,” 1910). The hymn to his beloved Greece that he published under the title Päan und Dithyrambos (1924; “Paean and Dithyramb”) contains a sequence of seven sonnets devoted to Europa, which move from the moment when King Phoenix’s “palm-slender daughter” wonders “whence her golden prince is coming,” to the birth of her son Minos and its consequences.24 The sequence begins with a poem in which Europa has a dream more closely resembling Danaë’s experience than that of Moschus’s heroine: the vision promises her a shower of gold from heaven. The next morning she encounters an 22 Georg Kaiser, “Europa,” in Stücke, Erzählungen, Aufsätze, Gedichte (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1966), 673. 23 Georg Kaiser, “Antwort auf eine Rundfrage der New York Times,” in Stücke, Erzählungen, Aufsätze, Gedichte, 698. 24 Theodor Däubler, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Friedhelm Kemp (Munich: Kösel, 1956), 353–56.

42

Minos and the Moderns

enormous white bull among the cattle on the meadows and, encouraged by its gaze, leaps onto its back and is carried away. Europa folgt der Blicke blauem Wink: Flink hilft der Wind ihr aufs geduckte Tier, Und gleich entblitzt der Stier mit Blutgeblink. (Europa follows the blue signal of its gaze: / Nimbly the wind helps her onto the stooped animal, / And straightway the bull ﬂashes away in a bloodlike glitter.)

The third sonnet follows their course on the sea, which rejoices at the bull’s appearance and strews pearls upon Europa’s gown. Arrived on Crete, Zeus discards his bovine disguise and invites Europa to a tryst of love, using the archaic noun Minne for courtly love, an act described with poetic delicacy. As Zeus embraces the virgin’s hips and bends to her ardor, his blue gaze awakens “like a day with myrtle fragrance.” This night of passion in a Cretan cave, portrayed as an astrological contest of sun and moon (“Europas Mondblick” and the god’s “Sonnenkunft”), produces Minos: “a man of justice, born from Zeus’s being as a human son under divine protection.” Dem Wesen Zeus’ entringt sich der Gerechte, Als Mensch geborner Sohn, in Gottes Hut.

The last two sonnets, which contain no further mention of Europa, relate brieﬂy the installation of Taurus as a constellation and, in a conﬂation of legends, the sacriﬁce of young men and women to the Minotaur. The conspicuous function of color and gaze relates Däubler’s poem directly to Expressionism and, indirectly, to Kaiser’s play. The “golden” prince promises a reward of “gold”; the stars glitter and the bull with its “white” hide “eyes” (“äugt”) her until Europa follows its “blue” gaze. The bull leaps into the sea in a “purple” arch while the heaven breaks like a “sapphire” and the ocean gleams like a “crystal.” Brilliant colors dominate the images as virtuosic onomatopoeia governs the words: the internal rhyme of “Des Königs Phönix” (“the king’s phoenix”), for instance, in the very ﬁrst line. In the ﬁnal analysis, however, the theme of Europa is invoked here not for substantive reasons—no erotic play or sexual tension, no political implications— but for sheer melody.

Europa and the Bull

43

E U RO PA I N T H E T W E N T I E S When we turn to the adaptations of the mid- and later 1920s, we note a gradual shift of emphasis, as the theme of sexuality gives way to social criticism. Osip Mandelstam’s short poem “Rose-foam of exhaustion” (1922) devotes two stanzas each to the emotions of the principals.25 The title-phrase refers to the bull plowing his unaccustomed way violently through the sea, accompanied by an occasional dolphin and sea urchin. Europa is challenged to seize his neck with her dainty hands. Where could the bull ﬁnd a more desirable yoke? But Europa, listening bitterly to the waves crashing around her, notes the oily glitter of the sea. In great discomfort, she wants only to get down from this rough hide. She would prefer the noise of oarlocks and a ship deck carrying a cargo of sheep. But, the poem ends, her mount bears her along without rudder or oar. In sum, postwar Europe appears to the poet as having lost its bearings and being unwillingly borne along by rough rulers with no sense of direction. Despite the eroticism implied subtly by Europa’s dainty hands and the bull’s desirable neck, the thrust of the poem is almost wholly political. We hear nothing here either of the initial abduction or of the ﬁnal destination. The poem—by a poet who that same year in his volume with the Ovidian title Tristia (1922) published a number of other poems with classical themes—is concerned wholly and solely with the lack of orientation governing both ﬁgures in the postwar world. Claire Goll (1890–1977), a German writer and left-wing journalist, was brieﬂy the lover of Rainer Maria Rilke before marrying the German-French poet Ivan Goll. Until their emigration in 1939, she lived in Paris with Goll, whose works she later edited and translated into German, and published her own Poèmes d’amour (1925) and Poèmes de jalousie (1926) while writing her novel Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa (1926; “The Negro Jupiter Abducts Europa”). The novel is not a retelling of the myth but, rather, a modern transﬁguration that, like Joyce’s Ulysses, uses the ancient myth as a framework on which to hang an action set in the 1920s and portrays Europa, not unlike 25

From the volume Poems (1928), in The Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany: SUNY Press, 1973), 125.

44

Minos and the Moderns

Kaiser’s heroine, as a modern young woman disenchanted with the degenerate youth of her own society. The story, complicated by analogies to Shakespeare’s Othello, is straightforward. At an embassy reception in Paris the strikingly blond eighteen-year-old half-Swedish Alma Valery expresses a wish to meet the handsome Juju Djilbuti, a cabinet chief in the French Colonial Ministry, who is known as Jupiter. Jupiter, from French Guinea, refutes all the common European prejudices about African blacks: as handsome as the African masks on display in the shops of trendy art dealers, he quotes Virgil and dances—in what is no doubt an allusion to Kaiser’s play—like “a black Nijinski” (19).26 He, in turn, is strongly attracted to the young beauty, whose fragrance and sulfur-yellow hair dizzy him. The affair of these two, each intoxicated and sexually attracted by the very otherness of the opposite, develops quickly. Within the week she visits Jupiter in his ofﬁce; he calls on her mother to ask for her hand; the wedding takes place in a Christian church although Jupiter, an animist, prays at home to the mask of the god Ftu. After the wedding the young couple do not take the usual honeymoon trip but remain secluded at home. Jupiter is pragmatically concerned about the comments they would elicit as a mixed pair although Alma believes that she has become socially more interesting through her marriage to an African. “At the moment Negroes were modern. Their music, their sculpture, their dances occupied for a time the superﬁcial Ten Thousand of society” (104). For a week Jupiter woos Alma: he sings African songs to her, tells her stories, explains his amulets and idols, but does not approach the still inexperienced young woman sexually. Alma has a romantically unrealistic conception of their union, calling them “a rare, black-white woodcut” and “a lovely symbol for the union of two continents” (119). Their photograph, she thinks, should be sent out into the world as propaganda for human understanding. When, after the week of gentle wooing, Jupiter ﬁnally “takes possession” of Alma, they initiate a month of frantic sexual activity—on tables, on carpets, on his knees, on couches and beds. At this point, midway through the novel, things start to go downhill. Alma, egged on by her friend Annette, becomes impatient staying 26

Claire Goll, Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa (Basel: Rhein-Verlag, 1926).

Europa and the Bull

45

at home and insists that Jupiter take her to the theater. There she is ﬁnally forced to the realization that people are making jokes about them as a mixed couple and recognizes the “martyrdom” of blacks in the so-called “civilized lands” (151). For the ﬁrst time, she denies Jupiter her sexual favors. When Annette reports that people are calling her “the blond Negress” (154) she begins to fall out of love—or, more accurately, to lose her impetuous sexual infatuation—with Jupiter. When she becomes pregnant, she worries about the color of her child while Jupiter dreams that his children will be blond like their mother. Alma goes to a fortune teller who reassures her—quite wrongly, as it turns out—that she will have a son and ﬁnd joy in a second marriage. The cards that she draws show an allegorical group in which the planet Jupiter is clothed in animal skin and posed lasciviously with various satellites, while the satellite Europa, a nude with long blond hair, moves further away from its orbit. Eventually a daughter is born—deceptively white at ﬁrst, but gradually turning darker—whom Alma cruelly trains to scream at anything black, including her father. Alma begins to serve ﬁsh twice a week, even though she knows that it is Jupiter’s fetish, which he is forbidden to kill or eat. She makes him take her to a fair in Neuilly, where she exuberantly throws balls at a booth called “Negro Down” to cause the black men balanced on a beam to fall into the pool below. On her dressing table, Jupiter ﬁnds a copy of Othello with various racist passages marked in red. He loses weight, begins to slump in his once-proud posture, and weeps alone at night, while Alma encourages their growing daughter to cut the nose and ears off the statues of his ancestors. Alma, meanwhile, who has begun an affair with the Swedish attaché Olaf, through whom she hopes to be “rehabilitated” in white society, goes off on a skiing trip with him to Chamonix. When she returns, Jupiter notices among her lingerie a handkerchief with the initial “O”; but made cautious by the function of the handkerchief in Shakespeare’s play, wants further evidence before acting. Finding a ﬁngerprint on one of her perfume bottles, he goes to Olaf ’s ofﬁce on a pretext and gets his ﬁngerprint, which he compares with the other for a match. Satisﬁed that his wife is cheating on him, he stabs her to death in her bed. “He was healed,” the novel ends. “Despite his apathy he did not forget after this justiﬁed murder to perform several holy rituals so that the sprinkled blood would not bring misfortune to his child” (239).

46

Minos and the Moderns

Goll’s novel, alluding in frank detail to many of the crude preconceptions, clearly plays on a hypocritical inner contradiction within European society of the 1920s: on the one hand, the overt prejudices of white Europeans against blacks; on the other, the fashionable obsession with Africa and its culture as evidenced by Carl Einstein’s studies of African sculpture (Negerplastik, 1915; Afrikanische Plastik, 1921), the popularity of American jazz, the enthusiastically acclaimed Revue Negre in Paris featuring Josephine Baker, and the Cubist paintings and sculptures with African motifs by Picasso and his colleagues. It is also obvious that the author, married to a French-German husband hypersensitive about his Jewishness, is using her black hero as a surrogate for the fate of Jews in Europe entre deux guerres. “Why are you cowardly—cowardly like a Jew?” Alma reproaches Jupiter after the disastrous evening at the theater. “Perhaps we are the black Jews of the twentieth century,” he replies (150). “What help against our oppression is the rebellion of an individual! The skin of the Negro irritates whites just as greatly as in the Middle Ages that yellow and red strip of cloth that the Jew had to wear irritated the Christians.” Jupiter, who is genuinely in love with Alma, is portrayed with considerably more sympathy than his young wife, who marries him out of youthful daring because he is different and “interesting.” With its stereotypical ﬁgures the work constitutes less a novel than a tract by a radical journalist directed against what she perceived as the rampant xenophobia and racism of France in the 1920s. But it is appropriate in the present context to note that precisely the tale of Europa and the bull is invoked to expose the naiveté of Europa, who believes initially that her sex-driven union with Jupiter can contribute to the rapprochement of two continents. The same pseudo-liberal stance was viciously caricatured in 1933 in a Nazi cartoon entitled “Europas drohende Vernegerung” (“The Threatened Blackening of Europe”) and depicting a blond Europa in a ﬂowing gown decorated with the word “Liberalismus” who is seated at the edge of the continent on a submissive bull and extends her arms imploringly toward a huge grinning black in a loincloth and military helmet as he steps into the Mediterranean from Africa.27

27

Kladderadatsch, October 29, 1933 (No. 44); reproduced in Mythos Europa, 366.

Europa and the Bull

47

“Europa” (1928) by the American poet/translator Rolfe Humphries (1894–1969),28 which begins with clear allusions to the sexual theme of Expressionism, ends with a bleakness more appropriate to the cultural and political situation of the late 1920s.29 His Europa is a modern young woman who comes home from a dull party bored, like Kaiser’s Europa, by the effete men she met there: “Polite, intelligent, and thin, / Never a bull-necked savage there.” She goes to bed longing “so to be possessed, / And she had really never been.” As she lies listening to the boats on the river outside, her pulse begins to pound and she imagines that they were not boats at all “but bulls / With red and thunder-swollen throats.” Springing from bed and dressing hurriedly, she rushes outside, where she now hears more clearly: “Each bull was bawling to his cow. . . . Each lowing urgent bull besought her.” When she reaches the waterfront the boat appears to her like a “monster, huge and blunt”; though she can see its eyes, its “secrets” are hidden in the water. Dipping her ﬁngers into the stream, she feels, like Mayer’s princess, “a pounding in her blood.” As she enters the river, the cool water “caressed / The burning nipples of her breast.” She wades out toward the boat/bull and, as the last two lines imply, toward death “because she could not swim.” Again, then, a sexually liberated Europa ﬁnds no satisfaction in her own effete society; but rather than being rescued by the bull, she follows it to her own Liebestod—a possible comment on the fatal lure of the dictators dominating the European scene in the late 1920s. Sexual captivation is also the theme of the adaptation by William Plomer (1903–1973), a South African poet/novelist who in the early 1930s was living in Greece. (His “Europa” is one of “Two Abductions”—the second featuring Ganymede.)30 Initially the setting of the poem could be understood as either ancient or modern. As a woman on a lovely morning washes and admires herself in the mirror—“the quivering wiry wavy / Stiffness of her vigorous hair”—a shadow in the door shuts out the sunlight and “a stately intruder” turns toward

28 Humphries published, among others, translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Art of Love, Juvenal’s satires, Martial’s epigrams, and Lucretius’s De rerum natura. 29 Rolfe Humphries, Collected Poems (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 5–6. 30 William Plomer, Collected Poems (London: Cape, 1973), 209.

48

Minos and the Moderns

her his “one-idea’d head.” Sexually aroused by his powerful shoulders, his “lustrous pearly hide,” and his dark eyes, she glances once more into the mirror like “a summoned bride” and accompanies him out into the hot morning. She leapt on the straight ﬂat back And was carried when the tide was full Out, far out, by the Thunderer To sea on a great white bull.

The poem can be read in two different ways: as the surrender of a woman to a man who is metaphorically like a bull; or as the explanation in modern psychological terms of the mythological tale. In either case no political implications intrude into the pure sexuality of the scene. That same year the cover of the journal Jugend (No. 47, 1928) carried an explicit critical comment on the decadent society of the 1920s: Werner Peiner’s striking painting of a blasé, nude, mascaraed ﬂapper-Europa with a feathered hat and necklace astride her bleeding and exhausted bull on a busy city street with skyscrapers (ﬁgure 2.4). While Kaiser’s Europa was a play with music, dance, and pantomime, Darius Milhaud’s The Abduction of Europa (L’Enlèvement d’Europe, 1927) advanced to pure opera, albeit an opéra-minute in eight brief scenes. During the 1920s Milhaud composed several other operas based on such classical themes as Orpheus (1925), Ariadne (1928), and Theseus (1928). His Europa, based on a text by Henri Hoppenot, makes several changes in the traditional theme.31 As the opera begins, the choruses of men and women are wondering why Europa has refused the hand of the hero Pergamon. When Pergamon and Agenor appear, the rejected hero tells the king indignantly that Europa has gone too far, offering her affection only to animals. Just yesterday he caught her embracing the bull’s neck and kissing its hide. Agenor agrees that girls are hard to understand and that she prefers the dull bellowing of the noble beast to the tales of heroes and warriors. When Europa appears with her bull, the choruses describe how tenderly she and her bull are looking at each other and how she 31 Darius Milhaud, L’Enlèvement d’Europe: Opéra-minute in huit scènes, paroles de Henri Hoppenot; ins Deutsche übertragen von Karlheinz Gutheim und Wilhelm Reinking; partition pour chant et piano (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1953).

Europa and the Bull

49

Figure 2.4. Werner Peiner, Europa. From Jugend, 1928, No. 47. Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Familie Marcus Albanus.

appears to understand its lowing. Then Zeus, in the shape of the bull, tells Europa that love, which brings out the beast in men, has not spared him: he put on horns and a frizzly hide in order to be near her, whom he prefers to all the pretty young cows in her father’s stables. Europa assures him of her love and tells him that she will come to him that night on the shore. Pergamon, enraged at this exchange, seizes his bow and, as the choruses report, shoots the bull. But the bull simply shakes himself; the arrow tears loose and ﬂies back, striking Pergamon in the heart. As Pergamon dies, Agenor curses his daughter. But the choruses report that his reproaches come too late: Europa is already

50

Minos and the Moderns

resting blissfully on the back of the bull, which rushes to the sea and storms into the waves. “And so Zeus abducted Europa, to engender with her their son Minos.” This enlèvement is close in spirit to Mayer’s Raub with its theme of sexual awakening, but the theme is intensiﬁed by a rejection of suitors reminiscent of Kaiser’s play. Since, however, the warrior Pergamon has none of the effeteness of Agenor’s dancing ﬂower-men, Europa’s rejection of him can hardly be viewed in terms of politics or of Nietzschean vitalism. Instead, it appears to incorporate the fascination shared by many artists of the period regarding the relationship of man to beast and, at most, to suggest a comment on the animality inherent in humanity. Stefan Wolpe’s short (less than 30 minutes) opera Zeus und Elida (1928; ﬁrst performed 1997) was directly inspired by Milhaud’s opéra-minute but updates the scene from antiquity to the present, setting the ancient deity down in the center of a modern European metropolis, like the Prometheus in Paris of André Gide’s Le Prométhée mal enchainé (1899). Before he ﬂed Germany as a Jew and a Communist and made his way via Austria and Palestine to the United States, Wolpe (1902–1972) had been closely associated with the Bauhaus, and his early compositions reﬂect musically that movement’s principles of political modernism. His “musical grotesque for soloists, speaker, chorus, and orchestra” consists of seventeen very brief scenes (some only ﬁfteen seconds long), each in a different contemporary musical style (Charleston, tango, Boston, foxtrot, blues, and csárdás) interspersed with recitativos.32 The action takes place one evening at Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, which was then regarded by many as the center of Europe, where the chorus sings from the windows of the surrounding buildings while the square, illuminated by electriﬁed advertisements, is ﬁlled with the noise of automobiles and horsedrawn trafﬁc. Suddenly the sky darkens, the trafﬁc comes to a halt, and a cloud descends from which an aged Zeus emerges, clad in Greek garments, leading a stuffed eagle by a leash, and thoroughly confused by modern society. (When he is warned against the danger of contracting syphilis from women who have slept with too many men, he 32 Stefan Wolpe, Zeus und Elida; Schöne Geschichten; Blues—Stimmen aus dem Massengrab—Marsch, recorded 1997 by the Ebony Band and the Cappella Amsterdam directed by Werner Herbers (London: Decca, 2000).

Europa and the Bull

51

hears only “a wonderful Greek word” that reminds him of the sylphs.) He announces that he is now a private citizen (whereupon the speaker explains that Hitler currently bears Zeus’s scepter) and searching for Europa, who was long ago carried off by a bull. Looking around, Zeus catches sight of a billboard for the well-known brand of Elida cosmetics and immediately claims that the smiling blond model is his Europa. When a prostitute named Charlotte approaches him, he identiﬁes her with Europa/Elida (an anagram of “ideal”), while she regards him as a potential customer even though she only has an hour before her next rendezvous. He promises to take her off to Olympus, but she says that there are other cheap hotels with rooms-by-the-hour nearby—or the Europahaus, where she works as a taxi dancer. Soon the trafﬁc on Potsdamer Platz is tied up, the drivers are shouting their complaints, and a prosecutor arrives with the police, threatening to arrest Zeus for offensive dress, immoral behavior, disturbance of the peace, and blasphemy against the gods of Greece. Irritated by the crowd, he closes off the entire Potsdamer Platz while Zeus is enveloped by a white cover and borne off to the museum. While Wolpe’s brilliant musical pastiche conveys the jazzy sounds of the 1920s, the cabaret-like libretto by Karl Wickerhauser and Otto Hahn with its political criticism, social commentary, and cultural satire might almost be illustrated by Werner Peiner’s cartoon of that same year.

E U RO PA I N T H E PU BLI C SPH ER E Beyond its use as a tool for psychological and social analysis the theme of Europa and the bull had long been popular as a theme for public celebration.33 In 1904 Adolf Amberg produced in porcelain the model for an elaborate wedding-table decoration executed in 1911 by the Royal Porcelain Manufactory (KPM) in Berlin. In the procession of ﬁgures bearing gifts, Europa on her bull represents the bride while her bridegroom advances toward her in the dress of a Roman warrior on horseback. A large bronze epergne by Hugo Lederer (1931), 33 For the material in this paragraph, see Berger, “Europa in neuer Gestalt,” in Die Verführung der Europa, 201–17.

52

Minos and the Moderns

presented by the IG Farben Company to the chemist and industrialist Carl Duisberg for his seventieth birthday, has Europa seated with crossed legs and billowing scarf on a prancing bull. Less expensive porcelain knickknacks in Jugendstil (the German term for the art nouveau of ca. 1895–1905, which took its name from the satirical periodical Jugendstil) and usually in dainty poses, were widely available. The motif was also used allegorically on medallions, such as the one created by Georg Wrba for the 150th jubilee of the Dresden Art Academy in 1914: Europa on a leaping bull before the aureole of a rising sun was intended to suggest Dresden’s stature as an art-city of European rank. By the mid-1920s Europa had been revived as such a popular theme that it could readily be exploited for larger public purposes, as is evident in the monumental works of the Swedish sculptor Carl Milles. In addition to his Orpheus Fountain (1926–36) in Stockholm and a Poseidon Fountain (1930) in Göteborg, he designed a “Europa” that provided the model for his Europa Fountain in Halmstadt, Sweden: a bronze Europa kneels on the back of the bull, which raises its head tamely to lick her hand (1924).34 The 1930s, perhaps in reaction against the darkening political atmosphere, brought forth several conspicuous examples of this public use. The city of Wiesbaden, Germany, created a “Europa”-complex in the park leading from the Central Train Station into the city and meant to tout the city with its warm baths as a spa of European status.35 The complex contained a hall known as the “Temple of Europa,” which was to feature frescoes depicting scenes from the story of Europa. Outside beside the pond a colossal statue (1937) by Ludwig Spiegel shows Europa reclining on a rather submissive bull. Skirting the edge of kitsch were the accoutrements created for the Hapag-Lloyd luxury liner Europa, launched in 1930 as Germany’s largest and fastest ship.36 The brochure advertising the new “Queen of the Seas” featured a huge tapestry in the ﬁrst-class dining room, 34 Replicas of the ﬁgure are also found in the United States at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomﬁeld Hills, Michigan, and at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. 35 See the images and commentary in Mythos Europa, 428–33. 36 Bernhard Decker, “Der Lloyd-Schnelldampfer Europa” and the accompanying illustrations in Mythos Europa, 121–26, 401–27.

Europa and the Bull

53

which depicted Europa being carried away on her white bull and waving gaily to friends on the shore, who are standing under palm trees and dressed more like South Americans than Eastern Mediterraneans. Passengers entering the ﬁrst-class reception area were greeted by Joseph Wackerle’s immense bronze statue depicting a nude Europa with arms outstretched in prayer as she prepares to mount the bull. Smokers on board could deposit their ashes in ashtrays decorated with the same image—in porcelain for ﬁrst class and bakelite for second. Europa on her bull offered such an obvious symbol for travel that it was soon appropriated elsewhere, as in the relief sculpture by Jacob Probst (1930) that adorns the façade of the central train station in Geneva. For the New York World’s Fair in 1939, the Russian-American sculptor Gleb Derujinsky created a Europa clinging to the mighty neck of her rampant bull, which stood in the entrance court to the exhibition of Railroads and which was described by Life magazine as “one of the most famous transportation feats of all time.”37 Ever since Daumier, the myth of Europa and the bull has been exploited for political satire.38 On New Year’s Day of 1913, for instance, the satirical newspaper Der Wahre Jacob featured a cover in which Europa clings to a red bull glaring at something outside the frame as it wades ashore to a welcoming crowd—an image expressing the paciﬁst hope that socialism could prevent the war threatening in the background. Two years later (November 12, 1915) the same paper expressed the feelings of a war-weary and starving populace with a cartoon captioned “No one knows when peace will come” and depicting Europa, holding an olive branch and seated on a fatted ox, being led through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. A decade later, in a Europe already skeptical of postwar uniﬁcation efforts, Kladderadatsch (March 24, 1929), a satirical journal with a fervently nationalistic tendency violently opposed to the League of Nations and the

37 Dawn of a New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939–40, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 104. 38 On the cartoons and political instrumentalization of Europa, see Knut Soiné, “Mythos als Karikatur: Europa und der Stier in der politischen Karikatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Mythos Europa, 76–83; and Bodo Guthmüller, “Europa—Kontinent und antiker Mythos,” in Der Europa-Gedanke, ed. August Buck (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 5–44.

54

Minos and the Moderns

Pan-Europa Movement of Count Coudenhove-Kalerghi, showed “Miss Europa in Geneva” in high heels and a cocktail dress astride a mustachioed bull with the lecherous face of French foreign minister Aristide Briand and surrounded by a group of beaming gentlemen in evening dress. A few months later (September 29, 1929), the same cartoonist drew a shapely blond Europa on her bull being pursued by a mustachioed Pan with Briand’s facial features. Europa inevitably made her way into the medium of ﬁlm. In 1930–31 Franciska and Stefan Themerson created what was acclaimed as Poland’s ﬁrst avant-garde ﬁlm, Europa. The ﬁlm was based on a poem (1925) by the Polish Futurist poet Anatol Stern, which as “a dry chronicle devoted to the tragedy, the misery, the wisdom and the wickedness of Europe” does not mention the myth of Europa.39 Although the ﬁlm itself was lost in World War II, some of the still-shots and montage materials survived—notably the photo-collage of a bull’s head superimposed upon a huge molar tooth and the montage of a languorous Europa surrounded by a cubist pastiche of images—and convey a sense of the work.40 The highly experimental ﬁlm did not seek to retell the familiar tale but rather, through montages and stream of associations, to communicate the mood of anxiety and dissolution that permeated Europe in the early 1930s—its violence anticipating the terrible death of Europe.

E UROPA POLI T I C I ZE D A nationalistically politicized exploitation is obvious as early as 1917 in Karl Goetz’s plaque entitled Europa’s Suicide (1917), in which Europa, screaming and with tousled hair, clings to a raging bull leaping over a ﬁeld of outstretched bayonets. On the verso the beneﬁciaries of Europa’s suicide are suggested in the ﬁgures of an American and a Japanese trying to catch a rain of gold.41 In the 1930s the cartoons found

39 Stern’s own characterization, quoted in the unnumbered prefatory pages to Europa: A Poem by Anatol Stern, trans. Stefan Themerson and Michael Horovitz from the original Polish edition of 1929 (London: Gaberbocchus, 1962). 40 The surviving material is reproduced in Stern, Europa. 41 Mythos Europa, 211.

Europa and the Bull

55

political targets closer to home. In the cartoon “Europa and Bolshevism” (Kladderadatsch, January 25, 1931), the bull is being stabbed by a matador with a death’s head, holding a red cape and wearing a fur hat with a red star. Other satirical journals gleefully employed the same motif. In Simplicissimus (July 2, 1933), an emaciated and frightened Europa sits on her bewildered bull in the middle of an ocean rocked by waves bearing such phrases as “Communism,” “Unemployment,” “Disarmament,” “War Debt,” and so forth. The front cover of Kladderadatsch for January 27, 1935, above the caption “The Cattle Trade Came Out to Everyone’s Satisfaction,” showed Europa wearing a French cocarde riding off happily on a red bull while Mussolini waves to her from a black ram named “Africa” (ﬁgure 2.5). A few years later (February 26, 1939) an analogous cover depicted a ﬂirtatious Europa standing in front of the Statue of Liberty and being nuzzled by a Democratic donkey, to whom she says dismissively, “No, Longears, what worked for the bull. . . .” As the war raged on, Simplicissimus (December 8, 1943) printed a scraggly “Soviet Bull” carrying a bloodied and bedraggled Europa through a burning landscape. The German sculptor Gerhard Marcks was obsessed for more than four decades with the image, which enabled him to combine two themes. Marcks has documented his lifelong fascination with animals, which he saw “in correspondence to ourselves, often cruelly deformed by slavery . . . but always undisguised, in their unambiguous expressive power.”42 At the same time, he viewed Europa as a discontented woman representing a continent carried away by external, that is, American and Asian, powers.43 As early as 1917 he shaped a baked mold with Europa seated on the bull; in 1927 and 1930 he created bronze groups showing Europa, respectively, kneeling on and leaning against the bull; and in 1962 he was still making woodcut prints of the ﬁgure.44 His best-known and, through its many copies, most widespread creation is no doubt the plaque, executed in bronze (1954), 42 Marcks’s notes for a 1954 exhibition of his works, in Gerhard Marcks, Sculpture and Reﬂection, trans. Peter Heller and Henry A. Lea, special publication of the Massachusetts Review (1961), unnumbered pages. 43 As he told the manager of the foundry that cast his works; reported in the commentary on the plaque in Mythos Europa, 278. 44 Gerhard Marcks: Das plastische Werk, 1973–81, ed. Jürgen Fitschen (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2004), 376.

Figure 2.5. Arthur Johnson, The Cattle Trade. From Kladderadatsch, 27 Jan. 1935. Permission of Heidelberg Universitätsbibliothek.

Europa and the Bull

57

Figure 2.6. Gerhard Marcks, Europa. 1955. Privately owned. © 2008 GerhardMarcks-Stiftung, Bremen.

depicting a fully-clothed Europa seated sedately not astride but sidesaddle on the bull, in a pose familiar from early ﬁfth-century terracottas (ﬁgure 2.6).45 Other artists soon seized upon the theme as a striking political image. In Paul Klee’s Europa (1933), a blood-red exclamation mark highlights sketchy line-abstractions of Europa and her bull, hinting at a sense of threat and disintegration. That same year Max Beckmann created a more explicitly politicized Europa in his powerful gouache The Rape of Europa (1933; ﬁgure 2.7). Like many of Beckmann’s paintings of that period, when as a “degenerate artist” 45 For other examples, see Eva Zahn, Europa und der Stier, 126–27 and plates 16–17; and LIMC, vol. 4.

58

Minos and the Moderns

Figure 2.7. Max Beckmann, The Rape of Europa. 1933. Privately owned. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

dismissed from his teaching position he directly experienced the violence of the Nazis, the work is dominated by the ﬁgure of a snorting dark bull bearing on his back an unconscious nude Europa with a boyish haircut and a stylish necklace—a coupling that clearly alludes to the rape of modern Europe by Hitler’s brown-shirted hoodlums. The second of Jacques Lipchitz’s two bronze sculptures of The Rape of Europa is equally explicit. The earlier version (1937), reminiscent of the frequent association with sexuality, shows the bull—as in Carl Milles’s fountain—caressing Europa with his tongue in “tender and erotic love.” But by the time he created the second (1941) the sculptor saw the myth “in a quite different context”: looking from exile in the United States, he understood “Europa as a symbol for Europe and the bull as Hitler, with Europa killing Hitler with a dagger.”46

46 Jacques Lipchitz with H. H. Arnason, My Life in Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), 140.

Europa and the Bull

59

Nazi artists also painted Europas. Like the other classical themes popular at the time, Europa and the bull offered an opportunity to depict erotic scenes while remaining within the conventional limits of respectability and respect for women proclaimed ofﬁcially by Nazi doctrine. But the dominant, even domineering ﬁgure of the woman in most of the paintings suggests that this Germanized Europa will subdue the rest of the world.47 On the 1937 “Day of German Art” in Munich, the elaborate procession along the “Via triumphalis of the new Reich” passed, among the banners and other decorative statuary, a large gilt Europa in full ﬂowing gown seated side-saddle on an enormous prancing bull.48 The National Socialist “European Conference of Youth” held in Vienna in 1942 met in the Parliament building on Ringstrasse, which was decorated by a large stucco Europa on her bull—an occasion for which Rudolf Schmidt designed a medallion featuring an athletically muscled and unmistakably Germanic Europa seated on a bellowing but immobile bull and representing both “woman” at one with the powers of nature and the goddess of European rebirth.49

S UR R E A LI ST E U ROPA Not all treatments of the period were political in their intent. Oliver St. John Gogarty’s poem “Europa and the Bull” (1933), a witty and humorous fantasy on the theme, begins when the king chides the nurse for allowing little Wide Eyes (an etymological play on her Greek name) to play in the barnyard.50 It is not the animals he is worried about, he tells her, but the recent democratic fashion threatening girls of county families with horse-grooms who are overly familiar. He instructs the nurse to take Wide Eyes down to the seashore instead, where she 47 See Bertold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 151, 161. 48 See Bernhard Decker, “ ‘Europa’ mit Arierpass: Geisterfahrt durchs Ewige im deutschen Faschismus,” in Mythos Europa, 104–37, here 114–15. 49 Mythos Europa, 132–34, 442–43. 50 The Poems and Plays of Oliver St. John Gogarty, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 2001), 119–26.

60

Minos and the Moderns

scampers with her playmates, “a tomboy / With the scratches on her shins!” Suddenly a cry of wonder breaks out as the girls spot a bull in the sea and run away in fright. But Wide Eyes goes fearlessly down to the beach to meet him as he comes prancing to the shore, “Like a man of Yorkshire / Grunting after Christmas.” The bull runs around the girl and ﬁnally kneels before her, causing her to pull back her foot from his snorting nostrils. The poet then slyly explains the psychology of the situation: “the very sight of / Strength becoming gentle— / That is what they can’t resist.” His hide, when she climbs onto his back and “held the strong beast / Tight with either thigh,” feels silky-soft; nor does he have a halter or ring in his nose. As she is borne away laughing, people wonder if she regrets leaving home. But the poet is fond, he confesses, of tales without a moral and illustrating—with an implicit nod to Freud—what we were like “Before the animals found out / What animals we are.” He loves an age when miracles were still common, he observes wryly, “For what eloping god to-day / Would turn into a Ford?” Rather than looking to modern faiths, “I go for Truth to Beauty / Which is subject to less doubt.” So he happily contemplates the bull as, in a world of “peace instead of panic,” he triumphantly bore off his sweet burden. And what about her father? He felt only “glory when the Church declared / His son-in-law was Zeus!” A similar disregard of current events is evident in the work of Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960), an Italian poet, novelist, and dramatist, who after taking a degree in philosophy and classics taught for several years before turning to literature and criticism. Early inﬂuenced by Carducci and D’Annunzio, he was associated with the Futurists before in 1926 founding the review 900, where he sought to mediate between the traditionalism of his early years and the radicalism of the avant-garde. In his own writing this produced what he termed (using an internationally current phrase) realismo magico, combining realism and surrealism in a highly poetic prose. This posture, which prompted him during the 1930s to turn away from the Fascist movement to which he had been initially drawn, produced among various other works the short novel, or long novella, Viaggio d’Europa (written and published serially in 1939 and later included in the collection Giro del Sol, 1941).51 51 I cite the work according to Massimo Bontempelli, Opere scelte, ed. Luigi Baldacci (Milan: Mondadori, 1978), 449–93.

Europa and the Bull

61

The work amounts, with a signiﬁcant addition, to a retelling of the tale as familiar from classical sources: it is framed by chapters utilizing the wholly unrelated Egyptian legend of the Phoenix, the wonderbird that every ﬁve hundred years consumes itself in ﬂames to be reborn from its own ashes. (The association was no doubt suggested to the author by the similarity of the bird’s name to that of Europa’s father/brother.) As the work opens (chap. 1), the fourteen-year-old princess Europa is taken out into the desert in a procession of priests and maidens to witness the phenomenon of l’Augello Fenice. When the bird reappears from its ashes and “entered the sphere of our space and our time” (455), it ﬁxes its gaze directly on Europa, who understands its inchoate message. The next day (chap. 2) Europa goes down to the seashore to gather ﬂowers and play ball with the other girls, when toward sunset a boy drives his herd of four large bulls down from the hills. Studying the group, Europa asks the boy when his herd grew larger, for now a ﬁfth bull, smaller and white as milk, has joined them. The boy is nonplussed, but when the bull bellows melodiously, the girls are charmed and ask it to bellow again. Europa says: “Sing, little bull” (462) and touches its neck. When the bull kneels before her, she is ﬁrst intimidated; but then she hangs her ﬂower-basket on its horn and embraces its neck while the bull half-closes its eyes. “What do you want, torello?” she asks, leaning against its ﬂank. The bull shifts so subtly that she unwittingly ﬁnds herself seated on its back. As the bull moves gently, the other girls follow, but it does not permit them to climb on its back. Circling the meadow and edging toward the sea, it wades out so far that Europa suddenly realizes that she can no longer climb off. During their night-long swim through the sea (chap. 3), Europa talks constantly to the bull, who appears to understand even though it makes no response. The next day (chap. 4) they arrive on land, Europa dismounts, and the bull leads her up a path and into a splendid palace. When Europa asks why he will not speak, the bull now replies that he did not want to frighten her and tells her that they are on the island of Crete, his homeland. When the girl expresses astonishment at the idea that a bull has a homeland, he says that he is neither a bull nor a dolphin nor any kind of animal—not even a man. “Then what the devil are you?” “I’m a god” (479). When he tells her that he is Jove, she bursts out laughing—not unlike Europa in Kaiser’s play—and assures him that

62

Minos and the Moderns

she is not afraid and wants to see him as he truly is. The air vibrates, a tension pervades the atmosphere, there is a tremor in the earth and a blinding light—and suddenly Jove appears in all his glory. Taking her by the elbow, he leads her gently to a decorated room where they celebrate their wedding night. The ﬁrst person she encounters the next morning as she slips out of the wedding chamber (chap. 5) is Clori, who introduces herself as the youngest of the three Horae. When she volunteers to foretell Europa’s future, Europa eagerly agrees and learns to her consternation that she is already pregnant with Minos, the son of Jove, who will be born in Crete and, one day, condemned to judge all men. Clori tells her, further, that she has come from Asia, birthplace of human wisdom, and across the Mediterranean, the absolute center of all history, to give her name to the new continent, where the spirit governing life will become materialistic, reaping power and sorrow. Europa is still too shaken to understand a single word. But when Jove appears and says that he is hungry, Europa expresses her surprise that a god can feel hunger. She also wonders how a god can chew cud, and he replies that a god can do everything. How can she be sure that he is a god who changed himself into a bull and not a bull that changed itself temporarily into Jove? “If you should die, would you be able to be reborn?” (487). Jove paces back and forth a few times, then extends his arm toward a small cloud that has formed. Suddenly two bolts of lightning cross the room, encircle Jove, lift him, and carry him away, sprinkling the air with ashes. After Jove’s disappearance (chap. 6), Europa lies in her bed dreaming of the Phoenix, which she had seen only three days earlier, and wishing to die. Chori comes in and reports that she has talked to her sister Eunomia. As Horae who govern the course of all time—hours, seasons, years, centuries—they can speed up her pregnancy and enable her to bear her son Minos speedily and without discomfort. Europa falls into a profound sleep and, when she awakens, feels light and emptied although she sensed and dreamed nothing. (There is no further reference to the child to which she has given birth.) Laying her head back on the pillow, she thinks of the Phoenix and tells it she now understands that there are two realities: the realm of the Phoenix and the rest of the world. Only the Phoenix is perfect. She asks it to liberate her from the human regrets that she still feels. In her dream

Europa and the Bull

63

the Phoenix tells her that it has prepared a funeral pyre in Heliopolis, where it will carry her after her death. Will she be reborn? Certainly, the Phoenix replies. Whoever is born once can never die forever. However: “The most difﬁcult task of any life is to be truly alive and not mere appearance containing nothing” (492). Only those who fear death, it continues, will die—whereupon she recalls “that Jove who considered himself a god” (492). Raising herself on her elbows in order to see the now materialized Phoenix, Europa smiles and falls back in death. The Phoenix raises Europa gently until she is freed from all earthly substance and then bears her away into the center of all light. The novel concludes with the remark (in parentheses) that, to bear Europa back to earth, the Phoenix did not take the direction back to the Orient from which she had come. “A mystery, which is beyond all comprehension, showed it the destined and necessary way.” Nothing could be further from Claire Goll’s bitter commentary on European society and its prejudices or the politicized works of the 1930s than the metaphysical ruminations on life and death, reality and illusion, of Bontempelli’s surrealism. With no sexual implications whatsoever, the author implicitly explodes any religious belief in a higher deity but afﬁrms his faith in an almost existential commitment to life. A similarly surreal but darker treatment is evident in Max Ernst’s concurrent Europe after the Rain II, painted in 1940–42 in the United States, where the mythic scene occupies only one of the large work’s six sections: while most of the other sections depict an utterly devastated and unpeopled landscape of a postwar Europe, one section reveals an almost wholly metallicized bull pressed down beneath the columns of a temple of Love, while a tiny nude Europa stands on its back. The myth of Europa and the bull exempliﬁes perfectly the reasons why classical themes have been appropriated by modern writers and artists. Like other classical themes, this foundational Cretan myth provides a means of addressing contemporary concerns while distancing them critically. Thus, we saw, ﬁrst tentatively, then openly by more daring artists of the 1920s, and ﬁnally blatantly, the use of the tale as a vehicle for the discussion of human sexuality: the awakening of sexuality in the young, the exploration of animality in that sexuality, the exuberant joy of sex, and prurient sex concealed under the mantle

64

Minos and the Moderns

of respectability. The theme lent itself also to be a vehicle for social criticism, both from the left and the right, as the cultural pessimism expressed subtly in Kaiser’s dance-play descended by way of Claire Goll’s tendentious novel to the often crude political propaganda in the cartoons of National Socialism. It was further used and abused both as a symbol of European unity and as a motto for the business of transportation. At times, ﬁnally, its exoticism was happily engaged as a surrealist escape from the all too urgent realities of the present. In the new Europe during the second half of the twentieth century, Europa and her bull provided a popular image for the public sphere as a symbol of European unity, being represented on occasional postage stamps from Greece, Poland, Great Britain, Sweden, and Switzerland; on euro bills and coins issued in Germany, Greece, and Italy;52 in the ceramic mosaic Myths of the Mediterranean created in 1993 by the Italian artist Aligi Sassu to adorn the new seat of the European Parliament in Brussels; and even as the decoration on a festive cake presented at a dinner for leaders of the European Union at Brussels in June 2006.53 It has also continued to appeal to writers, such as the Nobel Prizewinner Heinrich Böll. In his story “He Came as a Beertruck Driver” (“Er kam als Bierfahrer,” 1969), a Greek “guest worker” named Tauros travels around a Germany mired in cheap commercialism and technology as a miracle-working outsider in search of Europe/Europa. Taking a job as a truck driver, he picks up a free-spirited, nun-schooled girl named Europa and disappears with her in the forest near Aachen. In Böll’s ironic inversion of the myth the continent named for the original Europa has lost its soul, which she represents; and by spiriting her away near Aachen—which as Aix-la-Chapelle and Charlemagne’s capital represents the birthplace of modern Europe—Zeus apparently hopes to found with her a new and better “Europe” for the future.54 52 Jacques-René Rabier, “Tradition et résurgences d’un mythe: Le Ravissement d’Europe,” in Figures d’Europe / Images and Myths of Europe, ed. Luisa Passerini (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2003), 65–76, here 71–72. 53 As reported, with a photograph, in Die Zeit, June 14, 2006, 10. 54 Heinrich Böll, Romane und Erzählungen, 5 vols., ed. Bernd Balzer (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1977), 4:507–13. The story was written originally for the anthology Die Liebschaften des Zeus: Eine moderne Eroto-Mythologie, ed. Maria Dessauer (Munich: Nymphenburg, 1969). See also Guthmüller, “Europa—Kontinent und antiker Mythos,” 41–42; and John T. Hamilton, “Integration, Subversion, and the Rape of Europa: Heinrich Böll’s ‘Er kam als Bierfahrer,’” Comparative Literature 58 (2006): 387–402.

Europa and the Bull

65

Douglas Dunn’s celebratory long poem Europa’s Lover (1982) features a Europa who invites a young man of today to join her in conversations and meditations on Western culture and its values.55 Roberto Calasso’s international bestselling ﬁctionalization of classical myths, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, 1988), opens appropriately with an elaborate deconstruction of the story of Europa, comparing the various ancient versions and relating them by motif to other myths and to Cretan history.56 Sabine Groenewold’s anthology Nach Europa (1993) provides the framework for six modern (born between 1918 and 1961) daughters of Europa who tell their own autobiographically colored stories of an unsettled Europe and try to understand what happened between the time of the original myth and its contemporary trivializations.57 And in a brilliant essay entitled “Europas Liebhaber” (2003; “Europa’s Lovers”), the German poet Durs Grünbein analyzes the reasons for the appeal of this “playmate of an entire continent”: the Oriental maiden seduced by a god in “the typical macho-shape of a bull.” Grünbein attributes Europa’s “special historical nimbus” to the fact that she offers at least a premonition of that “intellectual adventurousness” and the “almost erotic tendency to personal freedom” that characterized Europe from antiquity until it was shattered by World War II.58 Inevitably Europa and her bull have decorated the covers of such cultural-political journals as Cicero (July 2005) to publicize issues dedicated to questions of European unity. Stimulated no doubt by this attention, the myth of Europa and the bull has afforded a rich ﬁeld for the archaeologies of scholars who have recently expanded its interpretation both backward and forward. In a provocative article Michael Rice, an authority on bull-cults in the early (Neolithic and Bronze-age) Mediterranean world (The Power of the Bull, 1998), has suggested that the myth “is not merely aetiological, seeking to explain the acquisition by ﬁrst millennium Greeks of

55

Douglas Dunn, Europa’s Lover (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1982). See Guthmüller, “Europa—Kontinent und antiker Mythos,” 34–36. 57 Nach Europa: Texte zu einem Mythos, ed. Sabine Groenewold (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1993). 58 Durs Grünbein, Antike Dispositionen: Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 318–27. 56

66

Minos and the Moderns

an alphabet from its Levantine originators. It may be that it stands for a much closer involvement of southwest Asiatic traders and goddesses in the development of Europe than has otherwise been appreciated.”59 Another critic has neatly summarized several of the more recent readings of the myth. “This lunar goddess, with the wide, round face and big eyes of the moon, . . . symbolizes—we are told—the continuous movement westwards: the migratory drift from Asia, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, the diffusion of the alphabet and writing, the spread of agriculture into the fertile western European plain”; while the bull “with a deﬁnite aura of ‘otherness’, of sexual power, male compulsion and patriarchal possessiveness about him” is viewed as “something ‘dark’ and dangerous, who comes lumbering out of the European collective unconscious and steals Europe away to Crete.”60 Europa did indeed in the twentieth century become, in Nietzsche’s sense, a “story” exploited by “modern ideas.” Regardless of their fascination and validity, however, these theoretical excursions into the past as well as the psychological, feminist, or deconstructive ingenuities of recent decades hold little relevance for the literary and artistic treatments of the earlier twentieth century, with which we have been concerned. Indeed, few of the writers and artists refer explicitly to Crete or to ancient Greek sources; Vallotton, Marcks, and Däubler are conspicuous exceptions. But these poems, plays, operas, novels, paintings, and sculptures belong to a larger group of works that, directly or indirectly inspired by the publicity surrounding the recent excavations, brought the myths surrounding Minos into the public eye. Now that Europa has been brought to Crete and given birth to her semi-divine son, the later myths of Crete can take place. 59 Michael Rice, “When Archetype Meets Archetype: The Bull and Europa,” in Passerini, Figures d’Europe, 77–87, here 85. 60 Stuart Hall, “‘In But Not of Europe’: Europe and Its Myths,” in Passerini, Figures d’Europe, 35–46, here 39.

3 The Minotaur: The Beast Within and the Threat Outside

THE MINOTAUR AND HIS LABYRINTH As the thickening clouds of dictatorship and war darkened Europe’s cultural landscape in the 1930s, the effect was rapidly apparent in the use of classical images. In Hitler’s Germany a number of poets assumed the voice of the Trojan prophetess Cassandra to sound their unheeded warnings. Before he was murdered by the Nazis, Albrecht Haushofer lamented in his sonnet “Kassandro” that people were angered because he pestered them with his admonitions. Before his ﬂight into exile Heinz Politzer foretold in his “Cassandra” the conﬂagrations of the war years. In another poem Max Herrmann-Neisse named his wife “Cassandra” because she foresaw, listening to Hitler’s early radio speeches, that the destruction of the world was beginning. And in 1940 the exiled Richard Friedenthal sought in his poem “Cassandra” to alert his British compatriots to the dangers abroad. But this image was limited primarily to German poetry. In other countries Surrealist artists anticipated the threat to traditional European culture and values with a series of works depicting a Venus variously deconstructed.1 Francis Picabia’s gouacheon-cardboard Venus (ca. 1927–28) depicts a goddess dissolving into tendril-like lines. In his ﬁlm The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un poète, 1930) Jean Cocteau has a statue of Venus come to life when the poet smears onto its face a mouth that has come alive in the palm of his 1 The following examples are all represented in Antiguitat/modernitat en l’art del segle XX, ed. Gladys Fabre (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró, 1990).

68

Minos and the Moderns

hand. For his Eclipse of Venus (En pleine occultation de Vénus, 1934) Man Ray arranged the bodyless head of Venus decorated with lipstick and mascara next to the upper neck of a cello (which he found in a Paris ﬂea market and used in several other works) and a pear (the artist’s favorite fruit, which he often painted). Two years later his photograph of Venus Restored (1936) showed the torso of the goddess—albeit now armless, legless, and headless—bound securely with crisscrossing ropes. But unlike the formless shape tied up in a coarse blanket in his Enigma of Isidora Duncan (1920) or his Reclining Woman in Bondage (1928–29), this Venus conveys a sense of power and sexual vitality. In his Venus (1937), ﬁnally, the photographer restored the head—dragged up from the sea in a ﬁsherman’s net. Salvador Dalí was also obsessed by the ﬁgure of the goddess of love.2 His Venus of the Drawers (1936), for instance, reproduces in a plaster cast the Aphrodite of Melos with her body disﬁgured by drawers pulled by pompons of white mink fur from her forehead, her breasts, her abdomen, and her left knee—a disﬁgurement suggesting her sexual availability. In England, Roland Penrose’s photograph of The Last Voyage of Captain Cook (1936) displayed the torso of the goddess, painted with garish blue-orange-brown-olive and enclosed within a wiremesh globe of the world. And the Polish artist Kasimierz Podsadecki contributed a photomontage showing Venus (1933) in two adjacent poses: on the left in the background the Aphrodite of Melos sporting a fedora and in the foreground another torso of the goddess opened anatomically to display her inner organs. While these warning Cassandras and deconstructed Venuses strikingly convey through poetry and the visual arts the apprehensive mood of the 1930s and a European society in disarray, perhaps no other mythological theme was so widespread in all the arts as that of the Minotaur and his labyrinth. The basic tale as related by Catullus (Carmen 64), Virgil (Aeneid, bk. 6), Ovid (Metamorphoses, bk. 8), Plutarch (in his life of Theseus), and in various other classical sources—it never became part of the epic or tragic tradition—goes as follows. After Zeus/Jupiter brought Europa to Crete and gave her three sons, she was married to the king of Crete, who adopted her sons. The 2 See Salvador Dalí: Dreams of Venus, exhibition catalogue (North Miami: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002).

The Minotaur

69

oldest of the three, Minos, wed Pasiphaë, daughter of the sun-god Helios, and, to prove his right to the kingship, prayed to Poseidon to send a bull from the sea for him to sacriﬁce. Poseidon did so, but the white bull was so handsome that Minos declined to fulﬁll his pledge. In revenge the angered god aroused a powerful desire for the bull in Pasiphaë—Europa’s daughter-in-law!—who begged the craftsman Daedalus for his help in fulﬁlling her longing. Daedalus constructed an imitation cow of wood and rawhide so skillfully that the sexually aroused queen could conceal herself within it and be mounted by the bull—an unnatural union that produced a monstrous offspring named Asterion, who was human in body but had the head of a bull: the bull of Minos or “Minotaurus.” Out of shame Minos ordered Daedalus to construct at Knossos a maze, the labyrinth, in which to conceal the Minotaur, who fed upon the seven youths and seven maidens sent annually—or, depending on the source, according to some other schedule—from Athens in tribute for the murder of Minos’s son Androgeos. It is known from archaeological evidence, especially seals and coins, that the image of the bull in a maze or labyrinth goes back originally to ancient myths and rituals in Egypt. The bull represents the god Osiris, who in a ceremony accompanied by dances of lamentation, protection, and fertility is taken annually into a sanctuary where he is slain and dismembered in order to be reborn. The Egyptian labyrinth was both secular and religious in function, the center both of cult and of administration. The most famous labyrinths known to antiquity were the temple of Amenemhet III in the Fayoum and the one at Knossos. The Greek designation is based on the pre-Hellenic word labrus, the doubleaxe familiar as a religious symbol in Crete.3 Later the Cretan myth was incorporated into the Attic legends surrounding Theseus, the national hero of Athens, who voluntarily joined the fourteen youths 3 C. N. Deedes, “The Labyrinth,” in The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World, ed. S. H. Hooke (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 1–42. See also Joseph Leo Körner, Die Suche nach dem Labyrinth: Der Mythos von Dädalus und Ikarus, trans. Lore Brüggemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 24–116; and Paolo Santarcangeli, Il libro dei labyrinthi: Storia di un mito e di un simbolo (Milan: Frasinelli, 1984). For a survey of the most recent views see “Labyrinth,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2d ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 8:5273–79.

70

Minos and the Moderns

and maidens sent as tribute to Crete. There he entered the labyrinth, killed the Minotaur, and found his way back out by means of a thread provided by Ariadne, who had fallen in love with him. Later he betrayed Ariadne and abandoned her on the island of Naxos; but he was punished when, returning to Athens and failing to raise the white sail of victory, he caused his father’s suicide. Theseus later married Ariadne’s sister Phaedra but, again, was punished for his betrayal when Phaedra falsely accused his son Hippolytus of assaulting her. Theseus banished his son, who was subsequently killed by a bull emerging from the sea—the family nemesis! Why should this myth, which with a few notable exceptions— for instance, Botticelli’s and Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Inferno 12—was conspicuously missing from premodern art, have suddenly intruded on the public consciousness in the 1930s? One catalyst was no doubt the completed publication of the six volumes of The Palace of Minos (1921–35), in which Sir Arthur Evans described the results of his spectacular excavations in Knossos, the site of the tale. Marguerite Yourcenar stated outright that the excavations caused young French writers of the 1930s to speculate more than ever on the history of the Minotaur.4 Evans’s ﬁndings prompted a series of scholarly works, such as S. H. Hooke’s important collection of scholarly studies, The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World (1935), which included, beyond the contribution by Deedes on Egypt and Crete cited above, articles on its occurrence in Babylonia, Jerusalem, the cult of Sabazios, Christian rituals, and the Indian Vedas. These pieces led to the general conclusion that “the monster at the heart of the Labyrinth is a symbol of the ambivalence of that which is the focus of all ritual. For the monster is the ancient bull-man, at once the conqueror and the conquered, the dying and the rising god, the slain and the living king, the symbol of the price that must ever be paid for the gift of life” (ix). A few years later Karl Kerényi published his Labyrinth-Studien (1941) with a dedication to Carl Gustav Jung. The myth-scholar argues that the labyrinth, originally a spiral in shape, represents a totality that is both inﬁnite and immortal, both life and death, as exempliﬁed by the medieval Christian reading according to 4 Marguerite Yourcenar, “Aspects d’une légende et histoire d’une pièce,” in her Théâtre II (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 165–79, here 166.

The Minotaur

71

which “the Minotaur in the center is hell, the devil; the Labyrinth a false path leading into certain destruction unless Theseus-Christ comes to the rescue.”5 Later writers often emphasized the political implications of the theme in the subtitles of such essay collections as “poetry under the hooves of state and industry”6 and “poetry and the nation state.”7 In the latter volume, Tom Paulin suggests that “the modern identiﬁcation of Minotaur with state repression begins [with Shelley’s Oedipus Tyrannus of 1820]. Before this the myth was used to illustrate the vice of bestiality” (3–4). Paulin misses the point, which constitutes the central theme of André Siganos’s study of the Minotaur, that “the myth is modern precisely through its brutality and animal cruelty.”8 In all these cases, what matters is not the validity of the interpretation but, rather, the new urgency with which the Minotaur and his labyrinth with its images of politically imposed violence emerged in the 1930s as a subject of artistic and intellectual endeavor.9

T H E JOU R NA L M IN OTAUR E It was this image that inspired Georges Bataille and André Masson to propose the name Minotaure for the avant-garde cultural journal published in Paris from 1933 to 1939 by Albert Skira and E. Tériade (Efstratios Eleftheriadis) under the unnamed editorship of André Breton.10 (The thirteen numbers of the journal in Princeton University’s Marquand Library are gathered in two volumes bound 5 Karl Kerényi, Labyrinth-Studien: Labyrinthos als Linienreﬂex einer mythologischen Idee, 2d ed. (Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1950), 32. 6 Minotaurus: Dichtung unter den Hufen von Staat und Industrie, ed. Alfred Döblin (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1953). 7 Tom Paulin, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 8 André Siganos, Le Minotaur et son mythe (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), 145. 9 For other possibilities of interpretation, see “Labyrinth,” Encyclopedia of Religion; and Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manierismus in der europäischen Kunst und Literatur, expanded ed. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987). Neither work deals with modern literature or art. 10 See the various essays in Regards sur Minotaure: La Revue à tête de bête, ed. Claude Gaume (Geneva: Musée d’art et d’histoire, 1987).

72

Minos and the Moderns

ﬁttingly in black and white cowhide.) The journal, whose text and images contain virtually no allusions to the Minotaur, is notable for three reasons. First, each of the issues (including two double-issues) bears a striking cover depicting a bull and/or labyrinth in the characteristic style of each respective artist: (1) Pablo Picasso; (2) GastonLouis Roux; (3–4) André Derain; (5) F. Borès; (6) Marcel Duchamp; (7) Joan Miró; (8) Salvador Dalí; (9) Henri Matisse; (10) René Magritte; (11) Max Ernst; and (12–13) André Masson and Diego Rivera. Second, the journal fulﬁlls its aim to be genuinely multidisciplinary. “It is impossible today to isolate the plastic arts from poetry,” the announcement proclaims. “The most characteristic modern movements have closely associated these two domains.” The publishers and editors afﬁrm their desire “to recapture, to reunite, and to recapitulate the elements that constitute the spirit of the modern movement in order to spread its radiance.” According to the title page its scope will extend beyond the plastic arts and poetry to include music, architecture, ethnography and mythology, theater, and psychologypsychiatry-psychoanalysis. In this spirit the ﬁrst issue features, in addition to a chronicle of current cultural events, the text of a ballet by André Masson, an illustrated essay by André Breton on Picasso in his atelier, music by Kurt Weill to poems by Bertolt Brecht, an anthropological article on funerary dances of the Sudanese Dogon, a psychological study of paranoiac forms of experience, along with various other scholarly and critical pieces. Finally, the totality of the thirteen issues, whose title images intensify the earlier preoccupation with the relationship between human beings and beasts, conveys an overall impression of violence (e.g., in Masson’s series of drawings entitled Massacres) and sexuality (in images of which some fall just short of pornography)—precisely the qualities noted earlier in the tale of Europa and the bull but escalated here to an extreme pitch. “At no moment,” observes one critic, “is the inquietude in which political Europe of the years 1933–1939 lived absent from Minotaure. The excitement that one feels upon contact with this review stems from the generosity of imagination and never from an irresponsible indifference.”11 At the end of World War II, when Albert Skira established in Geneva a new monthly journal of art and literature as “a bridge 11

Jean-François Revel, “Une revue qui, en trente ans, n’a pas vieilli,” Minotaure (Paris: L’Œil galerie d’art, 1962), [unnumbered pages].

The Minotaur

73

to a world searching for its identity,” he called it Labyrinthe, explaining that “After the Minotaur, the next trial of Theseus was the labyrinth.”12 There have been various attempts to interpret the symbolic meaning of the image for the contributors to the journal. Marcel Jean, a paintercritic who provided a “chronicle” item for the ﬁrst issue of Minotaure, explained years later in his history of Surrealist painting that the Minotaur is “the ancient symbol and classic example of the hybrid, a being considered in the western world as a ‘monster,’” going on with a certain etymological abandon to relate “hybrid” to the term hubris meaning “a proud insolence towards the gods.”13 (The two words are in fact etymologically unrelated.) According to this reading, the Minotaur represents the punishment for King Minos’s hubris in failing to keep his promise to Poseidon. The author maintains that the monster’s eventual slaying by the “pure man” Theseus amounts to the triumph of racial purity over the hybrid—a disquieting reading in light of the racism prevalent in Germany, France, and elsewhere in the 1930s. He concludes with the suggestion that Theseus represents the conscious mind and the Minotaur the unconscious—two worlds that the Surrealists, identifying them with Nietzsche’s conception of the Apollonian and Dionysian, sought to bridge in their works. Jean’s view, though farfetched in part, has been inﬂuential among critics of Surrealism.14 In the cited exhibition catalogue, for instance, Jean-François Revel, picking up the Freudian theme, observed that “the monster, half-man halfbull, symbolizes the powers of the unconscious”—that realm where the passions rule and reason is excluded. Another reading suggests that the Minotaur exempliﬁes the ethical and political convictions of the Surrealists: “unlimited freedom, the uncompromising proclamation of violence, total revolution, insubordination of the established order.”15 But the meaning is best examined case by case from artist to artist. 12 Preface to reprint edition of Labyrinthe (New York: Arno, 1968), which appeared from October 15, 1944, to December 1946. 13 Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), 231. 14 It is quoted at length in two separate sections of Antiguitat/Modernitat, 313, 321. 15 Paloma Esteban Leal in her commentary for Picasso Minotauro, catalog of the exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Soﬁa, Madrid, October 25, 2000–January 15, 2001 (Madrid, 2000), 223–38, here 228. The author is quoting Marie-Laure Bernadac’s commentary in the exhibition catalog Picasso e il Mediterraneo (Rome, 1983), 154.

74

Minos and the Moderns PI C A SSO A N D T H E MI N OTAU R

Apart from their illustrations for the cover of the journal Minotaure, several artists in the 1930s created further images of the monster. While André Masson produced his ﬁrst renditions in the early 1920s, it was only in the following decade that the Minotaur became “an essential symbol” in his oeuvre.16 In all his paintings of the 1930s, Masson was obsessed, he reported, “by the idea that Europe was on the point of being consumed by ﬁre and blood.”17 In The Minotaur and the Labyrinth (1930), the artist depicted the monster’s head supported by a human torso opened to reveal a labyrinth. In The Secret of the Labyrinth (1935), a Minotaur who has triumphed over Theseus is reduced to horns and two arms, one of which holds a sword and the other a nude Ariadne, while the torso is again opened to expose a labyrinth. Masson’s Histoire de Thésée (1940) shows a tiny Theseus lost in a dark labyrinth. Man Ray’s photograph entitled The Minotaur (ca. 1935) depicts the nude torso of a woman whose arms are uplifted around her wholly obscured head in the shape of horns; her breasts and nipples suggest eyes and her shadowed abdominal cavity the bull’s lower face; the effect is astonishingly like that of a bull. The artist obsessed during these years more absolutely than any other by the Minotaur was Pablo Picasso.18 Indeed, Picasso’s understanding of the myth was so profoundly personal that his minotaurs show little or no trace of their mythic source. Showing several of his prints to Françoise Gilot, Picasso explained that he envisioned all the scenes as taking place on a Mediterranean island much like Crete. That’s where the minotaurs live, along the coast. They’re the rich seigneurs of the island. They know they’re monsters and they live, like dandies and dilettantes everywhere, the kind of existence that reeks of decadence in houses 16

Patricia Mayayo, André Masson: Mitologías (Madrid: Copias Prado, 2002), 159–98. Luisa Passerini, Il mito d’Europa (Fiorenza: Giunti, 2002), 151–54, here 153. 18 I take my information in this section mainly from Sebastian Goeppert and Herma C. Goeppert-Frank, Die Minotauromachie von Pablo Picasso (Geneva: Patrick Cramer, 1987), which reproduces the artist’s many and varied representations. But see also the useful exhibition catalogues for Picasso: Minotauro (Madrid: Museo National, 2000); and Picasso und die Mythen, ed. Ortrud Westheiden (Hamburg: Bucerius Kunst Forum, 2002). 17

The Minotaur

75

ﬁlled with works of art by the most fashionable painters and sculptors. They love being surrounded by pretty women. They get the local ﬁshermen to go out and round up girls from the neighboring islands. After the heat of the day has passed, they bring in the sculptors and their models for parties, with music and dancing, and everybody gorges himself on mussels and champagne until melancholy fades away and euphoria takes over. From there on it’s an orgy.19

Picasso’s vision of the minotaur’s death is equally idiosyncratic. Theseus was only one of many gladiators who killed minotaurs, he continued. “It happened every Sunday: a young Attic Greek came over from the mainland and when he killed a minotaur he made all the women happy, especially the old ones. A minotaur keeps his women lavishly but he reigns by terror and they’re glad to see him killed.”20 How did this view develop? Clearly, it was colored by the image of bull-ﬁghting, a pervasive theme in Spanish art and one that appears in Picasso’s oeuvre from his earliest works.21 Added to this was the inﬂuence of mythological subjects, which since the early 1920s, in his so-called classical period, occurred with some frequency in Picasso’s prints and drawings. It is likely that Picasso was ﬁrst alerted to the speciﬁc theme of the Cretan Minotaur, in which the bull-ﬁght and neoclassicism so smoothly merge, by depictions of frescoes from the palace of Knossos in the journal Cahiers d’Art (1926), which was edited by his friend Christian Zervos, a Greek who knew Crete and its legends at ﬁrst hand. In any case, the minotaur rapidly emerged as an alter ego in the mind of the artist and from 1928 to 1937 provided one of the principal themes in his work, notably in the more intimate genres of drawings and engravings rather than in the paintings. In his late forties and early ﬁfties, Picasso had entered a new and passionate love affair with the much younger Marie-Thérèse Walter, and the minotaur initially provided a symbol for rejuvenated animal energy combined with violence. (Apropos of an etching in which the minotaur is watching over a sleeping woman he remarked that “It’s hard to say whether he wants to wake her or kill her.”)22 His ﬁrst 19 Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 49. 20 Ibid., 50. 21 Leal in Picasso: Minotauro, 225. 22 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 50.

76

Minos and the Moderns

representation of a minotaur-like ﬁgure appears in a collage of January 1928, which shows two legs surmounted by a bull’s head taking a gigantic stride. That same year produced an oil painting based on the collage Running Minotaur. But it was not until April 1933 that a minotaur quite literally burst onto the scene, entering the artist’s studio and engaging the models in orgies of the sort he later described in his account of the theme. Its dominance of Picasso’s work for the next three years was evidenced ﬁrst in a series of ﬁve etchings entitled Minotauros with a Dagger, one of which was used for the collage on the cover of the ﬁrst issue of Minotaure, where the image of the monster is superimposed on a white paper doily and decorated with ribbons and tinfoil—all on a piece of corrugated cardboard pinned to a block of wood (ﬁgure 3.1). The other images were printed facing the ﬁrst page. In all of them the ﬁgure of the powerful naked male with the majestic bull’s head incorporates in its various poses lasciviousness and sexual vitality. Almost immediately Picasso went on to create a series of drawings in which the minotaur takes possession of a woman in violent rapes. The next month saw further etchings in which the minotaur behaves with a more restrained sexuality toward his lover: caressing her gently, toasting her with a glass of wine, and sleeping peacefully beside her. But the violence still emerges from time to time in rape scenes and in others in which the minotaur is himself wounded in an arena. That summer and fall produced more drawings, etchings, and watercolors featuring minotaurs in a variety of erotic or violent scenes, sixteen of which took their place in the one hundred engravings of the so-called Suite Vollard. All in all, and varying with Picasso’s own emotional state, the hybrid continued to reﬂect the artist’s feelings of strength coupled with underlying fears of impotence. As the artist’s sense of weakness increased, along with a sense of guilt about his treatment of his ﬁrst wife, a new and more poignant motif appeared in 1934: a series of some ten drawings and etchings depicting a blind minotaur clutching a staff in his hand and led by a small girl—a scene reminiscent of the aged Oedipus guided in his blindness by his daughter Antigone. These dozens of works from the years 1933–34 prepared the way for what is widely regarded as the ﬁnest graphic work of the

The Minotaur

77

Figure 3.1. Pablo Picasso, Minotaure. From Minotaure 1 (1933). Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. © 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

twentieth century and, by some even, of Western art since Rembrandt: the Minotauromachy of 1935 (ﬁgure 3.2).23 The large work is dominated by the ﬁgure of a minotaur with his powerful body and massive head, which occupies the entire right-hand third of the print; he faces a group of ﬁgures whom he appears to be warding off with his right hand: a young girl holding up a lighted candle and grasping a bouquet of ﬂowers; between them a mortally wounded 23

The Goepperts in the preface to their Minotauromachie.

78

Minos and the Moderns

Figure 3.2. Pablo Picasso, Minotauromachy (7th State). 1935. Princeton University Art Museum. © 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

mare with its entrails exposed, and on its back the body of a clearly pregnant woman dressed in toreador’s garb and apparently dead; a near-naked bearded man climbing a ladder; and two women observing the scene from a nearby window. We realize instantly that this minotaur is no longer the jovially brutal beast of the earlier erotic etchings but rather, like the blind minotaur of the preceding year, a ﬁgure of pathos. Despite his powerful body and monumental head this minotaur, whose left hand grasps a cape ﬂung over his shoulder, wears a wide-eyed expression of open-mouthed dismay and extends his arm in a defensive gesture. What does he reject? The girl, who closely resembles the girl guiding the blind minotaur in the earlier works, illuminates with her candle the central scene of suffering and death: in the presence of witnesses—the two women in the window and the Christlike ﬁgure ascending the ladder—the minotaur is summoned to acknowledge his guilt in killing not only the horse

The Minotaur

79

in the corrida but also, through the violence of his love, the pregnant woman.24 The work thus represents a striking moment of painful self-appraisal. The problematical meaning of the work, which in its composition strikingly foreshadows without its Cubist deformations his renowned 1937 painting Guernica, is reinforced by Picasso’s treatments of the minotaur in the next two years. In one paired drawing and painting a minotaur is dragging a two-wheeled cart on which are heaped his earthly belongings—a combination suggesting that the artist-outsider is being forced by circumstances to make upheavals and changes in his life. In another pair the minotaur has been reduced to a voyeur who can do nothing but gaze longingly at the sleeping nude woman. And in a ﬁnal set of three works the minotaur, mortally wounded by an arrow, is lying on a beach while a naiad emerging from the sea holds up a mirror in which he sees himself reﬂected. The dramatized moment of anagnorisis in which the minotaur must acknowledge his own guilt and impotence and the ensuing change in his life suggests an explanation for the expression on the face of the monster in the Minotauromachy: a shocked recognition, in the light held up by the young girl, of his own character, which he tries desperately to ward off with the defensive gesture. However one reads Picasso’s great Minotauromachy and the dozens of drawings, etchings, and paintings surrounding it, it is clear that the Minotaur of the 1930s aroused strong personal resonances in the artist. Indeed, minotaurs also appear in the free-verse poems

24 I follow generally the Goepperts’ interpretation in their Minotauromachie, 103–4. But the complexity of the work, magniﬁed by the successive stages of its composition and printing, make it impossible to arrive at any ﬁnal authoritative interpretation. For a wholly different Jungian reading, see Valéry Rouzeau, “Minotaurs et miroirs,” Iris 12 (1992): 91–111, esp. 100–101. The critic interprets the minotaur as the Jungian Shadow, the dead woman on the horse as the conquered libido, the man on the ladder as the archetype of the Wise Man, and the girl with the candle as the Divine Child. In his classicist’s view of “The Resonant World of Pablo Picasso” Harry C. Rutledge (The Guernica Bull: Studies in the Classical Tradition in the Twentieth Century [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989], 22–42) suggests yet another possibility: the man in his “heroic seminudity” represents Old Europe in retreat and the girl is “Young Europe, in whom Picasso seems to have hope” (24). But this view, as appealing as it may be, does not account for the role of the minotaur in its allegorical scheme.

80

Minos and the Moderns

in French and Spanish that Picasso wrote from May 1935 to February 1936.25 These resonances, both positive and negative, were essentially private and sexual in nature and shared little of the political symbolism that emerged more and more strongly in other artists and writers of the 1930s and 1940s. It is not without interest to note in this connection that Paloma Picasso currently produces a brand of Men’s Designer Cologne and Eau de Parfum Spray for Women under the name Minotaure. A more serious postwar effect of Picasso’s taurine inﬂuence can be seen in the work of the British sculptor Michael Ayrton, whose fascination with the Minotaur produced a series of ten etchings (1971) tracing the life cycle of the creature from birth to maturity.26 Far more elaborate, however, is the vast labyrinth with ten-foot high stone walls—the ﬁrst accessible labyrinth in several centuries—that he completed in 1969 on a Catskill estate in Arkville, New York. Located in the center of the maze is a huge bronze statue of the Minotaur, whose appearance betrays a striking resemblance to Picasso’s many depictions. (Ayrton’s lifelong obsession revolved around Daedalus, who is also represented along with Icarus in a second chamber of his labyrinth, rather than the Minotaur; accordingly, his two major literary works dealing with that ﬁgure will be discussed in chapter 4.) Indeed, it has been suggested that Ayrton’s New York maze inspired a modern “labyrinthomania” that produced in the late decades of the twentieth century hundreds of new labyrinths worldwide—a phenomenon that led England in 1990 to celebrate a “Year of the Labyrinth”27 and whose continuing fascination has produced numerous websites of such groups as The Labyrinth Society, the German Labyrinth-Projekt, and the Labyrinth Resource Center.28

25

The poems are reprinted in Picasso: Minotauro, 246–47. Jacob E. Nyenhuis, Myth and the Creative Process: Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, the Maze Maker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 180–85. 27 Georg Gerster, “Kreta in New York,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, weekend edition, July 7–8, 1990: 82. 28 The Worldwide Labyrinth Locator website lists over 2,200 labyrinths, both public and private, built since about 1970 mostly in the USA and Canada; and locators in other countries bring the total to some 5,000 mazes and labyrinths constructed worldwide during that same period. 26

The Minotaur

81

T HE M I N OTAU R A MON G T H E PO ETS In his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” (from The Tower, 1928) William Butler Yeats spoke of modern man, who “in his own secret meditations / is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.” Several poets of the next generation, including several admirers of Yeats, appropriated his image of this “labyrinth of the mind.” Among the various classical and religious images cluttering the modern consciousness that Conrad Aiken set out to explore in his Preludes for Memnon (1931) the Minotaur and the labyrinth occupy a minor yet central position. Aiken’s poetic ego, with a “miscellany of shards and shreds” (XXVIII) in its heart, lives in a world trivialized by “bickerings of the inconsequential, / The chatterings of the ridiculous, the iterations / Of the meaningless” (I).29 As he explained in the preface written decades later for a new edition of the poems, he was striving with that book to formulate “a new Weltanschauung” for a world where Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin, and Einstein “suddenly turned our neat little religious or philosophic systems into something that looked rather alarmingly like pure mathematics”—a new poiesis to replace “the many mythical wonders we have now lost.”30 The (musically or mathematically) serial form of the sixty-three poems constitutes therefore not only an “exploration of the fragmented ego” but also a celebration of it. The poet ﬁnds no respite even in sleep, which ties him with its “bondage of harsh dreams” (III). The poems teem with images of downwardness leading the soul “from dark to deeper dark” to a place where it may forget the “torn world”—a “labyrinth” from which “no Theseus-thread of memory” will guide it back (III). Aiken shares with his Surrealist contemporaries the image of the labyrinth as the Freudian unconscious, but it is unclear what the soul will ﬁnd when it goes through the “labyrinths of change”: “Downward and inward to such coils of light,” where reside “laboratories / Of obscene shape” 29 Conrad Aiken, “Preludes for Memnon or Preludes to Attitude,” in his Collected Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 498–571. I cite passages by section number. 30 Conrad Aiken, Preludes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), v–vi.

82

Minos and the Moderns

(XXXIV). Will it be secrets “Monstrous as Minotaur” (XIII)? Or the “sad confusion which is god” (XXIV) in that shapeless and vast “ruin in which godhead lives” (XIV)? Aiken provides no answers; his poems constitute, rather, a courageous exploration of the unconscious—an exploration just as adventuresome as the most daring conceptions of the Surrealists.31 But while his labyrinth represents, as in Surrealism, the descent into the unconscious, his Minotaur is not the playful hybrid of Minotaure or even the all-too-human monster of Picasso, but an unknown Conradian horror lying in the abyss of that downward spiral. While Aiken appears to be lost in Yeats’s “labyrinth that he has made in art,” W. H. Auden, another Yeats admirer, has politicized the image. In his New Year Letter of 1940 Auden looked back at the past decade, which witnessed “The Asiatic cry of pain” as well as the cruelties of the revolution in Spain, the war of aggression in Abyssinia, “the Danubian despair,” and “Flat Poland frozen into hell.” Recalling these horrors, he wonders, who will not feel blind anger draw His thoughts towards the Minotaur, To take an early boat for Crete And rolling, silly, at its feet Add his small tidbit to the rest?32

In this political context the Minotaur stands in for the various European dictators—Franco, Mussolini, Hitler—as the poet speaks of the temptation “to surrender to / The grand apocalyptic dream” in a world in which language has become useless. In another work of that period (“The Sea and the Mirror”) Auden longs for “promiscuous pastures” far from the rules of Business, Science, Religion, and Art, where “the minotaur of authority is just a roly-poly ruminant and nothing is at stake” (394). As for the labyrinth itself: toward the end of his New Year Letter Auden speaks of “the labyrinth of choice” in which men and women must learn

31 On Aiken, see the excellent pages in Lillian Feder, Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 384–93. 32 The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945; New York: Random House, 1966), 273.

The Minotaur

83

the civil art Of making from the muddled heart A desert and a city where The thoughts that have to labour there May ﬁnd locality and peace, And pent-up feelings their release. (315)

Similarly in “Autumn 1940” the labyrinth is again the arena of choice: “that labyrinth where either / We are found or lose ourselves for ever” (102), just as it is in “Casino,” where The labyrinth is safe but endless, and broken Is Ariadne’s thread. (91)

In sum, Auden’s Minotaur is a political monster and his labyrinth not the vast unconscious but a place of existential decision.33 A similar political view can be detected in Robert Walser’s brief prose-sketch “Minotauros” (1926–27), where the Minotaur exempliﬁes “the nation” or “the shaggy difﬁculty of making sense of the problem of nations”—a labyrinth, the author concludes, “from which the reader emerges, as it were, like Theseus.”34 In Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Minotaur” (1944), in contrast, the beast exempliﬁes the betrayed heart of modern urban man, “brutalized by loneliness” and “lost, trapped, blinded and led, / Deserted at the middle of the maze.”35 It was in direct response to Picasso’s late etching of the naiad holding up a mirror to the wounded minotaur that his friend Paul Eluard wrote his short poem “Fin d’un monstre.”36 Most of the seven lines amount to a description of nature and its effect upon the dying minotaur. The sea is high and your spirits are low, the poet tells the minotaur, who is called a son of the earth. In your breast the shadows cover the sky for ever. The sun lets go, the walls no longer dance, and the sun opens impenetrable paths to the birds. The ﬁrst two lines of the poem explain why the minotaur sees all this: 33 Feder, Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry, 152–54, stresses the religious and speciﬁcally Christian symbolism of Auden’s labyrinth. 34 Robert Walser, Das Gesamtwerk, 12 vols., ed. Jochen Greven (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 11:192–94. 35 Muriel Rukeyser, Beast in View (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1944), 30. 36 Paul Eluard, A Pablo Picasso (Geneva–Paris: Trois Collines, 1947), 5–57, where the image is reproduced facing the poem.

84

Minos and the Moderns Il faut que tu te voies mourir Pour savoir que tu vis encore.

(You must see yourself die in order to know that you are still alive.)

Like Picasso, but unlike Auden and Walser, the French poet sees in the minotaur strictly a personal symbol for the aging artist, whose recognition of death makes him even more keenly aware of life—the life surrounding him and the life he has enjoyed. Edwin Muir was as obsessed as were Masson and other Surrealist artists of Minotaure by the image of the labyrinth. In his volume The Labyrinth (1949) we read of the “labyrinth of longing” that prevents returns, of the “haunted labyrinths of the heart,” and of “mazes past recall.”37 The most extended treatment occurs in the title poem (10–12), which represents the monologue of Theseus as he emerges from the labyrinth after slaying the monster. The ﬁrst thirty-ﬁve lines (almost half of the poem) constitute one sustained syntactical period punctuated three times by the conjunction “since”: (1) since he emerged, dazed, from the labyrinth, splashed with the blood of the Minotaur and unsure whether he was dead or alive; (2) since he came out into the bright, ﬂowered world again and into time (“For in the maze time had not been with me”); (3) since he entered the deceptive streets of the noisy world, still hearing the echo of his footsteps in the maze—ever since that moment “all seemed a part / Of the great labyrinth.” Ever since, the poem continues, he must remind himself not to hurry. Haste and delay are equal In this one world, for there’s no exit, none, No place to come to, and you’ll end where you are, Deep in the centre of the endless maze.

He could not continue to live, Theseus tells himself, if this world he has reentered were not an illusion. Once he saw in a vision the world of the gods, where their eternal dialogue was peace Where all these things were woven; and this our life Was as a chord deep in that dialogue. 37

Edwin Muir, The Labyrinth (London: Faber, 1949), 14, 56, 59.

The Minotaur

85

Having once touched that real world, he can escape “the lie, / The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehoods” that constitute the other world, for his soul “has birdwings to ﬂy free” despite the recurring dreams of the labyrinth. Muir’s poem has wholly interiorized the labyrinth: having once entered that maze and even having slain the monster imprisoned within it, man can never again in life be free from its all-pervading image. Like Sartre’s hell, the labyrinth is the others: the world in which we live. Only the imagination enables us from time to time to soar above it, like Icarus, and to perceive the “chord,” the harmony in the words of the gods.38 Jack Lindsay’s long poem-cycle Clue of Darkness (1949) presents itself as the meditations of Theseus, who comes back to Crete, “when old age had dried and stretched / the skin across his face” (8), to revisit the scenes of his youth and his “tryst with history”: the slaying of the Minotaur and abduction of Ariadne.39 But modern Crete, with its customs-ofﬁcers, tour-guides, and ancient ruins—has changed almost unrecognizably. As he sits in a bar, brooding over his wine, Theseus tries to reconstruct those distant past events. Between the prologue and the concluding epilogue, the ﬁrst of three major sections constitutes a rehearsal of his “Discovery of Earth”: the awakening of the ﬁve senses, childhood, youth, manhood, ﬁrst love, and conﬂict. (Up to this point the experiences recounted are so universal that they are hardly particular to Theseus.) The middle section, “The Analytic Thread,” focuses on Theseus’s Cretan episode, and speciﬁcally his love and abandonment of Ariadne. His memories up to that point are perfectly clear, he tells us. “Why / did life thereafter steadily turn awry?” (41). Although he killed the Minotaur (who is never described) and left him “dead in bowels of the maze,” he realizes that “in a deeper maze he’d strayed for life” (42) and interiorized his guilt by deserting his ﬁrst wife Ariadne. To be sure, his great deed was renowned, but he had betrayed his own virtue. Should he therefore denounce his fame? At this point Theseus recapitulates the various excuses and rationalizations that he used to justify the abandonment: a Cretan wife would 38 Feder, Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry, 373–75, again detects a Christian spirit in Muir’s labyrinth. 39 Jack Lindsay, Clue of Darkness (London: Andrew Dakers, 1949).

86

Minos and the Moderns

provide fuel for his political opponents in Athens; people would say that his expedition had no loftier goal than to get “a beauty for my bed” (44); rumor might even suggest that the credit for the slaying of the monster was hers, not his; his father would reproach him for his premature marriage; and her imperious willfulness would make her a difﬁcult wife. Telling himself that Ariadne would ﬁnd a more suitable husband in Naxos, Theseus takes “the difﬁcult but virtuous course” (45) and sails home. But he goes on to confess a deeper cause for his desertion: the sexual power that Ariadne exerted over him. “The labyrinth was the convulsive cavern / of her rich body” (51). The third section amounts to his effort to ﬁnd “The Uniting Symbol” that might pull things together again: “Earth Dance,” “Initiation Dance,” “Release” of love and sex, and the ultimate “Distortion” of death. Awakening ﬁnally from his wine-stupor, Theseus realizes that people have lost the “myths which held their crisis-sense of union” and to which they gaze back longingly (80). Wholeness is nothing but a dream of Art and of Science, “ﬁghting to hush the rambling fury of the world” (81). The epilogue ends as the waiter cries “Time” and shakes “the sleepy old gentleman who had drunk too much.” Lindsay’s depressing modernity amounts to a mythless world in which his Theseus-Everyman, once he has lost his youthful innocence, succumbs to the power of sex, to crass political motivations, and to the all-too-human rationalizations of our worst betrayals—of others as well as ourselves. The Minotaur and his labyrinth do not disappear from poetry after the 1930s and 1940s. In the United States, Robert Penn Warren introduced the myth at the beginning of his long narrative poem Brother to Dragons (1953) in Thomas Jefferson’s self-characterization.40 Recalling the 1776 events in Philadelphia, Jefferson imagines the delegates as “lost in some blind . . . corridor of Time.” Yet they found “no thread, / Airy as breath by Ariadne’s ﬁngers forged” in the darkness where “The beast waits.” The beast, “the infamy of Crete” conceived in pain by a screaming Pasiphaë in her cow’s hide, is the “darling brother” of the lost delegates, who were “caught in our errors and interests.” 40 Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (New York: Random House, 1953), 7–9.

The Minotaur

87

Contemplating his fellow delegates, Jefferson suddenly recognized in their bleary faces the brightness of hope and realized that the Minotaur was man. “There at the blind / Blank labyrinthine turn of my personal time, I met the beast” and knew that he must deny nature— “leap beyond man’s natural bourne and constriction”—in order to ﬁnd joy, light, and glory. With this excited realization he seized his pen and wrote the great document. Like Muir’s Theseus, Jefferson has recognized that the labyrinth is within us; like Picasso he knows that man is the Minotaur. But the American poet once again politicizes the myth: the Declaration of Independence, created in the joy of selfawareness, was followed inevitably by war. Just as Theseus had to kill the Minotaur and then was himself punished—by his father’s death, by the false accusation of his son by Phaedra and the son’s death—“All liberty is bought with blood.”41 In his Notes of a Clay Pigeon (1977) the Czech poet Miroslav Holub labels an entire section of ten poems “Minotaur,”42 adopting the myth as an occasion to ruminate wittily on imagination and reality, symbol and substance, metaphor and being. In “Minotaur’s Thoughts on Poetry” the poet assures us of the beast’s existence “Because thousands of bulls want to be people. And vice versa” (45). Accordingly, in “Minotaur on Love” the beast sees Ariadne give Theseus the fatal thread “because I was Theseus just as Theseus could have been me” (49). In “Loneliness of the Minotaur” the poet, surrounded by the walls of daily existence, experiences the fears of the Minotaur. Yet to turn aside from the walls means that all life is lost: “No Minos, no Crete, No Theseus” and on the cliff “only an ageing Ariadne” (46). The “Successful Young Man in the Labyrinth” is a con artist who tries to persuade the Minotaur to show him the way out of the labyrinth in return for “twenty gorgeous broads” (51). When the monster reminds him that there are demons, the young man tells him to “stuff it” and be like other normal people. Normality, the beast replies, is “merely a milder form of imbecility.” The young man, offering him powder

41 Feder, Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry, 403–4, stresses the violence in the rape of Pasiphaë as foreshadowing the violence in the poem as a whole: the murder of a slave and, more generally, “the evil inherent in the very structure of Southern society.” 42 Miroslav Holub, Notes of a Clay Pigeon, trans. Jarmila and Ian Milner (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977), 45–58.

88

Minos and the Moderns

against bed bugs, confesses that he simply wants to get back to reality and earn money. So the Minotaur has the demons throw him out and treat the passages of the labyrinth with the powder. In “On the Origin of the Minotaur” the poet/Minotaur speculates ironically about various theories on the Minotaur, concluding ambivalently that he may or may not exist, being “only a shadow of the myth which changes from epoch to epoch,” or “that I am anyone who has been cut down to size” (55). And in “Minotaur’s Thoughts on the Labyrinth” he inverts the common notion that the labyrinth is within us, pointing out that “In the labyrinth you don’t look for the maze in yourself but for a direct light from outside” (56). “The symbols of the subconscious are exposed” because “Metaphor comes before thing and before the poet.” The political impulse implicit in the myth persists into the recent past. In the lengthy title poem of his collection The Minotaur and other Poems (1999) the Irish poet Anthony Cronin depicts a civilized and liberal world surrounding the labyrinth from which the citizens can still hear “the thud of the Minotaur’s hooves” and the “deep bull moan” expressing his “long agony of desire”—sounds not stilled even when they periodically usher trembling girls into the labyrinth to ﬁll the monster’s “insatiable need.”43 Rumors circulate about a hero who will one day kill the monster and destroy the evil in their midst. In the meantime they are prepared to celebrate the goddess who gave them “all the arts of accord” that govern their civic peace. Yet as they listen to the angry roar of that “Leviathan of lust,” they sense “deep in the human heart something caged and hidden, / which no hero can ever root out” and are forced to the realization that their world of order and morality is nothing but a “labyrinth of lies” and that they all live “in symbiosis with / the dark thing in its lair.” Like Muir, Cronin addresses the beast within us all and in our society; but whereas Muir looks from despair to hope, Cronin peers out of order into chaos. While poets like Cronin, Holub, and Muir adduce the Minotaur as a powerful personal and social image, it seems inevitable that the myth would also experience a feminist re-vision. The Canadian poet Nicole Markotić proposes in “the minotaur dreams” that “it is pos43 Anthony Cronin, The Minotaur and Other Poems (Dublin: New Island Books, 1999), 26–42.

The Minotaur

89

sible the minotaur bull was female, pregnant, long overdue and desperate for escape into a more temperate myth. an ache for religions more gentle toward animals and virgins.”44

T H E MI N OTAU R I N F I C T I ON The tale of the Minotaur in his labyrinth fascinated novelists of the period as greatly as it did the poets. Franz Spunda’s Minos oder die Geburt Europas (1931; “Minos or the Birth of Europe”) looks like a weird mélange of recent discoveries in the ﬁelds of ancient history, myth, religion, and archaeology, intermingling as it does the twelfthcentury b.c.e. Dorian invasions of the Peloponnesus and Crete, the myths of Atreus and Thyestes as well as Theseus and the Minotaur, and the emergence of the Greek deities from the animal worship of the past. Spunda’s overblown descriptions often read like the scenario for a Hollywood extravaganza, and in this thoroughly rationalized but somewhat confused work psychology is largely replaced by typology. But the novel exempliﬁes the obsession of the 1930s with the myth of the Minotaur as well as its criticism of the unbridled culture of the 1920s. Crete, undisputed ruler of the Mediterranean world, worships animals—the divine Minotaur as well as sacred serpents—while Minos is reputed to be eternal and invisible, secluding himself from generation to generation as he does within the ruling council of priests and princes. His traumatically blind daughter Ari-Hagne (Ariadne) is endowed with prophetic powers while her older sister Phaidra, like their mother Pasiphaë, is sex-obsessed, summoning to her chambers one-night lovers, whom she has executed immediately after satisfying her lust. While the island is ruled by law—“the upper-earthly aspect of the labyrinth” (159)45—it frankly acknowledges the bestiality in humankind by celebrating once a year a Day of the Minotaur, when 44 Nicole Markotić, Minotaurs and Other Alphabets (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 1998), 82. 45 I translate from Franz Spunda, Minos oder die Geburt Europas (Berlin: Bischoff, 1944).

90

Minos and the Moderns

the women give themselves to any man who desires them as well as to various animals. The only man who rises above this depravity is Minos himself, who has recognized from certain signs that the era of the bull is over and that rule must now pass to people from the North. It is the thesis of the novel that humankind needs to overcome the beast within in order to establish a new world, which will synthesize Asia and Hellas, dark and light, passion and reason. Thesawi (Theseus) and his friend Thyestes, “half-tamed wild men” (11) from lands that still have no word to designate “art,” arriving as emissaries in Knossos, are awed by the fabulous display of Asiatic wealth but dismayed by the sacriﬁce of victims to the roaring Minotaur in his labyrinth. When the blind Ariadne passes close to Theseus, she is attracted by the aroma of his breath while he falls impetuously in love with her. Thyestes returns to the Peloponnesus to stir up the Akajuasha (Achaians) against the domination of Crete, but Theseus remains in Knossos, where he is pursued by the nymphomaniac mother and daughter. Meanwhile, the blind Ariadne sends him maps of the labyrinth, which she knows from her visions and explorations. Minos, who has learned from oracles that Theseus was destined to come as the redeemer of his declining culture, summons him, the ﬁrst outsider ever to have seen his face, and offers him Ariadne as wife as well as the kingly succession. Theseus, a naive and tediously innocent hero like the “pure fool” of the Grail legend, refuses to accept the rule of the Minotaur, stating his intention to kill the beast, the symbol of Cretan depravity; but he agrees to a political pact with the noble Minos ensuring peace between their lands. Yet he himself, torn between his love for the chaste Ariadne and his lust for the seductive Phaedra, is caught in a “labyrinth of passion” (95). (Several intervening chapters recount the political machinations back in Mycenae and Aigeus’s journey to Dodona to get the support of the Dorian tribes for the invasion of Crete, in order to save his son Theseus and to liberate the world from Minos’s domination.) When the ship arrives from Athens with the nine victims for the Minotaur, Pasiphaë tries to seduce Theseus with promises of assistance. Unsuccessful, she demands in his place his friend Doxileas—she lusts for a “love battle,” she says, with the hard ﬂesh of an alien people—in return for hiding a sword in the labyrinth. When she arrives at the gate of the labyrinth to claim her prize, a messenger announces the

The Minotaur

91

landing of the Achaian and Dorian hordes. As their leader, Thyestes demands the surrender of the city, but his ﬁrst attack fails. Pasiphaë sports with Doxileas, who is afterwards killed by her palace guard— but not before he succeeds in strangling her. Meanwhile, Ariadne has succumbed to a deep illness, and Phaedra goes to the labyrinth to take a weapon to Theseus: the vengeful Pasiphaë did indeed place the promised sword there but only after blunting its cutting edges. When Ariadne awakens from her illness, her sight has been miraculously restored (although her divine gift has been lost). Rushing off to the labyrinth, she ﬁnds Phaedra tending the wounded Theseus, who has killed the Minotaur after a ten-hour battle. He and Thyestes manage to restrain the invading hordes from destroying Knossos, as agreed with Minos. When Minos hears that the Minotaur is dead, he kills the sacred serpent and hands over his royal cloak to Theseus. However, he sadly realizes that Theseus is not yet the man to complete the renewal of the world and that “the animal is eternal” (315): though slain in life, it will remain a phantom in the human soul. Following the elaborate burial ceremonies for Doxileas and the other fallen Achaians and Dorians, war breaks out between the invaders and the Minoan armies recently summoned from East and West, who refuse to respect Minos’s agreement with Theseus. As Minos and Theseus look on from a tower, they are joined by Ariadne and Phaedra, with whom Theseus celebrates a mystical union: “madness of most sacred rapture, ecstatic ﬁre of Minos-blaze and Minos-love. reverence for the All-Holy and sensual longing for Phaedra” (363). Yet Minos ruefully states the thesis of the novel: “It was the greatness of the two of us to believe that we could bridge the hatred of two peoples through wisdom and love and thus compel the ﬁrmament to bend to our will. But the world regards our strength as weakness. We must return to that from which we come” (347). In the course of the battle the tower collapses; Minos and Ariadne are killed; but Theseus manages to rescue Phaedra. Theseus realizes that “his love for the saint had been rejected in malevolent deceitfulness by the bull, and Phaedra imposed upon him as a new law of the blood” (372). As the novel ends, the rampaging Achaians and Dorians raze Knossos to the ground, and “the torment of conscience” pervades Theseus. Subsequently, his grief is resolved into the legend of his deed, “and with him Ariadne, his betrayal and faith in her, Minos and Phaedra—they all

92

Minos and the Moderns

stride with him, hemmed with the down of legend, as sacred dreams of humankind, eternal and grand, through our ages and those to come” (376). After more than three hundred pages of preparation, the labyrinth and the actual battle with the Minotaur are never described, and we learn only that the “eternal minotaur” is nothing but a periodically replaced huge bull. From Spunda’s high-ﬂown rhetoric and often pretentious ideas, it is a relief to turn to the subtler ironies that characterize many of the succeeding works. While most of the prose works were published later, their conception in almost every case can be traced back to the 1930s. André Gide’s Thésée (1946) was written in 1944 but conceived as early as January 1931, when he wrote in his journal: “I am dreaming of a Vie de Thésée where there would take place . . . a decisive encounter between the two heroes,” Theseus and Oedipus.46 It is ﬁtting that the author’s last novel should revolve around a classical myth because his ﬁrst publication over half a century earlier was a Symbolist experiment entitled Le Traité de Narcisse (1891), and he later wrote a playful satire entitled Le Prométhée mal enchainé (1899), which ends with a brief epilogue parodying the Minotaur theme. There we read that the story of Leda and the swan brought her husband so much fame and glory that Minos was not disquieted when Pasiphaë told him that she did not desire men. But later she was vexed to learn that there was no god hiding in her bull. “If Zeus had been involved, I would have given birth to a Dioscurus; but thanks to this animal I have brought into the world nothing but a calf.”47 Gide was no stranger to classical mythology. Gide had been fascinated by the ﬁgure of Theseus at least since 1919, when he published in the Nouvelle Revue Française his brief “Thoughts on Greek Mythology,” in which the Attic hero ﬁgures prominently and whose character, Gide maintains, has long been misunderstood. I admire in Theseus an almost insolent rashness. No sooner is he at the court of Minos than he seduces Ariadne. There is no evidence that he loves her. But he allows himself to be loved by her as long as this love can be useful. Is the 46 André Gide, Romans, récits et soties, ed. Yvonne Davet and Jean-Jacques Thierry (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 1606. 47 Ibid., 341.

The Minotaur

93

thread that she ties to his arm there solely to guide him? No. It is the “apron string” and straightway Theseus ﬁnds it a bit short: he feels it tugging at him at the moment when, with horror and delight, he advances into the unknown depths of his destiny.48

That early sketch contains the gist of Gide’s short récit, which is presented as a ﬁrst-person account written by Theseus for his dead son Hippolytus. Although it rapidly surveys his entire life, the Cretan episode occupies most of the space (eight of the twelve chapters).49 While it was his principal goal to defeat the Minotaur and to liberate Greece from the domination of Crete, he was also curious about that rich, powerful kingdom. Having confessed early (chap. 2) that women were “at once my strength and my weakness,” Theseus ﬁnds himself almost immediately involved with three Cretan noblewomen: Queen Pasiphaë with her empty eyes and bovine expression; Princess Ariadne, who presses him suggestively with her knee during the ﬁrst banquet; and her sister Phaedra, who despite her youth attracts him from the start. Pasiphaë (chap. 5) takes him to her apartment and, massaging his chest, urges him to take advantage of the opportunity. But her seductiveness has a hidden purpose. She admits that she knows why he has come and says that she wants to prevent an error: the Minotaur is not the monster as which he has been portrayed; he is her son. She then relates the background, rationalizing that her bull was no ordinary beast, that her mother-in-law Europa was carried away by a bull, and that Minos is therefore also the son of a bull. As her importuning becomes more sexually urgent, Theseus’s thoughts keep returning to Ariadne, who had let him know that she wanted to meet him on the terrace. When he ﬁnally escapes Pasiphaë and meets Ariadne (chap. 6), she conﬁdes that she will be glad for him to slay her half-brother, the Minotaur, and take her away from Crete. But since no one previously has been able to escape from the labyrinth, she advises him to consult Daedalus, who constructed the maze. Daedalus (chap. 7), after recounting his own story, tells Theseus the secret of the labyrinth: those who enter never leave it—not because they are unable but 48 André Gide, “Thoughts on Greek Mythology,” in his Reﬂections on Literature and Morality, ed. Justin O’Brien (New York: Dell, 1959), 227–33, here 232. 49 I translate the text from Romans, récits et soties, 1413–53.

94

Minos and the Moderns

because they are unwilling to do so! Drugged with various substances and perfumes, they enjoy such blissful illusions that they refuse to leave. Daedalus warns Theseus that he must take Ariadne and leave her on the threshold, attached to him by a thread, “the tangible ﬁguration of duty” and of attachment to the past. Theseus, already irritated by Ariadne’s constant use of endearing diminutives, has no desire to tie himself to her, but he goes along with the plan opportunistically for the moment. As Theseus prepares to leave (chap. 8), he encounters a handsome young man whom Daedalus introduces as the living shade of the dead Icarus, who has become the eternal “image of human inquietude.” Daedalus gives him several spools of thread and instructs him to attach them to Ariadne. When they arrive at the labyrinth (chap. 9), Ariadne attaches one end of the thread to Theseus “with a knot that she considered conjugal” and embraces him with an interminable kiss. In the very ﬁrst room Theseus ﬁnds his companions, happily intoxicated by the perfumes. Covering his face with a cloth saturated with an antidote provided by Daedalus, Theseus makes his way through further rooms until, ﬁnally, he reaches a garden where he ﬁnds the Minotaur asleep. “The monster was beautiful,” he realizes, displaying the very harmony between man and beast that, as we have seen, was the goal of artists from the ﬁn-de-siècle down to Picasso. In the face of this youthful beauty, Theseus cannot initially summon up the hatred necessary for battle until the monster opens an eye, and Theseus realizes that he is stupid. He is later unable to recall how he killed the monster; his memory was affected by the fumes, he reports. (Could this be an act of repression? An implicit inversion of Picasso’s Minotauromachy, where the Minotaur is reluctant to acknowledge his own history of murder?) In any case, he returns to the entrance, dragging along his reluctant companions, who slowly recover their senses. The remaining three chapters record the shifty means by which Theseus manages to leave Crete with Ariadne but also with Phaedra hidden on board. The version according to which Dionysus married the abandoned Ariadne on Naxos, he adds (chap. 11), was nothing but an oblique manner of saying that she consoled herself with wine. The last chapter, following Theseus’s later adventures and Phaedra’s betrayal, is concerned with Oedipus’s explanation of his deeds as seen in light of the superhuman wisdom he has acquired through his

The Minotaur

95

blindness—an embodiment of all that Theseus is not. Theseus, as he tells Oedipus, “remains a child of this earth,” playing the cards that have been dealt to him. Comparing his own destiny to that of the Theban king, he is satisﬁed: “I have fulﬁlled it.” He has created the city of Athens and enjoyed the goods of the earth. “It is sweet for me to think that, after me, thanks to me, men will ﬁnd themselves happier, better, and freer. I have done my work for the good of future humanity. I have lived.” He can now go easily into the netherworld, for he has achieved that against which Daedalus had warned him: “Know that in Hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the unachieved deed of one’s life.” In Gide’s ironic narrative, where almost every seemingly superhuman incident has been rationalized, the labyrinth has been reduced to an opium den and the Minotaur to a handsome but stupid youth. The act of slaying is skimmed over—repressed?—so that the hero has no memory of the deﬁning moment of his career, which he enhances by shrewdly exploiting the men and women alike who are attracted by his masterful strength. It is even suggested (chap. 10), as in the 1919 précis, that he wittingly caused the death of his father by failing to hoist the white sail of triumph. It is such calculating behavior, Gide implies, that enables one to achieve one’s goals in real life, as opposed to the ideal realm glimpsed by Oedipus in his dark vision. To the extent that the ﬁnal dialogue between Theseus and Oedipus concerns the role of past and present, secular and sacred, in human destiny, Kevin Herbert persuasively suggests, Thésée exempliﬁes “positions between which Gide was torn all his life” and “the valediction and ﬁnal summation of his views.”50 Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s prose ballad Minotaurus (1985) had an equally lengthy genesis. Unlike Gide, however, Dürrenmatt did not identify with Theseus but, like Picasso, with the Minotaur. In Winter War in Tibet—the opening section of the collected reﬂections, reminiscences, and themes (Stoffe) whose ﬁrst volume is entitled Labyrinth (1981)—the author recalls his childhood in the Swiss village of Konolﬁngen, located on a high plateau of the Emmental 50 Kevin Herbert, “The Theseus Theme: Some Recent Versions,” Classical Journal 55 (1960): 175–85, here 180.

96

Minos and the Moderns

valley, and his youthful years as a student in Berne and Zürich.51 As a boy he read the Greek myths and became acquainted with the story of the labyrinth. When he left his village at age fourteen to attend school in Berne, “the very ﬁrst impressions were labyrinthine” (45): the long corridors of the evangelical teacher’s seminary, the narrow streets and arcades of the city, and the stone quarries outside the city. Dürrenmatt never came to terms with the city: “we found each other repulsive; I groped my way around like Minotaurus during his ﬁrst years in the labyrinth—it must have been a long time before he comprehended that he was in a place with no exit” (52). In fact, the writer later spent most of his life away from cities in a village above Neuchâtel. It was during those years of the 1930s that he became obsessed with the labyrinth as a metaphor. “By representing as a labyrinth the world in which I ﬁnd myself exposed I attempt to gain distance from it.” Dürrenmatt recapitulates the tale of the Minotaur psychologically and realistically. The birth must have been a difﬁcult one, he imagines, for anatomical reasons. (One of Dürrenmatt’s ink drawings represents this painful birth with a huge horned head emerging from the woman’s womb; consistently, he always refers to the Minotaur as “it” and not “he.”) There are several reasons, Dürrenmatt believes, to explain why Minos did not divorce Pasiphaë: she was a goddess while he was only three-quarters divine; he had ﬁnanced her coupling with the bull because he himself might well have been born as a minotaur; it would not be inconsistent with Mendel’s genetic laws to imagine that Minos himself might have been the Minotaur’s father (and not the bull). In designing the labyrinth, Daedalus presumably had several factors in mind. Because the Minotaur was not a man with the head of a bull but a bull with the body of a man—and hence not an intellectual being—it possessed a wildness and strength that no door could have withstood. (In Dürrenmatt’s many drawings, the Minotaur appears more taurine than human.) Moreover, since as a bull it had the mouth of a ruminating animal and not the teeth of a predatory beast, it would have been a vegetarian. So we have to

51 See Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “Der Winterkrieg in Tibet,” in Labyrinth: Stoffe I–III (Zurich: Diogenes, 1990), esp. 70–88.

The Minotaur

97

imagine the labyrinth as an extensive expanse with gardens, trees, greens, and a pond. According to this interpretation, the Minotaur was not a bloodthirsty cannibal but a son loved by Minos, who felt guilty for its birth because he had refused his tribute to Poseidon. When the seven young men and seven maidens appeared before him, the Minotaur killed and raped and dismembered them with its horns in a sudden access of rage because it realized intuitively that it was different, being neither man nor beast. By forcing down bits and pieces of their dismembered bodies it sought unconsciously to become human. And thus the legend was born. Ariadne helped Theseus to slay the Minotaur because she was jealous of her half-brother, whom their father loved more than her. Decades later, Dürrenmatt reports, after he had thought incessantly about the Minotaur and painted it many times, he changed his mind, deciding that the monster was actually happy in its labyrinth and that Ariadne was motivated not by jealousy but by envy. In any case, the Minotaur eventually encountered Theseus, who killed it—in punishment, as the legend has it. But where a punishment takes place, Dürrenmatt reasons, there must be a court that determines this punishment and a guilt that justiﬁes it. But if Minotaurus is incapable of grasping the concept of guilt, there can be no guilt on its part. It is punished for a crime that preceded its birth: its guilt consists in being the Minotaur, “a guilty innocent.” When toward the end of World War II he imagined a labyrinth, Dürrenmatt continues, he identiﬁed unconsciously with the Minotaur, the inhabitant of the labyrinth, and protested against his own birth: for the world into which he had been born was his labyrinth, the expression of a puzzling mythic world that he did not understand—a Kafkaesque world that calls the innocent guilty and whose law is unknown. He identiﬁed himself, further, with those victims who were thrown into the labyrinth and with Daedalus, who created the labyrinth. Every attempt to shape the world in which one lives is an attempt to create a counterworld. But “realization is something different from conceptualization,” he concluded during his military service near Geneva. “On the banks of the icy Rhone, staring across the border into no-man’s land, I conceived my world-labyrinth” (86). Later he attempted again and again to give it shape: for instance, in an early story entitled “The

98

Minos and the Moderns

Image of Sisyphus” (1945) and in many drawings, watercolors, and paintings.52 In 1972 he tried to synthesize and formulate his thoughts in a Dramaturgy of the Labyrinth (1977)—an effort later incorporated into the section Winter War in Tibet. At this late point in his thinking about the labyrinth, Dürrenmatt came to the realization that he was not the Minotaur but Theseus because he alone enters the labyrinth of his own free will. “On the Ariadne thread of his thinking he begins to search for the Minotaur” and, when he does not ﬁnd it, to ask whether there is a Minotaur at all. If not, why is there a labyrinth? Finally he comes to the realization that Theseus himself is the Minotaur and that every attempt to overcome this world by thinking is a battle where one engages oneself: “I am my enemy, you are yours” (88). It was in this spirit that Dürrenmatt, after a half-century of meditations on the subject, published his “ballad” Minotaurus (1985), whose nine principal scenes are illustrated with full-page drawings that the author—an accomplished artist whose paintings and drawings have been widely displayed and published—created for that purpose.53 Unlike Gide’s Thésée, Dürrenmatt’s Minotaurus is written wholly from the poignantly restricted viewpoint and consciousness of the beast. Having grown to maturity in a cozy stall among cows, the Minotaur awakens one day to ﬁnd itself enclosed in a mirrorwalled labyrinth built by Daedalus. Everywhere it looks it sees itself surrounded by beings exactly like itself and spends its days in joyous dance in “the universe of its reﬂections” (304). One day it sees another being crouching before it, a being that is not one of its accustomed mirror images. It dances with the creature, pursues it through the corridors, and ﬁnally takes it in love—thereby killing it; for the Minotaur does not understand the difference between life and death. It licks

52

Several of these from 1958 to 1985 are reproduced in Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Schriftsteller und Maler, ed. Ulrich Weber and Anna von Planta (Zurich: Diogenes, 1994), ills. 48–65. On labyrinthine images in Dürrenmatt’s early stories, see Sydney G. Donald, “Of Mazes, Men and Minotaurs: Friedrich Dürrenmatt and the Myth of the Labyrinth,” New German Studies 14 (1986/87): 187–231. 53 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Minotaurus: Eine Ballade. Mit Zeichnungen des Autors (Zurich: Diogenes, 1985). A three-volume edition of Dürrenmatt’s Selected Writings has been published by the University of Chicago Press (Chicago 2006); 2:303–13 contains a translation of “The Minotaur” by Joel Agee, which I cite.

The Minotaur

99

Figure 3.3. Friedrich Dürrenmatt. From Minotaurus. 1985. Courtesy of Charlotte Kerr Dürrenmatt.

the naked white body and stirs it gently with its horns. It raises the body in exhortation to the heavens and roars laments (ﬁgure 3.3). But the girl along with all her reﬂections remains motionless until the great black birds of prey descend and begin to tear the body apart. Finally the Minotaur cries out its rage, realizing unconsciously that heaven is punishing it for the blasphemy of its daughter Pasiphaë, who had borne a being that—as an insult to the gods and a curse to mankind—was damned to be neither god nor man nor animal but simply a minotaur, guiltless and guilty alike.

100

Minos and the Moderns

At this moment another being appears with a cloak and sword. Having learned from his experience with the girl, the Minotaur approaches more cautiously and begins to caper around the new creature in a dance of joy at no longer being alone. As the Minotaur dances, the new creature leaps back and forth, waving its cape, and then suddenly steps back and leans against the wall. The Minotaur, now noticing the sword stuck in its own breast, is mystiﬁed by the unaccustomed pain and by the blood on its hands when it pulls out the sword. New creatures appear and begin dancing around it, approaching closer and closer until the Minotaur, enraged that hateful non-minotaurs have presumed to enter its labyrinth, begins a mad slaughter, killing them all, savaging them with its horns, and drinking the blood from their bellies and wombs in the moonlight, as a thick ﬂuttering of carrion birds swoops down. Blinded by the moon, it begins to attack its own images in the mirrors, which shatter and cut its hide, until it ﬁnally realizes that there is only one minotaur and that it is locked in with its own images: locked in a labyrinth which had to be built for its sake because the order of the world had no room for a being like it, whose place is situated somewhere between animal and man and between man and the gods. It must remain in the labyrinth so that the whole world will not degenerate into a chaos, a labyrinth. Collapsing with this insight, the Minotaur falls asleep and dreams that it is a man, unaware that Ariadne has slipped in and out of the room, fastening the end of a red string around its horns. When he opens his eyes the next morning, he sees yet another creature walking toward him—another minotaur! But this new image is weird: it reﬂects the Minotaur’s gestures, to be sure, but uncertainly and awkwardly. Roaring at the joyful discovery that it is no longer alone, that there is truly a second minotaur, a Thou for its I, the Minotaur begins a dance of brotherhood, of friendship, of security, of love, winding the red string around its horns, until the other pulls a sword from his hide and plunges it into the Minotaur’s back. The Minotaur is dead before he hits the ground. Theseus removes the bull’s mask from his own head, rolls up the red string, and disappears from the labyrinth, which now reﬂects nothing more than the dark body of the Minotaur. “Then, before the sun came, there came the birds” (313). Dürrenmatt’s starkly lovely prose ballad, which would be marvelously suited for a ballet, is essentially a masterful psychological

The Minotaur

101

analysis of a primitive consciousness striving to understand a world outside its own narrow realm of experience. It is, therefore, a profound comment on alienation and betrayal in the modern world and the search of the self for understanding and companionship. At the same time, in its depiction of the world as a prison the work, clearly a product of the Hitler years, can be read as a parable on World War II, National Socialism, and the Holocaust.54 In his lifelong obsession with the Minotaur and its labyrinth, Dürrenmatt can be matched in his intensity by no one but Picasso. At the same time, in its communication through dance—dances of joy, of love, of rage, of friendship—Dürrenmatt’s Minotaur shows its ancestry in the ancient Egyptian and Cretan cults of the labyrinth with their dances. During the years when Dürrenmatt was brooding about the grotesque tragedy of minotaurs, several other writers seemed ineluctably drawn to expose its humorous or ironic implications in short ﬁctions. Among the satirical treatments of eleven classical myths in Jules Supervielle’s collection Le Petit Bois (1947) we ﬁnd, in addition to “L’Enlèvement d’Europe,” the tale of “Le Minotaure.”55 This Minotaur is no monster but “a very pretty child of Crete” with only a slight lapsus naturae: a horned head. Already brilliant at age two, by three he displays adult intelligence. He wonders why they regard him as a savage. Granted: he has the head of a bull, but otherwise human hands and feet with neatly manicured nails. To be sure, his mastication is somewhat slower than that of the others, but this is excused because of his affability. He also does not have the problem of the centaurs, when they come to dine and are unable to get all four hooves under the table. He quarrels with them because they insist that the head is the deﬁning characteristic, since the body is animal in any case. Women are attracted by him and, in order not to alarm their husbands, tell them that it cures their migraines to

54 See Ioana Crăciun, Die Politisierung des antiken Mythos in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), whose chapter on Dürrenmatt’s ballad (261–324) is entitled “Politisierung durch Metaphorisierung.” The author suggests that the alternative to the violent world of the labyrinth is the Minotaur’s idealized “dream of humankind” (327). 55 Jules Supervielle, Le Petit Bois et autres contes (Paris: Wittmann, 1947), 17–27.

102

Minos and the Moderns

walk in the Minotaur’s shadow. Cows follow him also; and while not insensitive to their charms, he ﬁnds their affection too simplistic. He himself is drawn to women with an empty gaze and large, wide-set eyes. One day, insulted by a man as being “inferior,” he impulsively gores him and discovers suddenly that “the horn feels truly at home only in someone’s belly.” The authorities of the town, alarmed by fearful families, send a delegation led by Daedalus, who promises the Minotaur a ﬁne palace as a token of their esteem. Daedalus leads him along winding paths toward the palace but, when they arrive, suddenly disappears. In his rage his head becomes so enﬂamed that his singed horns spread a terrible odor through the city—an odor so intense that it causes a plague to spread across Greece and all the islands. To soothe him, they send him a tribute of fourteen youths and children whom the monster—out of shame and fear of ridicule—devours. Soon public opinion is disquieted, but Daedalus himself has died of the plague and with him the secret of access to the labyrinth. So Theseus, who has already achieved fame by killing various giants, designates himself to combat the Minotaur. He has not given thought to his exit from the maze, but when he disembarks at the pier he sees a young woman, Ariadne, playing with a ball of thread. She tells him that the thread can guide him through the labyrinth. Making his way into the labyrinth, he kills the monster with the ﬁrst blow of his club—a disappointment to the children inside, who hoped for a lengthier spectacle. To extend their pleasure he uses a small utensil to saw off the Minotaur’s horns, which are still warm from the battle. Then, mission accomplished, he follows the thread to lead the others out of the labyrinth. A medical examination shows that the Minotaur, though in his prime, was still a virgin, and people begin to understand “how unjust they had been to this bipartite being whom nature had rendered familyless, loveless, and lacking judgment.” Since the Minotaur had neither parents nor friends, Theseus conducts the burial service. The notables of the city accompany the procession along with their wives, their daughters and sons, and many children. Several cows follow at a distance. Almost at the same time that Supervielle was portraying the Minotaur as an exempliﬁcation of the misunderstood outsider, Jorge Luis Borges set down a wholly different reading in “The House of

The Minotaur

103

Asterion.”56 The brief narrative constitutes the ﬁrst-person account of the Minotaur in his labyrinth: a complacent idealist living so happily in the self-enclosed world of his own narrow experience that he is unable to survive in or to comprehend the world outside. He lives alone in his house, which he has even on occasion ventured to leave, returning almost immediately because of the fear on the faces of the people, which he mistakes for reverence. “The fact is that I am unique. . . . Bothersome and trivial details have no place in my spirit, which is prepared for all that is vast and grand.” He amuses himself by running through the galleries of his house with its mangers and troughs, which he imagines as being a world unto itself, and pretending to show it to a second Asterion who comes to visit (almost like Dürrenmatt’s mirrored minotaurs). “Every nine years nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from all evil.” He interprets a dying man’s threat of an avenger as being the prophesy of his own redeemer. “Will he be a bull or a man?” his reﬂections end. “Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?”—that is, a man with the face of a bull. The story ends with a radical shift of subject and a terse line of dialogue: “ ‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus. ‘The minotaur scarcely defended himself.’ ” The Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert tells us that, like Dürrenmatt, he had also ever since the late 1920s always taken the part of the monster. “Poor Minotaurus! From my earliest childhood I felt more tenderness for him than for Theseus, Daedalus, or the other crafty guys. When my father told me the story the ﬁrst time, I felt a painful cramp in my heart and a profound sympathy for the half-animal, the halfman, who was held prisoner by the labyrinth and all human history, so alien to him, of treachery and deceit.”57 After a trip to Greece in 1964, Herbert wrote a lengthy account of his stay on Crete entitled “The Labyrinth by the Sea,” in which he relates the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.58 According to the usual interpretation, he says, “the hero embodies the typically Greek admiration of trickery—or 56 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), 138–40. The story appeared originally in Borges’s collection El Aleph (1949). 57 Zbigniew Herbert, Im Vaterland der Mythen: Griechisches Tagebuch, ed. Karl Dedecius (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 188. 58 Ibid., 143–206, here 187–88.

104

Minos and the Moderns

intelligence—that triumphs over dark powers, the victory of rational order over chaos.” He adds the political reading, according to which Theseus is the liberator and leader of the revolt that freed Athens from Cretan domination. These anti-Cretan interpretations are all at variance, he points out, both with the Hellenic tradition that views Minos as a symbol of justice and with iconographic representations of the Minotaur in which he is invariably a handsome ﬁgure defeated in an uneven battle. This reading underlies Herbert’s one-page ﬁctional account, which relates “the true story of Prince Minotaurus according to the still undeciphered Linear Script A.” In truth the son of King Minos and Pasiphaë was born as a healthy child with a preternaturally large head, which the soothsayers interpreted as a sign of future wisdom; but he soon developed into a strong but somewhat melancholy simpleton. When the priests refused to take him in, Minos had Daedalus construct the labyrinth with “pedagogical architecture”: a system of corridors, graduating from the simplest to the most complex, through which the Minotaur was supposed to be introduced to the principles of error-free thinking. But, wandering through the passageways of induction and deduction and contemplating the educational frescos, the poor nincompoop understood nothing. So King Minos, deciding to rid himself once and for all of this embarrassment, summoned the professional killer Theseus from Greece, who slew the Minotaur. When Theseus emerged from the now superﬂuous alphabet-book of the labyrinth, holding the bloody head of the monster, its eyes showed for the ﬁrst time signs of understanding—the byproduct of experience. After 1950 the story continued to exert its popular appeal in more detailed ﬁctional retellings. In Mary Renault’s The King Must Die (1958)—the ﬁrst half of the Theseus legend, which she later completed in The Bull from the Sea (1962)—the Cretan adventure consumes almost half of the text. In the author’s rationalizing and non-ironic retelling, the Minotaur is Asterion, the brutal son of Pasiphaë by a brawny Assyrian bull-leaper; the labyrinth is the vast palace at Knossos; and Ariadne a priestess regarded as the Goddesson-Earth. Theseus, who comes to Crete as tribute with his fellow Athenians as a bull-dancer, is guided through the palace cellars by

The Minotaur

105

a red thread to Ariadne. She enlists his help against her half-brother Asterion, who seeks to seize control of the government. To that end he has already infected Minos with leprosy, causing the king to hide in his chambers and conceal his disﬁgured face with a golden bullmask contrived by Daedalus. He also tries to have Theseus killed by drugging the bull with which the hero performs his daring bull-leaps. But when an earthquake destroys the palace, Theseus escapes and kills Asterion, who has appropriated his father’s bull-mask. He takes Ariadne with him but must abandon her on Naxos when she relapses into a drunken orgy of sex and brutality with maenadic women in the course of cultic celebrations on the island. In Renault’s version, we sense political undertones surviving from the author’s own experience of the 1930s.59 Asterion aspires to revolution and seeks to attain dictatorial powers by playing the native Cretan populace off against the Hellene ruling classes—not unlike Hitler in Nazi Germany. But the principal, and successful, aim of the novel is entertainment. A similar case could be made for Nikos Kazantzakis’s At the Palaces of Knossos, originally written in the 1940s as a serialized novel for an Athenian youth periodical. It was not published at that time but ﬁnally appeared in 1981. The work is basically a fast-paced adventure story for teenage readers for whose beneﬁt the author introduces several subplots involving young ﬁgures: notably Icarus, son of the master craftsman Daedalus, and his friend Haris, son of an Athenian blacksmith kidnapped by Minos to forge iron tools and weapons. Prior to the famous visit Theseus journeys incognito to Crete in order to spy on the kingdom’s military preparations. The Minotaur, an ancient monster long antedating the present King Minos, senses tearfully that he will be killed by Theseus, who regards him almost pitifully as “this poor wretch . . . this sickly creature.”60 The trick with the ball of

59 Peter Wolfe, Mary Renault (New York: Twayne, 1969), 16, argues that “Although Mary Renault published only one novel before 1940, it is hard to ﬁnd a better term for her than that of a 1930’s novelist” and suggests persuasively that “Parallels between ﬁctional events and the milieu of the 1930’s are also present in the Classical novels” and “invite loose comparisons with the totalitarian threat of the 1930’s” (19–20). For a less sympathetic reading that ignores any political implications, see Herbert, “Theseus Theme,” 175–76 (as in note 50). 60 Nikos Kazantzakis, At the Palaces of Knossos, trans. Themi and Theodora Vasils (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), 159.

106

Minos and the Moderns

thread occurs to Ariadne when she sees a kitten playing. Ariadne persuades her father to grant a favor by performing a dance straight out of Strauss’s Salome. Minos tries to have Ariadne’s friend Krino killed by drugging the white bull with which she performs the bull-dance, a practice well-known from ancient Minoan culture and also used by Renault in her novel. On Naxos, Ariadne willingly leaves Theseus to accompany Dionysus on his great ship. At the end and on the advice of Athena, Theseus joins forces with barbarian hordes from the north to conquer rich, powerful, but decadent Crete (as in Franz Spunda’s 1931 novel). The only modern touches involve Theseus’s economic motive for taking the blacksmith back to Athens to make weapons for the war against Crete; the vaguely antiwar sentiment implicit in Daedalus’s refusal, after Icarus’s death, to equip an elite battalion of winged soldiers with the ability to ﬂy; and the contrast created by setting the strong and unspoiled Athenians and barbarians against the corrupt and weakened Cretans. However, the play that Kazantzakis wrote in 1949 (see below) reﬂects more directly than the simpliﬁed narrative for a young audience the author’s profound understanding of the myth. In addition to such ﬁctional retellings, the myth survived metaphorically in dozens of works, including many with “labyrinth” in their titles, even though they renounced the legend itself: for instance, Michel Butor’s La Modiﬁcation (1957), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth (Dans le labyrinthe, 1958), or Anaïs Nin’s Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). Other examples using the device of the labyrinth include such well-known works as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili, 1972) and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980).61 But these later authors have concerns that differ 61 See Catherine d’Humières, Le Monstre en son labyrinthe dans les littératures du XXème siècle en langues romanes, 2 vols. (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2000–2002). D’Humières (2:774) dates the radical break in treatments of the legend to 1950 and not, as I do, to the 1930s; this emphasis is reﬂected in the chronological list of texts she treats (2:777–78). See also Siganos, Le Minotaure et son mythe, half of whose examples (57–58) come from the decades after 1950; André Peyronie’s rubrics “Labyrinth” and “Minotaur” in Dictionnaire des mythes littéraires, ed. Pierre Brunel, 2d ed. (Monaco: Rocher, 1994), 915–50, 1053–60; and Manfred Schmeling, “Der Erzähler im Labyrinth: Mythos, Moderne und Intertextualität,” in Europäischer Philhellenismus: antike griechische Motive in der heutigen europäischen Literatur, Philhellenische Studien 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995), 251–70.

The Minotaur

107

appreciably from those of the artists and writers of the 1930s and 1940s. When writers tire of writing about the labyrinth, they write labyrinthically.62

T H E MI N OTAU R ON STAG E After World War II the Minotaur and its labyrinth offered powerful symbols for the experiences of those who survived. The ironies of Marguerite Yourcenar’s “entertainment” To Each His Minotaur (Qui n’a pas son Minotaure?) are qualiﬁed by the ambivalent adjective “sacré,” which can mean either “holy” or “cursed.” While the “divertissement” was not published until 1963, the author tells us that its genesis goes back to the early 1930s, when she and two friends agreed to write separate versions of the legend from the viewpoints, respectively, of Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur.63 Yourcenar admits that she cheated a bit because Ariadne was only one of the characters she created for her treatment: Theseus, Phaedra, the Minotaur, and a clever sailor named Autolycos. Amused by the game for a week or so, they soon turned to other matters, putting away the Minotaurmask, Theseus’s wooden sword, and Ariadne’s jewels of paste. The three pieces were later published in a journal, but Yourcenar says she never met anyone who had read them: “the autumn of 1939 was not a particularly favorable moment to publish a literary fantasy on the misdeeds of the minotaur; reality offered more and worse” (177). When she took up her bal masqué again in 1944, “The minotaur and his lair, the victims rushing on their own to death, the nonpersevering Theseuses, and the Minoses winking at their crimes, all cast into a new light by the rays of the movie projectors of 1944, suddenly acquired a terrible symbolic reality” (178). As she reworked the play that year, she added only two new scenes: one showing the victims in the hold of the prison ship discussing the nature of the Minotaur— a scene, she adds, that bears the date of its composition in its very 62 Manfred Schmeling, Der labyrinthische Diskurs: Vom Mythos zum Erzählmodell (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1987). 63 Yourcenar, “Aspects d’une legende,” 176–79 (as in note 4).

108

Minos and the Moderns

ﬁligree: “the image of the leaded cars leading to Auschwitz and the image of man in general, enclosed in his shifting destiny, knowing nothing of the world that surrounds him and continuing to the end to ask himself where he’s going.”64 The second is the scene in which Theseus, lost in the labyrinth, hears voices from his own past and future and is unable to identify himself among the various identities. No longer the comedy prince of the earlier sketch, Theseus has become prey to rumblings of his conscience and an altogether unpleasant person. Retouched in the late 1950s, it was essentially the dark version of the war years that was ﬁnally published in 1963.65 In an antiquity that with its postcards and journalists anticipates the interwoven past and present of such postmodern works as Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World (Die letzte Welt, 1988), Autolycos speaks (in the ﬁrst of the ten scenes) a brief exposition, which gives way (scene 2) to the chorus of victims in the hold, torn between hope and despair.66 “Our sacriﬁce will save them all,” says one. “The State would not exist without us” (187). And another: “There must be a reason for so many holocausts. Let’s not judge It: let us be silent, we who have been judged.” Still another believes that their compatriots will always remember them: “We are eternal” (188), to which another responds dryly: “We shall perish. They will forget us.” As Theseus and Autolycos listen to the discussion below (scene 3), Theseus complains that he would like, once and for all, to escape the heroic destiny associated with his name: to “renounce the hardships demanded by a hypothetical victory” (193). He confesses that he would rather be the Minotaur than kill it. The dialogue between Ariadne and Phaedra as they watch the prison ship land (scene 4) exposes the radically different characters of the two sisters: Ariadne is a chaste, pure idealist while Phaedra, her mother’s true daughter, wants only to be seduced: the Minotaur, she says, “was born from my mother’s folly, from a woman’s caprice” (199). Minos, meanwhile, has learned from forty years of political experience to have no fear of Theseus: “I have 64 Patrick de Rosbo, Entretiens radiophoniques avec Marguerite Yourcenar (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), 155. 65 The English translation by Dori Katz (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984), on which the author collaborated, dates the play to 1943; but in her Entretiens, 154, Yourcenar says that the play began to take shape only in 1945. 66 Marguerite Yourcenar, Théâtre II (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 181–231.

The Minotaur

109

conﬁdence in the solidity of the walls, the ingenuity of the locks, the charm of the women, the prestige of the Laws” (201). When Theseus, following a dalliance with Phaedra, arrives at the gates of the labyrinth (scene 5), he discovers that he is too late: the other victims have already entered. He has no choice but “to resign myself to heroism” (205). “The labyrinth has complications worse than death, solitudes more fatal than battles,” he fears, afraid of losing himself and his consciousness. But Ariadne gives him the thread and assures him that she is not simply a woman, but his. In the labyrinth (scene 6) Theseus is confronted not with a monster but with the voice of his own past and future, of his own guilt and responsibility in the person of women he has betrayed, Antiope and Helen, and of his father and son, whose deaths he will cause. He collapses in a great shattering of woodwork and breaking of glass. When he is found asleep the next morning at the edge of the sea (scene 7), he reports that he arrived too late to save the other victims but that the Minotaur is dead. He agrees to take both Phaedra and Ariadne back with him. When their ship is stilled by the wind at Naxos (scene 8), Ariadne realizes from impressions in the sand that Theseus has already deceived her again with Phaedra. “My time of heroism is approaching its end,” Theseus tells her, “and great love has never been my specialty” (221). He admits that he did not kill the Minotaur, “a ﬁction invented by Athenian propaganda, that imbecilic story in which I was involved despite myself.” Ariadne sends them on their way, saying that she intends to stay. “I’m stopping, while there’s still time, what was for me the human adventure; I will not triumph over Phaedra by becoming Phaedra” (222). Theseus and Phaedra can play to the end their roles of king and queen, even though Phaedra confesses that she is already a bit weary of her much older (thirty-eight-year-old) husband. As Ariadne observes their departure from a promontory and enjoys the pure solitude for which she has long yearned (scene 9), God appears to her in the person of Bacchus. Ariadne tells him to leave her in peace, saying that she likes neither tigers nor wine, and that she wishes only to sleep. God tells her that it was he whom Theseus encountered in the labyrinth: “It is necessary to battle me before knowing me” (227). What he saw was himself: “It wasn’t the ﬁrst time that man created me in his own image.” He will also encounter Phaedra and consume her: “Even the least traveled roads lead to you,” Ariadne realizes (228).

110

Minos and the Moderns

When she says that she would prefer not to leave the island, God points out that the island is already rising toward the stars. She never before knew, she confesses, the sweetness of self-abandonment and now has no fear of death. “You are already dead, Ariadne. And it is precisely so that your eternal life begins” (229). To Ariadne’s apotheosis the last brief scene adds a cynical footnote. Noting signs of grief, Theseus tells Phaedra that, to spare his sickened father any shock he carefully instructed Autolycos not to raise the black sail, an explanation that Autolycos hears with astonishment. Meanwhile he warns Phaedra not to reveal to the journalists gathering on the quai any details concerning the atrocious deaths of the hostages in Crete. He tells Phaedra that he hopes she will be able to get along with his sullen twelve-year-old son. In the ﬁnal words of the play, which of course point ironically to the next stage of the tragedy, she replies: “I hope, Theseus, that I can make myself loved by Hippolytus.” Yourcenar’s literary fantasy, now clearly marked by the experience of World War II and the Holocaust, has developed into a thoughtful and sometimes mystical meditation on two conﬂicting aspects of womanhood, on the lies of political expediency, on bravery and cowardice, and on tyranny and its hapless victims. By the end we understand the title: destiny is determined by inner character and not by external factors, no matter how monstrous they may appear. It is no accident that Yourcenar entitled her own memoirs Le Labyrinthe du monde (1974–88). Nikos Kazantzakis wrote his Thésée (1949) as an attempt to come to grips with “the dark subconscious, wherein the three great branches (Animal, Man, God) have not yet become separated; this is the primitive, dark Essence containing everything.”67 The highly lyrical allegory comprises a single sustained act limited essentially to three ﬁgures— Theseus, Ariadne, and Minos—with briefer appearances by the Athenian ship captain and the young men and women of the sacriﬁcial tribute, and the entire action takes place around midnight before the gate of the labyrinth.68 With its unity of time and place and its limited 67 Letter of April 3, 1949; in Helen Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on his Letters, trans. Amy Mims (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 400. 68 I have read the play only in its French translation by Charles Guillemeau in Kazantzakis’s Tragédies Grecques (Monaco: Rocher, 1953), 159–245.

The Minotaur

111

number of protagonists, the play closely resembles a classical Greek drama. As Theseus, bathed, perfumed, and wreathed like a sacriﬁcial beast, stands before the labyrinth, he recalls how the Cretans for several days have tried to soften him up with wine and women, but he is resolved to battle the Minotaur, who can be heard within. The captain approaches to notify him that a priestess of the Great Goddess, with whom he has been sleeping, has told him that Ariadne intends to visit Theseus at midnight. The captain tries to convince the young hero that there is only one sure happiness in life: the irreplaceable minute that is no longer than a ﬂash in nothingness (177). But Theseus claims that he is interested in nothing but struggle. He deﬁnes himself as a realist, a worker, a lawgiver (180–81), whereas Ariadne represents Chaos. She tries to persuade him that he has a secret desire to take her into his boat and to ravish her—that he will lose himself in “the inextricable maze” of her spirit and her body (185)—but he asserts that his soul occupies a higher place than his loins. Shifting the argument, she begs him to take her with him, saying that she knows everything except sexual love. She claims that he secretly wants to raise the black sail so that he can take over his kingdom. She explains that Minos has sent her to save her brother from him—that her father has returned from his ritual trip to the mountaintop, whence he brings laws to Crete, with the warning that the gods have died and deserted his land. When Theseus still insists that it is his destiny to descend into the labyrinth and to destroy the Minotaur, she warns him that he will get lost. He replies that he has heard of her magical skein, which she calls a symbol for her mind. Ariadne hides behind a column when her father appears. Surprisingly, Minos tries to persuade Theseus to join forces with him. Their conversation leads Theseus to believe that there is no Minotaur, and the king admits that it was a necessary ruse invented to control the people of Crete: in truth, the Minotaur constitutes a synthesis of beast, man, and god, struggling desperately to impose order on the chaos of the world. He himself once descended into the labyrinth to do battle with the creature, but failed. There are only three possibilities, he continues: to kill the creature and be damned; to be killed and still to be damned; or to vanquish the creature without killing or being killed—a battle that must be fought anew by every generation. Minos blesses Theseus and sends

112

Minos and the Moderns

him into the labyrinth accompanied by Ariadne with the magical spool of her mind. The earth trembles, and the captain reappears with the young Athenian victims, who execute a bull-dance before the gates. Suddenly they hear the delightful strains of a ﬂute, whereupon Theseus and Ariadne appear from the labyrinth. It turns out, according to his own and Ariadne’s accounts, that he fought the beast and then embraced it with tears, freeing it from its horns and beastlike appearance and calling it “older brother.” Ariadne reports in turn that she saw two youths, both tall, blond, and browned by the sun and sea. “Gods? Men? I couldn’t tell the difference” (234). In any case, they fell into a profound silence that Minos recognizes as the last of “the three gates of the Mystery: blood, tears, silence.” Theseus tells his listeners that he entered the labyrinth as a barbarian and emerged with a new concept of love, of virtue, of virginity. He informs Ariadne that, though he loves her, his new god demands that he leave her behind. The infuriated Ariadne begs her father to kill him, and Minos raises his conch to summon his warriors. “Let us declare war on Destiny,” he tells her. But at that moment the gate of the labyrinth opens and, like an archaic statue, a kouros, the liberated Minotaur appears—resembling Theseus but taller, more handsome, calmer. He extends his right arm while he discards with his left the bull-mask. Ariadne falls at his feet; Minos bows his head; Theseus makes a gesture with his hand. Then he summons his companions, saying “hard combats still lie ahead of us” (245). It is difﬁcult to see in this mystery play any hint of the recent European past. Indeed, Kazantzakis explicitly stated that he was striving, by hard work, “to forget the pain of Greece. . . . When will this martyrdom be over?”69 The play reminds us, rather, of the mythic power underlying early Greek drama and the moment of anagnorisis when mortal man recognizes the divinity within himself and his own responsibility for his mortality.70 Instead of a comment on Europe’s past, it is a summons to a new future. As Kazantzakis remarked in that same letter, 69

Letter of April 3, 1949; in Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 400. Herbert, “Theseus Theme,” 178, suggests that the author “is stressing his belief that god and man are mutually dependent, that man must ﬁrst discover the divine, and that this divinity can accompany man in his ﬁght for freedom.” 70

The Minotaur

113

Minos represents “the last fruit of a great civilization” and Theseus “the ﬁrst ﬂower of a new civilization.” In his autobiographical Report to Greco written late in his life he spoke of “the age-old battle between man and bull (whom today we term God).”71 We can conclude this glance at the Minotaur in the theater with a work that actually brings the beast onto the stage: Elliot Carter’s ballet suite The Minotaur (1947). Like most of the others, Carter became familiar with the story during the 1930s. It is not unlikely that he became acquainted with the journal Minotaure during his years in Paris, where he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger. Later, while teaching at St. John’s College in Maryland in the early 1940s he read widely in the history and culture of classical antiquity. When in 1946 he was invited by the Ballet Society to compose a large-scale ballet score, he chose the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur and included in the powerful overture reminiscences of ancient Greek music. The curtain for the performance featured a design of the labyrinth,72 and the ﬁrst half of the ballet deals with the story of Pasiphaë, who engages in a violent dance with the bull. In the second part, Minos orders the Greek victims to be sent to the labyrinth, whereupon Theseus and Ariadne perform a pas de deux leading up to Theseus’s farewell as Ariadne unwinds her thread. In an agitated sequence Theseus ﬁghts and kills the Minotaur and then follows the thread back out while Ariadne enters from another side in search of him. As the work concludes, the triumphant Greeks emerge from the labyrinth and prepare to leave Crete—and Ariadne. Like Kazantzakis, Carter and George Balanchine preserved the unity of time and place by having all the action take place before and within the labyrinth; in both works, consequently, Ariadne is deserted in Crete and not on Naxos. In the ballet, however, the Minotaur is simply a minotaur with no further symbolic meaning and Theseus merely thoughtless and self-centered. The ballet, despite its powerful and moving music, has no detectable political

71 Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, trans. Peter Bien (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 486. 72 I take my information from a newspaper review cited on the dust jacket of the LP recording of Carter’s ballet suite by Howard Hanson conducting the Rochester Orchestra (Mercury, 1978).

114

Minos and the Moderns

or mythic meaning; it is simply an entertainment, like most of the works written after the 1940s.73 The obsession with the Minotaur was largely a product of the tensions of the years preceding and during World War II. Of course the myth has continued occasionally to attract the minds and imaginations of writers down to the present. In Claudia Bernardoni’s “philosophical novel” Die Opfer des Minotaurus (2002; “The Minotaur’s Victims”), set in Berlin of the year 2000, a politician and his consultant are blackmailed for a sex-game they played years earlier under the pseudonyms Theo and Mino with two women they called Lissi and Kora (from Lysidike and Koronis, two of the victims whom Theseus accompanied to Crete). The mythic analogy is made explicit in another context by the consultant’s wife, who tells her lover the traditional story of Theseus, the Minotaur, and the labyrinth. MacDonald Harris’s Bull Fire (1973) features a contemporary Minotaur nicknamed Bovril, who lives in a villa on a Mediterranean island and entices visitors into his father’s basement “Lab” for sexual encounters. The plot of Benjamin Tammuz’s thoughtful thriller Minotaur (English translation: New York: New American Library, 1980) has nothing to do with the myth. But the hero has since childhood seen himself in the etching from Picasso’s Vollard Suite (Nr. 90) depicting the minotaur dying in an arena while a woman stretches out her arm to him; when he is shot at the end, in the street outside his beloved’s house, he sees her standing above in the window with her hand extended. More recently, in Barbara Vine’s mystery The Minotaur (London: Viking, 2005), the labyrinth is the maze-like library of an English country house, its minotaur is the severely autistic son of the wholly dysfunctional family, and various other parallels emerge (e.g., to Theseus and the women of Minos’s house). The twelve-year-old hero of Rick Riordan’s book for young readers, The Lightning Thief (New York: Mirimax, 2005), encounters the Minotaur along with other mythic creatures on the Long Island of today. In Victor Pelevin’s cyber-satire The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006), the Minotaur is the imagined horned controller of the chatroom in which the eight characters—Ariadne, IsoldA, Organizm, Monstradamus, and 73 See also Bohuslav Martinu’s one-act lyric opera Ariane (1958), with a libretto by the composer after the play by Georges Neveux, Le Voyage de Thésée (1948).

The Minotaur

115

others—communicate as they wait for the Theseus who will liberate them from their labyrinth of virtual reality. In the computer game Dungeon Keeper the usual values are reversed: here the players are supposed to identify with the monster named “Horny” who guards the labyrinth.74 In general, however, almost every work we considered, whether personal or sociopolitical in tendency, reﬂected the violence that erupted during the troubled decades surrounding the war. To be sure, the Minotaur and its labyrinth offer astonishingly multivalent images, which have been exploited in a variety of ways by modern artists and writers. Most generally—in the poems of Muir, Aiken, and Cronin and the prose of Walser and Dürrenmatt—the labyrinth represents the social-cultural world in all its chaotic darkness. For several writers with personal experience of World War II—notably Yourcenar, Auden, and Renault—the realm of Minos with its prisonlike labyrinth took on the appearance of Nazi Germany and Minos the characteristics of Hitler. In the works of those writers who identify more closely with Theseus (Spunda, Gide, Kazantzakis, Renault), the ﬁgure of the monster is often reduced to the point of being hardly represented. Others focus more centrally on the Minotaur. The artists of the 1930s generally, and Picasso in particular, tended to see in the Minotaur a largely personal image—one, however, whose bestial violence foreshadows the horrors of World War II. Many of the writers, in contrast—Dürrenmatt, Supervielle, Holub, Herbert—viewed the Minotaur as an image of the outsider. Borges, while also focusing on the Minotaur, presented it as a negative image of blind selfcenteredness. In any case, few myths demonstrate more strikingly the persistence and revival of classical antiquity in the literature, art, and music of modernity. 74 Frank Degler, “Vom Minotaurus zum Dungeon Keeper: Narrateme im Computerspiel,” Grenzen der Germanistik: Rephilologisierung oder Erweiterung? ed. Walter Erhart (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004, 431–53. See also Sondra F. Swift, “In and Out of the Labyrinth: Myth and Minotaur in MacDonald Harris’s Bull Fire and Steven Sherrill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 17 (2007): 255–65.

This page intentionally left blank

4 The Other Cretans: Alienation, Invention, Liberation Europa and the bull and the Minotaur in his labyrinth have largely dominated the twentieth-century obsession with the myths of Crete. Yet the mythic imagination, which has no love of loose ends, requires closure, as well, for several of Europa’s descendants who play a role in the central narrative of the Minotaur—notably Minos and Pasiphaë along with their daughters, Ariadne and Phaedra. Finally, the mythic cycle would not be complete without the story of Minos’s henchman and Pasiphaë’s enabler, Daedalus, and his son Icarus.

M I N OS A N D PA SI PH A Ë Myth tells us little about Pasiphaë after her big moment in the bull pasture, although several of the modern ﬁctions, as we have seen, let her live on until Theseus’s arrival, when she attempts to seduce him. Modern artists and writers for their part have also shown surprisingly little interest in her. Henri de Montherlant’s one-act Pasiphaé (1938) takes place before the construction of the labyrinth or the birth of the Minotaur. Its single act is devoted to the reﬂections, motivations, and self-justiﬁcations in the mind of Pasiphaë on the evening as she prepares to couple with the bull.1 During those same years, André Masson, whose obsession with the Minotaur we have already 1 Henri de Montherlant, Le Théàtre complet, 6 vols. (Neuchâtel: Ides et calendes, 1950–51), 5:81–113.

118

Minos and the Moderns

noted, painted a Pasiphaë (1937) depicting the violent coupling of a ﬁerce dark bull with a pale and helpless woman. Later in the United States, he completed another abstract Pasiphaë (1943–45), which inspired the young Jackson Pollack to his own painting of that title (1943–44). Robert Graves wrote a brief “Lament for Pasiphaë” based on his understanding of Pasiphaë as a moon-goddess: following her appeal to the sun, the poet comments that “Faithless she was not: she was very woman” until “she who shone for all resigned her being” in the notorious coupling.2 As for Minos, Herodotus relates that, following Daedalus’s escape, Minos pursued him to Sicily, where the local ruler, who had given Daedalus refuge, took him in with feigned hospitality and then had him boiled in the bath by his daughters. In recognition of his stature as a just lawgiver, Minos then became a judge of the dead in the netherworld. Yet despite his semi-divine birth, spectacular death, and renowned afterlife and despite the series of love affairs that he pursued during his lifetime—with Britomartis, Procris, Scylla, among others—and his successful military-naval exploits, Minos has not attracted the attention of writers and artists, remaining for the most part a secondary ﬁgure in someone else’s story. In one notable exception, B. Cyril Windeler’s King Minos of Knossos (1935), which is “respectfully dedicated” to Sir Arthur Evans, the author uses the legendary destruction of Knossos for portentously symbolic purposes.3 It is the argument of the play that King Minos was warned by the priesthood to banish his son Khalis, who, having perceived a loftier, eternal truth, turned away from the ancient worship of the Snake Goddess, ruler of the underworld (vii). The king, fearing that his son in exile might attract an even larger following that would spread the heresy and rise against him, imprisoned the prince in the palace—shades of the Minotaur!—and sent away another in his place. Minos, we are further informed, represents man as “king of his lower mind, his emotional and his physical forces” (vii), unwilling to release the spiritual forces and aspirational intellect within himself as 2 Robert Graves, Collected Poems (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 254; see also his The Greek Myths (New York: Penguin, 1960), 1:297. 3 B. Cyril Windeler, King Minos of Knossos (London: Oxford University Press, 1935).

The Other Cretans

119

embodied by his son. The king is supported in the play by the mercenaries of the Black Company and its sinister captain, while the White Guard and its lieutenant are loyal to the prince. The brief action, communicated in high-ﬂown blank verse, takes place before the shrine of the great Mother Goddess in the courtyard of the palace at Knossos, where Khalis’s betrothed Ishama, the princess of Libya, and her friend Panasae, discuss ominous signs that have been reported: tremors in the earth, fragmented viaducts, receding waves, rumblings from below, and falling walls and columns (act 1). That night, disturbed by public outcries for protection, Minos decides to move his son secretly and lock him for three days in the cell “where is enshrined / That Holy One to whom thou hast denied omnipotence; / Daring, in raving insolence, to profess to all / That thou and She art one” (23; act 2). The prince is imprisoned there, but the following morning disaster strikes: the king is killed by falling towers, and the captain of the Blacks seizes command. But at that moment the shrine splits to reveal Prince Khalis, who emerges unharmed to ﬁnd his beloved Ishama, who has been in his mind “like a strange, glowing thought of beauty” (43). Leaving the captain of the Blacks to rule in Crete, Khalis and Ishama—spirit and beauty now united—go forth to seek their own future. The captain remains behind as king, crowned, as he suddenly realizes, with responsibility. “How different is a fruit that has been gathered” (44). The highly rhetorical verse drama with its improbably invented plot offers a slight frame for the Hegelian philosophy of history it exempliﬁes—the emergence of spirit from the dark powers of irrationality—and the implicit political commentary on contemporary Europe: indecisive rulers pushed aside by the violent forces of totalitarianism.

ARIADNE AND PHAEDRA Their daughters lived fuller lives—or at least lives that offered more promising material to future writers and artists.4 Ariadne’s remaining 4 See Rebecca Armstrong, Cretan Woman: Pasiphaë, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

120

Minos and the Moderns

career, following her rescue of Theseus from the labyrinth by means of the spool of thread, was quite brief.5 True to his word, Theseus took her away from Crete—but only as far as the nearby island of Naxos, where, deserting her in her sleep, he abandoned her to her fate. Later, according to the myth, she was married to Dionysus (or Bacchus). Ariadne’s plaintive lament, as she stands on at the seashore and watches the disappearing ship of the treacherous Theseus, was memorably poeticized in antiquity by Catullus in his epyllion (Carmen 64) and by Ovid in the tenth of his Heroides (representing an epistle from Ariadne to Theseus). In the years immediately before World War I, several composers, writers, and painters dealt with the same theme. Among his Dionysos Dithyrambs (1891), Nietzsche included a poignant poem entitled “Ariadne’s Lament” (“Klage der Ariadne”), which refers not to her desertion by Theseus but, rather, to what she perceives to be the cruel blows by Dionysus as he seeks to penetrate her heart, “my most secret thoughts” (“meine heimlichsten Gedanken”).6 Only when he threatens to depart does she realize that she desires him, “my unknown god! my pain! my last happiness!” (“mein unbekannter Gott! mein Schmerz! mein letztes Glück!”). The poem ends when Dionysus explains that one must ﬁrst hate oneself if one is to love oneself and with his mysterious statement: “I am your labyrinth” (“Ich bin dein Labyrinth”). Others made use of the same theme: Jules Massenet in his opera Ariane (1906) with a libretto by Catulle Mendès; the popular German novelist and dramatist Paul Ernst in his three-act Ariadne auf Naxos (1912); and Lovis Corinth in his painting Ariadne in Naxos (1913). But with the exception of Nietzsche’s poem these respectable albeit fairly conventional treatments have been largely displaced in the public consciousness by two works that have entered the international repertory. The classic attitude of the sleeping Ariadne—reclining with lightly crossed legs, her face propped on one hand and the other arm thrown 5 For this paragraph, see Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 3–17. See also Theresia Birkenhauer, “Mythenkorrektur als Öffnung des theatralischen Raums: Ariadne auf Naxos,” in Mythenkorrekturen: Zu einer paradoxalen Form der Mythenrezeption, ed. Martin Vöhler and Bernd Seidensticker (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 263–77. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (München: Hanser, 1954–56), 2:1256–59.

The Other Cretans

121

loosely over her head—achieved from antiquity onward such iconographic status that it was formalized in textbooks of art as the “Ariadne pose.” It was this pose that obsessed Giorgio de Chirico, beginning with a group of eight paintings in 1912–13 and extending through his entire lifetime in scores of works known collectively as the Piazza d’Italia paintings, in which the mythic theme is juxtaposed dramatically with its modern setting.7 Ariadne’s abandonment followed by her marriage to Bacchus provided the material for Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912; revised to its present form in 1916) with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Again, as in de Chirico’s paintings, the ancient action is given a more recent framework: the opera seria of Ariadne is produced as entertainment for dinner guests in eighteenth-century Vienna, and its dramatic scenes are divided by a comic intermezzo featuring songs and dances by a commedia dell’arte troupe. As late as 1927 Darius Milhaud produced his opera L’Abandon d’Ariane with a libretto by Henri Hoppenot. In general, however, while Ariadne continued to play a role in the many and various works dealing with Theseus and the Minotaur, she was rarely featured as the central ﬁgure, whether in music, literature, or art. When she does appear, it is normally as a compelling image for the modern theme of human loneliness and alienation. Many years later, the myth continues, Ariadne’s sister Phaedra entered into a diplomatic marriage—to seal a pact between Attica and Crete—with the now aging Theseus. There, in an episode immortalized by Euripides in his Hippolytus, Aphrodite causes her to fall in love with Theseus’s son; but when she declares herself to him, the young man, a victim of his own sense of self-righteous purity, indignantly rejects her advances. Out of vengeance Phaedra, now maddened in her passion, hangs herself, leaving behind a letter falsely accusing Hippolytus of raping her. Theseus sends his son into exile, and Hippolytus is almost immediately dragged to death in his chariot when his horses are frightened by a great bull that emerges from a sea surge sent by Poseidon. When the shattered body is brought back to Theseus, Artemis notiﬁes the devastated father of his son’s innocence. This tale 7 Michael R. Taylor, Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002).

122

Minos and the Moderns

of passion and bloody vengeance—especially with the messenger’s high-ﬂown account of the mutilation of Hippolytus as elaborated rhetorically ﬁve centuries later by Seneca in his Phaedra—then made its way down to the Renaissance and Baroque, where it was repeatedly adapted, most brilliantly by Racine in his masterpiece Phèdre (1677). Unlike the loneliness theme of Ariadne, however, the rhetorical passion of Phaedra has held less interest for the twentieth century. Even when the theme has been taken up, mainly in dramatic form, the works have enjoyed little popular success. Gabriele D’Annunzio looked to Phaedra to ﬁnd an adequate surrogate for the erotic passion of his lover Donatella (Natalia de Goloubeff). “I had to give myself up blindly to the storm,” he wrote her on December 10, 1908. “It was because your singing muse’s voice gave me no rest. . . . So I ﬂung myself upon an antique prey, with the velocity of the great rapacious birds. I really possessed Phaedra. . . . I dare, after Euripides, after Seneca, after Racine, to present a new Phaedra. You have given me the power to fecundate the exhausted womb.”8 However, the womb so fecundated with Nietzschean ideas about the violence and sensuality of a preclassical Dionysian antiquity produced, if not a minotaur, an equally strange monster: D’Annunzio’s huge (3,200-line), baggy Fedre (1909). The ﬁrst of the play’s three acts has almost nothing to do with the classic Phaedra theme: inﬂated by contamination from other plays, it ﬁrst introduces Theseus’s mother Aethra (Edra) and the Suppliants from Euripides’ drama of that title, who are awaiting news of Theseus’s success in recovering the bodies of their men slain in the battle of the Seven against Thebes. It goes on to recount Fedra’s (Phaedra) conversation with a beautiful Theban slave-girl sent as a prize to Hippolytus and whom the jealous Fedra kills in a semi-sacriﬁcial act. Following this seemingly interminable ﬁrst act, which is more narrative than dramatic, we get to the Phaedra/Hippolytus theme proper. Fedra, it emerges, is inﬂamed not only by her violent passion for Ippolito but also by her long-abiding hatred of Teseo, for whom she was not so much a wife as “the robber’s prize” (“non la donna di Tèseo, la cosa fui del rubatore”), tossed carelessly into the ship’s hold along with 8 Quoted from Frances Winwar, Wingless Victory: A Biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio and Eleonora Duse (New York: Harper, 1956), 234.

The Other Cretans

123

other booty.9 In the course of their long dialogue and Fedra’s conversation with a Phoenician pirate, the weary Ippolito falls into a dreamy slumber, from which Fedra arouses him with a passionate kiss. “That wasn’t a mother’s kiss” (“No fu bacio di madre il tuo,” 113), he notes reproachfully. She continues her attempted seduction by arguing that she is not his mother nor is he her son: there is no blood-mixture between her and him. When he still rejects her impetuous advances, she says that she will offer him, then, if not the love then the power of Fedra, the daughter of Minos. In a blind fury he grabs her by the hair and causes her to fall, but she continues to provoke him until he rushes blindly from the room. When Teseo appears, having seen his son pallid and wrathful, he presses Fedra for an explanation. Eventually she lets him drag the false account out of her, swearing to its truth by the gods of the underworld. At the beginning of act 3, which takes place in an outdoor setting featuring a temple of Aphrodite as well as a sacred grove of Artemis, Ippolito’s death is reported at length by a witness. When Fedra appears, she is cursed by Etra, whose accusations Fedra contemptuously brushes aside as “the petriﬁed virtue of old age” (“impietrita virtù della vecchiezza,” 3125). She gleefully announces to Teseo, whom she calls “the destroyer of Antiope [Hippolytus’s mother] and Ariadne” (“Distruttore d’Antìope e d’Ariadne,” 3047), that Ippolito was pure—purer than sacriﬁcial wine or lustral water and more limpid than air. The ﬁnal scene remarkably and consciously parallels the closing moments of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, whose heroine wills herself to death. Challenging the power of the grove’s virgin goddess, as the ephebes look on in shocked horror, Fedra seems to see Artemis with her bow and feels a coldness infuse her body. Falling to her knees, she dies beside the body of Ippolito. “I’ve won after all,” she exclaims. “Ippolito, I’m with you” (“Ancóra vinco! / Ippolito, son teco,” 163). A year later Miguel de Unamuno set out, like D’Annunzio, to write what he repeatedly called a “drama of passion” (“un drama de pasión”), saying that the contemporary theater had all too little of such to show.10 The action of his “stripped-down tragedy” (“tragedia desnuda”) Fedra 9

Gabriele d’Annunzio, Fedra, ed. Pietro Gibellini (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 119. See the introductory notes in Miguel de Unamuno, Obras Completas, vol. 5, Teatro completo y monodialogos (Madrid: Escelicer, 1966), 57–61. 10

124

Minos and the Moderns

(1910) is set in the present, and the dialogue contemporary and idiomatic. In addition to Fedra and Hípolito, the principal characters are her husband Pedro, her nurse Eustaquia, her servant Rosa, and Pedro’s friend Marcelo. The updated action of the ﬁrst two acts more or less follows that of Euripides and Racine as Fedra, ill from her unrequited passion and already under the medical care of the physician Marcelo, confesses her love to her son-in-law. Rejected, she informs her husband and brings about an enmity between father and son. But this Christian Phaedra is unable to accept her own guilt. She cannot continue to live “in this hell” (349: “en este inﬁerno”) with father and son at odds on her account and, above all, without the love of Hípolito. Before she dies, she composes a letter containing the ﬁnal confession (350: “mi última confesión”) of her crime and detailing the whole truth (“la verdad entera”). Otherwise, she says, the Virgin would not pardon her. After her death Eustaquia hands the letter to Pedro, and Hípolito conﬁrms it as “the whole truth,” explaining that he did not speak sooner because he was unwilling to accuse her and to upset his father’s tranquility and honor simply in order to defend himself. Father and son embrace and resolve to live on in the knowledge that Fedra was, after all, “a sacred martyr” (363: “una santa mártir”) who knew how to die. To turn to a more recent example that differs radically from D’Annunzio’s violent passion and Unamuno’s soothing modernization, Robinson Jeffers, who had already written his own versions of the Oresteia (in “The Tower beyond Tragedy,” 1925)11 and Medea (1946), found in Phaedra the perfect theme to illustrate the theory of inhumanism that he developed late in his career, “a shifting of emphasis and signiﬁcance from man to not-man.”12 As Jeffers’s Aphrodite coldly states in The Cretan Woman (1954), “to suffer is man’s fate, and they have to bear it” (3:324).13 To punish Hippolytus, a young man who because of his homosexuality refuses to worship her, she exploits Phaedra as her tool. “I am a little sorry for the lady Phaedra, his old father’s young wife, / Who must go down into shame and madness to 11 See Theodore Ziolkowski, The View from the Tower (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 83–91. 12 In the preface to Robinson Jeffers, The Double Axe and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1948). 13 The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, 3 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), “The Cretan Woman” occupies pages 3:315–63.

The Other Cretans

125

make his ruin.” But the gods cannot have scruples: “we are forces of nature, vast and inﬂexible.” Hippolytus realizes that Phaedra in her passion is “clearly insane; not responsible; not to be blamed” (3:335). But his rejection maddens her: “This is the worst thing that can happen to a woman,” says one of the women of the chorus: “when love meets contempt” (3:337). When Phaedra tells the impetuous Theseus that Hippolytus has raped her, Theseus confronts his son, who refuses to accuse Phaedra, whom he once loved and honored. Because her maidservant Selene and the other women falsely conﬁrm the lie, Theseus brutally stabs Hippolytus with his sword. Almost immediately, and maliciously, Phaedra confesses to Theseus that she lied: “I lied, you understand: he was clear: he was pure as crystal: and any fool but you, Theseus, / Would have perceived it” (3:356). It was Theseus she hated, “an old gray manslayer, an old gray wolf, stinking of blood.” Taunting, she dares him to kill her. When he refuses and kneels in bewilderment by his son’s body, she goes into the palace and hangs herself. Theseus is left alone, having lost “the two I loved” and so profoundly misunderstood. As the drama ends, it is a mirthful Aphrodite who speaks the ﬁnal words, and not the consoling Artemis of Euripides’ tragedy: “We are not extremely sorry for the woes of men. We laugh in Heaven” (3:363). As men in the future become more powerful and think that they control their destinies, she warns, “Let them beware. Something is lurking hidden. / There is always a knife in the ﬂowers. There is always a lion just / beyond the ﬁrelight.” While these three adaptations are fascinating and signiﬁcant as reﬂections of their authors’ personal beliefs—D’Annunzio’s passionate eroticism, Unamuno’s Christianized tragedy, and Jeffers’s grim inhumanism—they had small public impact and contributed little to the continuity or reception of the myth of Phaedra in modernity. Euripides’ own Hippolytus, moreover, enjoyed conspicuously fewer stagings in the twentieth century than did, say, his Bacchae, Medea, or Trojan Women.14 Despite occasional allusions—for instance, 14 Hellmut Flashar, Inszenierung der Antike: Das griechische Drama auf der Bühne der Neuzeit 1585–1990 (Munich: Beck, 1991), 398–401. Flashar notes (124) that remarkably few performances occurred despite a relatively successful revival in the ﬁrst decade of the century. In contrast, Seneca’s Phaedra has shown up since 1965 on stages in various countries. See Theodore Ziolkowski, “Seneca: A New German Icon?” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 11 (2004): 44–77, here 49–50.

126

Minos and the Moderns

Marguerite Yourcenar’s reﬂections on “the passionate criminal we owe to Racine” in Fires (1936)15—a piece of lyrical prose recapitulating the thoughts of the frustrated queen as she decides to implicate Hippolytus in her death—Phaedra is less meaningful to modernity, it appears, than she was to Seneca’s Neronian Rome or the Racinian grandeur of Louis XIV’s France.

DA E DA LU S A N D I C A RU S Of all the principals remaining on Crete after the slaying of the Minotaur only two achieved a notable success in the imagination and works of the twentieth century. Daedalus was not himself a Cretan. An Athenian by birth, he enjoyed a ﬂourishing reputation in his native city as a gifted sculptor and creative inventor—an Attic Leonardo da Vinci— until, overcome by jealousy at the inventions of his nephew and pupil Talos, he murdered the boy by pushing him from the top of the citadel of Minerva. Forced to ﬂee from Athens, he was taken in by Minos and eventually married a Cretan woman, who bore his son Icarus. Following Pasiphaë’s tryst with the white bull, Minos commanded Daedalus to construct a labyrinth in which to conceal the hybrid Minotaur. In punishment for his complicity with Pasiphaë and to retain his skills as an artisan, Minos also conﬁned Daedalus—according to some accounts within the labyrinth itself. Eventually, “hating Crete and his long exile and afﬂicted by love of his native land,” as Ovid puts it (Met. 8.183–84: Creten longumque perosus / exilium tactusque loci natalis amore), Daedalus began to plan his escape. Minos controls the land and the sea, he told his son, but the sky lies open (Met. 8.185–86: terras . . . et undas / obstruat: et caelum certe patet). So, in a phrase made famous by James Joyce as the motto to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he turns his mind to unknown and, by implication, forbidden arts (Met. 8.188: ignotas animum dimittit in artes), daring to alter nature itself (naturamque novat). Hindered more than helped by the assistance of the young Icarus, 15 Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires, trans. by Dori Katz in collaboration with the author (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981), x.

The Other Cretans

127

Daedalus constructed two sets of wings made of feathers, twine, and wax. After testing the wings himself, he instructed Icarus in their use, cautioning him to adhere to a middle course: for if he should ﬂy too low the sea waters would weigh down his wings; and too high, the sun’s ﬁre would melt them. Then, kissing his son, he led him on their ﬂight to freedom. But Icarus, “attracted by a desire for the heavens, directed his course higher” (Met. 8.224–25: caelique cupidine tractus / altius egit iter). In the heat of the sun the wax melted, his arms beat uselessly, and, crying his father’s name, he fell into the sea below and drowned. Daedalus, cursing his own forbidden arts (Ovid repeats the word artes), collected his son’s body and buried it in the nearest land, which took its name, Caria, from the boy. As Daedalus was burying his son, a partridge (perdix) chattered gleefully from a ditch nearby— the very bird into which Pallas Athena had transformed the boy Talus when he fell from the citadel years before. Daedalus then made his way to Sicily, where he was taken in by the king, who protected him from the pursuing Minos. This tale was recounted most elaborately by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (8.152–262), which, despite brief mentions in several other classical works, provided the principal source for all future adaptations. Ovid had related a similar but shorter version, using many of the same phrases, in his Ars amatoria (2.21–98). Ovid’s account contains at least three motifs that were developed by future writers.16 First, while for Daedalus the wings are merely a tool, a means to escape, for Icarus they represent the temptation to ﬂight itself and to the conquest of the unknown. Second, Icarus’s disobedience can be seen both as a symptom of the son’s rebellion against the father and as a rejection of society’s laws and rules. Finally, the gleeful sounds 16 Bernhard Greiner, “Der Ikarus-Mythos in Literatur und bildender Kunst,” Michigan Germanic Studies 8 (1985): 51–126, esp. 61–70; and the afterword to Mythos Ikarus: Texte von Ovid bis Wolf Biermann, ed. Achim Aurnhammer and Dieter Martin, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Reclam, 2001), 244–67, esp. 44–49. The volume contains a useful anthology of texts from antiquity to the present. See also Robert Vivier, Frères du ciel: Quelques aventures poétiques d’Icare et de Phaéton (Brussels: La Renaissance du livre, 1962), a chatty overview down to the early twentieth century, mainly in France; Niall Rudd, “Daedalus and Icarus,” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Inﬂuences in Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–53; and Erich Unglaub, Steigen und Stürzen: Der Mythos von Ikarus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 15–21.

128

Minos and the Moderns

of the partridge at his burial make it clear that his death amounted to retribution for his father’s guilt: both for the murder of his pupil Talos and for his presumption in the use of unnatural arts to enter the forbidden realm of the heavens. The Christian Middle Ages saw little in the myth except a parable on the dangers of curiositas (the search for forbidden knowledge) and the virtue of mediocritas (avoidance of extremes). In the fourteenthcentury Ovide moralisé, for instance, the story exempliﬁes the dangers of the unbridled passion suggested by low ﬂight as well as the arrogance of the all too lofty soaring.17 In other texts of the next two centuries, and notably the sixteenth-century emblem books, which cite the image to symbolize the same ethical conviction, it is usually though not invariably Icarus, rather than Daedalus, who is singled out as the offending overreacher, as in the famous painting by Bruegel.18

DA E DA LU S T H E SC I E N T I ST A N D A RTIS AN In the twentieth century, Daedalus succeeded in regaining some of his stature as the scientiﬁc hero, notably in J. B. S. Haldane’s inﬂuential paper Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924), where the geneticist prophesied an era of scientiﬁc progress under the aegis of this “ﬁrst modern man.”19 Following his achievements in sculpture, Haldane continues, “his interest inevitably turned to biological problems, and it is safe to say that posterity has never equaled his only recorded success in experimental genetics. Had the housing and feeding of the Minotaur been less expensive it is probable that Daedalus would have anticipated Mendel.” In order to escape Minos’s “ruthless economies” he invented the art of ﬂying. “He was the ﬁrst to demonstrate that the scientiﬁc worker is not concerned with gods.” Yet, and perhaps precisely for this reason, “he has been exposed to the universal and agelong reprobation of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent.” 17

Mythos Ikarus, 249. Unglaub, Steigen und Stürzen, 22–34. 19 J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (New York: Dutton, 1924), 46–49. 18

The Other Cretans

129

In his response, Icarus; or, the Future of Science (1924), Bertrand Russell expressed his skepticism regarding Haldane’s conception of a society ruled by scientists. “I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy. Icarus, having been taught to ﬂy by his father Daedalus, was destroyed by his rashness. I fear that the same fate may overtake the populations whom modern men of science have taught to ﬂy.”20 Among scientists and scholars, nevertheless, Daedalus generally prevailed. The quarterly journal published since 1955 by the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences is entitled Daedalus in memory of its namesake, “an inventor, scientist, and unriddler of riddles.” On its title page, the journal features from issue to issue images of different labyrinths in order to symbolize its interdisciplinary aspiration to “lift each of us above his cell in the labyrinth of learning in order that he may see the entire structure as it from above, where each separate part loses its comfortable separateness.” With a few notable exceptions, however, it has been not Daedalus but his son Icarus who has captured the modern imagination.21 The verse-tragedy Das Labyrinth (1945) by the Austrian poet-dramatist Maria Neuhauser (pseud. for Maria Loibl) revolves around the tragic fates of several people who enter the fabled maze, and principally Daedalus, with whose words the play begins and ends.22 Act 1 is principally exposition: Ariadne wants to save Theseus, whom she spots among the victims sent from Athens, and Daedalus, sickened by the sacriﬁces, offers to help. Even Minos suggests that the sacriﬁces may cease after Theseus’s death; in the meantime, he plans to wed Ariadne to the god Dionysus. In act 2, following a dialogue in which Theseus tells Minos that Athens will thrive as Crete declines and that he will conquer the Minotaur not with might but with mind, the Athenians perform a sacriﬁcial dance; Ariadne joins them and, with a ball of thread given to her by Daedalus, wordlessly acts out the means by which Theseus and his wards can escape from the labyrinth. 20

Bertrand Russell, Icarus; or, the Future of Science (New York: Dutton, 1924), 5–6. Despite its title Juan José Domenchina’s Dédalo (1931–32) (in his Poesias completas [Madrid: Signo, 1936], 147–201) has almost nothing to say about Daedalus except to make him complicit in and guilty for the adultery of Pasiphaë (178). 22 Maria Neuhauser, Das Labyrinth: Tragödie in fünf Akten (Vienna: Amandus, 1945). 21

130

Minos and the Moderns

Before Theseus enters the maze, Daedalus whispers a few words and hands him a sword, which Ariadne blesses at the altar of Aphrodite; he promises to rescue her. Daedalus warns him to bore holes in the Cretan ships before he escapes; and Ariadne sends drugged wine to the harbor watchmen. The act ends with Ariadne’s fateful words: “I fear nothing in his love,” whereupon Ariadne and Theseus disappear from the drama, which continues with the tragedy of Daedalus. The third act begins with Minos’s dedication of Ariadne to Dionysus; but it is reported that Ariadne has disappeared, that the boats have been damaged, and that the watchmen are asleep. For their part in the escape Daedalus and Icarus are condemned to the labyrinth, where (act 4) Daedalus in a vision witnesses Theseus’s reluctant abandonment of Ariadne on Naxos: he has been commanded by Dionysus, who demands the rights of his symbolic marriage to Ariadne. Minos orders Daedalus to help him capture the fugitives and imprison them in the labyrinth “in order to restore law and order” (102); but he adds that Daedalus, in return for being freed from the labyrinth, must always be restricted to the palace grounds. When Daedalus refuses to accept this tyrant’s deﬁnition of freedom, Minos storms out and places guards at the gate of the labyrinth. But Daedalus awakens Icarus, telling him that they are ﬁnally free: wings are growing. The play closes (act 5) on an island near the Italian coast (Cumae) where the despondent Daedalus is lamenting the death of Icarus. In a series of rapid scenes Minos appears but is prevented from seizing Daedalus by Apollo; Ariadne ecstatically proclaims her marriage to Dionysus; and Daedalus is forgiven by the ghost of Talos for his own sinful murder years earlier of that young pupil, whose skill he envied. The play ends with Daedalus’s song in praise of Apollo while a chorus of hunters and shepherds hail “Fate, ruling eternally, unbreakably, and inescapably.” While the passages involving Minos have unmistakable political implications recalling Nazi tyranny, the work as a whole sounds a more religiously mystical tone, suggesting that in the labyrinth of the world god’s will ultimately prevails to set matters aright: Ariadne is wed as promised to the deity; Daedalus is punished and forgiven; Minos and the warriors of his evil empire are overcome; and Theseus, shadowed by no guilt for his divinely ordained abandonment of Ariadne, will establish a free society in Athens (i.e., post–World-War-II Europe?).

The Other Cretans

131

Nothing could be further from the piously celebratory tones of Neuhauser’s tragedy than Ernst Schnabel’s wittily rationalizing picaresque novel I and the Kings (Ich und die Könige, 1958).23 In this ﬁrst-person account of his “projects, incidents, and résumés,” written ostensibly for his deceased son but actually in order to extract some meaning from the “educational journey” (57: “Bildungsreise”) of his life, Daedalus depicts himself as a typically sober and rational engineer after Haldane’s model: the inventor, among other things, of conventional Greek sculpture, the ﬁrst mobile, and various more practical devices. Having served as Court Engineer to the kings of Athens and Egypt, he arrives in Crete where he plans and builds the palace at Knossos in the form of a labyrinth, a sort of philosophical Pentagon copied from the prototype he saw during his time in Egypt. The “minotaur” is actually Asterion, the illegitimate son of Pasiphaë and her lover, Admiral Taurus. Daedalus designs a theater and dancing ﬂoor for Ariadne, with whom he has fallen in love; but Pasiphaë infuriates Minos by performing there a public tableau-vivant of Europa and the bull, which in turn gives rise to rumors about the “minotaur.” Theseus, who invents bull-ﬁghting to entertain the Cretans, kills the “minotaur” in open battle in the bull ring, and then departs with Ariadne as the unspoken reward for his deed. In pursuit, Daedalus catches up with the abandoned Ariadne on the isle of Dia, too late to prevent her suicide. At that point he decides to leave Crete and, inspired by the principle of windmills he has seen, constructs wings not of feathers but out of thin bronze leaves that he ﬁnds in the workshops. After the death of Icarus, who otherwise has literally no role in the novel, Daedalus arrives in Sicily, where he charms the princesses with his dolls. When Minos arrives to take him back again, King Cocalus is amenable; but his young daughters boil Minos in his bath so that he will not take away their dollmaker. As his account ends, Daedalus tranquilly awaits his death. The poet-sculptor Michael Ayrton’s remarkable poetic narrative The Testament of Daedalus (1962), illustrated with his own ink drawings, resulted from a long obsession with Daedalus and Icarus. This obsession, inspired by Ayrton’s visit to Cumae in 1956 and Virgil’s 23 Ernst Schnabel, Ich und die Könige: Projekte, Zwischenfälle und Résumees aus dem Leben des Ingenieurs D. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1958).

132

Minos and the Moderns

account of the illustrated portal created there by Daedalus, produced initially a number of paintings and bronzes focused principally on the son and including a statue of Icarus situated near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London as well as many scraps of verse in various forms and called “Songs of Icarus.”24 But Ayrton’s attention soon shifted to the craftsman-father. The “Songs of Icarus” are included in the prose narrative that Daedalus purportedly set down at Cumae as his testament, a testament that recounts the principal events of his career up to that point: the alleged murder of Talos, the fake cow for Pasiphaë, the labyrinth, his inventions, and so forth. But it amounts above all to Daedalus’s attempt to come to grips with the riddle of his son. “I am not exactly an immortal and certainly not an oracle,” he tells us. “I am not a poet and I am certainly not a hero. That was my son’s role and he played it fully with a proper degree of foolishness mixed with glory” (10–11).25 A skilled technician and a realist, like Schnabel’s Daedalus, he confesses his jealousy of his son, who was clumsy with his hands but who achieved a fame greater than his father’s “although he had no particular skill and could not be described as a maker of anything, except his own death, which he contrived in a vainglorious and very poetic manner” (14). While Daedalus learned many things during their long ﬂight, and notably the geography of the Mediterranean, Icarus was obsessed only with reaching his “burning god” (49). And the scream that Daedalus heard as his son fell was “not a scream of pain but a dreadful cry of loss” when he lost his god Apollo. Evidently Ayrton’s poetic narrative did not satisfy his obsession with Daedalus. Five years later, he came back to the subject in a much longer novel, The Maze Maker,26 which is allegedly the autobiography that Daedalus addressed to readers three thousand years in the future and in which the role of Icarus becomes almost negligible. Despite all his other inventions in technology and art, Daedalus now regards himself principally as a maze maker because he has designed mazes as simple as a dancing ﬂoor and as complex as the labyrinths he created for Minos 24 On Ayrton’s artistic treatments of the theme, see Jacob E. Nyenhuis, Myth and the Creative Process: Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, the Maze Maker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), which is copiously illustrated. 25 Michael Ayrton, The Testament of Daedalus (London: Methuen, 1962). 26 Michael Ayrton, The Maze Maker (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967).

The Other Cretans

133

and, later, for King Cocalus on Sicily. (In this connection we recall from the preceding chapter the vast maze that Ayrton, in obsessive imitation of his hero, constructed in Arkville, New York.) Daedalus sees “each man’s life [as] a labyrinth at the center of which lies his death” (12). Only the ﬁrst of the three parts deals with the events in Athens and Crete, and virtually every incident is given a realistic rationalization—even the Minotaur, if one accepts him as a wild genetic freak (as in the ten etchings in which Ayrton depicted the Minotaur’s life cycle). Daedalus does not kill Talos; instead, it is Talos who kills their assistant and then ﬂees, causing people to believe in Daedalus’s guilt, and later reappears on Crete, now completely mad and clad in metal armor. Icarus is the son born to Daedalus by Naucrate, a Cretan priestess; but he is a heroic fool who has little interest in his father’s work. Daedalus does devise a fake cow to fool the handsome bull, but he had already constructed the labyrinth years earlier as a private retreat for Minos himself. Daedalus is blamed for Pasiphaë’s lust, for the birth of a monster, and for a threat to Cretan peace. In one of his frequent asides applicable to the twentieth century, Daedalus writes: “It is amazing into what confusion political discussion can drive people. Public opinion often displays a poetic wildness as intoxicated as any Dionysiac celebration and politics are largely conditioned by the brevity of public memory” (114). The wings amount to a kind of glider that takes advantage of thermal air currents. As Daedalus and Icarus leave Crete, the kingdom is struck by a disastrous earthquake, and Icarus, foolish but bold, dies on the second day of their gliding ﬂight. The remaining two parts of the novel take place in Cumae and Sicily. The rather phantasmagoric episode in Cumae is triggered by Virgil’s description in the opening lines of Aeneid 6 of the paneled gate that Daedalus built there and by the circumstance that it serves as the access to the underworld. The bulk of the narrative is a rather technical account by a professional sculptor of ore mining in this Cumaean “underworld,” foundry work, casting, and sculpture by the lost-wax method, interspersed with visions including the Minotaur, Pasiphaë, and the Cumaean sibyl Deiphobe. Part 3 takes Daedalus by foot and boat to Sicily, where King Cocalus saves him from the attacking Cretan warriors and where Daedalus sets down his autobiographical account. In this brilliantly imaginative work, which mixes myth with archaeological realism and history in a fascinating and generally convincing

134

Minos and the Moderns

array, Icarus plays virtually no role, apart from his prescribed role of death resulting from foolhardy daring. The focus of the author, himself a sculptor and maze-maker, is concentrated wholly on the rational inventor and designer of labyrinths. To take a more recent example: in Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Daedalus in Sicily” (1993) the aged Daedalus looks back at his life: constructing an artiﬁcial heifer “to cuckold the king,” or a labyrinth to hide “the unbearable offspring,” and ﬁnally “a ﬂying contraption.” Now in his dotage, having ﬂed all his earlier inventions, he ties a string to his ankle (“so as not to get lost”) and “heads out for Hades.”27

T H E R E SU RG E N C E OF I C A RUS We can point to at least three causes for the resurgence of Icarus in the twentieth century. First, Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Les Plaintes d’un Icare” (1862) became an inﬂuential poetological statement for modern writers, as evidenced by its translation by such poets as Stefan George, Stefan Zweig, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The signiﬁcance of Baudelaire’s statement is suggested by the title, which by speaking of “The Laments of an Icarus” clearly equates Icarus and his fate with that of the modern poet.28 Baudelaire’s short poem begins with the assertion that, in contrast to those contemporaries satisﬁed with earthly pleasures, he is exhausted from constant striving to attain the unattainable—the clouds, the stars, the sun—and to penetrate the ultimate secrets of space. En vain j’ai voulu de l’espace Trouver la ﬁn et le milieu. (In vain I wished to ﬁnd the limits and the center of space.)

But—and here the Icarus image is made explicit—he feels his wing melting beneath a ﬁery eye yet, consumed by his love of beauty, will not manage even to bestow his name on the sea below. 27 Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 404. 28 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, ed. Ernest Raynaud (Paris: Garnier, 1958), 269.

The Other Cretans

135

Et brûlé par l’amour du beau, Je n’aurai pas l’honneur sublime De donner mon nom à l’abîme Qui me servira de tombeau. (And seared by love of the beautiful / I will not have the sublime honor / of giving my name to the abyss / that will serve as my tomb.)

Baudelaire was of course not the ﬁrst poet to take Icarus as a model. Already Horace began one of his odes of self-assertion (Carmen 2.20) with the image of himself, the poet now transformed, ﬂying on mighty pinions through the pure air. Non usitata nec tenui ferar pinna biformis per liquidum aethera vates. . . . (I shall be borne by no common or ﬂimsy / wing, twofold in form, through the liquid air, / a poet-seer.)

Four strophes later in the same poem he goes so far as to claim that he, a “melodious bird” (canorus ales), will soon be even more famous than Daedalus’s son Icarus (iam Daedaleo notior Icaro). This identity of Icarus and the poet lay largely dormant until it was picked up again by Baudelaire and, through him, passed along virtually as a commonplace to many modern poets. Gabriele D’Annunzio, for instance, can be numbered among the modern admirers of “the lofty destiny of Daedalus’s son, [who] kept himself far from the limits of moderation and plunged boldly into the maelstrom.” Oh del ﬁglio di Dedalo alta sorte! Lungi dal medio limite si tenne il prode, e ruinò nei gorghi solo.29

(Daedalus is dismissed merely as “the creator of the infamous cow”: “il fabro della vacca infame.”) Another short poem from that same year 1904 takes its title from a phrase describing Icarus’s higher course in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Altius egit iter.”30 The poem relates Icarus’s 29 “L’ala sul mare,” from the volume Alcyone, in Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poesi, Teatro, Prose, ed. Mario Praz and Ferdinando Gerra (Milan: Ricciardi, 1966), 322. 30 Ibid., 322–23.

136

Minos and the Moderns

ﬂight and fall as seen by a poet rowing his despotic ruler in a small boat. That one, he points out to the despot, has always been his spiritual brother, whose bold endeavors he wishes to emulate. He implores the tyrant to allow him to seek the extremes of life. “O Dèspota, costui” dissi “è l’antico fratel mio. Le sue prove amo innovare io nell’ignoto. Indulgi, o Invitto, a questa mia d’altezze e d’abissi avidità.” (“O tyrant,” I said, “he is my ancient / brother. I aspire to undertake anew his endeavors / in the unknown. Indulge me, unvanquished one, in / my lust for heights and abysses.”)

A third and much longer (650-line) poem from the volume Alcyone (1904), “Ditirambo IV,” is a ﬁrst-person account by Icarus of his own life, whose eight episodes are introduced by the phrase “Icaro disse:—”.31 The ﬁrst four memories are associated with Pasiphaë and her unnatural lust for the white bull. It emerges—this is D’Annunzio’s unique contribution to the myth—that Icarus is in love with Pasiphaë and “burned within himself ” (“Io chiuso in me riarsi,” 157) when he saw her coupling with the bull and, in honor of the occasion, decided to consecrate an eagle to the sun. The next episode relates his battle with the eagle, which awoke in him an inextinguishable desire to ﬂy (“una immortale avidità di volo,” 261) and whose wings he took away for his father to study and copy for him. As Daedalus worked on his unnatural task (“innaturale opera,” 334–35), scores of other birds— hawks, buzzards, vultures, cranes—had to sacriﬁce their feathers. In the penultimate episode Icarus sees “the adulteress of the pastures” (“l’adultera dei pascoli,” 431) one last time as she “felt . . . the horrible monster come to life and quiver, trembling, within her—her son both bovine and human” (“Sentiva nel suo ventre, abbrividendo, / vivere il mostro orrendo, / fremere il ﬁglio suo bovino e umano,” 444–46). The ﬁnal episode begins with the preparations for ﬂight and Daedalus’s warnings; but Icarus has only silent contempt for the ingenious artisan (“Il mirabile artiere ebbi in despregio / silentiosamente,” 504–5). Introduced by Icarus’s cry “Oh libertà!” (530), the last 31 “L’ala sul mare,” from the volume Alcyone, in Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poesi, Teatro, Prose, ed. Mario Praz and Ferdinando Gerra (Milan: Ricciardi, 1966), 323–44.

The Other Cretans

137

hundred lines rapturously describe the experience of ﬂight, ending with Icarus’s plunge into the deep sea now named for him (“nel mio profondo Mare,” 645). D’Annunzio’s reason for writing his dithyramb is made explicit in the concluding four lines, spoken now by the poet himself, where he prays that he may likewise fall into the sea and lose his life but that his name may remain immortal. Icaro, Icaro, anch’io nel profondo Mare precipiti, anch’io v’inabissi la mia virtù, ma in eterno in eterno il nome mio resti al Mare profondo! (Icarus, Icarus, I too fell into the deep / sea, I too lost there / my strength, but from eternity to eternity / let my name remain upon the deep sea.)

D’Annunzio’s dithyramb combines the poet’s own spirit of passion and violence with the medieval trope of Icarian ambition and the Horatian/Baudelairean sense of poetic mission to produce a typically modern appropriation of Icarus. The image was not limited to European poets. In his volume Young Adventure (1918) Stephen Vincent Benet included a poem entitled “Winged Man,” which disparages Daedalus while glorifying Icarus. Whereas Daedalus, “the cunning workman, the crafty past all praise,” ﬂies low and safely, Icarus “with all Adventure in his heart” soars up “where lightnings go.”32 Borne ever higher by “the rapture of his wings,” his heart “burns intenser with the strength of his desire.” Despite his piteous end, the poet instructs us, we should “see the ﬁrst supernal glory, not the ruin hideous.” For Icarus was Man—“Man absurd, gigantic, eager for impossible Romance”—and will take his eternal place “on the highest steeps of Space.” For the twenty-year-old American, as for many of his European contemporaries, Icarus exempliﬁed the Young Adventure of the poet—an image that continued to exert its attraction for decades to come.33 32 Stephen Vincent Benet, Young Adventure: A Book of Poems, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), 79–81. 33 The anthology Icarus, ed. John H. Bens and Douglas R. Baugh (New York: Macmillan, 1970), which is intended as a text for English courses, actually includes only three poems about the mythical Icarus. In the preface, however, he is evoked as “an image which suggests thoughts of daring and adventure, perhaps even pride that man can approach to the level of gods” (ix).

138

Minos and the Moderns

A second cause can be seen in the Wright brothers’ ﬂight in 1903 and the succeeding rapid development of aviation in Europe, which generated enormous excitement among writers and artists.34 In his Futurist Manifesto of 1909 Marinetti proclaimed the intention of “the young and strong Futurists” to sing of “the sleek ﬂight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”35 He goes on to imagine that their successors will ﬁnd them “crouched beside our trembling airplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take ﬁre from the ﬂight of our images.” In September of that same year the widely publicized international aviation meeting in Brescia attracted—in addition to D’Annunzio, who seized the opportunity to make his ﬁrst airplane ﬂight, Giacomo Puccini, and representatives of the Italian nobility—Franz Kafka, who wrote a sober account of the occasion that was soon published in the newspaper Bohemia (without, however, any reference to Icarus).36 Edmond Rostand, another enthusiast of aviation, published a “canticle of the wing” (Le Cantique de l’aile) in 1911, in which he virtually dismisses Icarus. “We haven’t read about it in Ovid’s fables,” he boasts. “We’ve seen it. It is in vain that the specter of Icarus attaches itself to the slender fusilage. It is time to sing the Canticle of the Wing: Man fears nothing.” Nous ne l’avons pas lu dans les fables d’Ovide: Nous avons vu cela. C’est en vain que s’accroche au fuselage grêle Le spectre Icarien. Il est temps de chanter le Cantique de l’Aile: L’homme n’a peur de rien.37 34 See Felix Philipp Ingold, “Ikarus novus: Zum Selbstverständnis des Autors in der Moderne,” in Technik in der Literatur: Ein Forschungsüberblick und zwölf Aufsätze, ed. Harro Segeberg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 269–350, which deals more generally with the literary enthusiasm about ﬂight and aviation and very little with the speciﬁc theme of Icarus; and especially Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 35 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Selections, trans. by R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1972), 42–43. 36 “Die Aeroplane in Brescia,” in Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), 401–12. 37 Edmond Rostand, Le Cantique de l’aile (Paris: Charpentier, 1922), 2.

The Other Cretans

139

In Rostand’s eyes modern ﬂight is something altogether different from Icarus’s pathetic effort: for anyone contemplating an airplane in the blue sky it is man’s very soul, “Psyché visible” (14), that traverses the azure. But another contemporary, Amelia Josephine Burr, warned of the dangers in man’s recent conquest of the skies. Watching the modern “Icarus” (1912) soar ever higher, “an iron monotone of human will,” and tame the Prince of Air, the spectators wonder “What hinders men . . . from traversing the Upper World / In quest of unimaginable things?” This presumptuousness is answered when their champion is hurled at their feet, “dead, with broken, silenced wings.”38 Hermann Hesse, who had been eager for years to experience ﬂight, made his ﬁrst ascent in 1911 in the zeppelin Schwaben.39 The following year he was able to fulﬁll his “secret wish of ﬂying” when “a lovely one-winger” passed over his home near Berne, Switzerland.40 Not at all interested in the technical aspects, Hesse ﬂew “for the sake of pure sensation.” As he gazed down at the landscape, gripped by the experience, he felt himself to be a child again, a boy, an adventurer, and the inevitable image asserts itself. “I imbibe in deep draughts the intoxicating wine of disentanglement, of indifference and contempt vis-à-vis everything belonging to the past, of an animallike excitement. I am dragon and cloud, Prometheus and Icarus.” German poets of the Expressionist generation quickly made the association with Icarus. Georg Heym’s visionary, even apocalyptic poem “Die Morgue” (“The Morgue,” 1911), written only a year before his death, imagines the bodies heaped up high on their catafalques in a morgue as the attendants creep around softly.41 Three years before World War I the poet, already known for his powerful poem “Der Krieg” (“War,” 1911), lets the corpses recall how they “marched out, girded like giants, each one clanking like a Goliath.” Wir zogen aus, gegürtet wie Giganten, Ein jeder klirrte wie ein Goliath. 38

Amelia Josephine Burr, The Roadside Fire (New York: Doran, 1912), 52. Hermann Hesse, “Spazierfahrt in der Luft” (1911), in Die Kunst des Müßiggangs: Kurze Prosa aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 128–32. 40 Hermann Hesse, “Im Flugzeug” (1912), in Kunst des Müßiggangs, 132–39. 41 Georg Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Ellermann, 1964), 274–78. 39

140

Minos and the Moderns

They go on to call their generation “sons of Icarus” (“Ikariden”), roaring into a black death. In the remote realm of lost heavens, far across the seas, they ﬂew proudly in the glow of the evening sun (“Wir ﬂogen stolz in Abendrotes Brande”)—and found “an empty nothing” (“Ein leeres Nichts”). The following year Hellmut Wetzel titled his poem “Ikariden” (1912) to describe a generation dying in war.42 “They are young and beardless,” the poem ends, “and die before others live, and live to die; they are young and precocious and arrogant and satiated; but theirs is conquest, distance, speed, and theirs is a mad death.” Denn jung und bartlos sind sie, Die sterben eh’ andre leben, Und leben um zu sterben; Jung und frühreif und hochmütig sind sie und übersatt, Aber ihrer ist die Erob’rung, die Ferne, die Geschwindigkeit, Und ihrer ist der tolle Tod.

Karl Bröger’s “Schatten des Ikaros” (“Shadow of Icarus,”[n.d.]) employs the same image without the military associations but clearly identiﬁes the mythic Icarus with modern ﬂight. As the poem begins, the poet is urging his heart to “ﬂy ever higher, forwards, upwards in the clattering, rattling motor machine.”43 Höher, mein Herz, höher hinauf den Flug! Vorwärts, aufwärts im ratternden, knatternden Motorzug.

The poet describes the sensation of ﬂying, with the engine’s noise in front and nothing but glassy silence behind, as he looks down at the landscape. Suddenly he internalizes the image, identifying himself with his airplane. “Noisy motor-heart, your rhythmic beating holds fast my quivering, elated soul.” Lärmendes Motorherz, dein Schlagen im Takt hält die zitternde, jauchzende Seele fest gepackt.

42 Originally in the revolutionary journal Die Aktion 2 (1912); quoted here from Mythos Ikarus, 117. 43 Karl Bröger, Sturz und Erhebung (Jena: Diederichs, 1943), 225–26; quoted here from Mythos Ikarus, 118–19.

The Other Cretans

141

Then his heart is awakened by a divine light and, seeing the shadow of the airplane on the ground below, knows where he is: alive and ﬂying and, at the same time, sinking onto the earth as a second dark image. The poem ends with an exhortation similar to the initial one, but now he adds that he can “never have enough of the depths and heights.” Höher, mein Herz, höher den Flug! Vorwärts, aufwärts, nimmer der Tiefe und Höhe genug!

It was in this context that the sculptor Georg Kolbe in 1918 designed a monument featuring Icarus to commemorate wartime ﬂyers. A third cause for the revitalization of Icarus can be seen, ﬁnally, in the enormous popularity of Pieter Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1555), which ﬁrst came to light, with no known provenance, at a London auction in 1912 and was immediately bought and put on display by the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels (ﬁgure 4.1). The most familiar ekphrasis (the rhetorical term for self-contained descriptions of works of art or architecture), at least in English, is W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938), which uses Bruegel’s painting to exemplify his thesis that the Old Masters understood that individual suffering takes place within a larger context of human indifference. Drawing his examples from Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses, Auden cites the peasant plowing his ﬁeld and the ship sailing past as the boy’s white legs disappear into the green water.44 But Auden’s moving poem, for all its fame, is only one among the thirty-ﬁve poems on Bruegel’s painting in various languages, and several of them earlier, that one scholar has assembled.45 A reproduction of the painting, for those unable to contemplate it in Brussels, was soon available in the Belgian monthly Der Belfried, where it was accompanied by an enthusiastic appreciation of the art historian Gustav Pauli, who was astonished 44

The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), 3. Gisbert Kranz, “Bruegels ‘Icarus’ gedeutet von Dichtern,” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 14 (1981): 91–102. See also the twenty-one poems reprinted in Mythos Ikarus, 183–217. 45

142

Minos and the Moderns

Figure 4.1. Pieter Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus. c. 1555. Permission of Musée Royeux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

by the improbability (“Unwahrscheinlichkeit”) of the painting. “Is this picture world-wisdom? . . . No existence is aware of the other. Dispassionate objectivity prevails. . . . Inexorably it says: This is the world.”46 In 1930 the Flemish poet Albert Verwey published his poem “Brueghels Ikarus,” which amounts to a scrupulous description of the painting in seven rhyming couplets. Beginning with the foreground ﬁgure of the plowman intent on his labor with no ear for the noise of Icarus falling— Vielt ge, Ikarus? De landman snijdt de voor: Hij heeft voor ‘t plassende geplons geen oor47 (Did you fall, Icarus? The ploughman cuts his furrow: / he has no ear for the plashing splash)—

46

Der Belfried 1, No. 2 (Aug. 1916): 83. Albert Verwey, Oorspronkelijk Dichtwerk, Part 2: 1914–1937 (Amsterdam: Querido, 1938), 392. 47

The Other Cretans

143

the poet allows himself no personal comment apart from the concluding couplet, where Icarus’s disappointed expectation is implicitly suggested. Op heel de baai van Samos straalt de zon Die Ikarus dacht naadren, maar niet kon. (Over the whole Bay of Samos shines the sun, which Icarus hoped to approach, but was unable to.)

In “Breughel: Ikaros” (sic; 1937/39) the Swiss poet Albin Zollinger contrasted Icarus’s “storming soul” with the placidity of the plowing peasant. Ikaros, Ikaros, stürmende Seele, Immer noch stürzest du Täglich ins Meer, In der Sehnsucht Hinaufverlangen, Indem der Bauer, geruhig, Pﬂügt!48 (Icarus, Icarus, storming soul, / you still plunge / daily into the sea, / in longing’s / upward striving, / while the peasant calmly / plows.)

In the seven lines of “La Chute d’Icare” (1939), Raïssa Maritain mentions the greenery framing the sea, the ships sailing reﬂectively, and the dozing sheep, before concluding that “in the midday sun all is at rest and nothing troubles the beauty of the world.” Tout repose au soleil de midi Rien ne trouble la beauté du monde.49

The ekphrastic poems continue in various languages by way of William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1962) down to the present.50 Bruegel’s inﬂuence was not limited to direct descriptions of the painting. The war brought a number of Germans to Brussels, among 48 Albert Zollinger, Werke, ed. Silvia Weimar, vol. 4 (Zürich: Artemis, 1983), 179; quoted here from Mythos Ikarus, 191. 49 Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Œuvres complètes, vol. 15 (Freiburg: Editions Universitaires, 1995), 548; cited here from Mythos Icarus, 191–92. 50 The most recent example I know is Mary Jo Bang, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2007, 53.

144

Minos and the Moderns

them the poet Gottfried Benn, who spent the years 1914 to 1917 there as a medical ofﬁcer in a hospital for prostitutes, a position that left him a good deal of free time for his own activities. His three-part poem “Ikarus” (1915) amounts to a series of reﬂections triggered by Bruegel’s painting, which though never mentioned appears to provide the setting of the opening lines: “midday, which with its hot hay softens [the poet’s] brain into meadow, ﬂat land, and shepherds”: O Mittag, der mit heißem Heu mein Hirn Zu Wiese, ﬂachem Land und Hirten schwächt.51

His thoughts, quickly moving away from any speciﬁc representation, lead the poet to contrast the inanimate life of animals and plants and the modern Icarus, a carcass with its brain eaten away. He longs for “an hour of good early pre-visual light” (“eine Stunde / des guten frühen Voraugenlichts”), which would melt away the deceptions of color. But (section 2) the modern brain consumes dust. If our eyes were round and self-contained—that is, animallike—then we might reconstruct our consciousness. Now (section 3) the sun, already on the horizon, is preparing to push another world out into space: “o one of the [worlds] forgetfully strewn and melting my temple with a young scorching heat, drinking up the blood seeping from my forehead—.” o eine der vergeßlich hingesprühten mit junger Glut die Schläfe mir zerschmelzend, auftrinkend das entstirnte Blut—.

While the speciﬁc meaning of Benn’s absolute poems is often difﬁcult to determine, the general tendency of this one seems approachable. Stimulated by Bruegel’s painting, the poet longs for a premodern state of life when man stood in a more direct relationship to nature and the world; but the modern Icarus lives in worlds that pass quickly and almost indistinguishably and, in the process, corrupt his very consciousness. In sum, the modern preoccupation with Icarus, which can be dated fairly precisely to the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century, resulted 51 Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden, ed. Dieter Wellershoff, vol. 3 (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960), 46–47.

The Other Cretans

145

from three distinct factors: the impact of Baudelaire’s poem “Les Plaintes d’un Icare,” which reminded writers of the ancient (Horatian) role of Icarus as the image of the poet; the new obsession with airplane ﬂight and the resulting identiﬁcation of Icarus with daring pilots; and the fascination with Bruegel’s newly rediscovered painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which seemed to sum up the Icarian theme while placing it in a modern social context, displacing the individual genius and foregrounding the society of the common man (the peasant, the shepherd, the ﬁsherman).52

DA E DA LU S A N D I C A RU S AT OD DS We have already seen Icarus play a minor role in several ﬁctions dealing with the Minotaur and the labyrinth: notably in Gide’s Thésée, where his shade is introduced as “the image of human inquietude,” and in Kazantzakis’s At the Palaces of Knossos, where he is given a livelier role in recognition of the youthful readership for whom the novel was intended. We should brieﬂy note, in addition, the use of the myth in the work of James Joyce, where the hero’s name, Stephen Dedalus, hints at the mythic analogy while various labyrinthine images—mazes, snares, circles, spirals, and others—regularly characterize Stephen’s walks through Dublin.53 Despite frequent references to the oddness of his name, “The Dedalus,” Stephen is not himself a Daedalus-ﬁgure. Both in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) and Ulysses (1922) he is most emphatically the son—to his own father in the earlier work and to Leopold Bloom in the later one—and hence an Icarus-ﬁgure. In A Portrait, standing on the shore at Dollymount 52 For a list of mostly minor English poems of the period, see Helen H. Law, Bibliography of Greek Myth in English Poetry, American Classical League Service Bureau, Bulletin 27 (Oxford, Ohio: Miami University, 1955). 53 In this connection, see Rudd, “Daedalus and Icarus,” 50; and esp., for more exhaustive treatments, Diana Fortuna, “The Labyrinth as Controlling Image in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 76 (1972): 120–80; and Joseph Leo Koerner, Die Suche nach dem Labyrinth: Der Mythos von Dädalus und Ikarus, trans. Lore Brüggemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 161–217, which is somewhat vitiated by its over-heavy indebtedness to recent “theory.”

146

Minos and the Moderns

and gazing up, Dedalus does not himself take ﬂight; instead he seems “to see a winged form ﬂying above the waves and slowly climbing the air,” like Daedalus leading Icarus on their ﬂight, and recognizes in the hawklike man “a symbol of the artist” to which he aspires (131).54 Later he thinks again of “the hawklike man whose name he bore” (175). A Portrait (1914) begins, as we observed earlier, with an Ovidian motto referring to Daedalus’s manipulation of “unknown,” or forbidden, arts (ignotas artes). It ends as Stephen prepares to set off for Paris with the invocation “Old father, old artiﬁcer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” But when Stephen in Ulysses ﬁnds himself back in Dublin some thirteen months later, various indications suggest that the experience in Paris, including his encounters with prostitutes, amounted to an Icarean fall rather than a Daedalean success.55 His mother has died; he recognizes his earlier behavior as pathetic posturing; his former political and aesthetic views have been exposed as those of a dilettante. He now sees himself as a failure with no “rich booty” to show for the time in Paris except “a blue French telegram” (43) announcing his mother’s death.56 In a moment of frank selfappraisal he realizes that he is no Daedalus and makes explicit the Icarean analogy. Fabulous artiﬁcer, the hawklike man. You ﬂew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater, ait.57 Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he. (208)

The remainder of the novel depicts Stephen’s gradual recovery from that Icarean fall under the preceptorship of the Daedalean Leopold Bloom. 54 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: New American Library/Signet, 1954). On Robert Motherwell’s obsession with Joyce and his resulting The Dedalus Sketchbook (New York: Abrams, 1988), see Monika Schmitz-Emans, “Dädalus zwischen den Künsten,” in Mythen in Kunst und Literatur: Tradition und kulturelle Repräsentation, ed. Annette Simonis and Linda Simonis (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 205–32, here 212–21. 55 Here I follow Joseph C. Heininger, “Stephen Dedalus in Paris: Tracing the Fall of Icarus in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 23 (1986): 435–46. 56 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946). 57 The Latin phrase appears to be a compression of the falling Icarus’s actual words (in Ovid’s Ars amatoria 2.91): “pater o pater, auferor” inquit; see Rudd, “Daedalus and Icarus,” 50.

The Other Cretans

147

Apart from these isolated ﬁctional occurrences, it was on the twentieth-century stage that Icarus came into his own as a major ﬁgure, usually in explicit juxtaposition to his father. The oratorio Ikarus und Daedalus (1912) by Herbert Eulenberg, one of the most frequently performed neo-romantic dramatists in prewar Germany, takes place on a lonely island where Daedalus and Icarus have settled following their escape from Crete.58 In the hour before dawn, when Icarus emerges from their hut, sleepless and complaining of insomnia, a chorus of birds ridicules him, telling him to return to his father, without whom he is nothing. Who created Pasiphaë’s cow? they ask. Who constructed the labyrinth with its corridors twisting like intestines? Who fashioned the wings with which to ﬂee the ingratitude of the king? Who led Icarus, after a safe ﬂight, to this island refuge, leaving him to walk and crawl as before? When Icarus reminds the birds that Daedalus also taught him to understand their speech and to distrust them, they ﬂy off, taunting that he owes everything to his father and, an insigniﬁcant creature, has accomplished nothing for himself. As Icarus laments his destiny as “the late-born son of a great man, able to feel greatness and unable to accomplish it”— Sohn eines Großen zu sein, nachgeboren das Gewaltige zu fühlen und nicht zu vermögen (14)—

Eos announces the splendor of the sun-god Helios, followed by the Horae, who proclaim the swiftly moving hours of the day. Icarus implores them to tell him why he lives and suffers. Does this thing named Icarus have a meaning? The Horae can explain everything but “Why?” He pleads with them for a task of his own, if only two or three people to lead. But the Horae can only provide the time; the individual must create his own destiny. When these “chambermaids of Time” (“Kammermägde der Zeit,” 20) ﬂy off, Icarus vows that he will provide a spectacle never seen before and rushes into the hut to seize his wings so that he can soar into the sky like an eagle, alone and without his father’s aid. The morning winds laugh in malicious anticipation 58 Herbert Eulenberg, Ikarus und Daedalus: Ein Oratorium (Leipzig: Rowohlt, 1912).

148

Minos and the Moderns

of destroying his insigniﬁcant “sparrow’s wings,” but Icarus emerges with the wings and rushes off toward a crag overlooking the sea. Then his cries are heard as he plunges to his death, “eternally ridiculous, my life a patchwork” (“Ewig lächerlich! Stückwerk mein Leben!,” 24). As the trees wonder who will tell Daedalus, he emerges from the hut and calls his son but is answered only by Echo’s mocking repetitions. When the now silent birds drop a few wet feathers at his feet, Daedalus immediately understands the worst and rushes down to the bay. Fama, half woman and half bird, announces that she will proclaim the deed far and wide, giving it the worst possible interpretation and arousing both fear and superstition. Daedalus returns, bearing his son’s body, and laments the death that has “closed the circle of your being” (“den Kreis deines Seins geschlossen”) where only yesterday his breast was still “full of titanic plans like a spanned bow” (“wie ein gespannter Bogen voll titanischer Pläne,” 32). He throws the body back into the sea, which he names for Icarus, and then turns his attention to the gods, whom he curses. “What are you without us human beings?” he challenges Zeus. “If we don’t imagine you, you don’t exist!” Wer bist du denn ohne uns Menschen! Wenn wir dich nicht denken, bist du nicht da! (37)

He declares his freedom henceforth from their whims. At that point a crowd approaches, alerted by Fama, and, reviling him as a seducer and blasphemer, threatens to kill him. Daedalus is astonished at their madness and proclaims his all-embracing love of humankind. “It’s to help you that I am here on earth, always creating and thinking . . . to better your lovely lot.” Euch zu helfen leb’ ich auf Erden, ewig schaffend und denkend ....... euer schönes Los zu verschönern. (41)

He bequeaths them all his treasures, “the slaves of my brain” (“die Sklaven meines Gehirns,” 41), and his beautiful sculptures, which will not decay like humankind. The public indignation changes to affection and concern, as Daedalus prepares to leave them. He explains that he must now ﬂee from their love so that he can die, as lonely

The Other Cretans

149

as the sea. They fall onto their knees to implore him, but Daedalus orders them to stand up, unwilling to take away the sight of slaves as his last memory. With the arts and crafts that he has taught them they can live well, he reminds them. He asks only one last thing of them: Don’t pray any more! Be free spirits! Now that humankind is truly liberated, Daedalus ﬂies away, eager to learn something new even in death. The oratorio ends with a “chorus of humanity,” which replaces the individual voices of men and women, young and old, heard before. “Humankind is free, the gods are dead, this life and land are ours.” Frei ist die Menschheit, tot sind die Götter, unser ist dieses Leben und Land. (49)

While Icarus dominates the ﬁrst half of the oratorio, he remains an unfulﬁlled and rather pathetic ﬁgure. It is Daedalus who liberates mankind physically through his creations and spiritually through his denial of the gods and who, at the end, soars off into the unknown. While we see Icarus only in conversation with the forces of nature—the birds, the Horae, the winds—and reveling in his dreams, Daedalus is engaged with people to whom he has provided real accomplishments. The neo-romantic author sympathizes with the unfulﬁlled Icarus, but his admiration is reserved for the Nietzschean ﬁgure of Daedalus. The emphasis shifts dramatically when we turn to the short dramatic poem Ikaros (1919) written by the Expressionist Johannes R. Becher in the months that witnessed the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany and the violent counterrevolutionary measures. The action takes place in the present, we are told, and the names are merely symbolic.59 In the ﬁrst scene Ikaros and Daidalos are conversing in the prison cell where they have been conﬁned for four years. In heated, disjunctive, exclamatory Expressionist language Ikaros exhorts his father to help him, and humanity, against the tyrant who has imprisoned them. So hilf doch Vater . . . Unerträglichkeit. Verruchter Hund. Ein Henker: der Tyrann. (7) (So help, father . . . Unbearable. Despicable dog. A hangman: the tyrant.)

In the face of his son’s impetuosity the calmer Daidalos, in more moderate language, recommends patience. “They are killing our spirit. 59

Johannes R. Becher, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1971), 5–15.

150

Minos and the Moderns

Time, time, my son!” But Ikaros will have none of this “consolation of laziness” (“Trägheit-Trost,” 8). Aufrührer wir! Empörer! Rebellion!! Zerreiß! Dolch ins Tyrannen-Herz. Grab oder Freiheit. (We rabble-rousers! Rebels! Revolt! Tear apart! Dagger into the tyrant-heart. Grave or freedom.)

Daidalos concedes: no free human being can imagine their plight. Ikaros sounds the characteristically Expressionist hymn in praise of Man (using the generic word “Mensch”): “Man, man is good” (9). He envisions ecstatically a humanity in which a thousand peoples embrace in a fabulous union and wars are extinguished. They will do away with murder; original sin will burn itself out. “But now we call ourselves a united people of brothers. And human, chaste and pious such a New Day!” Nun aber nennen wir uns einig Volk von Brüdern. Und menschlich, keusch und fromm solch Neuer Tag!

(9)

Again Daidalos cautions him that such visions exist only in dreams. Reality is different. Any prophet who has promised such things is a fraud and misleads the people. But Ikaros replies that his dream cannot be comprehended with sober reason alone: it spills from the heart and remains true. And so it goes back and forth between father and son. Daidalos rejects the “accursed delusion. Madness. And night-vision” (“Verﬂuchter Wahn. Irrsinn. Und Nacht-Erscheinung,” 10), which ignores the reality of falling bombs, destroyed cities, refugees, mass graves. But the spirit cannot be killed, Ikaros responds. Daidalos has had enough: This is the reward for our conspiracy—lifelong imprisonment. But Ikaros insists that the brain triumphs and the spirit sings praise (“hier triumphiert Gehirn, hier lobsingt Geist,” 11). The second, much shorter scene takes place in the prison yard, where the Chorus of Prisoners—a conscious reminiscence of Beethoven’s Fidelio?—marches slowly in a circle, closely observed by armed guards and with a guillotine in the background. Not all are young idealistic visionaries: they include swindlers, murderers, assassins, conspirators. Yet in the splendor of the open sky and despite the curses and degradation and bitterness, “God cries shrilly from our torments” (“Gott gell aus unseren Martern schreit,” 13) and will lead them. Ikaros

The Other Cretans

151

exhorts them with the vision of a future life in freedom, but Daidalos sees only darkness, walls, blood. No brotherhood—only soldiers and bayonets. “It’s useless, comrades” (“vergeblich, Kameraden,” 14). The guards order them to stop talking and to march back into their cell, but Ikaros looks forward to the night, when the moonlight will glow in the cells. With his last words he seems to be planning his escape: “Then to work. The sea resounds broadly. And boundlessly. O eternal melodies!” (“Dann an die Arbeit. Meer tönt breit. / Und uferlos. O ewige Melodien.” 14). The work ends with a two-line third scene, in which the guard reports that someone, presumably Ikaros, is nowhere to be found. “Not in the cell. The courtyard empty. Escaped.”60 Becher’s dramatic poem exempliﬁes the major themes of Expressionism: the father–son conﬂict of generations, the heralding of the New Man, the proclamation of a New World of Brotherhood—all set against the background of a modern tyranny equivalent to that of Minos and the labyrinth. Here, in a total reversal of Eulenberg’s prewar values with its Haldanian faith in science, it is Ikaros who represents the passionate spokesman of the visionary ideal while Daidalos urges caution, restraint, and a gloomy acceptance of the fait accompli. Not to be outdone, it must be added, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1930) Alfred Rosenberg, the mad theoretician of National Socialism, cited Icarus as an early example of “the Nordic Spirit,” which dreamed of man’s ﬂight beyond Olympus—an initially doomed ﬂight that was ﬁrst completed by the Valkyries who soared up into Valhalla and later by “silver airships” driven by motors (bk. 3, chap. 1). The form may have been different, Rosenberg concludes, but the dream was in each case the same eternal will to overcome the earth’s gravity.

LIFE IMITATES ART: LAURO DE B OSIS Lauro de Bosis’s Icaro (1927) offers one of the most remarkable treatments of the myth in the twentieth century, written as it is in the 60 Although Becher published the work as complete in this form, some critics regard it as fragmentary because of the brief ﬁnal scene; see the notes in Gesammelte Werke 8: 814–16. Fragmentary or not, the work is ideologically and poetically complete as it stands.

152

Minos and the Moderns

strict form of a classical Greek tragedy, albeit on a theme that was never treated tragically by the ancient tragedians. De Bosis, the scion of privilege, learned Greek and Latin at an early age and was weaned on the classics.61 His father, a lawyer and minor poet associated with a group of artists and writers including D’Annunzio, and his mother, an American with a profound knowledge and love of English literature, provided at home a cultural world rich in the arts, where such friends as Eleonora Duse and Thornton Wilder were frequently hosted. In the course of his short life de Bosis translated not only Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (Edipo Re, 1924) and Antigone (1927) and Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (Il Prometeo Incatenato, 1930) but also Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Il Ponte di San Luis Rey, 1929) and John Erskine’s The Private Life of Helen of Troy (La Vita Privata di Elena di Troia, 1928) as well as an abbreviated version of Frazer’s The Golden Bough (Il Ramo d’Oro, 1925). From his vantage point in the United States during two years as Visiting Lecturer for the Italy America Society (1924–26) he developed a critical opposition to Mussolini’s Fascist policies and style. Returning to an Italy now wholly dominated by the Fascists and Ducismo, he was heartened by such anti-Fascist spokesmen as Benedetto Croce but conﬁned his own protests to indirect literary activities: notably his translation of Antigone, which pits a young rebel against the voice of authority and order. It was in this spirit that in 1927 he wrote his drama Icaro, in which Minos’s realm provided an unmistakable analogy to Italy under Mussolini’s dictatorship. The play, based structurally on the severe form of Greek drama, uses classical terms to designate its organization into episodes divided by choral stasima introduced by a prologue, and featuring a chorus that enters with a parodos and exits with its exodus. The parodos, though composed in rhyming strophes, amounts to a veritable paraphrase of probably the most famous choral ode in Greek tragedy, the Ode to Man of Antigone: “Wonders are many, but none more wonderful than man.” Or as de Bosis has it: L’Universo sfavilla di miracoli; ma niun ve n’è che come l’uomo splenda! 61 For biographical information, see Jean McClure Mudge, The Poet and the Dictator: Lauro de Bosis Resists Fascism in Italy and America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).

The Other Cretans

153

(The Universe sparkles with miracles; but none among them shines like man!)62

Several of the other stasima contain equally clear reminiscences of choral odes from Antigone, which the author was translating that same year. In the prologue Minos promises Daedalus his freedom as soon as the great Athenian craftsman (“arteﬁce ateniese,” according to the cast of characters) has provided him with the means to complete his domination of the world. Daedalus agrees to the bargain, informing the king that he has already invented such means: swords made of iron, capable of shattering the bronze weapons that are still customary. When Daedalus presents Pasiphaë with a lovely golden statue, Minos tells him not to waste his time on such useless triﬂes. Daedalus conﬁdes that he is dreaming of an invention much greater than iron but is unwilling yet to tell Minos the secret. After Minos and his courtiers leave, Icarus gallops up with two dead eagles he has just shot, to be used for the secret purpose that Daedalus has not disclosed even to his son. When Icarus learns that Daedalus has given Minos the iron sword, it brings on a quarrel between father and son. Icarus had dreamed of brandishing the sword to liberate the people from the tyrant; but the apolitical Daedalus says that tyrants, liberty, and the miserable affairs of Crete mean nothing to him. Solo il pensiero vigilante avanza e inalza un tempio, la scienza, a fronte di cui l’impero de la terra è nulla. (26) (Thought alone advances, ever vigilant, and raises a temple, knowledge, to which the kingdom of the earth is nothing.)

While Icarus dreams of man’s happiness, Daedalus wishes only to make him greater. The ﬁrst episode reveals that Icarus with his lyre, hailed by the people as a poet—indeed, in the archaic term a vatic “aedo”—regards it as his poetic mission to mediate between the world of dark and

62 I take both text and translation from Lauro de Bosis, Icaro, trans. Ruth Draper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), here 30. On occasion I have modiﬁed the translation to make it more literal.

154

Minos and the Moderns

light: to lift our hearts to ethereal harmonies (“le musiche eteree,” 38) and to bring down the sparks to fecundate our fertile earth. As Icarus sings to the chorus his Song of the Sea, which lives joyously if only for the moment, Pasiphaë appears, and Icarus explains to her his melancholy, saying he feels like an eagle caught fast in a rock and unable to ﬂy. Pasiphaë tells him, suggestively, that she knows a means to relieve his torment; but at that moment Ariadne arrives and admires Daedalus’s new statue. When Phaedra comes out, he tells her his dream of a world ruled by the free and the wise, but the calculating Phaedra calls it madness: What would people be without kings to rule them? Icarus declares his love for her, which she coldly rejects, reserving her affection, she says, only for the greatest of heroes who will give her a kingdom. Following the stasimon, Pasiphaë returns to continue her seductive efforts, promising Icarus the kingdom of Crete in return for his love. When he rejects her, she threatens him with vengeance from her father, the Sun (unwittingly foretelling his subsequent death when the sun melts the wax on his wings). Daedalus rushes in to tell his son about his new invention, which will open a new kingdom to humankind. “L’eterno sogno s’è raggiunto: il volo!” (82; “The eternal dream is attained: ﬂight!”). Icarus is ecstatic, seeing in this creation the dawn of a new era uniting humanity into “one family beneath one sky” (“una famiglia sotto un solo cielo,” 84). But his father is more restrained, reminding his son that only constant work produces liberty and love and that the faith of the poet will eventually raise humankind toward love. At this point Phaedra reappears to ask if Icarus has prepared his hymn for the next day’s celebration in honor of Prometheus, and Icarus replies in mysterious words, promising that he will raise “a hymn more winged than song” (88; “un inno più alato del canto”) and, out of his love for Phaedra, conquer “the most splendid of kingdoms” (92; “il più splendido dei regni”). Phaedra is mystiﬁed by his images, but Icarus explains that he is no longer a mere poet of words—that he intends to conquer a new world without walls and frontiers: Uno ed eguale per gli eguali, libero pei liberi, che accerchia le diverse genti, sfatte da l’odio, in una sola azzurra patria, luminosa e immensa, il cielo, Fedra, il cielo, ecco il mio regno!

(94)

The Other Cretans

155

(One world equal for equals, free for the free, which will embrace the diverse peoples undone by hatred into a single azure fatherland, luminous and vast—the sky, Phaedra, the sky. Behold my kingdom!)

When Daedalus summons Icarus, Phaedra prays to her goddess to protect him and sustain the ﬂight of the youth, in whom she has suddenly recognized a hero. As the third episode begins, a herald announces that a dreadful sacrilege (“un orrendo sacrilegio,” 108) has taken place: he has seen two men ﬂying! When Daedalus and Icarus return from their test ﬂight, Minos views their achievement not just as sacrilege but as rebellion, sensing that they hope to leave Crete. The guards seize Daedalus, and Minos orders the priest to burn the wings. Daedalus, having achieved his intellectual goal, faces his death with indifference; but Icarus rushes out with a sword and ﬁghts the guards until he is rescued by Phaedra, who tells her father that she loves him and that the Great Mother has awarded him to her. With Daedalus in chains, there is no need to bind Icarus, who is bound to her by the stronger chains of love. Minos wonders how she can love a man without a crown, but Icarus exclaims proudly that his royal laurels have risen to the sky (“i miei regali laurio son saliti in cielo,” 126) while Daedalus states that, for free Athenians, genius serves as the only crown. In his hubris Icarus demands that Minos permit him to ascend into the skies and “from on high prove to your pride that Icarus is lord of the elements” (“da l’alto io provi / al tuo orgoglio che Icaro è signore / degli elementi,” 128). All plead with Minos to allow the attempt. He does so, but insists that Daedalus remain on the ground as hostage. As Icarus prepares to ﬂy, Pasiphaë, unnoticed by all, prays to her father, the Sun, to avenge her heart, “which writhes like a wounded tigress.” At the beginning of episode 4 Daedalus issues the traditional warning to Icarus—to keep to the middle course (“Tieni la via media,” 146)—but his son resists all restraints and bounds. Icarus plans to drive his chariot swiftly to the edge of the precipice and then, when the steeds spring from the cliff, to launch himself into ﬂight. As he binds on his wings, Icarus prays only that, should he fall, his name may remain “the token of daring” (“l’arra de l’ardire,” 152) and that others will carry on the sacred ﬂame of Prometheus that he bears. Before he departs, Phaedra professes her love with a kiss. Then the onlookers describe his successful ﬂight. They see him seize and strangle one

156

Minos and the Moderns

of the angry eagles that attack him. Then, rising, he disappears from sight in the dazzling sun. Even Minos ﬁnally prays for Icarus, who henceforth will be honored together with Prometheus: the one for the gift of ﬁre and the other for the conquest of the sky. Both have opened the way to the future. After the chorus has sung an ode to Nike as the leader in mankind’s struggle for a new kingdom, the exodus brings the black-sailed ship to Crete with fourteen victims destined for the Minotaur. Theseus reports that he saw a being, half man and half eagle, ﬂying through the sky and urging Theseus to resist fate: “Take Death by the hair and conquer! Thanatos is a beast that can be tamed!” (“prendi la Morte pei capelli e vinci” / Thànato è belva che si doma!” 186). Watching the strange creature plunge headlong into the sea, the Athenians recovered its mortal remains and brought them to Crete for burial “as for a god.” In the concluding lamentation (commos) the Cretans mourn Icarus: Minos bids them to honor him as an imperial conqueror; Daedalus foresees that “the world will follow your ﬂight” (“il mondo seguirà il tuo volo,” 196); Ariadne understands that his ﬂight proclaims “the new era that you desired” (“l’era novella che volevi,” 196); Theseus says that his divine example will always guide men upward; and Phaedra exhorts his spirit to rejoice, for he still lives, “immune at last from earthly torments” (“immune alﬁne dal terreno strazio,” 198). All sing “glory to him who dares!” (“Gloria a chi osa!” 200) and urge men to listen to his song: “Wherever in the world a human heart, armed against the Fates, burns with eagerness and love, there, for ever unseen, Icarus watches over him.” dovunque al mondo cuore umano arda d’ansia e d’amore, contro i fati armato, sempre, non visto, Icaro lo guarda. (200)

For the young author in his literary resistance to Fascism, Icarus clearly represents the neo-romantic poet par excellence: a poet who, through his vision and example, leads a political rebellion against tyranny despite the betrayal of such old-fashioned liberals as Daedalus, who put their science at the disposal of the tyrant although he burns their wings to retain their loyalty. (It can also be understood that Minos, like Mussolini in his obsession with the air force, will eventually use the wings along with the iron swords for military

The Other Cretans

157

purposes.)63 Ultimately, it is suggested, Icarus’s words and example will ﬁre Theseus, who does indeed go on to liberate Crete from Minos and the Minotaur. In de Bosis’s drama the emphasis and interest have distinctly shifted from Daedalus the scientist (who exempliﬁes all of Bertrand Russell’s fears) to Icarus the poet, and from nineteenthcentury pragmatic liberalism to twentieth-century Expressionist idealism. In the event, Icaro had no immediate political impact. Although the play won an award in the drama competition at the 1928 Olympiad in Amsterdam, it was not read as an anti-Fascist work either there or by contemporary critics in Italy. Yet in a twist stranger than ﬁction de Bosis soon became the best exempliﬁcation of the main theme of his work. In 1928 he returned to New York for two years as Executive Secretary of the Italy America Society and now worked more pragmatically in his opposition to Fascism. Back in Italy for the summer of 1929, he formed the National Alliance for Liberty, a movement that sought to bridge all “non-subversive parties including the socialist” in a sort of Second Risorgimento.64 To accomplish this aim, the Alliance began distributing a series of letters to thoughtful Italians. During de Bosis’s brief sojourn in New York in the fall of 1930 several members of the Alliance, including his mother, were arrested by Mussolini’s secret police. On his return to Europe, de Bosis decided with a certain ambivalence not to go back to Italy and face his own certain arrest but to work for the cause from Paris and London, where he was supported and assisted by many friends and anti-Fascists. By the summer of 1931 de Bosis had concocted a fantastic plan, which he detailed in “The Story of My Death.”65 Although he had no experience, he arranged to buy an airplane, which he named Pegasus, and quickly learned how to ﬂy it. It was his idea to ﬂy over Rome and drop thousands of leaﬂets from the National Alliance addressed to the 63 See Mudge, Poet and Dictator, 67. In his provocative article “Icarus as Anti-Fascist Myth: The Case of Lauro de Bosis,” Italica 69 (1992): 198–209, Joseph Farrell plays down de Bosis’s political motivation, arguing that he was unrealistically “enveloped by myth,” spurred by an irrational Nietzschean sense of Übermensch, and caught up in the rhetoric of D’Annunzean grandeur. 64 Mudge, Poet and Dictator, 94–95. 65 Reprinted in Mudge, Poet and Dictator, 181–87.

158

Minos and the Moderns

king of Italy, to the citizens of Italy, and to the militiamen. After a misbegotten venture in July, which ended with a crash in Corsica, he took off again on October 3 in a second Pegasus and ﬂew from Cannes to Rome, where in the early evening he circled over the city for thirty or forty minutes, showering thousands of leaﬂets on the Corso Umberto, the Piazza Colonna, and the Palazzo Chigi where Mussolini was entertaining the Fascist Council. According to his ﬂight plan he intended to return to Nice; but the fuel in his slow small plane, low since take-off to accommodate the weight of the leaﬂets, appears to have run out. De Bosis went down with his Pegasus somewhere in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Corsica. Neither the wreckage nor his body were ever found. De Bosis had become his own Icarus, taking to the sky in the name of freedom from tyranny—and perishing in the attempt. De Bosis’s heroism was lamented by Joseph Auslander in his “Elegy for Icarus” (1935), dedicated speciﬁcally to his memory.66 The American poet recalls various classical cases in which the body of the dead has been surrendered to the appeal of words or song: Priam’s appeal to Achilles for Hector’s corpse, Orpheus’s journey to the underworld to recover Eurydice, Pluto’s concession to Ceres to allow Proserpina to return from the underworld for half of each year; even “Heaven can open to a phrase, and Hell.” But the sea that swallowed de Bosis and his aircraft is less compassionate. But though I clang grief like a dungeon bell How should the Sea give up thy secret bones? Ah, hadst thou angered the accessible Fates, And spilled thy golden valour at the Gates!

DA E DA LUS A N D I C A RU S I N T H E 1 9 3 0 S A N D BEYON D The myth enjoyed a wide international appeal during the 1930s. Stephen Spender’s short early poem “Icarus” (ca. 1932) uses the image only to hail a ﬂyer, “This aristocrat, superb of all instinct,” who loses his 66 Joseph Auslander, No Traveller Returns: A Book of Poems (New York: Harper, 1935), 212.

The Other Cretans

159

“war on the sun” and is now found “like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned, / Hands, wings.”67 That same year John Redwood Anderson reenvisioned the myth in a much longer four-part poem, which begins by exploring the differences between father and son. When Daedalus says that he has subdued the earth, Icarus cries “O Earth! O more than Earth!”68 To his father’s claim that he built the labyrinth and saved victims from “the red horns of the Bull of Death,” the son replies “O Life! O more than Life!” Instead of the inventor’s ship-sails Icarus demands “Wings! O give me wings!” And beyond the shrine that the architect built to Apollo, Icarus longs “O Sun! O Light! O Wings!” Daedalus (part 2) reminds Icarus that pride—the will to create a new world—and love—the wish to make unchanged life more pleasant—separate mankind from beast. Daedalus has taken the second path; now Icarus must choose. When he chooses wings, Daedalus sadly but lovingly promises to fulﬁll his dreams the next day at dawn. At that time (part 3) he gives his child the wings with a kiss and utters the traditional warning: “Earth is man’s native country.” Then the hushed crowd watches in wonder as Icarus leaps from the cliff and soars upward out of sight. Icarus, in contrast, “not once looked down,” and “a joy unfathomable and bright” burned in his eyes as he moved upward toward “the lambent circle of the sun.” But when noon comes, a sigh sweeps through the watching crowd as they see Icarus’s white body plunge into the sea and, drifting slowly behind, his splendid wings. In the last section, Daedalus stands alone beside the dead body of his child, alongside whom he has set the wing, “erect in failure and in pride.” At last Daedalus looks up to heaven and cries, “The victory is with thee, O Icarus!” Here we ﬁnd none of the conﬂict and hostility that is implicit or explicit in most treatments of the theme. Nor is Daedalus motivated by the ambition that often makes him a guilty party. Instead, he recognizes the desire for higher goals that drives the younger generation and the necessity for progress, which he is able through his technical skill to abet but not to share. In addition to these poems and others—for instance, Alexander Kernbichler’s volume of selected poems entitled Ikarus (Vienna, 1932)—we ﬁnd a stone relief by Gerhard Marcks (Icarus, 1930), 67

Stephen Spender, Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 1964), 3. John Redwood Anderson, Transvaluations (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 9–21. 68

160

Minos and the Moderns

a wood sculpture by Marino Marini (Icarus, 1933), a ballet by Igor Markevich (L’envol d’Icare, 1933) and another by Serge Lifar (Icare, 1935), for which Picasso designed the backcloth and which was performed in Paris, London, and Sydney. De Bosis’s Icare, with music by David Diamond and Franczeska Boas, was choreographed by Eleanor King at the Brooklyn Museum Dance Center in 1937. And Auden’s soon famous poem was written in 1938. The closest analogy to de Bosis, and the ﬁnest treatment of the theme in the 1930s, was provided by the German writer Fritz Diettrich, who was also a proliﬁc translator from the classics (Aristophanes, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius), an opponent of the Nazi regime in his country, and as a young man of thirty the author of a tragedy in blank verse, Die Flügel des Daidalos (“The Wings of Daedalus,” 1932/33; pub. 1941).69 In contrast to de Bosis, however, Diettrich focuses more on the tragedy of Daedalus than of Icarus. Indeed, Icarus hardly appears in the ﬁrst of the play’s three acts. We ﬁrst see Daedalus in his studio, dejected because he doubts his talent and, in fact, wants to destroy all his existing statues. His depression and sense of rejection by the gods is heightened by the works of Talos, his brilliant and gifted disciple whose seemingly effortless art is blessed by Apollo. When Talos enters and wonders at Daedalus’s mood, the chorus warns him to beware. Talos refuses to destroy Daedalus’s works that stand on the marketplace; instead the two of them go off into the mountains to ﬁnd stone worthy of their further efforts. As they search in a sudden fog, Apollo manifests himself to Talos and assures him of his love; but the vision infuriates Daedalus even further. Blinding Talos in both eyes, he throws him from a cliff. Later, back in his workshop, a new disciple presents himself, with clay models of Daidalos’s statues—his Hermes, his Artemis, his Apollo—as evidence of his talent and introduces himself as an orphan from Piraeus named Icarus. But Daedalus, still distraught from the incident with Talos, refuses to take him on. Later, as he is lying to Argeia, Talos’s mother, about her son’s death, Apollo appears with the shade of Talos, demands clothes and a coin for a proper burial, and tells the truth about Talos’s death. 69 I quote and translate from Die Flügel des Daidalos, in Fritz Diettrich, Werke, ed. Wilfried Brennecke, vol. 3, Dramen und Stücke (Göttingen: Sachse & Pohl, 1966).

The Other Cretans

161

Act 2 begins in Knossos, where Minos has just awakened from a warning dream about a stranger who, rejected by the gods, has come to him seeking shelter. Meanwhile, Daedalus has reached the coast, followed by the persistent Icarus. But they still do not know each other, as the chorus observes. They walk along side by side, only their garments touching. Seht, sie schreiten dahin, Der Alte neben dem Jungen! Flüchtig wie Tag und Nacht, Die sich nicht kennen, so streift Ihres Gewandes Saum sich im Schreiten. (33) (See, they stride along, / Age beside Youth! / Fleetingly as day and night, / which do not know each other; thus / the fringes of their garments brush each other as they go.)

Back at the palace of Knossos, where the kingdom—throne as well as altar—is at the peak of its power, Minos and his chancellor are making their sacriﬁces reverently at the altar. When Daedalos and Icarus appear to appeal for refuge, Daedalus straightway confesses his crime, the murder of his disciple who was beloved of Apollo. It was an act of impulsive passion, he tells Minos, and asks the king to cleanse his hands and conscience from the blood-guilt. Minos would like to agree, but tells Daedalus that a sin before the god Apollo cannot be simply washed away, a view conﬁrmed by the hungry ﬂame on the sacred altar. At this moment Pasiphaë rushes in to report another evil sign: the Minotaur has seized a servant girl, gored her to death, and lapped her blood. Minos wants to kill the beast, but Pasiphaë objects on grounds of mother-law. She agrees that her son can be imprisoned in a place where he can gallop at liberty and feast on slave-girls brought in from the various wars. The only hope is “to venerate what is terrible and turns against us” (“Daß man still verehrt, / Was furchtbar ist und gegen uns sich kehrt,” 41). Minos has heard the rumor that a hero will come one day to slay the monster; but Pasiphaë reminds him that they must deal with the present problem. So Minos orders Daedalus to construct a house in which the Minotaur can spend his life, a house from which there will be no escape. Daedalus objects that Minos is abusing his guest-friendship, but the king replies that Daedalus has lost his rights. Just as he once ascended to the skies, he must now attend to the underworld until he is liberated.

162

Minos and the Moderns Stiegst du hinauf einst, Himmel zu erlauschen, So neige nun dein Ohr zur Unterwelt Und fördre Grauen, wiederhole Schmerzen Vielhundertfach, bis dich der Gott befreit. (44)

(If once you climbed up to overhear the heavens, / now bend your ear to the netherworld / and demand horrors, repeat your torments / many hundredfold, until the god frees you.)

Minos asks Icarus to remain behind, but the boy insists on accompanying Daedalus: perhaps he is the god who will redeem him (“Vielleicht ist er der Gott, der mich entsühnt,” 44). As the third act begins, Daedalus and Icarus have just completed their great assignment: “the dark work is ﬁnished” (“Beendet ist das ﬁnstre Werk!” 45). They have also prepared their wings in secret and look forward to their escape. As Daedalus recounts to Icarus the tale of Androgeos’s murder and the ensuing guilt for which Athens must send the tribute of young women, an Attic maiden appears lost in the labyrinth. Icarus helps her to ﬁnd the way out and gives her a spool of thread to take to Ariadne. The girl, who has fallen in love with her savior, says that her love is now leading her into another labyrinth of the heart and says farewell. Following a chorus of the winds and the Earth-Mothers, Daedalus and Icarus emerge with their wings. After Daedalus’s ritual warnings, they ﬂy away. Shortly thereafter the chancellor reports to Minos that ﬁshermen heard singing from the skies, saw two human birds, and then watched one soar up toward the sun until a dark boy fell into the sea, a rain of feathers covering their boat. Daedalus, he continues, ﬂew on. “And if he looks back,” Minos concludes, “he’ll be undone. Emptiness stares at him, the monstrous net of the gods that we never escape.” Wenn er sein Antlitz wendet, ists geschehn: Die Leere starrt ihn an, das ungeheuere Fangnetz der Götter, dem wir nicht entgehn. (58)

Unlike de Bosis, who in 1927 still believed in the D’Annunzian power of poetry and politics to change things for the better in Fascist Italy, Diettrich was depressed in 1933 by the sense of inevitability that seemed to accompany the Nazis’ rise to power and by the guilt of Daedalus, which not only involved him in Minos’s machinations but also brought about the death of his new protégé Icarus. Accordingly, he

The Other Cretans

163

shifted his focus from the heroic Icarus to the guilt-ridden Daedalus, whose talents have been coopted for the regime. The ﬁgure of Icarus, and less so of Daedalus, continued to exert its attraction in the decades following World War II—in William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1962) and other poems in several languages about that painting.70 It also constitutes the unifying theme in the series of panels that Picasso executed in 1958 to decorate the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. It has been pointed out that rock musicians of the 1970s were strongly attracted to the myth, which shows up in a number of their lyrics and provided the name for at least one of the groups.71 But nowhere did it achieve a more prominent symbolic status than in the German Democratic Republic, where Icarus’s fall served as the image for disappointed hopes.72 The best-known example is Wolf Biermann’s “Ballade vom preußischen Ikarus” (1976, “Ballad of the Prussian Icarus”), which provided the title for Biermann’s volumes of songs, ballads, and poems Preußischer Ikarus (1978).73 The cover of the volume was illustrated with a photograph of Biermann, made by Allen Ginsberg, of the poet standing in front of the large cast-iron Prussian eagle that decorates the Weidendamm Bridge on Friedrichstraße in central Berlin. Biermann, his arms crossed, stands before the eagle in such a pose that its wings appear to be sprouting from the poet’s shoulders. That Prussian Icarus, the poem says, “stands with gray wings of cast iron and its arms hurt so badly that it can’t ﬂy away.” dann steht da der preußische Ikarus mit grauen Flügeln aus Eisenguß dem tun seine Arme so weh er ﬂiegt nicht weg.74 70

See the examples reprinted in Mythos Ikarus, 148–217; and in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths, ed. Nina Kossman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 148–53. 71 Nyenhuis, Myth and the Creative Process, 218 n. 18. 72 Mythos Ikarus, 260–61; and Unglaub, Steigen und Stürzen, 105–6. 73 See the discussion of Kunert’s earlier poem, “Ikarus 64,” in Ioana Crăciun, Die Politisierung des antiken Mythos in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 81–122. 74 Mythos Icarus, 167–68.

164

Minos and the Moderns

The poet, virtually a prisoner in his own country, has seen many of his friends try to escape from their “half land.” He himself holds fast until the hated bird seizes him and drags him over the edge. “Then I am the Prussian Ikarus,” he writes, who ﬂies up, only to fall down again. From the glorious image of hope and escape and liberation Icarus has become the poet who is now unable to escape the Iron Curtain of this new realm of the Communist Minos. Daedalus, of course, is a much more reassuring name than Icarus for ﬂight enterprises. On April 23, 1988, a team of students and professors from MIT styling themselves the Daedalus Project succeeded after two years of efforts where both de Bosis and Biermann’s “Prussian Icarus” failed. On that day their ﬂyer, a Greek professional cyclist, powered their “Daedalus 88”—a 92-pound, pedal-driven aircraft with a wingspan of 34 meters—the seventy-two miles from a cliff near Knossos to the island of Santorini, thus repeating after some four millennia Daedalus’s archetypal feat.75 75 Gary Dorsey, The Fullness of Wings: The Making of a New Daedalus (New York: Viking, 1990).

5 Conclusion: The Modernity of Myth Twentieth-century adaptations of those Cretan myths in which Minos is the connecting ﬁgure—Europa and bull, the Minotaur and his labyrinth, and Daedalus and Icarus—exemplify strikingly how the economic, aesthetic, psychological, and anthropological re-visions of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Frazer revitalized ancient myth, enabling it to be taken up as a mirror of modern consciousness. Speciﬁcally, Nietzsche’s early advocacy of the preclassical Dionysian aspects of Greek antiquity prepared the way for the enthusiastic popular response to the exciting archaeological discoveries at Knossos made by Sir Arthur Evans and stimulated a literary and artistic resurgence of long-ignored Minoan myths. It was the special appeal of these myths that they so vividly embodied the sometimes bestial eroticism, the violence and cruelty, and the often foolhardy daring that fascinated the modern mind. Myth, as we saw, often results from the poetic condensation of actual historical events, a process conﬁrming Nietzsche’s observation in his essay on The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life that “there are times that are quite incapable of distinguishing between a monumental past and a mythical ﬁction.”1 Europa and the bull mythiﬁed incidents of piracy, kidnapping, and war that took place not infrequently between Phoenicia and Greece, and thus exempliﬁed the ancient antagonism between Asia and Europe. The story of Pasiphaë and the Minotaur amounted to the allegorization of an everyday, albeit royal, episode of adultery; and the labyrinth was the fabulous

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1954–56), 1:223 (= §2).

166

Minos and the Moderns

enhancement of an actual architectural wonder of which many Greeks had heard but which few had seen. Daedalus was the ﬁgure around whom the inventions and accomplishments of various unnamed artisans coalesced; and Icarus was the projection of ancient dreams of freedom and ﬂight. Minos himself appears to consolidate generations of rulers named or titled “Minos,” a fact leading eighteenth-century rationalists to treat him virtually as a historical ﬁgure, as do Benjamin Hederich in his inﬂuential Gründliches mythologisches Lexikon (1724) and John Lemprière in his renowned Classical Dictionary (1788). Often, in the retelling, the myth was simply reinterpreted in contemporary terms—religiously in the Middle Ages, ethically in the Renaissance, and rationally in the Enlightenment. But in the twentieth century, thanks to the precursors mentioned above, the myths went through the reverse process, being unpacked and rehistoricized. This process achieved its extremes in the career of Lauro de Bosis, in whose ﬁnal adventure myth once again became history as life imitated art. But it is also evident in the totalitarian concentration camps, where the mythic labyrinth and its dark violence were tragically realized; in recent experiments in the therapeutic cloning of stem cells from humans beings and cows, popular accounts of which have sometimes been illustrated with ancient depictions of Pasiphaë and her bull or of their offspring, the Minotaur; and in the invention of the airplane, in which the ﬂight of Daedalus and Icarus was ﬁnally actualized. The modern adaptations of myths reveal several thematic clusters. The story of Europa and the bull caught the attention of artists at a time in European history when society was awakening to the idea of sexual liberation, experimentation, and even license, as evoked in the paintings of Vallotton, Corinth, and others; it continued to hold its appeal for those who dreamed of European uniﬁcation, as was the case during and immediately following both of the world wars; and it emerged as parody when that dream was bitterly disillusioned, as in Claire Goll’s novel and the cartoons of the 1920s. The Minotaur raises his taurine head at times when the artist or writer feels so utterly alienated from society that he identiﬁes wholly with the mythic creature, as was the case with Picasso and Dürrenmatt; or when Europe under the heel of dictators came to resemble Minos’s tyranny and the concentration camp of his labyrinth, as in Yourcenar’s bitter “entertainment.” Daedalus has held his own in the twentieth century as

Conclusion

167

the archetype of the scientist and technologist, as foreshadowed in Haldane’s controversial paper and then exempliﬁed in the novels of Schnabel and Ayrton. But it has been especially Icarus who captured the imagination, ﬁrst, of those who recognized in his dream a symbol of the artist; then of the early enthusiasts of aviation; and ﬁnally of those who saw in ﬂight an image of liberation from the tyrannies that dominated much of the twentieth century, both early fascism and later communism. The adaptations have assumed the widest possible variety of forms and genres. We have encountered not only plays and paintings, novels and sculptures, but opera and ballet, high art and kitsch, traditionalism and experimentation. To that extent the forms assumed by these adaptations reﬂect modern art in its total breadth, just as thematically they mirror a broad spectrum of twentieth-century concerns, ranging from the most personal (sexual awakening, lust, alienation) to the most public (war, social prejudice, political oppression). A special subgenre is evident, as we noted, in the several dozen ekphrastic poems inspired by Bruegel’s painting, in which it is not the ancient myth that is deconstructed but Bruegel’s sixteenth-century reading of that myth—a phenomenon evident also, for instance, in the many deformations of classical statues of Venus in the 1930s. In sum, ancient myth generally has been rediscovered by writers, artists, and thinkers in the twentieth century in its illuminating capacity both as a mirror of the modern world and as a projection of the individual psyche. Oedipus and Antigone in Thebes; Clytemnestra, Electra, and Orestes in Mycenae; the heroes of Troy, Prometheus suffering on his Caucasus mountain crag, and Medea raging alone in Corinth—all have provided us for centuries with images for private emotions and public deeds. The Cretan myths in particular reemerged in response to the speciﬁc circumstances of the twentieth century: the awakening of a new sense of sexual liberation, the experience of totalitarian brutality and the dream of European unity, and the hopes and hazards of modern science. It is worth noting that all these Cretan myths depict ﬁgures being acted upon (like Europa, Pasiphaë, the Minotaur) or failing to succeed in their actions (like Icarus). This fact suggests the existential sense of futility, despair, and anxiety that has prompted some observers of the new millennium to capitalize on those associations in their titles, as in Chantal Delsol’s study Icarus

168

Minos and the Moderns

Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World (2005) or Erich Sedlak’s poetry volume Ikarus oder Die Zerbrechlichkeit der Flügel (2004; “Icarus, or the Fragility of Wings”). In light of the adaptations of these myths in the most varied forms and genres and by many of the most talented and representative creative artists of the early twentieth century, we may well conclude that Crete, like Icarus, has emerged from its preclassical fall into obscurity to achieve even new heights of mythic glory.

Index Aiken, Conrad, Preludes for Memnon, 81–82, 115 Amberg, Adolf, 51 Anderson, John Redwood, 159 Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 41 antiquity, modern turn to, 18–22 Apollodorus of Athens, 8 Ariadne, literary treatments of, 119–21 Auden, W. H., 82–83, 115 “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 141, 160 Auslander, Joseph, “Elegy for Icarus,” 158 aviation, early interest in, 138 Ayrton, Michael labyrinth in Arkville, 80 The Maze Maker, 132–34, 167 Testament of Daedalus, 131–32, 167 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 9, 10 Baker, Josephine, 46 Balanchine, George, 113 Bataille, Georges, 71 Baudelaire, Charles, “Les Plaintes d’un Icare,” 134–35 Beardsley, Aubrey, 33 Becher, Johannes R., Ikaros, 149–51 Beckmann, Max, 57–58, 58 ﬁg.2.7 Behn, Fritz, 31 Benet, Stephen Vincent, “Winged Man,” 137 Benn, Gottfried, 144 “Ikarus,” 144–45 Bernardoni, Claudia, Die Opfer des Minotauros, 114 Biermann, Wolf, “Ballade vom preußischen Ikarus,” 163–64 Blake, William, 70 Boas, Franczeska, 160 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 29–30, Böll, Heinrich, “Er kam als Bierfahrer,” 64 Bonnard, Pierre, 34–35 Bontempelli, Massimo, 60

Viaggio d’Europa, 60–63 Borès, F., 72 Borges, Jorge Luis, “The House of Asterion,” 102–103 Botticelli, Sandro, 70 Boulanger, Nadia, 113 Brecht, Bertolt, 72 Breton, André, 72 Briand, Aristide, 54 Brodsky, Joseph, “Daedalus in Sicily,” 134 Bröger, Karl, “Schatten des Ikaros,” 140–41 Bruegel, Pieter, The Fall of Icarus, 128, 141, 142 ﬁg.4.1 poetic renditions of, 141–45, 167 Burckhardt, Jacob, 9 Burkert, Walter, 18 n.42 Burrows, Ronald M., 12 Butor, Michel, La Modiﬁcation, 106 Calasso, Roberto, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 65 Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, 106 Carter, Elliot, 113 The Minotaur, 11–14 Cassandra, as political symbol, 67 Cassou, Jean 23 Catullus, 23 and Ariadne, 8, 120 and Minotaur, 68 Chirico, Giorgio de, 21, 121 Cocteau, Jean, 67 Corinth, Lovis, 32, 34 ﬁg.2.3, 120, 166 Crete history of, 3–5 its myths in art, 6, 14 myths of, 5–10, 167 new interest in 20th century, 10–14 proverbs about, 8 travelers on, 24–25 Cronin, Anthony, “The Minotaur,” 88, 115

170

Index

Daedalus in ancient art, 6 in conﬂict with Icarus, 145–51 as image of modern science, 128–29, 164 interpretations of, 127–29, 166–67 literary treatments of, 129–34, 158–63 myth of, 126–27 Daedalus ( journal), 129 Daedalus Project, 164 Dahn, Felix, 40 Dalí, Salvador, 68, 72 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 122, 124–25, 138 Fedre, 122–23 and Icarus, 135–37 Däubler, Theodor 41, 66 Das Nordlicht, 41–42 Daumier, Honoré, 30 De Bosis, Lauro, 152, 157–58, 166 Icaro, 151–57, 160 Deede, C. N., 70 Delsol, Chantal, 167–68 Deluermoz, Henri, 34 Derain, André, 72 Dermée, Paul, 20 Derujinsky, Gleb, 53 Diaghilev, Sergei, 40 Diamond, David, 160 Dietrich, Fritz, 160, 162–63 Die Flügel des Daidalos, 160–63 Donatella (Natalia de Goloubeff), 122 Duchamp, Marcel, 72 Duisberg, Carl, 52 Duncan, Isidora, 40 Dungeon Keeper (computer game), 115 Dunn, Douglas, Europa’s Lover, 65 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 99 ﬁg.3.3 Minotaurus, 98–101 and obsession with labyrinth, 95–98, 115 Duse, Eleonora, 152 Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose, 106 Einstein, Carl, 46 ekphrasis, 141 Eliot, T. S., 21 Eluard, Paul, “Fin d’un monstre,” 83 Erasmus, 8 Ernst, Max, 63, 72 Ernst, Paul, Ariadne auf Naxos, 120

Eulenberg, Herbert, 147 Ikarus und Daedalus, 147–49 Euripides, Hippolytus, 7, 121–22, 125 Europa in ancient art, 6, 27 in cartoons, 46, 53–55, 166 in contemporary thought, 64–66 interpretations of, 28–29, 165–66 in modern art, 14, 30–35 myth of, 28 in Nazi art, 59 politicized, 53–59 in public sphere, 51–54, 64 in surrealist literature, 59–63 as symbol of sexual awakening, 30–42, 47–50 as symbol of xenophobia, 43–46 Europa (luxury liner), 52–53 “Europa”-complex, Wiesbaden, 52 Evans, Arthur, 11–13, 24, 70, 165 Expressionism, 40–41, 139, 151 Fermor, Patrick Leigh, 25 Frazer, Sir James, 16–17, 23, 165 Freud, Sigmund, 16–17, 23, 31, 37, 60, 165 Friedenthal, Richard, “Cassandra,” 67 Gaster, Theodor H., 16–17 George, Stefan, 134 Gide, André, 50, 92–93, 15 Thésée, 93–95, 145 Gilot, Françoise, 74 Goetz, Karl, 54 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, “Europa and the Bull,” 59–60 Goll, Claire, 43, 46 Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa, 43–46, 63–64, 166 Goll, Ivan, 43, 46 Gooch, G. P., 12 n.27 Graves, Robert, 28, 118 Groenewold, Sabine, 65 Grünbein, Durs, “Europas Liebhaber,” 65 Haft, Adele J., 8 n.13, 25 Halbherr, Federico, 11 Haldane, J. B. S., Daedalus, or Science and the Future, 128, 167 Hall, H. R., 12 n.28

Index Harris, MacDonald, Bull Fire, 114 Harrison, Jane, 10, 17 Haushofer, Albrecht, 67 “Kassandro,” 67 Hederich, Benjamin, Gründliches mythologisches Lexikon, 166 Herbert, Zbigniew, 25, 103–104, 115 Hermann-Neisse, Max, “Kassandra,” 67 Herodotus, 118 Hesse, Hermann, 139 Heym, Georg, 139 Heymann, Werner Robert, 39 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 21–22, 121 Holub, Miroslav, 115 “Minotaur,” 87–88 Homer, 6 Hooke, S. H., 70 Hoppenot, Henri, 121 Horace and Europa, 28 and Icarus, 135 Humières, Catharine d’, 106 Humphries, Rolf, “Europa,” 47 Hyginus, 8 Icarus in ancient art, 6 and aviation, 138–41 and Bruegel’s painting, 141–45 in conﬂict with Daedalus, 145–51 interpretations of, 127–28 in life and work of Lauro De Bosis, 151–58 in literature since 1930, 158–63 myth of, 126–27 as symbol of poetry and freedom, 134–37, 166 “inhumanism,” 124–25 Jean, Marcel, 73 Jeffers, Robinson, 124 The Cretan Woman, 124–25 Johnson, Arthur, 56 ﬁg.2.5 Joyce, James, and Daedalus/Icarus, 126–27, 145–46 Jung, C. G., 17, 70 Kafka, Franz, 138 Kaiser, Georg, 37, 40–41 Europa, 37–41, 64

171

Kazantzakis, Nikos, 24, 112–13, 115 At the Palaces of Knossos, 105–106, 145 Thésée, 110–13 Kerényi, Karl, 10, 70 Kernbichler, Alexander, 159 King, Eleanor, 160 Kingsley, Charles, 10 Klee, Paul, 57 Kolakowski, Leszek, 15 n.35 Knossos, discovery of, 11 Kolbe, Georg, 141 labyrinth in Dürrenmatt’s work interpretations of, 70–71, 166 sources of, 69 “labyrinthomania,” 80 Lanson, Gustave, 19–20 Lapatin, Kenneth, 12 n.26 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret), 20–21 Lederer, Hugo, 51–52 Lemprière, John, Classical Dictionary, 166 Lenardon, Robert, 10 Lifar, Serge, 160 Lindsay, Jack, 25 Clue of Darkness, 85–86 Lipchitz, Jacques, 58 Lücke, Hans-K. and Susanne, 10 Magritte, René, 72 Mahler, Alma, 41 Mandelstam, Osip, “Rose-foam of exhaustion” (Europa), 43 Mann, Thomas, 23 Marcks, Gerhard, 55–56, 57 ﬁg.2.6, 66, 159 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 138 Marini, Marino, 160 Maritain, Raïssa, “La Chute d’Icare,” 143 Markevich, Igor, 160 Markotic´, Nicole, 88–89 Marx, Karl, 14–15, 23, 165 Massenet, Jules, 120 Masson, André, 71–74, 117–18 Matisse, Henri, 72 Mayer, Karl Leopold, 35 Der Raub der Europa, 35–37, 41 Mendès, Catulle, 120

172

Index

Milhaud, Darius, 121 L’Abandon d’Ariane, 121 L’Enlèvement d’Europe, 48–50 Miller, Henry, 24–25 Milles, Carl, 52, 58 Minos, myth of, 118, 166 Minotaur in ancient art, 6 in ﬁction, 89–95, 101–107, 114–15 myth of, 68–70 in poetry, 81–89 polyvalence of, 115, 165 on stage, 107–114 as symbol of alienation in Dürrenmatt, 95–101, 166 as symbol of alienation in Picasso, 74–80, 166 Minotaure ( journal), 71–73 Miró, Joan, 72 Mithras, cult of 6 modernism, intellectual precursors of, 14–18 Montherlant, Henri de, Pasiphaé, 117 Moreau, Gustave, 30 Morford, Mark, 10 Morris, Sarah P., 7 n.11, 13 n.32 Moschus of Syracuse, 28 Muir, Edwin, The Labyrinth, 84–85, 115 Mussolini, Benito, 55, 158 Myers, John L., 13 myth ironic adaptation of, 22–23 modernity of, 165–68 polyvalence of, 27–28, 63–64, 167 Neuhauser, Maria (Maria Loibl), Das Labyrinth, 129–30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15–16, 29–30, 41, 65, 165 “Klage der Ariadne,” 120 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 40, 44 Nin, Anaïs, Seduction of the Minotaur, 106 Norden, Eduard, 20 Ovid, 8, 23 and Daedalus, 126–27 and Europa, 28, 30 and Icarus, 135, 141 and Minotaur, 168 Ovide moralisé, 29, 128

Owen, Wilfrid, 19 Ozenfant, Amédée, 20–21 Pasiphaë in ancient art, 6 myth of, 117–18, 165–66 Pauli, Gustav, 141–42 Paulin, Tom, 71 Peiner, Werner, 48, 49 ﬁg.2.4 Pelevin, Victor, The Helmet of Horror (Minotaur), 114–15 Penrose, Roland, 68 Phaedra, literary treatments of, 121–26 Picabia, Francis, 67 Picasso, Pablo 21–22, 46, 72, 77 ﬁg.3.1, 77 ﬁg.3.2 and Icarus, 160, 163 and minotaur, 74–76, 115 Minotauromachy, 77–79 Suite Vollard, 76, 114 Picasso, Paloma, 80 Plato, 5, 41 Plomer, William, “Europa,” 47–48 Plutarch, 7, 68 Podsadecki, Kasimierz, 68 Politzer, Heinz, “Cassandra,” 67 Pollack, Jackson, 118 Porter, James I., 15 n.36 Pottier, Edmond, 12 Probst, Jacob, 53 Propertius, 23 Puccini, Giocomo, 138 Racine, Jean, Phèdre, 122 Ransmayr, Christoph, 108 Ray, Man, 68, 74 Renault, Mary, 115 The King Must Die, 104–105 Respighi, Ottorino, 21 Revel, Jean-François, 73 Rice, Michael, 65–66 Ridgway, Sir William, 13 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 43, 134 Riordan, Rick, The Lightning Thief, 114 Rivera, Diego, 72 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, In the Labyrinth, 106 Rostand, Edmond, Le Cantique de l’aile, 138–39 Roux, Gaston-Louis, 72 Rouzeau, Valéry, 79 n.24

Index Rukeyser, Muriel, “The Minotaur,” 83 Russell, Bertrand, Icarus; or, the Future of Science, 129 Rutledge, Harry C., 79 n.24 Sassu, Aligi, 64 Schliemann, Heinrich, 10–11, 13 Schnabel, Ernst, Ich und die Könige, 131, 167 Schwab, Gustav, 28 Sedlak, Erich, Ikarus oder Die Zerbrechlichkeit der Flügel, 168 Seneca, Phaedra 122 Severini, Gino, 21 sexual awakening in modern art, 30–35 in modern literature, 35–42 Shelley, Percy B., Oedipus Tyrannus, 71 Siganos, André, 22, 71 Skira, Albert, 71–72 Spender, Stephen, “Icarus,” 158–59 Spengler, Oswald, 3–4, 10, 18 Spiegel, Ludwig, 52 Spranger, Eduard, 20 Spunda, Franz, Minos oder die Geburt Europas, 89–92, 115 Stern, Anatol, 54 Strauss, Richard Ariadne auf Naxos, 121 Salome, 36, 106 Stravinsky, Igor, 21, 40 Supervielle, Jules, 115 “Le Minotaure,” 101–102 Tammuz, Benjamin, Minotaur, 114 tauroctony, 6 Tériade, E. (Efstratios Eleftheriadis), 71 Themerson, Franciska and Stefan, 54 Thucydides, 5 Toynbee, Arnold, 4, 10 Trilling, Lionel, 16 Unamuno, Miguel de, 123, 125 Fedra, 123–24

173

Valéry, Paul, La Jeune Parque, 37 Vallotton, Félix, 31 ﬁg.2.1, 31–32, 66, 166 Venus, deconstructions of, 67–68, 167 Vernay, Jacques, 18 Verwey, Albert, “Brueghels Ikarus,” 142–43 Vine, Barbara, The Minotaur, 114 Virgil, and Minotaur, 8–9, 68 Vogeler, Heinrich 32, 33 ﬁg.2.2 Walser, Robert, “Minotauros,” 83, 115 Walter, Marie-Thérèse, 75 Warburg, Aby, 20 Warren, Robert Penn, Brother to Dragons, 86–87 Wegener, Gerda, 33 Weill, Kurt, 72 Weininger, Otto, 31 Wells, H. G., 18–19 Wessell, Leonard P., 15 n.35 Wetzel, Hellmut, “Ikariden,” 140 Wilamowitz, Ulrich von, 13 Wilder, Thornton, 152 Williams, William Carlos, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” 143, 163 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 9 Windeler, B. Cyril, King Minos of Knossos, 118–19 Wolfe, Peter, 105 n.59 Wolpe, Stefan, 50 Zeus and Elida, 50–51 Wrba, Georg, 52 Wright, Wilbur and Orville, 138 Yeats, William Butler, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” 81 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 70, 107, 115, 126 To Each His Minotaur, 107–110 Zervos, Christian, 75 Zollinger, Albin, “Breughel: Ikaros,” 143 Zweig, Stefan, 134