The Classical Divide: Imagination and Rationality

Other Books by Nanette Norris Cultural Studies in Literature, Vol. 2 Modernist Myth: Studies in H.D., D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf Cultural Studies in Literature, Vol. 5 Attack on All Fronts: The Culture of Twentieth Century War Available in ebook and hardcover: www.lulu.com

Nanette Norris

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

Cultural Studies Through Literature Volume One

The Classical Divide: Imagination and Rationality

Nanette Norris

Nanette Norris

Nanette Norris

ISBN: 9781435716308 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008904286

Copyright © 2008 by Nanette Norris All Rights Reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author, with the exception of short passages which may be referenced by reviewers.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

Contents Introduction.........................................................................................1 1. The Greek Legacy in the British School Curriculum from Roman Occupation to the Twentieth Century..............................11 2. Mythopoesis and Ironic Voice in the Chanson de Roland.........25 3. Classical Values in Defense of the Jews: Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.................................................................................................45 4. Hellenic Revival in the Nineteenth Century: The Conceptual Homeland as a Stable Space in a Chaotic Universe.....................63 5. Woolf's Quarrel with Russell: Mrs. Dalloway and the Limits of Knowledge.....................................................................................77 6. The Two Faces of Hellenism: Virginia Woolf and Queer Theory.................................................................................................95 7. Transformation and Displacement in Mythopoesis: Disguising the Real in H.D.'s Helen in Egypt....................................................109 Conclusion........................................................................................131 Notes..................................................................................................135 Bibliography.....................................................................................139

Nanette Norris

Introduction Classical study is the study of Greek and Roman mythology and rhetoric, the study of "the intellectual and imaginative sources of Greece and Rome" (Mayerson ix). The classical influence, by extension, is considered by scholars such as Gilbert Highet (The Classical Tradition) to be reflections of the mythology and rhetoric in post-classical works. This study seeks to broaden this understanding of the classical influence to include value systems and frames of reference the origins of which, while not ostensibly holding a mirror to classical figures, can nonetheless be traced to classical times and thought processes. “In ancient Greece the concept of dialectics began to take shape. The world became understood as a series of opposing forces that created a certain synthesis and a transient balance that always shifted to accommodate the movement of the opposing forces” (Sakoulas). A fairly clear dividing line can be drawn between pre-Socratic and post-Socratic thought. Before Socrates was the great Heroic age of mythology, of Homer and before Homer, before our written records. There is tension between the non-written and the written, pre-logos and postlogos, imaginative and rational. This study looks at the ways in which this Hellenist tension survives in post-classical literature. The first chapter is essentially a cultural study which focuses on the specific conditions which nurtured the transmission of Greek thought in England, as well as the conditions which appear to be at the root of differences between England and the European continent. Though many of the details of this progression are common knowledge, the focus on tracing the split between the rational and the irrational, the logical and the mythopoeiac, is key to this study. This split is part of our inheritance from ancient Greek thought. The rationality upon which our western culture and technology is built has the drawback of excluding every concept which does not fall within the bounds of the logical concepts of the day. That which cannot be explained or accepted at any given moment in time does not disappear: it goes underground and survives in mythopoeiac expression until such a time as it can once again surface into open cultural discourse. The binary expressions – pre-Socratic/post-Socratic, mythopoesis/rationality,

2

Nanette Norris

pre-logos/post-logos -- are an attempt to define and explain rather than limit what is actually in flux. History reveals that Greek thought was underground, piggy-backed with the dominant Roman culture, and represented or supported resistance to the invaders. It embodies that which is asbeston, unextinguishable, as of a flame or light -or desire. Chameleon-like, what it is and what it is perceived to be changes over time, whatever it originally was. Two moments in history stand out. First, the role of the Irish in protecting classical knowledge and then in disseminating it during the medieval revival. The type of classical knowledge which the Irish protected was primarily mythopoeic and pre-Socratic rather than post-Socratic rhetoric. Second, the Norman conquest and subsequent centuries of occupation of England by the Normans resulted in the mass of English-speaking people being excluded from the major post-Socratic classical revival of Western Europe. In resistance to the invaders, the English maintained their language and their preference for a mythopoeically-based system of thought. Chapter 2 explores the way in which this historical anomaly plays out in the medieval epic poem, the Chanson de Roland. The earliest existing manuscript is written in AngloNorman, and this chapter argues that the literature reveals a tension between the English and the Norman conquerors through ironic double-entendre. This anonymous and originally oral piece was chosen because of its links with the Greek epic tradition. It clearly and transparently represents the Heroic tradition in literature, the epic descriptions of battle, of participants – the direct influence of Homer's The Iliad. At the same time, it manipulates the tradition towards its own ends by reflecting the tradition, being written in the style of the tradition, and at the same time it altering the tradition towards its own cultural and historical ends. A major focus of this analysis is the distinction inherent in the text between mythopoesis and rationality, the first speaking to the English and the second speaking to the Normans. Chapter 3 analyzes a fairly transparent use of the Hellenic model -- in this case, post-Socratic -- in Sir Walter Scott's

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

3

Ivanhoe. The post-Socratic mode of thought is quite clear and the connections are overt. Scott makes no bones about calling upon classical reference for his didactic purpose. Many of the chapter headings of the story are quotes from Pope's translation of The Odyssey, a work which would have been well-known to and well-received by many of Scott's readers. Scott employs the classical, post-Socratic value system to argue on behalf of the Jews and against anti-Semitism, raising his voice in the soon-tobe crucial "Jewish Question." To those who are suspicious of the historic approach, as Mark Golden and Peter Toohey appear to be in their introduction to Inventing Ancient Culture, in that it suggests that the author is controlled by his or her culture or moment in time, I would reply that the author, so far from being dethroned, is empowered by the perspective of time, as are the readers. Sir Walter Scott was able to employ classical (post-Socratic) values in his pro-Judaic literary argument in Ivanhoe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He did not yet have the full perspective of the Hellenic revival of the century to come, a revival which was Romantic in nature and privileged the mythopoeic spirit of the pre-Socratics over the logic and rational argument which previous centuries had preferred. Is Virginia Woolf "trapped" in her time and culture when she privileges mythopoesis? Or is she empowered by it? It is a question of perspective. To some extent none of us can escape the historic finalities of time, place, and even gender. To ignore these "pressures of history" (Golden 5), or rather, to fail to allow them their rightful place in the critical consideration and appreciation of a work of art, is to put undeserved limits on the work and the appreciation thereof. This is the clear rational for an historic approach. Golden claims that 'new' historicism differs from the older variety in a crucial way. The earlier brand stressed as crucial a belief in the uniqueness of historical phenomena. The 'old' historicists maintained that each age should be interpreted in terms of its own ideas

4

Nanette Norris

and principles and that the actions of people of the past should not be interpreted by reference to the beliefs, motives, and valuations of the historian's own epoch .... There tended to be, in such work, a focus on one or another canonical narrative whose poetry was felt to reflect or express or illustrate a crucial stage in human consciousness. (4) The inference is that 'new' historicism 'reinvents' the past according to the lights of today, and that 'new' historicism has a different attitude towards 'stages' of human consciousness. These are tricky points, indeed. First, we can never be in the mind-space of another age. This truth is painfully clear in the discussion of the Chanson de Roland, whose ironic attitude can be considered but hardly proven over this distance of time. Would the audience have laughed at the histrionics of Roland as he fainted again and again on the battlefield, or was it all deadly serious to them, deadly 'heroic'? Is it, indeed, possible to consciously remove ourselves from the thinking of our own time, to put ourselves in other's shoes? The discussion of Ivanhoe in Chapter 3 attempts to do so, but we are aware of our own thorough revulsion for the anti-Semitic portrayals of the text, well-meaning as they may be. We can only remind ourselves that anti-Semitic fervor was everywhere, and on the rise (see Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism). There is clearly need for historical context in the present appreciation of this older text. Does this mean, then, that a work of art, of literature, belongs to a particular period in time and represents a particular "stage of human consciousness" (Golden 4)? Yes and no. We will take the second point first. To say that there are 'stages of human consciousness' is to accept a 'progressive' and developmental view of the human psyche, an evolutionary view. This, of course, was the nineteenth century view, which is discussed in Section 4. The modernist, mythopoeic sense of 'things Greek' revised the idea that there is nothing new under the sun: we have much to learn about ourselves, emotionally, from the

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

5

ancient Greeks. There may be phases of our understanding of ourselves, but not developmental stages. As to the first point, to the extent that a work reflects a period in time, it 'belongs' to it, and understanding that time, historically, cannot but augment one's appreciation of the work. The historical approach of this thesis is an attempt not to compartmentalize a work, but rather to see it in a larger context. As Paul Johnson writes, "I have tried throughout not to compartmentalize politics and economics, science and engineering, the arts and literature, but to present them as they really were, closely enmeshed, reacting one upon another, parts of the seamless garment of a society exhilarated and sometimes bewildered by the rapid changes which were transforming it" (xviii). He is speaking of a particular period, what he calls the 'birth of the Modern', 1815-1830, but I would contend that all societies are changing societies, and all are "exhilarated and sometimes bewildered by the rapid changes." Golden and Toohey call this approach 'non-linear dynamics': First, non-linear dynamics reverses the onus of Newton's laws of motion. A main feature of Newtonian mechanics is that bodies remain at rest or in motion at a constant rate and in the same direction unless they are subject to some kind of force. In this model, continuity is regarded as the norm, and change requires some explanation. In non-linear dynamics, however: it turns out that the world as a whole is far from in equilibrium, as are most regions of the world ... the picture that must emerge to recommend itself to our intuitions is one of the world in constant flux, with change the norm, and any lasting sameness the result of very special local conditions maintained at cost ... The strong presumption is that [this] is also true of social systems. (Dyke 1990, 373, 385)

6

Nanette Norris

... Second, non-linear dynamics insists on what is called sensitivity to initial conditions: very small changes in the baseline of a dynamic system can be magnified exponentially over a system's history. Tiny variations in the starting direction or velocity of two pendulums can produce utterly different patterns in their paths; the actions of a single individual can have momentous and unpredictable consequences in an unstable social system.(7-8) Thus, this work places special emphasis on the certain conditions which existed in England and contributed to establishing the English context as different from the European one. The England-for-the-English movement which arose in the post-1066 era and which could be detected centuries later (linked with nationalism) as a form of xenophobia, is a case in point, as is the historic truth concerning the persecution of witches in England. Sensitivity to initial conditions. "Tiny variations in the starting direction" can be seen to play out hundreds of years later: a pedagogical decision made during the Medieval times (to make classical education the basic pedagogy, excluding women) comes to unpredictable fruition in the works of Virginia Woolf and H.D. Now, we can read these works without this knowledge, and come to a reasonable understanding and appreciation of them, but our sense is greatly augmented with the fullness of context. Chapter 4 picks up the history of classical influence where Section 1 left off. The Hellenic revival of the nineteenth century ran parallel to industrialization. This chapter argues that the instability of life in the chaotic and changing nineteenth century led to the imaginative creation of a stable topos or homeland, a stable point of reference which ancient Greece and things Hellenic fulfilled. In addition, with the growth of science domineering the rational perspective, a gap developed between rationality and mythopoesis. Mythopoesis came to be connected with a sense of the sublime and a transcendence of the everyday world. Classical figures embodied many important concepts for

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

7

the emerging Western nations: heroism, individualism, the civilizing impulse. The Hellenic revival of the nineteenth century did much to promote patriarchy and exclusivity into the twentieth century. Both Virginia Woolf and H.D. reacted against patriarchal exclusivity, and did so on Hellenic grounds, in Hellenic terms. They both claimed (or reclaimed) Helen, the female voice, the hegemony of knowledge, the privileging of a perspective of reality. Hellenism is synonymous with the finest values of the Western world: heroism, equality, spiritual strength, honour, democracy. The Greeks were adventurers, and thus the spirit of their age supports commercialism, business, travel, colonialism. Yet, in ancient Greece as in the nineteenth and early twentiethcentury Western countries, these values were in force for those who were already equal: the subtext, the hidden code, was a system of class and of exclusion. Virginia Woolf and H.D. found themselves marginalized by this inherited perspective. For them, as with many other modernists, the question was not simply one of addressing the concerns of the marginalized. It was a revisioning of relations – a demand, a questioning, of those who were accepted – and, turning the story by a few degrees, they found a new angle which could give the story a new perspective. One looks through the canon of modernist writers and poets; each time that Greek themes have emerged, there has been a revisioning. In Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" the ancient story, the great seduction, is questioned, revisioned, and becomes what it seems it always must have been: a rape by one of great stature and power upon an innocent, marginalized, and powerless person. And seeing this, we see all the accepted inequities of an aristocratic British society, and the trade in people-commodities, and the pillage of what is not rightfully one's own. It is all there, in this one recasting of an ancient Greek story. It is a vision which comes out of an historic moment or movement: the decline of the aristocratic, classed society, the movement towards egalitarianism, socialism; it bridges the two and enables the intellectual turn by which the future is made possible. Once we see the power in Yeats' terms we can never go

8

Nanette Norris

back. Our awe of Zeus is tempered by a new realization; we become aware of our own participa-tion in the insidious working of this power. The image of the swan-lover is beau-tiful, enticing, but try as we might, we cannot erase the realization of the brutality of rape. When D. H. Lawrence evokes the specter of the Goddess of Chastity in the figure of Winifred Inger of The Rainbow, he is taking a familiar and fondly conceived image – one which echoes with the dominant Christian image of the Virgin Mary – and questioning its role in modern society. Winifred transforms from Diana, proud and free as a woman without a man, into a prehistoric lizard, un-feeling, unacceptable. The transformation of Diana/Winifred -- who in herself does not change, only Ursula's perception of her – speaks to a fundamentally abhorrent element of the so-called 'modern woman's' rejection of men. The conceptual prototype for the 'modern woman's' behaviour and thinking is there in the model of Diana, which Lawrence exposes, much as Yeats exposed Zeus. (See my "Alchemy and The Rainbow.") In Joyce, we see the revisioning of the heroic Ulysses in the unheroic or anti-heroic Bloom. It strikes one with some force, this neurotic misfit, moving through chapters named after the 'Great Work.' The contrast is too great, too ludicrous to leave us unmoved. Yet, we have no choice but to realize that we are more like Bloom than we are like the long-lost hero, Ulysses: Bloom is everyman. When, ultimately, Bloom becomes heroic spiritually, through his epiphanies (the very word is irrevocably connected with Joyce), we realize how it is that 'everyman' can participate in the heroic. Chapter 5 explores Virginia Woolf's mythopoeic sense of reality by juxtaposing Mrs. Dalloway and Bertrand Russell's postSocratic, pro-rational theories of the mind. Knowledge is of primary importance in Mrs. Dalloway. As Raymond Williams reminds us, Woolf was not in the pattern of boarding school and Oxbridge which by the end of the century was being regarded not simply as a kind of education but as education itself: to have missed that circuit was to have missed being 'educated' at all. In other words, a 'standard' education was that received by one or

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

9

two per cent of the population; all the rest were seen as 'uneducated' or as 'autodidacts;' seen also, of course, as either comically ignorant or, when they pretended to learning, as awkward, over-earnest, fanatical. (170) Woolf was very sensitive to having missed out on the 'received' education to which her brother Thoby had been privileged, simply because she was a woman. "I have to delve from books, painfully and all alone, what you get every evening sitting over your fire and smoking your pipe with Strachey etc. No wonder my knowledge is but scant," she wrote to her brother, who was then at Trinity College, Cambridge (Gordon 83). Knowledge, how we receive knowledge, what counts as knowledge, how we know, what we know -- all of these questions were uppermost in Woolf's thoughts as she dealt with her own, personal exclusion from 'received reality': her manicdepressive illness. The nature of her illness necessarily called reality into question. Mrs. Dalloway plays with the rational sense of sense-data, memory, and the question of what comprises knowledge. To what extent is knowledge 'in the mind' -- 'mental' -- and to what extent external? Woolf's own experiences as 'unbalanced' gave the lie to the 'reality' of the inner perception: this reality is denied by the rest of the world. Section 5 argues that in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf acknowledges both tangible and intangible ways of knowing, and ultimately privileges the personal, non-verbal knowing. Chapter 6 focuses on the extent to which post-Socratic binary discourse is evident in discussions of the marginalized today. Such discourse fails to acknowledge the 'space between the words' which Woolf opened up in Mrs. Dalloway. This chapter clearly distinguishes between the two Hellenic modes of thought: classical versus mythic. It argues that post-Socratic, rational discourse continues to dominate our discussions of identity and reality. Chapter 7 addresses the issue of the way in which the mythopoeic mode of thinking is functioning underground and behind the scenes. Looking at a late-modernist work by the imagist H.D., we see overt and covert employment of classical figures which suggests that the classical inheritance is

10

Nanette Norris

continuing to adapt to historical and cultural realities. In Helen in Egypt, H.D. appears to be holding a mirror up to distinct classical intertexts, "filling out ... an existing narrative" (Swann 176). This section argues for a distinct second or ironic text, whereby the classic mythological overtones are used as a smokescreen for a second layer where actual mythopoesis is occurring for the initiate only. Inherent in this argument is a shifting sense of the definition of mythopoesis, as well as an acknowledgement of a movement away from classical sources even though it continues to be bound by the limits of logos. In a post-classical world, the classical influence continues to evolve in part because it provides a frame of reference through an established logos, if not discourse. To the extent that our culture continues to be dominated by the hegemony of rhetoric and rationality, the intellectual sources of Greece continue to have power. Ultimately, perhaps the most important aspect of Greek inheritance lies in its ability to provide a subtle discourse for resistance and change, a way to speak the unspeakable, to frame the unframable, to find acceptance and a passage to future generations of the unacceptable.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

11

1 The Greek Legacy in the British School Curriculum from Roman Occupation to the Twentieth Century Any discussion of the legacy of the Greeks which purports to encompass a 2000 year time span in twenty pages must be cursory at best. From the point of view of classical scholarship, John E. Sandy's A History of Classical Scholarship is the most comprehensive. U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's History of Classical Scholarship is more brief and is considered to be quite accurate. However, these volumes focus on scholarship per se, and the scholars who engaged in the Hellenization of the Western world. My purpose is rather to ask why it was that Greek language, literature, and values were privileged throughout the centuries, maintaining an important place in what students were taught, in both public and independent institutions. The Roman Conquest and subsequent occupation (54 BC - 410 AD) first established Greco-Roman civilization and Hellenistic thought in Britain. The Romans brought a muchneeded unifying principle. They brought civilization in the best sense of the word: technological advancements, law and order, schools for the well-born. Although the law and order is considered specifically Roman, as are the technological advancements, the philosophical and argumentative underpinnings of the schooling are Hellenistic. The focus was that of transform-ing man from his savage state into a civilized being – an essentially humanistic project, and Hellenistic. It encapsulates the cult of the hero which the Greeks passed to the Romans, and from them to the world at large. It was a sensibility which sat well with the expansionary projects of both the Greeks and the Romans, the Romans being successful in physically controlling territories, and the Greeks in inculcating philosophy and values. Once the basic elements of literacy and numeracy had been learned, the ultimate aim, calling on the resources of both languages, Latin and Greek, was to train men in the arts of eloquence (rhetoric) and to equip them to reflect on human

12

Nanette Norris

destiny (philosophy). Rome supported this curriculum because it formed the basis of Roman patriotism. The school was an institution of the State in that it furnished lawyers, officials, and such like (Fossier 47-48). Hellenistic thought can also be seen in the urbanizing focus of the Romans. The Hellenic ideal was the city-state. The democratic society which the Hellenes promoted was a specific democracy, benefitting a favoured few and excluding many others; it is in this limited sense that the Romans built upon the Hellenistic model. The Roman structure was far from democratic, yet it maintained, amongst the aristocrats, a democratic sense. And it continued to value the urbanizing focus of the Hellenes as Roman expansion brought a sense of society and urbanization to savage lands. Latin was not in widespread use by the native Britons, its use being confined to members of the upper class and inhabitants of the cities and towns. Use began to decline after 410 AD, the approximate date at which the last of the Roman troops were officially withdrawn from the island (Baugh 46). Although it is true that Latin came to Britain before English, the influence of this language upon the Celts was slight. Baugh contends, "It would be hardly too much to say that not five words outside of a few elements found in place names can be really proved to owe their presence in English to the Roman occupation of Britain" (Baugh 80). The influence of the Romans was more roundabout, coming through their contact with the Germanic invaders. The Romans withdrew from Britain in order to defend their territory at home from Germanic invaders. A few years after the withdrawal, certain Germanic tribes began invading Britain. The traditional account of the Germanic invasions comes from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. The German invaders, unlike the Romans, were not interested in living harmoniously with the native Celts, as leaders and nationbuilders. Where they invaded they drove the Celts out or massacred them. Consequently, the Celts were a submerged people who had little effect upon the Germanic invaders. Of the approximately 600 Latin words which had been adopted into the

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

13

Celtic language during the Roman occupation, only five are known to have survived (Baugh 80). The Celtic words which survived in English were those which already existed in the vocabulary of the Germanic invaders. Although the early contact with Roman language and culture was lost in that it did not pass through the Celts, Latin nonetheless came to Britain, through the Germanic invaders whose contact with the Romans on the continent had been considerable. As Baugh points out, "some fifty words from Latin can be credited with a considerable degree of probability to the ancestors of the English in their continental homes" (78) – mostly words having to do with war and trading, the two points of contact between the peoples. The introduction of Christianity into Britain in 597 marked the single "greatest influence of Latin" (Baugh 81) on English. It also marks the true beginnings of the influence of the classical heritage which can be traced into the twentieth century. This is, by now, common knowledge. But if Latin came with Christianity, Greek, which piggy-backed along with Latin throughout Roman times, also came. Latin, of course, was the purveyor of Roman ideology. Greek ideology was more akin to concepts which resisted the Roman philosophy, and thus Greek survived. The Greek heritage is one of resistance. Christianity came to Britain with Augustine and a small band of forty monks. Baugh relates: It is not easy to appreciate the difficulty of the task which lay before this small band. Their problem was not so much to substitute one ritual for another as to change the philosophy of a nation. The religion which the Anglo-Saxons shared with the other Germanic tribes seems to have had but a slight hold on the people at the close of the sixth century, but their habits of mind, their ideals, and the actions to which these gave rise were often in sharp contrast to the teachings of the New Testament. Germanic philosophy exalted physical courage,

14

Nanette Norris

independence even to haughtiness, loyalty to one's family or leader that left no wrong unavenged. Christianity preached meekness and humility, patience under suffering, and said that if a man struck you on one cheek you should turn the other. Clearly it was no small task which Augustine and his forty monks faced in trying to alter the age-old mental habits of such a people. (81-82) The Germanic philosophy which was in place before Christianity came to the island stood in contrast to -- and in resistance to – the Christian philosophy. Yet, it had much in common with the Greek values celebrated by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey: the exaltation of physical courage, the independence, and the loyalty. The Hellenic mental culture was also characterized by what Matthew Arnold would later term "spontaneity of consciousness" (1093) which offset the Roman, Latin, strictness. It would perhaps be too much to say that Christianity found its welcome because of its Hellenic affiliation rather than because of its meekness and humility. However, the facts remain that Augustine's De doctrina christiana, written between 396 and 427, took the view that a grounding in classical culture is essential for understanding the Bible, and that Christianity as preached by Augustine in Britain included a strong association with classical culture. It did not seem to matter that the knowledge came most often in translation. Wilamowitz records the importance of these texts in the Syrian and Arabic traditions: "A vernacular literature, which preserved Greek works in translation and carried on the Greek tradition in several branches of knowledge, had existed in Syria since the second century. The Arabs became the apt pupils of these Syrians and took with them to Spain whatever learning they had absorbed or evolved for themselves" (10-11). Hexter notes that "knowledge of Greek and Greek texts virtually disappeared in Western Europe in the Middle Ages so that poets like Dante and Chaucer were dependent on the Latin

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

15

tradition" (xxiv). As early as the fourth century, "the best Romans saw a threat to Latin culture in the decay of Greek in the west, and tried to ward it off by means of translations" (Wilamowitz 13). The Hellenic philosophy was valued in spite of certain obvious divergence from Christian teaching and historically had been considered a preserver of its host culture, not a destroyer. Thus, it entered Britain with the Christian teachings of Augustine, found favour with the Germanic philosophy which was akin to it, and survived.Indeed, the first archbishop of Canterbury, appointed in 669, was Greek: Theodore of Tarsus. He began the scholarly movement by establishing schools in most of the monasteries and larger churches. Both he and Hadrian, the abbot of Saint Peter's of Canterbury, were skilled in both Greek and Latin, according to Bede. Poole notes that "they made their pupils learn Greek so thoroughly that more than half-a-century later Bede says that some of them still remained who knew Greek as well as their mother-tongue" (17). By the eighth century England "held the intellectual leadership of Europe" (Baugh 83), accomplished through the leadership of the Christian church, with a classical (Greek and Latin) pedagogy. Even at this early stage in the history of learning and pedagogy, the value placed on Greek language and literature seems to have been the result of a yearning for a 'golden age.' As Knowles points out, the intention of Greek education, as it was in ancient Greece, "was ethical and psychological rather than technical or economically useful" (59). It was always "essentially aristocratic in character" (59) and came to be regarded "as the training that had produced the great men of old, the pristine honour and simplicity of the city" (60). The Romans revered Greek learning and civilization in just such a conservative, revivalist fashion, adopting it unquestioningly, imitating it ceaselessly, and passing it on in the same spirit. As Knowles explains, "the two short generations (390-320 BC) in which Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle were, either together or in succession, teaching and writing in Athens were perhaps the most genial and influential in all the history of education" (61). The legacies of Plato and of Aristotle are well known: the

16

Nanette Norris

buildings in which they taught, the Academy and the Lyceum, have given their names to institutes of higher education. Isocrates is less well known, but perhaps more influential. "With him the literary and mathematical stages were both preparatory; they were followed by a training in 'eristic' or the technique of disputation and argument, and this led on to what was the crown of all, the art of speaking well and persuasively" (Knowles 61). Knowles goes on to say: The Hellenistic education ... was a more schematized version of that of Isocrates. The three grades, primary, secondary and superior, now became universal: in the first the child learnt to read, to write and to cipher; in the second the boy absorbed the Greek classics. (62) Knowles contends that there was "no opposition or rival system to the old Roman primary education based on grammar and the classics" (66) when the Christian church began to establish schools. From the end of the eighth century through to the tenth century was a period of decline for the Christian church in Britain, and for the education and learning that it promoted. This is the period of the Danish invasions. During this time, Ireland played a pivotal role in the preservation and dissemination of Hellenism and of learning in general. Poole points to the growing intolerance of the Christian church to the classical tradition and to all learning (6); Baugh stresses the role of the "ravages" of the Danes upon churches and monasteries in bringing about a decline of "the moral fibre of the church" (86). Suffice it to say that Ireland was exempted from this decline until 795 (after which time "the Vikings settled in Ireland, plundered the churches, and destroyed all the special tokens of Irish civilization" [Poole 13]), possibly because of its isolation. It remained untouched by the invasions of "foreign barbarians": Isolated in a remote island, the stream of classical learning had remained pure while the rest of

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

17

Roman Europe had suffered it to be corrupted or dried up in the weary decay of the empire that followed the Teutonic influx. In Ireland it was still fresh and buoyant; and from the Irish it passed back to the continent in greater and greater waves. (Poole 10) A unique combination of circumstances joined to make this possible. First, Irish Christianity itself was newly-planted, having been received only in the middle of the fifth century, with the preaching of a foreign missionary, saint Patrick. Then too, the ecclesiastical constitution failed to develop in Ireland in quite the same way as elsewhere, with bishops having the care of a definite diocese -- there was no money, no fixed endowment, for such organization. The monastery was the basis of organization in Ireland; many bishops settled in one place; ministers were "free to choose their own work where they would .... They had no hopes of ecclesiastical preferment to tempt them to stay at home: poverty was their natural lot, and it might be met with as little inconvenience abroad" (Poole 9-10). The distinct nature of Irish learning was such that, in the seventh century, nobles and men of middle class flocked to the schools in Ireland. Poole indicates that the Greek language itself may have been "widely cultivated" (11) in the Irish schools when it had almost ceased to be known elsewhere. The evidence for this is scanty; more to the point was the mythopoeic, preSocratic style of learning, with "a keen delight in poetry" (Poole 11), "full of conceits and mythological allusions; they read as the work of an entire pagan" (Poole 12). Wherever the Irish went they established schools. The Frankish king, Charles the Great, showed "hearty goodwill towards scholars" and "zeal for the promotion of learning" (Poole 14), causing schools to be established "in connexion with every abbey in his realm, and laid the foundation of medieval learning" (Poole 16). Poole maintains that it was this 'sanctuary' of learning, fed by the Irish scholars, which nurtured the flame of the Greek tradition in learning until the revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

18

Nanette Norris

The European revival spanned three hundred years, from 1050 to 1350, causing Western Europe to form "a single undifferentiated cultural unit" (Knowles 80). Knowles goes on to say: No adequate cause can be assigned for this great reawakening. Those which have been proposed, such as the return of peace to Western Europe, with a consequent growth of ordered government, wealth and leisure, are certainly not the originating causes of such a widespread, permanent and dynamic change; they are scarcely even necessary conditions .... The parallel with ancient Greece is indeed very striking. There, as in medieval Europe ... there sprang up everywhere men of the most acute mental perception; in Greece also, before and during the lifetime of Socrates and Plato, the weapons of logic and dialectic were turned against venerable institutions and doctrines, as they were in medieval France; there, as here, a great body of logic, metaphysics and ethics was built up; there, as here, skeptical and opportunistic school of thought succeeded in breaking the fabric of thought constructed by the great creative masters, in Greece, Plato and Aristotle, in Europe, St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas. (83) From the structure of his argument, comparing medieval Europe to ancient Greece, Knowles demonstrates his own Hellenistic leanings, where all things lead to Athens. Nonetheless, his point is well-taken: throughout Europe, for three hundred years, a revival in learning and thinking occurred. It included three stages of scholasticism: the cathedral schools of the eleventh century, the great dialectical masters such as Abelard, and the epoch of the universities of Paris and Oxford. Several events, however, coincided during this same

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

19

period which affected the attitudes of the English people, and subsequently the pedagogy in English schools. The first and most major event which needs to be considered is the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the occupation which followed it. This conquest effectively blocked the greater mass of English people from participating in the revival; it also resulted in a lasting antiforeign mind-set amongst the English natives. The crowning of William of Normandy came only after he had burnt and pillaged the southeast of England. As a conquest, it "was attended by all the consequences of the conquest of one people by another" (Baugh 111). Instead of simply placing a few French favorites in court, a new nobility was introduced. "Many of the English higher class had been killed on the field at Hastings. Those who escaped were treated as traitors" (Baugh 111). Important positions in the church were filled by Normans: "In 1075 thirteen of the twenty-one abbots who signed the decrees of the Council of London were English; twelve years later their number had been reduced to three" (Baugh 112). Merchants and craftsmen came from the continent; every Norman baron was surrounded by Norman retainers. "For two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, French remained the language of ordinary intercourse among the upper classes in England .... before long the distinction between those who spoke French and those who spoke English was not ethnic but largely social. The language of the masses remained English" (Baugh 113). Under these circumstances, it is not difficult to understand why the cultural unit of Western Europe should be "undifferentiated" (Knowles 80) since it was largely Norman; nor is it difficult to see that 'culture' is being attributed to the upper classes, from which the mass of English-speaking people were excluded. During this period, education proceeded throughout Europe, and including England, according to Norman precepts – that is to say, the Roman legacy was once more disseminated, use of Latin was strengthened, the classics (Greek and Latin) were taught, and the three stages of scholasticism mentioned earlier were undergone. In England, there began a strong "England for the

20

Nanette Norris

English" movement. It was part of the break between Beckett and Henry II when, in 1167, English scholars studying at the university of Paris who received revenues from England were ordered home (Rashdall 13). National feeling was beginning to develop and from about 1230 onward "opposition to the foreigner became the principal ground for such national feeling as existed and drove the barons and the middle class together in a common cause" (Baugh 132). Differences between the English and the Europeans became marked from the twelfth century on. England experienced a state of calm unknown elsewhere. The ignorance and superstition which characterized the Dark Ages were quickly superseded in England by civility and rationalism; mercantile interests grew, towns developed, and people's concerns focused on economic development. The separate paths of England and Europe began to distinguish themselves after the Latern Council of 1215 decreed that clergy should not take part in the ceremony of the ordeal. Public ordeal was the traditional Germanic manner of justice; it presupposed that supernatural powers would arrange for guilt and innocence to emerge. In England, the ordeal was abolished "at once and for ever" (Pollock 599) soon after the 1215 decree, probably because England already had a strong tradition of cohesive custom which the relative isolation and small geographic proportion of the island had enabled to develop. Included in this 'custom' were many elements of Roman Law: The normal criminal procedure of the classical Roman Law was accusatory, and for a long time the normal criminal procedure of the canon law was accusatory. It was not unduly favourable to accusers; on the contrary, the accuser bound himself to undergo the peona talionis in the event of his failing to furnish a complete proof of the guilt of the accused, and the law's conception of a complete proof was narrow and rigorous. (Pollock 656-657)

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

21

This meant that if the accusation was unfounded, the accuser was made to suffer the punishment to which the defendant would have been subject. Along with the high cost of mounting a law suit, the peona talionis was effective in preventing frivolous accusations. The peona talionis originally came to England during the time of the Roman Occupation; its preservation was a matter of centuries-long custom rather than through the reintroduction of Roman Law which, in Europe, occurred during the twelfth century. On the continent, knowledge and understanding of Roman Law grew through the teaching of Roman Law at the universities of Italy, especially Bologna. The reintroduction of Roman Law enabled the Inquisition (and subsequently the witch trials) only insofar as it was linked with the lapse of the peona talionis. The horrors of both the Inquisition and the witch trials effectively by-passed England, creating a major difference between the experiences of the English and those of the Europeans. As Pollock points out: But in the twelfth century all these methods were breaking down. Innocent III introduced a new procedure, the inquisition. The judge proceeds ex officio either of his own mere notion, or on the suggestion of a promoter; he collects testimony against the suspect, testimony which the suspect does not hear; it is put in writing. But even this weapon was too feeble for the warfare against heresy in which the church was by this time engaged .... Every safeguard of innocence was abolished or disregarded; torture was freely used. Everything seems to be done that can possibly be done to secure a conviction. This procedure, inquisitory and secret, gradually forced its way into the temporal courts .... When in the eighteenth century French philosophers and jurists rebelled against it and looked about them for an accusatory, contradictory, public

22

Nanette Norris

procedure, a procedure which knew no torture, they looked to ancient Rome and modern England. Fortunate in her unblemished orthodoxy, England at the critical moment had escaped the taint of the inquisitio haereticae pravitatis. (657) The educational system which developed during the relative calm from the twelfth century onward, if it can be dignified with the name of 'system', began to have two streams: one for the boys who were needed as clerics, and the other for the sons of the wealthy upper class. The British grammar school has its origin in this time: schools were endowed by guilds and wealthy philanthropists for the instruction of students whose income did not exceed 3.6s.8d a year (Lawson 45). They differed from the private instruction which was common for the children of the wealthy in that the emphasis was practical and career-oriented -basic literacy in Latin, as well as French and math. The boys were expected either to become clerics with the church or to find positions as clerks for commercial enterprises. Latin was the language of commerce right into the fourteenth century. A true liberal arts education, classical and humane, including both Latin and Greek, was reserved for the wealthy and leisure classes. It was maintained more out of style than out of need. Class division was supported through pedagogy in British schools right through the nineteenth century and, many argue, into today. Of the specific changes which took place in the shaping of the school system from the early fifteenth century to the nineteenth, little needs to be discussed in the context of the learning of Greek. Until the nineteenth century, it remained exclusively in the realm of the upper-crust. Then, for arguably the first time since the Romans focused upon and disseminated Greek learning, 'things Greek' burst into prominence. This revival did not touch upon the schooling per se: it was a popular movement that ultimately touched all classes, connected as it was with exciting scientific, archeological discoveries, such as Heinrich Schliemann's excavations in

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

23

mainland Greece (1871-1890) and Wilhelm Dorpfeld's uncovering of Troy VI (1893-94). These excavations were wellpublicized and captured the popular imagination. Frank M. Turner argues that the appeal of the Greek culture to Victorian Britain lay in the discontinuous relationship which it had enjoyed with the British people. I would argue that the discontinuity was with the lower classes, and thus its appeal was of something both fresh and upper-crust – an appropriation of an upper class domain in a society which was experiencing the social levelling effects of the industrial revolution. One can be quite sure that those who were most familiar with Greek stories and myths, and with Greek philosophy, came from a privileged station in life. K.J. Dover contends that "one of the causes of the redirection of interest from Latin to Greek ... was travel in the Aegean and the sight of Greek art and architecture in its native place" (296). Such travel was made possible by peace, prosperity, improved shipping, as well as having the leisure to travel -- we are still talking about a small percentage of the population. The overhaul of the schooling system which began during Victorian times made basic education more widely accessible, modernized and humanized the curriculum, yet the truly classical education remained the domain of a privileged few. The Victorians believed that they had embraced Hellenism – for the first time, or so the average person thought -- in reaction to Virgil, in reaction to the 'strictness' of the Latin learning which was the lot of the commonly-educated person.

24

Nanette Norris

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

25

2 Mythopoesis and Ironic Voice in Chanson de Roland As we have seen, Greek language and thought survived in an upper-class context of elitist learning, a context which the general populace did not share. However, through popular literature most people in Britain partook of the inheritance of Hellenic thought -- the attitudes, the values, the approaches to life which the ancient Greeks passed on. For the most part, literature which survives through the ages does so because it is popular in some way; such popularity is not elite but indicates writing which speaks to a cultural outlook, a more general and broad way of thinking. Literature and literary culture was in no way obliged to be the purveyor of Hellenic thought, even when such influence existed in the upper echelons of the educational system, but in fact there is an interesting reciprocal relationship between the elite and the general populace. We know that Hellenic thought was consciously valued in the upper echelons of society; we also know that its strength lay in the extent to which it resisted domination, resisted the philosophy of the conquerors, Roman or other. This resistance is the most likely place to look for an explanation of its appeal to mass culture in Britain: Hellenic thinking appears to have spoken to significant cultural attitudes of the British people through hundreds of years when the British were a subject people. Thus,the valued learning of the conquerors contained the germ of the autonomy and resistance of the subjects. The Chanson de Roland (11th century) The Chanson de Roland is a 'chanson de geste.' The Latin term 'gesta' means 'things which have been done, deeds, actions.' The Old French term 'geste' has a similar meaning with the inclusion of a sense of heroic deeds. In addition, the Old French term can encompass concepts of 'family,' 'people,' 'race' or 'history,' referring to an account of the deeds of a nation or a kinship group. There are approximately a hundred surviving 'chansons de geste' dating from around 1100 to the second half of the

26

Nanette Norris

fourteenth century. The Chanson de Roland is thought to be the earliest one. The poem "has been dated as early as 1060 and as late as the second half of the twelfth century, but the most frequently accepted date is around the very end of the eleventh century (1098-1100)" (Burgess 8). This would place the poem at the time of the First Crusade, after the Norman Conquest, when England was occupied by Normans and French was the language of the ruling class in England. The chanson de geste was originally a performance piece: It will have been performed by a jongleur to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument called the vielle (Modern English 'viol'). The jongleur (Old French jogler, jogleor) was an itinerant minstrel who provided his audience with a wide variety of entertainment, one aspect of which has survived in the English term juggler. We have virtually no knowledge of the music which accompanied the chanson de geste. It was probably a simple, monotonous tune repeated unchanged line after line .... The presentation of any chanson de geste by the jongleur would certainly have been an artistic performance and the various minstrels would have been able to use their personal skills in the areas of drama and musicianship in order to please their public. (Burgess 16) Therefore, it appeared in manuscript form some time after it was originally performed. In addition, it was quite unnecessary for the public who enjoyed it to be literate in French. It would have been sufficient for them to have a good working knowledge of oral French. This would have meant that, among others, the illiterate women of the Norman court in England would have had access to the performance, as would all retainers, all of those who served the Norman court, who provided for its needs. This included any number of English people who, as we know, by the end of the eleventh century had become bilingual, if not

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

27

unilingual French, using a dialect known as Anglo-Norman, in order to serve the needs of the conquerors. Such an understanding of the audience of the piece greatly expands the range of its possible meaning and reception: it opens a space for ironic double-entendre whereby it speaks to two different audiences: the conquerors and the conquered. The Chanson de Roland is the "oldest extant epic poem in French" (Burgess 14). Its manuscript, executed in the twelfth century and thought to be a copy of a copy, was discovered by Francisque Michel in July 1835. The legend of Roland has enjoyed enormous popularity, with adaptations into Middle High German (the Ruolandsliet), Old Norse (the Karlamagnussaga), Welsh (can Rolant), and Dutch (the Roelanstslied). The exploits of Charlemagne were popular throughout Europe and especially in Italy. Burgess notes that in the early thirteenth century the epic poems in French which had become popular during the twelfth century were grouped by scribes into gestes or cycles. "The Song of Roland belongs to the Cycle of the King (Geste du roi), a category which includes the Pilgrimage of Charlemagne .... The other two principle cycles were the Feudal Cycle (Gest de Doon de Maiance) and the William Cycle (Geste de Guillaume d'Orange or Geste de Garin de Monglane)" (Burgess 15). The Chanson de Roland, however, was the first, as far as we know. It had tremendous influence in the literary field, catching the imagination of hundreds of poets. Its relation to the whole world of chivalrous court literature is considered almost inestimable. Its popularity spanned centuries, with manuscripts ranging from the twelfth century one to one from the fifteenth century. Such a vastly popular and influential text is an ideal place to begin illustrating the tracings of Hellenism in literature. Burgess mentions that the twelfth century manuscript, called Digby 23, "presents a number of linguistic features reflecting the Anglo-Norman dialect, the French spoken in England for some three hundred years after the Norman Conquest" (7). Indeed, one cannot help but speculate that the Chanson de Roland was perhaps initially performed in England. There is support for this possibility: "In his Roman du Rou, written about 1160, the poet Wace claims that a song of Roland

28

Nanette Norris

was sung to the Normans by a certain Taillefer before the battle of Hastings" (8). In this context, of course, it would have spoken specifically to the would-be conquerors. No manuscript exists of the version of the poem which was sung before the battle of Hastings. However, what we know about the oral tradition suggests that additions and variations could have been initiated by subsequent singers over the next fifty or sixty years after the Norman occupation, resulting in the manuscript of 1100 in which certain ironies can be seen when a mixed audience is considered. The epic tradition of which the Chanson de Roland partakes is an aristocratic one: In the earliest times, then, epic poetry was a sung, or more likely chanted, account of the doings of either gods or men, performed by a professional .... The epic technique ... seems too contrived and elaborate to have been taken up casually. Aristocratic young men could be trained to show some skill at it, but by and large it must have remained in the hands of men who spent their lives at learning the old themes and phrases and remaking them to their own view. It is hard to see, as some would like, any connection between this highly stylized art and genuine folk poetry. Not only is the style complex and sophisticated, but it is hard to discover anything in the epics that is not sprung from or directed to an aristocratic conscious. People of low birth do not appear on the scene. The concerns of the characters are those of the ruling classes. (Beyer 7-8) The French chanson de geste, however, seems to have been a more hybrid form of epic, partaking of the 'low mimetic' (in Frye's term) through the entertainment factor offered by the performance of the jongleur, who performed for many types of audiences in many different settings: professional, but with a

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

29

more general appeal. The jongleur was more than just the instrument player: Burgess feels we "can assume that jongleurs, equipped with a stock of chansons de geste and works in other genres, would have been capable of all forms of improvisation" (16). The piece would have been performed for an audience of distinctly pro-Norman, nationalistic conquerors who would have seen in Charlemagne's exploits (and his success) an echo of their own. In fact, Charlemagne is credited in the poem with unhistoric sovereignty over Scotland, Ireland and England, victories the Normans desired but failed to attain. As Roland relates: With it I conquered Scotland and Ireland And England, which became his domain (v. 172, ll. 2331-2332) One can speculate that the conquered English, hearing this, would not have liked to have been reminded of their own situation. Instead of rooting for Roland and for Charlemagne, as the French-speaking rulers would surely have been doing, they might have identified with an undercurrent of resistance raised in the poem through the specter of their own situation, clearly identifying Roland not as the doomed hero but as the oppressor. The roles of the characters might indeed have been reversed in the minds of the listeners, depending upon whether they were Norman or English in origin. There is always the problem, when reading and interpreting medieval documents, of imposing the standards of one's own age. At the same time, it is obviously difficult to tune in to and to recreate the ethos and the thinking of the time in which the document originated. E. Vance contends that the Chanson de Roland is a simple heroic poem of absolutes; the colors are always black and white with few shades of disturbing gray. He argues that the day of the Chanson de Roland was simple and candid, and that in the poem things are simple as they are; the reader is expected to understand them without explanation. In considering the text 'simple', Vance is at odds with research

30

Nanette Norris

into other medieval literature which suggests that the texts are highly complex, with allusions, symbols, texts and subtexts. We may not nowadays be in a position to clearly illuminate the complexities, but it is a mistake to take the text at face value. For instance, taken at face value the fact that Charlemagne and Roland are battling Saracens is simple enough. The historical Charlemagne, in 778, was crossing the Pyrenees towards France when his rearguard was attacked, at the pass of Roncesvalles, by (Christian) Basques. The attack could not be revenged as the enemy dispersed in such a way that "no one knew where or among which people they could be found" (Burgess 10). That the attacking Basques are changed in the Chanson de Roland to Saracens is taken to reflect the realities of the day, the First Crusade and the battle against the Islamic armies, Christian versus Moslem. However, the smaller details of the changes made open a space for doubt. In the poem, Roland is presented as a Frank from France, not as the Breton he originally was. This is not an insignificant point if you are an English listener, and the Normans are your conquerors, in which case Roland would represent the conquerors in quite a direct way through this change. By the same token, Burgess may be doing the original manuscript a disservice. In the Digby 23 manuscript "The christians are referred to both as Franks ('Francs s'en irunt en France, la lur tere', v. 50) and the French ('L'ost des Franceis verrez sempres desfere'. v.49) ... the poet normally uses the two designations interchangeably and as Charles was King of the Franks, I have chosen to retain Franks in this translation" (Burgess 20). Burgess may be presuming upon the intentions of the poet in choosing one term over the other. Historicism and the politics of the poet's day may have been intertwining in an irony of perspective: if you are English, Franceis indicates the Norman conquerors rather than the historic Franks, and the interchangeable use of the two terms would keep this perspective alive, audible only to those who are affected by it. Then there is the issue of the "veritable roll-call of the Frankish empire" (Burgess 20). This roll-call is well-matched by the naming of the various people of the pagan world: Butentrot,

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

31

Milceni, Nubles, Blos, Bruns, Slavs, Sorbres, Sors, Armenians, Moors, Nigres, Gros, Canaanites, Turks, Persians, and so forth. Nearly seventy Saracens are mentioned by name in the text. Many of them are as honoured by title, degree, and kinship as any Christian mentioned: An emir is there from Balaguer. His body is very handsome and his face fierce and fair. When he is mounted on his horse, He bears his arms with great ferocity. He is well known for his courage; Had he been a Christian, he would have been a worthy baron. (v. 72, ll. 894-899) The mores by which they live are parallel to those of the Christians: Margariz of Seville came galloping up; He holds the land right up to Cazmarines. He is so handsome that the ladies adore him; Whenever one sees him, her eyes light up. When she catches sight of him, she becomes all smiles. No pagan is such a good knight; He came and joined the throng, crying out above the rest And saying to the king: 'Do not be dismayed. I shall go to Rencesvals to kill Roland And Oliver will not escape with his life. (v. 77,ll. 955-964) The noble and courageous attributes of the pagans, who worship Muhammad as faithfully as the Christians their God, suggest not an evil mirror-image of the Christians, but a noble and likeminded people, right down to the feudal ethos of courtly love. Their nobility is heralded sufficiently often to make it possible

32

Nanette Norris

for one to think positively of them in spite of those who are associated with villainy and the devil. An audience listening for a subtext would have found it possible to identify with the Saracens rather than the Franks. G. F. Jones argues that the real spirit of the Chanson de Roland is not really Christian at all but Roman and German. The 'true spirit' of Christianity had not yet penetrated society. The ethos of the Christians continues to be pagan, with none of the Christian virtues of love, humility, and forgiveness. Indeed, there is intrinsic irony in the roots of the story. "In Old French and Medieval Latin literature, there is a lasting tradition involving the 'sin of Charlemagne'. Supposedly, Charlemagne committed adultery with his sister ... and they conceived Roland. Charlemagne then gave his sister in marriage to Milon, who fostered the child to adulthood. Milon subsequently died, and Berte/Gisle was remarried to Ganelon, creating the stepfather situation of the Song of Roland (Gaiffer; Keller; Lejeune)" (Morgan 7). The 'sin of Charlemagne' is repeated time and again in the Egyptian traditional mythology which honours sisterspouses: all 8 Gods who form the Eanead of Heliopolis are intimately related. However, the Saracens are not depicted in the Chanson de Roland as sharing this (by Christian standards) 'immoral' tradition, even though it originated on the African continent as did many of them. Rather, they worship Apollo, a pagan but 'civilized' Greek god -- the god of light, of music, of colonizing (all approved of by the Franks and the Normans), as well as of divination and prophesy (which was not). This is one of the little inside 'jokes' of the text. Gilbert Highet, in The Classical Tradition, says the following about the classical influence in the Song of Roland: French literature ... opens with The Song of Roland. Like Beowulf, which opens English literature, this poem is rather more primitive that Homer; and it is almost as unaware as Beowulf of the existence of classical civilization and Greco-Roman history. It is a 4,000- line epic, arranged in strophes bound together

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

33

by assonance, and inspired by the Saracenic wars of Charlemagne. It relates the heroic death of Charlemagne's Lord Warden of Brittany, Hruodland, in A.D. 778. (Roland is his modern name, and he was actually killed not by the Saracens but by the Basques.) The few classical reminiscences that occur in it are feeble, and distant, and distorted. For instance, we are told that the pagan Saracens worship a trinity of idols. One is Mahomet; one is Tervagant, whose name survives in the word for a woman with a devilish temper; and the third is Apollo, in the strangest company that the Far-Darter ever kept. Then once the poet, telling how a Saracen enchanter was killed by a Frankish archbishop, adds that the sorcerer had already been in hell, 'where Jupiter led him by magic'. At a great distance, this might be a reminiscence of the visit of Aeneas to the underworld. Lastly, in the Baligant episode (which is not thought to be by the original poet of Roland), the emir of Babylon is said to be so old that he 'quite outlived Vergil and Homer'. There is no other trace of classical influence, nor should we expect to find it in a poem whose author barely knew the Roman deities. (49) This is rather surprising lack of insight on the part of a scholar who has traced and delineated so much of what it is to partake of 'classical influence'. Highet knows that influence is not to be found simply in a textual awareness of "classical civilization and Greco-Roman history." By the same token, when an author seems to be mistaken in the details concerning a deity or an event, the answer may lie in a reason other than ignorance. In the case of the Song of Roland, Highet has missed the possibility that the text may be ironic, although he admits that in both irony and satire (satire being a "literary form invented by the Romans" [303]) it is "possible to trace certain Greek influences which are still active" (304). He speaks of "the Greek street-preachers, usually Cynics and Sceptics" (304), who employ numerous devices to attract and hold attention, such as anecdotes, character-sketches, fables, dialogues against imaginary opponents, topical references and so forth. There is a

34

Nanette Norris

"general intention to improve society by exposing its vices and follies" (305). As we have seen with the Song of Roland, overt satire and criticism would have been dangerous for the poet/singer, whereas an ironic voice maintained an illusion of a pro-Norman stance. The epic form itself can be traced back to Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. The poetry is constructed to be sung; its formulaic method aids the singer's memory. In this sense, it is an ideal form for someone who wishes to partake of the ethos of the Greek street-preachers. The epic form provides the safety of a recitation of so-called 'historic' events (in this case, radically altered), as well as the freedom of an improvisation. The author of the Chanson de Roland was not even restricted by the narrow metrical confines of the Homeric verse: this gave freedom of expression unknown to anyone who closely followed a particular tradition. The freedom of expression allows the seriousness of the piece to border on the ludicrous in a number of places. For instance, there is the degree of detail given concerning Roland's dying moments: he takes forever to die -- he faints time after time, twice on his horse, and at least twice on the ground. One can imagine the dramatic possibilities of these scenes. Then -v.206 and 207 -- Charles faints twice: "he could not prevent it" (l. 2891). In one sense, these fainting spells are understandable, given the context of the narrative: Roland is hemorrhaging in his skull and Charles is overcome with grief. However, this might also be reference to an illness which the Norman kings may have been susceptible to, some kind of fainting sickness, petit mal epilepsy or the like. (We know now that all fainting is due to seizure.) And, of course, Charlemagne and Roland are father and son, sharing the 'tainted blood'. This suggests a satiric dig at the occupiers. At the very least, these fainting scenes could provide an element of buffoonery in a dramatized scene. Not all satire and irony is Hellenic, but the frame of mind which actively resists being assimilated and dominated by a conquering force or people most certainly is. The Cynics and Sceptics live on in this spirit. The epic tradition includes a device called the catalogue

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

35

which we see operating in the Chanson de Roland with interesting results. Beye notes that "Poetry is a great help in remembering. Metered catalogues very likely supplied in illiterate times a handy means for transmitting a culture's necessary information. The catalogues we know from Greek epic, however, seem to be fulfilling form more than function. The poet has put them to structural or decorative uses, rather than informational ones" (89). In the Chanson de Roland the catalogue verses appear to relate real information concerning individuals, information which would be interesting if we knew who these people are or were. In fact, all of the individuals, pagan or Christian, were fictionalized, unknown even to the listeners of the day. The result of this technique is that we approach the individuals' names as though they were real people and this a real story: the individuals begin to stand out so that we can have some sense of empathy for them. This is understandable in terms of the Franks involved: the listeners, if Norman, would welcome a feeling of empathy with the Franks of the story. However, the pagans are accorded similar individuality which raises their status from mere satan-driven fiends to people with families -- fathers and sons, noble backgrounds, just like the Franks. When the formulaic phrases appear, such as "flinging him dead" and "piling one body on top of another," the horror of the slaughter is poignant: there are no winners. It gives the lie to Roland's statement that "The pagans are wrong and the Christians are right" (v.79, l.1015). The battle narrative itself is an important inheritance from Greek epic tradition. The battle narrative is not simply a recital of traditional saga names, not the poet's bow in the direction of an insensitive, bloodthirsty, numerically superior part of his audience. The Iliad is just as much about war as it is about Achilles. These passages develop the important philosophical and psychological frame to the whole poem. What personalizes the battle narrative are the small anecdotal descriptions of the men in combat. (Beye

36

Nanette Norris

94) It is also a question of seeing the bravery of the fighters and not idealizing what they went through: the battle is not pretty or gentile: Then Anseis gives his horse full rein And goes to strike Turgis of Turteluse. He breaks his shield beneath its golden boss And smashed the lining of his hauberk. He plunges the point of his fine spear into his body. He gave him a firm push and rammed the iron right through him; With a free blow of his lance he lays him out dead on the ground. Roland said: 'This is a brave man's blow!' (v.99, ll.1281-1288) The Chanson de Roland shares with Homer's The Iliad not only the detailed descriptions of the battle and the catalogue of the participants, but also an intimate knowledge of those concerned, with attention to personal suffering and to mourning the loss of fallen comrades: Count Roland sees the archbishop on the ground; He sees his entrails spilled and lying around his body. Beneath his brow his brains flow forth; Upon his chest, across the breast, He crossed his fine, white hands. He mourns him out loud, in the fashion of his land (v.167, ll. 2246-2251) The attention which is given to the individual is evidence of the Hellenic philosophical legacy of a "relativized view of truth and knowledge, by which what seems to each man is true for him" (Williams, "Philosophy" 229). This is the ultimate declaration of individuality, from which stem comes values most precious to the Western world today, such as democracy itself, along with

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

37

sense of self, and the many freedoms and rights of the individual which are entrenched in our political constitutions. The nascence of this strong sense of self was the attempt, with the breakdown of the identification with the Olympian Gods, "to elevate man himself to a power equal to, or higher than, that of the gods and to bestow on him a faculty whereby he could identify himself with Being as such. They found this faculty in human reason or thought" (Kohanski 21). Logos, or man's reasoning faculty, achieved primacy, and "nomoi, laws ordained in mythos, were replaced by laws derived from logos" (Kohanski 21), with its "power to order his cosmos independently of the gods" (21). The ramifications of this philosophy are profound; the sense of the individual life and ancestry, the homage paid to the individual person are but symptomatic of these thought processes in operation. We will end the discussion of the Chanson de Roland with a look at Charlemagne's dreams because it is here that we see most clearly the mystical legacy of the ancient Greeks which counterbalances the rational principal of the logos. In fact, the "mythological and scientific accounts of nature" (Kohanski 21) were in contention in ancient Greece "with Heraclitus and Parmenides, who tried to reconcile logos with mythos; going through Plato, who drew a parallel between the two; and culminating in Aristotle, whose aim it was to free his science of the universe from all mythological admixture" (Kohanski 21). The degree to which these views of the cosmos were in contention during the time that the Chanson de Roland was performed, of which the twelfth century manuscript, Digby 23, gives record, sheds interesting light on the intrinsic ironies of the piece. There are 2 dream sequences -- one before the battle and one after Roland's death -- with 4 dreams in total. The first sequence is as follows: 56 The day passes, the night grows dark; Charles, the mighty emperor, lies asleep. He dreamed he was at the main pass of Cize;

38

Nanette Norris

In his hands he was holding his lance of ash. Count Ganelon seized it from his grasp; He broke it and brandished it with such violence That the splinters flew up into the sky. Charles sleeps on without being roused.

57 After this dream he had another vision: That he was in France in his chapel at Aix; In his right arm he is bitten by a vicious boar. From the direction of the Ardennes he saw a leopard coming; It attacks his body with great ferocity. From within the hall a hunting-dog came down, Bounding and leaping towards Charles. It tore off the right ear of the first boar; Angrily it wrestles with the leopard. The Franks say that there is a mighty battle; They do not know which of them will win it. Charles sleeps on without being roused. This sequence appears at a point in the narrative when, unbeknownst to Charlemagne, four hundred thousand pagans are lying in wait to attack his travelling army. He has not yet designated his rearguard and is unaware of Ganelon's initial treachery. Although Charlemagne's dream is related to the audience, he himself appears unaware of it and certainly does not act upon it, either to consciously interpret it or to behave as though he has interpreted it. This is absolutely in keeping with the teaching of the Christian, Catholic doctrine which held that divination, augury, attempts to predict the future through mystical seers, through signs or dreams (a term used interchangeably with vision) was forbidden, if not positively devil-worship. The condemnation of magia can be traced back to Roman times. As Flint reminds us, "magia had long been current in the Roman Empire as a term of condemnation, and fierce efforts had

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

39

been made to bury all its trappings and practitioners in a dark sea of oblivion" (3). The Theodosian Code read as follows: No person shall consult a soothsayer [haruspex], or an astrologer [mathematicus] or a diviner [hariolus]. The wicked doctrines of augurs and seers (vates) shall become silent. The Chaldeans and wizards [magi] and all the rest whom the common people call magicians [malefici], because of the magnitude of their crimes, shall not attempt anything in this direction. The inquisitiveness of all men for divination shall cease forever. For if any person should deny obedience to these orders, he shall suffer capital punishment, felled by the avenging sword. (9, 16, 4) Flint also points out that "a parallel and reinforcing process of condemnation ... is to be found in the Bible, in Judaic and apocryphal literature, and in many of the writings of the early Christian Fathers" (18). Technically, it would have been permissible for Charlemagne to seek interpretation of his dream on the grounds that, as emperor of vast territories with the fate of many people in his hands, it was important for him to use predictive measures to protect against the injury of humans. As Flint points out, "Even the Theodosian Code can make a distinction between arts aimed at the injury of humans (which arts are called magic ones), and predictive measures aimed to protect crops from the elements or to assist in cures" (25). Charlemagne, however, does not interpret his dreams. The inclusion of the dreams in the narrative, coupled with the lack of interpretation (with the possible exception of the lines "The Franks say that there is a mighty battle;/They do not know which of them will win it" [v.57, ll. 734-5]) speaks to a tension between modes of thought or ways of seeing the world -- the rational versus the irrational, or rather, the rational versus the imaginative. The tension concerns not only the way the world is viewed or thought about, but also the way it is spoken or written

40

Nanette Norris

about -- the language, the idiom, the discourse. Even the ancient Greeks were torn between the poetic language of the myths and the rational rhetoric of philosophy. As we know, the rational rhetoric became valued in exclusion of the poetic -- as Graves puts it, "Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind" (White Goddess 10). 'Magical poetry' continued to exist, even amongst the Greeks, in the language and thought processes of myth. However, as myth receded in time and became a vague memory of its former, dynamic, religious reality, the language of 'magical poetry' continued in the parallel and fiercely protected Semitic tradition. James Shiel, in his Greek Thought and the Rise of Christianity, argues that "the Semitic type of expression" (48) was "repugnant to the Hellenic ear" (48) and that it was with difficulty that the "Greek convert from paganism" (48) adapted to the "Semitic phraseology, the core of the Christian liturgy, [which] did not build up rationality of form or the dramatic punctuation of 'beginning, middle and end'.... Its idiom was 'words of life' rather than words of reason" (48). The mythopoetic discourse, then, was inherent in the Christian liturgy, the Biblical phraseology, and in the non-linear faith. Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, maintains that 'magical poetry' also continued to exist until at least the tenth century with the Welsh poets: ... the ancient language survived purely enough in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, Corinth, Samothrace and elsewhere; and when these were suppressed by the early Christian Emperors it was still taught in the poetic Colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in the witch-covens of Western

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

41

Europe. (12) The Welsh bards, or master-poets, like the Irish, had a professional tradition, embodied in a corpus of poems which, literally memorized and carefully weighed, they passed on to the pupils who came to study under them .... When the Welsh poets were converted to orthodox Christianity and subjected to ecclesiastical discipline -- a process completed by the tenth century, as the contemporary Welsh laws show -their tradition gradually ossified. Though a high degree of technical skill was still required of master-poets and the Chair of Poetry was hotly contested in various Courts, they were pledged to avoid what the Church called 'untruth', meaning the dangerous exercise of poetic imagination in myth or allegory. (18) What we have, then, is a fascinating and seminal convergence of ideologies and discourses in Ireland from the eighth century through the tenth century. Irish schools both disseminated Hellenism and promoted 'magical poetry'. By the twelfth century, when the Digby 23 manuscript of the Chanson de Roland was written, the Christian tradition as it came through the Normans was intensely rational, antisuperstition, anti-Semitic (and anti-Arabic/Islamic due to the Crusades), with an intense distrust of the unknown, of the magical, symbolic discourse which represented the non-rational universe. On the other hand, the English were inheritors of a profound tradition of mythopoetic thought. Given the European Christian strictures against symbolic thought and the discourse of 'magical poetry', it is most likely that only the English members of the audience of the Chanson de Roland would have responded to the dream content in a symbolic, predictive manner. Analysis of the dream suggests that the narrative values symbolic interpretation to the point that the tragedy of Roland's

42

Nanette Norris

death can, at least in part, be attributed to Charlemagne's failure to listen to his dream-warning. The dream setting is identical to Charlemagne's own situation: he is at a main pass. His "lance of ash" is not only a strong spear: to those who are aware of the tradition it is the symbol of the Ash-god, Woden -- Graves mentions that Ygdrasill was the enchanted ash, sacred to Woden, whose roots and branches in Scandinavian mythology extended through the Universe (White Goddess 57). Charlemagne, of course, ruled an empire whose roots extended quite far, as Roland catalogues for us. An English audience, more in touch with a Celtic ancestry and mythopoesis, might have recognized the parallel. The lance of ash which Ganelon seizes would therefore be the symbol of power. In fact, even read without a sense of the Celtic allusions, a society which values prowess in battle would interpret the seizing of a lance as the seizing of power. That the splinters fly up "into the sky" can be read as alerting the Heavens, or God, to the circumstance. In one sense, verse 56 is no more than a reckoning, fairly realistically, of events which had already transpired, although unbeknownst to Charlemagne: in his treachery Ganelon had threatened the power of Charlemagne. Interpretation of this verse requires not so much augury as simple recognition of the allusions. Verse 57, however, offers an audience only two choices: accept this fanciful narrative at face value or interpret it. Any interpretation runs the risk of entering the domain of augury. A chapel is a holy place; to attack someone in a chapel is to defile a holy place. Charlemagne is bitten in his right arm, indicating that the attacker is someone close to him, someone he would not have expected such an attack to come from: his right arm. Certainly, Ganelon was Charlemagne's brother-in-law and someone to whom Charlemagne turned for advice. Burgess points out that "the portrait we are given of him is not entirely unfavourable" (23). He "cuts a dashing figure with his marten skins, his silk tunic, his sparkling eyes, his fierce countenance and his impressively handsome physique (vv. 281-5)" (23-24). "His followers comment that he is a man of great nobility (v. 356) who has given his brother-in-law Charlemagne extended service

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

43

(v. 351), a man who has always enjoyed an excellent reputation in court (v. 352)" (24). Interestingly, in Celtic mythology the boar is a death-beast, often sent by a God or actually a God in disguise (Graves 210). The ironic double-entendre of this attack would entertain a sense of fitness, a sense of God's punishment of Charlemagne. The hunting-dog which comes to Charlemagne's aid is a symbol of the Underworld, and indicates that Charles is defended by the 'dark forces', a reverse of Charles' own sense of his side as 'right'. There seems to be a sense amongst commentators of the Chanson de Roland that the Baligant episode was not written by the original poet (Highet 49). As Burgess mentions: The exact status of the Baligant episode in relation to the poem has puzzled commentators. It can be regarded as unnecessary, once Marsile's forces have been dispatched into the River Ebro, as somewhat tedious in places, and generally as lacking the aesthetic qualities of much of the rest of the poem. But we have to admit that this episode is there in the Oxford version, even if it was added by a less talented poet. It has been argued that the addition of the Baligant episode is the major contribution of Turoldus himself. It has the advantage of raising the struggle between Charles and Marsile into one between Christianity and the full-fledged might of paganism. (20) Exactly at which point the 'Baligant episode' begins is difficult to say. The narrative moves to reference of King Marsile and Baligant at v. 187. However, intrinsic evidence in v. 185 and v. 186, the second dream sequence, suggests that it begins earlier. Both the tone and the content of the second dream sequence are markedly different from the first. In comparing the two, with the possibility that they were created by different poets at different times, one is tempted to speculate that the first sequence was created by someone with Celtic background who was ironically criticizing the Norman invaders, while the second was created

44

Nanette Norris

by someone who imitated the style and language of the first but with no knowledge of its double-entendre and in keeping with the 'politically correct' attitudes of the time. First of all, the dream or vision is sent to Charles by God -- the only type of dream that was acceptable to medieval Christians. The dream discourse maintains the realistic catalogue of the epic form. There is a pronounced shift in the image of the evil forces which "swoop down on the Franks" (l. 2545) -- gone is the Celtic double-entendre, replaced by clearly devil-associated "Serpents, vipers, dragons and devils" (l. 2543). The relationship between the images in the dream and the events of the narrative reality is realistic and direct rather than symbolic -- no augury is required here. The "bear cub" held by chains is clearly Ganelon in captivity, and the "thirty bears" who come to demand his return are obviously Ganelon's thirty kinsmen who plead on his behalf. The hunting dog comes to the attack, but here it is clearly working for the forces of God, which symbolically is inaccurate -- it indicates an insensitivity to or ignorance of mythopoesis on the part of the poet. Certainly, the tension between realism and myth, between the rational and the mythopoetic, continues in English literature into the twentieth century. It is rare that one is able to separate the two forces as clearly as is evident in the Chanson de Roland which, although it is considered to 'begin' French literature, deserves, at least for the first half of it, an honoured place in Anglo-Norman literature as well.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

45

3 Classical Values in Defense of the Jews: Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe In a word, if a virtuous and self-denied character is dismissed with temporal wealth, greatness, rank, or the indulgence of such a rashly-formed or ill-sorted passion as that of Rebecca for Ivanhoe, the reader will be apt to say, 'Verily virtue has had its reward.' But a glance on the great picture of life will show that the duties of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated; and that the internal consciousness of their high-minded discharge of duty produces on their own reflections a more adequate recompense, in the form of that peace which the world cannot give or take away. (535) With these words, Scott ended his "Author's Introduction to Ivanhoe," prepared in 1830 for the Opus Magnum of all his novels, signaling his debt to Hellenic ideals, especially the principles of Plato. He is responding, in fact, to the criticism of "fair readers" who were disappointed that "he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca, rather than the less interesting Rowena" (534). He might also have been responding to critics such as Nassau Senior who, in an 1821 review, questions the "improbability" of Rebecca's love for Ivanhoe: When we recollect that she knew, when she first saw him, that their difference of race raised between them an impassable barrier; and that, in their first conversation, she discovered where his affections were fixed, it is scarcely possible that love, so totally without hope, could have arisen in a well-disciplined mind ...." (236) The fact remains that the concepts of principle and race are inextricably intertwined in Ivanhoe, and that even as Scott privileges the classic perception of principle, he argues against

46

Nanette Norris

the contemporary concept of race and racial division. In so doing, he was of inestimable service to the cause of the public acceptance of Jewish people in England and a prime mover in the "philo-Semitic" attitudes of the English which resulted in the Jews of Great Britain being "spared the crises and anti-Semitic campaigns which raged practically everywhere in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century" (Poliakov 323-324). Even as Scott was gently professing that "the prejudices of the [medieval] age rendered such a union almost impossible" ("Author's Intro." 544), his own age was actively and virulently anti-Semitic. The word 'anti-Semitic' was not coined until 1870 (see Pulzer), but its sense was well-established in both English and European society. The question of whether or not to emancipate the Jews, to bestow on them the rights of citizenship, had been an issue throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. In England, anti-Jewish sentiment arose concerning the Naturalization Bill of 1753, which aimed to simplify procedures for naturalization of Jewish people and to authorize them to acquire land. The House of Lords and the Commons both adopted the bill, but popular agitation derailed it: Petitions from all sections of the population multiplied, seditious inscriptions appeared in the streets of English towns. Pamphleteers outdid each other in their warnings against the influx of Jews and their accession to landed property, which would lead to their seizure of the nation's land .... (Poliakov 36-37) French Jews were emancipated after much discussion and many degrading decrees only in 1818, the year before the publication of Ivanhoe. The partial emancipation which Jews in various German lands enjoyed at the time of the Napoleonic hegemony was regarded by Germans as "a measure imposed by 'foreign tyranny'" (Poliakov 233). In August, 1819, 'anti-Jewish excesses' (Poliakov 302) began at Wurzburg and spread through German towns and countryside. As Poliakov relates,

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

47

The rioters' war cry was "Hep! Hep!" Intellectuals interpreted this as a contraction of "Hierosolyma Est Perdita," thought to be the cry of the Crusaders in 1096. Improbable in itself, this version shows that in Germany, the memory of the persecutions which took place in 1096 had not been lost. The contemporary press gives detailed descriptions of the riots .... (302) Perhaps Scott heard about or read of these riots and their 'Crusaders' war cry of 'Hep! Hep!' and conceived of his medieval setting for his address to a contemporary subject. Certainly, as Wilson notes in his "Introduction," Ivanhoe was composed under "peculiar circumstance" (xv). Scott had been "pursuing the medieval researches which had been his passion since adolescence" (xvi), and had written seven novels on the Scottish eighteenth century. However, in the spring of 1819 he became "afflicted by the crippling pain of gallstones and was compelled to abandon his work in the courts" (xv) (he had been writing at the beginning and the end of his working day). He "laid aside a novel he had begun to write, called The Monastery" (xv) and, too ill to write, dictated first The Bride of Lammermoor and then Ivanhoe (which was partially written by hand) to "William Laidlaw, his factotum at Abbotsford, and John Ballantyne, his printer" (xvi). He wrote "while in considerable pain, and under pressure" (xvi) and later stated "I little thought to have survived the completing of this novel" (Scott, Journal 226). Not only is this a book which "grows out of the very depths of Scott's favourite reading" (xvi), as Wilson contends, but out of his most heartfelt beliefs, when he thought he was on his deathbed. It is a tremendous testimony to the strength, beauty, and skill of Scott's writing that the book was "doubtless the most broadly popular of all the novels" (Hillhouse 45), and that it caused readers to celebrate "the character of the fair Jewess" (Scott, "Author's Intro." 544) and to accept her as being endowed with the finest qualities of the human race, a concept which crossed the contemporary construct of racial traits (and barriers).

48

Nanette Norris

Contemporary criticism suggests that feelings ran deep on the issue of the place of Jewish people in society. Pamphleteers and the common multitude might vocally rail against their inclusion; the issue appears to have been 'unspeakable' amongst the more genteel. Many reviewers and critics sidestepped the theme of the novel. One critic in the Portfolio ("the longest lived and the most successful American magazine to be established before the advent of the North American in 1815" [Hillhouse 77]) declared that "he had been thrown into such a state of excitement that he was unfit to review it, just awakening as he was from a dream of beauty and wonder in the days of Richard I and returning to prosaic life" (Hillhouse 78). In this review there is no reflection of the brutality Scott describes, of the injustice of the anti-Semitism practiced in the narrative as an everyday occurrence, or of the perverted values of the so-called Christians. Considering the importance of the issue on a world scale, the critical omission is telling. Coleridge called Ivanhoe a "wretched abortion" (letter dated January, 1821, cited in Hillhouse 149). He contended that the Waverley novels had caught the imagination, but that Ivanhoe was specifically lacking the success of the subject which characterized the other novels. It lacked "the contest between the two great moving principles of social humanity; religious adherence to the past ... the desire and the admiration of permanence ... and the passion for increase of knowledge, for truth as the offspring of reason -- in short, the mighty instincts of progression and free agency" (letter dated April 8, 1820, cited in Hillhouse 149). In fact, it was the subject itself which Coleridge, who aligned himself with the century's great German thinkers, Kant and Schiller among others, could not accept. Scott's reasoned proposition that the racial barrier was man-made, and that honor and virtue were properties of behaviour, not birth, defied the growing racial and nationalistic directions of German thought to which Coleridge subscribed. And yet he could not bring himself to admit it outright. The word 'anti-Semitism' did not exist at the time that Scott was writing, and there is evidence to suggest that the

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

49

negative attitudes in England towards Jewish people were not displayed overtly. Daniel Goldhagen contends that "over a period of years, anti-Semitism -- composed of a set of beliefs and cognitive models with a stable source metaphor and understanding of the nature of the Jews' putative perniciousness – does not appear, disappear, then reappear in a given society. Always present, anti-Semitism becomes more or less manifest" (43). The English were capable of overt anti-Semitic expression in 1753, but the wave had crested by 1820. The subject had become unspeakable in polite society as the English distanced themselves from the actions of their European neighbours. The reality of life as a Jew in England in the early 1800's is perhaps best reflected in the biography of Benjamin Disraeli. Born in 1804, he was taunted for his Jewishness while at boarding school: "a rabbi came on Saturdays to instruct him in the Law of Moses" (Poliakov 328). He was eventually baptized an Anglican. Poliakov states that "the peculiar circumstances of their birth normally drove ambitious young Jews at that time to deny an 'otherness,' which they wanted to reduce to a simple difference in faith" (329). This was certainly the argument promoted by the liberal historian Macaulay when, in 1831, he compared Jewishness to 'red hair' – an unimportant accident of birth. Of course, Disraeli went on to become the first Jewish Prime Minister. Such anti-Semitism that he encountered did not impede his political progress. Poliakov contends that such a public rise by a young Jew touting his Jewishness "was only practicable in eccentric England" (329). Certainly, a path of tolerance and acceptance had been paved for him. "The young Disraeli's great originality was to take the opposite line .... Convert that he was, he used the fact that he belonged to the Chosen People as a basis for demanding preferential treatment and the political promotion of his brethren" (Poliakov 329). He considered the Jews to be an "aristocracy of Nature" (330) and declared "you never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate" (Sidonia, cited in Poliakov 330). That which Disraeli proposed concerning Jewish

50

Nanette Norris

intellectual prowess, Scott proposed concerning Jewish moral superiority in Ivanhoe. The moral precepts which Rebecca so clearly demonstrates are those of the ancient Greeks, and Plato specifically. Michael Haren informs us that "with the exception of part of Timaeus and later of the Meno and Phaedo, Plato's dialogues were not directly known in the medieval west" (7). Scott's narrative, however, was destined for an audience to whom the dialogues themselves, or a filtered version such as popular culture disseminates, would have been familiar. Over fifty years later, George Eliot was to write Daniel Deronda with the same respect for race, faith, and tradition (see Handley) that she, too, identified with the Jewish people. "Daniel Deronda is a moral microcosm. The real concern of the novel is not merely with Judaism but with humanity and humanitarian practice as a whole .... The separate identity of the Jewish people is seen as part of a wider communication with all peoples" (Handley xix). Eliot clearly felt that there was much that the nonJewish world could learn from the moral fibre of the Jewish community. Scott's purpose was didactic. Hellenistic principles are invoked for the purpose of narrative-style argument, to convince through literature. Scott seems to have recognized, as Goldhagen points out, that "the definition of the moral order as a Christian one, with the Jews as its sworn enemies, has been the single most powerful cause in producing an endemic anti-Semitism ... in the Christian world" (43). The narrative returns us to an important historic moment in this clash between Jews and Christians. The attitudes and behaviours are traced with brutal accuracy concerning the regard in which Jews were held in England. They are painted in such a way that the nineteenth-century reader could not help but see the absurdity of the claims of witchcraft and devil-worship–beliefs which had had more prominence on the continent than they ever had in England. Christianity as practiced by the usurping Normans is suspect at best in the narrative. The nobility of the Saxons -- always an important point for an English audience -- is lauded. Finally, Hellenic, and specifically Platonic, principles are invoked as both a means of predating the corrupt Christian mores and as a reminder of the

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

51

civilized beliefs which the English people held dearest. To invoke these beliefs was to win the argument by the standards of English society. For instance, from Crito comes the principle "not life, but a good life .... a good life is equivalent to a just and honorable one" (Plato, Trial and Death 48). Rebecca fights throughout the novel to live a just and honorable life. When her father deals unjustly with Gurth, out of greed (a supposedly 'Jewish' characteristic which Rebecca belies), she herself reverses the injustice: 'My father did but jest with thee, good fellow,' said Rebecca; 'he owes thy master deeper kindness than these arms and steed could pay, were their value tenfold. What sum didst thou pay my father even now?' 'Eighty zecchins,' said Gurth, surprised at the question. 'In this purse,' said Rebecca, 'thou wilt find a hundred.' (122) When she is kidnapped by the Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, she is adamant that she will not behave dishonorably, even to save her life. There are many ways in which this sense of honor is expressed. In the scene in the turret she raises the issue of religion: "We can have nought in common between us; you are a Christian, I am a Jewess. Our union were contrary to the laws alike of the church and the synagogue" (249). The laws of religion are against their having an honorable marriage. When BoisGuilbert questions her beliefs, she replies, "I believe as my fathers taught .... And may God forgive my belief if erroneous!" (249). Although not identical, both of these statements partake of the Platonic sense that individuals must not set aside and overthrow the decisions of the law (Plato, "Crito," Trial and Death 51). In this case, lacking a country, Rebecca is following the law of the Jewish people and, like a soldier in battle, she must uphold the law of her country without yielding or retreating. For her, the law is adherence to her faith.

52

Nanette Norris

Her sense of honor includes, of course, the more obvious one of the honor of her person. When the Templar declares he will not "abstain from taking by violence what thou refusest to entreaty or necessity" (250), she is understandably horrified. Post-Holocaust readers of Ivanhoe are often disturbed by the virulent display and description of anti-Semitism in the text. Certainly, to our sensibilities and sensitivities, Scott can be accused of having been overly passionate in his portrayal of Isaac of York as a 'greedy' man, and in his articulation of what anti-Semitism looks like in action. The text is in danger of being tarred with the same brush. This being said, it is equally as clear that Scott has raised the specter of many erroneous and antiSemitic opinions. Goldhagen delineates a few: "supernatural powers, international conspiracies, and the ability to wreck economies; using the blood of Christian children in their rituals, even murdering them for their blood; being in league with the Devil" (39). Add to this greed and lack of human feeling, and one begins to see how anti-Semitics justified to themselves maltreatment of Jewish people. Scott was being historically accurate in portraying the brutal extent of the maltreatment. The medieval period was especially vicious, yet history tells us that Jews were protected in England at that time because of the economic needs of the Norman conquerors (Poliakov 77-78). Given this, the portrait of Rebecca stands in clear and obvious contrast to the far-fetched and ludicrous anti-Semitic beliefs, as well as to the much more benign but real greed of Isaac. Isaac's greed is addressed when Isaac and the Prior are haggling over the ransom amount (ch. XXXlll): it is a human failing, rather than specifically a Jewish characteristic. Rebecca embodies the highest moral attributes. That she is generous rather than stingy is clear in her dealings with Gurth. She is equally as generous with her person: when the castle is on fire she begs Bois-Guilbert to take Ivanhoe and her father rather than her (ch. XXXl). Her steadfast devotion to her faith is to be envied: "I may not change the faith of my fathers like a garment unsuited to the climate in which I seek to dwell" (518). She has knowledge which she uses for the benefit of others, nursing both Robin of Locksley and Ivanhoe back to

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

53

health. All of this serves to counter the anti-Semitic beliefs outlined by Goldhagen and illustrated in the text by Scott. In the scene when she stands at the lattice and describes the battle to Ivanhoe, her courage is unmistakable: 'Rebecca -- dear Rebecca!' exclaimed Ivanhoe, 'this is no maiden's pastime; do not expose thyself to wounds and death.' (310) Courage, of course, is a principal Platonic virtue: "There is a virtue ... which is named courage" ("Phaedo," Trial and Death 310). Indeed, the narrative effect of this scene is singular, given that Rebecca is Jewish: by filtering the view of the world through her eyes, Scott humanizes her. This intimacy of vision is no more than one would expect for most characters, but it must be remembered that we are dealing here with anti-Semitism and the dehumanizing of an entire group of people. Witness the great surprise of Front-de-Boeuf when, preparing to torture Isaac to gain his money (ch. XXXl), he discovers the love Isaac has for his daughter: "My daughter is my flesh and blood, dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty threatens" (234). "'I would,' said the Norman, somewhat relenting, 'that I had known of this before. I thought your race had loved nothing save their money-bags'" (233). Connecting Rebecca with the battle scene, the description of which is a standard epic device, serves also to directly connect her with the much-valued Greek tradition, which in turn serves to raise her status in the eyes of the discerning readers. A final point in favour of Rebecca's high moral standing is the extent to which she is concerned about her soul. As Plato taught, the soul leads and masters the affections of the body. This enables the "calm, and control, and disdain of the passions which even the many call temperance" ("Phaedo," Trial and Death 66). She will not jeopardize the state of her soul by going against the precepts of her religion; she denies herself the passion she feels for Ivanhoe. By the end of the narrative, she personifies the

54

Nanette Norris

lines from Phaedo (112): ... let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him ... who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility and truth -- in these arrayed she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her time comes. Rebecca hands Rowena the casket full of valuable jewels. "Think ye that I prize these sparkling fragments of stone above my liberty? or that my father values them in comparison to the honour of his only child? Accept them, lady -- to me they are valueless. I will never wear jewels more" (518). Her 'proper jewels' have become the five 'Cardinal Virtues' which she embodies. There are some interesting twists on Plato in the text. For instance, Plato held that suicide is not right: "any man who has the spirit of philosophy, will be willing to die, though he will not take his own life, for that is held not to be right" ("Phaedo," Trial and Death 59). Rebecca has no such qualms: 'The God of Abraham's promise hath opened an escape to his daughter– even from this abyss of infamy!' As she spoke, she threw open the latticed window which led to the bartizan, and in an instant after stood on the very verge of the parapet, with not the slightest screen between her and the tremendous depth below. (251) For Rebecca, as a fully practicing Jew, "God's rewards– usually of a material nature but perhaps including a resurrection – came to those who were actually observing the laws, the sacrifices, the Sabbath, the Jewish diet, and the rest (Goodenough 162-163). The soul was understood to be trapped in its earthly existence. The rules against suicide are as firm

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

55

under Jewish law as they are under Christian, with the one exception to which Rebecca is referring: The onerous conditions of Jewish life in Christian and Mohammedan lands often posed some desperate choices. One of these, for example, considered what was to be the behavior of Jewish women when they were being threatened with rape during the all-too-frequent anti-Semitic riots and massacres. The consensus of rabbinical judgment, based on the earlier decision of the Synod of Lydda with regard to adultery, was implacable and brief: "Die, rather!" (Ausubel 248) This martyrdom in the face of pressure to lure the Jew from his faith is called al kiddush ha-Shem: the sanctification of the Name [of God]. When pressured to renounce their faith, Jewish people chose martyrdom as an act of faith which carried its own reward. Bois-Guilbert's threat of rape made it morally more tenable for Rebecca to commit suicide rather than to submit. The greater sin would have been to capitulate with the immoral BoisGuilbert. As an historian, Scott was able to pinpoint one of the major shifts away from Hellenic and Platonic thought, a shift caused by the spirit of nationalism which had been growing since the early medieval times. Plato stated as follows: Our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor .... And when we are punished by her, whether with imprisonment or stripes, the punishment is to be endured in silence; and if she leads us to wounds or death in battle, thither we follow as is right; neither may one yield or retreat or leave his rank, but whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him; or he must change their view of what is just .... Any of you who does not like us and the city, and

56

Nanette Norris

who wants to go to a colony or to any other city, may go where he likes. ("Crito," Trial and Death 51-52) Clearly, this is problematic in Ivanhoe. When the country is under the rule of invaders, as England was subject to the Norman rule, to which country, which rule, are you loyal? Historically, the Britains resisted the new rule and maintained an 'England for the English' stance for three hundred years of being ruled by the Normans. Cedric the Saxon, with his fierce loyalty to Athelstane of Coningsburgh, the Saxon heir, represents this resistant tradition. Yet, he is depicted as old-fashioned, and Athelstane is weak and a buffoon. That Cedric should expect his ward, Rowena, to marry Athelstane out of duty to her people seems quite unfair, especially when Wilfrid is Saxon, if not a direct descendant of the former Royalty. Wilfrid, however, is disinherited for his disobedience of his father in his willingness to set personal desires over the needs of the country -- the Saxons -- to whom he should (according to Cedric) be loyal. The text raises the question which history itself answered: loyalty belongs to the side of justice. Wilfrid chooses to be loyal to Richard the Lion-hearted because he earns that loyalty through feats in battle (the time-honored Greek epic fashion): 'Rebecca,' said Ivanhoe, 'thou hast painted a hero; .... Under such a leader as thou has spoken this knight to be, there are no craven fears, no cold-blooded delays, no yielding up a gallant emprize, since the difficulties which render it arduous render it also glorious. I swear by the honour of my house -- I vow by the name of my bright lady love, I would endure ten years' captivity to fight one day by that good knight's side in such a quarrel as this!' (317) Unlike his brother John, who is a usurper and not very just, Richard has earned the respect of his young follower. The Platonic principle here is that one should follow the one man who has understanding ("Crito," Trial and Death 47).

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

57

The shift, then, is away from blind, dutiful allegiance to thoughtful, personal fealty. Never again would people give unswerving support to the laws of the country or to the lawmakers and enforcers. Richard's failing as a king is accurately portrayed in the narrative: he is too much the knight-errant, the adventurer. As Wilfred points out: 'But why -- oh why, noble Prince, will you thus vex the hearts of your faithful servants, and expose your life by lonely journeys and rash adventures, as if it were of no more value than that of a mere knighterrrant, who has no interest on earth but what lance and sword may procure him?' 'And Richard Plantagenet,' said the King, 'desires no more fame than his good lance and sword may acquire him; and Richard Plantagenet is prouder of achieving an adventure, with only his good sword, and his good arm to speed, than if he led to battle an host of an hundred thousand armed men.' 'But your kingdom, my Liege,' said Ivanhoe– 'your kingdom is threatened with dissolution and civil war; your subjects menaced with every species of evil, if deprived of their sovereign in some of those dangers which it is your daily pleasure to incure.' (470) The concept here is also Hellenic, although not Platonic. It is contained in the story of King Minos. Poseidon gave him a bull which Minos should have immediately sacrificed. The "whole sense of his investiture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person. The return of the bull should have symbolized his absolutely selfless submission to the functions of his role" (Campbell 15). The king must submit himself to the duties of his role, in spite of his desire for personal pleasure. Richard fails to do so; both historically and in the narrative this was his failing as a king. Finally, there is one particular Hellenic discussion which

58

Nanette Norris

forms the skeleton of the narrative as a whole: the ethical debate of whether or not we always act out of self-interest. In the first book of Plato's Republic, the Sophist Thrasymachus is debating with Socrates on an aspect of this issue: whether "justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger" (236). Thrasymachus takes the Cynic's approach, arguing that rulers impose their will and act in their own interest. Socrates contends that, on the contrary, a worthy ruler thinks only of the needs of the subjects, and therefore acts in the interest of others. Plato's discussion encompasses one angle of the ethical question. Certainly, this angle is discussed by Scott in the issue of King Richard versus Prince John, and the Normans versus the Saxons, as mentioned above. But the question in its broader compass is key to his discussion of anti-Semitism. One anti-Semitic accusation holds that all Jewish people are self-serving. Scott responds to this accusation by working through the beliefs of the ancient Greek philosophers. Scott reminds his readers that part of what it means to be a practicing Jew, like Rebecca, is that one follows the dictates of the religion, which lays down a code of conduct. This code of conduct corresponds to the Socratic/Platonic sense of virtuous action. Scott's presentation of virtuous action includes the concepts of duty and self-denial. At the opening of this chapter Scott is quoted as saying that "the duties of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated" ("Author's Intro. 535). These concepts are the hallmarks of the Cynics and the Stoics, both precursors of Socrates. Scott's nearcontemporary, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), revived the Cynical and Stoical position in Scott's own time, arguing that "an action is not good unless done from a good motive, and that this motive must be essentially different from natural inclination of any kind; duty, to be duty, must be done for duty's sake" (Sidgwick 774-775). The question remains, does Rebecca behave as she does for duty's sake – a behaviour which would reflect positively on all Jewish people, contrary to the accusations of anti-Semites, or is she an anomaly – one good person? It is clear that the text privileges Rebecca and sees her in

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

59

a most positive light: it is hard to miss the linking of Rebecca and the Platonic/Socratic virtues which occurs at the end. The answer to whether or not Rebecca can represent all Jewish people is not quite as evident. The early Greeks "'believed in' the soul only to a minimal extent. They admitted that something, call it 'breath' (which is the original meaning of the word psyche), was needed to animate the body, and departed the body with death. But, according to this picture, the soul needed the body just as much as the body needed the soul. Without the soul, the body was dead, but without the body, the soul was just a pathetic shadow, with no meaning and no value" (Solomon 54). Socrates believed, as the Jews and Christians do today, that the "soul had moral significance. It was also more important than the body. Socrates believed that the soul outlives the body in a significant sense" (54). In the argument as to whether or not all actions are ultimately self-serving, it is not enough to point to Rebecca's good deeds, which appear at first glance to be altruistic, because it can be argued that she behaved well in order to 'save' her soul. Even when she appeared most brave, preparing to die for her beliefs, she can be accused of being selfish: Socrates did defend something of a theory, at the core of which was a very special notion of virtue. The virtues represented what was best about a person, and foremost among these were the philosophical or intellectual virtues. Socrates' death might be said to reflect this sense of virtue. As Aristotle was later to argue, the first virtue of philosophy is the need to do philosophy. Yet Socrates also argued that he gave up his life "for the sake of his soul." Here we find one of those philosophical nuggets that would obsess moralists for the next two thousand years. Does this mean that Socrates was, as he teasingly suggested, being selfish, looking after his own interests (the interests of his soul)? Alternatively, is acting (dying) for the sake of

60

Nanette Norris

one's soul the ultimate virtue? (Solomon 46) Rebecca, however, acts because Jewish law requires that she act this way, as we saw in the example of her willingness to commit suicide. She does not have to be concerned about the state of her soul: the Jewish religion holds that her immortal soul is provided for if she 'keeps the Faith' and behaves according to the dictates of Judaism. Socrates was not sure of the soul's immortality: "Living (and dying) for the sake of one's soul has purely to do with personal character and integrity and nothing to do with any expectations of future reward. Socrates' concerns are strictly ethical, without a hint of the cosmological intrigue that had fascinated his predecessors" (Solomon 47). Rebecca, on the other hand, is quite sure of the soul's immortality, but her actions are simply what are required of her – duty -- rather than a self-serving attempt to 'save' herself: her future is assured. Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, objected to this single-minded adherence to the law. Such people were "victims of Hebraism, of the tendency to cultivate strictness of conscience rather than spontaneity of consciousness" (1094), the latter being the Hellenic inheritance, as he considered it. Scott clearly admires this 'strictness of conscience.' Ultimately, the answer lies with Aristotle. The bottom line for Aristotle is the individual. Whereas Socrates felt that virtue was innate, Aristotle contended that one has to be brought up with the virtues: that virtue must be learned (Solomon 65). Herein lies the crux of Scott's argument, for if virtue must be learned, then Rebecca must have learned virtue during the course of her upbringing as a Jew. According to Aristotle, this is the only way she could behave virtuously. The virtuous behaviour is learned; it becomes second nature, and as such it is not self-serving. Moreover, Rebecca's behaviour speaks well, in this case, for the Jewish community in which she was fostered. Contrary to erroneous beliefs of anti-Semites, who do harm to others with these beliefs (which is not virtuous action), the Jewish community and the Jewish upbringing must be virtuous, judging by Rebecca. And what of Isaac? How do we explain his obvious

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

61

failings? Aristotle would argue that everyone is an individual: not all Jews are like Isaac. Scott obviously agrees: Rebecca is a Jew, and she is not like Isaac. It is clear from Scott's remarks concerning self-denial that he believed his readers could not accept a view of duty that included pleasure: in 1819, "obligation is often counter to selfinterest and doing what one ought to do is often measured not by one's enjoyment but by the amount of temptation one overcomes" (Soloman 66). Perhaps this is why it was necessary in the narrative that Rebecca overcame some great temptation (romantically, Ivanhoe) in order to 'prove' that she was 'only' or specifically doing her duty. Aristotle, however, would have held that there was pleasure in being virtuous, with no conflict between what one should do and what one would like to do. Scott put Hellenic arguments and value-systems inherited from the ancient Greeks to the service of a timely problem in his own society. Ivanhoe involves an application and utilization of Hellenism which is direct and overt.

62

Nanette Norris

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

63

4 Hellenic Revival in the Nineteenth Century: The Conceptual Homeland as a Stable Space in a Chaotic Universe "How does an emergent nation use the past to create a homeland ... ?" asks Artemis Leontis (35). The answer? Through topos: "In ancient Greek rhetoric, topos represented a site of learning to which speakers returned again and again for reliable phrases, expressions, and motifs" (Leontis 18). In the chaotic, expanding, bewildering universe of nineteenth-century England, the Hellenic past provided stability through an iterable set of values, a common referent and an ethos which was comfortable with the nationalist yet expansionist fervor of the time. Hellenism was the topos through which the English defined themselves. Many years later, Virginia Woolf was to write a reaction to the English identification with the values of Hellenism in "A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus." "Germans are tourists and Frenchmen are tourists but Englishmen are Greeks," she writes (979). One of the characters concludes that Greek "can mean in short all that we do not know ... all that we dream and desire" (979). Leontis translates this into postmodern discourse: " 'Greek' finally functions as a sign around which English society can organize itself: high culture, educational system, and rhetoric of superiority over other nations" [Leontis 110]). Woolf has put her finger on the essence of the Hellenic revival of the nineteenth century: a topos, a sign. Interest in 'things Greek' was certainly not confined to the nineteenth century. The intellectual appeal can be traced through early interest in Sappho (painted in Raphael's Parnassus of 1512, her poetry mentioned in Longinus' On the Sublime of 1674) to Mitford's History of Greece (1784). Peter Tomory mentions the "international 'Greek cult' of c. 1795 to c.1810" (126): ... it included the young women of the demi-monde in Paris wearing Athenian linen robes, with neatly pleated folds carried over the right arm,Mme VigeeLebrun and her daughters dressed a la grecque eating anddrinking from antique plates and glasses at a

64

Nanette Norris

symposium in the house ofthe Comte de Parois, and David as he commenced to paint the Sabines in1799 saying, 'I wish to lead art back to principles followed by the Greeks.In painting the Horatii and the Brutus I was still under the Roman influence.' (126) This places the sense of 'things Greek' as avant-garde very early in the century. We think of the nineteenth century as a time of Hellenic revival because the interest in and the influence of ancient Greece grew out of all proportion, beyond what can be explained by the avant-garde interests or by the caprice of popular culture. So central was it to the way in which the English defined themselves that attempts to reform the educational system, even late in the century, failed again and again, because of the strong, distinct bias towards a classical curriculum. There are many ways in which ancient Greece provided a model for the expanding, industrializing nation. What made the revival so complete, so important that the English 'became' Greek was first and foremost the topos of mythopoesis. The Hellenic revival was a little bit about archeology, a bit about politics and travel, a bit about value systems and nationalism, but mostly it was about feeling really great about who you were and where you were going. It was about realizing a sublime connection with the universe. It was abstract, it was nonrational, and it attested to a connecting truth, a kind of imaginative permanency behind the changing world. In this sense, the Hellenic world provided a ready-made symbolic homeland with which the English could identify in the midst of their physical, scientific, and technological upheavals, a homeland with the spiritual depth that the so-called 'real' world lacked. Mythopoesis means the making of mythic poetry. It is the imaginative faculty of humankind in combination with symbolic language to express thoughts, visions, awareness which transcend the everyday world. It is arguably an intrinsic human capacity, and a necessary function. When mythopoetic outlet is denied or overpowered by the rational and scientific, it

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

65

seems to find a means of expression. As Robert Graves writes, "I am still amused at the paradox of poetry's obstinate continuance in the present phase of civilization" (White Goddess 17). Perhaps one day scientific enquiry will show it to be a function of right brain/left brain activity. For the moment, the best explanation we have is Graves': "since it defies scientific analysis, [it] must be rooted in magic" (17). Rather, magic is rooted in mythopoesis. Certainly, it is a sense of connectedness, a sublime sense, and with this sense comes a surge of power as the individual transcends common limitations and finds the means to express the sense to others. Ancient Greece became the topos for the people of industrializing England to make connections on a mythic level. Hellenism became "the territory of a utopian homeland -- an otherwise 'empty' space, unoccupied, at least in the imagination of the diaspora, by any other inhabitants -- ... a gathering place" (Leontis 35). The word 'diaspora' refers to people who have been ousted from their homeland, separated from their families and scattered across the globe. This was indeed how the English felt. Many of them were scattered across the globe because of colonialism and the expanding empire. Those who remained in England felt like foreigners in their own homeland, so rapid and invasive were the changes brought about by industrialization. Within a short period of time the entire landscape of England changed, with railways laid all across, huge factories built to handle the lucrative cotton-spinning, gaslight lighting up the night sky as the factories worked day and night, hundreds and thousands of people huddling in newly-formed towns around the place of work, living in squalor, working long hours in poor conditions. As Paul Johnson explains: The rapid growth in population brought with it a huge increase in crime throughout Europe, which bewildered the authorities in all countries. They raised their hands in helpless horror, much as they do now, while criminals filled to bursting expensive new prisons as fast as they could be built. Governments executed as many as public opinion

66

Nanette Norris

would stomach. (247-248) In England, there were "220 criminal offences ... punishable by the death penalty and mass executions were common" (Bowen 167). The use of opium also factored in to the state of mind which was receptive to concepts of sublimity. In spite of the drawbacks of heavy use, opium was widely associated with both clarity of mind and depth of imagination. In 1822 De Quincey wrote: But the main distinction lies in this -- that, whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his selfpossession; opium sustains and reinforces it ...opium ...communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive; and, with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment ...the opium-eater ...feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount -- that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and high over all the great light of the majestic intellect. (201-203) Such a sense of the intellect is most clearly connected with conceptions of sublimity. Centuries earlier, Longinus taught that skill in invention and ordering of the parts of a whole are important in writing, but that sublimity, "flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt" (79). Kant, in 1790, explained the sublime is boundless, formless and beyond cognition -- the faculty of mind that surpasses sense and imagination. Kant posited that the a priori of consciousness is time and space: that we cannot be conscious except through the ordering lens of time-space perceptions. In these terms, sublimity is that which reaches beyond Kant's a priori of

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

67

consciousness. For many people, sublimity was the opium experience. Drug-induced experience supported the sense of expanding consciousness, progression, and limitless possibilities. Of course, issues to do with the intellect figured largely in the argument concerning evolution. The nineteenth century English attitude towards intellectual prowess – especially their own -- resulted in Darwin being ignored when he postulated that "the acquisition of an upright posture, not the achievement of a threshold in mental development, was the key step in human origins" (Bowler 97). An upright posture was too prosaic an answer; the nineteenth-century mind was conditioned to think in terms of expanded consciousness. In reality, life was brutal and cheap. As late as the 1880s the average life expectancy of a female was forty-four years (Flaste 9). Surgery meant death by infection, and the list of 'leading causes of death' is long: "consumption, pneumonia, infant cholera, measles, cancer, typhoid fever, diphtheria, croup, bronchitis, whooping cough, and scarlet fever" (9). Death was quite democratic: it didn't care if you were rich or poor. In this brutish existence, Hellenism and the mythopoesis which it supported affirmed the inner self, gave value to the individual, and promoted self-worth in the face of impossible odds. Paul Roubiczek argues: It is Romanticism which forces man, throughout almost the whole century, to choose between the spiritual and the material. The romantic betrayal of the spirit avenges itself upon man, for now it is hardly possible any longer to further that reconciliation of the spirit with early life which Kant and Goethe had almost completed; the ideal and the real are altogether estranged. The human mind, whether it despises reality or whether it is searching for it, has lost contact with the world, and those men who feel themselves inextricably involved with real life have no alternative but to surrender unconditionally to the purely material. (82)

68

Nanette Norris

In fact, there is nothing in mythopoesis which is not real: it is rooted in reality. The affirmation is not of the classical ideal – Roubiczek is quite right to point out this estrangement – but of a complete, full, reality: the sublime. Hellenism was key in this reinterpretation and re-rooting of the classical ideal. Bernard Stern makes this point when he writes, "Essentially the romantic method is the pursuit of a "true" reality the symbol of which is to be found in the objects of the senses; the classical method is the pursuit of an "ideal" reality, a symbol in itself, which must be deduced logically .... Obviously, then, romanticism begins its expression from observation and experiment rather than theory or abstraction" (3). So far from having lost contact with the world, romanticism is very much of this world, and its project is to extend the boundaries of what is real. Hellenism provided a connection, a transition between the time-honoured classical ideal world-view and romantic 'realism'. The Greek poet Sappho became an "international cult" (Tomory 124) during the nineteenth century in part because she epitomized this grounding of the ideal. Some of her notoriety was due to an invented story of her "unhappy affair with Phaon and her subsequent suicide" which "was the invention of the dramatists of the New Comedy" (Tomory 122). Nonetheless, her poetry was seen as raw, unmediated by the rational, expressing "sensuous frankness" (Tomory 124). Pain penetrates Me drop by drop (Sappho 61) That her passions were not confined to the heterosexual mold was seen as being more in touch with her true and real nature. Her poetry was seen as expressing the otherwise hidden inner self, without conceit, device or shield. This was the attraction of the so-called 'primitive' to the Romantic mind. Sappho's poetics spoke to the time. Their personal vision was in tune with the growing emphasis on the individual. Their

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

69

passion stood in stark contrast to the rational and scientific movement of the age. Their fragmentary nature reflected the nature of most nineteenth-century experience. Sappho was proof of a female poetic identity, and the history of how much of her work failed to survive the book-burnings of the early Christian era fueled the growing feminist anger against the patriarchal society which was seen to have oppressed and silenced women for so long. Later, modernists such as Amy Lowell and H.D. would reread and recreate Sappho: imagism and tight, lyrical verse would express what other eras had marginalized. One aspect of Hellenism proved especially empowering: the pre-Socratic Heroic age. Through the myths of the heroes, one participated vicariously in an empowered experience. The heroes were strong and vital; they took part in other-worldly adventures similar to the bewildering realities met by the colonialists; they were fiercely individualistic. Even today we respond almost irrationally to mythic heroes: Superman captured the popular imagination for decades. When Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman in the first movie, suffered his crippling accident, his behaviour in face of his adversity was seen as 'heroic' as he participated in the fictional valor of his Superman character. One paradox of the hero is the extent to which supreme individualism is coupled with intense nationalism, intense identification with the homeland. Odysseus (Roman Ulysses) is the quintessential hero, yet his quest is entirely to get home. He travels far and wide, yet he keeps the values, the mores and the mannerisms of his homeland. Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" touches upon the paradoxes of this new heroic age. One risks being a 'victim' in the foreign land in which one travels. Suspicion of strangers, an inherent xenophobia, is echoed in the opening lines: "My first thought was, he lied in every word,/ That hoary cripple, with malicious eye/ Askance to watch the working of his lie" (ll. 1-3). When he reaches the Tower he meets "the lost adventurers his peers" (XXXIII, l. 3): "I saw them and I knew them all" (XXXIV, l. 4). The unknown becomes the familiar; the foreign land becomes peopled with familiar faces.

70

Nanette Norris

Tennyson's "Ulysses" expresses the intellectual spirit of his own age rather than the Homeric story: "I am become a name;/ For always roaming with a hungry heart/ Much have I seen and known, -- cities of men/And manners, climates, councils, governments" (ll. 11-14). This Ulysses has come home and is now looking to be off again: "this gray spirit yearning in desire/ To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought" (ll. 30-32). Charles Segal, in his "Introduction" to a collection of essays by the classicist Cedric H. Whitman, comments that "The notion of the hero that pervades Whitman's work is the center of one of the most powerful clusters of ideas that Greek culture has bequeathed to Western literature and art. It is also a principal target of a major movement in contemporary criticism which seeks to replace the person with the discourse of the person and to deconstruct the individual into mental categories, strategies of representation, and linguistic forms" (2). The nineteenth century heroic ideal had the effect of replacing the Greek heroic discourse with the specifics of individualism. Of course, it was constructing a discourse which later generations were to deconstruct. Nonetheless, the important point remains that the age deconstructed one discourse to produce another (as we all do); in this case, the generic heroic affected the construction of the individual. As Segal notes, "In Whitman's view, the hero, unprotected by religious orthodoxy or dogmatic faith, confronts the ultimate questions of life in the largest terms, experiences the deepest sense of self in isolation and suffering, and refuses to constrict the greatness of his nature and ideals to suit convention and so-called normality" (3). The 'Homeric Question' which so fascinated the nineteenth century is directly connected with this heroic sense of the individual. The question was whether or not Homer was illiterate, and therefore whether the epics could possibly have been a series of shorter poems which were united at a later date. The suggestion of Homer's illiteracy came from Robert Wood, in his Essay of the Original Genius of Homer, written 1769. People were generally excited to think that such work could be "untutored genius" (Knox 9), and they much preferred a

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

71

primitive Homer to a cultivated one. The concepts of progress, evolution, and a clear conception that newer was better, that the passage of time brought improvement, that even our sense of honour is positively improved in a developmental sense, argue against this privileging of a primitive Homer. It stems, in fact, not from any sense that 'untutored' was better, or that 'primitive' was superior, but that an individual who accomplished outside the shackles of social conditioning was superior to a 'cultivated' social lackey. The Romantic sense was of originality, individualism, personal reality, all of which the Greek heroic appeared to support. Hellenism provided an adequate framework for a common topos of individualism (an oxymoron, really). Another paradox is the extent to which the concept of hero necessarily involved an 'other' which was an opposite. The ethos recognized and tolerated great inequities as though the heroic necessarily implied the non-heroic. Thus, the 'great intellect' of the 'more highly developed' Western mind intimated the lesser intellect of those being colonized. The 'civilizing' impulse admitted its opposite, the uncivilized. The concept of the dominance of the strong allowed for the concept of the subjugation of the weak. Key amongst these opposites is the extent to which the heroic involved definitions of manliness. This was certainly not new to the nineteenth century, and definitions of manliness have changed over time and culture. As Carolyn Williams notes: In Plato's Symposium, a dialogue on the nature of love, one speaker claims that Patroclus must have been the active partner, since Achilles was his junior, and supremely beautiful. This theory depends on the common classical assumption that homosexual relations should take place between an older, active lover ... who desires intercourse, and a younger, passive beloved ..., who derives no physical pleasure from the encounter. This practice is not universally associated with effeminacy: the orator Aeschines

72

Nanette Norris

(390-314 BC) finds it expedient to argue in court that men who form such bonds are more masculine than those who feel affinities with women (Against Timarchos). (103) Williams argues that Pope's translation of The Iliad actively masculinizes the Homeric text: "Pope's treatment of Achilles is an attempt at rehabilitation --not only of Achilles but of Homer, whose Iliad is often condemned for its flawed hero" (104). Achilles' passions are carefully presented "as manly excess" (105). The issue here, then, is not what the ancient Greeks saw as manly, but how manliness was interpreted during the nineteenth century. The Hellenic Heroic age enabled a nineteenth century ethos of masculinity. Nietzsche wrote that "the hero always bears the wilderness and the sacred, inviolable borderline within him wherever he may go" (392). The essence of the masculine ethos of the age was this sense of the inner self, the inner wilderness which is part of oneself. The Hellenic hero became the outward manifestation of the inward self, the hero's adventure made manifest the inward journey. In this sense, Nietzsche had his finger on the pulse of his age. Romanticism and the privileging of the emotions, the need to express the affective self, was in no way seen as feminizing, but rather as a masculine and heroic act. Hellenism provided a common discourse with which to express the sense of heroism. As with Plato, the person who made consciousness and understanding his life's goal -- the philosopher – was of the highest order of people. Nietzsche referred to this use of Hellenism as "The Greeks as interpreters": When we speak of the Greeks we involuntarily speak of today and yesterday: their familiar history is a polished mirror that always radiates something that is not in the mirror itself. We employ our freedom to speak of them so as to be allowed to remain silent about others – so that the latter may now say something into the thoughtful reader's ear. Thus the Greeks make it easier for modern man to

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

73

communicate much that is delicate and hard to communicate. (218: p.264) Nietzsche's reputation is largely that of "a rather unorthodox writer who called into question important dogmas in the Western tradition" (Schutte 231). He had a deep "appreciation of the profound and extensive consequences of the collapse of traditional ways of thinking" as well as a sense of the "insufficiency of the resources of both the Enlightenment and the Romanticism to which he had been attracted to fill the void" (Schacht vii). During his own lifetime, his work attracted little attention. The Birth of Tragedy sold modestly well, and attracted a good deal of attention -- even if much of it was hostile. But the same cannot be said of any of Nietzsche's subsequent books, during his sentient lifetime. Prior to his collapse, none of them sold more than a few hundred copies, and few of them attracted any attention whatsoever" (Schacht xii). James L. Jarrett notes that as late as 1925 Nietzsche remainedunmentioned in a popular history of philosophy textbook in America (xiii). English-language translations of his work appeared late (1954). The English-speaking world therefore became interested in Nietzsche only after the war, and he has affected postmodern thought (see Derrida's Spurs). His reputation in the Germanspeaking world, however, grew well before this, as witness the seminar given by C. G. Jung on Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1934-1939. Germans such as Thomas Mann and Heidegger were influenced by Nietzsche; English speaking artists who had access to German thought directly, like D.H. Lawrence, were also profoundly influenced, and thus Nietzsche also influenced the pre-war modernists. Most central to Nietzsche's break with tradition was the extent to which he turned to the ancient Greek culture for guidance and insight: "Both those spirits of a classical and those of a romantic bent -these two species exist at all times – entertain a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness" (Nietzsche 217: p. 366). Nietzsche was a classicist, a professor of classical

74

Nanette Norris

philology for a short while, who "was ill (often violently ill) more days than he was well. He was nearly blind at the age of thirty-five: he was lonely, unpopular, unsuccessful, poor: no one understood him, and no one was interested in his work: he had every reason to believe that he had completely failed: finally he went mad" (Knight 165) in 1888, at the age of 44. Essentially a classicist, he upheld the classical view that philosophy and politics represent "some of the highest activities that the human being can accomplish in society" (Schutte 234). At the same time, he championed the 'free spirit' – an idea particularly attractive to the nineteenth century mind: "He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule" (Nietzsche 225: p. 108). However, his sense of what constitutes a 'free spirit' was rooted in Hellenic ideas and values. Tradition was, to Nietzsche, the unexamined life. (Socrates, of course, held that the unexamined life was not worth living.) Thus, to examine life was to go beyond tradition. However, you can break from tradition and still hold to convention: "For conventions are the achieved artistic means, the toilsomely acquired common language, through which the artist can truly communicate himself to the understanding of his audience" (Nietzsche 122: p. 339). He was a champion of classical education as "a higher gymnastics for the head" (Nietzsche 266: p. 126). He understood Greek culture as "a masculine culture" (Nietzsche 259: p. 121). The paradox of the heroic ethos meant, for Nietzsche as for the ancient Greeks, that women were made 'other'. Nietzsche was adamant that women could not be 'free spirits', and that they were an encumbrance upon a man who himself wanted to be free. As Schutte writes: ... Nietzsche draws the line sharply against the view that women can be "free spirits." Instead, he argues that women must follow traditional social norms. Men who are free spirits must therefore keep an

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

75

unbridgeable distance between themselves and women. The "free spirit" must be like Socrates, who asked his male friends, prior to his death, to send away the women who were visibly expressing their sadness about his situation. A second argument used by Nietzsche to keep women tied down as much as possible to the home is his suggestion that, if women are trained for public life, this will mean the degeneration of philosophy and politics, at least for a period "of transition" lasting several centuries .... In other words, Nietzsche thinks that women are less capable of acting freely than men. The general structure of his views leads to the following conclusion: the gender difference cuts human beings into two kinds: men, who fall on the side of freedom, and women, who fall on the side of unfreedom. (234) There is always the risk of misunderstanding Nietzsche's thoughts and intentions, and perhaps Schutte goes too far in asserting that Nietzsche felt women were less capable of acting freely than men. He criticized the women of his day: "Their conviction that men are terrified of intellect in a woman is so firm that they are even ready to deny they have any sharpness of mind at all" (Nietzsche 270: p. 375). He was convinced that woman have the capacity for inward growth: "The more women grow inwardly, however, and cease among themselves to give precedence to the immature as they have done hitherto..." (Nietzsche 215: p. 364). Nonetheless, many of his aphorisms reveal a distinctly negative sense of womanhood, a sense with which the ancient Greeks were certainly not in conflict. Nietzsche's sense of the Apollonian/Dionysian split reflects his sense of the tension which existed in his time between rationality and mythopoesis. In The Birth of Tragedy Dionysus is the wild, uncivilizable spirit. Nietzsche turned to ancient Greece not for its cool, level-headed rationalism, but for its passion and intensity. "He held that the essence of Greek art was misrepresented as calm, impassive, statuesque. It grew, he

76

Nanette Norris

believed, out of a tension .... It was the result of the artistic sense working, not on a neutral material, but on savage subconscious urges .... the products of violent conflict ... not serene repose but a hard-earned victory" (Highet 460). Nietzsche represents that which the nineteenth century bequeathed to the twentieth. The criticism which he had for his own society -- ideas which continued to ring true decades after he wrote them -- came from his profound respect for the wisdom of Hellenism. For Nietzsche, as for many others in the nineteenth century, Hellenism was a topos around which ideas could organize, and through which a new society could emerge.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

77

5 Woolf's Quarrel with Russell: Mrs. Dalloway and the Limits of Knowledge Bertrand Russell wrote of his life's work, "my philosophical development may be divided into various stages according to the problems with which I have been concerned and the men whose work has influenced me. There is only one constant preoccupation: I have throughout been anxious to discover how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness" (My Philosophical Development 11). On this point Russell and Virginia Woolf find common ground, for she, too, was concerned about the certainty of knowledge, although not a formal philosopher like Russell. Woolf was certainly aware of Russell's ideas before writing Mrs. Dalloway. Russell was a don at Cambridge while Thoby Stephen, Virginia's brother, was a student there. He was a member of 'The Apostles,' a Cambridge debating or conversation society to which Thoby was not elected but to which many of his close friends were (Alexander 45). A 1912 edition of Russell's The Problems of Philosophy was in Leonard and Virginia's library (see 'Addendum to Holleyman,' Steele 325). They both had what D.A. Drennan calls the 'metaphysical attitude': "What Plato and Aristotle meant by philosophic wonder could be called an intellectual attention, or a spiritual posture, that encourages what Aime Forest has called the 'unveiling' of the secrets of reality. What they were talking about was not a passing fancy but the shape of the mind and a way of looking at and living through life" (3). Russell, however, could not conceive of the 'shape' of Woolf's mind as that which is conducive to 'unveiling' knowledge: it is here that the two part company. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, selfinterest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such

78

Nanette Norris

personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge -- knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal. (Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 160.) Was Virginia Woolf ever 'mad', as her nephew Quentin Bell terms her undeniable illnesses (xvii)? Stephen Trombley ('All that Summer She Was Mad') argues that definitions of madness as applied to Woolf are unsatisfactory, vague, and misleading. Thomas C. Caramagno makes a case for the known symptoms being those of manic-depression, or bipolar affective disorder. If Caramagno is correct with his diagnosis, this condition would have vitally affected her view of the world, of reality, of knowledge, of thinking, reasoning, sensing. There was no medicine at the time which was capable of producing 'remissions' (Caramagno 1) or otherwise altering this mode of knowing (except, perhaps, to exacerbate it as opium may have done). Whatever the 'truth' about Virginia Woolf's own state of mind, Mrs. Dalloway clearly explores "the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side" (Woolf, The Diary Vol. II, Oct. 14, 1922, 207). Woolf challenges Russell's contention that 'knowledge' is outside the self and beyond the senses: to do otherwise would have been to negate everything she herself 'knew' of the world. One can only conjecture that Woolf's sensitivity to paradigms of knowledge has its roots in her own experience. What Mrs. Dalloway suggests about the lived experience and the authority of the senses has profound implications for both

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

79

feminist ideology and metaphysics. In Women's Ways of Knowing Belenky writes: We do not think of the ordinary person as preoccupied with such difficult and profound questions as: What is truth? What is authority? To whom do I listen? What counts for me as evidence? How do I know what I know? Yet to ask ourselves these questions and to reflect on our answers is more than an intellectual exercise, for our basic assumptions about the nature of truth and reality and the origins of knowledge shape the way we see the world and ourselves as participants in it. They affect our definitions of ourselves, the way we interact with others, our public and private personae, our sense of control over life events, our views of teaching and learning, and our conceptions of morality. (3) Woolf's narrative, Mrs. Dalloway, raises these questions through many different devices: memory, point of view, gender, the sublime experience, the respective sanities and insanities of the characters -- the sliding of the sane/insane minds. All of these are ways in which Woolf questions how it is we know what we know, and, as Russell says, "with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness." In Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse, the two books which punctuate Mrs. Dalloway in Woolf's ouevre, "consciousness is the touchstone of 'knowable' reality, and consciousness has no absolute linear existence in time" (Vogler 5). The key question pertains to the validity of the subjective world. Nowadays, feminist thinking privileges subjective experience. Many hold that, given their social history, women's lived experience is largely interior and subjective. Belenky contends that subjective knowing represents "a particularly significant shift for women when and if it occurs":

80

Nanette Norris

Our reading of the women's stories leads us to conclude that as a woman becomes more aware of the existence of inner resources for knowing and valuing, as she begins to listen to the "still small voice" [1Kings 19:11-12] within her, she finds an inner source of strength. A major developmental transition follows that has repercussions in her relationships, self-concept and self-esteem, morality, and behaviour. Women's growing reliance on their intuitive processes is, we believe, an important adaptive move in the service of self- protection, selfassertion, and self-definition. Women become their own authorities. (54) Belenky's sense of subjective knowing suggests that truth can be found through subjective evidence, based on one's own authority, with no more objective source than "an inner source of strength," a "still small voice" (54). It must be said, before we critique this sense of knowing, that it represents a major advance of the feminist movement through the valuing of the personal and private experience. Today, feminist thinkers such as Belenky, Chodorow (1978), Olsen (1978), Annas (1987), Caywood (1987) would suggest that Woolf saw the world from inside the self, from the subjective side, not only because of her individual mental state, but because of her gender. The exigencies of [patriarchal] life had molded her self-definition, her valuing, her knowing. She was sensitive to the fact that her gender had disenfranchised her from attending Cambridge as her brother Thoby had; she felt unlearned because self-taught (Gordon 83). Moreover, as Quentin Bell relates time and again, 'masculine authority' (72) was a very real factor in Virginia's life. She was, perhaps, one of the few who had broken through this narrowing experience to recognizing and valuing subjective knowing. This being said, there is an important difference between the subjectivism of Belenky and that of Woolf which needs to be recognized in order to understand Woolf accurately and specifically. The "inner source of strength" to which Belenky

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

81

points is essentially Platonic in that it represents "a still small voice," which quote materializes God's voice. Intuition in this sense remains linked with that which is essential, unchanging, what Plato called the invisible world of perfect ideas (397) and, specifically, G-d. Belenky may not realize she is making this connection: although the quote is biblical and refers to the voice of G-d, and the footnote adds that "Maimonides uses the phrase to refer to intuition" (54), nonetheless, not being a philosopher, as most of us are not, she still may not realize that the words indicate a concept of G-d: the authority is not women's own, but getting in touch with G-d within themselves. Truth in Belenky's sense is a reality beyond the world of the senses, although she privileges a subjective way of accessing it as opposed to Plato's objective path. The role of intuition is of some importance in any theory of knowledge, and most especially when discussing a feminist, pro-woman perspective, given the degree to which it has been privileged in discussions of 'feminine authority.' Russell explains intuition in his essay, "Mysticism and Logic": The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a Reality behind the world of appearances and utterly different from it. This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive mind, to shine in its glory even through the apparent folly and wickedness of Man. The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory: the haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun. But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision: what others dimly seek he knows, with a

82

Nanette Norris

knowledge beside which all other knowledge is ignorance. (15) He is explaining here, in a somewhat deprecatory tone, intuition as a form of mysticism which believes in 'reality' as a unified whole, and human experience as the illusion of division. The mystic sees what others do not, and believes he/she possesses special knowledge. Belenky's truth, given the words she uses to explain her ideas, is of this form of special knowledge: an intuition. For Woolf, truth, if there is such an essence, resides not in intuition, but in experience. It is neither God nor science. As Septimus muses, "Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared him, pardoned his weakness. But what was the scientific explanation (for one must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future ..." (102). The fact is, the reality is, "he could see through bodies," whatever the explanation. The experience of seeing through bodies (as well as birds speaking Greek and the many other extraordinary experiences of Septimus) is outside the realm of mysticism simply because it occurs not as intuition but as an experience of the senses. In his own work Russell, in The Problems of Philosophy, has sidestepped any inclusion of God, yet he has retained the Platonic sense of 'perfect ideas' in his "knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain" (160). He privileges a particular knowledge: "impersonal" and "contemplative" and suggests that here is truth, immutable. To this extent, then, Russell leans towards mysticism through his sense of 'elite' knowledge. Russell's knowledge is that of Plato's cave: the intellect which is chained, not free, is tantamount to the human beings who have been chained since childhood in the underground den. "They see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall" (Republic 398). "Would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? ... To them ... the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images" (399). The free intellect,

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

83

on the other hand, has emerged from the dark into the light, and has knowledge of reality rather than shadows. In this paradigm of knowledge, error results from reality-testing with the senses or the distractions of the world: "men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power" (405). Thus, knowledge is "impersonal" and "purely contemplative" (Russell, Problems 160). Although there is no mention of God, and it does not presuppose a oneness of all things in the 'Reality behind the veil', nonetheless Russell's metaphysic leans towards the mystic vision in that it eschews the world of the senses. Russell's term, free intellect, owes a large debt to Nietzsche's concept of free spirit. Both are Platonic in that they involve 'elitist' knowledge. Nietzsche's free spirit could only be male in gender. He went so far as to say that a man who was or aspired to be a free spirit should keep a distance between himself and women. As Schutte notes: As with his earlier Apollonian/Dionysian transformations, the transfiguration taking place here [Thus Spake Zarathustra] excludes women, while it takes place in a space far removed from women's space." (242) Russell has removed Nietzsche's ideas from their blatantly mysogynistic sphere but has maintained what could be called a masculinist approach. The 'women's space,' for various reasons as we have seen, is often primarily subjective. The free intellect, according to Russell, cannot operate in the subjective sphere; with few exceptions, this concept inherently excludes women and therefore is as misogynistic– if not as blatantly so -- as Nietzsche's free spirit. In philosophical terms, knowledge is of reality: one knows what is real. If it is not real, one is mistaken in thinking one knows it. Therefore, what is real and what is not real (a shadow, perhaps?) is of prime importance. Who makes this decision? How is it decided what is real and what is not? If you are Septimus Smith, the lines become blurred even in the realm of

84

Nanette Norris

everyday experience: He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him.Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music should be visible was a discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy's piping (That's an old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered) which, as the boy stood still came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint while the traffic passed beneath. This boy's elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into the snows, and roses hang about him -- the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself. The music stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to the next publichouse. (103) The expansion of consciousness, the sublime experience which was so prized during the nineteenth century is no longer valid. It is no longer seen as a window on truth, truth being the reality obscured from us in everyday life: the mystic experience is maligned. The opium experience, which Septimus' experience echoes, has become encompassed by another paradigm of knowledge: the scientific, medical paradigm. This paradigm holds that the mystic experience needs grounding in a more everyday reality, as Septimus identifies and reasons out the 'real' source of his sublime moment – the "motor horn", the old man on the penny whistle, and the association with the roses on the bedroom wall. But what about the rest of this experience: the thrilling of the earth, the music meeting in "shocks of sound

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

85

which rose in smooth columns" (103). Woolf poses the question, 'Is this not equally as real, even though not a shared reality?' According to Russell, Septimus' knowledge, his reality, is "brought by the senses, and dependent ... upon ... a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal" (Problems 160), and therefore unreliable. According to Russell, everyday experience is but the experience of the shadow. "In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe .... any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong" (Problems 7). Philosophically, such sophistry (if we may use this term loosely) makes perfect sense: it is logical, scientific. As Russell states, "what we see is constantly changing in shape as we move about the room; so that ... the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table" (Problems 11). However, if you are Septimus, or Clarissa, or Virginia, to know that you know nothing is an unbearable irony -- nay, cruelty. When the most ordinary touchstones of reality are beyond your grasp and control, one can only imagine the attendant sense of powerlessness. If expanded consciousness offers a false window on knowledge/reality, and everyday experience is unreliable, what remains? What do we know, and how do we know it? This is the crux of the problem Woolf is addressing in Mrs. Dalloway. The Hellenistic concern for what constitutes knowledge was one which both Russell and Woolf shared. Like the ancient Greeks, they both respected philosophy as the highest of intellectual accomplishments. But whereas Russell followed Plato and Aristotle on the path of logic, Woolf had to reach behind these philosophic giants, to the earlier time of the preSocratics to find a philosophic model of thought which could privilege her own style of thinking. Heraclitus was the first of the ancient Greek philosophers to conceptualize both a large split between the world of the senses and the reality, and the thesis that "All things

86

Nanette Norris

are one" (Ring 70), thereby reconciling opposites. Prior to him, philosophers such as Xenophanes, while accepting G-d as beyond the human sphere, held that we could only know through our senses. Before Heraclitus, knowledge resides in sense-datum, albeit potentially inaccurately. As well, perspective was recognized as playing a large part in perceived realities. Finally, mythopoesis was a privileged, respected mode of communicating knowledge, knowledge which included the nuances of human psychological and emotional being, as is true of Homer. Woolf's argument is that there are two types of knowledge: the tangible and the intangible. Russell wrote in didactic prose because the knowledge he privileged respected the rules of logic and logos -- Heraclitus' sense of a rational pattern. Woolf was arguing that some knowledge cannot be contained in the rigid boundaries of logic and rationality. Russell contended that: Those who maintain there is knowledge not expressible in words, and use words to tell us what this knowledge is .... include the mystics, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, also certain aspects of Hegel and Bradley .... can be dismissed as self-contradictory. ("Language and Metaphysics" 341) Woolf did not use words in the sense that Russell is deprecating here. The narrative method, mythopoesis, is superior for making arguments concerning intangible knowledge because, instead of explaining and describing, it makes manifest the intangible experience, enabling a new, shared experience. So often one's private and intangible experiences remain vague, elusive, and unreal because it is too hard to express them, to communicate the experience and real-ize them in a shared milieu. The narrative provides an actualizing moment. The issue of shared experience is an important one because 'rational' philosophers such as Russell use this concept as a guide to the reliability and accuracy of the sense-data from which a "vast cosmic edifice of inference" (Russell, Human

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

87

Knowledge 22) is based. Take the example of memory. Russell writes that "when I have a memory-picture of some event ... it is 'true' in so far as it has the resemblance which an image has to its prototype" (Human Knowledge 442). However, for Russell, "there must be in the outer world connections between facts similar to the connections between the visual sensation and the beliefs that it causes ..... In this way connections between facts are relevant in judging the truth or falsehood of what might pass as judgments of perception" (443). Facts exist "in the outer world" and involve words with conventional elements: shared experience. A personal, unverifiable memory is therefore unreliable. The question is, does memory lack reality? In the movie Silence of the Lambs, the psychopathic killer, Dr.Hannibal Lechter, from the confines of his jail cell contends that, "Memory ... is what I have instead of a view." His memory enabled him to experience vivid and detailed scenes in the here and now. In this sense, memory is not simply a recollection of events from the past, which may or may not be accurate, but is an intangible and personal experience in the present, using remembered sensedatum instead of tangible ones. As Russell says, "everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer .... Hence the occurrences which are called knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analyzable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed" ("Memory" 159-160). Russell, however, terms images, and memory-images, "merely imaginary" (185), saying that they do not have "the sort of reality that belongs to outside bodies" ("Memory" 185). Certainly, the intangible does not connect facts, and yet it may have the attribute of immediacy which it shares with outside bodies. Immediacy is perhaps the only attribute which the intangible shares with outside bodies. "And isn't imagination the way we try to understand anything we did not directly experience?" writes Andrew Kunka in a recent review (815). We speak of 'trying to understand'; we speak of 'living vicariously';

88

Nanette Norris

we speak of 'recreating' an experience. Woolf saw memory, imagination, and images as experiences themselves. The intangible, the imaginative, are real, although they do not adhere to the rules of logic. Woolf is building upon Pater's explanation of Plato's sense of "absolute and independent knowledge" (Pater 27): "all was gone that belonged to an outward and concrete experience, thus securing exclusive validity to the sort of knowledge, if knowledge it is to be called, which corresponds to the "Pure Being" (32). Pater's discussion of Plato, while maintaining a clear division between the world of the senses and that of ideas, nonetheless opens the door to the possibility of the validity of non-traditional, supra-sensual knowledge. Woolf herself studied Greek with Pater's sister, Clara (Gordon 84), and may have been exposed to some of Pater's metaphysical ruminations through her. For Woolf, rational, fact-based reality-tests are insufficient. In Mrs. Dalloway she evokes the idea that a shared experience can occur without either of the parties to the experience being aware of it. For instance, both Septimus and Clarissa see Dr. Bradshaw as one in whose power one wouldn't want to be: So he was in their power! Holmes and Bradshaw were on him! The brute with the red nostrils was snuffing into every secret place! "Must" it could say! (223) At the idea that "Holmes would get him" (226), Septimus chooses rather to die. Clarissa shares with him the sense that a 'dignity' is wanted and is worth preserving: And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect ... (181) They both recognize the need for a 'secret place,' and this belief constitutes a form of shared experience.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

89

The tendency of people to think of Elizabeth in natural terms is a type of shared experience. Willie Titcomb, at the party, thinks "She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth," echoing Elizabeth's thoughts when she is waiting to get on a bus: "People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties" (204). In this case, Elizabeth has been made aware of the terms in which people see her, although she doesn't agree and finds the requirements of this 'mythic stage' in her life burdensome. Septimus, in his madness, does no more than Nietzsche or Heraclitus in writing his insights down as pithy aphorisms: Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). (35) His words enter the realm of shared experience. In fact, he experiences various 'accepted' kinds of experiences, including intuition and sublime moments. His most 'mad' moments are not the experiences in his mind, but when facts are interfered with: "None of these things moved. All were still; all were real" (215). At the same time, Woolf evokes experiences which appear on the surface to be shared, and shows that they are replete with individual perspectives. The appearance of the "motor car with its blinds drawn" (23) is one such instance. No one knows who is in the car, and every person has a different idea on the matter: "ruffling the faces on both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute" (23). The facts themselves are insufficient for drawing an accurate conclusion as to who exactly is

90

Nanette Norris

travelling in the car. Nonetheless, an intangible shared experience occurs: the feeling of veneration connects the people, and it doesn't matter who is actually in the car. The incident has evoked a symbol, the symbol of "greatness," whoever that person may be in actuality. Later in the narrative, at the party, the Prime Minister is depicted as being a very ordinary person, yet this doesn't detract from what he stands for as a symbol: One couldn't laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits -- poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa then with Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society. (261-262) A symbol can encompass many ideas – it is the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Yet, as knowledge, it is intangible and can be described neither in words nor through the connectedness of facts. The intangible can occur without sign or reference appearing in the outer world of facts. Clarissa illustrates this as she walks through the streets of London, thinking: "Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on." There is no reflection in the outer world of the thoughts which are in her mind, but the thoughts are no less real for being uttered privately. Being words, they still partake of convention, and therefore a shared reality. The same is true for Peter Walsh. Woolf creates a sharp juxtaposition between his inner life and his outer one: ... doing what one likes, not caring a rap what people say and coming and going without any very great expectations (he left his paper on the table and

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

91

moved off), which however (and he looked for his hat and coat) was not altogether true of him ... (247). The validity of the content of Peter's private speech is an entirely different issue from that of the reality of his private speech. Woolf raises this point in respect to what Peter and Clarissa believe each other to be thinking. During their shared experience in the drawing-room, there is the speech which takes place in the outer world, and then there is the private experience each one has, offering private perspectives (and inaccurate interpretations) of the experience. "Well, and what's happened to you?" she said. .... He assembled from different quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which she knew nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and altogether done his job. "Millions of things!" he exclaimed. (66) Peter actually speaks a shorthand of what he was thinking; in this case his thoughts are more full and accurate and, at least for detail, have a greater degree of reality than his spoken word. That he is mistaken in thinking Clarissa knows nothing of his marriage does not change the reality of his perspective: his perspective exists simultaneously with Clarissa's, and is no more or less real, even when it involves verifiable facts (his marriage and her knowledge of his marriage). For Woolf, sensory knowing occurs in two dimensions. The tangible includes events, actions, and speech. The intangible includes ideas, thoughts, memories, and reverberations. The tangible is also effable; the intangible may or may not be. To illustrate the limits of rigid paradigms of knowledge, Woolf slides between the two dimensions. Moving from the figurative to the literal is the most direct example: For having lived in Westminster -- how many years now? over twenty, -- one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive,

92

Nanette Norris

a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. (4-5) We notice it especially because it goes against our expectations, interrupting the reliability of her personal experience ("one feels") with the medical paradigm. Finally, the personal is privileged: "The leaden circles dissolved in the air" (5). A more complex example occurs as Clarissa is both remembering and considering Peter Walsh. One moment he is a memory, a consideration, and the next he has almost materialized: ... that was only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be intolerable; he could be impossible, but adorable to walk with on a morning like this. (8) A literal and figurative metonymy has occurred. Clarissa is indeed 'walking with him' as she 'real-izes' him through the immediacy of her imaginative experience. When the tangible and the intangible intertwine, Woolf's point is driven home: "Do you remember the lake?" she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said "lake." For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter. (63-64)

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

93

Through emotional contact with a memory-image, Clarissa experiences a sublime moment in which all that she was becomes all that she is, at this moment in time, "sitting this morning with Peter" (64). As Woolf writes later in the narrative, It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people .... So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. (231) Ultimately, Woolf argues that perhaps it is simply that we do not have the tools for measuring the interrelationship of dimensions of reality: Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional. (25)

94

Nanette Norris

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

95

6 The Two Faces of Hellenism: Virginia Woolf and Queer Theory Although Virginia Woolf's place as one of the major authors of the early twentieth century is certain, her influence, her legacy has yet to be adequately assessed. This is due in part to the unfortunate dominance of a system of thought which is essentially inimical and antithetical to Woolf's own. Her thinking was ahead of her time and remains so to this day. It may be, in fact, that her influence is still to come. Woolf has been credited with a fairly substantial participation in emergent feminism. This is a fair assessment, but perhaps not for the reasons usually ascribed. Ironically, one of the major works for which she is known in a popular sense, A Room of One's Own, a piece which has become a rallying cry for feminists and a staple of women's studies, was outdated at the time it was composed. The essay which has survived for posterity is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928. Woolf gave her impression of this speaking engagement: I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women -- that's my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine & have a room of their own. Why should all the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians & the Francises, & none on the Phares & the Thomases? There's Julian not much relishing it, perhaps. I fancy sometimes the world changes. I think I see reason spreading. But I should have liked a closer & thicker knowledge of life .... I felt elderly & mature. And nobody respected me. They were very eager, egotistical, or rather not much impressed by age & repute. Very little reverence or that sort of thing about. (Diary, Vol. III, Oct. 27, 1928, 200.)

96

Nanette Norris

The style of the essay, the tone, the images, were all designed, journalistically, to be appealing and accessible. It remains so to this day. Then as now, the essay resonated on a level other than the factual. For the fact is that by 1928, fine classical education was available for women in England, and had been since the turn of the century. Granted, it was not commonly available, but neither was classical education for men, which reached only 2% of the male population. Windsor School for Girls, for instance, was (and may still be) a boarding school adjacent to Windsor Castle and across from Eton, the prestigious boy's school. This school, and others like it, was probably created too late for Woolf, and may certainly have been beyond the means of the women to whom Woolf was speaking in 1928, but it existed. By the same token, a great number of women of every class or socioeconomic stratum had experienced the broadening of horizons made possible by the exigencies of WWI. The Depression forced many women out of the home and in to the work force to help ailing family finances. These were the realities of the time in which Woolf wrote this essay. The world about which she was complaining had already changed by the time she was speaking of it. Woolf's contribution to feminism is the same as her contribution to concepts of gender, gendered behaviour, and sexuality generally: she broadened the perspectives so that many otherwise marginalized people could be themselves with less public censure. Among these numbers were intelligent women, gays and lesbians, the mentally ill. In aeronautics, there is a mathematical calculation which determines two curves on a graph: the upper curve is the top speed at which the airplane can travel in order to get lift; the lower curve is the least amount of air foil below which there will not be enough lift to lift the plane. The envelope is the space between the curves. The expression "pushing the envelope" refers to physically exploring the edges of the envelope to determine if the calculations are correct. Virginia Woolf's accomplishment was to 'push the envelope' of the definition of what counted as real. In the process, she helped discover many "bodies that matter," to use Judith Butler's term.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

97

But if Woolf was on the side of mythopoesis, of expanded consciousness, of broadened definitions of reality, opposing her was the restricted thinking of logic, of logos and the primacy of the word, and the clearly defined binary opposites of post-Socratic thought. Much post-structuralist, postmodern discourse, while allowing for an actualization of what was previously without 'subject-hood,' nonetheless privileges rhetorical thinking. The difference between Woolf and much postmodern discourse is the difference between inclusiveness and exclusiveness, between the pre-Socratic and the postSocratic. This study has shown the extent to which Hellenic thought -- the thinking of the Hellenes, the ancient Greeks – has permeated Western culture. However, to call all Hellenic thought and influence 'classical,' as Highet and others tend to do, is misleading . As Graves has pointed out, within this general category of 'things Hellenic,' of 'classical' thought, there are two modes of thinking which can be termed mythic versus classical. For the ancient Greeks, classical thought developed slowly over time until it achieved a position of dominance. There was nonetheless a belief among the ancient Greeks in a 'golden era' which had gone by: the mythic era. For our purposes it is useful for clarity of definition to place the dividing line between the two modes of thought with Socrates, with whom recorded history virtually begins. Thus we speak of pre-Socratic and post-Socratic. Pre-Socratic thinking is little known in actuality as few records exist. There are the myths, the intricate stories of the Gods and their interchanges with man. There is evidence from archeological digs attesting to religious belief, mystery cults, fertility rites, and so on. The period remains shadowy for lack of concrete evidence. One thing survives: the (unwritten) spirit of myth, of the imagination, of mythopoesis. By imagination we do not mean 'imaginary' or 'unreal' but rather, as Joscelyn Godwin writes: ... the road to mythical understanding lies through the Imagination. It must be emphasized that this

98

Nanette Norris

Imagination (deliberately capitalized) is not the same as the "phantasy," a mental function often loosely identified with it. The Imagination is an organ of the mind that gives access, as the sense organs do, to a particular world of events and entities that take the form of images. These may or may not correspond to things seen in the external world; for instance, the Unicorn does not, nor does the Angel, unless we are Blake or Swedenborg. But they are real, not merely "imaginary." (3) Clearly, such thinking is part of human nature. However, in Western ideology there has been a struggle, shall we say, between the mythic and the classical which is unique to our inheritance from ancient Greek thought. Classical, post-Socratic thought is characteristically scientific, rational, logical, empirically-based, and rhetorical in nature. It privileges a world of entities and events accessible through the sense organs and other instruments of measurement. The concept of the 'evolution' of consciousness has coloured attitudes towards post-Socratic thinking, causing it to be privileged as the preferred mode of thought: it alone is referred to as "acute mental perception" (Knowles 80). In spite of the revivification of the imaginative faculty during the nineteenth century, science, scientific thinking and discoveries dominated the century, as they continue to do today. The effect of broadening the concept of what constitutes reality is inclusiveness. Words, speech, rhetoric, logos in the narrow sense of discourse, are denied exclusive regulatory power. Much postmodern discourse, however, materializes otherwise marginalized 'bodies that matter' in a binary fashion: inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, subject/abject, real/unreal, us/them. As Butler writes: The exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed ... thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet "subjects," but who form the constitutive outside the

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

99

domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those "unlivable" and "uninhabitable" zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the "unlivable" is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject's domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded indentification against which -- and by virtue of which – the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, "inside" the subject as its own founding repudiation. (3) Butler's analysis articulates a reality in which social norms, shared experience, and the outside world are given hegemony. She is reclaiming, through articulation, that which fails to materialize in such a reality. Certainly, to be able to describe the situation is a breakthrough towards the materialization of the excluded. However, Butler's discourse partakes of the exclusionary discourse, and therefore remains a part of it, giving hegemony to exclusive binaries, a complaint against the system rather than a reworking of it. Butler's discourse is post-Socratic. It privileges the world of entities and events accessible through instruments of measurement. Its logic is scientific: force a + force b (where a = subject and b = abject). The concepts are those of inside/outside, with a domain for each. The approach is a social one, in which society dictates what is acceptable and what is not. The effect of post-Socratic discourse is that it maintains lines of division and exclusion which benefit the few rather than the many. It is ultimately patriarchal in the limits which it places on reality and what can be known: Butler's exclusive domains fail to acknowledge any subjective reality and hegemony gained

100

Nanette Norris

thereby. The social matrix of compulsory heterosexuality is inherently privileged, if criticized. It is the standard by which all things are judged. There is another way of thinking. The contrast to this is not an either/or, an inside/outside, but a space between: a space, in fact, between the words. Can one know what cannot be expressed? Can one give logos the by? Woolf answered with a resounding Yes! by employing the ironic space which could materialze bodies and make meaning through positioning in, around, and between the logos of socially/culturally acceptable realities. What is in the space between the words? Butler contends that, Where there is an "I" who utters or speaks and therefore produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that "I" and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will. Thus there is no "I" who stands behind discourse and executes its volition or will through discourse. On the contrary, the "I" only comes into being through being called, named, interpellated, to use the Althusserian term, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the "I". (225) In saying that logos must precede subjectivity, Butler is tipping her hand as a classic post-Socratic. She is saying that whatever fails to receive 'cultural intelligibility' cannot know itself, cannot be self-reflexive or constitute an 'I'. "There is no 'I' who stands behind discourse": there is nothing in the space between the words. The falsehood of this is easily demonstrated through Woolf's ironic method of positioning in and between various intelligible realities so that the space itself achieves a position and materializes. This is the space of the ironic, what Kierkegaard contends "sustains the opposition between essence and phenomenon, between the internal and the external" (274). The question of knowing Mrs. Dalloway is answered in

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

101

this ironic space: "She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that .... she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that" (11). Peter Walsh responds in the space between the words: "What does the brain matter," said Lady Rosseter, getting up, "compared with the heart?" "I will come," said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. (296) Knowing Clarissa Dalloway is not an issue for articulation, for logos -- except in the broadest Greek sense of the word. She materializes through positioning. Irony is used most effectively by oppressed people who cannot speak openly. In "Of Hebrew Humor," A.M. Klein suggests that irony is the particular province of the Jewish people. Exile, he suggests, "ruthlessly wiped off even the first faint glimmerings of a smile from the face of the Jew" (103), yet "still could the Jew indulge, though secretly, in a sly dig at fate, a sardonic smile at inquisitorial busybodies, a word satiric" (104). Irony, wit and satire, the discourses of hidden humor, became the special arts of the oppressed Jewish people. Klein's poem "Dialogue" functions in silence as much as it does through voice. Irony, says Kierkegaard, is the art of making something out of nothing (267). Residing in the silence which envelopes the poem, the irony manifests through context alone, and is available only to the initiated. The two shawl-covered grannies, buying fish, Discuss the spices of the Sabbath dish. They laud old-country dainties; each one bans The heathen foods the moderns eat from cans. They get to talking of the golden land,

102

Nanette Norris

Each phrase of theirs couches a reprimand. Says one: I hate these lofty buildings, I Long for a piece of unencircled sky. I do not know the tramway system, so I walk and curse the traffic as I go. I chaffer English, and I nearly choke, O for the talk of simple Russian folk! The other says: A lonesomeness impels Me hence; I miss the gossip at the wells. I yearn for even Ratno's muds; I long For the delightfully heart-rending song Of Reb Yecheskel Chazan, song that tore The heart so clear it did not ask for more. They sigh; they shake their heads; they both conspire To doom Columbus to eternal fire. Nothing can be directly pointed to in the poem to suggest the operation of an ironic voice. Perhaps the sing-song quality of the rhyming couplets adds a tone of joviality; perhaps the word "grannies" (l.1) suggests a gentle mocking tone, but no more. The criticism is left unsaid: that they would not be alive to gossip and curse so harmlessly were it not for the sanctuary of the New World; that it is not Columbus who needs to be doomed "to eternal fire" (l.20) but rather the anti-Semites, the instigators of the pogroms. Klein can be seen as writing from a marginalized position -- that of a young person who finds himself critical of the older and so-called wiser, who does not want to expose himself by openly voicing his criticism. At the same, the poem operates in another ironic dimension: once the irony of the context is realized, the reader can reflect upon the poem with new insight. The irony is that

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

103

these women cannot mention the circumstances of their immigration without touching impossible sores and compromising their pleasant memories. Not only is it unlikely that they could go back to taste "old-country dainties" (l.3) or that they might hear again "the gossip at the wells" (l.14): it is impossible. The Jews have been accused of poisoning those wells –there is no 'back' for them. The poignancy lies in the separation of time and place that they cannot overcome; the irony lies in their inability to speak truthfully and openly of the circumstances surrounding their move. In "Good Housekeeping" Sara B. Blair claims that "the space created by Woolf's ironic gestures has ... sheltered the historically disenfranchised, the female and working-class 'outsiders'" (100). The irony does not create a space: it is the space, and if it 'shelters' the disenfranchised, it is because they receive their franchise in this space. What precisely can materialize through logos? Philippe Lejeune has pointed out that the meaning of a sentence depends upon a contract between the reader and the writer. The contract shapes the reading and guides the writing. Both reader and writer have expectations which may or may not be fulfilled. The writer assumes a 'posture' which is more or less maintained for the duration of the piece, a posture which is not a revelation of the true identity of the writer, but a mask assumed for the dictates of the moment. There is a theatrical element to writing – the footlights go on and the actors take their places. Post-colonial literatures and the increasing multiculturalism of North American classrooms have taught us that cultural differences and expectations play an important role in the reading/writing interchange. The notion itself of a writer/reader contract is, in fact, an extension of the Western sense of individuality and the place of the individual in a society in which the concerns of the one can take precedence over the concerns of the many. In Chinese society, individualism is synonymous with selfishness, and reviled. Moreover, the mind is not the highest good, the ideal. In Chinese culture, the mind is a product of the material world: I am, therefore I think. The resulting social structures demand self-effacement, indirect and

104

Nanette Norris

humble reference to one's own thoughts, clear acknowledgement of one's place in the larger reality. By contrast, our Western (and largely post-Socratic) emphasis on the individual results in glorification of one's own thoughts, often without reference to a larger context. In "The Classroom and the Wider Culture" Fan Shen recounts his experience as an immigrant learning to write English: One day in June 1975, when I walked into the aircraft factory where I was working as an electrician, I saw many large-letter posters on the walls and many people parading around the workshops shouting slogans like "Down with the word 'I'!" and "Trust in masses and the Party!" I then remembered that a new political campaign called "Against Individualism" was scheduled to begin that day. Ten years later, I got back my first English composition paper at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The professor's first comments were, "Why did you always use 'we' instead of I'?" and "Your paper would be stronger if you eliminated some sentences in the passive voice." The clashes between my Chinese background and the requirements of English composition had begun. At the center of this mental struggle, which has lasted several years and is still not completely over, is the prolonged, uphill battle to recapture "myself." In this paper I will try to describe and explore this experience of reconciling my Chineseidentity with an English identity dictated by the rules of English composition. I want to show how my cultural background shaped – and shapes –my approaches to my writing in English and how writing in English redefined -- and redefines – my ideological and logical identities. By "ideological identity" I mean the system of values that I acquired (consciously and unconsciously) from my social and cultural background. And by "logical identity" I mean the

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

105

natural (or Oriental) way I organize and express my thoughts in writing. Both had to be modified or redefined in learning English composition. (459) Several points emerge from Fan Shen's experience. First, readers of English bring certain expectations to a work, expectations which are laden with cultural baggage. Second, writers adapt to these expectations, and present, as far as possible, the persona that the reader will accept. This doesn't mean that another persona doesn't exist, and it certainly calls the primacy of logos into question. In fact, it is exceedingly egocentric to say, as Butler does, that if I don't see something, it doesn't exist, or if my culture doesn't ratify something, it isn't a subject. The words may fail to materialize Fan Shen's Chinese identity, but that identity is in no way weakened. It may be argued that Fan Shen materialized his identity initially through Chinese discourse, or that Klein possessed a materialized identity through his Jewish culture that simply could not be expressed at that moment in time in logos, and that the situation is different for non-heterosexuals in a society which, at least until recent years, has enforced, privileged, and otherwise shaped its inclusivediscourse around heterosexuality. In our article, "Creating Gender Expectations through Children's Advertising," Nancie Kahan and I argued that advertiser are "commingling with the creation of the collective unconscious in the children's formative period, possibly causing the contents of the children's collective unconscious to become attached to gender-differentiated objects and ideas" (277-278). There is no doubt that children are socialized from birth, that they are susceptible to socializing influences, and that "genderdifferentiated objects and ideas" can be and are involved in this socializing process. Socialized identity is clearly an important portion of identity as a whole -- but it is not the entire story. Jung contended that we have the power to resist manipulation: an ad (or other socializing mechanism) can fail in its effectiveness for various reason; there are ways of empowering children to resist (such as collaborative learning, which Kenneth Bruffee contends challenges the "traditional authority of knowledge" [649]).

106

Nanette Norris

Manipulation and traditional authority can be challenged, but the fact is children are very vulnerable, and not always up to the task of challenging authority, having so little power themselves in our traditional structures. Sedgwick quotes the horrifying statistic that "young gays and lesbians are two to three times more likely than other young people to attempt and to commit suicide" (154). She argues that, "Revisionist analysts seem prepared to like some gay men, but the healthy homosexual is one who (a) is already grown up, and (b) acts masculine" (156). She is objecting to the pathologization of gender-nonconforming children, arguing that "for any given adult gay man, wherever he may be at present on a scale of selfperceived or socially ascribed masculinity (ranging from extremely masculine to extremely feminine), the likelihood is disproportionately high that he will have a childhood history of self-perceived effeminacy, femininity, or nonmasculinity" (157-158). These are the ongoing realities of our time, and one cannot in all conscience object to theorists such as Butler and Sedgwick raising general awareness of these issues and being the watchdogs. Nonetheless, by offering no alternative they succeed only in continuing to ratify the very instruments of measurement they decry. It can be argued that we all need to live in and with society. We are therefore severely wounded by social attitudes and encumbrances when we find ourselves marginalized and fighting for our identities or our very lives. We mould ourselves to the expectations of society because of our need to live in and with it. The point is that, in spite of all this, there is something in the space between the words, an I, an identity, even though this I may not be mirrored in social discourse. At one point in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, the heroine Connie thinks, "these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn't matter" (282). This was

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

107

Woolf's experience also, as someone with a different vision, a different experience of life, which has been labelled 'ill.' Neither the label nor the war alters the reality of the space between the words.

108

Nanette Norris

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

109

7 Transformation and Displacement in Mythopoesis: Disguising the Real in H.D.'s Helen in Egypt This study has shown that the Hellenic inheritance has taken two forms: that of classical rationality and the pre-Socratic mythic. Since the resurgence of mythopoesis in the nineteenth century, however, articulation of mythopoesis-as-entity has engendered the kind of debate that reveals the intellectual climate of our times more than any formal understanding of mythopoesis itself. In Chapter 4, mythopoesis was identified as "the making of mythic poetry. It is the imaginative faculty of humankind in combination with symbolic language to express thoughts,visions, awareness which transcend the everyday world." The nineteenth-century sense of sublimity was connected, in Chapter 4, with mythopoesis -- as though synonymous, as being that which went beyond Kant's "ordering lens of time-space perceptions". It was possible, even privileged, to be conscious outside of time-space limitations. In fact, imagistic poetry specifically has been described in sublime terms. Pound wrote, "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time ... It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art" (cited in Pratt, 18). Inherent in this discussion is the changing sense of symbol and allegory, in the nineteenth century, and sign in the twentieth. de Man reminds us that the word 'symbol' began to supplant 'allegory' in discussions of figural language at the end of the eighteenth century. "Appeal to the infinity of a totality constitutes the main attraction of the symbol as opposed to allegory, a sign that refers to one specific meaning and thus exhausts its suggestive potentialities once it has been deciphered" (188). This sublime sense of the relationship between "the image that rises up before the senses and the supersensory totality that the image suggests" is a mode of "the

110

Nanette Norris

classical idea of a unity between incarnate and ideal beauty" (189). de Man goes on to suggest two developments in the twentieth century: first, that metaphorical styles have developed "that cannot be called 'symbolic' in the Goethian sense" (190); second, he raises Gadamer's question: "The basis of aesthetics during the nineteenth century ... was the freedom of the symbolizing power of the mind. But is this still a firm basis? Is the symbolizing activity not actually still bound today by the survival of a mythological and allegorical tradition?" (191). If, in keeping with our previous definition, we accept mythopoesis as the logos which actuates in temporality 'the freedom of the symbolizing power of the mind,' then mythopoesis partakes, first of all, of an infinite, if not an ideal, through the power of mind, and second of all, of the incarnate, through logos. In order to be comprehensible and iterable, logos requires a basis in tradition: whether it be historical/cultural or mythological, meaning is activated and invested in a context. de Man's point is that criticism and critical terms operate with an inherent bias, either towards subjectivity or objectivity, towards the infinite or the temporal. We are moving, he feels, towards a rhetoric "that would more or less openly raise the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures" (188). As we saw with Woolf, rigid paradigms of knowledge are ultimately reductive. Knowing can be tangible or intangible, both will be real, and thoughts can have a greater degree of reality than spoken word, or logos. Mythopoesis, however, whatever its connection with intangible knowing or experience, exists as logos. Even though logos mediates between the tangible and the intangible, it is temporal, of time and space. In structuralist terms, the author controls the text, controls the entire scope of signification and the perception of meaning; it remains only for the reader to 'understand,' to 'dig' for meaning which exists in the text in some finite measure. The post-structuralist position holds that meaning is constructed in an interface between reader and text, and that "only the reader ... can activate the 'intertext' " (Hutcheon 232). "Kristeva defines intertextuality as the sum of knowledge that makes it possible

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

111

for texts to have meaning .... Meaning in literature is in part dependent not just on other texts which it absorbs and transforms, but on the reader's recognition and activation of that intertextual process" (Hutcheon 236). However, whereas all logos involves "the reader's recognition and activation of ... intertextual process," not all logos is mythopoesis. In mythopoesis, the logos resonates in several 'realities' or 'dimensions' at once, enabling the reader to activate intertext of which the writer may have had no idea: the tension between the infinite and the temporal allows for the creation of a new whole. Wilde contends that "a painter is limited, not to what he sees in nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen" (1401). The poet is similarly limited by the bounds of logos and the possibilities of intertextuality. Nonetheless, mythopoesis is that class of writing (to borrow Wilde's rhetoric) which entertains the greatest potential for both temporizing and detemporizing thought. In this way, logos is a sign, a sign-post. One of the problems inherent in a discussion of mythopoesis lies with the word 'infinity.' It means, 'without limit' or 'boundless,' but it is especially associated with the concept of Deity. The word 'temporal' also bears such doublemeaning: it is 'terrestrial' as opposed to 'heavenly.' As Owen Chadwick reminds us, Europe in the nineteenth century was undergoing a process of secularization. Terms which had previously 'signed' a relationship with Deity were secularized, stripped of their heavenly associations. At the same time, some concept of the infinite, some concept of the temporal versus the non-temporal, some concept of percipience beyond the world of the senses remained. In many ways, Freud stands at the crossroads of this discussion of allegory and symbol, of temporal and infinite, of logos and thought. In Freud's psychology, the boundlessness of the infinite-as-Deity became the boundlessness of the personal unconscious: what had been outside the person was now inside, and infinitely 'deep.' His analysis of dreams is especially relevant to a discussion of mythopoesis. We have seen previously the problematic relationship which has existed throughout recorded history between man

112

Nanette Norris

and his dreams. Dreams as magia were condemned during Roman times, and this condemnation continued in the Catholic, Christian doctrine. Many artists, however, have reported dreams which initiated their creativity. Mary Shelley, in her "Introduction" to Frankenstein, has told us something of the ideas and images which she experienced in a dream prior to writing Frankenstein. Similarly, Robert Louis Stevenson has written about the dream which engendered The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As with many writers and poets, Stevenson reports the sense of being aided and abetted in his creativity by some outside power -- he calls it "the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, G-d bless them! who do onehalf my work for me while I am fast asleep" (382). Stevenson's memoir shows that all fear of the dream-as-devil has disappeared by 1892, and there appears to be very little connection with a G-d-given creativity: a strong sense of the "internal theatre" (381) is developing, along with an understanding that the contents of this theatre are connected in some way with the dreamer's waking life. They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. (382) The connection between dreams and mythopoesis is fairly evident in both Shelley and Stevenson. However, as Stephen Wilson points out, in his "Introduction" to Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, the Romantic "introspective investigation of the mind's mysteries" (vii) had given way, by the end of the nineteenth century, "to a philosophy of science which venerated empirical observation and looked askance at

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

113

anything speculative" (vii). Freud's work with the analysis of dreams extended the connection between the dreamer's conscious life and the dream content while bringing the potentially speculative dream analysis into the arena of empirical observation. Freud completely secularized the dream process, bringing what had been magia and mythopoeia into the realm of the scientific and rational. The infinite which was once of G-d became invested in man, and what once would have signalled a knowledge of G-d now signalled a knowledge of man. As H.D. writes in her Tribute to Freud, "he had opened up, among others, that particular field of the unconconscious mind that went to prove that the traits and tendencies of obscure aboriginal tribes, as well as the shape and substance of the rituals of vanished civilizations, were still inherent in the human mind -- the human psyche, if you will" (12-13). He articulated a secular, culturally-based theory of mind. This is not to suggest that Freud was without his critics -far from it. "He was a little surprised at the outburst. He had not thought that detached and lofty practitioners and men of science could be so angry at what was, after all, chapter and verse, a contribution to a branch of abstract thought, applied to medical science .... that the whole established body of work was founded on accurate and accumulated data of scientific observation" (H.D., Tribute 76-77). In spite of his scientific approach, his work was suspect: In the dream matter were Heaven and Hell, and he spared himself and his first avidly curious, mildly shocked readers neither. He did not spare himself or his later growing public, but others he spared. He would break off a most interesting dream-narrative, to explain that personal matter, concerning not himself, had intruded. Know thyself, said the ironic Delphic oracle, and the sage or priest who framed the utterance knew that to know yourself in the full sense of the words was to know everybody. Know thyself, said the Professor, and plunging time and again, he amassed that store of intimate revelation

114

Nanette Norris

contained in his impressive volumes. But to know thyself, to set forth the knowledge, brought down not only a storm of abuse from high-placed doctors, psychologists, scientists, and other accredited intellectuals the world over, but made his very name almost aby-word for illiterate quips, unseemly jokes, and general ridicule. (72-73) H.D. is suggesting here that the outcry against Freud's theory of the mind was connected with his "nonchalantly unlocking vaults and caves, taking down the barriers that generations had carefully set up against their hidden motives, their secret ambitions, their suppressed desires" (75). It may have also been connected with his disturbance of the 'new religion' of science and rationality. His work maintained one foot in each camp, secular and religious. As H.D. writes, "There were those G-ds, each the carved symbol of an idea or a deathless dream, that some people read: Goods" (Tribute 93). There remained the concept of infinite (now termed 'depth'), and the concept of percipience beyond the world of the senses, concepts which actively reminded people of what they could not control in a laboratory. Dreams are a form of mythopoesis in that they mediate between temporality and infinity (secular or otherwise) and temporize the freedom of the mind, through symbols. The connection between dreams and literature is more tenuous, except in cases like Shelley and Stevenson where a dream was the impetus for the writing. But it may fairly be said that literature is mythopoesis in much the same way as dreams. One issue which has emerged from dream analysis has been that of the shadow or double. Carl Jung and Marie-Luise Von Franz have theorized extensively on this concept, but as they came after Freud, and their major work, Man and His Symbols, was published three years after H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, we will restrict ourselves to the theoretical position of Freud, with which H.D. may have been familiar. In essence, dream formation involves transference and displacement, a process which accounts for "the textual

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

115

difference between the dream-content and the thought-content" (Freud, Dreams 193). The dream is not identical to the thought, any more than a work of literature is identical to the ideas which engendered it. However, when doubling or shadowing is involved, "on account of the censorship it transfers the psychic intensity of the significant but also objectionable material to the indifferent" (Freud, Dreams 424). As in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the double can be seen to represent the repressed psychic content, displaced into the literature as an 'open secret.' The dream (and the literature) "actually misrepresents things by producing their opposites" (Freud, Dreams 52). Freud goes on to say, Where in social life can a similar misrepresentation be found? Only where two persons are concerned, one of whom possesses a certain power while the other has to act with a certain consideration on account of this power. The second person will then distort his psychic actions; or, as we say, he will mask himself .... The political writer who has unpleasant truths to tell to those in power finds himself in a like position. If he tells everything without reserve, the Government will suppress them ... The writer stands in fear of the censorship; he therefore moderates and disguises the expression of his opinions. He finds himself compelled, in accordance with the sensibilities of the censor, either to refrain altogether from certain forms of attack, or to express himself in allusions instead of by direct assertions; or he must conceal his objectionable statement in an apparently innocent disguise. (Dreams 52-53) In Helen in Egypt, the focus on the doubling -- Helen in Egypt or in Ilium -- is intentionally highlighted, and the privilege of voice has been given to someone who traditionally has been without voice -- the Helen who is in Egypt. Artistically and intellectually, this is an interesting departure from tradition, one which has

116

Nanette Norris

been seen as a "feminist re-vision of the classical, phallocentric literature" (Chisholm, Note 11, 251). Friedman suggests that, "From her perspective as a woman in a man's world, H.D. resurrects matriarchal values and literally restores the desecrated Goddess (Isis-Aphrodite-Astart-Aset, etc.) to her original position of veneration .... Her purpose is to counterbalance what she views as the masculine 'whirlwind of destruction' ("Creating a Women's Mythology" 375). Chisholm extends this discussion by saying that H.D. addresses "the demonological psychoanalytic treatment of women" (206). However, if we apply Freud's sense of transformation and displacement in mythopoesis, then we would have to conclude that "the psychic intensity of the significant" lies elsewhere. In fact, H.D.'s Helen, being in Egypt, carries twice the 'normal' load of possible intertextuality. First we are asked to recall everything we know of Helen in the traditional Homeric myth. Then we are asked to activate the intertext of Stesichorus, of Euripides, and of Goethe, all of whom touched upon the anomolous myth which held that the Helen seen in Ilium was a shadow, and the real Helen had resided in Egypt, blamelessly, throughout the Battle of Troy. Swann calls these "poetworn figures" (176) and contends that the poem "is more a filling out of an existing narrative" (176). He points to "the prose Arguments preceding each of the eight divisions in each of the twenty books" as part of the "weaknesses" in the poem: "One assumes that H.D. wrote the verses and then, on perceiving the difficulties for the reader in their occasional oversubtlety, their bewildering shifts in time and speaker, their complex genealogies, added the Arguments as a guide. The result is unsatisfactory" (179). What do we make of the ancient Greek concept of the eidolon? It appears very far removed from present-day thinking, and thus the problem which is being presented as the heart of the poem inherently removes the subject from the temporal sphere. H.D. destabilizes intentional rhetoric: Helen is a myth, and everything about her is 'nothing but' story -- a story about a shadow. Greek myth is intellectually very rich and the intertexts

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

117

are complex. Many of the incidents mentioned in the poem entertain inherent doubling: Clytemnestra is either Homer's wicked woman, the traitor-wife who committed adultery and killed the King, or she is the last of the matriachal queens who "claimed a queen's traditional right to choose her consort, and have each new one slay the old one" (Walker 172). She is "slain by her son Orestes, a worshipper of the patriarchal god Apollo" (172). Since, as Meagher writes, "A main theme ... of Greek myth is the gradual reduction of women from sacred beings to chattels" (173), it is not difficult to understand why, in a feminist age, this should be the intertext we have chosen to read. Is this the subject for which H.D. would have been censored if she had not 'displaced' it in her poem? What other subject might require elucidation through masking? Even in the sixties era of 'free love' (the poem was published in 1961), that love was -- and had been for the duration of H.D.'s life -- that of compulsory heterosexuality, so a closeting rhetoric is one possibility. The other is religion, that pariah of the rational age. One possible intertext for the concept of Helen as a shadow in Ilium can be found in Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed that all matter, the entire world, is totally corrupt. As such, man's true condition is to "live in the heart of a misunderstanding so total that everything which surrounds us is in reality non-real, a reflection, an illusion, a distorting mirror, a phantom" (Lacarriere 61). This, of course, is the issue with which the poem opens: Do not despair, the hosts surging beneath the Walls, (no more than I) are ghosts; (Book One [1] ll. 1-3) The interjection, "(no more than I)," establishes a non-temporal relationship with the reader. Logos is phantom; the temporality reflected in the logos is phantom; the subject, Helen, is no more than a phantom. For all this, the thoughts are real. Stesichorus' Pallinode was a recantation of an "invective against Helen" (Helen in Egypt 1); H.D.'s Pallinode is more a restoration to sight.

118

Nanette Norris

It attests to what is real rather than what is phantom. Ilium in the traditional version of the myth is the 'real' world. The eidolon version allows the entrance of the intertext with Gnostic belief. Wink contends "Christians have been especially fearful of Gnosticism because in many respects it represents the shadow side of Christianity" (viii). Gnostic belief allows one to question the Battle of Troy as the battle between the matriarchal (Trojan) and patriarchal (Greek) forces (Walker 383), even though such a concept is not suggested in Homer, who is the prime source of knowledge of this battle. The obvious and traditional, through Gnosticism, inverts "the psychic intensity of the significant" by becoming the phantom, the unreal, and throwing the burden of reality elsewhere. In this case, the burden of reality falls to Helen in Egypt. What we know about Gnosticism comes from a few rare texts "discovered in the last century and a more recent collection which came to light in the caves of Upper Egypt after the last war" (Lacarriere 44). Lacarriere also contends that Gnosticism came to its "fullest flowering" (58) in Egypt. According to Lacarriere, seventeen years after the death of Jesus, two people began to walk the roads, preaching on the eastern shores of the Roman Empire, along with many other preachers of the time. One of these was Simon Magus, whom Lacarriere terms "the most ancient of these wandering Gnostic prophets" (44). He called himself the Sun, Zeus, the Supreme Power, and is said to have performed feats of magic. His travelling companion was Helen, who is called the Moon, Athene, and "Ennoia (Sophia), Wisdom descended from the heavens, the Mother of the universe" (45). H.D.'s Helen is also this Gnostic Helen. The poem assumes the form of the dramatic monologue, and is especially reminiscent of William Morris' "The Defence of Guenevere." (H.D. was introduced to Morris' work by Pound [Guest 4].) In Morris' poem, Guenevere defends herself against the charge of adultery. The question of her guilt is the same as Helen's -- and the response equally as ambiguous. H.D.'s Helen, if she was indeed in Egypt throughout the war, would clearly be blameless, as she is in Euripides. She is in Egypt, but the blame, and the actions which brought the blame upon her, have

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

119

followed her as though they happened to her and not to an eidolon. One possible explanation for this would be her connection with the Gnostic Helen. As with Guenevere, Helen may not be defensible in patriarchal terms, or in Christian terms. However, her defense, or perhaps one should say her defensiveness, may lie in her association with the Gnostic Helen. She connects with H.D.'s sense of the need to know thyself through the Gnostic belief in man's condition on earth: "the evil which taints the whole of creation and alienates man in body, mind, and soul, deprives him of the awareness necessary for his own salvation. Man, the shadow of man, possesses only a shadow of consciousness" (Lacarriere 11). For our own salvation, we must awaken from the sleep, the dream, which is life; we must become fully conscious -- possess wisdom. There is an interesting moment in Tribute to Freud when H.D. worries about Freud's sense of his own immortality. She mentions that "The Professor himself was an Austrian, a Moravian actually by birth" (33). H.D., of course, was Moravian by ancestry and religion. H.D.'s Moravian upbringing may have given her a specific sense of salvation and immortality. We catch a glimpse of it here: I am also concerned, though I do not openly admit this, about the Professor's attitude to a future life. One day, I was deeply distressed when the Professor spoke to me about his grandchildren -- what would become of them? He asked me that, as if the future of his immediate family were the only future to be considered. There was, of course, the perfectly secured future of his own work, his books. But there was a more imminent, a more immediate future to consider. It worried me to feel that he had no idea -- it seemed impossible -- really no idea that he would 'wake up' when he shed the frail locust-husk of his years, and find himself alive. I did not say this to him. I did not really realize how deeply it concerned me. It was a fact,

120

Nanette Norris

but a fact that I had not personally or concretely resolved. I had accepted as part of my racial, my religious inheritance, the abstract idea of immortality, of the personal soul's existence in some form or another, after it has shed the outworn or outgrown body. (43) What she says of immortality here is fairly standard Christian belief -- the Moravians recited the Apostle's Creed as one of their rituals. Her 'deep distress', however, points to something that the Professor himself would need to involve himself in for his own salvation, something of which he did not appear to be aware. In Gnosticism, salvation is by no means automatic. What you do here on earth counts. "The soul is not immortal by nature, it can only become so if man feeds and sustains this privileged fire which he carries within him. Otherwise, ineluctably, he will return to nothingness" (Lacarriere 49). This is part of the "struggle against the generalized oppressiveness of the real" (50). To the Gnostics, Hermes is the "The Wide-Awake," the one "who keeps his eyes wide open" (23). Hermes, of course, has played a large role in H.D.'s poetics. H.D.'s concern for the Professor points to a feeling on her part that, in spite of his work in psychoanalysis, his own level of awareness might not be sufficient to guarantee him salvation. Memory plays a major role in this awareness. In Helen in Egypt H.D. writes, The potion is not poison, it is not Lethe and forgetfulness but everlasting memory (Book One [2], ll. 1-3) Walker records that, in classical and Gnostic imagery, The location of Lethe in the underworld ... derived from the ancient oracular cave of the Earth-deities (Chthonioi) at Lebadeia, where one

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

121

made elaborate preparations to go into the dark pit and learn his fate through "things seen" or "things heard." Among the preparations, "he has to drink the water called Lethe, in order to achieve forgetfulness of all that he has hitherto thought of; and on top of it another water, the water of Mnemosyne, which gives him remembrance of what he sees when he has gone down." (536) Helen is saying that the process must be that of the mysterycultists, whose training was "to learn endurance of thirst, for a draught of Lethe would wipe out their memories of their previous incarnations and leave them no wiser than the rest of humanity .... The enlightened one should seek instead the spring of Memory (Mnemosyne)" (Walker 536). Memory, in spite of being non-temporal, is nonetheless real. H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud: We travel far in thought, in imagination or in the real of memory. Events happened as they happened, not all of them, of course, but here and there a memory or a fragment of a dream-picture is actual, is real, is like a work of art or is a work of art. I have spoken of the two scenes with my brother as remaining set apart, like transparencies in a dark room, set before lighted candles. Those memories, visions, dreams, reveries – or what you will -- are different. Their texture is different, the effect they have on mind and body is different. They are healing. They are real. They are as real in their dimension of length, breadth, thickness, as any of the bronze or marble or pottery or clay objects that fill the cases around the walls, that are set in elegant precision in a wide arc on the Professor's table in the other room. But we cannot prove that they are real. (35) We have already noticed that the subject of Helen in Egypt is

122

Nanette Norris

inherently removed from the temporal sphere. Within the poem, time slides, speeds up, slows down; Helen is maiden, witch, and crone. All time exists in one time. In Gnostic belief, time is "a condition appropriate to damned matter" (Lacarriere 23). That Helen is able to play with time in her memory, in her poetics, is testament to the extent of her release through wisdom. Whether or not Moravianism was an offshoot, a quietened version of Gnosticism, is impossible to say with any certainty. The similarities are striking enough to have given H.D. a discourse for her experience, an experience which colored her vision, marginalized her, and was alternate enough to require masking in order to avoid social persecution (as had been the case for Gnostics for centuries). The Moravian Brethren was founded in the east of Bohemia. Their history is of persecution and wandering: the sect to which Hilda was born was helped to the New World by Count Zinzendorf of Bohemia. Moravianism seems to have been as much a culture as a religion for H.D., and thus religious beliefs are largely inseparable from her world view. Moravians believe, for instance, that the world is utterly corrupt. They were persecuted in their native Moravia for their resistant stance to the traditional Christian church which, like the Gnostics, they believed to be corrupt. Like Gnosticism, it is a matriarchal religion: one ritual, called the "Liturgy of Wounds," holds that "man -- through the image of the crucified Christ -- has 'died' in order to be reborn as a 'New Mortal' cradled in the lap of the Great Mother" (Friedman, Penelope's Web 348). Achilles is referred to as the 'New Mortal' in Helen in Egypt: true, I had met him, the New Mortal, baffled and lost, but I was a phantom Helen and he was Achilles' ghost. (Book Four [4], ll. 15-18) Moravian belief in another world is extremely strong. "Death is not a subject for sorrow" (Guest 9). This belief is evident in H.D.'s occultism: "She always sought out the world of the

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

123

beyond, whether through table-tipping, Tarot cards, crystal gazing, astrology, or numerology" (Guest 9). The Gnostics believed themselves to be exiles from elsewhere in the universe; "Hence their feeling of having fallen onto our earth like inhabitants from a distant planet, of having strayed into the wrong galaxy, and their longing to regain their true cosmic homeland, the luminous hyper-world that shimmers beyond the great nocturnal barrier. Their uprooting is not merely geographical but planetary ... man, then, is a lifelong exile on a planet which is a prison for all mankind; he lives in a body which is a prison for the soul; he is the autochthon of a lost and invisible world" (Lacarriere 29-31). H.D. spent a great deal of time attempting to break through the barrier of that invisible world. As Materer contends, "Her occultism was an 'alchemy of the word' that never limited its importance to poetic symbol making. Unlike Pound, who simply drew heavily upon occult beliefs and symbols, both H.D. and Yeats may be described as true occultists" (21). He is suggesting that H.D. was not 'playing' at symbol making: her words were signs expressing gnosis through which the infinite was made manifest. Her story, The Gift, appears to document her becoming aware of the import of her Moravian roots. Susan Friedman relates that, "By the time H.D. was born in Bethlehem, the Moravians had for the most part lost touch with their origin as a mystical and egalitarian sect. Certain distinguishing customs remained -- the ritual love feasts, the kiss of peace, the pacifism, the flat gravestones, the missions around the world. But the esoteric roots of those traditions, going back to at least the fifteenth century, had been lost to most Moravians" (Penelope's Web 345-6). The rituals included "love feasts, passion plays, ecstatic trances, speaking in tongues, and burning raptures" (Chisholm 160). These rituals may have held the clue, the connection, to Gnosticism for H.D. She writes in Helen in Egypt: I said, I was instructed in the writ; but I had only heard of it,

124

Nanette Norris

when our priests decried paypyrus fragments, travellers brought back, as crude, primeval lettering; I had only seen a tattered scroll's dark tracing of a caravel with a great sun's outline, but inked-in, as with shadow; it seemed a shadow-sun, the boat, a picture of a toy; I was not interested, I was not instructed, nor guessed the inner sense of the heiratic, but when the bird swooped past, that first evening, I seemed to know the writing, as if God made the picture and matched it with a living hieroglyph; (Book Two [3], ll. 1-21) Again, one cannot make a direct connection between H.D.'s awareness of the similarities between Gnosticism and Moravianism, but these lines seem to speak of a moment when two discourses melded. H.D's beliefs must also be seen in the context of the temper of her time. Chapter 3 discussed the issue of defining oneself vis à vis the ancient Greeks – the topos of Hellenism. This was part of H.D.'s inheritance from the nineteenth century. However, unlike nineteenth century culture, which used this topos as a stabilizing force, a unifying principle in a dissolving world, the modernists of the early twentieth century manipulate

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

125

the mythology of ancient Greece to be an expression of this dissolution. As Friedman points out: The starting point of modernism is the crisis of belief that pervades Twentieth-century western culture: the loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration, and shattering of cultural symbols and norms. At the center of this crisis were the new technologies and methodologies of science, the epistemology of logical positivism, and the relativism of functionalist thought -- in short, major aspects of the philosophical perspectives that Freud embodied. The rationalism of science and philosophy attacked the validity of traditional religious and artistic symbols while the growing technology of the industrialized world produced the catastrophes of war on the one hand and the atomization of human beings on the other. Art produced after the First World War recorded the emotional impact of this crisis; despair, hopelessness, paralysis angst, and a sense of meaninglessness dominated the scenarios of various waste lands in modernist literature. But these writers refused finally to be satisfied with the seeming meaninglessness, chaos, and fragmentation of material reality. In a variety of ways suited to their own religious, literary, mythological, occult, political, or existentialist perspectives, they emerged from the paralysis of absolute despair to an active search for meaning. (Psyche Reborn 97) Popular culture, from the mid-Victorian through the modernist periods, has recorded a lively interest in the occult, perhaps in reaction to the loss of religion. Certainly, H.D.'s circle of friends and colleagues, the Imagists, including Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, were fascinated by the occult, although, as we have seen, H.D.'s own connection with occult matters seems to have gone more deeply than some.

126

Nanette Norris

H.D. also inherited the Nietzschean abandonment to pleasure, the Dionysian revival which "can be be traced from early Romanticism through the 1890s as, variously, "Decadent Romanticism," "Decadence," or "the fin de siècle" (Laity xi). Laity argues that "H.D. and others used the Decadents to fashion a modernist poetic of female desire" (xi). However, the difference between H.D. and the Decadents is of degree. Moravianism promotes the sharing of the awareness of G-d's love. Gnosticism goes further, calling for "the aggressive and destructive impulses of desire" (Lacarriere 96) to be used up, thereby liberating and exhausting them: One must try everything, experience everything, unveil everything, in order to strip man down to his naked condition; to 'defrock' him of his organic, psychic, social, and historic trappings; to decondition him entirely so that he may regain what is called by some his choice, by others his destiny ... No knowledge, no serious contemplation, no valid choice is possible until man has shaken himself free of everything that effects his conditioning, at every level of his existence. And these techniques which so scandalize the uninitiated, whether they be licentious or ascetic, this consumption and consummation of organic and psychic fires -- sperm and desire – these violations of all the rules and social conventions exist for one single, solitary purpose: to be the brutal and radical means of stripping man of his mental and bodily habits, awakening in him his sleeping being and shaking off the alienating torpor of the soul. (Lacarriere 98) Whereas the Nietschean inheritance was a Dionysian abandonment to pleasure, for Gnostics it was an aesthetic duty. Thus, the irony when Helen says, "I am a woman of pleasure," I spoke ironically into the night,

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

127

for he had built me a fire, he, Achilles, piling brushwood, finding an old flint in his pouch, "I thought I had lost that"; (Book One [6] ll.16-21) Laity suggests that H.D. is part of an 'alternative modernism' through which twentieth-century women writers countered doctrines which insisted on "normative male masks, purgative conceptions of the female image, masculinist theories of love and desire" (xii), through "the dual textual bodies of Decadent transgressive desire, with their attendant grotesque body tropes, disruptive language practices, and sympathetic theories of love and sexuality" (xii). Certainly, the traditional Helen in Ilium is a 'femme fatale' and Achilles can be seen as the male androgyne through the combination of his relationship with Patroclus before death and with Helen after death. In Psyche Reborn Friedman writes, Given a different cultural climate, would she have openly and explicitly identified herself as a lesbian? .... I do not believe that enough biographical information is available at this point to understand the nature of H.D.'s sexual identity, preference, and experience throughout her long life .... Her epics of the fifties, like Helen in Egypt and Vale Ave, seem as profoundly heterosexual in their portraits of love between archetypal woman and man as Asphodel and Her are fundamentally lesbian in their exploration of erotic sister-love. (44-45) H.D.'s ouevre has been embraced by critics as 'creating a women's mythology' and articulating a vision of female desire which rehabilitates such desire from the patriarchal straitjacket. Perhaps it does, but it also speaks to the extent to which desires remain encoded. Achilles destabilizes the primacy of the heterosexual reading of Helen in Egypt.

128

Nanette Norris

Written forty years after most modernist texts, it reasserts the search for meaning at a time when the variant sexualities, expressions of love, alternate lifestyles, the Hippie movement of the '60s, had lost their ability to broaden experience by becoming the norm. The norm, it appears, was as restrictive as ever. The encoded practice of Helen in Egypt suggests that outré, in becoming de rigeur, has lost something on the way. The encoded mythology of Helen of Egypt restores meaning and purpose to the disruption of traditional practice and belief by one who is an initiate to the mythopoesis. The obtuseness, the double-entendres, the intertexts superimposed one upon the other, which result in a metaphorical style "that cannot be called 'symbolic' in the Goethian sense" (de Man 190), are linked to the religious sense of the initiate. Gnostic teaching "was transmitted in a clandestine and underground fashion" (Lacarriere 55) in part because the content "was reserved for certain initiates" (55). There is the suggestion in Helen in Egypt that Helen has recognized Achilles as a potential initiate, a soul-mate (in the religious sense), although he himself is not aware of his status. Here is the crux of Helen's 'argument': that there never was cause for blame, according to her view of reality. He is unconscious of the unreality of his world-vision, of the fact that Helen of Troy was a phantom, an eidolon, and that his attitude towards her was unfair: for I knew him, I saw in his eyes the sea-enchantment, but he knew not yet, Helen of Sparta, knew not Helen of Troy, knew not Helena, hated of Greece. (Book One [7] ll. 20-24) Achilles proves himself a worthy initiate: only Achilles could break his heart and the world for a token,

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

a memory forgotten. (Eidolon ll. 1-18)

129

130

Nanette Norris

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

131

Conclusion The classical influence is more than the reflection of mythology and rhetoric in post-classical works: it is value systems and frames of reference which have survived over hundreds of years for various cultural and historical reasons. Classicism is often understood to mean both Greek and Roman intellectual and imaginative sources. Greek classicism, however, can be distinguished from the Roman by the degree to which it privileges the mythopoeic, especially before Socrates. Within Greek classicism, Hellenism, there is an inherent tension between pre-Socratic and post-Socratic values. Before Socrates, Greek culture, learning, and values were transmitted orally, through the mythopoesis of epic, the imaginative, and through the imaginative conjunct, mythic or pre-logos understanding. Literature, or mythopoesis, was valued as a transmitter of culture and values. After Socrates, literature and mythopoeic thought lost their valued position in favor of rationalism and logos-understanding, the limits of which are specifically a denial of 'other', a denial of whatever fails to fit the parameters of deductive, provable thought. This study has traced the Greek classical influence, and more pointedly the tension between the imaginative and the rational, in a few works in a few time periods. In addressing the question of how Greek classicism operates in post-classical works, this study has shown that literature continues to be able to function as mythopoesis, articulating whatever each society deems to be 'other', whether it be the irrational or the unacceptable, through chimeric devices such as metaphor, symbol, irony and double-entrendre. The Chanson de Roland communicates two perspectives, two cultures, two value systems simultaneously. Virginia Woolf questions the irrational and how we define and limit what we call real, although she never specifically states the issue in these terms. Instead, she allows her story to destabilize our certainties. The tension between the imaginative and the rational is inherent in metaphysical concepts. Whenever we address the question of what comprises reality, we enter what Derrida refers to as the

132

Nanette Norris

circle which "describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysic and the destruction of the history of metaphysics .... we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest" ("Structure" 1118). By avoiding the pronouncement of any particular proposition, which would be employing the discourse of the rational, Woolf is able to evoke an 'other' which is beyond "the form, the logic and the implicit postulations" and whose reality cannot ultimately be denied. This study has attempted some understanding of how Greek classicism has survived up to our own age. Chapter 1 traced the actual transmission of Greek language, learning, and values in England, both pre- and post-Socratic. It is possible to speculate on the extent to which the Celtic background supported a privileging of a pre-Socratic influence in resistance to pressures towards the post-Socratic influence which came from the Continent. They are both Hellenic, but the one admits thoughts that the other circumscribes. Chapter 3 looked at the influence and employment of specifically post-Socratic values in Ivanhoe, a nineteenth-century novel with the didactic purpose of defending a proposition. It shows how well-suited the Socratic argument form is to didactic purpose, even in literature. What are the implications for the next century? A small portion of the population continues to study ancient Greek thought and is conversant with the myths. To this extent, we maintain a link with the early years of western civilization and culture. Walt Disney movies pass on a version of the ancient stories filtered through a Hollywood lens. The continuing value of the Greek inheritance is less and less 'things Greek,' less and less the obvious common discourse that it was during the nineteenth century. The western world is increasingly multicultural, its people the inheritors and purveyors of non-western thought. What can Hellenism offer them/us? Multi-culturalism is the challenge of our age. It has forced upon us new definitions of ethnography, of nationhood, of who and what we are and what we accept as 'real'. Society's tendency, as Derrida says, is to "turn their eyes away when faced

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

133

by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity" ("Structure" 1126). The limitations of foundation, of origin, of ethnography, are intolerable in the world in which we live, and yet the transformative effort is frightening, a new birth. The Hellenistic tension between rationalism and the imaginative affirms and supports a space between the words in which the "as yet unnamable" can proclaim itself. That which the world cannot accept can first proclaim itself through mythopoesis, in a discourse of metaphor, double-entendre and irony, which continues to be our inheritance from the ancient Greeks. Mythopoesis is not anti-rational, but rather intensely rational in that it insists on preserving for posterity that which cannot at present be quantified and calculated.

134

Nanette Norris

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

135

Notes 1 Research has revealed the incredibly extensive use of opium during the nineteenth century. Until 1868 there were no restrictions whatsoever on the importation, wholesaling and retailing of opium. In fact, the import duty which was in effect in the first half of the nineteenth century was completely abolished in 1860, resulting in greater availability of less costly opium. In England, the drug was sold mainly over the counter, rather than by doctor's prescription, there being a long tradition of self-medication. 20-25 drops (1 grain) could be bought for a penny. The drug was included in tea, cough drops, tonics, suppositories, toothache remedies, baby-soothers, and was used as a remedy for rheumatism, dysentry, cholera, headaches, stomach cramps, women's ailments, menopause, ulcers, bruises, as well as to counteract excessive drinking. Opium was added to beer, to brandy, and to children's cordials. It was a standard component in every home's medicine chest. With such widespread application, it would have been a wonder if anyone in England had not taken opium many times in his or her life. (See Berridge and Edwards.) At the very least, the culture of opium use and the state of mind which nearly everyone would have partaken of at least once in his or her life would have contributed to this overall sense of "the great light of the majestic intellect." 2 In 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published. It is now thought to offer a "progressionist and largely nonDarwinian approach to evolutionism that almost certainly preconditioned the way in which the Origin of Species would be understood" (Bowler 89-90): Vestiges used the theme of progress to link the development of life on earth, the origins of mankind, and the history of society into a single, unified subject. The model of growth or development toward maturity was appealed to over and over again as a

136

Nanette Norris

means of promoting the view that the universe advances inexorably towards a higher state. On the question of human origins, Chambers invoked phrenology as an integral part of his campaign to show that behaviour -- including moral behaviour -is subject to natural law and hence can have evolved from primitive levels. As the brain expanded in the the course of progressive biological evolution, so did the mental and moral capacities, until at last something approaching the human mind appeared. (Bowler 90) Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and his Descent of Man (1871) were preceded by Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855), which accepted and promoted "the evolutionary mechanism proposed by Lamarck at the beginning of the century: the inheritance of acquired characteristics" (Bowler 92): Although now discredited by modern genetics, Lamarckism played a major role in nineteenthcentury evolutionism because -- unlike Darwin's natural selection of random variation -- it allowed the effects of individual effort and initiative to play a role in evolution. In the most famous example, the ancestors of the giraffe saw a new source of food in the trees and began stretching their necks to reach it. The cumulative effects of their neck-stretching, inherited over many generations, have produced the giraffe we know today. Applied to mental evaluation, Lamarckism allowed the benefits of experience to accumulate in the form of increased intelligence and social instincts. (Bowler 92) 3

Concerning the tension between mythopoesis and rationalism in ancient Greece Nietzsche writes: The dialogue of tragedy is the actual achievement of

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

137

the dramatists, on account of its uncommon definiteness and clarity against a background of a people who revelled in symbolism and allusions and who were educated away from this especially by the great choral lyrics of the tragedy: just as it is the achievement of Homer to have liberated the Greeks from Asiatic pomp, vagueness and obscurity and to have attained to architectural clarity on a large scale and a small. It was, moreover, by no means accounted easy to say something with true distinctness and lucidity; how else would there have been such great admiration for the epigram of Simonides, which presents itself so plainly, without gilded figures or witty arabesques but saying what it has to say clearly, with the reposefulness of the sunlight, not the snatching at effects of a flash of lightning. It is because striving towards the light out of an as it were inborn twilight characterizes the Greeks that a cry of rejoicing goes through the people when they hear a laconic maxim, the language of the elegy, the sayings of the Seven Wise Men. That is why the promulgation of laws in verse, which we find offensive, was so well loved: it represented the actual Apollonian task for the Hellenic spirit of triumphing over the perils of metre, over the darkness and obscurity that otherwise characterizes the poetic. Simplicity, suppleness, sobriety were extorted from the people, they were not inherent in them -- the danger of a relapse into the Asiatic hovered over the Greeks at all times, and now and then they were in fact as though inundated by a stream of mysticism and elemental savagery and darkness. We see them sink, we see Europe as it were flushed away and drowned -- for Europe was very small in those days -- but always they come to the surface again, excellent swimmers and divers that they are, the nation of Odysseus. (219: p. 265)

138

Nanette Norris

4

5

Kaufmann, Walter and R. J. Hollingdale. The Portable Nietzsche. Harmondsworth, 1954.

Leonard Woolf kept a careful record of the medication Virginia took under his care. These included chloral hydrate, a narcotic sedative which nowadays is under strict control, 'veronal' (barbital sodium), a member of the barbiturate family of drugs, also under strict control nowadays, medinal, potassium bromide, and sodium bromide. Julia Duckworth's mother was known to recommend treatments of morphia and chloral (Bell 17), although there is no evidence that Virginia was treated with morphia. 6 Heraclitus "acknowledges two different types of rationality: (1) the knowledge of (many) things and (2) the wisdom that has insight into those various facts." (Ring 65)

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

139

Bibliography Alexander, Peter F. Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Literary Partnership. NewYork: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Almog, Shmuel. Nationalism and Antisemitism in Modern Europe, 1815-1945. London: Pergamon, 1990. Andreasen, Nancy C. "Creativity and Mental Illness: Prevalence Rates in Writers and Their First-Degree Relative." American Journal of Psychiatry 144 (1987): 1288-92. Annas, Pamela J. "Silences: Feminist Language Research and the Teaching of Writing." Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity. Eds. Cynthia L. Caywood and Gillian R. Overing. Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of NewYork Press, 1987. 3-17. Anonymous. The Song of Roland. Trs. Glyn Burgess. London: Penguin, 1990. Arnold, Matthew. "From Culture and Anarchy." In The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968. 1087-1096. Arthur, Rose Horman. The Wisdom Goddess. Lantham, MD.: Univ. Press of America, 1984. Austin, Norman. Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Ausubel, Nathan. The Book of Jewish Knowledge. N.Y.: Crown, 1964. Baugh, Albert C. A History of the English Language. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957. Belenky, Mary Field, et al. Women's Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic, 1986. Bell, Quentin. "Introduction." The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 1915-1919. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth, 1977. xiii-xxviii. Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Berridge, Virginia and Griffith Edwards. Opium and the People. N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1981. Beye, Charles Rowan. The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Epic Tradition. New York: Anchor, 1966.

140

Nanette Norris

Blair, Sara B. "Good Housekeeping." The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal. Eds. Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. 99-118. Bloom, Harold, ed. H.D. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Bolgar, R.R. The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries from the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance. Cambridge: The University Press, 1954. Bowen, James. "Education, ideology and the ruling class: Hellenism and English public schools in the nineteenth century." Rediscovering Hellenism. Ed. G.W. Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 161-186. Bowler, Peter J. The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past. Cambridge: Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Browning, Robert. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." Hero's Way. Ed. John Alexander Allen. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 11-18. Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" College English 46.7 (1984): 635-52. Burgess, Glyn. "Introduction." The Song of Roland. Anonymous. Trs. Glyn Burgess. London: Penguin, 1990. 7-25. Butler, E.M. The Fortunes of Faust. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1952. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. N.Y.: Routledge, 1993. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1973. Caramagno, Thomas C. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992. Caywood, Cynthia L. and Gillian R. Overing. "Introduction." Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity. Eds. Cynthia L. Caywood and Gillian R. Overing. Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, 1987. xi-xvi. Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. Chazan, Robert. "Medieval Anti-Semitism." History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism. Ed. David Berger. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986. 53-54.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

141

Chisholm, Dianne. H.D.`s Freudian Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978. Corbishley, Mike. The Middle Ages. New York: Facts on File, 1990. DeMeester, Karen. "Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway." Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (Fall 1998): 649-673. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. 1822. London: Oxford UP, 1960. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979. Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. 1117-1126. de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. London: Methuen, 1983. De Salvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work. New York: Ballantine, 1989. Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1951. Dougherty, Carol. The Poetics of Colonization. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Dover, K.J. The Greeks and their Legacy. Vol. II. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Drennan, A.D. "The Spirit of Metaphysical Inquiry: Introduction to Part One." Metaphysics. Ed. A.D. Drennan. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. 1-11. Dyke, C. "Strange Attraction, Curious Liason: Clio Meets Chaos." Philosophical Forum 21(1990): 369-92. Cited in Mark Golden and Peter Toohey, 7. Edelstein, Ludwig. The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Flaste, Richard. Medicine's Great Journey. Toronto: Little, Brown, 1992. Flint, Valerie I.J. The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1991.

142

Nanette Norris

Flynn, Elizabeth A. "Composing as a Woman." College Composition and Communication 39.4 (Dec. 1988): 423-435. Fossier, Robert. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages: I: 350-950. Trs. Janet Sondheimer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Freud, Sigmund. "Erotic Wishes and Dreams." Dreams and Inward Journeys. Eds. Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. New York: Longman, 1998. 303-306. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trs. A.A. Brill. 1900. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Creating a Women`s Mythology: H.D.`s Helen in Egypt." Signets: Reading H.D. Eds. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis. Wisconsin: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990. 373-405. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981. Friedrich, Paul. The Meaning of Aphrodite. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978. Gadamer, Hans-George. Wahrheit und Methode. 1960. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1975. Trs. G. Barden and J. Cumming. Truth and Method. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Glassman, Bernard. Anti-Semitic Stereotypes Without Jews: Images of the Jews in England, 1290-1700. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1975. Gleason, Maud W. Making Men. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1995. Godwin, Joscelyn. "Foreword." The Golden Fleece and Alchemy. Antoine Faivre. N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993. 1-6. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust. Part One. Trs. Philip Wayne. London: Penguin, 1949. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust. Part Two. Trs. Philip Wayne. London: Penguin, 1959. Golden, Mark and Peter Toohey. "General Introduction." Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World. Eds. Mark Golden and Peter Toohey. New

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

143

York: Routledge, 1997. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Goodenough, Erwin R. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. Ed. and abridged by Jacob Neusner. 1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992. Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life. New York: Norton, 1984. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 1955. London: Penguin, 1992. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. 1948. London: Faber and Faber, 1961. Grun, Bernard. The Timetables of History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: the Poet H.D. and Her World. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984. H.D. End to Torment. New York: New Directions, 1979. H.D. Helen in Egypt. 1961. New York: New Directions, 1974. H.D. Tribute to Freud. 1956. New York: New Directions, 1974. H.D. The Walls Do Not Fall. London: Oxford UP, 1944. Haarhoff, T.J. The Stranger at the Gate. Boston: Beacon, 1951. Handley, Graham. "Introduction." Daniel Deronda. George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. ix-xxii. Haren, Michael. Medieval Thought. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1992. Haskins, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1927. Haskins, Charles Homer. The Rise of the Universities. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1957. Havelock, Eric A. "War as a Way of Life in Classical Culture." Classical Values and the Modern World. Ed. Etienne Gareau. Ottawa: Univ. of Ottawa Press, 1972. 19-78. Hay, Malcolm. Europe and the Jews: The Pressure of Christendom over 1900 Years. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992. Helleman, Wendy E. Hellenization Revisited. Lantham, MD: University Press of America, 1994. Herman, William. "Virginia Woolf and the Classics: Every Englishman's Prerogative Transmuted into Fictional Art."

144

Nanette Norris

Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays. Eds. Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb. Troy, New York: Whiston, 1983. 257-268. Hexter, Ralph. "Introduction." A Guide to The Odyssey. New York: Vintage, 1993. xv-lxxv. Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. Hillhouse, James T. The Waverley Novels and Their Critics. New York: Octagon, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda. "Literary Borrowing ... and Stealing: Plagiarism, Sources, Influences, and Intertext." English Studies in Canada X11.2 (June 1986): 229-239. Jarrett, James L. "Introduction." Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung. Vol. 1. Ed. James L. Jarrett. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. ix-xxi. Jenkyns, Richard. The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830. London: Phoenix, 1991. Jones, G.F. The Ethos of the Song of Roland. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Modern, 1946. Jung, C.G. Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster. From The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Vol. 9. Part 1. Bollingen Series XX. Trs. R.F.C. Hull. 1959. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1973. Jung, Carl G. and Marie-Luise Von Franz. Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday, 1964. Kahan, Nancie and Nanette Norris. "Creating Gender Expectations through Children's Advertising." Images of the Child. Ed. Harry Eiss. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State Univ. Popular Press, 1994. 273-286. Kant, Immanuel. "From Critique of Judgment." Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. 376-393. Kaufman, Walter and R.J. Hollingdale. The Portable Nietzsche. Harmondsworth, 1954. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Irony. Trs. Lee M. Capel.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

145

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1965. King, Karen L., ed. Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988. Klein, A.M. "Dialogue." The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein. Ed. Miriam Waddington. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974. 28. Klein, A.M. "Of Hebrew Humor." Literary Essays and Reviews. Eds. Usher Caplan and M.W. Steinberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. 99-109. Knight, A.H.J. Some Aspect of the Life and Work of Nietzsche, and particularly of his connection with Greek Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1933. 165. Knowles, David. The Evolution of Medieval Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. Knox, Bernard. The Oldest Dead White European Males. New York: Norton, 1993. Knowles, David. The Evolution of Medieval Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. Kohanski, Alexander S. The Greek Mode of Thought in Western Philosophy. Toronto: Associated UP, 1984. Kunka, Andrew J. "'Adversary Proceedings': Recent Books on War and Modernism." Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (Fall 1998): 813-833. Lacarriere, Jacques. The Gnostics. Trs. Nina Rootes. 1973. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991. Laity, Cassandra. H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Larner, Christina. "Crimen Exceptum? The Crime of Witchcraft in Europe." Crime and the Law. Eds. V.A.C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker. London: Europa, 1980. 49-75. Lawrence, D.H. The Rainbow. 1915. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1989. Lawson, John and Harold Silver. A Social History of Education in England. London: Methuen, 1973. Lekas, Padelis. Marx on Classical Antiquity. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trs. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Press, 1989.

146

Nanette Norris

Lenman, Bruce and Geoffrey Parker. "The State, the Community, and the Criminal Law in Early Modern Europe." Crime and the Law. Eds. V.A.C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker. London: Europa, 1980. 11-48. Leontis, Artemis. Topographies of Hellenism. Ithaca: Cornell, 1995. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Livingston, R. W., ed. The Legacy of Greece. Oxford: Clarendon, 1922. Longinus. "On the Sublime." Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. 76-98. Magill, Frank N. ed. Great Events from History: Ancient and Medieval Series. 3 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1972. Materer, Timothy. Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1995. Mayerson, Philip. Classical Mythology in Literature, Art, and Music. Glenview, Il.: Scott, Foresman, 1971. Meagher, Robert Emmet. Helen: Myth, Legend, and the Culture of Misogyny. New York: Continuum, 1995. Mielke, Robert. "Revisionist Theory on Moral Development and its Impact UponPedagogical and Departmental Practice." Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity." Eds. Cynthia L. Caywood and Gillian R. Overing.Albany, N.Y,: State University of New York Press, 1987. 171-183. "Moravian Brethren." Encyclopedia Britannica. Vol. 15. 1945. Morgan, Leslie Z. "Italian Literature: Geste Francor." http://orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/culture/lit/Italian/morganint ro.html 12/17/97 Morris, William. "The Defence of Guenevere." Victorian Poetry and Poetics. 2nd ed. Ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. 615-619. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Trans. Marion Farber with Stephen Lehmann. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

147

Norris, Nanette. "Alchemy and The Rainbow." D.H. Lawrence Review 26.1-3 (1995/96). 133-146. Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delacorte, 1978. Orme, Nicholas. English Schools in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen, 1973. Pater, Walter. Plato and Platonism. London: Macmillan, 1925. Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1976. Plato. "Republic." Plato. Trs. B. Jowett. Ed. Louise Ropes Loomis. Roslyn, N.Y.: Walter J. Black, 1969. 221-495. Plato. The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues. Trs. Benjamin Jowett. Ed. Shane Weller. Toronto: General Publishing, 1992. Pollock, Sir Frederick and Frederic William Maitland. The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I. Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968. Poliakov, Léon. The History of Anti-Semitism. Vol. III. London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Poole, Reginald Lane. Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Pratt, William. "Introduction." The Imagist Poem. Ed. William Pratt. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963. 11-39. Prickett, Stephen. " 'Hebrew' versus 'Hellene' as a principle of literary criticism." Rediscovering Hellenism. Ed. G.W. Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 137-159. Pulzer, Peter. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. London: Peter Halban, 1988. Rashdall, H. The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. 3 vols. Oxford: The University Press, 1963. Ring, Merrill. Beginning with the Pre-Socratics. Mountain View, Calif: Mayfield, 1987. Robinson, Janice S. H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Roubiczek, Paul. The Misinterpretation of Man. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1947. Russell, Bertrand. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1948. Russell, Bertrand. "Language and Metaphysics." An Inquiry Into

148

Nanette Norris

Meaning and Truth. 1940. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961. Russell, Bertrand. "Memory." The Analysis of Mind. 1921. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924. 157-187. Russell, Bertrand. My Philosophical Development. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959. Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. 1912. London: Oxford UP, 1957. Russell, Bertrand. "Mysticism and Logic." Mysticism and Logic and other essays. 1917. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. 9-30. Sakoulas, Thomas. “Greek Art: The Classical Period.” GreekLandscapes.com. (14/04/08) http://www.greeklandscapes.com Sandys, John E. A History of Classical Scholarship. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Sappho. Sappho. Trs. Mary Barnard. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1958. Schacht, Richard. Classical Modern Philosophers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Schaup, Susanne. Sophia: Aspects of the Divine Feminine Past & Present. York Beach, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, 1997. Schutte, Ofelia. "Nietzsche's Psychology of Gender Difference." Modern Engendering. Ed. Bat-Ami Bar On. Albany, New York: State Univ. of New York Press, 1994. 231-245. Scott, Sir Walter. "Author's Introduction to Ivanhoe." Ivanhoe. Sir Walter Scott. Ed. A.N. Wilson. 1819. New York: Penguin, 1986. 534-545. Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe. Ed. A.N. Wilson. 1819. New York: Penguin, 1986. Scott, Sir Walter. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott. Ed. W.E.K. Anderson. 1972. 226. Cited in Wilson, xvi. Sedgwick, Eve. Tendencies. Duke University, 1993. Segal, Charles. "Introduction." The Heroic Paradox. Cedric H. Whitman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. 1-18. Senior, Nassau. "Nassau Senior Surveys the Novels, Quarterly Review 1821." Scott: The Critical Heritage. Ed. John O. Hayden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. 215-255.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

149

Shelley, Mary. "Introduction to Frankenstein." Dreams and Inward Journeys. 3rd ed. Eds. Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. 1816. New York: Longman, 1998. 237-241. Shen, Fan. "The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition." College Composition and Communication 40.4 (Dec. 1989): 459-462. Shiel, James. Greek Thought and the Rise of Christianity. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968. Sidgwick, Henry, and Abraham Wolf. "History of Ethics." Vol. 8. Encyclopedia Britannica. 1945 ed. 761-778. The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. With Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn. Orion 1990. Solomon, Robert C and Kathleen M. Higgins. A Short History of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Steele, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf's Literary Sources and Allusions. New York: Garland, 1983. Stern, Bernard Herbert. The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English Literature 1732-1786. New York: Octagon, 1969. Stevenson, Robert Louis. "A Chapter on Dreams." Dreams and Inward Journeys. 3rd ed. Eds. Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. 1892. New York: Longman, 1998. 381-383. Swann, Thomas Burnett. The Classical World of H.D. London: Oxford UP, 1944. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. "Ulysses." Hero's Way. Ed. John Alexander Allen. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 109-110. The Theodosian Code. Trs. C. Pharr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1952. Cited in Flint, 17. Tomory, Peter. "The Fortunes of Sappho." Rediscovering Hellenism. Ed. G.W. Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 121-135. Trevelyan, Humphry. Goethe & The Greeks. New York: Octagon Books, 1972. Trombley, Stephen. 'All that Summer She was Mad': Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors. London: Junction Books, 1981. Turner, Frank M. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981. Turner, Frank M. "Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?" Rediscovering Hellenism. Ed. G.W. Clarke.

150

Nanette Norris

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 61-81. Van Steenberghen, F. The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1955. Vance, E. Reading the Song of Roland. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Vogler, Thomas A. "Introduction." Twentieth Century Interpretations of To The Lighthouse. Ed. Thomas A. Vogler. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970. 1-38. Waddell, Helen. The Wandering Scholars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman`s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1983. Wheelwright, Philip, ed. The PreSocratics. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Whitman, Cedric H. The Heroic Paradox. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von. History of Classical Scholarship. Trs. Alan Harris. 1921. London: Duckworth, 1982. Wilde, Oscar. "The Critic as Artist." The Norton Anthology of English Literature.Revised, Vol. 2. Gen. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 1968. 1393-1402. Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993. Williams, Bernard. "Philosophy." The Legacy of Greece. Ed. M.I. Finley, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. 202-255. Williams, Carolyn D. Pope, Homer, and Manliness. New York: Routledge, 1993. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Wilson, A.N. "Introduction." Ivanhoe. Sir Walter Scott. 1819. New York: Penguin, 1986. Wilson, Stephen. "Introduction." The Interpretation of Dreams. Sigmund Freud. Trs. A.A. Brill. 1900. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Wink, Walter. Cracking the Gnostic Code: The Powers in Gnosticism. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1993. Vogler, Thomas A. "Introduction." Twentieth Century Interpretations of To The Lighthouse. Ed. Thomas A. Vogler. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970. 1-38.

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

151

Woolf, Virginia. "A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus." Ed. S.P. Rosenbaum. Times Literary Supplement. 11-17 September 1987: 979. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume II: 1920-1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth, 1978. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1925-1930. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth, 1980. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1986. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1928. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973. Woolley, Sir Leonard. History Unearthed. London: Ernest Benn, 1958. Yeats, William Butler. "Leda and the Swan." Modern Poetry. Vol. VIII. Ed.Maynard Mack et al. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964. 86.

152

Nanette Norris

THE CLASSICAL DIVIDE

153