Classics in the Modernists' World

Abstract

Classics in the Modernists' World Stephanie Nelson (bio) While the range of Gregory Baker's new work on Celtic Modernism and Classics is impressive, even more impressive is the web of interconnections that it calls forth. On the one hand, Baker uncovers the fascinating variety in the nationalist and language-revival movements of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries. On the other, he reveals the profound differences possible in the role of "Classics" in the modern world. Far from the normative view of a gradual disappearance of Greek and Latin as irrelevant to modernity—an issue Baker interestingly, and ably, leaves to his conclusion—we see, for example, Scotland, where the study of academic English prevailed early over Classics, Wales, which viewed itself as Roman, and Ireland, seen now as an oral culture on the verge of finding its Homer. In each case, Classics, which had served as a key instrument of the English ruling class, connects with movements supporting the national language against the over-powering encroachment of English. Again, this occurs in a variety of ways: in Wales linked to anti-industrialism, in Scotland to the divide between Lowland Lallans and Highland Gaelic, and in Ireland to a mythologized past. Moreover, as Baker points out, Classics' "decline" in fact opened it up for different kinds of repurposing, while work such as that of Cornford and Harrison "superannuated in a stroke the Victorian Homer," as Eliot put it (100) by bringing ethnography, archaeology, and cultural anthropology into Classics, radically changing the implications of its reception. To add another intriguing touch, the four writers treated here, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones, and Hugh Mac-Diarmid [End Page 109] (Christopher M. Grieve) linked the Celtic and the Classical even though (excepting Joyce and Latin) they had only a peripheral knowledge of the languages. And all of this before we even get to the infinitely tangled question of what modernism actually is. The work thus brings together what might be, in other hands, a dizzying combination of factors, underlining the need that Baker describes, to resist a prevailing "temptation to employ categories or other abstract principles as a blunt instrument" (xi). There is, of course, a reason why the simple idea of "inheritors of a so-called classical tradition" (xiii) has taken hold—among other things it puts the forest and the trees in their proper places and proportions. Baker manages the same in a far more nuanced and productive way, through an approach he describes as narrative historicism, a method that gives thick historical context while (citing Kevin Birmingham) embedding arguments in a story rather than stories in an argument (xv). The method is extremely à propos, rejecting the idea of an "ossified 'classical tradition' of predetermined significance" and exploring instead a series of relations in which Classics "catalyzed a variety of insurgent ideologies, literary idioms and experimental expressions across languages" (xvii). Given this complexity, Baker's choice to focus his discussion through Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid and to look closely at specific works rather than an entire oeuvre was extremely wise. In the case of Yeats, where any attempt to summarize could only be superficial, the choice to concentrate on The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and King Oedipus, Yeats' translation of Oedipus Rex (published in 1928), not only brings out how drastically Yeats' approach to the Classical changed, but also serves as a brilliant contrast to the consideration of the "Cyclops" episode from Joyce's Ulysses (1922) which Baker places between the two chapters on Yeats. The final two chapters, on the Welsh and Scots poets, David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid, range more widely, as is appropriate for lesser-known authors, but maintains its focus by concentrating on Jones' Anathemata (1952) before moving into a consideration of the changes in MacDiarmid's poetry. Baker's conclusion caps the study by remarking how, as the study of Greek and Latin was replaced by academic English, Yeats and Joyce themselves became [End Page 110] canonized—just as English, inexorably, and against the grain of all four authors, moved from taking over the Celtic languages into the world-language it has become. Baker's...