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The mirror of antiquity: 20th century British travellers in Greece, by David Wills
Article in Studies in Travel Writing · September 2009
DOI: 10.1080/13645140903146205
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The mirror of antiquity: 20th century British travellers in Greece, by David Wills
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a University of Athens
Published online: 08 Sep 2009.
To cite this article: Efterpi Mitsi (2009) The mirror of antiquity: 20th century British travellers in Greece, by David Wills, Studies in Travel Writing, 13:3, 279-281, DOI: 10.1080/13645140903146205 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645140903146205
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The metamorphosis from a republic to an empire is not to be taken lightly for Davis.
Although enraptured with the pomp of Europe, he despised colonialism. His coverage of the British–Boer war is illustrative of the manner in which the changing world changed him. Sympathetic to the Boers, he finds his criticism of the British military expedition in Africa validated in the presence of foreign irregular volunteers entrenched in the Boer lines; for Davis they were ‘a jury composed of men from all over Europe and the U.S.
. . .gathered in judgement on the British nation’ (105). Davis’s final combat coverage in the
collection finds him trapped behind the lines in Japan waiting to witness a battle which fails to materialise, or rather which his Japanese handlers fail to allow him to witness.
Without the field of battle to report on Davis reverts to principal actor and describes his complete frustration in Japan with a scathing indictment of Japanese censorship.
‘A War Correspondent’s Kit’, which ends the collection, is riddled with a self- deprecating humour in which Davis lists his entire kit in complete and minute detail. In the last estimation he concludes that the best way to proceed is ‘to go forth empty-handed, naked and unashamed, and borrow from your friends’ (142). For all its interest,Moments in Hellfailed to create a larger legacy for Davis when first published in 1910 and continues to do so now. It is good to see the volume back in print but even this edition’s new and brief introduction makes no allusion to Davis’s career as a noted novelist and travel writer.
Mark Sullivan Nottingham Trent University,UK [email protected] 2009, Mark Sullivan
The mirror of antiquity: 20th century British travellers in Greece, by David Wills, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, xii + 162 pp., £29.99, ISBN 1-84718-267-4
The liminal position of Greece, located between the East and the West, the ‘Orient’ and Europe, has resulted in its absence from analyses of British travel, whether in Southern Europe or the Near East, despite the great number of British travellers and authors inspired by the country. Notable exceptions to this surprising neglect include Terence Spencer’sFair Greece, Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron(1954), David Constantine’sEarly Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal(1984), Robert Eisner’s Travellers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel in Greece(1991) and more recently David Roessel’s In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination(2002). David Wills’The Mirror of Antiquity: 20th Century British Travellers in Greeceis a welcome contribution not only to the research on travel literature about the region but also to the broader issue of the role of Greece in British culture. Wills focuses on travel accounts from the last century, mainly from the three decades following the Second World War, intending to ‘show how travel writers described the people and monuments of Greece for consumption back home in Britain. . .[and] the influences that lay behind these representations’ (2).
In the introduction, Wills explains that the book’s originality lies mostly in ‘using all that was published in Britain during a given period’ (almost a hundred books), as he is interested not only in ‘the big names who produced ‘‘quality’’ literature’ but also in the unknown and forgotten travellers to Greece (3). The analysis, therefore, succeeds in revealing a general picture of the representation of Greece in twentieth-century Britain and in drawing conclusions based on a great number of texts. The reader, nonetheless, wonders Book reviews 279
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who these less ‘famous’ or unknown authors were and whether their accounts could be determined by other factors besides nationality, such as gender, class, education and political ideology. Wills remains true to his intention throughout, concluding at the end of the book, ‘Much of the material discussed may be regarded as of little literary merit, but it forms an archive of attitudes, offering opportunities to explore the relationship between the past and present, and between Britain and Greece’ (117).
Wills’ method is emphasised by the use of tables presenting statistically the travellers’
representation of specific monuments as well as their perception of the characteristics of the Greeks. As the author argues, this methodology does not necessarily make his conclusion ‘objective’, but allows him to make assertions about the way Greece is represented in travel literature ‘reinforced by verifiable method and not merely by isolated quotations’ (139). Wills’ conclusions do not differ much from what readers expect from most travelogues on Greece: on the one hand travellers expose more about their own culture than the place visited and on the other they confirm the commonplace ambivalence toward Greece, the conflict between the country’s noble past and often disappointing present, revisiting the paradox of Lord Byron’s famous phrase ‘Sad Greece, fair relic’.
In the first chapter of the book, Wills presents a survey of travel writing on Greece from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the time of the Greek War of Independence (1821–30), to the fall of the colonels’ junta in 1974, while in the second chapter he discusses the discourses that formed the travellers’ perception of Greece, including the role of classical education, the admiration for the Greek resistance during the Second World War and Cold War politics. The third chapter explores one of the main themes of the book, the aesthetic appreciation of the ancient monuments, focusing on ten major sites, the Acropolis, Corinth, Aegina, Bassae, Delphi, Mycenae, Olympia, Sounion, Sparta and Crete, and the fourth moves from the sites to the people, examining the travel writers’
responses to contemporary Greeks. Wills stresses particular characteristics and positive or negative reactions, which are also shown as numerical results in the appendix (e.g. friendly/curious about others, brave/heroic, religious/superstitious, etc). In most travelogues, Greeks were either ‘classical relics’ or ‘pastoral and timeless’, attributes that often turned out to be ambiguous: people ‘untouched by modernity’ (99) and progress might be also regarded as backward and inferior. Wills situates these negative reactions in the context of Orientalism, since travellers perceived the laziness, corruption and misogyny of contemporary Greeks as the legacy of the Ottoman occupation. Finally, in the last chapter, Wills considers whether representations of Greece have developed in relation to the radical transformation of the country after 1974. In this brief survey of recent travel writing on Greece, the author points out the popularity of books by ‘stationary travellers’, British men and women who settled in Greece and, as insiders, adopted a superior status to the rising number of tourists.
The book concludes that Greece, despite its complexity and ambiguity, became the mirror of antiquity in twentieth-century British travel writing; the present was a reflection of the past. Following the tradition of previous travellers to Greece, twentieth-century writers appeared equally anxious to discover the ‘original text’, the ‘authentic’ vision of Greece hidden under the layers of time, a quest often clashing with the reality of a nation claiming a European identity, modernisation and change. Wills rightly connects the travellers’ search for a changeless world with primitivism, the desire ‘to journey back and experience the more fulfilling lifestyle of a simpler age’ (118). For post-war travellers, tired of the intensity of the developed North’s commercial and consumer culture, ‘‘‘modern’’
Greece could be regarded both as the birthplace of European culture and as a primitive backwater’ (119), while, as evidenced by anthropological studies, its people embodied the
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exotic and picturesque Other within Europe. The post-war transformation of the country, especially urbanisation and industrialisation, disturbed travel writers and anthropologists alike, the latter determined to find a primitive Greece, to reveal ‘an archaic frozen society’, almost ‘unchanged since Homeric times’ (96).
Wills’ method is scholarly, his research meticulous and the material collected fascinating. Yet, the reader wishes for a more in-depth analysis of the travel writing and for a more active engagement with the numerous quotations, from both primary and secondary sources. Rather than fitting all accounts to an inclusive theory like Orientalism, it might be more rewarding to expose their variety and complexity, since there were authors – Virginia Woolf and Lawrence Durrell are obvious examples – who rejoiced in the impure modernity of Greece, overcoming the cliche´ of the ‘sad relic’. Although contemporary critics cannot ignore the travel writers’ complicity with imperialist operations that since the eighteenth century constituted modern Greece as the ‘Orient’
while appropriating its classical past, the rapid political and social changes of the post-war period have complicated matters and made generalisations difficult. After all, the tension between past and present, between the ideal, timeless image and the confusing reality of Greece is what characterises the nation since its foundation in the early nineteenth century.
In the distorting or broken mirror of modern Greece travellers can only re-imagine and re-invent the past through multiple fragments of fact and fiction.
Efterpi Mitsi University of Athens [email protected] 2009, Efterpi Mitsi
In search of America: The image of the United States in travel writing of the 1980s and 1990s, by Malgorzata Rutkowska, Lublin, Wydawnictwo Universytetu Marii Curie- Sklodowskiej, 2006, 23.00 PLN, 155pp., ISBN 82-227-2606-6 (pb)
Malgorzata Rutkowska’s study builds on three previous studies of US highway literature (by Ronald Primeau, Kris Lackey and Rowland Sherill) but is the first to deal exclusively with non-fictional narratives. Focusing on just nine accounts of long-distance journeys in the continental United States (published between 1979 and 1999), she is able to gauge their specificity astravelliterature in a way that her predecessors cannot. The book opens with a brief history of American travel writing, identifies some of its key themes, and introduces the nine texts she has chosen. William Least Heat Moon’sBlue Highwaysand Ian Frazier’s Great Plains are perhaps the best known. Some, like Blue Highways, try to get a sense of the whole country: Bill Bryson’sThe Lost Continent, Dale Peterson’s,Storyville, USA, Brad Herzog’sStates of Mind and Peter Jenkins’s A Walk Across America. Others, like Great Plains, target a particular region, such as the Canadian border (Howard Frank Mosher’sNorth Country) or the territories explored by Lewis and Clark (Dayton Duncan’s Out West). None is particularly obscure; only Gary Ferguson’s exploration of the forests of New England and the Midwest, The Sylvan Path, is currently out of print, as far as I can tell.
Reflecting her intention to adopt a two-pronged methodological approach, Rutkowska examines these works first in order to illustrate some common formal characteristics of contemporary travel writing, in particular the process of converting the travelling experience into a narrative through using devices it shares with both fiction (such as the Book reviews 281
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