FIGURE 4.1 Funerary portrait from Fayyum, Egypt, second century CE.
David Damrosch
Analyzing modernism should not lead us to fall into a presentism that limits our ability even to understand the recent modernisms themselves. In the absence of a deeper temporal context, historically local choices may be mistaken for inherent or inevitable features of modernity and then of modernism; twentieth-century British or Bengali writers may come to represent modernism tout court.
No one ever lived in antiquity. People live only in the present, and in that sense every culture has always been modern at any given time. Yet an awareness of modernity is far from universal, and it can take many different forms. Every landscape bears the traces, and the scars, of earlier eras, but these traces may be prominent or obscure, and they may or may not loom large in people’s consciousness. For some cultures, the distant past is no real issue: its echoes are faint, or they are rarely listened to. Conversely, the monuments and memories of the past can be pervasive, and people may feel closely connected to their ancestors, still fundamentally part of their spiritual and material world. To have a sense of oneself as a modern, however, depends on an active awareness of a premodern era that is understood to have been significantly different from one’s own time. In such circumstances, particular weight is often given to the foundational era of antiquity as a prime point of reference, whether for emulation or opposition or both, and so modernity can be said to emerge in dialectical relation to antiquity as its buried twin.
As a literary movement arising both within and against modernity, modernism involves a sense of “an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time” (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 20). Yet for many writers this rupture is a qualified one shadowed by the presence of a distant past to which they remain inextricably tied. Born amid political upheaval and social stress, modernism precipitates out as a crisis of language and of representation, bound up with a fraught but often highly productive relation to the past. These well-known characteristics are prominent in the following fairly little-known passage, probably written around 1900, which can help us think freshly about the more canonical “high” modernists and their struggle for self-definition over against their contemporaries and the distant past alike:
If only I had unknown phrases, sayings that are strange, novel, untried words, free of repetition; not transmitted sayings, spoken by our ancestors! I will wring out my body of what it holds, to release all my words; for what was said is repetition, when what has been said has already been said! There should be no pride about the literature of the men of former times, or what their descendants discovered! What I say has never been said. . . . I speak these things just as I have seen them.
Our author seeks out strange, unknown phrases, in terms comparable to Baudelaire and Mallarmé’s gesturing toward medieval grimoires or the retro-mysticism of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, while at the same time seeking to “make it new” in a Poundian sense. Like a good imagist, our author will speak the truth of his own observations, avoiding the clichés of the ancestors whom he repeatedly evokes even while claiming to have leftthem far behind. His new language will be given psychic and even somatic force by a quasi-expressionist wringing out of language from his body; we may think here of Joyce’s Shem the Penman, mixing ink out of his urine and excrement in order to scribble his “nameless shamlessness” on “the only foolscap available, his own body” (Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 182, 185). Our author writes in opposition to those he sees around him—let us say, his self-satisfied contemporaries, comfortable in their graffiti-free skins, who fail to experience the pleasurable anguish of the modernist’s divided self: “If only I knew what others ignore,” he declares, “to say it and have my heart answer me, so I might explain to it my grief, shiftto my heart the load on my back . . . and sigh ‘Ah’ with relief!”
This passage encapsulates a range of themes typically associated with Anglo-American and continental modernism, but its actual provenance is very different. It was written not in London or Paris but in Egypt, and the date I’ve cited wasn’t the more recent 1900 but the earlier one: 1900 BCE. This is the prologue to “The Lamentations of Khakheperre-sonbe,” preserved in a collection made in the Eighteenth Dynasty but written earlier. W. K. Simpson and others (The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 212) believe that it was likely composed in the late nineteenth century BCE, toward the end of the Twelfth Dynasty or in the chaotic period following the dynasty’s collapse, resonantly known today as the “Second Intermediate Period.” This was a time of civil strife and economic decline (vividly described in the body of the lamentation), a period in which the nostrums of the older wisdom tradition were wearing thin. An alternative possibility is that Khakheperre-sonbe was actually writing much later, not detailing his own observations at all but merely plundering older texts in order to display his rhetorical skill (Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 146), in which event this would be a pseudomodernist text or, we might even say, a protopostmodernist pastiche.
By invoking Khakheperre-sonbe, I don’t mean to collapse four millennia of cultural history into a single timeless schema or to deny the exceptional density of modernist production by the Anglo-American and continental writers who continue to serve as prime reference points for field-expanding discussions such as those in Mao and Walkowitz’s Bad Modernisms (2006) and Wollaeger and Eatough’s Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2013). Ancient modernisms are often more tentative and ephemeral than the broad movement that gained momentum around our modern 1900, but they are all the more interesting for their challenges to the dominant attitudes toward language and history that reigned around them. The ancient modernisms, whether briefly glimpsed in Khakheperre-sonbe’s prologue or fully elaborated in Ovid and Apuleius, can help us resist the common identification of modernism as only a period concept, constructed by a select group of fin-de-siècle writers and their immediate heirs, against whose values all other modernisms are to be assessed.
This tendency persists even in a good deal of work that seeks to globalize modern studies. Thus in his introduction to the Oxford Handbook, Mark Wollaeger stresses the importance of “decentering modernism” by developing a global view that doesn’t simply map European modernism onto the world at large. The volume includes essays on all sorts of writers, from the Balkans to Vietnam, who have been leftout of discussions of modernism. Yet Wollaeger notes only in passing that most of his contributors presuppose that modernism centers on a “core period of about 1890 to 1945” although “they are willing to identify other instances of modernism coming either earlier or (more often) later” (14). This generous “willingness” to find other instances of modernism mostly extends back only as far as Baudelaire in the 1850s or forward to later non-European modernisms. Though the contributors emphasize postcolonial modernists’ transformative creativity, across the volume the modernist movement takes on overtones of a mission civilisatrice spreading enlightened disillusionment around the globe.
I would like to propose that if we are ever to break from this kind of neo-imperial modernism, we should attend to the variety of global modernities that can be explored across time as well as space, a perspective adumbrated over the past decade by Susan Stanford Friedman. Though her own work centers on Western and postcolonial modernisms of the past century, she understands herself as focusing on just some among the many modernisms that have emerged at different times as well as places. As she says in her article “Periodizing Modernism,”
rethinking the periodization of modernism requires abandoning what I have called the “nominal” definition of modernity, a noun-based designation that names modernity as a specific moment in history with a particular societal configuration that just happens to be the conditions that characterize Europe from about 1500 to the early twentieth century. The “relational” mode of definition, an adjectivally-based approach that regards modernity as a major rupture from what came before, opens up the possibility for polycentric modernities and modernisms at different points of time and in different locations.
(426)
She argues that modernity often arises in the context of empires and conquest, in times and places as disparate as the Roman Empire, Tang Dynasty China, and the Abbasid Caliphate (433). Modernism of one kind or another typically accompanies a given modernity’s emergence: as Friedman elsewhere puts it, “Every modernity has its distinctive modernism” (“Planetarity,” 475).
Even a “nominal” definition of modernity need not confine itself to just the last few centuries. In his classic study Five Faces of Modernity, Matei Calinescu traces the roots of the term “modernity” back to the fifth century CE, when the Latin modernus began to displace the older νεώτερος/neotericus, in a heightened contrast to classicus or antiquus (14). Though Calinescu concentrates on later texts that use or imply the term “modern,” he adds an important qualification: “Of course, I am fully aware that such a limitation is artificial and that the ‘consciousness of modernity’ is not tied down to the use of a specific word or of a set of phrases, similes, or metaphors that obviously derive from it” (10). For literary studies of modernism and modernity, anywhere we find written texts we have a key precondition for the development of a self-consciously modern perspective, a factor clearly evident in Khakheperre-sonbe’s highly intertextual lament. As the Egyptologist Jan Assmann has remarked, “Historically, the invention of written language marks the turning point in which ‘modernity,’ as we know it today, began: ‘Writing creates history where myth was’” (cited in Richter, review of Dynamics and Change, par. 2).
Analyzing modernism should not lead us to fall into a presentism that limits our ability even to understand the recent modernisms themselves. In the absence of a deeper temporal context, historically local choices may be mistaken for inherent or inevitable features of modernity and then of modernism; twentieth-century British or Bengali writers may come to represent modernism tout court. In the following pages, I will look at some of the ways in which antiquity was construed in the ancient Near East and the classical Mediterranean world and then conclude by suggesting how an attention to ancient modernities can aid us in comparative study of global modernisms in our own era as well.
Ancient writers knew that they were heirs to centuries or even millennia of previous artistic endeavor. The Assyrians of the seventh century BCE thought of themselves as modern by comparison to the Babylonians, who had dominated Mesopotamia before them. They were immensely proud of the novel strategies and innovations in weaponry that had enabled them to bring Babylon under their rule and to build the greatest empire ever known in the region. Ashurbanipal boasted of receiving tribute from King Gyges of Lydia, “a distant country,” he declared, “whose name the kings, my fathers, had never heard” (Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 2:297). The Babylonians in turn saw themselves as modern by comparison to the Sumerians, whom they had supplanted in the early second millennium BCE, but even the Sumerians hardly thought of themselves as ancients. Four thousand years ago, the world’s first known patron of literature, the Sumerian king Shulgi of Ur (r. 2094–2047 BCE), already proclaimed himself to be the preserver and restorer of an ancient literary heritage. “I am no fool,” he says in one of his ebullient self-portraits, “as regards the knowledge acquired since the time that mankind was, from heaven above, set on its path: when I have discovered . . . hymns from past days, old ones from ancient times. . . . I have conserved these antiquities, never abandoning them to oblivion.” He ordered the old poems to be added to his singers’ repertoire, “and thereby I have set the heart of the Land on fire and aflame” (“Šulgi B,” lines 270–280).
Most significant among these antiquities was a group of poems about his ancient predecessor Gilgamesh, who had reigned in Uruk, thirty miles from Ur, six centuries before him. Shulgi’s scribes’ versions of these archaic Sumerian poems became the basis for the Epic of Gilgamesh, first in its Old Babylonian version of c. 1600 BCE and then in the “Standard Version” attributed to Sin-leqe-unnini (c. 1200 BCE). In this self-consciously modern rewriting of the older epic, Sin-leqe-unnini presents Gilgamesh himself as the recoverer of ancient stories:
He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden,
he brought back a tale of before the Deluge.
He came a far road, was weary, found peace,
and set all his labors on a tablet of stone.
(George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, 1)
Here, Gilgamesh’s literary achievements get as much attention as his actual adventures.
A full consideration of ancient writers’ relations to their own antiquity could encompass a wide variety of issues. For the writers of a particular time and place, were their ancient predecessors primitive or sophisticated? If primitive, were they innocent and authentic, or had their lives been nasty, brutish, and short? Was antiquity preliterate or already the site of enduring writings? Was it a world of tribes and clans, or of independent city-states, or of a great early empire? What mixture did it involve of what we would now think of as myths versus legends or verifiable history? Just as we are increasingly inclined to speak of modernisms in the plural, we need to be attentive to the wide variety of prior antiquities that existed already within antiquity itself. In the following pages, I will focus on three antinomies that seem particularly suggestive for later modernisms too: for a given culture or group of writers trying to define themselves as modern, was antiquity their own or someone else’s? Was it single or multiple? And was it shallow or deep? These antinomies can give us a basis for comparative study of the varieties of modernism that can be traced within early periods as well as over time.
To return to my opening example, for Khakheperre-sonbe antiquity was his own country’s foundational history, not the past of some privileged “reference culture” (Denecke, Classical World Literatures, 4) such as Greece was for Rome or China was for Japanese writers. Egypt’s antiquity was a chthonic past, and it was singular in nature, at least in theory. In actual fact, Egypt had a multiethnic population, and the Nile Delta differed significantly from Upper Egypt to the south. Yet the legendary founder of the First Dynasty, Menes, had united Upper and Lower Egypt into a single oxymoronic entity, “The Two Lands” (Tawy), embodied by the kings’ dual crown, and the kingdom was taken to have had a singular history ever since. By Khakheperre-sonbe’s time this was a history of great depth. Scribes in the nineteenth century BCE were already heirs to a thousand years of textual tradition, and they loved to study the works of their famous predecessors, whose images adorned the walls of temples and tombs. So strong was the ideology of continuity that few Egyptian writers would have thought of their era as clearly distinct from past times, but periods of social and political turmoil could yield a modern self-awareness, haunted by a lost—but still very audible—past:
I have heard the words of Imhotep and Hardedef,
Whose sayings are recited whole.
What of their cult places?
Their walls have crumbled,
Their cult places are gone,
As though they had never been.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Make holiday; do not weary of it.
Lo, none is allowed to take his goods with him,
Lo, none who departs comes back again.
(Simpson, The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 332–333)
Preserved on the wall of a thirteenth-century tomb, this “Song of the Harper” was composed as early as 2000 BCE; it is probably the oldest surviving example of a poem on the present-centered theme of “carpe diem.” So strong is the poet’s evocation of loss that it is easy to miss the fact that he does still possess his predecessors’ works, which are “recited whole”—read aloud from papyrus scrolls—and so this poem takes shape within a sense of antiquity’s simultaneous loss and preservation.
Then as now, the antiquity that mattered most for writers was the era of foundational literary productions that they knew and had to deal with. As Jan Assmann has said of Egyptian scribal culture:
The emergence of the classics altered the tense of culture. . . . The past was the time of the “classics.” It was not a primal age that always remained the same distance away from the progressive present—a distance that was not temporal but ontic; this was an historical past, whose distance from the present was observable and measurable.
(Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 77)
Imhotep and Hardedef were not mythic culture founders like Prometheus in Greece or Quetzalcoatl in Mesoamerica. Imhotep served as vizier to the Third Dynasty king Djoser in the twenty-seventh century BCE; a century later, Hardedef was a son of the pyramid-builder Cheops. Imhotep’s fame was sufficiently lasting for the Greeks to have known of him long afterward (as “Imuthes”), and while his sayings have since been lost, we still have portions of Hardedef’s maxims today. The Harper’s Song thus looks back to sages who had lived six and seven centuries before the poet’s own time. If the proposed datings are correct, the poet would have been roughly contemporary with Khakheperre-sonbe, in which event we have evidence of a modernist sensibility extending beyond a single writer during a time of upheaval.
By contrast with the Egyptian scribes, the biblical writers of the exilic and postexilic periods were located very differently in relation to the past. Antiquity for them was only partly their own, extending from the patriarchal age through the time of Moses and the entry into the Promised Land. Equally, they knew how closely their own culture was connected to the histories, and the literatures, of the empires that so often controlled their destinies. From Genesis to Proverbs, Job, and the Song of Songs, the more literary books of the Bible owed much to Egyptian and Babylonian models, and those cultures’ foundational eras had an effective history for the Israelites themselves. So in contrast to the Egyptian scribes’ singular antiquity, the biblical writers were heirs to three major bodies of ancient traditions, which differed considerably in their historical depth. Their direct Abrahamic and Mosaic heritage was revered but also relatively shallow, unlike the far deeper Egyptian and Babylonian traditions to which they were also reacting. Culturally indebted to the imperial societies that were often oppressing them, the Hebrew writers didn’t have the luxury, or the limitations, of an assumption of continuity with Egyptian or Mesopotamian history, and they adopted foreign models with a mix of admiration and distance, transforming and even parodying them in the process.
The Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures had great historical depth, and they exaggerated it still further; the Sumerian King List stretches back tens of thousands of years. Yet rather than regretting their youth in a world of gerontocratic prestige, the Hebrew writers sometimes chose to present their antiquity as even shallower than it was, as a mark of their continuing closeness to God and his covenant. Thus the modernizing, revisionist book of Deuteronomy (26:5) describes Abraham as the direct father of the contemporary community: “A wandering Aramaean was my father, he went down to Egypt and sojourned there, he and just a handful of his brothers at first, but soon they became a great nation, mighty and many.” Reciting this history, the community enters directly into it: “The Egyptians abused and battered us, in a cruel and savage slavery. Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors. . . . So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders” (Deut. 26:6–8). These signs and wonders included drowning Pharaoh’s army and slaying the Egyptians’ firstborn sons: this was making it new with a vengeance.
By the Hellenistic age, antiquities were multiplying all around the Mediterranean. Whereas the only antiquity that really mattered for Virgil and Ovid was Greek, by the time of Apuleius in the second century CE the floodgates of history had opened up. Born in Madauros in North Africa of mixed Numidian and Berber parentage, Apuleius was sent as an adolescent to study philosophy in Athens and then to Rome to study law. In the prologue to his Metamorphosis (or Golden Ass), his narrator describes himself as a linguistic acrobat, performing “much as a circus-rider leaps from one horse to another” (1). He comically excuses his provincial Latin by asserting that his style is distorted by his bilingual fluency—not in North African Punic but in the culturally prestigious language of Greek.
Like Virgil and Ovid before him, Apuleius revered Homer, “that godlike creator of ancient poetry among the Greeks,” who sang “of him who had attained the highest virtues by visiting many cities and gaining acquaintance with various peoples” (169). His asinine hero’s wanderings become a parodic odyssey, and Lucius claims that even though he lacks Odysseus’s powerful intellect, his metamorphosis into animal form has allowed him to overhear the fund of stories he now retells. In a striking moment in the middle of the book, he attempts to flee a band of robbers, carrying on his back the beautiful Charite, whom the bandits have been holding hostage, and she imagines that their tale will one day become an ancient classic in its own right:
I shall have a picture painted of this flight of mine, and consecrate it in the atrium of my house. This unprecedented theme, “A noble maiden escaping captivity on an ass’s back,” will be on view, will be heard in common gossip, and will be immortalized by the pens of learned men. You too will have your place among the wonder-tales of old, cited as an example from real life to inspire our belief that Phrixus swam across the sea on a ram, that Europa straddled a bull. If it is true that it was Jupiter who bellowed in the form of a bull, there may lurk within my donkey some human identity or divine personality.
(116–117)
Remarkably, Charite anticipates that once their tale acquires the authority of antiquity, it will inspire skeptical moderns to believe again in the truth of the ancient Greek myths themselves.
The ass’s body does, of course, conceal a human, but freeing him will take the power of a much more ancient divinity than Odysseus’s patron Athena: Lucius will need the aid of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of the moon and mistress of transformation. Already in his prologue, Apuleius invites his reader to enjoy his “Greekish tale” (fabulam Graecanicam), “as long as you don’t disdain to run your eye over Egyptian papyrus inscribed with the sharpened point of a reed from the Nile” (1). In the climactic eleventh book, Isis appears to Lucius in a dream vision, granting his fervent wish to be restored to human form, on condition that he be initiated into her mysteries and become her servant. Her speech is filled with references to the antiquity of her cult, and she reveals that she has been worshipped in many forms around the world:
I am the mother of the world of nature, mistress of all the elements, firstborn in this realm of time. . . . In one land the Phrygians, first-born of men, hail me as the Pessinuntian mother of the gods, elsewhere the native dwellers of Attica, Cecropian Minerva . . . the Eleusinians, the ancient goddess Ceres.
(220)
Yet amid all these linguistic metamorphoses, her Egyptian name is ultimately the real one: “the Egyptians who flourish with their time-honoured learning—worship me with the liturgy that is my own, and call me by my true name, which is queen Isis” (221).
Apuleius’s Greco-Egyptian syncretism was not uncommon in the eastern Hellenistic world. Funerary portraits from Fayyum in Egypt depict the features of the deceased with Roman realism, even when (as in figure 4.1) a toga-clad youth is being guided into the underworld by Thoth and a mummified Osiris. In this painting, the deceased’s head is framed in a hieroglyphic inscription offering him safe passage into the afterlife. Resting his weight on his leftfoot, he bends his right knee, ready to step into the next world. His passage will be assisted by the powerful spells contained in the sacred scroll he holds, much as Lucius’s initiation is performed by priests equipped with hieroglyphic scrolls, “books headed with unfamiliar characters . . . in the shape of every kind of animal” (233).
The Fayyum image suggests a harmonious combination of traditions, but the world of Apuleius’s Metamorphosis was violent, uncertain, and endangered on all sides. Apuleius satirizes many forms of human venality and corruption, but he also mobilizes Egyptian antiquity against two growing threats to morality: skepticism and monotheism, each rewriting history in alarming ways. Just as Calinescu would say of our more recent modernists (41), Apuleius’s modernism is formed in opposition to the threatening modernity around him. Apuleius is quite serious about the divine power of the ancient religion that frees Lucius from his animalistic self. His Metamorphosis is aimed squarely at the cultivated secularism of Roman sophisticates like Ovid, whose Metamorphoses presents the ancient Greek gods as little more than literary conceits or tropes, colorful characters whose stories offer opportunities to probe purely human concerns and to display his poetic virtuosity. Nor does Apuleius favor the rationalism of his contemporary Marcus Aurelius, raised like him on Homer and on Neoplatonism, for whom it was an open question whether the gods did or didn’t actually exist. It is surely no coincidence that the first character to fall victim to the power of witchcraftin Apuleius’s tale is a hapless oldster named Socrates.
Yet also of concern to Apuleius is a very different kind of history: the monotheism that was starting to take hold in Rome and in his adoptive city of Carthage, where a group of Christians were martyred in the year of his death. Rejecting every religious tradition but their own and subjecting even Judaism to radical revision, the Christians were asserting a singular salvation history dating back to the creation of the world. During his wanderings, Lucius encounters a dissolute miller’s wife, who “despised and ground beneath her heel the powers of heaven; instead of adhering to a sure faith, she sacrilegiously feigned bold awareness of a deity whom she proclaimed to be the only God. By devising empty ceremonies she misled the people at large, and deceived her hapless husband by devoting herself to early-morning drinking”—evidently communion wine—“and day-long debauchery” (170). Among the many peoples whom Isis lists as worshipping her under different names, Jews and Christians are not included.
Apuleius’s modernism arises amid the tectonic shifting of competing antiquities just beneath the surface of the present. As the denouement of his story shows, this multiplicity can be liberating as well as troubling. Whether their antiquity was singular or multiple, homegrown or imported, shallow or deep, writers of earlier eras had almost always been playing the historical hand that had been dealt them. For Hellenistic writers, antiquity was becoming less a given, more a matter of choice. Punic culture was evidently still thriving in second-century Madauros (Bradley, Apuleius and Augustine Rome, 41–58), and Apuleius made a deliberate decision to leave that cultural world behind even after returning from his studies abroad; he made further choices when he sought initiation into the mystery cults of Isis and also of Dionysus. Very different from Apuleius in his particular choices but similar to him in having choices to make, Tertullian was born in Carthage during Apuleius’s years there; raised as a pagan, he then opted for Christianity, as later did Augustine, also a Carthaginian of Punic heritage.
One of the most modern features of the Hellenistic age, then, is the unusual freedom that people had to choose between competing antiquities—a factor bound up with empire, as Friedman emphasizes. In this late imperial context, writers such as Apuleius clearly show one of Calinescu’s prime indices of modernism: “the total freedom of individual artists to choose their ancestors at their own discretion” (8). This Hellenistic modernizing process would be reversed with the consolidation of Christian orthodoxy, which ratcheted antiquity back down to a nearly singular form, sidelining classical antiquity or harmonizing it as closely as possible to biblical history. But the modernizing multiplication of antiquities resumed in the Enlightenment and reached a new level of openness in the late nineteenth century, a development comically encapsulated in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance (1879). There Major-General Stanley, having recently acquired a country estate, asserts his kinship with the ancestors buried in its chapel. Describing himself as “their descendant by purchase,” he asserts that “with the estate, I bought the chapel and its contents. I don’t know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are” (14).
I hope that the examples discussed in the preceding pages can suggest the interest for global modernist studies of ancient literatures, which already show an intense and varied engagement with antiquity as a prime ground of self-definition. Taken together, the earliest modernities open up a range of terms that can be useful in analyzing contemporary modernisms as well. Shoring up their ruins with fragments of the antiquities available to them, the Euro-American modernists similarly enlist their distant ancestors in the struggle with their contemporaries and their more recent predecessors. They find their way among antiquities that are variously local or imported, shallow or deep, though rarely if ever still singular or simply given a priori. Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and Eliot all have to reckon with a dual antiquity, both biblical and classical, but they diverge widely beyond that base, with Yeats but not Joyce turning to Irish antiquity, Pound to Confucius and the Shi Jing, Eliot to Sanskrit studies, and Joyce ransacking The Book of the Dead in order to mold the Wake’s H. C. Earwicker into “the Bug of the Deaf” (134).
In China, the writers of the New Culture movement of the 1920s worked against the Confucian classics not only by turning to modern Europe but also by extensive programs of translation of classical Greek authors, including Homer, Plato, and Aeschylus. Lu Xun and his brother Zhou Zouren reworked Herodotus and Plato in their fiction, even as Lu Xun’s madman fears the vengeance of an official whose ledgers he has trodden underfoot: Gu Jiu, “Mr. Ancient Old” (2). Their counterpointing of classical Chinese and Greek can be compared to Ezra Pound’s converse blending of Greek and Chinese antiquities, as when in Canto LIII he describes the emperor Yu receiving tribute in the form of sycamores, river stones, “‘and grass that is called Tsing-mo’ or μῶλυ”—the plant that Hermes gives to Odysseus to protect him from Circe’s spells (Pound, Selected Cantos, 64). A page later, Pound records the ancient inscription hsin jih jih hsin, the basis for his famous slogan “Make it new.” As we read next to the Chinese characters:
Tching prayed on the mountain and
wrote MAKE IT NEW
on his bathtub
Day by day make it new
(65)
Pound doesn’t add any Greek gloss to this phrase, but if we are aware of the multiplicity of modernist antiquities, we may also hear an echo of the climactic statement in Revelation 21:5, proclaimed by God from his throne in the New Jerusalem at the very end of the New Testament: Ἰδοὺ καινὰ ποιῶ πάντα—“Behold, I make all things new.”
A full exploration of global modernisms will need to bring together studies of early modernities and their different antiquities in many parts of the world, which to date have mostly been explored separately by scholars based in different regions, whether Matei Calinescu for Europe, Satya Mohanty for medieval India, or Jan Assmann on ancient Egyptian modes of preserving and transforming cultural memory. A whole new old world awaits modernist studies today.
Works Cited
Apuleius. The Golden Ass. Ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Trans. David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Bradley, Keith. Apuleius and Augustine Rome: Historical Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987.
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Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 425–443.
. “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies.” Modernism/modernity 17, no. 3 (2010): 471–499.
George, Andrew, ed. and trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Version. London: Penguin, 1999.
Gilbert, W. S., and Arthur Sullivan. The Pirates of Penzance; Or, The Slave of Duty. New York: Chappel, 1911.
The Holy Bible. New Revised Standard Version. New York: Meridian, 1994.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin, 2012.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. Vol. 1, The Old and Middle Kingdoms. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Luckenbill, D. D. Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. 2 vols. 1926–1927; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Lu Xun. “A Madman’s Diary.” In The Complete Stories of Lu Xun, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, 1–12. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds. Bad Modernisms. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.
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