Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T02:56:58.689Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Raven and the Bust of Pallas: Classical Artifacts and the Gothic Tale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Patricia Merivale
Patricia Merivale*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Classical artifacts, particularly busts and statues, play an important part as image, symbol, plot element, or even character, in a large number of “Gothic” (i.e., romantic horror) contexts. Eighteenth-century neoclassicism provides “classically” serene artifacts to contrast with “Gothic” ones in, for instance, Poe and Hawthorne. But medieval tradition provides the Venus statue story, where the statue itself is the focus of Gothic horror, in Eichendorff, James, Merimee, Gautier, and others; this, especially in the subtler artist parables, is the key nineteenth-century usage. For the twentieth century, statues become “Dionysian,” classical yet fearful, as in Forster and Lagerkvist. More recently, statues represent a frivolous, melodramatic terror, or else mere emblematic pageantry. In contemporary poetry, however (Rilke, Plath, Seferis), the wheel has in a sense come full circle; classical statues are serious emblems of art and of the artist's obligation to put together the maimed and shattered fragments of a personal and “classical” tradition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 5 , October 1974 , pp. 960 - 966
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Note 1 in page 965 I discuss classical imagery in The Marble Faun more fully in Pan the Goat-God (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 155–58.

Note 2 in page 965 See Paull Franklin Baum's “The Young Man Betrothed to a Statue,” ? ML A, 34 (1919), 523–79, for a very full account of the plentiful medieval sources and analogues, and some hints (esp. pp. 574–79) of the later history of the motif; Walter Pabst, Venus und die missverstandene Dido (Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter, 1955), on the Demonic Venus; and Stephen A. Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1943), and Wolfgang Leppmann, Pompeji: Eine Stadt in Literatur und Leben (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1966), for more general discussions of the role of classical statuary in literary contexts.

Note 3 in page 965 This broader interpretation of Venus' role is Manfred Beller's “Narziss und Venus,” Euphorion, 62 (1968), 116–42. For sources and analogues in German Romanticism, see Robert Miihlher, “Der Venusring : Zur Geschichte eines romantischen Motivs,” Aurora, 17 (1957), 50–62. Cf. Baudelaire's prose poem “Le Fou et la Vénus” (1862).

Note 4 in page 965 A Crusader statue carries out a similar violent revenge in E. Nesbit's “Man-Size in Marble,” Grim Tales (1893) and in Gustavo Bécquer's “El beso” (1863).

Note 5 in page 965 The hunt for Mérimée's sources still goes on. Guy Lambrechts' “La Source immédiate de La Vénus d'Ille” Revue de Littérature Comparée, 42 (1968), 110–13, makes several further suggestions, but leans particularly toward the version in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, m.2.i.l. In Dmitri Merejkowski's The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1902), the White She-Devil, a Venus statue, is similarly excavated; she fills the young hero with the sensual disturbance and wonderment of erotic fear, as well as the sinful enthusiasm of a true though amateur antiquarian. But, for most of his contemporaries, she brings out mere superstitious dread; the statue is finally smashed to make cement for a wall.

Note 6 in page 965 Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years (London: Hart-Davis, 1953), p. 166.

Note 7 in page 965 Gioconda, trans. Arthur Symons (London: Heinemann, 1901), p. 137. In Vernon Lee's Dionea (Hauntings, ?. Y.: F. F. Lovell, 1890), the earthly wife is actually given as a blood sacrifice (in a far crueler libation than James's) to the idol of Venus that her husband has sculpted. His model, a reincarnate Venus and very much a femme fatale, returns to the supernatural realm from which she came. The resemblances between Dionea and Gioconda are striking enough to make one wish for evidence that d'Annunzio knew Vernon Lee's story; they had met each other in 1887, before either work was written. But more important resemblances are those between Gioconda and a far more famous tragedy of the rivalry between art and life, Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken (1899): the statue of “Resurrection” is the “child” of the artist and his model, and she, having sacrificed her human life and love to the making of the statue, now wishes she had “killed that child . . . crushed it to dust.”

Note 8 in page 966 In The Three Impostors, Caerleon Ed. (London: Martin Seeker, 1890), ii, 150–51. Machen, as so often, gives fairly clear evidence of one source at least. Burton the narrator “contrives to loot a copy of his namesake's Anatomy” as he departs. See n. 5. The conclusion of Machen's Hill of Dreams is a more blurred variant; he alludes to “a solitary man … the lover of a black statue.”

Perhaps Oscar Wilde is not parodying this tradition in Charmides (1881), when the statue of Athena, in an odd role for our goddess of enlightenment, strides over the sea to track down the youth who had amorously and blasphemously assaulted her within her very sanctuary on the Parthenon:

In all the pride of venged divinity Pale Pallas swept with shrill and steely clank And a few gurgling bubbles rose where her boy lover sank.

But F. Anstey, in The Tinted Venus (1885), and Anthony Burgess, in The Eve of Saint Venus (1964), are certainly parodying it, in an amiable and trivial way, and so, grotesquely, is Gunter Grass in his account of the attempt to rape the statue called “Niobe.” The statue sees to it that her attacker is impaled upon one blade of that double-headed ship's ax, which he had driven into her wooden breast to help him mount her (“Niobe,” Die Blechtrommel, 1959). But the best “Niobe” sculpture since Dante's is the heroine of Konstanty I. Galczynski's long Polish poem of that title (1951). Cf. ?. M. Forster, “The Classical Annex” (1930), in The Life to Come and Other Stories (New York: Norton, 1973).

Note 9 in page 966 The Longest Journey (London: Arnold, 1947), p. 206. I discuss Forster's classical imagery more fully in Pan the Goat-God, pp. 186–90. Other “Puritan” heroes have their first disturbing encounters with sensuality by way of statues; e.g., in Gerhart Hauptmann's Ketzer von Soana (1918) and Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), Ch. xix, in which the temptations of “Greekness” as against Christianity are reinforced by a lovely statue with both arms broken off. Cf. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1894), Pt. ii, Chs. iii-iv.

Note 10 in page 966 The Sybil, trans. Naomi Walford (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958). A somewhat similar effect is achieved in John Buchan's “The Watcher by the Threshold” (1902), where the somber and heavy marble head of the Emperor Justinian shares the work of a demonic familiar. “El Minotauro,” Sc. xii of Alberto Ginastera's somber Gothicsymbolist opera Bomarzo (1967), brings the hunchback Duke face to face with a row of Roman imperial busts, and with his own monstrous image in the Minotaur statue. There is a modest tradition of male statues, usually the Apollo Belvedere, in “Gothic” love stories; but the finest is the statue of Mars that seems to come to life in Valéry Bryusov's “Rhea Silvia” (1908) in The Republic of the Southern Cross and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1918), where two lovers reenact the episode shown on the bas-relief of Mars and Rhea Silvia, parents of Romulus and Remus, and half-believe that they are really the characters of myth.

Note 11 in page 966 Buchan, The Dancing Floor (London: Nelson, 1926), p. 226; Machen, “The Great God Pan,” and elsewhere; Buchan, “The Wind in the Portico”; Fowles, The Magus; Durrell, Balthazar; Morris West, The Devil's Advocate.

Note 12 in page 966 Jean Cocteau, Le Sang d'un poète, scenario (Monaco: Rocher, 1957), p. 35.

Note 13 in page 966 E.g., “fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsoes, and busts that have invariably lost—what it might be well if living men could lay aside in that unfra-grant atmosphere—the nose” (“Miriam's Studio,” Ch. v). “Another generation, who will take our nose between their thumb and finger (as we have seen men do by Caesar's) and infallibly break it off” (Ch. xiii). “ ? should like to hit poor Cleopatra a bitter blow on her Egyptian nose with this mallet.' 'That is a blow which all statues seem doomed to receive sooner or later.' ” (“Snow-Drops and Maidenly Delights,” Ch. xli).

Note 14 in page 966 Collected Poems 1924–1955, ed. and trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), p. 7. For the nearest prose equivalent to this new Hellenism, see the movingly evocative conclusion to Claude Simon's La Bataille de Pharsale ( 1969).

Note 15 in page 966 “To Mr. Addison, Occasioned by His Dialogues on Medals,” 11. 51–52. “Art reflected images to Art” better, perhaps, some centuries before Pope than at any time since. Dante's “grotesque” classical carvings in the Gothic setting of the Purgatorio are static, yet active; emotionally suggestive, yet emblematic. They are “visible speech” (Purg. x. 95), the prerogative of the divine carver alone. Purg. xii. 14–72, describes gravestone pavements:

Ah, Niobe! with what eyes wrung with pain I saw your likeness sculptured on that road Between your seven and seven children slain !

(11. 37–39, trans. John Ciardi)

Purg. x. 25–96 describes wall carvings that “seemed about to speak and move” (1. 36), one of which is a bas-relief of the Emperor Trajan.

Note 16 in page 966 The locus classicus being the African statuette of “Moony” in Lawrence's Women in Love: beetle-faced, heavy-buttocked—pure sensuality and “mindless, dreadful mysteries.” Cf. Carlos Fuentes' “Chac Mool” (1954).