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10
Adaptive Historicism in Literature
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole, whose Strawberry Hill (chap. 8) stood in the long tradition of Gothic architecture in England, was a thoroughgoing antiquarian. In The Castle of Otranto (1765), the first true Gothic novel, Walpole deliberately sought to create a work his readers would believe had been written at some time between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, concealing his own authorship by attributing the text to one Onuphrio Muralto, an Italian canon of Otranto. In the preface to the first edition, Walpole wrote the following in his capacity as "translator":
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The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The style is the purest Italian.
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If the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have been between 1095, the era of the first Crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards. There is no other circumstance in the work that can lead us to guess at the period in which the scene is laid: the names of the actors are evidently fictitious, and probably disguised on purpose: yet the Spanish names of the domestics seem to indicate that this work was not composed until the establishment of the Arragonian Kings in Naples had made Spanish appellations familiar in that country. The beauty of the diction, and the zeal of the author (moderated, however, by singular judgment) concur to make me think that the date of the composition was little antecedent to that of the impression.
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In that Walpole's novel is an original work of fiction which draws upon historical fact and imagery in a style intelligible to eighteenth-century English readers, it is an outstanding example of the creative potential of adaptive historicism. The Castle of Otranto and its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors, with their emphasis on evocative architecture (especially the haunted mansion); picturesque landscapes, ruins, and cemeteries; and elements of the supernatural, fantastic, and macabre, gave rise to a genre that continues to be emulated and parodied to this day. Twentieth-century cinema was especially influenced by the Gothic literary tradition, as evidenced by such diverse films as Le chien andalou (1925) by director Luis Buñuel and surrealist painter Salvador Dali, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a wildly popular cult classic directed by Jim Sharman.
Sir Walter Scott - Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) is based on the presumed hostilities between Normans and Saxons during the reign of Richard I. Although that premise has been contested, and there are doubtless some inaccuracies in such a long, complex work of historical fiction, Ivanhoe brilliantly conjures up images of the medieval world in a contemporary English style enriched by archaism and allusion.
The passage below from chapter 31 presses both narrative prose and poetry into the service of vivid characterization. It is significant that Scott draws attention to the fact that his text is not a medieval document by stating that tradition has preserved "Ulrica's Death-Song." He further foregrounds his own authorship by providing a note explaining that "these verses are intended to imitate the antique poetry of the Scalds—the minstrels of the old Scandinavians," and argues that Ulrica "may be not unnaturally supposed to return to the wild strains which animated her forefathers during the time of Paganism and untamed ferocity":
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The fire was spreading rapidly through all parts of the castle, when Ulrica, who had first kindled it, appeared on a turret, in the guise of one of the ancient furies, yelling forth a war-song, such as was of yore raised on the field of battle by the scalds of the yet heathen Saxons. Her long disheveled grey hair flew back from her uncovered head; the inebriating delight of gratified vengeance contended in her eyes with the fire of insanity; and she brandished the distaff which she held in her hand, as if she had been one of the Fatal Sisters, who spin and abridge the thread of human life. Tradition has preserved some wild strophes of the barbarous hymn which she chanted wildly amid that scene of fire and of slaughter:—
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Whet the bright steel,
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Sons of the White Dragon!
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Kindle the torch,
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Daughter of Hengist!
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The steel glimmers not for the carving of the banquet,
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It is hard, broad, and sharply pointed;
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The torch goeth not to the bridal chamber,
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It steams and glitters blue with sulphur.
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Whet the steel, the raven croaks!
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Light the torch, Zernebock is yelling!
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Whet the steel, sons of the Dragon!
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Kindle the torch, daughter of Hengist!
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The black cloud is low over the thane's castle
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The eagle screams—he rides on its bosom.
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Scream not, grey rider of the sable cloud,
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Thy banquet is prepared!
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The maidens of Valhalla look forth,
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The race of Hengist will send them guests.
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Shake your black tresses, maidens of Valhalla!
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And strike your loud timbrels for joy!
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Many a haughty step bends to your halls,
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Many a helmed head.
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Dark sits the evening upon the thane's castle,
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The black clouds gather round;
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Soon shall they be red as the blood of the valiant!
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The destroyer of forests shall shake his red crest against them.
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He, the bright consumer of palaces,
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Broad waves he his blazing banner;
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Red, wide and dusky,
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Over the strife of the valiant:
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His joy is in the clashing swords and broken bucklers;
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| He loves to lick the hissing blood as it bursts warm from the wound! |
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All must perish!
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The sword cleaveth the helmet;
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The strong armour is pierced by the lance;
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Fire devoureth the dwelling of princes;
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Engines break down the fences of the battle.
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All must perish!
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The race of Hengist is gone—
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The name of Horsa is no more!
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Shrink not then from your doom, sons of the sword!
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Let your blades drink blood like wine;
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Feast ye in the banquet of slaughter,
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By the light of the blazing halls!
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Strong be your swords while your blood is warm,
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And spare neither for pity nor fear,
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For vengeance hath but an hour;
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Strong hate itself shall expire
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I also must perish!
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T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land
American-born poet T. S. Eliot was profoundly attracted to literature of the Old World, and would eventually take up residency and citizenship in Great Britain. In 1928 the expatriate would proclaim himself a "classicist in literature, an Anglo-Catholic in religion, and a royalist in politics."1 Like Stravinsky, he had a pronounced talent for assimilating traditional styles, and his poems are infused with words and imagery that summon to mind the most diverse historical times and geographic locales. The Waste Land—the very work by which he is most remembered—is replete with historical borrowings and allusions, a fact which Eliot himself acknowledged in the detailed notes he appended to his poem:
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Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jesse L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.
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It is ironic that this, the poetic work most representative of literary modernism, would so boldly proclaim its debt to tradition. The poem actually begins with a quotation in ancient Latin and Greek, and a dedication in stylized Italian:
The concluding lines draw on an even wider range of historical and cultural references (see text below). Line 425 is attributed in Eliot's notes to the "Fisher King" chapter in Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance. Line 427 is excerpted from a traditional children's nursery rhyme recounting the collapse of London Bridge in the eleventh century. Line 428 alludes to Dante's Purgatorio, 26.148, which Eliot cites in the original Italian in his textual note. Line 429 references the Pervigilium Veneris, a Latin poem of late antiquity combining a hymn to Venus with an evocation of spring. Line 430 is taken from a nineteenth-century sonnet, "El Desdichado," by Gerard de Nerval. Line 432 derives from Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587). The final line, where the word shantih is thrice repeated, is a formulaic ending from the Upanishads (300–600 B.C.), signifying, in Eliot's words "The Peace which passeth understanding."
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424a----------------------------------I sat upon the shore
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425 Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
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426 Shall I at least set my lands in order?
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| 427 London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down |
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428 Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
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429 Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
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430 Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
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431 These fragments I have shored against my ruins
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432 Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
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433 Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
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434 ------------Shantih---shantih---shantih
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Laden with such an abundance of material from such a wide variety of preexisting sources, The Waste Land, for all its ostensible modernity, resists facile classification. To a significant extent it is derivatively and eclectically historicist in the romantic tradition. Indeed, one is reminded of many an eighteenth-century English landscape garden, bestrewn with classical temples, obelisks, and urns; pavilions in various ethnic (e.g., Chinese, Turkish, Islamic) styles; Gothic follies; and diverse mock ruins (cf. line 431 above). The modernist literati were fond of borrowing ideas from other art forms, and landscape architecture in this case is a likely source of inspiration.
Eliot later executed an about-face and stated that his detailed notes were merely a "remarkable contribution to bogus scholarship" intended to increase the bulk of the small volume in which The Waste Land was originally published.2 So saying, he probably wanted to emphasize his own contributions as a contemporary poet. In this light, it seems reasonable to conclude that The Waste Land, for all its derivative and eclectic content, would still be most appropriately described as an "adaptive" historicist work, in which bits and pieces of history are embedded like shards of broken tile or pottery in an essentially contemporary matrix.
Eliot's retrospective tendency is a constant in his oeuvre, so that even a late work like the Four Quartets (1942) is steeped in tradition. As Gardner remarks, "Always strongly influenced by the past, Eliot now seemed to be living there as well."
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Eliot affords an opportunity to consider the marginality of the modern creative figure—caught between cultures, 'inhabiting' diverse time periods, experiencing painful personal anxieties and disjunctions on the border of mental disturbance."3
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In his later years, Eliot spoke of an historical sensibility that "compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."4
