The eighteenth century adulation of the Classical Ideal in Europe assigned to the Greek War of Liberation of 1821 a momentous meaning in western consciousness. As a result, this revolution was supported and successful at a time when other Balkan insurrections were not. This aesthetic Hellenic Ideal was conceived and propagated by individuals, philhellenes and expatriate Greeks, who often never in fact set foot in Greece itself (Winckelmann, Herder, Lessing, Goethe).
Those Anglo-American philhellenes who did venture to the land itself, and so outdid their stay-at-home German counterparts, saw Greece through the prism of classical philology, aesthetics, and the logic of the museum; the discursive topoi of their philhellenism, manifest also in their travel writing, draw them perilously close to orientalism. With few exceptions, travelers to Greece gazed through the pellucid light in search of a "pure representation" of the past as they read the landscape as epigraph. For here, in a Greece consumed by loaded signifiers that overwhelmed their referents, there was nothing outside the text! Lamentably, it was also home to a contemporary civilization that, in travelers eyes, was defined de facto by decline in relation to itself and irrelevance in relation to other modern nations (Leontis). As a consequence, these shocking Byzantinicized Slavs who lingered between the lines of this venerable text, and whom the travelers encountered, were an irritating speck in the eye; their modernity, as that of their fledgling state, to be negated and retarded. Humboldt's deification of the classical Greeks in his belief that they were outside of History was also applied to the modern Greeks though quite differently and with a devastatingly pejorative connotation. The discursive terms that have structured such transcultural contact have spawned a series of travel narratives that follow its prescriptions to this day, and yet still, inexplicably, manage to sport the deluded conviction of originality. However, the gradual erosion of Classical education in the West on the one hand, and the extended reach of the tourist through globalization and better communications on the other, has led to more sustained contacts with modern Greece and its inhabitants in new ways that should have made neohellenisms polyphony and difference more apparent.
The two works considered in this paper span this latter period. Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi (1941) appeared at a cultural moment when a group of Greek modernist writers were just beginning to make themselves known to their European counterparts and would soon make their mark as Nobel Prize winners (Seferis, Elytis) and generate intense Western interest in Greece in the 1960s; the second, Patricia Storace's highly acclaimed and beautifully written Dinner with Persephone (1996) comes at a time when Greece has disappeared from cultural view and lost its exotic cachet. Though both exhibit some of the favored themes and predominant motifs that the philhellenic tradition has handed down, these two writers also locate the modern Greek sensibility by staging conspicuous scenes with a Greek male figure or a series of Greek male types who are unequivocally there in the text. The colossus of Miller's title refers to the imposing figure cut by the litterateur George Katsimbalis, the doyen of the influential group of Greek men of letters known as the Generation of the 1930s and whom Miller casts as the embodiment of much of that which he perceives as the ubiquitous spirit of an emergent (modern?) Hellenism in the 1940s. Storace, on the other hand, is keen to stage and comment on a number of rhetorical tirades and unwanted advances by a series of Greek male admirers who embody a Greek attitude that, by implication, goes beyond simply matters of gender to interconnected perceptions of Greek (and American) nation and identity in the 1990s. The paper will try to tease out the significance and interpret the dynamics of such a central mise en scne in order to speculate on Storace's place against or next to Miller and the tradition of western travel writing on Greece.
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