On the idea of "Greece," a topos of modernity simultaneously reconstructed and dismantled through the dream of recovering lost origins, Europeans reproduced the unequal temporality of Eurocentric time and its abstract space. Functioning as what Michel de Certeau famously described as the "non-place" from which all historiographical operation begins, Greece is the topos which European histories must encounter in order to shape their modernity. From the late eighteenth century, when Europeans first "discovered" Greece, to today, when they "rediscover" it, Greece has been the determinant fantasy of self-conceptualization, the template, on which European modernity's historiographical project models itself.
The world that enabled Greece to emerge as a foundational civilization was a world that saw it only very partially cultivated and sparsely populated. When late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English travellers surveyed Greece, they saw empty space-the kind of empty space burdened with history yet empty of living descendants. When they did see inhabitants, they either idealized them as the living statues of ancient time or debased them as oriental and living in despotic time, which, Louis Althusser brilliantly describes as "space without places, time without duration."
What are the effects of these early travelers' descriptions of Greece? This is my paper's central question. Reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's and Byron's Letters, John Galt's Letters from the Levant-to name only some of the thirty five travel books on Greece that were published in the period 1800-1824-and also later work by Lawrence Durell and even contemporary travel writing, this paper will examine their construction of the topos that is Greece. It will then examine the effects of their literary mapmaking.
While it is a generally accepted argument in literary histories of England that these representations were part of a late eighteenth and nineteenth-century temporal shift in which Greece displaced Rome as the point of origin and model of English culture, I will argue that this temporal shift was instrumental in the construction of Greece as a borderland, a beginning and an end not only for particular aesthetic periods (from classicism to Romanticism) but also for Western culture's periodization itself.
Strangely, I will conclude, this periodization bans Greece from the passing of time and keeps it in the eternal exile of timelessness. Petrified in its ancient past, Greece's emergence and existence as a modern nation-at precisely the time when the above described temporal shift begins-is ignored. As a result, even today Greece remains a place that, in the words of a nineteenth-century traveller, "is still the land of the imagination." Contemporary Europeans and Americans, whether they are tourists, intellectuals, or policy makers, celebrate either the ancient ruins or the folkloric tradition of Greece and decry the Westernization they see not only in the streets of Athens but also (worse still) in the quaintest and most remote villages. Their stance, I will finally argue, is the latest in a series of attacks designed to castigate the Greeks for either not succeeding or for trying to live up to the standards imposed by the discourse on culture that emerges in the modern era of the West, a discourse that is structured by a normative temporality of human development that has Greece as and at its origin.
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