Keep Your Guilty Secret!
On Monday, the Cambridge Union Society debated “This House would return the Parthenon Marbles to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.” Sponsoring the debate was easyCruise. The travel company offers a Classical Greece cruise that includes a visit to the Acropolis, the tourist attraction bereft of most of its treasures. An Acropolis reunited with its lost marbles is surely a seductive motive for those in the cultural tourism trade to back the repatriation campaign.
Of course, tourism companies and museums shouldn’t feel bad about sustaining commercial interests in the fate of the Parthenon (a.k.a. Elgin) Marbles, but guilt has always been an underlying theme in this tug of war between historical rivals, the English and the Greeks.
Nikos Kazantzakis (acclaimed for his exuberant Zorba the Greek, but excommunicated for tempting his Christ) put it rather aptly when he referred to the illegitimate acquisition of the Marbles, “In her sooty vitals,” he wrote in his England: A Travelogue, “London stores these marble monuments of the gods, just as some unsmiling Puritan might store in the depths of his memory some past erotic moment, blissful and ecstatic sin.”
And pro-repatriation Christopher Hitchens echoed Kazantzakis when he wrote, “There is, in one of the museum’s priceless acquisitions, a repressed and guilty secret.”
Underlying much of the popular debate on the Marbles is the outrage and hysteria surrounding the original theft 200 years ago, but the most legitimate argument for repatriation is the motivation behind easyCruise’s support of the campaign and one that is in line with contemporary archaeological theory: that cultural treasures should always be displayed in their original context.
But why should the unity of the monument be more desirable than its disunity? Every monument from the past exhibits its history and the Acropolis exhibits layers and layers of it, a true palimpsest (to quote Kazantzakis) of numerous historical periods. We can never reclaim what was lost when the Byzantines converted the Parthenon into a church, or when the Ottomans converted it into a mosque, or when the Venetians bombed it, or when Greeks recycled its stones to build other structures. So why should we hope to reclaim what was lost to the British? History is full of such wrongs. So why make right this particular wrong? Why cleanse the “sin?”
The historical truth of the Marbles in London and the Parthenon in Athens includes all the illegitimacy, looting and plundering of the past. I say that this “guilty” history adds to, not detracts from, the beauty of the monument.
Kazantzakis might even have agreed with me.
When, in 1939, he travelled to England, he visited the British Museum countless times and conducted his own little debate: In the case of a great disaster – earthquake, fire, Barbaric invasion – which artefacts would he be moved to save?
He spent days on end examining his three most “stable loves:” the Assyrian reliefs, the Persian miniatures and the Classical Greek exhibit. Incidentally, Kazantzakis was able to do this because the British Museum offers a unique opportunity to experience the world’s cultures under one roof; just one more argument often cited against repatriation.
Kazantzakis responded to the Marbles just like any Greek would: with epic emotion characteristic of the most nationalistic Greek he praises the Hellenic miracle, the attainment of the “great secret of perfection in life and art.”
Reading his philosophically charged account of his museum visit with its heightened and patriotic tone, it seems that Kazantzakis would solve his conundrum by choosing to save what, as a Greek, he “must” save: the Parthenon Marbles, his cultural heritage.
And yet, he does not. “I would not choose what I ’should’ chose,” he writes, “I would chose to save the wounded Assyrian lioness, my sister.” The alabaster relief of a dying lioness was carved in 650BC as Assyria fell to Babylon.
Granted, it was a different world back, a world ready for war and Kazantzakian scholar Vrasidas Karalis, of the University of Sydney, tells me that Kazantzakis would have seen the “strong emotions” and “raw animality” of African art and not the “symmetry and harmony of Greek art” as better able to express the “the atmosphere of barbarism and imminent collapse experienced by Western civilisation.”
But what if Kazantzakis were here today? Would he bow to nationalist pressure for Greeks to support the cause and call for the return of the marbles?
I doubt it.
Let us remember that this is the man who saw himself as a human being first and a Greek second, this was the man excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church, the man who was loved more by non-Greeks than his own countrymen, the man who requested “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free” to be his epitaph, the man who knew that one must be at once “soaked in” one’s culture and yet removed from it so as to better see the truth.
I can only conjecture that Kazantzakis would keep things as they are. He would visit the divided monument in Athens and in London and be awed and astonished by the plundered history in one place and the guilty possession in the other. I too wish to be astonished by them, wherever they are. And as a Greek who does not live in Greece I am both soaked in my culture and free from it. Also, since I have no commercial interest or any other other interest in the Marbles, I can freely say to the British, keep the guilty secret; do not cleanse the sin.
Posted by By: kathryn | 
2008/02/19 | Essay - Article - Books - Feature - Greece - History - Archaeology - Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis - England - Parthenon Marbles - British Museum - Culture - Acropolis | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]
