MOMENTS AND METAMORPHOSES: VIRGINIA WOOLF'S GREECE
". . . here we are at Monks House, & Greece is
perceptibly
melting: just for a
moment England and Greece stood side
by side, each much
enlivened by the other."
Diary, 15 May 1932
THE GREEKS HAUNTED WOOLF. Her essay "On Not Knowing Greek" stresses both their aloofness and unfamiliarity and our ignorance of how their minds worked, of how and why their literature was written; as a woman, she found them more primitive, puzzling, and alluring than their legitimate male heirs in Cambridge and Bloomsbury could imagine. "When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black men," says Miss Allan in The Voyage Out, "which is quite incorrect, I'm sure." Yet Woolf's essay also conveys a profound sense of intimacy and recognition. Picked up through private study rather than beaten in at public school, Greek worked its way into her imagination, elusive but persistent: "how Greek sticks, darts, eels in & out" (Diary, 11 September 1939). A solid "grounding" gave way to shifting and unbidden moments of insight: "A strange thing-when you come to think of it-this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden" (Jacob's Room). Her first Greek essay (now lost) was to have been called "Magic Greek"; it explored the closeness yet unknowableness of the Greeks, the "veil" she still felt between her and the ancient texts. There followed a prose sketch ("A Vision of Greece"), a story fragment, a dialogue, and a review ("The Perfect Language"), before the major essay, "On Not Knowing Greek." Magic, vision, dialogue, perfection, elusiveness: Greek is the perfect language, which we can never truly know.
Woolf's England and her Greece enlivened each other through
a lifelong encounter that began with her first Greek lesson in October 1897 and
was interrupted only by her death, on the eve of the fall of Greece, in March
1941 . . . The study of Greek (never, she felt, her "mastery" of it) remained a
precondition of her intellectual and creative life, of her self-respect as a
woman and of her fulfillment as a writer.
The Greek language held out the possibility of absolute clarity, and yet
offered Woolf the alternative eloquence of pure, pre-verbal, non-verbal
sound. Her two visits to Greece, in
1906 and 1932, helped her transmute the classical past into personal history
and played a role in defining her sense of "Englishness." Woolf's Greek reading and study, including
her attempts at editing, translating and teaching, were continuous both with
her critical and autobiographical writing and-most importantly-with her
fiction, where she re-accommodated classical myth and naturalized the
conventions of epic and tragedy. Her
dialogue with Greece was often carried on in letters and conversations and even
in the dialogue form itself. It admits
the voices not only of Woolf and the ancient and modern Greeks but also of many
of the people and texts through which their worlds had been mediated: eminent
Victorians, modern scholars, earlier English writers, and a whole-predominantly
male-classical and philhellenic tradition.