Sidonius in Clubland

This article seeks to explain the surprising appearance of fifth-century Gallo-Roman poet and bishop Sidonius Apollinaris in ‘The Wind in the Portico’ (1928), a fantastic tale by John Buchan. It first situates the story among a group of works in which Buchan treats the First World War as an unleashing of primal or subconscious energies often portrayed in the form of revived pre-Christian rites. It argues that Buchan is here alluding to a particular strand of post-war atavism: the irrational impulses which, in his analysis, feed into Celtic nationalism. Buchan draws on his reading of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Helen Waddell, as well as a long-standing interest in Late Antiquity, to present Sidonius Apollinaris as a ‘troubled’ Christian whose vivid evocations of pagan deities risk awakening them from their sleep. ‘The Wind in the Portico’ is not, however, simply a cautionary tale warning of the dangers of toying with the barbaric. While Buchan’s heroes wrongly seek to repress or to exorcise the primitive and subconscious and return to a state of prelapsarian purity, Buchan himself indicates that innocence and barbarism are two sides of the same coin

Ancient history · Art · Celtic languages · Literature · Reading (process · Subconscious · Travel Writing and Literature · History · Philosophy

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