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The critique of Greekness and the formation of the Greek Avant-Garde
Bosnakis, Panayiotis Constantinos, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University, 1994
UMI 300 N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 THE CRITIQUE OF GREEKNESS AND THE FORMATION OF THE GREEK AVANT-GARDE
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of the Ohio State University
By
Panayiotis C. Bosnakis, B.A., M.A.
The Ohio State University
1994
Dissertation Committee: Approved by
V. Lambropoulos
G. Jusdanis Adviser
S. Constantinidis Interdisciplinary Program Copyright by
Panayiotis C. Bosnakis
1994 To my family, my People
"Here there is no death, no shortness of life, but its endless duration ..." C.P. Cavafy ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the co-advisors of my dissertation, Professors Vassilis Lambropoulos and Gregory Jusdanis. I also want to thank Professor Stratos Constantinidis who helped me with the second chapter on Kazantzakis. Special thanks are also due to Professors Timothy Gregory and Marilyn Waldman for their precious co-operation and teaching in the fields of history and modernity respectively. I must especially thank my advisor Vassilis Lambropoulos for his long steadfast support during my graduate studies. I earned from him great lessons of academic erudition, integrity, and enlightenment. I am also indebted to Professor Fredrick Cadora, Chair of the Department of Near Eastern, Judaic and Hellenic Languages and Literatures, for his long financial support which made my study possible. The completion of this study was also subsidized by an Allumni Research Award, and two generous grants from the Office of International Education at the Ohio State University and the Helen Zeese Papanikolas Foundation. I thank all my friends and colleagues from the United States, England, Australia, and Greece, who in many different ways encouraged my work. I am grateful to Nanos Valaoritis for many discussions and comments on earlier drafts of my chapter on Cavafy and Kazantzakis. My dear friends Elizabeth Arseniou, Stathis Gourgouris, Artemis Leontis and Fritz Thenor taught me not to lose faith but to continue struggling. Finally, I received a great deal of courage from exiled and dissident writers and artists who have preserved their humanism producing their works under extremely unfavorable conditions. Nicolas Calas and lanni Xenakis, in their infinite wisdom, taught me that Hellenism in its protean humanism can be much larger than its nation. VITA
May 2,1960 Born - Volos, Greece
1982...... B.A., University of Athens, Greece
1987 ...... M.A., Ohio State University
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: Interdisciplinary Studies Comparative Literature, Greek Studies
PUBLICATIONS
1990 "Facing Fragments: C.P. Cavafy's Poetic Experimentations With the Iliad" in Mary Layoun (ed.) Modernism in Greece? Essays on the Critical and Literary Margins of a Movement New York: Pella, 161-179.
1992 "Greece and Modernity in N. Kazantzakis's Prometheus," Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 18:1 (Spring): 57-86.
1992 "Radicalizing Modernism: The Conception of an ethnic Avant-Garde in N. Valaoritis's My Afterlife Guaranteed," Journal of Modern Hellenism, 8 (Autumn): 15-26.
1992 "Nanos Valaoritis's My Afterlife Guaranteed,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 10, 1 (May): 149-150 [Book Review]. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ...... ii Acknowledgements...... iii Vita ...... v Table of Contents...... vi Introduction ...... 1 Note on Translations...... 15
I. CAVAFY'S EXPERIMENTATIONS WITH THE ILIAD AND HIS CRITIQUE OF NATIONAL LITERATURE...... 16 Palamas's Construct of National Literature ...... 19 Cavafy's "The Reflections of an Old Artist"...... 24 Experimenting with and Revising Classical Tradition ...28 The Romantic Experiment...... 30 The Aesthetic Experiment...... 40 The Symbolist Experiment...... 55 The Ithaka of Writing ...... 69 After Homer...... 74 Notes...... !...... 76
II. NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS AND HIS CRITIQUE OF GREEKNESS 81 The Odyssey...... 83 The Promethean Trilogy...... 97 Greekness and Contemporaneity...... 117 Notes...... 132
III. THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE CRITIQUE OF GREEKNESS...... 136 Calas's Poems of 1933:Poetry as a Social Text...... 137 Alternative Views of Hellenism ...... 147 Calas’s Critique of Greekness in Collection A' ...... 154 Calas's Critique of the National Literature ...... 160 Valaoritis's Reaction to Tradition and Greekness ...... 164 The Civil War and the Degeneration of Greekness...... 175 From Greekness to Fascism...... 180 The Absurdist Subject ...... 183 Notes...... 187
EPILOGUE...... 191
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 196
vii INTRODUCTION
This study is about the formation of the Avant-Garde in a national literature. It examines texts by various authors who oppose the idea of writing a national literature. It explores the possibility of aesthetic radicalism in a European periphery. My project, therefore, is to examine how certain authors practice criticism against the orthodoxy of national poetics. National poetics represents the evolving systematic thought of poets and critics that places the ideational framework of nation in the teleology of poetry. Although all literatures underwent a stage of identification with their nation, literatures of developing and Third-world countries, in particular, have experienced the entanglement of nation and literature in a rather complex way. In this study I want to explore a single aspect of this problematic, namely the question of the Avant-Garde in a national literature (1). But first let me explain some of the terms used in this study. By Avant-Garde I mean the "historical" Western European Avant-Garde, mainly French Surrealism, French and German Dadaism, German Expressionism, and Italian Futurism as well as their immediate derivative movements that claimed for
1 themselves an analogous orientation (i.e., Czech Poetism, Russian Imagism, Hungarian Activism, and the Greek Surrealists). By national or peripheral Avant-Gardes I mean the Avant-Gardes that respond to their national literatures or the ones that are located in peripheries, such as the Brazilian, Peruvian, Chinese, and Yiddish Avant-Gardes. By neo-Avant-Gardes I mean later post war neo-Avant-Gardist manifestations, such as neo-Surrealism, neo-Dadaism, or underground poetries in the 1960's (2). By cosmopolitanism I mean an expansion beyond the local and the provincial as well as an orientation towards the Other. According to Ulf Hannerz:
A more genuine cosmopolitanism is first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other. It is an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity. (Hannerz 1990: 239) (3)
The study of the Avant-Garde is relatively recent in the Academy. Although we owe some earlier definitions to Marxist critics such as Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, it was not until Renato Poggioli's book The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968) that the subject drew the attention of scholars. After Poggioli's work, scholarly studies began to proliferate, appearing in different magazines and exploring various issues of Avant-Gardism. Peter Burger has written the most comprehensive study to date on this topic in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (first published in German in 1974) (4). Poggioli and Burger follow two quite separate lines of thinking about Avant-Gardism. As Josephine M. Guy indicates:
The first of these traditions [Burger's] comprises those critics who emphasise the 'political' aspects of avant- gardism; who see avant-garde artists and writers using art principally in the service of ideological concerns, their aim being to bring about wider changes in the nature of society. The second tradition [Poggioli's] comprises those who stress the pre-eminence of the 'aesthetic'. In this view the main concern of avant-garde artists and writers is seen to be the disruption or replacement of accepted formal devices; to use Victor Shklovsky's term, avant- garde art defamiliarises conventional literary language, artistic symbols and iconography. (Guy 1991: 22)
According to Burger, the Avant-Garde revolts against the bourgeois institution of art's autonomy. His thesis, however, at best represents German and French Avant-Gardes, where art’s autonomy had long acquired a rather specific context and represented the established official art. Scholars thus observe two routes of Avant-Gardism: first, Poggioli's aesthetic one that empasizes formal innovation and aesthetic experimentation, and second, Burger's political one that stresses the anti-conformist and anti-bourgeois ideology of the Avant-Garde (5). In my view, both Poggioli's and Burger's definitions are parochial and only vaguely describe the phenomenon of the Avant- Garde. A further study which takes into account other Avant- Gardes from peripheral countries must be pursued to complement present scholarship. Unfortunately, this parochialism is the result of the commonplace assumption which claims that Modernism is an exclusive movement of the metropolitan centers, while the periphery is only capable of importing models. Most traditional accounts of Modernism, for example, are largely drawn from canonical European literatures, while peripheral Modernisms have only recently been discovered (6). An alternative study which would examine these issues in reverse, from the periphery to the metropolis, is yet to come, although today we often acknowledge the radical writing, even by Western standards, of many authors from non-Western literatures (7). According to Raymond Williams, after 1945 Avant-Gardism expanded outside the metropolitan centers and underwent a process of change. At the same time, the notion of metropolis was widened so as to encompass the technically advanced and dominant cultural economies which transmitted their messages to the suburbs (Williams 1989: 38). Williams nonetheless reports a more generalizing post-war tendency, when neo-colonialist States (Greece was among these) imported Western theories and models to hasten aesthetic modernization. But, as Elizabeth Arseniou rightly reminds us, the process of internationalist literary movements had started much earlier than 1945: 5
At the same time [1930's], Surrealism, which was still considerably influential, started to spread beyond the countries where it first appeared. Groups and reviews with surrealist affiliations appeared in Greece, Sweden and Czechoslovakia. (Arseniou 1993: 105)
James Clifford also traces the spread of Surrealism in the Third World before the 1930's (8). Endre Bojtar who continues the discussion of the less known Avant-Gardes in Central and Eastern Europe notes the spread of Avant-Garde tendencies in various new artistic associations while hesitating to recognize a real progressive program in them.
That the avant-garde was alive well into the 1930’s is demonstrated by a sequence of changes common to every artistic trend: after dissolving, its individual components, chiefly the morphological, became common property, combining with factors such as sociological characteristics to form other trends, which in many cases depart considerably from the progressive. (Bojtar 1990: 56)
Certainly, the Avant-Garde differed from country to country and was subject to its historical and social context. In the English-American, Spanish, Brazilian, Central and Eastern European literatures, for example, it is considered part of a more radical Modernism. Among the groups and associations proclaiming Avant-Gardist tendencies in the 1930’s, we can mention the Polish Kwadryga [Four-in-Hand] and Zagary [Embers], the Lithuanian Trecias Frontas [Third Front] and the Greek Surrealists. All these groups proclaimed Avant-Gardism but in a way that was more subject to their specific socio-historical setting than to the standard Western European models. Sometimes Modernism and the Avant-Garde cannot be dissociated, such as in the classical American Avant-Garde (Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams). My study explores the possibilities and positioning of alternative Avant-Garde writings in national contexts. Specifically, I will demonstrate how some Greek writers opposed tradition, continuity, and the formation of national literature by turning to cosmopolitanism and contemporaneity. By "contemporaneity" I mean the tendency of stressing the present, of making the present theme of reflection, while rejecting the past. Contemporaneity denies vertical tradition and opts for the making of a synchronic (horizontal) one by borrowing models from abroad (not only Western but Eastern, as well); at the same time, it engages them in a dialogue. Thus, these authors, instead of looking at the Greek literary past in search of precursors and masters, the most common strategy of revitalizing tradition and change in Greece, looked for contemporary ideas and models imported from abroad, sometimes strikingly unfamiliar to Greek roots. By doing so, they founded a neoteric idiom representing a defamiliarized tradition (9). Vassilis Lambropoulos rightly observes that national tradition in Greece often acquires a "sacred" meaning, while the Other, the foreign meaning imported from abroad, represents a secular culture (10). Sociologically speaking, Greece resembles other developing countries (e.g., Islamic societies) in its way of modernization (11). I will study the work of the following writers: Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), Nicolas Calas (1907-1988), and Nanos Valaoritis (b. 1921). Cavafy and Kazantzakis reacted against national poetics: Calas and Valaoritis criticized national Modernism and Greekness in the 1930's. All four shared the following characteristics: they lived most of their lives in cosmopolitan cities, abroad. Cavafy, born in Constantinople, spent most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, a city with a Greek culture since the Hellenistic period. Kazantzakis, a citizen of the world, lived the greatest part of his life abroad. He visited France, Germany, Spain as well as China and Japan, and was particularly interested in international cultures. Calas and Valaoritis lived in France and the United States, where they contributed to the formation of French Surrealism and the Avant- Garde, while later they were among those who introduced French Surrealism to America and Greece (12). Viewing Greece from abroad, these writers conducted a critique of the canonical national poetics. Cavafy and Kazantzakis were the forerunners of the Greek Avant-Garde, for their work challenged fundamental notions of literary ethnocentrism. Calas and the younger Valaoritis nonetheless represent the beginnings of the developing of this oppositional thought, because, first, their work exemplifies the opposition to the consciousness of a continued presence of an indigenous Modernist poetics characterized by Greek tradition, continuity, historicism, and a narrative style. Second, they were actively involved in the formation of Western European Avant-Garde. Their work represents a double stance, first, against national Modernism in Greece, and second, a positive and liberated trend towards Western Avant-Garde. In different ways each of these authors defamiliarized Greek tradition and turned to contemporaneity. The past was no longer a venerated source of influence as it was for Palamas and Seferis. Ironically, these authors wished to subvert tradition. Cavafy revised the Homeric texts and made deliberate allusions to serve his own purposes. His style was obviously derived from primarily British Victorian poets, such as Alfred Tennyson, Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning. When his models were not European, they were more preferably Hellenistic than Classical Greek. Kazantzakis differentiated Greek tradition as well in order to follow a cosmopolitan path. His models were pre-classical or European: Dionysus, Goethe, Nietzsche. Calas and Valaoritis borrowed ideas from the European Avant-Garde, and particularly, French Surrealism. These authors had no predecessors in Modern Greek literature, only some international models. They tried to start something new. Cavafy created poems specifically for aesthetic pleasure; Kazantzakis to enlarge the Greeks' horizons of understanding and to awaken their minds; Calas and Valaoritis to radicalize Modernism and to subvert fundamental principles of national poetics. All four tried to place Greek literature in an international context, in the center of modern culture. Since the establishment of the Modern Greek state in 1829, Greek writers aimed at the production of national culture. In the 1880's, especially, with the Demoticists under the leadership of Kostis Palamas, the greatest goal of literature was to create a sense of the neo-Hellenic narrative of an uninterrupted continuity since antiquity. Greeks were enticed by the Great Idea and nationalist irredentism. The 1930's was a crucial decade because a new generation of writers paved its way to overcome Palamas's influential presence and to renew ideas and modes of writing. Most of these young writers (i.e., Yiorgos Katsimbalis, Andreas Karandonis, George Seferis) formed the periodical Ta Nea Grammata which promoted a free-verse writing that transcended Palamas's metrical poetry, although they remained faithful to his ideas of tradition and continuity. Several other writers rather loosely associated with Ta Nea Grammata soon found themselves criticizing it (Nikos Engonopoulos, Nicolas Calas). Nonetheless the magazine remained in the hands of the conservatives and did not lend itself to radical individuals. The basic conflict was between national Modernists, on the one hand, who were well represented by the magazine and the critics alike, such as K. Th. Dimaras, Karandonis, and the Surrealists, on the other (Embirikos, Engonopoulos, Calas, Elytis). National Modernists attempted to renew poetics from Palamean and Karyotakean influence, sometimes by using free verse and other Modernist techniques. They also oriented themselves towards Europe (e.g., Seferis was influenced by T.S. Eliot); but, above all, they opted for the establishment of an autochthonous neo-Hellenic tradition (13). Modernism in Greece, as in other countries as well, presented two components: first, the conservative national Modernism, and second, the Avant-Garde. Dimitris Tziovas also notes:
Av p.Tropoti(jay.e va crxTipaToiron) croupe tis> e£eXlfeis* c jt t | veoeXXrivaic^ t t o lt |( 7T| c tto trpiiTO |a.icrd t o u euccxrroti a ic iv a , 0a 8 iaKplvap.e 8 uo icupies Tdaeis1 on? (moles' 0a pTropoiiaav va evraxQotov apKCTol ttoit|t£s' auTi^s tt)s TTepi68ou* tt)v TTpuTotTopeta (avant-garde) icai to liovTepviapd. H trpcoTotTopela TreptoradTepo eupumaiicd irpoaavaroXiap^ vri i>inip£e •yXwarcuicd avop0d8o£ii, ata0r|Tiicd ttpokXt|tlkt^ tcai i8eoXoyi»cd a(7i>|a|3l|3aaTr| pe Kupious etCTTpoaaiTTOus' rov Kapd
icai XaTpeCiov'Tas' t o eXXT}vaic6 TTapeX06 v.
("If we would schematically map out the developments in Modern Greek poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, we would discern two major trends where many young poets of this period can be accomodated: the Avant- Garde and Modernism. The Avant-Garde, more European- oriented, was linguistically heretical, aesthetically provocative and ideologically uncompromising with main representatives Cavafy, Karyotakis, and the Surrealists. On the contrary, Modernism was more conservative and Hellenocentric marked by linguistic orthodoxy and admiration of the Greek past.") (Tziovas 1993: 88) (14)
The four writers whom I examine represent different historical moments of Greek Modernism. Cavafy criticizes Palamas's project and strives to show that art can be autonomous. Kazantzakis attacks Greekness and bourgeois Modernism by embracing cosmopolitanism and an anti-bourgeois Avant-Gardist tendencies. Calas and Valaoritis criticize national Modernism and Greekness while following Western Avant-Gardist ideas. My approach is based on comparative definitions of the Avant-Garde, as described above, especially the ways in which the Avant-Garde of a developing nation responds to national writing. My method also involves certain sociological and historical definitions, although not always mentioned. Through close readings of various texts I demonstrate how these writers differentiated themselves from ideals of national literature. Chapter I examines Cavafy's re-writing of Homeric texts and his experimentation with different styles. Cavafy's aim is to approach Homer aesthetically. Viewed from this perspective, Cavafy's plan seems to be in direct opposition to Palamas's project of a patriotic poetry looking at the past. Cavafy's endeavor openly represents art's autonomy and its separation from national essentialism. Moreover, as Tziovas notes:
O Kapd^Ti? ai/aXapPdvei pdXXoi/ auavrippr] ra t o pd\o TOU 6 lO ”T|'yT|T 1^ TT|S‘ TTOITITIICT)? TTpWTOTTOpei a? (TTT)V EXXd 8 a .
("Cavafy undoubtly undertakes the role of introducing a poetic Avant-Garde in Greece.") (Tziovas 1993: 88)
Chapter II demonstrates Kazantzakis's separation from Greekness and tradition and his route for a cosmopolitan Modernism. It traces Kazantzakis's alternative view of Hellenism and examines his infamous debate with Laourdas on Kazantzakis's Odyssey. Chapter III examines the work of two Avant-Gardist poets, Nicolas Calas and Nanos Valaoritis, by demonstrating how they criticize Greekness and tradition while building on an alternative poetics of free-verse, subjective and cosmopolitan w riting. NOTES
1) Miklos Szabolcsi discusses this phenomenon at some length but from a different perspective (Szabolcsi 1971).
2) For the neo-Avant-Garde, see Christopher Butler (1980), Paul Mann (1991) and Miklos Szabolcsi (1971). 3) See also Bruce Robbins (1992). 4) For a critique of Burger's views, see Martin W. Ludke (1976).
5) For an interesting criticism of this bipolar scheme, see Josephine M. Guy (1991).
6) See, for instance, Raymond Williams (1989).
7) Post-colonial poets, such as Derek Walcott and Vikram Seth among others, are placed at the frontiers of new writing even by Western standards.
8) See, especially, Clifford's chapter "On Ethnographic Surrealism" in his study The Predicament of Culture (Clifford 1988).
9) Tziovas prefers the term "modernity" which is also very close to my own "contemporaneity." In my opinion, the term "modernity" can be more confusing as instantly remindind us Western modernity.
10) See Vassilis Lambropoulos (1987).
11) See the following: Eric Hobsbawm-Terence Ranger (1983), Joseph R. Gusfield (1967).
12) In the years 1940-1944 Calas edited special issues and contributed articles on French Surrealism to many journals, such as Decision, Partisan Review, VVV, View, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Art Magazine. Valaoritis also contributed to neo- Surrealism of the 1960's with his books Diplomatic Relations, Hired Hieroglyphs, Flash Bloom and the magazine Rejection. Both contributed to Greek Surrealism, too. Calas wrote many articles on Surrealism, see Calas (1982). Valaoritis published the magazine PALI (1963-67) in which neo-Surrealism and post-war Avant-Garde were presented, see Arseniou (1993).
13) See Artemis Leontis's writings for Modernism and Hellenism (Leontis 1991) and for Ta Nea Grammata (Leontis 1990).
14) In 1992 I wrote the following:
Modernism in Greece was introduced by two conflicting, yet on a higher level not contradictory, theories of writing: a nationalist Modernism and an anti-nationalist cosmopolitan Avant-Garde." (Bosnakis 1992: 15)
At that time I wrote these lines with some hesitation arguing against most established scholars of Greek Modernism. But I was especially rejoiced later to read Tziovas's article which also recognizes this paradoxical schism in Greek Modernism. NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
Most translations in this dissertation are my own. I have tried to translate faithfully from modern Greek without poetic inspiration. Other translations are acknowledged as follows:
Cavafy's "Night March of Priam" was translated by Rae Dalven.
"The Horses of Achilles," "The Funeral of Sarpedon," "Unfaithfulness," "Interruption," "Trojans," and "Ithaka" were translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.
Homer's passages were translated by Robert Fagles.
Passages from Kazantzakis's Odyssey were translated by Kimon Friar. CHAPTER I
CAVAFY’S EXPERIMENTATION WITH THE ILIAD AND HIS CRITIQUE OF NATIONAL LITERATURE
Constantine Cavafy's (1863-1933) involvement in Greek letters marks a significant turn in Greek poetics. Cavafy indeed was the first to consciously react to Kostis Palamas's call for national literature and to accept the precepts of a cosmopolitan poetics. Furthermore, Cavafy's anti-racist and anti-nationalist poetry expands so as to include other modern European concerns, such as the individual expression of the private and erotic sphere as well as issues of ethnic and gender differences. Cavafy's poetic project was to "modernize" Greek poetry by making it contemporary and autonomous, following a cosmopolitan plan based on a new understanding of East and West for Greece. Within the limits of this plan, he also attempted to revise the Greek canon, and, most significantly, Palamas's rhetorical lyricism of a national ethos. Although most critics examine Cavafy in relation to Greek literature, his programme was a broader and more cosmopolitan one, as was his conception of Greece. Cavafy presented Greece in an aesthetic way and his poetics was largely drawn from Hellenistic influences. Cavafy's
16 Greece, such as Domenicus Theotokopoulos's one, enticed Europeans (1). His aesthetic yearning to Europe, his cosmopolitan view of East and West must also be related to his revisionary thought of Hellenism. After all, he remained an observer, an outsider Helladic matters. Having said that Cavafy's Modernist plan was the revision of Palamas’s project of national poetry and the conception of a cosmopolitan Greece, I should add that he was barely affected by grand narratives and stories of neo-Hellenism. Cavafy did not "live" the ancients but read and felt them as an open book, an endless manuscript, with the scholarly fascination of the half- European and half-Greek. Notably, his textual encounter with the ancients occured in a purely aesthetic realm that called for art's autonomy. David Ricks states:
For the rhetoric of autochthony is alien to Cavafy: outside the Greek state, and initially peripheral, as reader no less than as writer, to its modern literature, he has not the spirit of Homer on which to draw but the letter. (Ricks1989: 85)
In this chapter, I will discuss Cavafy's aesthetic attempts to re-orient poetry and to divorce it from nationalist bias through various stylistic experimentations with the most ideologically charged of Greek texts: Homer's epics. In this encounter, Cavafy employed several defamiliarizing methods for Greek poetics, such as a self-reflexive text-oriented writing, formalist experimentation, and a synchronic modern tradition. For Cavafy poetics was a theoretical enterprise intimately related to sophisticated ideas of difference, cosmopolitanism and diaspora (2). Gregory Jusdanis also notes Cavafy's attachment to a theoretical poetics:
Despite the absence from Cavafy's oeuvre of many prose texts dealing expressly with theoretical issues, his work reveals a profound preoccupation with poetics. This, I think, accounts for Cavafy's current status as one of the great revisionists of modern Greek literature. (Jusdanis 1987: 176)
Cavafy indeed already made the difference with his theoretical inquiries in fabricating a new poetry during the years 1893-1911, at a time when national literature was underway by Greek writers, critics, and academics. Cavafy's Homeric poems represent a distinctive and unique cycle in his poetry, comprising a separate folder in his manuscripts, entitled "Ancient Days." Through these, the poet experimented with different styles of writing that reflected his poetic concerns, which eventually led him to a radical detachment from tradition. When necessary, I will take into consideration other relevant poems that complement and highlight further Cavafy's ideas and definitions employed here. But let me first 1 9 show how Palamas conceived of "national literature" against which Cavafy primarily conducted his criticism.
Palamas’s Construct of National Literature
Yannis Psycharis (1854-1929), the famous Greek linguist and demoticist, states:
r\(2>acxa icai TrarptSa elyai t o IS i o . Na iroXep.d icavet? •yLa tt)V uaTplSa tou f| y i a t t i v e0viicf| t t i ? yXciaaa, £va? elvai o ayiii/as. ITdi'Ta afivi/eraL nepi irdrpr]^
("Language and fatherland are identical; whether one fights for his fatherland or for his national language, the struggle is one and the same. He always battles for his country") (Psycharis 1935: 37)
In this statement Psycharis claims that the struggle for language is equivalent to the struggle for the country. Psycharis dreams of a literature whose stories will consolidate national unity. In the wake of Psycharis, Palamas formulated a theory according to which poetry represented a national enterprise. In his important essay "My Poetics" (1906-1927), Palamas expounded his views on national poetry and the role of the poet as the leader of his nation.
Kai oi TTepiTr^Teies" tou £0vous' Kdvouv t o £pyo t o u 20
ttoit|Tt), air6 pid tou Attoi^ti, to ttoltitlk6 xPov'lk6 ths1 laToplas’ tou EGuou? tou. ToXpcii va maTciiu ira)? 01 TTaXpot ttou pu0pi£ouv tt|u icapdid ttis1 peydXt|s‘ naTpLSa? p-a? airo tt|v ITaXiyyeveala ttis1 teat ttoX{>
TTpoTT^Tepa, aird t t \ v MeydXt|v ISda ttou darpaipe a pdaa)? pe rr|V dXuiori tt^s1 TTdXris, ioa \ie t t |v KaTaaTpo<|)^ Tqs* XpOpvns1, 01 iraXpoi auTot auTLXTUTToiue (jto TpayoiiSi pou.
("And the nation's adventures make the work of the poet, from one respect, the poetic chronicle of his nation's history. I dare to believe that the pulses sustaining the heart of our great Motherland from its Rebirth and well before, from the Great Idea that flashed at once after the fall of the City until the catastrophe of Smyrna, these pulses resonate in my song") (Palamas 1972: 569-70) Palamas overtly declared the missionary character of his
poetry, ’TroiT|TiKd xpo^Kd iCTTopias1 tou £0yous“ tou’ ("a poetic chronicle of the history of his nation"). Influenced by European nationalism of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, Palamas attempted to establish a national culture in the neo-Hellenic state inspired by the ideals of nationalism and Hellenophilia. He identified Hellenophilia with archaeophilia, while ancestolatry ("TrpoyovoTrXTif C a ') was ascribed to the purists.
"H EXXrivoXaTpela, pa XuTpwpdvT] aud t o SacncaXicrpd,
ttou -nqv dtcape a^oppfi (jeTTeapou <{>epp£i/T| cjtt| Can5! pe
t t |S Cwt) ? t o airauou an' 6Xa avi p0oXo' t t | SrjpoTLKfi yXa) o a a ’ ("Hellenophilia, freed from pedanticism, which made it source of blame, brought to life with life's supreme symbol: the demotic language") (Palamas 1972: 452)
He defines archaeophilia as follows:
Oi apxaloi, TTpci)T' air' 8Xa, etuai 01 TTaT^pes pa?, boo ki au eivai paicpuap^voi Kai 8ia
("The ancients, first of all, are our fathers, no matter how far distant and different they are. Archaeophilia, entrusted to skillful hands, a Muse of inconsiderable power for the demotic song, fades and goes astray easily by those incapable to help both themselves and others; tied with the ropes of a short-lighted philosophy, entirely historicist, it becomesancestolatry, as one of our great men among the other great ones has christened this going astray”) (Palamas 1972: 500)
And further down he admits that:
OXo to TpayouSi •trepvcii/Tas' aud t t i s ’ A O rivds1 t o u 22
G pi/o o ra 'Mdna Tils' ^ux^S' pou', pia a ott\w ’AadXeuTT| Zioif ’ Kai cjtou? T a p 0 o u ? Kai AvdTTaiaTOU?", o "AcoSeKdXovo? tou rd
("All my song from the Hymn to Athena in the ’Eyes of my Soul,’ in the 'Motionless Life' and the 'Iambics and Anapaestics,' The Twelve Speeches of the Gypsy," The City and Loneliness,' the 'Altars,' 'The Flute' etc. bear vividly the marks of archaeophilia") (Palamas 1972: 501-02)
Palamas’s stance, however, toward the Hellenic tradition was not nationalistic. Instead, he wanted to link the new state of Greece to the "great" Western European tradition which he admired. Through the Renaissance and the Reformation, Western Europe discovered Hellas. It is this resurrected Hellas that he wants to establish for the neo-Hellenes in an age of high nationalism.
Eupcoirai' oi, AaidTe?, ApepiKauoi', peydXoi,
upcoTeiKot, pe t i s“ TiaTpi8oXaTpiicds' XOpe? t o u s “
TToXiixopSes* Kai TroXO gloves', KaQoi? etvai k o i o i epurrduaGe? KiGdpe?. TiaTi Kai oi uaTpt8e? pe Ta
x£Xia pOpia tou? i8auiKd Kai ovetpaTa, apiaTOKpaTiKd , SrjpoKpaTiKd , ipnepiaXiaTiKd ,
KocxpouoXiTiKd, pe t i? ttoikI X e? TUV iCTTopiKd?
Trepm^Teie?, t ‘ auGlapaTa Kai to u s1 fenecrpou?, t i?
8 d £ e ? t o u s1 K ai t i? a 8 o f l e ? , t i? ai/GpamiaTiKd? Xpvaauyd? Kaira peaaiamKd aKOTd8ia,
Kai TpejioCTaXetiouv,
KaXoCiu K ai k t ip Ot t o u i/, crwcTtalpvow t i s " (pavraate s\
yevvotov t i ? aydue? Kai Ta p.laTi, aav TTpdauma Kai aa 0e6rr|Te?, aav Trap0^i/e? Kai aa yuuatKe?
("Europeans, Asians, Americans, great people, proteans, with their multi-chorded and multi-vocal patridolatric lyres, like the loving guitars are. For the countries with their thousand myriads of ideals and dreams, aristocratic, democratic, imperialistic, cosmopolitan, with their varied historical adventures, their blossomings and declines, their glories and non-glories, the humanistic golden dawns and the medieval darknesses, they shine and tremble, they threaten and smile sweetly, invite and proclaim, incite the imaginations, bear loves and hatreds, as both individuals and goddesses, as both virgins and women") (Palamas 1972: 570) Palamas's plan aimed at the creation of a national poetry which could possibly bind the ancients with the neo-Hellenes forming a tradition of continuity and irredentism. His lyricism was one of "we," of his people. Even the European poets from whom he derives his models, such as Sully Prudhomme, Vicenzo Monti, Victor Hugo, and Wolfghang Goethe, refer to a heroic nationalistic poetry. Hellenism of diaspora represented for Palamas only an irredentist romantic dream nostalgically derived from the past and based on the recipes of the European orientalists. Nowhere in his work does it become evident that Palamas had an active contact with that part of Hellenism, as Cavafy actually did. 24
Cavafy's "The Reflections of an Old Artist"
While in continental Greece the shade of Palamas was felt more and more compelling upon his contemporaries, and demoticists and purists alike were competing for who could first establish a national model for literature, Cavafy developed a different approach to poetics. For Cavafy the basic question was how poetry could evolve as an autonomous institution. In his early, but only lately published, prose essay "The Reflections of an Old Artist"(3), Cavafy made two interesting observations. First, he admitted the power "rj ^ykplctis1 tou k6apou" ("the people's acknowledgment"), which a public audience exerts on the production of poetry as well as on the existence of a literary discourse, what he calls "0
B£|3aia Kai twi/vtuv auTG&v to £pyov 0a eiuai upoawpit'di/ us1 to i Sik 6 tou
("Of course, even the work of these younger ones will be indeed temporary as his own had been.") (Cavafy 1973: 2)
The old artist attributes the demode character of his poems to the effect of the passing of time.
E v tt) e£eXl£ei tojv oK£if,eun/ Kai tcov pepPacrpuW, TrapaTTipet p.e Trucpiav 6 t l o Eu0ouaiaa|j.6s’ Kai t| IIoi.T|TiKdTT|S‘ eKdoTou auy ypa
("in the evolution of his thoughts and musings, he bitterly observes that every author's Enthusiasm and Poeticity, as soon as he becomes old after 40 or 50 years, begin to seem bizarre or ridiculous") (Cavafy 1973: 3) (5).
The "Reflections of an Old Artist" exemplify several aspects of Cavafy's poetics. First, poetry is subject to a renewal in style and orientation; next, experimentation is a necessary stage for the maturity of every poet; and finally, "classical technique" and antiquite of style and theme can acquire an additional value with the passing of time. After a considerable period of time the poems become transformed from old-fashioned to "antique," and seem more dignified. 26
Cavafy described the work of art in absolutely modern terms. Notably, there is no direct reference to a historical literary tradition. Instead, tradition is regarded as synchronous and horizontal. The old-artist forms his tradition and chooses his models; this is exactly what Cavafy did. "The Reflections of an Old-Artist" revealed a premature modernist approach to poetry, where questions of style, time, and the reflection of the poet and his public occupied a central position. Cavafy's approach to Homer was largely derived from these ideas. Cavafy understood the power that the public exerts on poetic writing. To poetic writing he attributed a number of extrinsic factors related to the public discourse, such as conventions of reading and the antagonistic Oedipal relationship between the junior-poet and his father-poet. Thus, the textual and rhetorical elements, in constrast with the oral and the biographical ones, of poetry play a primary role in his writing, although the two others cannot be entirely excluded (6). From 1893 to 1903 Cavafy devoted himself to experimenting with and exploring a new poetic language; a language which he will finally perfect, as we can infer from the critical reception of his work. Gregorios Xenopoulos, the editor of the influential journal Panathinea, as early as in 1903 writes a very encomiastic article on Cavafy, introducing him to the Greek audience. 27
AXXd i/opl£u) 6 t l 6aa n a p £0eaa elvai apKCTd va oas SaJaouv Kd Troiav i 8 £av ttj? TTpajTOTtitrou outt)? (JhXoctcxJjikt)? TTOLi^aea)S‘, t t ) ? t 6 ctov vm
vnevdv\Li Covcrav p a K p d d e u t o u K d X p o v , Kai upoud i/tui/ pe Trp/ £XXenjui/ Kd 0e a i'a p p d a T o u eXa
("But I think that all that I included for are sufficient to give you an idea of this original philosophical poetry, so sober, with the severe and peculiar dress, the aristocratic technique, the entirely personal character, the language that distantly reminds one of Kalvos, and above all with the lack of every unsuitable lightness, every nonsensical vocal sound, every illusive decoration") (Xenopulos 1933: 1448)
What Xenopoulos understood and appreciated in Cavafy was his philosophical (read: theoretical) approach, his uniquely personal style of an aristocratic (read: cosmopolitan) character, and the rejection of shallow lyricism. Xenopoulos indeed realised Cavafy's difference and unfamiliar discourse from his fellow Greek poets, although he could not effectively illustrate the modern character of his poetry. In what follows, I will demonstrate how Cavafy achieved two of his main goals, experimentation and revision of tradition in his Homeric poems. 28
Experimenting with and Revising Classical tradition
Cavafy applied many of the above ideas to his Homeric poems. In fact, his relationship with the ancients was more complex than what has been proposed by most of his critics. Up to date, most Cavafian scholarship has been burdened by statements that either claim his intimate and faithful attachment to Hellenic continuity, approaches that classify him as an "historical" poet, or his complete detachment and alienation from the Greek tradition. The first interpretations have mainly focused on Cavafy's relationship with Hellenic history and ancient Greek texts (some critics also add the Byzantine tradition), while the second ones underline his European ideas, modernism, and homosexuality. I will argue that Cavafy's approach to the Greek past was principally aesthetic and cosmopolitan. Cavafy used the ancients for the pleasure of writing itself but also as a way to expand poetic boundaries in Greece. His conception of Hellenism was far different from the nationalistic one of the Athenian philologists and scholars of the 1880's challenging contemporary Greece from the periphery. Cavafy attacked "continuity," which on the national front found its culminating point in the ideology of the Great Idea; for him, the ancient Greeks belonged only to the past. However, the past for him was not a dead letter but something that had yet to 29
be re-discovered. The Homeric poems challenged the predominant Romantic discourse of Greek continuity by engaging a style of writing which suggested discontinuity and fragmentation. Interestingly enough, Cavafy's encounter with Homer was more focused on theIliad (six poems) than the Odyssey (one poem and one prose essay). The main reasons are the following: first, the Iliad offered him unique scenes of heroism and passion to depict the decadent ideal of beauty and mortality. Opposed to Homer's epic, which is about "immortality" and "glory," Cavafy's poems are about "mortality" and "decadence." From very early Cavafy's aim was antagonistic to Homer. Cavafy knew that his contemporary poet's task was to liberate himself from the burden of tradition, to write against his father. Good writing was antagonistically made by writing against great and difficult texts
(7). Secondly, the Iliad was not an accidental text among all the rest of Classical antiquity. It was, rather, the most discussed, learned, and admired Greek poem about "human beings and their destiny," a poem representing epic and heroic identity. In other words, it was the text that exemplified ancient and neo-Hellenic pride proving also the perennial values of Greek tradition. The neo-Hellenes focused their Classical education on learning Homer, and especially the Iliad. A formidable Romantic scholarly tradition based on this particular epic was also formed in the 30
West (8). Greeks' education as well as their identification with the past was largely affected by all these facts. Cavafy was certainly aware of the position that the Ilia d occupied in European and Greek letters and its significance for both Classical education and the emerging ideology of national identity. But he was also aware of the nationalistic overtones and ideological abuses that such an authoritative position entailed for them, and he tried to shun these from his poetry. Cavafy's re-writing of the Iliad was completed between 1893 and 1911. During these years he progressed through various stylistic techniques which range from Romanticism to Aestheticism and, finally, to Symbolism. The Homeric poems that I want to examine include the following: the "Night March of Priam" (1893), "The Horses of Achilleus" (1897), and "The Funeral of Sarpedon" (1898, 2nd version), "Interruption" (1901), "Trojans" (1905), "Unfaithfulness" (1904-05), and "Ithaka" (1911).
The Romantic Experiment
From the beginning Cavafy's aim was to use Homer as a textual and aesthetic source rather than as an ideological tool. The "Night March of Priam" ("Priam") is the first lliadic poem (1893)(9). Cavafy revises the Homeric scene(Iliad, XXIV 1.192- 416) (10) in order to create a Romantic poem (11). 3 1
To define Romanticism I will evoke Lilian Furst's cautious remarks:
If there is little hope of a finite definition of Romanticism, certain vital traits are distinguishable and unified elements within the members of this family, such as the predominance of individualism, the primacy of imagination and the emphasis on feeling (My emphasis) (Furst 1979: 26)
To this definition we should add Kurt Weinberg’s view which supports and elaborates Furst's list:
There are traits common to all of European romanticism. Universally it proposes absolute creative freedom, spontaneity, 'sincerity,' a sort of emotional engagement on the part of the poet. To neoclassical dictates of objectivity, imitation, invention, clarity, separation of prose and poetry, the romanticists oppose demands for the free play of imagination and originality, functional rather than decorative imagery, the use of prose rhythms in poetry, and of lyrical prose in novel, essay, and criticism (My emphasis) (Weinberg in Preminger’s 1974: 718) Cavafy plays against Homer by choosing a particular scene from the Ilia d and transferring it to a Romantic level (12). The following elements attest to his choice of Romanticism: the predominance of emotions and feelings, the poet's subjective voice, Priam's Romantic character, the imagination and the supernatural, and the formality of purist language. If we compare the development of both scenes, we will see that Cavafy created a scene quite different from Homer's (13). The "emotive" atmosphere in Homer is given in an objective manner explicit to the narrative and direct style of the epic (14). Homer's description features the following: the sons of Priam sitting around their father, their clothes sodden with their tears, the veiled Priam who beats his breast and rolls in the dung, and the mourning of his daughters, wives and sons. Such features represent external reality, things as they are and not as they should be mediated by subjective impressions, intuitions, and feelings. Cavafy's "Priam," on the other hand, presents many subjective features including emotions and feelings expressed by both the poet's and Priam’s minds. Homer's objectivity and clarity are replaced by subjectivism. The external nature does not stand by itself but is expanded by the poet's state of mind. It is represented through other voices that make sense and speak of it. The poet eventually becomes the interpreter of the lliadic episode. Cavafy begins his poem by expressing the "dXyo? Kai o ijiw y ij' ("pain and lamentation") which exists in Ilium. Ilium suffers generally; its drama is not imposed on the particular individuals but it is the city as a community which suffers. Cavafy mentions no names, but "H yfi th? Tpolas- ev aireXniapti) Trucpri icai 8£ei' ("the earth of Troy is in bitter despair.") He creates a poem of general despair, until the figure of Priam emerges around whom the poem will be localized thereafter.
Toy p£ya Eicropa Toy npiaplS-nv icXalei. O Qpfivos1 Poepds\ (3api>? T)xet- vtoXTl 8ev p £ v e i ev tti Tpola TTevGotiaa, too Ektopos’ Trjy pyi)pr|v apeXoixja.
("It weeps for the great Hector, son of Priam. The loud threnody echoes heavily. Not a soul in Troy is left who is not mourning, no one neglects the memory of Hector.")
Cavafy understands that the main idea of book XXIV is the mourning for Hector's fate. He admits that "it [Troy] weeps for the great Hector," and "no one neglects the memory of Hector." Nevertheless, he shifts his perspective from the mourning for Hector to Priam's action. From the line "T‘ ayw^eXi1! o ITplapos liia a iy ’ ("Priam hating the useless") onwards, Priam becomes the epicentre of the poem. Cavafy avoids the dramatic and narrative elements of Homer. The images that follow are due to Priam’s imagination, sentiments, and judgments, and add to the vitality of his action. Such images are the following: ”o 8pdpos- Co
wind that "oSiipeTai Kai KpciCci' ("wails piteously and laments.") Priam's action, however, is represented by the poet's voice again. The poet becomes the interpreter of the narrated events explaining Priam's imagination. The rhetorical question "and they wonder why the scion of Dardanus flies in such haste toward the ship?" for instance, exemplifies the poet's viewpoint. The poem concludes that:
AXXd o PaaiXev? auTd Sev ra irpoo£x£L’
("the king does not notice these things; provided the chariot runs swiftly, swiftly.")
In the Homeric scene, on the other hand, the narratological elements prevail and several figures are involved. In addition to. Zeus, Iris, Hekabe, and Hermes are mentioned, too. The Homeric Priam acts as Zeus' agent. Zeus sends Iris to command Priam to go to Achilleus.
’Then, at the same time, I am winging Iris down to greathearted Priam, commanding the king to ransom his dear son, to go to Achaea's ships, bearing gifts to Achilles, gifts to melt his rage.' So he decreed and Thetis with her glistening feet did not resist a moment. Down the goddess flashed from the peaks of Mount Olympus, made her way to her son's camp, and there he was, she found him groaning hard, choked with sobs (1.144-150) 3 5
Iris, indeed, presents herself to Priam and delivers Zeus' command. Priam passes the message onto his wife and obeys the king of the gods.
Father Zeus sped Iris down to sacred Troy: 'Quick on your way now, Iris, shear the wind! Leave our Olympian stronghold_ take a message to greathearted Priam in Troy: he must go to Achaea’s ships and ransom his dear son, bearing gifts to Achilles, gifts to melt his rage. But let him go alone, no other Trojan attend him, only a herald with him, a seasoned, older one who can drive the mules and smooth-running wagon and bring the hero's body back to sacred Troy, the man that brilliant Achilles killed in battle. Let him have no fear of death, no dread in his heart, such a powerful escort we will send him_ the giant-killer Hermes will guide him all the way to Achilles’ presence. And once the god has led him within the fighter's shelter, Achilles will not kill him_ he"ll hold back all the rest: Achiles is no madman, no reckless fool, not the one to defy the gods' commands. Whoever begs his mercy he will spare with all the kindness in his heart (1.173-191)
Homer's Priam is fearful. He is often engaged in acts that reveal his fear and terror: his crying in the courtyard, his fear of Achilleus, and his prayer to Zeus requesting to send him a good omen to guarantee his return.
Father Zeus! Ruling over us all from Ida, god of greatness, god of glory! Grant Achilles will receive me with kindness, mercy. Send me a bird of omen, your own 36
wind-swift messenger, the dearest bird in the world to your prophetic heart, the strongest thing on wings_ clear on the right so I can see that sign with my own eyes and trust my life to it as I venture down to Achaea's ships and the fast chariot-teams! (1.364-372)
Cavafy, on the contrary, appropriates some of the attitudes of the Romantic hero into his Priam, making him a Romantic character. These attitudes include: individualism, egocentricism, and spontaneity. Jacques Barzun describes the Romantic hero as follows:
The Romantic hero condemns himself to a life sentence within the prison of his own egocentricity. He often sinks into a selfish melancholy, boredom and emptiness of an egocentric existence. From this manic and depressive situation he is unable to find any such means of escape and freedom. Such an egocentric individualism with its exaggerated self-awareness leads to introspection, melancholy, restlessness, emotional instability, discontent with present reality and flight into vague dreams and longings (Barzun 1975: 66)
Priam stands out more clearly as a self-willed individual, explicitly separated even from his community: Trojans mourn for Hektor’s fate, "lamentation in Ilium." Yet Priam thinks that "aXX' etvai pdTaios[.. . ]0pTj vo?" ("lamentation is in vain") and ' t ' avaxfjeXi^ [...] iuaAv" ("hates the useless.") He decides to leave and meet Achilleus by himself all alone. His decision is made because 37
he "hates the useless" and "G^Xei [...] tou t£kvou tou to cri^pa v auaicTTjaTi" ("wants to honor the body of his child.") The world as it appears to him is of great importance. The lamentation is subject to his transcendental passion. All the imagery of nature is part of his imagination. Homer says almost nothing about Priam's night journey. He describes the preparation only with little detail:
Terrified by their father's commands the sons trundled a mule-wagon out at once, a good smooth-running one, newly finished, balanced and bolted tight, and strapped a big wicker cradle across its frame. They lifted off its hook a boxwood yoke for the mules, its bulging pommel fitted with rings for guide-reins, brought out with the yoke its yoke-strap nine arms long and wedged the yoke down firm on the sanded, tapered pole, on the front peg, and slipped the yoke-ring onto its pin, strapped the pommel with three good twists, both sides, then lashed the assembly round and down the shaft and under the clamp they made the lashing fast. Then the priceless ransom for Hector's body: hauling it up from the vaults they piled it high on the wagon's well-made cradle, then they yoked the mules_ stamping their sharp hoofs, trained for heavy loads_ that the Mysians once gave Priam, princely gifts. And last they yoked his team to the king's chariot, stallions he bred himself in his own polished stalls (1.322-327)
The scene is of little importance to the structure of book XXIV. Homer, evidently, was not concerned with Priam’s journey or state of mind but rather with Hektor's fate. During the Homeric 38
journey, nevertheless, an important episode occurs between Priam and Hermes, which Cavafy omits. Hermes is metamorphosed into a young man and stands by Priam who fails to recognize him. Cavafy, on the other hand, devoted half of his poem to the journey itself. The objective features of the Homeric scene are transformed by Priam's imagination. The journey is presented from Priam's point of view. The chariot's swift running occurs in Priam's mind,
cfK^ipiu T(i>pa £x£l Taxi), Taxi> to dppa tou ua Tp^xh
("The only thought he has now is for the chariot to run swiftly, swiftly.")
It is Priam himself who thinks that he runs "swiftly, swiftly," precisely because the external reality is immediately subject to his state of mind. The road is presented as "dreary," "the wind wails piteously and laments," and the raven looks "frightful." These images, that have the feeling of the supernatural are due to Priam's transcendental imagination. Negotiations and exchanges usually take place during daytime in Homer and represent celebratory public events. According to Martin Mueller:
Contrary to romantic cliches about heroism, the Homeric warrior is not the opposite of the huggling shopkeeper. Exchange, negotiation of disputes, and settlements are honourable transactions in the Homeric world, to be carried both with a keen calculation of material advantage and with a deep sense of ceremony. (Mueller 1984: 68)
Priam's encounter with Achilles occurs privately and secretly in the night. To Homer, the ransoming of Achilles by Priam is a shameful act. Cavafy, however, reserves the night for his Romantic intentions, namely, to make the action contrast the night tranquility and to emphasize supernatural elements. The depiction of the inward will, which reveals the true condition of the hero's soul, determines Romantic poetic expression and distinguishes it from the rationalistic objective description. The raven, the barking of the dog, "the shadows that awake sinister shadows" are part of Priam's frightful mind. In Cavafy’s statement "the king does not notice these things," we indeed hear Priam's inner determination to impose his will on his imagination. The details represent a horrifying atmosphere which eventually intensifies and stresses the emotional part of the poem. The repetition of the phrase "provided the chariot runs swiftly, swiftly," expresses Priam's thought of: "the only thought he has now is for the chariot to run swiftly, swiftly." Finally, the choice of the purist language emphasizes the Romantic character of the poem, for the purist has largely been 40
the language of Greek Romantic poetry (15). Cavafy, indeed, uses the purist only in his early Romantic poems which he never published. The poem, as Maronitis observes, reflects Romantic characteristics in language and metrics taken from another Romantic poet, loannis Karasoutsas.
The Aesthetic Experiment
Cavafy did not practice Romanticism for long. In his next two lliadic poems, "The Horses of Achilleus" ("Horses,"1897) and "The Funeral of Sarpedon" ("Sarpedon,"1898), he proceeds to the Aesthetic experiment. Cavafy applies aestheticist perspectives to the corresponding scene of Homer(Iliad, XVII, 428-458). Ricks suggests that Cavafy's writing of the "Horses" owes much to Alexander Pope's translation.
The long passage of Pope leavestraces in Cavafy's poem, giving it much of its colouring - a hue not in Homer's Iliad. The key words of Pope that are not in Homer but which dominate Cavafy's poem are these: 'and shar'd in human Miseries'; the 'Work of Death' so prominent in Cavafy appears in Pope's rendering of the last line of Book 17; and the concatenation of phrases about the dead Patroclus is also culled from Pope (Book 16, lines 552, 1017, 1000, 1032): 'the breatless body'; 'with faint expiring Breath’; 'So many Lives effused, expires his own'; 'the beauteous Body left a Load of Clay'.(Ricks 1989: 93) 4 1
Once again, Cavafy detached himself from Homer to create his own poem. R. V. Johnson defined Aestheticism as follows:
Aestheticism means, broadly, a devotion to beauty, and to beauty primarily found in the acts and in whatever is attractive in the world around us ... It appears in different interrelated aspects: as a view of life - the idea of treating life 'in the spirit of art'; as a view of art - 'art for art's sake' (My emphasis) (Johnson 1969: 1)
The aim of Aestheticism was the appreciation of beauty. Walter Pater explained how this passionate desire for beauty became associated with melancholy, sadness, and a sense of imminent death:
One characteristic of the pagan spirit the aesthetic poetry has, which is on its surface - the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life. This is contrasted with the bloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it - the sense of death and the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death" (My emphasis) (Pater 973: 102)
It is exactly this sense of death effecting beauty which is the common theme in "Horses" and in "Sarpedon." Homer provides splendid material for the representation of decadent beauty. Cavafy chooses one of the most static and consoling moments of Iliad to express beauty. Ricks demonstrates that Cavafy followed 42
the British Aestheticists at this point. Matthew Arnold, for example, notes for the "Horses of Achilles":
"There is, perhaps, in all the Iliad nothing more deep in significance -- there is nothing in all literature more perfect in human tenderness and honour for the mystery of inferior life -- than the verses that describe the sorrow of the divine horses on the death of Patroclus, and the comfort given them by the greatest of the gods." (Arnold quoted by Ricks 1989: 94) We also hear from Ricks that George Meredith himself wrote "Fragments of the Iliad in Hexameter Verse." One of these was "The Horses of Achilles" which resembles Cavafy's poem in several ways (Ricks 1989: 94-95). The Aesthetic elements in "Horses" include the following: the emotive atmosphere, pessimism and death, and the elevation of the soul. The overflow of emotions and feelings creates an emotive atmosphere throughout the poem. The weeping of the horses occupies a central position in the poem. But although their weeping could possibly create a Romantic atmosphere, it remains far different from it. Romantic emotions are subject to the poet's or hero's will and perspective: aesthetic emotions correspond directly to objective reality. In "Priam," the emotions that originate in the "dreary night" and the "frightful raven" are subject to Priam's imagination and thus extracted by a subjective mind. Here the horses weep because they confront Patroklus' death, an objective and real event. Let us proceed to a direct comparison of both scenes from the Iliad Book XVII, 1.426-458 and "Horses." In order to justify Aestheticism, Cavafy draws outward signs of the Homeric scene: the tears of the horses and their dirty bright manes. He then emphasizes grief by adding the detail of the rearing of their heads, their tossed manes, and the beating of the ground with their hooves-- indications of their burdened sadness. What grieves the horses is the immediate experience of the objective reality: the scene of dead Patroklus, his youth, and his inevitable death in contrast to the horses’ immortality. External reality becomes the main cause of grief and melancholy because it represents an objective as well as a tragic situation. Melancholy is also expressed by passive tears shed for a real event. The poem begins with tears and ends likewise, resulting in an elegiac mourning. It seems that Cavafy shunned all the other Homeric elements that would possibly cause opposite feelings of violence and harshness, such as the battle scenes.
So on they fought like a swirl of living fire -- you could not say if the sun and moon still stood secure, so dense the battle-haze that engulfed the brave who stood their ground around Patroclus’ body (1.424-427)
The scene of Automedon hitting the horses with the flying lash, or even the supernatural scene where Zeus breaths vigour into the 44
horses as they start running among the Achaeans and Trojans, are also omitted. Another contrasting cause of grief is that whereas the horses are immortals, they perceive the mortal nature of men. The sight of death and the necessity of human nature motivate the horses' thinking about death. Their natures are outraged as they look at the work of death. These horses have feelings and the faculty of thought about men. Yet feelings and thought are exclusively human attributes. Their immortal natures reasonably cause an emotional superiority. They produce a god-beast phenomenon grieving for human mortality. Thus, what makes men men is essentially a cause for weeping. In the Homeric scene the horses are immortal too, but they cannot think about death. They make sense of it only by instinct. On the horses' stance Ricks comments the following:
The Horses are not to be consoled: this is the point of the poem [...] The Horses, like the absent Achilles himself with his divine mother Thetis and human father Peleus, are caught between divinity and humanity; and the poem's last two and a half lines, which not only conclude the narrative as altered by Cavafy but also gloss the first part of the poem as a whole, define the problem [...] While the gods (for whom Zeus is a spokesman) can only see the temporary misfortunes of each individual death, the Horses can see the permanent misfortune of Death itself - that through which Achilles himself, the owner of the Horses, will eventually die. (Ricks 1989: 95) Zeus' intervention emphasizes the dramatic condition of the horses. He calls them "SuorTuxicr^va’ ("unhappy") because they
are doomed to live in misery among "ctttii/ deXia av'0pwiT TToiivai to Tralyvaoi/ ttis1 polpas'” ("pathetic human beings, the toys of fate.”) Their immortal natures are contrasted to their "Trpdcncaipes‘ aup SCTTtz pdaavd twv oas £p.TrXe£av 01 avGpuiTroi" ("men have caught you [them] up in their misery") The "gallant" horses nevertheless continue to shed their tears for the fate of death. Pessimism combined with the aestheticized death and the consequent elevation of the soul represent further aesthetic elements. The horses stare at Patroklus’s body and think that it is "lifeless," "mere flesh," "spiritless," "defenseless" and "breathless." It reminds them that humanity is fated to eternal disaster. The "great Nothingness" is a pessimistic idea of the end of nineteenth century. In his essay "The Vanity of Existence" Arthur Schopenhauer demonstrates that man is subject to the fate of a persistent change of time. Everything that is present in a little while becomes past. The continual Becoming and the never Being 46 represent equal forms of existence. But in such a world where all is unstable the idea of happiness is unconceivable (not dated: 44). Georg Simmel comments on Schopenhauer's pessimism as follows: Schopenhauer made suffering into the absolute substance of emotionally experienced existence and did so against a manifold of pessimistic interpretations which declared the world to be a vale of tears, life not to be worth living, and happiness a passing dream: he made suffering into a priori definition that grows out of the central roots of our existence, and made sure that none of its fruits could be of a different essence (Schopenhauer 1986: 44) Existence, consequently, is fated to a priori eternal suffering. In "Horses" Cavafy recognizes that "t o peydXo TlTroTa" ("the great Nothingness") pre-exists life. The body of Patroklus returns to the great Nothingness} it returns from the place in which it was before coming into being. Cavafy was indeed influenced by pessimistic ideas, as we can infer from other poems written during the same period. For example, in "The Candles," "The Windows" and "The Walls" (all written in the years between 1896-1904), he developed the similar idea of the vain existence in a constantly fleeting present. Cavafy, however, associated pessimism with Aestheticist ideas, such as melancholy and death. Other Aestheticist poets developed similar pessimistic ideas in the end of nineteenth century. E. A. Poe, in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) declares that melancholy and death are the most suitable and moving poetic themes: Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetic tone (Poe 1984: 77) Cavafy seems to agree with such ideas. The mourning of the horses is purposeless because they themselves are immortal and "free of death." Cavafy is concerned only with the act of mourning per se, and what remains by the end of the poem are the passive tears of the horses. In the conclusion of the poem the horses are called "euyevrj" ("gallant.") The gallant nature of the horses is harmonious with the humanization of their nature, but its appearance and emphasis here implicates more than anthropomorphism. It signifies their superiority in a specific context: Ojaois* TO Sdicpud Twv y i a t o u 0ai/dTou TravTOTeiWi tt)V aup. ("it was for the eternal disaster of death that those gallant horses shed their tears") Their mourning for Patroklus' death elevates them. Sadness and melancholy resulting from grief create their superiority while the experience of death and mourning results from the superiority of their emotions. Although the Homeric scene is associated with the death of Patroklus and the mourning emphasizes the sadness for this death, Cavafy's poem is about the horses. Cavafy wrote this poem to produce some "authentic" poetic moments: the tears that elevate the soul. The poem has no other moral or didactic implications; it only causes emotions. The tears in the spectacle of human vanity are finally transformed into a work of art. "Horses" was Cavafy's first attempt to approach the Iliad through Aestheticism. In his next poem "The Funeral of Sarpedon" ("Sarpedon" 1898), Cavafy further elaborates the Aesthetic principles on the Homeric text. The poem refers Iliad, to book XVI, I.439-683, yet it must be taken into account that there is a previous purist version of the poem dated before 1893 (16). The main differences between the two versions are the following: the first version is an amalgam of Romantic and Aesthetic elements as the poet tries to render a notable Aestheticist scene through the coldness and inflexibility of purist language. The poem remains obscure, archaistic, and without emotion. In the second version, however, the poem finds its balance. The choice of demotic provides the images with light, sweetness, and a sense of sentimental simplicity. In addition, more emphasis is given to the homosexual aspects of the scene with the omission of verses referring to Sarpedon as husband. With Aestheticism, Cavafy begins to express another aspect of his poetics which was not overtly stated in his earlier Romantic poems: the theme of pleasure and love as primal causes of poetry. The Aestheticist elements include the following: the emotive atmosphere, beauty as an aesthetic ideal, the elevated soul, and the aestheticized artifact. The melancholic and emotive elements, which are spread throughout the poem because of Zeus' mourning, Apollo's sorrow and the funeral of Sarpedon, are matched by an Aestheticist point of view that differs from the corresponding Homeric function and purpose. In the Iliad, gods often devise some way to help mortals and mostly their children. Zeus’ concern about his son Sarpedon is justified by this epic convergence of gods and men. Zeus communicates his dilemma to Hera: should he snatch Sarpedon out of battle or beat him down at the hands of Patroklus? It is customary that gods must ask for the opinion of other gods when they want to save the life of their 50 favorite children. Such a convention takes place every time they want to make similar decisions. Zeus here addresses his dilemma to Hera, but she strongly disagrees with him. Upon her suggestion, Zeus commands Apollo to bear Sarpedon's body to rich Lykia where his brothers will give him due burial with tomb and gravestone. Another epic convention, and one which is repeated with the death of every hero, is that Sarpedon's death arouses blood-lust among the warriors as they fight over his body. Cavafy focuses on the objective features of Sarpedon's death found in Homer. A comparison of both scenes shows the objective features that are commonly used by them: Sarpedon is dead, Patroklus and the Achaeans rush on to dishonor his body, Apollo bears the body to the river, takes care of the wounds and then he carries it to Lykia. Beauty is one of the most significant Aesthetic principles that elevates the soul of the poet and is often a result of death. In "Sarpedon," the emotive atmosphere is implicated by the appreciation of beauty, the elevation of the soul, the craftsman and the gravestone. In other words, the emotions here function to create the appropriate atmosphere in which the beauty of Sarpedon can be nicely shown, the soul elevated by the lament for Sarpedon, and melancholy turned into an artifact by the craftsman. As he takes care of the dead, Apollo's reverence and sorrow for Sarpedon exemplifies the emotive tones existing in the poem. He restores the beauty of Sarpedon combing out the hair -- already jet black and lovely -- and arranging the beautiful limbs. He also bleaches the skin _ and Sarpedon's pale white deathly skin contrasts with the jet black hair in the same way that the pearl comb stands out against that hair. Apollo reveals Sarpedon's beauty, makes him beautiful, creating a beautiful scene of which his own comb is an integral part. Sarpedon thus "aav i/dos poid£ei |3a<7iXe£is‘" ("looks like a young king") after Apollo's treatment. The simile "like a young king" shows that Sarpedon is both restored and no longer the dead warrior. He has been transformed into a king only after he is dead; Apollo's rearrangement creates victory where there was only defeat before: "avaTraudpevos' peTd itou eicdpSicre’ ("Resting himself after winning.") The verb "resting" here has a double meaning: first, it means that Sarpedon is dead, and second, that he relaxes as a winner. Thus, verbal artifact joins Apollo’s arrangement and Sarpedon's newly bleached skin to create an elusive but effective victory. In Homer such a glory is represented as reputation and prestige, "kleos andron." In Cavafy, however, glory represents art and the artifact, craftsmen and the tomb. Melancholy and grief motivate the craft of the craftsman and the establishment of the tomb and the tombstone. Melancholy underlines the burial of Sarpedon and the craftsmanship of the skilled workers. The burial is "sad"; "dirges" are heard as the ceremony begins. The tomb and the tombstone emphatically represent both the sad occasion and its aesthetic rendering. Homer represents the death of Sarpedon in a conventional scene of heroic death. The battle scenes, the dialogues between the warriors, and the interventions of the gods represent common elements of similar heroic scenes. Apollo treats Sarpedon as it is apt to treat heroes and the beloved sons of the gods, taking care of his wounds, washing him in a river and pouring ambrosia upon his body, "charging forward as always, head-on, until Polydamas speared his shoulder -- just grazing its ridge but grating bone - he thrust at point-blank range" (1.679-680). Cavafy, on the other hand, represents Zeus to be concerned with the restoration of beauty, the supreme Aesthetic ideal. Zeus "8ev CTT^pyei auTd* ("doesn't tolerate") Sarpedon's body to be dishonored by Patroklus and the Achaeans. He obeys the "Law," which represents the transcedental order, and decides to honor him after death. Apollo, following Zeus' instructions, takes care of Sarpedon in order to reveal his beauty. Cavafy thus emphasizes Sarpedon's physical appearance more than his heroism. The inspired view of the beautiful body will lead the poet to the next aesthetic element, the elevated soul. E. A. Poe defined beauty as an affect of the poet's mind: when, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precicely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an affect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, of of heart - upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating 'the beautiful' (Poe 1984: 16) The death of Sarpedon does not cause mourning or grief for the shortness of life, or of the untimely loss of youth. On the contrary, it elevates the soul of the poet for its beauty and leads him to experience some authentic poetic moments. The soul of the poet is moved onwards and sadness and sorrow are transformed into the "pearl comb" and the arrangement of beautiful limbs. The sad burial becomes an artwork. In this way, although the poem begins with Zeus' mourning, its development soon turns to Sarpedon's treatment and the manifestation of his beauty. The holiness of Sarpedon's body is explicitly stated when Apollo V euXdpeia" ("reverently") raises and dresses it in "XapLTrpd OXiijiiTLa honor, reverence. Lastly, the body turns into an artifact. The skilled workers come from the city to set the tomb and the tombstone in honor of dead Sarpedon; through the elevation of the monument, the poet’s soul becomes elevated, too, and reaches its supreme passion. Art for art's sake essentially stimulates an art which can be relevant to life with no moral implications. It is an art evaluated simply in terms of the immediate pleasure it offers. The poem gives meaning to the poet's life. It becomes a valuable object per se. Walter Pater urged the sensitive individual "to burn always with this hard gemlike flame" and to find the most precious moments of his life in the pursuit of his sensations raised to the pitch of: poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake (quoted by Mcdowell in Preminger 1974: 7) What finally remains beyond tears, death, and melancholy, is the grace of art. The poem ends with no didactic purpose and moral indication. Homer refers to the heroic death of Sarpedon; Cavafy turns this message into a poem within which the poet is privileged to achieve aesthetic purity. The beauty of Sarpedon stands for the poet; although Sarpedon is dead his death becomes the theme of an artwork. For the Aestheticist poets art is the absolute truth, the only truth. The poem ends with this aesthetic sublime, the artistic (and poetic) conception of Sarpedon’s death. Thus, the closure of the poem does not justify Sarpedon as an epic hero, as the epic does, but as an aesthetic ideal. The Symbolist Experiment "Interruption" (1901) is the first Symbolist poem of Cavafy's lliadic cycle. According to Charles Chadwick: Symbolism can [...] be defined as the art of expressing ideas and emotions not by describing them directly, nor by defining them through overt comparisons with concrete images, but by suggesting what these ideas and emotions are, by re-creating them in the mind of the reader through the use of unexplained symbols (Chadwick 1971: 2-3). Cavafy uses the myths of Demeter and Thetis to express human intervention to the gods' acts. The episode is mentioned by Homer in the Hymn to Demeter and by Apollodorus in The Library I, 5. Cavafy mixes the two myths of Achilles and Demophon. Peleus is the father of Achilles and the king of Phthia, and Metaneira is the mother of Demophon and queen of Eleusis. Both Peleus and Metaneira prevented Thetis and Demeter, respectively, from completing their job, that is, to put Achilles and Demophon into the fire to become immortals. Cavafy has omitted several scenes 56 from the Homeric Hymn focusing only on the fact of disagreement in the acts of mortals and immortals. We, the mortals, always interrupt the good acts of gods. Humans are placed in opposition to the immortals. In the Iliad, we see exactly the opposite: gods intervene in the mortals' lives. In Cavafy, the mortals, who are not even honoured heroes, are: Piatmicd Kai direipa dvTa iris' cmy|j.f|s ("hasty and inexperienced creatures of the moment") The content is symbolic; the world of men is pitiful, nonsense, and miserable, while there is another world above, the one of the Greek gods, which represents harmony and beauty. History is used symbolically. The ancient gods, Demeter and Thetis, are evoked with their mythic personae to initiate "£p-ya icaXd’ ("good acts.") However, Metaneira always rushes from the king's palace to interrupt these "good acts." Metaneira personifies destiny and fate. We will see the same motive to be repeated in the "Trojans," as well. Cavafy carries out the message of the ancient myth to modern men. Men are "powerless" and "hasty." Until now we have seen them as "dead heroes" (Achilles, Sarpedon); now they are ironically described as "unfortunate beings." Once more, Cavafy wants to emphasize the powerlessness of modern men and their 57 temporal destiny. He thus criticizes analogous theories in his times about the power of modern man while underlining the "irrational" character of man. Cavafy's irony, indeed, represents a complex development parallel to the evolution of his poetics. In his more mature poetry, written after 1916, irony and the irrational become more tropologically enacted in the way of writing itself in subverting poetic modes of more traditional forms and signification. With "Interruption" and the other Homeric poems that followed it, Cavafy adopted a more advanced and sophisticated view of poetics than that of his other contemporary Greek poets. In addition to formal features, such as brevity, prosaic and narrative style, as well as abstraction and allegory, Cavafy conceived of a more literary relation between signification and textuality; language was understood as an inquiry of self- conscious writing and modes of representation became more crucial. As I said, Cavafy's intertextual reading depends on two texts: the HomericHymn to Demeter and Apollodorus's Library I. Cavafy now turns to the risk of textuality, signification, and representation. He also understands the artificiality of the poem. For Cavafy, the poet is an "artifex" in its Greoco-Roman sense, namely, a constructive imitator. From this point on, his writing will be reflecting more and more this tendency. "Interruption" 5 8 expresses an early attempt at "architectural writing," where space moves around artificial minimal contexts. For example, the playful use of meter that ironically disrupts the conventions of the established metrics in provoking various explosive conflicts of space (17). Rhyming also violates the rules: aa bccb dd. Supposedly, there is an implied caesura before the word "aXXd " ("but") which divides the poem in two reversed but equal poetic phrases. Rhyming thus can be notated as follows (where the slash stands for the caesura): aa bc/cb dd. Cavafy understands very well that the poem iscomposed, despite the various adversarial contexts which contain it; namely, it becomes a battlefield of contradicting and dangerous balancings. The more these confrontations persist, the more the poetic pleasure is gained. Seferis also notices Cavafy's tactics in writing: IlapaTTipoi tru? to £kttXtiktik6 t 6 cto iSidp.op p.6vo fie Ta xaP^CTFaTd T0U. aXXd pLe t l ? S ucticoXU s' t o u T rp orrd v t u v . A u t t ) vop.t£u elvai T| (3dcrr| t t is 1 irpuTOTUtrl as t o u . H TTolriai1! tou elvai £va aSidKono ai>^paapia Trduu o ra ep.Trd8id ttis*. ("I note that what is amazing with tis man is that he was able to create this very special character of his art, not only with his merits, but, above all, with his difficulties. This, I think, is the base of his novelty. His 59 poetry is a continuous escalation on its obstacles." (Seferis 1974: 141-42) Another issue is the critique of the ethical consciousness of the poetic self. This principle begins in Cavafy as an autonomization of the poetic self, as we have seen it through the constant experimentation, which will later develop into a more complete criticism of the social and literary institutions of his era. He has also written other famous poems expressing a high degree of critical consciousness, such as "Candles" (1893), "Walls" (1896), "Windows" (1897), and "Waiting for the Barbarians" (1898). Cavafy confronts the poetic self with crucial ethical questions, such as the artist's separation and isolation from society, the gradual understanding of his homosexuality, as well as the ennui of the modern individual. In "Interruption," we, the human beings, are the ones who intervene in the good acts of gods. Destiny can also be traced in earlier Romantic poems, such as in "Priam," where "the ill-disposed destiny is deaf" to Hektor's father. Cavafy wished to show that modern men are unable to do great deeds, "di/Ta T-qs" aTLyin)?"- Gods are presented as "machines." Like automata, they intervene into mortals' lives, and act with a lack of spiritual essence and human substance. Cavafy places gods in an absurdist context: in a sometimes tragicomic way, he presents them as fictitiously governing fate and chance. 60 Seferis who tries to understand human beings through a dialectic relation with history and fate criticizes Cavafy as follows: ...T a Piacmicd icai dTreipa dvTa tti? cttlyjxi^s'... ITdXi Ta ^uxdpia- o UTroicopi anted S’ Tdvos’. Ttrdpxei pid pdi/tpTi Trape^Tnaxi a n ? ax^oreiS’ ai/6pd!>TTou icai Geoii •yia tov Ka|3d ("...The hasty and inexperienced beings of the moment... The crumbs again; the diminutive tone. There is a permanent misunderstanding by Cavafy in his relationship of human beings and gods. God is indifferent, and if it happens to him to want to please us, we, the inexperienced and hasty beings, 'interrupt' his good work.") (Seferis 1974: 386) In "Trojans" (1905) Cavafy makes another deliberate allusion and gives his own interpretation to the Trojan myth but from the side of the defeated. Cavafy's Trojans are different from Homer's. Cavafy represents Trojans metaphorically as symbolizing the decadence and despair of modern men. From "Trojans" on, Cavafy leaves the Homeric text aside and deals more with the Homeric myth. As Ricks notes: It is easy to see that both poems ['Ithaca' and the 'Trojans'] are of a different kind from the 'Ancient Days' poems [...] both have been described as 'metaphorical'; for 6 1 neither does the existence of theIliad and the Odyssey as poems, or the figure of Homer, have the slightest significance. Each mythical exem plum simply is the moral of each poem; each has been apprehended in what is perceived to be its essence rather than in any Homeric context (Ricks 1989: 86). Maronitis, however, finds some textual references between the original and Cavafy's poem. 8ud d p u ? TrotfujLaTct (t o u ? Tpiie? icai rnv I0dicr|) o apxaio? p.000? xPTlcriP0Tr0L^ TaL peT napa|3dXXei t i ? TrpocrTrdOeie? xai t i ? au|i p e t o u ? iXiaSiicdu? -rrpoyovou? t o u . Etctl eTTLTuyxdueTai T] e iriO u p iiT ^ e^iCTCoari ueoTepiK oi) K ai {J.U01KO0 UTTOKeip^l/OU. ("Yet in two poems (the 'Trojans' and the 'Ithaca') the ancient myth is taken metaphorically. In the 'Trojans' the modern plural subject parallels his endeavours and his sufferings with his lliadic predecessors. This is how the desired equation between modern and the mythical subject is achieved" (Maronitis 1983: 72). In my view, Cavafy did a little of both. He apparently read the Homeric passages (as Maronitis rightly admits) but at this advanced stage his approach to Homer had been far more textual and deliberate than his two commentators suggest. The "mythical use" of Homer, as Ricks proposes, is vague. Cavafy's approach was more skillful. He precisely wanted to avoid the ideological 62 implications of the Homeric text. The target text no longer carried the source and spirit of the original; instead, it was rivaled and misread by the ambitious modern poet. It should be noted here to the fact that Cavafy overtly sided with the Trojans, not the Greeks. Modern men (and the poet himself included) join the efforts of the defeated, "Our efforts are like those of the Trojans." Obviously, Cavafy's poem, as Maronitis and Ricks note, lacks any direct link to Homer. However, as was the case with "Interruption," some lines, indeed, correspond to particular passages from Homer. Maronitis writes again: ITapd Tai>Ta, o Ka(3d ("Nevertheless, even when he summarizes an entire myth, Cavafy refers to particular passages of his literary source. For instance, in 'Trojans' there are at least the following direct references to theIliad. Achilles in front of the trench is precisely found in lines of the 18th rapsody. Cavafy’s statement 'so we move outside ready to fight' condenses the first lines of the 22nd rapsody. The Cavafian distich 'and we scurry around the walls trying to save ourselves by running away,' transports the sorrowful course of Hector in the same lliadic rapsody, the 22nd. And finally, the Cavafean dirge of Priam and Hecuba on the walls is the simple resonance of the corresponding one of the same persons in theIliad, to persuade Hector to enter the castle avoiding the cruel Achilles." (Maronitis 1983: 66) Homer narrated the events in accordance with oral tradition. He depicted the Trojans as conquered, but he avoided narrating the final fight between the Achaians and the Trojans. Rather, he focused his attention on the glory and immortality of his heroes. Where Homer's poem is mostly about "heroes” Cavafy's is about "those who suffer defeat." The Trojans are taken as a symbol of lost men in a decadent era. They mourn for "our” days. Priam and Hekabe mourn for "us b itte rly ." Thus it is we, modern human beings, who are the conquered. They suffer defeat by fate. Bereft of an individual profile, they merely represent miserable pawns diametrically different from the epic heroes. Homer speaks from the Greek side, but Cavafy speaks from the side of the condemned and the 64 suffering. Already in "Priam," Cavafy seems sympathetic to the Trojans, as we can see from the dead young ones (Achilles and Sarpedon) and finally he mourns for the Trojans. Cavafy extracts this powerful dramatic image from the past to characterize the modern world. The Trojans' point of view, a people definitively lost and sunk into historical memory seems better able to describe the moral decay of the individual. Cavafy, apparently, extracts the Trojans and the other lliadic characters, such as Achilles, Priam, and Hecuba from Homer, but enacts them as symbolic figures. In Symbolism, a symbol signifies an abstract idea or an indirect emotion. In Cavafy Trojans mean the following: they are always ill-fated, willing to change their destiny and move to fight, but finally, terrified, they run to save themselves in vain. Ideas of decadence are more evident in this poem than in the previous ones. We already saw Maronitis's explication of the poem, the identification of the ancient with the modern subject. We might suppose that Cavafy’s implication was larger than that. In the first place, he addressed the poem to the Europeans adopting many current ideas of decadence. Indeed, the poem was too advanced to be read by Greeks at that time and was, consequently, easily dismissed. But read in a Greek context, this claustrophobic poem seemed to be in stark opposition to Palamas's lyricism and openly exquisite style. It was not a usual elegaic lament in 65 elaborate metrics and refined versions but a pathetic solipsist monologue incompatible with the current ideas of poetry in Greece. Furthermore, Cavafy's siding with the Trojans challenged commonplace nationalistic biases and showed them that Greece was a larger nation with a more troubled history and identity. For Cavafy, the Trojans were another Greek people as well. Cavafy implicitly criticizes localism and raises the issue of cosmopolitanism in Greece, the same and the other, Greece and the near East, an issue which will start preoccupying him more and more from now on. For the "Trojans" are the "barbarian" others, the near Eastern allies of the Greeks, who once formed a unified cosmopolitan Christian civilization, and who still nowadays keep these memories of Hellenism alive. Thus, the "Trojans" actually are an early example for the Greeks to understand other alternative dimensions of Hellenism sought in the East. Palamas searched for Hellenism in the European Renaissance among the Greek refugee scholars of Byzantium who escaped the Ottoman rule. Cavafy searched the East where a lively Greek tradition still existed but was dismissed by official Greek culture. The main concerns of Symbolism include the evocation of feelings through the symbolic use of concrete objects and the predominance of form over meaning. As regards the emotive element, there is a fundamental difference between Romantic and 66 Symbolist emotion: in Romanticism, emotions spring from the poet or the hero and reveal the internal nature of things, or the inward reality of the Romantic hero which goes beyond external evidence. In Symbolism, emotions come from the poet but only to show his intentions to the readers. In "Trojans," emotions and feelings prevail over ideas or meaning. The poem's motif is "effort and failure." Only a description of the poem's progression is sufficient to reveal us the formalistic and suspensive play of the ill-fated effort. The efforts are like those of men prone to disaster. In the next line, the men prone to disaster are identified with the Trojans. Thus, we learn that the Trojans symbolize the conquered men in this poem. The stanza's optimism is already undercut by Trojan disaster. The ending is already suffused with failure: Koppd-ri KdTopSuWoupe- Koppdn TTatpvoup’ ctrdvw pa?- kl a p x ^ C o u p e i/dxovipe Sdppos1 kgu KaX^j eXutSes1 ("We just begin to get somewhere, begin to gather a little strenth, grow almost bold and hopeful.") In the second stanza, Achilles rises from the trench. Failure is certain. In the next two stanzas, the same scheme of effort and failure is repeated, and the poem ends with the last stanza which 67 concludes the finality of failure. Thus, the dirge appears as a reasonable end. In other words, the purpose of the poem is to express feelings that are never openly revealed but only suggested. The men prone to disaster, the Trojans, Achilleus, the crisis and the dirge represent the emotions of failure. The boldness and hope suggest the emotions of effort. The poem ends with the assertion of failure. The dirge of Priam and Hecuba suggests the definite fall and the melancholic closure. Cavafy is interested more in repetitive and suggestive emotions than in ideas and meaning. The poem constantly adheres to the same feelings without elaborating them but only creating a monotonous melancholic and pessimistic atmosphere. Undoubtely, "Trojans" is one of the best of Cavafy's decadent poems. Decadence is, however, a vague term andwas largely applied to British and French literature of the 1890's (18). Decadence represented the degeneration of political, social, and cultural milieu and the crisis of Western ideas. Remy de Gourmont states: Having seen with its own eyes the death-struggle of Byzantium, Europe coupled these two ideas, Byzantium- Decadence, which became a commonlace... From Byzantium, this association of ideas was extended to the whole Roman Empire, which is now, for sage and respectable historians, nothing but a series of decadences... This commonplace, of Christian origin, has been popularized, in modern times, as everyone knows, by Montesquieu and Gibbon (Gourmont 1922: 8-9). 68 Renato Poggioli makes many insightful remarks regarding Cavafy's ironic stance towards decadence. The total effect is that of satirical parable, full of moral insight. 'Waiting for the barbarians' portrays decadence as a way of life without issue, as a fatuous automatic suicide of the will. It is in a negative, and , ultimately, non-tragic sense that such a life finds the solution of its inner crisis -- that is, by ignoring it. (Poggioli 1959: 148) This comment can be perfectly applied to "Trojans" as well. For us who suffer there seems to be no solution, "micpd yia pd? o ITplapos k g u n Etcdpii KXatve.’ However, Cavafy's alternative to the malaise of Western culture exists. It is the re-settling of modern man with the ancient world. Cavafy believes that men should by christened with the ancient spirit again and to reconsider Western values. It is the ethics, justice, and citizenship of men in the Hellenistic era that he finds encouraging and promising. Cavafy's vision was Romantic in attitude but with political meaning. He himself was well aware of the incogruities in modern Western culture, and particularly, with British decadent writers. His response to them was to re read the ancients (as well as the orient) but without Western Romantic bias. For him it was much easier to conceive this message, because Alexandria was still under the influence of a lively antiquarian (and self-consciously peripheral) sense of Greek culture. Thus, when the British and French writers saw in Constantinople and Alexandria the most representative examples 69 of decadence, he opposed this because these cities represented the struggling and neglected part of Hellenism. Cavafy’s decadence, therefore, did not ’fit' the European modes of thinking. Instead it transgressed them by showing, first, that Western culture alone was in crisis and decadence would be ascribed to these cultures only, and second, that concepts of the subject should be re-examined in light of a new reading of Greek antiquity(19). The Ithaka of writing With "Unfaithfulness" (1905) and "Ithaka" (1911) Cavafy's intertextuality and distance from Homer becomes more evident. Now neither Symbolism nor any other aesthetic dogma preoccupies him but more complex questions of signification and representation. It is myth and the subversion of the myth that concern him. Beyond the work of an historian and a mythographer, he understands that the poet's material is language in its entire metaphorical and tropological purview. The title of the poem is symbolic: unfaithfulness to logos itself. Margaret Alexiou rightly states that "Unfaithfulness" is a comment upon a quotation within a quotation with quotation marks as if to draw attention to its 70 intertextuality, with the story of Achilles, Thetis and Apollo as a paradigm" (Alexiou 1985: 161-62). Cavafy's ironic and rhetorical language, which constantly subverts the historical source as well as his dramatic and anti lyric style, is further developed here (20). The theme is "Unfaithfulness"; unfaithfulness to Apollo's words but also to Homer's as well, as Plato misreads Homer and Cavafy comments upon Plato's misreading. As in other poems, such as "Interruption" and "Thermopylae," Cavafy uses the method of fatal reversing of human fortune by a coincidence. This is a technique of intensifying the dramatic element, borrowed from tragedy. Thus, Cavafy subverts not only the Homeric myth but also the authority of the poet in discourse itself. Apollo is a poet and a prophet but he is also telling lies. Alexiou claims that "there is no absolute truth, and therefore there can be no implicit faith: everything depends on the art of interpretation, or the skill of deception(apate)” (Alexiou 1983:163). Cavafy chooses one of Plato's most infamous statements to revise Homer. Beaton comments on that: The lengthy epigraph from The Republic which prefaces the poem does much more that refer us to the ancient source for Cavafy's treatment of the myth of Achilles 7 1 [...] It also refers to what is probably the first recorded rational critique of myth and its function in society, namely the part in The Republic where Socrates argues that only morally edifying forms or variants of myths should be allowed currency in the ideal state. The reference of this epigraph is precisely to the historical moment in Greek _ and European _ culture of the first rational attempt at curtailment of the mythic function (Beaton 1983: 29-30) The last Homeric poem is the proverbial "Ithaka." "Ithaka" (1911) is a later development of an earlier version, whose title only, "Second Odyssey" (1894), was found in the poet's archive. "Ithaka" is also a Symbolist poem but with an optimistic end. The poet's journey for aesthetic satisfaction has come to an end. Ithaca is poor but gave him the exciting adventure of writing. H I0dicr| & £8o)cre t cupalo TafelSi ("Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey") Cavafy found poetic expression to be "•m-wx'-K'n" ("poor") although "sincere" "t| I edict) 8ev oe yk\aae' ("Ithaka won’t have fooled you") without many decorations. After he tested many modes of writing of many -isms (Romanticism, Aestheticism, Symbolism) and gathered precious knowledge, the time came for him to anchor and enjoy what he gained. George Seferis also makes similar remarks. Seferis interprets Cavafy's “Ithaka" as the poet's journey into poetics. "With 'Ithaka' the first journey of Proteus is over; it began in 1886; twenty five years" (Seferis 1974: 429). 72 Cavafy himself feels as if he benefited from this protean journey, Va etixecrai vdi/ai paKpii? o 8p6po?’ ("hope your road is a long one.") Although in his private life he did not seek adventures, in his writings he wandered considerably for twenty five years until he found his personal voice. "Ithaka" indeed summarizes Cavafy's aesthetic principles extracted by the experience of all these years: first, the struggle for personal expression in defiance of original sources: Tous“ AatCTTpuydi'as1 icai t o u s KincXuma? to v 0ujiujp.£i/o noaeiScii/a jiti ("Laestrygonians, Cyclops, don't be afraid of them") Second, the poet writes with his mind and intellect as well as his feeling, "ti crKtiffis crou ut|rr|XiV ("high thoughts") and "eicXeicTTj CTUYtclv'TiaiS' t o nueupa icai t o craipa crou ayytCei' ("rare excitement stirrs your soul and body.") The final product of his poetry is both of soul and body, an experiential writing. Third, a search for innovation: ttou pe t I euxaplcrTncri, p.e t I xaP& da p.TTatv'eis1 ere Xi|j.£i/as“ TTpu>Toei8u)p£i/ous' ("with what pleasure, what joy, harbors you 're seeing for the first time") 73 until he arrives at Ithaka, the materialization of the aesthetic goal. And finally, this new world is "poor," humble, as all Cavafy’s later work will be. This 'poor' language was the outcome of Cavafy's rebellion against the literary bourgeois edifice of a stylized national literature. Joseph Brodsky interprets it from a slightly different angle: Starting as early as 1900-1910, he began to strip his poems from all poetic paraphernalia _ rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance, and, as already mentioned, rhymes. [...] This technique comes out of Cavafy’s realization that language is not a tool of cognition but one of assimilation, that the human being is a natural bourgeois and uses language for the same ends as he uses housing or clothing (Brodsky 1977: 32). With "Ithaka" Cavafy left Homer aside and wrote the most intertextual of his Homeric poems. As Ricks notes: The hunt for other literary sources, in the case of 'Ithaca' at least, seems to be a never-ending one _ Epicurus, Petronius, Dante, Du Bellay, Baudelaire, Tennyson (Ricks 1989: 87). Cavafy takes the theme of journey from Dante and Tennyson. However, preoccupied with innovation, as Jusdanis shows, he focuses on the preparation before Odysseus' return. By writing on this very popular topos, especially after Dante and Tennyson, Cavafy of course was faced with the difficulty of adding something new. His own supplement to the Odyssean story is to address the hero before his nostos, that is, before he begins to amass the experiences of his ten-year journey home. (Jusdanis 1987: 143) Thus, Cavafy was faced with this double task: first, to defamiliarize Greek poetic tradition by adopting a number of non- Homeric sources, and second, to seek innovation in the already heavily accumulated tradition of Ullyses's theme in the Western tradition. After Homer As my analysis demonstrates, the main pursuits of Cavafy's re-writing Homer, unlike Palamas's, transcended all nationalistic and ideological bents that were claiming "continuity". Instead, he sought stylistic innovation, aesthetic autonomy and revision of tradition. Intertextuality and a self-conscious writing were also among his interests even in this early stage of his work. Cavafy paves the way for an alternate writing in Greece, which will not follow the style and the rules of national poetics, which will not identify the poet's experience with each historical fate of the nation. His irony towards gods, Seferis's "yuca;ria," the infidelity towards Homeric and Platonic logos are rather subjective reactions. Here for the first time in Greek literature we are confronted with a subjective interpretation of the myth and history even in irrational terms. The defamiliarization of tradition, the preference for aesthetic autonomy rather than a national style, the modern exchange with Europe, and his “outside” perspective from the diaspora, among other things, make Cavafy a precursor of the Greek Avant-Garde. Jusdanis states that: At a time that Cavafy was applying modernist techniques to poetry, formulating a self-conscious writing, and exploring the meaning of literariness, Greek society was asking for a patriotic literature that would posit Greece, not art, as the compelling subject of the writer [...] The principal ideology informing a writer's task was nationalism and not, as in Cavafy's case, aesthetics (Jusdanis 1987: 177) In the 1930's, Nicolas Calas took Cavafy’s lesson of understanding the radically of this poetry. In 1931-32, he wrote that: H ttoItictti irpoxwpet crfipepa pe Ta (Sapid \6-yia twi/ <{>ouToupi(7T(o v, inTeppeaXicrTiiJ u Kai ipayiCTT TToiTiToiv pe t i ? truK i^s1 (frpaaeis tou KXout£X, tou T.2. EXiot icai tou Sikou pa? Ka(3acj>Ti (Calas 1982: 49) Cavafy's poetics was more complex than the shallow emotionalism and lyric verses of most contemporary Greek poetry. He was concerned with more difficult and timely poetic issues and viewed the role of poetry in society and Greece in the world from a more advanced point of view than his many Greek fellows. NOTES 1) This is how we can explain the poetic seduction of many major modern poets and writers for Cavafy's "Greece". The following prominent authors and artists have been intrigued by Cavafy’s representation of Greece: E.M. Forster, Laurence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Joseph Brodsky, Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Derek Walcott, David Hockney, and Edward W. Said. 2) Consider also Cavafy's essay "My Poetics" (1903), where he considers poetry as a work in progress, exacty what he did with the Homeric poems. 3) George Savidis (1972: 5) dates this text between 1894-1906. Because of its thematic relevance with other poems, especially "The Enemies" (1900), he proposes that it must have been written before 1900. 4) See also Jusdanis's essay "C. P. Cavafy and the Politics of Poetry" in Alexiou - Lambropoulos (eds.) (1985). Jusdanis analyses Cavafy's understanding of public discourse and power of public opinion. 5) Of course, the validity of a prose text, such as the "Reflections 77 of an Old Artist," is questioned, because the poet always preferred to express his views by the means of his poetry alone rather than his other prose texts which he wrote asparerga. Savidis counts 107 (I!) poems where Cavafy touches upon poetic matters (1985: 308-11). Nevertheless, I will include this text in my study with the confidence that the poems themselves will prompt us to the same conclusions. Savidis also seems to agree with this by quoting a statement of Seferis: "the safest way to get acquainted with the ideas and the poetics of Cavafy is to listen to, as best as we can, to what his poems say" (Seferis, 1974: 327, quoted by Savidis, 1985: 283). Vyron Leondaris also states: "certainly Cavafy is a theoretician of poetry in the most precise sense of the word, he is even the most theoretical of all other Greek poets not by theoretical texts but by his poems themselves" (1983: 27). 6) The oral character of Cavafy's poetry is an important issue that transforms his late poetics, but has notbeen discussed by critics. This theme relates to adaptation of prosaic tropes and the address to an alternate middle-class audience and the ones of commerce and the modern "city." It must also be distinguished from the high, sophisticated and academic discourse of a national and academic poetry. 7) Jusdanis brilliantly analyses Cavafy's overcoming of tradition (1987: 141-55). 8) See also George Steiner (1977). 9) For the dating of Cavafy's poems, see Pieris (1983). For the dating of the Homeric poems, see Maronitis (1983). The "Night March of Priam" was written in 1893 launching the cycle of the Homeric poems. However, Savidis states that there is a previous 78 (dated in November 1892), albeit repudiated, version of the "Funeral of Sarpedon" besides the one dated 1898. According to this information, the "Night March of Priam" represents his second attempt to write a Homeric poem. 10) Maronitis maintains that the corresponding Homeric scene extends from 1.159 to 1.338. However, I will consider the 1.192- 416. Priam enters the scene in 1.192 - I always refer to line- numbers in Fagle's translation, Maronitis counts from the original Greek text; therefore, there is also a slightly different numbering. The first stanza of Cavafy's poem refers precisely to Homer's 1.192-201. I extend Homer’s picture up to 1.416 where Priam goes to meet Achilles in the darkness of the night, "a sudden darkness had swept across the earth" (1.146), leaving aside Priam's following encounter with Hermes, since itis not mentioned by Cavafy at all. It is also true, as Maronitis points out, that Cavafy indeed seems to have left the poem incomplete; perhaps, not incomplete but with an unsuitable ending. 11) Maronitis lists this poem among the "transitional ones" that mark a progress from Cavafy's Romanticism to Symbolism. He states: ("The language of the 'Night March' is evidently phanariotic, the versification follows patterns of the Athenian School, the rhyme, in particular, recalls Karasoutsas, while in 1.25-35 technique-patterns of the Romantic manner are accumulated. However, the composition of the poem is restrictive and disciplined and the posited themes and motives in their polyvalent structure show the "Night March" at least a forerunner for Cavafy's entrance to symbolism.”) (Maronitis 1983: 39) Pieris, too, reaches a similar conclusion (Pieris1983: 33-39). 12) Pieris classifies the poem in a transitional phase between 79 Romanticism and Symbolism. According to Pieris, from 1882 to 1891/94 Cavafy writes Romantic poems; from 1891/94 to 1899/1903 he writes Symbolist poems; and after 1900/03 he gradually proceeds to Realism (1983:9). Maronitis, who follows closely Pieris's view, acknowledges the Romantic character of the poem, although he also finds some Symbolist elements. 13) The poem indeed presents both similarities and disimilarities from the original. The main similarities include: at many points Cavafy borrows phrases and words from Homer which he simply translates. Such phrases are: "pain and lamentation" addresses I. 194 "cries and mourning"; "Fate" pops up twice in the Homeric passage, I. 248 "strong Fate spun out" and in Priam's angry words to his sons, I. 302 "my life so cursed by fate!" The "full bars of gold," the "tripods" and the "cauldrons" are all to be found in Homer, tool; (I. 276-77) Cavafy's discussed concept of darkness is also borrowed from Homer (I. 416) "a sudden darkness had swept across the earth." The night is again mentioned in I. 429 "the godsent night." Maronitis asserts that Cavafy in this poem reads Homer in a revisionary way but without undoing the order of the text. Kai Ta 8£tca puGoXoyiKd TToi^paTa tou Ka(3d ("All the ten mythological poems of Cavafy prove to be revisionary readings of their literary models. Sometimes the revision is evident and overturning -fo r example, "Oedipus," or "Ithaca", -- sometimes discriminating -fo r example, "The Horses of Achilles" 80 or "The Funeral of Sarpedon." The "Night March of Priam" lies in the middle of these two extremes" (Maronitis 1983: 41 ftn.) 14) See also C. A. Trypanis (1977: 59). 15) Greek Romantic poets who write in the purist (katharevousa) include the following: Raghavis, Karasoutsas, Paraschos, Tantalidis, Koumanoudis, Valavanis, Paparrhegopoulos, and Vasileiadis. 16) See also Savidis (1985: 257-80) 17) In fact, Cavafy questions traditional poetry in Greece by introducing many novel techniques that concern textuality, orality, quotation, artificiality, linearity, and synchronicity, to name a few. However, the goal of the present study is not to explore all Cavafy's techniques that disrupt traditional poetry in Greece. 18) For Decadence, see Whissen (1989), Thornton (1983), Fletcher (1979), and Gourmont (1922). 19) It should be realized that there are more, particularly non western, notions of decadence, too. See also Whissen (1989). 20) Roderick Beaton believes that "Unfaithfulness" is the first historical poem by Cavafy. According to him: This poem, ostensibly mythical, in fact probes the non- rational world of myth with the rational tools of the historian to expose the paradox of myth as a contadiction in reason and in rationally _ grounded morality. Hence the poem's title, which alludes not only to Apollo's bad faith but to the impossibility experienced by Socrates [in the epigram] of any longer having faith or belief in such ambitious material as inherited mythology. Cavafy 'demythologizes' myth in this poem by rewriting it in terms of historical discourse (1983: 30). CHAPTER II NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS AND HIS CRITIQUE OF GREEKNESS In addition to Cavafy, Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) also distanced himself from the Greek writers who shared a narrow nationalist viewpoint. Kazantzakis’s work disrupted the late 19th century trend which romanticized and nationalized the Hellenic tradition. His work, therefore, ran against the ethnocentric Greek philologists who hatched the ideology of Greekness. In a schematic way, Cavafy and Kazantzakis shared the following positions. They rejected tradition and continuity in Greek culture by foregrounding "neglected" texts from the pre- classical (Kazantzakis) and Hellenistic periods (Cavafy). They adopted a revisionist model for Hellenism founded on the notion of "re-discovery" and diaspora. They opposed the assimilation and homogenization of neo-Hellenism. After the liberation of Crete (1913), the Balkan wars (1912-15), and the uprooting of some three million Greek refugees (1885-1922) the Greek governments and the official State proclaimed a politics of cultural assimilation to foster a more unified national identity in their attempt to resolve intrinsic conflicts. National literature worked in the light of this formation. Cavafy and Kazantzakis, however, 82 83 retained their particular local identity (Alexandrian and Cretan respectively) and strived for cultural heterogeneity (1). They challenged the traditions of Church, State, and Family with homosexuality (Cavafy) and with "atheism" (Kazantzakis.) They also favored a cosmopolitanism which transcended the boundaries of the Greek nation. In this chapter I will discuss how Kazantzakis's cosmopolitan modernism challenges the ideology of Greekness in hisOdyssey (1937) and Prometheus (1943). The Odyssey The Odyssey was for Kazantzakis his most cherished work. It preoccupied him from 1925 to 1937. It is an epic of 33,333 seventeen-syllable verses. He wrote it at a time that the august Greek scholarly consensus disapproved of long narrative poems based on myth and favored short lyric poems in demotic Greek (2). The baroque length of Kazantzakis's poem shocked Greek scholars and critics. They attacked its form, unusual spelling, unfamiliar diction, its meter, and its 'anti-classical' style.” The Odyssey caused turmoil because it was incompatible with the programmatic poetic principles of established Greek periodicals, such as Ta Nea Grammata (3). Kazantzakis's centrifugal and experimental hero is a different man from Homer's. Homer's Odysseus leaves Troy to 84 return to Ithaca and Penelope. Kazantzakis's hero leaves the comfort of Penelope's home (after their reunion) to go to the heart of Africa. Kazantzakis borrows many linguistic features from Homer (4) but reshapes them in order to retell the myth of his own times. Kazantzakis does not emulate Homer to be recommended as the father of Greek literature, as Palamas did, nor does he express any nostalgia for antiquity, as Seferis did. Kazantzakis adopts the non-Homeric hypothesis of Odysseus-wanderer, for such a Romantic adoption of the myth fits better with the anarchist figure that he wished to display. Obviously, this Odysseus owes much to the Odysseuses of Dante and Tennyson. In translating Dante's Commedia, Kazantzakis collected the first seeds for hisO dyssey. According to W. B. Stanford: Kazantzakis’s Ulysses is an avatar of Dante’s centrifugal hero, and derives from the tradition which leads from Dante through Tennyson and Pascoli to the present day. (Stanford 1976: 235) Kazantzakis's Odysseus desires to reach a knowledge of life and God Tennyson's Ulysses praises life and travel, the adventure of knowledge: to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought. (Tennyson 1882: 62) 85 By dissociating his hero from Homer's model, Kazantzakis was more free to change familiar scenes. He kept for himself every licence of innovation to re-create a hero according to the needsof Europeans and Greeks as well. For Kazantzakis's work, like Cavafy's, always contains this ambiguity: on the one hand, to carry messages in response to current European ideas, and on the other hand, to enlighten and mobilize contemporary Greeks. Stanford aptly notes: [Joyce and Kazantzakis] see Ulysses not as regional, or a national emblem, but as a cosmopolitan, supra national figure. He bears, in a sense, the hopes and fears, the wisdom and folly, both of contemporary European society and of the whole European literary tradition. Further, he bears this accumulated load of eagerness and anxiety at a time when Europeans are uncommonly apprehensive for the welfare of European civilization, and acutely conscious of the need for a new supra-national organization of society. (Stanford 1976: 225) Like Virgil's Aeneas, Kazantzakis's Odysseus will carry with him the fate of modern man. Stanford concludes that Kazantzakis's O dyssey "is an exploration of the meaning of freedom" (1976: 235) which can only be reached through struggle and suffering. The modern Greek Odysseus reflects Kazantzakis's restless mind to mobilize people 86 in transforming society during the 1930's through the contradictions of Greek modernity. As Vrasidas Karalis notes: [Kazantzakis's] symbols seem contradictory because the social undertakings themselves that produce them are contradictory. (Karalis 1988: 49) Kazantzakis thereby created a new Odysseus who counter proposes a historical awareness to the nationalist idealism of the advocates of Greekness. Kazantzakis detached his epic from the Greek classical tradition and located it in Africa. Odysseus is a citizen of the world who abandons his Greece to explore the possibilities of a new foreign world. He does not tolerate national boundaries. |j.a to onraGt ttou £cibi/ou|jicu, kl eyc5 abuopa 8ev K a rtx0*! (Now, by the sword I wear, I too concede no boundaries!) (2. 1333-35) Odysseus' cosmopolitanism opens to the non-European world and worships a new god with the natives of Africa. Africa represents the undiscovered land which possesses spiritual and material resources unknown to the Europeans. Odysseus is an uprooted rebel, a desperado who wishes to expand his knowledge and experience much beyond the boundaries of European culture. 87 The natives of Africa will teach him the primitive dionysian principles of life. Kazantzakis leaves neo-Hellenic tradition aside, because the truths of life and the problems of man concern him rather than ideas about the nation. According to Pandelis Prevelakis, Kazantzakis: eXeuGepoiuei t t |v TTolmcrf| t o u t o u rrvetip.aTos'' kcll 6 xl T0V aifiaro^' (frees with his poetry 'ideas of mind' not 'ideas of blood'.) (Prevelakis 1958:70) His intention is not to become a national poet (5). Nonetheless, he does not reject the tradition altogether. He rather selects from it those ideas that are more likely to broaden the mind of modern man. He objects to the abuse of Greek antiquity in the name of "continuity" and Greekness. His Odyssey's outlook is towards the future and the universal. Odysseus celebrates his detachment from motherland and tradition as follows: ITdei to Xoupl, ir (There goes the navel cord, lads! Cut! We're free of mother!) (Kazantzakis 8.1006) 88 At the same time, he leaves behind all the representative features of Greekness. £x€T€ yXuic^s' XaP^S“ xai TUKpes* tti? E X X d 8 a s \ dcnrpa xwPL(*. y a X d C ia a x v d |3 o u v d K ai TTeiiica. Kai Oupdpil (Farewell, O Greece, with all your small sweet joys and griefs, white towns and hamlets, azure mountains heather, pine.) (Kazantzakis 8. 1007-11) He thus leaves behind the Greek landscape, the "balanced virtues," the measure, and the rational mind. He then sets sail to his new land, which is expected to represent irrational passion, instinctual life, and a dionysian style of life. Peter Bien states that the poem's geographical symbolism leads Odysseus away from the values of Greece to the barbarian vitality of Africa. (Bien 1989: 208). Kazantzakis believes that Greece must abandon the folkloristic idealism of tradition and rediscover its dionysian foundations. Kazantzakis's cosmopolitan mind was open to local cultures and the exchange of ideas; non-Europeans should revitalize the aging European cultures. For him the end of Western civilization is approaching while the dawn of a new era of multi-ethnic societies is emerging. Karalis notes that: 89 T 6 t c iypailie t t } v OSOaaeia, to duo? eud? peTayevdaTepou and to Sued pas’ TroXiTiapd, -q aTiJJiaCTia tou oirotoL ai^pepa pdvo ore X^PeS" SianoXiTLCTp.iKds1, 6 it(os' e tv a i ol Evu)pdves“ IToXiTeleg, jjnropet va KaTav/oTiOet. ("Then he wrote The Odyssey, the epic of a later civilization than ours, whose meaning nowadays can be understood only in multi-ethnic countries, such as the United States") (Karalis 1988: 50) Kazantzakis wrote the epic of an alternative Hellenism with the awareness of the particularity of his historical moment. He understands how crucial his epoch is for the whole world but, at the same time, he believes that the dionysian element, born in Greece, can revitalize an aging Europe. In a letter to Prevelakis, he said: the Odyssey [...] continues the huge epic of the white race, Homer. It closes a circle that so many centuries have left open. And it closes it precisely in an age astonisingly similar to the state of the world in the twelfth century B.C., shortly after the Achaeans' invasion, shortly before the invasion of the Dorians and the creation _ following a middle age _ of a new civilization (Prevelakis 1958: 109, Bien 1989: 195-96). 90 This dynamic and optimistic stance, as opposed to James Joyce's tired Leopold Bloom, exemplifies Kazantzakis's radicalism. Levitt adds characteristically that: Kazantzakis's hero [...] seeks a new way that will revivify the old standards and make them significant again, that will renew society itself and, most importantly, will provide new meaning to individual lives. The original Odysseus, despite his aggressiveness, and Leopold Bloom, behind his mildly socialist ideas, remain essential conservative; Kazantzakis's hero, reveling in his age between great epochs, is a radical who will remake society, restate our values, reinstate the spirit of man himself. (Levitt 1983: 43) Like Cavafy, Kazantzakis is not pessimistic but rather optimistic when confronted with the crisis of the modern mind. Both turn to the "inexhaustible" sources of the ancient Greek spirit to rejuvinate Europe. Behind their beliefs lies the fact that both realized that ancient Greek literature must be re-read differently from the way it was read by the Romantics of western Europe. In addition, the fact that Greek modernity was so incomplete by the 1930's was still bringing hope for continued change. Kazantzakis's cosmopolitanism exactly originates from his dionysian understanding of Hellenism, which is broader than the nationalistic view of the writers of Greekness and Romantic European conception. His Hellenism defies borders, meets with the other, it is based on antithesis, its view is synthetic. Moreover, Kazantzakis discovers this synthetic mind to be a fundamental characteristic of the fragmented Hellenic culture. Stanford again notes that: [Kazantzakis] thinks to create a synthesis of all those varied racial elements and to find a way of expressing their variegated richness. His Odyssey embodies his conception of this synthesis, and is an expression of this 'hyperhellenic' tradition. (Stanford 1968: 237) What Europe needs to inherit from Hellenism is this synthetic view in order to reach a balance between East and West, and Greece represents the necessary passage to this union. Kazantzakis's cosmopolitanism is intimately related to the style of his writing. Despite what is commonly believed, he paid much attention to form. The Odyssey is a provocative poem that is at odds with most works of its time. According to Karalis: t o ipya to u KaC avrC d kt| avairap d youv\ kcu eueKreivovu, ti? ai/Ti0^ creis* to ou KoivowiKbi v Siepyaaiaiv p£aa and to? XoYOTex^^S1 pop ("Kazantzakis's works reproduce and expand, the contradictions of social undertakings in literary forms 92 which were not created during the bourgeois period, but with literary genres, such as the epic and drama, which the imposed bourgeois ideology essentially abolished with the discovery of the novel.") (Karalis 1988: 49) Kazantzakis writes an epic that greatly disagrees with the demands of the emerging bourgeois literature. Its objections are so evident that until today they have kept it away from the canon of Greek literature. His language is filled with "port-manteaux" words made by him or selected from all regions of Greece. This "savage" style of writing creates new parameters for literary expression openly conflicting with the Generation of the 1930's. The style is not far from Joyce's English or Klebnikov's Russian style (6). By uncovering the "roots" of rural language, Kazantzakis wants to shock people, to make them feel strange in themselves, to undermine common experience, to subvert the modern Greek way of thinking. The Greek readers wanted an academic demotic, such as the one proposed by the philologists, without dialectic aspects and extremities. That demotic should be a written one (the best example is that of Seferis) not an oral. The O dyssey displayed a mosaic of linguistic extremities in a very vernacular language; for many, it was unbearably oral. Kazantzakis's epic can be related to Andreas Embirikos's The Great Eastern (1945-65), another incomprehensible operatic work in the purist. Both these "dreamwork epics" represent the 93 two sides of a coin sharing many characteristics, such as language estrangement, orgiastic imagery, high metaphoricity, travel and cosmopolitanism, a dionysian ecstatic pleasure, as well as an experimental form. Kazantzakis opposed the tradition of "low-scale" poetry that was prevalent in the 1920's and 1930's. To put it schematically, the Odyssey continued Palamas's The Twelve Speeches of Gypsy (1907) rather than Dekatetrasticha (1925). But he attacked the Romantic excesses of Palamas and his followers. Kazantzakis writes in a revolutionary style with an anti-social and aristocratic mind. His verse is flown by instinctual primitive lyricism and seventeen-syllable meters. Rhythm and music are fundamental elements in his poetry. His imagination, surrealistic and eccentric, stretches up to its limits in embracing the entire world. The Odyssey is the largest Greek poem, not only in size and style but also in ideas and visions. The manuscript is different from the printed edition of 1974. Kazantzakis uses his extreme vernacular idiom to express high-brow ideas. His language is highly phonetic and optical in a framework of strict formalism. The flow of his words must be recited in fast tempo with rhythm maintaining all the glissandos, assonances, and puns. The "word," sharply concrete in its fashion, occupies a prime position; he searched it from different perpsectives: semantically, etymologically, and rhythmically. 94 O yi)X i 09 iud StayotipiCe tt| 77) 9 , fuTrvoiiae t] noXiTei' a, icai tou TToXOTraBou Ta ydvaTa XaxTapiap^ t/a erp£ p a v d a o pe pidcni Koi'ToCiiywve tt|V' Tauen^ ttXcott) tou. M a £d icai KaTT^dpae £exe<-XLCoi'Ta 9 k i avdy\ei kl cnrdvu) T 0U9 x l M-°^CTa 0L iTeXapyol pe r' avoixrd pap Animate and inanimate beings fuse into one another by means of similes or by the use of appropriate adjectives and verbs. [...] the sun ransacks the earth, which is later mounted by a river; knees and hands are full of longing; (Colaclides 1983: 95) The unusual images evoked here, the sun that awakens the people, Odysseus' heart that skips a beat like a fish, the parade of the river, the small houses of the village that look like islands, and 95 finally the fish in the river, all these phonetically and visually fused into each other demonstrate Kazantzakis’s canvas of highly personalized language. The poem presented to us is a "torrent-poem" made of words and voices. The vocal aspects of the poetic language were entirely neglected by the Generation of the 1930's and by the major part of later poetry as well, which unquestioningly follows G. Seferis's unimagistic and voiceless writing. The O dyssey transgresses the standards of national Modernism and exemplifies many Avant-Gardist features. Its radical content carries out an international message for modern men to struggle individually. National Modernism is confined to the voice of the nation and the collective soul. Kazantzakis rejects both; his hero is an individual who breaks away from the laws of his country. He prefers to live travelling the world. Seferis's Odysseus returns nostalgically to his native land but Kazantzakis's one is a desperado, a cosmopolitan exiled. He departs from Ithaca to meet the other. The Odyssey has no predecessors in Greek literature. Only Dante's Comedy seems to be a familiar poem, especially in the choice of the vernacular. But the form of the poem also presents Avant-Gardist features that stand against the currently established trends. The extreme vernacular plays against bourgeois academism. It also draws attention to the material 96 form of language. Because for Kazantzakis language was doing more than containing metaphors and representations and the signifieds of the nation. It was rather an expressive language made by images and sounds to render experience and vital elements of life. As we will see later, Nicholas Calas will also come close to an oral language. All the above characteristics along with the seventeen-syllable meters mark Kazantzakis’s rebellion to national Modernism. 97 The Promethean Trilogy Prometheus continues the aesthetic and ideological program of Kazantzakis. However, it emphasizes contemporaneity more than the Odyssey. By "contemporaneity," I mean a cosmopolitan anti-traditional literary attitude that emerges in the 1920's and 1930's. I prefer to use the term "contemporaneity" instead of modernity, which is a more confusing one when applied to non- Western literatures. Tziovas (1989) discusses the particularities of Greek tradition that differentiated it from the universal Western model of European modernity. He states, for example, that Greece resisted the Western rationalistic model of modernity by projecting ideas of conflict and rivalry. Greece as a cultural phenomenon, accordingly, opposed and questioned the West’s inflexible rationalism, insisting on contradiction or pluralism. In Tziovas’s view, the Greek pattern of modernity was based on its alternative and multi-vocal character which differs from the European model. T| eXXT|l/t,KT) TToXlTlCrfjUICT) TdUT6TT|Tfl 8lClKT)pi) OOOVTCIS tt|v eTepdTTiTa tcai tt|v TToXu(Jxi8f| (jjuCTioyvaipla ttis irpoTTopeOeTcu icai apvod p.evT| va uuoKuif»ei (jTa Trayittp.^ va arepedrvna tou Sutlkovi op0oXoyiCT|iou p.ds UTTeuSuptCei 6 t i r) o u ala £yiceiTai ctttj 8ia (“in declaring difference and its varied character Greek cultural identity goes ahead refusing to give in the solidified stereotypes of Western rationalism reminds us that its substance lies in the difference and that its determination finally depends on its negative, namely on non-identity.”) (Tziovas 1989: 16) Tziovas, furthermore, observes that concepts such as these regarding tradition and Greekness were introduced to Greece not as historical phenomena but as abstract ideas. Greekness was juxtaposed to modernity which was identified as a break with tradition, modernism, and Europeaness. Jusdanis, on the other hand, defines Greek modernity as: a path of perpetually catching up with Europe with the aim of ultimately becoming a European nation. (Jusdanis 1991:127) Greek modernity, thus, is a broader concept than Modernism and concerns the introduction of European ideas and a neoteric non- traditional attitude. Peter Bien (1975) examined the historical and literary context of Kazantzakis' earlier plays Masterbuilder and Capodhistrias that foreground the ideas of Prometheus. Bien accurately highlights Kazantzakis's drama of ideas in the context of modernity. The theatre in Greece failed to fulfill its promise because Greek critics and audiences could not stomach 99 a true theatre of ideas that spoke courageously, even outrageously, to real contemporary problems. At least this is the conclusion one draws after studying Kazantzakis' repeatedly discouraging attempts to function as a playwright in Greece. (Bien 975: 398) Kazantzakis's agenda was to create an alternative dionysiac theater, but he did not reject Greek antiquity altogether. He thought that the Classical tradition needed to be reconsidered by the modern Greeks. InPrometheus, Kazantzakis shows his respect for Classical Greece. Of course, as in The Odyssey earlier, he attacks the ideas of tradition, classical prototypes, and continuity, "to. tcXaaiicd a as 'irpdTviTrct," of the Romantic scholars. In Prometheus, by emphasizing modernity Kazantzakis urges the Greeks “to enter the twentieth century" (Bien 1975: 400). His modernity necessitates a break with the past in order to achieve a state of contemporaneity. In the plan, Prometheus is modelled after Nietzsche's superman. Greeks should emulate this Prometheus in order to make their mark in modern history. Prometheus is committed to save humanity at all costs. He goes against Zeus who killed "ra TTXdcrnaTa ttis Xdainis’ ("the beings of clay") (1964: 30). His single weapon is his mind: Noi)s, KpaTci kl eyc5 TaeKoupi, to ^uaX6 }iou (I, too, hold an axe, my mind.) (Kazantzakis 1964: 37) 100 Prometheus believes that human beings must transform material flesh into spirit. Pandora complains: tt| ad pica TUpavuds va yivei -rri/^ p a (you torture the flesh so it could become spirit.) (Kazantzakis 1964: 101) Prometheus lives in a new life without past memory. His "life" is conceived not just in biological but in temporal terms as the ability to forget whatever precedes the present situation. Kazantzakis believes that the Greeks must wage a spiritual struggle, which is best expressed as a dionysiac passion for freedom. Prometheus, as a “modern superman,” creates a new, free mankind, YaivoOpyia avBpwiroaO^r)' ("a new mankind") (1964: 32). The invention of the "new," which in turn effects in the reconsideration of Prometheus' self as a superman, constitutes a renovated aesthetic of newness. The new era is bom by the "mother Earth.” (9) "Newness" is described in great detail. Its originality and purity, for instance, are well displayed by the panegyric expression of natural freshness and fertility. 101 2ici»pa), ae ayyt£u), Mdva p.ou, Koupdyio! ITdXi 0a ylvei T| (I bend over, I touch you, Mother, have courage! The fire will become light-weight soil again. Soil will become grass again.) (Kazantzakis 1964: 12) Earth, deprived of its metaphysics and returned to a mere state of nature, represents fertility "xiXiavTpoi), yiyai/ToaTTiSii" ("of a thousand men, of gigantic breasts") (Kazantzakis 1964: 15). Hois’ tous1 ydo'vrjaes’, Mdo»a, rovg yiyai'Tes’ ere OupavoO cr (How did you bear, Mother, the giants holding the Heavens tight?) (Kazantzakis 1964:15) She engenders the machine of a new cultural and human memory, “tcaii/od pyio ai/epuuoXd i!" ("a new human race!") (Kazantzakis1964: 62). Prometheus, conscious of his temporality, shapes this new mankind with his own hands out of clay in order to be morally superior to him. Na pd0ei to vl6 aou a ("Let your new master learn that I am not afraid of exhausting all my power on my creatures and let them succeed me!") (Kazantzakis 1964: 34) The temporal character of art was also demonstrated by Kazantzakis in Saviors: HpGe ■ Xap4 Kai inicpa peydXT]! - ti crTiy|j.^ va TrapaTTeTaxTOi)|xe k i epets\ oi iTpwTotTdpoL, cxtt|V' 6 (“The moment has come -- O great joy and bitterness! -- when, we, the vanquished, must also be cast away among the reserve troops.") (Kazantzakis 1971: 53) The new people are transplanted onto the modern era by forgetting prior history and tradition. Their supremacy is their tenacious will to a self-conscious struggle against the authorities of the old era which will liberate them from the totalitarian past. Prometheus is an enlightened creator who interestingly mixes up Eastern primitive pessimist passion with elements of Western civilized optimism (9). It is the synthesis of the two elements that Prometheus tries to comprehend (10). From the fusion of these antithetical forces he achieves the Nietzschean "joy of wisdom," a pessimism "beyond good and evil." 103 To p£ya apxtCei av£paap.a t o u avBpci-nrou, t| aT^XeiaiTTi yia rnv Kop ("The grand ascension of man begins, the endless course to the top! The heart beats smoothly, my mind calms down; I fought and won, and now, forgive me, my untamed soul, I, too, pined a bit, only a bit of human joy to feel!”) (Kazantzakis 1964: 74) The new mankind that Kazantzakis's Prometheus creates is a younger generation of dionysiac Greeks who must struggle for the breakthrough of Greece from its old form of State in order to set up a new society liberated from conservative and academic Atticism and Byzantinism of the 19th century (11). In Kazantzakis's terms, Prometheus is the "masterbuilder" of a modernized Greece, the Nietzschean superman who “builds" this new society with his own hands. 0a ae uXdaio eytii \ie auTa r a 8u8 p.ou x^PLa KaL THs Mdi/as pou tt|s yi)s tti adpica, Kaivoi) pyia ai/0pa)TToaiiuT| dirws tt | 0£XuM (“I shall mold you with my two hands and with my Mother Earth's flesh, a new mankind as I wish it!”) (Kazantzakis 1964: 32) 104 The new dionysian ethos is demonstrated in the will to struggle, the experience of a self-conscious liberty. In the Ocean virgins' dance in the last part ofthe trilogy, Prometheus Delivered, they celebrate this experience of freedom in the new era. Geiiad anyn^l ITa a k v a tt6 c to i ai^ve? ^d c tt ti Kop (“A divine moment! How many centuries worked for you at the top of the desert!") (Kazantzakis 1964: 236) This newly created mankind, paradoxically, bears the insignia of a poetic eternity in the constant search for and imagining of "modernity" which is conceived of in terms of historical temporality with respect to the course of Time. Modernity can function only within the limits of this extraneous duality that functions as a transitory and spontaneous reality and as an eternal one. Present and past, thus, are diffused into a temporal and ephemeral contemporaneity. Ax. TTote C T p lyo u v T| y k v v a ki o BdvaTOS'! ki axl Trais" 6Xa afeSidXirra! Me? t o ytd t o o o ucrr£pa? exd0T), icai x 0 !1^ 0? aT0 Y1^ T0U dav'dviwae! (“Oh, how birth and death are met! And oh! how is everything undissolved! The father was lost in his son, and lost he was reborn in his son!”) (Kazantzakis 1964: 261) 105 Kazantzakis's contemporaneity to a certain extent reminds us Charles Baudelaire's inspired definition of modernity. "By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable" (Transl. Jonathan Mayne). Yet there is one important exception: Baudelaire wanted to reject any kind of Neo-Classicism and Romanticism that dominated the French literary scene, while Kazantzakis attacks tradition and continuity that obscure the apocalyptic power of the present. According to Kazantzakis, Greece must be viewed in the light of contemporaneity. Greece represents an amalgam of East and West that can save Europeans from their current "crisis," namely, the failure of the technological and scientific revolution. Pre-socratic Greeks, because of their specific geographical and spiritual position to East and West, reached the acme of civilization by creating the "tragic myth." This myth represents a fusion of apollonian and dionysiac elements. Apollonian elements refer to the individual forms that struggle to save the T from anarchy and to establish order in a disordered and chaotic world. Dionysiac elements, conversely, refer to passionate attempts to transubstantiate individual forms into a formless Oneness. Furthermore, East represents pessimism, namely, a passionate contemplation, m,itci0t|tlkt^ evarlvioTf (Kazantzakis, 1943: 1033), 106 which leads to a happy renunciation, "p.aKdpia aTrdpwriari' (1943: 1033). However, the East also represents, as Bien states (1965: 150) passion equated with "soul," a deindividualizing force that permits human beings to transcend the limits of rational thought and to acquire extensive physical and moral power. It is precisely this positive passion in Eastern thought that Kazantzakis finds useful and then adapts for the purposes of his own project. The West, on the other hand, represents Socratic optimism, which makes people believe that they must create another world more pure and moral than the one that exists. To Kazantzakis, Greece achieved the best symmetry between passionate East and rationalist West. Here is how he describes Greece's spiritual specificity: To Kiipio xaPaKTTlPlCTTLK^ t 1!? EXXdSa? eivai: ticrrepa aird ttoX i!ii/ ayaWa, ti KaTox^poari t o u eyci, t o arkpeo treplypappa tto u uuoTdCei t i ? aKaTdaTaTe? opp.£?, t o u ? apx^Y°vou? Saip.dvou? ae pia <#>a)Teiim T r e i 0apxT)|i£ vt) avOpolmuTi 0 oOXt)ctt). To avtiiTaTo i8avuc 6 t t | ? EXXdSa? eluai: va aa)0el t o ey& air6 t t | v auapxta xai to x^o? ("The main characteristic of Greece is the following: after a great struggle, the emancipation of self, the solid figure that subjects the unruly impulses and the primordial daemons in a brilliant ordered human will. The superior ideal of Greece is: to save the I from anarchy and chaos") (Kazantzakis 1943:1033) 107 In other words, the Greek tragic spirit can transform the disordered primeval drives into an ordered and superior humanized will. Therefore, Greece's supreme ideal is to save the individual self from formless chaos. Nonetheless, this contradicts the Asiatic ideal, which represents the union of the individual self with the infinite and its consequent dissolution into it. Hence, to Kazantzakis, Greece represents not only the creative and progressive mixture of East and West, but furthermore, the exemplary spiritual source that will save Western civilization from a fruitless optimism. Following the Nietzschean views as exposed in his seminal treatise Die Geburt der Tragodie, where the author declares that the solution to the decay of Western rationalism must be searched in the spirit of Attic tragedy, Kazantzakis turns to this spirit to re-invent his own Greece. It is precisely this Dionysiac Greece that he presents as an exemplary model to his contemporaries. In addition, by claiming the global truth and validity of the tragic myth, he wants to strengthen the importance of the tragic spirit. Like Nietzsche, Kazantzakis believes that Western people must turn optimism into pessimism and to see through the great illusion of life. A pessimist, however, is not passionately abandoned in the wirlpool of life disturbances, as a Buddhist is, but he struggles to 108 fill in the vacuum of his existence with power and joy. According to Nietzsche, the nations will progress when they find the "golden rule" between the apollonian and the dionysiac spirit, the "third mode of existence" (Nietzsche, 1967: 125), that is, in Prometheus’ words "Apjxovi' a’ ("Harmony!") (1964: 248). Prometheus exactly represents the fusion of these two antithetical yet not contradictory elements. He steadily casts his eyes upon the abyssmal chaos, and his glance at the disordered world fills him up with passion, will, and power (dionysiac elements) to set order, beauty, and reason (apollonian elements) upon the abyss: ncpe|i6s eivai T) £o)f|, yicpepds o x^Pos’ [• • • 3 ^ [xdna yaXriv/d, naiSt jxou, va tov» KoiTds, va t o v KoiTds, va voi (“Life is a precipice, death is a precipice, too; [...] but you, my child, with peaceful eyes look at, look at it, to feel, by looking at it you increase your strength-- this is the greatest task on earth".) (Kazantzakis 1964: 252) The passage of the precipice leads to freedom, that is, to look at and play with chaos without fear. kcli 0a KoiTdp.e oX6p0oi, 8Lxws (f>dfio, \ie tt^v' icap8id yiop.d*rr| eXeuTepla, to updowTrd jias 6Xo ("and we will look at standing tall, fearless, with the heart full of freedom, our face full of light, in chaos’’.) (Kazantzakis 1964: 252) In the progress of this struggle, Prometheus learns from Athena that the greatest enemy of men and women is not God but "Mofpa" ("Fate") (1964: 170) and that the only way to confront Fate is to reconcile with it. Indeed, Athena advises him to obey and accept Fate. IT aT d p a, GKixpe t o ice ToXp.dei va tt^v icoiTdfei- (“Father, bend your head, keep silent; not even God dares to look at her") (Kazantzakis 1964: 170) Prometheus immidiately responds to her: Epydrns* etpai, epydTTis‘, icai 8 ovXeifu cttti d(3ua<70 ttjs Mol pas' Kpep.aap.dvos' (“I am a worker, a worker, and I work hung from the abyss of Fate.”) (Kazantzakis 1964: 174) Only the Savior is able to look at Fate, "KaTdpaTa KoiTdCovTas t t | Mot pal" ("looking steadily at Fate's face") (1964: 175). Nonetheless, by confronting Fate at the brink of the precipice, Prometheus discovers "apfioin'a" ("harmony,") the ultimate goal of 110 human beings, that makes possible the golden balance between anarchy and freedom, subjective chaos and objective reality. Harmony is the new-born spirit that turns Necessity into Freedom: ttou Kdvei rr|y AvdyKTi dcro pTropei o t o v ic6crp.o, eXevrepia I ("which turns Necessity as much as it can in the world to freedom!”) (Kazantzakis 1964: 249) Here Kazantzakis presents the reader with an aesthetic paradox. Why is reason related to beauty in Kazantzakis’s terms? Bien explains that: It is because man, in creating logical systems on the one hand, and beautiful forms on the other, is actually doing the same thing: he is attempting to give order and meaning to a world about him which is of itself disordered, contradictory, and ugly (Bien 1965:149). It is the relation of praxis to Fate that eventually leads to the Apollinairean mirroring of a self-conscious reflection, such as the harmonious bridging of being with the world, of Prometheus and the abyss. Here we are confronted with the psychological attitude of the suffering subject against Fate, an opposition that has to be a priori viewed through the irony of the limited power of human 111 will in the place where we trace the perennial secret common to all mortals. The Kazantzakean aesthetic thus takes its physiognomy from this heroic stance, which follows upon the agonistic erring of the ego in a world where production is being constantly revolutionized, all social relations are disturbed, and where uncertainty and agitation dominates in every respect all that eventually constitute the fate of contemporaneity. The power of beauty and the aesthetic sublime emerge out of this dialectic view of harmony, which represents the Synthetikprozess of the l-in-the world; yet such a view is not far from reminding us of that Heideggerean erring of being-in-the world, guiding the blind and the blinked individual, the struggling and the suffering subject, to the intoxicated happiness when contemplating the abyssmal precipice (12). According to Kazantzakis, this contemplation of chaos is the Cretan glance. Unlike the Eastern meditative glance, what characterizes the Cretan one is the contemplation of the abyss without dissolving into it. Instead, it plays with chaos in a proud and brave manner. Crete, according to Kazantzakis, represeents the synthesis of Greece and the East. H Kp^TTj elvai T) obvdeoT) ttou ■ndvra |j.ou em8Lt5icur t} CTui/SeCTT) EXXd8as kcli A vcitoXt5|s...to eyci v aTevi£ei tt|V' dpucro x^pts v' aiTocrui/G^TeTcu' to evavTlov, r\ evaT^vnari auTi^ va to yep.LCei auvox^, tmepT| k i ai'Tpela. Kai t h pand Toinri it o u a T e v l£ e i £tc t i t t ] Ccof) K a i t o 0 d v a T O , t t iv ow opdC io KprjTLKid (“Crete is the synthesis that I always seek; the synthesis of Greece with the East [...] the “I” to contemplate the abyss without dissolving into it; on the contrary, this contemplation must fill him up with cohesion, pride and bravery. And I call this glance, which contemplates at life and death, a Cretan glance") (Kazantzakis 1943: 1033) The Greeks’ characteristic, therefore, is to struggle for freedom at the expense of all the risks without fear and hope, while they are aware of the Necessity to reconcile with Fate in order to achieve the greatest virtue, “harmony.” Kazantzakis's conception of Greece is not to be understood in nationalistic terms. Kazantzakis discovers in the Greeks a dynamism which can help him combine Western and Eastern features in order to redeem the modern crisis of man Nevertheless, his aim is to propose the Greek paradigm to the other peoples as well to get rid of the ambivalence that rational thought, science, technology, and oriental pessimism have effected upon Greeks. InPrometheus Bound, Act III, Kazantzakis refers explicitly to the Greeks when Athena takes Prometheus to watch a battle between the Greeks and the barbarians. The scene is elaborately described by Kazantzakis and many historical, yet to the contemporary observer, monumental sites from ancient 113 Athens are brought to the viewer: Acropolis, Parthenon, the city of Athens, and the sea of Salamis. In that particular scene, Greeks seem to fight "barbarians" in order to liberate Dionysus from them. AeuTepoicJTe atT' T a X^Pia TWl/ PapPdpcov t o peydXo 9 ed Tcav TTaT^puv pasrl (“Set free from the barbarians' hands our fathers' great God!") (Kazantzakis 1964:150) The meaning of this scene is not only to remind the reader once more of the pessimism which is depicted in the arrival of the barbarians who threaten Greece and contemparary mankind as well. However, the more subtle meaning of this scene is depicted in Dionysus' revelation. Dionysus is evoked here to remind the contemporary readers not only of the inhuman and hostile attitude of Zeus (and certainly of other Gods as well) toward men, but rather to point out exactly the disappearance of God. The "barbarians" signify a threat to civilization. Greeks undertake the effort to send them away by re-establishing cultural progress. Here we should not identify the barbarians with Asiatic peoples but rather we should conceive of them in a more general sense of "barbarism," especially common in literature and philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (13). Arthur Rimbaud, for example, in A Season in Hell (1873) discusses the 114 threatening of Europeans by primitive and barbarian civilizations. Greeks lead an imaginative war to save culture on behalf of all humanity. Kai udv [iTTpoaTd cttti yf|S k i avolyouv 8p6p.o (“and they go ahead to the world and clear the way.") (Kazantzakis 1964: 157) This is, however, the only explicit reference to the Greeks throughout the trilogy and aims specifically to recall their distinctive ability toward the dionysiac and apollonian G eist. Kazantzakis’s project was to liberate mankind. Ae (iiXds eaij. Mf|Te elvai t] pdrcra p.ovdxa aov TTOu (“It is not you talking. Nor is it your race only which shouts within you, for all the innumerable races of mankind shout and rush within you: white, yellow, black. Free yourself from race also; fight to live through the whole struggle of man”) (14). 115 His call for freedom is beyond limits of race, class, and gender. The final victory of Prometheus, however, is waged against Zeus, who, in Kazantzakis's terms, represents totalitarian power of the State. Freedom is the antidote to Life's absurdity and it is the task of an inner struggle. H XeuTepid 8ev £pxeTai, dxi! and/or pd Satpovas' evTds pas*, Kai pd s Tpdiei (“Freedom does not come from outside! but it is a daemon inside who eats us") (Kazantzakis 1964:197) The creative Mind liberates Prometheus from the long-term totalitarian regime of Violence and Anger. XiXidSes1 XP^vta o Noils' aXuacop^vos air’ t o 9 ed , p' uTTopovfl k i ay d nr) t i s aXucrlSes dKape (frrepoiiyes' ("Thousands of years Mind chained by the God turned the chains into wings through patience and love") (Kazantzakis 1964: 239) Prometheus, specifically, struggles against the oppressive institutions that appear in the form of Violence and Anger. AuTpii>0T|Ke o 9e6s and t t i B l a k i a n ' t o 9 u p 6 ("God was freed from Violence and Anger”) (Kazantzakis 1964: 240) 116 Kazantzakis's modernity and Prometheus' creation of the new era must be understood in the context of this political climate, in their escape from this torturing past and present (15). Throughout the trilogy Kazantzakis wants to incite the Greeks to rebel against the corrupt politicians. As Bien states, to understand Kazantzakis we must realize that in him "metapolitical and political aspects are symbiotic" and, therefore, we must not separate the religious agonist from the political person as long as neither can exist independently of the other because the very method employed by Kazantzakis to win personal salvation is political engagement (Bien 1989: 4). Thus, Kazantzakis’s play, overall, represents a socio-political allegory, a politicized drama integrated into social imagining of Greece, while, at the same time, it attempts to escape nationalistic constraints in its humanistic premises. Nevertheless, such a project is in opposition to the more general plan of a national Modernism as propagated by the Generation of the Thirties. Bereft of the critical support either of Marxists or Liberals or Nationalists, Kazantzakis’s Prometheus was forced into the margins, unintelligible and "foreign" to its contemporary Greek critics. 117 Greekness and Contemporaneity I will now return to the debate between Laourdas and Kazantzakis. This debate shows how much Kazantzakis differed from the nationalist aesthetics of Greekness in the 1930's. Laourdas's article "The 'Odyssey' of Kazantzakis" (1943) received Kazantzakis's immediate reply "One Comment on 'Odyssey'" which was in turn addressed by Laourdas's "Comment on a critical essay." According to Laourdas, the modernist Kazantzakis introduces foreign ideas which go against the Classical Greek ethos: O KaCavT£dicT)9 8ev avr)icei ctto veoeXXTivucd f|0os“. H icoorp.o0ea)pla t o u 6 x l p6vov 8evetvat eXXr|viicf|, a\Xd »cai avTi\i&x€Tai ctto k \( x c t ik 6 eX\7}in»c6 T r v e iip a . Eva t £t o io fiOos1 Cwfis1 Sev 0a pTTopotiCTe |3£|3aia va Ppel rn |iOpl) TOU [Jl^CTa CTTT| |i.Op<|)l) ttou avdiTTufe aiT' TLS“ ISie? tou tls 1 plCe? to eXXriviicd TTveiipa (“Kazantzakis does not belong to the Neohellenic ethos. His theorizing not only is not Greek, but also fights against the Classical Greek spirit. Such an ethos of life, of course, could not find its form within the one which the Greek mind itself developed from its own roots”) (Laourdas 1977: 4) 118 Kazantzakis's ideas of decline are suitable to Western Europeans. For Laoudas, the Greeks must return to their Classical Greek antiquity to find their national identity. Laourdas writes: avTt va TTepnrX.av'T)0oCi|j.e a' dXXe? x^PeS\ 8ev 0a TTp^irei va <7Tpa ("instead of wandering in other countries, why sould we not turn to our own roots, to form the Law of ourlife from our own soil, and to converse with ourselves?”) (Laourdas 1977: 26) To Laourdas, the Greeks must foster the "myth" of their nation and modern history. Epet? elpatJTe £va? Xa6? ttou Ttipa p6Xi? nXdOet t o Mii0o t t |? £mV)? t o u . Tl ax^cni ^x0Ul/ 01 £woie? t t i? Trapaicpf|? icai t t |? aicpf|? pe t t | 8ucf) pa? polpa; ("We are a people who just now mold the myth of their lives. What is the relationship of notions of rise and decline with our own fate?”) (Laourdas 1977:26) The "myth of Greekness" corresponds to"t o atTTipa STipioupyia? i/eoeXXT|viKoO uoXiTiapoO’ ("the demand to create a neo- Hellenic culture") (Laourdas 1977:28). 119 Laourdas defines Greekness as an Idea, not a concept. Unlike concepts, ideas, are not amenable to analysis. A Greek play, or novel, or poem must express the Greek spirit, it must represent ideals suitable to it in appropriate Greek form. Obviously, Laourdas thinks of "Greekness" as an ideologeme rooted in the Greek tradition. It is our land which will furnish us the principles of our lives. Greece, therefore, as both a territory and idea, lies above history and time. Like a transcendental truth, Greece tells the Greeks what they must do. The Greek landscape lends itself as a model to the Greeks revealing to them its deepest essence. This description of a naturalized and authentic Greece placed in a transcendental location, which acquires some metaphysical truth and whose soil and roots are recognized by the blue clear sky and the blue ocean, is totally missing in Kazantzakis's Prometheus. The entire trilogy unfolds on unspecified land, which is hard to locate. Aypio xai ^eyaXdirpeTTO totuo: paGi^s* yup.v£s* XapdSpes1, pouvoKop<|>^ s’ ttou kcittWCouv a ic d p a , Kepauvajp.^ va Siurpa, yiydvTioi £eKouvTi|i^ voi Ppdxot. IT£pa T| BdXacrcra, aypiep£im. pouyicpiCei. BapCis1, x a kmXa}p£ v'os' oupai/ds\ pe p a u p a £ecnci(jp.£i/a CTl) vue (“A wild and magnificent landscape: deep bare ravines, mountain-peaks which are still smoking, trees hurled by thunderbolts, gigantic displaced rocks. Far away the 120 wild sea is roaring. The sky heavy, lowered, with dark and tattered clouds”) (Kazantzakis 1964: 11) With this landscape Kazantzakis provokes any spatial claims to Greekness. Kazantzakis's heroes feel at home in every corner of this world. Kazantzakis informed Laourdas about the transitional nature of their modern age, about the struggle between new and old values. S t l ? e-rrox^S1 t o O t c s 1 t t ) s p.eCTO0aaiXei as p .ta TTveuji.aTiK^ irpoairdSeia p-uopet va KoiTd£ei ttIctco SiicaioJvovTas Kai icptvovTas t o v TraXid TToXiTiap.6 ttou yicpep.i£eTai, t) va icoiTdCei. p.TrpoaTd icai v' aycoviCeTat va Trpo ("In these transitional times, an intellectual effort either may look back justifying and judging the old culture that collapses, or it may look ahead and struggle to prophecize and express the new”) (Kazantzakis 1943: 1028-1029) Kazantzakis spells out his anarchic, boundless dionysiac Greekness from Laourdas's apollonian "Greekness" confined in the narrow boundaries of the Greek nation. Kazantzakis's Greekness breaks all national borders. He states: ^Trpeire c u t u s efapxiis Ka0apd icai Tip.ia va XwplaeTe to w s ' 8iio k6ctjj.ous, tt|v EXXdSa (auTd tto u X £ t 6 “EXXdSa") Kai t t | v AvaToXi) (auTd now X^Te 121 "AvaToXiV)' t) av TrpoTip.dTe, to v EXXt]vo. ATTdXXuva icaL to v Aaidrri Aidvuoo. ("From the very beginning you should clearly and honestly separate the two worlds: Greece, what you call "Greece," and the East, what you call the "East"; or, if you wish, the Greek Apollo and the Asian Dionysus”) (Kazantzakis 1943: 1032) Kazantzakis’s Greeks stand for a dionysiac mankind, a revolutionary people who transgress national, religious, and class limitations. Here Kazantzakis differs from other writers and intellectuals of the Generation of the 1930's. Seferis, for example, attempts to build on tradition without disrupting it. Kazantzakis, on the other hand, takes a further critical step to discontinue tradition and to re-invent Greece’s present moment. He overtly speaks of contemporaneity: H eiroxi) ttou irepvo £/|ie piou (paiveTai anotpamaTiKd avTiKXaauc^. Zt\t&€ i va CTndaei Ta KaXouma, - cttt|w ttoXltlkt), OLtcoi/ojiLtci^, Koii'amta) cttt) ctk£i{jt|, c ttt|1' Trpdfrri,- va TTe-riixei. m-a lctopp6tttj(7T|" pua v£a KXaaiKi) eTrox^ * o e auuiTepo etritTeSo, va STmLoupy^aei auTd ttou eluap.e vko Mu0o, ttou va 8 lu e i£va vio, auyxP01'1'0^ 1'0 TTLC^> vdTi^ia (“the era we live in seems to me decisively anti- classical. It seeks to break the stereotypes, — in the political, economical, social life, thought, and praxis, — to achieve a new balance - a new classical era - at 122 a superior level, in order to create what we called “new Myth”, which would give a new, contemporary, meaning to the world”) (Kazantzakis 1943: 1033-1034) Kazantzakis's Greekness is meaningful both to the Greeks who live in Greece and to the entire world. According to Kazantzakis, Laourdas is unaware of the present time, "^xfre dyvoia tti? Tiopivn)? 2TiypT)?’ ("you 're ignorant of the present Moment") (Kazantzakis 1943: 1034). Kazantzakis wants to isolate the present moment from past historical time and to examine it in temporal terms. For this reason he breaks away from the Greek tradition, because the first thing that he attempts to invade is the idea of continuity and the link with the immediate past. Laourdas remains anti-European, while Kazantzakis is pro-European. His dramatic ideas demonstrate close affinities with other European authors, such as Nietzsche, Goethe, Shelley, Ibsen, and Bergson. However, Kazantzakis's project of contemporaneity differs from Western European modernities. To Western Europeans, modernity is associated with the project of Enlightenment and mainly attacks neo-Classicism for its adherence to the past and its imitation of Classical models and principles. Moreover, European modernity challenges some notions of Romanticism, specifically whatever is concerned with universality, eternity, and the genius. 123 Kazantzakis's project of contemporaneity, however, is different. Since Greek neo-Classicism and Romanticism were different from Western European ones, Kazantzakis did not need to attack them and to bring his model of modernity in line with the European standards. But, as I stated earlier, Kazantzakis’s intention was not to attack antiquity but tradition and continuity. His project makes sense within a broader context regarding the re-invention and modernization of national Greek culture. Both Laourdas's and Kazantzakis's Greeknesses constituted different responses which have influenced the future of Greek literature. Kazantzakis's emphasis on the present moment has a historical and metaphysical focus. His call for individual and collective struggle derives fromLebenspraxis, the positioning of the individual within the world. Kazantzakis urges his heroes to participate in the design of their societies effecting upon significant changes. Constantinidis acknowledges this call for Lebenspraxis when he demonstrates that Kazantzakis's plays function in various ways as a theatre of protest (16). Kazantzakis's understanding of praxis is still confined within the horizon of his dialectic vision, as, for instance, in that particular scene when solitary self is confronted with the abyss. The gained momentum of the individual who faces the risk of the abysmal chaos explains Kazantzakis's potential Einstellung to contemplate chaos without dissolving into it. Standing at the edge of the 124 abyss, Prometheus consoles Dionysus that life is an abyss at which we must look in order to strengthen ourselves. His aim is to regard this chaos being free of fear, hoping with a face full of light: Kai 0a KoiTdpe oXdpGoi, Sixes' (“And we will see standing upright, with no fear, with the heart filled with freedom, our face full of light, in the chaos") (Kazantzakis 1964: 252) It is precisely this Synthetikprozess which represents the dialectic view, the reconciliatory attempt of a certain x with its opposite y to resolve into the complete form of a resolute z. Kazantzakis states: 8ev p-uopo!) iT o ri va oKe ("I can never think of and accept A without, at the same time, thinking of its opposite, -A, and immediately wishing, in order to get rid of the antinomy, tocomplete both in one synthesis, A’") (Kazantzakis 1943: 1029) 125 It depends only on the intellectual lavishness of such a triadic rhythm that Prometheus (the Father), Earth (the Mother), and Dionysus (the Son) will unite again -- beyond the former great difficulty of the atomic and rationalist consciousness — in Oneness, that is, the ambiguity of being in the status of an impossible perfection in order to render disorder into "harmony." M oi'dxa 01 8u6 i/jvx ^S’ cpd? av ap.i£ovv a' £va (3a0t) Koppl, p.id p.£pa, *yi£ pou, tt|S' X^JTpa)crr|S■ T^ep^'a!>^'Tas• tt]v eXiTlSa, 0a (“Only if our own two souls are met in a deep body one day, my son, passing through the hope of salvation, we will reach the edge of the abyss") (Kazantzakis 1964: 252) In a similar way, Kazantzakis's contemporary Greeks must struggle to create a new Dionysiac mankind. The rebel demands a transformation of human nature. Institutional reforms are not enough. (Constantinidis 1987: 161) Kazantzakis, thus, locates the task of modernity in the individuals themselves, who must wage a personal struggle to improve themselves, just as Prometheus attempts to do. The progress of society depends on the responsibility of the individual people. To put it in Peter Bien’s terms, it is 126 Kazantzakis’s “metapolitical agenda” that differentiates his project from other political ones. Laourdas's society is collective; the Greeks act upon the dictates of the national yet transcendental truth; according to their national character, the demands of their community, subjected to a more abstract code of behavior, a more abstract attitude which is Greekness. Laourdas takes great pains to explain this Greek character, and especially, what is proper and what is improper to it. Greek essence, the Greek forms of life and art, are presented to the people as a refined code to which they have to adhere. Kazantzakis's "Greeks" are free to choose what is good or bad for themselves (17). The advent of the new God Dionysus entails also the revolutionary breakthrough from institutions, such as the nation-State, the Church, and Education. The urgent call for a new radical society transcends, first, its national boundaries to encounter European progress; second, it transcends the limitations of Christianity posed by the Greek Orthodox Church; and third, it renders the ethnocentric education into a more humanistic culture. For this reason, Kazantzakis views the case of Greece as a "unique” one. On the other hand, he does not intent to universalize its importance, but regards it as the dynamic potential of Greece on which it can found its contemporaneity. 127 Laourdas, on the contrary, estimates tradition as being quite important. His "Greekness" implicates both an evolution and a nostalgia towards a literary past but again his position ideologically assumes Greece’s historical and cultural continuity. It is interesting to observe that Laourdas accuses Kazantzakis of being distant from what Laourdas considers the “genuine Greek tradition." In Laourdas’s view, Kazantzakis's vocabulary does not contain concepts of logical and analytical thought but has risen from the poet's falling in love with things themselves. He states: Apl'otifi.ai d^WS1 T T ^ TTOLTjTLKd TTjTCt TT|S‘, yiaTl Tl£ nepiaa6Tepes' (“Nevertheless, I deny itspoetic technique because most times the word [...] originates not from the erotic relationship with the thing, itself but from a metrical purpose or analytical thought") (Laourdas 1977: 10) Laourdas, furthermore, claims that Kazantzakis’s poetic world is a fictional representation existing only in his imagination. Kazantzakis’s language lacks sensibility, the doctrine of “soul” that grows in contemplating Nature. No|ii£u) TTa)S‘ TroXii SucaioXoyrmdi'a p.Tropei va uel icavel? 6 t i im dpxei ttoXXtI t£x vi) (3d|3ai.a oe £va 128 t£toio otlX, 8ev undpxei dp.ws' Kajxid p.a0T|Tela ttis’ ipvxf\S TTXdi ( t t t | (“I think that quite justifiably one can say that there is certainly enough art in such a style, but there is no discipline of soul by the Nature”) (Laourdas 1977: 12) (18) Laourdas is certainly influenced by the ideology of demoticists. He evaluates Kazantzakis's work according to the aesthetics of demotic songs. O XexTLKd? GTicraupds* t o u KaCavrCd eivai auyKev'Tpajp^vos’ air* dXe? tis" eXXTiviic£s“ ycovi^s1 kcu and direipa Xaiicd Keipeva, aird TpayoOSta, ■trapa|i.d0ia, TTapoipLies\ TTapaSdacis1 ttis 1 PotipeXii?, t t is 1 P68ou, t t is 1 KOirpou, t o u IT 6 v t o u . ("Kazantzakis's lexical treasury has been compiled from all Greek peripheries and from an endless amount of popular texts, songs, tales, proverbs, tr"ditions, from Roumeli, Rhodes, Cyprus, and the Black-Sea") (Laourdas 1977: 8) He extolls Kazantzakis as being one of the very few who know so much Greek. p id eTrox^ ttou dXoi jxiXdfie yia t t \ v EXXdSa icai p6vo ^vas 8u6 ttjv ££pouv, dXos auTd? o TrXoi)Tos“ 8ev p.itopel napd va tou 8 lv e i noXii ^xeydXr) x a P^- 129 ("In an age when all speak of Greece and only one or two know it, all this wealth must give him nothing but great joy") (Kazantzakis 1977: 8) Laourdas ends up by defining the Hellenicity of language as such: -rrtaw aird icdGe X£(m £va? Kdapo? CeaTd?, ai(70T|T6s‘, x e i P0 T T ia (7 T ^S ‘, £ua? Kdap.o? € \ \t)vik6 s*. H 6X\t|VLKii ypappT) t t | ? aKpoGaXaaaid? Kai t o u Pouuoti, t t i s 1 ^doTepTig vuxTa? Kai tou t^Xlou, CTinGtCft- cttti X££ti tou uoiryrfi Kai Katei. X tva t £ t o i o £pyo tto u KaTaXiiei ("Behind every word a warm, sensible, palpable world, a Greek world lives. The Greek line of the shore line and the mountain, of the starry night and the sun, lights inside the poet's word and burns. In such a work that philosophically disintegrates the world the Greek word saves even the most insignificant things of life.”) (Laourdas 1977: 10) Herein lies how Laourdas understands the Greekness of literary language: as naturally representing the living umwelt, as coming straight from the heart 'Kdapo? crrd?" ("a warm world") and as been subjected to senses and reality, "aio0T|To'", xeipoTuaorTo " ("sensible, palpable.") Furthermore, he identifies the vocabulary of poet (in the sense ofpoietes as demiourgos, creator) as immediately associated with the most representative 130 characteristics: the Hellenic line of the sea-shore and the mountain, and of the starry night and the sun. The "new shiver" that Kazantzakis brought to literature is a contemporaneity which represents an alternative utopian Greece. His Prometheus trilogy represents the best evidence of this project of revival, of rebirth. Of course, Kazantzakis wrote for a local and specific national audience regardless his cosmopolitan ideas (19). It is precisely this ambiguity that one discovers in Kazantzakis's project: on the one hand, his turn towards Europe; on the other hand, his confinement to a small national audience. But it is not true that he abandons Aeschylus. On the contrary, Kazantzakis reads Aeschylus carefully and is deeply concerned with the tragic message of the classical drama. But his aim is to re-create Prometheus and to modernize its message for the contemporary Greeks (20). Kazantzakis’s attempt is important in radicalizing Greek Modernism because of its ambivalence to its literary tradition and the European models as well. As in Dionysius Solomos’s case (21), we are confronted again with a writer who strives to innovate Greek literature via the cosmopolitan West, but who also senses his position as a national writer. His contemporaneity was always based on the ambiguous relationship of cosmopolitan dreams with local reminiscences. In the more general project of contemporaneity which takes place in the 1930's and 1940’s in Greece, Laourdas and Kazantzakis employ two different strategies, that is, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, respectively (22). Thus their projects foreground two different approaches to the modernizing of Greek literature. Kazantzakis’s “unique” view of cosmopolitanism and contemporaneity in Greek letters and, especially, his ideological confrontation with the Generation of the 1930’s resulted in his long-time marginalization by the dominant Greek critics. As Bien states: If Kazantzakis’ case is at all representative (and, obviously, I think it is), we are forced to conclude that a Greek theatre has never fulfilled the promise that existed in the beginning of this century. The reasons, as I remarked at the very start, must certainly be varied and complicated. Yet surely one of them has been the refusal of both critics and the wider public to accept the theatre as a natural, healthy arena for the exhibition of disagreeable ideas. (Bien 1975: 408-409) 132 NOTES 1) In reality, it was the politics of most Greek governments concerning the problem of refugees and the former Greek territories that wished to assimilate the refugees with the natives. In literature, this plan was successfully carried out by the convergence of demoticism, modernism, and urbanization, ideologically based on centralization, modernity, and Europeaness. The central idea of this plan was the following: The Greeks of the Black Sea, Constantinople and the Pontic penninsula, Asia Minor, and Alexandria should give up their former lands and histories on behalf of a neo-Hellenic culture centered around Athens. 2) See also Friar (1958: ix) 3) Kazantzakis's work has especially suffered from such narrow minded criticisms until recently. Even the generations of the 1960's and 1970's in Greece have learned it as forbidden literature charged with "atheistic" and "communistic" inclinations. 4) See also Colaclides (1983: 85-98). 5) See also Prevelakis (1958: 70). 6) See also Colaclides (1983: 97). 7) See, for instance, Morton P. Levitt (1983). 8) The "mother Earth” is the original numen of creation. Could it allegorically represent a “renaissance of the State", a new State of innocence and freedom? 9) See also P. Bien (1965) 133 10) On Kazantzakis's synthesis of East and West, see Stanford (1968: 237-239), Bien (1965: 148-154) and Lea (1979: 156-160). 11) I am referring to all those nostalgic attempts primarily initiated by the purists and the academicians to revive the Attic and Byzantine spirit in the name of a belated Neo-Classicism and Romanticism in the 19th century. Kazantzakis was against all these humanistic attempts at revival. His own project was neither to restoreHellas nor to link the present with the past ensuring continuity, but rather to enlighten individuals in order to create a modern Greece. Such a plan was further based on the moral and political consciousness of the free subject. It is the new subject who is aware of his/her nation-State situation and who attempts to re-define Greece’s position toward its past and the West. 12) Constantinidis also observes that Kazantzakis’ aesthetics lies in “personal and collective freedom from repressive artistic and social structures” (1987: 159). 13) On the issue of barbarism, see Tziovas (1986) and Poggioli (1959). 14) See also Arthur C. Banks and Finley C. Campell (1964). 15) In the same context of change we must also place another poem entitled “Promhqe;af3’’ by Tellos Agras published in Ne;a Esti;a 29(1941 ):437 and reprinted in “TpiavTd<#>uXAa p.iavi)s rin^pas” “One Day’s Roses,” ed. Kostas Stergiopoulos. Athens: Fexis, 1965. 16) See also Constantinidis (1987). 17) The idea of the individual subject pre-existed in Greek literature since Cavafy and Karyotakis, not to mention the Romantic poets, such as Panayiotis Panas, Demosthenes Valavanis, and loannis Karasoutsas. However, such an idea of the private individual was always oppressed by the ideology of a 134 national literature. Individualism emerges again during the 1930’s and 1940’s in surrealist and radical modernist texts, such as texts by Stelios Xefludas, Andreas Embirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos, Nicolas Calas, Nanos Valaoritis, Nikos Gavriel Pentzikis, and Renos Apostolidis. 18) Laourdas, in general, was interested in the relatioship of soul with nature. He finds that his contemporaries are unable to address this issue because of a “lack of spirituality” (“e;lleiyh pneumatiko;thtal3”). In his essay “H AoyoTexvitci^ KpiTnci^ ctto MeCToiroXepo,” Laourdas accuses O. Elytis that his representation of nature in "HXios o ITpciTos” is “souless" and “irrational” ("di/juxTi Kai dXoyr|”) (1944:3). 19) See also Karl Kerenyi (1963). 20) It is no accident that Kazantzakis chooses Prometheus in order to materialize his project of rebirth. According to Gilbert Murray, Aeschylus' Prometheus is the most representative drama of Attic tragedy. Murray states: I know of no other Greek play which at all approaches the Prometheus in this ambitious and romantic use of stage devices. The Greek word for it isierateia [...] a style which makes constant appeal to the sense of the marvellous (1940: 43). And E. A. Havelock adds: Seen in this light, this tragedy becomes a commentary on the basis of all Greek tragedy. At an almost abstract level, it seeks to present the humanist spirit of free inquiry, and of belief in the man who inquires, set over against the religious sense of insecurity, before an environment which is jealous and can crush us [...] The fundamental thing about the play is that it seeks to dramatize the dialectic itself, in the Greek consciousness, between the anti-humanism of 135 Mediterranean religion and the fierce faith in man possessed by the Greeks (Havelock 1968: 47). 21) On Solomos, see Bosnakis (1991). 22) Although Greek literary nationalism has already been sufficiently studied by scholars, cosmopolitanism is yet to be examined. Its chief representatives include: Nikos Kavadias, Kostas Karyotakis, Constantine Cavafy, Andreas Embirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos, Nicolas Calas, Alexandros Baras, and D. I. Antoniou. CHAPTER III THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE CRITIQUE OF GREEKNESS In the previous two chapters, I examined how Cavafy and Kazantzakis reacted to national literature by foregrounding a more cosmopolitan writing. Both were indeed involved in exceeding the narrow borders of the Greek nation, as much as in a different way each of them wished to be ahead of his times. In this chapter, I will demonstrate how the Greek Avant-Garde was related to cosmopolitan ideas, such as Cavafy's and Kazantzakis’s, and how it challenged national Modernism of the 1930's. Cavafy and Kazantzakis showed to younger poets that poetry could be larger than nation and that the task of the poet was to uncover other hitherto undiscovered dimensions of Hellenism in order to debate modern ideas (1). Historically, the Greek Avant-Garde emerged with Surrealism in the early 1930's. Andreas Embirikos and Nikos Engonopoulos were the main representatives of Surrealism in Greece (2). Greek Surrealism, such as those of Eastern Europe, was a more complex phenomenon than what we believe (3). In peripheral literatures, it lasted much longer than in France, its native land. In Greece, especially, Surrealism concerned 136 137 literature as late as the 1970's. This date, however, is not accidental as the same is evidently true for Latin-American and Eastern European literatures as well (4). In Greece, Surrealism acquired various forms, and, particularly, during the years 1945- 65 became the cardinal trend of the Greek Avant-Garde (5). In this chapter, I will examine the works of two important but not adequately studied _ poets, Nicolas Calas and Nanos Valaoritis, who began their poetry with Surrealism and ended with the Avant-Garde. Both Calas and Valaoritis, as did Cavafy and Kazantzakis before, lived most of their lives outside Greece and saw it from abroad. Calas's Poems of 1933: Poetry as a Social Text "Our task is to transform the world!" (6) With the famous marxist 12th thesis on Feuerbach Calas attempted to awaken his contemporaries from New York in the unhappy year 1940, while Hitler's army was invading Paris. Calas urged contemporary poets to internationally embrace the world beyond nationalistic boundaries. Calas's adoption of Feuerbach's statement at that critical moment implied his following beliefs: his dedication to committed art, his duty to enlighten the people, and his ultimate purpose to change society. Committment, change, worldliness: 138 these three key-words are constantly encountered in Calas's work. In the "Poems of 1933," Calas turns the focus of Greek poetry towards "megalopolis" and "metropolis," such as Athens/Peireus and New York. "To TpayotiSi Tali' AipeviKcii' Epyaiv," for instance, represents the construction of (New York’s or Peireus’s? he gives evidence of both) harbour by thousands of immigrants. In this poem, such as in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1929), one is confronted with the irony of a constructed megalopolis as well as with the labor and exploitation of workers. Et8a aK6 p.T| va atcdpouue rq 0dXa aa a TrXT|p.p.upci VTas" T-qv pe dytcous aud pTreTdv _ o TeTpaya)viap6s> tou tt6vou _ eKTOnlCovTas’ £ t c t i t o vepd ttou ttIvouv axdpTaya oi tou ZItu tou OudiX 2 t p t i t _ ("I also saw them to dig into the sea overflowing it with pieces of cement _ the quadranism of pain _ turning over thus the water drunk with greed by the gold-hunters of the City of the Wall Street") (Calas 1983: 11) Or 139 AyopdCfTe BevClim 2£XX ypd elvai t) y\ 6 tt o u 8 6 alu6Tai T) GdXaaoa kl aicoiiyeTai povdxa. va e l i / a i t| ttoI tictti ttou a y a ir a i t t o u |ioi) X£ei 6cxa jic cruyKivoiii' 6lu' to T p a y o iS i t u v tt6X6wu ('"Buy Shell Gas the house of the twelveth district writes this is the language spoken here the poetry of the harbour where the sea cannot be seen and only the silos are heard to be lapping the poetry I love telling me all that moves me the song of the cities") (Calas 1983: 13) Before him, Karyotakis had attempted to speak about the "city" compelled and constrained by the routine and loneliness of provincial life. To Karyotakis, the urban environment was concomittant to boredom, fatigue, and anonymity. Karyotakis's conception of the city juxtaposed the provincial with the urban, rural regionalism with industrial urbanism. His stance towards the urban and the modern seemed close to similar views held by other, mainly French writers, offin-de-siecle. Cavafy also wrote about "cities," but those located outside of mainland Greece, 140 which were turned into prominent cosmopolitan centers mainly because of the West's Orientalist interests. To Cavafy, the city represented a particular location of historical and commercial significance. In Calas's view, the city, or rather the "metropolis," introduced a concept that was different from those of Cavafy and Karyotakis. Calas understood the reciprocal distinction between the local and the cosmopolitan, where the diminishing of the one results in the empowerment of the other. Interestingly enough, he understtod very well the complexities of development in colonized countries in relation to metropolitan centers. His journey to Quarzazat in Morroco (1938) was instructive to him. The first time I saw New York it was in Quarzazat. Before I visited this oasis of the Tafilalet _ the long valley in South Morocco that runs between two ranges of the Atlas _ Q.uarzazat meant nothing to me. But when I saw its astonishing houses I felt I was already in New York. Quarzazat, Tinherit _ among the most beautiful places in the world _ fill the landscape with the forms of scyscrapers built for Lilliputs, or should I say, for human beings? These buildings in which five hundred fires can be lit _ around each fire sits a family _ are human in scale. (Calas 1942: 262) He also perceived the demise of nationalisms and the ascension of a revolutionary internationalism (7). 141 The "Poems of 1933," especially those under the subtitle "H Botf," are of particular interest here. In these, Calas introduces a poetry of oral languages and plural subjects, all those heard and met in the metropolis. It is this plurality of tongues and subjects that furnishes form and rhythm to the poems themselves. Orality is given a primal status in Calas's early poetics. The new language he introduces is more an objective one, expressing human needs and voices, instead of subjective feelings and emotions, as poets did of his previous generation (8). aXX' 6rrou icai va iTeTouaa to p&Ti ^ou dicouya ("but anywhere I could throw my glance I was hearing voices voices of poverty that builds hills") ("To TpayoiiSi tiov AineviKaW Epycov" Calas 1983: 12) Unlike national Modernism, and particularly the poetry of Seferis and Elytis, which represents concepts of Greekness on a metaphysical and transhistorical level, the "Poems of 1933" focus on the quotidian and social protest, representing a vocal writing filled with dissonance and noise. In "AiaStj Xwcni" and "ZTpoyyuX^ Sup^wvia," voice and noise penetrate the poem and give its form. Language becomes deeply realistic in order to distill the linguistic experience of daily life from the reader. 142 TupiCei yupl£ei pTixa i/^? ttoikIXwv pop ("Turning turning awfully the round street turning turning awfully in the round street people of one thousand kinds machines of various forms") ("ZTpoyyuXi^ Zop^iov'ta" Calas 1983: 32) This realistic language dismantles the linguistic idealism of national literature by integrating language into praxis. Calas's language celebrated the rhythm, the free-flowing expressivity, the ambivalences of discourse, the "buts" and “ifs" of an oral live speech. And it does so by refusing poetic and academic formalism, the stylistic rules and conventions that any national poetry required. Seferis made up a style first and only then wrote poetry. Calas, on the contrary, was indifferent to style; he made up verses first to be read and which could be later recognized as "good" poetry. His poetry offered opportunities for participation and conversation with the readers. k i rj avSpoimi/Ti pd£a 143 oav oxerbs ttov to uepd Tiov d X A a w ("and the people's mass like a drain that poisons the water of others because it broke it bursts its anger its own anger our own anger and that anger this anger it is now flowing it is flowing slowly strongly fa st it is flowing") ("AtaStf Xwctti " Calas 1983: 16) Orality governs the phonetic context of the poem, until it draws all rhythm towards itself. Orality represents a disinterested style, for the impulsive and instinctual elements inherent in speech predominate. Style presupposes a 144 programmatic and refined choice of textual strategies, such as in Seferis’s case. In addition, it is difficult for someone to find links with literary tradition in Calas. I would rather say that his work has been largely absorbed by synchronicity. According to his early Greek essays, it seems that only Calvos, Cavafy, Varnalis and Papatsonis interest him. Varnalis left some traces on Calas's early poems. In a letter to Theotokas, Calas indirectly comments on Varnalis: KaTaKplv'eis’ to style twv NeoeXXi'ivwv, lows' dxL d 8 iica, pa ott)v t^xvt) 8 ev p-tropels 1 v ' airoKXelaeis tt| Ppiatd TTdvTa _ as elvai TrdvTOTe xu$ala topa TTixpd) f| e l v a i dXXoTe sublim e (dpa BdpvaXri ttou poii < f ) a i v e r a i T d o t) V a UTTOTipds". ("You condemn the style of Neohellenes, perhaps not without reason, but in art you cannot always exclude the insult _ let it be sometimes vulgar [see Pikros] or other times sublime [see Varnalis whom you have the. tendency to overlook.") (Theotokas 1989: 24) (9). As I noted earlier, Calas's poetry also addressed multiple subjects. Calas diffused conceptions of high and low language. He opened his poetry to new audiences, to educate people of labor by means of poetry. Poetry now recovered from academic linguistic sophistication could be carried out in non-academic circles whose only linguistic experience was that of spoken reality. 145 Calas spoke about the hardships of the proletariat and declared social change. To (ZTodXi piXdei _ pe T|X^ anayy^XXei tt| SwaTi^ IC T T O p la TOV tt]u tuttAvoiiv oi epydTes1 pe Ta tcoupaafi^va tiov X^PLa icai ttiv' atcoiiei o SiapdTT)? v' avrnxet otcl vnboTeya "The steel speaks, with echo reciting its powerful history, the workers print it with their tired hands and the passenger hears it to resonate in the shelters" ("A ijid i/i" Calas 1983: 40) Calas was the first Greek writer who took up issues of colonization and exploitation of immigrant workers. X t I£o w eSdi Kau/oii pyia yf| T a 0ep£Xia too Traptc^Tou rov SieuSui/Ti1! Kai TToXXciv' peTdxwi' 8ia ("Here they build a new land the foundations of the director's floor and many shareholders of various companies") ("To Tpayoi»8i toju Epyuiv" Calas 1983: 13) He described the Athens of 1933, a decadent city (as he will later admit to George Theotokas) (10) as facing the problem of absorbing the newcoming crowds from the Greek provinces and the refugees who flooded the city (11). This is the new sound, the 146 noise that constitutes the new poetry of a growing Athens in transition. Omonoia square represents nothing but the chaos of the emerging industrial cities, the impersonal crowds, and the modernized spirit, where everything is mixed up into a "ritualistic satanism," to use one of Calas's metaphors. The new linguistic and social minorities are well presented in his poetry. These include the two million displaced Greek refugees along with the thousands other Greeks from the provinces who inhabited Athens in a few years, the ethnographic immigrants in the largest cities of the world, as well as ideological minorities, such as socialists, proletariats, and anarchists. National poetry was addressed to concrete educated audiences, nationally and socially well-defined. A language representing the symbolics of the official State as well as of a transhistorical and idealistic history was most suitable to it. This is the language that most poets spoke from Palamas to Seferis with the exception of Cavafy. However, in Calas it is the inscribed uncertainty, the national and social boundaries that blur, and history that is replaced by a fleeting present. All these aim at a live speechlike language (12). Calas believes in a political Avant-Garde which can subvert the bourgeois institution of national literature. At any rate, his poems challenge national Modernism in some significant ways in form, the most important of which is the use ofvers fibre as a 147 "torrent speech" of orality and rhythm. Moreover, his socialist and anarchist ideas radicalize and oppose further his writing to nationalist and conservative Modernism. Similarly, such as other socialist poets William Morris and Gustave Gurbet do, for whom Calas overtly expressed his admiration, he wished to create a "proletarian" Avant-Garde in opposition to the nationalist and Greek character of bourgeois writing. Alternative Views of Hellenism Beyond the fact that his poetry functions as a social text, an everyday lyric mostly directed outward, it also critiques the "Greekness" of national Modernism. Calas's Hellenism questions the re-invention of tradition and continuity: Tps1 icrToplas' pou o eipp6s‘ Sev ava^ploKerai ("the coherence of my history is lost, cannot be found again") ("Sn^Xes OXuinrlou Aid?" Calas 1983: 68) Calas's Hellenism was largely derived from heretical writers, such as Herakleitus, Sappho, and Aristophanes contradicting the nostalgic neo-romanticism of the poets ofGreekness. One could be more daring to say that Calas's Hellenism was close to Kazantzakis's dionysian one, although Calas always and literally refers to an irrational but democratic Hellenism, "the small 148 democratic-minded world." Greece represents a political game played in the margins of European modernity. To overcome its destiny, Greece must become the Herakleitean fire to liberate people's minds. In a similar vein, Surrealism, such as revolutionary arsonized Greece and Parthenon in its ruins in Calas's famous images, can seize the poets' minds and change the world. As Kazantzakis does, Calas also believes that his fellow Greeks are mistaken by false myths: Kai/ets* 8e voyd TT|i' dXaXt| Sdt| ("nobody understands the unspeakable prayer of an old worship") ("ST^Xes1 OXufXTrtou A 16 ?" Calas 1983: 68 ) In his mind Calas has Greeks who have been dragged into nationalistic dreams and unfulfilled promises. All the children of my generation have heard over and over again the marvelous tale of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine the Eleventh" (Calas 1941: 45) While other poets including Seferis and Yannis Ritsos are nostalgic to the past, Calas "sees' and "senses" the present moment. Att6 tou Mluwa tt)i> eiToxf| r\ upala ic6pn tou KpT|Tiicoi) (xoucrei' ou. 149 [. . . ] EToi)Tes‘ 01 auTiauxle? elvai yia o tva _ T e x ^ T p ta TT|S“ OP-Op^ld? CTOU _ e lv a i to Tlp.rip.a ttis‘updaKaipri? uTTepoxfis1 oou kol Ta X6yia pou auTd Ta T&XavTa ttoi) KaTapdXXovTai and daou? ££pouv va eKTipoiii/ dTav koitoOv ("Since Minos' epoch is the beautiful maiden of the Cretan museum. [...] These worries are for you _ artisan of your beauty _ it is the honor of your timely superiority and my words these talents paid by all those knowledgeable to value upon their look") ("Mivauicd" Calas 1983: 79) It is the modern message of the ancient beauty, its counterpoint to the irrational decadence of the West that Calas discovers in the Cretan maiden. "Those knowledgeable to value" are the revolutionary Europeans who ecstatically saw in Greece the ruins of beauty. Calas refers to the poets, the creators; Greece represents art and revolution. Counting on Greek art, science, logos, and democracy, Calas thought that Greece could play a pioneering role in changing the Western world. But Greeks first should awaken and re-orient themselves towards the present and future. Calas was writing all this about Greece while Europe had lost its vision and gradually moved to decadence and fascism. In particular, the misery of Paris, which used to be the heart of freedom, saddened him. In a letter to Theotokas (10-5-1939), he w rites: 150 EXttI£u) ua £xu ^ y e i airi> T0 Ilaptai dmo? £ ("I hope to leave Paris as I left Greecefor ever! [...] Everything is miserable in Paris, they are waiting for the barbarians. They have not decided to die but they don't know how to live any more. This is the decadence!") (Theotokas 1989: 48) Calas used Greece, the philosophy and art of a small democratic society, to oppose the dark age of upcoming totalitarian empires. Unlike the days of Phidias, Leonardo and Picasso in which activity was centered around the agora (the courts and the salons of a small democratic-minded society) today, as in the times of Alexander the Great, Philip II, the pendulum is swinging from Lilliputian states to empires, and artists can no longer enjoy that person to person relatioship which it was the purpose of classic art to express (Calas 1947: 4) Classical Hellas still has significance for the world because it represents the democracy that is much needed by modern empires. Thus, on the one hand, Calas showed the potentialities of Hellenism, but, on the other hand, criticized the populist and nationalistic excesses of the Greek traditionalism 151 The city of modern Athens, for example, the center of neo- Hellenism, of homogeneity, assimilation, and tourist invasion, is criticized in Calas's poem "Athens 1933" as follows: Tcipa TTOU TT|V CriUTTl^ TWV pT|Tdp(j)V, TOW ao^lCTTciv, KaTaiTaToiiv T^tcva dXXwv a ("When now children of other bourgeois step upon the silence of rhetors, sophists, teutons _ patricians, downfallen, heroes of many deaths in Venice_ English poets with welsh form and byronic scandals, and Egyptian and foreign victories are carried to the arenas and stadiums, and those children of R om iosyne have been regular inhabitants of her life who, from lands where Ephesios Maximus was making miracles, from lands of other faiths daily, abord on ships of bankrupted companies, arrive at 152 Athens ... it is time for us to abandon the courtyard of its ruined walls.") ("A0t| va 1933" Calas 1977: 43) Calas attacked the folkloristic disguised "modernism": and with that, of course, all those men of letters who celebrated it as the beginning of a new Greece. Much later (1977) Odysseus Elytis wrote: M t| X'ncrp.ov'oiipe 6 t l KdTroTC, cttti iiaK dpia TTpoTToXepucfi A0i)va, elvai auTd evv. ra TToi.i1p.aTa tou KdXa ttou 8iauol£ai/e avdp.eaa cttov TraXaioXiOiicd 'TTapuaaad' Kai tt\v eToi^dppoTrri 'Earla', pta tcaiuoOpyia o86: tt/v 086 NiKT^Ta PduTou. ("And let us not forget that sometime ago, in blissful prewar Athens, these [the poems of Calas] opened, between the palaeolithic 'Parnassus' and the prone to be demolished 'Estia', a new street: Niketas Randos street.*') (Calas 1977: 8) In addition to his many polemic essays, during the 1930's Calas was indeed writing poetry suggesting a revision of locally- minded Greekness, a heretic Hellenism with internationalist intentions. And as Cavafy did, Calas professed a pagan hedonistic love hoping to liberate the neo-Hellenes, developing their critical thinking and expanding their horizons. Aitdif/e enfipa Tqi/ ubxra pa£l pou _ £Xa Kai av 6Xa p-d? avfpcoui/ Tot>pa, 8e pitopel 153 Kai yia pd? k A ttou 0a imdpxei ^vas1 TTav£pTipos“ Xeipiivas [. . . ] 0a dcrrpaKa Kai paviTdpia, TT|X£<|>iXa k i o iv d v O ia ("Tonight I took the night with me _ come you, too, anything belongs to us now, it cannot there will be somewhere for us an all-deserted valley [...] we will be as gods: we will plant around us shells and mushrooms, telephiles and inanthia”) ("AlxtoS tt| Poi)0 Kai tt| BdXia" Calas 1977: 62) Calas's view is rather political. To him, pagan love means participation, criticism to bourgeois society and to passive emotionalism of the poets of the previous generation, a re awakening of the Classical world, an explosion ofgender- democracy and Surrealist passion in love, all this in an individualistic, liberating, and revolutionary way that only love may offer. His intention is to make the neo-Hellenes conscious of their anthropological tradition, so as to pass it onto their daily life because: r| euuSid to)v XioS^uTpuu aimKaTCCTTd0Ti aud tou 0dpu|3o tou daTews’ ("the fragrance of sun-bathed trees was replaced by urban noise") ("To W Calas 1977: 57) Being an artist, Calas believed that Greek love and passion could make people more optimistic, appreciative of life as well as it would elevate the moral about their Hellenicity. For Calas 154 criticized the miserable society of his times which was obstructed by Western Romantic imitations, feelings of ethnic inferiority towards Europe, the followers of Palamas, and the sonnet poets of 1910's and 1920's. Calas's Critique to Greekness in Collection A’ Calas predicted the consequences of populism and tourism upon the newly formed neo-Hellenic identity. In "ZuXXo-y^ A'," Calas parodies Greece as suffering from tourist invasion. With the advent of British and Americans in Greece, some Greeks wanted to be Americanized. In addition, other Greeks immigrated to Anglophone countries at the same time for a better living. However, the disillusionment of immigration further deepened the ideological confusion of the petit-bourgeois Greeks. H icupta ITdyicoi/u and t o Miapi Kai Ta 4>dpcraXa •yiopTdCei ("Mrs Pagony from Miami and Pharsala this year celebrates Christos Anesti dancing Rock 'n' Roll with an evzone 155 and Mr. Pagony dances with an evzone, too, while in Plaka an Englishman with faultless Erasmic accent recites Cavafy.") ("Aiyei/Tjs Calas 1977: 92) It is not only the new petit-bourgeois Americanized Greeks, but also the poetics of Greekness, the aesthetic establishment of philologists and academicians in the 1930's and early 1940's that are also criticized in the above lines. This poem is a free-verse satire of Greekness. Calas's satire is sharply ironic and realistically bare of metaphors. Any claims to metaphysical truth, lyric, and optimism, those elements that remind us the poetics of Greekness are gone. British imperialism is also targeted: A6£a to) X6yw ttou o Apeios ndyosr |i£vei Ppdxos K ai to TZH MTTH ncpavT MtTpeTdyv ki 6xi Kimposr! ("Glory to reason that the Supreme Court remains as rock and G. B. as Grand Bretagne and not Cyprus!") ("E£va Soxeta"Calas 1977: 87) Pericles' wife Aspasia is now presented as a prostitute working for the British and the Italians at the port of Cairo: Haouy ACTtraala Kai ae yvohpiaactttiv 086 ITepiKX^ous1 \ie to -rrepnayKavdi/T. Mou aTeiXe |iid KdpTa aird t ITo pT-Sd iut TT|W eiTOp.£l'T| p.TTT^Kai' 01 iTaXot OTO Al'Tls,'A[JL,tT^p.TTa.' ("You were Aspasia and I met you in Pericles street with the permaganant. She sent me a card from Port-Said, 156 next day the Italians invaded Adis-Ababa.") ("Me AoTraapotis'" Calas1977: 88) He parodies all the kitch that accompanies Greece's modernization, especially the modernized bourgeois class. He even recalls them eponymously: Tipis' £uexeu NT'iapxos1 0a X^yeTai o Naiiapxos Kai to tt\(ot6 tou ToolTcra. ("For the sake of honour Navarchos will be named Niarchos and his ocean-liner Tositsas") ("H£ua Aoxela" Calas 1977: 87) Or: IIoXi> oxoXidCeTai t o u AdKTopos; O' udiau t o crifiuXXiKd T a TelxT) t o u ITauapd eKdpifraue t t iu t u x t ) t o u GepioTOKXiy. Tou KaTTyyopoijv eltre tt) oKd ("the O' naisey sibyllic dictum 'Panamas's wall halted Themistocles’ fortune' is much rumoured. He is accused of calling the skafi skafos. The excavations brought to light coins cut by Themistocles silver-plated and unwanted." ("oupToO ua" Calas 1977: 93) 157 Thus Calas parodies the two famous Greek shipbrokers, Nearchos and Onasis. They both formed a popular legacy in the ascent of the bourgeois class in Greece, but were also well-known for numerous scandals regarding their business. Other well-known people of the public and artistic life in Greece are parodied, too, such as Vasilis Vasilikos, Melina Merkouri, Leonidas Christakis, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Alexis Akrithakis, Yiannis Tsarouchis, Alexandras lolas, and the last King of Greece, Konstantine II. The Aegean seems to have lost its glory and beauty which Elytis and other poets and thinkers of the 1930's attached to it. Calas w rites: EfaXXe? TupTravoicpoucrt e? TiX O ^v cttous' K o x X ie s 1 atpdrov Kard rna t t j u ai8ii jj-eo-’ c tto aX|iup6 to v AiyaC ou K a i t t )? TpiKup.las’. ("Frantic drummings echo in the snails since I swallowed the shame in the salty light of the Aegean and the tempest.") ("eeaTpiKd" Calas1977: 98) Calas, however, adores the Aegean but in a different way from what other poets and philologists. We saw that in Laourdas the Greek landscape and the Aegean meant something more than a place. They were used ideologically to denote cultural 158 homogeneity and continuity. But for Calas the Aegean, much like the marbles of the Parthenon, acquire a revolutionary character. "Santorini" is an Herakleitean poem made by "danger and fire" to underline radical change in our perception of the Aegean. The poet performs a theatrical role in the middle of the archipelago representing "the wild Thera" (the ancient name of Santorini). This is not Elytis's nostalgic Santorini but the red land of volcanoes which, mixed with fire, smoke and thunder awakens those who enjoy a quiet sleep. Calas seeks the adventure of the sea and the volcanic land. This particular island represents the escape from misery and the Herakleitean harmony of opposites. Santorini's characteristic traits disrupt the tranquility of the Aegean, the harmony of the other islands. SeioiJV'Tai udXi 01 3 |u0ol kl r) T a p a x i*| t w v voSetiei t o xpt^i^a t w v aXpnjpcjiv vep&v t o u A iyalou ("The deeps again are shaken and their tumult corrupts the color of the Aegean's salty waters.") ("Santorini" Calas 1983: 67) Santorini teaches him the pain of life: TToGtil TT|V ^pT)JJLT| y f | TT1V d y p i a , TT|V KdtCKLim y f | TTOU 8 i8 d aicei p.e XTl£eTai T| Can). 159 ("I crave for the desert land, the wild, the red land that teaches with flames and smoke and thunder with what pain is life made.") ("Santorini" Calas 1983: 64) It is the rocky ruins, the relics of Oia that impress him: ATrdvu) aTous 1 epenTwii^v/ous 1 Ppdxous: Tt)? Oiag T a uuoXel|jL|iaTa yup.vaWowe t t | yf| ("On the ruined rocks of Oia, the relics bare the earth") ("Santorini" Calas 1983: 65) Santorini represents the inflammatory Herakleitean universe in ruins. It is this picture of Hellenism with the beauty of its ruins that he wanted to resurrect. 160 Calas's Critique of the National Literature With the "Poems of 1933" Calas aimed to challenge national Modernism and Greekness by counter-proposing a cosmopolitan socially oriented poetry. At that time, Calas developed an optimistic political poetry engaging himself in a dialogue with other Modernist poets in Greece. Greekness was the contested issue of much of his criticism. However, in the 1940's onwards, with his residence in New York, Calas began to deeply realize the conservative turn and the gradual institutionalization of the poetry of Greekness. Hellenicity (as a populist ideology and not as a concept of historical and social enlightenment) became the axis around which the interests of most poets and writers evolved. At this time he understood that the Generation of the 1930's represented not just a group of friends but a well-established literary institution. After 1945 almost all Calas's poems are caustic satires of this poetic establishment. A recurrent theme of this writing was national literature itself and its picturesque character. ndi/co cnr' t t |v ITXdica, ctttii/ T apdraa t o u ITepiicXfi T a 2 6 via icai T a Xoujidpia 0a O KavaTd? nou aveicdXuiJje T-qv t t o it |t l k i ^ a f la t o u Cearoii vepov 161 cmayy^XAeiajrdtfte t o O M'iTaKXa0ds‘ elvaiyXuKiiTepo? a n d t o v ' O d v aT o ... Kai pud Kaiv'OTopla* or' a 8 i£ £ o 8 a 0 1 ae^pri8es“ pe Ta TaxuTdfid tiov/ 9a p.eTa TTai/poupXicrpioi) s* ("Above Plaka, on ’Pericles' Terrace' 'Sonia and loumaria will sound and light [...] The Jarman who discovered the poetic value of the hot w ater tonight recites that 'Baklava is sweeter than death' [...] And one novelty: at the 'no exits' seferises by their taxis will carry through the avenue of Collisions all the broken things to toast them with insanity." (" A c r ir a a ta rXuicoiXoiJCTa" C a l a s 1 9 7 7 : 1 0 3 ) "Sonia and lomaria" are distortions of the original names of the cafes "Sonia" and "Loumides" where most poets and writers gathered to chat. The Jarman is Seferis and the consequent direct reference points to his gastronomic preferences rather than the literary ones. His novelty is that he will carry all the broken (marbles?) to Syggrou street with crazy frenzy. "Panvourlismos" probably means metaphorically "all rubbish mixed up." The language games and their hidden meanings make the poems a satirical anthology of the canonized Greek verse. For example: KaeuCTTeprui^va dyeipa Ppwp.oiii' aav pnraicaXidpos' riaymiiTiica IToXlTiKa paicpoaupTa TpayoiiSia 162 auaToXlnica ^p ("Belated dreams smell like cod long eastern songs from loannina and Constantinople smell like tuna") ("Ev8eKa K a i Aiio IIoi^paTa" Calas 1977: 135) Belated dreams stands for the Great Idea and the poet who wrote these poems is Palamas but also Seferis is alluded to in the "eastern songs." The rest of the poem satirizes Seferis. But even the Surrealists do not escape his criticism. Eva uapeXBdv avaveciveTai EpTreipiKos, nairaTCTiJvTis andtpe K p u c iv io . "a past is renewed Embirikos, Papatsonis tonight I am cold." ("EvTeKa Kai Aiio ITolripaTa" Calas 1977: 145) Or IToXii pe auyKlvriae o irpaiTiv draw Spool vioe XTUTroi v T a j 1 to KoiiTeXd tou ae X ^ M -a aiT<^ p u e T d v eXXriviKd k i dpa OTiKii)0riKe KpepdTav aiTd t o aTdpa t o u o\iyos paiSavds". ("I was very moved by the former when he cooled beating his head on a ground from Greek cement and when he stood up from his mouth was hanging a little parsley.") (Tpa in the second example it is Nikos Engonopouios who is parodied. For Calas as well as for Andre Breton was unacceptable to write automatic Surrealism as late as the 1940's. In a letter to Theotokas dated 1946, Calas states: 0 Eyyoi'dirouXos' ^ o t c i Xc Ta £pya t o u Kai 0a t o u •ypai/ju) Trpoaex^S’- AXXd eiXucpivd Seu TucrTeiito (ofiTe Kai o BpeTou) ttws’ icai/elsr jxtTopel ua ouuex^fL va ypd ("Engonopouios sent me his works and I will reply to him soon. But fankly I do not believe [and neither does Breton] that one can continue writing in 1946 in the style of the first years of the 1920’s.") (Theotoka 1989: 53) For Calas it was the entire literary establishment that needed change and Surrealists were often deceived by Modernists and were not as radical as he wished them to be. Papatsonis and Embirikos finally published poems in Ta Nea Grammata; Calas remained always critical to the journal. He understood very well the difficulties of a radical poetry in Greece. After 1945 he felt himself isolated, away from his country (he never visited Greece after his residence in New York), his old friends changed with time and became more conservative. Thus having no communication with Greece, without knowing the new writers, 164 and with the country being torn apart by the war, Calas's attempt was doomed to fail. Nanos Valaoritis's reaction to tradition and Greekness Nanos Valaoritis's (b. 1921) poetry from its very inception was intended to radicalize Greek Modernism by conducting a critique of tradition and Greekness. Moreover, Valaoritis questioned the "continuity" and the "homogeneity" of Hellenism. Like Calas, Valaoritis is a poet of the diaspora, having lived almost all his life abroad. His internationalism relates to broader literary networks, such as the Surrealist circle of Andre Breton, the language-oriented French circle of Jean Pierre Faye and the magazine Change , and the San Francisco-based group of City- Lights of Laurence Ferlinghetti. His work My Afterlife Guaranteed (1990) contains collected prose poems from 1947 to 1990. It is a late epitome of his prose poetry where he discusses the postmodern question of the end of writing and the immortality of an ecriture intertextuelle. He is also concerned with the dilemmas of radicalizing Greek modernism, as they preoccupied him in his earlier life. From the poems that follow, "Procrustes," "Hermes and Hermione" and "Penthesileia" were originally included in his early collection The Tower of Aleppo (1945-55). The other two, "Helen of Troy" and "A 165 Classical Education" are much later texts and printed for the first time in My Afterlife Guaranteed. In "Procrustes," Valaoritis revises the Greek myth. what took place, what was said between these two when they met, tradition will not say. So let us try to restore what ensued. (Valaoritis 1990: 2) Unlike Embirikos (13), Valaoritis questions the truth and the validity of the established myth. By the virtue of logos and continuous argumentation, the poet-narrator refashions the story to empty himself of the burden of tradition. The accumulated interpretations point to the illusion and inadequacy of logos, as well as to the discontinuous fragments of Greek tradition, and to the homeless dispersion into a lost past. With the sense of black humor, Valaoritis plays with the self-colonization of Greek tradition, that is, their haunting by antiquity and the question of the present. The "radiant illusion" of logos exorcises Procrustes, our fears and repressions, through its labyrinthine and enigmatic explanations which are ironically exposed and argumentatively transparent. The "bed" exists for everyone: As for the bed ... if there evenwas a bed, don't we all sleep on it every night? (Valaoritis 1990: 5) Neohellenes are deceived exactly by the fallacy of logos. 166 As in the oral tradition, spoken logos is predominant here. The poem is written in a conversational manner. Writing is elusively conceived as a rejection of the past and a perpetuation of life. Each new interpretation postpones death, until Procrustes is defeated by his opponent's weapons that he had made by himself. that he [Procrustes] had made with his own hands the weapons that his adversary would use to destroy him is undeniable and tragic."(Valaoritis 1990: 4) Valaoritis's greatest weapon against modernist unmediated rational logos is his excessive language, his continuous argumentation: "And this could have gone on for days, for months, for years, with no way out." (Valaoritis 1990: 4) National Modernism's transparent and lucid language, the great heritage of Makriyannis, Solomos, Calvos, and Palamas that so much fascinated Seferis, turns ironically int empty talk. He playfully ridicules tradition, and philosophical disputatio is relegated to mere chatter. In "Hermes and Hermione," Greek antiquity (symbolically reminiscent of Pericles) is ironically mixed with modern tradition (Miaoulis). Historical memory, an important virtue of 167 nationalist Modernism, is minimized in a spontaneous present of ephemeral desires: the party with the songs and the smoke as well as the oneiric atmosphere interwines with the awakening description of the Greek island Hydra in the night. The people seem to have a very loose memory of tradition. Miaoulis (the Greek hero by name) struggles against the sea: Tomorrow the weather will change. A north wind or a nor'easter, whispered Miaoulis. Tomorrow we 'II round the cape. And then hoist sail for the open seas. (Valaoritis 1990: 6) The sea is neither as good and beneficial nor nostalgic as in the poets of Greekness. The water takes its revenge over steel, because in the end water always wins over steel and man, and eats away continuously at the land, licking and biting it, undermining it, until the time comes for it to crash forever to the bottom of the sea, this virgin Greece of ours. (Valaoritis 1990: 6) The Aegean sea become the priviledged dreamland, hosting the passion and imagination of the expatriate writers of Asia Minor, the "point of view" of the new elegaic lyric, a new search for identity after the national defeat of 1922, but it no longer represents the pride and identity of Greece. Instead, it is the repository where Greece will crash and sink slowly into the 168 waters until its complete destruction. As for antiquity, it can be heard only through the telephone, a technological and alienating medium that signifies the lack of active human communication and logos. The battle over the telephone had subsided around midnight. (Valaoritis 1990: 6) The Surrealist "telephone" distances the poet himself from tradition. Glorious figures of the past have lost their priviledged roles with their distinctive purity and integrity of logos as entering the modern scene. They have become the "parasites" of a new urban assymetry, singing and dancing to popular hasapika and rembetika songs: Pericles started playing nostalgic hasapika and rembetika songs from Piraeus on his bouzouki. Then came the time for a smoke. (Valaoritis 1990: 6) Valaoritis's strategy of popularizing the antique is overtly ironic and differs from the nostalgic Modernist stance. In "Penthesileia," the myth of Penthesileia is used to represent the alienation of modern man in a new cosmopolitan world, which is the product of new conditions of life. The "sorrow" is indeed the estrangement of man in this new 169 environment. Penthesileia represents this "sorrow," this "stationary dream," the ship that "disappears into the blue." The fever had pierced the metal and had penetrated the softer innermost layers of moisture and sorrow, where the seat of all pains resides, where all the poisons collect and empty drop by drop from peoples' hearts. (Valaoritis 1990: 8) Here the Greek myth is juxtaposed to a Surrealist cosmopolitanism: the "ladies made of all kinds of green metals, ribbons, and crystals" but We all have somewhere inside us, hidden or unexpressed, some memories from this strange land. (Valaoritis 1990: 8) At first glance, Valaoritis's neutrally comfortable stance to this unusual mixture marks an interesting conflict. The resolution comes from the cosmopolitan outlet to an imagined plural world, the "other" land that awaits the "ship," the transport of our souls and minds. A small part of all our life, your life passes like a ship that leaves port and disappears into the blue. (Valaoritis 1990: 8) 170 Interestingly enough, it is the Greek myth that stands for the beginning of this journey. Penthesileia gives us the opportunity for the lovely journey. The Greek myth takes us ahead to the strange new world. Just as the paths of life curl up and disappear in the thickest forests, in stationary dreams, so does this almost symbolic sorrow sometimes stay a little on your lips, in your eyes, and on your lovely hair, O Penthesileia. (Valaoritis 1990: 8) "Helen of Troy" stands closer to satire and criticizes both the emptiness of tradition as well as its superficial abuse by Western societies. Marilyn Monroe claimed her [Helen] and came close to impersonating the fickle Goddess. (Valaoritis 1990: 17) Under the obvious influence of Calas's puns, Helen, the "empty tunic" as described by Seferis, is metamorphosed into Helen of Ploy (as she is called in the text), a matinee idol, a mere joke to entertain the audience. Helen "hanged herself from a tree in Rhodes," and "her brothers recovered the statue when Theseus stole it." The heroes of Homer were: plain and simple homespun country folk ploughing the rivers of their underworlds with their delirious imagination. (Valaoritis 1990: 17) 171 Valaoritis, a bilingual poet with a strong sense of cultural identity, alludes to how Americans and other Western Europeans have received Seferis (and the Hellenic myths). Euripides took it [Helen's statue] to Rome with him but it was too soon for the British Empire to be born. (Valaoritis 1990: 17) Western hegemony over Modern Greece is once more at stake here. The stolen statue of Helen, like the Elgin marbles, travels from Hellas through Rome to the British Empire. Valaoritis continues more bitterly: Lord Chesterfield did that for him laler. He invented the cigarette. Do we have to, by all means, define it in a sentence? Discuss Coleridge's use of repetition in the mire of the Ancient Mariner." (Valaoritis 1990: 17) The great legacy of Homer's Odyssey here implies the shattering of the Greek epic within Western society's habit of turning myths into mere tales for the media. This "tale-centered" narrative of history discloses, above all, the impasse of a paradoxical and alienating voice, largely known in western Modernism. It is the finale of collective history to be always 172 between estrangement and paramythia (a Greek word with a double meaning "making up tales" and "consolating the hearers.") Anything cut in two would still be an Epic even if it were only a worm! (Valaoritis 1990: 18) Even Milton's Paradise is "lost again," as he says. In the poem "A Classical Education," Valaoritis tells us that he grew up by studying Classics. My nurse [...] although illiterate, was a classical scholar. (Valaoritis 1990: 11) Homer, who represents the "father" and the "greatest myth" of the nationalist Modernists, provided the "milk." History and Literature, the two most respected disciplines of a minor culture (and Greece's for special reasons, too) were acquired by the poet with "his mother's milk." His mother's name was Hellas and his father's Eros. His family tree included many classical names, such as Demosthenes, Xenophon, and Aristotle. Here nationalist Modernism is ironically alluded for mixing classical and modern tradition Rhetoric, the purity of discourse and logos, the pride of the ancient Greek Democracy, is now lost forever. Only the waiters in the cafes and prostitutes are eloquent and know the tropes. 173 I only heard about rhetoric much later, for the waiters in the cafes who knew all the tropes in the trade. I will never forget their discourses on the tragedy of Government. I also found the prostitutes very eloquent [...] the prostitutes reminded me of the ancient Greeks. (Valaoritis 1990: 12) Tradition proves unfaithful. Patroclus I was told had died in a chariot crash from tetanus. Was Homer so totally ignorant of the causes of his hero's death, or was he only pretending? He is now remembered for exactly that. (Valaoritis 1990: 13) Homer was ridiculed in schools by schoolboys and offered him nothing useful for education. He taught me nothing. Plato was right. Poets are too immoral to be of any use for education. (Valaoritis 1990: 13) The classical tradition had no output on his work, it proved literally "useless" despite its great use by Modernists. Not only that but classical education was largely promoted by fascists, such as Hitler and Metaxas. My classical education was finally completed by World War II. (Valaoritis 1990: 13) 174 Ironically once again violence is reconciled with respect, raising the question whether he must be sympathetic to Hitler because Hitler was another "classical hero," very much like Achilles, or he must feel an antipathy for Plato because his views on poetry are close to Hitler's who "hated degenerate art. And evil books of literature." (Valaoritis 1990: 13) Evidently, Valaoritis critiques the way that tradition and Greekness have been abused by national Modernists. Like Calas, Valaoritis not only takes a distance from but also becomes critical to the poetics of Greekness. He notices an increasingly augmented populism by the excessive use of tradition. However, he explores popular elements (such as in "Hermes and Hermione" where Miaoulis represents an ordinary popular individual, overtly influenced by Nikos Gatsos) but rather in a rhetorical and experimental way on the level of form, while resisting any nostalgia of the past or to merge lyric with a national narrative. Rather, his use of some figures from the demotic tradition forms a tropological mapping of the ethnographic Other and the estranged familiar if placed in the context of international Surrealism. The demotic figures come from the forced power of the imaginary upon writing to transform reality. That is why these figures are empty of substance, automata, machines that 175 only defamiliarize history and experience. Seferis's heroes, on the contrary, are historical figures modelled according to myths and to the truth of the nation; they are positive individuals inviting to a tragic message. Valaoritis's writing, thus, continues to defend art's autonomy in Greece separated from national grand narratives. The Civil War and the Degeneration of Greekness The populist abuses of tradition and the excesses of classicism were not the only factors that enforced Valaoritis to revise his notion of Greekness. The Nazi occupation (1940-44) and the following Greek civil war (1944-49) came to humiliate the Greeks. This decade marked a significant change in the Greeks' perceptions about their nation and the people, and sank their morale into disgrace. The shade of the civil war remained for decades after leaving its imprint on many political, social, even ideological symptoms that followed. Valaoritis regards the war from a humanistic viewpoint. He particularly notes the bankruptcy of Greekness, the ideology that aimed at imposing the superiority and purity of the Greeks. His poetic collections directly addressing these issues are "The Lesson of the Dawn" (1944-46), "The Punishment of the Magi" (1947), and the "Central Arcade" (1944-58). In the poem 176 "AouXotiSia Kai KaTaicTTiT^s 1944" ("Flowers and Oppressors 1944") he writes: K i av OeXi^croui/ tA t^s* va fepuapicdpow oi icaTaxTTiT^s* Troid? 0a tous* epuoSC a e i; TdxaTC? X£yape 0a to u s* ^ t i s* TrpciTes* aicpoyiaX id s* T d x a T e ? X £ y a p e 0 a Tons* im o S e x T o iip e p e to p a x a l p i a T a 8 d i m a T d x aT es* X £ y a p e 0 a ("And if the conquerors want to land who will stop them? We were supposedly saying to strike them on the first seashores We were supposedly saying to greet them with a knife in the teeth We were supposedly saying they will be afraid of the be Ilf ries We were supposedly saying they will retreat to the mountains And many other things now forgotten Betrayals dates disgraced gestures ETERNAL SLAVERY, slavery slavery, steps stairways, steps candles paths candles.") (Valaoritis 1980: 36-37) The Greece that Valaoritis saw was stricken by traitors, disgraced bby insignificant individuals. The racial superiority implicated in 177 the poets of the 1930's has now been effaced into oblivion and nothingness. Greece suddenly became a "small" and "strange" country. People were getting lost in a narrow, unimaginative, territory, that is, the Aegean. HAI0 2 TOT ME2 0 NTXTI0 T Evas' 8ik6 s pas KL £vas 8ik6 s tou s a v0p cottos A e tn a an6 Kaipd. Ta pdTia t o u favdpxovTai auxvcl Kai Xdpnouve pes orov avTlpaxo Ka0p£TT) Ka0(is Ta k 6 k k iv o ("THE SUN OF THE MIDNIGHT There is one man from us lost and one from them absent long ago. His eyes are often coming back and shine in the opposite mirror just as the red lights of the boats captived and covered cross over the ocean.") (Valaoritis 1980: 38) Through the quotations of another poem,"Troy" (1980: 48), well- known phrases denoting Greekness are revised: the Homeric seashores host the dead (Elytis), the ocean is full of drowned people (Elytis), this spring nobody knows whether he survives or not (Rhegas Velestinles) and the towers change their color 178 (Seferis). The "Troy of defeat," Cavafy’s Troy, characterizes the Aegean. "The Punishment of the Magi" continues the drama of war. All friends are gone, passed away. S' aim*| ttiv £pT||jLT) euoxfi icavels1 8ev £xeL M-dvci kl' auTi? ttou trepip^vaiie 8ev p.TTdpecre va 'p0el. ("In this deserted age nobody has lived and the long-awaited one could not show up either.") (Valaoritis 1980: 53) People watch with deathly faces and tied up mouths. TT6aa a|3T|afidva pX£jj.pLaTa KoiTdve dTav KoiTd£eis‘ irdcra Septi>a ard^iara |itXdve drau piXd? ("How many dying eyes watch you when you watch how many tied up mouths talk when you talk") (Valaoritis 1980: 51) Love hides itself in fear and terror. KXeicrTd Trapa0upduXXa Ta a n )0 ta ttou ayairdsr ("Closed shutters the chests that you love") (Valaoritis 1980: 51) The country is dying day after day. H X^Pa 1T0U ayaTTf|aape cnyd aiyd TT60alvei 179 ("The country we loved is now slowly dying") (Valaoritis 1980: 51) "The Punishment of Magi" is a lament for human values and life under the state of war. The presence of death shades the entire poem. People are dead like statues, alluding bitterly to Seferis, and death for ever standing there. EKelvoi aav aydXpaTa kl auTd? TTav'TOTeivds1 ("Those like statues and him eternal" (Valaoritis 1980: 52) Greece suffered a deep crisis and every human value collapsed during this war. Death, life, dead families, thousands of orphan children, and next to them Greekness humiliated, the Greek mind defeated. After 1922 and 1940, the civil war was the latest defeat of neo-Hellenism. The heroic resistance to the Nazis was soon to be disrupted by the rapid British and Soviet propaganda of the two politically extreme parties, the Monarchists and the Communists, that made every Greek an enemy. Valaoritis very expressively deplores the bankruptcy of human values and the nonsense of brutality, the degeneration of Greece. 180 From Greekness to Fascism Valaoritis's critique of Greekness continues in the post-war period. In the following decades, he wrote many important works that hold a critical stance towards the literary trends of the 1930's and open new possibilities for Greek literature. Among these works we can include the following:Central Arcade (1944- 58), Sanctuaries of Microbes (1961-64), The Feathered Confession (1961-68), The Talking Ape (1961-71), The Unbalanced Muse (1963-65), The Hero of the Accidental (1966- 68), Anti-poems (1961-64), The Anonymous Poem of Photeinos Ai-Yannis (1973), Some Women (1982). The war left behind a void. In a poem of the Central Arcade, Valaoritis writes: M d T a t a oi ttoltit^S' TrpocnTa0oiiv va y e p la o u v t o Kevd p.e tous* cttIxous’ KCU TLS“ 6LK6l/eS> TOUS. T o Kevd e-navtpxerai tti6 d 8 e io air6 irplv icai £riT^ eL v£o -y £ p .ia n a ("The poets vainly try to fill the void with their verses and their images. 1 8 1 The void returns more empty than before asking for a new filling.") ("IIoi'Ticni" Valaoritis 1983: 131) In the context of this emptiness it was easy again for shallow nationalism to rise. But now it is the official State of successive conservative governments that approriate it for their own political propaganda. In the cold war era Greekness often served the purposes of conservative anti-communist politics many times. In Diplomatic Relations (1972), Valaoritis criticizes the military coup in Greece (1967-74) and its proclaimed Greekness. Greek mythology has been abused by Western contemporary pop- culture and tourism. Helen of Troy is a Hotel in the vicinity of Mycene and the Achilleion is a German empress's Summer Palace in Corfou ("Orpheus and Eurydice") Greece, the country of gods and demigods, is being governed by a non-sensical dictator, Stylianos Pattakos. And Hades is now the whole world including Cerberus or Pattakos whose daughter was married in the Church of Saint-Dionysus protector of the city of Athens 182 And "long live mythology in Juntaland"; in other words, long live the myths, the lies of those who exercise political power. "Factual Poem II" is a critique of the Greek kitsch of the petite-bourgeois and tourism. Ravencheck made some recent croaks the other day: 'Greece's Colonels, he wrote, keep peace through apathy crowds stroll casually through the streets camera carrying tourists jostle for position in front of white skirted Evzones Valaoritis criticizes the apathy of the people, only a few of them along with some Greeks abroad committed themselves to resistance. It is hard to imagine the Regime's opponents existing really anywhere but in their own imagination detested by intellectuals, criticized by Greeks abroad the military seized the power The exiled poet writes to awaken his compatriots, to remind them of their responsibilities to democracy. In "The Story of Thymios Whose Name Means to Remember," the prisoner Thymios attacks the silent majority to protest for its rights. There is only a handful of us under arrest right now your correspondents love to say the numbers vary from 300 to 3000 however in reality there are 8 million prisoners. 183 The Absurdist Subject Other important changes in Valaoritis's post-war writing are the absurdist text and the schizophrenic subject. The civil war and what followed it created an atmosphere of madness in Greece. Thousands of people in exile and political immigration, an unproductive beaureacracy, and the official anti-communist propaganda, all this caused a violent hostility to any Modernism and intellectual growth. What was gained in ideas in the early years of the 1930's for Greece now seemed lost. Greek literature became again ethnocentric and internalized to itself; the contact with Europe seemed once more unwelcome. It is to this new ethnocentrism that Valaoritis now from abroad tries to oppose; he is one of very few who grasp this conservative return to ethnocentrism. From now on, his poetry will be more political with Avant-Gardist tendencies. The subject is now driven to absurdist madness and schizophrenia. Language often becomes the medium of such schizophrenia revolting against collective poetry. FromCentral Arcade and The Unbalanced Muse onwards, Valaoritis turns to an Avant-Gardist, language-centered poetry. Often his language is more preoccupied with real and concrete images and objects. Even his surreal images represent the socio-political reality, the 184 escape from reality and the contradictions of Greek Modernism. Putting nationalism aside, the subject is now liberated, delivering cataclysmic speeches. In The Unbalanced Muse, the speaking subject is mediated by another ego refusing to name and identify himself. KdTToios1 icoiTdei p£aa pou icai px^irei o t i pe (3X£iTei Kdiroios aicoiiei p£aa pou k i a K oie i 6 t l p aKouei "Somebody is watching me and sees me watching somebody is hearing inside me and listens to me hearing" ("KdTtoLos" Valaoritis 1987: 9) The poem continues with language shuttering meaning. KdiroLOS’ poi» X£ei, 8ev e lp a i eyco,ttou ypd pa £va x^PL cXaaTLKd ttou awpaix^L to 8 l k 6 p o u ("Somebody tells me that I am not I, who is writing this moment but an elastic hand which is pushing mine.") ("KdTToios" Valaoritis 1987: 9) In national Modernism language evokes the symbolism of the nation. It is the nation with its signifiers and desires that lies behind the speaking subject. The personal and the national meet. In Valaoritis, the subject seems fragmented into multiple 185 personae, "not I, not I, someone else, me". This contradiction exactly stakes the problem of authority in Greek national writing. The escaping subject tries to liberate and put itself in other contexts from the limited space of national literature. This negativity will be later more extremely figured in the Kafkaesque "becomings." In the prose poem "The Woman of Constitution Square," the speaking subject accuses her of the entire socio-political system. A speech of delirium, overflown with strange questions and dissociations. The woman finds her escape in the becoming-androgyne, the becoming shoe. In the poem "Words-Women" the becoming-Woman takes its most extreme position; it becomes the margin, the edge of language possibilities. Here we are confronted with words that open to new possibilities, connect to flights, a generic field of schizophrenia, "Use only words - keys - that open cupboards - shelves - drawers - linen chests - boxes - desks - bookcases - soapcases - trunks - bags - baggages - souls - processes - that open holes on the walls ..." In the "Anonymous Poem of Photinos Ai-Yannis," the schizophrenic writing is the result of a specific political situation, that is the military junta in Greece (1967-1974). More specifically, the poem is written after the uprising and the bloodshed of students by the army and the police forces (November 1973). 186 Tou? Xalnapyou? Xe-qXdTes tou k£ p8ous tou avdpou, tou p.lcrous\ auToiis ttou Sappod v tto)S“ pe TauKs ayopd£ouv T^auxla kgu Td£t|. "the greedy pillagers of the unlawful profit, the hatred those who think that can buy security and order with ta n k s n (Valaoritis 1987: 134) It is the bloodshed, the injustice, the political oppression that causes the delirium. T o t £ X o s t o u eXei)0epou X6you- t o t £ X o s t t i s a n ^ i l a i S 1 t t )s £peuuas’ rj KdTioCiaa KaptrdXri o u^os pecralwuas "the end of free speech; the end of thought; of research; the descending curve; the new Middle-Ages." (Valaoritis 1987: 125) This madness results in a subjective writing that becomes everybody's writing in the small community. rpdcfxo p.id Ypa t t o u avt\K€i ere b\ov$' 8ey elpat k avkuag 8eu etpai kva TrpdatuTTO [. . . ] T| pou ai/f)icei ae bXovg. "I am writing a general and anonymous writing that belongs to anybody; I am nobody, I am not someone [...] my voice belongs to everybody." (Valaoritis 1987: 112) 187 This "everybody," the individualized voice of the community becomes the line of escape, the identification with all those who are oppressed. NOTES 1) Karyotakis has also criticized national literature and tradition. Nevertheless, the reason I do not disccuss him here is because his poetry had not a radical effect upon the poets of the 1930's and after World War II. "Karyotakism," a poetic attitude taken up especially by poets of the left, was more to describe political failure, urban alienation and decadence, but in traditional form and metrics. On the contrary, the works of Cavafy and Kazantzakis gave an impetus for radicalization in both form and content and facilitated the cosmopolitan resistance to nationalism. 2) To a similar tendency of neoteric poetry in Greece we must add the short-lived Greek poet from France Theodores Dorros. Dorros remained for a long time an enigmatic figure and kept himself in anonymity. It was not until recently that many critics believed that the name "Dorros" was another pseudonym for Calas, since the lives and styles of both poets are strikingly similar. Manos Charitatos recently brought enough evidence verifying Thrasyvoulos Castanakis's claims that Dorros was real and lived in France, until he committed suicide soon after the publication of his book. Dorros's only - albeit important - poetic collection Stou Glitomou to Chazi (1st ed. 1930, 2nd ed. 1931, Paris) was not an orthodox Surrealist one. His work was derived from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Guillaume Apollinaire rather than Andre Breton. However, it stands close to Surrealism and what for Greece represented a French-influenced neoteric poetry at that time. 3) A mere look at essays written as late as in the 1970's will prove the hostile and inadequate way most Greek criticism deals 188 with Surrealism. Generally speaking, many critics meant with "Surrealism" any incomprehensible, irrational, and hermetic poetic mode. It was not until recently that Surrealism began to be seriously examined. See, for example, the books by Frangiski Ambatzopoulou (1980, 1987), Yiorges Yatromanolakis (1983), and Z. I. Siaflekis (1989). However, we need a more substantial and comprehensive study on this topic, which will examine Greek Surrealism in conjunction with its specific socio-political context. 4) For the Eastern European Avant-Gardes see Bojtar (1990) 5) For the contribution of Surrealism to the post-war Greek Avant-Garde see Elizabeth Arseniou (1993). Arseniou proposes an innovative approach to Surrealism by discussing the complexities of this movement in Greece. She distinguishes between a rather orthodox inter-war Surrealism and a post-war neo-Surrealism which emphasizes politics and neo-Avant-Gardist tendencies. 6) This is the opening phrase of Calas's "Towards a Third Surrealist Manifesto" (Calas, 1973: 31) 7) See, for example, his early Greek essays edited by Argyriou (1982) 8) If one wants to examine orality in Greek poetry, Solomos's epico-lyrical poem Free Besiezed. seems the best place to begin with. When Solomos writes expressions, such as " aL(i.aTOT(TciKicr|jL^ va," or "avd k o u c t t o s : KiXaiSiapLos“ and "XiXidSe? i)x0L cl|j.£t p t |t o i , troXi) |3a0id o t t | XT^aTl" encaptures exactly the oral (and aural) effects of language. Solomos's aim is to assemble all the bloody experience of his struggling nation in a neoteric idiom. 9) It must be noted that as a young student in the Law School at the University of Athens (around the years of 1923) Calas was actively participating in " Association") following Dimitris Glinos, as Alexandros Argyriou states (Argyriou in Calas 1982: 9). 10) Note also Calas's many early attacks on a bourgeois Modernism and his belief in a proletariat art. Kelvo dpw? ttou efapTi^Tcu and pd? elvai va avTiTdfoupe- 2to TTaixvt8ia tou?- ra £pya pa? _ crra Xwpl? aupirepdapaTa flt|3Xla tou?- ti? 8i8axd? pa? _ o t i? aT^XetuTe? avaXOaei? tou?- 8uvaTd? auvSdaei? _ oTa KoapoiToXmicd tou? popdvT^a- tl? koivwviic£? pa? 0daei? [. . . ] pe pid X£fn. TH M o v r i pva TexvT] TrpdTrei va TroXepfjaoupe pe tt)v ITpoXerapLaKTj T ix v V ("But what depends on us is to counter-propose: To their games: our works _ to their clueless books: our teachings _ to their endless analyses: strong compositions _ to their cosmopolitan romances: our social positions [...] in one word, we must fight Modern Art with our Proletariat One.") 11) See Svoronos (1981). 12) It is also interesting to note Roland Barthes's remarks regarding the relatioship of speech and body which could fine be applied in Calas's case. It should be understood after these few observations that what is lost in transcription is quite simply the body _ at least this exterior (contingest) body which, in a dialogue, flings toward another body, just as fragile (or frantic) as itself, messages that are intellectually empty, the only function of which is in a way to hook the Other (even in the prostitutional sense of the term) and to keep it in its state of partnership (Barthes 1985: 5) 190 In Calas this exchange between speech and body appears very often and his poetry many times presents a physical sense. 13) Embirikos also adopts a similar digressive technique of re writing tradition. See, for instance, his "Oedipus Rex". EPILOGUE In this study I explored how certain Greek authors distanced themselves from national literature and turned to a cosmopolitan and international writing. Through extensive reading of their texts I examined modes of writing that were opposed to a national collective literature. In the 1930’s these modes of writing provided the means with which the Greek Avant-Garde could develop. We can now conclude that Greek Modernism typologically belongs to those Modernisms with a double component: one conservative Modernist and another radical Avant-Gardist. The Greek Avant-Garde comes into being as a reaction to the nationalization and academization of Modernism. Cavafy and Kazantzakis led Greek literature towards an anti-traditional cosmopolitan and contemporary writing. Cavafy neither used Homer for ideological purposes to justify continuity of tradition nor pointed him as the father-figure for the young poets to emulate him. Instead, he experimented with different styles and viewed the Homeric epic particularly for aesthetic purposes. Moreover, Cavafy’s writing exemplifies a defamiliarization of the Greek poetic tradition, free verse and formal innovation. Cavafy’s conception of Hellenism did not 191 192 reflect through the most established one by Greek historians, anthropologists, and other academicians and writers who viewed Greek official culture as the natural uninterrupted heritage of the Ancient and Byzantine tradition; on the contrary, it was the result of a dialogue with the East and West, and particularly with European poetics. Cavafy believed that Hellenism was much greater than its Greek State and understood it in a synthetic way, taking into consideration territories of the Hellenic diaspora as well as the syncretic Greek culture made by Eastern and Western elements. This internationalization of Hellenism and poetry was the first serious attempt by a Greek author to be read abroad and to contribute to an international readership. Kazantzakis also criticized Greekness, as we saw in his debate with Laourdas. His principal preoccupations were to express the agony of .modern man and the crisis of European culture and to offer the Greek alternative to this crisis. Kazantzakis based his claims on the dionysian elements of Hellenic tradition and conceived of Greece as the passage between the East and West. Thus, we see that both Cavafy’s and Kazantzakis’s conception of Greece and Hellenism were broader than the autochthonous understanding of neo-Hellenic topos and tradition, as represented by the poets of Greekness. Cavafy’s and Kazantzakis’s proposition was to place Greece at the heart of European debates. At the same time, they wanted to enlighten 193 Greeks and show them the path to European modernity. Greek tradition had to go beyond the revolution of 1821, popular songs, and the memories of the Ottoman rule. Greekness was, to a large extent, based upon such founding notions of the popular Romeic tradition. Cavafy and Kazantzakis reminded the neo-Hellenes about forgotten but important moments in their history; their view of Greece was a "panhellenic" one that took into account the ecumenicity of Hellenism. Kazantzakis nonetheless responds directly to Greekness as proposed by national Modernists. In his answer to Laourdas, he argues for social change and a widening of the neo-Hellenic mind to comprehend the modern questions of mankind. The Greek Avant- Garde emerges from the ambiguity of changing and radicalizing literary form and content, on the one hand, and the internationalization of writing, on the other. Kazantzakis’s radical reforms aimed at the critique of academization of literature through language, style and tradition. National Modernists cleansed the demotic from dialectic features according to the needs and tastes of the new bourgeois class; for them style expressed the nation as collective soul, to emphasize similarities among people. The invented topos of the Aegean, for example, was exactly a catalyst of this new psychology. But Kazantzakis presents his Odysseus as a wanderer in unknown and unhospitable places in the heart of Africa. Cavafy and Kazantzakis 194 have no tradition behind them; they only engage in a dialogue with European poets. Calas and Valaoritis are more consciously engaged in Avant-Gardism. Calas’s work responds more directly to national Modernism. Like Kazantzakis, he attacks linguistic academicism, although he does not use Kazantzakis's extreme form. Rather, he emphasizes orality and opens poetry linguistically to multiple social groups, especially the working-class. Thus, while Kazantzakis addresses a linguistic “panhellenism," Calas is more concerned with class and social strata and a leftist orientation. In his rejection of tradition, Calas tries to show the value of forgotten and neglected ancient works of art with a revolutionary (and anti-bourgeois) meaning have value for modern Greek culture. From the 1940’s on, national Modernism and Greekness became the most common subjects of his poetry. Valaoritis criticizes Greekness and ethnocentrism in his early poetry. His poetry is touched by the experience of war and the aftermath of the cold war. In his post-war poetry we can trace many important elements which greatly influenced the Avant-Garde of the 1960’s, such as absurdist tendencies, schizophrenic subjects, parody of Greekness and nationalism, and a protean language of multiple signifiers. Calas's and Valaoritis’s direct target is conservative Modernism. They both want to radicalize Greek Modernism 195 according to the European standards, while Seferis, Theotokas, and Karandonis argue for an indigenous Greek Modernism. The Avant-Gardists' concern was to relate their writings with international movements, such as French Surrealism, Socialism, the rise of fascism in Spain, World War II, modern arts in metropolitan cities and the like. They greatly contributed to Greek post-war Surrealism and the underground literature of the 1960's. The conflict between a canonical national Modernism and the marginal Avant-Garde also continued in the 1960's and 1970’s. Although the work of Calas and Valaoritis was not much discussed by critics, it marked the beginning of a writing that opposed Seferis's influence; even in the 1930's a writing which questioned nationalism was already in the horizon. If we can add one more type of Avant-Garde following the Greek case, we might say that Avant-Gardes that are born within the context of a national literature revolt against nationalism and adapt a cosmopolitan tendency. 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