The Nation Between Utopia and Art: Canonizing Dionysios Solomos As The

15 The nation between utopia and art: canonizing Dionysios Solomos as the ‘national poet’ of Greece Vassiliki Dimoula Perhaps the most controversial element in the work of Dionysios Solomos, the ‘national poet’ of Greece, is his nationalism. My aim in what follows will be to discuss a contrastive relationship between the utopian element in Solomos’s national poetry and his canonization as the ‘national poet’ of Greece. The tension between Solomos’s work and its reception has recently been discussed by Giorgos Veloudis from the point of view of the appropriation of Solomos for the needs of Greek ‘national ideology’ (Veloudis 2004). By contrast, my own focus here will be on the ideologization of the aesthetic dimension of Solomos’s work in the course of his canonization as the leading figure of Greek national literature. Although I will not discuss the poet’s reception in any detail, my points of reference will be Iakovos Polylas and Kostis Palamas. The social‑imaginary institution of the nation is by definition ideological; it constitutes ‘a social reality whose very existence implies the non‑knowledge of its participants as to its essence’ (Žižek 1995, 2, cited in Gourgouris 1996, 26). In order to justify my discussion of it as a ‘utopia’ in the poetic work of Solomos, I will refer to the transcendental poetics of his time, Dimoula as well as to modern theorizations of utopia, with particular emphasis on the notion of ‘negative utopianism’ suggested by Theodor Adorno.1 Veloudis, in his recent book (2004), provides a detailed account of Solomos’s appropriation by Greek ‘national ideology’, which was based on a politically motivated distortion of his work.2 The ‘nationalization’ of Solomos in the course of his multifaceted reception obscured the initial, historically very specific grounds of his canonization as ‘the national poet’ of Greece by the Heptanesians. The first to describe Solomos as ‘the national poet’ – as well as the first to use this phrase in Greek – was Iakovos Polylas in chapters XI and XVIII of his Prolegomena to his posthumous edition of Solomos’s work in 1 As a social‑imaginary institution, the nation is impossible to fix as a positive entity. However, it does register a topographic desire. Its topos has been defined by some scholars as ‘heterotopia’ – in Michel Foucault’s sense of an effectively enacted utopia (Foucault 1986, 24; Leontis 1989, 43; Gourgouris 1996, 46). My use of the term ‘utopia’ instead of ‘heterotopia’ is not intended to deny the nation’s spatial grounding, but to allude to a different theoretical corpus, from Bloch to Adorno and Jameson, which proves more suitable for my purposes in this essay. 2 Indeed, Solomos’s name is cited in connexions as diverse as the ‘national’ wars of 1897 and 1922 and the Greek ‘language question’ (Veloudis 2004, 94, 216). 2 Dimoula 1859 (Veloudis 2004, 81). For Polylas, ‘national poetry’ was by no means restricted to a narrow patriotic sense, but depended on the combination of the national preoccupations of the work with its aesthetic quality (Veloudis 2004, 81, 147). In this sense, it coincided with ‘Romantic’ poetry, defined as a ‘modern’, ‘urban’, ‘national’ literature, which supported the creation of the new, national states in Europe during the first decades of the nineteenth century (Veloudis 2004, 300‑1). Polylas’s emphasis on ‘truth’ as essential to the national, on the genius of the individual poet, and on the vision of a better Greek world in the future, is suggestive of the distinctive position of the Heptanesians on the newly formed concepts of ‘national poetry’ and ‘national poet’.3 Despite the distance that separates the Heptanesians from overtly political misappropriations of Solomos, whether later or contemporary, Veloudis sees in the ‘interpretive’ interventions of Polylas in the poet’s oeuvre 3 See Solomos 1961, for the poet’s statement that ‘the nation must learn to consider national what is true’ (26). Polylas also writes about the ‘true Greece’ in ‘The Free Besieged’ (29). See also Veloudis 2004, 151‑2, for Solomos’s endorsement of the views of the Heptanesians on ‘national poetry’. The utopian in Solomos in the sense given to this notion here is realised exclusively at the level of verse and not at the level of the overt statements of the poet about his poetry. 3 Dimoula the beginning of his integration into ‘national ideology’ (Veloudis 2004, 104, 108). From my point of view, I believe that the main ideological gesture of the Heptanesians is located in their emphasis on the aesthetic, the individual, the visionary; in what follows I shall draw attention to the difference between this ideology and the utopian in Solomos’s ‘national’ late work. Polylas’s emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of the newly‑formed notion of ‘national poetry’ places his Prolegomena at the beginning of the appropriation of Solomos’s work within the frame of an ‘aesthetic nationalism’.4 This appropriation would be completed at the end of the nineteenth century by the second major figure in Greek ‘national literature’ to play a key role in Solomos’s canonization, Kostis Palamas. Apart from some texts of a panegyrical character, which directly aimed at the integration of the poet into ‘national ideology’ (Veloudis 2004, 84), Palamas gradually prioritized the aesthetic dimension of Solomos’s work. This started as a justified move away from the patriotic, but resulted in a neglect of the national altogether and a failure to acknowledge its centrality for Solomos. The characterization of ‘The Cretan’ as the ‘most musical embodiment of the 4 The Prolegomena have interestingly been paralleled with the genre of Bildungsroman by Lambropoulos 1988, 16. On ‘aesthetic nationalism’, see Redfield 1999, 60. In an earlier book (1996), Redfield discusses the Bildungsroman in connection with the problematic of aesthetics and ideology. 4 Dimoula most dream‑like mysticism’, and of the last period of Solomos’s work in its entirety as that of ‘metaphysical creation’ are a misunderstanding of the real significance of the aesthetic in Solomos as an enabling condition of the utopian within the national (Palamas 1981, 46, 58). Indeed, Palamas characteristically rejects what is, from this point of view, the most crucial aspect of Solomos’s aesthetics: fragmentariness.5 His insistence on the ‘eloquent effusions of lyricism’ in Solomos’s late poetry is also telling for his intention to ground the national upon the lyrical space of aesthetic abstraction, itself based on an impressionistic identification of the lyric as the genre most unbound from history (Palamas 1981, 43). The question has been raised whether a lyric poet can also be a ‘national poet’ (Tziovas 1999, 164). In fact, it seems that lyric abstraction is no less essential than epic grandeur for the canonization of a poet as ‘national’.6 The utopian element in Solomos’s late poetry emerges clearly through a comparison with his early work. The different realization of the national in 5 See his disapproval of the disjecta membra (λείψανα) of the poet’s oeuvre (Palamas 1981, 106) and the discussion of this issue by Angelatos (2000, 73‑191). 6 See MacPfail on the canonization of Whitman as ‘the lyric poet of an epic consciousness’ (2002, 137). 5 Dimoula the different stages of Solomos’s poetic career is suggestive of the evolution of his poetics. The ‘Hymn to Liberty’ (1823) and the ‘Ode on the Death of Lord Byron’ (1824) engage with contemporary events in a largely documentary way, in order to serve the cause of the War of Independence.7 The revivalist aspiration of the ancient Greek past is the main ideologeme evoked in support of the ‘national cause’ in these poems. If Solomos’s early work has a utopian potential, this is only to the extent that all ideological and, more specifically, national poetry does. As Fredric Jameson puts it, the ‘simultaneously ideological and Utopian character of the national phenomenon’ offers a central example of the fact that every ideological gesture participates in a dialectic between ideology and utopia, to the extent that it involves an effort to attain universalizing (Jameson 1981, 289, 271‑290). In contrast, the late poetry of Solomos resists ideology at a formal level. Its utopian potential consists in the indirectness of its engagement with the national. However, to describe this indirectness through the aestheticizing discourse which marks the rhetoric of Polylas, Solomos’s posthumous editor, is to narrow down its utopian dynamic and reduce it to what has been criticized as the ‘aesthetic ideology’ of high Romantic poetics. ‘Aesthetic 7 For Solomos’s ‘conversion’ to the ‘national cause’ by Spyridon Trikoupis in early 1823, see Veloudis 2004, 73. 6 Dimoula ideology’ serves bourgeois hegemony precisely as an escape from the socio‑ political to the aesthetic realm (De Man 1996). My suggestion will be that the utopian in Solomos relies on specific formal qualities of his poetry, which resist the ‘aesthetic ideology’ implied in the discourse of the Heptanesians or Palamas devoted to his work. In support of this suggestion, I will allude to Adorno as the thinker who, par excellence, and from within a Marxist vocabulary, made the case for the aesthetic against aestheticization and ‘aesthetic ideology’.8 The utopian in Solomos’s poems that I will discuss here also differs radically from the emphasis on the future that tended to be stressed by the Heptanesians. This emphasis is, it is true, by no means absent from Solomos’s poetry, even the late poetry. It appears, for instance, in the fragment which was later given by Polylas the title ‘The Eastern War’ (1854): ‘The fourth one – look – seems to the eye to be, but is not’ (Solomos 1961, 261). As Veloudis suggests, for all its indirectness, this line refers to the vision of a better Greek world in the future (Veloudis 2004, 106).

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