Classics in Performance Vassilis Lambropoulos

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 20, Number 2, October 2002, pp. 191-213 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2002.0030

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/21981

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Classics In Performance Vassilis Lambropoulos

Abstract

This paper examines different ways in which ancient quotations are incorporated in contemporary poetry, arguing that Greek writing has often freed itself from the interpretive demands of modernist classicism by adopting the position of a public, virtuosic performance. By cultivating the ethics of an agonistic relation with their ancient predecessors, poets today reinvent cultural literacy and fashion their unique place in literary and intellectual history.

But, generally speaking, only through knowledge of the present can the passion for classical antiquity be acquired. Without this knowledge, where could the passion come from? (Nietzsche 1990:340)

It has become commonplace today to worry about the decline of cultural literacy. We have all discussed documentations of the diminish- ing interest in our shared (Western or otherwise) intellectual, artistic, and scientiﬁc heritage. Educators, journalists, opinion makers, and politicians have diagnosed a gradually weakening transmission of humanistic culture to younger generations. That the public no longer has a well-rounded familiarity with literary masterpieces, artistic treasures, historical events, or civic achievements of the past puts at risk the liberal institutions of the public sphere. What binds us together in a common culture may too easily come undone. Here is an eloquent expression of this concern from the early 1960s: The continuity of the cultural tradition guarantees a certain community of general cultural horizons, if not of philosophy or attitudes toward life. It is proper to ask whether this common horizon has perhaps in the last half- century lost in signiﬁcance and in relative cohesion and stability, and whether this loss has perhaps had a reciprocal effect on literary production and helped to shape its features. (Meyer 1968:20)

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 20, 2002. 191 192 Vassilis Lambropoulos

Paradoxically, the growth of intellectual apathy has been accompanied not by the cultural amnesia that one would normally expect—a total forgetting of works, themes, dates, sources, and sites—but the opposite: the rapid cultivation of a different learning skill, the itemiza- tion and memorization of everything. Audiences may have grown less learned but at the same time they possess a surprising capacity to process and juggle references. Wherever we look today, we confront the need to identify and trace an overwhelming number of quotations. From film to advertising, from classical music to fiction, from architecture to fashion, producers of style and sensibility seem to borrow directly and uninhibit- edly from previous sources of any kind and period, and to expect the public to accept and appreciate the practice. Creators of high and low culture (from Alfred Schnittke with his “poly-stylistics” to the South Bronx rapper with his “sampling”) invite their audience to “catch the reference,” and in turn audiences are growing increasingly sophisti- cated, exercising gleefully their ability to scan mentally impressive stores of information and identify with obvious pride the origin of an image, tune, verse, title, slogan, theme, and the like. (Incidentally, this capacity is also extensively mobilized by the recent popular interest in lineage as well as the academic fascination with memory and testimony.) Much serious criticism, not to mention many copyright lawsuits, have been directed against indiscriminate quoting, which, though able to draw from vast data banks of memory, sensibility, and intimacy, appears to lack historical consciousness or a strong sense of debt. While the recognition of quotes can produce research on large quantities of disparate sources, many of them obscure or ephemeral, neither the sources nor their contemporary amalgamation seem to belong to or form an organized whole, a linear narrative, or an organic tradition. Such a generalized cannibalistic borrowing makes sources much more recyclable than recoverable. If everything is quotable, originals lose their quality of origin and become nomadic: they circulate but cannot function as a topos, a commonplace, a shared site of ancestry, feeling, and reference. As a result, at a time when everybody can quote, no one can comprehend, so the criticism goes. Of course, one person’s exhaustion is another person’s abun- dance. Mallarmé’s desperate opening cry in the poem “Sea Breeze” from the mid-1860s, “The flesh is sad, alas! And I have read all the books,” could be taken as Michel Foucault’s badge of erudition. One might look at the new literacy from the standpoint of Adorno and decry it as another sacrilegious marketing strategy of the culture industry, which puts a price on everything and is interested only in the profits of reproduction. Or one might look at it from the standpoint of Baudrillard Classics In Performance 193 and endorse, in the disregard for quotation marks (Garber 2002), the collapse of the market of quotes as fixed prices and rates. If quotation today refers more to the current quoted price of a commodity than to an established authority, is this bad because we can no longer relate to passages and their rites of reading, or is it good because we have grown more sensitive to proportional share, to quotas? We must therefore confront a paradoxical situation whereby one kind of literacy is replaced by another: to wit, humanistic literacy, based on a progressive view of history that sought to understand the past dialectically as an archive of organic cohesion, is now replaced by postmodern literacy, inspired by a non-linear, synchronic view of the past, which approaches history as a data bank of digital information that can be retrieved at will to answer present concerns. Literary, cultural, and social studies have analyzed this important shift under categories such as the anxiety of influence, appropriation, iterability, and intertextuality. These discussions often offer a wealth of insight but lack focus and rigor since they range quite indiscriminately from reference to allusion to paraphrase to parody to pastiche. In this paper, I would like to concentrate specifically and systematically on the instance of the quote, the exact repetition of part of a pre-existent work. Additionally, I would like to suggest a different angle on the issue by looking at recent quotations from the weightiest of sources, the Greek Classics—the most authoritative, for some, and oppressive for others, quotable source. Finally, I shall draw on Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy (specifically, her theory of action) to examine the performative dimension of quoting in Greek poetry. As we all know, Greek and Latin were a cornerstone of western cultural literacy for many centuries, to the extent that they often defined its chronological, aesthetic, and epistemological limit. Specifically in modernity, every time we debate our identity, we revisit the famous Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns and, like the French, use antiquity once again as a measure of comparison precisely because, by defining at the end of the 17th century the Greeks and the Romans as “Ancients,” we have entered a problematical relation with them. There- fore it would be instructive to examine their status and circulation at a time when quoting methods have broken the exclusive hold of the textbook and the anthology on learning and cultivation. If traditional literacy is in decline both in quantity (the syllabus and the Grand Tour) and in quality (the dialectical comprehension of history), who is reading the Classics today and to what effect? Do they have a place in the postmodern digitized library? In order to answer this question, I shall draw on Greek literature, an area which over the last two centuries has 194 Vassilis Lambropoulos exhibited a rare, if not unique, awareness of its belatedness and has been pulled recently along the same postmodern trajectory witnessed else- where. If by definition we must rely on the Ancients in order to comprehend our modern condition, it is hard to find a more intense involvement with questions of origin, descent, priority, or filiation than in the only field that bears its modernity in its very name: Modern Greek Studies. Let us first remind ourselves that quoting becomes an issue with modernist painting, music, and poetry. Before the early twentieth century, when a poetic work addressed an earlier one, the standard mode of citation was allusion: an indirect, covert reference. We can see allusion at work in a school steeped in its systematic use, Neoclassicism. The neoclassical poem has an explicitly mimetic character, but it is an imitation not of antiquity but of classicism. It adopts and reiterates the classical ideal by treating ancient sources as a repertoire of rhetorical figures and modes. Let us look at an excerpt from Andreas Kalvos’s 1824 ode “Zante” [O filÒpatriw]: The forests and shady hills of Zante once heard the message of goddess Artemis’ silver bow. And today the shepherds honor the trees and the cool fountains; the Nereids still wander there. The Ionian wave first kissed the body of Cythereia, and Ionian Zephyrs first caressed her breast. And when the sky kindles the Evening Star, and wooden barks sail laden with love and with the voices of music, The same wave kisses, the same Zephyrs caress the bodies and breasts of the bright maidens of Zante, the flower of maidenhood. (Trypanis 1971:8–9)

The scene is unfolding in an atemporal space. Reference is made through disciplined paraphrase. Nereids, Zephyrs, stars, islands, boats, bodies—they all fly and float, suspended in time, always inhabiting the same place, without ever changing. Arcadian serenity envelopes everything in its music and perfumes, bathing the landscape of eternity in transparent light. Following the advent of Romanticism in literature, philosophy, and scholarship, the ancient site loses its rhetorical legitimation and pictorial harmony while acquiring a new dimension, the sublime interpretive depth of hidden meaning. Light turns dark, voices become elusive, bodies recede, premonitions of mystery and doom prevail. Where shape and balance promised immediacy, the gap of time now opens, separating the present from its history. Instead of working with stable figures, art is now consulting the oracles of allegory. Signification Classics In Performance 195 needs to be reinvented each time from the beginning, while the secret rites of pagan antiquity become the object of a perilous quest. Place and time must be excavated, authenticated, and exhibited—brought to the light of research. The legacy of Hölderlin’s apostrophe, “But, my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living, / Over our heads they live, up in a different world,” still resonates in the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, the Cambridge Ritualists, and J. Alfred Prufrock. What had been an enigma to the Jena Idealists was still irresistibly inscrutable to Yeats, Valéry, and Heidegger. The impossible quest to span the historical and cultural distance now separating modernity from antiquity has been famously recounted by the modernist George Seferis in “The King of Asine” [ÑO basiliãw t∞w AsinhwÉ ], his 1940 poem, which can serve as a “primal scene” for archaeology. Here the narrator (who, witnessing an excavation, seems to speak on behalf of many poets, Greeks, Philhellenes, Moderns, and perhaps philologists) is looking for the king of the ancient Peloponnesian city in texts, in ruins, in artifacts, in nature, but is unable to locate his presence, and even questions his existence. Instead of continuity, he discovers “a void” everywhere—in Homer, on the acropolis, beneath the burial mask, and in his own poetic vocation: “a void . . . everywhere with us” (Trypanis 1971:611). The interpretive quest for hidden or forgotten meaning remains unfulfilled. Seferis has discovered “the gap between past and future” described by Hannah Arendt: “Man lives in this in- between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward ‘the quiet of the past’ with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of” (Arendt 1978[I]:205). Kalvos’s neoclassical landscape is now barren and silent. It is not difficult to imagine T.S. Eliot sitting upon the shore of Asine, quoting disembodied passages, and musing: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” What gives this agonizing quest its special urgency, though, is its concentration not on a symbol (like Kalvos’s Evening Star), a figure (like Artemis), a place (like Zante) or a memory; the focus is instead on a Homeric quote from the Catalogue of Ships, provided in the poem’s motto: “one word only in the Iliad and that not certain.” This textual focus makes the interpretive nature of the search explicit: Can collective experience survive? Can poetry save history? What is the place of literature in an “antimythical era” (Gourgouris 2002)? And if the past is just a quote, what is the responsibility of reading, whether it is archaeological, philological, historical, or plain literary? Seferis’s answer, and that of modern poetry in general, is that any nostos, any return home to 196 Vassilis Lambropoulos the Ancients, must first pass through Hades: it must make an interpretive descent into the underworld of past texts (its footnotes, so to speak), where it must listen to their voices and seek their guidance. It is worth recalling here that quoting presupposes a rather homogeneous audience, a community of readers sharing the same course of education, standards of cultivation, horizons of reception, principles of exemplarity, and respect for a body of canonical works. In the words of Dr. Johnson, “Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world” (Boswell 1965:1143). The practice of quoting has been variously traced back to Christian homily, New Testament revisionism, Jewish commentary, Plato (Demos 1999), or Aristophanes’s The Frogs. As an artistic device, though, quotation came into being in the Renaissance novel, the humanistic epic of Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Fielding, and later Wieland. Quoting functioned prefiguratively, displayed the author’s erudition, or educated the reader. In music, it was often a matter of convenience (Bach or Beethoven repeating themselves), embellishment, or enrichment through incorporation. In poetry, however, before the early 20th century, quotation was very rare, and when it occurred (for example, in Callimachus, Catullus, Ovid, or Petrarch), it seldom drew attention to itself. Certainly quotations were not allowed into poetry while originality was a supreme Romantic value. The work of reference was entrusted to allusion, which could range widely within a body of shared artistic works, aesthetic principles, and moral values, all codified in the aesthetic disposition. Only after the traditional hierarchy of the humanistic canon began to disintegrate, commonly-read texts to disappear, and faith in the institution of literature to weaken did allusion become difficult. At this time, a new source of canonical authority was found in the quoting technique. Ezra Pound put it thus, quoting the Iliad in his poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920): “There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization /. . . / For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books.” Whereas allusion alludes to tradition, quotation quotes history. As early as 1835, Emerson had concluded in his essay “Quotation and Originality” that, although quotation is inevitable, the two are not mutually exclusive. Eliot remembered this lesson in 1919, when he suggested that the genius of individual talent is expressed in original rearrangements of inherited materials. That is why modernist poetry, and art in general, boldly and obsessively incorporated quotations, developing a dramatic dialogue between the lyric voice of the post- Romantic poet and his or her literary possessions. It is fair to say that “the quoting poem is the field on which strategies essential to the larger modernist project tug in opposing directions. The quoting poem is both Classics In Performance 197 profoundly repetitive and original; it is neither purely lyric nor dramatic, neither univocally personal nor impersonal” (Diepeveen 1993:138). In the U.S. alone, the legacy of this extensive technique from the years 1914–35, practiced by the likes of Pound, Eliot, cummings, Zukofski, Moore, and Crane is still vital to poets from John Ashbery to Adrienne Rich and above all Robert Duncan. With the introduction of quotations to poetry, the Romantic demand for originality was neither rejected nor adopted but rather transposed to interpretation: poetry became interpretive. Here literature achieved its consummate self-awareness, one that I would call philological. It decided that it not only necessitated interpretation, but it was itself interpretive, a kind of philology in verse. By thematizing its parasitic dimension, poetry moved from Romantic self-referentiality to modernist self-consciousness as literary history became one of its major preoccupations. In this context it is also important to note that many High Modernists (Seferis, Pound, Eliot, Rilke, but also Picasso, de Chirico, Stravinsky, and Brecht) attempted to deploy their new consciousness of historicity to produce a classicism of their own. Works like “The King of Asine” or Pound’s first Canto and, of course, Joyce’s Ulysses (Knowlton 1998) explicitly appropriated and reinterpreted the Classics, seeking in the process and eventually achieving themselves classical status and authority. Combining the impossibility of pure innovation with the demand for novelty, simultaneously questioning originality’s value and investing in it, they created through their expropriation of the Ancients an anachronistic original—a new universal classicism. “In embodying at once both sides of a contradiction—investment in originality and a challenge to originality’s value—quotation emblematizes the modernist position: a position which combines nostalgia with forward looking. Modernist quotation tropes the paradoxical historical situation of the poets who employ it” (Gregory 1996:3). The tremendous success of the modernist legacy often overshadows the efforts of contemporary writers, our own contemporaries. If the twentieth-century Moderns felt belated toward the Ancients and over- came their secondariness by quoting and reinterpreting them, this approach does not seem to be equally available to the postmoderns because they feel belated not to the Classics but to modernist classicism. This present condition is acknowledged in a poem by Yiorgos Chouliaras, the title of which bears the date of Seferis’s death, “September 1971” [Sept°mbriow 1971]. If Seferis “was looking for the dead king’s face / in a gold reflection” (Chouliaras 1993:119), Chouliaras seeks the “message” of Seferis’s search “in the stone, the birds, and the ship.” If Seferis was trying to understand the word Asine in Homer, Chouliaras wonders about the meaning of this name in Seferis: “many names from those days / 198 Vassilis Lambropoulos remain unchanged / but we, what do we know / AsinhnÉ te / a word in Seferis.” The postmodern poet admits with both gratitude and resent- ment that Asine is just a Seferian quote for his generation. The modernist nostalgic reference takes on a self-parodying tone. While Modernism quoted ancient documents, postmodernism quotes modernist monuments. It mediates the relation between An- cients and Moderns through interpretive classicism, the poetic philology of the quote. At issue is not the quote itself (the borrowing from antiquity), but the quote’s history of appropriation. The past becomes a hall of mirrors where readings reflect earlier readings, and interpretation emerges as a narcissistic enterprise. The danger of formalism is evident as the quotation no longer draws attention to its qualities but to its borrowed status, its status, to use Montaigne’s expression, as a fashionable “borrowed ornament.” It is one thing for Richard Strauss in the 1940s to quote Beethoven’s Third Symphony and another for Luciano Berio in the 1960s to create an entire constellation of quotes from other musical sources around copious borrowings from Mahler’s Second Symphony, superimposing upon it passages from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable! What, then, is philological responsibility under such circumstances of double belatedness? Commenting insightfully on Montaigne’s defense of quotation, Alexander Nehamas has offered a sound criterion: “To the extent that Montaigne uses earlier texts for his own purposes . . . , using them to fashion something truly his own by their means, his defense is legitimate. Whether it is successful in general depends on the importance of the particular purposes to which he puts his ‘borrowed ornaments.’ The question is whether his borrowings are really ornaments and not part of his very substance” (Nehamas 1998:117– 118). I shall argue that Greek poetry has successfully attempted to free itself from the dead hand of interpretation and at the same time to resist postmodern nihilism by devising an alternative, affirmative, self-fashion- ing approach that ought to be of interest to philologists everywhere. Let us look together at a few representative examples. In my first example, Aris Alexandrou refracts the Ancients not through the modernists but through other Ancients. In his 1959 poem “Meditations of Flavius Marcus” [Flãbiow Mãrkow efiw •autÒn] (translated as “Flavius Marcus to Himself” in Friar 1985:156–157), a Roman intellectual is considering the task of cultural transmission: “Of course you may translate verses of Homer” (translations from this poem are mine). Whether this is done with flair or care, there is one risk that this exercise must avoid: “Be careful not to translate into your life / the demeanor and passions of the heroes / no matter how much they may seem yours.” The danger inherent in interpretation is that it identifies with texts, that it seeks life in literature. It is not worth falling for Troy Classics In Performance 199 when you know that at the end of the siege only the “smoke and ash” of the city are left. Poetry may be read for profit or illumination, but this activity is only a translation, not a quotation. The Roman reader of Homer could be advising the poet who runs the risk of measuring his life against Seferis’s cryptic borrowings. If the fate of a certain belatedness, Roman or modern Greek, is limited by translation, that should not be taken to dictate the quoting of ancient conduct, feeling, or character. A certain critical distance applied to our modern duties can also be applied to their ancient sources so that we can develop a skeptical attitude toward them as well. As Nietzsche put it, “the classicist is the great skeptic in our cultural and educational circumstances: that’s his mission” (1990:345). In his poem “Credo,” Haris Vlavianos (1989:17) has offered the following incisive warning, which captures the Nietzschean spirit of all the Greek poetry discussed in this paper: TÒ nã e‰sai poihtÆw shma¤nei nã mÆ nostalge›w tÒ parelyÒn t∞w po¤hshw shma¤nei nã épexyãnesyai tÆn Ïpoulh gn≈sh t∞w ofikeiÒthtaw ≤ ıpo¤a s° ıdhge› stÆn êgnoia ka¤ tÆn égon¤a. AÈtÒw poÊ sÆmera §pim°nei nã metrãei prÒbata stÆ gl≈ssa toË AfisxÊlou yã pr°pei nã e‰nai ßtoimow nã épolaÊsei tÒn Ïpno toË ÉAgam°mnona.

To be a poet means not to feel nostalgic about the past of poetry It means to detest the insidious knowledge of familiarity Which leads one to ignorance and bareness. He who today insists on counting sheep in Aeschylus’s language Ought to be ready to enjoy Agamemnon’s sleep. (Vlavianos 1989:17)

We find a very different non-interpretive reading of antiquity in Yannis Ritsos’s poem “The Disjunctive Conjunction ‘Or’” [TÒ dia- zeuktikÒn «≥»] (1969). Like Seferis, Ritsos is interested in a word in Homer, and his motto conveniently quotes the Iliadic passage where it is found. But or is not a unique word, like Asine. On the contrary, as the poem’s title announces, it is one of the most common ones, a mere conjunction. Homer says that when the god Ares was wounded by Diomedes’s spear, he “let loose a shriek . . . / loud as nine or ten thousand combat soldiers shriek” (Ritsos 1991:113). Ritsos refuses to interpret the word or; he is not interested in the precise or deeper meaning of this description. Instead, he celebrates the gross impreci- sion, finding the conjunction “an expression both of mockery and of courtly precision, / an equivocal smile out of an incommunicable and nonparticipating wisdom/which turns satirically on itself as well as on others.” Thus he gladly preserves the conjunction in its ambiguity, its 200 Vassilis Lambropoulos smiling indecision, and hails it as a “modest outcome of the mystery of uncertainty, / profound response to the multiplicity of essences and phenomena.” There is a wisdom to be learned from this self-mocking precision, which accepts that life cannot be reduced to its essence or phenomena to their experience. In turn, the Modern poem reflecting “satirically” on the ancient one and on itself offers lessons in a philology that explicates without explaining away, that does justice to the original without exhausting it, and that happily encounters and smilingly, knowingly joins the ancient tradition. A third kind of non-interpretive understanding of ancient Greek is represented by the poem “Eumastas” [EÈmãstaw] (1982) by Yannis Patilis. The speaker is explicating the inscription on a big stone now in the archaeological museum of Santorini. The inscription is simple, its content inconsequential: it records that somebody was strong enough to lift the heavy stone. That is all. The speaker of the poem admires the deed and calls it “a Greek topic” (Patilis 1989:15). What is so Greek about it? That it was a purposeless feat, which earned its doer glory. This use-less treatment of the stone is then contrasted with two other treatments. One is the utilitarian one that asks people to add their little stone to a building, thus contributing to a collective, long-term en- deavor. It is expressed through an unattributed quote that sounds like a party line. The other is the interpretive one, where people carry history as a burden and sink under its weight. This latter treatment is depicted at the end through an eloquent quote from Seferis’s famous lines “tear yourself away from the unfaithful time / and sink, / those who lift the great stones sink.” The fact that these lines conclude Seferis’s 1935 poem “Santorini” indicates that the speaker in the poem by Patilis, the postmodern poet, has his modernist predecessor in mind while visiting the island’s museum. Like Asine for Chouliaras, Santorini for Patilis is a word in Seferis. But Patilis refuses to seek its meaning, and therefore does not sink under the burden of its tradition. In sharp, almost contemptuous contrast, he praises Eumastas for lifting the huge stone. This poem is also inviting us to compare Eumastas with the king of Asine. They are both figures overlooked by history, unknown as indi- viduals, lost in the ruins of the past. The difference between them is that, thanks to his feat, the eponymous hero has not been erased from memory precisely because he did not make an impersonal, anonymous small contribution to a larger cause (like the expedition to Troy), he did not seek a place in the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships. Instead, he performed a feat, leaving behind a record of, and monument to, his achievement. That is why the modern poet considers him a blessed mortal. As to those who are still dreaming of Trojan expeditions and sinking under the Classics In Performance 201 recollection of past glories, Tasoula Karageorgiou’s sarcastic combina- tion of two quotes will suffice:

APOKLEISTHKAME! «Oﬂ ≤m°teroi prÒgonoi toÊw toÊtvn progÒnouw §n¤kvn ka¤ katã g∞n ka¤ katã yãlattan . . .» —Eme¤w oÊt’ °na gkol de bãlame kai sun toiw ãlloiw maw ad¤khse ki h diaiths¤a.— (Karageorgiou 1986:12)

Patilis’s poem is a splendid illustration of Hannah Arendt’s theory of action as performance. For Arendt, action embodies freedom because it does not respond to a teleological (moral, artistic, religious, communal or other) obligation. The freedom of action is self-contained because it is divorced from all causality, independent of motivation and results. When action is autonomous from morality and work, it is located in the realm not of depth or surface but of appearance, the realm of the world. But how does freedom of action appear in the world? How is its atelic quality manifest? How does free worldly action endow appearance with meaning, if it can have no resort to a transcendental justification? Arendt argues that the actuality/energeia of free action consists in performance. In autonomous action, the performing act makes freedom appear. Thus action is the self-presentation of freedom in the world through performance. How is this performance to be evaluated if there is no determining telos? Arendt proposes the criterion of virtuosity, understood as Machiavelli’s virtù, “the response, summoned up by man, to the world, or rather to the constellation of fortuna in which the world opens up, presents and offers itself to him, to his virtù” (1961:137). If action is performance, then freedom is virtuosity judged according to the greatness of its achievement. Action can be judged only by its greatness (1958:205), not its outcome (like victory or defeat), while behavior can be judged by moral standards. In the performance of action, freedom finds its full expression as virtuosity. Recalling Arendt’s sharp distinction between art as the realm of making and politics as the realm of action, where activity/praxis has priority over work/poiesis, can help us see freedom as a dramatic, rather than plastic, practice. Consequently, performance should be understood in agonistic, not aesthetic, terms. If performance is agonistic appearance, then virtuosity is a great performance inspired by “agonal spirit, the passionate drive to show one’s self in measuring up against others” (1958:194). What is it, then, that prevents performance from being another aesthetic theory? What else is there beyond its virtuosic 202 Vassilis Lambropoulos theatricality? The intimate connection between virtuosity and virtù provides worldly action with its intrinsic justification—an agonal ethic. Performance may not be driven by existential fulfillment or moral obligation, but it does carry with it a fundamental accountability to the world itself, its openness and availability. Arendt limits the conditions for appearance to the public space, and the possibility of performance to the phenomenal realm of politics. “The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame,’ that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinct- ness” (1958:197). But we can see how the Greek poet is inspired by the same agonal spirit when he believes that Eumastas won “immortal fame” by showing in a great deed who he was and distinguishing himself through his virtuosity. Furthermore, Patilis is himself performing a virtuosic reading of the ancient inscription, thus responding to the constellation of fortuna and showing in word (and in agonistic competition with Seferis, the earlier visitor to the Santorini museum) who he is as a poet. For the agon to be remembered, it must be objectified in the artwork. Such objectification, as well as the drive to distinction, is what the agonistic poet is doing. This poem, therefore, offers through its own virtuosity a counter- model both to the modernist interpretive approach to antiquity and to the postmodern formalist play with it. By simultaneously quoting an ancient and a modernist text; by focusing on the task of reading itself; by emphasizing the performative dimension of doing and understanding, it proposes and exemplifies an agonistic philology—one inspired by the ethics of worldly (as opposed to, say, ascetic) virtuosity. Such a philology is not assigning itself the secondary role of serving the ancients or the aesthetic vocation of revealing their hidden depths. Instead of a scribal or archaeological disposition, it adopts an agonistic one that views understanding as a public, virtuosic performance. By so doing, it responds to Nietzsche’s challenge that the Classics should not be imitated or superseded but surpassed by action. Such a disposition finds a defiant expression in section V of the long poem From Afar by Vyron Leontaris. Here the narrator is a poet, murdered by our information age, who is searching not the traces of an ancient king but the meaning of what was the “place and time” of his own existence. Unable to comprehend names and obscure quotes, tormented by “pages swirling in the void” (Leontaris 1986:16), pursued by “killer words,” he descends into a postmodern underworld, “the hades of Poetry.” There he encounters first those poets’ words which, out of artistic fear, raging vanity, or sudden catastrophe, never found rest in silence or verse, and thus remain “unburied,” still “mortal,” never Classics In Performance 203 decaying, and thus suffering the “torture of rotten immortality” (1986:17). They are the words that now lie mummified in literary archives and have come to curse the philologists who refuse to burn them, since they are obviously planning to exploit them through publication, like the poets’ heirs. Inquisitive readers of the following tour de force (which utterly defeats at least one translator) may wish to study it in parallel with section No. 25 of Dionysios Solomos’s long poem Lambros in the standard edition of the poet’s collected works by Iakovos Polylas, together with Stephanos Rozanis’s seminal 1976 essay on the Romantic “demonic sublime” (now conveniently collected in Rozanis 2000). V Na¤, per viltate. . .

S° d¤xtu plhrofori«n mplegm°now tã ‡xnh §m°na toË ‡diou poÊ peya¤nv mãtaia zht«. ÉAnejixn¤astow fÒnow. T¤ ¶gine ˜, ti ≥tane tÒpow ka¤ xrÒnow t∞w ÏparjÆw mou; ’AnÊparktew dieuyÊnseiw ka¤ ≤meromhn¤ew . . . ParaisyÆseiw kãnoune tÒ korm¤ mou êgnvsto m°row, ÙnÒmata poÊ mÒliw tã prof°rv stãxth stÒ stÒma g¤nontai, xvr¤a é- nermÆneuta s° mantikã bibl¤a §n°drew fonik°w m° trigur¤zoun, sel¤dew stÒ kenÒ gurnoËn ka¤ tr¤zoun portÒfulla stÒn é°ra d¤xvw pÒrtew l°jeiw l°jeiw foniãdew ka¤ prodÒtew . . . Ki ¶tsi stÒ periy≈rio sfagm°now tÆ n°kuia mou tel« ka¤ kateba¤nv st∞w Po¤hshw tÒn ëdh . . . ÖEsxato r¤gow mÉ èrpãei ka¤ stã ¶gkata m° pãei ka¤ d¤xvw ékÒmh nã perãsv tã skotãdia tr°xoune katapãnv mou kopãdia sarkonef°lew é°rinew spiliãdew éllãzontaw édiãkopa xiliãdew sxÆmata ˜pvw èpl≈noun ka¤ tanÊzoun reust°w fvn°w ka¤ x°ria ka¤ mÉ égg¤zoun «^Tã lÒgia t«n poiht«n, poÊ oﬂ ‡dioi éfÆsan êtafa épÒ deil¤a ≥ dÒjaw lÊssa 204 Vassilis Lambropoulos

≥ jafnikÒ xamÒ, e‡maste: oÎte mn∞ma ponetik∞w sivp∞w mçw d°xthke oÎte po¤hma. Ynhtã ka¤ kayhmerinã ka¤ gÆina ¶jv épÒ t°xnh ka¤ zvÆ épome¤name êluvta stÒ martÊrio t∞w sãpiaw éyanas¤aw . . . P°w stÒ Sabb¤dh ka¤ s° kãpoia gra˝dia poÊ mçw ¶xoun tarixeÊsei kairÒw tÒ kr¤ma toËto nã tel°cei. ÉApÒ tã érxe›a touw ¶jv nã mçw bgãloun ka¤ s° purã §jagnismoË êw mçw bãloun énãpaush nã broËme. ÉAlli«w, st∞w d¤kiaw katãraw maw nã spartarçn tã nÊxia . . .» (Leontaris, From Afar, 1986)

Here we have the revolt of textuality against traditional philology which turns all writing into literature, against the curatorial quotation which turns every word from the past into a dead letter. The language trapped in the archive is cursing its keepers and urging them not to turn sayings into quotes, and poets into biographies, now that all poetry has been reduced to collectable, citable, recyclable material. We can imagine the frightened bat that comes out of the Platonic cave at the end of “The King of Asine” protesting in the same manner against Seferis’s search for traces of ancient life. We can also imagine Ezra Pound himself, the author of Canto I, the originary locus of poetic quotation, as the narrator of the Leontaris poem, descending into the textual Hades of the transmission of the Odyssey and facing the rebellion of poetry against interpretation. This rebellion, however, captured so dramatically in contemporary Greek literature, is not directed against philology itself. As a matter of fact, the agonistic approach adopts many philological skills in order to enrich its virtuosic performance of the ancients. For example, in his award-winning autobiographical novel Mother Tongue (1995), Vassilis Alexakis draws on a variety of methods to search for the significance of the letter epsilon inscribed at the entrance of Apollo’s temple at Delphi. On the last page, while visiting his mother’s tomb, he finally thinks of the word ellipsis, which means “falling short” in several ways, including failure, lack, and inferiority. In a series of short narratives, Panos Theodoridis similarly fails to fill in ellipses in contemporary newspapers and popular song lyrics when he enacts archaeological readings from a distant future in the next century. The collection Prose texts entitled archaeological studies (1978, 1993) by Charalambos Bakirtzis includes texts in several genres which present different pictures of the archaeo- Classics In Performance 205 logical enterprise as it approaches such objects as an ancient mosaic, a Christian inscription, and a Cavafy poem. In my next example, etymology is deployed with the utmost seriousness but produces some unpredictable results. In 1991, Dimitris Kalokyris collected a set of short narratives under the title Poikile istoria, which alludes to Lucian’s Verae historiae/True History, itself a parody of travelers’ tales. In a narrative entitled “Statue-lewd” [ÉAgalmatobãtew] (1991:15–16), he alleges a close etymological connection among the words elegein/to loose one’s mind, elegainein/to act lustfully (from which we also derive elegeia/elegy), and the fish eleginos, and proceeds to reconstruct a custom of the ancient city of Elge whereby, as a way of praying for success in fishery, the inhabitants, under the influence of sacred fury, acted lustfully on big statues of fish, and then composed elegies if their prayers were not heard. The fact that until today a county in Scotland bears the name “Elgin” indicates that the custom spread beyond the Mediterranean. This custom gave psychoanalysis the term “elgin drive” to describe the condition of being unnaturally attracted to statues. As we know, the Elgin Room in the British Museum contains marble fragments of violent expressions of this drive. Thus Kalokyris. It would be a gross injustice to inflict an interpretation upon this performative reading of an ancient performance and, having myself experienced this uncontrollable drive in many a museum room, I would be the last to attempt it. This truly Lucianic narrative deserves nothing less than another performance, which I cannot undertake here. I shall only point out that, by quoting ancient words and offering to elucidate them, the piece returns to all the issues raised by Seferis and other modernists (origins, traces, obscurity, transmission, history, memory, continuity) but puts them under the erasure of simulation. For Seferis, the polis of Asine is reduced to its king’s death mask. Kalokyris, however, approaches the polis of Elge as a living abode/ethos, thus giving prominence to ethical considerations. His brief etho-graphy of the ancient custom enables us to recognize in the artificial abode of the British Museum our own ethos, our custom of simulating the Ancients, and to think about the kind of lust that drives this. There is another kind of unnatural lust, which also carries the name of an ancient figure possessed by it. I am referring to the habit of the legendary brigand Procrustes to fasten his guests on a bed and force them to fit it. We often use the expression “Procrustean bed” when we discuss standards for the proper comprehension of the Classics, and we are all very sensitive to the lethal possibility of stretching or amputating our material to make it fit the measure of our bias or ignorance. Our negative reference to Procrustes, however, may also mean that we have 206 Vassilis Lambropoulos rushed to take sides, that our use of the myth is itself Procrustean. In his prose poem “Procrustes” [ProkroÊsthw] from the late 1940s, Nanos Valaoritis presents the villain as “a great lover of the human body” (1990:1, translated by Mary Kitroeff) who was an artist of its measure- ment and a craftsman devoted to its improvement. He should not be blamed for the condition of those who suffered on his bed, Valaoritis’s poem tells us. “Procrustes’ motives were fine, beyond reproach. The fact that he kept failing wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of those who are born so imperfectly.” When Theseus came his way, Procrustes was so dazzled by his body that he invited the stranger “to a contest/agon.” What is not at all clear is the reason, Valaoritis suggests. After describing what previous commentators/scholiastai have said on the matter, he proceeds to offer his own explanation, portraying the duelists as engaged in a night-long “dialectic contest” (1990:4), an agon of dissoi logoi, as the sophistic treatise goes. In the end, regardless if Procrustes was fooled or wanted to be fooled, we know who won. But are we better off now that Theseus is “the omnipotent master of the world” (1990:5), and we all sleep every night on the bed of “his corrupt sovereignty”? In other words, when interpretive philology quotes with confidence and solves the riddle, can we be sure that in reality it is not itself being quoted, cited, by a superior, more intolerant authority? Modern Greek literature had expressed such fears long before modernist poetry began quoting ancient sources. In Canto V of his epic poem The Twelve Lays of the Gypsy (1909), called “The Death of the Ancients” [ÑO yãnatow t«n érxa¤vn], Kostis Palamas has the hero of his epic poem witness the exodus of intellectuals from Byzantium to the West during the last years of the Eastern Empire. They are carrying with them the “beautiful Immortals,” the classical texts. As the sad procession advances, the papyri speak and express great confidence in their future civilizing mission: “Statesmen and artists shall seek us out. / Towers and cities shall be erected, / And everywhere shall be re-established / True judges of the good and beautiful” (Palamas 1969:77). But the gypsy hero of the poem has only Zarathustrean scorn for their optimism, retorting that, though Hellenolatry may return, “There was only one Hellas, and she is gone and will not come again.” And he proceeds to give them a thunderous warning: “Whoever shall follow obsequiously in your foot- steps, / Be he man or nation, shall perish with you. / Only he who with you shall not lose himself / And of your flowers plucks just enough to crown his hair, / He alone on earth shall stride adorned like a bridegroom, / Adorned with your grace, stride on and on” (1969:78). Not for Palamas Pound’s reverent quoting of Sappho in his poem “Papyrus” (from Lustra, 1916). The Gypsy’s approach is very different: “If I discover a papyrus, I burn it to make heat or light. / Unconcerned Classics In Performance 207

I watch it kindle / In whatever moldering ruin it may be, / Palace, abbey, school or temple” (1969:79). Modern Greek poetry has also been questioning both the mimetic (Procrustean) and the interpretive (Thesean) approach to antiquity more directly—by staging experimental readings of ancient texts through the technique of quotation. The greatest virtuoso of this technique has been, of course, C.P. Cavafy who, in some 45 of his poems, uses real or fictitious quotations in the title, motto, or body of the text. In fact, Cavafy began using this technique as early as 1892 in “Priam’s Night Ride,” twenty seven years before Pound’s first Canto. His sources ranged from Homer to the demotic song, from history to epistles, and from official decrees to inscriptions. Recall his poem “Young Men of Sidon (A.D. 400)” [N°oi t∞w Sid«now (400 m.X.)] where the epigram on Aeschylus’s tomb is rendered five different times—in turn, by its classical author, by an actor at a social gathering in A.D. 400, then by a young intellectual listening to the actor some eight centuries after the tragedian’s death, then by Cavafy writing in 1920, and finally by us reading it today. This cumulative rendering reminds us that “the location and comprehension of a quotation’s limits, and the degree to which its voice is marked as different from the speaker’s, can radically alter both our sense of its truth-value and our interpretation of its meaning” (Garber 1999:679). The poem begins with a performance right away: an actor is entertaining a small group of young Sidonians. We are introduced to his first performative move when he starts reciting Hellenistic epigrams. This choice seems to fit perfectly with the aesthetic, physical, and chronological horizons of the delivery. But then he makes another move, a bold one, when he shifts his poetic choices back more than two centuries to recite the Aeschylian epigram. Appropriately enough, this performative choice is accompanied by a marked change in delivery as he stresses, “maybe more than he should have” (Cavafy 1975:100) certain words in the text. At this point, whether by design or chance, the actor’s performance acquires an agonistic character, at least for one member of the audience. We do not know whether it is because it appears to be challenging the taste, the morality, or the conduct of its listeners. The point, however, is that “a vivacious young man” jumps up and picks up the challenge, joining the agon and offering his view of the epigram. The kid’s Nietzschean passion for grammata is clear. Predictably, his maturity has been debated repeatedly. The stark contrast between the old tragedian and the intemperate youth is still shocking to many people. What is even more shocking is that not only does the latter explain with great conviction the meaning of the epigram, but he even corrects it by counter-proposing his own epigram to an artist’s life, thus 208 Vassilis Lambropoulos adding a strong creative dimension to his own performance and making the actor’s appear like a pale imitation of an already weak original. One hears his voice clearly: Don’t count as a major achievement your place among the herd of an Athenian (or, in the case of the Asine king, Argivean) army; instead, claim your own unique feats eponymously. The youth’s feelings are echoed in the admiring words of Patilis’s poem. The contest is not so easily won, however, since Cavafy is undermin- ing the Sidonian’s victory with the date he gives in the poem’s title. How valid is his critique of Aeschylus and his own improvised epigram when all this virtuosity is exhibited at a private, privileged, perfumed gathering of immature youths at the end of the ancient era in the rich Hellenized Phoenician port of Sidon? Where is the space for a youth to display and distinguish himself? What audience is there to appreciate his virtuosity and make it memorable? If the goal is mneme, in Cavafy’s word, (or “immortal fame,” in Arendt’s favorite Greek quote), perhaps Aeschylus was right to ignore his victories at theater contests and record on his tomb his participation in a more glorious contention, the Athenian victory in Marathon. The polis gave him the opportunity to appear before both Greeks and Persians, to show in deed who he was and to preserve the glory of his polis. Can Sidon, the commercial metropolis, do the same for its young intellectuals in A.D. 400? By thus situating his ancient quote, by having Aeschylus cited in the site of Sidon, Cavafy declared a contest with the young man. Whether he can win, depends on us. Following its publication, the bibliography on this poem has been steadily increasing but most of it is of a strongly interpretive nature (Lambropoulos 1988:182–208) since it seeks to expose Cavafy’s motives, the youth’s disposition, the decadence of the time, and the like. But if we view the poem as a study of agon that takes us on a Mediterranean tour of ports, from Cavafy’s Alexandria to the youth’s Sidon to Aeschylus’s Athens, and directs us to engage in a performative understanding of the past, then we can, in our turn, read it in an appropriately agonistic manner: We can honor the ethics of appearance and the achievements of virtuosity. We see the high stakes mentioned in one of the two passages whose emphatic delivery irritated the Sidonian youth: alken d’eudokimon. Alke means “strength displayed in action.” All the participants in this diachronic contest are seeking the “renowned valor” that can be achieved only through great virtuosity in public action. To be true to this agonal spirit, we too should pursue no less. In proposing an agonistic philology, and indirectly advocating what Nietzsche called a “curriculum of competition” (1990:382), I have tried to go beyond postmodern avant-gardisms that radicalize either literature as textuality or reading as appropriation, and that present interpretation as an Classics In Performance 209 antihegemonic practice. Furthermore, by insisting on the ethics of public appearance, I have tried to go beyond the politics of “passing” for an identity, a hybridity, a position, or a confession, all advocated these days by so-called “performative pedagogy.” It seems to me that a philology whose syncretist (Lambropoulos 2001) task is to perform, to enact, to dramatize the ancients does not need to serve as anybody’s ancilla—neither the Ancients’ nor the Moderns’. Here by “philology” I mean not just the specific discipline but something more general: any conscious and systematic relation to something taken as classical, that is, something of a certain or broadly accepted antiquity and canonicity. Thus philology is the epistemic field that aspires to develop a meaning- ful and productive relationship with a classical era and may include, in addition to various branches of humanistic scholarship (from linguistics to archaeology), areas from the arts, politics, religion, education, anthropology, and the domain of culture at large. In this paper, I have examined quotation not as a structural element but as the thematic dimension of a philological problematic— as an explicit reflection on the tasks and limits of reading. I began with a contemporary author, Chouliaras, looking out of his open windows at Seferis, the king of modern Greek poetry, reading Homer, the king of epic poetry, as he searched for the king of Asine. The poem by Chouliaras ended with this aporia: “many names from those days / remain unchanged / but we, what do we know / Asinen te / a word in Seferis.” I should like to conclude with a more recent piece by the same author where the difficult passage between the ancient name and the modern quote, or between history and memory, is successfully negotiated.

Fvn°w fantãzomai t«n filolÒgvn fullolog≈ntaw érxa›ew touw §pistol°w poÊ ≥dh diabibãsyhkan stÒ m°llon ên ka¤ épeuyÊnontai stÒ parelyÒn poÊ kane¤w d°n nom¤zei p≈w mpore› t≈ra piã nã éllãjei s° xrÒno m°llonta giÉ aÈtÒ pãnta yã grãfei jexn≈ntaw ˜,ti ¶xei grafe› prÒw tã §mprÒw ˜, ti diabãzetai prÒw tã p¤sv éllãzontaw ˜sa pernoËn. (Chouliaras 1995:31)

Pondering the work of philologists in his long poem Letter of 1995, Chouliaras says that “they will always write / forgetting whatever has been written / forward that it is read / backward changing all that passes away” (unpublished translation by the author). We philologists read ancient epistles delivered in the past but addressed to the future. In our turn, we will compose our own epistles, written forward but reading 210 Vassilis Lambropoulos backward—epistles, that is, delivered to our future but addressed to our past, “changing all that passes away.” This is what the imaginary voices of the philologists tell the poet, who in his turn listens to them attentively, philologically. All this has nothing to do with the abyss of meaning, the open- endedness of literature, the self-referentiality of writing. The philological voices of contemporary Greek literature announce that there is no more need for a modernist descent into the Hades of interpretation. The plight of Flaubert’s copying clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, con- demned to quote the circular library of human knowledge, need not be ours. Instead of following Odysseus the traveler, we may begin to emulate Odysseus agonistes, the hero constantly competing for the meaning of, and the rights to, the past. William Spanos has recently issued an urgent call to think “the break between ancient and Modern Greek positively” (2001:108). I hope I have shown that, unlike “many contemporary Western, including Greek, intellectuals [lamenting] the disintegration of the prevailing monumental/nationalist image of [Romanized] Greek culture now irreversibly underway” (109), Greek poets exhibit in their best work a remarkable awareness of the qualities that Spanos so convincingly recovers from ancient thought such as “agonistic belongingness,” “conflictual aletheia,” “‘philobarbarian’ sympa- thies,” the “finiteness” of the human condition, and above all “the imperative of . . . an unending and mobile contestation” (2001:108). If I have used Greek poetry as my test case here, it is only because the study of quotation can find in modern Greek literature some of its most evocative examples, since the old passage and the new text share the same alphabet and a lot of the same vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, thus making questions of literacy, memory, canonicity, and agonism extremely pressing (all examined in the path-breaking Van Steen 2000). As Artemis Leontis has put it, In Neohellenic revisions of Hellenism, the elliptical quotation became the ultimate modernizing innovation made in the name of a Hellenic native tradition. Here the learned quotation somehow registered the concrete sociopolitical needs of a besieged, war-torn, and shrunken state. More to the point, when [the Greek Modernists] reassembled the fragments of Hellenism in their literary texts, they recoded Hellenism. (1995:129)

What is even more impressive, though, is that non-Greek writers and artists too have been using Hellenism as an active, resourceful corpus of literacy to recode their own traditions. One thinks of such recent works as Omeros by the Caribbean Derek Walcott, The Bacchae by the Nigerian Woyle Soyinka, The Cure at Troy by the Irish Seamus Heaney, The Kentucky Cycle by the American Robert Schenkkan, or Medea by the East German Classics In Performance 211

Christa Wolf—all of them using classical quotation to register, as Leontis put it, “the concrete sociopolitical needs of a besieged, war-torn” culture, nation, state, gender, or class, exactly like their modern Greek counterparts. For several women, African-American, and post-colonial creators today, the Classics still function as a rich, contestable repository of themes and values that invites performative readings—approaches that dramatize and bring to public view and scrutiny our complex relation with both regional and cosmopolitan, native and universal elements in our diverse traditions. The virtuosic achievements of these creators prove once again that, in the end, it is our agonistic relation to history, our engaged and inventive cultural literacy, which judges and determines what is memorable among all that comes into being and disappears in the Anaximandrean “assessment of time.” Arendt has expressed all this in her epigrammatic way: Each new generation, every new human being, as he becomes conscious of being inserted between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave anew the path of thought. And it is after all possible, and seems to me likely, that the strange survival of great works, their relative permanence throughout thousands of years, is due to their having being born in the small, inconspicuous track of non-time which their authors’ thought had beaten between an infinite past and an infinite future by accepting past and future as directed, aimed, as it were, at themselves—as their predecessors and successors, their past and their future—thus establishing a present for themselves, a kind of timeless time in which men are able to create timeless works with which to transcend their own finiteness. (Arendt 1978[I]:210–211)

university of michigan

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the institutions which in 1997, while I was teaching at The Ohio State University, invited me to present this paper: the Department of Classical Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan (and especially the Department’s Chair, Sharon Herbert) and the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (and especially its Director, Alexander Nehamas). Peter Murphy contributed valuable suggestions and his precious love for Greek culture. The paper is dedicated to the several poets quoted and cited in it who, for decades, through their friendship and comradery have taught me what literature is and why it matters so much. 212 Vassilis Lambropoulos

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