Enter Karagiozis

KARAGIOZIS KARAGIOZIS Culture & Comedy in Greek Puppet Theater LINDA S. MYRSIADES AND KOSTAS MYRSIADES THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1992 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Myrsiades, Linda S. Karagiozis : culture and comedy in Greek puppet theater / Linda S. Myrsiades and Kostas Myrsiades p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-1795-X 1. Shadow shows—Greece. 2. Karagoz. I. Myrsiades, Kostas II. Title. PN1979.S5M96 1992 791.5—dc20 92-9927 For Giorgos Haridimos Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Enter Karagiozis 1 PART ONE: KARAGIOZIS IN CONTEXT 13 1 Official and Unofficial Culture 14 2 Karagiozis as Urban Folklore 31 3 Gender in Karagiozis 48 4 Text and Context 78 5 Giorgos Haridimos, Karagiozis Player 113 PART TWO: KARAGIOZIS BAKER 123 Notes 211 References 220 Index 232 Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Giorgos Haridimos, nine times president of the Karagiozis Players Association, who has generously, during a sixteen-year period, shared his art and his expertise, his indigenous theory and native criticism of the Karagiozis performance, and his hospitality with us. Mr. Haridimos introduced us to his family, both at home and at the theater, involved us in setting up exhibits of his puppets, stage properties, posters, and stage, and allowed us back- stage to observe and record the preparation and presentation of his performances. He submitted to myriad interviews, largely by Kostas Myrsiades, with whom he shared professional and personal confi- dences that enabled us to see the performance from the inside, as the player knows it. This work was facilitated by a variety of grants over a period of several years that West Chester University has generously provided. This aid, including travel grants, released time, and funding for project materials from the Faculty Development Committee and the College of Arts and Sciences Development Award, not only kept a difficult undertaking from becoming intolerable but also ensured the suc- cessful completion of this manuscript. We are further indebted to the expertise of the Inter-Library Loan Office staff at WCU, which made available sources that were difficult to access. The Karagiozis figure, designed by Giorgos Haridimos and executed in cardboard. INTRODUCTION Enter Karagiozis The Karagiozis tradition dates from at least 1799 in Greece, but it has its origins in the Ottoman empire. Turkish theater historians have bemoaned the loss of this satiric and political performance in Turkey over the last generation, but few believed the end in Greece would follow so soon. Part I of this book provides an extended study of critical issues that have been debated but have not been conclusively addressed in the numerous critical studies of the Karagiozis performance that have appeared in Greek. These issues require comment and resolution if we are truly to engage the performance in both its particular historical moment and its political and social context. In Chapters 1-4 Linda Myrsiades has taken up these issues: the performance as the non- canonical expression of an unofficial social world, as a gender state- ment that stands as a homologue for the split social vision of the culture in which it exists, as a form of folklore that expresses the pluralism of different social strata as well as interactivity along the rural-urban continuum, and as an indigenous performative event that is determined by its economic, geographic, political, and social contexts. In Chapter 5 Kostas Myrsiades describes the background of Giorgos Haridimos, the last of the great Karagiozis players in Greece. Part II presents an oral translation directly from a 1973 tape made of Giorgos Haridimos's classic performance of the inestimable Kara- giozis Baker text. Kostas Myrsiades checked the transcription of the tape line for line with the player, who elaborated at critical points on scenic effects, audience reaction, historical references, and alternative presentational strategies. This publication of a live Karagiozis performance is thus the first of its kind in Greek or in translation. It represents an important change in the collection and dissemination of Karagiozis texts, which have been printed exclusively in reduced form, either dictated by a player or put together by a publisher from typical scenes rather than an actual 2 Introduction performance. This translation provides, as a result, an opportunity to study oral compositional techniques in performance as they naturally occur as well as to observe the actual effect of the presence of an audience on the conduct of the performance. The translator, Kostas Myrsiades, not only preserves performance rhythms and original performative divisions but also replicates linguistic and paralinguistic playing techniques of the oral performance style in translation. The key to producing a translation of a rformancKaragiozie lies pe in the language of the performance, for the critical cultural component in translating the Karagiozis text is the performance's colloquial speech. The demotic language of these texts represents a culmination of the development of popular speech in Greece. It has been chal- lenged by purist Greek, or Katharevusa, a form of educated speech used by the upper classes and officials since early Byzantine times. It has accommodated itself to the various foreign tongues spoken by Greece's many invaders, including the Franks, Slavs, and Turks. It is continually modified by dialects of the various regions of Greece— those of the Ionian and Dodecanese islands, Macedonia, Rumeli, and Thessaly, among others. The spoken language of the Greek people thus distinguishes both historic period and geographic area through the variety of its expressions (those generally common to the Greek language, those peculiar to certain sections of Greece, and those of Turkish origin), its foreign-derived vocabulary (historically Italian, Slavic, and Turkish, but in modern times also French, German, and English), and its local forms and pronunciations (e.g., Vlacho-Greek, Italianate Greek, Turco-Greek, Athenian, Cretan, and high or purist Greek). The language of the Karagiozis text capitalizes on the rich potential of idiomatic demotic Greek through the range of the performance's characters: Barba Giorgos (Uncle George) the Rumeliote, Omor- fonios the Corfiote, Manusos the Cretan, Dionisios of Zakinthos, Stavrakas from Piraeus, Gerasimos the Cephalonite, Pip the Corfiote, and Karagiozis the Athenian, for example. Moreover, it clearly plays on distinctions of power and status in its handling of Katharevusa. On the one hand, high Greek is reserved for heroes, rulers, and leaders; on the other, it is ridiculed by Karagiozis, the political leveler. Finally, language establishes a clear historical frame for the action. Set in the Ottoman period, the texts use a colloquial Greek characterized by more frequent Turkish expressions than are common in modern Greek Enter Karagiozis 3 popular speech. It encompasses as well the wide variety of languages of the Ottoman empire in the Arab, the Jew, the Vlach, the Albanian, the Persian, and the Armenian. The performance, furthermore, consciously exploits in its oral delivery those language differences that distinguish characters by time period, geographic region, level of education, roles, and individual psychology. Just as Turkish pashas, beys, and viziers use a polite form of speech that is slightly antiquated and interspersed with Turkish phrases to create an impression of the Ottoman period, so modern figures like Stavrakas and Kolitiris use an Athenian argot that reflects modern times in the lower-class urban world of the piazza. Regional characters exhibit characteristics of a conservative country culture itself dated by several centuries. Characters like San Na Leme and Omorfonios use tag phrases to identify themselves and to punctuate rhythmically their otherwise nondescript speech, while Kolitiris stutters under the tutelage of his abusive father Karagiozis. Whining pitch patterns for Omorfonios and Dionisios and accelerated speech rhythms for Dionisios and Stavrakas add up to a highly variegated aural world. The translator who specifies the language values of the performance thus has an opportunity to convey in translation much of the original performance value of the Karagiozis text. Other vocal peculiarities and performance rhythms require repre- sentation in translation as a means of preserving performance values. Karagiozis, for example, speeds his pace as he comes to the end of long speeches that build to a climax. This quality can be recaptured by short, noninformational terms set into run-on constructions. Verbal exchanges during beatings are expressed in measured tempos that coincide with the rhythmic sound of the hitting of a stick against a piece of wood. Regular metrical patterning of these expressions in translation and metrical balancing of rhymed exchanges between characters can recreate performance effects. Equally, the exploitation of progressively developing rhythms in pun sequences or in series jokes (one joke can go on as long as fifteen paired exchanges, as in Karagiozis's quizzing of his sons in the prologue to the performance) can replicate oral effects that are not available to translators who work from print texts rather than performances. Other effects that deserve attention include interrogative narrative rhythms, in which the player uses one character's interrogating of another to punctuate informational scenes and thereby to maintain.

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