Maria Oikonomou
OnOnOn thethethe Clinical Picture ofofof NostalgiaNostalgia———— aaandandndnd aaa Remote Literature
Nowhere does one find better somatization than among foreigners... (Julia Kristeva: Strangers to Ourselves )
When speaking of homesickness, Odysseus comes to mind as the first great nostalgist, who is fated to force his return against insurmountable resistance – not only against all the external adversities, but also against inner deviations and the ebbing of all motivation. Later on, in Tomis on the Black Sea, Ovid finds plaintive words for his longing for Rome, for his desiderium patriae . In his epistles Cicero laments the loss of his homeland, while Dante’s Divine Comedy speaks of the hour “that turns back desire in the sailors, and softens their hearts.”1 For the ancient and pre modern world, homesickness – a longing for that which is lost and a profound desire to ease this deficiency – was at base a spiritual orientation, and only the use of metaphors could make this emotional state palpable. Sometimes, metaphors pertaining to the body seem to presage the path of homesickness through the history of the discourse. While Odysseus’ homesickness is soothed by the smoke of Ithaca, transient and incorporeal, for Dante it is the heart of the sailor, which seems to transfer homesickness not only into the material, but even the somatic realm. In that sense it is no longer a vague yearning, not scattered signs in the heavens, but an organ whose tissues and pulse are inscribed with emotion. This shift of a previously disembodied feeling of longing, which now enters the subject and its anatomy, presages the reconceptualizations of homesickness during the early modern differentiation of discourses. Here, in the context of a general and all encompassing scientification, of
1 “Era già l’ ora che volge il disio/ ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core/ lo dì c’ han detto ai dolci amici addio.” “Now was the hour when voyagers at sea / Pine to turn home and their hearts soften, / the first day out, for friends they bid goodbye” (Dante 2000:1 3).
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an increasingly sharp distinction between all areas of knowledge (from philosophy to psychology and anthropology to medicine), in the environment of what Foucault calls the 'human sciences,' nostalgia finally emerges as a disease. One witnesses the shift from the soul to a metaphoric body and then to a physical one. It is precisely this corporality of nostalgia, which makes it – much like neuralgia or myalgia – recognizable as a pathological condition, as a syndrome for which diverse theories and healing processes of modern medicine have been devised. Moreover, it is not surprising that literature – as an 'interdiscourse' which, according to Jürgen Link, gathers the dominant ‘collective symbols’ of other fields of knowledge – understands nostalgia as belonging to the same discipline. 2 Accordingly, literature begins to replace the 'body metaphor' with an actual body. And in 19 th century literature homesickness is no longer a diffuse psychological phenomenon, but reveals itself, in light of the thought of that period, as a collection of somatic symptoms. It is this re contextualization of nostalgia, its relocation into pathology, which is examined by the first part of this article. At the forefront stands Johannes Hofer, who founded the relevant discourse; its end is marked by Karl Jaspers. These authors’ respective texts on homesickness may be seen as opening and closing brackets. Meanwhile, the second part of the essay is devoted to the reflection of this concept in literature. While it hardly seems possible to contribute anything new to Jean Starobinski’s study of nostalgia or Simon Bunke’s transhistorical and transnational reconstruction of this 'lethal disease,' the accent is shifted to a so called 'minor' literature. In focusing on nostalgia in Modern Greek writing, this paper does not only discuss a text’s contexts or the relationship between medical and literary discourse. Likewise (and perhaps to an even greater extent), aspects of cultural transference come into view when Greece adopts the European syndrome of homesickness, when nostalgia manifests itself in other times and other ways. While symptoms of nostalgia can claim an enormous growth and establishment throughout the Western civilizations of the 18 th and 19 th centuries, they are much less accepted in not so 'modern' cultural spaces. It remains to be examined how and why these spaces admit this 'foreign' knowledge, whether it is filtered and deferred, and which mechanisms or agents allow it to enter and circulate. With respect to the history of science, as well as literature, one can thus delineate a differentiated image that bears in mind the discontinuities, rifts and asymmetries within the
2 According to Link, the total system of societal discourses is held together by a synchronous system of ‘collective symbols.’ The term designates the entire “imagery” [Bildlichkeit] of a culture, the totality of “the most widespread allegories and emblems, metaphors, examples, demonstrative models and orienting topics, comparisons and analogies.” Collective symbols are like funnels; the knowledge of the particular discourses flows into them, into the melting pot of interdiscursive materials. For Jürgen Link, literature is the preferred medium of this interdiscourse (Becker, Gerhard, Link 1997).
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European discourse of homesickness – an image that is not limited to the ‘central’ or culturally 'hegemonic' zones of France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the English speaking world. When research on nostalgia states that “in the 18 th century a new, terrible sickness arises first in Switzerland and then in all of Europe ” (Bunke 2009:13, emphasis M.O.), this statement should, in light of the Greek culture, not be categorically rejected, but qualified with due care. In this respect, the paper at hand is a rejoinder of peripheral comparative studies, which often are only theoretically included in ‘actual’ comparative studies.
AAA Brief History ofofof Homesickness, ororor How ItItIt Became a Narrative
'Homesickness' first appeared as a medical term at the end of the 17 th century. It describes an illness characterized by the sufferer’s constant thoughts of his native land, in addition to various other symptoms. The discoverer of this new disease is Johannes Hofer, who wrote the Dissertatio medica De Nostalgia, Oder Heimwehe , composed in Latin and published in Basel in 1688. In this study, the ambitious medical student, later city doctor and burgomaster of Mulhouse, takes up – with an unmistakable claim to originality – a 'new topic,' an illness described by no doctor before him. In Swiss dialect, this new sickness was known as 'Heim Weh,' literally 'home pain,' in France as 'mal du pays,' but the humanistically learned Hofer coins the term 'nostalgia.' He goes on to give a comprehensive description of the malady’s characteristic signs:
The symptoms indicating the presence of the disease vary and consist particularly in a lasting sadness, incessant thoughts of the native land, restless sleep or lingering wakefulness, a decline in strength, decreased sensations of hunger and thirst, feelings of anxiety or even intense heart palpitations, frequent sweats and a mental lethargy able to muster an interest in almost nothing beyond thoughts of home. Such people are then susceptible to various illnesses. For example, they may suffer from persistent fever or febrile attacks, often quite serious, if the longing of the victim cannot be assuaged (Hofer 1745:14; Transl. by M.O.).
However, as nostalgia was not – or not yet – a temporally, but a spatially backward directed yearning, it also appears curable, namely through a return to the familiar ways of life. This is demonstrated by three case studies of patients, who spent time abroad, fell victim to the disease and found relief only through a return to their homeland. One of Hofer’s case studies examines a young student from Berne, who falls ill in Basel and becomes feverish and panicked. Severe symptoms ensued, and his death was expected. Ordered by the treating doctor to administer a clyster, the apothecary recognized the man’s condition, diagnosed it as homesickness, and insisted that the only cure would be a return to his
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native city. The student’s constitution improved day by day; he recovered fully on his journey, and arrived hale and hearty in Berne. Another case concerned a young girl taken to hospital with an injury, who responded to all questions and treatment attempts with the words: “I want to go home, I want to go home.” Home again, she recovered in only a few days, entirely without further treatment. In this manner, the pathologization of homesickness takes place in the context of a new medicinal knowledge, which is characterized not only by the progress of healing methods, but also by the novel conceptualization of ailments of all kinds. Particularly with respect to the tenacity and historical insistence of nostalgia as a complex of physical symptoms, it seems appropriate to characterize Johannes Hofer as a “founder of discursivity” in the emerging framework of the humanities, even though his discovery owes much to pre classical or 'archaic' knowledge. The first of the two case studies clearly shows how homesickness is not merely a curable illness in the scope of an enlightened 17 th century. At the same time, it is traversed by a then obsolete form of knowledge, which Foucault would identify as a concept of “resemblance” (Foucault 1997:79 82). Up to the 16 th century, resemblance serves as the guiding principle and establishes a global system of counterparts between heaven and earth, planets and fate, microcosm and macrocosm – a fertile ground not only for the 'magical' views of astrology. Consequently, this pre modern age assigns a fixed place to all elements within a holistic totality. The play of analogies between a mandrake root and the human body, between a constellation of stars and a person's future knows no boundaries and makes it possible to discover overwhelming resemblances in the world. Against the background of this episteme, which by 1688 had become outdated, it seems significant that it is not Hofer’s doctor, the representative of a newly established field of study, but the apothecary (Pharmacopoeus ), who discovers the true cause of illness of the student from Berne. 3 Being the heir of quasi magical healing powers and descending from alchemists and herbalists, he therefore identifies illnesses as a disturbance of resemblances by comparing the human body to the body of the world. While the helpless doctor wants to administer an enema, thereby restricting his treatment methods to the limits of the exterior and interior corpus , the apothecary links the corporeal microcosm to the macrocosm of the entire Earth and locates the student’s ills in the area of his homeland. The patient’s suffering, his fevers and his frights, are connected with the home country. Through the representation of the apothecary, who seems superior to the medical doctor, the case study is infused with a knowledge that pervades Hofer’s Dissertatio as an
3 Simon Bunke views the pharmacist, who collects facts, evaluates them and formulates the diagnosis of 'nostalgia,' as a “textual figuration of discursive knowledge.” Thus, the case study appears as histrionic support for Hofer's theses (Bunke 2009:43f.).
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anachronism and renders it a text on the threshold of the dawning classical age. On the near side of this threshold two aspects must be emphasized, which make Hofer’s book an eminent example of the new forms of thought. These new forms of thought can be characterized as a rationalism that implies the subsumption of nature into a scientific order and produces this order through the comparison of its parts, having nothing more to do with magical resemblances (Foucault 1997:87). Now, the members or elements of this order stand side by side without being subordinate to a 'whole.' They are separated by the columns of the tables and the lines of the charts, in which they are listed. They are arranged according to their size, significance, function and structure – a rule, which also pertains to the constellation of human qualities or intellectual capacities. Hofer views the innermost part of the brain as the seat of nostalgia. He thereby connects an anatomic place with a mental property. As in a kind of shelf or type case, the particular abilities and ways of thinking, which constitute a person’s character, appear to be related to a specific locus in the organism. In this setting, the scholar defines the illness’s essence as disturbed imagination, since the animal spirits can only traverse one of the many channels in the brain’s so called 'striate body,' in which the idea of the homeland is located. Just as 'homesickness' has its particular place in the brain, the notion of 'homeland' can also be precisely located. The areas and nerve fibers of the brain, in which these notions are produced and archived, determine the relation between nostalgia and other concepts and arrange them in a system, which corresponds precisely to the grid formation of the classical era. These grids, which the 17 th century superimposes on the human brain, will result in the scientific discipline of phrenology in the 18 th century, so that in this sense Hofer does not seem to maintain old superstitions, but thinks ahead of his era when he designates the 'notion of the home country' in the subject as something, which – just like compassion or irascibility – will later be called one of the 'faculties.' For my purposes, however – interested as I am in the narrative of the sickness, in homesickness in literature – it is of much greater significance that Hofer’s text makes almost no references to scientific authorities dating back to ancient times. Instead, he employs case studies to support his conclusions. The case study, however, is not simply a way of empirically demonstrating his thesis; it must itself be seen as a story, which makes new knowledge accessible. 4 For the complex of nostalgia as a pathology can only be understood through narration, a strategy, which celebrates its final triumph in the written reports of medicine, clinical psychiatry and law in the 18 th and especially 19 th centuries. One need only think of Irma, or the Wolf Man, or Little Hans and his fear of horses, each an account, which first makes it possible to understand what a neurosis or psychosis is, all of the above
4 With respect to the significance of case studies, cf. Höcker 2006.
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being figures that are as much a part of world literature as many a fictional character. In this way, by becoming a tale, the student from Berne and the girl in her hospital bed provide an insight into Hofer’s novel concept of homesickness, particularly when this girl says nothing more than: “I want to go home.” This stereotyped utterance, the unending repetition of the same few words, denotes two things: She does not merely speak of a desire, but also fulfils it, the constant repetition constituting a so called 'ritornel' in the sense used by Deleuze and Guattari. 5 For this ritornello creates a sense of home in a strange and frightening land. However, it has this function only for the person intoning it; for those outside, it simply remains a senseless compulsion. Therefore the case study is necessary, the invention of a story in which the ritornello is embedded, and through which it also acquires meaning. In a very modern way, Johannes Hofer seems to have understood that the phrase, “I want to go home,” is meaningless unless a person speaks it as part of a story. It is this aspect in particular that transforms illness into the subject of literature. The barrenness of the event, its intelligible core, demands narration. Just as Hofer’s pathologization stands at the beginning of the medical concept of nostalgia, the further development is marked by its criminalization. Hofer’s thesis circulated within the discursive landscape of the 18 th century.6 And it behooves a discourse founder to influence not only medical, but also anthropological, philosophical, literary or juridical conceptualizations. Hofer’s model of nostalgia is included in the nosology of that time and becomes established as the widely accepted knowledge of medical professionals, and at the same time this knowledge affects various neighboring discourses. It seems that an established term – in this case nostalgia as an illness – must spread through all fields of thought. Michel Foucault’s lectures on the 'abnormal' demonstrate this process with respect to the notion of the monstrum, which on the one hand implies an anatomical deviance and, on the other hand, is situated
5 In this way the girl constructs a ‘tonal wall,’ thereby delineating a territory in which she feels at home and where her desire for the homeland is always already fulfilled. Deleuze and Guattari state: “A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. […] The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. […] Now we are at home. But the home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center to organize a limited space. […] The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do” (Deleuze & Guattari 1997:424). 6 With respect to the various phases of the discourse of nostalgia, the initial reception of Hofer's tract, the lexicalization of the concept and its nosological localization, including its use in non medical discourses (jurisdiction, politics, military strategy and even the discourse of national identity), cf. Bunke 2009:50 and 615 619.
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in the field of justice. A hermaphrodite brings up the question of nubility and legally sanctioned marital life, and in the same manner Siamese twins constitute a problem for the laws of baptism or inheritance. Thus, the physicality of a 'monster' cannot be contemplated without considering its judicial position (Foucault 2003) – and much the same applies to nostalgia between the 18 th and the early 20 th centuries. As soon as nostalgists are identified as bearers of a pathological condition, the deviation also concerns their legal status. This is particularly noticeable in one text, which stands on the threshold between homesickness as an illness and homesickness which – until the present day – is primarily a question of psychological depression. The text in question is the doctoral dissertation by Karl Jaspers, composed in 1909 and published under the somewhat Dostoyevskyan title Homesickness and Crime .7 The thesis opens with an apparent contradiction (one that will give rise to a literary topos): “Great interest has long been shown in those crimes (murder and arson) carried out with unbelievable barbarity and heedless brutality by delicate creatures, young and docile girls still in their childhood” (Jaspers 1996:29). Drawing on medical and forensic sources, Jaspers presents and analyzes cases in which girls from poor village families in Switzerland are sent to work as maids or household servants in distant towns and hamlets. There, they fall ill with homesickness, and – in order to be sent home – set fire to the farmstead where they are working, suffocate or drown the infant, whom they are entrusted with, and so on. Again, and in a peculiar way, Karl Jaspers’s study stands at the interface of two views on nostalgia. On the one hand, the above mentioned notion of 'resemblance' still seems to form an undercurrent in the fluvial topography of the concept, since Jaspers blames the inability to separate the ego from its environment for all these atrocities. As the girls feel the compulsion to carry their lost home with them, as they can only indistinctly separate their outer from their inner perceptions, it appears that a new version of the old interconnections between self and world is at work in this concept. This 'resemblance,' however, no longer designates the orderly state of nature, as the pre classical age had understood it, but constitutes sickness. Those who are unable to make a distinction between the bodily self and the place of origin exhibit a delusional world view. Separation and difference that would allow a classification of elements, their comparison and systematic arrangement can no longer be experienced. Suddenly, everything stands in connection to the home; everything reminds one of the same thing so that the world sinks into magic or delusion. And just like Johannes Hofer before him,
7 Bunke explains that in 1903 a monograph by Ferdinand Maack had been published under the same title: Heimweh und Verbrechen. Ein Beitrag zum Strafgesetzbuch . [Homesickness and Crime: A Contribution to the Penal Code ] (Bunke 2009:152). Subsequently to the disappearance of nostalgia from the medical discourses around 1870, the text by Karl Jaspers clearly constitutes an anachronism.
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Karl Jaspers traces nostalgia back to a lack of imagination. While for Hofer it is forced into such narrow channels of the brain that it can solely address the idea of homeland, for Jaspers it is characteristically numbed, hence denying the patient’s physical presence in a foreign place. The acts of violence result from the imagination's lacking flexibility to relate to that which is new; no clear separation can be drawn between the physical world one desires and the lived external environment. Meanwhile, the novelty and modernity of Jaspers’s description of homesickness is its transfer into the realm of psychological illnesses, for which the body is only a medium. Nostalgia no longer consists of sweating and a lack of appetite, but concerns the psyche, which uses the body as a surface for the inscription of symptoms. Thus, if Hofer is the discoverer of nostalgia as a physical disease, it is Jaspers who puts an end to this model with his shift to the psychosomatic . For a long time thereafter, the understanding of homesickness is firmly characterized by two constants, its classification in the realm of medicine and in that of social deviance. With respect to the literary treatment of nostalgia, it is therefore necessary to follow the traces it may have left as a physical syndrome, for literature passes on certain notions, while the respective scientific discourses have already found their end. The other task would be to investigate the complex of criminalization, which Jaspers has set beside the catalog of medical symptoms. The question to be posed is: Where in Greek literature does homesickness appear in terms of pathology, and where can it be identified as the cause of (legal or moral) transgression? As I have already said, the transition from medical to literary history is facilitated by the fact that the sciences themselves have already adopted the narrative as a way to make their theses comprehensible. The 'literarization' of knowledge is inherent in the text of the case study; literature is the medium of knowledge in all discourses . Homesickness must be narrated in order to be thought. In this long established 'literarization' of homesickness, and also in its adaptation as a literary topic, we find the point of contact, where the history of discourse and that of literature meet. If I have thus far focused on the germ of narrative in the sciences, I will now examine the marks left by the sciences in literary prose to highlight the historical and cultural contextuality behind the texts.
Homesickness ininin Greek Literature: A Dual Alterity
Homesickness is no stranger to Greek literature. As part of a long popular tradition, it constitutes a phenomenon that has in many forms made its way into epics, poetry, and song. However, neither in Homer nor in popular tradition does nostalgia appear in the sense of a sickness, recognizable by a stereotypical inventory of symptoms. The focus is rather on the poetic bond between the Earth and sorrowing Man. Thus,
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when, from the 19 th century onward, homesickness appears as a physical malady in Modern Greek texts, this marks a discursive 'import.' This import, however, does not necessarily result from the direct influence of European literature. Rather, it implies something like an 'echo' or pertains to an intellectual climate, which makes actual influence obsolete. We may speak of a sort of subcutaneous inflow or infiltration of the foreign. It appears that nostalgia in a medical sense arrived late and only sporadically on Greek territory, a process accompanied by often perceptible distortions and displacements. During the halting and cautious adaptation of the concept (thanks – in a majority of cases – to authors, who are also doctors, or have at least received medical training), nostalgia makes its way into Greek literature not without a few blemishes. One may thus speak of a dual alterity. On the one hand, it is homesickness itself, whether as malady or as moral deviance, which always brings the 'other' into play. On the other hand, this homesickness requires an agent with knowledge of its original place in the European scientific discourse to introduce and cultivate it in his local literature. In this respect, Ioannis Vilaras' (1771 1823) very biography mirrors the connection between episteme and art. Originating from Epirus in northwestern Greece, he studied medicine in Bologna and Padua, where he also received his diploma. After his return to the Epirotic capital of Ioannina, he became the personal physician of Beli Pascha, the Ottoman ruler. And as a scholar educated in the humanities he came into contact with the region’s intellectual elite. He can also be viewed as one of the first representatives of Modern Greek literature, who advocated the ideal of demotic language in the ongoing 'language dispute' and debates about Greek national identity and wrote numerous poems that are ascribed to early Romanticism. Nevertheless, his scientific and artistic position does not result in an equivalent depiction of nostalgia on the boundary between contemporary medical and literary knowledge. Rather, Vilaras seems to locate the nostalgist's suffering in the ancient medical field of melancholia, which derives from Hippocrates' theory of temperaments:
The stranger enters foreign lands and soon he wrecks his mind, his thoughts are running from his head, they go astray and blind. […] The stranger seems imprudent; his clothes hang in rags, he is in mourning constantly and doesn’t smile and nags. The stranger builds, like night owls do, his nest in barren spots, And day and night he cries his woes, beweeps his bitter lots…." (Vilaras 1995:341; Tranl. by M.O.)8
On the one hand, these lines illustrate the first traces of the familiar catalogue of symptoms. The description suggests the subject’s
8 An almost literal repetition of this passage can also be found in Vilaras' poem «Από την άγρια ερη ιά» (“From the Wild Desert” / Vilaras 1995:237). The term ‘nostalgia’ is not found in his work – only the phrase “the sweet longing for home” (e.g., in «Σε άνθρωπο χωρίς υγεία» (“To the People without Health”, 314f.).
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dissociation from his own thought, a characteristic feeling of being outside oneself and a certain loss of control in self presentation or social intercourse, which could perhaps be termed a 'defective socio cultural disposition.' In this representation of the nostalgist, one also encounters the desire for isolation and an irritating spontaneity and expressiveness in the utterances of suffering. Yet this highly poetic representation obviously refers to traditional notions of melancholia, to an excess of black bile and to the beliefs of empirical psychology [ Erfahrungs Seelenkunde ], and is therefore hardly fit to produce a reasonably distinct or even physiologically articulate clinical picture. However, in comparison to Vilaras’ poem, a story by Alexandros Papadiamantis offers a deep insight into the interrelationship of homesickness and medicine: “Η νοσταλγός” [The Homesick Wife] from 1894, which for the first time introduces the term 'nostalgic' into the Greek language. 9 In the tale, a young woman named Lialió has been married for some weeks to an estate manager more than twice her age, who has taken her from her family home to the neighboring island. Though Lialió can in fact see her home, just twelve miles distant, she is plagued by a deep longing for her native soil. One evening, in collusion with the young Mathios, who secretly loves her, Lialió makes her way to her own island in a rowboat. The nocturnal voyage is filled with a joyous expectation of magic and unspoken affection, which soon seems to carry over to all of Nature, to the living sea and the facilitating winds. After a short while, however, her absence is noticed, and Ljaljó’s husband and his companions set out in pursuit of the fleeing pair’s small vessel. Driven by her profound desire to see her family once more, the protagonist and Mathios reach the distant coast. At almost the same moment, their pursuers catch up, and Lialió and her husband – partly from sympathy for her homesickness, partly out of concern for his honor – together make their way to the house of the young woman’s parents, while the lovestruck youth remains alone on the shore. One immediately notices, in this text by Papadiamantis, that nostalgia is now a physical ailment. Whether it is actually rooted in the body or whether the afflicted soul simply works on its physical vessel can, in some cases, hardly be determined. But as a psychosomatic clinical condition, nostalgia always weighs so heavy on the physical constitution of Papadiamantis’s protagonist that, far beyond any hypochondria, it takes hold of the body, withering it sometimes to the point of death. Lialió, described in the text as a fragile creature of alabaster hue, loses her appetite away from her native land; her face
9 The encyclopedia of neologisms (1900) by Andreas Koumanoudis detects the adverb 'nostalgically' for the first time in Greek in 1890, while the noun 'nostalgic' is contributed to Alexandros Papadiamantis (Koumanoudis 1998:704). The word 'nostalgia' can already be found in the title of a poem by Zacharias Mauroudis from the year 1808: «Νοσταλγία ή περιγραφή των κατά την Σαράταν α πελώνων» (“Nostalgia or Description of the Vineyards of Sarat”).
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turns pale, and her heart begins to pain her. 10 Loss of appetite, pallor, and chest pain may either be read as elements of a catalogue of physical symptoms in the sense established by Johannes Hofer, or as secondary characteristics of an illness caused by the imagination, as Jaspers – in parallel to the definition of hysteria – categorizes homesickness. But while the systematic representation of nostalgia as an illness in the manner of Hofer is only weakly exemplified in the figure of Lialió, some traces of the discourse pertaining to Karl Jaspers’ concept of homesickness can perhaps be more clearly recognized. Jaspers describes the sort of young woman, to whom he ascribes a particular susceptibility to pathogenic homesickness, as a delicate, sometimes even frail creature, a docile and perhaps almost childlike girl, recognizable not only by her heightened sensitivity, but also by a tendency toward physical feebleness. Thus, Papadiamantis writes about his protagonist’s petite figure, the pale translucence of her cheeks, bathed in soft red at the slightest exertion or change in mood. Lialió is precisely the phenotype most susceptible to the onslaught of nostalgia. Hand in hand with this, according to Jaspers, goes the quality that constitutes the paradoxical in the relationship between homesickness and crime. His formulation “delicate creatures of unbelievable barbarity,” the petulance, which combines with childish innocence to form a sinister complex, constitutes a contradiction found also in Lialió. Though she commits neither murder nor arson, her cruelty and 'crime,' her status as a figure of ethical and even legal deviance, is manifested when she secretly steals the boat in which she would flee under the very nose of her husband, accompanied by a young stranger. This violation of both the law of property and the law of marriage displays what one could call a certain suppressed criminal energy, a tendency toward careless yet desperate transgression that stems directly from homesickness and can at best be distinguished quantitatively, but not qualitatively from the list of crimes compiled by Jaspers. That we are dealing in this story with an admittedly rather harmless realization of 'homesickness and crime' is beyond doubt. More important, though, is that collision between delicateness and wickedness expressed in both Jaspers’ formulations and Lialió’s behavior. At one point, shortly after the theft of the boat, Papadiamantis writes: “And as though she had carefully thought it all through, she continued: 'Won’t they be looking for their boat? Won’t they need it? Who does it belong to, anyway?'” (22) The introductory subjunctive – as though she had considered her deed – suggests her lack of all consideration or remorse. This underscores her spontaneity and invalidates any expression of doubt. Shortly after, indeed, she says – and the text emphasizes her unconcerned tone of voice: “The owner of the
10. “After the second week from Lialió’s arrival, whenever she was awake as her husband came home at midnight, she would complain bitterly and demand that he send her back to her native village. She could not live, she declared, so far from her parents. Indeed her heart had begun to ache a few days after she left home. She had no appetite and her face grew pale” (Papadiamantis 1994:28f.).
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boat will be looking for his vessel, and Uncle Monachakis for his Lialió.” And when the boat owner’s watchdog tries to call attention to the two thieves, Lialió shouts with childish glee: “Well then! Let the dog bark after his boat! Just let them try and find me at home!” (23) This erratic oscillation between compunction and desire, between impulse and doubt, presents the protagonist in the same fractured and overdramatic light as Jaspers’ dictum of 'delicacy and barbarity.' Here, Lialió is a maiden, there an enchantress, now impulsive, now dutiful, so that in her mysterious nature a narrow fissure can be seen, a quiet, palpable breath of the pathogenic. On the other hand is the sternness of her husband, who makes clear to her that, despite her homesickness, it does not behoove her to ever leave him again:
He expounded at length his view that a wife is obliged to go wherever her husband goes, for otherwise the purpose of a Christian marriage would be thwarted, the purpose being, according to the weightiest Orthodox tenets, not the propagation of the species but the exhibition of restraint and sobriety between man and woman, for otherwise, said he, in cases of childlessness divorce would be sanctioned as a matter of course. As far as the propagation of the species is concerned, a natural union would suffice, and that is a very different thing from a religious and civil marriage (Papadiamantis 1994: 29).
This passage makes clear that homesickness not only implies deviance; it always diverges from the norm in manifold ways . Lialió’s husband arrays a whole list of discourses as a corrective to the nostalgia of his wife. He calls on medicine, religion, ethics, social duty and law; and from the field of biology he borrows the argument of sexual reproduction. All this might be brought into question by nostalgia and its threateningly asocial nature. One can see in this example how homesickness in fact permeates the whole discursive landscape; how (according to Foucault) multiple discourses are always needed for its definition. And Karl Jasper’s text seems to exemplify this transgression of the mono discursive phenomenon into psychopathology and criminality. Indeed, Karl Jaspers’s work hints at something that is artistically achieved by Papadiamantis’s story. Homesickness clearly possesses what is in many ways a boundary erasing quality. It stimulates the 'delicate creature' to acts of tremendous brutality. It transgresses the line between imagination and corporeality. It tends to create a 'dual space,' as the nostalgist is always here but also there – at home. Therefore, nostalgia appears as a merging of incongruent character traits, of psyche and soma, of home and abroad. This phenomenon of transgression makes homesickness the 'threshold state' par excellence. This is implemented by the story in many ways. Firstly, the text incorporates the alternative within its fictional universe, thereby transgressing the boundary between itself and a potentially different
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narrative. For example, a lengthy parenthesis is introduced with the words: “How easy it would be to change this romance to high drama, if only the literary conscience of this author would allow it!” (32) And then, the text deviates from the course of events and proposes a different plot, which in turn is interrupted by the next passage returning to the actual proceedings. But now, of course, one can no longer clearly identify the 'actual' course of events. Such moments not only unveil the text’s 'textuality' and narrative structure; they reflect the 'threshold state' and the eternal indecision of nostalgia itself. This indecision is also shown in the story’s topography. As in the blurring of the mental and the physical, of presence and absence, the text presents an indeterminate sphere of undefined boundaries. As long as homesickness holds sway, the mountain in the distant homeland is always visible. Moreover, from the very beginning, one can say that Lialió is simultaneously in a foreign land and already on her way, on the island yet already at sea, as made clear in a passage at the beginning of the text. The young woman stands on the patio of her new house: “… hard by the sea, presently washed by the waves or girdled with sand, with the flood of the south wind or the ebb of the north.” Similarly, the boat which she gazes upon from her viewpoint: “… rested partly on land, and rocked partly on the water, the bow on the sand and the stern moved by the waves.” In this spatial constellation, the borders and the coastline are blurred; the house is a boat and the boat is a house, the island is the sea and vice versa, so that Lialió seems to stand with one leg here and with the other already on the distant shore. One may point to several other passages of the story indicating an erasing of boundaries, a uniting of that which is divided. The narrative structure and fictional space are thus clearly indebted to that same indeterminacy that, according to Jaspers, characterizes homesickness. Considering Jaspers’s study of the mental constitution of exiled servant girls, a number of mostly poetic texts appear to be of particular note. These poems take up a theme common in Greek literature: a young maid, who is taken from her home and placed in an alien household. One example is the brief lyrical text about the girl Marie, written in 1920 by Zacharias Papantoniou who, like Vilaras, had studied medicine, but worked mostly in journalism and wrote educational books. His poem not only depicts the typical absentmindedness and helplessness of the maid suffering from homesickness; it also illustrates the urge to recover the lost home in every place, which Elisabeth Bronfen refers to as the “mental double spatiality” [Doppelräumigkeit] of Jaspers’s servant girls (Bronfen 1996:16f.). What was only hinted at in the above quoted poem by Vilaras, namely the split or divided nature of the nostalgic subject’s self, is now depicted as a mental state of existing in the abandoned place, while not being present in the here and now: one is where one is not, one is not where one is . This condition permeates Papantoniou’s lyrical poem:
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This one servant girl, Marie Makes a mess of all her chores, Every duty she ignores, Just in thoughts of home dwells she.
With her hands she may do that, While her thoughts are into this, She breaks dishes piece by piece, Little Mary, little pet.
When she carries home the jug While she thinks and cannot tell If at home the child is well She spills half the earthen mug.
In the two subsequent verses, the maid asks herself what might have happened to the white chicken at the farm back home, what of the pig, the grandfather, and whether her grandmother ever thinks of her. The text ends with the following stanzas:
Gloomy eyes, why can’t you see? Why can nothing cheer you up? To pieces goes another cup, My little pet, my sweet Marie.
Take your white dress, your scarf and bow, Don’t forget your aprons, too, Run where all just waits for you, Little Mary, home you go! (Papantoniou 1920; Transl. by M.O.)
Unfolding a simple sequence of events and sentences, the poem begins by depicting the clumsiness and absentmindedness of the young woman, then goes on to reveal something of her mental and emotional state, and concludes by giving her a piece of fatherly advice. However, in the ostensible innocence of the text’s episodes and the narrative attitude, something else emerges. By systematically listing the external symptoms of 'Philopatridomania,' the suffering of homelessness (verses 1 and 2); then describing the girl’s internal sensibility, which adds an analytical inside view to the empirical observations (verses 3 to 5); and finally suggesting a 'course of therapy' (verses 6 and 7); the poem follows the classical structure of a medical case history. What appears to be a nursery rhyme turns out to closely resemble a well structured description of a clinical condition with its manifest expressions, associated latent wishes and accompanying cure. Apart from the structure, it is also the tone of the text, which seems to reveal the perspective of a knowing, lenient and sympathetic outsider. Throughout
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the text the poetic voice expresses a certain, unmistakable possessiveness; however, this attitude does not so much belong to an employer or master, but hints at someone, who well meaningly regards the person as the subject of a study, just as the analyst might perceive his patient. It is this characteristic mix of solicitousness and professional distance that undercuts the text’s manifest sympathy for the young maid – the voice of an 'I,' who sees and at the same time tries to purge his language from his own existence as observing, interpreting instance. This is the precarious state of all classical forensic texts, of expertise and case study, manifesting itself as an unstable, self conscious and troublesome objectivity, while nonetheless maintaining a close (and perhaps even romantic?) relation to its object.11 It becomes apparent how the medical syndrome of homesickness leaves its trace in Greek literature during the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Throughout the entire cultural expanse of Europe the discourse is in steady circulation, sometimes with explicit claims to scientific valididity, other times as a subconscious and quasi 'climatic' undercurrent of thought. Nevertheless, in the periphery of its influence this discursive circulation not only seems characterized by a certain belatedness, but also by an idiosyncratic tension between appropriation and critical distance. Greek writing is marked by a scattered and comparatively reticent pathologization of nostalgia, while German, French and English literatures have long since adopted and transformed the illness of nostalgia into a topos. Moreover, at the very moment of the concept's arrival in Greece, in the moment of a successful cultural transference of nostalgia, Greek literature seems to object to the complete subsumption of homesickness into medical discourse. This twofold reaction is exemplified in Pavlos Nirvanas’ novel Το αγριολούλουδο (The Wildflower , 1924). It was published at almost the same time as the first edition of the Μεγάλη Ελληνική Εγκυκλοπαίδεια , the Great Greek Encyclopedia , put out by the Athenian Phoinix publishing house, which clearly placed 'nostalgia' in the sphere of (psycho)somatic illness:
Nostalgia: Such is named the great sadness, accompanied by a general ebbing of strength and mental and physical weakness, observable in individuals dwelling far from their native lands and their family and social environments and wishing to return home. It […] manifests itself in depression, in combination with a slowing of various psychological and physical functions, i.e. in a state of melancholia, accompanied by a sharp
11 Although, with regard to a children’s poem, this interpretation of an unspoken desire of the 'therapist' may seem far fetched, representations of the loss of innocence are prominent in this poem/case study. The dish that breaks into shards, the jug with which the girl fetches water from the well, her white dress; all this forms a complex of topoi pertaining to virginity and its endangerment. Thus, the text itself poses the question as to which relation the young girl actually has to the speaker, and whether his fatherly benevolence demonstrates a special lack of objective distance...
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decline in appetite, anorexia, exhaustion, and an inability to work, phenomena which frequently lead to death, unless a timely return home eliminates the cause of the nostalgia and brings recovery (Great Greek Encyclopedia 1928-29:406).
This entry provides sufficient evidence that the process of the embedding of homesickness in the field of medicine had been completed by the 1920s. And as a writer and doctor, Pavlos Nirvanas possessed all the characteristics needed to act as the agent of a seamless transmission of the concept to Greek literature. 12 He first seizes upon the familiar semiotics of the body and the thesis of homesickness as an illness. Just like the author, the central figure of the novel, the young doctor Alkis Kralis, has an interest in both literature and medicine. He has just completed his studies in Vienna and returns to the Greek capital, armed with the latest discoveries of psychoanalysis. This academically trained physician is also shown to be an aspiring poet, citing Dante and Balzac and reciting poems with gusto. All his poetic descriptions are replete with references to aesthetic concepts or cite artistic sources (as, for example, when comparing his aunt to a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Nonetheless, he also tries to build a bridge between literature and his scientific investigations, carefully analyzing fictional texts for signs of assorted mental symptoms. As in his planned project “Neurology and Psychiatry in Homer and the Greek Tragedians,” he draws particularly on works of classical literature, using them to develop a theory of psychological disturbances. However, his promising career appears threatened by his impending marriage to a woman of allegedly inferior intellect. The ambitious young man decides to leave Athens for a time, searching for distance from his fiancée in the mountains of the island of Kephaloniá. But plagued by his own unrest and particularly by the news of his fiancée’s suicide, he suffers a nervous breakdown. His recovery is aided by the young farm girl Maria. This seeming 'child of Nature' is uneducated, but of noble spirit. Her inborn gentleness stems from her way of life, at one with the natural world, which the young woman seems indeed to embody. Her voice resounds in the silence of the woods like “the mystical music of the streams” (Nirvanas 1956:87); and she is “a wildflower, more beautiful
12 Pavlos Nirvanas, actually Petros Apostolidis (1866 1937), wrote numerous medical works and was particularly interested in psychology and psychiatry (cf. his publications “The Personality Illness” in Neon Pneuma , year 2, vol. 2, 1894, 258 268 and 354 364; Art and Neuropathy , Athens 1905; The Psychoses: Medical, Social and Philosophical Studies on Neuropathies , Athens 1889. His studies demonstrate good knowledge of the state of medicine of the period, as well as of the theories of Jean Martin Charcot and Max Simon Nordau. He also suggested the founding of a 'psychological workshop' at the University of Athens. A document signed by Nirvanas (15 January 1924) can be found in the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, nominating Sigmund Freund as an honorary member of the ‘Greek Psychoanalytical Society’.
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than every bloom in the conservatory.” One might think that Maria does not merely resemble Nature, but is Nature herself. When Alkis – now restored to health, if still in a melancholy mood – climbs the highest peak of the island and gazes from the summit, he sees nothing but Maria reflected in the landscape:
He found her everywhere, even in the infinite sea that stretched before his feet, on the distant mountaintops, the airy isles below him, on the earth and in the sky, remote and within him, everywhere, everywhere. Maria filled the entire world, he felt her existence with nearly metaphysical delight – even beyond this world, in the spheres of imagination, outside of time and space (125).
At first, the romantic love that blossoms between the unequal partners and their later marriage seem idyllic. During their first year, they delight in mountain hikes and landscapes soaked in moonlight. A certain 'pedagogical' relationship also develops between the two, with Alkis serving as a tutor to his wife. In a scientific experiment, with his own 'wildflower' as object of research, he delves into the dichotomy of ars and natura , teaching Maria about literature and painting, instructing her in table manners and social niceties. This state of bliss comes to an end with the couple’s departure for Athens, which is accompanied by an increasing lack of interest by Alkis in his wife, who will never fully master the self confident refinement of an Athenian lady. Maria thereupon falls ill – wracked with severe psychopathological symptoms, with depression, apathy, anemia and a lack of appetite. Detached, and with the cool gaze of the physician, Alkis observes the health of his wife deteriorate. He reaches a diagnosis: “I believe [...] that Maria’s condition is a nostalgia, which she is attempting to conceal from us. A voyage to her home village would restore her completely.” The patient’s silence concerning her sufferings underscores the conclusion of her doctor and husband: “It is this, in particular, that convinces me that this is a case of homesickness. It was observed by a ship’s doctor that, unlike those who feign suffering, true nostalgists generally attempt to keep their homesickness a secret from others.” (203) Even this brief summary of the novel’s plot illustrates that two visions of homesickness clash together here. One is the medical view, clearly recognizable as the perspective of a science imported from enlightened Europe. The other is a late Romantic conception, which opposes the analytical gaze with the individual blessed by Nature. Accordingly, the 'criticism' of nostalgia as a pathology cannot simply be understood as a skeptical rejection of psychophysical patterns of interpretation. Instead, Nirvanas’ text oscillates between the strict application of such theories (this betrays the author’s fascination with them), and a concept that is far removed from the merely 'medical' and places man in an organic relationship with the cosmos of his life and origins. On the one hand, the author himself becomes the cool observer.
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He records the processes in the minds and bodies of his characters, describing them like objects in a carefully crafted psychological study, so that the novel reads in parts like a clinical report. At the same time, an almost magical worldview can be discerned, which assumes a deep equivalence between Nature and the human soul, between micro and macrocosm, and which postulates the merging of the one with the other. Thus, the alpine wanderings of the young doctor are also an unmistakable reminder of the topoi of Romantic literature, which trace their origin to Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloїse and arrive at their typical expression in, for example, Georg Büchner‘s Lenz . It is the submersion of the subject in a deeply animated world that simultaneously questions and lends itself to medical diagnosis. Certainly, then, Nirvanas does not aim at denying nostalgia’s status as a psychological illness with physical symptoms. Nonetheless, his story is not exclusively a case history, but “the story of a human flower […], torn from its natural surroundings to wilt in the atmosphere of the conservatory,”13 a formulation, which calls to mind quite another discourse than that which is scientific. Just as the text, and even its very title, repeatedly present Maria as plantlike and rooted in Nature, Mina, the sensible friend of the protagonist, takes his wife’s illness back to poetically embellished images of Nature, culminating finally in the admission that nostalgia is simply inexplicable (that it is located outside of all discursive territories):
I see the flower, torn from the earth which gave it birth, withering now slowly in foreign soil. What is the reason for its sad and quiet death? Is it the unfamiliar earth that enfolds its roots? Is it the water that bedews it? Is it the new sun that shines upon it? Is it the new birds that sing around it, the stars that accompany their sleep? No one knows. (208f.)
Nirvanas’ work can, thus, most accurately be described as a hybrid. It belongs to a rather short tradition in Greek literature that begins with the transformation of the formerly pure and incorporeal desire of the homesick into 'melancholia,' into an excess of black bile, which marks a first turn towards nostalgia’s physicality (I. Vilaras). Subsequently, and in accordance with foreign discursive developments, homesickness may not yet be transformed into a treatable illness, but becomes a phenomenon that unquestionably concerns the body, as well as its functions (A. Papadiamantis, Z. Papantoniou). And when nostalgia finally acquires 'illegal' or asocial traits, Greek literature seems to have completed – in its rudiments, in subtextual and scattered hints – the discursive history from Hofer to Jaspers, from pathologization to criminalization. In this process The Wildflower takes on an ambiguous position of confirmation and dissolution. In accordance with the definition of the Great Greek Encyclopedia of 1928, the novel understands nostalgia as a syndrome – and then describes it as a rupture of the
13 Subtitle of the first publication of the text in the journal Patris , cf. http://archive.enet.gr/online/ online_text/c=113,dt=28.02.09
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mystical bond with the Earth. The resulting tension between psychiatry and Romanticism does not lead to the exclusion of either; instead, it suffuses the text to its very end, so that the young Doctor Alkis remains unfathomable even to himself. This may stem from the fact that Greek literature only delineates, erratically adopts, compresses or mistrusts that, which has gradually and systematically developed in the north. Therefore, the texts are characterized by particular adjustments and rupture lines, as if they wavered between the will to appropriate and distanced suspicion, as if the concepts of European science and literature could only find acceptance in a distilled, yet attenuated form, as if the other and the – reluctantly intrigued – self were nudging each other.
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