Identities in Papadiamantis FINAL

Disrupting Fading National Identities and Questioning the Identity of Faith: Identifying Papadiamantis Nicholas A. E. Kalospyros Although it might seem an academic-literary commonplace to argue about Papadiamantis’ literary identity –who initiated a lengthy ‘school’ in modern Greek letters–, and it would also seem inevitable for me to draw his ideological maxims from my florilegium or gnomologium Papadiamanticum 1, I intend to focus on some further aspects, not so common-bound, about the spectre of his authorship and its inner identity articulated in his narrative techniques. Critical readings of Papadiamantis’ fiction have frequently been framed either by emotive concerns to highlight his ideological manifesto towards an Eastern Greek identity and by academics reproaching his fear for the adulteration of national traditions or the respective modest exile from such ad hoc illusions. The further attestation of both national identities, imperative in the writer’s epoch but steadily fading in his own understanding, and the consenting identity of religious faith, disputed but highly appraised in his unique world, creates aspects of literary importance towards his stylistic compliance and awaits philological interpretation in the self-assertive tone of Papadiamantical imagery. Concerning bibliographical issues his identity could be stated as dilemmatic and controversial, due to secular interests and relative confrontations of his readers disencumbering of their own ideas against or in favour of an exclusively Byzantine entity. I shall not refrain from inquiring in his authentic literary identity by intimating its three main aspects: i) enargeia (aspiring to lyricism and ecphrasis , vividness), ii) agonizing and fighting merit (Orthodox Christian faith and upright liturgical life), and iii) classical scholarship (to stylistic experience); all things considered, an identity transcendental and consciously integrated. In order to render the importance of overt and covert readings of texts, each providing an insight into aspects of our own cultural identities or the norms which we use to form our concept of other people’s cultural identities 2, we may trace the understanding of any individual writer as a coherent whole subject to a collection of various cultural identifiers from a variety of aspects including: place, race, history, nationality and ethnicity, language, gender and sexual parameters, religious beliefs and aesthetics. Even as a ‘historical reservoir’, yet a social process in which individuals participate in the context of changing historical conditions, culture forms an important factor in shaping identity; such identity politics prepared by nationalist and romanticist movements engraved the Greek past since the European Enlightenment, bursting in the nineteenth-century horizon like a deliberative age of transition 3. If Greek history had to be continuously reinterpreted, which one of the following ethnonyms was tenuous enough to be relinquished: Romans, Greeks, or Hellenes? 4 To adopt any of these could prove more perplexed than reliable both in the 1 Kalospyros 2005. 2 On the importance of cultural identities see Hall & Du Gay 1996 and Alcoff & Mendieta 2003. 3 See Tziovas 2003 and Beaton & Ricks 2009 on relevant perceptions and cultural encounters of the modern Greek state; for the respective evaluation in modern times Robyn 2005 and Demossier 2007 on the political structuring of European cultural identities. 4 There is an extensive bibliography on the historical use of these three ethnonyms; among others see mainly Mantouvalou 1983, Dimaras 1985: 82-86, Christou 1993, Beaton 2007, Page 2008: 27-71. context of nationalism and in the appreciation of positive elements of identity such as those familiar to Papadiamantis himself: close family ties, adherence to the perceived political and cultural essence of ancient Hellenism, and the combination of humane personalist values and liturgical life in corpus Christi . It is known that ‘the political imperial identity foundered, giving place to a religious identity that was essentially distinct from the imperial tradition, and to an ethnic identity that emerged into and gained weight within the public consciousness of the Romans as a result of the enforced encounter with the Latins of the west’ 5. Papadiamantis’ choice, the growth of Orthodox identity 6 and his refusal to conflate Greek nationalism and the Orthodox faith, is historically attained; therefore, his disavowal of Graeculism 7, a generating symptom of national inferiority or of collective identity under crisis. Thus, R. Shannan Peckham focused on Papadiamantis’ novel The Gypsy Girl (1884) to show how his narrative dramatizes contending versions of Hellenism and inquires into Byzantium’s relations to nineteenth-ventury Greece 8, arguing that in The Gypsy Girl we may explore the incoherences of an ideology that vigorously promoted an archaeological model of culture in late nineteenth-century Greece. So far we can realize Papadiamantis’ standards of the most sorely Hellenism of the last centuries supported by Lord Byron’s awareness: ‘ Η τουρκική βία και ο λατινικός δόλος ! Αι λέξεις αύται δεν είναι ιστορικόν σύµβολον , παραστατικόν της τύχης του πολυπαθούς Ελληνισµού; Πόσον ενδοµύχως ῃσθάνετο και κατενόει ο µέγας Βρεττανός την θέσιν της Ελλάδος , την τότε και την διαρκή και την παντοτινήν! Και πόσον απέχοµεν ηµείς να την εννοήσωµεν και να την αισθανθώµεν ! Ο Βύρων ήτο αρχαίος Έλλην κατά την καρδίαν , κατά το πνεύµα και κατά το φρόνηµα . Ήτο αρχαίος Έλλην της ΙΘ΄ εκατονταετηρίδος , τέλειος ανήρ και κοσµοπολίτης ’ [5.260.4-12]9. There is a constant danger that approaches to identity are reducible to the search for diversity, a matter of cultural fictions and cultural identity, as if competing myths explaining the origin of polis could be used again to support overriding of otherness; e.g. like military dominant Rome that chose Aeneas to incorporate Greek, or like Jews, a depending minority, who asserted primacy by inventing Greek descent for Abraam. Papadiamantis’ complaint, however, is nourished in his identified classical scholarship as literary identity. His classical allusions are like a sort of infusive memory, a kind of inherited identity realized through linguistic expectations. His attitude towards modern Greeks and Franks, his relations with Athens and Skiathos, his narratives of identity are not metaphors awaiting their interpretation by critics or a modern transcription of Pausanias’ text; a text that has long been regarded as a pedantic and antiquarian tourist guide, still showing how Greeks of the 2nd cent. A.D. coped with a burden of a distinguished past weighing on their political identity, with the contemporary politics of Greece’s status as a Roman province, and with the profound sense of the sacred with which so much of antique culture was imbued 10 . The happenings and scheming of everyday’s world are temperately infiltrated in his Hokwerda 2003 on identity and historical consciousness of the Greek past (see also Carras 1983 and Hall 1997). 5 Page 2008: 281. 6 Makrides 1993 discusses Orthodoxy’s role in Greek anti-Occidentalism. For an account of Papadiamantis’ religious journalism see Ricks 2009. 7 See Dimitrakopoulos 2000. 8 See Shannan Peckham 1998. 9 All references to novels, tales and articles of Papadiamantis appear in square brackets and refer by volume, page and lines’ number, to the critical edition by N. D. Triantaphyllopoulos Αλέξανδρος Παπαδιαµάντης Άπαντα , vol. 1-5, Athens: Domos Editions, 1981-1988 (some repr. in 1989). 10 See Elsner 1992. classical scholarship and reduced to their classical image in the case-history of the human subject suffering grief. The classical authors’ logos reveals temporal aspects of human personality, all of which could be regarded as a precursory (in the sense of pre- Christian theology) philosophy, for Papadiamantis prefers to invoke classical passages as his own commentary upon futility, beauty, friction or prosaicism of everyday speech, in order to preserve acclaimed testimonies of Hellenic-tempered life and stoic mood. Nevertheless, in Papadiamantis’ fiction the knowledge of Greek thought and life turns to an ontological consideration of protagonistic beings –not a psychological one. Denouncing philological and ideological differentiations he cannot but ironically face the alienating voices that pretend manichaistic versions of modern Greek particularity deprived of rectilinear kinship: ‘Μη θρησκευτικά, προς Θεού! Το Ελληνικόν Έθνος δεν είναι Βυζαντινοί, εννοήσατε ; Οι σηµερινοί Έλληνες είναι κατ ’ ευθείαν διάδοχοι των αρχαίων . Έπειτα επολιτίσθησαν , επροώδευσαν και αυτοί. Συµβαδίζουν µε τάλλα έθνη ’ [2.515.30-33]. By upholding the poetical spirit and the freedom of thinking, achievements resulting from the ancient era, which were afterwards transmuted in ecclesiastical speech of Orthodox transcendence, he gains an obvious agreement with the priest from Βαρδιάνος στα σπόρκα , who appeals to the SS. Martyrs Floros and Lavros so as to eliminate the epidemic of cholera ‘όπως τον παλαιόν καιρόν είχον ελευθερώσει τον κόσµον από την νοητήν χολέραν , την ειδωλολατρίαν ’ [2.587.31-33]. He derives the poeticality treasured up in the didactic myths of antiquity to conciliate the two undisputable layers of modern Hellenism – pre-Christian culture and Eastern/Orthodox religion– and to drive them into its unique synthesis 11 . For instance, in his story Στην Αγι -Αναστασά (a tale with intense autobiographical hints adequate of setting a personal mythography) he

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