In the “Surrealist Map of the
World” printed in the 1929 ‘Surrealism Special’ of the Variétés journal,
Greece shines by its very absence. So, of course, do several other countries,
but Greece and Italy in particular (insofar as having originated the
‘Greco-Roman’ civilization) were reportedly seen by surrealism’s founder André
Breton as symbols of an insipid rationality imposed upon what has come to be
called the ‘Western world.’ Yet the simultaneous
absence of France and presence of Paris in the map should draw attention to the
function of the emphatically present Constantinople:
a Greco-Turkish hybrid (Turkey being equally absent), a crossroads between East
and West. From the outset, Constantinople (the fabled origin of the surrealist
Nikos Engonopoulos) marks a challenge to the assumed heritage of
Greek civilization.
It is thus that Greek surrealism
has been blatantly conscious of the cultural practices and attitudes reporting
to ‘tradition,’ as well as of the complexity pertaining to the latter concept.
The relationship of its major representatives with the Greek language itself will be addressed in the
course of this anthology (as concisely as possible, given that such a
relationship is by definition resistant to translation). Equally noteworthy,
however, is the use of ‘indigenous’ themes, especially by Greek surrealism’s foremost
figures, Andreas Embirikos and Nikos Engonopoulos. In the former’s paganist
inclinations, in the latter’s pointed rejection of French rationalism
and neo-classicism in favor of an idiosyncratic treatment of Greek themes, a
crucial inversion takes place: to the earlier French surrealists’ repudiation
of the classical heritage, Greek surrealism answers by promoting an alternative, expansive and indeed subversive
interpretation of this very heritage.
Certain critics, whose hostility
toward surrealism is complemented by a tendency to pronounce definitive
statements, often argue that the movement flourished in Greece to an extent
unequalled in any other country, save perhaps France. This contention, which
chooses to ignore surrealism’s international dynamics, rests on the
impressively wide influence surrealist imagery has exerted on mainstream Greek
poetry: an actual fact, albeit one alarmingly reminiscent of the ‘Chinese
whispers’ game, whereby the original explosion is too often evoked and
eventually replaced by its tiny echo. Nonetheless, the phenomenon is not
without its importance, for in Greece, unlike many other cultures (notably
English-speaking ones), it has been impossible, even on the level of the most
conservative literary tendencies, to ignore surrealism altogether. And this, in
fact, is not hard to explain.
Being a post-colonial state,
marked by financial provinciality and political instability, informed by
countless layers of history and culture albeit being a mere century old, that Greece to which surrealism was
introduced in the early 1930s boasted neither a substantial, tried and tested
cultural canon nor a coherent prehistory of radical expression. Having said
which, an anthology of Greek pre-surrealism, such as that envisaged by Nanos
Valaoritis [1]
in homage to Nicolas Calas (the first Greek writer who conceived of mapping the early mavericks, extremists and experimenters), would
not go amiss in placing the present work in perspective.
It is also Valaoritis who has
noted, on various occasions, that Embirikos, both with his work and with his
physical presence (exerting as he did a quasi-polar attraction on young poets),
has attained in Greece a status similar to that of Guillaume Apollinaire in
France. The comparison is particularly apt because
troubling, for Embirikos, Calas and (a little later, yet more aggressively)
Engonopoulos propagated surrealism in a country that ignored the very notion
of an ‘avant garde,’ with all the complications or limitations this
term may entail. Greek surrealism thus knew no preparatory stages; the double
result of which was, on the one hand, an overwhelmingly scandalous (if
quantitatively modest) debut, in the shape of a few albeit important early
books and interventions, and, on the other, a number of obstacles to its
development.
Other critics, equally (but less
openly) hostile to surrealism, make the exact opposite argument, to the effect
that Greek surrealism has never actually existed; and in fact, the extreme
peculiarity pertaining to such a dual
interpretation of the phenomenon would in itself suffice to render the latter
remarkable. This second scenario is often based on the assumption that the
appearance of the earliest surrealist-related events and texts in Greece came
at too late a date (that is, around 1935!) to be either truly radical or
unproblematically incorporated into a movement conveniently presumed to have
died a little while before or after World War II. Of course, given that radical
expression had not been properly introduced to the country before Embirikos’
first book, this argument (which, as we shall see, is repeated vis-à-vis the
Greek surrealist presence in the 1960s and beyond) would be meaningless, even
if its claims regarding international surrealism were true.
Alternately, the said view
attempts to prove the international movement’s incompatibility with Greek
surrealist production and activity; which could be an intriguing effort, were
it not based on a fragmentary knowledge (and systematic distortion) of those
early writings of Breton’s that happened to be translated in Greek. It goes
without saying that here, too, the movement’s history and continuation are
completely ignored. What is more, this attack originates from figures of the
academic establishment, and is contemporary to, and neatly (if not overtly)
compatible with, the pseudo-progressive, ‘deconstructive’ attitude of certain
North-American academics in particular toward international surrealism; the
difference being that here the movement’s denigration is replaced by that of a
specific expression/incarnation of it, surrealism itself being misread rather
than badmouthed. Such a symptom could well be considered as one instance in a
trans-national academic ‘enterprise,’ and thus may as well be put aside, as a
potential topic for a special study.
This, of course, is not all: the
seminal works of Embirikos and Engonopoulos in particular have, over the years,
been read and reread in whichever way was deemed convenient according to each
given critic’s ideological frame. At once impossible to ignore, in terms of
their influence to start with, and uncomfortably daring, these works have been
distorted in the following ways:
a. By assigning to them a minor value, seeing them as the mere
preconditions for more ‘substantial’ and acceptable kinds of ‘literary
production.’ In this view, the most groundbreaking Greek surrealists are
thereby, by definition, ‘not really’ poets, but rather blind slaves to an
‘ideology,’ albeit also too radical and indeed free-flowing in
their approach to be taken seriously. This rather paradoxical position is by
far the commonest and oldest treatment of the phenomenon, judging from another
kind of curious ‘dialectics’ Greek surrealism is subjected to: its notoriety
all too often giving way to silence when it comes to critical treatment, it is
accordingly suppressed on the level of translation, despite (or because of) the international potential
(as opposed to national stereotype) attached to its works.
b. By reclaiming them for the ‘tradition’ of Greek literature, while
dissociating them from surrealism. This view utilizes in particular the
Greco-centered thematics of certain
surrealists (an aspect, to be addressed throughout this anthology, not
unexpected in the surrealist expression of a peripheral country) in order to celebrate them as ‘pure’ artists
despite their rash alliance to the movement (a newer, rapidly developing
critical tendency would have surrealism itself being identified with these
presumed ethnocentric poetics, its international practice blissfully ignored);
or else, to challenge them as signs to the effect that surrealism has not really operated in Greece in any
substantial way, and is now therefore (it being too late for an actual
resurgence) unacceptable even as an influence.
We can thus see that a certain
mechanism of suppression (of evasion,
even) is firmly at work, certainly not in the sense of a ‘conspiracy,’ but
rather of a network of academic discourses coming to terms with a particularly
bothersome residue. Seldom is the issue of Greek surrealism placed in the right
perspective—namely, that of its compatibility (in terms of products and of public presence) with the
international movement’s activity. This crucial matter is not so easy to
resolve, and accordingly few have deemed it worth bothering about, save for
extracting facile conclusions from familiar (as titles if not as texts) French
books. The organization of Greek surrealism has always been deficient, indeed
intermittent; but this factor is, usually, addressed neither vis-à-vis its
objective causes (as this anthology will purport to do) nor within the temporal
framework proper to it, due to the prejudices peculiar to art and literary
history—hence the critical suppression or underrating (as a nostalgic venture)
of an actual surrealist resurgence in the 1960s, one that reported boldly to
international developments and
remained a long-standing influence on younger generations.
It is for these reasons that the
present anthology focuses on activity within the spatial confines of a country
(as opposed to adopting ‘ethnocentric’ criteria); all the names included herein
have been connected, in one way or another, to groups formed around Embirikos
and/or Nanos Valaoritis. This explains the absence of such long-established
surrealist figures as Gisèle Prassinos or Ado Kyrou, who may have maintained
some loose links with Greece, but actually operated in the context of French
language and activity. Likewise, the French and English works of Calas and
Valaoritis are also excluded (excepting a few French poems by Calas, so far
only printed in Greece). In the former’s case, given that his non-Greek
writings constitute the bulk of his output (which, nevertheless, cannot be
assessed independently of those writings which display his intellectual
formation within a particular milieu), one may only hope that his mature
theoretical work will become widely available in its original form. With the latter,
who, even while physically absent, has always written and published extensively
in Greek, the situation is more straightforward.
In concluding this part, here are
a couple of points on the structure and choice of texts. For the reader’s
convenience, the anthology has been divided into three sections, preceded by
brief introductions to the eras addressed. However, this is not meant to be
read as a linear narrative, but rather as a presentation of successive groups
of writers, whose works and activities more often than not overlap at some
point or other; the reader is thus strongly advised to use this classification
as nothing more than a guide. Also, this being (one hopes) the most
comprehensive selection of Greek surrealist poetry, prose and theory ever made,
it should nonetheless be pointed out that, if almost all poems and stories are
presented in their entirety, the essays included are usually abridged, to a
greater or lesser extent, as the reader will find. This, in some cases, is due
to their overwhelming length; in other cases, it is merely an effort to omit
those details that would seem too peculiar to a specific time and place.
In the hope that such a conscious
choice (which nevertheless leaves the bulk of the crucial arguments intact)
will not spoil the overall picture, it is now time to proceed.
THE FOUNDERS | Despite
a number of perplexed newspaper reports on the emergent international movement,
and a 1931 essay by Dimitrios Mentzelos (more on whom in the Nicolas Calas
section), Greek surrealism really started with the poet Andreas Embirikos. A
magnate’s son who, while living in Paris, had met André Breton and his circle
around 1929, [2]
Embirikos returned in the early 1930s with the double intention of introducing
psychoanalysis and surrealism to Greece. His activity as an
analyst would meet with international recognition later on, especially after
the formation (in 1946) of the Greek Psychoanalytic Society around Marie
Bonaparte and its collaboration with its Parisian counterpart.
In the process of making those
experiments with automatic writing that would constitute his groundbreaking
debut, Embirikos made the acquaintance of Nicolas Calas, a young poet and
essayist about to become one of the prime movers of Trotskyist activity in
Greece, and Odysseus Elytis, a still younger poet and translator of Paul
Éluard. In May 1934, Embirikos notified Breton by telegram, declaring his and
his friends’ full support on condition that surrealism does not denounce the 4th
International. And, after a January 1935 lecture on surrealism that met with
little success and the publication of his first book, Blast Furnace, in March
of the same year, Embirikos, along with Calas and Elytis, planned the
publication of a surrealist periodical (O
Thiassos), which was never materialized; while in March 1936, Embirikos
organized a surrealist exhibition, based on paintings and objects he had
acquired from artist friends (such as Max Ernst, Oscar Dominguez, Yves Tanguy
and Victor Brauner) who participated in the Paris group, along with collages by
Elytis and rare books. In the following years, Elytis and Calas would also
undertake the public defense of surrealism, by essays and other forms of
intervention, while certain of their friends would make peripheral
contributions, by means of private sessions, involving discussions and
collective games.
Nikos Engonopoulos, a painter and
poet introduced to Embirikos by Calas (who also organized Engonopoulos’ first
exhibition), was the final figure in this early quartet. His first collection, Do not distract the Driver (1938), bore
the same motto, taken from Breton’s 1st Manifesto, that Embirikos had used in his aforementioned volume: “…la voix surréaliste, celle qui continue à
prêcher à la veille de la mort et au-dessus des orages…”; a further sign of
commitment to an emergent indigenous branch of the movement. And the scandal
that ensued from Engonopoulos’ book in particular would seem to corroborate
this notion.
From the word go, however,
surrealism was widely badmouthed as the outrageous pastime of socially
indifferent individuals: a paradox, given that Calas for one had discovered
surrealism precisely through the evolution of his political thought, albeit not
an inexplicable one, given that he had, by the same stroke, rejected Stalinism and the impasses of ‘socialist realism,’
to which surrealist expression offered a radical alternative. Indeed, an
overview of the relevant literature [3] reveals the conservative bourgeois and
Stalinist critics decrying the phenomenon in unison. ‘Humorists’ and all-round
columnists jumped on the bandwagon, which is actually going strong to this very
day; and the political isolation often regarded as a fatal shortcoming of Greek
surrealism was not irrelevant to the monopolization of ‘left wing’ writing by
the Stalinist ‘intelligentsia,’ all the more dominant for being politically
persecuted—a fact that, as we shall see in the following sections, continued to
plague free expression for the following decades.
Yet these observations should
refrain from reaching easy conclusions: to highlight, as some Greek writers
have recently done, Calas alone, due to his very pronounced political
commitment and international presence, would be to disregard other, vitally
important aspects, such as the originality and unprecedented boldness of
Engonopoulos’ work—as well as its actual impact.
Having already contacted the
Paris surrealist group, Calas decided to leave Greece, due to a combination of
political and personal reasons. His final contributions to prewar Greek
surrealism were his translations of texts by Benjamin Péret and Gisèle
Prassinos in the collective tome Υπερεαλισμός Α΄ ( Yperealismos A΄ [Surrealism A΄]) (Athens: Γκοβόστης [Govostis], 1938), an anthology of French
writings rendered into Greek by indigenous surrealists and sympathizers. The
1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie
(a major surrealist theoretical work of the 1930s, celebrated by Breton),
secured Calas’ place in the movement’s history, yet fell outside the scope of
an activity that, despite its limitations, had provided the very background for
this very work.
All of which poses a particular
problem: like Nanos Valaoritis nearly two decades later, Calas participated in
Parisian surrealist activity before moving to the U.S.A. and contributing
greatly to the Anglophone discourse regarding surrealism. It is thus no
accident that those two writers are the only ones in this anthology mentioned
(and, in Valaoritis’ case, cited extensively) in essays by Breton himself; they
are also the only ones, perhaps along with Embirikos (and Elytis, albeit for
reasons foreign to surrealism), with whom the Anglophone reader may be more or
less familiar, via their book publications as well as inclusions and/or
citations in English-language international surrealist anthologies and studies.
Calas’ absence from Greece has
had a paradoxical double result: in terms of international activity, it
rendered him the sole recognizable early Greek surrealist, even though he was
neither the first (his early poetry, which preceded Embirikos’ first
publication, being pre-surrealist on his own admission) nor the one who
affected most the sensibility of his era. The early theoretical works he produced
upon his immigration to France and, later, the U.S.A. (Confound the Wise, his first book in English, appeared in 1942),
impressed André Breton to the point of including him (along with Bataille,
Caillois, Duthuit, Masson, Mabille, Carrington, Ernst, Etiemble, Péret,
Seligmann, Hénein) in his list of those contemporary names “which are very
dissimilar but nonetheless figure amongst today’s most lucid and daring”: [4] a quotation that would seem to justify Greek
surrealism merely by evoking Breton’s approval of one of its central figures.
Yet what will soon be apparent in this anthology is that the international
tendency to equate early Greek surrealism with Calas, because of his activity
outside Greece, tends to obscure the environment from which Calas himself
emerged, and which gave rise to the most significant, in terms of immediate
impact as well as historical function, works of surrealism in the Greek
language.
At the same time, however, in Calas’ native
country, his absence gave birth to a myth around his name, which tended to ignore
his international presence. Thus, when Elytis provided the foreword
to Calas’ Greek poetry collection Nikitas
Randos St. (1978), he
invested his old friend with the aura of an invisible, semi-legendary figure,
comparing him to Jacques Vaché and Marcel Duchamp, both characters with a
physically peripheral but actually crucial contribution to the surrealist
adventure. It is only in a recent publication of Calas’ French poems of the
late 1930s that Spilios Argyropoulos and Vassiliki Colokotroni, that volume’s
editors, have pointed out the danger entailed in this loving tribute, insofar
as it distorts the fact that that what actually rendered Calas invisible in
Greece was his visibility on a world scale. [5] Of course, what with the
recently undertaken effort to publish the Calas archive in Greek, now that the
English and French editions of his works are mostly unavailable, the writer
runs the danger of developing posthumously into a ‘lost and found’ national
treasure, in yet another distortion of his intentions.
Calas’ departure may have been
definitive (bar those Greek writings of his that appeared sporadically from the
1960s onwards), yet it was not conceived as such from the start. An unfinished
manuscript by Embirikos, dated 21/2/1940 but published as late as 2000, [5] recalled the rebellious ‘Ivan’
(a nickname given to Calas by his friends) as an adventurous spirit, one that
had abandoned Greek intellectual life to pursue the thread of his desire.
Embirikos compared his friend to a great navigator, albeit one who, being a
surrealist, preferred permanent search to final attainment or imperialistic
conquest. “Years have since gone by, and you still have not returned, Ivan,”
writes Embirikos. “Nobody knows where you are, what you are doing. Nobody has
learned where you are heading. Yet I do know what it is that attracts and
allures you.” Embirikos’ anxiety is registered in his avowed ignorance of
Calas’ prospects, yet the fragment ends on a hopeful note: “For you shall come
again, you shall come despite the clamors, you shall come with all the pride
and all the joy of pure people, those high-flying, tireless travelers of
lightships and steamboats, who receive, upon their heads and shoulders, the
cool steam of victory.” In the process, Embirikos cites, as representative of
his friend’s desires, Lautréamont’s evocation of the Ocean, in Elytis’
translation: a poignant, final allusion to the original surrealist trio.
Up until the 2nd World
War, Embirikos maintained close contact with the French surrealists, a
better-organized activity having only been prevented by the combination of
Calas’ departure and the War’s outbreak. After sustaining interest in
surrealism in a quasi-clandestine manner, Embirikos went on to suffer a major
crisis, whose details have yet to be sufficiently illuminated.
Being the offspring of a famous dynasty of
ship-owners, Embirikos’ involvement in surrealism, psychoanalysis and left-wing
politics had rendered him (like Calas) the black sheep of his family from quite
early on. Having concentrated on psychoanalytic practice and severed his
financial bonds with his father, Embirikos nevertheless did not cease being
inspired by the symbol of paternal dominance, in a manner that is perhaps in
itself worthy of analysis. After all, his best known (though by no means best)
poem, “Revolving Cranks,” as well as his later novel The Great Eastern,
turned the phallic/fatherly ship into the vehicle of a utopian craving—an
aspect that actually brings Embirikos close to Breton, whose Ode à Charles Fourier (1947) was roughly contemporary to the first drafts of The
Great Eastern. But the Greek poet’s tendency toward utopian thought and an
erotic re-organization of the world was not a little affected by his
disenchantment vis-à-vis the actuality of the Greek so-called ‘Left.’ For it
was precisely as an Embirikos that he was arrested by Stalinist guerillas in
1944 and taken to a mountain refuge, where he was saved from imminent execution
by the intervention of British forces.
The
experience seems to have had a lifelong impact on him: whilst never renouncing
his early ideas, Embirikos henceforth kept a perceptible distance from
organized activity. His involvement with the Psychoanalytic Society was
likewise short-lived: in the postwar era, the prevalent ‘left-wing’ criticism
in Greece continued to encourage a naïve distrust of psychoanalysis as a sign
of ‘bourgeois decadence’—like surrealism, of course. For reasons that have yet
to be fully clarified, Embirikos abandoned analytic practice altogether in
1951; his personal writings testify to bouts of depression, countered by the
joyful, if not always conclusive, fervor of his visionary works. And, despite
keeping in touch with Breton (he was regularly notified on developments in the
Paris surrealist group), he failed to visit him, on various pretexts, during
his sojourns in Paris.
Might Embirikos have feared that his personal
condition was ultimately non-communicable
to his old friends? It is true that the problems were mutual: after Breton, out
of an avowed aversion toward classical antiquity, refused to join his wife
Elisa on a trip to Athens, it was with her that Embirikos eventually met.
The above serve partly as a brief historical
introduction, leading rather neatly into the postwar situation dealt with in
the next sections of this work, and partly as a chronicle of those fluctuations
that gave rise to and concluded the first era of Greek surrealism. The Great Eastern, Embirikos’ purported magnum opus and a less than clear-cut
utopia of polymorphous erotic enjoyment (in the form of an impossibly expansive
Victorian “dirty novel”), was one way of setting a challenge to the miserable
objective conditions. Another way (perhaps more effective, given criticism’s
stubborn resistance to it), is the early poetry of Engonopoulos, full of
mysterious signs, unbreakable codes, hermetic allusions, subterranean
textual correspondences, intriguing
blind spots and an aggressive juxtaposition of lyricism and humor, somewhat
reminiscent of Benjamin Péret, albeit framed by the extreme precision of its mise-en-scène, as in early de Chirico
(Engonopoulos’ major influence as a painter), and thereby creating situations
of an unnerving concreteness.
The
works of early Greek surrealism registered the tension between the misery of
modern Greece and its assumed discourse with its ‘glorious past,’ which
constituted the country’s national ideology, ever since its establishment as an
independent state. Modern Greek writing had been invested with the ‘nationally
vital’ task of detecting and defining ethnic character and continuity both in
thematic and in linguistic terms. And this project was significantly more
charged, ideologically speaking, than the literary establishment of a
relatively powerful state with a standardized idiom—all the more so since Greek
literature was still attempting to stabilize a fluid language, even as it was
claiming the crystallization of ‘natural’ truth.
The intervention of Greek surrealism could not be
addressed in terms other than those of a direct confrontation with the
pronounced national mission of ‘literature,’ of writing as such; by confusing
both the layers of history/experience and the available linguistic forms, early Greek surrealism complicated radically the
linguistic situation in which it necessarily participated. But, in their
thematic orientation, these works also involved the somewhat indecisive
coexistence of the evolving urban modernity and the ‘traditional’ Greek
landscape (and seascape).
A general tendency to re-appropriate ‘natural’
indigenous aspects is mostly connected with Elytis, the so-called ‘poet of the
Aegean’ (although the genre of poems dealing with the said sea really starts
with the pre-surrealist work of Calas). Yet Elytis’ rather essentialist treatment
of the ‘Aegean experience,’ and of the quasi-hermetic harmonies
formed by the elements involved therein, lacks both the humorous edge and the
allusive ambiguity of other Greek surrealists: a fact that becomes especially
troubling given the vulgarization to which this surrealist-derived lyricism was
subjected much later by the tourist industry. As for Nikos Gatsos, the fifth
poet who appears in this section (close to the central surrealist quartet but
an elusive presence until the publication of his only book in 1943), he named
his major poem after an island (Amorgos) to which he had never been. Beside
displaying the surrealist method of ‘disconnection’ between title and text,
this also bore testament to the aura of undiscovered
territory that the Aegean retained in the eyes of those young poets:
witness also Engonopoulos’ early evocations of Mykonos, now one of the most
obvious international tourist resorts. In Gatsos, as in Engonopoulos, the
lyrical allusions to a lost, ‘organic’ plenitude receive the assault of black
humor, in ways that will find an echo in the next generation of Greek
surrealists.
At the same time, let us note that Calas’ first
important poem “The Round Symphony” (written in 1932 and not included here
insofar as it falls within what Calas himself considered his pre-surrealist
period), was a boldly ‘modern’ and thematically urban composition. The poem was
a dynamic representation of Omonia Sq., Athens’ (and consequently Greece’s)
central point, whose (then) round shape gave Calas the pretext for a
futurist-inspired expression of the evolving city life’s dizzying rhythm and
manifold spectacle. It is really, however, with Engonopoulos, who made the tram
into a lyrical emblem of Greek surrealism, that the city and the modern aspects
and commodities it contains are evoked as a network of enigmatic signs; yet his urban landscapes often
dissolve into indefinite ghost-towns (notably in “A Journey to Elbassan,” one
of the masterpieces of narrative surrealism), in the manner of de Chirico’s
metaphysical paintings.
A similarly idiosyncratic attitude is observed
vis-à-vis the early surrealists’ view of ‘Greek-ness’: in his best-known poem
Engonopoulos calls Simón Bolívar a ‘Greek,’ whilst mixing the layers of the
Greek language’s history, as well as the Greek and international references,
reflected on his own self-description in the poem, as a solitary who
subsequently attains a universal allure. He thus addresses an unresolved
tension experienced by the inhabitants of a small, war-torn, ultimately
‘insignificant’ modern country, recognizable via the ‘memory’ of a distant
past. Calas’ call for turning all art into an ‘arsenal,’ like Parthenon (a call
reflected, as we shall see in a later section, on the young Yorgos V. Makris’
tract proposing the said monument’s annihilation), betrays a profound unease
toward this surviving emblem of Western rationality. Yorgos Seferis, the prime
modernist of the ’30s generation, rendered the continuity of the Greek
experience into an ideology, in the process also propagating, in true modernist
fashion, the use of a strictly delineated form of Modern Greek. By contrast,
Engonopoulos relishes the discontinuity of historical layers, cultural currents
and linguistic forms. As for Embirikos, he comes rather late to explicitly
Greek themes, which he uses largely with respect to his surrealist
concerns—hence his emphasis on aspects of pagan mythology, in other words, not
on received ethnic ‘values,’ but of lost mythic origins, whose evocation is
invested with subversive potential.
This
section, then, purports to be a comprehensive selection of works by those
pivotal writers, and one which may well be approached with the above
considerations in mind. The reader, however, is also advised to relate the
post-’30s writings included herein to the works of the following generations,
this being a historical classification, as opposed to a neat sectorization
between currents, eras and tendencies.
THE SECOND GENERATION | During the Nazi occupation, Embirikos and
his then-wife, the poet Matsi Hatzilazarou, had held regular meetings in their
house; along with Engonopoulos, Elytis and Gatsos, a number of young poets made
their first appearance in this milieu. These included some of the most
authentic voices of their generation: Miltos Sahtouris, E. Ch. Gonatas,
Dimitris Papaditsas and others, including the two figures who, out of all those
younger writers, would go on to display the most consistent surrealist
leanings: Hector Kaknavatos and Nanos Valaoritis. A maverick case, Yorgos V.
Makris, who would later become a vital member of the Pali group, also
participated in those sessions, which extended into meetings at coffeehouses
and some publishing activity. It was not, however, to last for long.
The
aforementioned wartime crisis experienced by Embirikos was not without its
counterpart in the upbringing of his younger friends. Greece emerged completely
devastated from the occupation, only to be plunged directly into a catastrophic
civil war. The revolutionary Resistance, manipulated by the ‘Communist’ Party on
the strength of Soviet support, had then been deprived of this support
following an agreement between Stalin and Winston Churchill, which granted
Britain control over the country’s postwar administration, thereby leaving the
left-wing fighters at the mercy of British imperialism and its local allies.
This is how the French surrealist and revolutionary Benjamin Péret resumed the
ensuing situation, in a text signed B. Peralta and printed in Lucha obrera, No
47, February 1947: [7]
The
Stalinist direction of the [Resistance movement] E.A.M. capitulated after
bloody combats, forgetting that it still controlled the country’s
principal centers. (…) [E.A.M.’s armed
section] E.L.A.S. capitulated hastily before its class enemy, thus
disorganizing completely the struggle and allowing the Greek bourgeoisie to
resume control over the situation. But the E.A.M. masses, after a few weeks of
confusion, restarted the struggle (…). In fact, once the revolutionary movement
was disorganized by their capitulation, once the danger of a revolutionary
triumph susceptible to unmask the Stalinists had disappeared, the Greek C.P.,
following instructions from Kremlin, could without risk fight in Stalin’s name
against English imperialism. (Benjamin Péret: Oeuvres
Complètes, tome 5, Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1989, pp. 169-70; my
translation, after the French version, by Éliane Aldama-Juquel and Soledad
Estorach, of the Spanish original.)
The war dragged on until 1949. With the defeat of the
Left, and the merciless persecutions that ensued, there emerged a new
‘intellectual climate,’ in which surrealism seemed to have no place. Typically,
one of Engonopoulos’ most celebrated and discussed poems to this day is “Poetry
1948,” the brief, somewhat ‘occasional’ text that closed his book Eleusis, [8] and which remains
interesting to the extent that it constitutes a desperate admission of poetry’s
ultimate impotence before the actuality of a doomed struggle. The poem is, of
course, most appreciated to this day by those who relish the defeat of surrealism implied therein.
The civil war and its aftermath have since informed a
great deal of artistic production; it is in poetry, however, that the cost of
this experience on free expression becomes most apparent. To start with, a
major influence on that poetic current which purported to register the
experience of the defeated Left, was Yorgos Seferis (an influence,
incidentally, also apparent in more recent artifacts with ‘civil war’
references, such as the early films of Theo Angelopoulos). This is no accident,
for Seferis conceives the Greek landscape and language as a kind of
metaphysical topos, burdened by the weight of History and the loss of its
mythic center. Such a concept, however, is a far cry from the playful treatment
of ‘Greek-ness’ by the ’30s surrealists: for, by mixing disparate figures of
the Greek history, landscape, mythology and speech (by relating them, even, to
an international revolutionary and/or utopian vision, as in Bolívar and Embirikos’ later Great
Eastern), early surrealists had challenged
the ideologically-constructed, essentialist mentality in Greek poetry’s assumed
national mission.
Seferis’ dialogue with Greek history and myth
(‘ideological’ also in the sense of being informed by the linguistic purism and
cultural dogmatism of Anglo-saxon
conservative modernism—a kind of contradiction in itself) was, in the works
of postwar poets, such as Takis
Sinopoulos, rendered into the fatalistic experience of recent history as a
‘Greek tragedy,’ giving rise to what came to be called ‘the poetry of
defeat’—whose critical champions dismissed the ‘historical irresponsibility’
and formal playfulness of surrealism as opposed to this current’s austerity and
social ‘relevance.’ At the same time, the massively popular Yannis Ritsos, a
poet of the ’30s generation who came into prominence after the civil war (and
whose work is too voluminous to summarize here), assumed the allure of Aragon,
Éluard and Pablo Neruda amongst international Stalinist circles.
The postwar era saw the group of friends around which
Greek surrealism had been formed practically disintegrate; social relations
were maintained, but very little was published to start with. Nevertheless, an
activity undertaken during the Occupation by the journal Τετράδιο
(Tetradio) aimed at a syncretic
coexistence of various tendencies, including surrealism, which operated under
the difficult climate of the era. The journal pursued its existence for some
years before concluding it in the midst of the Civil War; original texts and
surrealist translations by Embirikos, Engonopoulos, Elytis, Hatzilazarou,
Sahtouris and Valaoritis were published there, and Embirikos’ Hinterland, a collection of prewar
poems, was printed under the Tetradio
logo.
While the increasingly detached Embirikos and Engonopoulos
remained mentors to certain young poets, Elytis and Valaoritis had left the
country (the latter eventually participating in the Parisian surrealist
activity), Gatsos was writing song-lyrics, Kaknavatos was to undergo political
persecutions and Sahtouris, along with Gonatas, would, in a sense, seem to
typify a particular climate: their works derive directly from the flora and
fauna of Engonopoulos’ poetry, albeit with a touch of Kafka and, especially in
Sahtouris, a strongly evident if subterranean presence of the war experience,
that is horrific and disturbing rather than either bitterly resigned or
lyrically ‘engaged.’ Just as typical, however, was their solitary attitude; for, at a time when the fervor of early Greek
surrealism had given way to disenchantment, these writers seemed detached both
from collective activity and from literary careerism. Yet this solitude
reflected the situation of the surrealist outlook at that time and place.
Dimitris Papaditsas, a poet particularly close to
Gonatas and Kaknavatos, is unique in cultivating the vein of a lyrical
surrealism, with remarkable inventiveness. His mature poetry displays a
tendency toward metaphysics, whilst still indebted to the principles of
surrealist imagery, whose presence is mostly apparent in his early work.
The paths pursued by others of the same generation
were disparate and fruitful. Nanos Valaoritis, who begins in the same milieu as
the aforementioned writers and is equally marked by the war experience, follows
a different route, with a pointedly cosmopolitan attitude that registers the
experience of international surrealism and the philosophical currents that
inform it. In contrast to the persistent imagery and stylistic stability of
such poets as Sahtouris, Valaoritis displays a permanent will toward
transformation, beginning with the uses of language itself. As for Hector
Kaknavatos, he begins along the lines of lyrical surrealism (Fuga, 1943), then
returns after a two-decade hiatus with one of the boldest forms of Greek
surrealist expression, at once historically-conscious and constantly
experimental, informed (especially in his mature works) by his mathematical
research.
In a 1985 text, Nanos Valaoritis noted how his
generation of surrealists and sympathizers, including Sahtouris, Gonatas,
Alexander Skinas, Mando Aravantinou and Makris, were positioned vis-à-vis the
prewar surrealists: [9] very close to Embirikos, Engonopoulos and Gatsos, as
opposed to Elytis, they appear somewhat rootless, beyond standard critical
categories (and thereby evading general acclaim). All belong to a postwar brand
of humour noir, which Valaoritis
distinguishes from that of Kostas Karyotakis—an earlier poet who persists as an
intriguing influence.
Karyotakis (1896-1928) would be regarded as little
more than a belated symbolist, were it not for the still alluring humorous
nihilism that pervades his late work, even including his suicide note. A major
albeit superficial tendency amid vaguely ‘melancholic’ and formally
conservative poets of a symbolist persuasion, the phenomenon of ‘Karyotakism’
was largely exorcized by members of the ’30s generation, which was also that of
the first surrealists. Although Elytis (who took care to set the poet apart
from his imitators) is generally regarded as the ‘anti-Karyotakis’ par excellence, what with his
‘heliocentric’ worldview, one of the earliest personal attacks on the deceased
poet had come from none other than Nicolas Calas, in his very first critical
article, printed in 1929. Calas, not yet a Trotskyist and surrealist militant,
deplored Karyotakis for ignoring the ‘dignified’ mores of proletarian
literature. Yet, despite appearances, Karyotakis left his mark on Embirikos and
especially Engonopoulos, both of whom dedicated poems to him. Second generation
surrealists have little to do with Karyotakis’ spleen, given the overwhelmingly
sociopolitical aspects of their malaise, but his renewed influence is also
symptomatic of a tendency toward a particular concept of humor, certainly
prefigured, within Greek surrealism, by Engonopoulos—and, as we shall see,
continued by the Pali group in the 1960s.
Sahtouris’ poetry is perhaps the first on which the
double impact of Karyotakis and Engonopoulos is clearly discernible: the
latter’s surrealist freedom is here activated in a sparser manner, whereby a
nursery rhyme-like simplicity is invested with a tortuous intensity, whose
effects are at once playful and nightmarish. The mythology of love also
changes, from the abstract sensual femininity of Elytis’ and Embirikos’ femmes-enfants (whose masculine counterpart in abstraction appears in
Hatzilazarou) to the more personalized, if elusive, amour unique of the Engonopoulian ‘Muse,’ underlying the dark
eroticism of Sahtouris and Gonatas, and the alchemical transformations of the
loved object in Valaoritis’ tales and novels.
THE PALI GROUP | Nanos Valaoritis
soon became the most vital organizing force in Greek surrealism: being the one
consistent link between Embirikos and Breton, an effort toward the
collaboration of both Embirikos and Elytis in French surrealist publications
came to nothing, as we have seen, due to objective difficulties. But in the
1960s the conditions were ripe for a Greek attempt along those lines; hence the
Pali journal.
Valaoritis’
own chronicle Μοντερνισμός, Πρωτοπορία και Πάλι (Modernism, the
‘Avant-Garde’ and Pali) [Athens: Καστανιώτης (Castaniotis), 1997], provides a description of the conditions under
which that publication was launched. While Yorgos Seferis, about to receive the
Nobel Prize, was surrounded by younger writers and critics eager to suppress
radical alternative voices (in the process even distorting Seferis’ own moments
of groundbreaking boldness), the most advanced periodical was Εποχές (Epoches), an instrument of informed
albeit ultra-conservative modernism. Having been encouraged by the Paris
surrealist group (in the context of surrealism’s increasing postwar
de-centralization), Valaoritis planned a journal edited by himself, Embirikos
and Elytis. Soon, however, Elytis demanded full editorship and subsequently
withdrew from the project, while approaching the ‘Seferist’ critics, and
eventually becoming Seferis’ successor, Nobel Prize-wise.
The
idea was not abandoned, nevertheless. In a 1975 account written for the
reprinting of all 6 issues of Pali by a later periodical [Σήμα
(Sima)], Valaoritis talks of “a wall of hesitation” erected, on the part
of friends, against his wish to publish a surrealist-oriented journal.
“Everyone was scared, and what they were mostly scared of were either their
very selves, or the others. But who were those mythical ‘others’? As it turned
out, they were ‘nobody’… It was the climate of an era, like the conspirators in
the army and behind the scenes of politics.” [10]The journal finally
materialized after Valaoritis’ encounter with a group of young and enthusiastic
writers (Tassos Denegris, Panos Koutrouboussis, Eva Mylona, Dimitris Poulikakos
and others).
If
early Greek surrealism addressed a public completely unaware of preparatory
stages such as Dada, the young people who formed the core of Pali’s team, and
indeed readership, had limited albeit not insignificant access to postwar
currents outside the confines of Greece. Raised in a climate of continuous
censorship and political intolerance, that was to carry on throughout the ’60s,
via political and military upheavals culminating in the 1967 colonels’ coup
d’état, there was a choice to be made between the acceptance of a monolithic
so-called ‘left-wing’ cultural environment and the risk of discovery.
The
monopolization of ‘dissident’ art, on a mass level, by an outlook exemplified
by Mikis Theodorakis’ songs, involved the works of established poets (such as
Seferis, Elytis and Yannis Ritsos) set to music, along with an emphatic and
rather sentimental idealization of the ‘people,’ conceived as an abstract and
static entity. For all the fervor of its consumers and followers, this cultural
strand was largely compatible with the ‘educative’ principles of a
quasi-Stalinist cultural mentality: a somewhat pompous version of popular
musical motifs, forming an aesthetic ideal of ‘folk oratorios,’ while stressing
the corruptive potential of ‘foreign’ cultural influences, ‘decadent’ trends in
international artistic production and of course ‘introversion,’ as opposed to
the mass appeal of ‘healthy,’ popular socialist-minded artifacts. It goes
without saying that this state of affairs was accompanied by a strong current
of ‘socialist realism’ in literature and the arts—a current whose precarious
status vis-à-vis State censorship (partly compensated for by the status
accorded to certain of its prime movers by international Stalinist mechanisms)
rendered it overwhelmingly appealing to a part of the population still bearing
the wounds of the Civil War and its aftermath, albeit unable to either renounce
the principle for which that war had been fought and lost or accept the treason
to which the Left had been subjected by its leadership. Significantly, the
lifestyles and references of those members of the first postwar generation who
joined Pali, as well as those of their direct forefathers, were
demonized both by the official State and by an equally official ‘Left,’ also
intolerant of long hair, experimental expression, ‘oneiric’ and nonproductive
activity.
Yet
a few things had changed since the first Greek surrealists
addressed a fully unsuspecting public, an important factor being the creation
of minor albeit interlinked ‘scenes.’ Yorgos Makris, the author, in 1944, of a
tract calling for the annihilation of the Parthenon, had evolved into an
anti-‘teacher,’ whose refusal to publish and, more often than not, even finish
his philosophical and poetic writings, reflected his overall rejection of
literary (or any other) careerism. Alexander Skinas, living between Athens and
Frankfurt, was developing a new, richly humorous treatment of language, which
he was to pass off as the invention of Eleutherios Dougias, a deceased
schoolmate of his. Panos Koutrouboussis, a young veteran of ‘Simos’ shed’ (a
self-proclaimed ‘existentialist,’ but actually quasi-‘beat’ group, complete
with a jazz band and led by the semi-legendary Simos in the 1950s), was writing
his tales and ‘Tachydramas’ (‘Fast Dramas’), exploring the surrealist potential
of brief scenes and stories conceived ‘in a flash,’ whilst bearing, along with
others of his generation, the influence of the ‘beatnik’ lifestyle. Meanwhile,
Nanos Valaoritis had returned from a long sojourn in the Paris surrealist
group, while also remaining in touch with other signs of the times.
To
realize, however, the true measure of the journal’s scope, it must also be
remembered that when Pali appeared Breton’s own writings remained
untranslated in Greek, with the exception of a few poems, while the most
important early Greek surrealists were still marginalized figures, frequently
subjected to ridicule, albeit not without a certain subterranean influence
amongst the young: Embirikos had recently published his third book (the last
one he lived to see published); as for Engonopoulos, his early collections were
out of print, whilst his latest one had been awarded a State prize (to which he
reacted with irony) by a literary establishment finally wishing to atone
somewhat for the vehemence of past persecution. Pali boldly
put these figures back in the picture: [11] previously unpublished work
by Calas (his first in Greek since his immigration), Embirikos and Engonopoulos
was generously represented, along with that of Valaoritis, whose writings by
that stage combined impressively the first-hand experience of older Greek, and
contemporary international, surrealism. As for the younger writers, they were
seen, in Valaoritis’ unsigned editorial of the 1st issue, to
constitute the forefront of a group that would oppose the mentality imposed by
conventional rationalism and social prejudices, as well as the obstacles,
placed by a particular way of thinking, against the realization of dreams
through love and the elementary right to the freedom of expression on all
planes. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the future looks bright, full of
new strange beings, extracted from the still-unknown areas of the psychic
hinterland. It is this search alone that justifies poetry, whichever medium
this latter utilizes, whether visual, written or auditory. [12]
Both
Embirikos and Engonopoulos would remain involved in Pali until
the very end; so would Calas, despite the scarcity of his physical presence. Of
the older writers, who nevertheless first made their mark in the Pali
era, Mando Aravantinou and Skinas were also heavily involved, contributing some
of their most influential writings, and so was Makris, especially via his
classic translation of Octavio Paz’s Sunstone, which was printed in the
journal’s 1st issue, but also published separately, in book form
(bearing the Pali editions logo), and introduced that poet to
the Greek public.
Despite
the distances some of Pali’s younger writers may have kept since
vis-à-vis the surrealist movement, their standard absence from accounts and
anthologies of Greek surrealism is due partly to the disconcerting change in
tone and perspective apparent in their works, as compared to some ’30s writers,
and partly to ignorance of the conditions concerning the international movement
itself. [13] The two reasons are actually interlinked, for, as displayed
by the evolution of Valaoritis’ own work, the influence exerted by older
surrealists over Pali is again, as in the ’40s generation (albeit now informed
by a clearly postwar sensibility), based on the more sharply humorous
aspects of the ’30s works, a fact that reflects the development of
international surrealism—for instance, the persistent influence of Engonopoulos
as opposed to Elytis recalls the respective impacts of Péret and Éluard (an
analogy referring to the latter’s lyricism rather than his Stalinism) on the
postwar surrealist poetic production.
Even
more blatantly ignored is the fact that surrealism never limited itself to a
small repertory of variations on its original forms, which, nevertheless,
remained functional as influences, albeit within the context of evolution.
This did not preclude an acknowledgement of other currents and tendencies, to
the extent that these were felt to feature aspects compatible with an overall
surrealist sensibility. The fact that Koutrouboussis and Dimitris Poulikakos in
particular are often pigeonholed as Greek ‘beat’ writers, due to their
perceptible lifestyles, does not help assess their function within Pali,
given that, actually, an accusation commonly directed against the journal,
especially regarding the work of Koutrouboussis, was its supposed ‘rehash’ of
Embirikos and Engonopoulos. Such writers perplex critics, especially those
declaring surrealism long dead, by their simultaneously obvious relation to the
surrealist past and evasion of stereotypes. Poulikakos’ early contributions
included important translations of Lautréamont and Ted Joans (another surrealist
commonly branded as ‘beat’); as for Koutrouboussis, the Engonopoulos influence
bears as heavily (and creatively) on his work as on that of Sahtouris and
Gonatas, albeit with a radically different perspective. For Koutrouboussis’
subversive folktales, in which the pretended reproduction of oral tradition is
invested with memories of B-movies, Krazy Kat comics and cheap sci-fi, register
the experience of a 1950s upbringing, whereby obscure, slightly antiquated
artifacts of local and U.S. mass culture (as in Walter Benjamin’s account of
surrealism’s relation to early modern commodities) are re-appropriated.
His work, whilst being recognizably a product of its period, has nothing to do
with a ‘Pop Art’ mentality of uncritical reproduction and a lot to do with the
activation of transnational emotive combinations from the confines of a ‘minor’
if complex language and a culturally and geo-politically peripheral country.
With
Aravantinou, a poet of the ’40s generation who nevertheless emerged in the
early ’60s, language itself is, in a radical turn, transformed into the
protagonist and driving force of her prose poetry, which explores the main
streets, byroads and curious features of urban landscapes, whose labyrinthine
structures are reflected on the very forms of the texts. Skinas’ writings
follow a similar route, often richly humorous in their Jabberwocky-like
sense of wordplay, yet equally serious in their constant evocations of a final
plenitude, magically attained through language—evocations whose very failure
definitively to materialize their object sustains their underlying desire.
Besides
constituting the sole platform for surrealist ideas at the time, Pali
also attempted to provide general information on all that was remotely new and
interesting, in a country whose precarious political situation was accompanied
by the reign of an intellectual establishment presenting surrealism itself as
an outmoded current, whilst tending to suppress all expression deviating from
coarse realism, conservative modernism or the miserabilist ‘poetry of the
Defeat.’ Again, then, the major issue to be addressed vis-à-vis Greek
surrealism, namely, in what ways it is compatible with the international
movement, needs to be considered precisely with respect to the various conditions
under which surrealism is received, activated and developed on an international
level.
The
late Kostas Taktsis, a stranger to surrealism who contributed to Pali as
an ally/fellow traveler, later (1975) recalled the conditions of the journal’s
emergence with a somewhat ironic relish:
[The invisible members of the Pali group were:] André Breton,
whose deputy in Greece Nanos considered himself to be, as the Pope considers
himself God’s deputy on Earth; Andreas Embirikos, under whose aegis Pali had, in a sense, been placed;
Engonopoulos, whom we all admired unreservedly (…). The stormy discussions that
took place in Nanos’ bedroom-cum-studio will sadly remain forever on the
darkest and least accessible corner of memory. (…) Nanos’ room was full of objects,
which, whether innocent in themselves or not, made it look like the laboratory
of some astrologer or alchemist in search for life’s secret (…) [and which]
brought to mind some sort of Hermeticism or Black magic. [14]
Taktsis’
testimony also refers to Skinas’ linguistic games, by contrasting critically
the latter’s supposed social irresponsibility (given the era’s political
situation) with Taktsis’ own contributions to the journal, including an
actually influential study on Rembetiko, the Greek (very) rough equivalent to
the blues. It is striking to note that Taktsis’ acute historical and
sociological analysis of Zeimbekiko, the foremost Rembetiko dance, whereby the
music’s roots and social uses were juxtaposed with its eventual commercial
manipulation, was neatly compatible, regarding its function in a surrealist
publication, with the developing surrealist tendency toward a thorough
examination of popular music—in fact predating by some years the studies
undertaken by North-American surrealists regarding the blues and their
distortion by white ‘blues-rockers.’ Not being a surrealist, Taktsis saw his
study as a sign of divergence from the journal’s overly ‘playful’ turn, in a
manner not a little reminiscent of Tristan Tzara’s condemnation of surrealist games
performed during World War II. What should, in fact, be apparent, is the
journal’s position within a developing, multidisciplinary field of surrealist
research.
Pali undertook
a comprehensive presentation of the surrealist movement’s past and present,
thereby providing the first systematic coexistence of Greek and international
surrealism since the aforementioned 1938 one-off collective tome: essays and
editorials by Valaoritis, writings by Lautréamont, Breton, Tzara, Joan Miró,
Joyce Mansour, Octavio Paz, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Jean-Louis Bédouin, Philip
Lamantia, Ted Joans, Arrabal, Alain Jouffroy, along with pictorial work by
Marie Wilson, Jean Benoît, Miró, Manina and others, collages by Valaoritis,
photography by Embirikos, paintings and drawings by Engonopoulos. A list of the
names announced in the 1st issue for future presentation (the
journal’s folding annulled such high hopes) was very impressive indeed by any
standards, all the more so considering the era’s overall conditions: Benjamin
Péret, Raymond Roussel, Malcolm de Chazal, Aimé Césaire, Clément
Magloire-Saint-Aude, Leonora Carrington, Gérard Legrand, Georges Bataille,
Henri Michaux—but also such precursors and latent influences as Sade, Oscar
Panizza, Xavier Forneret, Mary Shelley, Charles Maturin, and even the totally
unknown in Greece H. P. Lovecraft (who would not become a ‘cult’ favorite in
that country before the late ’80s).
Yet
Pali also presented such diverse figures as Jorge
Luis Borges (also a later ‘vogue’), Aldous Huxley and assorted ‘beat’ writers
(ditto); it explored the surrealist potential of obscure indigenous texts, as
in its presentation of Greek alchemists; and, had its publication continued, it
would have gone on to print hermetic and Gnostic texts, myths of ‘primitive’
peoples, writings by children and ‘insane’ persons, as well as ancient texts of
mythic lore from the international literature.
This
actually unprecedented degree of coverage, which measured Greek surrealism, in
its successive generations, against the prehistory, philosophical origins and
perspectives of the international movement, reflected Valaoritis’ overall
stance, which, as revealed in a note printed on the 5th issue of
Pali, [15] was boldly internationalist. Valaoritis pointed out the
provincial attitude of those Greek poets and critics who were eager to dismiss
surrealism as a ‘school’ whose inadequacy had been proven by the supposed
international impact attained by Greek poetry in its more soberly modernist,
and more ethnically ‘identifiable,’ guise. In fact, as Valaoritis noted, the
temporary self-satisfaction offered by Seferis’ Nobel could not annul the fact
that no Modern Greek poet had yet attained the status of a radically
influential figure on a world scale (the aforementioned addition of a second
Nobel prize in 1979 did little to change this picture). Evoking Breton’s
dismissal of the French ‘resistance poetry’ as irredeemably nationalist (in
Arcane 17), Valaoritis stressed the necessity to measure Greek writing against
the most radical international developments, as opposed to basking in the
‘glory’ of an ultimately ethnocentric worldview. Yet this cosmopolitan attitude
did not entail imminent resolution, especially insofar as Valaoritis himself
granted that even the problem of language was not yet resolved, the oral Greek
idiom being then still ignored by official education.
At
this point, the Greek surrealist tradition resurfaces as an inherently
dissident option: after the mixed dialects of early Embirikos, Engonopoulos and
Calas, a tendency that had also informed Gatsos’ Amorgos, with its
tension between demotic and literary tones, the work included in Pali displayed
a similar idiomatic divergence, several texts by Embirikos, Aravantinou,
Koutrouboussis and Skinas being mock-archaic in expression, while an ironically
pompous style was also apparent in the prose pieces of Poulikakos. Indeed, in
the work produced in that era by the trilingual Valaoritis (The Downy Confession
in particular), a trans-linguistic process also takes place, given that certain
puns evident in the English translations included herein are not evident
in the presumed Greek ‘originals’—which can only mean that the texts’ original
conception took place, at least partly, in English, their secret being
quasi-hermetically sealed behind a code that demands the abolition of
linguistic barriers. Once again, then, the essentialist pretensions of
linguistic forms are here subverted, by combining to constitute a
superstructure in a state of constant flux; the contrasts of expressions are
transformed into dynamic potentialities.
Sadly,
the “climate of an era” mentioned by Valaoritis did not take long in
manifesting itself explicitly, in the form of the 1967 military junta. The Pali
group, which had continued its public existence in spite of severe financial
problems (not to mention certain inner conflicts) and had announced a special
issue devoted to the recently deceased André Breton, suspended its activities—an
unfinished project that would prove to be massively influential on subsequent
forms of radical expression in Greece, from the early 1970s onwards. Soon,
Valaoritis and Marie Wilson moved to the United States, while other members of
the group followed their largely disparate ways, in Greece or abroad. As for
Yorgos Makris, the group’s least visible member (in terms of published output),
but one of the foremost influences on its spirit, he departed one year after
the coup with a note of humour noir: upon being asked by the
janitor of his block why he had called the lift, Makris answered: “Don’t worry,
I’ll be right down,” then went on to jump from the roof.
What
follows, then, purports to be a Pali anthology, but a few things need to
be specified: this is the work of those writers whose presence is indelibly
linked to that of the journal, mostly focusing on their 1960s texts, albeit not
necessarily on those actually first printed in Pali. The stress being
placed on the young nucleus of the group, the writings of those Pali writers,
including Valaoritis, who are strongly connected to the activities of previous
generations, have been included in the respective sections. Again, it is best
to use this classification as the rough outline of a climate, as opposed to a
pigeonholing device, and consult the mature works of Embirikos, Calas and
Valaoritis included in other sections for a fuller picture, this not being a
neat, ‘linear’ narrative, but rather an attempt to trace the consecutive
conditions under which the authors have emerged.
AFTERWORD | The
importance of Pali, which has only recently begun to inspire some academic study in good
faith, has been rather underplayed in Greece, for the simple reason of a
profound and indeed stubborn ignorance on the part of critics vis-à-vis the
actuality of surrealism. Yet the journal’s heritage involved a double movement:
besides posing the issue of continuity, it encouraged the earlier surrealists’
reappraisal, beyond the options of hostile rejection or mute admiration. This
is primarily due to Nanos Valaoritis, who inaugurated the mature period of
surrealist theory, often focusing on the early works of Greek surrealists,
examined for the first time with any degree of thoroughness.
The
era’s climate certainly helped: after the restoration of the parliamentary
system in 1974, surrealism and Dada emerged vaguely in the context of Greek
counter-culture as precursors of May ’68, the situationist movement, ‘beat’
literature etc., while the indigenous surrealist writing was freshly
appreciated via re-printings. Yet as Valaoritis noted, in a text included
herein, no significant study was written on Embirikos’ work during his lifetime
(he died only a year after the junta’s downfall). This may not be irrelevant to
the equally crucial fact that the actual texts of international surrealism were
completely ignored, and that, despite the gradual emergence of books from the
French group’s early days, continue to be so, to a considerable extent. This
fact may, as already noted, be readily witnessed in certain recent accounts
which, whilst purporting to assess Greek surrealism from the momentarily
assumed viewpoint of the international movement, actually reveal only
the faintest of acquaintances with certain early texts by Breton. And even
though the latter’s thought did at last become partly available, this often
happened in the context of a facile pigeonholing: thus, for instance, a
’70s-’80s vogue that gave rise to a vulgarization of situationism allowed
surrealism some room as a dead and somewhat discredited precursor.
Significantly, whilst a fair number of publishers put out certain ‘classics’ of
surrealism, only one, with a tiny output and limited distribution
(Parallelogram Editions, which sadly folded too soon) was exclusively devoted
to surrealist works and relevant studies, even though, in that case too, the
stress was placed on early, French texts. Crucially, the postwar phase of the movement
has been by and large ignored, with the exceptions of Octavio Paz (especially
post-Nobel) and Joyce Mansour (mostly thanks to Hector Kaknavatos’ efforts).
But even early surrealism is approached with a curiously selective attitude:
not a single book by Benjamin Péret was published until very recently; whilst
the introduction of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille to a largely receptive
young Greek public followed for the most part the line of disengaging their
works from surrealism due to their brief disputes with Breton. Pali’s
intentions regarding the coverage of old and new surrealism alike were thus not
fulfilled.
Frangiski
Abatzopoulou’s 1980 anthology of Greek surrealism purported to be the first
academic work placing the phenomenon firmly in its international context; yet
despite including rare material by certain ‘forefathers,’ the anthology coupled
a brief account of surrealism’s principles via early French polemics and essays
with a vague introduction and a near-random selection of Greek names bearing a
certain debt to surrealism—in some cases an almost invisible one. Given that
Greek writing (poetry in particular, but also a great deal of prose and drama),
has, as mentioned already, displayed a strong surrealist influence over the
years, albeit one that veers toward a sanitized, mildly lyrical and politically
dubious version of the movement’s poetic conquests, this double focus served to
confuse rather than enlighten. Notable book-length studies have since been
provided by such writers as Z. I. Siaflekis and Victor Ivanovici, along with a
plethora of shorter essays and articles by younger writers.
At
the same time, the fortunes of Greek surrealism in the English-speaking world
have left much to be desired. Following the extreme conservatism of those
Anglo-Saxon publishers who showed some interest in Greek poetry in the
immediate aftermath of the 2nd World War, certain translations from
Elytis were the only ones that had any impact to speak of. This situation was
reinforced much later by Elytis’ Nobel, which has resulted in the availability
of virtually his entire poetic output in English, albeit with little emphasis
on his surrealist period, his early essays in particular. The first true
achievement of Greek surrealism on this count, however, was the 1966
publication in London by Alan Ross of Embirikos’ Writings or Personal
Mythology, under the title Amour-Amour. The volume, prefaced by
Valaoritis and translated by Ross and the late Nikos Stangos of the Pali group,
has been recently (2003) reprinted in the U.S. by Green Integer, Los Angeles.
Embirikos, along with Valaoritis (but, sadly, not Engonopoulos), have also been
represented in Michael Richardson’s two-volume anthology of surrealist
narratives (1993, 1994) as well as in a recent (2004) anthology of Modern Greek
fantasy, edited by David Connolly with an Engonopoulos cover (all three volumes
published in Britain by Dedalus). Apart from some poetry by Greek surrealists
that has appeared over the years in anthologies and journals, there have also
been two short Sahtouris collections, now out-of-print, while Valaoritis’
latest book of English surrealist proses My Afterlife Guaranteed (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990) is still available; yet the absence of an
Engonopoulos tome has hardly been redressed by certain scattered translations.
The
heritage of Greek surrealism has lived on in periodicals and works, rather as a
development and expansion of some possibilities evoked by Pali, albeit
now deprived of the centrality that the surrealist perspective maintained in
the Pali group.
Meanwhile,
the actuality of contemporary surrealism has only recently begun to be
acknowledged in new, mostly fanzine-shaped periodicals; whilst the supposed
dissolution of the ‘historical’ movement on the eve of World War II, or, at
most, in its aftermath, is still taken for granted even by those sympathetic
writers of the academia who may now contribute the odd homage to Embirikos. Yet
there are now the first visible signs of systematic surrealist activity, on the
part of young people who remain unconnected to academic
research.
The
sole Athens periodical covering current surrealism with a clearly stated
commitment (Farfoulas, edited by Diamantis Karavolas) was recently
replaced by Klidonas, the instrument of the newly-formed Surrealist Group of
Athens. Another group, that of Ioannina (formed in 2000), produced the leaflet Allegories
of an Objective Past Perfect in December 2002. This was followed by the
group’s declaration in late 2004 and the publication, in April 2005, of Penetralia,
the first issue of the group’s official journal. The Athens group’s declaration
was issued in May 2005.
Of
particular note in the current groups’ activity is their emphasis on collective
creation, an aspect whose relative lack (despite the early experiments between
Embirikos, Elytis and their friends described in “Art-Chance-Risk”) constitutes
a major peculiarity of the Greek surrealist ‘canon’: the early treatment, by
conservative and so-called ‘left-wing’ critics, of surrealists as bourgeois
invalids, whose purely subjective works gave rise to a repertory of
pathological profiles, has had the regrettable consequence of partly succeeding in
its goal—that is, isolating those writers’ individual voices, even within their
small circle. It is significant that, whilst early Greek surrealism made its
mark first and foremost via its poetry, the Ioannina group started out by
avoiding on purpose the publication of anything susceptible to being taken for
‘literature.’ A sign that attests to a conscious decision to break away from
the academic framework too often reserved for the past of Greek surrealism;
also, perhaps, an example of the leaps and breaches by which the history of a
phenomenon chooses to proceed. For, in all probability, surrealism was
introduced to Greece too early to have a fully operational form from the
beginning.
The
Ioannina group’s first leaflet ended with a declaration signed by V. (Vangelis
actually), whence the following excerpt:
Poetry destroys the values
of the existing civilization.
Poetry’s mouth is bleeding.
Poetry is the community of
desire. (…)
Poetry is a revolver turned
toward the crowd. (…)
Poetry is a well full of
hungry Gorgons.
Poetry saws bourgeois
groins.
Poetry invents
constellations upon stretched fingers. (…)
Poetry is an ever-suspended
enigma. (…)
Poetry finishes poetry off,
finishes with poetry.(…)
Poetry is an overdose of
proletarian sadism.
Poetry saws discord upon
married couples. It kills their offspring night after
night. (...)
Poetry is, after Auschwitz
more than ever, critical history. (…)
Poetry is above all
antinational.
Poetry is the stolen scepter
of god whom we sent guffawing back to the
guillotine.
Poetry is the Music of
goblins. (…)
Poetry is eternity—never
immortality.
Poetry is man and woman
when, lying on their backs, they act the train whistle,
while a video fast-forwards
their image within a black wooden box.
Poetry is the tiger that
jumps into the past.
Poetry recomposes, under the
light of an indiscernible alchemical writing, the
body torn to pieces by
cog-wheels. (…)
We are everything that was
reborn by the deluge. (…)
We
demand nothing but total freedom! [16]
If
the easy option is to dismiss the above as a kind of tired rhetoric (not so
much a repetition of a past moment as a move that comes too late to make its
mark), it is exceedingly oppressive, let alone dubious, to pass judgment on a
youthful, collective and clearly heartfelt expression, thereby condemning it to
a mute existence in the persistent shade of forefathers. Whether other
similar groups are in existence, about to make their presence felt, or whether
the interested parties are still isolated, is a matter of speculation; so are
the duration and value of their possible ventures. In any case, what the
preceding pages purported to show was where it all began, and which general
directions it took.
The
future is still open-ended.
NOTES
1. In: Συντέλεια (Synteleia), Spring-Summer 1991, No 4-5.
2. According to his interview to Andromachi Skarpalezou,
posthumously printed in Ηριδανός (Heridanos), February-March 1976.
13. Thus, in a recent ‘Greek Surrealism’ special on a
prestigious newspaper, the editor enumerates a few early French, Belgian and
North American surrealist (-related) periodicals, before stating flatly:
“Later, and totally inopportunely, there was published by Nanos Valaoritis the
journal Pali, perhaps in memory of,
but also strongly influenced by, a movement which, in the European context
(sic!), had by then died.” She then goes on to limit Greek surrealism to the
’30s generation, and concludes by stating that “the dialogue (sic) on
surrealism has begun again, [so] let us have another look at that truly
revolutionary movement, which aimed [my emphasis] toward a different
vision of the world.” [Καθημερινή, “Επτά Ημέρες” (Kathimerini, “Epta Imeres”
[“Seven Days”]), 7 July 2002] Given that Pali was not published “in
memory of” anything, but instead constituted a groundbreaking (and still
influential) attempt toward the representation of the most radical ideas
available at the time, how can it be deemed a ‘nostalgic’ venture, in the same
breath as declaring surrealism a ‘truly’ revolutionary movement? The message is
actually clear: make sure that surrealism has been dead since 1935 or
thereabouts—then it can be ‘discussed’ indefinitely. One wonders why, in such a
case, it could be a remotely fruitful topic today.
14. In: Ανάτυπο Πάλι, op. cit., no pagination.
*****
EDIÇÃO COMEMORATIVA
| CENTENÁRIO DO SURREALISMO 1919-2019
Artista convidado: Jan
Dočekal (República Checa, 1943)
Agulha Revista de Cultura
20 ANOS O MUNDO CONOSCO
Número 134 | Maio de 2019
logo & design | FLORIANO MARTINS
revisão de textos & difusão |
FLORIANO MARTINS | MÁRCIO SIMÕES
ARC Edições © 2019
