War, Agon and the Greek Literary Imagination[1]
Richard Pine
It is no exaggeration to say that consciousness of war, and the consequences of war, permeate the literature of modern Greece. A passage from The Heroic Age by Stratis Haviaras (1984) exemplifies this preoccupation:
His body was probably like the trunk of an ancient olive tree, a trunk with many rings and much history: here the 1896 disaster, and here the First Great War, and after that the Asia Minor catastrophe. Here the Italian attack, and here the German and Bulgarian atrocities, and here the Resistance, and more Resistance, and more and more Resistance: terror, the civil strife, the islands of detention and the death camps. Year by year our glorious history, the whole history, and throughout the years the starving and the dispossessed, the disabled and the thoroughly dead – unnamed and unclaimed forever.[2]
Although the example is an extreme one, it underlines, in a graphic way, the fact that modern Greek history can be recited as a series of disasters, of which the ‘Asia Minor’, or Anatolian, crisis of 1920-22 has been the most severe.
The novel is set in the Greek civil war, and concerns a group of young boys and girls who have lost their homes and have been swept up in the internecine struggle for a new Greece which they barely comprehend, and which forces them to live as adults and to survive by their wits.
Unless the speaker is referring to the Olympic Games of 1896 as a ‘disaster’ (unlikely), he is in fact signalling the unsuccessful 1897 revolt against Turkish rule in Crete, which was not overcome until 1913. ‘The Italian attack’ presumably refers to the attempted invasion of Greece by Italy in 1940, and the reference to atrocities applies to the many incidents in Greek history, including the second world war, when Greece’s integrity was impugned by stronger forces – notably Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. To refer to the ‘islands of detention and the death camps’ was, even in 1984 (only 25 years after the end of the civil war) a very courageous act, since the civil war – still, today – is a painful and divisive episode in Greek history, the result of the political fall-out from the Anatolian catastrophe – which I will describe – and the scene-setter for the stormy politics of the following twenty-five years. The ‘islands of detention’ would also be a preview of the régime under the Colonels’ military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974.
However, it is noticeable that the speaker does not mention in his catalogue of warfare the successes of Greece in the Balkan wars of 1912-13 which expanded its frontiers to the north and east, at Turkey’s expense. It is as if the reference to ‘the starving and dispossessed’ and the ‘unnamed and unclaimed’ transcends any positive aspect of Greece’s international affairs – as if those terms describe a population which persists in the imagination of the author as an entity to be ‘named and reclaimed’, to be nourished and repossessed.
At first sight, this appears to sit uncomfortably beside the conventional view of Greek rural society as an idyllic, timeless, arcadian epic in which nothing happens except in a periodic, cyclic fashion of constant but extremely slow repetition. Yiorgos Yatromanolakis’s The Spiritual Meadow (1974, 2000 translation), in which a man witnesses his past and future life in the dream-like context of Greek history and culture during a period of twenty-four hours, is one of the most compelling treatments of this suspension of time and also of place. But the later novels of Yatromanolakis, for example History of a Vendetta (1982/1991) and A Report of a Murder (1993/1995), which, rather obviously, introduce the concept of violence, also make it clear that strife, in some form, is a constant in the Greek experience. An agon, or contest, may be the struggle of a man with himself, or with another, and, in the case of the Olympic Games (agones olimpiakoi), may not involve violence at all.
But if we recall the commonplace, that war takes place after the possibilities of diplomacy have been exhausted, we can postulate that there is a calibrated scale of activity, starting with the expression of an opinion, moving to the discussion or denial of that opinion, until we reach the stages of violence which embrace two people, or two families, or a township, or two tribes or nations, in all-out violent destruction. If we think of the Greek word for war – polemos, - as the outcome of a series of polemics, I think that this calibration becomes very persuasive.
As Anthony Stevens has observed, war and peace ‘seem to stand at opposite ends of a continuum. They both are aspects of the same condition, namely, relations between groups of people. In this sense, war and peace are complementary states of mind which qualify one another like our perceptions of light and dark, hot and cold, noise and silence’.[3]
Stevens has written that
war brings out both the best and the worst in us. It mobilizes our deepest resources of love, compassion, courage, cooperation, and self-sacrifice; it also releases our capacities for xenophobia, hate, brutality, sadism, destruction, and revenge.[4]
There is, in my view, a more deeply embedded tendency towards disputation, or polemics, in Greek society than in most European societies. This is intimately connected with the question of identity, both individual and collective, especially in the context of the deep divisions in Greek society following the first world war and the Anatolian catastrophe. When we recognise that the Greek word for a novel is ‘mythistórima’ [ó] – a meeting-point of myth and history – we can also easily recognise that ‘biography’, ‘politics’ and ‘history’ are intertwined with literature to a considerable extent.
A notable example of this is the recent novel by Yorgos Yatromanolakis, o (2005; English title My Father and [the] Evil) which describes the fictitious conversations between the narrator’s father and Eleftherios Venizelos, probably the most significant Greek politician of the twentieth century; and the forthcoming biography of Venizelos by Michael Llewellyn Smith, which will place the figure of Venizelos centre-stage in the evolution of modern Greek politics. Venizelos’ legacy is perhaps best summed up by Georgios Theotokas, in his novel Argo(1933/1951) in a passage which describes the deteriorating ideological and political position between Venizelos and King Constantine over the question of Greece’s part in the first world war:
There were Venizelist nationalists and anti-Venizelist nationalists, Venizelist marxists and ant-Venizelist marxists. And it was a thousand times easier for a Venizelist nationalist to reach an understanding with a Venizelist marxist than with an anti-Venizelist nationalist.[5]
It was in this estrangement of left and right, exacerbated by the subsequent Anatolian catastrophe, that the seeds of the struggle for dominance in Greece in the 1930s were sown, and from which the civil war and its legacy derive. And it was in writers such as Theotokas that the so-called ‘generation of the Thirties’ expressed its concern and dismay at the way that modern Greece was emerging.
If, as Stevens says, ‘conflict is endemic to the human condition’, then, if it is grammatically possible to say so, it is more endemic to the Greeks than to most other peoples; not surprising, perhaps, when we remember that ‘endemic’ is itself theGreek word for ‘that which pertains to a people’, that which is innate or inborn.
Furthermore, as Stevens reminds us,
Wherever human communities exist, conflict is generated both within them and between them at all levels of intimacy – conflict between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, teachers and pupils, workers and bosses, leaders and followers.[6]
Therefore, if in Stevens’s words, ‘conflict is cooperation’s shadow’, it is hardly surprising that conflict will appear in even the most tender and sensitive love story – as it does, for example, in Alki Zei’s story Achilles’ Fiancée (trans. 1991),[7] with the deeply divisive figure of Marxism as its central character as well as its hinterland. After all, marriage, as D.H. Lawrence tells us, is a fight to the death – not, that is, that one enters into marriage in order to fight, but that the agon or conflict within marriage is inescapable. Stevens supports this point: ‘war and love are activities so utterly at odds, so completely opposite in nature and intent, that they could only exert on one another the most powerful appeal’.[8]
It would of course be absurd to suggest that all modern Greek poems, short stories and novels are oriented towards war. There are many love stories and poetic idylls in both poetry and prose. As younger Greek writers are located in time in an era when Greece itself is removed from most – but not all – war experiences, it is easier for them to turn their attention to topics evident in modern Greek society which are not – at least on the surface – concerned with violent strife. The most notable problem for those of us reading Greek literature in translation is that predominantly it is the ‘bad news’ that achieves translation, and thus wider circulation, whereas novels, stories and poemswhich celebrate the joys of life are deemed less attractive to a wider readership.
When I say ‘but not all’, I am referring to the continuing presence of acts of terrorism within that society, which indicate that Greece, no less than any other modern democracy, is vulnerable to the acts of those who would dispute the authority of the state.(This has been acutely exemplified as I write (in the third week of April) by several acts of terrorism – by communists and anarchists – in Athens during the past month. As I shall argue, the general tenor of Greek literature is subject to the hegemony of the past, in which the sense of polemical failure is deeply imbued. As Vangelis Hatziyannidis says in his novel Four Walls (2000/2006), ‘Some people are proud of their past; others embarrassed by it; some people are indifferent to it, while for others, the past is so important that they spend more time planning it than they do planning the future’.[9]
In the remainder of this paper, I shall mention several novels which I believe typify the awareness of the war experience in Greek society which is sometimes explicit and very often subliminal. But the main intention of the paper is not an exegesis of individual texts but an unfolding of these broader themes.
I start with one of the periods of Greek history mentioned in the quotation from The Heroic Age – the Anatolian catastrophe of 1922. My reason for making this central to my argument is that the ill-conceived and badly executed campaign by the Greek government in 1920, to entrench and enlarge its hegemony in western Turkey (Anatolia) is in itself central to Greek irredentism, which had been a feature of Greek international ambitions since the fall of the archetypal Greek city, Constantinople, to the Turks in 1453.
The expansionist idea, known in Greek as the Megali idea, saw Greece making significant territorial gains from the Ottoman (Turkish) empire, from 1881,[10] through the two ‘Balkan wars’ of 1912-13, the first world war and the start of the Anatolian campaign in 1920. In the course of these wars Greece gained Thessaly, southern Epirus, Macedonia, the Aegean islands, Crete and northern Epirus, and from 1920 Greece made significant incursions into mainland Turkey, most notably around the predominantly Greek city on Turkey’s west coast, Smyrna (today Izmir).
The motivation was not wholly territorial, however, since there was a deeply nationalistic agenda which had everything to do with the ambition to regain Constantinople. As Linos Politis points out, Hellenism had been inextricably connected to the concept of Byzantium, and therefore the fall of Byzantium/Constantinople in 1453 ‘was a national disaster. After a thousand years and more, Hellenism was without the background of a state, and without political leadership’.[11] It would continue in such a condition for over 350 years, until the first attempt to wrest independence from Turkey and to form a modern Greek state in the 1820s. During those 350 years, mainland Greece and the Aegean islands were subject to Turkish domination not only politically but culturally (whereas the Ionian islands, ruled by Venice, were not).
But the Greek advance on Constantinople (now Istanbul) was not only halted, by an equally burgeoning Turkish nationalism under Kemal Attaturk, leader of the Young Turks, but the Greeks were, literally, thrown into the sea at Smyrna, which was effectively destroyed by the vicious Turkish backlash, and in the aftermath almost the entire Greek population of Anatolia was sent to live in Greece – a country with which it was almost completely unfamiliar – in exchange for the Turkish population of eastern Greece, which was in a similar quandary. As even a Greek-American writer like Harry Mark Petrakis, in Nick the Greek, his novel of gambling and Prohibition in 1920s Chicago, could refer to the impending disaster:
Now that the Greek army occupies Smyrna, there are fools who think the danger is over. But if they pursue the folly of marching eastward to regain Constantinople, I fear disaster. If that army is beaten, nothing wil prevent the Turks from taking vengeance for that invasion on your godfather’s family and on a million other Greeks living in Anatolia. We have only to remember what the Turks did to the Armenians in 1915 to understand what the fate of our Greek brothers and sisters will be.[12]
I might also add that it was particularly marked in Corfu, since in the aftermath of the defeat six political scapegoats were executed by the Greek government, including the Minister for War, the Corfiot politician Nikolaos Theotoki, son of George Theotoki who had been Prime Minister several times in the 1900s. As Roderick Beaton observes, by destroying the idealistic vision which had held Greece united for at least the last four decades, the catastrophe set the political, social and cultural agendas of the next fifty years.[13]
‘Anatolia’ is a word central to the Greek mind, since it literally means ‘the place where the sun rises’, and the expression [or ] - ex Anatolia fós – light comes from Anatolia [i.e. the east] is in every Greek’s heart.
This humiliating defeat was particularly ironic since Greek consciousness, especially novel-writing, had also been expanding from the 1880s onwards, as the end of the Romantic phase in Greek literature, which concentrated on poetry, was reached, and a very significant period of prose writing was ushered in, which has been called ‘the first appearance of literary prose in modern Greek literature’, with its ‘attachment to the familiar and concrete’.[14] This became a ‘genre’ literature, sharply and deeply focussed, of which the undoubted master (still much admired today) was Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911).[15]
Previously, poetry had been founded on the central element in Greek rural society, the demotic song, which, as Politis says, ‘is… the means by which the people gave the most authoritative expression to its world and to its personality’.[16] Thus the transition from song-based poetry to prose was a challenge, brilliantly met and overcome by Papadiamantis, to continue to give expression to that world and that personality through the medium of prose. The genre involved a focus on sites such as the house, the village and the island, and generated a magical realism within the ‘concrete’ of the site.
As the translators of George Theotokas’s novel Argo (1923, translation 1951) emphasised, one of the results of the Anatolian catastrophe among Greek writers was ‘the urge to achieve the greatest possible measure of mental and spiritual liberty’; ‘freedom from all dogmatism; the need to attain absolute sincerity in life, in thought, in art, and to lift this quality of sincerity to the plane of a supreme moral value…and… the fusion of Greek traditions with the flower of the genius of modern Europe’.[17] (It is remarkable that Theotokas’ novel appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Anatolian catastrophe.)
If the Megali idea or expansionist policy of Greece from the 1880s onwards was fuelled by irredentism, it was also the result of a passionate nationalism, even though at that time there was by no means any consensus as to what the Greek nation actually was. The fact that the near collapse of Greece in the wake of the Anatolian catastrophe led to decades of division within Greek society, and was one of the contributory factors in the civil war which followed on the second world war, illustrates that questions of identity can be closely associated with questions of belief systems, such as the communistic element which persists in Greek society to this day.
Furthermore, it is my belief that the emotions of fear and anxiety which are major factors in the production of violence, are omnipresent in modern Greek society and operate at a deeper level in Greek literature than those of identity and self-determination.
As Roderick Beaton has unequivocally stated, ‘since the founding of the Greek state [1831-2], political and cultural life in Greece has often been riven by sharply polarized divisions’. But, he continues, the issue of Greece’s role in the first world war sowed the seeds of ‘a more fundamental, and traumatic, division’, which ‘brought to the surface deeper divisions about the kind of nation that Greece was or should be, and about how it ought to be governed’. Beaton tells us that the period from the 1920s to the end of the civil war (1949)