Literary Renaissance: Modern Tendencies in Poetry and Fiction

by C. TH. DIMARAS

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THE popular song of Greek folklore is timeless yet relatively modern: though its roots reach down many thousands of years, its production has continued almost to the present day. The natural reproduction of folk themes ceased years ago, but the interest of the intelligentsia in popular creation has given it a new lease on life. In popular art verse forms are more prevalent and more important than prose. Two reasons may be mentioned: its rhythm, or musical accompaniment, makes poetry easier to memorize, and hence ensures it a longer life; and the poem can undergo a series of elaborations which make it ever more perfect. This is what has happened to the Greek folk song, which, as it passed from mouth to mouth through the centuries, acquired a marvelous smoothness and perfection. Historians have proved that the folk song of today has its origins in antiquity; its language gradually modified, as did its meter, which changed from quantity to stress.

While other nations express themselves in the epic or novel, tragedy or the essay, Greece expresses itself in song. Greek folk songs show a sense of balance (a strictly classical feature, the weight of the verse matching the weight of the meaning), a certain plasticity, a sense of volume. Neither musicality nor suggestiveness blurs content; everything is clear, with no overloading of epithets nor subordination of meaning; a few sparse isolated images are suggestive by their very simplicity.

The entire world participates in the passions, the adventures and mishaps of the heroes of demotic song. Thus, in a ballad which cannot be less than five hundred years old, the hero sings:

And again, in another, later ballad:

The hero of epical wars is thus described:

And when the hero speaks of his exploits, he is no more reserved than his rhapsodists. Of the enemy, says the hero:

Naturally such heroes need appropriate beasts of burden:

In the above, we seem a long way from the unrestrained wealth of imagery of the contemporary lyric. But closer inspection will reveal other ingredients: predominantly an unbridled vigor of imagination which might well be termed Asiatic.

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OUCH was the literary climate when Greece in the early nineteenth century experienced the revelatory shock of contact with the romantic literature of the West. One of the qualities which made the romantic outburst dear to Greek hearts was its turmoil of imagination, its tendency to exaggeration. Certain aspects of romanticism still affect the nervous system today: in its passionate love of rhetoric the romantics also loved its chief instrument, the word — not the meaning but the word in itself. When we judge the past we talk of “verbalism,” whereas with things contemporary we refer to “the magic power of the word.”

A new generation of Greek poets found themselves around 1880. They reacted against both the wordhunting and exaggeration of fancy of their predecessors; under the leadership of Kostis Palamas they sought simplicity, the quiet tone, the familiar.

Palamas is of supreme importance, for with him we arrive at modern Greek literature. The great spiritual and physical intensity of his personality, and the sheer length of his life (1859-1943), gave him authority, lie wrote, and copiously, in every genre: plays, columns of the day, short stories, essays, criticism, two long epics and, above all, bulky collections of poems which he continued to produce throughout his life. In Palamas’s work there is a little of everything: folk tradition, the influence of the greatest among the older lyric poets — Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857) and Andreas Kalvos (1792-1867) — and that of Western Europe: an immense caldron in which diverse elements have been stirred up together and become one under the enchanted touch of a true genius. This gift for assimilation has always been a characteristic of the Greek’s spiritual life. We see it symbolized in the figure of Odysseus — the eternal traveler, lover of the curious and the new.

The poet who, more than any other of his own time and ours, has succeeded, by the originality of his technique and inspiration, in reaching a widely varied foreign audience, was Constantine Kavafis (1863-1933). lvavafis’s subjects were frequently taken from history; at other times, from his own past; but one has the impression that both devices served merely to free the poet from personal involvement in events which touched him directly. This incessant hiding of the person behind a mask produced a strange atmosphere of suggestion, intensified by a descriptive art relying on purely oneiric means: a hypnotic use of detail which compels the reader to follow the poet in a sort of waking dream.

The poetry of Kavafis is above all a poetry of absence. Emotion and fulfillment are brought about, not by a presence, but by a recollection or illusion of presence. It is a poetry that is sterile by nature, capable of attaining perfection but not of founding a school: hence there are legatees of Kavafis’s wealth, but no direct heirs. The natural course of modern Greek literature must be sought elsewhere— in the line that stems from Sikelianos.

Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951) was strictly within the modern Greek tradition. From Kavafis the heretic and Palamas the teacher he carried on those basic themes whose blending creates the polyphonic Greek harmony. The national world and the Christian, the Greek and the foreign, antiquity, Byzantium, and popular life, all contributed to the many-sided work of Sikelianos. A longing for elevation, for synthesis, can be felt throughout his spiritual and aesthetic development. Ilis original attitude — a purely sensuous worship of nature, including natural man — became steadily more and more spiritualized until it reached that of a wholly mystical, pantheistic worship of the natural world. Similarly his love of man first appeared concretely as a preaching of brotherhood, but ended in a longing for union with the entire world of living organisms. An orgy of the imagination, an astounding accumulation of images, might make us speak once more (as with Kavafis) of a tendency to the dreamworld, but in Sikelianos they bear the signs rather of a boundless euphoria. What is more, from within this wholly concrete world of images, the poet could move with the greatest of ease toward total abstraction, toward the ideal and the conceptual.

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PARALLEL with Sikelianos — as Palamas parallels Kavafis — may be set Nikos Kazantzakis (born in 1885). In Sikelianos the desire for an aesthetic end always prevails; in Kazantzakis what justifies the effort is the joy of the quest. It cannot be mere chance that led Kazantzakis, at least twice in his life, to choose Odysseus for the central figure of a poetical work: once in a tragedy (1928) and again in a very long epic which carries on the story of the classic Odyssey (1938). His world, too, is made up of the most heteroclite materials, which his insatiable intellectual thirst has driven him to test and explore. The most primitive mysticism mingles with extreme realism; but here, instead of synthesis, for which there is not even the desire, unity is provided solely by the restless personality of the writer. Whenever Kazantzakis seeks individuality, either in prose or verse, or in the rejuvenation of obsolete literary genres, one feels that it is less from the need for an aesthetic renewal of such forms than for a solution of intellectual problems.

I think that most critics will agree that the mantle of Sikelianos has fallen today upon George Scferis (born in 1900). With no sacrifice of his Greekness, Seferis is determined to include in his art the achievements of Western literature. Here the French fantaisistes, Valery, T. S. Eliot, and even surrealism, have left their imprint. But it is a matter of conquest, rather than mere passive receptivity; an enlarging of Greek intellectual territory in which the pressure of Greece’s vast racial heritage was nonetheless not forgotten. Thus, even while the breadth of his inspiration resembles that of Sikelianos, Seferis’s historical awareness places him in the tradition of Kavafis — with one great difference: if Kavafis is a romantic hiding away self-protectively behind the mask of history, Seferis is a classicist nourished on historical memories. The strongly tragic element that distinguishes his verse, his view of human destiny, has nothing melodramatic about it. Unlike the great solitary, Seferis has assimilated modern techniques and, faithful to abstraction, makes no concessions to the logical word-order of prose used by Kavafis.

In Takis Papatzonis (born in 1895) we find rich material imported from abroad, much avowed borrowing from the teachings of Sikelianos and Kavafis, and in addition the tendency to abstraction —yet all transcended by a strong lyrical personality. Papatzonis’s work is personal in language, in versification, in the luxuriance of its imagery — which always maintains a scholarly level—and in the basic optimism which the poet derives from a vigorous Christian faith.

Among the younger creators, I would cite especially Andreas Embirikos, who is loyal to the strict orthodoxy of surrealism, in the service of which he has offered up an unusually rich and clear profusion of images and an exceptional gift for ultralogical association. The same might be said of Nikos Engonopoulos (also a painter), though in his case the effort is more obvious. Odysseus Elytis, though he approached surrealism in his early work, has gone beyond it, preserving only the free play, the iridescence of the word. His optimism has no religious source but derives from youth, from the euphoria given by the joy of living under a bright sun and a clear, diaphanous sky.

Along this line, then, and not unworthily, the progress of modern Greek lyricism continues. The problems that arise are those raised by all modern poetry: above all, the problem of memorization. The acceptance of freer metrical forms, more and more divorced from the easy, acoustic harmony, has made the best contemporary poetry difficult to hold in the mind; however dear to him, it can only rarely accompany a man s meditations.

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WHEN we turn to modern Greek prose, we cannot begin by reference to a living popular tradition because it simply did not exist, at least not on a level of interest equal to that of poetry. Modern Greek prose can point to only a few isolated precursors: Emmanuel Roïdis (1836-1904), who both in theory and practice condemned rural themes; John Psycharis (1854-1920), who developed the cosmopolitan novel, and Grigorios Xenopoulos (1862-1951), who devised the sociological novel and laid the foundations of modern Greek drama. It is typical that all three had the closest ties with Western European culture.

Such tradition as there is behind the writer of modern Greek fiction consists of prose-poems and “slices of life,” usually peasant life: works almost devoid of plot and which, when extended, tended to take the form of a chronicle. One may say that the novels of Kazantzakis, whose poetry we have already discussed, are of this type. His style in prose is very lyrical and sometimes its swarm of poetic and unusual words hamper the common reader. In translation this drawback disappears, leaving (with other virtues) his great narrative gift.

Bourgeois atmosphere is alien to Kazantzakis. What he — somewhat nostalgically — loves is robust natural men with strong passions and direct contact with the outdoor world. He is fond of relating the doings of such people in brief anecdotes which take us back to the popular tales of the past. Whether the scene is the island of Crete or the hinterland of Asia Minor matters little; there is always one framework and one hero, variously incarnated, who seems to be the narrator’s ideal. Two of Kazantzakis’s novels, Zorba the Greek and The Greek Passion, have been published in America.

Younger writers such as Stratis Myrivilis, Elias Venezis, Pantelis Prevelakis, and Thanasis Petsalis, have also given us books which are perhaps more chronicles than novels. It was the experience of the First World War which provided both Myrivilis and Venezis with the prime motive for their literary creation. Myrivilis published a chronicle of the war, Life in the Tomb, in 1923, and one on the return from war, The Teacher with the Golden Eyes, in 1933. In these books a strongly colored style, a language rich in natural sap, and a traditional art of narration find ample scope in the overwhelming experience of war and its aftermath. He has also written a large number of short stories of varying length, in which the same virtues may be seen.

Venezis’s career is not dissimilar: starting with a volume of short stories, he produced, in 1924, what is perhaps his best work, Number 31328, the recollections of wartime captivity. His later novels among which is Aeolia, published in translation in London, deal with the life of the Greeks in Asia Minor, their withdrawal after the end of the First World War, and their life as refugees; subjects which go straight to the heart of the Greek reading public. In addition, Venezis has written many short stories, applied himself to the theater, and given us impressions of his travels, including a volume on the United States.

Prevelakis and Petsalis are of a younger generation, writers of the city whose spiritual contacts with the outdoor world are somewhat limited. They are more sophisticated than Venezis and Myrivilis. Prevelakis, after much experiment, produced a novel in three volumes, The Cretan (1948-50), which deals with the struggles of Crete for union with Greece between 1886 and 1910. An epic scope, great technical dexterity, and a strongly idiomatic use of language characterize his work. Prevelakis is also a successful playwright.

As for Petsalis, his true starting point was a three-volume chronicle of modern Athenian society in its formative period, from 1863 on. Entitled Wealthy and Weak Generations, it appeared between 1933 and 1935 and was another effort to shake off the “folk” element in both language and theme. Then, in 1947-48, he gave us a two-volume chronicle of a Greek family under the Turkish domination, The Mavroliki. Courageous and daring, this attempt was successful and has done much to widen the scope of young Greek writers. Petsalis has also written short stories and plays.

If most of the novels so far discussed have had historical themes, a number of younger writers, such as Cosmas Politis and M. Karagatsis, have attempted to deal with contemporary problems. In them, clear-cut, we find the urge to present a narrative freed of all that is not mythos: plot, action, incident. Their prose is developed in terms of the modern novel of the West, following the rules of the genre, whether it has to do with internal — the roman d’analyse—or external incident.

Politis is fascinated by the troubled moments of life: adolescence and difficult psychological situations. He deals with them in a swift, sensuous, often elliptical, and brilliant style.

Karagatsis writes with the deliberate intention of attracting and holding the reader; his methods are exoteric, but none the worse for that. He knows how to construct a sound plot; there is plenty of incident, his love scenes are described without prudery, and his characters live and move with ease and vigor.

To assess the development of prose in Greece, with its gradual deliverance from all that is not organically proper to it, we must also speak of Angelos Terzakis and George Theotokas. Terzakis’s early novels might be classified as middle-class naturalism: a survival of realism tinged with symbolism, and concerned with the troubles of lower-middle-class existence. But soon his active consciousness as a writer led him gradually to more personal creations of fiction. Terzakis raised everyday bourgeois speech to the level of art. Though he has produced plays based on the rich history of Byzantium, and though his greatest epic work — one of the finest modern Greek novels — draws its subject from the Frankish domination of Greece, his main interest lies in contemporary man and the problems of Greek society today. Its upheavals and transformations, however, are cut out of a purely literary cloth; all the novelist’s powers are devoted to justifying his plot and rendering inevitable the movement of the tale towards its conclusion. His characters, without being excessively obvious, act plausibly and convince the reader by revealing unity in their nature and consistency in their behavior.

George Theotokas launched his career in 1929 with an essay which is today considered the manifesto of his generation. Then he turned to creative prose, producing novels and short stories, though in no great number. If he was later to cultivate other literary forms, such as the drama, he still continues, par excellence, to be the thinker among modern Greek novelists. In his first novel, Argo (1933), he dealt with the life of the Greeks of Constantinople during the Asia Minor Disaster and the troubled years that followed in Athens. The problems of adolescence concern him but he also manages to convey certain basic aspects of the modern Greek character. Of his recent production the foreign reader will be especially interested in a study of the war, very thinly veiled in fiction, and a book of impressions of America. All Theotokas’s work is characterized by absolute intellectual honesty, an incessant concern for the man of today and his fate, and a responsible awareness of the critical times we live in.

Modern Greek literature is turning towards those forms which express the maturity of a society: from verse to prose, and from this again to abstract thought. The play of imagination no longer seems to represent the total aim of the younger generation; the fulcrum of the stress is moving elsewhere. It may be, indeed, that we are nearing the end of a chapter in the intellectual history of Hellenism: an end which, in the way of living societies, is also a beginning.

Translated by H.L.R. and Epy Edwards