Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt and Nostalgia 9781463213275

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Makings of the Sea

Mediterranea

1

This is a book series that opens the notion of Mediterranean Studies to the tessellated spectacle of Modernity. While arguing for the perennial condition of difference and paradox across the various histories, polities, forms and expressions that converge in this region, Mediterranea is intended as a discursive, analytic, poetic and critical space that hosts, affirms and problematizes what is often identified as a hybrid narrative. Voices and approaches that come together in this space include, amongst other, philosophers, historians, artists, poets, performers and critics; as well as pedagogues, sociologists and political theorists. While in remit, this series remains open-ended, it aims to hone in on the dynamic multiplicity that ultimately brings together the various peoples that have come to identify themselves with one sea.

Makings of the Sea Journey, doubt and nostalgia

JOHN BALDACCHINO

ON MEDITERRANEAN AESTHETICS VOLUME I

GORGIAS PRESS 2010

Gorgias Press LLC, 180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2010 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. 2010

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

ISBN 978-1-59333-695-0

ISSN 2154-4735

The front cover photograph is entitled "Poseidon" by Jeremy Diggle (All Rights Reserved)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baldacchino, John. On Mediterranean aesthetics / by John Baldacchino. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. Makings of the sea : journey, doubt, and nostalgia -- v. 2. Composed identities : sound, number, and desire -- v. 3. The carob and the olive : land, art, and polity. ISBN 978-1-59333-695-0 (v. 1) 1.

Mediterranean Region--Civilization--20th century. 2.

Mediterranean Region--Intellectual life--20th century. 3. Mediterranean Region--Social conditions--20th century. 4. Aesthetics--Social aspects--Mediterranean Region--History--20th century. 5.

Art and society--Mediterranean Region--History--20th

century. 6.

Popular culture--Mediterranean Region--History--20th

century. 7.

Political culture--Mediterranean Region--History--20th

century. 8.

National characteristics, Mediterranean--History--20th

century. 9.

Mediterranean Region--Foreign public opinion.

DE60.B35 2010 909'.09822--dc22 2010010149

Printed in the United States of America

I. Title.

For Claudia My dearest loving and inspiring daughter

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents....................................................................................................v Acknowledgements ...............................................................................................vii Introduction .............................................................................................................1 The project ......................................................................................................2 Makings of the sea..........................................................................................3 Nóstos ................................................................................................................4 Tracing horizons against the hill ..................................................................5 1 Touched horizons ............................................................................................9 Journey, doubt, nostalgia.............................................................................10 “Wait a little and do not anticipate the unknown” .................................13 Ways of reading the world ..........................................................................17 “We talk ... but what are we talking about?” ............................................22 2 Bodies of memory ..........................................................................................29 Odyssean presence .......................................................................................30 Of “eternal, unconfessed desire” ...............................................................32 From Alexandria...........................................................................................36 Besides modernity ........................................................................................42 3 Private Shores .................................................................................................45 “Living in a bell-jar”.....................................................................................46 Cuttlefish bones .................................................................................................49 Mediterranean liturgy ...................................................................................56 Claiming immanence....................................................................................61 The sea’s law of diversity.............................................................................65 4 A hole in the sky.............................................................................................69 “Madness as an act and state of liberation” .............................................71 Art and involution ........................................................................................74 When the margin prevails ...........................................................................80 Orestes and the cyclops...............................................................................84 5 Everyday’s heresy ...........................................................................................91 Danced mor(t)ality .......................................................................................92

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Apocryphal choices ......................................................................................97 Around the tears of the damned ..............................................................101 “With dreadless hand touching thee” .....................................................106 6 In the poise of water and hill......................................................................115 Avant-nostalgia and the aesthetics of suggestion ..................................119 Fencing with the duende..............................................................................123 The return of the poet-torero .....................................................................129 7 On Mediterranean aesthetics ......................................................................135 Looking at what we tell..............................................................................137 Looking south to the North and East.......................................................143 Metanarratives and …................................................................................146 … the smiling sailor ...................................................................................149 Bibliography .........................................................................................................155 Index......................................................................................................................163

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks and recognition must go to colleagues and friends whose encouragement and assistance made this book possible. First of all I would like to thank Dr George Kiraz, President of Gorgias Press for supporting this project and for giving it a home at Gorgias. One hopes this is the start of a fruitful collaboration that will engender and support the field of Mediterranean Studies. Thanks also go to the editorial team at Gorgias for their advice and support. Credit is also due to BOA Editions for giving me full permission to quote sizeable excerpts from Yannis Ritsos’s Twelve Poems for Cavafis.1 I also thank Princeton University Press for giving me permission to quote a good number of citations from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrards’s translations of C.P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems.2 I also thank them for allowing me to cite two excerpts from the same translators’ volume of George Seferis’s Collected Poems.3 Special mention and a note of gratitude goes to Professor Edmund Keeley, for his help and advise with regards to gaining permission and use his and the late Philip Sherrard’s translations. Here I would like to add a note of gratitude for his and Sherrard’s great translations and extensive scholarship on these great twentieth century poets. As this book originates from a passion for the Mediterranean which had to emerge, one way or another, in book form, it is imperative that I Yannis Ritsos, excerpts from “Twelve Poems for Cavafis”, translated by Kimon Friar. From Selected Poems 1939-1988, edited and translated by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades, with additional translations by Athan Anagnostopoulos (Copyright © by BOA Editions, Ltd. Reprinted with permissions of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org. 2 Keeley, Edmund. C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Revised Edition. © 1992. Keeley Edmund and Sherrard Philip. Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press. 3 Keeley, Edmund. George Seferis: Collected Poems. Revised Edition. © 1992. Keeley Edmund and Sherrard Philip. Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press. 1

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recognise the ardent inspiration of my colleague, friend and mentor Professor Fred Inglis, who since he was my doctoral professor, a decade and a half ago at the University of Warwick, England, never stopped urging me to develop and complete my Mediterranean project, and was steadfast in supporting me in its realization. Closer to my current work at Columbia University’s venerable Teachers College, I am grateful to Provost Thomas James, whose generosity of spirit, encouragement and support played a strong part in my realizing this volume. Tom was not just supportive as Dean and Provost, but inspirational as a colleague who, as a historian of education, recognizes the value of projects like this as intrinsically embedded in our engagement with the arts as sites of learning. There are many other colleagues whose support I would like to recognise, particularly my colleagues in Art, Philosophy, Cultural Studies and related fields within Teachers College and in Columbia University’s wider academic community. I would also like to thank my students, whose friendship and interest in my work kept me buoyant and perseverant. I am particularly grateful to Guillermo Marini for his interest in this project and for his helping me with my Spanish. Anyone who underestimates the power of learning from one’s students is missing something fundamental in terms of what Academia is all about. Likewise anyone who forgets that research must emerge from the act of dialoguing with one’s students who at the moment of knowledge are equal peers in its pursuit, forgets Academia’s origin within the agôn of friendly discussion and witty conversation on the shores of the same Mediterranean sea with which I seek to engage the readers of this book. Two special persons deserve unique mention. I am indebted to my wife Laura Falzon whose dedicated performance of Mediterranean music gives me profound inspiration. I also want to thank our daughter Claudia who since she was a child has expressed deep affection for Homer’s Sea even though she was born not on its shores but on that green and pleasant land bathed by Heine’s North Sea. A young and enthusiastic cosmopolitan, Claudia claims both seas as truly hers. For this and for the love, loyalty and friendship with which Claudia continues to privilege me and Laura, this volume is duly dedicated to her. John Baldacchino Teachers College Columbia University New York City, December 2009

INTRODUCTION Wring me upon the sea out in the sun, as if my body were a shred from a sail.1 —Rafael Alberti They kept going back further and further in time, until eventually they settled some time in the seventh century with the caliph ’Umar ibn alKhattab and the Prophet himself. They competed with each other to drag up the past, trying very hard to use the glories of yesteryear as a means of forgetting the present.2 —Naguib Mahfouz

This is the first volume of On Mediterranean Aesthetics, a three-book project that discusses the makings of the Mediterranean imagination in the 20th century. The significance of the Mediterranean emerges from centuries of narrative segmentation that reveals a region far removed from the sunny and idyllic pictures found in tourist brochures. The same Mediterranean sun worshipped by the thousands who annually flock to the coasts of Spain and France; of Italy, Greece and Turkey; of Malta, the Balearics and the Aegean; of Morocco and Tunisia, also shines over a region that remains besieged, in one part or another, by the plague of ethnic and religious hatred, war and oppression. To discuss the Mediterranean is to open oneself to a sense of paradox and contradiction, especially when the discussion dwells on the arts and politics. A discussion of Mediterranean aesthetics is immediately exposed to incongruities and complexities that are never easy to describe, let alone unravel. This is a region where leisure and the arts, hatred and war exchange Alberti, Rafael. §25. Marinero en Tierra [A Sailor on Land], 55. [Note: From here thereafter, all English translations of excerpts from books that are cited in their original language edition are my translations unless otherwise indicated.] 2 Mahfouz, Naguib. Karnak Café, 36. 1

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roles in the extreme. We often forget that coastal cities like Dubrovnik and Beirut, which have been theatres of the most ferocious conflicts, are also the place names for beautiful resorts where good climate merges with a melting pot of traditions and peoples. Against this challenging backdrop of human longing, readers are invited to embark on a journey whose ‘travelling’ intent is to cultivate a healthy scepticism over populist perceptions of the Mediterranean imagination, while placing a higher and more sober value that surpasses the limits of human nature and what it brings upon itself. THE PROJECT This project evolves in three volumes: the present book, Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt and Nostalgia, followed by Composed Identities: Sound, Number and Desire and The Carob and the Olive: Land, Art and Polity. Before I introduce the present volume in some detail, a quick overview of On Mediterranean Aesthetics would be in order. As a point of departure Makings of The Sea broadly takes a Southern European perspective of the Mediterranean as this looks to its south and east. This is prompted by a strong interest that begins with a case of ‘personal accident’ (the author being Mediterranean by birth and upbringing) which over the years has grown into an academic interest in how the Mediterranean comes to signify an aesthetic horizon of cultural and political particularities that have often been glossed over by generalized paradigmatic terms such as Oriental and Occidental, Modern and postmodern. By focusing on specific cases in the arts and literature, this book gains the subtitle of Journey, Doubt and Nostalgia, which is what would broadly thematize a Mediterranean perspective as this is constructed from a Southern European focus. A discussion of Mediterranean identity—and more so the idea of Mediterraneanism—revisits the political mystification and instrumentalization of art and society and how it impacts on the development of an artistic genre that claims national borders. Describing identity as an interconstruction between idioms, aspirations and meanings Composed Identities develops through an analysis of music, focusing on the work of a number of Mediterranean composers. Being the second of three volumes, this book seeks to define and establish the meaning of popular and contemporary representations as fluid and ultimately non-identitarian where the usage of dyads such as local and universal are questioned, and where the idea of alterity is proposed as a way of understanding the diversity by which the Mediterranean is continuously constructed.

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The last volume, The Carob and the Olive discusses, amongst other, the relationship between art, politics, land and its people. While Makings of the Sea presents Mediterranean aesthetics from a Southern European perspective, this volume takes the view from North Africa and the Middle East. In this respect it discusses the relationship between art and the politics that articulate the legacy of colonialism. As the argument over the politics of post-colonialism is still evolving where it may well be argued that beyond it being a historical fact there are grounds on which post-colonialism as a notion could be challenged, a diversity of situations continuously challenge the discourse by which this notion is constructed and formulated. In this context, the arts are confronted by new questions that invariably affect the very meaning of the contemporary Mediterranean, especially when this is read from the politics of aesthetics. MAKINGS OF THE SEA The present volume begins to analyse the possibility of a Mediterranean aesthetic by engaging with the work of artists, writers, film-makers and poets whose perspective is markedly Southern European. This selective perspective accounts for a conscious integration, though not a directly expressed discussion, of issues like gender and sexuality, whose importance lie within the interstices of a greater picture. Likewise here one would find less of a direct reference to Arab, Jewish, Israeli and Turkish traditions except for the relevant influences on the artists, poets and authors in question. One must not read this as a ‘gap’ within the general thread of the project. The plan is that the two volumes that will follow would provide a more focused engagement with the questions that emerge from the political aesthetics of gender, sexuality and other wider contexts such as post-colonialism. All this is grounded in the arts; which is why other artistic practices—most notably music and the visual arts—will have a more pronounced presence in volumes 2 and 3 respectively. Another important aspect of the Mediterranean imaginary that will be discussed in the volumes that follow this book is how the arts express and articulate the dilemma that emerges from the balance that is often struck between the notion of land and that of people. This is particularly the case with the Middle East. Reading this book with the larger project in mind, would hopefully begin to discuss, engage with, and somehow define Mediterranean aesthetics. However, this is neither guaranteed nor cast in any certainty. One must expect more questions than answers. This arises from a sense of frustration with the tragedy of the human condition. However, any a sense of tragedy must also be tempered by a horizon of creativity founded on the belief that

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even within a state of impasse there remains the case to write poetry, make music, or do art. Also one must not forget that upon speaking of a Mediterranean aesthetic, one is doing philosophy by the same seriousness that we continue to seek ways of explanation, if only as an excuse for dialogue.

NÓSTOS In Theo Angelopoulos’s film Ulysses’s Gaze it is poetically claimed that God’s first creation was the journey after which came doubt, and then nostalgia. Anyone who knows the Mediterranean would recognise that claims of this sort move beyond their poetic packaging and find their way back in what is specific about the Mediterranean imagination. In its search of a Mediterranean ‘specificity’ this book casts an eye on the Mediterranean as a horizon of journey, doubt and nostalgia as these cut across the various themes that characterize the artists, poets and authors discussed. The centrality of the journey as that which, since Homer and before, has constructed the Mediterranean as a universe, tends to open the way for doubt as the spell of time and place where the Mediterranean imagination emerges over a horizon stretched between utopia and crude fact. While doubt prompts an examination of the polity within which the journey takes place, the ultimate end of the journey is nostalgic. If the Greek word nóstos gave us the word nostalgia, one cannot reduce the nostalgic to the commonplace meaning of a hopeless romantic rewriting of a past, as common parlance would have it. Before the longing for a lost past, nostalgia gets from nóstos the notion of homecoming, where what animates the journey is the return—knowing, as Constantine Cavafy tells us in his poetry, that we want to keep the journey going as much as we can, because any sense of return always remains with us. In this we could assume that the narrative of the journey and the polity of doubt come together as the nostalgic return to an end that is historically postponed. Ultimately the Mediterranean’s historical imagination defies any notion of a ‘definite history’. Homecomings are placed between one end and another beginning. Nostalgia transforms itself from a feeling to a way of life, where it continues and perpetuates its journeys and doubts over the horizons of time, shaping our present by force of our past. The Mediterranean imagination is the most historical of imaginations even when it defies the boundaries of history by dint of its own apocryphal stories. As in Nikos Kazantzakis’s work, this line of thinking is heretical; pertaining to the freedom of thinking which the original meaning of the word heresy gave us. As we get an insight into the paintings of Renato Guttuso, the polity emerging from an apocryphal

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and heretical stance is often incestuous—not by means of the biographic lineage that it partakes, but in the closeness and involution of its practices. In all this the journey perpetuates itself by carrying within it what Naguib Mahfouz saw in Midaq Alley and what Cavafy loved in Alexandria. All of this comes together as that personal journey which one never travels on one’s own, but where one retains one’s privacy by the same degree of intimacy found in Eugenio Montale’s poetics. By engaging with the 20th century, Makings of the Sea also invites the reader to consider how the narratives of modernity have ‘inhabited’ and defined the Mediterranean as a common cultural horizon founded on difference. Yet this book entertains no illusions on how this region is ‘shared’. Indeed, it remains attendant to what Albert Camus identifies as “the light” which Mediterranean men and women “have been able to keep.” Readers are reminded that Camus’s statement is further qualified with a desire that becomes admonition: “just as the Mediterranean sun is the same for all men, the effort of men’s intelligence should be a common inheritance and not a source of conflicts and murders.”3 TRACING HORIZONS AGAINST THE HILL The opening chapter, “Touched horizons” sets a context for the Mediterranean in the 20th century. The latter two decades of that century were marked by an equal measure of hope and misery. The hopes triggered by the fall of State Communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s were soon consumed by the war that ensued in the Balkan region in the 1990s. Likewise, the fanfare of agreements and counter-agreements, memorialized by historic handshakes between friends and foes left the crisis in the Middle East broadly unresolved. For history to bleed into the Mediterranean in this fashion is no news to those who lived and outlived Modernity in a geographical context that defies every convention of boundary or history, where hope and tragedy could never go their separate ways. Coming to terms with this paradox is not an easy task, especially when once upon a time the Enlightenment and an ensuing Modernity were heralded as the answer to fin de siècle irrationalism. Whatever the case, the Mediterranean imagination emerged through a line of artistic, philosophical and literary narratives where within and beyond the promise of a rational condition, men and women survived history’s contingency and its irrational predicament. Anticipating what will follow in more detail in this book, this opening Camus, Albert. “Native Culture. The New Culture of the Mediterranean.” In Lyrical and Critical, 194. 3

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chapter presents an overview and discussion of the works of Constantine Cavafy, Luigi Pirandello, Italo Calvino and Giorgio De Chirico as a way into the horizons of this sea. Constantine Cavafy’s poetry was clearly formed and informed by the Mediterranean character of Alexandria. While defining Hellenism beyond the particular geographical restrictions of Modern Greece, Chapter 2 will focus on how Cavafy’s spectacle carries the poetic imagination in the triadic grounds of the historical, the philosophical and the erotic. In going beyond time and place, Cavafy’s work provides a contemporary reading of the Odyssean character of the Mediterranean logic where journey becomes synonymous with the making of truth and where history bequeaths its grand narratives from the privacy of individuals who live and inhabit their own physical space. Chapter 3 invites the reader to visit the sea from one’s “Private shores.” This dwells on the relationship between the private and communitarian definitions of the poetic self with a view on the private appropriation of the sea as structured by the exercise of poetry. Here I focus on Eugenio Montale’s set of poems Mediterraneo where the communitarian plurality purported by this “boundless sea” is confronted by the poet’s choice to protect and preserve his private sphere. This leads to a discussion of the whatness of the human condition; how this whatness is intrinsically linked to the private sphere as a polity that resists the intrusions of political hegemony; and how by means of its hermetic intimacy poetry transforms (by opening) the self to the paradox of aesthetics. Far from sustaining solipsism, Montale’s hermetic poetics provides a way into freedom even when politics relentlessly push women and men into a sense of existence that often feels as if one was trapped in a bell-jar. The sense of quiddity that one gets from Montale’s intimate and private poetry strongly contrasts with what is promised in Chapter 4. In Pirandello’s novel Il Fu Mattia Pascal, an old theosophist imagines a bizarre situation during a marionette representation of Electra. At the moment of Orestes’ revenge on Aegisthus and his mother Clytemnestra, the marionette’s sword accidentally rips the scenery. About to strike, Orestes’s eyes are distracted by a “hole in the ‘sky’.” He loses heart and downs his sword. From this situation, the old theosophist infers that Orestes becomes Hamlet and that the difference between ancient and modern tragedy boils down to “a hole in the sky.” Here, doubt is cast by the accidents of history—even when the valuation of these accidents as necessities in the making of reason remains central to the reading of history itself.

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Titled “A hole in the sky” this chapter begins with a discussion of political grammars within the literary and visual manifestations of the Sicilian context. This is done with reference to the art of Renato Guttuso and the literary works of Leonardo Sciascia and Luigi Pirandello. This is where notions of freedom, autonomy and cultural mediation emerge as most fluid; and where, as Sciascia notes, any duality between openness and closure fail to present us with a working analysis. Instead, readers are invited to look at other categories that prevalent ideologies have left behind. This prompts one to consider categories such as resemblance and involution, where the passion for human resemblance takes a central place in the definitions of history. Here, myths of a singular definition of freedom within an inevitably progressive sense of modernity become redundant. The challenge to the modernist conformity of a presumed way of thinking is vividly illustrated by the art of Guttuso, where even at the height of the avant-garde, he subscribes to the modern by the conventional images of a quotidian life that often turns out to be conservative, if not outright reactionary. Yet in such depiction, what also emerges is a critique of the reactionary approach of the would-be progressives whose total view of the world is as conservative as that which they pretend to oppose. Chapter 5 lies on the cusp between doubt and nostalgia. This chapter moves from dwelling on the significance of dance to a discussion of touch as an aesthetic category in a context that attests to the centrality of the image in the Byzantine imagination. Here, the Byzantine does not stand for its historical origin but signifies what comes of it in the contemporary context of the Orthodox imagination. This context is read against the process by which Nikos Kazantzakis’s work traces the horizon of an aesthetic identity where creed and faith are read once more within the commonplace meanings of life and everydayness. While life mediates faith by means of the heretical, the narrative of everydayness is apocryphal by choice. As individuals we make these choices in an effort to reclaim reality from divine universality. This chapter’s main object is a discussion of how the heretical image and the apocryphal story form part of the Mediterranean persona where the realisation of love, duty, and happiness render irrelevant any Platonic division between art and beauty, the body and the soul. A discussion of Federico García Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí opens the penultimate chapter where it is proposed that the notion of nostalgia is inverted within the parameters of an avant-nostalgia and where we would unlearn the cultural hegemonies that have reified our aesthetic imagination. By the example of Lorca’s work, this chapter traces the grounds on which creed and polity construct the Romance and Catholic imagination of South-

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ern Europe. This is where the Latin Mediterranean partakes of those Semitic terrains where Arab and Jewish filiations give this region’s cultural genealogy its unique character. In this chapter I look at the relationship between Lorca and Dalí’s narratives as read from a Mediterranean perspective, which implies a closer look at the link between the various genealogical influences which these artists prioritised in their work. All this is particularly read through Lorca’s theory of the duende, which offers a platform for a possible definition of Mediterranean aesthetics. Concluding this first volume is a chapter that begins to sketch a loose notion of Mediterranean Aesthetics. It brings together a way of concluding, while at the same time it sets a number of questions that are taken up in the second volume of this project, Composed Identities. Chapter 7 also moves the discussion into the question of performativity and the posture that the latter embodies in the construction of metanarratives. More importantly I argue that long before we coined every word with the prefix post-, men and women knew that any attempt to define a before and an after would ultimately end in despair. This is where the Mediterranean casts a sober note over the cruder sides of life while it also figures itself in the most contingent yet utopian of imageries. It is also by this sober note that this concluding chapter urges readers to appropriate their own sense of homecoming, even when their homes may be fairly distanced from the shores of Ulysses.

1 TOUCHED HORIZONS The plural always outweighs the singular. There are ten, twenty or a hundred Mediterraneans, each one subdivided in turn.1 —Fernand Braudel Every day our younger poets appear to grasp more clearly the fact that the only patriotism compatible with a poetic dignity is the conscientious and disinterested application to the love of art ... that the Greek poet, who has before him the example of his immortal ancestors, must be first of all a human being and that true national poetry is poetry without a country and poetry in its highest intensity.2 —Kostis Palamas

There is a significant moment in Theo Angelopoulos’s film Ulysses’s Gaze (1995) when in a matter of minutes an entire century of European history is set before us as if in final judgement. Ulysses’s Gaze is about a GreekAmerican filmmaker (played by Harvey Keitel) who sets on a journey in search of three early film reels documenting the Balkan wars at the turn of the 20th century. The filmmaker’s journey takes him from Northern Greece, into Bulgaria to Belgrade and ultimately to Bosnia. Leaving Bulgaria, he hitches a lift on a barge. The barge is ferrying a huge statue of Lenin to Belgrade. Keitel sits besides Lenin’s statue. The statue is dismantled. The body is dismembered. The head is rested on the torso with one of the arms still in magisterial pose. It’s as if the once venerated leader now lays prostrate on a hearse while the barge slowly carries his body to a destination marked by uncertainty. As the statue appears in gentle procession a crowd gathers on the riverbank to witness the event. The crowd becomes a congregation, kneeling and doing the sign of the cross, three times, in the Orthodox rite. Like an Orthodox icon Lenin now fulfils the role of a relic

1 2

Braudel, Fernand. Memory and the Mediterranean, 14. Cited in Seferis, George. On The Greek Style, 89 (my emphasis).

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to be mourned and venerated. The crowd-turned-congregation comes to witness one of history’s ‘final’ words. JOURNEY, DOUBT, NOSTALGIA By its very title, Ulysses’s Gaze carries the gravitas of the Odyssean struggle between human project and destiny. In an interview, Angelopoulos remarks that the dismembered effigy “represents the end. A complete end.”3 We may read in this ‘end’ an end to a chapter in history that tells us more about the future than the past. Lenin’s passage is yet another episode in our historical perception of a world that remains complex and mysterious. History’s passage is a personal matter of interpretation. Whether we stand as disinterested spectators or choose to participate, we know that there is no such thing as an isolated individual that survives by one’s own design, even when one’s personal autonomy is not being questioned. Perhaps this is why Angelopoulos chooses to distance the notion of a personal journey from the illusion of solipsism. Like Odysseus, Angelopoulos’s hero is never alone. To go to Belgrade, the filmmaker departs from Kali whose passion made him prisoner in Bulgaria just as Calypso captured Odysseus on Ogygia. Kali’s role in Ulysses’s Gaze forms part of a cycle where all female characters in Homer’s Odyssey act as reference-points throughout the journey, becoming as it were, fixed signifiers of a moving goal. Maïa Morgenstern appears as Penelope in the first scene in Greece, as Kali the Films Archivist (Calypso) in Bulgaria, as a bereaved widow (Circe) in Serbia, and as the young Naomi Levy (Nausikaa) in Bosnia.4 Like Odysseus, the filmmaker is confronted with the dilemmas of passion. He cannot love Kali as he still loves Penelope. Penelope is the love he carries throughout his journey, where the same person recurs as Kali, as Circe and as Naomi. Yet all these women are the same person—Penelope. Leaving Lenin’s ‘funeral’ behind, the filmmaker stops in Belgrade to meet his friend Nikos, a journalist. In the few dialogues interspersed in Angelopoulos’s long and ponderous takes, Nikos greets his Greek-American colleague with the axiom: “God’s first creation was the journey ... then came doubt and nostalgia.” After reminiscing over their young revolutionary dreams, they drink to the sea; the sea being the only certainty left:

Angelopoulos, Theo. “‘What do our souls seek?’ an interview with Theo Angelopoulos.” In The Last Modernist. The Films of Theo Angelopoulos. Edited by Andrew Horton, 105. 4 See Angelopoulos, “What do our souls seek?” 102. 3

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“Let’s drink to the sea, to the inexhaustible sea, the beginning and the end. To Tsitsanis, to Kavafis, to Che Guevara, to Santorini (...)”

Throughout a film of considerable length (as all Angelopoulos’s films tend to be) these are the only words of hope; a nostalgic hope acclaimed with one’s back to an uncertain future. Andrew Horton aptly comments that “it is one of Angelopoulos’s traits and, we might add, virtues that he does not ‘explain’ or preach.”5 As Angelopoulos’s audience we are invited into a world of equality. As his audience we are never entertained as students of history or sociology. Rather, we often feel ‘betrayed’ and ‘let down’ by the fact that the art form weighs heavily on our shoulders, without even attempting to entertain or please us by some subliminal or cathartic moment. In Ulysses’s Gaze there is nothing to entertain except our own decisions, memories and truths. Angelopoulos puts the judgement squarely on us as the main protagonists of his art form. Dan Georgakas comments that within the long takes in Angelopoulos’s films “the viewer must share with the filmmaker the responsibility of what to look for, how long to look, and whether to return to a specific place for a second look. Long takes with little action in them often follow emotional scenes. Angelopoulos candidly admits that they may be considered dead time or down time he has provided for the viewer to think about the events depicted to that point.”6 The audience is expected to engage in history as a matter of personal choice. Angelopoulos reserves no judgement. He abdicates from this right and makes sure that his films come across as artworks intended to belong. By ‘belonging’, these works of art urge us to return home. This home is distinctly Greek, where ‘Greekness’ is primarily Hellenic, Balkan, Mediterranean, and ultimately, universal. As he put it “the deeper one goes into one’s particular place—Greece for me—the more universal it will become for others.” But what is “home”? It is the place where you feel at one with yourself and at one with the cosmos. It is not necessarily a real spot that is here or there. And this goes as a concept for “Greece” as well, for I do not believe that Greece is only a geographical location. That is not what is important or interesting to me. For me, Greece is much larger. It extends much further than the actual borders, for it is the Greece for Horton, Andrew. The Films of Theo Angelopoulos. A Cinema of Contemplation, 6. Georgakas, Dan. “Angelopoulos, Greek History and The Travelling Players.” In The Last Modernist, 32. 5 6

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which we search, like home. So this Greece that is in my mind is the Greece I call home, not this office or this place here in Athens where I am sitting.7

The stories of Odysseus and Agamemnon teach us that there is no such thing as a benign journey or a salvific homecoming. The journey is an excuse for further journeys. It leaves no choices, but entertains more than an excuse to move on and to keep going in the hope of surviving. Like Agamemnon, the poet in search of a self, a nation, a limit and a definition, finds on his ‘return’ that there is nothing at home but the misery of fact that was left behind in the first place. Angelopoulos makes of the homecoming a continuity, a journey that has no beginning or end; a “cradle of democracy (...) exposed as a place where tyranny has deep roots”; a land of “fabled islands (...) revealed to have also served as places of confinement, torture and execution.”8 This is the history of the Balkans and of a Mediterranean in whose waters tourists would bathe and have idyllic repose. Yet it is also the Mediterranean where history reveals the paradox that reconstructs, time and time again, the definition of home: home as a forgotten place whose memory we pine for, but where hope transcends raw fact. While we often choose to forget that the Adriatic formed the same part of the Mediterranean where tourists flocked to old Yugoslavia’s tourist havens, the atrocities of the recent Balkan wars are a continuous reminder that Mediterranean history has a different tale to tell. The cultural appropriation of the Mediterranean might alleviate history with the intimate delights of those who want to forget and escape, but we all know that on all accounts the pleasures of tourism, leisurely scholarship and enlightened connoisseurship remain relative to their laudable origins. In other words, if we look for the meaning of the Mediterranean without thinking hard on the notion of a difference spared from the pleasures of our innate relativism, then any definition of this ancient Sea remains limited, if not impossible. We will, in short, fall between two stools. We neither understand the humanist terrain on which the Mediterranean has tied itself to the promise of truth, nor will we distinguish fact from those same ideals to which we have subscribed (for better or worse) the main thrust of human history. I concur with Fred Inglis, when in his chapter on the Mediterranean in his captivating book The Delicious History of the Holiday, argues that: none (…) goes back to anything more fundamental to social and moral feeling, to the promise of happiness and feasibility of humanism than 7 8

Angelopoulos. “What do our souls seek?” 106-107. Georgakas. “Angelopoulos, Greek History and The Travelling Players,” 33.

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the lines that tie the best modernity, from whatever corner of the globe, to the lovely, blood-stained ratios of Mediterranean history and geography.9

“WAIT A LITTLE AND DO NOT ANTICIPATE THE UNKNOWN” As seen from its Northern shores, the definition of the Mediterranean follows suit in the attitude and construction of the European imagination. In this respect, the European experience bears direct influence (and often forces itself) on the plural definitions of the Mediterranean and invariably leaves them open to being misconstrued. This is especially symptomatic of those historic moments where borders are moved, countries renamed and nations reconstructed from the bloodstained soil that hides mass graves and conceals the hatred of holocausts on all sides. This is a symptom of a European obsession with constructed origins. It is as if such origins remain in need of a constant remaking of newer, though sometimes incomplete and ill-fated, dialectical patterns. The truth that emerges from such patterns constitutes the historical moments that make of Zeus’s mythical abduction of Europa an ubiquitous event in the self-fulfilling narratives by which Europeans define themselves. In the nineteenth century, Europa’s revenge sweetens and turns desirable the struggle to define the indefinable and impossible: a nation. One such example is Giuseppe Mazzini’s case against bad governments that he considers as the disfigurers of Europe “by conquest, by greed, by jealousy of the just sovereignty of others.”10 Mazzini dreams of a Europe where “natural divisions, the innate spontaneous tendencies of the peoples will replace the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by bad governments.” The map of Europe will be remade. The Countries of the People will rise, defined by the voice of the free, upon the ruins of the Countries of Kings and privileged castes. Between these Countries there will be harmony and brotherhood. And then the work of Humanity for the general amelioration, for the discovery and application of the real law of life, carried on in association and distributed according to local capacities, will be accomplished by peaceful and progressive development; then each of you, strong in the affections and in the aid of many millions of men speaking the same language, endowed with the same tendencies,

9

Inglis, Fred. The Delicious History of the Holiday, 117. Mazzini, Joseph. The Duties Of Man And Other Essays, 52.

10

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and educated by the same historic tradition, may hope by your personal effort to benefit the whole of Humanity.11

According to Mazzini, this map of Europe will emerge on each and everyone’s identification with the idea of Country: “Without Country you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the Peoples.”12 Mazzini sees no conflict between nationhood and the fellowship with other nations. He sees the idea of the nation as an offspring of the individual’s duty towards human fellowship: Do not say I; say we. Be every one of you an incarnation of your Country, and feel himself and make himself responsible for his fellowcountrymen; let each one of you learn to act in such a way that in him men shall respect and love his Country.13

One cannot read Mazzini without taking account of his optimistic hope and entire political investment in the reunification of Italy. Also Mazzini remains the shared hero of cosmopolitans and nationalists, of liberals, republicans, socialists and fascists, alike. Supposedly his words represent the Country and the Continent as mutual signifiers. Mazzini’s rhetoric favours the ethical shaping of the individual out of a duty to others. In this ethical imperative, self-recognition is negotiated between the ‘I’, the self’s identity with a nation (the ‘us’), and the place of the nation within a further fellowship (in Mazzini’s case, the ‘European us’). This relationship between the self and the national-cultural boundaries that are seen as defining the self is highly relevant to the exploration of the definition of ‘the European’, understood from the construction of a Europe that claims unification by transcending—romantically or indeed naively—the crudeness of socioeconomic realities. Mazzini’s ideal of the free individual discerned as someone living in the context of plurality, has a lot to do with the extents by which a definition of culture makes or breaks the same ideals it propounds. This ideal is in no way uniquely European, but it has been characteristic of a European mind that presumes its ‘origin’ in the Delphic notion of the known self as a moral point of departure. Here, the self also endeavours to transform the historic rape of the other (already prefigured in the rape of Europa by Zeus) into a celebration of makeshift difference, substituting Zeus’s eros by a Christianised form of agape. Love as agape may be construed as a duty that Mazzini. The Duties Of Man, 52. Ibid. 53. 13 Ibid. 55. 11 12

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invokes ‘the world’ as being other than an individualist ‘I’, but as the construct of others. However, this kind of otherness opens new quandaries. If the scenario of difference is stuck into a naïve mutualism between same and other, the assumed transformation of eros into agape is at best a form of liberal naiveté and at worst a fascist myth. The recent history of genocide in the Balkans (not to mention the genocidal lineage that cannot be omitted from European and Mediterranean history) shows that for the journey to become a ‘perpetual’ reality, the recognition of otherness is not enough. The simplistic notion of a ‘perpetual journey’ goes something like this: a journey lays the grounds on which one could reconcile the notion of I and us with that of the same and the other. Constantly, we must go elsewhere so that the same is transformed into a perpetually removed other. In terms of ‘a journey’ our definitions are opened to what may come across as a new frontier where one encounters new definitions and seeks to learn them. In learning these other realities individuals need to keep their journey going; and by the same token, the meanings of its discoveries will never be the same. The imperative of the other becomes a matter of Bildung, classically understood as a pedagogical ground for the formation of culture. To sustain this assumption, many would recall the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy, whose poem Ithaka attained canonicity in its assertion that the journey should be kept as long as possible. In the name of culture as a plurality and in the name of agape as a love of otherness, it could be claimed that the journey takes all precedence over the destination, and since the destination marks finitude, there is no haste for any journey to be finished. Like Angelopoulos, Cavafy refers to Homer’s Odyssey and takes Ithaka (Oysseus’s kingdom and home) as the journey’s final destination. Thus the classic lines in Ithaka: Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn’t have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.14

However, such a formulaic reading does a great disservice to Cavafy’s poetics. What “these Ithakas mean” to those who set out to explore the excuse for a journey (whether entertaining European subjectivity or a notional journey through Mediterranean plurality) could never be simplified by a need to divest the journey into perpetuity. Neither should one read the yearning for Ithaka as a mere dialectic between departing and returning. In 14

Cavafy, Constantine P. “Ithaka.” In Collected Poems, 37.

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Ithaka, as in his other poems, Cavafy shows that departure and return are neither mutual nor dialectically posed.15 Departures are irrelevant because there is no origin or goal to the journey. There is no arché or télos, but an impossible dialectic that could not promise synthesis or an identity between beginning and end. This is what empowers individuals to construct other journeys and rescue history from genocide. A promise of synthesis is a false promise that identifies the beginning with the end, and annuls the very journey on which one embarks. Living in Alexandria, Cavafy longs to embrace a country as his own. This country turns out to be a mythical and somewhat ‘ahistorical’ Greece. Rather than disappoint or alienate him, Cavafy’s ‘Greece’ proscribes his exclusion from other countries—as indeed the ‘real’ Greece would have done. The Alexandrian’s definition of country is thus widened and its history restored to the realities by which the myth of agape and the love of eros are ‘reconciled’ by the construction of other histories, which ultimately have nothing to do with the false categories of nationhood, ethnicity or religion. It is in this personal journey by which agape, eros and history become once more possible; where the definition of one’s place starts from the individual’s construction of a temporary, makeshift and ahistorical ‘belonging’. Undoubtedly Cavafy’s notion of the journey is a classic aporia where no entry could guarantee a reversed exit. In effect this journey cannot be retraced back. Its origin is irrelevant, just as its end is impossible. Not unlike Cavafy, Naguib Mahfouz, would characterize the same dilemma. He remarks: Through a destiny over which I had no power, I had to submit to being away from my homeland. I realized that the event would come about without any doubt, either tomorrow or the day after. Wait a little and do not anticipate the unknown.16

The journey’s aporia provides a special insight in the manners by which the aesthetic imaginary recalls an inner city as a contingent destination, constructed brick by brick, only to be demolished and reconstructed several times over. This illusive destination—this made up city and homeland—gains longevity, and is never consumed by the finitude of a télos. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities Marco Polo tells Kubla Khan:

As we find in Hegel’s case for Bildung in his Phenomenology of Spirit. See Hegel, Georg W. Phenomenology of Spirit. 16 Mahfouz, Naguib. Echoes of an Autobiography, 54. 15

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For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. (…) I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said.17

Calvino’s stories of Polo’s description of his journeys illustrate the diverse imaginary locations by which we reconstruct our own. When Kubla Khan asks for a map to get some orientation for his own travels to Polo’s would-be cities, Polo tells Khan that these cities cannot be mapped. We may add that the condition for such a map lies in our negotiation of a place and a time where our cities will be placed and replaced without ever reaching an end. In the specific case of the Mediterranean, before we could ever place or replace a city, we need to span over wider, more commonly owned, makings. These makings move far beyond terra ferma. They are makings of the sea, and this sea holds no secrets to those who have been drowned by the storms of its terrible destinies. Yet like Odysseus, we travel on. WAYS OF READING THE WORLD As we move through time we pass by ‘old’ horizons while we make ‘new’ ones. Obviously there is no such thing as new and old horizons, because horizons do not hold a concept of time. As such, a horizon does not exist, even when we see it. There is no demarcation, and like time, a horizon is a state of mind. But because horizons are a state of mind, and our mind does assume specific demarcations, horizons are there and in a certain sense they entertain a physical presence. Horizons also emerge in the philosopher’s attempt to obtain a narrative where experience and meaning gain value beyond the limits of time itself. In this respect one great philosopher, Hans Georg Gadamer, sheds light on another, Edmund Husserl, while discussing the idea of phenomenology. In Truth and Method, Gadamer explains that “every experience has implicit horizons of before and after, and finally merges with the continuum of the experiences present in the before and after to form the one flow of experience.”18 Given that time moves with us as much as we move with the 17 18

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities, 150. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method, 216.

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passing of time, the image of the horizon strikes us as an apt analogy to explain our attempt to bring together the experiences we ‘receive’ in time. Angelopoulos’s construction of the bystander doing the sign of the cross to the effigy of an enemy of organised religion has a lot to do with this mode of arguing. Needful of a faith in a reality out there (be it God’s design or that of a universal accident), we, as witnesses to history’s passing, have to reach out for a meaning by which we would make sense of our being in a place and a time. This need to understand is not dissimilar from the need to make sense of an abstract painting. Although few would claim to ‘understand’ an abstract painting (at least by ‘figurative’ standards), most would want to engage with it (because it is beautiful). In this sense the experience may be, in the jargon, ‘phenomenological’. But beyond any jargon, the consequences of everyday life, of making sense of being here, is as actual as opening a tin of beans. Some may prefer to call this need a form of intentionality, but to the bystanders of history—like Lenin’s accidental mourners who are strongly aware that they are by no means historical spectators—the flow of experience demands that the horizon is touched. Gadamer explains that with the concept of a “universal ‘horizon consciousness’”, Husserl wants to capture the transition of “all limited intentionality of meaning within the fundamental continuity of the whole.” Ultimately, “everything that is given as existent is given in terms of the world and hence brings the world horizon with it.”19 By such token, upon witnessing the passing of history we come to touch the very horizon over which we travel and beyond which we hope there is always a better world, even when we know in our own philosophical instincts, that such a practice is in itself dubious. Nowhere is the horizon ever more present than in the vision of the sea, in whose apparent expanse the imagination merges poetic hopes with stoic perseverance, as one finds in the words of another great poet of modern Greece, George Seferis: Let your hands travel, if you can, here on time’s curve with the ship that touched the horizon.20

One could argue that along our horizons, the history of human expression is continuously prefaced and concluded by a dialogue between the dreams of tragedy and the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy as an art form is 19 20

Gadamer. Truth and Method, 217. Seferis, George. Collected Poems, 32.

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never distanced from the lives of women and men who fight and die by dint of a humanity on which they stake any hope that one might have for a future. This is widely reflected in the endeavour to understand the world through the human sciences. This is evident in how Fernand Braudel takes the wider narrative of everyday life into serious account, as he tries to chart out a history of the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II. Even when he writes with the precise intent of the historian focusing on a specific period, Braudel’s work presents the ‘Mediterranean World’ as a story that transcends the boundaries of particularity, whether this has to do with geography or the story of ‘events’. Woe betide the historian who thinks that this preliminary interrogation is unnecessary, that the Mediterranean as an entity needs no definition because it has long been clearly defined, is instantly recognizable and can be described by dividing general history along the lines of its geographical contours. What possible value could these contours have for our studies? But how could one write any history of the sea, even over a period of only fifty years, if one stopped at one end with the Pillars of Hercules and at the other with the straits at whose entrance ancient Ilium once stood guard? The question of boundaries is the first to be encountered; from it all others flow. To draw a boundary around anything is to define, analyse, and reconstruct it, in this case select, indeed adopt, a philosophy of history.21

Fifty years on from his magnum opus, Braudel’s advise remains staunchly valid. To look at history’s horizon is to engage in a continuum that presents itself as a permanent race between Achilles and the tortoise where any argument for a closure of history’s meaning proves to be a fallacy.22 When it comes to the Mediterranean, the lesson is further radicalised at source: “If the Mediterranean has done no more than force us out of our old habits it will already have done us a service.”23 Braudel’s work glows with a method that is neither constrained by some pretence for clinical factuality nor laid down as true and absolute. I 21 Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, xi (my emphasis). 22 As Gilbert Ryle argues, the race between Achilles and the tortoise always propounds the mathematical impossibility to define the total—having always in mind the recurring missing margin, caused by a continuous yet minuscule advance of the tortoise over Achilles, leaving the race hopelessly bereft of a conclusion. See Ryle, Gilbert. Dilemmas, 36ff. 23 Braudel, The Mediterranean, p. xiii.

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venture to suggest that Braudel’s history sits comfortably with Nikos Kazantzakis’s story where Alexis Zorba’s intricate dance could be read and accommodated within the philosophical realities of the temerity with which a fisherman survives the deadly currents off the shores of Greece, and the equal serenity by which a Turk recites his prayers in the intimacy of a Mosque. Likewise, Mauhfouz’s Cairo Trilogy’s grand epic, Midaq Alley’s microcosm, or the truthful heresy of Awlad Al Harantina (Children of the Alley/Gebelawi) are no lesser histories than Braudel’s longue durée—by which human history must be said, seen and read as a long and enduring perspective. As Oswyn Murray writes in his introduction to the English translation of Braudel’s Les Mémoires de la Méditerranée, “despite his recognition of the importance of the grand vision and the power of the longue durée and of structures, [Braudel] has always upheld that crucial historical value, the centrality of the individual as the subject of history; not the individual great man but the anonymous yet real peasant, the ordinary unknown man. In this sense he remains more truly revolutionary than any of his opponents on the left or the right.”24 Like Mahfouz and Kazantzakis, Braudel embraces the paradox of the Mediterranean and elucidates history from everyday life, as a long contradictory yet true story which moves thousands of years back, passing from one generation to another; where the skill of survival is passed onto youngsters; where poetry is sung in all the languages of Babel; where gods come and go with reverence, love and temerity; and where love and hatred, survival and murder, are exchangeable in the very same ways by which Odysseus raised Telemachus before time was invented. It is evident that the grammars of blasphemy, prayer, history and story alike attest and in turn create a presence where one stands in awe of the vastness of those horizons by which human beings have made their history. In such makings, minor details in the cultural imagination—such as an octopus being dried in the sun to soften and made palatable, or the way the Mediterranean peoples share similar lifestyles without necessarily ascertaining a ‘common origin’—bear considerable significance to the overall horizons of the making of the historical imagination. This is no more odd, ethereal, or scientific than the self-consciousness with which Luigi Pirandello’s characterisation of someone, no-one and a hundred thousand brings his main character Vitangelo Moscarda (affectionately known by the reader as Gengè) to a late-coming epic upon his apprehension that his nose is slightly bent.

24

Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, xviii.

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“What are you doing?” asked my wife, not used to see me linger in front of the mirror. “Nothing”, I replied, “I am looking here, into my nose, in my nostril. Touching it, I notice that it hurts a little.” My wife smiled and said: “I thought you’re finding where it leans to.” I swung round like a dog whose tail has been trodden: “It leans? My nose? Mine?” And calmly, she says: “Of course my dear. Have a look at it. It’s bent to the right.”25

Should Gengè’s nose matter to history, ethics, or philosophy? Should domesticity itself be so important that we are constrained to read and regale it with a much wider meaning? Could one assess Gengè’s predicament culturally—and more specifically locate it within the Sicilianity by which Pirandello’s narrative gains the full weight of a-way-of-reading-the-world? As in the case of the other more notorious Pirandellian character, Mattia Pascal, the answer to these questions is an emphatic “Yes!”26 Gengè’s story is located within the defining whereabouts of a cultural making, which emerges from an identifiable and liveable everydayness on whose precepts there is more than the sharp wit of a Nobel Laureate. In Gengè, Pirandello claims back the margins of reality where he locates and appraises those accidents by whose force, history moves on. In his anatomical observations Gengè stakes his life on a journey that drives him to complete ruin. His life is taken over by the contingent and factual wherefores of his bent nose. Upon revisiting my discovery of those slight defects, I was totally and quickly struck by the thought that this could (possibly?) mean that I hardly knew my own body; even those parts which intimately belonged to me: my nose, my ears, my hands, my legs. So I went back to look and examine them.27

Gengè’s nose conveys the abrupt, almost dysfunctional turns of the understanding: “So I stood, held on the first steps to many ways, with my spirit full of worlds, or pebbles—it makes no difference.”28 In Gengè’s predicament worlds and pebbles come to share the same passions of his own persona, as lived and formed by specific and atypical cultural whereabouts. Pirandello, Luigi. Uno, nessuno e centomila, 17. I refer to Pirandello’s well-known novel Il Fu Mattia Pascal, which will be discussed later in this book. 27 Pirandello. Uno, nessuno e centomila, 10-11. 28 Ibid. 10. 25 26

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Yet, because of this set of events, his nasal perception takes him off course. He starts to behave as if he is totally displaced from what he has hitherto considered to be his day-to-day normality. What was previously considered to be a polity of reassurance and steady progress is turned on its head. Revolution becomes involution and secure advancement suddenly loses its jurisdiction. The law of certainty is replaced by the randomness of the pebble. “WE TALK ... BUT WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?” The curve of time with which Seferis’s ship touches the horizon is a constant reminder of another perimeter, this time spatial, by which we give the Mediterranean its name. While the peoples that occupy the surrounding lands partake of a common description—that of being Mediterraneans— their common sea partakes of a name that is defined by the land that surrounds it. Short of being a big lake, this is a middle-sea, mediterraneo, mesògeios. The sea is confluent by nature and the ship touching its horizon finds Orient and Occident inhabiting the same space which was inhabited by the protagonists of those epic stories which have formed our imagination—St Paul, Odysseus, Aeneias, as well as Byron, and Camus, and Seferis. These names are characters in a story that partly informs our notion of the Mediterranean. Some of them may have lived; others we know to have lived; while more recently, others decided to travel in the footsteps of their ancestors, whether mythical or real. Byron relives the epic and makes of it a reality until he ultimately dies as he takes sides in one of the deadliest conflicts in Mediterranean history. Like Byron, Seferis could not escape the blood that tinted this sea; while Camus had no choice but to acknowledge the force of the Mediterranean’s epical presence by which, like Seferis, he urges us to touch the horizon and give it physical reality. In this way the thrust of the word ‘imagination’ is extended to the wider implications of the French word l’imaginaire where the assemblage of meanings, experiences, sites and sights collate into a narrative that supersedes the simplistic distinction between history and story, fact and expectation.29 What we make of time will now embrace and legitimise the grounds that trace the trails of rejection and love, by which we step into the economies of land and empire, or the polity of money and meaning. In this, the depiction of culture is nothing more and nothing less than the horizons curving around our cultural making of time and space. As Cavafy puts it in For my discussion of the imaginary in Sartre and Maxine Greene see Baldacchino, John. Education Beyond Education, 127ff. 29

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his poem Morning Sea, “Let me stop here. Let me, too, look at nature awhile. The brilliant blue of the morning sea.”30 Here, Cavafy achieves poetic universality by stealth: “Let me stand here. And let me pretend I see all this.”31 He also pretends that no one is looking. No one would know that the passion for flesh and land, sea and wonder, is entirely private and is only ‘shared’ by the proxy of an assumed horizon. Cavafy’s love, hidden in what was then deemed to be the scandalous act of homosexual sameness, participated in a greater business of sameness where the mark of divergence resided in the pretence of its nonexistence.32 Cavafy’s art is construed as a representational narrative, where what is initially seen as an imitation into reality, becomes pivotal for our need to give form to reality. In Morning Sea, the sea becomes a category of reality. Cavafy’s affectation is Cavafy’s passionate form, and by way of passion his work is yet another expression of the Mediterranean as a junction of plural concepts running in all directions. Cavafy’s art form asks us to consider how a private reality could ever engage us with universality. This stance is taken on, perhaps in less hermetic ways in Calvino’s essay Journey in De Chirico’s cities: Wherever I turn, I keep seeing those gentlemen down there. Would they always be the same, in any street, in any square, always deserted, where one happens to be passing and comes across another as they stop and have a conversation? And what would they talk about? I can only guess: my ears could never tell what they’re saying. “The city—says one—is not uninhabited, given that we are here.” “The city—says the other—extends in space, given that we could be seen from afar.” And the former replies: “The city is majestic, given that we seem so small.” And the latter: “The city is not silent, given our talking.” “We talk—adds the other—but what are we talking about?”33 Cavafy. “Morning Sea.” Collected Poems, 58. Cavafy. “Morning Sea.” Collected Poems, 58. 32 Whether Cavafy’s work could be read by the implements of Stratis Tsirkas’s historical analysis or whether it was intimately personal and contingent to the normality of everyday life in Alexandria—as claimed by Robert Liddell—has no real effect on what the poet’s re-enactment of the wonder within “the brilliant blue of the morning sea” is all about. For an account of these divergent views see Liddell’s discussion of Stratis Tsirkas’s Cavafy and His Time and The Political Cavafy in Liddell, Robert. Cavafy. A critical biography. 33 Calvino, Italo. “Viaggio nelle città di de Chirico.” In Romanzi e Racconti [Nov30 31

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Those who are familiar with De Chirico’s work would recall the deserted squares and the two solitary figures discussed in Calvino’s essay. Works such as La Nostalgia dell’Infinito (The Nostalgia of The Infinite, 1914), La Grande Torre (The Great Tower, 1913), L’angoscia della Partenza (The Anguish of Departure, 1914), Stazione di Montparnasse (Montparnasse Station, 1924), the two paintings entitled Piazza d’Italia (Italia Square, of 1913 and 1954) and L’Enigma di una Giornata (The enigma of a day, 1914) all include these two characters in conversation. Calvino’s prologue to the conversation between the inhabitants of De Chirico’s deserted squares, presents us with a dilemma. These questions seem to enter us into a negotiation between the individual and history, as we encounter history by accident while strolling in our daily passeggiata in an Italian street, or during one’s volta on a Greek boulevard by the sea. Because these are indeed paintings that were thought of and well planned, we know that the accident is made up. But even if the paintings are made up like fairy tales and folk stories, we know that there is more to the ‘accident’ than its narrative tricks, because our accidental meeting with history is a permanent condition. As we discuss the idea of permanence, there is nothing more permanent than the fixity by which De Chirico’s characters inhabit their own history—even when all they are doing is taking a stroll down the boulevard. Calvino juxtaposes stories over other stories, and invites us to think such stories by the same ways we come across our known (familiar) histories. The distinction between one and the other comes to no consequence. It does not matter at all whether they are true or fictitious, because we all share the reality that brings them together. That is why Calvino says of his Fiabe Italiane (Italian Folktales): “these tales are true.” [They] are a catalogue of fates that could be passed on to a[ny] man and a[ny] woman, mostly for that portion of life which, in effect, is the making of one’s fate: youth, from a birth which so often, either portends well or becomes reproachful; to that of leaving home; to the trials of adulthood and maturity; to human self-avowal. All in one instant: (…) especially that brings everything together: humans, animals, plants, things; the infinitely possible metamorphosis of whatever exists.34

Our accidental acquaintance with history is a metamorphosis, which not unlike Ovid’s gives meaning to what we often cannot express in words. The accident is poetic, in its original usage as ‘poesy’, which comes closer to els and Stories]. Vol. 3, 395. 34 Calvino, Italo. “Introduzione (1956).” In Fiabe Italiane [Italian Folktales]. Vol 1, xv.

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its Greek root poiesis, a making. Calvino turns the assumed conversation between De Chirico’s two characters into an accidental happening. In their acquaintance, these two characters indulge in a constructed metamorphosis, where love and death in their everyday occurrence, come across as the normality by which life encounters anyone and everyone. Above all, this metamorphosis brings up what Ted Hughes saw in Ovid’s interest for passion: “Or rather, in what passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis—passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural.”35 Calvino’s constructed conversation between De Chirico’s characters is also a series of questions where memory reconstructs itself along an imaginary Hellenic landscape. The landscape of the deserted square converges with De Chirico’s youth on Volos. The reconstruction is also an excuse, a fabricated accident, where Calvino wants to situate himself to be able to experience the pre-chronological world of the epic. Pretty much like Hughes’s Ovid, Calvino’s De Chirico is taken somewhere else, into a world that his work (like Ovid’s) requests as of right to inhabit. Calvino wonders how he arrives in this space: “I don’t know how I arrived here. I can’t remember what lies outside it, perhaps a blackened sea from where sides of monsters would be carved.”36 De Chirico’s city baffles Calvino. He is not sure whether he was there sometime in history or somewhere in his literary memory. He does not know what lies outside. To Calvino, De Chirico’s city is like Cavafy’s Ithaka—an interior city.37 It grew within him ever since he could remember its image. The sea is an interesting point of orientation: Little do I remember what the city looked like from the sea: white behind cypresses like that from where the Argonauts departed; granite steps that came down to the pebbly beach where the statuary marble was reddened by the blood of little goats sacrificed to the Goddess.38

In The Anguish of Departure, De Chirico’s characters are still in conversation. The idea of departure takes a timeless form where the horizon is overbearingly evident, only to be assigned with what looks like a relic of time in the high tower. His towers could well stand for Infinity. As in The Nostalgia of the Infinite, in The Great Tower De Chirico depicts a tower that cuts across the horizon. The tower introduces a vertical direc35 36

Hughes, Ted. “Introduction.” In Tales from Ovid, ix. Calvino. “Viaggio nelle città di de Chirico” [A journey in De Chirico’s cities],

395. 37 38

Cavafy’s Ithaka will be discussed in more detail in a further chapter. Calvino. “Viaggio nelle città di de Chirico,” 395.

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tion; this time upwards, as if the horizon is not enough for the syntheses by which we understand the case of the world. In The Anguish of Departure another tower cuts across time and dwarfs the two persons by its sheer magnitude. The Anguish of Departure and The Nostalgia of the Infinite share that perennial notion of homecoming, of nostalgia. Between them, homecoming and nostalgia provide a narrative of longing, within a journey that has departures and arrivals. The Mediterranean imagination always thrives in this recurrent theme. While Odysseus, and later on Aeneas, take us into journeys of tribulation and magic, Agamemnon welds the cycle with the catastrophic fate of his homecoming. Anguish and magic go together, and while departures are in themselves tragic yet hopeful, the return would never be the same once the truth of time’s betrayal is revealed. Indeed time changes everything and those who return cannot expect time to stop, or that the horizon remains static. As Seferis reminds us when he sings to the island of Santorini: Naked we found ourselves on the pumice stone watching the rising islands watching the red islands sink into their sleep, into our sleep. Here naked we found ourselves, holding the scales that tilted towards injustice.39

In the poetic imagination, the Mediterranean takes the role of a fluid stage where the narrative of homecoming is invoked as the cruel, yet healing antidote to the anguish by which the nostalgic edifices of history torment humankind. The fluid metaphysics of the sea provide the Mediterranean imagination with a grammar where the world is moulded by Poseidon’s angry moods and Aphrodite’s erotic musings. In this, the deity’s sacrifice is minimal whereas the sacrifice of a history cemented in empirical truth becomes a myth. This is an analysis where life’s game is gambled on myth’s reality. There is no direct connection between the virtuous life and the good that is supposedly reaped out of sacrifice—as Plato and his Christian and Muslim followers are led to believe. Instead, the metaphysics of the sea proclaims the supremacy of a godly chance where violent Scylla and voluptuous Charybdis preface Calypso’s gentle abode. The sea extends out of the city, from within the abodes of men and women: It’s from within the city that I remember the sea’s proximity: I remember feeling close to the sea: a black curtain flapped in the wind on a pal39

Seferis. “Santorini.” Collected Poems, 31.

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ace lodge, while those who awaited the flowing of dark oracles looked down on the waves hitting the ground of the arcade. If on the ground the wind stood still, while the curtains fell heavily on the autumnal afternoon; on the deep edge of the sea, wind and sails trailed high over the rooftops.40

The conversation imagined by Calvino between the two men in De Chirico’s paintings, could be any conversation about normal events which give life to the city: “The city—says one—is not uninhabited, given that we are here.” “The city—says the other—extends in space, given that we could be seen from afar.” (...) “The city is majestic, given that we seem so small.” (...) “The city is not silent, given our talking.” “We talk (...) but what are we talking about?”41

Calvino assumes a normality that may seem odd in the context of a deserted city. The depiction of two people in a deserted space is not abnormal in itself, but the questions they pose suggest something other than day-today chatter, even if it is conceivable to have such a chat. Situations like these are not signs of abnormality in themselves. However, what Calvino twists into the world of speculation is the fact that the city he imagines for these two characters, meets the sea in the same way his thoughts meet memory. His travel is a specific travel. It takes place in the Mediterranean as a sea that has been narrated within a mythological context. Upon lacing together these two worlds (as he does in the case of the folktale), Calvino exchanges our daily conventions with those of myth. The two characters question themselves, but they also make universal statements out of what appears to be very simple (and almost absurd) questions. Their questions verge on the unintelligible. What is intelligible is something other than what appears to be self-evident. Calvino is playing with memory. He locates his nostalgia for the past in the future. De Chirico’s metaphysical rearrangement of reality and space is very conducive to this kind of language-game, where what we recollect as a picture of various things that happen to us together with the feeling these recollections carry, could be projected into another time frame—possibly a future to come. The dialogue between the inhabitants of the city (the city that is constructed out of portions of memory) never concludes. It is not intended to reconcile itself with any answers; and in this way, it does not aspire to fore40 41

Calvino. “Viaggio nelle città di de Chirico,” 395. Ibid.

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gone conclusions. This kind of trope is very evident in Leonardo Sciascia’s definitions of Sicilianity (which will be discussed later in this book), as well as Kazantzakis’s illustration of the Mediterranean persona, whose dealings with life often appear as an exchange between God and the Devil. On the ship were Greeks, cunning devils with rapacious eyes, brains like the trumpery goods of bazaar-dealers, wire-pulling and quarrelling; an untuned piano; honest and venomous shrews. One’s first impulse was to seize the ship by both ends, plunge it into the sea, shake it thoroughly to make all the livestock which polluted it drop off—men, rats, bugs— and then refloat it, freshly washed and empty.42

Here freedom ceases to be positive. To use a phrase coined by John L Austin in his discussion of ‘the excuse’, one could say that Kazantzakis’s ‘Greeks’ come to act “not unfreely” in that they are set in a position where freedom could never be taken ‘as read’, for granted, or as it should appear within established conventions of meaning.43 Freedom remains pending because facts are often reliant on what one remembers about other facts, and on how the grammar of recollection tends to trace its own tracks by the default of memory. As in Kazantzakis’s presentation of ‘Greeks’, Calvino’s representation of the ‘men’ from De Chirico’s sea-washed yet deserted city comes as a case where the definition of everyday life relies on intended accidents. Hence the freedom by which the deal is made in a bazaar, is a matter of ‘common sense’ where what seems obvious is not that clear: The city (...) is not uninhabited, given that we are here.

42 43

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek, 18. See Austin’s essay “A Plea For Excuses.” In Philosophical Papers.

2 BODIES OF MEMORY Come back often, take hold of me in the night when lips and skin remember ...1 —Constantine P. Cavafy I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.2 —Alfred Tennyson

In Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, an aged Odysseus looks for a poetic pretext to resume his travels. The old King of Ithaka finds no profit in staying idle, haunted by a helpless distance from the memories of his glorious past. As an old mariner he “cannot rest from travel” because ultimately, what kept him alive has always been the desire by which his “grey spirit, yearning in desire” sought “to follow knowledge, like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”3 The old King’s torment recalls another of Tennyson’s poems, Ode to Memory, where the poet calls upon memory to rescue him from the dilemma of time: Thou who stealest fire, From the fountains of the past, To glorify the present; oh, haste Visit my low desire! Strengthen me, enlighten me! I faint in this obscurity, Thou dewy dawn of memory.4

Cavafy. “Come back.” Collected Poems, 43. Tennyson, Alfred. “Ulysses.” In The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 147. 3 Ibid. 148. 4 Tennyson. “Ode to Memory” § I. The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 21. 1 2

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Odysseus is moved by a desire to re-originate his travels and recover memory from the clutches of time as if wanting to rear a past from the future. Such skills would figure in the ‘logic’ of Odysseus’s quasi divinity. However, Tennyson modifies Odysseus’s predicament. As a poem Ulysses may have suited the Romantic imagination by its mythical musings, but the poet also dwells on the dilemma of time, where as an aged seeker of mundane and divine truths, Odysseus is exposed to the grammars of history. In Tennyson, Odysseus could not avoid the age of Reason where the claim over the Classical world is retained—and thereby humanised—in nostalgia. The Tennysonian Odysseus confronts the morass of time unassisted by divine mentorship. He outlives and surpasses the gods of Hellas and as an adoptive son of the Enlightenment he is entirely human even while he clings to his Homeric cunning when dealing with the mores of existence. Tennyson’s work is confronted by the rational certainty of the Enlightenment. In his post-Homeric tale he transfers immortality to the powers of human memory: that same memory which kept Homer’s epic alive from one generation to another, incremented and modified according to the ambitions and dreams of those who tell and those who listen, dream and marvel. Tennyson’s nostalgia is a personal rejection of a closed history. He opens history and makes of it a narrative where the present and future come second to human endeavour and the pursuit of knowledge. With Ulysses we are invited to yearn for timeless journeys at the helm of a future. We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.5

ODYSSEAN PRESENCE To re-originate Odysseus’s journey is to reclaim an historical imagination where our storytelling accrues a universal character and defies the compartments of time and place. From Homer to Joyce, from Cavafy to Angelopoulos, the Odyssey embodies the human struggle to solve the riddle of day-to-day existence. Far from being distant, the Odyssey emerges from our everyday life, where we all share a common grammar, and by whose rules we poeticise our acquaintance with truth. The Odyssean narrative is made to last amongst the loves and desires of the body—our body—by which we give origin, time and time again, to 5

Tennyson. “Ulysses.” The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 147.

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our sense of being. There is no doubt that the intentional origin of the entire Odyssean action emerges from the memory of that weary body which Tennyson left stranded on the shores of the present. To borrow Cavafy’s words, the body re-lives the moment “when lips and skin remember” those faded margins of time where unfinished journeys lie scattered, as if waiting to come to life once more. Cavafy’s words remind us that the body remembers only too well that history begins in the eyes which gaze and the voice that trembles upon being touched.6 And this is no more vivid than in the stranded memories of love and death, where women and men become conscious of their need to check self-preservation with risk, and balance reason with the ruses it provides. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it in their Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment: The adventures of Odysseus are all dangerous temptations removing the self from its logical course. He gives way to each allurement as a new experience, trying it out as would a novice still impervious to good advice—sometimes, indeed, out of foolish curiosity, or as an actor ceaselessly rehearsing his parts.7

So there is no place for Odysseus without the physicality of a bodily presence. There is no memory without a body. Lips and skin remember the loves and the temerities by which the body risked death. This is how, as it were, the self suspends its logical course in order to position the whole body on a vantage point where it could absorb history as memory and then make of it again a physical presence that rehearses its parts as if life would never end. In this context, Odysseus inhabits the grounds of everyday life. His loves and his dangers are never relegated to the myths of mere godliness, but retain a humanity by which men and women hold to a physical world that defies the very ‘logic’ of divinity or grace. Ernle Bradford echoes this in his search for the ‘physical’ Odysseus: Andreas had never read Homer, but he knew the story of Ulysses almost by heart. (...) Andreas had spoken of Ulysses as “the wily man”—a kind of Greek Pantagruel. (...) He was in Andreas’s reckoning the Artful Dodger, not the Romantic Hero. He was the kind of Greek who could still make a living in Alexandria after all the others had gone to the wall. Ulysses was the shopkeeper with his thumb on the scales, and an eye to the girls, handy with a knife in a dark alley, and at the same time in some

See Cavafy. “Body Remember.” Collected Poems, 84. Adorno, Theodor, Horkheimer, Max. “Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment.” In Dialectic of Enlightenement, 47. 6 7

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strange fashion or other, capable of honesty—or was it of great consistency?—over most of the major issues.8

Bradford’s Odysseus is reclaimed and distanced from the exclusive canons of mythical fantasy. He is not a figment of invention. Rather, he is a fellow sailor whom Bradford followed and met in his innumerable journeys in the Mediterranean. Bradford’s long maritime experience endowed the Odyssean journey with the logic of possibility. It shows that Homer’s story is not the exclusive property of the classicist. To the contrary, it remains ‘with us’; it is in the hands of human beings whose lives are marked by the overwhelming presence of practical business and whose stories are enhanced by the throes of living. I have spent most of the best years of my life sailing the Mediterranean and I never intended to make an incursion into the sacred grove of classical studies. It merely happened that during these years I found myself time and again seeing harbours, anchorages, islands, and stretches of coastline, through other eyes than mine.9

Throughout his travels of the Mediterranean, Bradford ruminates over Odysseus the genial navigator as he encounters a man who loves his wife and son, yet convinced that life must not be mitigated by the constraints of a purity sanctioned by divine will. OF “ETERNAL, UNCONFESSED DESIRE” Yannis Ritsos’s Twelve poems for Cavafis may be read as a projection of one poet’s great work over another, equally great, poet’s art. In Ritsos we are regaled by a kind of negotiation of art-works in the form of a commentarylike account of one poet in admiration of the older and wiser master’s art form. For this to gain fuller meaning, Ritsos seeks to engage with Cavafy’s art form through an engagement with Cavafy’s personality. Ritsos confirms that after all it is Cavafy’s persona that gives rise to Cavafy’s poetry and not—never—the other way round. In his narrative segmentation Ritsos leaves us with no doubts about his own poetic skills and philosophical insight. His philosophy and poetry present us with the problematic of selfhood as it comes to express its external actions. Ritsos’s philosophical poetry seeks out the poetic philosophy that reflects Cavafy’s persona. The poet Cavafy is also the actor Cavafy who masks himself as no other than … Cavafy. Ritsos’s sixth poem for Cavafy Places of Refuge is in part a discussion 8 9

Bradford, Ernle. Ulysses Found, ix. Ibid. 213.

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of speech as the essence of the poetic self. He seeks to understand the mechanisms of refuge where poetic semblance takes over and conceals the poet’s person in his wish to protect himself from his own words. “Expression,” he says, “does not mean to say something, but simply to speak; and to speak means to reveal yourself—so how should you speak?” And then his silence became so transparent that he hid himself completely behind the curtain, pretending to be looking out of the window.10

Ritsos narrates a scene where after exposing his expressed secret, Cavafy immediately takes refuge from his speaking. To make sure that what he utters is heard, Cavafy follows his speaking with an immediate retreat from the public domain. Cavafy hides behind a mask but he also makes sure we know who is hiding behind the mask. It is a double act that plays on paradox—a vain modesty that uses the mask to attract attention. This is but one tool by which Cavafy the poet conveys his memory by means of Cavafy’s body as an instrument of Cavafy the solitary actor. The body’s memory cannot but speak and reveal itself to the audience that it means to attract. By presenting the body as form—as immediate art—the poet is left defenceless against his re-enactment of his private sphere, kept safe in his memory. But as soon as his memory is exposed he seeks protection by diverting his audience’s attention. Far from a cliché, the prominence of the body in Cavafy’s poetic language is made quite clear. His ‘mask’ becomes so explicit; yet it also becomes integral to his poetry and cannot be ignored. Once this embodied memory is recognised within Cavafy’s poetics, his poetry appears to stand for a willed refuge and a concealed indulgence. Turned round, this also indicates a desire to take refuge within indulgence. As Cavafy suggests in his poem As much as you can: And if you can’t shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it by too much contact with the world11

And as he would add in When they come alive:

Ritsos, Yannis. “Twelve Poems for Cavafis: VI. Places of Refuge.” In Selected Poems, 134. 11 Cavafy. “As much as you can.” Collected Poems, 46. 10

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Try to keep them, poet, those erotic visions of yours, however few of them there are that can be stilled.12

In Ritsos’s account, Cavafy diverts his appearance away from his guests in order to preserve authority over his audience. He wants to understand the journey of the self in the way he wants to make it work for him and his body-as-art. While his art form traces some of the ‘rules’ by which he negotiates his appearance with the audience, Cavafy protects himself by manufacturing a philosophical manner of self-preservation that is sustained by a memory whose nature is erotic yet equally historical. While keeping himself at a distance from the world, the poet retains the vivid visions, stilled by his word, while instilled in his stories. What is stilled by his apparent silence is animated and further woven into a philosophical context that takes the form of a hermetic dialogue between him and the figures that populate his past. All this is done in front of a selected audience for which he craves, yet which he keeps at an arm’s length. Cavafy’s memory and his dialogue are indissoluble from what he does and makes with his body—by which he chooses to tell his stories, and through which he makes love. Love is also dual in nature: once physical, the act of love becomes a metaphorical riddle that would be (partly) solved by his readers after his death. As Ritsos observes, Cavafy’s use of light and his carefully worded games are continuously played as apt instruments for corporeal disguise and philosophical inquiry—the body hides while the mind seeks. Thus Ritsos continues: He said: “Form cannot be contrived nor imposed; it is contained in its material and is sometimes revealed in its movements outwards.” Platitudes, we said, vague words—what revelations now?13

And These ambiguities of his, intolerable; they try us; and he himself is also tried; his vagueness is obviously betrayed, his hesitations, his ignorance, his timidity, and lack of firm principles. Surely he’s trying to involve us in his own complexities. And he kept gazing somewhere beyond us14

Cavafy. “When they come alive.” Collected Poems, 66. Ritsos. “Twelve Poems for Cavafis: VII. On Form.” Selected Poems, 134. 14 Ritsos. “Twelve Poems for Cavafis: VIII. Misunderstandings.” Selected Poems, 135. 12 13

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Where would one place Cavafy’s gaze? Is the gaze his refuge? Would his refuge cover the extents of an endless pilgrimage whose ultimate power lies in the proximity of its goal? Is not the goal located in an Alexandria that continuously eludes us with its metaphysical geographic distance? Cavafy’s illusive self-protection has been identified by the ways with which he operates the mechanism of the city as an image and reference of being. His sense of being and the city are at play with his private persona and his poetry as a semi-public art form. Edmund Keeley calls this mechanism in Cavafy, “the Alexandrian mode”: What one might call the Alexandrian mode is first of all to search for the hidden metaphoric possibilities, the mysterious invisible processions, of the reality one sees in the literal city outside one’s window. If one is Cavafy, the mode is then to dramatise and expand these discovered possibilities until they carry a broad mystic significance. Cavafy’s use of the mode begins with his choosing to move from personal metaphors to communal and historical metaphors, and from there to the projection of a self-contained mythical world that serves to represent both his special view of Greek history and his image of the perennial human predicament.15

The extension into the city and its ‘political’ presence within one’s lifepilgrimage is evident in Cavafy’s well-known poem The City, where the logic of possibility—to put it this way—takes a full-fledged risk by wagering the very privacy with which individuals discover, conceal and reinterpret their immediate whereabouts. This city will always pursue you. You will walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, (...) You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there is no road.16

The Odyssean predicament is found in the end-objective which seems to offer two things: either a resignation (if not despair) that the city remains in you whether you like it or not; or a case for the city whose scope and certainty give essence and definition to the journey. In this case, the journey does not end, and is never foreclosed by the suffering and despair that we encounter in Tennyson’s aged Odysseus. In a certain sense, the latter is what Cavafy’s other celebrated poem Ithaka stands for: 15 16

Keeley, Edmund. Cavafy’s Alexandria, 6. Cavafy. “The City.” Collected Poems, 28.

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Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all.17

Ithaka legitimates Cavafy’s claim on the Odyssean plea to return to his life’s endless journey. Like Odysseus, Cavafy keeps his city in his mind and heart; he keeps it intact as if its certainty was untainted by its gradual physical and historical deterioration. Yet this is where Cavafy’s journey stops being Homeric. Unlike Odysseus, Cavafy’s journey takes an Alexandrian mode, where his individual poetic knowledge seeks to make the imagination possible through an endless journey into his “projection of a self-contained mythical world.” Such a world assumes a specific material reality that is made possible by the places of refuge where Cavafy’s search for love runs into the risks of social rejection. The bigotry by which a class-ridden moral imagination greets difference in sexual orientation upped the stakes on Cavafy’s journey—intimate by necessity, it is marked by the ambiguities, ruses, and tricks played on the tables of survival. Cavafy’s is a very distinctive sort of pilgrimage. Ritsos’s account of his person recall the chiaroscuro scenes by which Caravaggio paints the juncture between crude life and bodily memory, and which a couple of centuries later, Derek Jarman enhanced in his filmic rendering of the human condition, whose sexual intimacy is simply illuminated by candlelight. In terms of technology, Cavafy’s ‘advance’ on Caravaggio’s drama is staked on a spirit lamp: “(...) adjusted | according to the needs of the moment, according | to eternal, unconfessed desire.”18 It is in this dim-lit world that one finds the essence of Cavafy’s “self-contained mythical world”—so close, yet almost invisible. FROM ALEXANDRIA At face value, any case for the Mediterranean nature of Cavafy’s guarded intimacy seems to take us nowhere. Just because he was an Alexandrian places no automatic claim for his work to be read as Mediterranean. Yet in Cavafy’s work, the poetics of the journey is sea bound, and the sea retains the historical specificity given it by the horizon of Hellenism. To this effect Cavafy gives the Mediterranean imagination another facet, rather than the other way round. Conversely, without the Mediterranean context that embodies his Alexandrian mode, Cavafy’s work would lose its claim on the tripartite nature of his work, where philosophical, historical and erotic narratives converge to give it a unique character. 17 18

Cavafy. “Ithaka.” Collected Poems, 36. Ritsos. “Twelve Poems for Cavafis: II. The Lamp.” Selected Poems, 131-2.

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Born in Alexandria in 1863, Cavafy spent seven of his formative years in England to where his family moved after the death of his wealthy father. It was at this time that his family lived a testing time where they saw their relative wealth disappear and their social aspirations losing any match with their financial realities, mostly through the mismanagement and mishandling of their business by Cavafy’s elder brothers. However, it was also in England that Cavafy’s poetic receptivity was aroused by an education in English language and literature, which was to stay with him throughout his life. This Anglo-Saxon formation also sustained, and to many extents strengthened, Cavafy’s love of the Greek language, his mother tongue. In a way Cavafy’s Greekness was reinforced by his strong relationship with the non-Greek world—which would have been no surprise to any contemporary Alexandrian used to the array of ethnic and national backgrounds that were brought to shore by Mediterranean transmigration. There is no doubt that Cavafy’s relationship with the notions of Empire—modern and ancient; British and French; Greek and Byzantine—contributed to his Hellenic imagination on the grounds of his Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. Three years after he returned to Alexandria, nineteen-year old Cavafy had to move again, this time to Constantinople—another ancient metropolis—where he spent what he considered to have been the “most beautiful” three years of his life. Keeley describes Cavafy’s stay in Constantinople as a time of poverty and discomfort, which, however, “proved to be another significant stage in the development of Cavafy’s sensibility.”19 Commentators also argue that it was in Constantinople that the young poet had his first homosexual relationship—which, in view of his later poetry, is very significant. Other than brief visits, Cavafy never lived on mainland Greece. His Greekness emerges from Alexandria where he spent all his life and where he died in 1933. Alexandria not only gave him the sense of purpose he always lacked in his lifelong job as a special clerk in the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works, but also provided the very ground of significance for his poetic self, where he was to engage with a deep sense of history that facilitated the philosophical intent by which he would construct a moral imagination that effectively bridged over his struggle between an unconventional private self and a public image that stuck to the very embodiment of convention— an Egyptian Civil Service cast in the mould of the British Establishment. It is in this personalised array of private checks with public balances that Cavafy’s work and life partake of the same universality by which other po19

See Edmund Keeley. “Biographical note.” In Cavafy. Collected Poems, 276.

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ets command an audience that goes beyond the limits of their art form’s distinctive origin. It is also because of Alexandria that Cavafy affirms his modernity, even when it is argued that modernity bears a speciality of its own in the hands of this very particular poet. Peter Bien places the Alexandrian context at the heart of Cavafy’s special kind of modernity and its ensuing European frame of mind: Cavafy’s sophisticated modernity is all the more astonishing because it seems to issue from nowhere, or at best from some backwater. While Proust, Mann, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Conrad, Gide—all at the center of things and fortified to a greater or lesser extent with the writings of professional philosophers—were giving us their carefully elaborated artistic visions of homo Europaeus, together with implied attitudes toward time, memory, the afterlife, morality, God, and absolute truth, here was Cavafy doing the same thing as though naively, by instinct. He is of course the very opposite of a naive instinctive poet, and yet because of a fateful crossing of psychological disposition, personal circumstances both economic and social, and the fact that he was a Greek living in Alexandria, in order to evoke homo Europaeus he had no need of philosophers or acquaintance with literary trends: all he need do was write about himself—having first found a way that would remove the sentimental and maudlin from this personal indulgence.20

Cavafy’s modernity cannot be separated from his quest for the Hellenic. Beyond the myths and chauvinist dreams of the Greek nationalist, Hellenism for Cavafy embodies a poetic quest for a terrain that is not contained within the geographical space of the Mediterranean but rather in the wider context that Cavafy equates with the Mediterranean event—as a making of the imagination. The relationship between the Hellenic and the Mediterranean is essential to our understanding of Cavafy the Alexandrian. It provides us with a framework for a historical grounding that becomes a context for the self to a poet who stakes his work on a very personalised world. Cavafy’s poetics does not only provide a ground for this world but also identifies a set of goals, or teleological projects, that are balanced between an erotic privacy and public acceptability. To do this Cavafy invokes an image of historical continuity, which he personalised almost as an antidote to the crude facts of a declining society like early 20th century Alexandria. In all its aspects this continuity could not reside outside the Mediterranean context, where Hellenism realised itself as historical fact. In Cavafy’s personalisation of historic Hellenism, one could witness the intensity by which Hellenism engaged 20

Bien, Peter. Three Generations of Greek Writers. Cavafy, Kazantzakis, Ritsos, 13.

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with otherness, because it was next to its others—by way of its cultural, political, sexual and philosophical diversity—that Hellenism thrived; as it was to its others that it ultimately succumbed. To survive the trauma of historic Hellenism’s ultimate decline, Cavafy beseeched his own notion of a ‘Hellenic’ universality, which markedly formed the backbone of a personalised engagement with modernity. In its nomenclature of actuality and history, modernity provided Cavafy’s Hellenism with a contemporary face, where it became a category of a very distinctive existential possibility. This is the ground on which Cavafy works out his poetic strategy. As a ‘historical’ Greek he comes from the sea into the city, but as an Alexandrian he never goes back to the sea. On his return to Alexandria, the sea succumbs to the city. Like Ithaka, Athens and Constantinople are ever-present in Cavafy’s memory, but also ever-distant. Ithaka is a dream; ideally purified yet always worded by the existence that gives meaning to Cavafy the man. The sea mediates the city as a ‘political’ notion; the journey becomes a sea-bound end. Cavafy’s metaphorical distance between ‘city’ and ‘journey’ elects intuition as a ground for the self—where the self is equated to desire, and desire to the body. Cavafy conceals himself within the space of this distance, where he constructs an art form of detachment, as an implement of survival. This is what puzzles and fascinates Ritsos. One needs to share such bewilderment to start to appreciate and recognise the subtlety of the Cavafian ‘project’. The man works for a context that is not of this world yet solidly made of this world. Alexandria as a city is not one city but a pluralist concept. In it, the poet constructs his own abode where he takes shelter from the outer world that he loves so much. Within the narratives of his shelter, Cavafy had another journey to travel. Before the immediate whereabouts of Alexandria that he scoured during the night to seek bodily love, Cavafy sought solace in the whereabouts of his own body, where memory, historical or corporeal, found its origins. Bien explains how beyond Cavafy’s poetic masks and the historicity by which he donned them, he “was incapable of being a narrowly heroic devotee of any cause.” What was natural to him, and what therefore interested him poetically, was compromise, dilemma, self-delusion, indecision, bewilderment: the true, weak and ‘human’ reactions of the average man caught between antagonistic loyalties.21

21

Bien. Three Generations of Greek Writers, 34-5.

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One would not be wrong in attributing to this interest a form of care. It is a corporeal understanding of the weaknesses that make us human, as contrasted to the expectations of the false heroics by which chauvinist versions of nationhood claim to measure ethnic or cultural ‘greatness’. For Cavafy the greatness of the fallen heroes sung in his poetry, lies in the bodily frailty by which the moments of truth come to light, as in his poem Kaisarion: it seemed you came into my room, it seemed you stood there in front of me, looking just as you would have in conquered Alexandria, pale and weary, ideal in your grief, still hoping they might take pity on you22

By the same token, the question of sexuality runs parallel to the historical ruse by which Cavafy makes of his strategy a work of art. His art form provides a context for a plural morality that is attentive to the details that make us human. Beyond the heroic parabola of Hellenic history, his Hellene is as human as the wretchedness of poverty beyond which he seeks the absolute beauty of youth down the dark alleyways of Alexandria. In this axiomatic recovery of beauty from within social misery, Cavafy finds immense comfort on the singularity that would still preserve Kaisarion even when grieved with historical humiliation. It seems that beyond history, the poet still endears to the pagan origins of human understanding—in obligation to the relationship between what makes the historical self and what inhabits it as a sexual self. This kind of care for what is ultimately the frail condition of the body recalls Foucault’s discussion of how the ancient Romans placed the care for the body at the centre of their perception of the environment. Between the individual and his environs, one imagined a whole web of interferences such that a certain disposition, a certain event, a certain change in things would induce morbid effects in the body. Conversely, a certain weak constitution of the body would be favourably or unfavourably affected by such and such a circumstance. Hence there was a constant and detailed problematization of the environment, a differential valuation of this environment with regard to the body and a positing of the body as a fragile entity in relation to its surroundings.23

22 23

Cavafy. “Kaisarion.” Collected Poems, 82-83. Foucault, Michel. The Care of The Self, The History of Sexuality Vol III, 101.

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It is important that these relationships between body and care are kept central when one reads Cavafy’s work. Whether it deals with the body as its idea or whether the image of the body relates to encounters with real individuals, Cavafy’s work would become illegible without an attention to this kind of poetic specificity. The attention to fragility and how it makes us human allows the poet to link the art form with the person. This complete bond between the sexual and historical body is central to his poetic strategy and this is where Cavafy’s persona meets the world. That is why he insists on absolute control over the publication and dissemination of his work.24 In the Cavafian project this takes the specific contexts of history and body, where he re-originates Hellenism as a personal journey within the meanings and grammars of a corporeal world. In his travels he longs for a sexualised geography where intimacy is recognised in its universality. Just as the Mediterranean becomes a universe where diversity inhabits and expresses itself in like manner, Cavafy’s sexualised ground conveys diversity outside the conventions of historicized time or socialised space. The poet keeps his intimate life away from the public eye through the usage of historical poetry—a genre that is ultimately public. More than a contradiction, this appears like a philosopher’s aporia where plausible lines of argument are placed side by side to allow a link beyond any logical possibility. Because it is implicitly illogical, an aporia allows access to a ground of reasoning that is often laden with ruses—as evident in Ritsos’s frustrated admiration of Cavafy. To this effect, Cavafy’s lineage between history (Hellenism) and body (sexual love) cannot make sense without such philosophical allowances. In this way, when the sexual and historical self are seen as mutual parts of one compatible mode of arguing, one is allowed to cross out the conventional horizons of history. History is made flesh and the biographical journey of the body gains a higher degree of legitimacy above the factuality of its behaviour and presence. The aesthetic greatness of Cavafy’s work is located in the corporeal autonomy it gains. Away from his cautious hands, his poetic reconstruction of the world gains immortality, and lives beyond its origin. The origin of immortality is a longing, which “like the beautiful bodies of those who died before growing old”, surpasses the distractions of historical fact.25 24 For a detailed account of Cavafy’s methods of dissemination see Liddell. Cavafy. A critical biography. For a discussion of his methods of publication and the choices he made on his erotic poetry see Keeley’s “The ‘New’ Poems of Cavafy.” In Keeley, E and Bien, P. Modern Greek Writers. 25 See Cavafy. “Longings.” Collected Poems, 16.

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BESIDES MODERNITY The power of longing provides Cavafy with an immortal extent over which the strategy of bodily comprehension—carnal power—secures its success in revitalising the psyche and its definition (and appropriation) of truth. Ultimately both philosophy and history are received and perceived by the body, which becomes the context for any idealised or philosophised memory. In Cavafy’s work, memory provides us with a poetic universe that overrides any kind of formalised truth. Cavafy’s poetic memory immortalizes what is lost once the body is entombed in the ornate facts of history. In his poem Tomb of Evrion he defines life carnally. Life becomes the project of the body as the appropriation and redefinition of truth. This truth would never die once the memory of the body leaves the tomb (if that was at all possible). But how would one retain Evrion’s body beyond his philosophical and historical legacy? How would his truth retain a modicum of logical reality, without the form that was lost? (...) we’ve lost what was really precious: his form— like a vision of Apollo.26

This corporeal mechanism also redefines time, and refashions it out of its chronological continuum. In this way Cavafy refashions the journey and alters it by putting the actualised world before its potential. He defers any closing of the historical act, keeping everything suspended, and leaving us eternally expectant. This is a body that gazes and it is in turn gazed over forever. While looking at a half-gray opal I remembered two lovely gray eyes; it must be twenty years ago I saw them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27

This may throw some light on the wider, ‘didactic’ context of the body, as that vehicle where truth and reality meet on a terrain where beauty and fact come together and recognise the truth of the human condition— even when this could mean squalor and poverty. This implies an ethical structure that cannot be overseen as some fancy for casual sex. There is nothing casual in Cavafy. His homosexuality is never a noncommittal practice. Cavafy’s sexuality may appear predatory and obsessive to the prejudiced, but deep down it emerges as a conscious act committed to a wider 26 27

Cavafy. “Tomb of Evrion.” Collected Poems, 50. Cavafy. “Gray.” Collected Poems, 75.

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morality—a way of living that is responsible for itself, cautious even when it is at its heights of romantic fancy. This takes me to Keeley’s discussion of Cavafy’s poem Growing in Spirit, which highlights Cavafy’s poetic responsibility towards the body. Keeley comments on Cavafy’s “insistence on the virtue of pleasure” and argues for its redefined avant-gardism, contrary to what commentators in the seventies may have made of Cavafy’s avant-gardism. Keeley argues that Cavafy’s modernity will be irrelevant to the New Left, even when he may well be declared its prophet by means of the appeal it enjoyed with younger generations in the United States and Greece. (...) it would be a mistake to see Cavafy as a prophet of the extreme New Left, since he tells us that some laws must be honoured and that only half the house must be pulled down. It is the poet’s overt—not to say didactic—insistence on the virtue of pleasure that is the most substantial avant-garde element in the poem and that also relates it to a number of the best-known poems in the canon, this being perhaps the earliest expression of the “Ithaca” theme made famous by the later poem of that name.28

In distancing himself from modernity’s formulaic distribution of political thought, Keeley proposes a Cavafian redefinition of Modernity. This may hold even more relevance in the 21st century, where the relationship between Modernity and postmodernity continuously begs definition. If we take Keeley’s discussion a step further into the realms of the persona that he wants to keep for Cavafy (to keep him protected from the claws of the pressure group or the trendy bandwagon) Keeley presents us with a Cavafy whose modernity is couched within a vision of a world inclined towards an ethical responsibility that is kept open-ended. Cavafy’s erotic poems are also uniquely avant-garde for work written so early in this century. In his quest to tell the truth about life as he really experienced it, he became the first poet since Whitman to make homosexual love a central subject of his exploration, and his open treatment of the subject, sometimes so particular as to seem self-indulgent, makes Whitman’s more ambiguous treatment appear [as] a kind of evasion. Cavafy’s eroticism becomes most illuminating when the focus of his concern is not so much an honest depiction of particular encounters or affairs as it is an honest dramatisation of those vital and complex tensions that are manifest to some degree in all erotic experience. The best of the new erotic poems concentrate on the inescapable tension between illusion and reality, or imagination and actuality, in the game of 28

Keeley. “The ‘New’ Poems of Cavafy.” 132-133.

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love. At moments illusion is seen as a palliative for the loss of a reality that is seen to be very much worth achieving. At other moments, the reality of love seems to reside not so much in palpable experience as in images that the mind is stimulated to construct by an erotic impulse.29

This gives a sense of completeness to the erotic grammars of Cavafy’s poetry. The erotic endows the ethical grounds on whose decision individuality reconstructs the world as a universe of particulars. The erotic is a mechanism by which specific individual spaces are realised and inhabited. In this way Cavafy’s strategy keeps the didactic and the virtuous within the reachable realms of the everyday feelings and decisions that would engage the body. To “grow virtually in wisdom” one is urged to transcend—rather than transgress—both law and custom. Thus: He who hopes to grow in spirit will have to transcend obedience and respect.30

29 30

Keeley. “The ‘New’ Poems of Cavafy.” 133-134. Cavafy. “Growing in Spirit.” Collected Poems, 188.

3 PRIVATE SHORES Under the all-subjugating identity principle, whatever does not enter into identity, whatever eludes rational planning in the realm of means, turns into frightening retribution for the calamity which identity brought on the nonidentical. There is hardly another way to interpret history philosophically without enchanting it into an idea.1 — Theodor W Adorno

In his poem La Storia II (History) Eugenio Montale looks at history from below. He tries not to see it as a crushing leveller (devastante ruspa), but seeks in it those passages, crypts and burrows, and hideouts where one could survive.2 This allows the poet to steer consciously between an art that is forcefed with political engagement and an art that remains numb and indifferent to the human condition. This reading of history also allows Montale a way out, an exit, from the identitarian principle that Adorno sees as subjugating any notion of history and which leaves no other way for philosophy but to enchant it into an idea. Perhaps because he was mindful of this quandary, Montale refuses to yield to any form of polarity that would have helped, changed or bettered history. Not unlike Adorno, Montale consciously distances himself from a predetermined—identitarian—view of art or history, though he knows that art and history are far from safe from such predetermination. Predetermined views could only encroach poetry’s self-imposed illusions of unity. He is also sceptical over the certainties by which modernists have framed their daring narratives. He threads carefully through the minefields of modernity by avoiding the kind of ideological allegiances by which Modernism set boundaries to thought. His philosophy also excludes the mechanistic dualities that split the self between an external and internal world, or even between a subjective and objective view of the world. Theodor W. Adorno. Negative Dialectics, 320. Montale, Eugenio. “La storia II.” [History] Satura. In Tutte le poesie [Complete Poems], 324. 1

2

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In his poetry Montale reserves the right to be loyal to what he deems as art’s primary object: the pragmatic condition of the self, by which he claims back the grounds of truth and meaning. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Montale sees no rift between narratives and metanarratives. This is how his definition of history restores the recognition of art’s speciality. In art he sees no compelling force to consume history as if art must be forced to mediate our day-to-day events. In Montale’s poetic imagination history occurs because human beings want it to occur. In history—that is, in what humans do—we find burrows that offer protection through the leads and avenues that provide us with means of survival. Amongst other, history helps us survive from its own mishaps. Montale lived through the tyranny and genocide of two world wars. He knows that history is neither benign nor pre-determined. Yet he also knows that human beings live together and encounter each other through their virtues as well as their mistakes, thus making of history their only shelter. “LIVING IN A BELL-JAR” In an imaginary interview, which he titles Intenzioni (Intentions) Montale feels akin to living in a bell-jar. There is a sense of retreat from a world that remains hostile notwithstanding the lessons it was meant to learn from its own mistakes. Yet while protected—or somehow trapped in such a state— Montale remains close to a hair-line from what he calls the “quid definitivo”, the definitive quid, the ultimate what. I wanted my word to hold faster than that of other poets I knew. But holding faster to what? I felt as if I was living in a bell-jar and yet I felt close to something essential. A subtle veil, just a hair-line detached me from the ultimate what [dal quid definitivo].3

Montale’s detachment entertains the paradox of an inescapable quiddity that gives him the sense of feeling both removed from—and yet entirely absorbed by—the world. This leaves one feeling suspended between being the furthest, and yet at the same time the closest, to the whatness by which one lives (and defines) reality. As he stands in this inescapable relationship between his private space and what history seems to throw at him (and the rest of humanity), Montale is constantly aware that at some point this subtle balance between proximity and distance would collapse and dis3 Montale, Eugenio. “Intenzioni (Intervista Immaginaria)[1946].” [Intentions (An imaginary interview)]. In Il Secondo Mestiere. Arte, musica, società [A second profession. Art, music and society], 1480.

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appear into “an explosion; the end of the deceit of the world as representation.”4 Somehow, Montale wishes this explosion to happen—maybe sooner rather than later—as this will do away with the benign and prescribed illusions of history. Yet he also knows that somehow this is a limit that one could never reach. By this admission he works against the grain and considers his poetry to be a dissection of representational deceit. I hasten to add that Montale does not regard the act of representation as being deceitful in itself. Rather, the deceit comes from the world, as it becomes representation. While representation and the world are neither deceitful nor benign in themselves, the world as representation deceives us the more history becomes an instrument of certainty—as in the case of religion or ideology. The poet’s role is to unravel this instrumental turn. The poet must free representation from the quandary into which we fall when we try to cope with the chasm that opens between a world represented by forms of certainty and the poetic construction of reality that seeks to deny such certainties. To be fully appreciated in its aesthetic implications, the intention behind the poetic unravelling of representation must be given further context in terms of Montale’s anxiety over a specific essence, in the form of that ultimate what, which seems to be both a facilitator as well as an inhibitor of the Truth. Where does one find this ultimate essence, and more so the poet’s ultimate whatness? Scholastic philosophers would have claimed that whatness is that which helps us identify and clarify the essence of our actions and intentionality. This is important for the Medieval philosopher, not simply because the world is re-presented through an identification of its presumed essence, but because any claim to the world must partake of a fuller, more comprehensive claim to truth. In this context truth remains distinct from those partial and relative acts that remain in their immediate present. This implies that representation cannot be distanced from a sense of totality. Without identifying the whatness of things, human acts remain partial reconstructions of the essence of reality, and therefore they risk becoming deceitful acts. For this reason, in De Ente et Essentia (On Being and Essence) Thomas Aquinas argues that “what composes composite substances is material and its form (...), and neither of these by itself can be the thing’s essence.”5 In this case, the notion of essence must not be understood as 4 5

Montale. “Intenzioni (Intervista Immaginaria),” 1480. Aquinas, Thomas. “De Ente et Essentia.” In Selected Philosophical Writings, 93.

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something that is distanced from our thoughts and actions, but remains essentially bound to their quiddity, their whatness. For the Scholastic thinker, partial representations are untruthful because they slip away from the very reason for which they essentially are. Inasmuch as it may appear arcane, this kind of reasoning retains crucial meaning to those who, like Montale, remain intent on not falling foul of a relative and partial world. This is especially the case when even while feeling trapped in a bell-jar, one insists on looking out to a world with which one seeks full participation. To reflect on one’s daily life from a bell-jar one could ‘see’ the world as representation, knowing that this is but a partial awareness of what we are; and thereby knowing that this will have to be actualized at some point in the future when things move beyond their state of being relative constructs. Only by recognizing the possibility of such a paradox could one cope with the quandary of truth and representation as being necessary to each other—even when one must remember that the Scholastics would insist on the primacy of the former over the latter. Aquinas argues that “a thing isn’t known by its material, and we determine its species or genus not by its material but by the way that material is actualized.”6 This is where the weight of the ultimate what retains its hold on Montale. For something to gain actuality it must come to terms with its truth through its representation, and clearly runs the risk of the forms of deceit that it could bring. As a poet, Montale is quite aware of the weight of the whatness of things; which also means that he remains alert to how we could survive a way of living that only reveals itself in its limited condition, and where what’s left is the privilege to look through a bell-jar. Thus the poet recoils in his bell-jar. Sometimes he seeks a reason by which he could dismantle and then reconstruct the whatness of things, so as to live with the dilemma of their eventual incompleteness. In this contemplation of form one endeavours to understand how things occur, how they come about. But this contemplation is often split between the mindset of the philosopher and that of the poet’s. While the philosopher seeks form as the essence by which he or she could explain the world, the poet is happier with form as equivalent to essence; an equivalence by which art re-presents the world aesthetically. The philosopher argues that “essence involves both material and form. But it doesn’t simply express a relationship between material and its form or something supervening on both, because this would be incidental and

6

Aquinas “De Ente et Essentia”, 93.

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extraneous to the thing and not identify it to the mind, as essence must.”7 The poet, on the other hand, is after the ultimate what that carries the responsibility of knowledge—more as gnosis than episteme—and distances it from what is assumed as empirical by scientistic researchers. Likewise the poet wants to distance knowledge from the logically exclusive realms of philosophical grammarians. This recalls Croce’s critique of exclusive logic and epistemological simplicity.8 In Montale’s remit, what is known is aesthetically construed as being formal in the first place. It is then that this aesthetically construed form reveals its essential being by means of the necessary autonomy by which a being (qua being) comes to know—that is, becomes a knowing being. Because of the poetic parameters by which this knowledge is carried, any relationship between form and essence is distanced from the logic of the philosophical grammarian or the factuality of the scientistic researcher. For this to happen within an aesthetic approach towards truth, relations like grammar, polity and fact need to emerge from actualization and must not limit truth with aprioristic conditions, and thereby reasoned as given. This is where the poet comes to terms with being in a bell-jar as a vehicle that gives him the ability to distinguish, and therefore partake of the power of distinction. By distinction one does not mean an exclusivist realm reserved for the poet. Rather, distinctions allow us to understand the world without excluding it through scientistic or grammatical essentialism. This is where Montale the poet rebels against the preclusive mechanisms of unicity, duality and a presumed diversity, as assumed by a philosopher or scientist who seems to be only after an essentialized view of the world.

CUTTLEFISH BONES And yet, Montale’s poetic imagination leaves no scope for escape. Neither does it promise any form of ‘resolution’. This is even the case when he reserves the right—as a poet—to a view of the world without the certainties of empirie or logic. As he puts it, “a poet should not renounce life. It is life that will escape him.”9 Montale suspends any mediated meaning and transposes the claim for authenticity into the decency of poetic form, by which he radicalizes the poetic ground as a legitimate and autonomous fact. He

Aquinas “De Ente et Essentia”, 93. See Croce, Benedetto. Breviario di Estetica. Aesthetica in Nuce [Handbook of Aesthetics. Aesthetics in a nutshell], 150ff. 9 Montale. “Intenzioni (Intervista Immaginaria),” 1476. 7

8

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achieves this by avoiding any foreclosure of history even when adopting a hermetic form for his poetry. Montale’s book of poetry Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) (written between 1920-1927) emblematises the memorial reliquaries of the self where the function of poetry never accepts to be contingent in appearing to avoid the temptation of preponderant universality. By a fiercely acquired and equally defended autonomy, this hermetic form of poetry gains solace in the self, whose image gives form to an intimate articulation of history as personalised memory. A potent narrative in this work is the sea—the thalassa—that binds us all to an immanent-yet-moving continuity. By dint of Ossi di seppia’s thalassic character Montale claims his poetic right beyond everything else. In his intimations with the whatness of life, the poet abdicates from any enforced definition of human meaning or destiny. This abdication is not a desertion of the poet’s duty but a claim for the poetic right to formal space. Even when he would make less reference to the sea in his later poetic collections, Montale would never relinquish the freedom he acquired from what he sees as the Mediterranean’s paternal severity and how it ransomed even the “suffering of pebbles” by rejoicing in a kind of frozen bound expressed as an immobility of finitude (l’immobilità dei finiti).10 Montale’s sense for freedom is marked by rigour; a rigour that he perceives in the authority of the sea, as an enigmatic yet empowering presence. Inversely this rigour frees the poet from any descriptive consumption of meaning. What is justified in the somewhat lost meaning of the act of a frozen bound, a freezing of finitude, suggests the end-objective of what is boundless in the sense of the sea. This gives shape to the limits set by a language that equates limit with aporia. The limit is an aporia because it suggests other than a limitation, by almost saying: here are the extents to which one could go within the sea’s frozen bound. Yet at the same time this suggests that at some point the freeze ends because the sense of immanence by which the sea becomes boundless, cannot remain frozen. So in giving, the sea takes away. But as in the cyclic assumptions of Judeo-Christian thought, what takes away is also a giver of something other than the limit. One cannot miss this sense of generosity in a sea that acts as a referent to a sense of benevolence that is at the same time terrifying in both appearance and presence. 10 Montale, “Mediterraneo (3).” Ossi di Seppia [Cuttlefish bones]. Tutte le poesie, 55. [Note: Although the poet does not enumerate Mediterraneo’s nine poems, I am enumerating them according to the sequential order they appear for better reference.]

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Nonetheless, to define the Mediterranean through this sense of aporia is by no means a self-engendered form of edification. Rather it is contained by its own definition. Because it is aporetic, and therefore characterized by a propensity to paradox and inconclusiveness, this form of definition remains in continuous move between a conscious awareness of limitless movement and a sense of duration where the apparently immutable actually signifies continuity. In this context, any argument for the whatness of reality must be sustained by a non-identitarian relationship, where the poetic form avoids and defies the deceit of the world as representation. Somehow this suggests a similar parameter by which Bergson, in his Matière et Mémoire, defines matter as un ensemble d’images that is “an existence situated mid-way between the ‘thing’ and ‘representation’.”11 Bergson is disinclined to have to choose between Berkeley’s perceived representation and Descartes’s mathematized thing.12 Similarly Montale does not accept a fixed structure that distinguishes between what is abstracted and what is factualized. In his claim for an aesthetic space that would dispense with such structures, Montale asks for more time to pay respect to his reliquaries. These are figured in the image of cuttlefish bones. Far from a way of laying life to rest in a reliquarium, Montale assumes a deeper responsibility for life’s aporia by poetically expressing his disposition towards fact as an act—as facticity. In this way he presents his readers with something that is neither a mere thing nor an abstract concept. Beyond the thingabstraction dualism, Montale’s sensitivity to life’s inevitable what, inclines him towards seeing what is around him as acts of being facts. This does not only include the world of things as referents of his observation, but also his art. As an act-of-being-fact his poetry freely exchanges roles and moves between individual, memorial, quotidian, and historical spheres where rather than a hierarchy, each quality attains equal measure on a horizon that is limitless yet enduring. Montale’s reliquary is figured by the most immanent of forms: the cuttlefish bone. The cuttlefish bone is specific in form, yet it seems infinite in terms of what it represents. It is infinite because the shape of a cuttlefish bone is peculiarly dissimilar from the shape that the fish takes in the flesh. While other skeletal structures suggest lost bodies, a cuttlefish-bone is ambiguous. It holds no morphological reference to the mollusc that once held life and movement. In this narrative there is room for an analogy by which the poetic word gives figure to a reliquary that hardly hints at the weight of 11 12

Bergson, Henri. Matière et Mémoire [Matter and Memory], 1. Ibid. 2-3.

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a semi-descript presence. A cuttlefish-bone is entirely hermetic in outline and form, yet it refers to being in its entirety. It is hidden in terms of influence and what it was before it became a skeletal suggestion. Yet the suggestion is very ambiguous. Ossi di Seppia’s thalassic order could not be other than hermetic poetry in its entirety. The hidden order of the sea, made manifest by its objects and what it leaves behind, figures exactly what hermetism offers both in terms of its form, or style, and more so in terms of how the notion of a hidden language that is told but not necessarily said, becomes poetry. This is fully realised in Montale’s second poetic collection Le Occasioni (Occasions, 19281939). By the time he published Le Occasioni, Montale was widely travelled and enjoyed a fuller acquaintance with the world of individuals, persons and the dynamic of diverse personalities. Yet even then he felt that the sensation of being in a bell-jar continued to constrain his sense of personal duty and his general attitude towards the world. This, he says, urged him to confront the grievous belligerence of a feudal mayoralty (what he called “i lanzi di podesteria feudale”) that emerges from a fascist political structure that threatened his very livelihood by dint of how it strangled the intimate spaces of civil society.13 While we are used to read about poets and artists who resisted fascism by leading their struggle from outside, as partisans or as political émigrés, Montale’s struggle with fascism came from living within the civil structure which Italian fascism reduced to a feudal system, where the personal sphere was oppressed by being constantly undermined by forms of political patronage that gradually handicapped the foundation of society—an impairment that continues to be felt in the Italian Republic today. In this respect it is easy to understand how Montale was never in any mood for “pure lyricism” in the sense used by some of his contemporaries. Such lyricism he would denounce as mere “suggestive sonority.” Instead, Montale’s Le Occasioni confronts its audience with a new mode, where as he put it, the reader is immersed in media res—in total absorption—by an intentionality set at the heart of objective ends. Given that in art there is a balance between what is within and what stays outside, between the [moment of] occasion [occasione] and the work-as-object [l’opera-oggetto], it was necessary to express the object and say nothing about any drawn-occasion [occasione-spinta].14

The moment thrown in by an occasion is a moment where Montale’s poetry turns what happens (as mere occurrence) into a work-as-object, (un’ 13 14

Montale. “Intenzioni (Intervista Immaginaria),” 1481. Ibid. 1481-2.

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opera-oggetto). The poet has a choice between (a) regarding what happens as an object of his work, of his poetry, and (b) an occasion that is drawn across what happens and which takes away from the moment those meanings the poet is intent on capturing. The poet must invariably reject the limitations of a merely drawn occasion. Montale had no choice but to seek the moment of occasion and live it to the full, even when the belligerent mayoralty that held him to ransom within its distorted history severely limited his movement and constantly oppressed his freedom. In this personal strategy the poet claims back the grounds of form. He makes no compromise with the politics of totality. In forfeiting a comfortable career in exchange for a limited, privatized freedom—a freedom constrained by an undermined private sphere that remains in the ‘gift’ of a fascist regime— Montale claimed one thing that fascism could never compromise or wield any control upon: an art form whose sharpest weapon was the realization of form and essence played on the legitimacy which he gained by the thalassic grammars of Ossi di Seppia. Giacomo Debenedetti highlights Montale’s view that poetic inquiry should avoid general truth so that it can be redirected towards a ‘punctual’ truth. The poet’s truth would be that of the “poet-as-subject” (poeta-soggetto) who must never disown the truth of the “empirical human-as-subject” (uomo-soggetto empirico). Debenedetti draws specific attention to this distinction as follows: The poet-as-subject is someone who insofar as he is subjective, finds words and images that can communicate universally with all human beings. They could not only communicate what he finds on his own and for his own personal conjectures; [but at the same time] they can express everything. The empirical human-as-subject is someone with a personal destiny, [which is] untranslatable: someone who at best could find what words are made for him; that are valid only for him in that they express his own private sphere; and insofar as this belongs solely to him it remains jealously private.15

Debenedetti dwells on what he sees as the hermetic tools by which Montale experiments with an incommunicable and unique form of poetic signification. This presents an underlying “paradox of communicating an incommunicable [truth] in a direct, intuitive and immediate manner”— indeed a story that one could tell but which is difficult to say. But Debenedetti also hastens to add that unlike Mallarmé’s, Montale’s hermetism is Debenedetti, Giacomo. Poesia italiana del Novecento [Twentieth Century Italian poetry], 38. 15

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not ontological. While upholding a metaphysical quality “it makes allusion to that entity we call our destiny which is like a motive force.” This is not far from the whatness by which Montale’s poetry “configures our concrete, empirical and quotidian human adventure.”16 To elaborate on Debenedetti’s distinction between Mallarmé’s ontological metaphysics and Montale’s sense of everydayness (summed up in the empirical human-as-subject), one could qualify the idea of ‘the unique’ as ‘singular’. This would also imply that the empirical character of ‘direct meaning’ is factual but never positivist. A distinction between the factual and the positivist is an important qualifier in terms of how Montale threads between essentialism and scientism. Montale is a poet who is never lured by quickly fixed forms of mediation—be they essentialist, scientistic, or even historicist. He equally refuses the idealism of a preclusive unicité where the immediacy of perception is mistaken for a cheap form of abstraction that abdicates from the realities of the empirical human-as-subject. This is why Debenedetti does not privilege the poet-as-subject over the human-assubject. This leaves us with a poet whose work speaks for itself, especially when it becomes intrigued by the relationship between form, whatness and truth. This is what Debenedetti may have meant when he says that Montale’s hermetism could be seen as something derived from a double usage of words, employed to signify what they are meant to conclude, while concealing what separates and puts the poet on a level that seems unique and difficult to repeat and follow (unico e irrepetibile).17 There is another issue brought up by Debenedetti that suggests a further aspect of Montale’s work, and by which we might understand better where his work comes from. Commenting on a sonnet by Mallarmé, Debenedetti suggests that “to support the [idea] of an isolated rhythm in each verse one needs the heavy, grave and hieratic gestures of an unknown liturgy.”18 It could be said that unlike Mallarmé’s, Montale’s liturgy is necessary in terms of what it knows and also in terms of how it brings up the idea of a multiplicity of the senses. This emerges from how Montale’s work operates as a set of intentional gestures that read knowledge as a form of action. Montale’s liturgies emerge as actions that know. These actions carry knowledge because of their intimate relationship with reality as it is captured in poetic form. This also happens through the poet’s own situatedness, to borDebenedetti. Poesia italiana del Novecento, 39. Ibid. 38. 18 Ibid. 24 (my emphasis). 16 17

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row a term from Merleau-Ponty.19 In Montale’s poetic situatedness one finds how his lived body takes a route that is positioned between the world and the poetic self. This is situated in what he calls the “courtyards” that the youth explore as if it were a world; courtyards that are then superseded by a mature engagement with the immensity of the Mediterranean.20 That is why his poetic origins become reliquaries of a greater knowledge; and this is where his liturgy is an expression of a thalassic logos that rejects any confessional or ideological explanation of the self and the world. If one takes the meaning of liturgy in its original sense of leitourgía as a service done both in public and for the public, Montale’s liturgies are no less public, as they remain expressly secular; which also means that they pertain to the personal and formal spheres of his poetic polity. In their known form Montale’s liturgies gain enough universal currency to retain their public narratives, even when the work resides in the private sphere. In their personal origin, their public identity bears witness to their individual value and poetic specificity. This is where the thalassic narrative claimed in Ossi di seppia comes to its fullest meaning and provides a foundation for what followed in Montale’s other works—especially works such as the poems grouped under Madrigali Privati (Private Madrigals) published in the collection La Bufera e Altro (The Blizzard and Other) (written between 1940-1954). In Madrigali Privati the poet suggests that “a beam of sunlight” could once more become incarnate (…) if at the feet of Lucretia’s statue (one night she moved her eyelids) you let your face come to mine.21

In this poetic moment we find a tessellation of situations, contexts and projections. First we have the poet’s jealously held private intimations, known only to himself and to those affected by his life and thoughts. Then there is the context of the sea’s narrative expanse, where the law of the Mediterranean entertains the logic of aporia, a situation that often leads to dead ends but which could never be reversed unless one embraces the mysteries of paradox—as Odysseus, Paul and Byron would constantly attest. Then there are the projections of one’s own situated life, where history not only conceals the future but also the interpretation of the present and the See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, 252ff. Montale. “Fine dell’infanzia” [The End of Childhood] Ossi di Seppia. Tutte le poesie, 69. 21 Montale. “Madrigali privati (1).” [Private madrigals]. La Bufera e Altro [The Blizzard and Other]. Tutte le poesie, 263. 19 20

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past. In Montale’s work these interpretations are given in poetic form as figures on a horizon that rejects the immediacy of political convenience. As this rejection becomes a way of life, the private sphere preserves the factual presence of the human-as-subject. At the same time the Mediterranean’s thalassic law gives the poet-as-subject the power to sustain a universal intimacy by whose light Lucretia’s violent sacrifice is turned into an act of love. In this complex mosaic, Montale’s vindication of the private sphere becomes universal. In its universality the private sphere empowers the reader to recite those private madrigals by which we become novices in the Mediterranean order of things. Within this sea’s massive expanse the victim of history returns to be declared victorious over the oppressor who once restricted his freedom to engage in his public liturgies. Thus as in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, one resumes the journey and emerges anew: Once more upon the waters! yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar! Swift be their guidance, wheresoe’er it lead! Though the strained mast should quiver as a reed, And the rent canvass fluttering strew the gale, Still must I on; for I am as a weed, Flung from the rock on Ocean’s foam, to sail Where’er the surge may sweep, the tempest’s breath prevail.22

MEDITERRANEAN LITURGY As it revisits facts by revealing their essence through new sounds and meanings, poetry ebbs and flows over the presence of the personal occasions by which Montale grabs the world and hides it. In the markedly thalassic beginnings of Ossi di Seppia, and more specifically in his poems under the general heading Mediterraneo, Montale’s work emerges as a distinct form of secular transcendence that willingly takes a form of indirectness through the hidden narratives of hermetic poetry. Throughout Ossi di Seppia the poet meets the sea in its youthful liturgy and nurtures himself with a mood of uncertainty. This works symbiotically with the uncertain drift of an ebb without flow, which in his poem Fine dell’Infanzia (The end of childhood) is depicted by the “marked courtyard” (un segnato cortile) that is explored as if it Byron, George. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III: II. In The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, 185. 22

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were the world.23 The sea holds the dream in those courtyards-made-worlds of the young; but ultimately, maturity opens the walled boundaries of youth and acquires a taste for doubt and vulnerability. In a thriving and voracious sea that bears “a hesitant air of trembling tamarisks” one finds that “short years will fly like days.”24 Unlike the North Sea’s strong tides, which almost signify a daily retirement into the nowhere of the horizon, the sea of the Latins, Greeks and Semites conceals its history in the constancy of time, where tides remain weak and are far less visible. This quasi-absence of a Mediterranean tide poetically represents a kind of mercy, a robust presence, and a perennial narrative. Any hope to know from the safety of the shore is overtaken by the daunting prospect of having to know by immersion—short of a baptismal drowning. The Mediterranean is hermeneutic by deed and nature. It hides its meaning and requires that you engage with it as if one had to constantly interpret what lies in its deep briny waters. To interpret what is hidden, what remains hermetic by aesthetic choice, also gives way to a hermetic fancy that seeks legitimation in acts of flirtation with the sweet birthplace of Aphrodite and its indulgent secrets. But this youthful curiosity is tempered with danger, especially when the terrifying truths of Poseidon’s expanse show no mercy in their incumbent demands on the journeys of those who seek to know. This known liturgy has no reason for protestation. Its intimacy is orthodox and baptismal while the mysteries of the gods demand loyalty to the totality of its presence. Some knowledge of the Mediterranean’s seabed demands that one visits its depth in order to become worthy of its laws. Again this recalls Childe Harold’s play between terror and the enamoured flirtations with the moody sea: Pass we the long unvarying course, the track Oft trod, that never leaves a trace behind; Pass we the calm—the gale—the change—the tack, And each well known caprice of wave and wind;25

Not unlike Byron, Montale is petrified in the presence of the “solemn censures” by which the voice from the briny depth calls him to grow up and face the real world. The poet comes of age and “like then”—as in his Montale. “Fine dell’infanzia.” Tutte le poesie, 69. Ibid. 25 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II: XXVIII.

23 24

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youth—he is still stunned by the Mediterranean’s presence. He is no more worthy of the “solemn censures” of the sea’s “breath” as it reveals that the tiny aspirations of one’s heart are nothing but a share in its “risky law: wide and diverse, yet altogether fixed.”26 Once he comes of age, the poet’s respect for this vast yet well-defined law carries the same weight of his faith in those “passages, crypts, burrows and hideouts.” This is a faith (and fate) left to us by history, almost as if these were the few remaining signs of hope and survival. Montale’s youthful flirtation with the lyricism of life matures into a cautious and measured re-ordering of priorities. In the distance of poetic growth, a new kind of mediation becomes significant. This becomes more significant than a mechanical reply to “What does it really mean?” In Montale’s poetry mediation cannot be a mere bridge between what he knows as a person and what he means as a poet. That would defy his entire poetic project and reduce it to a naturalistic form of description. In his poetic project we find a clear move against the relational deceit of a world that has become a thing; that has been reified into representation. In response to this assault on the imagination, Montale invests in poetic mediation with a more complex role, where the task is not to bridge one end with another; but where poetry acts more like Lucretia’s moving eyelids. Montale’s metaphors of suffered pebbles and a frozen bound gain new significance, where the heart reanimates itself and comes to resemble the “hesitant air of trembling tamarisks.” In this poetic imagination, what is immanent—what has interiority—is inseparable from what we can transcend beyond the immediacy of the here and now. “Immanence and transcendence” Montale argues, “are inseparable.” However, by this he does not mean that interiority and the act of transcendence give meaning to each other. He rejects what he sees as modern historicism’s attempt “to create a state of mind out of a perennial mediation between the two terms.” Instead, he puts a wager on choosing “to live the very contradiction without any escapes”, but also without relishing the contradiction too much.27 Montale has no time for simplistic dualism: “nowadays everything is internal and everything is external” and there seems to be no necessity “for the so-called world to become our representation.” His conclusion is no less poignant: “We live an altered sense of time and space.”28 In this respect, immanence and transcendence could only remain Montale. “Mediterraneo (2).” Ossi di Seppia. Tutte le poesie, 53. Montale. “Intenzioni (Intervista Immaginaria),” 1479. 28 Ibid. 1482. 26 27

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inseparable by an act of paradox, which Montale refuses to reconcile through mediation. This amounts to a rejection of any pretence that one form of action would simply counteract another and in turn beg for reconciliation. Montale questions the kind of representation that excludes the occasion by which we can grasp the world as both immanent and transcendent and take responsibility for the paradox that ensues. He seems to be arguing that there could be no real dialectic that could afford to work on altered notions of space and time. This is because there is no such thing as a positive pattern of contraries. In effect the poet is challenging a naïvely positive concept of dialectics that keeps seeking a synthesis. This would only convince those who assume that a dialectical relation is a simplistic formula of contraries and that such a formula is possible or even historically inevitable. (This also goes to explain Montale’s critique of modern historicism). Montale’s position stands firmly on the choices that suggest a similar sort of inseparability: that between aesthetics and ethics. To some extent, this verges on the stoic. Stoics seek an ethical judgement founded on full responsibility that lives up to a self-imposed dénouement. Yet such dénouement never tempts us into false asceticism. False pretences of ascetism will admit a naïve concept of alterity and a hope to resolve simplistic dialectical patterns. This will amount to forced juxtapositions that become redundant when confronted by the poet’s recognition of a whatness that is empowered by situations (and occasions) that are neither immediate nor given to the pretence of universalized mediation. In Mediterraneo Montale presents us with nine poems that may be initially read as nine lessons in stoicism. If Montale holds onto his notion of indivisibility between immanence and transcendence he could do so because in his poetry, aesthetics and ethics remain inseparable. However, this must be qualified as secular because this kind of inseparability must remain unmediated. To retain a secular character the relationship between ethics and aesthetics must also be founded on a plurality of occasions, or events. The framework of a secular ethic is not distanced from a humanism that originates and returns to the narrative force of expression, as it resorts to the Mediterranean as an aesthetical—and equally ethical—representation: Yet you entrust us with one thing, father, namely: that some of your talent has been forever passed in those syllables we bear in us, [like] buzzing bees.29 29

Montale. “Mediterraneo (6).” Ossi di Seppia. Tutte le poesie, 58.

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If this heritage of “syllables” makes sense in our everyday engagement with an interior life by which the ‘paternal’ image of the sea regales us with a viable parentage, then there is no need for us to escape. Montale’s poetry dismisses the very idea of escape because it confirms that one cannot escape from one’s origin. And yet one’s projected origin cannot be an excuse for one’s irresponsibility. Montale’s recognition of parentage is an invitation to become like buzzing bees, fleeting everywhere and uttering syllables that may appear to have no meaning, but which must be read from the spaces that separate one syllable from another. This diversity of syllables becomes a poetic exchange between immanence and transcendence. In other words it makes it possible for us to live in altered states while travelling between time and space as we please. On this imaginary horizon, we can even transform the way by which we construct and recognise different narrative segments, where word and syllable rest upon a sound and a lyric borne by the aleatoric paths of buzzing bees. This is where, Montale says in the sixth poem in Mediterraneo, mute words “will speak to a brotherly heart, zest’d in Greek salt.”30 Thus we claim the sea’s parentage as a genealogy of words and sounds that are neither chained nor fixed. The paths remain aleatoric. They are accidental and like dice they become subject to a bet over fortune and misfortune. There are no progressive or cumulative aims invested in the Greek salts of a sea that brings into our words a totality of history which we manufacture as we try to make sense of it. This is because “history is not intrinsic, as it lies outside.”31 But where would history’s truth be without an intrinsic chain of events? How could history sustain itself if whatever happens is not bound together? How does one make sense of disparate narratives that sound like buzzing bees whose paths always appear accidental? Could history be reduced to an utterance of syllabic structures? Could we fashion it out of a presumed genealogy of syllables that may or may not be tied together in meaningful words and phrases? The poet’s qualm with the split between what is intrinsic and what becomes extraneous—between immanence and transcendence—may hint at a possibility for a conception of history that is distanced from any claims that we may pose on our syllabic genealogies. Were the Hellenic (rather than simply Greek) salts to be claimed on grounds of history, the diversity by which immanence becomes inseparable with transcendence will be made 30 31

Montale. “Mediterraneo (6).” Ossi di Seppia. Tutte le poesie, 58. Montale. “La storia I.” Satura. Tutte le poesie, 323.

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even more manifest, since the poetic encounter with history has to argue that history will never come united “like a chain in continuous links,” because mostly these chains will never keep. That is how history “leaves passages, crypts, burrows and hideouts.”32 As survivors of history’s most atrocious events we know very well that the chain cannot hold together. In claiming history and parentage as an aleatoric form of diversity we also claim the philosophical and poetic distinctions by which we understand the moments of immanence that the Hellenic salt of human understanding gained from the syllables of human reason. Such reason lies hidden under the grounds of what appears to be the language of history. This language could only survive if it identifies the other narratives that gave it origin. Like a son to his mother and a daughter to her father, our historical claims have to account for their responsibilities. This is where the secular ends of poetry will recognise lyricism as akin to ethics. Yet for this to happen language must be impeded from escaping into the clericalist dishonesty that wrote the darkest pages of human history. CLAIMING IMMANENCE Montale makes mention of a Kierkegaardian influence in his early intellectual reading. However, he does not volunteer to a Kierkegaardian analysis of poetry, as he remains cautious about confusing the rules of poetry with the grammars of philosophy. Indeed, there is a case for a philosophical analysis of poetry but it should always be guarded by Montale’s selfinterrogation, which suggests that poets must never strain their voice by overindulging in solfège, as this would forever spoil their timbre.33 With this disclaimer in mind, one could attempt a parallel reading of Montale’s poetic form and Kierkegaard’s aesthetic construction. The latter emerges, amongst others, in Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic: “bound to no positive content, transforming all being into an ‘occasion’ for its own activity, Kierkegaard’s dialectic exempts itself from material definition. It is immanent and in its immanence infinite.”34 Infinity presents itself in Kierkegaard—and I would argue, similarly in Montale—as the space within which the poet could find the truth he is seeking. Albeit hidden, this truth is reconstructed under (and by the) masks of indirectness. This serves as a mechanism, or a form of representation, that eliminates naïve simplification. Adorno cites and explains how KierkeMontale. “La storia I.” Satura. Tutte le poesie, 323. Montale. “Intenzioni (Intervista Immaginaria),” 1478. 34 Adorno, Theodor. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 31. 32 33

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gaard “hopes to protect the dialectic from the bad infinity of the simply unlimited:” When a mystification, a dialectical reduplication, is used in the service of a serious purpose, it will be so used as merely to obviate a misunderstanding, or an over-hasty understanding, whereas all the while the true explanation is at hand and ready to be found by him who honestly seeks it.35

Montale’s honesty is in this respect pertinent to the definition—and usage (poetic, rather than philosophical)—of immanence as a dialectic that is protected “from the bad infinity of the simply unlimited.” Montale’s protection of the dialectic is found in his rejection of a simplistic mediation between particular a and universal b. If the distance between a and b was that of otherness or was simply placed between origin and end, mediation would be unnecessary, since the distance itself would have already articulated both ends. An a-to-b construct holds no immanence because it is diagrammatically flawed by its two-dimensionality (where poetry has no place). Such a flat articulation of mediation amounts to that exclusivist logic which Croce detests in the vulgar historicist’s expectancy that the art form has to embark on two-dimensional journeys and await further instructions from the immediacy of incumbent forms of power. An a-to-b journey commutes no further than a distance summed up as a+b. The answer to this flat, two-dimensional, limitation is found in the poetic possibilities offered in works like Montale’s Mediterraneo where the recognition of immanence in the self’s realization of its potential is never exhausted by one point of arrival. An actualized life is not a point of arrival. Rather, it is an extent that ebbs and flows in all directions. Here the sense of ‘direction’ is made redundant once what actualizes the self’s potential also gains volume from the fact that it is continuously present. Through the lessons of Mediterraneo one is engaged with a search for true poetic explanation. This kind of explanation is ever-present in how it understands being, and by how this form of understanding becomes being. Here one comes to know the sea as the ultimate representation of immanence. One could argue that Montale’s Mediterranean aesthetic emerges as a transcendence of the here and now while taking account of the fact that we have no ready-made explanation of what sort of interiority the sea—as this deep and vast image of immanence—really presents. In the fourth poem of the Mediterraneo series, Montale makes reference to the hidden caves which emerge from the sea’s breast as a rumbling tem35

Kierkegaard cited in Adorno. Kierkegaard, 31.

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ple of spiralling light; in a city made of glass in whose azure quality raises the veils under which the sea’s rumbling becomes nothing but a whisper.36 The poet seeks a hidden polity whose laws could possibly affirm the self, where the exiled would return “to the incorrupt land” and where the sea’s paternal unrestraint (disfrenamento), avows for “a stern law” (legge severa).37 In Cavafy, Seferis and Angelopoulos—not to mention Agamemnon and Odysseus—homecoming remains a perennial attachment to the Mediterranean’s aesthetic representation. Yet the image of the exiled is not aesthetical, but profoundly ethical. The act of exile is a moral sphere where the image of severity emerges like a rumbling sea that is nothing more than a murmur. In the exile’s personal story the journey is a poetic category that resides within a moral sphere. At some point, this sphere becomes public even when it results from the poet’s private ‘confession’. This is why, as noted above, immersion is recurrent in the Mediterranean’s aesthetic narrative. This quasi-baptismal act comes across as a liturgical referent of immanence and a route to the knowledge of the laws of the polity that ordered the exile in the first place. But the same laws also become a means of reintegrating those who return. The exile comes home to a land without corruption, recognising the intrinsic ethical rigour of which the sea is the custodian by means of its “severe law.” In this kind of ethical undertaking, the poetics of a ‘concealed’ meaning is further extended to the concealed rigour of the sea. The poetic narrative of Mediterraneo evolves from an initial relationship between youth and its upbringing on the shores of the Mediterranean’s benevolence, to a mature encounter with the Mediterranean as a totality. This image of totality cannot be assumed externally as an idealist construct that becomes convenient for the idealization of a sea or location. Montale’s work does not entertain the same Romantic image of the Mediterranean as Heine does in his Hellenised ode to the North Sea: Thou valiant homing heart, How oft, how bitter oft, The northern she-barbarians have beset thee! (...) In vain I braced my buckler against them, (...) Down was I driven to the sea— And, breathing freely, I hail thee, O Sea,

36 37

Montale. “Mediterraneo (4).” Ossi di Seppia. Tutte le poesie, 56. Ibid.

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Thou kindly, rescuing Sea, Thalatta! Thalatta!38

In Mediterraneo the claim for immanence stands for the Mediterranean as a ‘lived’ sea. In his youthful constructions of the universe that will later expand, mature and break down into acts of demonstrative distinctions, Montale’s engagement with the sea constantly retains a sense of severity. Unlike Heine’s claim to a Hellenised destination by which the changing moods of the North Sea come in equal degrees of ferocious inhumanity and intimate love, Montale’s Mediterraneo is neither eidetic nor relative. Although Mediterraneo represents a journey, Montale’s homecoming is—like Cavafy’s —marked by reluctance. He is reluctant because of his love for a continuous present. The present is known, and unlike a predisposition to an arrival, the constant notion of being present affords a ritual intimacy that preserves the relationship between the self and its parentage. Montale does not want to leave the terrifying presence of the sea as a father whose severity predisposed him for a life of struggle against the iniquities of the State and the indifference by which the polity has been oppressed by feudal patronage. In the fourth poem of Mediterraneo, Montale remarks that it will be useless for the homecomer to try to escape that severe law whose gift of knowledge has always formed an intrinsic part of destiny. This is because without the context of destiny the game of exile and homecoming cannot be played: In a destiny in waiting there may be a pause for me (…)39

Beyond this hesitant acceptance of a notion of ‘destiny’, there is a poetic faith in the parameters of truth, whose thrust reveals a mechanism of concealment. The poet claims the laws of concealment for himself, so that he would know what destiny demands. This is also how Kierkegaard encounters the legal terrain of truth. As Adorno argues: Kierkegaard did not, in neo-Kantian fashion, reconceive being as pure becoming. (...) He prefers to let consciousness circle about in the self’s own dark labyrinth and communicating passageways, without beginning or aim, hopelessly expecting hope to flair up at the end of the most distant tunnel as the distant light of escape, rather than deluding himself with the fata morgana of static ontology in which the promises of an au-

Heine, Heinrich. “Greeting to the Sea.” The North Sea, Cycle II: I. Prose and Poetry, 66. 39 Montale. “Mediterraneo (4).” Ossi di Seppia. Tutte le poesie, 56. 38

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tonomous ratio are left unfulfilled. (...)—The qualitative multiplicity of the being of ideas is transposed into the unity of immanent becoming.40

Not in a dissimilar manner, Montale confronts the question of hermetism by claiming form in its pragmatic sense. He does this by putting us in the way of the truth of its things. He argues that while a new poet may claim autonomy by which “he expels any conclusive and extra-aesthetic elements from his own creations”, he is “all but autonomous in the definition of his own art.” The new poet accepts that the definition of his work would lend itself to, and would borrow from, definitions of other art forms. This seems inevitable in the recourse to define a poetic specificity for which it may be difficult to find clear terms of reference.41 This is what still complicates the nature of our poetic, pictorial and musical creation, and [this is what] increases the possible causes of obscurity in its various meanings. But even in its infinite variations there is still an inclination towards the object, towards an art that is invested [and] embodied in expressive means, towards the passion that becomes thing (la passione diventata cosa). One should note that here what is meant by thing is not an exterior metaphor, a description, but the resistance present in the word, in its syntactic constituency, in its objective and conclusive sense.42

What appears to be a concealed narrative code is, in effect, the ‘meaning’ of a poetic form that belongs to a tradition that has long sustained the specificity of art. The poet reminds us how “the short poem, the autonomous poem, had a lot to gain in intensity what it lost in extension; the step from the short to the intense poem is brief; and even shorter is the step from the intense to the obscure poem.”43 THE SEA’S LAW OF DIVERSITY It is apt to argue that in Montale’s Ossi di Seppia the sea represents the new poem’s struggle to define itself. At times the poet makes use of musical references that reveal a tradition that matters a lot to his sense of genealogy. The heavy weight of heritage becomes lighter once the poem’s musical and painterly chromatism helps us understand what lies behind the initial words Adorno. Kierkegaard, 31-2. Montale. “Parliamo dell’ermetismo [1940]” [Let’s speak of Hermetism]. In Il Secondo Mestiere. Arte, musica, società, 1533. 42 Montale. “Parliamo dell’ermetismo,” 1533. 43 Ibid. 1532. 40 41

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by which everyone is greeted. However, such comely greetings are shortlived and immediately overtaken by intense semantic properties that become heavy again. This apparent difficulty might be explained by revealing the urgent needs that sustain the poem’s autonomy from the simplistic mechanisms of the here and now. Yet, even when this becomes more accessible, we remain puzzled by the hidden meaning of a law that is bound by destiny. Tried thoughts abandon me. I’ve neither senses; nor sense. I have no limit.44

The poem’s magnitude becomes a matter of intensity. It leaves us with the vast extent of a Mediterranean image that recalls Homer’s and Virgil’s epics. In Montale’s work the magnitude of poetic tradition is directly implanted within the microcosms of the self. In this way our relationship with the Mediterranean tradition bypasses—but never ignores—the Romantic re-enactment of Hellenic and Latin magnitude found in the greatness of a Byron, a Heine or a Leopardi. While Heine and Leopardi personalize the epical into the journey of the pre-modern self, Montale adopts syllabic parsimony in recognition of a meaning that has neither senses, nor sense, nor limit. In this process Montale never rejects the poetic tradition as some of his more radical contemporaries may have done. Rather, he legitimates his work by claiming it.45 Montale’s poetic resolve goes beyond the limits of the word. In this way he ascribes to the sea’s severe laws of diversity, but does not succumb to it. His sense of infinity is controlled and played against the hidden veils by which he wears his masks in order to be able to live with—while indirectly resisting—the sea’s severity. So while Montale sees immersion as a baptismal initiation into the sea’s parentage and a way of defiantly belonging to a law that may well banish him, a Romantic like Leopardi succumbs to drowning and yields to the sweet sense of helplessness in the face of infinity: (...) Thus within this Immensity my thought is drowned: Being wreck’d comes sweet amid this sea.46

In Heine the prospect of shipwreck seems no less sweet and the intimacy no less infinite: Montale. “Mediterraneo (8).” Ossi di Seppia. Tutte le poesie, 60. See Montale. “Parliamo dell’ermetismo,” 1533. 46 Leopardi, Giacomo. “L’infinito” [The Infinite]. In Canti, 168. 44 45

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The waves are murmuring, the sea-gulls crying, Wafts of old memories over me steal, Old dreams long forgotten, old visions long vanished, Sweet and torturing, rise from the deep.47

Unlike Heine and Leopardi, Montale seeks a different relationship with the infinite depth of the sea’s immanence. Beyond (and because) of Romanticism, his search for magnitude in the vast yet personalized extents of the sea is done on his terms. Although belonging to the same genealogy, the intimacy that Montale projects into and from the sea gains a fuller and utmost proximity with it. In the eighth poetic moment of Mediterraneo the idea of parentage and genealogy is condensed in one phrase: “I have no limit” following another equally intense remark: “I’ve neither senses; nor sense.” In his parental confiance with water and current, time and space, concealment and imperious expression, the poet finds his ultimate judge. The Mediterranean becomes Montale’s arbiter, and to this judge the poet presents a case. The case directly challenges everyone with the idea of limit, and more specifically the limit of meaning. The poet places his words sub judice and intimates with his parental judge on prohibiting any discussion of it in public. The transition from the Byronic epic to Heine and Leopardi’s poetic intimations is made manifest by the artist’s claim to his art. The artist calls for a distinction between aesthetic judgement and the purely subliminal. This means that in art, any claim for meaning must never be reduced to quick mediations. Bearing in mind the paradox by which, Montale tells us, we should never be comfortable, we must resort to other means by which we would still lay our claim to write and recite poetry. Almost liturgically, our resort starts to look a bit like a desired act of theft. In his eighth poem in Mediterraneo the poet dreams of stealing the sea’s “briny words” (salmastre parole) where art and nature meet, “to better cry out my melancholy of an aged lad who shouldn’t be thinking.”48 The poet vies for the sea’s unceasing vainglory, by which the flow of time and the heaviness of presence even made shipwreck sound sweet to the Romantic dead. But Montale’s attempted theft is aborted by an admission of defeat. He tells the sea, that he has “nothing but these words which, like exposed women offer themselves to whoever asks.”49

Heine. “Shipwreck.” The North Sea, Cycle II: III. Prose and Poetry, 67. Montale. “Mediterraneo (8).” Ossi di Seppia. Tutte le poesie, 60. 49 Ibid. 47 48

4 A HOLE IN THE SKY (...) the hands are empty, but the eyes are full of her [Sicily’s] memory.1 —Ibn Hamdis of Noto, Sicily (...) we are in a vicious circle, a kind of aporia; which is the essence of that notion of Sicily that is altogether a common ground, a ‘recurrent idea’, and the cause of constant and profound inspiration in art and literature.2 —Leonardo Sciascia

By its complexity, Sicily precludes any imposition of boundaries. It makes its own. Sicily confirms that culture is far from definable. This raises the issue of Sicilianity—which implies two concepts: that of Sicily and the act of being Sicilian. This play on being Sicilian and the country that is Sicily questions the very myth of an uninterrupted coherent lineage. Instead of an identifiable homogeneous identity, Sicilianity denotes a multiplicity of acts which include individual ways of being Sicilian and what it means to be Sicily as an island in the middle of the Mediterranean where far from being a line or route, history is a point of convergence between routes; a crossroad converging on other crossroads. Leonardo Sciascia presents us with a definition of Sicily that reveals the limits of conventional analysis. Sicilianity defies any attempt of appropriation—whether this happens by an attempt of cultural construction, or by the political expediency with which Sicily has been scarred but against which it also stood firm. To identify Sicily’s inherent dialectic is to come to terms with the aporia of cultural and political identity where any assumption of inevitable historical progress is defied by the facticity of history itself. See Leonardo Sciascia. “Sicilia e Sicilitudine” [Sicily and Sicilitude]. In La Corda Pazza [Out of Control]. In Opere 1956-1971, 967. 2 Sciascia, Leonardo. “L’ordine delle somiglianze” [The order of resemblance]. In L’opera Completa di Antonello Da Messina, 5. 1

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Sciascia also notes how any duality between openness and closure fails to present us with a working analysis of Sicilianity. The main question of this largest island in the Mediterranean finds no answer in the polemic between those who argue that Sicily’s continued “historical isolation” consolidated an introspect, yet fruitful and authentic “indigenous” culture, and those who say that in deed and by dint of its autonomous nature, Sicily has emerged in its strong openness towards Italian and European culture.3 “As ever,” says Sciascia, “truth is somewhere in between these two views.” Rather than keep them in sterile opposition, both sides of the argument need to be considered. “After all, the history of Sicilian culture is all to be cast and re-cast within an organic construct, perhaps starting with the most modest of facts.”4 Culture is best approached from the contingent nature of everyday life, as figured in the individual stories that we all live and tell, dispute and agree upon, curse and write poetry about; over which we despair, and from where we launch our aspirations and hope for a better life. Whether real or fictitious, acquired or frustrated, aspirations reflect the self-identifying phenomena on whose grounds of being we construct our individual, societal, historic and even meta-historical edifices. In his discussion of Sicilian cultural history Rosario Contarino argues that the “discovery” of the anthropological, economic and cultural diversity of the South (of Italy) rearticulates those “ancient aspirations” by laying emphasis on their specificity. He also notes that upon recognising these ethical and cultural bearings, one comes across a distinct difference between South of the mainland (Italy) and Sicily, where the historical extents of the Southern question take a stronger literary character. While accepting “the materialist assumptions of positivist philosophy”, says Contarino, Sicilian intellectuals rejected the myth of progress, preferring “the route of literary mediation, by whose (modes of verist reflection and testimony) they adopted a method that is informed by modern forms of knowledge.” In this way they found an effective means to denounce the marginalization of South.5

See Sciascia. La Corda Pazza, 965ff. Sciascia. La Corda Pazza, 966. 5 Contarino, Rosario. “Il Mezzogiorno e la Sicilia.” [The South and Sicily]. In Letteratura Italiana. Vol. 3: L’età contemporanea. [Italian Literature: The Contemporary era], 714 (my emphasis). 3 4

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“MADNESS AS AN ACT AND STATE OF LIBERATION” In distinct reaction to naturalism’s positivism on one hand, and an ideologically impaired ‘realism’ on the other, verism engages us with socio-cultural recognition through its attention to the episodic nature of truth in all its elements. This includes the sophistic pattern by which an idea of totality is confirmed as aporetic. In verism, totality emerges from the contingent particulars that we negotiate in real life. So while totality might be seen as bringing together the accidental patterns that make culture, society, or a nation, the universal character comes from the individual parts that make the pattern and not from the pattern itself. This way of looking at patterns that are intrinsically diverse and therefore open to paradox and contradiction becomes akin to what Jacques Rancière calls a panecastic method, where each is a signifier of everything.6 In a panecastic approach everything is game and overarching formulae become redundant. Here everyday life takes the upper hand. History is transformed into an attention to individual nuances and tales, and truth must include paradox and even fallacy. In Sicily verism forms part of a literary tradition that is epitomised by the works of Giovanni Verga and which is claimed and extended into newer pastures by Luigi Pirandello. This tradition presents itself as problematic to romantics and idealists, realists and empiricists alike. Partly due to its inclination towards the panecastic, verism is an empty signifier. It adapts to divergent situations and like sophism it is seen as dialectical when in effect it remains dialectal. Verism is deemed subversive when it is playful. Conversely it looks reactionary, when it emerges to be progressive. The verist process regales its audience with the bravura of the episodic nature of storytelling. Embellished by a rich palette, it has a knack for minute detail. In this way verism offers full literary awareness. Stylistically it jumps in where other forms of literature would fail to thread, and where other forms of argument remain guarded from presupposition and mechanical logic. Legitimised by memory, the mechanism of this approach sidesteps the ruses of ‘logical’ truth and claims its truthful import by its essential (yet never essentialist) attention to the traditions of name and custom. Those like Pirandello who took verism beyond its confines take the In Greek pan denotes everything and hekastos means each. Rancière conceives the notion of a ‘panecastic method’ in The Ignorant School Master where in the learning process, rather than engage with the particular from a wider totality, the reverse happens, and a plural notion of totality emerges from within the contingent particularity of the each. See Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. 6

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traditions of name and custom to their absurdity, and once at that stage, they reveal their inherent obscurantism. Thus Sciascia’s comments on Pirandello’s novel Il Fu Mattia Pascal: As in Sicily the Mattia are [known as] Matteo (...), Pirandello must have been thinking of madness (mattia): as bland folly, capricious, (...) something like a momentary break in the gift of the genial [by] counteracting and as a relief from the habit of deep and heavy thinking. Anyway: madness as an act and state of liberation.7

In parenthesis Sciascia notes how central to Pirandello’s work one finds a Sicilian order of names and namesakes that emerges from specific dialectal usage. One must add that here the use of detail precludes the mechanistic style of the naturalist. After (and because of) Verga, Pirandello’s work recognises the literary responsibilities in the use of detail. In his articulation of a structure of reality, detail signifies an essence that is plural, and often disparate, but never minimal. This distinction is made clearer in Sciascia’s fascinating essay on photography and verism where he moves from a discussion on Luigi Capuana’s and Verga’s delectation with photography, to the implications of photography for Roland Barthes and Pirandello. While citing Barthes’s argument that photography is the advent of one’s self as one’s other and as an astute dissociation from the conscience of identity, Sciascia remarks how by an act of identity and one’s own “selfproperty”, Pirandello transforms the hereditary myths (of conscience) into reality and everydayness: “a reality and everydayness which, to us, measures up to photography: [but] no more as a game, and alas no more in ‘delectation’ as [it was] to Capuana and Verga.”8 To Pirandello the transformation of myth into everydayness was a matter of urgency. Perhaps, this was triggered by what he finds delectable in photography: as something that becomes the other’s other as one’s self. Like Pirandello, Sciascia enjoys playing with names and puns, just as Verga and Capuana enjoyed playing with the tricks of photography. But unlike Verga’s, Sciascia’s joy is Pirandellian. One is tempted to argue that in its Pirandellian mode, Sciascia’s playfulness saturates (rather than captures) the otherness of puns and names into a reversed form of consciousness. In this reversal the real is hardly distinguished from the meta-language which Roland Barthes calls myth.9 In Barthesean fashion Sciascia turns myth inside Sciascia, Leonardo. Alfabeto Pirandelliano. [A Pirandellian Alphabet], 53 (my emphasis). 8 Sciascia. Cruciverba [Crossword]. In Opere 1971-1983, 1129-30. 9 See Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” In Mythologies. 7

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out. He is keen to point out the importance of names in the Sicilian genealogical imagination where the name is Matteo not Mattia. Discussing Pirandello’s use of names and his play on terms, Sciascia argues that what was on Pirandello’s mind when he wrote Il Fu Mattia Pascal was not dissimilar from Cervantes’s recognition of Quixote’s reconstruction of a real world—as an other’s other that is made self—just as Matteo is transformed into Mattia. Mattia as a name is exchangeable with ‘mattia’ as ‘madness’. Matteo-made-Mattia could well be matto (a madman), but his mattia is also a collective abstraction of madness. This cloned word denotes an indirect embodiment of the genealogy of names and namesakes that leads to a direct relationship between freedom and geniality: “Mattia, I always knew it, Mattia, matto ... Matto! matto! matto!”, Berto shouted.—“Oh what joy you’ve given me!”10

In this way Pascal (the surname) becomes the keeper of Mattia (the name), but he is also Mattia Pascal (the character who fakes his own death) who is also the keeper of philosophical misogyny.11 This is a deliberate sophism; a truthful process that lays bare the tautological nature of naming by means of a deliberate acceptance of pun and presumed error. To be able to do this and get away with it, Pirandello saturates reality with meaning. He turns truth into a story without having to falsify anything about the story. After all, the novel is itself about falsity: Mattia Pascal fakes his death and comes back as someone else, ensuing in a life that is clearly farcical and perfectly tragic. In the Pirandellian saturation of reality and everydayness there are no men or women better than us, as one expects in the epic representation, or in the realist typology of characters and examples. Whether Pirandello’s characters happen to be bad or evil, accidentally benevolent or intentionally malevolent, it does not really matter. Unlike realism, verism and what Pirandello makes of it offers no total message to its audience. The temptation to understand or even hope to find an answer in Pirandello’s work remains dubious—and even redundant—especially when those who pose the question know, and have made it clear, that the question stands to grow, not diminish. It is curious how judgements on Sicilians and representations of the Sicilian person preserve their own truth and validity within the span of ten Pirandello, Luigi. Il Fu Mattia Pascal [The late Mattia Pascal]. In Tutti i Romanzi. [Collected Novels], 455. 11 See Sciascia. Alfabeto Pirandelliano, 53. 10

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or twenty centuries: from Cicero (“a suspicious and sharp people, born to controversy”), to Scipio of Castro (“theirs is a nature of two extremes, because they are largely timid, mostly audacious”) (...) and indeed to Giovanni Verga; from Antonello [da Messina] the personality— painter of personalities, to Pirandello, to Brancati, to Lampedusa. Indeed Lampedusa’s explicit ahistoricism, in the give and take of the Sicilian person—how he has been and will ever remain—is born from the appearance and illusion of an unchanged and unchangeable continuity of the Sicilian “way of being” [il “modo d’essere” Siciliano]. Everything else cannot but be an illusion, an absolute refraction of the history of that part of human reality called Sicily that is even placed in the crucible of history.12

Sciascia’s reference to the Sicilian way of being (il modo d’essere Siciliano) provides the conventions for a dialectical journey where the pattern remains sketchy. Strangely enough this works out a route into—rather than out of— the reality of a condition that far from revolutionary, it is purposely assumed as involutionary. ART AND INVOLUTION This takes us to the work of another Sicilian, the painter Renato Guttuso, whose work acts in recognition and synchrony with contingency as a tautological space of definition. This is a definition of culture that turns into selfreiteration. The extent of this involutionary context is never seen for what it is because its source is found in a polity that assumes itself to be unchangeable. The only way to break through involution is to give in to it and recognize it in the contingent grounds that reinforce it—that is, within the cultural terrain from where it grows as a political system. This is where (and why) artists are more likely to engage effectively with this state of affairs, particularly when the politics of aesthetics surpass the myth of progress, and instead the polity effectively seeks to cohabit the spaces of stasis and impasse. While art is always entertained as an act that anticipates history, and which becomes more ‘progressive’ than history itself, the radical nature of Guttuso’s work proves otherwise. Rather than anticipate, his art seems to follow. Rather than impose progress, he appears to mimic stasis. This apparent conservatism reveals Guttuso’s strategy. While many, including some of Guttuso’s comrades in the PCI (the now defunct Italian Communist Party), remained critical of his stylistic choices—not to mention what appeared to be his ‘conservative’ artistic subjects—few, other than Sciascia and others 12

Sciascia. “L’ordine delle somiglianze,” 5.

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who knew better, read Guttuso’s work strategically and really understood the political essence of his art. While it is easy to be selective and superficial in one’s assessment of Guttuso’s work, a deeper insight reveals how Guttuso’s aesthetic comes from the disjunctive ways by which it sustains art’s specificity as a form of criticality. Sciascia recognizes the specificity of Guttuso’s work as he does with Sicilianity. He remarks how the focus of Guttuso’s artistic attention is to be found in the modest facts by which one would start to converse with the contingency of everyday life: Guttuso violates the notion of a rapport between events and space, (...) between us and things [le cose], between things themselves. And if usually he deals with the great event within the great space (...) it is in space that little events take place; those small and contingent things which we recognise in everyday life. Jokingly one could say that one finds his greatness in the shirts [on the washing line], not the flags. (...) The spirit (...) which is ineluctably conditioned by the contingent and the banal— which, after all, is life—gives him more vigour and intensity than does the unconditioned spirit—which for him, is history.13

In Guttuso’s work, being is geography. As art, being takes place and takes its place in the artist’s attempt to understand how to find one’s way in (rather than out of) the “contingent and the banal.” Sciascia reminds us that what appears ridiculous and disjointed is what life is all about. To leave behind or simply ignore the contingent so as to impose an order or ideal that has no bearing with what is the subject of one’s art—life itself in its suffering and aspirations—would be as reactionary as supporting the Mafia and the reactionary Italian Establishment. In claiming the banal and the contingent Guttuso reclaims what constantly re-creates art as a vehicle of individuality. He individualises art by re-capturing the contingencies of life in the form of pictorial derivations from various artistic traditions that he appropriates and returns to human values. Guttuso’s appropriation of tradition is not simply a philosophical or literary attention to traditional narratives. It is directly assumed in his stylistic break with the historic avant-garde. His approach often appears to be a return to an artistic canon that was deemed to be central to the politics of his aesthetic. What I have described elsewhere as “the Caravaggism of Guttuso’s modernity”14 is attested by the fact that he claims back the tradition in order to radicalise the figurative genre and reassume it in the canons of radical art. Rather than reject the notion of the canon as reactionary, Gut13 14

Sciascia. “Guttuso.” In Cruciverba, 1201. Baldacchino, John. Easels of Utopia. Art’s Fact Returned, 151.

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tuso brings the canon back to the grounds on which the revolutionary violence of a Goya finds expression in the colours of everydayness. In Guttuso’s work Caravaggio’s ghosts of humanity reappear in synchrony with the obscenity of Courbet’s depiction of female nudes. They come together as scenes from everyday life, such as a nude woman ironing her clothes painted à la Courbet with a boy lifted directly from Caravaggio’s Il Martirio di San Matteo (The Martyrdom of St Matthew) (1599-1600) in the background in his Stiratrice e ragazzo del Caravaggio (Woman ironing and Caravaggio’s boy, 1974). Likewise, his work Il sonno della ragione produce mostri (The sleep of reason creates monsters, 1979), revisits Goya in title and spirit while it is clearly in active receipt of Michelangelo’s and Courbet’s figuration. However, these derivations are not re-inventions but Guttuso’s original recollections, a memory whose narrative is forever renewed as if in eternal recurrence. Il sonno della ragione—which forms part of Le Allegorie (The Allegories) series— reclaims a humanist heritage where the individual artist and art’s individuality rephrase contingency in its cultural specificity. The depiction of the rooftop in this painting is a recognisable link to this statement. It is a presence that recalls some of Guttuso’s paintings of rooftops such as Tetti di Sicilia (Rooftops in Sicily, 1950), Tetti di via Leonina, (Rooftops of Leonina Street, 1962), Case alla Kalsa (Palermo) (The houses at the Kalsa, Palermo, 1976), Tetti di Palermo (Rooftops in Palermo, 1985) and Tetti di Roma (Rooftops in Rome, 1963) where, as Calvesi put it, the notion of the rooftop becomes alien to the landscape genre. The rooftop is where one lives: one’s home and shelter, but also one’s prison; if everyone belongs to the proper roof and privacy [del proprio tetto e del proprio privato], before being master, one is a prisoner, swindled by his own irrationality.15

Like most of Guttuso’s paintings, The Allegories are saturated by images from other images. Derivation is an issue of reminiscence; a recognition of reality. Cesare Brandi suggests that rather than being a painter à la manière de, Guttuso “is a modern artisan who returns everything—even the past—to the actual and active.”16 But this does not exhaust the question of the recur15 Calvesi, Maurizio. “Presentazione della mostra di Guttuso alla Galleria del Milione.” [A presentation of the Renato Guttuso exhibition at the Galleria del Milione]. In Guttuso, Renato. Guttuso, Opere dal 1931 al 1981 [Guttuso’s Works from 1931 to 1981], 208. 16 Brandi, Cesare. “Lungo cammino di Guttuso.” [Guttuso’s long journey]. In Guttuso, Opere dal 1931 al 1981, 15.

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rence of the past and the reclaiming of the canon by an artist who claimed to be a radical and who militated in the PCI. Guttuso’s derivative imagery conveys more than a return, more than reminiscence. His work legitimates the past as actual in terms of a break with the linear progress into which art finds itself conscripted by those who claim that revolutionary art must represent a break with the canon. Guttuso turns this critique on its head. He uses his communist credentials to defy the myth of progress. His art defies time. Instead, it inhabits the space of permanence as an ever-present reality. Its truth is particularised and its claim to universality is panecastic where the everything is subsumed by the vitality of the each. This approach also takes the form of a compositional convention where his paintings defy one style and retains the right to plurality in how it represents and expresses its narratives of truth. Guttuso turns the total into a cultural expression of many totals, where the true is a definition of those particulars that could never find their proper reality in a proper ideology (propria ideologia). Like Sciascia’s reference to a proper roof and one’s own proper privacy—del proprio tetto e del proprio privato—one’s proper ideology is a self-entrapment in one’s assumed shelter. In being master of one’s shelter one finds himself prisoner. This qualification surpasses the relativism of individualist mediation. Guttuso paraphrases the theme of Il Sonno della ragione as follows: A reflection on sleep, on dreams, on solitude. An old man sleeps on a settee covered by a black and maroon blanket. Michelangelo’s Night is on the same blanket, sleeping, or in meditation, (...) Monsters generated by sleep seize the rooftops of a building and demolish it. The coupled figures that lie prostrate on the roofs as if on a bed, (and who could have [been depicted as] laying on a painted scene of rooftops), are also monsters. (...) The reclining human monsters are different in their characterisation. The man with a face of a monkey with blonde hair-locks symbolises vanity, animal virility, an ability to adapt, and a lack of scruples. The woman’s body unfolds on the rooftops in full bloom. Her skeleton bears a strong body-frame—that of a worker—but at the same time it gives away an infantile tenderness. A flame overwhelms the head with what’s within it, its thoughts, its past; and destroys every other value, keeping her engrossed in direct surge.17

Here one must distinguish between allegory and surrealism in Guttuso’s work. Guttuso’s sense of allegory redefines something other than an Guttuso, Renato. “Commenti alle Allegorie [1979].” [Notes on the Allegories] First published in Guttuso, Opere dal 1931 al 1981, 208. 17

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image of the subconscious. It has been suggested that as The Allegories coincide with the late 70s, they are a symptom of “the end of ideologies,”18 when Italy felt the weight of its own past crushing it. In Italy the late seventies are known as gli anni di piombo—the years of lead—scarred by the intensification of terrorism, political violence, and State conspiracy. Yet even when this must have had its direct impact on Guttuso’s political sensitivity, Guttuso’s art is never determined by the body-politic. Rather, his work construes a polity by assimilating history into one’s own story—warts and all, with its own deficiencies, its own fallacies but also its virtues. In many ways a sense of virtue may still emerge from what is sometimes considered to be a prejudiced view of the world. Guttuso’s depiction of women and his implicit eroticism has on many occasions brought him in direct collision with many on both the Left and the Right who either considered his work as exploitative of the female body or as simply obscene. Yet beyond the merits of whether the various critiques levelled at Guttuso were just or not, one cannot ignore the fact that Guttuso agonised on the very essence of what art must do in the 20th century. Works like his Crocifissione (Crucifixion, 1941) and I funerali di Togliatti (Togliatti’s Funeral, 1972) express a sense of historic responsibility with the moral imagination and how contemporary women and men are tasked with the responsibility of facing up to history and what it throws at them. One way of reading this sense of historic responsibility in terms of what art is tasked to do is by recognising Guttuso’s political aesthetic as a restoration of the historical sites whose archaeology is reclaimed by our sense of being. This sense of duty towards the archaeology of being is not simply expressed in the subject of what one paints but more so in how one paints it. Pier Paolo Pasolini presents Guttuso as (…) [he] who really loves tradition with a full, honest and bold love, which—being a true love!—never inhibits him. On the contrary, it gives him strength and impetus, shedding every modernism for his modernity, and every vain avant-guardism for his experiments and expressive violence.19

Guttuso’s politics of aesthetics is borne out of forgotten representations. While his art consciously rejects any presumed—stylistic and ideological—formulae for what is or should be modernism, his modernity emSee Cortenova, Giorgio. “Dal mito alla metafora.” [From myth to metaphor] In Guttuso, 50 anni di pittura [Guttuso: 50 years of painting], 1987), 15. 19 See Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “Risposta ad un ‘insodisfatto.’” [A reply to someone ‘dissatisfied’] In Pasolini, Pier Paolo. I dialoghi. [The dialogues]. 18

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erges from the attention that his work gives to the hidden and what has been expediently forgotten by a political class that continues to hide behind its proper ideology. Had Guttuso’s work been a reflection of the political establishment, represented along party lines and along the expectation of forced avant-gardism, both his art and his politics would have been different. Instead, Guttuso continues to militate in a political sphere by following his ethical sense of responsibility towards a polity that aims at liberation by means of its attention and care for the dispossessed. Thus, jealous for the sense of autonomy that fosters and sustains a struggle for the dispossessed, Guttuso’s art owes nothing to anyone. It re-occupies a dispossessed distance and a forgotten space. The distance has not only been dispossessed by political events and economic realities, but by their proper ideological narratives that reduce history to a formulaic notion of chronology. In defiance, Guttuso ‘reads’ Michelangelo after Guttuso. Like Courbet he vindicates Caravaggio, but invests and thereby sets a new chronology, where Caravaggio is derivative of Courbet. In I viaggi (The journeys, 1979), also in the Allegories series, Guttuso puts Caravaggio’s image of Roman Charity satiating an old man at the centre of a story whose protagonist is melancholy. This image is taken directly from Caravaggio’s painting Le Sette Opere di Misericordia (The Seven Deeds of Mercy, 1606-7).20 Guttuso explains that in his work, the image of melancholy is “like a statue retrieved from Böcklin or De Chirico, hastily put in the garb of Caravaggio’s Sant’Anna.”21 His idea of retrieval is indicative of another approach—that of renaming the actual. In renaming the actual, he opens other ontological horizons where being becomes a condition of doing art. In I Viaggi melancholy represents a state of being felt in the rather disorienting, yet hopeful annual movement of people going on holiday. In Italy this happens in the blazing Mediterranean heat of August—appropriately known as Ferragosto, an August that is as hot as iron. To Guttuso the movement of individuals going on holiday holds higher meaning for the understanding of women and men’s ontological condition—their state of being—than some greater political narrative. Even when he deals with great historical events such as Palmiro Togliatti’s funeral in I Funerali di Togliatti or the death of Christ in Crocifissione, Guttuso’s attention is always on the individuals that make the crowd. Both paintings are crowded. The central figure, whether it is Jesus or the historical leader of For my extensive analysis of this work and the politics of modernity see Baldacchino, Easels of Utopia, 86ff. 21 Guttuso. “Commenti alle Allegorie,” 211. 20

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the PCI, are framed within the crowd. Like Caravaggio, Guttuso democratizes the compositional structures of his paintings. He celebrates the crowds as the signifier of the dispossessed. This offers an alternative aesthetic pragmatic. It reveals a location where individuals form part of the contingency of the rooftops where the only universal is that of human pathos— the death of the Messiah, the death of the Communist leader.22 Looking at Guttuso’s work in its entirety, one would witness how revolution is exchanged with involution; which is where the art form’s individual autonomy rewrites history for the sake of our need to remember; our right to a formative, and therefore political, aesthetic that emerges from anamnesis. WHEN THE MARGIN PREVAILS In Sciascia’s most renowned novels A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own) and Il giorno della Civetta (The Day of the Owl) failure and success become irrelevant—both in terms of what these words mean in common parlance, and in terms of our understanding of success and failure in our definition of life in general. 23 Il giorno della Civetta is a story about the insufficiency of an apparent State, while at the same time revealing the devious nature of the real State. The reader of this novel is urged to question: “Where is the State?” But the reader also knows that all States are interchangeable: the Constitutional State, the Juridical State, the Italian State, the Sicilian State, the Mafia, the Clericalist and Catholic hierarchy. The protagonist of Il giorno della Civetta is Captain Bellodi, a Northern carabiniere24 posted in the South where he would soon realise that if the State was a text and a name it would have been, semantically speaking, a load of nonsense. The State transferred Bellodi to the South, and the same State recalled Bellodi to the North. The State acted in devious collusion with crime, while the State acted in the name of the Law to root out the same crime. Sciascia presents us with the State as it really is—an antinomy, a paradox and an interchangeable event. Bellodi’s subversion of the subverter soon becomes a subversion of the State that he originally considered to be an entity worth preserving in the name of the Law. Bellodi’s imaginary State 22 For a discussion of this aspect of Guttuso’s work, with special reference to his Crocifissione and Caravaggism, see Baldacchino. Easels of Utopia, 150ff. 23 Here I will be citing A Ciascuno il Suo [To Each His Own] and Il giorno della Civetta [The Day of the Owl] as published in Sciascia’s Opere 1956-1971. 24 The carabinieri are the Italian equivalent of the gendarmes. Though a police force, they form part of the military establishment.

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was ultimately absorbed within the spaces of a reality based on an antinomic structure, which, though paradoxical, functions as the preservation of the State. In this way, Bellodi exceeds his duty as a policeman, and becomes a student of culture. He becomes an archaeologist, looking for and uncovering the spaces that his imaginary State conceals in order to falsify the reality of the antinomical State. Bellodi looks for the cracks in the discourse of the State—embodied in the lies, the invitation to corruption, and the pious gestures of hypocrisy. Sciascia’s narrative reveals the antinomical nature of the State’s definitions. The closest definition of the State that Sciascia’s novel fully portrays is the distance that is trapped between permanence and subversion, sameness and disgregation. These two pairs of antinomies characterize the State’s usurpation of those legal spaces where Bellodi hopes to find a rational solution. Yet Bellodi fails pathetically because in his mind, the Law was never meant to be a purveyor of paradox; the Law could never hide behind tautologies. The only truth Bellodi encounters is more tautologies. He is trapped in his imaginary State. Bellodi’s archaeology cannot dig any deeper. The State lies to him. He cannot quantify the State in terms of crime or punishment, as edict or as a personal response to an ethical imperative. But Bellodi cannot find the State. In exercising the Law, which he is supposed to defend, he is confronted by a sense of impermanence that is juxtaposed with the real permanence of hegemonic structures like the Church, the Mafia or the Party of a manufactured democratic majority. In effect, Bellodi’s misled archaeology leads him straight to the aporia of history. This transforms him from what he thinks he is—an officer vowed to defend justice; into what he rejects—a rejection of his own vow of allegiance. Where he expects to legitimize his allegiance, he finds the dispersal of what he wrongly assumes to be the centre of legitimacy. In the concluding chapter of Il giorno della Civetta, Bellodi is ultimately wrong-footed by the State. He is recalled to mainland Italy as the real victim of a legal outpost that he mistakenly perceived through the misleading ethics of a missionary. In the final dialogue between Bellodi and his friends in the North, who want to know more about the ‘exotic’ South, Sciascia verbalises the politics of involution. Bellodi’s friend, Brescianelli, is eager to know more about Sicily. Bellodi answers that Sicily is incredible. Sciascia intervenes: “Italy is also incredible; and one needs to go to Sicily to realise how incredible Italy is. ‘Perhaps all Italy would become Sicily ...’”25

25

Sciascia. Il giorno della civetta, 479.

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Like Guttuso, Sciascia cannot escape the politics of involution—the moment when the margin prevails. But this prevalence, this taking over, does not follow an inverted Jacobin definition of revolution. The ‘taking over’ is not revolutionary in a Hegelian sense, when antithesis transforms the thesis via synthesis. Involutions are antinomic in a Kantian sense. They have noumenal properties and inhabit unknown spaces. These spaces remain unresolved because they do not facilitate the appearance of reality. In other words, they are averse to phenomena, and so they do not belong to ethics or reason—even when they take the semblance of common and good sense. Like Guttuso’s art works, Sciascia’s narrative is informed by the involution of the so-called ‘end of Enlightenment’, which is not relevant to the margin because it does not fit history as one event, but remains one of the events it seeks to preserve, reject and play with. The idea of a gone Enlightenment is irrelevant to the politics of involution. In fact the Enlightenment survives in the many disparate instances of what is ultimately mistaken for the margin. This is because in effect the margin does not exist as a margin. Involution does not act as an inverted or a lack of revolution. In Il giorno della civetta Bellodi got it wrong when he thought that he could go down South and act as a missionary of the State of Right. For the South, the North is a false category. North and South are a matter of geographical relativism. To understand Sicily one must look at Italy, but likewise all Italy becomes Sicily. Often Siciliy is seen as the margin of Italy. But here the margin is not an actual or rational residue of a larger context. Nor is it the backyard of some sound edifice. It would not help if one were to simply equate Sicily with a negative image of the Industrialized or Enlightened mainland. Sciascia reveals how actually, the margin is also the mainland. Sicily and Italy do not respond to each other but within each other. They are each other. So one is both right and wrong to see Sicily as the margin of Italy. This is not a mere play of words, but denotes an insufficient political narrative—or better put, the political narratives that we are used to, become insufficient when confronted by this state of affairs. Sciascia captures it all in just one phrase: “Perhaps all Italy would become Sicily.” It is now customary to identify an end or an expected conclusion of one historical paradigm or another. But what Sciascia presents cannot be configured in a space between a beginning and an end. In A ciascuno il suo (To each his own) Sciascia presents us with a tautological trap where the only way of escape is to know what one must forget. A ciascuno il suo is a memorial to a teleological project or a moral expectation that finds itself buried in a quarry. This novel articulates the dispossessed

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distance between he who knows and what one should choose not to know. In its story line, a college professor by the name of Laurana becomes a selfappointed ‘detective’ committed to solve the murder of a friend. Public opinion had already attributed the murder to an act of infidelity, blamed on a pharmacist, Manno. The truth is that Manno was killed because he happened to be with the Mafia’s targeted victim, Dr. Roscio. But this killing was not coincidental. The murderer engineered the plot, and wanted Manno to be blamed, and Roscio to be seen as innocent. Manno received threats. Everyone in the village chose to argue that the targeted victim was Manno, because he received threats, which were not Mafian, but smelt of vengeance for the chemist’s presumed affair with a relative of the unknown killer. Roscio (whom Laurana realised was the real target) was considered a victim of Manno’s would-be affair. Laurana’s loyalty to Manno, and his concealed sentimental attachment to Roscio’s wife motivates him to find the truth. So far this looks like a normal detective story. But there is an intended tautological flavour to Sciascia’s story, where Laurana reaches the moment of truth, but in doing so he finds himself buried in a quarry. The involution of knowledge (knowing too much means death) is here typified as a sense of self-imposed order by a polity that is jealous of its would-be stability. While Laurana is buried in a quarry, the victim’s wife marries her lovercousin who in fact murdered Laurana and her late husband. Truth could never reveal itself, even if some knew exactly what happened. Roscio’s widow grassed Laurana up to the Mafia. This was her conscious choice, but it is not clear whether it was planned or consented by her. Her consensus is helpless in the face of the tautology of survival. In Sciascia’s novels the real plot is the sleep of reason. This sleep keeps Sciascia’s readers awake, even when it appears to defy any hope for synthesis or resolution. The real story is not found in the undefined and undiscovered truth of the murder, but in the particularities of communication, speech acts and forms of testimony. This is what gives character to the plot. Sciascia’s novels could be read as a lesson in the theory of culture and the ensuing politics of involution. Sciascia’s works may take a tragicomic air of a thriller when turned into films,26 but what Sciascia says about Guttuso, could be said of his narrative: the greatness is not in the subliminal universality of the flags, but in the contingency of the washing-line, hanging on the terrace—those modest facts of cultural aspiration which say it all. 26 In 1967 Elio Petri directed a film based on A ciascuno il suo with Gian Maria Volontè as Laurana and Irene Papas as Roscio’s widow. In 1968 Damiano Damiani directed a film interpretation of Il giorno della civetta with Franco Nero as Bellodi.

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ORESTES AND THE CYCLOPS Pirandello argues that “the absurdities of life do not need to become verisimilar, because they are true.” This is contrary to what happens in art, where absurdities gain verisimilitude to appear (and gain) truth. “Once they are verisimilar, they cease to be absurd.”27 As an act that distinguishes the real from the mimetic, verisimilitude claims its right to autonomy28 for the sake of truth, where the necessary truth of semblance is opposed to the unnecessary truth of reality. This is necessary not for the sake of art, but for the sake of defining the truth in order to legitimize the way with which art defines itself and the world. Pirandello keeps the distinction between semblance and reality clear: while a fact of life may be absurd, a work of art (un’opera d’arte), if it is art’s work (se è opera d’arte), is not.29 Pirandello’s work of art in question is comedy, where the need to absurdity takes the quest for truth into the mechanisms of the ironic, and whose seriousness even takes the cathartic linearity of tragedy on a different order. As Aristotle’s classic definition of comedy goes, “comedy is (...) an imitation of men worse than the average; worse however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly. The ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.”30 There may be a way into pain by means of absurdity, out of which some good could emerge. However, Pirandello takes a different route, by which he takes comedy and tragedy out and away from moral certainty—which is far from saying that his idea of comedy is unethical. As Anselmo Paleari tells Adriano in Il Fu Mattia Pascal, one accident could make all the difference between ancient and modern tragedy: “a hole in the sky.” Old Paleari tries to talk his tenant Adriano Meis (known in his previous ‘life’ as Mattia Pascal) into attending a puppet-theatre presentation of Electra. He is fascinated by the setup, which is entirely enacted by mario27 Pirandello, Luigi. “Avvertenza sugli scrupoli della fantasia” [A note on the scruples of fantasy], appended to Il Fu Mattia Pascal [1921 edition] and as republished in Pirandello, Il Fu Mattia Pascal, 474. 28 One must remember that the word ‘autonomy’ is defined by the etymological distinctions represented by the dual meaning of the suffix ‘nomy’. While auto- implies the act of being by itself, nomy comes from nómos and ónoma, law and name. Thus autonomy indicates both something that sustains its own law but also an entity that names itself. 29 See Pirandello. “Avvertenza sugli scrupoli della fantasia”, 475. 30 Aristotle, Poetics 1449a 31-36. In The Complete Works of Aristotle.

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nettes. Although Pirandello makes no mention of the issue of semblance, the nature of the novel itself allows one to think in narratives that are twice, or even three times recast and removed in verisimilitude. Adriano Meis was once Mattia Pascal—believed dead and buried by his village, family and friends. Paleari himself is a theosophist whose imagination is entirely thanatic (obsessed with death) and knows nothing but the universalism of death. Paleari’s discussion of tragedy takes on a similar discussion, which operates between what may happen if in verisimilitude the absurd takes on the truth it needs in order to absolve the mimetic duality between fact and representation. Paleari imagines a bizarre situation where exactly when the marionette representing Orestes is to take revenge on Aegisthus and his mother, its sword rips a hole in the ‘sky’. “What happens then, Mr Meis? (...) Orestes will be utterly confused by that hole in the sky!” Orestes still feels revengeful and he is about to follow his impulse with frenzied passion. But when he is about to strike his eyes are distracted by the rip in the sky, which change the nature of the entire scene. Orestes loses heart and downs his sword. “Orestes becomes Hamlet. Believe it or not, all the difference between ancient and modern tragedy amounts to this Mr Meis: a hole in the sky.”31 While in ancient tragedy, to secure a good outcome would have implied a balanced relationship between the contingencies of life and the necessities of art, the Pirandellian imagination relays this certainty onto the weak constitution of a sky made of papier mâché. Life’s struggle becomes a prop in the imagination of time. In its contingent nature fulfilment and end (as télos) becomes a stage-prop. Sciascia attends closely to this passage and takes it to an anthropological level. He extends Paleari’s comparison to a comparison between Verga’s ancient and Pirandello’s modern tragedy. A rip in the sky is also the cause of Sciascia’s comparison. However, this time it is an historical accident: (...) as a remnant of geography: between Catania and Girgenti; between the Val Demone, which the Arabs never really conquered, and the Val di Mazara, which they secured for centuries. (...) While in Catania the sense of the tragic and that of the comic live in their ancient separate distinctions; in Girgenti they constantly play the dialectical and indissoluble contrast which generates that modern sense we call humour.

31

Pirandello. Il Fu Mattia Pascal, 383-4.

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This [difference] must be ascribed to the persistent Greek view of life in the Val Demone, and its weakening in the Val di Mazara.32

Again, these distinctions are found in everyday life. Yet they also seem to be played on the dice of Zeus, in whose hands the fate of a no one (a nessuno) is narrated by the hundred thousand. Like Vitangelo Moscarda in Pirandello’s other celebrated work, Uno Nessuno e Centomila (One, no one and a hundred thousand), Mattia Pascal confronts the accidental mishaps of his journeys, by externalizing their cause in a mimetic search for truth: “My true ‘outwardness’, to put it this way, was much more and only I knew it: I was no more anything; no civil state recognized me, except in Miragno, as a dead person with another name.”33 Once more, as recurrent in the Mediterranean literary imagination, Pirandello legitimates the journey as a way to objectify the self. Even before the journey starts, the intention is for it to be a permanently postponed homecoming. Like Odysseus in Sicily, whose life is threatened by Polyphemus the Cyclops and his one-eyed vision, Pirandello’s hero assumes the self as that of a no one or in the same way Odysseus calls himself outis—no man, or no one—as a trick to escape from Polyphemus whose eye he lanced. The struggle is pretty much situational, and just as the maddening absurdity of truth finds recourse in the solace of Mattia Pascal’s masking himself as Adriano Meis, so would the life of a no one restore the skills of trickery, where “every object in us would transform itself according to the images which it evokes.”34 In this way the object becomes our subject and we like what we want to like about it. Pirandello sees this as the free act by which we impose harmony on the objective world. It is a kind of “harmony which we establish between [the object] and ourselves, the soul that achieves for us only and that is formed by our own memories.”35 Even when duplicity becomes the only viable antidote against a oneeyed political system, there is still a viable way throughout the journey that the Mediterranean imagination allows us to perceive through our skills of questioning and tricking the same system. Whether this system, this polity, is articulated by the cultural peculiarity of Miragno in Il Fu Mattia Pascal or the local knowledge of those who live in Girgenti, in his historical novel I Vecchi e I Giovani, Pirandello’s sense of origin—his notion of arché—keeps coming back. Likewise his end-objective—his télos—keeps returning to the Sciascia, Leonardo. Pirandello e la Sicilia [Pirandello and Sicily], 18. Pirandello. Il Fu Mattia Pascal, 343. 34 Ibid. 346. 35 Ibid. 32 33

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same point of origin—the same arché—where the idea of constancy was supposedly regaled by fate. There is no way out of this constant to-ing and fro-ing between origins and ends. We are “thrown into reality”, says Pirandello, maybe anticipating Heidegger’s notion of Geworfenheit as if we were thrown-into-being.36 Yet in Pirandello, what ‘throws’ being is a fate that is never recognised—unless it is masked as a self-assumed objectivity. Inasmuch as this may be a literary way of asserting fate and being as a recurrence of facts, Pirandello retains a verist approach. This does not allow us to forget that reality out there signifies a constant homecoming. A continuous homecoming frees the imagination in the same way Cavafy always carries the city in his sense of being, while wishing that the journey never ends. This kind of reality is reached by the will with which the politics of involution free tragedy and comedy from their separate distinction. What is achievable, whether by the realities that are given or the truth one has to reinvent, is still down to the extents by which the inner city, as an internalized polity, and the continuous journey which has been hitherto completed by being externalized, would reach each other in the same way comedy and tragedy are mutually recognised in the necessary absurdity of mimesis. In becoming Adriano Meis, Mattia Pascal found his way into—and out of—the politics of involution. As Adriano Meis he realized that the strings of reality he believed to have severed could never be distanced from the constant returns of his journey.37 One could imagine how Adriano Meis reconstructs a world whose case is denied on the grounds of its teleological impossibility. Is this rejection of teleology an excuse to hold onto a journey without destination, where the arrival is precluded by an impossible homecoming? Assuming—unlike Agamemnon—that his return would remain open to any consequence (even when he could not believe his luck when events turned to his favour), Mattia Pascal returns to where he left, only to find that his wife was remarried and his dreaded mother-in-law was now happily lodged with a new son-in-law who gave her a granddaughter and a comfortable life. At the point of shattering this new life and take revenge, Mattia was distracted by a hole in the sky. In this accidental gift, and through this accidental whole, Mattia saw the light and he decides—against his instincts—to forfeit his legal right. Unlike Orestes, Mattia’s revenge finds sol-

36 37

Pirandello. Il Fu Mattia Pascal, 341. Ibid.

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ace in regaining a present and forgetting the past. Unlike Hamlet, he defies the ghosts of time by assuming that he could manipulate destiny. Mattia confronts the politics of involution with his own, inbred and personalized, political act: appropriating time as ever-presence, as a happy accident of throwness-into-being. Like Guttuso’s claim over one’s own roof and privacy, Mattia’s (or Pirandello’s?) present is claimed as one’s own presence. Here the marginal nature of contingency impedes any attempt to objectify or trivialize it by formulaic definitions. In this way one’s proper roof, privacy and presence, is safe from being turned into one’s own prison. Far from responding to crisis, Mattia Pascal’s engagement with the politics of involution recognizes crisis as permanent. This also implies that a different state of affairs may become possible not when crisis signals revolution (as it was customarily believed) but when the pragmatic nature of history is recognised in its aporetic character. Only then, would the self recognise history as mimetic truth. Far from dead, Mattia Pascal assaulted the givens of human potentiality, and saw history as an entelecheic process— that is, as a continuous journey between potentiality and act, between origins and ends; but where neither would exhaust each other, and where the order is often reverted, where ends are transformed into beginnings, and what appears to be a fulfilment is a form of inauguration. What some see as the death of everything (whether art, history, gender, philosophy, god or humans) Pirandello presents us with a sophismata—a series of refutations that counter and are in turn countered by respective forms of affirmation. His aesthetics presents us with an art form that enables women and men to deliberately replace the stories that make history. Like Sciascia and Guttuso, Pirandello reassures us that the social may implode; that this implosion is marked by the reconstruction of other socials that are less grand but ever more conscious of their continuous presence. This is what gives character to a revolition which, unlike revolution, allows past and present to remain, and where rather than rejected, the idea of impasse is celebrated as a repeated beginning. In Mattia Pascal one finds a model of how the present is reconstructed as perennial immanence, as Eugenio Montale’s “quid definitivo”, the ultimate what.38 The what asserts its individuality and its right to autonomy as a right to its own laws of being and its own way of naming itself and the world. The appropriated present of no one (Pirandello’s nessuno or Homer’s outis) regales autonomy with a right to name itself and trick Polyphemus. But to trick the Cyclops one also needs to accept the reminder of a sky 38

See chapter 3, above.

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made of papier mâché, once ripped by Orestes in his role of a marionette. Only then would absolute freedom begin to dawn and release the nonchalance by which Silenus, inspired by Odysseus’s wisdom, sang in Sicilian: Cu’ non ama lu vinu, è foddi! Biviri! Attrunzari, muncennu dui minnuzzi e carizzannu mulunedda lisci e tenniri! ballari e non pinsari a guaj! Ca comu non m’haju a accattari stu beni? E mannu a futtirsi dda bestia di Ciclopu cu dd’occhiu ’nmezzu a frunti!39 (The man who does not enjoy drinking is mad: in drink one can raise this to a stand, catch a handful of breast and look forward to stroking her boscage, there’s dancing and forgetfulness of cares. Shall I know kiss such a drink and tell the bonehead Cyclops—and the eye in the middle of his head, too—to go hang?)40

39 Pirandello, Luigi. ’U Ciclopu. [The Cyclops]. Sicilian translation of Euripides’s Cyclops. In Pirandello, Luigi, Saggi Poesie, Scritti Varii. [Essays, Poems and Various writings], 1224. 40 Euripides. Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea, 83. Note the use of David Kovacs’s English translation of Euripides’s Cyclops is meant to give a rough guide of the context and does not directly tally with Pirandello’s poetic Sicilian rendering.

5 EVERYDAY’S HERESY Form and essence are identical. (...) Zorba knew this, but could not say it. He danced it. I thought to myself, If only I can transform this dance into words! 1 —Nikos Kazantzakis [T]he concept of the connexion of cause and effect [is] by no means the only idea by which the understanding thinks the connexion of things a priori, but rather that metaphysics consists altogether of such connexions.2 —Immanuel Kant

Kazantzakis stands in awe of how Zorba’s dance connects form to essence without the implements of philosophical grammar. Conveyed through a body in jest, Zorba’s dance even defies physicality. There is no need to say what human essence might be or look like. When it comes to Zorba’s dance, rather than think, human reason must gaze. He leaped into the air and his feet and arms seemed to sprout wings. As he threw himself straight in the air against that background of sea and sky, he looked like an old archangel in rebellion. For Zorba’s dance was full of defiance and obstinacy. He seemed to be shouting to the sky: “What can you do to me, Almighty? You can do nothing to me except kill me. Well, kill me, I don’t care! I’ve vented my spleen, I’ve said all I want to say; I’ve had time to dance … and I don’t need you any more!” Watching Zorba dance, I understood for the first time the fantastic efforts of man to overcome his weight. I admired Zorba’s endurance, his agility and proud bearing. His clever and impetuous steps were writing on the sand the demoniac history of mankind.3

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Report to Greco, 468. Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics That Can Qualify As A Science, 7. 3 Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek, 294. 1 2

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Unlike Kant or Kazantzakis, Zorba says it all by constructing his own kinaesthetic narrative. In his dance what seems necessary to life becomes accidental. Certainty pales into insignificance. The sacred gives way to life’s accident. Zorba’s narrative verges on heresy, but the everyday must retain its heretical freedom if it were to survive the wrath of the gods. After all, what else could a deity do to a mortal beyond taking away its life? Even immortal power has its limit: “What can you do to me, Almighty? You can do nothing to me except kill me. Well, kill me, I don’t care! I’ve vented my spleen, I’ve said all I want to say; I’ve had time to dance … and I don’t need you any more!” DANCED MOR(T)ALITY In Zorba’s grammar, non-life does not mean the end, but a new beginning that vindicates those killed by the gods. In defiance of the gods, mortals gain immortality through the memory of other mortals. Even when not living anymore, the lived body is retained in the memory of what it touched. Zorba dances to the immortality of memory. In Zorba’s dance feeling and movement make existence possible. In the idea of kinaesthetics, movement is denoted by kinesis, while aísthesis (from where we get aesthetics) signifies feeling. Far from the beauty of goodness or truth, aesthetics has to do with sensation and the touch by which we as humans change existence into reality; and by which we continue to dare the gods and gain immortality beyond the limits of our mortal body. Kazantzakis does not simply equate movement with a kinaesthetic appreciation of dance. Kinesis is not restricted to the immediacy of a moving form, but as a negation of stasis; which includes the stasis of rational certainty and blind faith. Zorba’s dance embodies a critique of a life that is frozen in the eyes of the gods as well as mortals who think that life can be explained through reason: “You know [Chaucer’s] tale of the miller’s wife, don’t you? Well you don’t expect to learn spelling from her backside, do you? The backside of the miller’s wife, that’s human reason.”4 Better put, Zorba’s kinaesthetic narrative is a critique of metaphysics and the corresponding myth of an ethical imperative. (...) I’ll work for you as much as you like. I’m your man there. But the santuri, that’s different. It’s a wild animal, it needs freedom. If I’m in the mood I’ll play. I’ll even sing. And I’ll dance the Zéimbékiko, the Hassápiko, the Pentozáli——but, I tell you plainly from the start, I

4

Kazantzakis. Zorba the Greek, 13.

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must be in the mood. Let’s have that quite clear. If you force me, it’ll be finished. As regards those things, you must realise, I’m a man.5

Zorba’s dance is also meant to fascinate, tease, and transcend the immediate. It is a man’s dance that takes place in a world where power is nurtured by a narrative of protection, where women are adored as symbols of love, and by which they are equally objectified. Beyond what is also a form of male arrogance, Kazantzakis presents a narrative of protection and adoration towards women. For Zorba women “smell out a man who desires them and one who doesn’t. That’s why in every town I’ve ever set foot in, even now when I’m old, ugly as an ape and got no smart clothes, I’ve always had one or two women running after me.”6 This is symptomatic of a form of vulnerability where the assumption is that the male teaser needs temptation, thereby admitting his weakness with regards to the other gender. But this is also an inverted form of temptation where the assumption is that the weak person is the temptress not the tempted. This illusion of male power results in a game of hide and seek, moving between situations and human relations. It seems an outrage and a cliché, and one never knows where Kazantzakis is going with this, particularly when he (as the Boss in the novel) shies away from Zorba’s advise to seek the young widow Sourmelina’s perceived sexual favours. But when the reader thinks that Zorba is caught out, Kazantzakis moves Zorba on to the far side of the keel and comes out with an equally heretic proposal. In Zorba’s gender politics he poses man at the service of woman, overturning the tables of patriarchy and heretically stating that “he who can sleep with a woman and does not, commits a great sin.” My boy, if a woman calls you to share her bed and you don’t go, your soul will be destroyed! That woman will sigh before God on judgement day, and that woman’s sigh, whoever you may be and whatever your fine deeds, will cast you into Hell! 7

In his moral imagination Zorba ‘gives’ woman her right to sexuality, but more than that, her right to love whomever she wants. This is yet another move in his dance. He swiftly moves from dependence to apparent independence, and back to a form of interdependence between the sexes. Even when this seems to retain a sexist hierarchy, albeit presented in inverted form, through the character of Zorba, Kazantzakis severely critiques Kazantzakis. Zorba the Greek, 17. Ibid. 152. 7 Ibid. 107. 5 6

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the bigotry of the male-centred canon where women are forced to perform their sexual ‘duty’ to their husband. Before modern feminists asserted the right of female orgasm and deconstructed the fallacy of genital love, Kazantzakis hints at a proto-feminism, which though crude, is intent on overturning the moral hierarchy in favour of what seems to be a polity of mutualism between women and men. Zorba’s physical and moral defence of the young widow Sourmelina against Mavrandoni’s bigotry is more than a mechanism in Kazantzakis’s ethical romantic plot. In Mavrandoni’s murder of Sourmelina—in front of a consenting congregation on its way to Easter Sunday mass—Kazantzakis damns the religious sexist bigotry that prevails in society. Kazantzakis’s attack on patriarchal tyranny extends from old Mavrandoni—who claimed a right to murder the widow whom he falsely holds responsible for refusing his son Pavli from ‘owning’ her—to the fallacy of God as patriarch. Zorba’s fury even blames God for the deeds of men: I tell you, boss, everything that happens in this world is unjust, unjust, unjust! I won’t be party to it! I, Zorba, the worm, the slug! Why must the young die and the old wrecks go on living? (...) I had a boy once (...) and I lost him when he was three years old. Well ... I shall never never, never forgive God for that, do you hear? I tell you, the day I die, if He has the cheek to appear in front of me, and if He is really and truly a God, He’ll be ashamed! Yes, yes, He’ll be ashamed to show himself to Zorba, the slug!8

When the men in the bar make fun of Sourmelina’s friend Mimiko, they ask him mockingly: “how do you spend your days Mimiko?”, he replies: How d’you think? I live like a lord! I wake in the morning, I eat a crust. Then I do odd jobs here for people, anywhere, anything, I run errands, cart manure, collect horse-dung, and I’ve got a fishing-rod. I live with my aunt, mother Lenio, the professional mourner. You’re bound to know her, everybody does. She’s even been photographed. In the evening I go back home, drink a bowl of soup and a drop of wine, if there is any. If there isn’t, I drink enough of God’s water to make my belly swell like a drum. Then good night!9

Mimiko is a simpleton, innocently enamoured by the young widow. Mimiko tries to protect and help her, and Sourmelina returns the favour by giving him food and looks out for him. Yet Mimiko remains the absurd 8 9

Kazantzakis. Zorba the Greek, 251. Ibid. 103.

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figure, the idiot whose words seem to make no sense. But is Mimko’s life meaningless? Through the figure of Mimiko Kazantzakis brings forth the paradox of human existence. Mimiko’s character brings sobriety and humanity to what is a male-oriented, aggressive cruel world. In contrast Zorba’s morality stems from a direct, yet never relativist, form of humanism. As Kazantzakis writes in one of his notebooks in 1914: “We must add to the essence of life, express the summit of our desire. In the grip of a superhuman will, we must surge forward. There is no moral problem binding us.”10 Morality must not hold any hidden intent. In dance as in life this understanding of morality holds Zorba to his vulnerable position: yearning to be seen; needing to bequeath his (aesthetic) feeling to the gender he adores. In poetic articulation, power is no more a subject of masculinity than an object of femininity. In dance, the real subject of power remains within the dance as its ideal—with female and male representing a lived kind of mediation, which is expressed in those fleeting, yet essential, moments that occur between reality and existence, essence and form. While in essence dance is one, its formal manifestations are devolved in a plurality of individual interpretations. One could argue that in its totality, dance is the focus of any power by which women and men convey their narratives. Such plurality moves the perceptive feeling in a multiple and three-dimensional direction and take a plural nature. So while the dance is archetypal, the interpretative rendition of its kinaesthetic narratives remains very diverse in nature and in terms of how it is personalized by the dancer on one hand, and the participant audience on the other. In a dance like the zéimbékiko this power-structure leans to the female audience’s favour, where women are not just the spectators but referents of the archetypal character of the dance. If the gender role of this dance changes and the female concedes to dance the zéimbékiko, she forfeits the ideal structure of the dance and substitutes the aesthetic idea with a prosaic objectivity where female serves male. A female dancing the zéimbékiko (unlike the male dancer) traditionally dances on a table, indicating a willingness to be used and hence consenting to be an object of the audience-subject. To the contrary, the apparent power of the male-dancer is constantly projected onto a female audience where what appears to be purely aesthetic, is a structure of power that is bartered between will and deed—in other words between the volition of the dance’s poetics and what it does to the structure Kazantzakis, Nikos. “Notebook 1914.” Cited in Kazantzakis, Helen. Nikos Kazantzakis. A biography based on his letters. 56. 10

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of the gendered politics of audience, music and dancer. Yet, for what it’s worth, such a description may well be apocryphal and distorted by an aural history that exchanges gender roles by the conventions of who is telling the story.11 Kazantzakis articulates the polity of Zorba’s dance. The dance tells a story even when its veracity remains doubtful and is somehow apocryphal. Doubtful as it is, the dance maintains the supremacy of form by remaining suspended between fact and interpretation, between what is the truth of human relationships and the representation by which it is rendered through the moral imagination that is danced. The story is never really concluded. It is a continuous agony that comes from a feeling that nothing is really fulfilled. In the poetic narrative of such a télos-in-waiting, dance acquires its own peculiar grammar. The rhythm continues to suggest a conclusion that is never reached. Its syncopated tease is conferred with an autonomy that belongs to its intimate being, known only to itself, and therefore unknown to all. In the apocryphal nature of Kazantzakis’s story there is no place for a happy-ending with Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates dancing to Theodorakis’s music, as we find in Cacoyannis’s film Zorba (1964). Kazantzakis’s Zorba lives and dies as the eternal survivor. The figure of Zorba is empowering because it is apocryphal. One never knows who the real Zorba was, even when we know that there was such a man, whom Kazantzakis knew well and who in fact worked for him in a lignite mine in Prastova, in the Peloponnese (not Crete), and who was also quite a character.12 Yet while we do not know how faithful is Kazantzakis’s Zorba to the existent Zorba, Kazantzakis presents us with an archetypal homo ludens, a being who is defined and defines himself through play. Kazantzakis’s playfulness folds onto itself, representing another level of play between the existent Zorba—the man who lives and dies; and the real one—the character who outlives us all. The real Zorba gains epicurean value over and above the mortal, existent man whose errant life is lost on the readers of Kazantzakis’s novel. Odysseus-like Zorba gains immortality as a real demiurge, leading no one but himself through the meaning of everyday life: “It seemed that whatever Zorba touched had become immortal.”13 11 Just as this gender role has been narrated to me in the same oral fashion, and the truthfulness of which I can never prove or dismiss. 12 Kazantzakis, Helen. Nikos Kazantzakis, 65. On the relationship between Zorba in Kazantzakis’s work and Aléxis Zorbás the man, see Peter Bien’s Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, Vol. 2, 144ff. 13 Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 458.

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APOCRYPHAL CHOICES In his three monumental works, Aléxis Zorbás (known in translation as Zorba the Greek), The Last Temptation of Christ and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Kazantzakis regales us with a world outlook that unmistakably conveys a Mediterranean context. This context is defined by an imagery that depicts reality as actively transcending the limits of existence—just as Aristotle endows existence with an essence that is in constant process of realization. The agent of this realization is that of human will, which rises beyond the limits and assumes for itself a god-like power that is fully intended to beat all odds. Kazantzakis layers all these ingredients over each other: reality is layered over the limits of existence; love is layered over cruelty; peace ultimately overcomes the shortcomings of war; free will takes over everything, bearing out the intimate desires of a hidden self. In 1924 Kazantzakis writes to Elena Samios, who would later become his second wife: Now I am writing The Odyssey. My heart is a ship with a yellow sail, from prow to stern filled with Odysseus. He has set off on his second and last journey—passing through Crete, Africa, the Mediterranean. He encounters the ideas and women and labours he has longed for. He transcends human limits and goes on—creating God with the prow of his ship.14

The words aìresis and apòkryphos, whose modern meaning is twice removed from their original context, originally meant the ‘act of choice’ and the ‘intimacy of the hidden’. Yet these words now come to us as heresy and the apocryphal, thus prohibiting us from choosing what was deliberately hidden from us. Indeed, heretics are those who choose to dissent from an orthodoxy that upholds the right to select, standardise and reject anything beyond its totalitarian design. Thus the stories of Christ’s childhood, early adulthood or earthly love are prohibited in the Canon, but remain hidden in the apocryphal texts like the Gospels of Jesus’s Childhood, of Mary Magdalene, or Thomas. To reclaim one’s right to choose to narrate or believe these hidden stories would be tantamount to exercise the right for aìresis, a choice that is now deemed heretical, and thus proscribed. Yet in his heretical acts, Kazantzakis reveals and turns the apocryphal nature of life to his favour, so that the heroic figure of the human self answers to the eternal cry of fulfilment: “I saw substance, that great whore with her wide thighs, fall like Mary Magdalene at the feet of Christ, and, in

14

Kazantzakis, Helen. Nikos Kazantzakis, 65.

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tears, she too became transubstantiated.”15 In this occurrence of a sinful world that is delivered by an act of transubstantiation—which implies the change of one substance into another even when this is not evident in the actual form that we see, feel and taste—what was canonical and therefore uniquely chosen, becomes a matter of everydayness. Like an apocryphal evangelist, Kazantzakis returns the beatified back to its human origin. What was mystified by the orthodoxy becomes logical to the occurrence of everyday life. He also reassures us that the connections between legend and reality are clearly established so that the good news would be taken beyond the synoptic dictatorship of doctrinal selectivity. As Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel of Thomas: When you make the two One, and you make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below, so that you will make the male and the female into a single One, in order that the male is not made male not the female made female: when you make eyes into an eye, and a hand into a hand, and a foot into a foot, and even an image into an image, then shall you enter the Kingdom.16

Kazantzakis did not limit the apocryphal method to religion or Christianity, but extended it to the polity where Lenin sets foot on Russian soil “with his little cap, his clean frayed shirt, his shabby coat—an army of one, stubby, pale, and unarmed.”17 Like Christ, Lenin is tormented by the demons of the world and the desert which exhorts him: All this is yours, Vladimir Ilich. I give it to you—free! Just say one phrase, say the magic phrase I’ve been dictating to you for so many years: “Workers of the world, unite!” Say it, and czars, gold braid, goatbearded priests, well-dressed, well-fed pot-bellies—with one puff they’ll fall down on their backs. March over their carcasses, Vladimir Ilich!18

Like Lenin, Kazantzakis’s Nietzsche also adopts a hidden life that becomes a permanent epiphany as well as a permanent visitation. Nietzsche is a prophet who wanders the world with one idea kindling in his heart: to break down the hopelessness of humanity. Thus Kazantzakis exhorts his prophet:

From Kazantzakis’s drafts of the Symposium (c. 1918-1920). In Kazantzakis, Helen. Nikos Kazantzakis, 63. 16 The Gospel of Thomas, 22: 9-21, 24. 17 Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 394. 18 Ibid. 394-5. 15

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How moved I was while searching beneath the springtime sun in Engadine between Sils-Maria and Silvplana, searching for the pyramidal rock where you were first overwhelmed by the vision of Eternal Recurrence! (...) [Y]ou were tasting that bitter joy of heroes, a joy which to paltry souls seems a martyrdom: to see the abyss in front of you and proceed toward it without condescending to feel afraid.19

Kazantzakis re-roots Christ and Odysseus, Lenin and Nietzsche in Crete. He gives them a body that sweats, pants, lives and dies; but which is also resurrected over and over again into the wilderness of memory. The canons of politics or religion, philosophy or history are replaced by the glance of Knossos: where bull and man—gods and humans—battle and love each other; and where fish flies out of the waters of necessity towards the skies of freedom.20 Here he exchanges, often indiscriminately, an array of symbolic orders, while negotiating a community of languages that he brings together as the quotidian particles of a philosophy of practice where ethics and morality freely conflate, without having to be pushed by a preassumed ought. Kazantzakis constructs a genealogical structure of his own. More than a lineage of ideas and thoughts, actions or desires, he peregrinates over a vast terrain in search of the tiniest detail which might look inconsequential to everyone else, but which holds critical force to his edifice of being. Like Dante’s roaming in the afterlife, Kazantzakis commutes between the cycles of philosophical heights, and travels across the breadth of a time-less horizon. He freely re-phrases the patterns of philosophical grammar by a Lebensphilosophie whose teleology is guided by the poetic mentorship of historic discernment and moral thought. With Dante he would hear his mentor and be guided into a world “ove udirai le disperate strida, | vedrai li antichi spiriti dolente | che la seconda morte ciascun grida.” 21 In the romantic Kazantzakis there is a rationalist, in the Dionysian an Apollonian Stoic. Like a monk on Judaic Sinai, he relishes and conserves, with the wished order and protection of the Prophet Muhammad, the ascetic stillness of a Byzantine genealogy where he ultimately encounters the haunting truth of the apophrades—the return of the dead—that “whoever

Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 321. See Ibid. 486 and 454. 21 “where you will hear the desperate wails, | see the painful ancient souls | which a second death would each plead for.” Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia, Inferno I: 115-117. 19 20

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uproots his instincts uproots his strength.”22 As Bloom puts it, “the apophrades, the dismal or unlucky days upon which the dead return to inhabit their former houses, come to the strongest poets, but with the very strongest there is a grand and final revisionary movement that purifies even this last influx.”23 Read in this context, Kazantzakis turns what he calls “the Cretan glance” (that emerges from the continuous return of the ancestral dead—whether real, imaginary or literary) into a formative ground, a Bildung. The Cretan glance is a perspective of prior influence, an apophradic strength that looks out into a world that is vaster and larger than its point of origin. And yet the point of origin remains essential to the-world-as-view. Far from hubris, this claim to a glance at one’s origin; this celebration of influence; provides the same view by which the logos that sustains the epics of Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Moses, Aeneas, Christ, Paul or Muhammad would unify arché with télos, origin with end, departure with arrival. As logos, the word that prompts these epic narratives acts as the reason for what they stand. The origin returns onto itself. It becomes an end, only to recur again and becomes a new origin, as in Nietzsche’s concept of recurrence. What seems common to every epic is the choice by which both author and protagonist claim their heretic right to be, and by whose heresy we are all empowered. I had nothing with me except the Gospels and Homer; at times I read Christ’s words of love and humility, at times the immortal verses of the Patriarch of the Greeks. You should be good, peaceful, forbearing (...) You should be strong, should love wine, women, and war (...).24

Choice is never exclusive. Opened to the diverse and the pagan, the chosen logos confirms and enhances the necessity of the perennial, where permanence is secured by the contained yet infinitely rearticulated choices of the duration of human time. In this tessellation of anguish and utopia, we all preserve a sense of coherence by the accidental nature of everyday life and the culture that it expresses. The cultural milieu is mediated by the hidden stories whose pagan origins are preserved in human ability; in the need to sing and reconstruct humanity’s many epics: How long, I thought, shall I live to enjoy the sweetness of the earth, the air, the silence and the scent of the orange tree in blossom? An icon of Saint Bacchus, which I had looked at in the chapel, had made my heart Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 302. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. A theory of poetry, 141. 24 Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 237. 22 23

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overflow with happiness. The things that move me most deeply—unity, firmness of purpose and constancy of desire—were once again revealed to me. Blessed be that charming little icon of a Christian youth with curly hair falling over his forehead like bunches of grapes. Dionysus, the handsome god of wine and ecstasy, and Saint Bacchus fused in my mind and took on the same appearance. Under the vine-leaves and the monk’s habit there quivered with life the same body, burnt by the sun— Greece.25

Kazantzakis’s Greece is a moral proposition that goes beyond the myth of national purity or chauvinistic identity. As his works on Greek culture and language (other than his novel-writing) testify, land and language articulate themselves within a plurality without which there would be no claim for either nation or creed. This is the Greece that Stavros Deligiorgis defines as “an area where things have entered freely, and where the process of assimilation has made the nod of recognition more frequent than the shock of surprise.”26 The ‘spiritual’ nature of Kazantzakis’s search inhabits the wider context of a Mediterranean where “the vine-leaves and the monk’s habit there quivered with life the same body, burnt by the sun.” There, Kazantzakis seeks orthodoxy in the idiom of difference. AROUND THE TEARS OF THE DAMNED On Mount Athos, old Father Ignatius pleads the young Kazantzakis to listen to his confession. The old monk is exasperated by a torment that he can no longer contain. Like a tired Jacob who could not wrestle with God’s angel anymore, Ignatius yields to the notion that God is primarily signified in the beautiful bosom of a young woman. Good God, what joy that was, what an unburdening, what a resurrection! My whole life I had been crucified; that night I was resurrected. But there was also something else, the terrible part, the part which I believe alone constituted my sin. (...) for the very first time I felt God come near me, come near with open arms. What gratitude I felt; what prayers I offered up the whole of that night, right until daybreak; how completely my heart opened and let God enter! 27

Kazantzakis. Zorba the Greek, 203. On the cultural heterogeneity of Greece and on Kazantzakis’s work on the language question see Stavros Deligiorgis, “Elytis’ Brecht and Hadzidakis’ Pirandello”; and Peter Bien, “The Demoticism of Kazantzakis” respectively in Edmund Keeley and Peter Bien. Modern Greek Writers. 27 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 231. 25 26

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In the detached life of the monk, the image of woman raises his soul from the tomb of his body. In carnal signification—that is, the transference of love and desire—the body that is entombed in the abjection of deliberate abstinence from creation, no longer finds its realization in the notion of origin as some kind of relic where the body is abandoned to the debilitation of time. Rather, the origin becomes self. Agape and eros are no longer separated. When love refuted desire (and vice versa) it remained secluded into a dead monolith where body was only incarnate by means of its death: “It was Woman, God bless her!, who brought the Lord into my room.”28 Woman on Athos remains anathema to this day. There, God becomes a relic and the dead and their presumed memory come to signify happiness. Until he met Woman, Ignatius forgot and misplaced the body with a relic and he mistook the flesh for the corruption of the body. His return to flesh as sarx brought love and desire to a prohibited ground. But Ignatius knew that the sacrificial and transubstantiated verses of redemption could never exclude the flesh, as this would prescribe any communion between body and soul. In his redemptive teleology Kazantzakis continuously challenges Christian orthodoxy for submitting the truth of redemption to the hegemony of its politics, or a polity that was bereft of, and counterpoised to the flesh. This deemed the flesh as sarx, as an inferior notion of the body as polis. This counter-positioning of sarx with polis, flesh with body as a moral polity, is not limited to Christianity. In his adoption of sacrificial and transubstantiated categories by way of the flesh, Kazantzakis also strikes at Christianity’s Platonic genealogy where we find the original separation of the body as flesh from the body as intellect. In the Platonic-Christian negation of the flesh, the polity of the body as a moral relic constructs an ethic that abstains from the flesh’s corporeal memory. In this amnesiac state, communion is reduced to communion-as-bread, broken in the memory of a crucified Messiah who cannot rise from the dead. The Bishop on Mt Athos objects to Kazantzakis’s admiration for the resurrected Christ: “You’re in a hurry, in a hurry my child (...) This our earthly passage, now and as long as we live, is a crucifixion.”29 This also creates the image of a defleshed Christ whose chaste state is androgynous and desexualized—an image that Kazantzakis shatters in The Last Temptation. Father Ignatius recognises the irony of love and seeks grace beyond the separated state of body from flesh. He resurrects the pagan commandment of self-knowledge by pre-empting death with life and by following it 28 29

Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 231. Ibid. 219.

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again with the flesh. Ignatius becomes a pagan once more, because his humanity follows the Aristotelian trajectory where the body-politic—the polis—returns and considers its origin in the flesh—in the sarx. Far from being reductionist, Ignatius reinvents the soul and finds omniscience in the body-made-flesh. The crucified memory of a Messiah-made-relic or a Christ-made-inhuman by dint of defleshed chastity is rejected once the body presupposes the soul’s realized happiness. Ignatius ultimately realizes the antinomy of morality in the irony of sin: “Can sin too be in God’s service?”30 The young Nikos Kazantzakis affronts the irony of a newly formed ethic where the body is recognized in its sinful state by which in turn it is able to recognize God once more. This seems to jar with Paul’s idea of the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit.31 Yet it seems that for the body to become God’s abode, it cannot do so by dint of a body that is a relic of its flesh. In recovering the body’s flesh and its desires, the old monk resurrects the body and rediscovers its holiness. Thus the body is asserted in its totality as that which could potentially become a temple of love. Could this solve the riddle of the holiness of the flesh, and how the flesh realizes itself as holy through the sinfulness of its desires? Kazantzakis was surely very acquainted with Zarathustra’s riddles when Nietzsche states: “Unchanging good and evil does not exist! From out of themselves they must overcome themselves again and again.”32 Which is why, the young pilgrim on Mt Athos concludes that “As I was speaking, I thought to myself without voicing my thought, A new decalogue was needed! A new decalogue! ... Just how this new decalogue could classify the virtues and vices, however, I was unable to discover.”33 The answers would be hinted in Zorba’s practical reason. But then, what Zorba has to say to the older Kazantzakis, is already presupposed in the young pilgrim’s ruminations over the fashioned antinomies of Heaven’s abodes which he conveys to another monk in whose hermitage he seeks ethical solace: “I’ve been told, Father, that a certain saint (...) was unable to find repose in heaven. God heard his sighs and summoned him. ‘What’s the matter? What makes you sigh?’ He asked. ‘Aren’t you happy?’ “ ‘How do you expect me to be happy, Lord’ (...) ‘when in the very Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 231. See Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. 1 Corinthians 6:19–20. 32 Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 139. 33 Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 232. 30 31

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center of Paradise there is a fountain that weeps?’ “ ‘What fountain?’ “ ‘The tears of the damned.’ ”34

Kazantzakis liberates the ethical act from the idea that truth reaffirms itself tautologically. Rather than a notion of truth that recycles itself by an authority that it claims without any pretexts, the truth that emerges from the fountain is marked by damnation and sacrifice. This is the irony of ascetic morality. Truth in an ascetic way is not something given by some divine grace that in turn fulfils itself at the expense of the mystic who denudes himself of all. Rather, ascetism is proclaimed through the struggle that is possible because of the body and not in spite of it. Ultimately Kazantzakis claims Odysseus on behalf of all ascetics and makes of the heroic trickster a new mystic. The mysticism of Odysseus defies the denouement by which the gods want to play their tricks on mortal humans. In his struggle Odysseus defies the gods’ sadistic pleasure by demiurgic resolve—pretty much in the same manner by which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra descends from the mountain to proclaim the death of God.35 In effect the death of God proclaimed the death of an all-pervasive notion of narrative, philosophical and theological power that took away from humans the ability to reason.36 This death restored power to the weak, and primarily recognized the essence of truth in the flesh of humans. With thought restored to the quotidian truths of women and men, Kazantzakis resurrects Odysseus to resume his human journey: Untamed Odysseus then raised his head high and hung above the chasm and sank into the terror of thought. The contours of his brain glittered like mountain peaks, the whole earth shone, the darkness like a spool unwound, his eyes sank inward, his white head swayed sluggishly, his soul cut cleanly from the worm, became all silk, and slowly wove its fine cocoon in the empty air.37

This is the ironic stance of sin: sin as story, sin as what is done, enacted and redeemed by the fact that it was committed by the normalcy of being human. As a young man, Kazantzakis knows woman and her flesh in a chapel on Psiloríti. The remorse which follows and the suffering of the parting from his lover provides the building blocks for his writing of the Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 224. Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 58-61. 36 See Vattimo, Gianni. Credere di Credere. 37 Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Odyssey. A Modern Sequel. XVI: 412-419 [496]. 34 35

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apocrypha of love, where Eros, like Bacchus, takes his deserved place in the hierarchy of the Saints. The boundaries between the pagan and the Christian where the random and carnal become ethical and redemptive, acquire equivalence in Kazantzakis’s work. Here catharsis in the Aristotelian sense is no less holy than redemption in its orthodoxy. For this to happen morality assumes the heretical act of freedom: a freedom earned through the struggle between history and story, truth and reality, body and flesh. Like an apocryphal gospel, The Last Temptation brings Christ “the Cross maker” down to the earth of bodies made in flesh, thus emboldening the Messiah’s suffered nature within the susceptibilities of ‘humanness’. But no less apocryphal (and heretical) are all of Kazantzakis’s stories of happiness and truth. Here we find his entreaties with what he constructs as a Cretan Bildung. This bears some correspondence between the moments of expression that we can hardly articulate and the formative patterns that promise happiness. Kazantzakis leaves nothing to be desired by the acquired understanding of a straight equivalence that is placed between how we perceive the world aesthetically—by means of one’s felt body; and the formative needs by which one grows as an individual—by means of one’s flesh. The image of heaven surrounding a fountain of tears recalls an old Epirot folk-song where the lover asks: “There in the sky that you fly, my lady turtle-dove (…) did you by chance see my lover?” To which the same lover would reply: “Oh yes, indeed, you saw him (…) lying on a friend (…) black crows eating his flesh, devouring the man I love.”38 In Kazantzakis’s suffered iconography the quest for happiness remains suspended in an ironic form of redemption that reinvents the same angst that gives origin to the image. His other decalogue—the law of the flesh— held deca (ten) only in name. Ethical assumptions claim oneness not lists that come in multiples of ten. With the notion of a unified moral, the grounded ethics of the flesh fulfil those intricate antinomic relationships that emerge between one’s self and another’s self. In this claim for moral accordance, ‘one’ is meant as ‘one body’ that knows love; the human act that makes two into one before it would ever know sin, as we have seen in Thomas’s Gospel. This almost sounds like a narrative taken straight out of the theories of love that were wagered between friends in Plato’s Symposium.39 One reason may be found in how Kazantzakis presumes oneness as See I trigona (The turtle dove), in Domna Samiou, Journey Throughout Greece with Domna Samiou, CD Sleeve Notes, 43. 39 See Socrates’s recounting of Diotima’s sermon in Plato’s Symposium, 201d212b. In The Collected Dialogues. 38

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the foundation on which he brings together Buddha, Hellenic Philosophy and his take on Christianity—not to mention his other takes on Nietzsche and Lenin. By the same predisposition that realizes the necessary contradictions in building a moral dialectic, Kazantzakis’s Christ knows resurrection before he would encounter death; just as he knows grace before he knows sin. Christ as God-made-human had to know why his resurrection would require the passion by which he lived a life that was made flesh. In this way the saint made sinner—not unlike the Christ made cross-maker who is passionate about Mary Magdalene—knows the happiness of a heaven that is epistemologically begotten from the fountain of the tormented. In Kazantzakis’s understanding of redemption, the irenic rewards of everlasting life could never emerge from a straightforward Platonic string between an ethical life and eternal reward. Rather, heaven is achieved by an intricate ruse of ethical luck, that is not short of being operated on the mysticism of an Odyssean ruse, and which Aristotle programs within the human quest for happiness as a call for compelled fulfilment—as eudemonia—and not simply as a state of irenic rest. I realized to what an extent earthly happiness is made to the measure of man. It is not a rare bird which we must pursue at one moment in heaven, at the next in our minds. Happiness is a domestic bird found in our own courtyards.40

“WITH DREADLESS HAND TOUCHING THEE” In his Enneads Plotinus closely considers the structural possibility of a convergence between feeling and reason that emerges as a compound.41 As a solid grammarian Plotinus lets nothing pass by as disconnected, which is why he deems the act of perception as being more than a causal response to outer stimuli.42 Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 182. In one English translation of the Enneads Plotinus’s term synamphóteros is translated as compound. It is worth noting the different translations of synamphóteros. Within the limits of a dictionary one finds this term translated as “both together” and “both in the same manner.” In A. H. Armstrong’s translation of the Enneads synamphóteros is translated as “the compound”; while in his seminal translation of 1917 Stephen McKenna renders it as “the Couplement.” As readers of these great translations we could enjoy the versatility of this term by putting it somewhere between compound and couplement. 42 Plotinus uses the word aísthonámai for sense-perception, which has the same connotative roots of aísthesis. In this manner one could qualify the perceptive act by the 40 41

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Let us say that it is the compound which perceives, and that the soul by its presence does not give itself qualified in a particular way either to the compound or to the other member of it, but makes, out of the qualified body and a sort of light which it gives of itself, the nature of the living creature, another different thing to which belong sense-perception and all other affections which are ascribed to the living body. But then how is it we who perceive? 43

A learned scientist of human nature Plotinus is quite aware of the role of the flesh within the causality of perception and how this offers points of convergence between reason and sensation. But his question has nothing to do with the natural mechanics of perception. Plotinus positions perception and its image (external sensation) as a link between experienced truth and the contemplation of form. This is not a causal route between some predisposed idea and what one sets out to find. The contemplation of form constitutes an understanding of the reality whose act is the ‘we’—the personality that arises from the real person that is articulated as (and within) the soul. It is because we are not separated from the living being so qualified, even if other things too, of more value than we are, enter into the composition of the whole essence of man, which is made up of many elements. And the soul’s power of sense-perception need not be perception of sense objects, but rather it must be receptive of the impressions produced by sensation on the living being; these are already intelligible entities. So external perception is the image of this perception of the soul, which is in its essence truer and is a contemplation of forms alone without being affected. From these forms, from which the soul alone receives its lordship over the living being, come reasonings, and opinions and acts of intuitive intelligence; and this precisely is where ‘we’ are.44

In its contact with the experiential nature of reality, the personality embodies an understanding of being as a predisposition towards the whole as that reality that lies beyond mere existence. The image of perception helps us figure out reality’s dimensions as these emerge from feeling, knowledge and being as aesthetic, epistemological and ontological dimensions of the soul’s “lordship over the living being, come reasonings, and opinions and acts of intuitive intelligence.” aesthetic act, whereby the meaning and implication of perception is not merely sensory but also notional-expressive. 43 Plotinus. Ennead I. 1. c. 7. [Unless otherwise, citations are from Armstrong’s translation]. 44 Ibid. (my emphasis).

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In the contexts of Plotinus’s argument, images—eídolon—extend to the figuring capacity of what we perceive. In many ways one could argue that the relationship with perception and images emerges from an act where, as in Kant’s notion of intuition (Anschauung), rather than seeing the object, the subject is at sight of the object. Sight becomes a presence and not simply a recorded stimulus of the presence. This also suggests that object and subject become exchangeable, where image pertains to figure—as a noun that is also a verb. The act of figuring bridges the connotative space—the space of knowing—that lies between vision and shape. Shape is both the subject of and an object to vision. Inversely, vision objectifies shape, as it is also its subject. Plotinus extended perception into the image’s remit within a context where the soul’s power of sense-perception is not restricted to the perception of sense objects, but is directed towards “the impressions produced by sensation on the living being.” This favours the personality that the compound mediates (and transforms) into the ‘we’. In his discussion of the compound, Plotinus raises the truth of the perceived image to the contemplative plane of forms. From this ground of reflection, the soul (or mind) gains an understanding of reason and opinion. By means of this understanding, perception becomes a form of convergence—which Plotinus identifies with the dimension of the ‘we’ as the personality that articulates the living being. There are two senses to this personality. One refers to the ‘beast’ or brute: “the body which has been given life.” The other refers “to that which even in our present life transcends it”: “the true man [... who] has the virtues which belong to the sphere of intellect and have their seat actually in separate soul, separate and separable even while it is still here below.”45 Indeed, this separation follows on from the Platonic distinction between the body as flesh and the intellect of the ‘true man’ as the mortal vehicle of the soul. Here the Plotinian discussion moves, pretty much in a Platonic way, into the realms of virtue where the separation of body and soul—i.e., the distinction between the existent human and the real person46—enters the realms of morality. Plotinus locates vice and virtue within a joint entity where the faculty of sensation seems to resolve itself. But to his question about love’s whereabouts and its belonging, Plotinus has a less clear answer, arguing that it is shared between the joint entity and “the man within”—that is, reason. Plotinus’s argument leads to a further elucidation

45 46

Plotinus. Ennead I. 1. c. 10. That is, psyche in its interconnected meanings of person and soul.

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of what he means by the compound. This falls within the entelechy of perception, where perception as a form of fulfilment is found in the act of touch. While we are children the powers of the compound are active, and only a few gleams come to it from the higher principles. But when these are inactive as regards us their activity is directed upwards: it is directed towards us when they reach the middle region. But then does not the ‘we’ include what comes before the middle? Yes but there must be a conscious apprehension of it. We do not always use all that we have, but only when we direct our middle part towards the higher principles or their opposites, or to whatever we are engaged in bringing from potency or state to act.47

While what we gleam of the image (in terms of how it participates in a fuller understanding of the world) is marginalised by childhood’s full use of sensory perceptive qualities, Plotinus suggests that in the later stages where we gather a fuller understanding of reality, there seems to be an impairment of this process of fulfilment. In this impaired state our perceptive realization of the personality awaits something else. It wants more even when it is not yet clear what else it needs. Plotinus holds on to his Platonic ground with regards to the purity of the soul and its relationship with vice and virtue. Yet he also finds that this needs to be squared with the fulfilment of knowledge, and how this journey (from the potentially known to the actually perceived) would touch upon the realities that will fulfil its objectives. To achieve this, Plotinus also follows Plato’s pedagogical route, demanding that the contact—or touch—with reality is realized through those philosophical methods by which the soul is freed from its bodily encrustation. However, a full subscription to the Platonic duality between soul and body would leave less room for the possibility of contact with the principles of reality. This is especially so in the case of a theory of art such as Plato’s where imitation negates art’s qualities of representation, with the consequence that art and beauty, like body and soul, remain separate. Plato’s metaphysical structure allows none of what Plotinus would pursue further when he enters the realms of the lover and artist’s touch. Here Plotinus moves beyond Plato in ascertaining that art and beauty will find their way into the route of the understanding. Plato advocates a series of pedagogic strictures as the only process by which we can make connections through the processes of anamnesis as the moment of philosophical recollection. In contrast, Plotinus presents us with the contact—or indeed 47

Plotinus. Ennead I. 1. c. 11.

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the touch—as an aesthetic moment that surpasses strict pedagogical needs. Whereas anamnesis is an act of laboured retrieval where artist, philosopher and lover have to gain their keep within the strictures of morality where art and beauty are at the far opposite end of each other, Plotinus’s moment of contact attracts and empowers the philosopher, as well as the lover and the artist by breaking this polarisation. Benedetto Croce argues that it is only in Plotinus that beauty and art become one concept. Plotinus puts forward a totally new concept in which “beauty and art come together within a passion and a mystic celebration of the spirit.”48 Plotinus’s aesthetic leap has its origin in its attachment to the artist and lover, whose varying degrees of affection with the journey towards the knowledge of the All (and the Good) remains curiously liberating, especially in today’s artistic and philosophic climates where the conceptual bond between truth, beauty and goodness is long gone. Plotinus tells us that between the musician, the lover and the philosopher, the dialectic (of discursive reasoning) favours the philosopher, in whose remits he is already well placed. But Plotinus is not averse to the musician and the lover, even though as a ‘good’ Platonist he considers them as farther from reality than the philosopher. Indeed, he considers the musician as “easily moved and excited by beauty, but not quite capable of being moved by absolute beauty.” However, the musician has great merits in being “quick to respond to its images when he comes upon them, and just as nervous people react readily to noises, so does he to articulate sounds and the beauty in them.”49 The lover is akin to the musician in these instances, and what lovers are characterised by is “a kind of memory of beauty”: [The lover] cannot grasp [beauty] in its separateness, but he is overwhelmingly amazed and excited by visible beauties. So he must be taught not to cling round one body and be excited by that, but must be led by the course of reasoning and consider all bodies and shown the beauty that is the same in all of them.50

By way of the dialectic—which is philosophy’s way of reasoning through the tension of contradictions—the lover is shown how “all these beauties must be reduced to unity” where the knowledge of their origin will ascend to the higher states of intellect and Being. The dialectic is a potent way by which the true is recovered from the encrustations of the apparent. Croce, Benedetto. Estetica Come Scienza dell’Espressione E Linguistica Generale [Aesthetics as a Science of Expression and General Linguistics], 182. 49 Plotinus. Ennead I. 3. c. 1. 50 Plotinus, Ennead I. 3. c. 2. 48

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So rather than oppose the dialectical reasoning of philosophy to the qualities by which the musician and lover gain a memory of beauty, Plotinus uses the dialectic to enable the journey toward the ultimate touch. While he holds onto the Platonic premise which privileges reason to sensation, Plotinus turns this hierarchy onto itself and by using the dialectical grammars of reason he puts across the notion that what matters for the intellect is the moment of the touch, the instance of contact. Plotinus describes this moment with ecstatic rapture: The soul runs over all truths, and all the same shuns the truths we know if someone tries to express them in words and discursive thought; for discursive thought, in order to express anything in words, has to consider one thing after another: this is the method of description; but how can one describe the absolutely simple? But it is enough if the intellect comes into contact with it; but when it has done so, while the contact lasts, it is absolutely impossible, nor has it time, to speak; but it is afterwards that it is able to reason about it.51

Plotinus’s words harbour the spirit of the musician, the lover and the philosopher, singing together their hymn to the moment of Epaphus, the god of touch. There is no such reference in Plotinus, but the ideal moment when knowledge comes in contact with its seeker, bequeaths human history with an urge to rise and follow a journey that is no less Promethean than the Odyssean journey which Kazantzakis resumes. Here the idea of godliness is possessed by the act of contact between omniscience and its ultimate owners and originators—women and men. This may be heresy to the godfearing Platonists and their Christian descendants, but this is what Prometheus originally bequeaths the human race, when in its name he steals the fire from Zeus and gives it back to the human world: (...) A town lies, Canopus, at the limit of that land, Close to the mouth and sand-bar of the Nile. Therein shall Zeus restore thee to thy mind, With dreadless hand touching thee, nothing more. And thou shalt bear a son, dark Epaphus, Named from the manner of his birth from Zeus. The fruits of all the land that Nilus’s flood Makes rich with wide o’erflowings, shall be his.52 Plotinus, Ennead V. 3. c. 17. Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. v. 845-853. In The Seven Plays in English Verse, 258-9. 51 52

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Going back to Kazantzakis’s idea of sin as a state that leads to godliness, and knowing God through the pleasures of the flesh, one would sense that Kazantzakis’s work is quite close, if not entirely subscribed to, a Plotinian aesthetic. The sense of ownership that emerges within the human need to feel, love and know its case, becomes a political act by which women and men would reclaim what has always been human—the fire that the Gods kept to themselves. Kazantzakis’s quest to own the fire that is human by historic right could never rest. By implication it never awaits redemption. In his genealogical construction of truth, he tours and revisits the ideas of men like him whose search for the ultimate touch with the ‘All’ and ‘Good’ of truth is marked with the anguish that the journey brings. Overwhelmed with bitterness and growing “weary of resurrecting the dead” he dreams of this moment, whose female lips asked him: “Who is your God?” “Buddha”, I unhesitatingly replied. But the lips moved again: “No, no, Epaphus!” (...) Epaphus, the god of touch, who prefers flesh to shadow and like the wolf in the proverb does not await upon promises of others when it is a question of filling his belly. He trusts neither eye nor ear; he wants to touch, to grasp man and soil, to feel their warmth mix with his own, feel them become one with him. He even wants to turn the soul into body so that he can touch it. The most reliable and industrious of all the gods, who walks on earth, loves the earth, and wishes to remake it “in his own image and after his likeness”—that was my god.53

If the Plotinian moment of touch is too poetic to muster in an age when love seems to have ceased to be a philosophical category, there is no question in Kazantzakis that the way to an Epaphian fulfilment is the coming together of soul and body, beauty and art. The Plotinian moment of touch implies this fulfilment, even though the Platonic overtones of Plotinus’s metaphysics still retain the separation. In Aeschylus’s tragedy Zeus and Epaphus are manifestations of the Promethean will to wander into the horizon where sky touches the land, and become one compound. At the heart of the tragedy’s deliverance of the evil by which the chorus mediates the meaning of Prometheus Bound, one awaits the touch between the hidden fact and the ultimate truth. This expectation is moved by the need to prove life’s aporetic nature. Even when one assumes a hierarchic structure for a reality that acts as a prototypical framework for existence, this can never find fulfilment unless its manifestations (be they imitations or representations) come together to rear an ulti53

Kazantzakis. Report to Greco, 418.

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mate koinonía, a communitas that fulfils the source of life’s identity. Yet this community often assumed as a ‘joint entity’—indeed a Plotinian compound—could never realize itself as some serene or irenic touch. There is no absolute harmony to be reached. Identity remains a negative affair. It is marked by the aporia that makes it—be it in history, language or representation. The notion of identity is an utterance that could never harmonize the dialectical dialect by which we could speak it.

6 IN THE POISE OF WATER AND HILL Cadaqués, in the poise of water and hill raises stairways and conceals snails.1 —Federico García Lorca When I walk toward myself The villages expel me.2 —Mahmoud Darweesh

In Spanish, “el fiel” literally translates as “the compass needle.” Metaphorically, it stands for the balance, faithfulness and accuracy of orientation that the needle’s magnetic force gives—a sense of poise between opposite poles. In his Ode to Salvador Dalí Lorca takes us to Cadaqués, the seaside village around which Dalí seeks a balance between heaven and earth, the sea and the hills. In the original, Lorca’s verse reads as “Cadaqués, en el fiel del agua y la colina” which in two English translations is rendered as “Cadaqués, in the needle of the water and the hill”3 and as “Cadaqués, at the fulcrum of water and hill”.4 Like any poetic form that struggles between the word’s sound and its meaning, the translation of the word fiel here suggests a suspension between the fluidity of the sea and the solid physicality of the hill. In each and every word, laden as it were with greater meaning than their literal sense, Lorca’s poetic poise carries—in both the original and in its various translations—an aesthetic value that never promises resolution. In this sense of an unresolved narrative, beauty is neither tied to the question of the good, true or beautiful; nor is it assumed as a promise of catharsis or García Lorca, Federico. “Oda a Salvador Dalí.” In Obras Completas, I: Poesía. [Complete Works, Vol. I: Poetry], 458. 2 Darweesh, Mahmoud. Sand and other Poems, 12. 3 García Lorca, Federico. “Ode to Salvador Dalí.” In Selected Poems. Translated by Merryn Williams, 53 (my emphasis). 4 García Lorca, Federico. “Ode to Salvador Dalí.” In Selected Poems. Translated by William Bryant Logan, 289 (my emphasis). 1

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some lost utopia. Not unlike Dalí’s art, Lorca’s poetry invites us to engage with the perpetuity of struggle where the very notion of a poetic agôn is graced by what it seeks to present but never define or settle. This recalls one of Dalí’s great moments of “false memories” where, as he puts it: I pressed myself closer and closer against the infinitely tender, unconsciously protective, back of the nurse, whose rhythmic breathing seemed to me to come from the sea, and made me think of the deserted beaches of Cadaqués.5

The feeling that Dalí had as a boy, bewildered by whatever surrounded him, and equally amazed by what an older Dalí often recounts as retrospectively constructed false memories, informs the quality of a poetic struggle— a struggle of making—that looks more like a haggle between time and space than a depiction of reality. It is easy to assume that Dalí is taking formal refuge in a surreal meandering of memories and counter-memories, of willed forgetfulness and masqueraded recollections. Beyond the jargon and playful verbiage that Dalí borrows from psychoanalysis and surrealism respectively, both he and Lorca engage with a far more immediate set of narratives which, on close reading, invoke a form of materiality whose directness is often missed for rhetoric or metaphor. Key to this materiality is the Mediterranean, which poet and artist approach from the coastline of Cadaqués and its whereabouts.6 Cadaqués represents the moment where Lorca and Dalí wilfully haggle their aesthetic sensibility between the fluidity of the sea and the physicality of the hill. Dalí often recalls the pre-natal “intra-uterine memories” of amniotic fluid through his vision of eggs “fried in a pan without the pan”, so “grandiose, phosphorescent and very detailed in all the folds of their faintly bluish whites.”7 As memory and fluidity define each other by the same ambiguity that an eager child would press her eyes “in order to see circles of colours

Dalí, Salvador. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 51. After becoming friends at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, Dalí invites Lorca to Cadaqués. Cadaqués becomes a meeting point, not only of friendship but also of artistic and poetic creation. From then on, Cadaqués comes to symbolize the ground on which the relationship between the poet and the artist transforms into a continuous aesthetic encounter, which, in its concordance and dissonance, represents one of the most fascinating encounters in modern art and literature. This is comprehensively studied and analysed by Ian Gibson in his great book, LorcaDalí: El amor que no pudo ser. [Lorca-Dalí: The love that could not be]. 7 Dalí. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 27. 5 6

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‘which are sometimes called angels’”8, so Lorca reminds us that “the mermaids convince, without having to deceive”9 at the sight of fresh water. These are instances of vision and beauty that would not simply settle for a surrealist juxtaposition. These are realities that the poet and the artist exchange in their search for the materiality of beauty which the Mediterranean comes to mediate not only through its physical presence, but more so in its plural narratives and how they are exchanged with the quotidian dialects of reality. Materiality exposes the beautiful and the sublime in their tension where, to recall Kant’s third critique, we find that the mechanism of a disinterested taste by which we could reason out beauty, is immediately countered by the sublime’s want of accordance between the calculations of reason and the intuition of sensation.10 In the sublime’s want of accordance between reason and sensation stones may well become flesh—as in Dalí’s catholicised (and heretic) sense of material transubstantiation. This might explain how his memorial recollection of Cadaqués resembles the back of his largish nurse whose sheer physical presence offers a familiar sense of belonging. This sense of the familiar—what psychoanalyists fondly call the heimlich—is so cherished by Dalí that he wants to cut through it, as one would cut through the sacred notion of bread-made-flesh. Likewise, in Dalí’s physical journeys between Cadaqués, Port Illigat and Cape Creus, the landscape emerges “like a veritable geological delirium” which he reads through his re-imaging of the two figures in Millet’s Angelus: The fissures in the two figures, their erosion, their original coexistence with the rocks only serve to make their appearance atavistic so that we are led more and more to depend rigorously on the crepuscular intentionality of the Angelus. Here erosion and geological ruin are substituted for the luminous ruins; the end of the day is wiped away and fades into the two silhouettes of the picture, inspiring the same sentiment of ancestral survival.11

This kind of negotiation between a time and space that exchange transient fluidity with necessary physicality is far from a play with abstraction. Time and space become history and place. Dalí sees them unfold through an assumption of ancestry that petrifies and erodes in veritable geological delirium. As Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí demonstrates, in each and every Dalí, The Secret Life, 27. García Lorca. “Oda a Salvador Dalí,” 458. 10 See Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement, 37ff. 11 Dalí, Salvador. The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus, 72. 8 9

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word, line and stanza, we are presented with a time that is lived in an infancy that belongs to a space which signifies a real sense of materiality; a sense of matter which, Lorca tells us, is so “definite and exact” (material definida y exacta) that it could never gather any mould.12 Cadaqués, whose deserted beaches embody an imposition of being onto everything that art is there to do, is neither an abstraction nor a dream. Perhaps even more than Dalí’s paternal home in Figueras and his (and Gala’s) lifetime residence in Port Lligat, Cadaqués provides a ground of continuous return that defies the very idea of progression. Progression is clearly precluded from the Dalínian frame of mind, just as it is substituted by a sense of eternity in Lorca’s poetics of the ever-present. The sense of place in Cadaqués represents an avantnostalgic claim to a past that is recollected—in anamnesis—by means of a continuous reconstruction of the present.13 For a matter that is so “defined and exact” the present must be, not unlike the sublime, in want of accordance. But this need of accordance should not be read as an assumption of duality between reason and the senses, the object and the subject. Dalí and Lorca surpass such philosophical quibbles. Instead their want of accordance is a reaffirmation of a continuous alterity in terms of what gains presence by becoming absent, and how absence is a signifier of presence. In Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, the present body and the absent soul exchange roles. While the present body (cuerpo presente) of the poet-torero lies on a stone slab, Lorca likens the stone to “a forehead where dreams groan with grief.”14 Yet the absent soul (alma ausente) is not recognized by the blunt back of the stone, because Ignacio died forever.15 While those who mourn would normally imagine (and some would pray for) the presence of the departed’s soul, Lorca does not afford us with this presence because body and soul are no longer a duality, but they become coterminous categories of a presence that we would still await, maybe forever. This presents an alterity between an act of corporeal presencing and the image of absence as a forgotten soul. As one forgets and there is hardly anyone there to remind us, the poet would sing for the return of the poet-torero’s presence that once held great profile and grace. It will be a long time for an Andalusian, so bright and full of life to reappear, Lorca tells us. But reappear he García Lorca. “Oda a Salvador Dalí,” 459. On my coining and discussion of the concept of avant-nostalgia and its relationship with anamnetic recollection see Baldacchino, John. Avant-Nostalgia. An Excuse to Pause. 14 García Lorca. “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: 3. Cuerpo presente.” In Obras Completas, I: Poesía, 622 15 García Lorca. “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: 4. Alma Ausente,” 624. 12

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must. It is then that the poet will sing to the elegance of a body that was once held “with words that groan” under the heavy weight of remembering.16 AVANT-NOSTALGIA AND THE AESTHETICS OF SUGGESTION Remembering is not limited to personal memory. The weight of remembering moves between the personal and the public, individual and society, one’s own life and the life of an ever-changing community. The aesthetic imagination largely emerges from a dynamic exchange between remembering and futuring, nostalgia and avant-nostalgia. Moving in between remembering the past and leaping into the future is the mark of an existential aesthetic that turns the Sisyphean burden of everyday tedium into an opportunity to return.17 The risky need to return is gained by an equally hazardous foresight that seeks to regain and inhabit a world where the body gains presence just when the soul is absent. To return is to gain art’s gut feeling. It is the same sense of hope one finds within the silent spaces in Eliot’s Wasteland, where a sense of desperation is consoled by one’s gamble on blind Tiresias’s prophetic vision as the only foresight that could afford a life marked by the detritus of war. At stake is our pursuit to reclaim art’s autonomous possibilities that Lorca identifies with the “power and struggle”18 that marks a sense of aesthetic depth in “those who have duende.” 19 To take the leap of a desired imagination while recollecting what was “lost forever” is to engage with a sense of remembering that acts as a vanguard engaged with art’s power and struggle—as avant-nostalgia. Elsewhere I have argued that avant-nostalgia signifies art’s political acts of memory, where on one hand, memory struggles against the hegemony of fixed spatio-temporality, while on the other it recollects time and space as anamnetic possibilities by which we unlearn those pedagogical assumptions that inculcate in us a sense of stasis. Anamnesis, as a state of remembering, becomes politically expedient by reverting nostalgia into a force that looks forward; García Lorca. “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: 4. Alma Ausente,” 624. Cf Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. 18 “… el duende es un poder y no un obrar, es un luchar y no un pensar” [the duende is a power not an act of labour, it’s a struggle and not an act of thinking]. García Lorca. “Juego y teoría del duende.” [Play and Theory of the duende]. In Obras Completas, III: Prosa [Complete Works, III: Prose], 151. 19 For my discussion of the relationship between the aesthetic imagination and futuring with reference to T.S. Eliot and García Lorca, see Baldacchino, Education Beyond Education, 118ff. On Greene’s notion of futuring, see Ibid. 104ff. 16 17

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hence the term ‘avant-nostalgia’. A nostalgia that acts as a vanguard invariably distances the idea of a return away from an image of linear regression. By way of a nostalgic humanity, men and women invest their hopes in a sense of belonging. At the same time this would belie, via art, the myth of necessary progression.20 A nostalgic humanity pertains to a memorial polity that is moved by the will to return. Rather than a reactionary mystification of the past the will to return is a political recovery of one’s present. Some might call this an act of revolution in the sense that art intervenes and wilfully transgresses history. In this revolutionary sense art’s return as avantnostalgia shares the same notions of homecoming—the same nóstos—whose Odyssean heritage is pronounced in the poetics of Cavafy, Angelopoulos, Seferis and Kazantzakis.21 Dalí’s image of the sitting lady whose back is ruptured and carved into a piece of furniture that is in turn carved again to produce another piece of furniture, takes on a special meaning in this reworked notion of nostalgia. Each time I stole a furtive glance at Galuchka to assure myself with delight of the persistence of her presence I encountered her intense eyes peering at me. I would immediately hide; but more and more, at each new contact with her penetrating glance, it seemed to me that the latter, with the miracle of its expressive force, actually pierced though the nurse’s back, which from moment to moment was losing its corporeality as though a veritable window were being hallowed out and cut into the flesh of her body, leaving me more and more in the open and gradually and irremissibly exposing me to the devouring activity of that adored though mortally anguishing glance.22

Dalí’s recollection of the largish nurse sitting on the pavement while he, as a little boy, hides from a little girl whom he retrospectively names Galuchka, must not be limited to the artist’s introspection, which by his admission is a reattribution to a past projected from a deliberately manipulated hindsight. In ‘cutting’ through the safety of his nurse’s presence, Dalí’s gaze is removed from Galuchka. The more he wants to see Galuchka from a safe position, the more he cannot see anything but a deserted beach leading to the vastness of the sea. Yet through this maddening aperture, of frantically material and real aspect, I no longer saw the crowd which ought to have been there and in the midst of which Galuchka standing on a chair ought to have been in Baldacchino. Avant-Nostalgia, 39ff. See Chapters 1 and 5 in this volume. 22 Dalí. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 52. 20 21

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the act of looking at me. On the contrary, through this window opened in the nurse’s back, I distinguished only a vast beach, utterly deserted, lighted by the criminally melancholy light of a setting sun.23

In his 1934 painting The Weaning of Alimentary Furniture, Dalí is absorbed in Cadaqués’s presence, balanced as it were between the deserted beach and a pregnant memory that seeks the gaze of a girl. Is this a desire for the other’s gaze? Is this a feeling of guilt for one’s precocious voyeurism? Dalí hardly ever entertains a sense of guilt. His sense of mystery is gratuitous and the idea that somehow the sea came to his rescue and stopped him from entertaining a form of reverted voyeurism is not to be entertained. Yet the intervention of the sea and the constant memory of the presence of the deserted beach cues into another, one might say shared, image of Cadaqués—Lorca’s. Here we must move beyond any attempt to find an exegetic structure to Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí. Instead, one must attend to the real struggle that Lorca presents in this poem. This struggle has nothing to do with finding a precise word or getting the right meaning for the kind of equilibrium he alludes to. One must pay closer attention to how Lorca draws meaning from what carries the same poise by which Dalí imposes the impossibility of visual lyricism on the cacophonous presence that represents Cadaqués; and with Cadaqués, his entire universe. This is where the hermeneutic games of poetic interpretation stop and the aesthetics of poetic form begins. Neither Lorca nor Dalí seek to resolve anything they find in Cadaqués. Nor do they ever seek to unravel what they find in each other, as friends, as artists, as Spaniards … as Mediterraneans. Whatever the poet and the artist find in Cadaqués gains immediate significance. Aesthetic form is not a consequence of the object found, but of the act of finding. The act of finding is continuous and it is a hallmark in how Dalí and Lorca develop their thoughts and their art. Lorca tells us that in Cadaqués fishermen sleep without having dreams on the sands of the beach (arena). The image of the beach is exchanged with the image of an arena—suggesting the beach as a terrain of struggle where meaning unfolds in dreamless nights.24 In Lorca the combination of sand (qua arena) and struggle is highly significant. In his poem Memento Lorca asks to be buried with his guitar beneath the arena, which in this case denotes the sand as

Dalí. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 52. Note that in Spanish, arena has three meanings: sand (arena de playa, of a sandy beach), the bullring and the arena. 23 24

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well as the bullring;25 whereas in his Lament to Sanchez Mejías the agonistic image of the bullring achieves its highest poetic accolade where time stands still and the distinction between present, past and future remains suspended. In Ode to Salvador Dalí the beach is transformed, like a bullring, into an agôn of meaning. The beach becomes an arena where the struggle for truth is continuously staged. As an agôn of meaning, the beach provides a space where art haggles over the value of form by using the currency of word and image as consequences of a recurrent act—which some might read as the tedium of life, while others would simply assume as a celebration of the quotidian. Lorca’s fishermen carry a rose for a compass, and their negotiation is resolved in the image of a dream that is always anticipated but which is never returned. The void of an unreturned dream must make do with surrogate images. Within the surrogacy of the image, Lorca depicts that of wounded handkerchiefs that virginally mark a horizon self-aggregating in crystals of fish and the moon.26 Because these are surrogate—that is, borrowed—images, they move beyond metaphor. Metaphors tend to privilege analogy over truth, whereas an economy of visual surrogacy holds value only when its promise of meaning is based on truth. In this way Lorca’s word acquires a truth-value whose utterances become a language-game played within the interstices of what could be said and how this gains existence from within a reality that in all truth must not exist. To make of truth a reality that must somehow refuse to simply exist is to suggest, tautologically, another way of constructing the world in a context of alterity between presence and absence. If what is borrowed must be true in order to legitimize poetic currency with which one could negotiate a sense of reality, then what is present must correlate with what remains absent. This is why one cannot read Lorca’s poetics as random; and why metaphor per se is not enough. As his poetic construction aims at presenting reality, the assumptions made of (and by) truth must be assumed aesthetically just as the soul (of mourner and departed alike) finds solace in the absence that ‘appears’ in the wake of death. This absence is neither random nor preordained. Rather, it is found. Prima facie this might appear as nonsense, but here we are engaging with an aesthetic narrative that is founded on negation. In the tautology of a truth that must not exist, poetic ownership is like a gratuitously distorted 25 26

García Lorca. “Memento.” In Obras Completas, I: Poesía, 330. García Lorca. “Oda a Salvador Dalí,” 458.

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mirror. Without recognizing the need to distort reflection, art remains in the grips of imitation, of mimesis. As mimesis art can never entertain any autonomy. Neither could it construct reality. Aesthetic distortion is not meant to transgress truth, but to transcend the here-and-now and to return the then—avant-nostalgically—as a suggestion of a diversity of possible worlds. As this happens, Lorca confirms how the now is already gone by the wayside of a polarity balanced on another borrowed structure: that of a compassturned-rose. Beyond any simple explanation tooled with the tropes of surrealism, Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí goes deeper in the humanized immediacies by which things may appear out of joint. Dispensing of the flamboyant explanations by which Dalí treats us to his exotic and capricious imagery, Lorca’s poem poses a more precise context that is delicately poised between the whereabouts of hill and sea, rock and sand. Indeed, the poet tells us, art is never a light that blinds us with its intensity. Rather, art is made of the same stuff that makes love, friendship and … fencing.27 FENCING WITH THE DUENDE In art the real struggle—the wrestle that matters—is not with the angel or the muse, but with the duende. In his lecture on the Play and Theory of the Duende Lorca constructs three arches. One arch is inhabited by an Angel, while a Muse graces the other. In the middle arch “enters a mental air [un aire mental] that fervently blows on the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and ignored accents; an air that smells of child’s spittle, of pounded grass and jellyfish’s veil, that announces the constant baptism of things newly created.”28 A ‘spirit’ that is neither a Greek daimon nor an Arab âfrit, the duende presents us with no pattern by which one could emulate a poetic structure. Neither would its acerbic mental air subsist in Socrates’s elegant irony or Descartes’s truthful melancholy.29 Angels guide and grace us with gifts in their defensive strength and evasive wisdom. A muse would suggest and often dictate by way of its inspiration. Yet while angels tend to appear in high flight with hardly any possibility of reaching the human mind, the muse appears “lejana y tan cansada”—distant and too tired.30 It seems that the exteriority of both muse García Lorca. “Oda a Salvador Dalí,” 460. García Lorca. “Juego y teoría del duende,” 162. 29 Ibid. 151. 30 Ibid. 152. 27 28

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and angel retains the same problem that Kant’s concept of a disinterested taste has for beauty. Disinterestedness and exteriority stand in deep contrast with a sense of art embedded in a “mysterious power that everyone feels but which no philosopher could explain.”31 When it comes to art having duende, if there remains a sense of beauty, it would emerge from the horrific promise of the unknown and hidden depths where death is not feared, but sought as a way of engaging with the living. Lorca’s sense of beauty could never be disinterested. Beauty comes from the wound and it finds its way up the body through flamencian feet. A beauty that has no sense of the corporeal has no aesthetic value. As Lorca cites examples from poetry and music, he reminds us that one might sing with precision and pitch, harmony and well-measured rhythm, but unless one has duende, the aesthetic promise of corporeal immanence is not fulfilled. And yet there are no rules to the ways of the duende. One cannot repeat what the duende does. To have duende is to engage with what cannot be measured. It seems to rely on chance, inasmuch as the conviction of those who seek a sense of beauty would find it in the death and bloodstained arenas of struggle. Nevertheless one must hasten to add that in the case of the duende chance is not to be confused by irresponsibly or the gratuitously accidental. Chance has more to do with an ability to seek opportunity from the historically contingent. To seek the duende is to seek the opportune time when art yields that moment of truth which appears in what Benjamin identifies with a structure that “demands a mode of being which in its lack of intentionality resembles the simple existence of things, but which is superior in its permanence.”32 Benjamin argues that in its mode of phenomenal being—that which appears in the world of appearances, and which is the only one we have— “truth is not an intent that realizes itself in empirical reality; it is the power which determines the essence of this empirical reality.” While arguing that this state of being belongs to the power of the name, and that this “determines the manner in which ideas are given”, Benjamin stresses that this is given in a “primordial form of perception” and not a primordial language.33 Lorca argues that the duende offers no map to guide our way into an aesthetic whose confirmation of immanence mostly emerges from its attracLorca attributes this to Goethe who said this after listening to a performance by Paganini. See “Juego y teoría del duende,” 151. 32 Benjamin. Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 36. 33 Ibid. 31

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tion to a kind of inner terror, a darkness that emerges from the silt of which we all know but equally ignore.34 If one were to read this through the lens of Benjamin’s concept of a “primordial form of perception” where “words possess their own nobility as names, unimpaired by cognitive meaning,”35 the duende gains specific—and indeed unique—aesthetic meaning. As previously argued, Lorca’s aesthetics of suggestion presents us with the impossible existence that is gained from within a reality that must not and cannot exist. The truth-value of this position is gained as a tautology—that is, as a return, or reiteration, which may not make logical or even philosophical sense in its repetitious appearance, but which is the only way for art to construct the world in alterity. This kind of alterity could make sense only in the context of how art reads history avant-nostalgically, where anamnesis does not simply recollect in order to repeat and mimic, but where nostalgia becomes a vanguard, and where the ordering of past and present cease to be formulaic once the pedagogical assumptions made by such a recollection is reversed into a process of unlearning. Unlearning is not simply forgetting what we have learnt. Rather, it assumes absence in the form of a future presence that gains representation in art’s process of suggestion. Like the image of the poet-torero—whom Lorca signifies in the figure of Sánchez Mejías—the artist is forgotten by dint of the desire to return some day in the future and reclaim life in the name of death. Here the process of anamnesis takes on a forceful route towards engaging with the duende’s “mysterious power” that baffles the philosopher. However, one must not forget that the philosopher’s task is not to understand the mysterious power of the duende, but to find ways of representing art’s impossible existence. Benjamin seems to suggest a similar point when he gives the philosopher the task “to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word”: In empirical perception, in which words have become fragmented, they possess, in addition to their more or less hidden, symbolic aspect, an obvious, profane meaning. It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication. Since philosophy may not presume to speak in the tones of revelation, this can only be achieved by recalling in memory the primordial form of perception. Platonic anamnesis is, perhaps, not far removed from this kind of remembering; except that 34 35

García Lorca. “Juego y teoría del duende.” In Obras Completas, III: Prosa, 151. Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Ibid.

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here it is not a question of the actualization of images in visual terms; but rather, in philosophical contemplation, the idea is released from the heart of reality as the word, reclaiming its name-giving rights. Ultimately, however, this is not the attitude of Plato, but the attitude of Adam, the father of the human race and the father of philosophy. Adam’s action of naming things is so far removed from play or caprice that it actually confirms the state of paradise as a state in which there is as yet no need to struggle with the communicative significance of words.36

As the actualization of the image is not visual but philosophical, the poet’s task may well approximate more of an eternal wait for the return of Adam’s world. Yet this is an impossible return and a frustrated prospect. Art’s struggle against mimetic ascription directly proscribes the apolitical “paradise” that Adam may have enjoyed. Adam’s paradise is apolitical because only in a state with no need for a polity—that is, in a utopia—could the communicative significance of words evolve without struggle. Mimesis is proscribed not because art is not allowed to imitate, but because in imitating, art would be ascribed to a reality informed by an “outwardly-directed communication.” Here mimesis becomes an exercise in externalization and amounts to a form of reification (which is why Plato was averse to mimesis). Though it might appear methodologically viable in an empirical context where words are measured against facts that are supposed to correspond to truth and reality, art as mimesis is apolitical and therefore utopian, and therefore untrue. Benjamin is unequivocal: “Truth is the death of intentionality” and our way to understand the true is to see it as an “intentionless state of being.”37 With truth as a state of being which is not preordained by intention, artists and philosophers must dispel any utopian anticipations by which words and images are ascribed to fixed forms of representation—be they subjectively assumed or objectively tied to some form of corresponding reality that is only possible in Adam’s paradise. Likewise history is a context for the historically contingent. On its own, history does not exist, neither as mimesis nor as an “outwardly-directed communication.” Rather history can only come within the realms of truth once we see it for its materiality, and therefore in its contingent state. This is how Adorno evolves Benjamin’s notion of truth’s “intentionless state of being” within materialist terms. For Adorno “the intentionless elements of reality were to be gathered together so that they became the interpretable images of the real.”38 Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 36-37 (my emphasis). Ibid. 36. 38 Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography, 148. 36 37

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In terms of the aesthetics of suggestion that is here attributed to Lorca, historical contingency is a key concept. In Lorca’s poetics, history is never assumed as a formula for a corresponding ‘objective’ world. Instead it is opened to what art, in having duende, seeks within the opportunities that emerge from historical contingency—that is, the intentionless elements of reality. To struggle with the duende means to recognise these intentionless elements knowing that truth is never intended. Unlike the externalised methods of angel and muse, the duende rejects predestination while it seeks, in blood, art’s eternal struggle. Angel and muse come from outwith; the angel gives life and the muse gives form (Hesiod learned it from her). Whether it’s a golden loaf or a tunic’s fold, the poet gets his rules from his laurel copse. Instead, the duende must be awakened in the outmost environs of blood. Reject the angel, throw out the muse, and lose your fear of the violet scent inhaled from eighteenth century poetry and from that great telescope in whose crystals sleeps a muse enfeebled by limits. The real struggle is with the duende.39

This is where the fates of the philosopher and the artist cross each other. Just as Adam’s naming of the world is not within the reach of the philosopher, the artist can never repeat—or imitate—an angelic world, even when aided by the delectation of the muse. The duende promises neither a lost paradise nor a future utopia. It holds no triumph for an aesthetized polity where humans are entertained by angelic virtues while listening to the breeze-like voice of the muses. Lorca gives us an image of the duende that is devoid of aesthetic pleasure, philosophical consolation, or political utopia. “With idea, sound and gesture, the duende enjoys an open struggle with the creator on the edge of a well.”40 The edge, or rim, of the well (los bordes del pozo) is suggestive of the edge or lip of a wound (el borde de la herida), which far from curing, the duende struggles to keep open. The duende is attracted to the edge and the abyss, the lip and the wound. It approaches the uncertainty of the edge by engaging with forms that are cast within a sphere that surpasses the exteriority of visible expressions.41 The image of the abyss’s verge and the surpassing of what amounts to the metaphor of the visible—that which seems consigned to Adam’s paradise—recalls the narrative of the wounded soul in Spanish mysticism. At its best this is found in the works of Teresa of Avila García Lorca. “Juego y teoría del duende,” 152-3. Ibid. 159. 41 Ibid. 160. 39 40

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(Teresa de Jesus) and John of the Cross, whose desire for the way of a nothingness that affords no spiritual or earthly riches, offers a heightened expression of an aesthetics of negation whose task is to suggest, but never define: Unite the one who lacks being With the Being that knows no end: Without ending [the] end, Without holding what loves love, [To] widen your nothingness.42

As the duende is conditioned by the image of death, art is predicated by its struggle to make present a dark beauty from within. In the duende’s darkness one finds a métier that predicates effectively what Lorca means when he says that the duende cannot emerge “unless it is sure that it could sway those branches which we all carry, and which neither holds nor would ever have any solace.”43 This echoes John of the Cross’s approach to the dark night of the soul. In his Subida del Monte Carmelo (Ascent of Mount Carmel) he defines this night as a reneging on all pleasures that one takes from things. However, far from just a privation of pleasures, the Spanish mystic also poses a theological context where the renunciation is also one of the light by which one sees the things that lure a sense of taste and pleasure in them. In this respect the renunciation of pleasure becomes a night, and its greatest challenge is not that of mortification of the flesh but a night that is spiritual and in so many ways implying a mortification of the spirit.44 Inasmuch as the Ascent of Mount Carmel is a theological treatise, the dark night must also be read from its formative properties. As in all aspects of formation, this is underpinned by the idea of a struggle that moves from one state to another: from ignorance to knowledge, from darkness to light. Yet John of the Cross reverses this course. “This raises a doubt,” he says in Book II Chapter V of his Noche Oscura (Dark Night). “How could the soul call a ‘dark night’ that divine light which salvages and purges it from its ignorance?” I would reply that for two reasons not only Divine Wisdom [represents] night and darkness to the soul, but that it also brings pain and anguish. The first comes from the height of divine knowledge, which exceeds the soul’s ability for which it becomes darkness. The second is caused by Teresa de Jesus, “Hermosura de Dios,” Obras Completas, 481. García Lorca, “Juego y teoría del duende.” In Obras Completas, III: Prosa, 159. 44 See John of the Cross [Juan de la Cruz]. Subida del monte Carmelo [Ascent of Mount Carmel]. In Obra Completa. Vol. 1, 123ff. 42

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the soul’s low and impure state, for which this said knowledge becomes painful, afflicted and also dark. Proof of the first comes with reference to the philosopher, who affirms that inasmuch as divine affairs are clear and manifest in themselves, the more they remain naturally obscure and hidden to the soul. The brighter the light, the more it dazzles the owl’s pupil; [just as] staring directly at the sun its excessive glow would blind one’s vision.45

Perhaps not without irony, we find that this dark night, which the mystic seeks as “the privation of every kind of pleasure which belongs to the desire”, regales us with a glimpse into the deepest levels of poetic desire. Not surprisingly, Lorca finds in John of the Cross a way to get nearer to the darkness of the duende where art struggles to find life within the death of a sensual soul that transforms death into a way of life. Beyond its tautological appearance, this is the discourse adopted by mystic and poet alike when, in their different ways, they seek not the security of the subject, but the absolute dread of the struggle to understand from outside the subject’s sanctuary. As he struggles to understand death’s presence in terms of the act of living, John of the Cross claims that one must die in the very process of not dying: “Que muero porque no muero.” Lorca tells us that this is what holds the key to those who seek God’s “first thorns of fire.”46 This life that I live, deprives me from living; and as such, I would still die until I would live with you. Hear me, my God, as I say: that this life I do not want, while I die as I do not die.47

THE RETURN OF THE POET-TORERO In Lorca’s aesthetic imaginary the torero is the protagonist of a geometry that transcends the horror of the bullfight. This embodies the “vertex of terrible play.”48 Beyond the mere killing, the spectacle of the bullfight provides a microcosm where the play and theory of the duende gains special aesthetic value: John of the Cross. Noche Oscura [The Dark Night]. Obra Completa. Vol. 1, 482. García Lorca. “Juego y teoría del duende,” 153. 47 John of the Cross. “Coplas de el alma que pena por ver a Dios.” In Obra Completa. Vol. 1, 73. 48 García Lorca. Ibid. 160. 45 46

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The torero who scares the public in the bullring with his audacity does not bullfight [no torea] but lowers himself to that ridiculous situation which anyone could be in: risking one’s life. On the other hand, the torero bitten by the duende gives a lesson in Pythagorean music, and makes us forget that he is constantly throwing his heart over the [bull’s] horns.49

It’s as if Lorca wrote this as a metaphor of his life and how he died with what Camus calls “the truth that [was] murdered in Spain.”50 Lorca’s politics cannot be neatly attributed to a unified notion of Republican Spain. His art transcends the conflicting situation that wrecked the Republic. Though clearly on the Left and an ardent supporter of the Second Republic, he was no political propagandist. Neither did he kowtow to any political party or ideology within the Popular Front.51 His work and belief were animated by a radical democratic ideal aimed at redeeming society from its ills. In one of his many interviews, Lorca argues that: “in the face of social reality, the poet must be passionate.” In no way should he remain passive [impassable]. How could one pretend that a poet closes his eyes when confronted by people who suffer, faced by the haunting tragedy of the oppressed? The poet must feel and understand [the oppressed] by all possible means to achieve a world that is more just and humane.52

Indeed Francisco Franco and his nationalist allies did destroy the Republic and established what was perhaps the longest-lasting fascist state in Europe until the caudillo’s death in 1975. But the Republic was also wrecked from within, especially when the antagonisms within the Popular Front spread out and its leaders lost any control that they may have had. The collapse of a social democratic leadership, mostly undermined by bickering that was sponsored from outside—notably Stalin’s—gave way to Franco’s brutality and with it, the murders of any republican who resisted the Nationalists or happened to be in their way. Such was Lorca’s unfortunate fate. Yet as Ian Gibson concludes in his seminal book The Death of Lorca: “It is Lorca’s po-

García Lorca. “Juego y teoría del duende,” 161. Camus. “The New Culture of the Mediterranean”, 191. See also the Introduction in this volume. 51 See Ian Gibson, The Death of Lorca, (St Albans, Herts: Paladin 1973), 52ff. 52 García Lorca. “La poesía vista por un poeta. Hablando con Federico García Lorca” [Poetry as seen by a poet. Talking to Federico García Lorca]. Interviewed by Jordi Jou, Obras Completas, III: Prosa, 607. 49 50

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etic achievement, not his death, that remains and will always remain an enigma.”53 Gibson’s statement cannot be taken lightly. Nor is it meant as a passing comment. Lorca’s oeuvre presents its reader with a passionate mind for the good of humanity. His politics were radically conceived from the materiality of life itself. Undoubtedly Lorca’s politics emerged from his radical aesthetic sensibility towards the world; a sensibility towards the oppressed, as shown in his endearing love towards the gypsies and those who were marginalized by the bigotry of a moral majority that should have known better. Perhaps Lorca’s poetic radicalism is best defined by Agnes Heller’s definition of the left-wing radical whose main criterion is: [T]he assumption that all people are equally reasonable beings, the desire that values should be determined by everyone in collective and rational discussion, the striving for a discussion of true values. Thus leftwing radicalism will always retain an aspect of enlightenment. Without temporising, left-wing radicalism attempts to make everyone conscious of their right and their duty to think for themselves.54

This characterization of a left-wing radical is distanced from the partisan idea of a left-wing propagandist. One could somehow characterize committed liberals as left-wing radicals by Heller’s notion, though in this case the word “liberal” must be assumed as an appellation that is by all means distanced from the corporatist distortion of the term neo-liberalism, which is nothing but an excuse for right-wing propaganda. Once this distinction is clarified, one cannot but agree with Gibson who characterizes Lorca’s free (and I would add radical) spirit as that of a “liberal in the broadest sense of the word [who] had no deep interest in politics as such.”55 Yet Gibson never means that Lorca is apolitical. On the contrary, Lorca’s poetic is ingrained in a respect for humanity which could read, word for word as Heller’s description; and in deep contrast to rightwing radicals, whom she defines as “those who do not accept the norm of philosophical value discussion; all those who are not prepared consciously to reflect on the ideological nature of their values; all those who are not prepared to recognize that values with an affinity to other groups or societies can also be true.”56

Gibson, The Death of Lorca, 167. Heller, Agnes. Radical Philosophy, 135. 55 Gibson. The Death of Lorca, 167. 56 Heller. Radical Philosophy, 135. 53 54

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At a time when political bigotry is on the rise, and where the refusal to “recognize that values with an affinity to other groups or societies can also be true” is not unheard of, what appears to be Lorca’s enigma is shared by those who, contrary to right-wing radicals, remain “conscious of their right and their duty to think for themselves” while holding firm in their conviction that “all people are equally reasonable beings”. To this one might add that if it does not turn out to be the case, then one must make sure that at some point we must make the presence of reasonable beings possible again. Perhaps the dilemma is to do with the question of freedom, and to what extent one expects people to act reasonably in the face of an irrational world that is held captive to the fanatic whose rule of fear is made evident not only in the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan, but also in the streets of London and New York. And this is not just meant to be a snipe at the lone terrorist, but also at the palpably systematic injustices by which the weak and dispossessed continue to suffer—a truth which the terrorist uses as an excuse to perpetrate other murders of the equally innocent. The presence of human misery and how we are often at a loss to solve it, is not only enigmatic in terms of the resistance to assume that reasonable women and men must “retain an aspect of enlightenment”, but more so a source of helplessness that urges the artist to protest with the entirety of his body. And this, when the artist is herself helpless to do anything but yell and make her voice heard and her work present. When asked whether he thinks that his actual literary form has reached a definitive form of expression, Lorca replies, somewhat agitatedly: No. What nonsense! Every day I forget what I have written. This is the secret of being modest and of having the courage to work. Sometimes, when I see what’s happening in the world, I ask myself: “What am I writing for?” But one must work, and work again. [Pero hay que trabajar, trabajar] To work and help those who are in need. To work, even when sometimes one thinks that it’s a useless effort. One works as a form of protest. Because one’s impulse would be to yell every day as one awakes to a world full of injustice and misery of all kinds. I protest! I protest! I protest!57

As one tries to read what Lorca’s enigma represents, one cannot look for a holistic meaning in how his entire work—and here we cannot forget that Lorca was also a major playwright—gains its magnitude. Gibson leaves 57 García Lorca. “Galería. Federico García Lorca, el poeta que no se quiere encadenar” [Galería. Federico García Lorca. The poet who does not like being chained]. Interviewed by Ángel Lázaro. Obras Completas, III: Prosa, 556.

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it to us—as his and Lorca’s readers—to look for, and ultimately appreciate and understand such an enigma. In which case one could suggest that if there is an enigma to Lorca’s poetry, this must be sought in how Lorca’s artistic achievement fulfils the manner by which the poet awaits for the return of the poet-torero, as promised in his Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. But is the poet-torero just a teacher of Pythagorean music? Is he a radical poet who believes in relieving the miseries of the world by the power of aesthetics? Does the torero’s practice of geometry in the bullring promise a deliverance from the spherical constrictions of the externally visible, by which we have all been alienated into a formulaic truth proscribed by intention? Does the poet-torero’s return represent a demiurgic expectation that would engage beyond the forms that art finds in its way of engaging with historical contingency? Isn’t the return of the poet-torero at risk of investing in a notion that is erroneously utopian? Dalí’s description of his very first impression of Lorca at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid carries much insight, both with regards to the Granadine poet and also in terms of the Catalan artist himself: [W]hen I felt the incendiary and communicative fire of the poetry of the great Federico rise in wild, dishevelled flames I tried to beat them down with the olive branch of my premature anti-Faustian old age, while already preparing the grill of my transcendental prosaism on which, when the day came, when only glowing embers remained of Lorca’s initial fire, I would come and fry the mushrooms, the chops and the sardines of my thought (…) in order to appease for some hundred years in spiritual, imaginative, moral and ideological hunger of our epoch.58

In Dalí’s case the enigma lies in how to resist what fascinates and burns with “incendiary and communicative fire.” Dalí’s resistance is short lived because from its inception it was never meant to be political. Somehow he claims an other-worldliness that appeals to a lost symmetry, a sort of apollonian world, indeed a utopia.59 Otherwise what’s the use of appeasing for “moral and ideological hunger”? But Lorca’s world remains political, not because it favours any party or ideology, but by its ultimate rejection of those formulaic assumptions made by the narratives that move crowds who relinquish power to the few. In this respect, Lorca appears more Dionysian in the sense he gives to Nietzsche, who was taken unawares by the duende Dalí. The Secret Life, 176. In Lorca-Dalí: El Amor Que No Pudo Ser, Gibson suggests that Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí suggests subtly (sotto voce) an Apollonian-Dionysian distinction between the artist and the poet. See 145ff. 58 59

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while he was trying to find him in external form on the Rialto Bridge or Bizet’s music.60 Itself bitten by the duende, Lorca’s work is a reminder that it is the dark enigma of poetry that counts and one must not seek to solve or represent the enigma in any way. When in his Canción del naranjo seco (The song of the [dead] orange tree) he asks why was he born amongst mirrors, he evidently shows resistance to mere mimetic reflection. Just as in the same song, he asks the woodcutter to cut his shadow, Lorca seeks art not in its form, inasmuch as in the autonomous consequences that we seek to gain from form: Free me from the anguish of being seen without fruit. 61

60 61

García Lorca, “Juego y teoría del duende,” 151. García Lorca. “Canción del naranjo seco.” Obras Completas, I: Poesía, 411.

7 ON MEDITERRANEAN AESTHETICS The Gibraltarians casually quoted the Treaty of Utrecht, the coastal French could talk about the Roman occupation until the cows came home, and the Italians reminisced about the Etruscans. Even this was nothing compared with a Greek in full cry, describing his glorious Hellenic heritage (...), or a Turk animadverting about the Ottoman Empire. And references to Masada, Moses, and the wisdom of the prophet Abraham were part of most Israelis’ small-talk. Much of this was romance, or at least sentimental. The Frenchmen who talk about the Romans would be evasive when the subject of the German occupation was raised. Israelis might not be happy talking about something that occurred in South Lebanon last year. There is a book to be written about Mediterranean notions of time. Nor, in the Mediterranean, were there clear divisions between the dead and the living, between the mythical and the real. That was another book.1 —Paul Theroux

To engage with aesthetics often resembles a game whose rules are timed against the immediate whereabouts of a space that keeps changing. If, while playing this game, it becomes evident that the stories we tell about life and death remain suspended over an ever-expanding horizon of possibilities, one could be in a good position to begin—but only begin—to discuss what might be termed as a Mediterranean aesthetics. In the first Preface to his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II Braudel does not hesitate to express his anxiety with the definition of culture and identity in a context where the latter immediately signals a set of boundaries that consign any discussion of the former to parochialism. “It might be thought that the connections between history and geographical space would be better illustrated by a more straightforward example than the Mediterranean”, Braudel says, “particularly since in the sixteenth century the sea was such a vast expanse in relation to man.” The 1

Theroux, Paul. The Pillars of Hercules. A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, 74.

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Mediterranean’s character “is complex, awkward, and unique. It cannot be contained within our measurements and classifications. No simple biography beginning with date of birth can be written of this sea; no simple narrative of how things happened would be appropriate to its history.”2 Braudel’s questions run across the very character of the Mediterranean and the lands and cultures that define it. More importantly, one must not forget that any history of the Mediterranean would have issues with the sense of universality that is implied in one’s being Mediterranean—that is, one’s identification with this sea as an inhabitant of a land or country that forms part of this region. This raises many crucial questions. Does the history of the Mediterranean (as a sea, a geo-political region, and a meeting of peoples) leave us with a semblance of a common ‘humanity’ that could in one way or another describe those in whose drastic diversity claim to ‘share’ such a history? But then again, how common a ground is history? David Abulafia proposes another notion of the Mediterranean, which he distances from (though I would say he also complements) Braudel’s: that of “the Mediterraneans.” By “Mediterraneans” Abulafia appears to be referring to a composite notion of areas, histories and peoples. This plural context “played an essential role in the transformation of societies across the world by bringing into contact with one another very diverse cultures, which have themselves emerged in very diverse environments.”3 To my mind, Abulafia here reveals another structural relationship that begins to present a diverse geo-political context, as well as a human and phenomenological definition of the Mediterranean. It is not just the history of what happened on the sea, but the history of the way the inhabitants of opposing shores of the sea interacted across the sea. In this way we can hope to restore one of the missing elements in the Braudelian Mediterranean: human beings.4

Here, further questions gain pertinence. Such as: Don’t we all tell stories about history? Don’t we tell such stories from our own interested positions? Is not this telling of a Mediterranean history just another act of making? This is akin to the individual poetics of the Mediterranean women and men’s stories, that belong by implication, to the politics that concerns the aesthetic construction of a history commonly claimed from everyone’s relative interests. As we speak of these stories from the context of a ‘Mediterranean aesBraudel. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, x-xi. See Abulafia, David. “Mediterraneans.” In Rethinking the Mediterranean, Edited by W.V. Harris, 65. 4 Abulafia. “Mediterraneans”, 67. 2

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thetics’ the juncture between history and story appears more “complex, awkward and unique.” As we seek to affirm a semblance of a common humanity that marks out the Mediterranean from other regions, we also stumble on facts and acts that flatly refute this distinction. And yet, Mediterraneans would tell you that in their experience, the notion of feeling at home—a sort of a Mediterranean heimlich—across this region transcends language, religion, colour or custom. Maybe this sense of familiarity also explains the ferocity by which the Mediterraneans have fought each other on the pretext of language, religion, colour or custom. This is what makes it more difficult to approach the myriad questions that ensue in trying to disentangle what seems to be the paradox of a Mediterranean aesthetic imaginary. LOOKING AT WHAT WE TELL When we talk as Mediterraneans about the Mediterranean what are we looking at and what does it tell us about our looking? Looking is not just seeing with one’s eyes; just as feeling is not reduced to engaging with sensations that remain outwith any form of reason. Taking the position that any aesthetic narrative remains political even when it refuses to be trapped by politics, the politics of aesthetics blurs the necessary distinctions between seeing and looking, saying and telling. Even when the polis claims its democratic assumptions from the very notion of speaking, the same political condition by which we assume democracy deprives us from saying what we really want to tell, or looking at what we see. 5 In his literary essays Albert Camus reveals his acute awareness of the political underpinning of the aesthetic imagination. When he discusses the Mediterranean he casts more light on the sense of what is said beyond what is often told. Surely the grounds of everyday life, on which we claim to tell our story, are incongruent because they do not reside outside the agonistic nature of our political condition. In his essay The new culture of the Mediterranean Camus argues that our task is “to rehabilitate the Mediterranean, to take it back from those who claim it unjustly for themselves, and to prepare it for the economic organisation which awaits it.” Then he adds: Our task is to discover what is concrete and alive in it, and, on every occasion, to encourage the different aspects of this culture. We are all the more prepared for this task in that we are in immediate contact with the Oriental civilisation which can teach us so much in this respect. We are, here, on the side of the Mediterranean against Rome. And the essential See Rancière, Jacques. Hatred of Democracy and The Politics of Aesthetics. The distribution of the sensible. 5

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role that towns like Algiers and Barcelona can play is to serve, in their own small way, that aspect of Mediterranean culture which favours man instead of crushing him.6

This essay, written in 1937, is in part a response to what heavily weighs on Camus’s mind: Francisco Franco’s advance and his brutal rout of any shred of democracy that may have been left in the Spanish Second Republic. The advance of fascism had already claimed parts of Africa with Mussolini’s imperialist claims on Ethiopia in 1936. Three years before, in 1933, Hitler came to power, inaugurating a barbaric political system that would culminate in the systematic murder of six million Jews and another ten million victims including gay men and women, political dissenters, conscientious objectors, Roma and ethnic Poles, as well as Soviet and other citizens—without counting many more millions who died in World War II to counter fascism itself. The horror of fascism was evident to Camus from its inception, and as he becomes more alarmed by the rise of a form of barbarism that many thought would be unthinkable after the millions who perished in the First World War, he looks at the Mediterranean with trepidation: What we claim in the Mediterranean is not a liking for reasoning and abstractions, but its physical life—the courtyards, the cypresses, the strings of pimentos. (...) What we seek is not the lie which triumphed in Ethiopia but the truth that is being murdered in Spain.7

Somehow the making of this sea always carries within it the spectre of conflict, a murdered truth and a pack of lies, while at the same time it continues to promise the vibrancy of difference and alterity, as these move in and out of the hegemonic systems that characterized this sea’s long history.8 Camus’s words recall yet another distortion of human endeavour, marked by false reasoning and a juxtaposition of fabricated realities. Way back in 1809, another poet and artist trawled this sea in search of myths and history. Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage tells a story that is no less paradoxical:

Camus, “Native Culture. The New Culture of the Mediterranean,” 193. Ibid. 191. 8 I refer to two major recent works: Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History and the already cited Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by W.V. Harris. In both books the paradox of the benevolence and sheer tragedy that characterizes the making of the Mediterranean is made evident. 6 7

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Here the red Cross, for still the Cross is here, Though sadly scoffed at by the circumcised, Forgets that Pride to pampered priesthood dear,— Churchman and Votary alike despised. Foul Superstition! howsoe’er disguised, Idol—Saint—Virgin—Prophet—Crescent—Cross— For whatsoever symbol thou art prized, Thou sacerdotal gain, but general loss! Who from true Worship’s gold can separate thy dross?9

Byron and Camus’s narratives constitute two moments in a Mediterranean journey where one’s poetics in 1809 rebounds on the other’s politics in 1937. Although distanced by time and intention, they inhabit the same expanse; they share plurality in its impenetrable aporia. In their diverse— some might say opposed—vision of fulfilment they take on the heavy yoke of human expectation. That this expectation sounds dystopian in both cases is not unexpected given that every attempt to gain some comprehensive or rational sense of the Mediterranean’s “complex, awkward and unique” promise is frustrated, wherever its starting point might be. Byron and Camus’s testimonies can only capture the particularity of moments where the life of an artist begins to make sense and gain character in a region that defies closed answers. Just as any time or any date that one would accommodate in his or her own history, 1809 and 1937 construe two historical narratives whose stories were determined, in one way or another, by the Mediterranean. It turns out that any such history is characterized by the contingency and alterity that a scenario of asymmetrical otherness— whatever that appears to mean—makes any hope of dialectical resolution impossible. It would be simplistic to say that the Mediterranean is a model of mediated diversity. As I argue in the opening chapter of this book, to approach this sea is to travel with broken effigies of failed idolatries. It is to hitch a hike on a barge where Lenin lies in state, saluted by former followers who prefer the Byzantine sign of the cross than the clenched fist. But in carrying—or in this case travelling with—the effigies of the dead, one also takes a wager on what secures nothing but a hope based on chance that comes informed by historical contingency. As Guttuso and Sciascia witnessed in the context of Sicilianity, any engagement with the politics of aesthetics, is taken with the understanding that whatever is constructed—whatever is made—is an attempt to make limited sense of an economy of involution. 9

Byron. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II: XLIV.

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Dates like 1809 and 1937 are also remarkable in that they refuse to be remembered as such while at the same time they make an impression on us as a kind of reminder of what it may have been like had we worn Byron’s or Camus’s shoes. This also gives us an excuse to fix some context to the names ‘Camus’ and ‘Byron’; if only for the sake of not letting their stories become misplaced. If there is such a thing as the biographical location of a text or a work of art, this is anticipated by a negotiation between history and its consequent stories. As such a location, the Mediterranean is an artefact, constructed on an immense scale and positioned within the physical extents where women and men are enabled to constantly name and rename their diverse spaces whose design and scope they want to change—though politically, this may not always be possible. Just as one’s being is shaped in the dialectal—but not necessarily dialectical—spaces of singular words, Byron and Camus’s words leave a mark of biography. Yet their story remains a racconto, a perpetual telling whose praxis inhabits the world by the modality of circumstance, what we often call culture. One could imagine that Camus and Byron are participants in a genealogical game of tag where names bear reference to random singularities and moves, and whose relationships are as contingent as the posthumous arrangement of one accident with another. Though we might wish to transform this string of accidents into a prearranged map of compound histories, we find that the actual value of communal conventions relies on the currency of exchange between construed individualities. This form of exchange could in turn articulate—for all of us—some semblance of a collective ground by which we often endear to define the Mediterranean. However, this ground remains contingent, and therefore fluid and open, although ultimately it is captured—contrapuntally, as Edward Said puts it—in new narratives, where, one might add, new forms of historical contingencies might reappear: As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is a concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work. In the same way, I believe, we can read and interpret English novels, for example, whose engagement (usually suppressed for the most part) with the West Indies or India, say, is shaped and perhaps even determined by the specific history

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of colonization, resistance, and finally native nationalism. At this point alternative or new narratives emerge, and they become institutionalized or discursively stable entities.10

This is where we try to understand how we could ever look at what we tell in a construction of narratives that is simply received by a known body—such as an identifiable tradition—but with which we engage contrapuntally, and whose intention and sought effect remain outside our reach. As a construct of diversity, the Mediterranean’s cultural structure is contingent by way of the situational complexity that is played between unknown intentions and suppressed objectives. What seems even more problematic is that such teleological assumptions—bracketed between an intended origin and an aimed-for result—constitute a myth, because, in effect, there is no overall polyphony, no universal design. This would explain why the situational complexity of a Mediterranean ‘culture’ appears to be relativist; yet this form of relativism is only had by ways of the historical necessity by which we differently assume that there must be a universal ground on which conflicts must be resolved. Such statements help us forget that history is only ‘necessary’ a posteriori—that is, when it helps us configure the plurality of subjects that make it. When history appears as being universal, effectively it is being trans-subjective. In this way, the Mediterranean is a cultural construct that partakes of a myriad of relations that remain unpredictable, as they seem to beggar proper description. As a conversation between subjects, the trans-subjective sense of individuality that pervades the notion of the Mediterranean could not avoid construing a plural imaginary—which Abulafia terms as the “Mediterraneans.” But this makes no sense unless a plural imaginary is read from how it engages with the political realities that construct it. In this way one could begin to talk about specific moments of an imaginary that we could identify as being Mediterranean while we try to figure out a semblance of a Mediterranean aesthetic—which might well exude a sense of singularity. If this sense of singularity is anything to go by, any notion of the Mediterranean imagination must be extended to the universe of individual needs, even when it holds no promise against rejection. If one expects that a Mediterranean aesthetic holds a unitary expanse by which we all define ourselves or our makings, then one must move on and try to find this promise elsewhere. Neither this book, nor what will be written in the two volumes that follow it, are intended to gain any holistic notion because if anything, to 10

Said, Edward, W. Culture and Imperialism, 59-60.

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entertain a Mediterranean aesthetic is to anticipate—and reconfirm—what Adorno concludes in Minima Moralia, that “the whole is the false.”11 This is where a sense of singularity prevails when one starts to engage with what a Mediterranean aesthetic might look like. As a presumed ‘common’ presence, the Mediterranean also purports an array of concurrent hegemonic and liberating properties, confirming the construing of a cultural politics whose claim for commonality is nothing but a façade that conceals the same forms of identitarian power that murders democracy. Byron may have swept this sea with a presumed idea that would garner and reclaim the mythical totality of his notion of the Mediterranean, but his Telemachus—Childe Harold—was invented from an Odyssean totality that was aprioristically construed. Such apriorism does not coincide with the cultural (read: circumstantial) apriorism of the Mediterranean. Rather, Byron’s Mediterranean coincides with a myth of jarred universals implied in a Cross that may have been “scoffed at by the circumcised” but whose mocking also presumes the question that Byron directs to the politics of myth: “Who from true Worship’s gold can separate thy dross?”—as if “true Worship” could ever be ascertained or still awaits fulfilment! Assuming that somehow one could find a working notion of theMediterranean-as-a-common-entity, this warrants justification from other than a universal presumption. But this represents a continuous cycle of cultural murders whose victims are the story and those who tell it. As Benjamin reminds us: The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a “symptom of decay,” let alone a “modern” symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.12

What murdered Spain, first murdered its storytellers. Those who murdered the storytellers belong to that longstanding holy alliance between Clericalism’s organised belief and tyranny. Likewise what ‘triumphed’ in Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was the historical lie of Empire—the same empire that censored and got rid of many a storyteller. Guised under the tyranny of “true Worship”—that of secular ideology and religious fide11 12

Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia, 50. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” In Illuminations, 86.

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ism—the historical lies of tyranny reveal the cultural and ideological chasms that transform the spectacle of the epic into a closed totality. In its fallacy, the total claims to be free by an assumed certainty that precludes any questioning. Fascism was not the only purveyor of this dystopia. Any form of political certainty that premised itself on yet another totality as an excuse to counter totalitarianism—such as the establishment of state socialism in Eastern Europe—was also doomed from the start, and it turned out to be as dystopian as the latter. In contrast to the dystopias of totality, what characterizes the Mediterranean politics of aesthetic is the sheer presence of the arts and the wider spectrum of feelings, heresies, tragedies and hopes that entertain any possibility of freeing the epics, spectacles and stories by which men and women seek to make sense of the world. In the fallacy of a Mediterranean-as-acommon-entity, we find that epic, story and spectacle are compartmentalised, and this is what terrified Camus.13 LOOKING SOUTH TO THE NORTH AND EAST Looking south to the North and East, as this book has done,14 may seem like reclaiming old colonial positions, where from the Southern shores of Europe, colonialists looked to North Africa, then turning to the Eastern Mediterranean, where the legacy of Empire still haunts Europe and the West. However, looking south is not always an emulation of Empire. In his last public interview before Franco’s Nationalists murdered him, Lorca makes a controversial remark on the politics of identity, when he describes the fall of Granada in 1492 as an historical disaster. Lorca’s statement must be understood in the political contexts of Spain in 1936, just at the beginning of the Civil War, when the Nationalist backlash against the Republic was sustained by the fanatical propaganda of an España Catolicissima and its founders, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabel of Castile. Lorca defies the Catholic myth of a Spain ‘liberated’ from Islam by Ferdinand and Isabel. He characterizes the fall of Granada as “a dreadful moment, even though they tell you the opposite in school.” Granada lost “an admirable civilisation, a poetry, an astronomy, an architecture and a gracefulness unique in the world.” What Granada became was “a broken For my discussion of epic, story and spectacle see Baldacchino. AvantNostalgia, 10ff. 14 For an outline of the Mediterranean Aesthetics project, of which this book is the first volume, see the Introduction above. 13

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and terrified town” inhabited by “the worst bourgeoisie in Spain.” Lorca makes fun of the Grenadine Catholic bourgeoisie, calling Granada “una ‘tierra del chavico’ donde se agita actualmente la peor burguesía de España.”15 Lorca’s use of the phrase “tierra del chavico” is ironic. Literally translating as a “land of pennies” implying the pennies given to the church in votive offering, one can see how this phrase can imply a “land of pittance” whose bourgeoisie—notwithstanding its agitated pretences— remains mired in vulgarity. Though some might interpret this as if Lorca was just hitting back at the Nationalists and the Church, he is in no way being anticlerical or disdainful of Spain or its history. What he disdains is an “abstract nationalist idea held by those who love their country while wearing a blindfold.” He declares himself a “complete Spaniard” (soy español integral). In fact he admits that he could not see himself living outside his geographic boundaries; yet he pours scorn on those who consider themselves as Spanish just for the sake of being Spanish. Before anything else Lorca sees himself as a brother to all humanity and a citizen of the world (soy hombre del mundo), believing in no political borders.16 Framed in this context, Lorca’s lament over the fall of Arab civilisation in Granada does not play an orientalist game. He may be a romantic in many ways, but surely his position over the history of Spain and the end of the Arab era emerges from his denial of any form of historical revisionism and the propagandist triumphalism by which for many centuries a corrupt ‘Christian’ aristocracy ruled mercilessly over a country that witnessed the worst forms of ethnic cleansing and persecution of anyone who dared challenge the Church or the Crown—be they Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, freethinkers or gypsies. Spain’s imperial claims were not only detrimental to the millions who perished under the sign of the cross in the so-called “New World”, but were also directed inwards, where a refusal to convert to Catholicism would simply result in exile or indeed death. As one considers the politics of identity from the context of the myth of Empire that works in and out of artificial political boundaries, one cannot forget that the use of identity by colonialism is an enforced form of mediation between the culture of Empire and that of the colony. Mediterranean history is marked by the construction of regional knowledge as a García Lorca. “Diálogos de un caricaturista salvaje.” [Dialogue with a wild caricaturist]. Interviewed by Luis Bagaría. In Obras Completas. Volume III: Prosa, 637. 16 Ibid. 15

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selective exercise. Whether Carthaginian, Roman, or Hellenic; Spanish, British, French, or Ottoman; Norman, Byzantine or Islamic; a formalized kind of Mediterraneanism is invariably characterised by an outstanding plurality of myths, each leaving an indelible historical mark on its diverse forms of cultural and historical self-definition. In its most recent history of such forms of imperial myth the region found itself depicted as a selective doctoring of national interests, excluding what does not fit the interests of Empire. In the framework of the grand colonial project—best epitomised in British and French Imperialism—the ultimate targets of cultural and instructional attainment were centred on the construction of a local knowledge expected to extend from the Empire’s universal ambitions under the pretence of ‘common sense’. It was this kind of distortion that Lorca had to confront, and ultimately it was the same colonial ambitions and delusion of national grandeur that made him enemies who did not think twice to murder him. Some might argue that the Imperial cultural imagination is now a distant past whose memory we share, but whose grammar has long been overtaken by the post-colonial dialogues that have since superseded their initial internationalist utopias. While it may be a fact that now the question is radically different from the simplistic formulae of anti-imperialism, it should also be recognised that the post-colonial narrative is still in its disturbed puberty. The aftermath of French, British and Turkish Imperialism in the Mediterranean has further distorted history by the emergence of a different postImperial situation, succeeding the demise of the Cold War and the eclipse of reason caused by new ideological constellations and new forms of entrenchment. In this context, an analytical dismantling of this cultural and epistemological stratification has become more than ever, difficult to justify, let alone define. When all the discourse on the residual culture of colonialism is said and done, history leaves no choice but to ask with Said: “who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from the present actualities, and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India and Algeria upon these two imperial cities?”17 The simple answer is “No one.” It is impossible to reverse history because there is nothing to reverse. History is a matter of biographies and individual experience whose heritage could neither be forgotten nor ignored. To ignore this, would mean ignoring those who inherit it—that is, ourselves. At the same 17

Said. Culture and Imperialism, 15.

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time, to claim a reversal of history would amount to the identitarian fallacy by which xenophobes still denounce immigrants and refugees as having an illegal status—meaning that they are criminals. Lorca’s mourning over the fall of the splendour of science, poetry and philosophy in Granada sustains its validity by remembering while never calling for some absurd reversal of history. This is why Lorca’s work continues to attract the contemporary imagination with some force. This attraction is not found in the temptation to romanticise the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean. What attracts us to the work of Lorca and others like him who perceive the Mediterranean as a plural event, is the need to reassess (now more than ever) the European perception of the South and the East of this sea. This is also where the colonialist perception of the South as being ‘subordinate’ to the North must be seen for its absurdity and irrelevance. Yet as the fallacy of colonial perceptions are seen for what they really are, one cannot forget that we live in a time when Islamophobia has become an excuse to denounce terrorism, and where the vehement intolerance of a woman wearing a burka in the streets of Paris, Rome or London is becoming increasingly ‘common’. Here one wonders whether Lorca’s disdain for blind nationalism could serve as a stern reminder for some who may be all too prepared to follow in the same footsteps of those who in 1936 chose to support Franco with the excuse of defending the “true Worship.” METANARRATIVES AND … It has become fashionable to assume that the historic ‘demise’ from the scripted plans of an all-rounded ideology confirms the equally luring claim that all which remains of the old democratic polis is the logic of an irredeemable system. This may well be the case where politics fail to live up to unrealistic and utopian objectives, and where nostalgia operates as a screen for the myth of a ‘lost’ origin. As we have seen in the previous chapter, a nostalgic position that purports to reverse history in linear regression is premised on the fallacy of historical necessity. It would be equally mythical to assume that the ‘demise’ of prevalent narratives constitute some special situation, rather than recognise that such situations broadly figure the predicament of politics per se and it presents nothing that is historically new or unprecedented. More so, to claim that this state of affairs is the ultimate rejection of Modernism’s political project is to forget that in the Mediterranean imagination—diverse and contingent as it remains—the condition of the actual, (the modo) always presents a form of anticipation and any claim for newness

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in terms of either a demise of metanarratives or paganism sounds hollow when read against the tessellated political history of this region. Perhaps more than ever, this political awareness has emerged in the demise of Empire, when in their various ways, former colonies had to cope with the development of previously imposed, traditionally inherited or newly assumed forms of governance. This reaffirms Jean-François Lyotard’s argument that the postmodern is a case of the future anterior—the actually modern in its nascent state—and not some new era that ‘succeeds’ Modernity: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Thus understood, postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent.”18 One might add that this recurrent state of nascence is not an outcome of the epistemological ‘order’ that politics brought about in the demise of grandnarratives (such as colonialism and state-socialism), but a state of affairs borne out of the political aesthetics of anticipation. Here, any claim for definition is entirely post modo as it stands on the cusp of the here and now. The artist and the writer therefore work without rules and in order to establish the rules for what will have been made. This is why the work and text can take on the properties of an event; it is also why they would arrive too late for their author, or, in what amounts to the same thing, why the work of making them would always begin too soon. Post-modern would be understanding according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).19

Perhaps an identification of a specifically Mediterranean source for such an argument may or may not be the case.20 However, time and again one finds that across the Mediterranean’s disparate epistemological ordering the case for the actually modern as a perpetual state of partial ascent remains pretty much a l’ordre du jour. Likewise, as we have seen throughout these essays, the philosophy of the latter half of the 20th century—be it postmodern, deconstructive, postMarxist or neo-pragmatic—is broadly anticipated by artists, poets and authors whose immersion in the Mediterranean imaginary made them uncom18 Here I refer to Lyotard’s definition of postmodernity as ante-modern. See Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” In The Postmodern Explained, 13. 19 Ibid. 15. 20 I am not suggesting that Lyotard’s argument is owed to some Mediterraneanist core in his work. However it remains to be seen whether one could make a case for a ‘Mediterranean character’ in Lyotard’s work.

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fortable with a formulaic sense of the avant-garde, even when they appear to have adhered to several ‘aspects’ of Modernism. This is especially the case when Modernism came to signify yet another performative posture that attempts to deny historic contingency. It would appear that an argument for a Mediterranean imaginary leads to another metanarrative. But on a closer look the notion of a metanarrative always amounts to nonsense, especially when this is pitched against the socalled performative ratio of the transitory condition of the postmodern. This is because by dint and cause of its volatility, performativity construes what in effect prompts the smokescreen of metanarratives. At the same time this purports the continuous anticipation of the recurrent nascent state that the postmodern represents. So any contradiction that sustains the critique of metanarratives relies on the performative character by which metanarratives define themselves—which basically neuters any notion of longevity or groundedness, and turns the very notion of a metanarrative into a selfiterating statement, a tautology. Any discussion of the condition of postmodernity within the context of the Mediterranean yields a sense of déjà vu. In approaching a Mediterranean aesthetic, in how it moves from the existential-historical contexts of journey, doubt and nostalgia, art comes to represent the aporia of an aesthetics of suggestion, where, as we have seen in Lorca, what is uttered—and therefore performed—is like a language-game played in-between what is possible (and could be said) and the way it comes to be (as it gains existence) from within a reality that in all truth must not exist.21 Lyotard’s characterization of the postmodern is not that distanced from such a state of affairs: The postmodern would be that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations— not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.22

As something unpresentable, the Mediterranean imaginary presents a horizon that in its involutionary character operates on the pretexts of the liminal and the pagan. But before looking at contexts where this occurs, one must pause and clarify what role has the performative played in the making of the Mediterranean imagination. 21 22

See p. 122 above. Lyotard. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” 15.

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What many insist on identifying as performativity—as if it were the product of contemporary technology and its economic impact—is nothing but another iteration of the realities of historic contingency which the Mediterranean imagination already articulates in its disparate and contingent nature. As argued throughout this volume, the performative takes various positions: from that of the self’s whatness and its rejection of a universalizing narrative in Montale, to the unanticipated situations of a ripped ‘sky’ where the whole definition of tragedy and atonement in the moral and aesthetic imagination shift position. The latter is clearly argued in Pirandello’s discussion of truth, semblance and the absurd in comedy. These acts do not constitute poetic or literary whims, but reflections on life’s impossible truths; that is, an impossibility of representation and a resort to approximation. Here, life’s iterations are not done with any pretence of precision—as metanarratives would do; but emerge within the pragmatics of knowledge, where what is not yet known is borrowed into the phenomenal world, in the hope that an explanation is found in the future. As the Mediterranean artist learns from this sense of performativity, our notion of the Mediterranean imaginary begins to reveal a steady resistance to the pretence of certainty and, as argued in the previous chapter, it would concur with Benjamin’s notion of truth’s “intentionless state of being.”23 This also reveals performativity in a different light, and suggests that what are now identified as metanarratives, amount to postures of performance. However, when it comes to aesthetic, political and other forms of expression that resist this posture and reveal its shallow pretences, one need not find a counter-metanarrative. As the failure of the Left to create a “worker’s culture” that would rebut “bourgeois culture” shows, this kind of symmetrical warfare is broadly ineffective and often amounts to further performative myths. … THE SMILING SAILOR In Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of popular chant, one finds a good example that moves away from the fallacy of symmetrical resistance. Gramsci argues that as a form of expression popular chant is not a microcosm of a grand narrative, but is a “way of conceiving the world and life in contrast to official society.” One must not read this contrast as a counter-narrative that directly resists official culture, but as an alternative form that takes its distance from official society, while not necessarily confronting it. “Only

23

Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 36.

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then”, says Gramsci, “could one look into the collectivity of popular chant, and of the people itself.”24 As postures, metanarratives gain their strength from the same process of a consensus-turned-coercion, which Gramsci derives from his reappraisal of the question of the south of Italy (better known as la questione meridionale). This does not mean that private or ‘smaller’ conceptions of the world always resist or consent to grand narratives in equal measure. Neither does it mean that the South is simply an extension, or a poor version of the cosmopolitan metanarratives of the industrial North. (A fallacy forcefully rebutted by Sciascia). In discussing Gramsci’s analysis of the southern question, Said remarks on how “fastidious” Gramsci is “in describing the peculiar topography of the south, remarkable, as he says, for the striking contrast between the large undifferentiated mass of peasants on the one hand, and the presence of ‘big’ landowners, important publishing houses, and distinguished cultural formations on the other.”25 Rather than tactical or strategic resistance to metanarratives, we are here presented with a context where it is more appropriate to speak of alternatives that would resist by the consequence of them becoming visible to those who are trapped in the performative postures of ‘grand’ or ‘official’ narratives. While acknowledging that indeed, “there is incorporation; there is inclusion; there is direct rule; there is coercion”, Said reads this situation as also implying that “there is only infrequently an acknowledgement that the colonized people should be heard from, their ideas known.”26 This is where the condition by which the Mediterranean emerges as an impossible posture of performativity—and likewise an impossible metanarrative—anticipates the asymmetrical forms of resistance that Lyotard seems to suggest when he talks about the possibility of paralogy—whose point, Fredric Jameson argues, “is not to reach agreement but to undermine from, within the very framework in which the previous ‘normal science’ had been conducted.”27 Bearing in mind the underlying context of the postmodern as an anticipatory state of the modern—rather than some kind of new era that heralds an end of the modern as a category of the here and now—the implications of a paralogical state of affairs comes closer to what we have engaged with in the works of the artists, poets and authors discussed in this Gramsci, Antonio. “I canti popolari.” [Popular chants] In Letteratura e Vita Nazionale, [Literature and National Life], 274. 25 Said. Culture and Imperialism, 57. 26 Ibid. 58 27 Jameson, Fredric. “Foreword.” In Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition, xix. 24

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book (which, I hasten to add, are only a salient representation of a much wider Southern European imaginary, though quite representative in terms of Mediterranean aesthetics). When Lyotard argues that we have “to determine whether it is possible to have a form of legitimation based solely on paralogy,”28 what comes to mind is the paralogical approach in Leonardo Sciascia’s order of resemblance that he introduces in his essay on Antonello da Messina. A polity sustained by resemblance is one where power relies on a community that equates truth with the impression of figural meaning-qua-likeness. To recall Sciascia’s characterization of “a kind of aporia” which characterizes the “way of being Sicilian”, one must also remember that he is not talking about the Moderns—such as Pirandello, Verga, da Lampedusa and their literary legacy—but he goes back to Cicero and Scipio of Castro.29 In this purveying of a history that is characterized by more than one instance of aporia, Sciascia frames his argument by making reference to Antonello da Messina’s Ritratto d’uomo (Portrait of a Man), better known as the Ritratto dell’ignoto Marinaio (Portrait of an Unknown Sailor, 1465-70). This work gains particular notoriety amongst the many art historians and literary authors who are intrigued by the unknown sailor’s enigmatic smile. Such a smile and likeness invokes an insightful comment from Sciascia’s part. He asks: “Whom does this man resemble?” Sciascia concludes that this unknown individual could look like everyone: The Mafioso in the countryside and the other one who lives in the rich neighbourhood. The parliamentarian who sits on the benches of the Right and the other who sits on the Left. The farmer and the prince. He looks like the author of this essay (it has been said); and surely he looks like Antonello. And try to establish the social condition and particular humanity of this person. Impossible. Is he noble or a plebeian? A solicitor or a peasant? An honest man or a con man? A painter, a poet, a criminal? ‘He resembles’, that’s all.30

If the order of resemblance is not a new game that occurs with every new face that is in turn compared to the many persons and characters that it happens to look like, then one must find another way of defining what a game represents in terms of how people impress meaning on the ‘facts’ that animate a polity. Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition, 43 Sciascia, “L’ordine delle somiglianze.” See also chapter 4 in this volume. 30 Sciascia. “L’ordine delle somiglianze.” 6. 28 29

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Lyotard describes paralogy as “a move (the importance of which is often not recognised until later) played in the pragmatics of knowledge.”31 This follows another distinction that he makes with regards to “progress.” “[T]here are two different kinds of ‘progress’ in knowledge” he says, “one corresponds to a new move (a new argument) within the established rules; the other, to the invention of new rules, in other words, a change to a new game.”32 To say that one looks like someone else is a question of personal perception, if not taste. One might argue that any resemblance is probably wrong. But this is what makes resemblance a pagan political act. A resemblance is ‘wrong’ in terms of who judges the resemblance. It is pagan because it is not even democratic. It calls for no consensus. Whether the unknown sailor looks like the Mafioso who lives up the street, or the Communist parliamentarian who used to live in the rich neighbourhood, holds no universal legality in terms of what we all agree upon. This is because resemblance moves from the face to the person. A judgement that emerges from what one looks like goes deeper and is contingent on who is judging. Indeed no one could be jailed simply because they resemble the Mafioso up the hill; and if the Communist Member of Parliament happens to resemble the Mafioso, it should not really reflect badly on his suitability to be an MP. Likewise no Mafioso could be exonerated because he happens to resemble the statue of St Joseph in the parish church. Yet the order of resemblance never entertains the ambition to provide a determinant context. It ebbs and flows. It is a game that is being played all the time. The immediacy of the resemblance is just a way in, a move to a wider game that stands to be changed as soon as a new move proposes a new order. In other words it fits the very notion of paralogy, as a form of dissention that disturbs any attempt generated by closed economies of meaning. So the questions raised by a polity of likeness must move beyond the initial hunch of resemblance. What Sciascia proposes is not that the order of things relies on resemblance, but that resemblance cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant category of art or the polity. The order of resemblance plays more highly in the politics of aesthetics, where the performative never awaits the next technological advance. This way into the polity does not simply follow from some kind of post-Taylorist technology. Sciascia confirms that the performative condition constructs a pragmatic order that is 31 32

Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition, 43. Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition, 43.

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radically distinct from the expected economies by which capital has evolved from the alienation of human labour. There is no doubt that performativity emerges from estrangement. But the structure of alienation remains open-ended. It has no specific form and it cannot be pre-ordained by a cybernetic or technological order that universalizes everything. This is where the aporetic condition of one’s way of being—which Sciascia articulates in the notion of Sicilianity—stands out. As we have seen in the case of Kazantzakis’s images of Christ and Zorba or Lorca’s attention to the darkness of the duende, to unravel the aporia is to play its game. In making new moves, one alters the original game with which one begins. This is not, however, an act of liberation. It might reveal the nature of historical contingency that acts as a context for this game, but is not a counter-hegemony. Neither Kazantzakis nor Lorca, less so Montale or Sciascia, have dared offer a recipe for liberation—political or otherwise. Their view of the world is not presumed by Messianic or demiurgic certainty. This characterizes the aporia of the politics of aesthetics. One must add that such a politics of aesthetic is not uniformly executed by all the arts as if this was art’s a priori condition. Neither is this aporia common to all forms of aesthetic manifestation or polity. It simply means that some works of art choose not to take on this aporia. But as this book has shown, if there is such a term as Mediterranean aesthetics, what starts to explain it, is the open-endedness by which it is approached. Whether this is a must that is just short of becoming an aesthetic imperative, remains to be seen. Maybe it is something that needs to be learnt once more as if it were in a state of recurrent nascence. Taking learning as such an act, one wonders how learning constantly implies the need to forget. Mahfouz’s paradox of forgetfulness comes to mind in his recollection titled A Trick of the Memory. He recalls meeting a person whose stomach was markedly huge. I asked him in amazement. “Who are you, sir?” He answered with surprise, “I am forgetfulness. How could you have forgotten me?”33

If this does not anticipate the very idea of the postmodern, I await another trick of the memory to help me recall why must I remember, again and again.

33

Mahfouz. Echoes of an Autobiography, 48.

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———. Alfabeto Pirandelliano. [Pirandellian Alphabet]. Milano: Adelphi, 1989. ———. Il giorno della civetta. [The day of the Owl]. In Opere 1956-1971. Edited by Claude Ambroise. Milano: Classici Bompiani, 1989. Seferis, George. On The Greek Style. Translated by Rex Warner and Th.D. Frangopoulos. London: The Bodley Head, 1966. ———. Collected Poems. Revised Edition. Translated by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995. St Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas. Translated by Hugh McGregor Ross. London: Watkins Publishing, 2006 Tennyson, Alfred. The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Ware: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994. Teresa de Jesus. Obras Completas [Collected Works]. Edited by Efren de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1962. Theroux, Paul. The Pillars of Hercules. A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996. Vattimo, Gianni. Credere di credere. Milano: Garzanti Editori, 1996.

INDEX A ciascuno il suo, 80, 83 Abulafia, David, 136, 141, 155 act-of-being-fact, 51 Adorno, Theodor, 31, 45, 61, 62, 64, 65, 126, 142, 155, 160 Aegean, the, 1 Aegisthus, 6, 85 Aeschylus, 112, 155 Agamemnon, 12, 26, 63, 87 agape, 14, 15, 16, 102 agôn, 116, 122 aìresis, 97 aísthesis, 92, 107 Alberti, Rafael, 1, 155 Alexandria, 5, 6, 16, 23, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 159 Alexandrian mode, 35, 36 Algiers, 138 Alighieri, Dante, 99, 155 anamnesis, 80, 110, 118, 125 Angelopoulos, Theo, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 30, 63, 120, 155, 158, 159 anni di piombo, 78 Aphrodite, 26, 57 apocryphal, 4, 7, 96, 97, 98, 105 apòkryphos, 97 Aquinas, Thomas, 47, 48, 49, 155 arché, 16, 86, 100 Argonauts, 25 Aristotle, 84, 97, 106, 155 Austin, John, 28, 155 avant-garde, 7, 43, 75 avant-nostalgia, 7, 119 Baldacchino, John, 22, 75, 118, 119, 120, 143, 155

Balearics, the, 1 Balkan wars, 9, 12 Balkans, the, 12, 15 Barcelona, 138, 158 Barthes, Roland, 72, 156 Bates, Alan, 96 belonging, 11, 16, 66, 117, 120 Benjamin, Walter, 124, 125, 126, 142, 149, 156 Bergson, Henri, 51, 156 Berkeley, George, 51, 159 Bien, Peter, 38, 39, 41, 96, 101, 156, 157, 159 Bildung, 15, 16, 100, 105 Bizet, Georges, 134 Bloom, Harold, 100, 156 Böcklin, Arnold, 79 body, the, 7, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 102, 103, 104, 108, 119 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 9, 10 Bradford, Ernle, 31, 32, 156 Brancati, Vitaliano, 74 Brandi, Cesare, 76, 156 Braudel, Fernand, 9, 19, 20, 135, 136, 156 Buddha, 106, 112 Bulgaria, 9, 10 Byron, George, 22, 55, 56, 57, 66, 138, 139, 140, 142, 156 Byzantine imagination, 7 Cacoyannis, Michael, 96 Cadaqués, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121 Calvesi, Maurizio, 76, 156 Calvino, Italo, 6, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 156

164

MAKINGS OF THE SEA

Calypso, 10, 26 Camus, Albert, 5, 22, 119, 130, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 157 Capuana, Luigi, 72 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 36, 76, 79, 80 Caravaggism, 75, 80 Catania, 85 Catholic Church, 81, 144 Cavafy, Constantine, 4, 5, 6, 15, 16, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 63, 64, 87, 120, 156, 157, 159 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 92 Childe Harold, 56, 57, 138, 139, 142, 156 Christ, Jesus, 79, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 153 Cicero, 74, 151 city, the, 17, 25, 26, 27, 35, 39, 87 Clytemnestra, 6 comedy, 84, 87 Communism, 5 compound, the, 106, 107, 108, 109 Contarino, Rosario, 70, 157 continuous present, the, 64 Cortenova, Giorgio, 78, 157 Courbet, Gustave, 76, 79 Crete, 96, 97, 99 Creus, Cape, 117 Croce, Benedetto, 49, 62, 110, 157 cultural appropriation, 12 Cyclops, 86, 88, 89, 157 da Messina, Antonello, 74, 151 Dalí, Salvador, 8, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 133, 157, 158 Damiani, Damiano, 83 De Chirico, Giorgio, 6, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 79 death, 25, 31, 83, 85, 99, 102, 106, 122, 124, 125, 128, 135 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 53, 54, 157 Deligiorgis, Stavros, 101, 157 Descartes, Rene, 51, 123

Dionysus, 101 doubt, 4, 6, 7, 10, 57 duende, 8, 119, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 153 Electra, 6, 84 Empire, 37, 135, 142, 143, 144, 147 empirical human-as-subject, 53, 54 Enlightenment, the, 5, 30, 31, 82, 155 Epaphus, 111, 112 episteme, 49 eros, 14, 16, 102 erotic, the, 6, 34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 44 Euripides, 89, 157 Europa, 13, 14 Europe, 5, 8, 13, 14, 130, 143 facticity, 51, 69 fascism, 15, 52, 53, 130, 138, 143 Ferdinand II of Aragon, 143 folktale, 27 Foucault, Michel, 40, 157 France, 1, 145 Franco, Francisco, 83, 130, 138, 143, 146 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 17, 18, 157 genocide, 15, 16, 46 geographical relativism, 82 Georgakas, Dan, 11, 12, 158 Gibson, Ian, 116, 130, 131, 132, 133, 158 Girgenti, 85, 86 gnosis, 49 Goya, Francisco, 76 Gramsci, Antonio, 149, 150, 158 Granada, 143, 144, 146 Greece, 1, 6, 9, 10, 11, 16, 18, 20, 37, 43, 101, 105, 161 Greekness, 11, 37 Greene, Maxine, 22, 119, 156 Guevara, Ernesto Che, 11 Guttuso, Renato, 4, 7, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 88, 139, 156, 157, 158, 161 Hamlet, 6, 85, 88

INDEX

Harris, W.V., 136, 138, 155, 158 Hassápiko, 92 Hegel, Georg, 16, 159 heimlich, 117, 137 Heine, Heinrich, 63, 64, 66, 67, 159 Hellas, 30 Hellenism, 6, 36, 38, 39, 41 Heller, Agnes, 131, 159 heresy, 4, 97, 100 Hesiod, 127 historic contingency, 148, 149 historical imagination, 4, 20, 30 history, 4, 6, 7, 11, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 26, 41, 42, 46, 47, 55, 60, 69, 81, 88, 105, 120, 126, 136, 146 homecoming, 4, 8, 12, 26, 63, 64, 86, 87, 120 Homer, 4, 10, 15, 30, 31, 32, 66, 88, 100 homosexuality, 42 Horden, Peregrine, 138, 159 horizon consciousness, 18 Horkheimer, Max, 31, 155 Horton, Andrew, 10, 11, 155, 158, 159 Hughes, Ted, 25, 159 Husserl, Edmund, 17, 18 Ibn Hamdis of Noto, 69 Il Fu Mattia Pascal, 6, 21, 72, 73, 84, 85, 86, 87, 160, 161 Il giorno della Civetta, 80, 81 Illigat, Port, 117 Inglis, Fred, 12, 13, 159 intentionality, 18, 47, 52, 117, 124, 126 Invisible Cities, 16, 17, 157 involution, 5, 7, 22, 74, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 139 Isabel of Castile, 143 Italy, 1, 14, 70, 78, 79, 81, 82, 150 Ithaka, 15, 25, 35, 36, 39 Jameson, Fredric, 150, 159 John of the Cross, 128, 129, 159

165 journey, 4, 5, 6, 10, 15, 16, 35, 36, 39, 42, 62, 63, 64, 66, 74, 86, 87, 111, 112 Joyce, James, 30 Juego y teoría del duende, 123 Kali, 10 Kant, Immanuel, 91, 92, 108, 117, 124, 159 Kazantzakis, Helen, 95, 96, 97, 98, 159 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 4, 7, 19, 20, 28, 38, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 111, 112, 120, 153, 156, 159 Keeley, Edmund, 35, 37, 41, 43, 44, 101, 156, 157, 159, 162 Keitel, Harvey, 9 Kierkegaard, Søren, 61, 62, 64 kinesis, 92 koinonía, 113 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, 74, 151 Latins, the, 57 Lebanon, 135 leitourgía, 55 Lenin, Vladimir, 9, 10, 18, 98, 99, 106, 139 Leopardi, Giacomo, 66, 67, 159 Liddell, Robert, 23, 41, 159 liturgy, 54, 55, 56, 57 lived body, corps vécue, 55, 92 Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, 118, 122, 133 logos, 100 longue durée, 20 Lorca, Federico García, 7, 8, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 143, 144, 145, 146, 153, 158 love, 7, 15, 16, 20, 22, 25, 31, 34, 36, 39, 41, 43, 56, 64, 78, 93, 97, 100, 102, 103, 105, 109, 112, 123, 128 lover, the, 105, 109, 110, 111

166

MAKINGS OF THE SEA

Lucretia, 55, 56, 58 Lyotard, Jean-François, 147, 150, 151, 159 Mafia, 75, 80, 81, 83, 151, 152 Mahfouz, Naguib, 1, 5, 16, 20, 153, 160 Mahmoud, Darweesh, 115, 160 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 53, 54 Malta, 1 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 13, 14, 160 Mediterranean imagination, the, 1, 2, 4, 5, 26, 36, 86, 141, 146, 149, 150 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 55, 160 metamorphosis, 24 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 76, 77, 79 Middle East, 3, 5 Millet, Jean-François, 117, 157 mimesis, 87, 123, 126 Modernism, 45, 146 Modernity, 5, 43, 147 modo d’essere Siciliano, 74 Montale, Eugenio, 5, 6, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 88, 149, 153, 160 Morgenstern, Maïa, 10 Morocco, 1 Muhammad, the Prophet, 99, 100 Müller-Doohm, Stefan, 126, 160 Murray, Oswyn, 20, 156 Mussolini, Benito, 138, 142 Nausikaa, 10 New Left, 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 106, 133, 160 nómos, 84 North Sea, 57, 63, 64, 67 nostalgia, 4, 7, 10, 26, 27, 30, 118, 119, 120, 125, 146 nóstos, 4, 120 Oda a Salvador Dalí, 7, 115, 117, 121, 122, 123, 133

Odysseus, 10, 12, 17, 20, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 55, 63, 86, 89, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104 Ogygia, 10 ónoma, 84 Orestes, 6, 84, 85, 87, 89 Orthodox imagination, 7 Orthodox rite, 9 otherness, 15, 39, 62, 72, 139 outis, 86, 88 Ovid, 24, 25, 159 Palamas, Kostis, 9 panecastic, the, 71, 77 Papas, Irene, 83 paradox, 1, 5, 6, 12, 20, 33, 51, 55, 71, 81, 137, 138, 153 paralogy, 150, 151, 152 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 78, 160 PCI (Italian Communist Party), 74, 77, 80 Penelope, 10 Pentozáli, 92 Petri, Elio, 83 Pirandello, Luigi, 6, 7, 20, 21, 71, 72, 73, 74, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 101, 151, 157, 160, 161 Plato, 26, 105, 109, 126, 161 Plotinus, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 161 poet-as-subject, 53, 54, 56 poet-torero, the, 118, 125, 129, 133 poiesis, 24 polis, 102, 103, 137, 146 Polo, Marco, 16 Polyphemus, 86, 88 Poseidon, 26, 57 post-colonialism, 3, 145 postmodern, the, 2, 43, 147, 148, 150, 153 Prometheus, 111, 112, 155 Purcell, Nicholas, 138, 159 quid, 46, 88 Quinn, Anthony, 96 Rancière, Jacques, 71, 137, 161

INDEX

resemblance, 7, 151, 152 resemblance, order of, 152 Ritsos, Yannis, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 41, 156, 161 Romantic imagination, 30 Ryle, Gilbert, 19, 161 Said, Edward, 140, 141, 145, 150, 161 Samios, Elena. See Kazantzakis, Helen Samiou, Domna, 105, 161 Sartre, Jean Paul, 22 sarx, 102, 103 Sciascia, Leonardo, 7, 27, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 139, 151, 152, 153, 161 Scipio of Castro, 74, 151 Seferis, George, 9, 18, 22, 26, 63, 120, 162 self-preservation, 31, 34 Semites, the, 57 sense-perception, 107, 108 sexuality, 3, 40, 42, 93 Sherrard, Phillip, 157, 162 Sicily, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 81, 82, 86 solfège, 61 solipsism, 6, 10 Southern European perspective, 2, 3 Spain, 1, 130, 138, 142, 143, 144 St Paul, 22, 55, 100, 103 St Thomas, 162 Stalin, Joseph, 130 suggestion, aesthetics of, 119, 125, 127 synamphóteros, 106 Telemachus, 20, 142 télos, 16, 85, 86, 96, 100 Tennyson, Alfred, 29, 30, 31, 35, 162 Teresa de Jesus, 128, 162

167 thalassic logos, 55 The Last Temptation of Christ, 97, 102, 105 Theodorakis, Mikis, 96 Theroux, Paul, 135, 162 throwness-into-being, or Geworfenheit, 87, 88 Togliatti, Palmiro, 78, 79 touch, 7, 92, 109, 111, 112 tragedy, 6, 84, 85, 87 truth, 6, 12, 13, 17, 18, 26, 30, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 60, 61, 64, 70, 71, 77, 83, 84, 86, 92, 104, 105, 107, 110, 112, 122, 124, 126, 127, 130, 132, 133, 142, 148, 151 Tsitsanis, Vassilis, 11 Tunisia, 1 Turkey, 1 Ulysses. See Odysseus Ulysses’s Gaze, 4, 9, 10, 11 unicité, 54 United States of America, 43 Uno Nessuno e Centomila, 86 Vattimo, Gianni, 104, 162 Verga, Giovanni, 71, 72, 74, 85, 151 verism, 71, 72, 73 Volontè, Gian Maria, 83 whatness, 6, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 59, 149 Yugoslavia, 12 Zarathustra, Nietzsche's, 103, 104, 160 Zéimbékiko, 92, 95 Zeus, 13, 14, 86, 111, 112 Zorba the Greek, 28, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 101, 159 Zorba, Alexis, 19, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 103, 153