Eighteen Texts: a Literature of
Gestures
Stylianidou Anna
11107634
Master’s Thesis of Comparative Literature
Thesis Supervisor: Joost de Bloois
Second Reader: Arthur Bot
Department of Literary Studies
University of Amsterdam
Introduction... 1-9
Chapter 1: The social context of Eighteen Texts. The concept of “minor literature” 1.1. The establishment of the Greek military dictatorship (the Junta). Ideology and practices………. 10-12
1.2. Forms of resistance………. 12-13
1.3. Eighteen Texts as a manifestation of minor literature………. 13-17 Chapter 2: Homophony in Eighteen Texts
2.1. The concept of “paratext” and its political significance in Eighteen Texts……….18-20
2.2. A critical view of Genette’s theory………. 20-22 2.3. The cover of Eighteen Texts………. 22-25 2.4. The title………. 25-29
2.5. The epigraph………. 29-33 2.6. The preface………. 33-35 Chapter 3: Polyphony in Eighteen Texts
3.1. The concepts of “polyphony” and “heteroglossia” in Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel”: an overview………. 36-38
3.2. Appropriation of Bakhtin’s theory in the polyphonic analysis of Eighteen Texts...38-39
3.3. A critical view of Bakhtin’s theory………. 39-40 3.4. The objective of this chapter………. 40
3.5. Polyphony in prose writings
3.5.1. Polyphony in “The Plaster Cast”………. 41-45 3.5.2. Polyphony in other prose writings……….45-48
3.6.1. Bakhtin’s limited scope………. 48-49 3.6.2. Polyphony in “The Target”………. 50-53 3.7. Polyphony among the eighteen writers…... 53-59 Conclusion…... 60-62
Introduction
“We have a Junta!”1. This statement was made in the winter of 2014 by an outraged high school student, Ioanna, who was invited in a Greek TV political talk show. Talking about the occupation of public schools throughout Greece by students as a reaction to the devaluation of public education and the violence of some policemen, Ioanna Stasinou triumphantly drew the conclusion that we live in a military dictatorial regime. The journalist ironically responded that during the actual dictatorship in Greece (1967-1974), everyone who dared to occupy a public space was arrested and tortured. Ioanna, who represents a
significant part of her generation, is not the first person that has tended to draw parallels between the present and the recent past: between the objectively problematic democracy in combination with the financial crisis, and the Greek Junta. In fact, “Bread, Education, Freedom! The Junta didn’t end in ’73!” is one of the most popular slogans in protests. Therefore, although there has been a period of more than four decades since the fall of the Greek Junta, the stigma of that period still exists. The Greek military dictatorship is a chapter of the Modern Greek history open in interpretation, reflection and criticism.
This thesis focuses on a collective volume which was published in Athens in 1970 under conditions of self-censorship and has a clear anti-dictatorial message. Its name is Eighteen Texts and it contains eighteen literary texts: fourteen written in prose and four poetic works all published for the first time in Greece, which were written by eighteen Greek
writers2. A question that is reasonably raised is how this book with the anti-dictatorial message evaded censorship and managed to be published in the Regime of the Colonels. Another striking feature of the volume is the co-existence of eighteen texts which belong to
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ndnGHpIUjM (accessed: 29/5/2016)
2 George Seferis, Manolis Anagnostakis, Nora Anagnostaki, Alexandros Arghyriou, Thanasis Valtinos, Lina Kasdagli, Nikos Kasdaglis, Alexandros Kotzias, Takis Koufopoulos, Menis Koumantareas, D.N. Maronitis, Spyros Plaskovitis, Rodis Roufos, Takis Sinopoulos, Cay Cicelli, Stratis Tsirkas, T.D. Frangopoulos, George Chimonas.
different literary genres: poetry, short stories, essays, an extract from a diary and a testimony. The generic medley of literary texts in the same book is rather peculiar, on the grounds that all of us are familiar with anthologies which are made up of more than one text, but these texts belong to the same literary genre.
The issue becomes more complex with the intercourse of eighteen authors in Eighteen Texts. These authors, with the male-to-female ratio of 5:1, have different ideological and aesthetic standards. They cooperated for the first and last time under the roof of Eighteen Texts in order to collectively express their denunciation towards the repressive regime in their own distinct way. What we have therefore is one book with an anti-dictatorial message published in a dictatorial regime and written by eighteen authors who share a polemical attitude towards the Junta, preserving their special stylistic and ideological features.
My main sets of research questions are two and evolve around two concepts, which may look contradictory at first glance: homophony and polyphony. Speaking of homophony, I refer to the shared anti-dictatorial attitude of the eighteen writers and the co-articulation of the same voice of dissent against totalitarianism. My first research question is concerned with the political significance of paratexts in Eighteen Texts as conveyors of homophony. Is homophony limited only to the general statement that all the eighteen writers separately denunciate the Junta in their individual writings, or is there a visible, yet often disregarded, zone in Eighteen Texts in which homophony prevails? Which strategies did the writers employ to convey their anti-dictatorial message and at the same time hide it due to self-censorship, and how does language function as an indication of their polemical intentions towards the dictators?
The second set of research questions deals with the intersection of multiple voices firstly inside singular texts, prose and poetic, and secondly in Eighteen Texts as a literary
entity. I owe the term “polyphony” to Mikhail Bakhtin and particularly to his essay “Discourse in the Novel”, in which he argues that the characters in a novel have their own language and belief system, which is exposed while talking and acting. Even when the characters speak the same national language, there are multiple “socio-ideological languages” which intersect, and the dialogism leads to the exposition of the characters’ ideology. How does polyphony function as a mode of resistance to the Regime of the Colonels? Do the different voices produce neutral utterances or a complex discourse that has political
implications referring to the Junta? Last but not least, I assume that the eighteen writers have divergent opinions and perspectives on the same topics beyond the homophony, given that they are individual writers and not members of a specific movement, sect or group that follows particular poetic and political principles. Does this ideological divergence threat homophony and the existence of a coherent anti-dictatorial discourse in Eighteen Texts? Is resistance perceived as a singular, homogeneous practice by the eighteen authors or does polyphony broaden the anti-dictatorial discourse? At the end, is homophony compatible with polyphony, or do the eighteen writers’ different voices create a paraphony which undermines the political character of the book?
From the very beginning of its publication, Eighteen Texts was widely read in Greece, which is illuminated by the fact that the book was republished five times within 1970, as Robert Beaton mentions in Εισαγωγή στην Νεότερη Ελληνική Λογοτεχνία [Introduction to Modern Greek Literature] (333). The book was also read beyond the Greek boundaries as it was translated into English in 1972 and edited by Willis Barnstone3. From a critical point of view, the proliferation of essays and articles on Eighteen Texts demonstrates that it has drawn several scholars’ attention abroad and in Greece. The first reviews were written by scholars abroad. For example, “Arrogance and Intoxication” was written by Professor Peter Bien in
1973 and “Greek Writers and The Military Dictatorship” was written by the literary critic William Spanos in the same year, too.
After the restoration of democracy in 1974, more and more articles were written about Eighteen Texts in Greece. The feature on the role of intellectuals during the Junta, published by the literary journal Η Λέξη [The Word] in April-May 1987, is illuminating since many reviewers had either experienced the Junta or observed the events from abroad. Some of them, such as D.N. Maronitis and Kay Cicelli, had participated in Eighteen Texts. Eighteen Texts still stirs the attention of scholars, such as Karen Van Dyck, who wrote the thorough study Kassandra and the Censors. Greek Poetry since 1967 in 1998 and it was translated into Greek in 2002 as Η Κασσάνδρα και οι Λογοκριτές στην Ελληνική Ποίηση 1967-19904. In
addition, Anna Maria Sachini’s lecture in 2011 is of high interest and it is titled
“Θρυμματίζοντας το γύψο της Χούντας: ο λόγος κι η σιωπή στα Δεκαοχτώ Κείμενα (1970)” [Shattering the plaster cast of the Junta: discourse and silence in Eighteen Texts (1970)].
These studies offer a great insight into the different narratives that the eighteen writers employed to attack the regime. Nonetheless, what lacks, in my opinion, is a thorough
examination of the complex dialectic between homophony and polyphony in Eighteen Texts. As far as I am concerned, there are two crucial bibliographical gaps in the examination of this collective volume, which this thesis aspires to illuminate and cover. The first one is related to the political significance of Eighteen Texts’ paratexts, and specifically peritexts. It is my contention that the homophonic anti-dictatorial attitude of the writers is indirectly indicated in the cover and the title of the original book as well as the epigraph and the preface, besides the texts themselves. The second gap is related to the lack of a comparative study of the eighteen writers’ voices. Bakhtin’s concept of “polyphony” has been used before with regard to Eighteen Texts, for example by Van Dyck, but only for the examination of the multiple
voices inside a specific text and not among the eighteen texts. This lack must be attributed to the dominant and indisputable view that Eighteen Texts has a clear anti-dictatorial purpose which is served by eighteen writers. However, there are also stylistic and ideological
differences among these writers. The existence of these differences is stated in the preface of Eighteen Texts but they are not specified.
This thesis aims to offer an alternative way of reading Eighteen Texts and contribute to our consideration of the book as a complex literary work, which moves between the literature and the political discourse. It attacks but also incorporates aspects of the
degenerated regime with mechanisms such as parody, allegory, analogy and irony, and it is constructed by eighteen people who work as individuals but at the same time as members of a divergent group. Moreover, I would suggest that Eighteen Texts can be also read as a novel and the eighteen texts function as chapters of this novel: the chapters are marked by different registers of language and style, but all of them converge on the denunciation against the Junta.
Another contribution of this thesis is the examination of Eighteen Texts with the help of significant theoretical concepts which set the book in a broader framework beyond the Greek literary system. These concepts are “paratext”, which has been featured by the French Structuralist literary theorist Gérard Genette in his work Paratexts. Thresholds of
Interpretation, and “polyphony”. Both of these concepts have Formalistic roots as they mainly focus on the literary structure of a work and its internal orchestration. However, Bakhtin, who belongs to the late period of Russian Formalism, partly differentiates himself from this movement on the grounds that he understands the crucial role that the social context plays in the interpretation of literature. He supports that when a character talks in the novel, the meaning of his/her discourse is highly determined by the social milieu and the historical moment in which this character lives, and he concludes that discourse is a social and
ideological phenomenon. Genette, on the other hand, completely ignores the social context of a literary work and he examines paratexts as literary structures organically connected with the text. Contrary to this Formalistic-Structuralist, exclusively aesthetic approach to paratexts, I presume that the eighteen writers indirectly first indicated their anti-dictatorial attitude in the cover, the title, the epigraph and the preface of Eighteen Texts. From this perspective,
Eighteen Texts’ paratexts play a political role. Essentially, it is my thesis that peritext becomes the conveyor of homophony, and that the spoken version of the Greek language, Demotic, is strategically used as a mode of resistance to the Junta which promoted the purified version of the Greek language, Katharevousa. The connection between the writers’ political attitude against the major ideology and their conscious use of Demotic will be illuminated later on, with the introduction of the concept of “minor literature”.
Therefore, it is a challenge for me to appropriate these Formalistic and Structuralist concepts for the political examination of Eighteen Texts. Genette ignores the potential political usefulness of paratexts, and Bakhtin is concerned with the literary structure of a work but he expands the tradition of Formalism. Particularly, with the introduction of the concepts of “polyphony”, “heteroglossia” and “dialogism”, Bakhtin “asserts the way in which context defines the meaning of utterances, which are heteroglot in so far as they put in play a multiplicity of social voices and their individual expressions” (Selden et al, 40, original emphasis). A third theoretical concept broadens the examination of Eighteen Texts. This concept, which is called “minor literature”, is related to the political aspect of literature, its interaction with the social environment and the appropriation of language and literature in the political terrain. I consider “minor literature” as a useful tool for my thesis because it
precisely summarizes the salient characteristics of Eighteen Texts. These are the linguistic differentiation of the writers and the treatment of language for indicating their political orientation; the politically subversive character of the book and the writers’ strategies to
make the anti-dictatorial and thus subversive message visible to the readers but at the same time invisible to the Junta; and finally, the publication of Eighteen Texts as a political, collective action.
The concept of minor literature was coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Considering Franz Kafka’s literature as a striking example of minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the political, subversive character of minor literature. It is subversive firstly from a political point of view, on the grounds that the writers of minor literature oppose the major ideology. In addition, minor literature is linguistically subversive, owing to the fact that the language is used in an unconventional way, which Deleuze and Guattari call “deterritorialization” of language (Minor Literature, 16).
Concerning the structure of my thesis, in the first chapter I will precisely argue that Eighteen Texts is a special manifestation of minor literature, mainly due to the eighteen writers’ linguistic choice to write in Demotic and the determinant role of the social milieu in the formulation of their strategies to evade self-censorship. For this reason, I will briefly sketch the social conditions in Greece from 1967 till 1970. To my mind, this is prerequisite for the adequate reception of the political character of the book and our understanding of the innovative character of Eighteen Texts.
In the second chapter, I will move from the political and contextual background of Eighteen Texts to the literary work itself, with a view to demonstrating the political
significance of the book’s paratexts. Genette defines paratexts as the verbal productions that surround the text and ensure its presence and reception, and characterizes them as “a
privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy” (Paratexts, 2). I will only deal with these verbal productions which are found prior to the texts themselves, in other words the cover
and the title of the original book, the epigraph and the preface. I strongly believe that in these peripheral productions, the eighteen writers have given the first hints of their common anti-dictatorial attitude. Special emphasis will be placed on the original title of the book, which in my opinion calls the observant readers to decode the anti-dictatorial message from the very beginning of the reading process. Contrary to Genette who examines paratexts from a
Structuralist pont of view, which means that he merely focuses on the internal stratification of a literary work, my objective is to extract the discourse about the paratexts from its
Formalistic-Structuralist roots and appropriate it for the political examination of Eighteen Texts.
Having seen peritexts as an umbrella that covers the eighteen texts and conveys authors’ homophony, in the third chapter I intend to detect the multiple voices inside prose and poetic writings in Eighteen Texts so as to see whether polyphony was appropriated as a mode of resistance to the Junta. Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel” is a useful tool for my analysis because he links linguistic discourses with ideological views. It is my thesis that the eighteen writers strategically used polyphony by incorporating the Junta’s discourse in their writings in order to attack the Junta and show their dissent toward it. In the last part of this chapter, I will examine polyphony among the eighteen writers, comparatively mapping their different opinions on the role of the intellectuals in a repressive regime and the power of language as a means of resistance to dictatorship. The function of literature in a totalitarian regime is an issue widely discussed in Eighteen Texts and, more analytically, in Nora
Anagnostaki’s “A Testimony”, which is “a simple testimony of self-criticism” (67). Even the fact that several authors are concerned with the essence of poetic language reinforces my hypothesis about the political implications of the language in Eighteen Texts. Do writers’ different views contradict homophony, or do the different approaches make the anti-dictatorial discourse stronger and more persuasive?
All in all, I aspire to designate the multiple aspects of Eighteen Texts beyond the obvious statement that it is a book with an anti-dictatorial purpose. The appropriation of theoretical concepts that belong to significantly different literary traditions essentially underscores the multiple dimensions of this collective volume. The book itself calls for an approach beyond the stereotypical binaries of poetry-prose and aesthetically pure literature-politically engaged literature. I believe that binary thinking is challenged under literature-politically unstable circumstances. Instead, creative literary hybridizations are born, such as Eighteen Texts. I support that in this volume homophony and polyphony co-exist and a network of divergent writers was temporally formulated in order to collectively struggle for a democratic society. For these reasons, I believe that Eighteen Texts is a literature of gestures, an indirect political action taken within a repressive regime.
1. The social context of
Eighteen Texts
. The concept of “minor
literature”
The aim of this chapter is to make a brief, well-rounded outline of the political and social conditions in Greece from the establishment of the military dictatorship till the publication of Eighteen Texts, in other words from 1967 till 1970. My objective is to delineate the social milieu from which Eighteen Texts emerged, so as to elucidate the relation between this and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’ s concept of “minor literature”.
1.1. The establishment of the Greek military dictatorship (the Junta).
Ideology and practices
On 21st April 1967 a group of right-wing military men launched a coup d’état in Greece, while national elections were to take place in May the same year. The central figures of the Greek “Junta”, as the military dictatorship is often called, were the Colonels George Papadopoulos, Stylianos Pattakos and the Brigadier Nikolaos Makarezos5. Claiming that Communists were about to take over Greece, the dictators disdained the Parliament and declared martial law, adopting the slogans “Greece of the Christian Greeks” and “Homeland, Religion, Family”. These slogans accurately reflect the Junta’s aspiration to revive the glorious past of Ancient Greece and conciliate it with the tenets of Christianity. Moreover, the slogans indicate the dictators’ chauvinist ideology, which “gave the priority to traditions, to family, to the destiny of the race, to the faith in an eternal and immortal Greece”, as Despina Papadimitriou points out (402).
In the book Children of the Dictatorship. Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the 'Long 1960s' in Greece, Kostis Kornetis highlights the number of people who were persecuted and imprisoned during the Junta due to their participation in anti-authoritarian protests. More specifically, he states that “about three thousand left-wingers, stigmatized as “non patriotic”, were put in prison, and more than eight thousand were sent to concentration
5 Hereafter, I will use the term “the Junta” in order to refer to the Greek military dictatorship during 1967-1974.
camps on remote islands, a practice that had never been fully abandoned after the end of the civil war [in 1949]” (40). The popular Communist poet, Giannis Ritsos, was sent in the concentration camps in Gyaros and Leros, the songs of the left-wing composer, Mikis Theodorakis, were banned (Beaton, 338), and many anti-regime journals and newspapers were suspended, with their editors being persecuted. A striking example is Nana Kallianesi, the founder of the publishing house Kedros that published Eighteen Texts in 1970. Kallianesi was arrested with the accusation of editing communist volumes and participating in
subversive activities6.
One of the first measures that the dictators took was the imposition of a prepublication censorship and the targeting of books, films and songs that had anti-authoritarian references. Dimitris Asimakoulas, who delved into the reception of Brecht’s opus during the Greek Junta, mentions that a long index with banned books was issued in 1969. These books were either written in Greek or were translated into Greek; an example of the latter case constitutes Brecht’s work (93-94). Moreover, the dictators decreed the purified version of the Greek language, Katharevousa, as the official language of the state and education and they banned the use of the popular Demotic. The latter was considered as a vulgar linguistic version and greatly different from the language the Greeks’ glorious ancestors used.
I believe that the establishment of Katharevousa shall not be merely regarded as a linguistic shift but also as a manifestation of the Junta’s chauvinist ideology. As Antonio Gramsci puts in with regard to the relation between language and hegemony, “written normative grammar, then, always presupposes a ‘choice’, a cultural tendency, and it is thus always an act of national-cultural politics”(355). The establishment of Katharevousa and the strict preventive censorship, in combination with the dictators’ appropriation of literature for
6 https://istoriatexnespolitismos.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%AC-%CE%BA%CE %B1%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%AD%CF%83%CE%B7-%CE%B7-%CE%B9%CE%B4%CF %81%CF%8D%CF%84%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%B1-%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%85-%CE%BA%CE%AD%CE%B4%CF %81%CE%BF%CF%85/ (accessed: 31/05/2016)
propagandistic purposes (Van Dyck, 48,61), essentially illustrates Van Dyck’s argument that, for the Junta and the writers, writing and language in general were fruitful fields for political discourse, propagandist and anti-authoritarian (41-42). Deleuze and Guattari also agree on this view, regarding the minor literature as a political response to the oppressive regime.
1.2. Forms of resistance
The massive persecutions and assassinations of people with anti-authoritarian feelings as well as the control of the Press triggered many protests and other forms of resistance, such as the illegal circulation of brochures, newspapers and posters with anti-dictatorial messages. The illegal journals were distributed throughout Greece and abroad, mainly in Europe and the United States. Central figures of the resistance were Alexandros Panagoulis, who
unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Colonel Papadopoulos in 1968, union labors, as well as left-wing student organizations, such as Rigas Ferreos.7
Alongside with the activities in the illegal Press as a mode of resistance to the
oppression and the preventive censorship which lasted until 1969, the striking majority of the well-established Greek writers decided to silence and abstained from publishing in Greece. Publishing in Greece would presuppose the writers’ conformation to the Junta’s rules of preventive censorship. Therefore, silence was regarded as the preferable political attitude. The writers either published abroad or boycotted the regime with their overall silence. One of the writers who published abroad is the Nobelist poet George Seferis; he published the poem “The Cats of Saint Nicholas” in English a few months after his famous declaration on BBC against the Junta in 19698.
The eighteen writers’ conscious silence was broken after three years, particularly in July 1970, with the publication of a collective volume named Eighteen Texts (the original
7 For further details about the student resistance and cultural politics during Junta, see Kornetis, 2013. 8 For Seferis’s attitude within the Junta, see Dandoulakis, 1989.
title is ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ ΚΕΙΜΕΝΑ ), which was published in Athens by the publishing house, Kedros. This remarkable shift from silence to the publishing activity is attributed to the repeal of preventive censorship in 1969. The preventive censorship was replaced by a regime of self-censorship, in which editors, writers and publishers had to censor their works on their own. Kostas Tachtsis, a Greek writer who experienced the Junta, interpreted the dictators’ shift in attitude as Papadopoulos’s attempt to persuade the international Press that the Regime of the Colonels had a democratic foundation (258). The new law offered the writers some limited opportunities to express themselves in public, as long as the title of their volume accurately reflected its content. Van Dyck interprets the dictators’ particular decree as a part of Papadopoulos’s overall fear toward any linguistic ambiguity which could allow the writers to write something and mean something different, perhaps subversive (49).
The eighteen authors ostensibly complied with this law by titling their collective volume Eighteen Texts, a title that precisely reflects the contents of the book. Nevertheless, in fact, the writers did what Papadopoulos was afraid of: they published a volume with an anti-dictatorial message, which they carefully made obvious with every possible means, starting with the cover and the title of the book, as I will argue in the second chapter.
1.3. Eighteen Texts as a manifestation of minor literature
“Minor literature” is a concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their work, Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature. Minor literature is marked by three
characteristics, which Deleuze and Guattari detect in Franz Kafka’s literary work. Kafka was born in 1883 and came from a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, which was a periphery of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother tongue was the German of Prague, which was slightly different from the standard German language. He also acquired Yiddish through study. Kafka’s stories are written in standard German, which is the official
language of the Empire and the bureaucracy, to which Deleuze and Guattari refer as “a “paper language” or an artificial language” (16). The first characteristic of minor literature is that “language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16).
Kafka was multi-lingual, he belonged to the ethnic minority of the Jews Czech and wrote in the dominant language but in an unconventional way, deviating from the normative rules. Although he outwardly adheres to the rules of the high standard German, Maria Kager argues that “underneath the surface [of his language], Kafka opens up a language to foreign elements”, introducing Yiddish and Czech words (42). Instead of the term
“deterritorialization”, Kager prefers the word “destabilization”, with which she characterizes Kafka’s estranged relation to the German language (45). Kafka’s linguistic destabilization has national and cultural roots, as Deleuze and Guattari also suggest, and it is interpreted as a way for Kafka to “reappropriate” the German language and open it up to otherness (Kager, 45).
In a broader scale, the deterritorialized language is widely used by bi-lingual or multi-lingual writers who have been colonized or have migrated to another country. Concerning post-colonial writers who write in the colonial language, this language is often “othered into a hybrid linguistic form” and the “deliberate violation of the linguistic and aesthetic norms of the receptor colonial language” shall be understood as “the ideological representation of the colonized source language culture” (Bandia, 131-136, original emphasis).
However, the case of the eighteen writers is different in that they do not constitute an ethnic or religious minority, but instead they are an intellectual minority that dared to
publicly oppose the Junta after three years of conscious silence, despite self-censorship. The language of the authorities was Katharevousa while Eighteen Texts is written in Demotic, but both Katharevousa and Demotic are versions of the Greek language. Therefore, unlike Kafka and ethnic minorities who oscillate between two (or more) different national languages and cultures− the dominant and their local− the deterritorialization of the language in Eighteen
Texts occurs inside the Greek language due to the fact that both the dictators and the oppressed are members of the same nation. Nevertheless, beyond these differences both Kafka and the eighteen writers write in a linguistic version which is different from that of the authorities, and their strategic linguistic differentiation aligns with their political
differentiation from the major ideology.
The second characteristic of minor literatures is that “everything in them is political” and individual concerns are organically connected with the social milieu (Minor Literature, 17). This characteristic is prominent in Eighteen Texts, as I will demonstrate in the third chapter of my thesis. Essentially, behind every personal and common experience, such as a conversation between a taxicab driver and his passenger, which is depicted by Kay Cicelli in “Brief Dialogue”, the reader can discern a political anti-regime message. Even in cases when some authors, such as T.D. Frangopoulos in “El Procurador”, set their stories in Spain or Latin American “republics” and use fictional names of place and characters, the shift in locale offers a great alibi to the writers to attack the political situation in Greece without naming it outright.
The connection between the individual concerns and the political immediacy is additionally illuminated by Deleuze and Guattari in “Micropolitics and Segmentarity”. Particularly, they introduce the distinct and simultaneously inseparable concepts of “macro-politics” and “micro-“macro-politics” (213). Deleuze and Guattari’s main idea is that fascism applies not only to the macro-political level, which is the central State apparatus, but also to a
“molecular regime”: common people’ language, habits, intimate relationships, attitudes and expectations (“Micropolitics”, 214-215). The Regime of the Colonels shares similar ideology and practices with the fascist states, so Deleuze and Guattari’s argumentation about “macro-fascism” and “micro-“macro-fascism” is appropriate for the examination of polyphony in Eighteen Texts. At the moment, it is worth stressing that the connection between individual and
political concerns, which minor literature underscores, is verified through Deleuze and Guattari’s statement that “in short, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneous a macropolitics and a micropolitics” (“Micropolitics”, 213, original emphasis).
The last characteristic of minor literature clashes with the Romantic idea that the writer is an individual talented genius. Instead, in minor literature, “everything takes on a collective value”, according to Deleuze and Guattari (Minor Literature, 17). They explain that “what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren’t in agreement. The political domain has contaminated every statement (énoncé)” (17, original emphasis). Therefore, writing minor literature is first and foremost a political practice. This view is embraced by many eighteen writers, with Nora Anagnostaki stating in “A Testimony” that “for those whose gestures are too ‘poetic’, there are always laws and authorities to bind or cut off their hands” (65). Furthermore, writing minor literature is a political action taken by writers who cooperate with each other in order to serve a collective purpose, despite their stylistic and ideological differences. In Eighteen Texts, the collective spirit is felt in terms of both the content and the form of the volume; the book consists of eighteen texts with an
anti-dictatorial message, and the eighteen writers published their texts together, in one collective volume, so as to make the anti-dictatorial message greatly urgent.
To sum up, I believe that Eighteen Texts is a special manifestation of minor
literature− I use the adjective “special” to refer to the different kind of deterritorialization of the Demotic language in Eighteen Texts. Moreover, neither Kafka nor the group of the eighteen, divergent writers are politically engaged in a strict sense, but all of them deal with the political concerns of their time and they indirectly oppose the oppressive regime which they experience. I would suggest that the deterritorialized language is one of the strategies which the eighteen writers use in order to indirectly express their polemical intentions
towards the Junta. In the second chapter I will examine the political implications of the Demotic language and the eighteen writers’ strategic treatment of Eighteen Texts’ paratexts.
2. Homophony in
Eighteen Texts
Having delineated the social context of Eighteen Texts and the writers’ great difficulty in publishing a volume with anti-dictatorial purpose due to censorship, I believe that it is now the right time to examine the ways in which the eighteen writers conveyed the shared anti-dictatorial message, making it visible and at the same time invisible for the authorities. The texts themselves undoubtedly constitute the main source of attack against the Junta.
Nonetheless, it is my thesis that the writers alluded to their anti-dictatorial attitude in the cover and the title of the book, the epigraph and the preface. As a result, someone who observed Eighteen Texts from the window of a bookstore and thumbed the first pages of the book could immediately get an idea of the writers’ anti-dictatorial attitude.
2.1. The concept of “paratext” and its political significance in Eighteen
Texts.
The peripheral productions which surround a text are called “paratexts” by the literary critic Gérard Genette. Paratexts are divided into peritexts and epitexts. The former are found inside a book and some of such examples are the cover, the title, epigraphs, dedications and notes. Examples of the latter, which are found outside the book, constitute the author’s diary and an interview of him/her. In his book Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation, Genette categorizes the various paratexts and examines their functionality diachronically, both in classical texts and in contemporary literature. He argues that paratexts do not only have an aesthetic role, but they also “ensure the text’s presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption in the form of the book”, contributing to readers’ deeper understanding of the main text (1).
Moreover, paratexts are characterized as “liminal devices and conventions” (Genette, 2), because no one can certainly say whether, for instance, the dedication is an organic part of
the text or an interview of the author is actually an extension of the text and so on. In fact, due to their liminality, they are often disregarded by many readers who head straight for the main text. Nevertheless, paratexts contribute to a well-rounded reception of the text,
according to Genette’s view, constituting thresholds of interpretation, as the title of his book suggests. The liminal, ambiguous position of paratexts, which build “a zone between the text and off-text” (Genette, 2) actually renders them “a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public (…) that is at the service of a better reception for the text” (2).
The aspect of paratexts as liminal devices, which are frequently ignored but actually guide the reading of the text, and which can be strategically used by writers, is crucial for the political examination of homophony in Eighteen Texts because in my opinion homophony can be heard in the paratexts of Eighteen Texts. Genette supports that paratext is per se conceived as a privileged place for writers to deposit ideas, even for those who have the political liberty to directly express themselves in the text itself, without the fear of censorship. Taking the above into consideration, it is my contention that this privileged place must be exploited in the greatest extent by the authors who live and publish in a repressive regime and censorship is imposed on them. The privileged nature of a paratext mainly lies in its visibility and simultaneously in its invisibility−in a sense that it often eludes the readers’ attention− and in the authors’ potential to strategically veil their message behind these liminal devices, which often resist interpretation.
The participatory role of the reader, who is called to grasp the multiple connections between the text and its paratexts, has been underscored by John Margenot III. Examining the various functions of a contemporary Spanish novel’s paratexts, Margenot III suggests that the liminality or/and marginality of the paratexts is fruitful for the production of multiple
inviting them to provide their own marginalia” (95). I aim to show that Eighteen Texts’ paratexts are rich in political messages and they condition the readers to read the texts through an anti-dictatorial lens. I will focus on the political messages conveyed only by the cover, the title, the epigraph and the preface of Eighteen Texts. These peritexts are found prior to the eighteen texts and, in my opinion, they reflect all the eighteen writers’ anti-regime attitude. I assume that the peritexts have been carefully decided and placed by consensus, therefore the political messages which these peritexts convey reflect all the eighteen writers’ intentions. That is why I contend that homophony is heard in Eighteen Texts’ paratexts and, specifically, in these peritextual productions.
2.2. A critical view of Genette’s theory
Genette refers to the overall strategic position of the paratexts, yet he does not touch upon their potential political use. This one-sided approach is linked with his tendency to regard a literary work as an autonomous entity, cutting off its social context and its political background. Genette’s standpoint derives from the Structuralist literary tradition, which “generally examines the literary text closely, dealing with its internal make-up, and without emphasizing external context like the historical, literary or biographical surroundings”, as Harold Mosher points out (284). Therefore, it is a challenge for me to expand Genette’s theoretical model beyond its Structuralist roots and appropriate it for my political analysis of Eighteen Texts. I intend to demonstrate that Eighteen Texts’ paratexts have their own
dynamic and political meaning, which certainly bears on the eighteen texts’ discourse.
Genette’s work is ambitious because not only does he detect the various paratexts which have ever appeared in literature, but he additionally attempts to diachronically examine their development and their functionality. He gives special emphasis to the classical texts written in Ancient Greece and Rome, the Modern French literature and the overall Western
European literature. There are just a few references to the cultures that belong to the “periphery of the literary system”, to use Franco Moretti’s expression (58), for instance to Jorges Luis Borges’s work. However, Genette’s main focus remains on the canonical
literature. To become more concrete, talking about the functions of the original notes, Genette says: “I have studied this type of note over a small, arbitrary corpus, fairly classic and
basically French, extending from La Bruyère to Roland Barthes” (325, my emphasis). In addition, he mentions that “some elements (for example, the practices of non-European cultures) simply eluded me because I didn’t pay much attention to them or have enough information about them” (404).
His Eurocentric view actually contradicts his publisher’s words that “Genette presents a global view of these liminal meditations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function” (back-cover of Paratexts, my emphasis). Moreover, scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Susan Bassnett are likely to argue that Genette’s Eurocentric approach to literature is not a single phenomenon but a
manifestation of the overall Eurocentric orientation of comparative literature, which, according to the former, has died as a discipline (Death of a Discipline, 2003). Genette’s limited scope highly affects the examination of Eighteen Texts, firstly because this book cannot be interpreted out of its social milieu, and secondly because Modern Greek literature belongs to the semi-periphery, thus it is ignored by Genette.
Nevertheless, the two-fold criticism, concerning first and foremost Genette’s ignorance of the potential political significance of the paratexts and secondly his exclusive interest in the Western literary canon, does not mean to underestimate his miscellaneous study. In my opinion, its value lies in Genette’s systematic description of the function of these peripheral literary productions which can generate multiple interpretations. For this
reason, Genette’s theory is a useful entry for the political examination of Eighteen Texts’ paratexts.
2.3. The cover of Eighteen Texts
Genette supports that the design of a book cover is usually decided on by the
publisher. However, regarding Eighteen Texts, there is not a clear-cut distinction between the publishers and the writers, owing to the fact that seven writers took the responsibility for the publication of the book. The cover of a book is the first thing that the reader and a pedestrian who stops to browse the window of a bookstore observe. For this reason, the publisher and the writers of Eighteen Texts made sure that its cover does not have any symbols and
illustrations that could raise the dictators’ suspicions and impede the publication of the book. Even the choice of the colors played an important role in the publication of books during the Junta. Van Dyck particularly refers to an extreme case in which a poet was persecuted with the accusation of being Communist because he wrote in a poem that the lips of his lover are red (44).
The cover of Eighteen Texts was chosen to be white, which is the color of innocence and neutrality. I presume that the white color was consciously selected in order to create the false impression that Eighteen Texts is a “tabula rasa”, in which everyone can inscribe their own interpretation. The effect of the supposed politically neutral white color of the cover of Eighteen Texts can be felt if we imagine the political connotations of a red cover book, which would be certainly observed by the censors, as Van Dyck’s above-mentioned example suggests. Therefore, I believe that the publisher, perhaps along with the eighteen writers, strategically decided on the white color of the cover of Eighteen Texts so that the book can seem apolitical. This decision would be meaningless if it was taken in a democratic regime. Nevertheless, within a totalitarian regime which strangles the free speech, readers and
pedestrians’ first impression was crucial for their expectations as far as the theme, the style and the political orientation of Eighteen Texts are concerned.
In the cover of the book there is the title, ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ ΚΕΙΜΕΝΑ, the name of the publishing house, Kedros, the publication date, 1970, and a list with the eighteen authors’ names arranged in an alphabetical order. There is only one exception which is explained in the preface of the book: the name of George Seferis stands first and foremost. Fifteen men and three women, all of whom aged minimum thirty, cooperated in Eighteen Texts and some of them signed the book with a pseudonym. A salient example is the Nobelist poet and diplomat George Seferiadis, who adopted the pen name George Seferis from the very beginning of his poetic career and he always appeared with this pseudonym. Therefore, the function of his pen name was not to conceal his real identity but, instead, to make him recognizable in the public.
In fact, the main significance of Eighteen Texts is that the eighteen writers exposed themselves using the name with which they were widely known to the literary circles, the public and thus the dictators. While anonymity functions as a great alibi for a writer to conceal his/her real identity within an oppressive regime, the eighteen writers intended to be seen and be heard by the public so as to influence it, and this could only happen by revealing their identity. In my opinion, Seferis’s name was deliberately put in the top of the name list because, given that he had gained a global reputation as a Nobelist poet and diplomat, his popularity contributed to the wide circulation of Eighteen Texts. Taking the above into account, it can be claimed that even the arrangement of the authors’ names plays an important role as a paratext in Eighteen Texts.
Moreover, Genette delves into the relation between the author and the reader, stating that “the author’s name fulfills a contractual function, whose importance varies greatly
depending on the genre: slight or nonexistent in fiction, it is much greater in all kinds of referential writing, where the credibility of the testimony, or of its transmission, rests largely on the identity of the witness or the person reporting” (41). The expression “contractual function” is considered very accurate, since the author metaphorically signs a contract with the reader about the former’s reliability and intentions. At the same time, the author predicts the intentions and the background of his/her audience’s experience. Robert Tierney and Jill LaZansky also discuss the “implicit allowability contract between author and reader”, claiming that “written language is not primarily a means of expressing one’s own thoughts, but rather a means of directing others to construct similar thoughts from their own prior knowledge” (606-607).
However, what is missing from Genette’s above-mentioned statement is the concern of the fulfillment of the “contractual function” when it is realized in an anti-democratic regime. In this case, this contract obtains a social value. Likewise in the passage about the privileged place of a paratext, Genette once again disregards the social environment into which a literary work is produced, taking only into account its literary genre. However, this one-sided, aesthetic approach to literature cannot explain the significance of the eighteen authors’ conscious choice to publish the anti-dictatorial book, using the names with which they were well- known even to the dictators. By dissociating literature from its political and social context, Genette silences the risks that this contractual function entails, especially for the authors who live and publish in a repressive regime. As far as I am concerned, this constitutes a grave omission because the awareness of the dangers to which these authors were subjected (censorship, persecution, exile etc) is crucial for our interpretation of Eighteen Texts and for our reading behind the lines.
Just like the interpretation of the white color of Eighteen Texts’ cover, the socio-political significance of the contract between the eighteen authors and the readers cannot be
grasped out of the social environment of Eighteen Texts. The restrictions of self-censorship determined the eighteen writers’ subversive linguistic and aesthetic choices and it was the Junta that generated Eighteen Texts as a minor literature which reacted against the major fascistic ideology. For these reasons, I strongly believe that Eighteen Texts can be only interpreted as a social literary phenomenon and not as a close literary system, cutting off its social and political background, as Formalism and Structuralism propose.
2.4. The title
The original title of the book is ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ ΚΕΙΜΕΝΑ, which means eighteen texts. However, in Willis Barnstone’s edition a huge “18” is placed in the book cover instead of the expected “EIGHTEEN TEXTS”. The original title seems to conform to the Junta’s rule that every headline or title had to mirror the contents of the volume; therefore, there is no political implication in the title, at first glance. Nevertheless, an observant person who has developed the Greek language in an advanced level can discern a subtle detail in the original title, which, in my opinion, has a great importance in the interpretation of the eighteen writers’ anti-dictatorial attitude and the reception of the whole book.
This detail literally lies in one letter, the ‘X’ of ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ. I claim that the word “ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ” was not a random choice, but it was strategically selected by the writers among the word “ΔΕΚΑΟΚΤΩ” and the numeral “18”, which was adopted in the English edition. ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ /dekaochto/ and ΔΕΚΑΟΚΤΩ /dekaokto/ are in fact two
phonologically slightly different versions of the numeral “18” and they both mean eighteen. What is of paramount importance is that “ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ” is a linguistic type of the spoken Greek language, Demotic, whereas “ΔΕΚΑΟΚΤΩ” is a type of the purified Greek language, Katharevousa. Only one letter differs but behind this slight divergence a persistent problem is hidden, which has been solved but still haunts the Greek political scene. I refer to the
language problem of Greece. It is my thesis that the writers’ conscious use of Demotic in the title of Eighteen Texts and in the texts themselves demonstrates their political differentiation from the dictators’ ideology.
The roots of the Greek language problem are found in the Hellenistic period, during the transition from Attic to the Hellenistic Koine. “Koine” is the Common Greek language from which all the contemporary variations of Modern Greek have derived, as the classic scholar Sven-Tage Teodorsson explains in “The Phonology of Attic in the Hellenistic Period”. This linguistic transition brought about phonetic changes and orthographic
variations, an example of which is the pair ΔΕΚΑΟΚΤΩ- ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ. The former is a type of Attic which evolved into Katharevousa, whereas the latter is a type of Koine, the ancestor of Demotic. The Greek language problem became acute since the independence of the Greek state in 1830, when an official, standard language had to be established for use in education, the Press and the bureaucracy. Prior to 1830, the geographical division of the Greek territory had promoted linguistic divisions, some of which were on the way to becoming separate languages (Loader, 118). However, a long dialogue was triggered later on about the characteristics of the linguistic instrument that could vividly express the national feeling.
The Greek language problem lies in the written different versions or styles of the Greek language, which were proposed by politicians and intellectuals in every historical period. Demotic (popular) and Katharevousa (purified) are the two versions that alternatively prevailed from 1830 until 1976, when Demotic was issued as the official language of Greece. Particularly, Demotic is based on the spoken language of the Greeks whereas Katharevousa constitutes an artificial language which partly resembles the Attic language. Katharevousa owes its name to its purification from Demotic’s foreign elements and the vulgar vocabulary that disrupts the natural evolution from the Ancient Greek language, according to
Katharevousa’s proponents. In this line of thought, the establishment of Katharevousa was considered as a fundamental step for the revival of the glorious past.
The struggle for linguistic supremacy between the two rival idioms is discussed by the Marxist critic Alexandros Arghyriou in the last text of Eighteen Texts, an essay named “The Style of a Language and the Language of a Style”. Arghyriou examines the Greek language question from its outbreak till 1970. He convincingly shows that the prevalence of either Demotic or Katharevousa in a particular historical period is organically connected with the major ideological discourse of that period. To support his opinion, Arghyriou employs many examples from the political history of Modern Greece, for instance the domination of an archaizing language when Bavarian monarchists ruled Greece (1832-1862). Moreover, he stresses the expressional inadequacy of Katharevousa which is a hybrid language and cannot express the subtlest nuances of the national feeling. This artificial language is additionally associated with “the distortion of people’ thinking” (Arghyriou, 176).
Having being promoted as the linguistic instrument that would boost the Greeks’ national pride and revive the city of Athens of the 5th B.C. in the 19th and 20th century (Loader, 118-119), Katharevousa concealed the real problems of the contemporary Greek society and “falsified our whole sense of language” (Arghyriou, 181). Summarizing this long rapport between language and ideology, he states that “the fact that Greek conservatism becomes the repository of Katharevousa, holding stubbornly to the ideological clichés of the past and identifying these with nationalism itself (a phenomenon without parallel among any European people), shows how the structure of a language can affect thinking itself” (179). By building a bridge between the monarchy of the 19th century and the Junta of 1970, Arghyriou attacks the dictators who decreed Katharevousa as the official language of the state, the Press and the education. In Deleuzian and Guattarian terms, Katharevousa was for the oppressed
eighteen authors what the standard German was for Kafka: a language “cut off from the masses, like a “paper language” or an artificial language” (Minor Literature, 16).
From this point of view, Katharevousa is identical to the Junta. As a result, the eighteen writers’ denial to write Eighteen Texts in Katharevousa metonymically functions as a disdain towards the overall Regime of the Colonels. To put it in another way, the
acceptance and use of Demotic reflects the writers’ struggle for a progressive, democratic regime. In response to the “triumphant pompousness and tremendous pretense of gravity” which characterize the language style of the dictators (181) , most of whom think they properly know Katharevousa but they “ultimately use it in distorted forms” as Arghyriou ironically says (180), Demotic promotes the direct, accurate expression and critical thinking.
Both for Kafka and for the eighteen writers, the linguistic differentiation in literature is not a simple formalistic issue but it indicates their denunciation against the political discourse of the authorities. Language reflects, serves and embodies ideologies and Katharevousa embodied the Junta’s ideology. As Arghyriou states, “language is neither a form nor a means, but a vital essence, consubstantial with the spirit it expresses” (181-182). I believe that the word “ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ” itself prepares the observant reader for the authors’ anti-dictatorial attitude, which is more clearly expressed in the texts themselves. It is my contention that the eighteen writers’ choice to reject Katharevousa and publish Eighteen Texts in Demotic shall be regarded as their conscious political choice to ignore the Junta’s ideological discourse and indicate their collective struggle for the democratic beliefs.
Another argument that reinforces this opinion is Giannis Ritsos’s choice to include the word “ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ” instead of “ΔΕΚΑΟΚΤΩ” in the title of his poetic collection,
Δεκαοχτώ Λιανοτράγουδα Της Πικρής Πατρίδας [Eighteen Short Songs of the Bitter Motherland]. This collection was published in 1973 and Ritsos started writing the poems while he was exiled due to his Communist action. The rapport between Katharevousa and
Greek conservatism remains strong in the contemporary political landscape, although Katharevousa has been abolished. For example, Konstantinos Zouraris, who is a member of the Parliamentary conservative right-wing party “Independent Greeks”, often uses linguistic types of Katharevousa which are hard to be understood, and this tendency is inseparable from his nationalist ideas. To conclude, language and ideology mutually illuminate each other and this knowledge was strategically used by the eighteen writers in order to distance themselves from the Junta’s practices. By placing the word “ΔΕΚΑΟΧΤΩ” in the title of the book and by writing the texts in Demotic, they constructed an anti-dictatorial discourse, which is enriched in the texts themselves but also in the epigraph and the preface of Eighteen Texts.
2.5. The epigraph
The epigraph of a literary work either elucidates the title of the book or illuminates and comments on the text, and it obviously pays homage to the epigraphed (Paratexts, 156-157). In Eighteen Texts, the epigraph, which I assume was chosen by consensus like the title, is a quotation from Dionysios Solomos’s poem, “The Free Besieged”. The epigraph is: “But Goddess, I cannot hear your voice”.
“The Free Besieged” is an unfinished poem which consists of three written versions, called drafts. The drafts share some common episodes, characters and motifs, yet they preserve their own autonomy. Narrative, dramatic and lyric elements are harmonically blended and turned into “The Free Besieged”, which is regarded as one of the most difficult poems of Solomos, in terms of reading (Mackridge, 86). The epigraph-verse was taken from the tenth line of the first section of the third draft (C1.10 according to Peter Mackridge’s reference, based on the standard edition of Solomos’s poems by Linos Politis). Solomos started writing the poem in 1829 and abandoned it twenty years later. The actual events that inspired the poet are the second siege and capture of Mesolongi by the Turks in 1825-1826. The title of the poem refers to the inhabitants of Mesolongi, who heroically resisted the Turks
and they preferred to die during the siege than to abandon themselves to the enemies and Islam. Therefore, the oxymoron title of the poem owes to the fact that the fighters of Mesolongi were physically besieged but spiritually free.
The Goddess of Eighteen Texts’ epigraph-verse is the Homeland, the personification of Greece, which constitutes a central figure in Solomos’s poetry. In the original text, the lyrical “I” addresses “the Great Mother” for drawing his inspiration (C1.1), continuing Homer and other epic poets’ ritual “to call upon their Muse to inspire them to sing the great song”, as Mackridge points out (98). However, the communication between the lyrical “I” and the Goddess is unsuccessful as the speaking subject cannot hear the Goddess’s stride nor can he see her (C1.7). The weak communication reaches its peak in the epigraph-verse, when the speaking subject realizes his inability to hear the Goddess’s voice. The awareness is turned into impasse: if I cannot hear your voice, Goddess, how will I be able to transmute it into poetic words and gift it to the Greeks? (my loose translation, C1.11). The dramatic diction shifts into a narrative one and the readers are informed by a parenthetical sentence that “the Goddess replies to the poet and commands him to sing the siege of Mesolongi” (C1.13). The lyrical “I” obeys her command and the whole poem shall be eventually regarded as a hymn for the brave fighters of Mesolongi.
Almost a hundred and twenty years later, the eighteen authors appropriated the verse “But Goddess, I cannot hear your voice” as the epigraph of the anti-dictatorial volume, placing it, however, in a different context. The greatest difference is that they silenced the Goddess’s final positive response to the poet, which appears in the original text, and instead they underlined the lack of communication as a persistent, irreversible situation. This lack of communication would deprive the lyrical ‘I’ of his voice unless the Goddess responded. Moreover, the epigraph implies that the subjects, the eighteen authors, are forced to silence
because they do not have another choice: they attempt to communicate with the Goddess but in vain; there is no response.
Just as the Goddess encourages the lyrical “I” to depict the reality in “The Free Besieged”, an urgent need to publicly denounce the Junta is mutely expressed by the eighteen authors in the epigraph. Nevertheless, this need cannot be satisfied due to the Goddess’s silence. If Solomos had to address only a metaphysical power in order to transmute the reality into poetry, the eighteen authors must first address the authorities that strangle the free speech. As far as I am concerned, the weak communication described in the epigraph suggests the eighteen writers’ limited opportunity to raise their voice due to self censorship. Furthermore, I think that it implies the eighteen writers’ impasse and doubts regarding the power and usefulness of literature in a repressive regime. Solomos was persuaded that transmuting the thoughts and deeds of the freedom-fighters into poetry is a vocation; the Goddess dictated him to do so. However, contrary to him, the eighteen authors cannot
directly exert their vocation due to self-censorship and their personal doubts on the usefulness of their vocation. There is nothing that implies a heroic or genius writer in Eighteen Texts, whereas Solomos, who was influenced by Neoclassicism and Romanticism, is inspired by the Idea of Greece and Religion and believes in poet’s metaphysical powers.
Genette states that sometimes “the choices of author are more significant than the texts of the epigraphs themselves” (147). The name of Dionysios Solomos has actually a great symbolic burden. First and foremost, Solomos is the national poet of Greece and some stanzas of his “Hymn to Liberty” enshrine in the Greek national anthem. Furthermore, he is one of the first Modern Greek poets who exclusively wrote in Demotic although it was widely condemned as vulgar, and he associated the Demotic language with the ideals of freedom and cultural emancipation in his prose writing, “The Dialogue”. Therefore, the
incorporation of Solomos’s verse in Eighteen Texts gives an extra prestige to the book and strengthens the authors’ fair struggle for cultural emancipation.
Solomos’s presence at the edge of the main texts offers an indirect backing to the eighteen writers because their collective concerns− the problem of the weak communication, the advocacy of Demotic− are attributed to the influential national poet. In this way, these collective concerns gain a universal importance beyond the present historical moment. In my opinion, with the incorporation of Solomos’ verse the eighteen writers attempt to draw a line between themselves and him− his discourse and his views. We can imagine the existence of a network between Solomos and the eighteen writers, in spite of their stylistic, aesthetic and ideological different views. All of them have deal with the collective concerns of their time.
The idea of a network that has socially and ideologically divergent members who collective oppose the major political discourse is prominent in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’ s Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. They call this network
“Multitude”. The concept of “Multitude” aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that in minor literature the writer’s individuated enunciation cannot be separated from a collective enunciation (Minor Literature, 17). I think that the eighteen writers temporally formed an intellectual “Multitude” under the very specific conditions of the Greek dictatorship to collectively struggle for their democratic beliefs.
The divergent Multitude, in the middle of which the eighteen writers stand, becomes broader involving many intellectuals from different historical eras, such as Solomos. I have already mentioned the strategic placement of Solomos’s verse as the epigraph of Eighteen Texts; Solomos’ words are also quoted by Nora Anagnostaki and Alexandros Arghyriou. Moreover, D.N. Maronitis’ writes an essay on the salient poet C.P. Cavafy’s historical consciousness and Manolis Anagnostakis refers to poet and friend, Titos Patrikios ( “as my friend Tito rightly said once”, “ Epilogue (Fragment)”, 4). To my mind, besides their
different aesthetic and political choices, these disparate writers form a network, a
“multitude”, because all of them react to “the deep wounds of our collective life” (Maronitis, 119).
Therefore, although only the eighteen authors’ voices seem to be heard in Eighteen Texts, in reality there are much more voices that intersect with each other. The discourses of Solomos and Cavafy are respectfully treated. In the third chapter of my thesis, I will examine polyphony as a mode of resistance to the Junta, focusing on the eighteen writers’ polemical treatment of the dictators’ discourse and world-view through irony and parody.
2.6. The preface
Homophony is clearly heard in Eighteen Texts’ preface, which is extended in half of page and openly explains the eighteen writers’ motivations and intentions. This preface can be viewed as a Manifesto in my opinion, on the grounds that the pronoun “we” is used instead of “I” and the writers express their common belief in fundamental principles which are threatened during the Junta.
The eighteen writers’ denunciation against the repressive Junta is clearly stated in the following lines: “The repeal of prepublication censorship is not enough to bring about the intellectual emancipation of a land when major vital areas are still surrounded by complex pressures that do not allow them to develop fully” (vii). The repercussions of censorship touch not only the intellectuals but “each man” (vii). Consequently, the struggle for the freedom of expression, which is “tied inextricably to a respect for the dignity and opinions” of each man, becomes the duty of every singular oppressed citizen (vii). The distinction between mass and elite, ordinary people and intellectuals, has been erased, and what is stressed is the same difficult situation which affects all the Greeks without any exception.
The anti-dictatorial discourse becomes broader with the involvement of “each man” but also with the writings of eighteen authors who have different aesthetic and ideological
convictions. Homophony and the pronoun “we” include disparate writers, each of whom writes “in his own way” (vii). There is not a hierarchical order inside this divergent group of writers, and this is indicated in the cover of Eighteen Texts. Particularly, the eighteen writers’ names are arranged in an alphabetical order except for the name of the Nobelist poet George Seferis, which is placed first for honor as if he was the symbolic leader of the resistance.
As far as I am concerned, the existence of differences among the eighteen writers renders their anti-dictatorial discourse stronger because it lies beyond any aesthetic and ideological divergence. I assume that it is the divergent composition of the eighteen writers’ group that appeals to the wide readership of Eighteen Texts; it would be actually interesting to examine the social status and the educational level of the people who read Eighteen Texts during the Junta. Furthermore, I believe that the eighteen writers guide the anti-dictatorial reading of Eighteen Texts by presenting in the preface the objective as well as and the specific circumstances under which the work was written. While Roland Barthes argues for the death of the author “for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (142), the eighteen writers inscribe a specific interpretation of Eighteen Texts. The contract between the eighteen writers and the readers illustrates Genette’s
following view: it is “impossible after that [reading the preface] to read the story without having the authorial interpretation hang over your reading, compelling you to take a position, positive or negative, in relation to it”. (224)
To sum up, the preface of Eighteen Texts is a transitional zone between the texts and beyond them, reminding the readers of a Manifesto which argues for a broad cause: the eighteen writers’ collective struggle for the democratic values. The liminal position of paratexts inside and at the same time outside the text was politically productive for the eighteen writers. They created multiple meanings, which were addressed to both the
