Nostalgoi kai plastourgoi: Entypa, keimena, kai kinēmata ste metapolemikē Ellada (review)

Can there be an avant-garde in Greece? If so, what form does it take? Elizabeth Arseniou, a lecturer at the University of Thrace, answers in the affirmative and devotes 448 pages of dense prose to prove her case. Specifically, Arseniou examines what she calls the second period of the Greek literary avant-garde, which flourished in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. While she makes extensive references to the modernism of the 1930s, the very influential literary movement of the interwar period, she focuses on the second manifestation of vanguard writing in Greece, which she finds more radical both aesthetically and politically. To be sure, the writings of the Generation of the 30s, with few exceptions, did not exhibit any of the extreme gestures and impulses of the European historical avant-garde that exploded in the first two decades with such movements as Dada. The second avant-garde, on the other hand, attempted to push experimentation to its limits. This is what makes it so interesting for Arseniou. She only makes tantalizingly brief allusions to what she considers the third period of the avant-garde in the 1990s.

Arseniou knows her subject inside and out. She has read a lot, both in the primary material as well as in secondary sources and this extensive research shows throughout the book. Every reader will gain something from her efforts. The book will probably become a standard for writing on the Greek avant-garde.

A particular strength of the book is her comparative angle. Arseniou links developments in Greece to those in Europe and North America, making parallels between outside and inside that are illuminating. Readers are thus able to see how Greek authors differ from writers abroad and how they departed from them, responding to their own traditions and realities. Her study offers a detailed examination of how the avant-garde took root and grew in Greece. Like all cultural phenomena it developed in a negotiation between external forces and indigenous needs and exigencies.

The organization of the book is peculiar. This is not a traditional book with a thesis, rather the author's approach is more exploratory and descriptive, as she often goes in and out of her field, digging deep and climbing on a hill for a clearer look. Readers gain knowledge about the writing of the avant-garde rather than a particular argument about or theory of the avant-garde.

The first chapter provides a historical and cultural introduction to the 1950s and 1960s. This material is too general to be helpful, especially to a Greek audience, which presumably would be familiar with the subject matter.

In Chapter Two Arseniou investigates some of the social sites where the avant-garde developed, namely the small, left-leaning literary journals such as Επιθεώρηση Τέχνης, Εποχές, and Πάλι. One does not often get in one book detailed readings of poems and novels as well as an examination of the niches where these texts were originally produced. This chapter is very useful but here again, rather than presenting an argument, Arseniou examines each journal individually, looking into its aesthetic orientation, literature it supported, and authors it published. The penultimate chapter also adopts this approach, this time focusing on journals of the 1970's like Κούρος, Τράμ, and Σήμα. While these two chapters are enlightening and very useful, they function almost like encyclopedic entries rather than parts of on argument.

The rest of the book offers a rich exploration of the struggles to establish the avant-garde, the reactions to the literary radicalism both from the right and the left, the successes and the failures. Indeed, rather than presenting a picture of an ineluctable victory of the avant-garde over inherited aesthetic criteria and practices of reading, she demonstrates the conflicts that were involved in this process.

Arseniou ends her study with a few pages that are full of insights on the various stages of vanguard writing in Greece. She argues that the first phase was characterized by a fight between bourgeois and popular discourses, the second by the need to establish the autonomy of literature, and the third by a...