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  • Το παλίμψηστο της ελληνικής αφήγησης: Από την αφηγηματολογία στη διαλογικότητα by Dimitris Tziovas
  • Stathis Gourgouris
Dimitris Tziovas. Δημήτρης Τζιόβαζ, Το παλίμψηστο της ελληνικής αφήγησης: Από την αφηγηματολογία στη διαλογικότητα Athens: Odysseas. 1993. Pp. 285.

Dimitris Tziovas is an author who always treats his work with exhaustive attention, being particularly attuned to a subject's overarching framework as well as to the details of a subject's multiple points of origin. Thus, to those of us who know his work, there is no surprise to find here a book that is carefully conceived, meticulously documented, and executed with sinuous clarity. In what is certainly a rare occasion in the history of Greek letters, Tziovas attempts to sketch out the entire trajectory of neohellenic fiction from the standpoint of the circuitous development of narrative in Greek literature, which does not always parallel the narrative of Greek society's own development but which is nonetheless interwoven with it. In this particular sense, the book provides, even if implicitly, an argument about the various ways that Greek society has opted to represent itself in narrative form—which is to say, the various narrative modes that Greek society seems to have "selected" in order to render its history more palpable.

The problematic relation between narrative and history underlies this effort throughout. Tziovas argues from the start that the double meaning of the word , as story and as event, suggests a multilayered sort of narrative nature—indeed, as the book's central metaphor denotes, a palimpsest of narrations, chronologies, and interpretations. If history bears some affinity to fiction, this is not in the usual misapprehended sense of history's alleged untruth or unreality, but in the sense of history's composite nature that includes, as events, its various instances of interpretation. In other words, how history is read cannot but become one of history's events and thus be subjected to a narrative order. One way of reading the development of fictional ("mythistorical") narrative is therefore as the palimpsest of the cultural and social history of Modern Greece: (12).

In this respect, one of the book's central theses is that narrative discourse produces the narrative, not the other way around. Tziovas documents this point with an impressive survey of the entire trajectory of Greek prose from the 1830s to the present, showing the appropriate sensitivity to contextual specificity (i.e., the strict historical parameters of fiction) as well as to the theoretical apparatus that makes such a particular mode of analysis possible. Tziovas escorts us [End Page 140] through a vast geography of theorists and novelists, Greek and foreign, with significant entries on a range of figures such as Henry James, the New Critics, Peter Brooks, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yorgos Vizyinos, Stratis Myrivilis, Melpo Axioti, and Dimitris Hatzis. Noteworthy is the extensive reading of Stratis Myrivilis's three novels in the context of narrative's particular figuration of the ambivalence of desire.

The book's thematic journey takes us from a discussion of narrative perspective and poetics of plot to a discussion of issues such as the hermeneutics of reading, psychoanalysis and narrativity, Bakhtinian dialogism and heteroglossia in the novel, and, finally, postmodernism and micro-narrative as contemporary modes of voicing history. Although this sort of book can become cumbersome at times to the informed reader—since its attention to explanation and summary of relevant background information, to schools of thought that have glossed the subject matter, and to the genealogy of individual thinkers relevant to the argument's categories is painstakingly exhaustive—its contribution to the discussion of these issues in Greek letters must not be underestimated. Indeed, this book is itself a history—a history of Greek narrative within the overarching history of narrativity in modern times—and in such terms is invaluable as a self-contained assessment of the development of neohellenic culture as a whole.

Without a doubt, the book's most incisive and original contribution resides in its longest chapter, situated at the text's very center. It attempts to give us a substantial sense of Bakhtin's dialogic theory of narrative, while also suggesting that the Greek novel is characterized by an extensively polyphonic nature, a heteroglossia at its very foundation. Incidentally, I should mention that such discussion of Bakhtin in Greek letters is unusual, if not rare. (I can...

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