The Roar of Whispers: Cosmopolitanism and Neohellenism

The future of neohellenism is far from dim, at least viewed from a long-term perspective. While a certain romantic and nationalist Hellenism is dying, there are many signs that another Hellenism is waiting in the wings, ready to take its place.

It has been one of the vices of small nations, in the era of the nation, to fall prey to anxiety if their culture is not being talked about. The number of papers given at academic conferences, the amount of comment in the international press, the frequency of Nobel prizes—all are seized upon by the literati of small nations and by their supporters as a vindication not just of the nation’s worth but of its very existence. This is because, in the age of the nation, art has preceded politics. The artist is the true legislator of the nation. Literature creates the nation. The nation is “a country”; it is literature that creates the image of “the country,” its landscape, its earth, its geography—an imagery of “nativism,” folkloric ipseity, and elemental passion and pathos: the cauldron out of which the nation is born.

The nation grows out of its literature. If nobody is translating or reviewing its literature, then the nation lacks the recognition of its signifying core. The problem for a small nation, though, is that attention to its national literature comes intermittently at best, and for crudely contingent reasons—either because the country and its literature satisfy ghoulish curiosity or because they mirror someone else’s dilemmas. Modern Greece has played both of these roles. Its postwar history of civil war and junta was so agonizing that it could not be ignored. For a time, too, Greece offered the living remembrance of a premodern existence craved by many moderns unfulfilled by their own sophisticated but functionalized worlds. Yet such roles invariably pass with time, as modernity conquers the previously unmodernized landscape (which it did in an astoundingly rapid way in Greece in the 1960s and 1970s), and the wistful cultural tourists move on to more exotic sites, while national traumas pass, however painfully, into history, old enemies exchange invective for arms, and the rest of the world turns its attention to the latest even bloodier descent of some other benighted nation into civil war, tribalism, or genocidal “cleansing.”

It is a mistake to confuse a culture’s significance with the ghoulish or romantic attention paid to it. It is a mistake to encourage such attention. The psychology of moderns is adapted to sensationalism and to a nostalgia for a “simpler past.” To allow oneself to become an object of either of those affects is, at best, undignified, not to mention self-defeating since the recognition desired by the culture for its literature (the nation’s soul in which its traumas and pathos are exposed for all to see) will invariably be stripped from it in time. In contrast, great culture is culture that people approach not for ghoulish or nostalgic reasons—or because the culture industry has whipped up a sensation that everybody must “know”—but because it does the work of paideia, steeling the soul to overcome the pathos and grief of existence.

Neohellenism is doing well today because it has produced some remarkable objectivations of the spirit. It is true that time has diminished once-celebrated figures like Kazantzakis. But that is a natural part of time’s judgment on a culture. And it happens in all cultures, large and small. The force of such creative personalities—their intuitive grasp of the needs of their time, the magnetism of their own pathos—makes their work temporarily famous perhaps but alas not immortal. Their work dies with them or soon after, as those who knew them and their era pass on. To define a historical moment can also mean to be trapped in that moment and eventually to fade into oblivion with the passing of that time. But the judgment of time is fair, for while a Kazantzakis has faded from memory to some degree, a Cavafy has risen from obscurity. None of his poems, works that first saw the...