Η μορφή του γιατρού στο νεοελληνικό θέατρο. Μια δραματολογική αναδρομή (review)

What is literature? Although this question is central to the discipline of comparative literature, in my opinion only Russian literary theorist, Yuri Lotman, has provided us with a satisfactory answer to it. According to this well-known scholar, alongside science, religion, jurisprudence, music, and other art forms, literature is a means of acquiring and storing information. It is, moreover, a particular way of expressing knowledge that has not yet been sufficiently dealt with in other types of human discourse. As a consequence, studies about literature should not only make us acquainted with literary facts, their origin, and their organization into knowledge systems, but they should also inform us about the world view (ideas and ideology) expressed by those texts in their contemporary context. In short, whereas literature is meant, in the first place, to be instructive for the reader, literary studies should ideally contribute to a more comprehensive history of ideas.

Without a doubt, Walter Puchner is one of the most prolific and well-known scholars of modern Greek drama, and his command of both the original plays and studies of them is on display once more in this diachronic study of the figure of the physician in Greek theater from the Cretan Renaissance until the present. Puchner presents an enormous amount of information on the topic, drawn from works ranging from Latin comedy to the Italian Renaissance and Molière down to the plays of Henrik Ibsen. In addition to a fairly exhaustive bibliography (which unfortunately is not easily accessible, scattered as it is throughout his numerous and voluminous footnotes), the author examines an impressive number of rather unknown and unpublished plays. Puchner's deep and intimate familiarity with even the most obscure works of modern Greek drama is evidenced by the detailed plot summaries that he provides at the beginning of each section of the book.

Still, from the perspective of Lotman's view on the communicative function of literature, a detailed knowledge of the relevant works does not necessarily provide insight either into the world view expressed in those texts or to the ways the texts relate thematically and ideologically to their cultural and historical context. Such an approach to literature—and the scholar's resulting contribution to the history of ideas—requires a certain degree of hermeneutic subtlety, a quality that Puchner, at least in this study, unfortunately seems to lack. In this book, he shows himself to be a traditional philologist who confines his research, with an almost anachronistic Grundligkeit, to the mere collection of facts and figures. Three aspects of his study require further comment.

First, the book's raison d'être is personal and not scholarly in nature. Coming from a family of physicians in which he, as a professor of Greek drama at the University of Athens, seems to be the odd one out, Puchner explicitly intends his book both as "[έ]να hommage στους Έλληνες γιατρούς, που πρέπει βέβαια να διαβάζεται με το ανάλογο χιούμορ" ("a homage to Greek physicians, who, when presented on stage, must be read with a certain humor") and as "μια χειρονομία ευγενική προς τους ανθρώπους που με περιβάλλουν με την παρουσία και την αγάπη τους" ("an expression of gratitude to those men who influence me by their presence and their love") (p. 18). However, charming as this may be as an explanation for his interest in this topic, the lack of genuine scholarly research questions leads the author to adopt an almost antiquarian approach to his subject. As he himself states in the introduction, the five chapters of his book are arranged in chronological order merely because ". . . παρουσιάζουν . . . τους γιατρούς της νεοελληνικής δραμτουργίας και σχηματίζουν μια ιστορική εξέλιξη της τυπολογίας τους" ("they presented . . . the doctors of modern Greek theater and traced the historical development of the typology of them") (pp. 18–19), and not because this scheme facilitates a deeper understanding of the topic in relation to literary or cultural history.

A second remarkable flaw of Puchner's book concerns the inadequate methodology he employs and, more specifically, his methodology regarding the typology he deploys to study the figure of the doctor. For this typology is not so much presented as the result of the data collected and described in chapters one to five, but is already given beforehand in the introduction. Such a lack of methodological reflection—which more than likely is due...