Varieties of Illusion in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

Varieties of Illusion in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy Karl Malkqff Much of C. P. Cavafy's poetry contains puzzling ambiguities, unresolved dichotomies that at times leave the reader uneasy, at times seem to taunt him. Cavafy is an ironist, a man of masks. But unlike such contemporaries as W. B. Yeats or Ezra Pound, he does not use his masks, his multiple perspectives, in the service of a philosophy , a theology, a political or economic theory. Cavafy leaves us with uncertainty, enough uncertainty to send us searching for a key. But since the poet himself did not provide such a key—or at least all attempts to show that he did have proven inconclusive—it is necessary to invent one. In this game, winner takes all. Perfectly reasonable insights into the poetry are pursued obsessively, as if they were exclusive avenues of access. Cavafy's poems are political, indignant responses to Britan 's imperial presence in Egypt; or they are psychological, direct or indirect expressions of the poet's homosexuality; or they are commentaries on the past, the ruminations of a historian manqué; and the like. More recently critics have focused on the irony itself, in many ways a more promising approach, since by concentrating on method one can avoid overwhelming thematic generalities that obscure more than they illuminate. However, in Cavafy, even studies of technique lead to readings of the poems that will negate all other readings. Nasos Vayenás tells us that "Cavafy is neither lyric nor dramatic ; he is an ironic poet" (110). The Cavafian protagonist will never find fulfillment "because life is nothing more than an ironic juxtaposition of opposites" (113). Roderick Beaton accepts Vayen ás' analysis and carries it to its logical conclusion. "Irony, it may be concluded is all pervasive in Cavafy's poetry, and nothing in his poetic world is sacred. . . ." (527). In this world of "shifting relativities " we can trust no point of view. From here it is only a short step to the Structuralists and post-Structuralists, who, undeterred by the ease of their project, pounce eagerly on texts that seem to deconstruct 191 192 Karl Malkoff themselves. Here the critic does not so much do battle with his structurally unsophisticated predecessors as dismiss them with disdain. Vassilis Lambropoulos, for example, announces happily, "there is no such thing as the poem YMS ["Young Men of Sidon"] but only an interminable series of reinterpretations. . . ." (165), thereby reducing the fascinating ambiguities of this particular poem to just one more symptom of the universal impossibility of saying anything without also implying its opposite.1 It is not necessary to deny that Cavafy had attitudes toward experience , or that his poetry embodies those attitudes, in order to admit the importance of irony to his work. Arguing against the extremes of Vayenas and Beaton, Edmund Keeley concludes, "Though irony is central to Cavafy's work, it is not the only mode, and in his as in any other poetic world, the presence of irony depends on context" ("Voice and Context," 177).2 Even with this sensible caveat, irony remains crucial; it is at the heart of Cavafy's vision, the most appropriate expression of his sensibility. Irony, of course, emphasizes the tension between illusion and reality, between the way the world appears and the way it actually is. While this tension is generally present in most literature, few would disagree that it is of special interest to Cavafy, and it may be more useful to start with this central vision rather than the technique used to express it—which seems a case of the tail wagging the dog. Irony is central to Cavafy's work because illusion is central to his vision of the human condition. Whatever its occasional focus, his irony is consistently founded on two perceptions: first, that man is the illusion-making animal, and second, perhaps a corollary of the first, that the human world is infinitely complex, certainly too complex for a merely sequential account of its workings. The virtue of irony is that it permits the writer to say two (usually contradictory) things at once, rendering it particularly suitable in discovering the anatomy of an illusion. Vayenas and Beaton...