Reading Games in the Greek Novel (review)

Eleni Papargyriou's first book is a most welcome addition to the scarce number of studies on Modern Greek Literature that focus on reader response. The ambiguous title explores the games that literary works evoke as part of the reading process (reading games). It also studies the reader's response to and interpretation of the various games (reading games), which feature in the five novels examined in the book, whose publication dates span the years 1935 to 1975. Investigating the notions of game and playfulness with regard to Modern Greek literature, Papargyriou traces a line of works that challenged the literary establishment of their time within the wider context of modernism.

The first two chapters are introductory, placing the overall project in theoretical and historical contexts respectively. The first offers a succinct review of theories of play and games, and it focuses mainly on the aspect of play most akin to the reading experience, which is the creation of a fictional level in which participants immerse themselves. Furthermore, drawing from mostly European literary examples, it traces a shift in the form of playfulness—and the text's demands on the reader—from modernism to "post-WWII metafictions" (8): in modernism, playfulness is mainly based on the manipulation of knowledge, which leads to a "poetics of agonistics," whereas in late modernism and/or postmodernism, playfulness is increasingly linked to randomness.

The second chapter examines the literary scene of the 1930s, which ushered modernism into Modern Greek letters. It outlines the lucidity, sombreness, and lack of stylistic innovation of the period's dominant prose works, in stark contrast with the much more obscure and experimental (albeit equally sombre) poetry of the time. It discusses the provocation of the literary establishment by authors of the periphery (focusing on Yannis Skarimbas) and interestingly finds in the latter's playfulness a way to (re)negotiate their place in the establishment, unlike that of satire and parody, whose overt criticism tends to exclude them from the literary establishment. The second chapter is mostly a lucid and informative introduction to the third, which elaborates further on Skarimbas's work, focusing on his novel Mariambas (1935) and its multilayered intertextual practices.

The third chapter illuminatingly discusses different approaches to intertextuality; in contrast to the limited, awed, and "educational" use of European intertexts exhibited by established prose writers such as George Theotokas and Angelos Terzakis, Skarimbas playfully blurs the boundaries between "reading and borrowing, citing and rewriting" (56) his multiple sources, as he bases his novel entirely on "intertextual imitation" (58). Instead of the passive consumption of the text instigated by the former writers' strategies, Skarimbas invites the reader's active attention to constantly move from text to intertext, by using implicit, explicit, and thematized intertextual references. This results in a text open to multiple "concretizations," as a game would be; this openness as well as the novel's own irreverent reading of its interetexts, render its "attitude—precociously—postmodern" (72).

Intertextual games prove to be a key feature in Nikos-Gabriil Pentzikis's The Novel of Mrs. Ersi (1966) which follows its contemporary, characteristically postmodern, international trend of rewriting earlier works, in this case Yeoryios Drosinis's novel Ersi (1922). According to Papargyriou's insightful reading, Pentzikis rewrites Drosinis's novel by fictionalizing the latter's spots of indeterminacy, which challenges Dorsinis's neoclassical idealistic assumptions on a number of issues, among which the cultural centrality of Athens and a sense of timelessness. Furthermore, chapter four explains Pentzikis's playful stance towards his secondary intertexts, which he reformulates in a kind of collage that strips them "of their authoritative baggage, their ideological framework and their historical significance" (93). His technique encourages different readings based on the activation of multiple contingent relations among his sources. Papargyriou concludes that this work "perhaps heralds postmodernism in Greece" (93). Both chapters three and four, devoted to demanding novels, skillfully unravel the works' intricate intertextual networks, explain their playful character by detailing the role they ascribe to the reader, and make a significant...