Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology

Part Three: The Pali Group

Pa r t T h r e e T h e Pa l i G r o u p Nanos Valaoritis soon became the most vital organizing force in Greek surrealism: being the one consistent link between Embirikos and Breton, an effort toward the collaboration of both Embirikos and Elytis in French surrealist publications came to nothing, as we have seen, because of objective difficulties. But in the 1960s the conditions were ripe for a Greek attempt along those lines; hence the Pali journal. Valaoritis’s own chronicle, Μοντερνισμός, Πρωτοπορία και Πάλι (Modernism, the “Avant-Garde,” and Pali) [Athens: Καστανιώτης (Castaniotis), 1997], provides a description of the conditions under which that publication was launched. While Yorgos Seferis, about to receive the Nobel Prize, was surrounded by younger writers and critics eager to suppress radical alternativevoices (in the process even distorting Seferis’s own moments of groundbreaking boldness), the most advanced periodical was Εποχές (Epoches), an instrument of informed albeit ultraconservative modernism . Having been encouraged by the Paris surrealist group (in the context of surrealism ’s increasing postwar decentralization), Valaoritis planned a journal edited by himself, Embirikos, and Elytis. Soon, however, Elytis demanded full editorship and subsequently withdrew from the project, while approaching the “Seferist” critics and eventually becoming Seferis’s successor as he too was awarded the Nobel Prize. 2 7 2    The Pali Group The idea was not abandoned, nevertheless. In an account written in 1975 for the reprinting of all six issues of Pali by a later periodical [Σήμα (Sima)], Valaoritis talks of “a wall of hesitation” erected, on the part of friends, against his wish to publish a surrealist-oriented journal. “Everyone was scared, and what they were mostly scared of was either their very selves, or the others. But who were those mythical ‘others’? As it turned out, they were ‘nobody.’ . . . It was the climate of an era, like the conspirators in the army and behind the scenes of politics.”1 The journal finally materialized after Valaoritis’s encounter with a group of young, enthusiastic writers, including Tassos Denegris, Panos Koutrouboussis, Eva Mylona, Dimitris Poulikakos , and others. If early Greek surrealism addressed a public completely unaware of preparatory stages such as Dada, the young people who formed the core of Pali’s team, and indeed readership, had limited albeit not insignificant access to postwar currents outside the confines of Greece. Raised in a climate of continuous censorship and political intolerance that was to carry on throughout the sixties, via political and military upheavals culminating in the colonels’ coup d’état in 1967, they had to make a choice between the acceptance of a monolithic so-called left-wing cultural environment and the risk of discovery. The monopolization of “dissident” art, on a mass level, by an outlook exemplified by Mikis Theodorakis’s songs involved the works of established poets (such as Seferis, Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos) set to music, along with an emphatic and rather sentimental idealization of the people, conceived as an abstract and static entity. For all the fervor of its consumers and followers, this cultural strand was largely compatible with the “educative” principles of a quasi-Stalinist cultural mentality: a somewhat pompous version of popular musical motifs, forming an aesthetic ideal of folk oratorios, while stressing the corruptive potential of “foreign” cultural influences, “decadent” trends in international artistic production and of course “introversion,” as opposed to the mass appeal of “healthy,” popular, socialist-minded artifacts. It goes without saying that this state of affairs was accompanied by a strong current of socialist realism in literature and the arts—a current whose precarious status vis-àvis State censorship (partly compensated for by the status accorded to certain of its prime movers by international Stalinist mechanisms) rendered it overwhelmingly appealing to a part of the population still bearing the wounds of the Civil War and its aftermath, albeit unable to either renounce the principle for which that war had been fought and lost or accept the treason to which the Left had been subjected by its leadership. Significantly, the lifestyles and references of those members of the first postwar generation who joined Pali, as well as those of their direct forefathers, were demonized both by the official State and by an equally official “Left,” also intolerant of long hair, experimental expression, “oneiric” and nonproductive activity. The Pali Group    2 7 3 Yet a few things had changed since the first Greek surrealists addressed a fully unsuspecting public, an important factor...