Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (review)

To my knowledge, this book is unique at least in its attempt to present comparatively the work of the most famous French ‘auteurs–compositeurs-interprètes’, Brassens, Ferré and Brel, and their near-equivalents in Greece. It is perhaps unfortunate, then, that the readership of this journal may not find too much of interest in Papanikolaou’s expert presentation of the cultural context and political as well as artistic effectiveness of the greats of Greek ‘high-popular’ music, Hadjidakis, Theo-dorakis and Savvopoulos. When it comes to the French greats, who are given one out of three major chapters, Papanikolaou strives both to establish the cultural history behind their rise and to argue for the ‘persistent use of literary models to establish legitimacy and authority for a part of popular music’. He is right to bring attention to literariness as the key ideological factor in the near-sanctification of those three figures in the altar of the French chanson, as well as to point out the importance of their inclusion in the influential series ‘Poètes d’aujourd’hui’ by Seghers, and the book is careful to disentangle the ideological appreciation of Brassens as a ‘national poet’, from his reception as a maker of songs. What is perhaps missing here is the full realization of a promised radical re-reading of these works that ‘would mean remapping these texts as texts of pleasure’, taking cues from Barthes. Admittedly, the third chapter, concentrating on Savvopoulos’s engaging and subversive work, executes just that kind of radical reading, utilizing theoretical resources from Bhabha’s notion of ‘mimicry’ to a perhaps truncated but really rather thrilling Lacanian interpretation of the songs. In this chapter, Papanikolaou shows himself to be a clever, astute and sensitive reader of cultural products, and readers of French might have liked to see a similar approach to the French components of his study. More troublingly, perhaps, the theoretical approach he adopts in this chapter leaves Papanikolaou open to the charge of re-instituting literary effects and strategies at the core of the activity of song writing he initially offered to liberate from the ‘literary’ master-signifier. But the readings themselves remain exciting and suggestive, even if, as I suspect is the case with the majority of readers of French Studies, one has no knowledge of the actual Greek songs. Ultimately, this book undoubtedly makes a significant contribution to the study of Modern Greek culture, and also forwards the thinking behind what makes the conjunction between high and popular culture in any context—but it may not illuminate students of the French ‘auteurs–compositeurs–interprètes’ as one might have wished it to do.