Distancing Disaster: Trauma, Medium, and Form in the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange

Recent work in trauma studies has begun to differentiate collective trauma from its individual counterpart: while the latter is a psychosomatic phenomenon, the former is a secondary product, mediated materially, temporally, socially, and linguistically. The collective trauma that emerged from the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange of 1919–1924 serves as an exemplary case in point. Looking in particular to literary production, I assess how the trauma narrative of 1919–1924 was “remediated” in two Greek novels. For much of the twentieth century, the field of Greek prose fiction was dominated by the formal regime of realism, which masked the mediations of textual production and promulgated instead a rhetorical logic of authentic and immediate historicity. Using Elias Venezis’s Το νούμερο 31328 (The number 31328) and Kosmas Politis’s Στου Χατζηφράγκου (In the Hadjifrangou neighborhood), I trace the formal strategies by which two particular trauma narratives reacted to this realist regime, developing a theory of the self-reflexive medium.