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  • Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics
  • Vassos Argyrou
Vangelis Calotychos , Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics. New York: Berg. 2004. Pp. xii + 334. $84.95 hardback, $28.95 paper.

As the author himself points out, this is a book informed by a passionate neohellenism. The "statues," it suggests, or at least such is my reading, should be rounded up and placed where they belong: in the museum. Not to be forgotten or ignored—museums are, after all, often visited—but not to be allowed to circulate freely among the living and dominate the present either. The "statues" stand for the idealised image of classical Greece invented in Europe in the [End Page 408] eighteenth century and imposed on the "recalcitrant body of modern Greece" (16)—an imposition and a complicity, since many Greeks embraced this idealised image enthusiastically. An imposition, a complicity and a predicament: modern Greeks were from this point onwards viewed through the lens of this idealised image and, predictably, they were found lacking—a discourse of "ab-sense," as Calotychos calls it in the poststructuralist vein. They were viewed in this way and they quickly learned to view themselves in a similar manner. Hence the lack of self-confidence to which the book often refers.

The meaning of Greekness, then, is not to be derived solely from the idealised classical past. But nor is it to be derived solely from what it suppresses: the Greek "native," the Romios as opposed to the Hellene. This temptation should be avoided. Such "nativist," folkloristic discourses, the author maintains, stay within the binary logic and can do nothing more than to construct alternative authenticities or modernities—a "cultural exceptionalism"—as if Greek culture could be self-contained, self-sustained and free of Western influence. In short, they reproduce the myth of "presence" which is responsible for the discourse of Greek "ab-sence" to begin with. Everyday practice is more differentiated than what the binary allows for, and to do it justice one must employ a more "sensitive and pliable hermeneutic" (7). This is what Calotychos sets out to do in his book: to read modern Greek culture against the current of binary logic and to show how different people, some better known than others, have themselves grappled with the opposition between the Hellene and the Romios, the European and non-European, the West and its Other.

The results of this reading are often intriguing. Take, for instance, the "map of Greece" as imagined and put together by Rhigas Velestinlis, a man who had done much to inspire the Greek uprising of 1821 against Ottoman rule that eventually led to the foundation of an independent Greek state. In Calotychos reading, Rhigas emerges as "the Ottoman Greek Vlach who dreamed of all Balkan peoples, including Muslims, as part of a Greek and Balkan federation" (291)—a "protomartyr of the 1821 Greek Revolution" (24) to be sure, but also a kind of proto-multiculturalist. Or take the work of the national poet, Dionysios Solomos. Its fragmentary nature, Calotychos argues, should be understood as the result of the poet's "performativity," the fact that he produced poems spontaneously in the company of an audience without necessarily intending to formalise them in writing. This is very much in line with the oral tradition of the folksinger, which is context-sensitive and resists closure—and, of course, very much in opposition to nationalist readings of Solomos, which see in his work universal truths about the nation. Or take, finally, George Seferis's fascination with Cyprus. As Calotychos suggests, Cyprus became a place on which to project his own experience of displacement—he was an Asia Minor Greek—as well as his vision of Hellenism: a transcendental, mythological kind of Hellenism, different and at the same time more authentic than the Hellenism of the metropolitan centre.

I am very sympathetic to Calotychos's project, and as I have just suggested, I find many of his interpretations intriguing and illuminating. What I do not quite understand is his optimism. There are signs, Calotychos argues, that [End Page 409] modern Greeks are becoming more self-confident. This, of course, is to be applauded but it is not clear from the...

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