Nanos Valaoritis: The Cultural Cross-Breeding of a Cosmopolitan and Protean Writer

Nanos Valaoritis is considered an avant-garde writer chiefly owing to his role in promoting French surrealism in Greece and then in California. Parody, pastiche, collage, and effusive referentiality are ubiquitous in his work, but many of these elements could be considered the tools of postmodernism as well as surrealism. The attraction of two antagonistic poles reorients the poet, who turns toward structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstructionism, while blending easily such strategies as Bakhtinian dialogism and carnivalization. He continues to use intertextuality and theorization, ending up in narcissistic self-referentiality. The avant-garde classification is easily reversed by borrowing Valaoritis's absurdist syllogisms, so that this pioneer might just as well be the last of a group on the verge of extinction, waiting for the rebirth of yet another avant-garde.