Song, Self-Identity, and the Neohellenic

In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz claims that at a certain point in their development nations and peoples, like adolescents, become aware of their being. Awareness leads to reflection and the adolescent, like Narcissus, leans above the water, asking himself if the face disfigured there can possibly be his own. “The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question” (Paz 1961:9). When nations ask themselves what they are, the answers, Paz suggests, are often belied by history. They “differ in differing circumstances and the national character, which was thought to be immutable, changes with them” (1961:10). Still, the moment of reflection, the preoccupation with the significance of a people’s singularity, is valuable, Paz maintains, even if history corrects it.

The title “Whither the Neohellenic?” suggests that those of us who deal with Greece in our work (and perhaps a proportion of the Greek people themselves) have reached a point of adolescent narcissism where we have become fascinated by our own reflection. It is, I hope, a healthy narcissism, a pause before the next stage of Greece’s history makes our speculation seem irrelevant. I will limit my own adolescent reflections to a single topic: song. ¹

Despite the successful propagation of the myth of cultural continuity, ² Greeks continued to insist on a model of community-based affiliation that was often at variance with official ideology and frequently crossed linguistic and ethnic boundaries. Just as the moirolog¼streq of Epirus or Mani present a vision of the afterworld that conflicts with the teachings of Orthodox Christianity and yet remain staunch members of the Church, so Greeks have often embraced a superficial vision of themselves as members of a nation while defining themselves through song as inhabitants of a subgroup that transgresses, in some respects, the boundaries and/or ideals of the state. (I am thinking, for example, of the songs of left wing opposition from the time of the civil war to the mid-1960s, of many of the rebetic songs that defy Greek societal norms, or of the Pontian Greeks performing music indistinguishable from that of their Turkish counterparts.)

Indeed one of the attractions of Greece for the Western European or American traveler of the postwar era was its rich cultural diversity expressed largely through music and dance. Coming from a world in which regional differences were disappearing and nationalism had become an ugly substitute for national identity, Western visitors were struck by the intensity of local Greek patriotism. They listened to a Cretan lyra player improvising rizítika, to a Maniot lament, or to an Epirot clarinet player performing at a wedding, and they recognized, even if they could not name it, the passionate involvement of a people with its land, a land hard won and cultivated for generations. ³ The manifestation of Greek local identity was almost as attractive to Greek intellectuals as it was to foreigners. In Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek, the image of the European-educated “boss” being taught to dance by Alexis Zorbas on a Cretan beach exemplifies the attraction perfectly. Zorba is the authentic, almost forgotten Greek self, the man who may drink, curse, and sleep with women of loose morals but who has an enviable quality that the educated European lacks: he is in tune with himself. The metaphor is one that would have appealed to Plato, for it is through the means of music and dance, a language of soma as well as nous, that Zorba, in contrast to the “boss” (and perhaps to Kazantzakis himself), achieves a secure sense of his place in the universe. ⁴

I first traveled to Greece from Australia on a Greek ship. One of the passengers was a Maori chieftain as massive in his dimensions as a mahogany trunk. When I asked him why he was going to Greece, he said: “They tell me there is still paradise there, in the Greek islands. We have lost our paradise in the South Pacific. I don’t know, but maybe I’ll still be able to find it there.” Where the...