Fast Food Classics (review)

Reviews 173 In Ritsos' new Oresteia we . . . find a statement not about the great weight of responsibility, the scope of great decisions, and the stature of public figures, but a peeling away of the surface mask to the underlife of people like ourselves whose acts are dictated by social and situational forces, whose roles are prescripted and whose ends expose the failure of meaning and the vanity of pretense. . . . His non-canonical approach to the myth dissects our understanding of its many uses as it adds another use. His non-determinate approach disqualifies singular readings as it moves through the contradictions offered by its material to offer his readers entry into a zone that shifts from and interacts with both classical and modern intertexts, both literary and social. Reading the poems requires an active reader willing both to dissociate from the poems as authoritative texts and to engage the poems as part of the wider social relations off of which they feed and which they reference, (xxix-xxx) The present volume is unquestionably a valuable addition to the works of Ritsos already translated into English. Andonis Decavalles Fairleigh Dickinson University Yorgos Chouliaras. Γιώϕγος Χουλιάϕας, Fast Food Classics. Athens: Ypsilon. 1992. Pp. 61. It is safe to say that the poetic climate of our time burdens most Greek poets with the increasing demand for "original" writing. Since, moreover, the infamous "private vision"—self-ascribed slogan of the so-called "generation of the 80s"—has now become canonized, the majority of today's poets insist on privatizing poetry, which may explain the inabüity of contemporary Greek poetry to craft an even approximately public language. (It isn't altogether by chance, to my mind, that the supreme living Greek poet, who was once sung by the entire country, recendy published a book entided Private Road.) The necessary presupposition of every poet who seeks to privatize poetics is to brush aside the neohellenic literary tradition as poetic subject, since the poem's content is pressured toward a supposedly personal (private) experience—even though the stylistic imitation of contemporary classics has hardly gone out of fashion. In this climate, the publication of a volume of poems that attempts to confront the actual historical and poetic significations that allow it to exist is a noteworthy event. This is especially the case when its author is so easily dubbed a "heretic" (To Vima, 19/6/92) or habitually paradoxical and sophistic (Eleftherotypia, 22/6/92), and has, moreover, the general reputation of never being serious and of engaging in clever (and, for many, siUy) contrivances. A first (and indeed fast) glance at Yórgos Chouliáras's Fast Food Classics might inspire a rather common American expression: that he is too smart for his own good. Of course, whether this is fair is hard to say, since there is no way 174 Reviews to measure whether the vocation of poetry, for whomever invests in it psychically , does ultimately tend to one's own good or not. It is definitely true, however, that if, while flipping through the pages of this book, we happened to encounter first the poem "History of a Provincial Literature," we would most likely (after enjoying a laugh) go on undeterred to the next history our fortune might turn up. And this because, as we learn inthepoem«Επαϕχιώτηςποιητήςμεταφϕάζειελεϕθεϕα», Life is short Art is long ΉΖωή¿ναικοντή Ή"Αϕτα¿ναιμακϕιά (46) Such poems can easily be consumed, in this spirit of blazing gastronomical speed, with the impetuous and insolent style of the "modern Athenian" who has decided to raid a newly erected hamburger-stand. Leaving this particular poem without comment (its significance within the book's total project will become clearer as we go on), I should note that Chouliáras's writing urges us—rather consciously, it seems—toward a fastfood reading. What else could have been the meaning of his poem "Classic Summaries "—"ILIAD / They left / ODYSSEY / He returned"—but an attempt to represent the general condensation of reading in a time when the epic takes place on the TV screen, flying by between soap operas and private-eyes, car crashes and lexical machineguns in the daily news? Hence the Greek book's English tide. The language may be foreign...