Confession and Time: The Subject in Papadiamantes's The Merchants of the Nations

Alexandros Papadiamantes's importance for modern Greek letters is enormous. His short stories and novellas exhibited the first signs of a mature Greek prose following the emancipation from the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century. They captured a whole era's socio-political upheavals, and they inaugurated Greek modernism in the twentieth century.¹ Here I will concentrate on one of Papadiamantes's "juvenalia," The Merchants of the Nations (Οι έμποροι των εθνών, 1882-83), one of his most neglected works. The story unfolds in the thirteenth century and it is set in the Mediterranean. There are three main characters. Markos Sanoutos is a Venetian nobleman. The story begins when Sanoutos is saved from pirates by the prince of Naxos, Ioannis Mouchras. Mouchras offers hospitality to Sanoutos, who seduces his host's wife, Augousta. After a hiatus, we encounter the three heroes again under different circumstances. Augousta has abandoned Sanoutos, changed her name to Agape and joined a monastery in Patmos. Ioannis Mouchras has disguised his real identity under the name Vendikis in order to seek revenge from his former wife and her lover. The novel concludes with the three characters meeting again when Sanoutos leads a Venetian fleet on a mission to the Cyclades and lays siege on the castle of Naxos, during which the object of the love triangle, Augousta or Agape, perishes. Papadiamantes's second novel is largely contrived in terms of plot development, too obviously modelled on the European adventure novels Papadiamantes was translating into Greek. Nevertheless, The Merchants of the Nations presents the conceptual connection between confession and subjectivity. This philosophical dimension, it will be argued, underlies Papadiamantes's modernity already in this early novel.

The approach taken here aims to highlight the philosophical import of Papadiamantes's thought. The secondary literature on Papadiamantes tends to be preoccupied with presenting either the context of his works, or a detailed philological analysis. This is, of course, valuable work and it has informed much of the discussion that follows. But what is missing is an approach to Papadiamantes that concentrates on the conceptual matrix of his work. The import of his ideas, the philosophical significance of his texts, is all too easily resolved with reference to his Christian Orthodox beliefs. Papadiamantes's writings, however, are no texts on dogma. The characters in his works, either the so-called "Athenian short stories" or those set in the Sporades islands, are about suffering individuals. What conceptual framework underlies such suffering? The Merchants of the Nations is uniquely suited to tackle one aspect of this problem with reference to confession. The notion of confession that arises in The Merchants of the Nations not only dismantles the notion of subjective autonomy, but also alludes to a positive articulation of a decentered subjectivity. As a result, as it will be shown, The Merchants of the Nations can be aligned with contemporary debates about subjectivity. For this purpose, a discussion of the doctrinal differences about confession between the Eastern and the Western Churches will be eschewed, since it would introduce an unnecessary layer of complexity. The discussion here will concentrate on how confession is presented in fiction in such a way as to highlight the conceptual import of the fictional.²

The text itself, The Merchants of the Nations, challenges the limits of confession and subjectivity. I do not know what Papadiamantes intended to convey, nor can one ever be sure about an author's intentions. There are two reasons for a critical reading of The Merchants of the Nations that does not rely on the author's intentions. First, as Walter Benjamin argues, the critical terms must be derived directly from the text itself in order to avoid biographical or contextual criticism.³ Second, as will be shown, The Merchants of the Nations puts into question the notion of a subject's intentions. No subject can claim that it has clear intentions. The construction of such a subject through the figure of confession can be read as the real subject matter of The Merchants of the Nations.

The conjunction between confession and subjectivity in Papadiamantes...