The Unfinished ApeMediation and Modern Greek Identity in Iakovos Pitsipios's Ο Πίθηκος Ξούθ

Iakovos Pitsipios's novel, Ο Πίθηκος Ξούθ (1848) presents the encounter between a young "Europeanized" Greek pretending to a position of noble birth and the enigmatic character of his valet, Xouth, a German travel writer who has been transformed into an ape. This simian figure is not an isolated instance in European fiction and a brief examination of the ape in Western literature is useful in making meaning of Pitsipios's depiction here. The figure of the ape, the satire of travel writings, and the cultural exchange between East and West in this novel all serve to complicate notions of authenticity, imitation, and cultural identity in post-Revolutionary Greece. Pitsipios's Greece was a rapidly changing social climate adjusting to the new situation of independent statehood and trying to forge some national identity under the oppressive influence of a European world that had specific historical expectations of what a Greek state and nation meant. This cultural crisis of transition from nationhood (ethnos) to statehood (kratos) is negotiated in Pitsipios's novel in the themes of adaptation, imitation, and authenticity.