Surrealism in Greece. An Anthology (review)

Since the expiration of historical surrealism, the surrealist adventure has been revived by the paradoxical, oppositional, and prophetic energy of avant-garde trends and currents in differentiated social and cultural environments. By testing the boundaries of surrealism and exploring the tension between its acceptable and marginalized features, the writers who are still calling themselves "surrealists" return to its principles. Nevertheless, the anti-surrealist traps have not been eliminated, since international (neo)surrealism is still in arms against its rivals. To specifically focus on the Greek case, both the emphasis on the importance of surrealism for the development of indigenous modernist poetics and the controversy upon the movement's very existence in the Greek context constitute two sides of the same coin: the undermining of its international dynamics. Moreover, being confined to the role of an "advanced party" for the "real" literature, the surrealist texts became marginalized, their radical quality also being withered by their forced incorporation into the "authentically" Greek literary tradition.

A contemporary response to surrealism is still intriguing since, apart from conventional writing, it is challenged by the controversies within the avantgarde. In the current Greek context, for example, the artists and intellectuals who investigate the movement's transformation in new, more textual, forms and trends, while still respecting surrealism's historical existence, act in parallel with those who purport to continue the surrealist adventure in a way more faithful to the movement's diachronic combative dynamics. Such a double dimension of surrealist continuity indicates—apart from open historical issues—the movement's gained ground.

Anthologizing literature has always been a bold venture, especially when radical trends are concerned. The first and most influential anthology of Greek surrealism, edited and introduced by Frangiski Abatzopoulou, collected a wide variety of texts by both orthodox and neo-surrealist writers, thus establishing a respected canon of Greek texts. Nikos Stabakis's Surrealism in Greece is an extensive corpus of translated Greek writing of and on surrealism that is much more focused on the movement's specificities, which aspires not only to explore the long life of a fundamental avant-garde movement, but also to overrule any debate regarding its extinguished powers. Stabakis's anthology of Greek surrealism is the first one published in English, apart, of course, from Nanos Valaoritis and Thanasis Maskaleris's Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry, which includes advanced modernist texts and proposes daring divisions of poetic production significantly varying from the usual genealogical ones. Stabakis's work successfully occupies an important place in the scholarship on the construction of Greek modernity and/or Greek ethnicity in the avant-garde context.

It is important to note that surrealists have visualized the world in a map of mixed, hybridic, and revolutionary nations, powerful in their "exoticism." Their relationship with tradition and language and their use of "indigenous" themes, along with the "alternative, expansive, and subversive interpretation of Greek heritage" define the most radical and experimental wing of Modern Greek writing (1).

In his introduction, Stabakis presents the two versions of hostility towards Greek surrealism which are compatible with the "deconstructive" misreadings of the international avant-garde by the academic establishment: surrealism existed either everywhere or nowhere (3). The surrealist texts have been distorted by either the minimization of their value or their identification with ethnocentric poetics through the purity of their artistic qualities as opposed to their surrealist connections (4). In a country possessing neither a cultural canon nor "a coherent prehistory of radicalism," where the usually obstructed course of the movement was combined with an "impressively wide influence surrealist imagery has exerted on mainstream Greek poetry," surrealism was considered to be a "bothersome residue," an attitude relevant to that taken towards the scholars, artists, and few academics who dared to investigate its potentials (2).

Stabakis's positions are polemical and agonistic, yet scholarly composed: the marginalization or misappropriation of surrealism in the international Western environment has particular aspects, reasons, and results in reference to literary developments...