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Complicity and conflict: some aspects of reading and gender in Cavafy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Michaela Prinzinger
Michaela Prinzinger*
Affiliation:
Byzantinisch-Neugriechisches Seminar, Freie Universität, Berlin
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Extract

Reading Cavafy or Cavafy Reading or Cavafy’s Readings or Cavafy Reading Cavafy have been aspects of scholarly interpretive interests regarding either the author C.P. Cavafy or applied textual strategies. Relatively little attention has been paid to the reader on the opposite end of the chain of literary communication. The dominant paradigm of literary criticism regarding Cavafy’s texts has been for a long time the inference of the authorial intention by interpretive acts of the literary critic. Fragments of Cavafy Reading have been puzzled together to shed some light on the author’s poetically functioning brain. But — as recent approaches to the complex phenomenon of reading in Cavafy have shown — inferring some sort of ‘meaning’ can also be regarded as based on cooperative acts between reader and text and on shared knowledge about the procedures of interpreting texts.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 17 , 1993 , pp. 105 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1993

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References

2. These approaches have concentrated mostly on the textually thematized act of reading and on intertextuality (1), on attempts to distinguish between Cavafy the reader and the reader as textual character (2) as well as on the struggle between the ‘Intentio Auctoris’ and the ‘Intentio Lectoris’ with respect to Cavafian textual politics (3).

1) 5–6 (1983) 574–588;

Lambropoulos, V., ‘The Violent Power of Knowledge: The Struggle of Critical Discourses for Domination over Cavafy’s Young Men of Sidon, A.D. 400’, JHD 10 (1983) 149–166;Google Scholar

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4. Reader-response criticism embraces a wide range of approaches to texts. Mailloux describes them as 1) subjectivism aiming at a psychological model (Bleich and Holland), 2) phenomenology aiming at an intersubjective model (Iser and Fisher) and 3) structuralism aiming at a social model (Fish and Culler): Mailloux, S., Interpretive conventions. The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y. 1982) 22 Google Scholar; another overview in Suleiman, S.R., ‘Introduction: Varieties of audience-oriented criticism’ in The Reader in the Text. Essays on Audience and Interpretation, eds. Suleiman, S.R., Crosman, I. (Princeton, N.J. 1980) 3–45.Google Scholar

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7. I borrow the term ‘model reader’ from Eco 1979 and combine it with the notion of Iser’s ‘implied reader’. The terms ‘narrator’ and ‘narratee’ (Prince 1980) are added to describe a special manifestation of the model author and reader, i.e. as concrete textual characters. Furthermore, the sequence of the communication chain owes much to Chatman 1978, 147–151; Eco, U., The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington 1979)Google Scholar; Iser, W., Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (München 1972)Google Scholar; Iser, W., DerAkt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (München2 1984)Google Scholar; Prince, G., ‘Introduction to the Study of the Narratee’, in: Reader-Response Criticism. From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Tompkins, J. (Baltimore 1980) 7–26 Google Scholar; Chatman, S., Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, London 1978).Google Scholar

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12. Mr Kechagioglou has drawn my attention to the fact that the cultural interpretive pattern of femininity as predefined by history, society and the diachronic poetical canon should be differentiated from the mythological personae where gender is not as verifiable.

13. In the text , feminine grammatical gender helps to inscribe sociocultural gender into a personified landscape called: . In the landscapes of Ionia and Thessaly are feminised according to their linguistic gender where the verb connotates penetration. In these cases the landscape is explicitly addressed as narratee and via the model reader the actual reader gets involved into the textually implied eroticism:

Cf. the connection of in Alexiou, M., ‘C.P. Cavafy’s “Dangerous” Drugs: Poetry, Eros and the Dissemination of Images’, in The Texts and its Margins. Post-Structuralist Approaches to Twentieth-Century Greek Literature, eds. Alexiou, M., Lambropoulos, V. (New York 1985) 157–197 Google Scholar, esp. 179.

14. A ‘script’ is regarded as ‘a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation’. Schank, R.C., Abelson, R.P., Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (New Jersey 1977) 41.Google Scholar

15. The expansion of the social and linguistic dictionary by introducing the female martyr is paralleled by Cavafy’s proposal concerning the female counterpart of actor: in opposition to the demotic :

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16. Cf. .

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18. 1) , 2) , 3) , 4) 27 1906, 2 μ.μ., 5) .

19. 1983) 107–111, 122–126.

20. , Che fece … il gran rifiuto.

21. (1) , (2) , (3) .

22. 1) .

2) , .

3)

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24. Cf. Tangopoulos’s reader-response in (1918–1924) 1985) 114–116.

25. A well known example 1957).

26. Crawford, M., Chaffin, R., ‘The Reader’s Construction of Meaning. Cognitive Research on Gender and Comprehension’, in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, eds. Flynn, E.A., Schweickart, P.P. (Baltimore 1986) 3–30 Google Scholar, quotation 16.

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28. Fetterley, J., The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington 1978) XXII Google Scholar: ‘Intellectually male, sexually female, one is in effect no one, nowhere, immasculated’.

29. Schweickart, P.P., ‘Add Gender and Stir’, Reader 13 (1985) 1–9.Google Scholar

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31. Derrida, cited in Alexiou, M., ‘C.P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs: Poetry, Eros and Dissemination of Images’, in The Text and its Margins. Post-Structuralist Approaches to Twentieth-Century Greek Literature, eds. Alexiou, M., Lambropoulos, V. (New York 1985) 157–197 Google Scholar, 181 footnote.

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33. Mother tongue can also be correlated with the devouring mouth of the sea. In the text the female voice of the sea performs the song of male poetry and connotes intensely female sexuality. In the acknowledged canon the concept of the sea remains only as grave () and as denatured mirror of erotic memories (). Consequently, the postulation of female phone vs male logos is furtherly confirmed.