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The Greekness of Modern Greek Surrealism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Christopher Robinson
Christopher Robinson*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford
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Extract

Surrealism as a full-blown artistic movement, or, as many of its exponents preferred to see it, a full-blown way of life, was very much a French product. The line of descent from Jarry’s Ubu (1896), via the self-conscious modernism of Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, to the Dadaist activities of 1916 represents the continuation of that semi-official anti-culture which had existed throughout nineteenth-century France. With the destruction of the officially sanctioned culture of Nationalism and Catholic conformism in the débâcle of the First World War, there was a sudden vacuum in French intellectual circles which the anti-culture was quite ready to fill. In the words of an early member of the movement, Roger Vailland: ‘Surrealism was not a literary school. It was above all a common ground and meeting-place for young petit-bourgeois intellectuals particularly aware of the futility of every activity expected of them by their background and their era’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 7 , 1981 , pp. 119 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1981

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References

1. From Le Surréalisme contre la révolution (1947), quoted by Nadeau, M., The History of Surrealism (London, 1973), p. 13 (English translation by R. Howard).Google Scholar

2. Manifeste du surréalisme (Paris, 1924) and Second manifeste du surréalisme (Paris, 1929).

3. This work, which appeared in 1921, is often regarded as the first totally surrealist text. It contains, however, distinct echoes of Lautréamont and Rimbaud.

4. Karandonis, A., (Athens, 1958), p. 185.Google Scholar

5. This appeared as a supplement to the first manifesto. It is a series of thirty-two sections or prose-poems, presumably intended to illustrate the principles of the manifesto.

6. This is very reminiscent of the ideas put forward in Henry de Montherlant’s essay Syncrétisme et alternance (Paris, 1926), particularly: ‘… l’état lyrique est l’état du pur amour, et le pur amour ne peut exclure. Le pur amour égalise tout. Nous voyons enfin l’unité’. By pur Montherlant does not mean a moral classification, for he goes on to say: ‘J’ai désiré des bêtes, des plantes, des femmes, des êtres qui m’étaient proches, très proches, par le sang. Je pense que c’est cela la santé; la possession sexuelle n’étant qu’un essai de la possession totale, des hommes qui sont bornés dans le désir, je leur crois aussi l’âme bornée’. The rapprochement Embirikos/Montherlant shows that Surrealism is by no means a sufficient explanation for all facets of the former’s ideas.

7. Quoted by Nadeau, M., op. cit., p. 98 Google Scholar n. 13.

8. Breton, A., Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris, 1972), pp. 76–7 Google Scholar. Gershman, H. S. offers an interesting schematic view of how Surrealism can be seen as attempting such a process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in the second appendix to his The Surrealist Revolution in France (Michigan, 1969), pp. 170–1.Google Scholar

9. Tzara, T., Le Surréalisme et l’après-guerre (Paris 1948), p. 74.Google Scholar

10. VII (1944), 425–8.

11. Apart from Gatsos wrote nothing which would fall into the loose category of ‘literature’, though he was later a prolific writer of lyrics for popular songs.

12. Notably, VII (1944), 15–36.Google Scholar

13. VII (1944), 347–62.

14. ‘Odysseus Elytis on His Poetry: From an Interview with Ivar Ivask’, Books Abroad, XLIX (1975), 631. The interview was given in 1972.

15. VII (1944), 96–101.

16. ‘Odysseus Elytis on His Poetry: From an Interview with Ivar Ivask’, Books Abroad, XLIX (1975), 631 and 642.

17. cf. Elytis’ own comments on Eluard’s imagery, in his prefatory essay to selected translations, II (1936), 230.

18. The collection was published in 1940, but this poem first appeared in I (1935), 587.

19. Vitti, M., analysing this same poem in (Athens, 1977), pp. 144–5 Google Scholar, brings out the connexions between this sort of writing and the French tradition of poésie pure.

20. Karandonis, A., p. 192.Google Scholar

21. op. cit., p. 193.

22. The first quatrain of the sonnet ‘Correspondances’ from Les Fleurs du Mal. The French surrealists wrote approvingly of Baudelaire’s dissatisfaction with surface reality and his ‘spiritual appetite’.

23. From the Ivask interview, Books Abroad, XLIX (1975), 642.

24. ‘Aspects of Surrealism in the works of Odysseus Elytis’, Books Abroad, XLIX (1975), 685–9.

25. See footnote 8 above.

26. I am not denying the political affiliations of the Greek writers as individuals, but drawing a contrast with the decision, expressed in the pamphlet Au grand jour of 1927, officially to link French Surrealism with the Communist Party, followed by the break between the two provoked by the Soviet expulsion of Trotsky in 1929. Elytis’ refusal to answer the queries made by Papatzonis, in his article VII (1944), 340–6, about the connexion between Surrealism and Communism, is symptomatic of the Greek attitude. It was a non-issue. Equally, therefore, no Greek poet was ever faced with a choice between his literary and his political beliefs, as was the case with Aragon and Eluard, who had to sever their ties with Breton’s group, in 1932 and 1938 respectively, because of their continued commitment to Communism.

27. I am here adopting the view of the relationship between katharevousa and demotic set out by Mirambel, A. in ‘Les aspects psychologiques du purisme dans la Grèce moderne’, Journal de Psychologie, IV (1964), 405–36 Google Scholar. Unfortunately there has as yet been no significant psycholinguistic research into this important question.

28. This is not to deny that at times the use can be humorous or ironic, especially where shifts of register occur. However, one must take into account statements such as that made by Engonopoulos in a note to the re-edition of his first two collections (Athens, 1966; pp. 153–63). He stresses the unity of all levels of Greek language within the cultural heritage, and defends his entitlement to use elements from all these levels to enrich his poetry in the same way that he synthesizes elements of archaic, Byzantine and popular art in his paintings.

29. Elytis’ own phrase, as quoted in the Ivask interview, Books Abroad, XLIX (1975), 631.

30. Hence Elytis’ surprise at the ambivalent attitude to Surrealism expressed by Sikelianos in a review of contemporary attitudes to modern poetry organised by the periodical Sikelianos’ views are analysed by Elytis in VII (1944), 356–8. Hence too Elytis’ emphasis in the same article (p. 359) on the ‘local’ parameters within which Surrealism must work: ‘And I believe that this general surrealist spirit must take its own separate forms of release in each different place in accordance with the special historical, social and climatological parameters which define it’.