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Modern as Opposed to What?
In order to understand
better what it means to measure the Modern against the Greek,
against the model of the classical, let's spend some time looking
at the writer honored by this Professorship, the Greek poet Constantine
P. Cavafy. At first glance, Cavafy, who lived between 1863-1933,
does not seem to be the typical Greek poet. He was born and died
in Alexandria, Egypt, and never lived in Greece. He earned his
living as a civil servant in the Egyptian Ministry of Public
Works. He insisted that he was not "Greek" but "Hellenic."
The language of much of his formal education was English. He
is even rumored to have spoken Greek with an English accent.
He circulated only 154 short poems, which he never collected
in a book.
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YOUNG MEN OF SIDON (A.D. 400) The actor they'd brought in to entertain them The room opened out on the garden There were readings from Meleager, Krinagoras,
Rhianos. "I don't like that quatrain at all. |
The poem begins with a performance: an actor is entertaining a small group of young Sidonians. In his first performative move, he recites Hellenistic epigrams by Meleager, Krinagoras, and Rhianos. This choice seems to fit perfectly with the aesthetic, physical, and chronological horizons of the environment. But then he makes another move, a bold one, when he shifts back more than two centuries before the Hellenistic poets he had just selected to recite the Aeschylian epitaph. Appropriately enough, this performative choice is accompanied by a marked change in delivery, as he stresses, "maybe more than he should have," certain words in the text.
At this point, whether by design or chance, the actor's performance acquires an agonistic character, at least for one member of the audience. We don't know whether it is because it appears to be challenging the taste, the morality, or the conduct of its listeners. The point, however, is that "a vivacious young man" jumps up and accepts the challenge, joining the agon and offering his view of the epigram. The kid's passion for grammata is clear, and predictably his maturity has been debated repeatedly by critics. The stark contrast between the old tragedian and the intemperate youth is still shocking to many people. What is even more shocking is that not only does the youth explain with great conviction the meaning of the epigram, but he even corrects it by counter-proposing his own epigram to an artist's life, thus adding a strong creative dimension to his own performance and making the actor's performance appear like a pale imitation of an already weak original. We hear his voice clearly: Don't count as a major achievement your place among the herd of an Athenian army; instead, claim your own unique feats eponymously.
The contest is not so easily won, however, since Cavafy is undermining
the Sidonian's victory with the date he gives in the poem's title.
How valid is the young man's critique of Aeschylus and his own
improvised epigram when all this intelligence is exhibited at
a private, privileged, perfumed gathering of immature youths
at the end of the ancient era in the rich Hellenized Phoenician
port of Sidon? Where is the space for a young man to display
and distinguish himself? What audience is there to appreciate
his virtuosity and make it memorable? If the goal is, in Cavafy's
word, mneme, perhaps Aeschylus was right to ignore his victories
at theater contests and record on his tomb his participation
in a more glorious contention, the Athenian victory in Marathon
in 490 BC. His polis gave him the opportunity to appear in battle
before both Greeks and Persians and to show in deed who he was.
Can Sidon, the commercial metropolis, do the same for its young
intellectuals in A.D. 400?
By thus situating his ancient quotation, by having Aeschylus cited on the site of Sidon. Cavafy declared a contest with the young man. Whether he can win, depends on us. If we view the poem as a study of agon which directs us to engage in a performative understanding of the past, we can in our turn read it in an appropriately agonistic manner that honors the ethics of appearance and the achievements of virtuosity. We see the high stakes mentioned in one of the two Aeschylean passages whose emphatic delivery irrated the Sidonian youth; alken d'eudokimon. Alke means "strength displayed in action." All the participants in this diachronic contest must seek the "renowned valor" that can be achieved only through great virtuosity in public action.
Action embodies freedom and is located in the realm of public appearance, the realm of the world. The actuality of free action consists in performance. In autonomous action, the performing act makes human freedom appear. Thus action is the self-presentation of freedom in the world through performance. Performance is showmanship-it shows the man, it shows who he is. This performance is evaluated according to its virtuosity. Virtuosity is not pure skill but mastery that resonates with virtu, with virtue. Performance carries with it a fundamental accountability to the world itself. If action is performance, then performance is virtuosity judged according to the greatness of its achievement. Consequently, performance should be understood in agonistic, not aesthetic, terms. Performance is agonistic appearance in public, and virtuosity is a great public performance.
As we can see, in this short poem Cavafy has posited in very dramatic terms the question of modernity: What does it mean to be modern, not in the sense of living today but in the sense of living in the shadow of antiquity-in the sense of measuring your time and your work against something that appears unsurpassingly classical? What can you say about Aeschylus in A.D. 400, when you are a perfumed Greek-speaking youth living in post-classical Sidon? What can you say about Aeschylus in A.D. 1920, when you are a middle-aged Greek-speaking civil servant living in modern Alexandria? And how can you say it when your language is still that of Aeschylus, that is, Greek, only modern?
This is the question of modern Greek, the question of modernity that has been preoccupying us in various manifestations for centuries now: What does it mean to be modern when the opposite of "Modern" is Greek? Leaving Cavafy aside for a moment, listen to the voice of another Egyptian, the Jewish writer Andre Aciman, who teaches Comparative Literature at the City University Graduate Center. On September 11, 2001, he is ruminating on the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York as he and his twin boys join the human stream headed uptown on Broadway. While they are trying to flee the disaster, his mind travels back to two moments in history. The first one is painfully personal: "Holding each boy by his hand, I remembered an identical moment on such a walk with my mother as we hurried home during a sudden blackout in Egypt in 1956 during the Suez crisis. I wanted to think of how she had handled the moment, wanted to think of the layers of ironies involved now, as I remembered that the same anti-Western and anti-Semitic forces that finally ruined our lives in Egypt would, once again, wearing the vestments of Anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, touch my life once more" (NY Times, 9/16/2001). But our author cannot focus on that 1956 incidentbecause images of the present catastrophe are racing before his eyes.
He continues to walk uptown with his kids and hundreds of thousands of people. And as he is trying desperately to make sense of what is going on around him, he travels back to an earlier moment in history, and returns to the Persian Wars, the time of Aeschylus: He continues to walk uptown with his kids and hundreds of thousands of people. And as he is trying desperately to make sense of what is going on around him, he travels back to an earlier moment in history, and returns to the Persian Wars, the time of Aeschylus: “As I walk with my children, my mind turns back to another blackout reported, not by the networks, but by Herodotus, when the Athenians emptied their city and massed in all manner of ships and boats, while the Persians who had invaded the abandoned city put the Acropolis to the torch, burning what Athens was most proud of, because in burning it they were torching something in the Athenian soul as well. Those who saw the fire watched in silence and horror, no less helpless than those who watched the repeated images of the airplane boring into the second tower, of the collapsing towers, of the billowing smoke that spelled the end.” The morning after, when a French tourist asks the author where the two towers stood, he helps Aciman complete his mental trip to Athens. This is how his article ends: "For an instant, I imagined myself in ancient Greece, asking an Athenian the question the Frenchman had put to me. Where would the temple have stood? Pointing to the Acropolis, the man would have indicated a smoldering mound overlooking his town. And yet, I find something heartening in this. After the Persian invaders had left Attica, the Athenians rebuilt their temple and made it the marvel which still stands on the Acropolis today. We can and must always rebuild our monuments. As for the barbarians, we know what happened to them."
Using Herodotus even in the midst of devastation and panic in order to make some of the present when your own personal history is not enough-this is what it means to be modern. Using classical Marathon, Hellenistic Sidon, and 20th century Alexandria to make sense of the present, as Cavafy did-this is what it means to be modern Greek. Aciman wants modern monuments that compare with the Acropolis and even compete with it. He tries to comprehend the disaster and the remain modern first by thinking of his own history, and failing, and then by thinking of the Greeks and trying to envision an acropolis of the future in New York. To make sense as monuments, the Towers and any future buildings in New York must be compared to the Acropolis. This attitude is an appropriately agonistic and performative one, like those of the Sidonian youth and the Alexandrian poet. As we saw, through its own virtuosity, Cavafy's poem offers a counter-model both to the Modernist interpretive approach to antiquity and to the Post-modern formalist play with it. By simultaneously quoting an ancient and a Hellenistic (that is, belated) source; by focusing on reading not as a task but as a display of virtuosity; by treating memory as fame, rather than responsibility; by emphasizing the performative dimension of doing and understanding, it proposes and exemplifies an agonistic approach-one inspired by the ethics of worldly virtuosity. Such an approach does not assign itself the secondary role of serving the ancients or the ascetic vocation of revealing their hidden depths. Instead of a scribal or archaeological disposition, it adopts a dramatic one that views understanding as a public performance. By so doing, it responds to Nietzsche's challenge that the Classics should not be imitated or superseded but surpassed by action.
There is an interesting difference, though, between the two Egyptian authors I have been discussing. Aciman cites the ancients in translation. To him, they are a monument. Cavafy cites them in the original. To him, they are living interlocutors. He can still perform Aeschylus in Greek. To him, Greek is a direct source of both reverence and empowerment. He dealt with these two sides of tradition in a little-known posthumous poem called "Dynamosis," written in 1903.
When we examine Cavafy's art, we should never overlook the fact that he writes in Greek-not ancient, medieval, or modern but plain Greek, the Greek of reflection and deliberation. "Dynamosis" is an eminent example of this language. Its ten lines incorporate an entire philosophical vocabulary: dunamis, pneuma, pothos, parabasis, ethimon, paradeigma, euthyteta, hedone, deiaskalia, phobia, katastrophe, praxis, anaptyxis, arête, gnosis, etc. This vocabulary draws on, and resonates with, the long history of Greek-the language of the Presocratics, the Epicureans, the Church Fathers, the Byzantine scholiasts, the Enlighteners, the freedom fighters, the Postmarxists. Despite the historical frequencies of its diction, the text does not advance an argument for continuity, linguistic or otherwise. It constitutes a poetic meditation on the vernacular of philosophy.
Cavafy's Greek is not diachronic but precise or, to use his word, upright. It is able to name ideas and principles as they emerge in human consciousness and becomes issues for consideration. As such, it is a critical language: it assesses foundational claims. It is also able to recall and activate the history of those claims through various schools of thought, faith, and polities. In a sense, for those engaged in the Western tradition, this language needs no translation: its exact vocabulary operates on a shared level of abstraction. Cavafy can always be read in the original. In another sense, this language can sustain almost any translation: its exacting vocabulary in the end makes each new rendition its own.
For example, a contemporary rendition of "Dynamosis" might produce a poem dealing with knowledge, power, law, justice, subjection, transgression, paradigm, desire, and pleasure-a stunning array of notions and precepts debated in the postmodern world. And yet different renditions, equally faithful to the original, might produce a poem closer to Modernist. Victorian, classical, or other worldviews. This is not because the text is open to many interpretations but because it is composed in Greek-the philosophical idiom that, over the centuries, remains perfectly accessible and thus refuses to become a translation issue.
The twentieth century generated all kinds of extravagant, mystical claims regarding Greek by thinkers who approached it in originary terms. Cavafy understands it very differently-as a capacity, rather than a source. He illustrates his view in this poem on the violent power of virtuous knowledge. Greek, he proposes, is the capacity to think destructively and grow creatively. It is the admixture of goodness and excellence, merit and might, beauty and prowess found in arête and resulting in dunamis.
With these insights gained from the poem "Dynamosis," we can return to the Young Men of Sidon. In its Greek original, the use of the ancient quote is very different from the interpolation of Greek fragments in, say, Pound, Joyce, or Heidegger. Aeschylus, the Hellenistic actor, the Sidonian youth, Cavafy as well as his Greek readers all speak and read and write the same language. To the contemporary Greek, the ancient citation does not have an effect of alienation, defamiliarization, or learnedness but rather the impact of recognition: he recognizes these words, whose delivery spans some 25 centuries, as his own words-he recalls them to mind and know them anew. Thus to him their performative use operates as renewal and transmission as well. A virtuousic performance like Cavafy's keeps the language alive, functional, dynamic-capable of producing a poem like this one which, come to think of it, would be linguistically quite accessible to Aeschylus himself. Through it, the Athenian, the Sidonian, and the Alexandrian wordsmiths converse.
This on-going conversation makes the traditional distinction between Ancients and Moderns rather impossible to sustain in the case of the Greeks who, at least by virtue of their language, cannot be made to fit into either category. Here one is tempted to resort to Derridean terminology and call the Greeks the "supplement" of modernity, the force that cannot be contained by the opposition of modernity to antiquity precisely because this force still writes Greek, it still uses words that Derrida has made famous such as grammatology, abyss, polemos, philia, pharmakon, ousia, hymen, tympan, parergon, and aporia. Alternatively, one is tempted to take advantage of post-colonial approaches and characterize the Erasmian pronunciation (which still prevails in classics) as a voice of imperial command, one that colonized and disciplined the speech of those who were still speaking Greek and were never consulted their views (or should I say their vowels?) on the matter. Both these explanations (the deconstructionist and the post-colonial one) would claim some victim status for post-classical Greek and its speakers but would not take us far enough. The situation is more complicated and cannot be settled with dialectical oppositions of any kind.
The question I have raised in this talk, which honors the first endowed chair in Modern Greek on our campus, is the following: if Modern is the opposite of Greek, is then Modern Greek a contradiction in terms? How can a field, a culture, an identity be simultaneously Modern and Greek, present and ancient? The work of Cavafy provides several intriguing answers. There is a performative quality, an agonistic practice that distinguishes Greeks from both the Ancients and the Moderns-the plain fact that they have been speaking Greek. That is a quality that has been familiar to many eminent translators of ancient texts since, sooner or later, in trying to render them in an accessible idiom, they begin noticing people who communicate every day in Greek. Thus there is some important cultural and intellectual work performed by Greeks today that often goes unrecognized, which is that, through their masterful rhetorical action, they keep the language of Aeschylus, Meleager, and Cavafy potent and creative. Not that they are not haunted by their own sense of modernity or the nostalgia for a glorious era. But the critical difference is that they do not depend on the mediation of translation; in other words, there are no Greeks in their lives-they are the Greeks. Listen, for example, to the following rendition of the classic rembetiko song "Anoixe, anoixe…" by Yannis Papaioannou from the 1930's. Going back some 27 centuries, this rendition replaces the chorus of the song with another paraklausitheron, Alcaeus fragment No. 374, in the original. The recording was made in 1997.
I am not making an argument here for originality or authenticity, for autochthony or continuity. I am only trying to outline the rhetoric of Greek agonism, which is still practiced with a virtuosic ethos. When it comes to the importance of the Classics and the uses of the ancient tradition, we can learn a lot from the quoting methods of Greek literature and thought of the last 500 years. First, because the modern writer who quotes the ancients in the same language is doing, in certain respects at least, what the ancients were doing when they were citing their predecessors. Second, because this exercise enables him to bridge large chronological gaps as, for example, when he revisits the Medeival and Renaissance periods-the eras of Byzantine commentary and reappropriation. Most importantly, because the agonistic engagement of Greek speakers with Greek texts, marked by its remarkable etymological, grammatical, and rhetorical intimacy with antiquity, suggests the possibility of viewing the entire classical tradition not as something old, alien, or melancholic but as an invitation to a competitive exchange of gifts and to a dramatic display of mutual excellence. Whether they choose to place the memorial of this agon in the Marathonian grove, in ancient tragedy, or in modern poetry, the Greeks (always simultaneously "ancient" and "modern") seek and reward with immortal fame the ethic of virtuosic strength displayed in free action. And they do so in almost the same words for some 3000 years.
Because of certain ethnic stereotypes, and because of its Mediterranean origins, Hellenism until recently was portrayed as a "shame" culture. Today though, we notice an interesting shift in scholarship toward a performative approach, which seems to make much more sense. Although shame is certainly an element in the Greek social fabric, its importance appears much less decisive. To raise a crudely empirical question, when we think of Greeks we know, is shame their first quality that comes to mind? Not very likely! On the contrary, what is the feature that has distinguished 20th century Greeks, that has made people like N. Kazantzakis, M. Callas, D. Mitropoulos, M. Mercouri, A. Onassis, A. Papandreou, C. Castoriadis, or M. Theodorakis world-famous? What is it that has made them appear "larger than life"? I submit to you that it is the pursuit of fee action, public performance-agonistic display of excellence. If you recall how Zorba, in the book and the film, constantly fashions his character or how the Cephallonians, in the book and the film Corelli's Mandolin, stage their surrender to the Italians outside their City Hall, you will see exactly what I mean.
Thus with the help of the defiant Greek villagers, the help of Cavafy's verses, and the help of all those who worked so hard to endow this Chair and give a great name to the Greeks, we can begin to understand the meaning of "Modern Greek" better. "Modern Greek" refers to a double tension that is the hallmark of Hellenism. First, the syncretism of ancient and new, classical and belated, old and modern-the mixture of diverse traditions, beliefs, and idioms. Second, the agonistic pursuit of excellence in public action, the simultaneous pursuit of freedom and competition. Because of this creative tension, the only way to be Greek is to be modern, and the only way to be modern is to be Greek-to seek immortal fame not through any ancients or past glories but through your own virtuosic strength which shows who you are for everybody to see and admire. We may therefore conclude that, far from being opposites, as they may first appear, "Modern" and "Greek" are the two sides of the same coin, the twin conditions of the same performance. It is only fitting, then, that our celebration today will culminate at 8pm in such a performance by Mr. Yannis Simonides, one based on Cavafy's life and work. I hope you will all be there to celebrate the Cavafy Professorship in Modern Greek Studies.