Orthokostá Read online

  And on their way up to the square old Yiánnis Prásinos says, Haven’t you set it ablaze yet? And he took out his flint lighter. They were going to burn it down one way or another. But old Yiánnis, he gave them his lighter. He tossed it to them from his bench. May God forgive him.

  Orthokostá may be read as an account of the Greek Civil War as it was experienced in the villages of Kynouria: it is a fascinating and enlightening one. But it may also be read much more broadly, as an account of the human experience in the midst of extraordinarily harsh circumstances. This latter reading resonates powerfully with journalistic reports from contemporary civil wars and also with Thucydides’ description of civil strife in the earlier Peloponnesian War: “Human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself.”

  Orthokostá’s narrators reassert, via Valtinos, Thucydides’ perspective when they offer observations and reflections that encapsulate everlasting, almost biblical, truths:

  It was God’s wrath, all that, there’s nothing else you can say.

  And may all that never happen again.

  INTRODUCTION Stavros Deligiorgis

  Notre histoire est noble et tragique

  Comme le masque d’un tyran.

  —Guillaume Apollinaire, “Cors de chasse,” Alcools (1913)

  When Thanassis Valtinos first began writing, the literary climate in Greece was not particularly auspicious for fiction. Poetry was the dominant medium of expression, and formidable writers like George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, Andreas Embirikos, and Yannis Ritsos were in the forefront, giving Greek poetry both national and international acclaim. The appearance in 1963 of Valtinos’s novel Η κάθοδος των εννιά (The Descent of the Nine), however, set the pace for new forms of expression in prose fiction that had no precedent in terms of immediacy, terseness, and use of controversial subject matter—with the possible exception of the memoirs of the nineteenth-century general Ioannis Makrygiannis (published in 1907). Among Valtinos’s contemporaries few had ventured to broach the occulted subject of the 1947–49 Greek Civil War in all its problematical dimensions. And while it was obvious to everybody that Valtinos’s first novel dignified the sacrifices made in a lost ideological cause, it was also impossible for anyone to miss the harsh reality imposed by his telegraphic medium: the actual voices of the nine antigovernment rebels who perished through a variety of mishaps in an inhospitable landscape that forever withheld the redemption of the sea.

  Valtinos’s daring new voice in The Descent of the Nine had been preceded by only one Civil War novel worthy of a subject of such political complexity and demanding such self-examination—Stratis Tsirkas’s Ακυβέρνητες πολιτείες (Drifting Cities, 1961–65)—and followed by a mere handful of comparable attempts, such as Yannis Beratis’s Το Πλατύ ποτάμι (The Wide River, 1946–65), and Aris Alexandrou’s Το Κιβώτιο (The Box, 1974). But these were solitary works; Valtinos has been revisiting the Civil War tragedy in cycles over the years, with narratives both long and short, most powerfully Orthokostá (1994). Taken together with Valtinos’s other major works, Orthokostá holds pride of place as the most successful testing of the range fiction writing can achieve when plumbing the spaces between language and memory and the shading of the inhuman into the humane. History in the making seems to be the chief end of the present novel, even as its numerous asides imply the impossibility of viewing history divorced from the light of art and thought.

  Valtinos has sandwiched his narrative between two texts, one ascribed to an eighteenth-century cleric named Isaakios, perhaps the last humanist to project the virtues of ancient Arcadia onto the landscape of the southeastern Peloponnese, the Christian monastery in its middle notwithstanding; and the other an epilogue that debunks the good cleric’s utopian opener. Between the extreme sublimation at the outset and the grim realities that have intervened by the end, the novel similarly appears to have two hearts: one beating to the drum taps of the ancient epics, the other to the transport of lyricists like Tyrtaeus, Callinus, and George Seferis.

  It would be natural for an explorer of literary texts to want to prospect, upon first leafing through this book, for the presence of any sign promising the joyful experience of poetry—the aspect of any artifact, in other words, that would determine the quality of the time invested in the reading. If the precritical indicators could serve as guides and Orthokostá proved indeed to be the kind of “news that STAYS news,” in Ezra Pound’s definition, they certainly informed the impact that the book made when it was launched in 1994. A first rather short, page-long chapter, a much longer second, and then a surprising, barely twenty lines long, third must surely have raised intriguing questions regarding the conventions Orthokostá embodied. These rough, apperceptive data are the novel’s invitational markers—one thinks of the four initial notes of Beethoven’s Fifth—and a persistent reminder that the general thrust of the narrative and the relationship of its parts to the whole would need to be viewed on an equal footing with its other, more discursive materials.

  Keeping both the content and its organization constantly before the mind’s eye is a balancing act few readers of the prose classics, be they by Montaigne or Tolstoy, manage to maintain. Orthokostá’s irresistible human representations, its numerous dramatis personae coming slowly and rather mysteriously into focus, have tended to attract more vocal and more articulate responses than the book’s structure and its semi-transparent message. The terror that spread throughout the Greek countryside during the fratricidal period, roughly between 1943 and 1946, the appalling suffering it caused, as well as the survivors’ stories, would be hard to ignore. The book, however, communicates not long after its curtain raisers that it is as much about the many tortured tales men and women tell as it is about the drama of the disembodied voice-over experiences in its interviews and its surprising shorter but cryptic interjections. The latter, refrain-like sections—without which the book would hardly make sense—serve to reorient the reader away, momentarily, from the chronicles of the direct rightist or leftist depositions and toward a more meditative mode, in effect, toward the enigma of the aesthetic composition of the book as a whole. Shifting between elegy and anecdote, exorcism and self-exculpatory soliloquy, tableau and interview, novella and epiphany, Orthokostá exhibits virtuoso syncopation on the one hand and the infinite drama of the themes of the classical canon on the other.

  The book raised a furor when it first appeared in 1994 for presumably favoring one side of the conflict it portrayed over the other. Is it possible that so many of its critics read past the material in any single account (or the ironies inherent in the succession of any two) in an attempt to mine their subject matter for evidence of the author’s—Mr. Thanassis Valtinos of Main Street’s—own predilections? Was the medium of the many narratives so transparent and apparently without texture that they took it for raw, uninflected content? The numerous speaking sections of Orthokostá were easily construed as the evidentiary grail so many cultural historians are typically in search of. Even the possibility that the Rashomon effect might hint at the problematical nature of the novel, a text in the process of serial riddling, took second place to the quest for the oral histories covering the specific three terrible years that preceded the outbreak of the equally terrible Civil War in 1947. The knee-jerk reception of these critics to Orthokostá, personal penchants aside, might be explained in part by one legal technicality. Greece was probably the last anti-Axis country in Europe to pass legislation acknowledging that there had been resistance against the World War II Occupation powers. When the belated law was passed in 1984, both conservatives and leftists vehemently denied the other any right to claim participation in the Resistance. All this a full forty years after the withdrawal of the last German troops from Greece and only ten years before the appearance of Orthokostá, with its provocative polyph
ony.

  There have indeed been the exceptional readers who sensed an “impersonal” air to the book. They recognized Valtinos’s attraction to the slice-of-life, unsentimental folk forms that had informed a large number of his earlier works and to the unself-conscious, unschooled speech patterns of the man in the village coffeehouse, whether in Lesbos (You Will Find My Bones Under Rain, 1992) or in the Kastri epicenter of Orthokostá. Valtinos’s often nameless speakers parallel his own rather oblique presence in the larger story. Starting out as the primary listener to and transcriber of the numerous reminiscences, he comes across at first as the anthropologist’s participant observer and only gradually as the native interrogator’s amanuensis. The writer’s intermittent visibility in many of the narratives is but the self-ghosting of “Valtinos” the virtual editor who leaves no trace of his hand behind, no hint that he determined the order or form in which the book would greet or confront its readers. As the protagonists’ sex and political persuasions become progressively clearer, however, the novel appears to be concerned less with the characters’ existential predicaments, and lesser still with Greece’s role in the geo-ideological theater of the Balkans in the 1940s. Far from conflating the conventional in art with the historical, Orthokostá does not miss a chance to foreground the musicality of its linguistic medium and the logic of its structure. In doing so it appeals on almost every page to the range of its readers’ relationships to the craft of literature in general and the concision of poetry in particular.

  Gradations of timbre abound. Some sections read like officers’ reports to headquarters, others like legal treatises. They are the sections that make use of the purist, katharevousa, idiom by the speakers, who range from schoolteachers to lawyers to Party cadres. Other sections feature the reluctant responses to questions by an unidentified interlocutor. The philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Nikolai Leskov, observed that survivors of the carnage of World War I, contrary to expectations, were less not more talkative. The chronicler in Orthokostá, several times, gives way to the rhapsode, like the unidentified narrator (Homer?) in the Odyssey who, at some point, asks his fictional hero, “What did you do next, Odysseus?” The mix of the individual and the supra-individual in the novel suggests that its core of insight and sympathy lies not in the individual stories but rather in their seemingly unedited transcription as oral accounts that somehow reached the domain of the page in the form of an affidavit. Convention and invention are so tightly intertwined in the structure of the book readers may forget to shift from the substance of each first-person point of view to the page’s unacknowledged origin. The Aristotelian unities of action, place, and time have been replaced in the novel by a roaming ear that captures inflections and idiosyncratic expressions about incidents beyond count that each chapter introduces with dreadful timing.

  The periodic cross-fading of personalities in their relationship to time and the landscape of the Peloponnese underscores Valtinos’s implied insistence that he is dealing in uncoached random reports. Somehow, magically, Valtinos’s wildly variegated statements exhibit an interconnectedness and relevance to one another reminiscent of wind-blown papiers trouvés. Cervantes’ hero Don Quixote at some point in the novel that bears his name expresses an irrepressible desire to read every torn piece of paper littering the streets of the city. In practical terms, Valtinos has often acknowledged the same urge. His novel Data from the Decade of the Sixties (1989) exhibited a gargantuan appetite for the discarded and found scraps Cervantes writes about. Newspaper clippings, illiterate application forms scavenged from office wastebaskets, and letters of the lovelorn to a Greek Miss Lonelyhearts make up the Data “novel.” The transitionless linking together of so many sections of Orthokostá leaves no doubt that this novel is erected on a more elevated plane and in more closely figured themes than the docu-fantasies of his other books. The apparently unmediated orality in Orthokostá exhibits the stark ethopoeia of Aeschylus’s Persians and Thucydides’ unapologetic speeches in the genocidal Melian expedition. Both, like Orthokostá, make for fractured readings in times of fractured collectivity.

  Once past the prefatory utopia Valtinos sets the tone for the kind of communication that has neither Bishop Isaakios’s euphuism nor the detachment of its modernist retraction in the finale. The page-long first chapter contains a woman’s recollection of the summer wind carrying cinders from houses burning in neighboring villages. She cites the urgency of men’s messages to their families to pick up everything and make themselves scarce because bad things are coming their way. The sense of approaching danger, the rumors of violence spreading facelessly like a contagion, is so gripping that one forgets that this is happening in Arcadia, where such things are not supposed to happen. The unthinkable is becoming real. A local can tell that the smoke is not coming from burning vegetation. Houses that had not been bombed by Germans or blown up by Italians are now being torched, one after the other, with the help of a broomstick set afire by a fellow Greek’s flint lighter. This man, mentioned by name, even exchanges a quip or two with the members of the committee that was carrying out orders as directed by the Party chapter chairwoman.

  Like Hawthorne’s “Custom-House” overture to The Scarlet Letter, Valtinos’s audible hovering in portions of Orthokostá ensures, primarily, that its realist frontage does not falter, that its linguistic cast will give pleasure, and that its apport to the imagination will be to so conceal art that it will come across as artless. And what better masking of the conventions of the techne in any art than the apparent artlessness in direct voice transcriptions? Valtinos’s lifelong contributions to Greek cinema, including widely known collaborations with Theodoros Angelopoulos, may go a long way toward explaining his method: no genre does a better job of obscuring the seams of editing, the splicing and shuffling of “takes,” than the documentary. The framing mode of the audio-to-paper transfer is made explicit in other books by Valtinos. A cassette recorder is mentioned in Deep Blue Almost Black (1985), and The Life and Times of Andreas Kordopatis (1964) is an oral account partially based on an emigrant’s journal. Regarding Orthokostá, it matters little whether the published material is lifted from “live” recordings or simply “hearsay.” Even if Valtinos had done “the police in different voices” (T. S. Eliot’s original title for The Waste Land) in the forty-nine chapters of Orthokostá, this in itself would be no mean feat. Neither Bishop Isaakios’s “blurb” on the land around Orthokostá nor the Triple A–like epilogue would lie beyond Valtinos’s inventive abilities. In the end both are fictions that serve, each in its own way, to distance the reader from the gore and suffering associated with Orthokostá.

  Speakers in the book are either warned, typically by another speaker, not to mention any names, or they suddenly turn silent with an expression that comes close to a gruff, but ambiguous “I’m done talking.” The concluding reference to much that is unspeakable in Valtinos often assumes the gravity of historical closure (“The rebel insurrection was over. . . . It was over for good,” the Greek verb in this context being a derivative of catharsis). Occasionally the account progresses towards a note of exorcism. The parting shots of most of the recorded stories often end with a laconic one-liner (“that bloodshed still hounds him”). The beginnings, on the other hand, tend to be almost always teasers that, by dint of repetition, could as easily apply to the captive audience as to the speaker: “We were arrested when . . .” Once the captivity narrative gets under way, however, the contents are surprising in their immediacy. Both captors and captives, in the hundreds, are ill-equipped for the mountainous terrain, both are chronically undernourished, few attempt to escape their pre-ordained ranks, and both stoically accept the long marches that serve to maintain a supply of men and women hostages to be culled for summary retaliatory executions whenever the captors are attacked.

  The oft-intuited dilemma in Orthokostá, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” sounds painfully familiar from the ancient historians’ accounts of cities destroyed for not choosing neut
rality and then destroyed, a second time, for having chosen it. Like all complex epics Orthokostá is rich in war paradoxes. Glaucus’s meeting with Diomedes in the sixth book of the Iliad manages to tinge the action of the entire poem with the possibility of somber ironies (“Go find yourself other Greeks to kill . . .”) where one would least expect to find them. In one sense there is little that is peculiarly Peloponnesian in the list of the Orthokostá atrocities. The ancient lyricists such as Tyrtaeus and Callinus testify to the opposite. And so do Homer and Sophocles when it comes to orders that the executed not be buried. Were it not for the gods’ daily intervention Achilles’ punishment of the dead Hector’s body in the Iliad would have resulted in the same kind of posthumous disfigurement a man in Orthokostá suffers at the hands of his torturers. “Mémos’s Fields” refers to a spot named for a local official and torture victim who was shot during a march he could not keep up with because of the beatings he had received on the soles of his feet. As with the heroes of antiquity, place names are given to commemorate a victim’s tragic death. Walter Benjamin’s eighteenth thesis on the art of the storyteller—once again from his essay on Nikolai Leskov—sums up the etiological presentation as one that allows the “voice of nature” to speak, including the dark work of hatred. An anonymous initiative in itself, the naming of Mémos’s Fields does not monumentalize the circumstance of victimization, nor is it triumphalist. One corner of the countryside that had been repeatedly crisscrossed by forced marches of hundreds and hundreds of civilian “enemies of the people” now has a voice and a face.