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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003):  273-278

Styliani Kokkali

Université de Montréal

Athens, 1998

Eleni Politou-Marmarinou & Sophia Denissi, eds., Identity and Alterity in Literature, 18th-20th c. Athens: Domos, 2000-2001; 3 vols.

The present review discusses the convergent and conflicting ideas and positions articulated in the presentations of the 2^nd International Congress organized by the Greek General and Comparative Literature Association in Athens in November 1998. By reviewing a select number of essays presented at the conference, I will suggest that the wider scope of intellectual direction challenges the three pivotal concepts which entitled the conference: identity, alterity and comparative literature.

The main orientation of the texts presented in the first volume of the proceedings bears on the position of comparative literature at the threshold of the 21^st century, as well as on theoretical, historical and aesthetic methodological concerns. The introductory presentation by Eleni Politou-Marmarinou brings forth an issue that preoccupied the majority of Greek participants at the conference: that of a possible identity for Modern Greek Literature and its conception as a crossroads of multiple alterities. Politou-Marmarinou, by means of a short historical account, suggests that, since its very "beginning," Greek identity and Modern Greek Literature have been conceptualized within a syncretic dimension and have been constituted, though not reductively, by means of a constructive exchange between identity and alterity. The latter is the site of the articulation and inscription of specificity. In fact, it is not so much the actual "beginning" which interests either Politou-Marmarinou and the other Greek participants, as much as it is the very constructive and positive co-existence and interaction of polyvalent "mythical" and "new" alterities within a so-called "single" identity.

Theoharoula Niftanidou's more theoretically oriented presentation seeks to deconstruct the constitution of "literary similitude" among literary texts, by foregrounding the act of "co-readership" or synthetic (composite) re-viewing within conceptual syncresis. For instance, any pivotal concept (i.e., "silence," "utopia") constitutes a positive, generic, and alternative, third space in which the same and the Other co-exist, in which the syncresis between texts deploys itself in composite strata, aiming at constantly re-constructing the (syncretic) perspective of reading of those texts. Therefore, [end page 273] for Niftanidou, a concept is both the means of and a necessary condition for: 1) the articulation of a potential "similitude" among texts; and, 2) the emergence of "Comparative Poetics" as a research field with a specific orientation and a concrete methodological consciousness.

In an attempt to tackle the question of comparativism in relation to literary theory and interdisciplinarity, Eduardo Coutinho advocates an archeology of shifts of focus or scope within the field of comparative literature since its very inception, which is to be grounded in the 19^th century. By the mid-twentieth century the disciplinary interest and goal of comparative literature for self-definition were re-evaluated. A shift took place, from the establishment of homogenizing concepts and fixed disciplinary frontiers, to a self-definition conjoined to the transformational process of the fields of literary theory and historiography. Coutinho's conclusion encapsulates the leading argument of his essay: that comparativism cannot be conceived outside a dialectic interaction with theory.

The presentations gathered in the second volume tackle questions related to literary myths, genres, and themes, as well as the interactive contingency that these concepts entertain with alterity/sameness and identity. By undertaking a syncretic discursive process, the participants' readings of various literary and theoretical texts, as well as their particular critical interests, seek: 1) a de-naturalization and re-evaluation of formerly universal and canonized conceptualizations of literary myths and genres; and, 2) the articulation of the inherently heterogeneous and fragmentary synthesis of the above concepts. My own readings of certain presentations will focus on the issue of myth in Western literary and philosophical texts.

The constructive "nature" of myth is brought up by Pierre Brunel. In fact, his Deleuzian rhizomatic attraction to the oscillation between identity and alterity exemplified within nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets and philosophers turns his own reading of these texts into a self-consciously hybrid and fragmented mismatch of quotations from Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Lyotard, Pessoa, De Campos, Verlaine and Cavafy. All in a rather exhausting (although stylistically creative and unconventional) search for a possible theoretical and complicitous "middle" ground vacillating between identity and alterity. Western mythology serves as a rhetorical tool in order to negotiate dialectically the gap between identity and alterity, as Brunel perceives it within Western philosophers and poets.

Z.I. Siaflekis raises the inventive and transformative aspect of parody in eighteenth-century theatrical plays, and studies it in relation to Homeric literary echoes. Literary parody, although a thematic reproduction of former myths, is related to, and even stylistically determined by, the histo-[end page 274]rical times in which mythical re-writings are produced. Moreover, it is through the discrepancy that emerges at the moment of the discursive interaction between the Homeric myth and the discourse parodying it that an ambiguous space between identity and alterity comes up. And it is such ambiguity which allows for an irreducible dialectical exchange between the subject and the object of the parody.

Dorothy Figueira's reading of myth addresses the issue of the Vedic Arian race from a postcolonial perspective. She brings forward the hypothesis that the Arian myth was constructed as "the Orient"/Other with which the Eurocentric Self of "the West" would identify and eventually assume the position of historical subject. Moreover, the hypothesis proposes that the Aryan myth of origin and identity formation, constituted, for both the colonial European West in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and for India itself, a theoretical tool aiming to articulate ideological and nationalist interests. Therefore, the Vedic interpretation of the Western world's origins, articulated initially by the German Romantics and further developed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries by European and Indian linguists, counteracted "traditional" myths of Western European origins by promoting the Aryan alternative to the already existing Jewish, Egyptian or Greek conceptualizations.

Within a poststructuralist theoretical perspective, Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu discusses the epistemological shift within the theme of "exile" which was primarily articulated by nineteenth- and twntieth-century literary and philosophical texts (mainly Kafka, Borges, Nietzsche and Heidegger). In its repositioned orientation, the age-old conceptualization of exile as that which desperately seeks to recuperate and lament "sameness," is critically revisited. In fact, the "old" conceptualization of exile closely associated the latter with the necessity for "sameness," while mystifying it by means of theoretically traditional tendencies, and reducing it symptomatically within chronological historical limits. Such symptomatic temporal reduction was determined by the restrictive polarity between the past and the present, the exile being conceived literally and articulated within the mythical terms of a subject's (the exile) profound mourning for the loss of her patria. Mihăilescu's proposed conceptualization of the exile lies elsewhere. It certainly cannot be envisaged as a universally fixed construct seeking mythical representation. Rather, the "new" exile is beyond topographic or chronological positioning. It de-mythologizes and theorizes itself. It also acknowledges that its location lies in its ambiguous non-located space, in the impossibility of its own exiled predicament and in its self-conscious desire for an a-temporal conceptualization.

Finally, for Gerald Gillespie the figure of the androgynous angel in Joyce's Ulysses allows for a non-reductive crisscrossing between identity and alterity, between manhood and womanhood, between classical and modernist [end page 275] mythology. Joyce's androgynous cosmology and discourse pulverize the totalizing conceptualization of a single and unified sexual identity, advocating reconciliation, rupture and transformation, while simultaneously articulating, following the Freudian terminology, an "inherently bisexual" subjectivity.

The third volume of the proceedings is composed of essays which treat questions of translation, national identity and cross(inter)-cultural/linguistic mobility, interactions and transformations. The first of the two main directions of the presentations covers the Greek participants' predominant preoccupation with issues of cultural pluralism and alterity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greek literary and philosophical production. Moreover, the urge to translate acclaimed "Western" literary texts of the Enlightenment, aligned itself with the emerging demand, not only for national and cultural self-affirmation, but also for a constructive re-evaluation of traditional morals ensuing from the newly-established and free Greek nation. On a more theoretical level, an equally interesting and challenging approach to translation was attempted by participants touching upon the following aspects in relation to translation: postcolonialism, self-translation, poetic hybridity, "Western" (Occidental) and "Eastern" (Oriental) literary reception. Finally, a great number of presentations propose to challenge and even go beyond the supposed validity of the presumed necessary dualistic interaction between the original text and the translated one.

Stesi Athini points to the inherently innovative forces which run through Greek literary production during the 18^th century. She brings up the tendency to copy Western motifs and genres through closely scrutinizing and even mimetically reproducing and translating European (primarily French) literary texts. Such transformative mechanisms co-exist with an immanent dimension, which calls for a positive and non-coercive exchange between tradition and novelty, between "East" (Orient) and "West" (Occident), between prose and poetry, between primordial originality and mimetic representation. Athini's emphasis is placed on what she calls "composite readings" or "texts" (Fb::g46J") produced by a group of young intellectuals residing mostly outside of Greece and having been influenced by the liberal philosophical positions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Such (inter)textual mélange or hybridity inaugurates a liminal space in which lyric poetry and folklore, oriental and western influences, meet and interact constructively and by means of which "original" or "indigenous" texts transform themselves into alternative and variable versions.

Despoina Provata discusses the predominance of the discours préfaciel, a discursive genre, which allowed nineteenth-century Greek translators to take on the role of educating the Greek public according to [end page 276] European moral and intellectual standards. However, through prefaces and other introductory presentations to Western literatures (mostly French literature), translators would also take a critical stance toward the moral of the specific literary text they translate, and even articulate to what extent it would correspond to Greek norms without in turn contaminating the latter.

Having addressed the imminent liminal topos of translation, a parallel could be drawn between Provata's approach and Amiya Dev's theorizing of the translator's non-fixed location from a (post)colonial viewpoint. Dev's interest lies in the Other/Self opposition as the predominating paradigm in the translation process, and as being inevitably determined by ideological forces of power, racial inequality and difference. The Indian scholar exemplifies his argument by means of references to Tagore's English "self-translations" as well as to contemporary Indian poet Ramanujan's English translations of twelfth-century religious Indian poetry. For Dev, these examples can be seen as postcolonial tendencies to seduce Western audiences while, advocating and standing for necessary intellectual reactions to colonial and coercive attempts at "Eastern" cultural appropriation.

The inherently problematic discursive nature of translation is also articulated by Sugawara Katsuya through the example of the haiku. One of the shortest, most dense and extremely demanding verse forms to translate, haiku can best be conveyed to the Western public if considered within its own innate and liberating "syllogistic nature." R.H. Blyth's translating method proposes to revisit the obscure and enigmatic nature of the haiku by devising another context for its reading and understanding, a context where its newly constructed alterity would positively, dialectically, and creatively, counteract its formerly stereotypical rigid identity.

Finally, Manfred Schmeling tackles bilingualism and "self-translation" as well as the underlying linguistic, cultural and psychological predicaments of writers like Goll, Nabokov and Beckett. Bilingualism, "self-translation," and cultural and aesthetic hybridity emerge as both necessary conditions for, and discursive outcomes of, the above writers' lived experience of exile. Not longing for either an idealized and unique "mother-tongue," or an equally totalizing "target" language, these writers (and many others worldwide throughout the 20^th century) consciously choose to locate themselves within the comfortable and creative space of (self)translating or of re-writing themselves. Thus, by being aesthetically situated in-between the two languages, and by oscillating between them without renouncing to either of them, the above (self-)exiled writers attribute to translation the quality of an enacted and enacting meta-text that articulates itself by means of its impossible transferability.

Despite the divergent range of presentations included in these three volumes, and the multiple cultural backgrounds of their writers, they all [end page 277] aim towards: 1) re-evaluating historiographical, aesthetic, and theoretical approaches to comparative literature; 2) problematizing and questioning the position of comparative literature in the 21^st century by negotiating its intersection with, and expansion towards other disciplines, notably philosophy, postcolonial studies, and historiography; and, 3) breaking down totalizing and paradigmatic aesthetic "preoccupations" into various possible literary sub-genres and sub-themes.