Metaphor(a)

'It is interesting how a historian of [modern Greek], Peter Mackridge..., argues that the use of quotation marks in Greece around any comment that strays too far from the literal is a noticeable stylistic feature and demonstrates an estrangement from metaphor. Others, too, have shown how bouts of authoritarian rule in Greece, not least during the last dictatorship from 1967 to 1974, were vitally opposed to the dangers of metaphor.... The early 1990s also elicited a form of literal reading as a way of controlling the ways others read the self. Foreigners who were keen to mock Greek sensitivities over the name "Macedonia" were told in no uncertain terms to "study history" and to learn "the truth"....'

I can't recommend the book from which I took this quote. (Vangelis Calotychos, The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989, pp. 52-53) Among its several flaws, it is one of those academic books so heavily buttressed with an armature of footnotes, bibliography and parenthetical citations that one could never falsely accuse its author of having had an original insight: Each of my ellipses above elides over a citation, for the sake of readability and to draw out the essential point.

That essential point is that the authoritarian and nationalistic streak in modern Greek culture and politics expresses itself in the form of a deadening literalism that suppresses the self-contradictory metonymy at the core of modern Greek identity: That is, the notion that today's Greeks are the direct descendants and continuation of ancient Hellenic civilization, yet at the same time, the vanguard protectors of Orthodox Christianity. The illusory nature of this metonymy has been exposed by historical scholarship which Calotychos quotes in a later passage, showing that "contra the nationalist paradigm... Phanariots [a Greek-speaking Christian elite under the Ottoman Empire] were transnational before nation-statism: Greek was the dominant language for them, even though many had been raised as speakers of Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian, and Armenian. Indeed ... many Balkan Christians saw Hellenization as a way of achieving social mobility in the mercantile classes or advancing in the ranks of the clergy." (124-125) Just as Zionism was premised upon the "invention of the Jewish people" (see Shlomo Sand's book of that title), ellinismos forged a modern nation-state through a series of metaphors which could not be recognized as such. Neither of these forms of nationalism is particularly unique in that respect; it is just that the antiquity whose heritage they claim is particularly distant, and thus the metaphors are especially strained.

This was an insight of which I had an inchoate sense from direct observation, but had not been able to put into words until I read the first passage quoted. It was an insight which had already guided me in the writing of an as-yet-unpublished story, set in Greece in a hypothetical future dictatorship, which opens with the young protagonist/narrator searching for a set of metaphors in which she can tell her story, a search in which she is often frustrated by the internalized notion that something she wishes to say is something she "must not say."

In some of the subsequent rejections, I have received praise for the quality of the writing of the story, coupled with complaints that the "plot" is slow to start. As it happens, the process by which the narrator finds a voice by which she can tell the story by way of metaphor is an act, a subversive act, on her part. It is thus part of the "plot."

Note that this is not a complaint about said rejections: I may not have executed it well, or the story may not have been well-suited to the venues in which I tried to have it published. It is intended only as an apology (in the original Greek sense of the word) for the type of writing I prefer, and the type of writing I try to execute: A writing that recognizes its metaphors as such, calls attention to them, and thereby casts doubt upon the literal truth of the events described in the telling, challenging the reader to uncover the deeper truth that is revealed by the mode of its telling.

On a somewhat related administrative note: It occurred to me recently, when I was trying to reference a recently read story in conversation with my wife, that since I stopped using Goodreads (after their acquisition by Amazon) I have been reading a great many good and interesting stories, but losing track of their authors and titles. I will therefore be posting more reviews on this blog than in the past.