In January 1913, Nikos Kazantzakis delivered a lecture on Bergson's philosophy to the Educational Society of Athens (Εκπαιδευτικός Όμιλος Αθηνών). This lecture is especially significant, not only because it points to the emergence of a new philosophical anti-rational model for the Greek writer himself, who had hitherto been under the spell of Nietzsche's philosophy,Footnote 1 but also because it signifies a broader phenomenon: the symbolic transition of Greek aesthetic modernity from late nineteenth-century Nietzscheism to Bergsonism; the latter would leave clear traces on the field of literature until the end of the ‘modernist ‘ interwar period. A few days after Kazantzakis’ address, E. Karapanagiotis reported on it in the cultural journal Νουμάς:
[…] I did not want to leave unchallenged this official appearance of Bergsonism in Athens, for I know that in France a proper battle is taking place around this new philosophy which is distinguished by a peculiar flexibility of principles, as they say, since those principles can adapt to any philosophical ideology. […] Thus, Benda is quite right when he argues that in this way philosophy is no longer the knowledge of truth but degenerates into an endeavour of the heart!Footnote 2
This insightful comment clearly illustrates the type and breadth of the aftermath of Bergson's ideas in intellectual fields other than philosophy – to be more precise, principally beyond philosophy. Moreover, the very fact that Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 seems to justify Bertrand Russell's bitter comment – expressed fifteen years before the award – that the French philosopher was nothing but a mere ‘poet’.Footnote 3 And indeed, the questioning of Bergson's status and authority as a philosopher that was manifested within the ranks of the established scientific community of the time was as widespread as his own theories. Nonetheless, the ‘anti-scientific’ stance that indeed characterizes the philosopher's overall intellectual development, outlook and ideas was perhaps the main reason for the unprecedented dissemination of his work.
Bergson's academic career, though it has been retrospectively to be judged successful, was essentially developed and consolidated on the margins of what was at the time the elite of the official French academic establishment. It is indicative that the philosopher was never accepted at the Sorbonne. Instead, he was for many years (1904–20) a professor of philosophy at the Collège de France – an institution of high academic and scientific standards but also quite unconventional: there were no officially registered students, and no degrees were awarded, whilst all lectures, seminars and courses were officially open to the wider public. While this environment contributed to Bergson's fragile academic status, it nevertheless facilitated his rise to popularity, since the institution's policies guaranteed the accessibility of his ideas to non-experts, while his lectures were rapidly turned into a kind of a social event due to their extraordinary mass attendance. Lacking students and researchers, however, who would perhaps counterbalance the rampant dissemination of his ideas through their systematic study and the continuation of his work, Bergson's philosophy was fully exposed to any kind of vulgarizations and misinterpretations. As a result, there emerged various ‘Bergsonisms’ that distorted or misconstrued the philosopher's ideas, which were rapidly spread in the form of slogan-like terms such as ‘durée’ or ‘élan vital’ that were detached from their context.
It was precisely this atmosphere that Christos Androutsos, a Greek professor of theology, delineated in a lecture at the Parnassos Literary Society in 1917, an event that marked the first systematic presentation of Bergson's philosophy in Athens – after Kazantzakis’ address – and which was the third part of a series of lectures (the other two were on Tolstoy and Nietzsche and preceded the introduction to Bergsonian philosophy by five years). Androutsos justified the inclusion of Bergson into his series of philosophical lectures by noting that ‘the appeal and authority of the French philosopher […] is to such extent that had made him fashionable’.Footnote 4 Although Bergson's philosophy was never ‘fashionable’ in Greece, its reception in the country began to be more systematic from the mid-1920s onwards. Indicatively, in 1925, a year after Evangelos Papanoutsos’ lecture ‘The philosophy of H. Bergson’ in Alexandria, Konstantinos Papalexandrou's translation of L’Évolution créatrice – the second Greek translation of a complete work by the French philosopher – was published in Athens, while in 1929 Elli Lambridi published a Greek rendition of Bergson's L’Énergie spirituelle under the title Η διανοητική προσπάθεια as well as her short study Η φιλοσοφία του Bergson. However, though Bergson's presence in Greek intellectual circles through a translated part of his oeuvre or short introductions to his ideas has been more or less recorded,Footnote 5 what remains entirely unexplored is the influence of Bergson's ideas on the field of aesthetic theory and criticism – an aspect of Bergsonism in Greece that was aptly stressed by K. Th. Dimaras:
But such an original and creative thought as Bergson's opens various potentials to philosophy and unexhausted forms of application to critical reflection in general. We have already seen the philosopher's beneficial effect in other branches of human activity. Among those, I would like to distinguish literary criticism, which has been fertilized in Greece by Bergson's passage.Footnote 6
The issue of the entanglement of Bergson's philosophy with Greek literature and literary criticism was also raised in 1977 as a working hypothesis by Mario Vitti, who associated it with the aesthetic pursuits of the main representatives of the ‘Generation of the 1930s’ in their intellectually formative years.Footnote 7 Vitti dated the beginning of the creative influence of Bergson's philosophy in the aesthetic field to the middle of the 1920s, when the aftermath of the theory on pure poetry first became visible in Greek intellectual life. Vitti's hypothesis points to the aesthetic affinity of Bergson's theory with Symbolist poetics and, consequently, of Greek interwar Modernism with the resonances of both Symbolism and Bergson's ideas. Indeed, as we shall show below, the presence of Bergsonian ideas in Greek intellectual life acquires a new dynamic in the middle of the 1920s and it crystallizes at the beginning of the 1930s, at which time ‘his [Bergson's] major role […] in connection with novelists of the 1930s’Footnote 8 becomes clear. In respect to the common aspiration of fiction writers during the 1930s to overcome the traditional orientation of literature towards the representation of reality, it is important to note the Bergsonian allusions in Theotokas’ favouring of ‘inward expression’ in his Ελεύθερο πνεύμα – the so-called ‘manifesto’ of the ‘Generation of the 1930s’.Footnote 9 Most importantly, the examination of the relevance of Bergson's philosophy to the aesthetic explorations of Greek novelists has to take into account Panayiotis Moullas’ suggestion that the paths that indicate the transfer of modernist narrative techniques to Greek literature should be sought not in Freudianism, but in ‘more traditional areas’, that is ‘mainly in Symbolism’.Footnote 10
After a short exposition of Bergson's aesthetic ideas through their reception by Kazantzakis, we shall focus on the general aesthetic context of the interwar period in order to highlight the function of Bergsonian philosophy in the critical discourse associated with the Greek modernist journal Μακεδονικές Ημέρες.
‘La mélodie ininterrompue’
The conception of the ‘internal’ duration of time or, in different terms, of ‘real time’ to which Bergson attached the term ‘durée’ that he introduced in 1889 in his first important publication, the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, constitutes the most substantial contribution of Bergson's philosophy to the antirational perception of the world which steadily gained ground in the cultural field at the end of the nineteenth century. By introducing this term Bergson openly disputed the arguments of philosophers and intellectuals such as Auguste Comte, Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine,Footnote 11 the leading figures of scientific determinism which he opposed, foregrounding instead the inner world of the individual. Man's constant preoccupation with the manifestations of the external world has led, according to Bergson, to a distorted perception of consciousness, which the individual insists on interpreting as something existing within space, and consequently as something measurable and quantifiable. By contrast, ‘durée’ does not flow evenly and has no beginning or end, nor is it subject to preordained natural laws; on the contrary, it is experienced internally, conveying different states of consciousness, which commingle in such a way that one cannot determine whether there is one or many consciousnesses. This perception of the self's ‘deeper reality’ in its endless ‘becoming’, which corresponds to the direct knowledge of consciousness, is possible only through intuition. Intuition is not understood here as an intellectual process aiming at analysis, but instead as a direct method that does not require any mediation on the part of the intellect; hence it constitutes, according to the French philosopher, an organ higher than intelligence (the latter being the term that Bergson uses to denote intellectual understanding). Since intuition constitutes the single true method of artistic creativity, Bergson assigns the artist the task of preserving the intuitive perception of the world as well as the ‘free praxis’ of artistic creativity, which he describes as an eruption, a ‘flooding’ of the inner self.
In his 1913 lecture Kazantzakis broaches the aesthetic aspect of Bergsonian theory by referring to the connection that Bergson himself proposed between genuine artistic expression and his own philosophical thought. This reading suggests that art in general shared a common mission with Bergson's philosophy: the revelation of ‘life's essence’ by way of intuition:
And art aims to disclose for us the essence of life, to convey to us the vision of universal existence, lifting the veil of deceit that the intellect has raised before our eyes for its own practical necessities: […] In a recent interview, Bergson says: ‘Philosophy, as I see it, is closer to Art than Science. Science provides an inconclusive or rather fragmentary image of reality, which it necessarily perceives by way of counterfeit symbols. Art and Philosophy instead share a common basis: they are both founded on intuition.’Footnote 12
The aesthetic aspect of Bergson's theory of intuition was elaborated in his treatise Le Rire: essai sur la signification du comique (1900), paradoxically his only work that directly addresses questions pertaining to art. In this respect, it is particularly important that Kazantzakis rendered Le Rire into Greek just a year after his lecture at the Educational Institute of Athens, presenting the Greek public with the first complete translation of a work by Bergson.Footnote 13
The point of departure of Bergson's aesthetic theory is the assertion that everyday language is inextricably connected with a static perception of reality which, as we have already noted, the philosopher rejected. Thus, the use of language in this context, i.e. as an instrument of the intellect and a medium for the logical interpretation of the world, cannot penetrate the ‘deeper reality’ of the consciousness.Footnote 14 But if ‘inner duration’ remains impenetrable by everyday language, poetic expression potentially functions as a means to proceed towards inner reality, since it does not aim at the objective description of empirical reality but rather the indirect rendering of the inner world. For Bergson, much closer to the fulfillment of this task is the aesthetic experience of music as a means of contemplation and the ‘lifting of the veil’ that obstructs man's contact with his or her ‘inner self’. The following excerpt from Le Rire is indicative and at the same time crucial for our own discussion:
What is the object of art? Could reality come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless. […] Deep in our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life's unbroken melody, – a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original. All this is around and within us, and yet no whit of it do we distinctly perceive. Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd, – thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet.Footnote 15
To describe the way artistic intuition functions, Bergson resorts to the analogy of the way musical melody is perceived by the hearer: not as a series of notes placed next to each other but rather as a totality in which the distinction of its separate components is impossible. Thus, when Bergson metaphorically uses the notion ‘incessant melody’, he suggests a continuous flow which can neither be conceived through a specific scheme nor analysed into separate parts. The metaphor of the musical phrase consequently renders the idea of a non-homogeneous aggregate which consists of the different states of consciousness or emotions that overlap or penetrate each other instead of being organized into a separate and distinct sequence; therefore, music is interpreted as totally formless.Footnote 16
Taking this analysis into account, we can detect the aesthetic affinity between Bergsonian aesthetic theory and Symbolist poetry. In short, it is traced in the pronounced mistrust towards the expressive potential of everyday language, in the proclaimed faith in art's ability to suggest rather than analyse and, finally, in the resort to music as a means of perceiving the inner world. It was only in 1911 that the French writer Tancrède de Visan would call attention to these points in L'Attitude du lyrisme contemporain, which significantly contributed to the dynamic introduction of Bergsonian philosophy and terminology into the field of literature.Footnote 17
Bergson's theory in the aftermath of Symbolism
In 1924 the Greek poet and intellectual Kostis Palamas published an article titled ‘Ο νέος καιρός’ in which he alluded to the extensive effect of Bergsonian philosophy on European intellectual life, including it in the antirational currents which had already appeared in the middle of the previous century.Footnote 18 By that time, Palamas was aware of Henri Bremond's election to the French Academy the previous year. Thus, as early as 1923, before the outbreak of the French controversy over pure poetry, Palamas used the election of Bremond to the French Academy as an occasion to draw the portrait of the French priest, literary scholar and author of the emblematic, though incomplete Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France in the Greek newspaper Εμπρός. For, in Palamas’ view, the election of the latter to the Academy was absolutely relevant to ‘the current against scientific positivism and anti-religious rationalism that entices the eminent intellectuals of the day’.Footnote 19 The function of Bergson's philosophy within this context would be pointed out by Palamas a few years later, when the resonances of the ‘controversy’ over pure poetry had already arrived in Greece.Footnote 20 In 1927, replying to the question ‘Are we returning to Romanticism?’ that the newspaper Έθνος had posited, Palamas stressed that ‘the philosophy which is today admired and has been imposed on the intellectual world, Bergson's philosophy, is essentially a romantic ideology’.Footnote 21
The question raised by Ethnos, as well as Palamas’ use of the term ‘romantic’ at this time, points to a specific contemporary French intellectual and ideological current that primarily opposed the far-right nationalist movement ‘Action Française’, whose spiritual leader was Charles Maurras and which sought the return of ‘classicism’ –perceived as inextricably bound to the French tradition – to the political and, by extension, the aesthetic field. The dynamic reappearance of Symbolism through the re-introduction of the question of pure poetry by Bremond in 1925 can thus be seen as part of the opposite aesthetic demand for a ‘return to Romanticism’ or ‘poetry's firm tradition’Footnote 22 which constituted the alternative to the rationalist interpretation of aesthetic phenomena promoted by the adherents of ‘classicism’. Bremond, prompted by de Visan's ‘Symbolist’ explication of Bergsonian theory, highlighted the spiritual affinity and ardent support that he himself received from the philosopher in the dissemination of his poetic theory.Footnote 23 This common aesthetic orientation is traced, inter alia, in the indifference towards issues of technique and is particularly pronounced in the definition of ‘musical poetry’ which, according to Bremond, is not related to prosody, which is a product of reasonable process, but instead to ‘a “mysterious reality” that permeates the poem’.Footnote 24
Bergson's philosophy, which had been condemned and rejected as ‘romantic’ – as akin to German Romanticism (and therefore alien to the French tradition) – by the leading figures of Action Française,Footnote 25 constituted, as might be expected, a firm reference point for the intellectual and ideological opponents of Maurras, among whom was the significant and very productive French critic Edmond Jaloux.
The importance of Jaloux's influence for the reception of modernist literature by the circle of the Thessaloniki journal Μακεδονικές Ημέρες has been underlined by Jean-Luc Chiappone in his valuable study of the cultural journal. Chiappone has rightly questioned the originality of the Greek modernists’ turn to the English modern novel,Footnote 26 observing that ‘the presentation […] especially of the English novelists essentially consists of plagiarisms of texts by [contemporary] French critics’.Footnote 27 Chiappone's study constitutes a significant preliminary work for our purposes, since it points to Jaloux's collection of essays Au pays du roman (1931) as the principal source of information on English literature for the ‘modernists’ of Thessaloniki, who were almost exclusively francophone. From this standpoint, we shall focus on the critical method of Jaloux himselfFootnote 28 through the prism of the French demand for a ‘return to Romanticism’ – an issue that is not touched on by Chiappone – in order to investigate the precise character of its influence on the aesthetic discourse of the Greek authors and intellectuals in the reception of modernist intellectual trends.
The significance of the introduction of British modernism to the Greek intellectual field in the 1930s and, subsequently, the salient mediating role of French critics, particularly that of Jaloux, become evident, in our view, only if we see them in relation to the other inaugural attempts to translate European modernist novels for the readership of Μακεδονικές Ημέρες. Next to Virginia Woolf's paradigm, which monopolized the interest of the journal's contributors,Footnote 29 we should add the very first appearance of Marcel Proust and Katherine Mansfield and make a special reference to the presence of German literature in the journal's pages; it is in Μακεδονικές Ημέρες that we find for the first time excerpts from Die Aufzeichnung des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) by Rainer Maria Rilke in Dimitris Dimou's translation as well as other translations such as Franz Kafka's Ein Landarzt (1919) and Thomas Mann's story Tobias Mindernickel.Footnote 30 At this point the following testimony by one of the journal's instigators, Petros Spandonidis is illuminating:
Edmond Jaloux discusses German and English literature in two very important books. […] No German writer, he says, describes a subject for the sake of description; he has always something to state. Moreover, certain German novels have renounced psychology in favour of a mystical spirituality. […] Thus, German literature displays a musical quality in thought and in life, while setting aside, inadvertently or not, the strains of artistic perfection. English literature, on the contrary, offers a musical spirituality through misty horizons, where objects appear disorderly, yet profound, in their prophetic, primeval, divine nature. […] This is l’âme profonde from which Northern life [αναπνοή] emanates. This musical spirituality surrounds persons and objects, like a fundamental accompanying tone that accompanies them even in the most radiant externally creations.Footnote 31
The terminology used by Spandonidis in this excerpt is indicative of Jaloux's critical method and of the aesthetic questions that we will investigate below. The anthology Les Romanciers allemands (1931) and the volume of essays Au pays du roman (1931) constitute but a slight sample of the voluminous work that the critic of the prestigious journal Nouvelle Literature devoted to English and German literature.Footnote 32 In 1925, Jaloux, together with author and critic Jean Cassou, explicitly proclaimed the demand for the constitution of a ‘Modern Romanticism’, interpreting Romanticism, just like Bremond, in ‘psychological’ terms, not as a historically and chronologically determined artistic current but rather as an indissoluble spiritual state which embraced all contemporary antirational spiritual currents – the products of modern ‘turbulent’ times.Footnote 33 Rather than seeking in Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine the theoretical underpinnings for the cultivation and dissemination of the belief that contemporary writers were turning towards a ‘new Romanticism’,Footnote 34 Jaloux turned instead to the German Romantics. The French critic's preoccupation – from the middle of the 1920s onwards – with the work and ideas of (principally) Novalis and Jean Paul, though in fact quite cursory, was pivotal in the configuration of his aesthetic criteria, which can be summarized in the rejection of the French realist tradition and the customary scientism and, subsequently, in the conception of the work of art as a product of the imagination that conveys everything that is mysterious, dreamlike, fantastic and paradoxical.
In his effort to formulate a genealogy of ‘Romantic literature’, Jaloux begins from his admiration for novels of early German Romanticism such as Jean Paul's Hesperus, Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen,Footnote 35 which had, in his view, laid the foundations for an inventive regeneration of the genre with their emphasis on the individual and on the forces of imagination and formal experimentations. But Jaloux moves a step further, indiscriminately detecting the persistence and revival of the ‘romantic spirit’ in the works of German authors such as Rilke, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Kafka and Stefan Zweig but also in British modernists such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley and Maurice Baring – namely the authors that with almost no exception were presented in Μακεδονικές Ημέρες in that same period. Jaloux identified these paradigms with the epitome of spirituality, of artistic freedom and disengagement from every aesthetic dogmatism, hence recognizing in modern English and German novels the models for contemporary French literature which, in his view, suffered – with the exception of the cases of André Gide and Marcel Proust – from didacticism and overemphasis of the descriptive element as well as from the search for ‘perfection’ and ‘plastic expression’.Footnote 36
At the core of the idea of ‘modern Romanticism’ lies Jaloux's notion of ‘poetry’.Footnote 37 For the definition of the poetic element, the French critic proceeded to make a crucial distinction between two groups of poets: in opposition to the poetic theory of Mallarmé and Valéry, who conceived poetry primarily as an exercise in words and the result of an intense intellectual effort, Jaloux placed BremondFootnote 38 – whom he saw as Novalis’ heir – and the view that poetry is, for the most part, the result and expression of a mystic, almost religious, experience.Footnote 39 Correspondingly, adopting Bremond's definition of ‘musical poetry’ whose source, as we have already pointed out, was the indifference towards issues of prosody and technique,Footnote 40 Jaloux promoted a specific metaphoric meaning of the adjective ‘musical’ as a synonym of ‘formless’, which was to be found in both the German RomanticsFootnote 41 and Bergson; here ‘musical’ was used to describe the function of poetry as, in the French critic's terms, the art that awakens emotions and conveys ‘the song of inner life’.Footnote 42 In this respect, for Jaloux, poetry can be found in every manifestation of the spirit – Bergson's theory, in which ‘poetry rescued philosophy’ through its detachment from the rational interpretation of life's events, being a case in point.Footnote 43 Equally ‘poetic’ was the modern novel, and in fact Jaloux designated all the above paradigms as ‘poetic novels’, with Virginia Woolf's prose representing its most accomplished manifestation.
It was this aesthetic context that largely shaped the theoretical discourse of the contributors to Μακεδονικές Ημέρες on the modern novel. The first reference to the idea of ‘the poetry of the novel’ can be found as early as 1929, in a letter that the novelist and critic Stelios Xefloudas sent from Paris to Giorgos Theotokas, in which he quotes a small excerpt from Jaloux's review of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway that had been recently translated into French.Footnote 44 Even before the publication of the first Greek translation of a work by Virginia Woolf – her story ‘Moments of being: Slater's pins have no point’ which appeared in Μακεδονικές Ημέρες in a translation by Giorgos DeliosFootnote 45 – Xefloudas returned to the issue in 1933 and 1935 with three articles for the journals Ιδέα Footnote 46 and Μακεδονικές Ημέρες.Footnote 47 In the second of those articles, after citing a list of exemplary modern novels which he copied from Jaloux's Au pays du roman, Xefloudas asserted – again plagiarizing the French critic's views – that ‘what our literary production largely lacks is poetry in its broadest sense’.Footnote 48 The source of this lack, in his view, was the novelists’ willingness ‘to preach ideas’, ‘to solve problems pertaining to sociology, even politics’; as a result novels ‘become overburdened with an unbearable didacticism’. In this way, Xefloudas clearly advocated that Greek literature ought to distance itself from the principles of realist narrative and turn its attention to the depiction of the inner world, since ‘the psychical atmosphere of individuals […] moves us more than the most interesting plot, the most amazing action’. Thus, in his search for a paradigm that would render ‘poetry’ in Jaloux's sense, i.e. as ‘man's inner song […] a music that is rather guessed than heard’,Footnote 49 Xefloudas turned to modern English literature:
What immeasurably adds to the English novel's appeal, writes Jaloux, is its melancholy. And what is melancholy but this music, this misty horizon that surrounds everything, this prolongation beyond the souls of their most prophetic, primeval, divine elements […]? A secret, full of mystery, the purest perhaps of the human soul; and it can only be disclosed through poetry. This sometimes inexplicable sadness that overflows the soul of certain individuals turns into the noblest, most real expression of man's inner world. […] Poetic reality is the most real of all other realities.Footnote 50
Jaloux's article ‘Notes sur le roman anglais’, from which the excerpt paraphrased here by Xefloudas was originally derived, was translated into Greek four years later by Mitsos Papanikolaou for the literary journal Νεοελληνικά Γράμματα: ‘This melancholy is equally present today as it was in Shakespeare's times: it is one of the main attractions of Maurice Baring's, Virginia Woolf's, Katherine Mansfield's, Rosamond Lehmann's works. […] It is a very peculiar attitude of the English soul towards life […]. For the English soul melancholy is as characteristic as is “Sehnsucht” to the German soul’.Footnote 51 The ‘melancholy’ that Xefloudas detects in the English novel is metaphorically vested with the term ‘music’ to denote what Jaloux identified with poetry: the ‘mystic disposition of the soul’. The reading of ‘melancholy’ from the standpoint of ‘modern Romanticism’ is rendered more explicit through the reference to Shakespeare as well as to the basic motif of early German Romanticism: ‘Sehnsucht’. The latter, described elsewhere by the French critic as a ‘boundless nostalgia and anxiety’,Footnote 52 amounts to a constantly unfulfilled expectation and hence to the negation of what is fixed, concluded and past. It is from the standpoint of this constant abolition of boundaries that ‘Sehnsucht’ corresponds to the poetic programme of the Frühromantiker, who conceived poetry as an unceasing ‘becoming’, an interminable pursuit of completion rather than its fulfilment; but it also corresponds to the ‘modern Romantic’ novelists who abandoned the objective world, which they saw as being subject to determinism, and turned instead to the portrayal of the inner world, which was also in a process of a constant ‘becoming’.
Hence, in the above excerpt Xefloudas transposes to a Greek context Jaloux's reading of Novalis’ demand for the ‘romanticization’ and ‘poeticization’ of the world – a reading that had gained currency through the theories of Bremond and Bergson. The essence and mission of art, this reading went, consists in the transformation of reality and the revelation of the world's mystical aspect through the use of imagination and an intense personal emotional experience.Footnote 53 Thus the ‘Romantic spirit’ survives, according to Jaloux, in the work of Woolf, in which the plot and the objective world are replaced by the exposition of the constant flow of thoughts and emotions, creating ‘the impression of illusion and mystery’.Footnote 54 At this point, Jaloux detects the association of Woolf's poetics with Les Lauriers sont coupés by Édouard Dujardin, a work that in 1925 he had construed from the point of view of ‘Romanticism’: Dujardin is ‘anticlassicist’, i.e. ‘romantic’, since by abandoning plot ‘he transforms external reality’, infusing it with ‘illusion's mystery’.Footnote 55 Xefloudas reproduces this same reading when he notices that ‘in a series of interior monologues full of musicality, Woolf continuously immerses us in an ocean of magical poetry’.Footnote 56
The incorporation of the first efforts to define ‘interior monologue‘ in the aesthetic context shaped by Jaloux's impressionist critical method exhibits the reasons for the vague interpretation of this narrative technique by its early Greek reviewers, who saw it as an extension of Romantic introversion and identified it ‘with every form of lyrical, confessional prose’, as Moullas rightly observes.Footnote 57 This observation also touches upon the actual practice of Greek fiction writers of the time within the context of their common claim that they were breaking away from the literary tradition of realism as the standard way of representing reality. The inability to capture the significance of British literary modernism as an experiment primarily concerning the de- and reconstruction of literary form, language and meaning, determined the limits of the narrative experiments of the writers of the ‘Generation of the 1930s’. Karantonis’ vague definition of interior monologue as the ‘novel without plot, action and characters, without external orientation and positions’, which fuelled the respective debate, was drawn from Xefloudas’ novel Εσωτερική συμφωνία itself.Footnote 58 It was precisely due to this vague definition of ‘interior monologue’ but also to the reading of André Gide's Les faux-monnayeurs that the model of the ‘poetic novel’ promoted by Jaloux prevails in Xefloudas’ first two novels; the result was the adoption of the simplistic view that the new form of the novel consisted merely in the abandonment of the external plot and of characters. This confusion is manifested in the use of musical terminology by the author of Εσωτερική συμφωνία as a synonym of inward expression (‘musical disposition of the soul’) and as the abandonment of narrative order (‘incessant formal and rhythmic becoming’)Footnote 59 which rather resonates Bergson's ‘musical’ conception of internal time as an ‘incessant melody’ than the Wagnerian ‘undeveloped musical motifs’ that correspond to Dujardin's sentences, which are ‘restricted to the minimum of syntax’, or to ‘a discourse beyond any logical organization’.Footnote 60
Likewise, the fiction of Giorgos Delios reflects the ‘Bergsonian’ reading of Proust and Woolf that was promoted by contemporary French criticismFootnote 61. This reading, which is based on the favouring of ‘inward expression’, is detectable in Delios’ use of musical metaphors – especially in his collection of short stories entitled Μουσική δωματίου (1947) – in order to describe the function of memory and inner time as stream of consciousness. Nonetheless, Delios interprets stream of consciousness as mere ‘emotional expression’ without taking into account the particular poetological characteristics of the narrative technique, i.e. the lack of linguistic and logical order. On the other hand, and despite this prevalent orientation towards symbolist theories of expressivity, Yannis Beratis’ Διασπορά (1931) and Melpo Axioti's Δύσκολες Νύχτες (1938), without being programmatically based on ‘musical’ models, constitute a genuine realization of the experimental stream of consciousness technique. Conversely, although the function of ‘music’ as a model for the dissolution of the logical arrangement of narrative text (as in Dujardin, Woolf and Joyce) had been largely overlooked by modern Greek critics and novelists, Yannis Skarimbas’ ‘word music’ constitutes a rare example of extreme inter-medial experimentation with the limits of language in interwar Greek fiction.Footnote 62
As far as criticism is concerned, the issue of ‘interior monologue’ seemed to be temporarily clarified in 1935 and 1936 with the Greek translations of excerpts from Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés and Molly Bloom's monologue from Joyce's Ulysses published in the modernist journal Το Τρίτο Μάτι,Footnote 63 and the critical contribution of Dimitris Mentzelos and Dimitris Nikolareizis.Footnote 64 Earlier, Spandonidis was among the first critics who properly used the notion ‘flow of consciousness’ in relation to the anti-rationalism of James and Bergson. Nonetheless, this fairly superficial approach towards narrative technique and form permitted only general judgments and vague definitions in the context of the principal demand for ‘interiority’. The requirement of the depiction of the different, often contradictory psychical states that compose internal reality, which in its turn is in a constant process of flux and transformation, was only fulfilled in the Greek context through the general idea of the abandonment of the plot and the sidelining of characters that was transferred through the mediation of Jaloux's theory.
After 1936 the critical and aesthetic discourse of the ‘modernist’ circle of Thessaloniki continued to be steadily oriented towards the idea of ‘new Romanticism’. This is evident in the Greek translation of Jaloux's article ‘O André Gide και το πρόβλημα του μυθιστορήματος’ by Giorgos Damoris in 1938, in which one reads inter alia that ‘poetry in Les faux-monnayeurs is inconceivable, yet immanent. […] It is a free poetry, never in the spotlight but instead residing deep in the soul’.Footnote 65 Characteristic in this respect are Delios’ two articles on Virginia Woolf published that same year, in which the author's arguments are once again one-sidedly supported by an over-emphasis on the lack of ‘action’ and the depiction of ‘internal reality’ without further clarifications. Moreover, Delios’ attempted comparison between Woolf's narrative technique and Joyce's ‘interior monologue’ constitutes merely a transfer of the positions supported by Jaloux's, who detected in Woolf's work a more dispassionate and refined use of modernist narrative techniques.Footnote 66
It is in this context that one can place Spandonidis’ vexation with Petros Orologas’ rejection of Virginia Woolf's work, as well as of Jaloux's and Maurois’ aesthetic positions. Indeed, in his short 1938 study Οι συγγραφείς και η εποχή τους Orologas interpreted contemporary Greek literary production using Hippolyte Taine's theory, which led him to reject the work of the modernist writers of Thessaloniki as ‘ungrounded’. For Spandonidis, however, who set out to defend the circle of Thessaloniki modernists in his long article ‘Η ζωή που αγαπά τον εαυτό της’, modern man can only be ‘romantic’, i.e. anti-rational and introverted:
Mr P. Orologas does not love contemporary French intellectuals like Maurois and Jaloux and shuns female writers like Woolf and Mansfield. However, he loves H. Taine to excess. […] The fact is that Mr Orologas denies […] the qualities of the romantic attitude, judging them and opposing them to the classical attitude which he clearly favours […] but he is deceived when he merely denounces the romantic in favour of the classical spirit which, in the final analysis, cannot be fulfilled in modern times, nor can it be turned into a plain matter of preference or rejection, since the spirit of modern human beings cannot become classical, simply because we fancy so; rather, it will become classical if and when its time comes. Many of the flaws that Mr P. Orologas detects in the writers of Thessaloniki are not characteristics of second-rate literature […] but fundamental characteristics of Romanticism. […] It is thus rather a necessity to accept egocentricity, art as a life that loves itself, disharmony, and lack of moderation.Footnote 67
As is clear from the above excerpt, Spandonidis follows a reading which is based on Jaloux's genealogy and the notion of Romanticism as an aesthetic category or an ‘eternal and indissoluble attitude of the spirit’, designating Virginia Woolf's ‘art in flux’ as a typical example of this ‘romantic’ attitude: ‘architectonic literature tends to be replaced by an inner, mathematically-free view of the world’.Footnote 68 Correspondingly, in his late work Η νεώτερη ποίηση στην Ελλάδα (1955), Spandonidis invokes the bipolar scheme ‘plastic-musical’ – a scheme already dominant from the time of the Frühromantik Footnote 69 – to contrast the canonical aesthetic idea of ‘classicism’ to the ‘flow’ of Romantic poetics. Ostensibly adopting an antithesis in the term's history which became dominant after Schiller's 1796 essay, in which the ‘romantic’ is identified with the ‘modern’ in contradistinction to the ‘ancient’,Footnote 70 Spandonidis follows Jaloux's argumentation by finally adopting a historically expanded notion of the term ‘romantic’ (‘in the sense of the “modern” as is generally applied to our day’), which also allows him to include Bergson's intuition as a typical attribute of the (modern) ‘romantic character’:
The romantic spirit […] denies plastic immobility, renounces the pursuit of formal perfection, of the beautiful form, the overt analogies […] In this setting, overt analogies and symmetry, i.e. harmonies, would equal the death of rhythm and movement that Romanticism strives for. […] the romantic man (in the sense of the ‘modern man ‘ which is generally applied to this day) does not conceal his anxiety even when it results in disfigurement – he sings what is in the process of becoming, not what has already occurred; he therefore possesses a musical perception of art, i.e. he understands art in the process of its ‘becoming’, whilst classicism seeks to fix what has occurred to beautiful, overt, plastic connections. […] Thus, it is no longer the architecture of things and characters that matters but rather their musical essence. The characters are no longer represented by their solid emotions; they are rather represented by their over-sensitivity, i.e. by fleeting and volatile sensations; by passions that equal movement; by consciousness that, as Bergson put it, equals pure creation and not freedom. In this way, we reach a different kind of beauty; it is not the architecture of composition and fixed forms but that of music, of the undefined inner life […] And while the formally imperfect cannot be rejected (there is such a wealth of formal imperfection in Shakespeare and in Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen), the simple, flawless, classically perceived ‘plastic ‘ beauty can no longer move us.Footnote 71
By adopting the idea of the ‘new Romanticism’, Bergson's ‘musical’ conception of interiority appears in Greek aesthetic discourse as another manifestation of the revived opposition between romantic ‘musicality’ and classicist ‘plasticism’. The identification of music with the formation of a transcendental reality that reflects the incomplete, the unformed, the volatile is invoked in order to describe not only ‘the flow of the inner world’ but also narrative form itself, which relinquishes narrative order and realist depiction and which in the Greek literary field of the early 1930s was – at times altogether and abusively – classified as ‘interior monologue’.
The exploration of the presence and influence of Bergson's theory in the critical discourse of the Μακεδονικές Ημέρες circle and the connection of this discourse with the demand for the renewal of the novel have led us to late-1920s Paris. The examination of Jaloux's aesthetic ideas brings to the forefront the use of Bergsonian theory by those French intellectuals who were opposed to the rationalist interpretation of the world and, at times, to its political extensions.
Consequently, through the mediating role of Jaloux's impressionist critical method in the reception of the modernist novel in Greece, more specifically by the circle of writers and critics connected to the journal Μακεδονικές Ημέρες, we have followed the last resonances of the symbolist theory of poetry as it was perceived by Henri Bremond. Jaloux's mediation is to a great degree responsible for misinterpretations with regard to the understanding of modernism's narrative techniques but also for the uses of musical terminology in both the literary works and the critical and aesthetic discourse of those engaged in the Μακεδονικές Ημέρες circle. However, the reception of Bergsonian theory by the latter is typical of the aesthetic demands that had gained urgency in Greece at the beginning of the 1930s.
The idea of the ‘new Romanticism’ illuminates only a specific aspect of modern Greek literary criticism, the one most influenced by the ‘demand for interiority’. The examination of the reception of Bergson's philosophy constitutes a useful instrument for a further investigation of the question as it contributes to the clarification of the links connecting publications, periods, currents and trends. Besides, the fact that the first references to the aesthetic aspect of Bergson's philosophy can be traced as early as 1911 in the pioneering Alexandrian journal Γράμματα, while they reappear at the beginning of the 1920s in the journal Μούσα, the main organ of Athens’ ‘new Symbolists’ and a new forum for many of the previous collaborators of Γράμματα, confirms the hypothesis that the need for renewal ‘is equally manifested through continuities and fissures’.Footnote 72
