*

Demetrios Capetanakis’ life would certainly cause trouble to any prospective biographer seeking a vantage point from which to narrate it. His premature death – from leukemia in a London hospital on 9 March 1944 at the age of thirty-two – put an abrupt end to a career he was just starting to establish as a poet and essayist in wartime London. To suppose, however, that by that time he had found his niche and voice would be as unwarranted as to entertain the thought of his return to Greece after the end of the war. It is equally likely that the Greek poet would have chosen instead to move to the New World.Footnote ⁷ What his life trajectory shows (and his essays confirm) is that he was one of those people for whom settling has neither a personal nor an intellectual appeal. Ever since his first uprooting from his native Smyrna in 1922 at the age of ten, Capetanakis’ life is marked by a series of displacements which could only partly be attributed to historical circumstance.

The poet-philosopher's geographical and intellectual trajectory allows us to follow important moments in European interwar thought. Educated at the universities of Athens, Heidelberg, and Cambridge, Capetanakis managed, in the short span of his life, to develop ties with an impressive range of intellectuals and artists. As a young scholar in Greece, he studied under the neo-Kantian philosophers Ioannis Theodorakopoulos (1900-81), Constantine Tsatsos (1899-1987), and Panagiotis Κanellopoulos (1902-86), contributing to their quarterly philosophical journal Αρχείον Φιλοσοφίας και Θεωρίας των Επιστημών. He was also a disciple of the renowned classicist Ioannis Sykoutris (1901-37), known for his Platonic fervour and his passion for teaching. At the same time, he associated with a number of representatives of the Generation of the Thirties, including the poet George Seferis with whom he kept a correspondence and the painters Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas and Yannis Tsarouchis, whose work he was among the first to review. At Heidelberg, he studied under Karl Jaspers and was admitted into the circle of Stefan George's students. During the last years of his life in Cambridge and London, he moved in the circle of the British poets of the Thirties, including Edith Sitwell, William Plomer, and Stephen Spender. The most important relationship of his life, however, was his intellectual friendship with the poet and publisher John Lehmann. It was through Lehmann's periodical publications that Capetanakis established himself as a poet and critic in England and acted as a spokesman for Modern Greek culture.Footnote ⁸

‘All poets,’ Capetanakis remarks in his essay on Stefan George, ‘are made poets by an experience we could call revelation, which during their youth has moved them so deeply that they have to try to express it and speak about it to the world.’ And he proceeds with his examples: ‘Wordsworth was made a poet by the revelation of nature, Baudelaire by the revelation of sin, Rimbaud by the revelation of happiness and unhappiness, and George by the revelation of the miracle of the human body.’Footnote ⁹ If the statement has any relevance in his case (which means for the thinker as well as for the poet), we need not go far to discover the self-transforming revelation Capetanakis experienced in his youth: it was, I suggest, his disillusionment with George.Footnote ¹⁰ His gradual distancing from the aestheticist ideal of the ‘dictator poet,’ as he calls him, certainly accounts for a marked ethical turn in his later thought. Out of it also emerged his particular view of poetry as the struggle between solidity and dissolution – a view that informs both the remarkable, and yet unpublished, essays on English poetry that he penned during his time at CambridgeFootnote ¹¹ and his own beautifully crafted cryptograms,Footnote ¹² which made their way into the Golden Treasury of English poetry.Footnote ¹³

Capetanakis’ reception was largely determined by the editorial choices made in the posthumous collections of his works. Thus, while in the English-speaking world he became known as a ‘Greek poet in England’, in Greece he is today mostly remembered for his essays on aesthetics.Footnote ¹⁴ As a consequence of its editorial division along linguistic lines, his written corpus has not been studied systematically as a whole. And yet, it is precisely the dialectics between the parts, periods, and languages of his work that reveal the complexity of his case and merit our attention.

*

Capetanakis must have read Proust for the first time as a boy in Smyrna or shortly after he settled in Athens.Footnote ¹⁵ In his account of their first meeting in Cambridge, Lehmann notes that he was certain to feel intimidated by one who – rumour had it – ‘had read A la Recherche du Temps Perdu through fourteen times’.Footnote ¹⁶ The French novelist was therefore not just a significant chapter in Capetanakis’ life, but a point of constant return. His essay on Proust was first published posthumously in the 1945 volume of New Writing and Daylight, translated from the original French into English by Lehmann.Footnote ¹⁷ The editor notes that this is the translation of a lecture Capetanakis delivered to ‘a French Society at Cambridge’ and adds: ‘An earlier and longer version in German has unfortunately disappeared.’Footnote ¹⁸ Subsequently, the essay was included in the 1947 volume A Greek Poet in England, edited by Lehmann and containing Capetanakis’ English poems and essays. At the same time, it was translated into Greek and published in the 1946 tribute volume to Capetanakis of the journal Νέα Εστία. The Greek translator, who signs as ‘Α. Α. Σ.’, was Anna Sikelianou, Angelos Sikelianos’ second wife, who had been acquainted with Capetanakis in Greece. It is almost certain that Anna had no access to the original French lecture but based her translation on Lehmann's English version. To sum up, we are here dealing with four versions of a text in four different languages, of which the two ‘originals’ (German and French) have never seen the light of publication. In other words, Capetanakis’ study of Proust has reached the Greek and English-speaking public only in translation. Luckily, however, the manuscripts of the two ‘originals’ do survive: that of his French lecture is housed in the Demetrios Capetanakis archive at the Gennadius library, while the longer German version, which was written as part of Capetanakis’ coursework at Heidelberg, is housed among the Lehmann Family Papers at the Firestone Library, Princeton University.Footnote ¹⁹

There is more to the story. While working on his German dissertation on Eros and Time (Liebe und Zeit, Heidelberg 1936) Capetanakis rewrote and incorporated a significant part of his work on Proust – a part, it should be noted, which plays a pivotal role in the structuring of his argument and to which I will come back. Upon his return to Greece, the author decided to translate his dissertation into Greek.Footnote ²⁰ For the purposes of this translation, which remains to date one of his best known works among Greek readers, he had to translate the Proustian passages that he cites. This in itself makes Capetanakis one of the first people to introduce Proust to the Greek public in the 1930s,Footnote ²¹ when the French novelist was read only by privileged readers who had access to the original French – as was the case in most European countries.

While it is beyond the scope of this article to look at the reception of Proust in Greece, I would like to add this brief note which I hope to explore in detail elsewhere. During the period 1936–9 that Capetanakis spent in Greece (between Heidelberg and Cambridge), he would often travel to Pelion and stay at Zagora, the village his family came from and which served as his retreat. It was during these visits that he probably met Anna Sikelianou, at the time Karamani.Footnote ²² This was the same period when George Seferis, then posted in Albania, would travel to Pelion, where he also met Anna Sikelianou; it was in Zagora that Seferis was inspired to write ‘Piazza San Nicolò’ (1937), a poem which is largely indebted to Proust. There is no evidence that the two men met at the time,Footnote ²³ but the coincidence is striking.Footnote ²⁴ At any rate, Seferis uses Proust's opening (‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure’) as an epigraph and begins his poem with a Greek translation of this line: Για χρόνια πλάγιαζα νωρίς. Many years later, during the military dictatorship, his young friend Pavlos Zannas was to undertake the translation of Proust's voluminous work while serving his term in jail as a political prisoner. In his introduction to the first volume of his translation, Zannas acknowledges his debt to Seferis: his translation picks up exactly where Seferis left off, having incorporated the first line of ‘Piazza San Nicolò’.

*

In this section I will be discussing Capetanakis’ reading of Proust, following for the most part the English rendering of his French lecture, but also referring to the earlier German version as well as to his doctoral dissertation. My primary intention is not to distinguish between different texts or readings, but rather to try to synthesize them, in an attempt to approach the main issue at stake. This, I believe, is more in line with Capetanakis’ own approach to philosophy, an approach that is indebted to Socrates in Phaedrus: what matters is not the fossilized text but the speaker's attempt to communicate a certain truth to his/her interlocutor. For, here too, we are dealing with a speaker addressing specific audiences and striving to communicate. But since context and variation certainly matter, perhaps more so in this approach, I would like to add a few introductory remarks.

Capetanakis’ German study is undated, but was certainly completed during his Heidelberg years (1934-6). It was prepared – that much can be deduced from the manuscript – as an oral presentation for a philosophy seminar; addressed, that is, to an audience of fellow-students. It is thus that, at an early point, the speaker finds it necessary to explain, if only in a side comment, why and how the study of a novel can be both legitimate and fruitful in a philosophical context.Footnote ²⁵ In the French lecture, on the other hand, which was delivered to an audience with presumably broader interests, that of a French Society at Cambridge, what needs to be justified is the decision to make philosophy the object of his talk on Proust. Both demands, though, force him to reflect upon the relation between philosophy and literature. The introduction to the French lecture (which will be discussed in the following section) is perhaps the only part of the study that is radically revised and shows precisely that Capetanakis is becoming increasingly conscious of his choice of literature as a privileged field for philosophy: a field where the important philosophical questions are approached in a manner that can be more genuine than that adopted in most systematic philosophical treatises.

The other marked difference between the two works is not to be found in any particular passage but can be rather described as an all-pervasive shift in scope. I am referring to Capetanakis’ approach to the notion of individuality. While in the German paper the term is used mostly with reference to aesthetic categories (for instance, the individuality of the novel as an artwork, individuality being a distinctive feature of beauty), in the French lecture it is discussed in the context of a metaphysical/ethical quest. Indeed, these two categories become intertwined, particularly in the speaker's treatment of eros, where one senses the existentialist traces in his thought. Capetanakis’ growing concern for the author's life – for the author as an individual – is also, I believe, symptomatic of this tendency.

In other respects, however, the two texts are strikingly similar in terms of both content and structure – one comes across many passages that have been simply and faithfully translated from one (foreign) language to the other. The minor revisions could, at any rate, be attributed to Capetanakis’ attempt to abridge the paper (thus, his discussion of Bergson's influence on Proust is eliminated), to his newly acquired literary tastes (an interesting parallel between Proust and Wordsworth is appended), or to the new Proustian studies produced in the interim between the two talks (although of these there is little evidence).

Given the fact that both texts were intended to be read as lectures, it is not surprising that the references to critical studies we find in them are sparse. Here, as elsewhere, Capetanakis shows a preference for biographical sources, including Proust's correspondence.Footnote ²⁶ The only studies and portraits of Proust which he explicitly cites are those of Léon Pierre-Quint, Henri Massis and Paul Morand.Footnote ²⁷ I find it hard to believe that he was not familiar with the studies by at least Curtius and Benjamin (whose translation, however, he had not read) while he was still at Heidelberg, especially since he seems to have been aware of the first abortive attempts at a German translation of Proust's novel.Footnote ²⁸ It is more plausible that he would have tacitly assimilated a number of ideas from these texts.

A final note on translation practices. Given the lack of a Greek translation of Proust and the fragmentary German versions available at the time, Capetanakis chooses to provide his own translations of the passages he quotes in both his German paper (where, in the margins of the translated citation he includes the respective passage in the original French) and in the Greek version of Eros and Time (where he footnotes his references).Footnote ²⁹ Translating extensively for the purpose of citing is a practice he follows throughout his career as a scholar, lecturerFootnote ³⁰ and freelance writer and which testifies to the ease with which he could move between languagesFootnote ³¹ –although when it comes to scholarly essays he is most fastidious in his selection among available translations. In his translation of the French lecture, Lehmann uses Scott Moncrieff's English rendition of Proust, though he often introduces alterations intended to make Capetanakis’ argument clearer.Footnote ³² In the Greek translation by Anna Sikelianou it seems to me that the Proustian passages are rendered from the English and not from the original French, a fact which accounts for some misunderstandings (the word ‘impasses’, for example, is translated as ‘νεκρά τέρματα’ from the English ‘dead ends’). This is yet another aspect of this study that demonstrates how problematic the use of the term ‘original’ would be with respect to any of the available versions or even the relation between any two of them.

*

In the opening to his French lecture, Capetanakis describes a certain approach to a poet's philosophy against which he is on his guard:

It is true that what he so aptly criticizes here is a tendency displayed by a number of critics who either attempt to identify Proust's philosophical sources, thus reducing the novel to the implementation of a certain pre-existing philosophical system (as was the case with Anne Henry) or try to derive the novelist's philosophy through close readings of passages that are arbitrarily chosen and which they fail to contextualize. In the second case, the philosophical system superimposed upon the novel is that of the critic (Paul De Man would be an apt example).Footnote ³⁴ What is common to these approaches is what I would call a tendency to place the author in brackets, that is to be indifferent towards Proust's intentions or his work's overall structure, while citing him to corroborate their claims. How else, though, could one approach or identify the philosophy of a poet without either doing injustice to the work's poetics or falling into the intentional fallacy? The speaker does not even raise these questions, for there is something of greater import that he first needs to clarify, and that is the very meaning of philosophy.

Philosophy, he says, is not an abstract science that ‘can only make ordinary healthy-minded people yawn’ (90) – in fact it is neither boring nor abstract and, above all, it is not a science. Hence, we should not be referring to philosophical systems, but simply study the works of individual people who have something to say to us about life – about our own lives. And, to prove his point, he chooses to quote a philosopher who has indeed ‘a reputation of being very abstract, very boring and very dry’ (91). The reference here is to Aristotle – a rather unusual choice for Capetanakis:Footnote ³⁵

Capetanakis refers us to literature as a source of wisdom. His choice of poets is not in the least arbitrary: they are the poet-philosophers of the three great European traditions: Shakespeare, Goethe and La Fontaine (who is to give way to Proust). The importance of this gesture is clearer in the French: ‘Ouvrons nos poètes. Ouvrons Shakespeare,’Footnote ³⁶ he says, as if he is inviting us to consult the authorities – which is very different from merely taking the example of the poets as the Greek and English translations suggest.

In all three excerpts that he cites, life is weighed against death and the scales seem to balance. Let me pause for a moment at Shakespeare's puzzling lines.Footnote ³⁷ In a certain reading, one that would assume a figurative meaning of death (as that which is the opposite of life), Claudio's two statements seem tautological and their overall effect is ironic. It is, I would venture to argue, the kind of irony that Kierkegaard associates with Socrates, the irony of infinite negativity. But if we look at the lines more closely, the possibility of a different reading emerges. Perhaps the conjunction ‘and’ does not denote a relation of simultaneity, but one of succession in time: it is only when one is faced with the actuality of death that one sees life as something other than non-death, something worth hanging on to. In this second reading, irony has given way to what the ancient Greeks called palinode (recantation). Accordingly, the second statement, by negating the first, restores our faith in life, in human values and/or the divine order. I believe that this is precisely what Capetanakis seeks in literature and philosophy alike: the human (and living) subject of a palinode.

Proust was, for Capetanakis, one of those people who are a little ‘out of the ordinary’ (91) – and those are the true philosophers – who devote their lives to the search for being. To stress this point, he paraphrases the title of Proust's novel: ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ becomes ‘À la poursuite de l’être’. An unmistakable sign of Proust's philosophical nature was his interest in the individuality of things and of people. It is the perceived uniqueness of a person or a thing which arouses in us a desire to know them – more so: to possess them. Since, however, the individual is not something that our reason can ever grasp, this desire is bound to be frustrated. Hence, the question of being remains what Aristotle once proclaimed it to be: a question with no answer (ἀεὶ ζητούμενον καὶ ἀεὶ ἀπορούμενον).Footnote ³⁸ This is the philosophical struggle that Proust's work elucidates and it does so mainly through the paradigm of eros.

In his doctoral dissertation,Footnote ³⁹ Capetanakis tries to analyse the paradox of eros by referring to two clashing principles that it gives rise to and, in turn, is determined by: the desire for eternity and the necessity of temporality.Footnote ⁴⁰ The lover, who would like to be united forever with his beloved or, to use Aristophanes’ image in the Symposium, to be cast into one mould, is entrapped in the inexorable law of temporality – not necessarily because of the other's infidelity or of the infamous waywardness of death (the Proustian hasard), but because of the lover's own change of heart. This, Proust suggests and Capetanakis repeats, is simply the experience of death in our everyday life. When our heart changes, then we are no longer the same person – our old self who willed the eternal union with the beloved has died. Hence Proust shows that we cannot escape the law of time, because we can never be situated outside time – time is ourselves. And he manages to do so in this voluminous novel, where the difference between fictional and real time is blurred. One is here tempted to recall the original title of Proust's work – ‘Les intermittences du coeur’ – which, placed next to the actual one, strengthens Capetanakis’ philosophical reading.

This unbearable realization, Capetanakis continues, brought Proust to the threshold of despair. It was thus that he turned to his art in his attempt to assuage his fear, to escape the fetters of time. Convinced that the living individual – eros – could not give him the happiness and fulfilment that he sought, he tried at least to articulate general laws, to come to some other form of objective and extra-temporal knowledge. But the knowledge which Proust attained – and here one thinks of all the maxims and incisive observations about the human psyche that his work is replete with – comes at a cost. It is the knowledge of one who has suppressed his desire for the pleasures in life, indeed has given up on life. That is exactly what Proust chose to do, by becoming an ascetic in order to complete his great novel. Thus seen, his novel is but the attempt to drown his sorrow in knowledge, to hide it behind general laws, which also means an attempt to hide his own life. ‘We know nothing of the love affairs of a man who has spoken to us so much about love,’ says Capetanakis (92), echoing Henri Massis, who, in a study that had been published a few years earlier, had claimed that Proust worked systematically to conceal himself.Footnote ⁴¹ And one can also think of Walter Benjamin's essay on Proust which ends with the heartbreaking image of the author looking up from his deathbed at the microcosm of his own painting like another Michelangelo gazing at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.Footnote ⁴²

But it is not in the general laws that he formulates, in the objective knowledge that he acquires at the cost of his own life, that Capetanakis detects Proust's philosophical significance – his importance for philosophy. On the contrary, he considers Proust's artistic solution to the problem of individuality as a philosophically flawed one. To explain this, I will now turn to his discussion of Proust in his dissertation. What is interesting about this discussion – which otherwise does not add much to the points he makes in his other studies – is the way it is contextualized. In a stroke of brilliance, Capetanakis chooses to insert Proust in between Socrates’ two speeches in Phaedrus. This leads him not only to a daring and fascinating interpretation of Plato, but also to a questioning of the nature of all knowledge and particularly of its objective status.

The discussion begins in the second section of his dissertation, where the critic exposes the necessity of temporality in eros. The idea of eros as a fleeting passion surfaces in Socrates’ first speech in the Phaedrus, which is conceived, at least in part, as a parody of Lysias’ speech.Footnote ⁴³ Lysias claims that it is preferable to give oneself to one who is not in love and thus, among other things, more likely to remain faithful. So does Socrates in his first speech, where he presents eros as a fatal sickness (as opposed to a divine madness). Here is how Socrates depicts the change of heart in the lover:

Next to which one can read the passage where Swann falls out of love (and let us not forget that Swann's affair with Odette prefigures that of the novel's hero with Albertine):Footnote ⁴⁵

Capetanakis may have hit here on a fascinating affinity between Plato and Proust, if not a source for the Proustian motif of the intermittences of the heart. (But Capetanakis was not a literary scholar; the question of sources would not have been of particular interest to him.) A close look at the Proustian passage allows us to get a better grasp of Capetanakis’ argument. The narrator starts by explaining how Swann's falling out of love is accompanied by a weakening of his determination to hold on to his love. This, however, means that the old Swann, the Swann in-love, is now mort à jamais, forever dead. What is striking is the shift of focus in the last sentence from Swann to ‘one’ (the impersonal pronoun on in the French) – the same shift that arguably takes place in the Phaedrus.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is one of those instances when Proust resorts to a universal law (that is, according to Capetanakis, to pseudo-philosophy), under which the individual case is subsumed and hence obliterated.

It is a point of agreement among most critics that Socrates’ first speech is at best incomplete and limited in scope, hence inauthentic, even if what it articulates may be partially true. For Capetanakis, however, this is not exactly the case. The inability of readers to detect the nature and measure of truth in this speech, he says, stems from the fact that they associate truth with objectivity and permanence. And he asks:

Socrates’ first speech, then, is truthful not because it articulates a universal law of psychology – that the human heart is fickle, that love is a malady – for so does Lysias’ speech which is outright false (and so does Proust from his deathbed); its truthfulness is rather to be sought in the speaker's seriousness and his didactic purpose. Let us examine these two parameters separately.

The fact that what distinguishes Socrates’ speech from that of Lysias is the ethos of the speaker is a point on which most readers and critics would agree. However, Capetanakis deduces his seriousness not merely from his projected goal, but from the inner struggle which gives birth to it:

It is true that the law of temporality that Socrates exposes is false on account of its claims to universality and objectivity. That is why Capetanakis pays close attention to the philosopher's gesture of covering his face while he speaks,Footnote ⁴⁸ a gesture which is only too reminiscent of his argument about Proust: the person who resorts to a kind of general wisdom does so in an attempt to assuage his frustration over the individual, that is to conceal his own self.Footnote ⁴⁹ If I am reading the passage correctly, Capetanakis is almost emptying the Platonic logos of its irony, choosing to see behind any apparent contradiction not a rhetorical device but a dramatic struggle –indeed, to read Socrates as a tragic figure.

On the other hand, Socrates’ speech is intended to have a didactic effect: Capetanakis reminds us that the logos is ψυχεγερτικός as opposed to Lysias’ which is merely επιδεικτικός. Again, this is not so because by parodying Lysias’ speech he brings out the falsity in his argument, but because by adopting this line of argument to the extreme, he gives voice to a most dreadful consideration. Anyone listening to Socrates exposing so blatantly the vicissitudes of the human heart is bound to be plunged into despair. But despair is not an altogether negative thing, for though ‘as an ultimate danger, it threatens to destroy everything, should it manage to engender in us faith, it can also lead to salvation’ (98). One cannot miss the Kierkegaardian echo in this passage. Karl Jaspers, who must have played a part in setting his young tutee on Kierkegaard's track, had a term for such circumstances where one is brought to the brim of the abyss; situations which have the potential of triggering a philosophical awakening: he called them Grenzsituationen.Footnote ⁵⁰

Plato, as we well know, does not stop there. In his second speech, Socrates uncovers his face, acknowledges that he has been blasphemous and proceeds to extol the merits of eros as a divine madness in what has become known as the myth of the psyche. Surprisingly, Capetanakis’ commentary on this second speech is neither as extensiveFootnote ⁵¹ nor, I think, as interesting, so I will limit myself to a couple of observations. The essayist accepts that Socrates’ second speech gives a truer philosophical answer to the question of eros. Why? Precisely because philosophical truth is, for him, not the truth expressed by universal laws, not the truth of psychology that is derived from common everyday experience, but a higher truth. It is the ‘truth that would lead us to realize the highest potential of our existence.’ (135) By turning to myth, Socrates opens up an entirely different dialectic in which objective knowledge gives way to myth or, in Kierkegaardian terms (for here is, indeed, an instance of fusion), to faith. Capetanakis acknowledges as much: even if reason tells us that eternal love is unfeasible, we have to keep on living with, and believing in, this ideal; we have to struggle to realize this ideal, if only in the moment. This, then, is precisely how Capetanakis understands palinode: as a movement from negation to affirmation, from despair to faith; if it is a kind of catharsis or exoneration, that is because it constitutes an attempt to keep the philosophical struggle alive and not to seek knowledge in death. Palinode, then, seen not as a genre or a figure of speech, but as a natural tendency of a mind that is philosophically inclined, is Capetanakis’ choice over and above irony, including Socratic irony.

To sum up: For Capetanakis, the philosophical significance of the Recherche is not to be sought in the attempt to break the fetters of time by reaching an extra-temporal perspective through art – much less in the author's ability to turn individual experience into a universal principle. The novel's importance for philosophy can only be sensed in this back-and-forth – the intermittences in thought mirroring those of the heart – which are, I would argue, the equivalent to the Platonic palinode.

*

I would like, by way of a conclusion, to return to the question of Capetanakis’ joint approach to writers’ works and lives – not unrelated to his joint approach to literature and philosophy – an approach that is manifested throughout his essays and lectures but becomes progressively more pronounced. On the surface, the essayist may seem to be violating a basic rule of literary scholarship, a legacy of New Criticism which few people would dare to challenge: that one should never confuse the narrator of a novel with its author or the speaker of a poem with the poet. Capetanakis’ essays often give the impression that he is doing just that, but this is merely an impression: one would have a hard time looking for precise instances where this faux pas actually takes place. What is even more peculiar, which I have already hinted at, is that this quest of his for the real events in a writer's life most often comes to a dead end: ‘I do not know if we will ever come to learn the concrete facts of Proust's life which led him to despair,’ he writes (92). Similarly, in his George essay he laments the fact that we will never know anything about the miracle which changed his life (his encounter with Maximin): ‘His biographers avoid revealing more than the poet himself revealed [. . .]. The whole story is presented like a myth, a legend stripped of all human interest.’Footnote ⁵² Regarding Charlotte Brontë he remarks that ‘one is not so much interested in the adventures of [her] principal characters as in the misfortunes of the writer which these adventures reveal to us’ and yet points out that Elizabeth Gaskell's biography, despite its merits, ‘ignores or even misinterprets [her] misfortunes, which, as her novels show, had the most important bearing on her life.’Footnote ⁵³ Why, then, does his fascination persist and how does it relate to his overall approach to literature and philosophy? His lecture on Proust gives us a clue.

In the first part of the lecture, before Capetanakis proceeds to give his audience some biographical information on Proust, he finds it necessary to justify this choice. It is in this context that he exposes his view of philosophy as the expression of an individual's life. ‘Behind all philosophies there are living men, whose expression they are’ (92).Footnote ⁵⁴ This being the case, it would seem only natural that in seeking to understand a philosophy one should first seek to approach the person whose expression it is – seek, that is, to discover the individuality of that person, just as a lover seeks to possess his/her beloved or the beholder of an artwork seeks to unlock its mystery. And indeed, in his German study, this parallel is made explicit: to understand a work, one needs to understand the author, which means nothing less than to love the author. But, to press this analogy further, just as it is impossible to know and possess the beloved, so is it impossible to unlock the mysteries of an artwork or penetrate into the life of its creator. The closest we can come is by getting a fleeting glimpse of it in some rare moment of revelation, in the blinking of an eye (augenblicklich) – an image which, incidentally, recalls Plato's myth of the psyche.Footnote ⁵⁵

Edith Sitwell once noted that Capetanakis ‘did not remain a thing apart from the element he explored. He was the element itself.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Her comment provides a shrewd insight into Capetanakis’ reading habits, which could not have been further from those of Proust. For, if for the latter ‘becoming the thing itself’ presupposes seclusion and appropriation, for the former it marks an attempt to enter into the other's space, to identify with the other subject. To understand what is at stake in this opposition, one need only revisit Proust's extraordinary meditation on reading (‘Sur la lecture’) that prefaces his translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies.Footnote ⁵⁷ There, the French novelist opposes Ruskin's view of reading as a conversation, stressing instead the solitary nature of this activity. While he, too, acknowledges that one strives in vain to seize the other's truth, this realization sets him on a very different quest. Reading, for him, becomes an activity of re-creation. What this presupposes is that one understands, accepts, and even celebrates, the laws of visionFootnote ⁵⁸ – what we would call individual perspective. And yet, a few pages later in the essay, Proust goes on to claim that authors (books) remain our only true friends. Why is this so? For the simple reason that they are dead: they can be taken up or returned to their shelf at any time; they can be enjoyed in silence; one need not fret about complimenting or reproaching them; neither does one have to please them; and one is never scared of being rejected by them. One's relationship to them seems very similar to that of a married couple: Swann and Odette, for example (but – alas! – Swann was granted this happiness ‘posthumously’).

Capetanakis’ approach to reading, on the other hand, is the approach of the lover who would like to be united forever with his beloved. This kind of identification can only materialize as the fleeting experience of one reading, say, poetry or fiction. This is why the ‘young aesthete’ who grew into a ‘Greek poet in England’ chose to pursue his philosophical quest through a turn to the poet philosophers. To read an author philosophically meant for him to try to solve the enigma of poetry, that peculiar form of writing where one struggles to conceal one's innermost secrets and, in doing so, infinitely exposes oneself. This is certainly not a Proustian reading, but it is a most insightful philosophical reading of Proust.