Article
The Deafening Sound of Silence
January 18, 2006
It is such thoughts that spring to mind on the occasion of the recent re-edition of Manolis Anagnostakis’ poetic collections, under the general title The Poems (1941-1971) (already known to us from the previous edition). The subtitles – Seasons, Continuances and The Goal – enable us to divide the oeuvre into three main territories which, as we will come to see, follow its core orientations.
Seasons is comprised of three collections that bear the same title (the only difference being their numbering), covering a period between 1941 and 1950. The starting point of the first collection (1941-1944) is the internally inert time of the German Occupation, though the soft glow of certain pale moments is allowed to shine through. It is an undifferentiated time, bereft of any events that might intimate anything; it is a time full of ambivalent perspectives, carrying suggestions about abandonment and the impossibility of love, the denial of gentleness and the lack of any escape. Youth suffocates in its very first cellular blossoming, and faith is circumscribed by ceiling prices.
From very early on, Manolis Anagnostakis will reveal his scepticism: rejection of life and, at the same time, rejection of any escape from it. Although the verbal tense that dominates the poems is the past – thus the function of memory is in full throttle – the object of memory is almost totally absent; memory itself is dead. The past is already imprisoned, and only in its less discernible depths does the succulent core of vision slowly move, gradually dying away in the very process of being recalled. The coup de grace was dealt a long time ago: “We two remain defeated, with faithless, futile attitudes”.
From the point of view of the events themselves, the poet’s experience encapsulates the naked horror of the war, of the murders and deaths. The poet utilises his experience as his key source, and prepares his reader for his overall method and stance, which will be fully revealed in Continuances. In other words, he believes, just like Schiller, that what poetry chiefly does is to organise the past, reshaping it and constantly re-projecting it; even the liberation after the German Occupation is not capable of assuaging the weight of experience, which remains there as a ceaselessly expanding blot on the present, shaping the future: “Back then, do you remember telling me: The war is over!/ But the War is not over yet./ For no war is ever over!”
Nevertheless, the poet does feel the need for a historic and political struggle deep inside him; not as a pompous urge or an unconscious, animal-like engagement, but as a letter of invitation to the dead, a letter that adumbrates the rubescent moon of escape: “I too dream of a day when, standing on my dead verses I may accentuate my new song with big red letters (victorious trumpets)”.
Soon, however – Seasons 2 (1946-1948) – the sense of defeat becomes absolute; loss, absence, the disintegration of identity, alienation from other people are all intensified; love and escape are but myths; even the difficult and confused vision itself comes into question (“We did not ask for any sure transaction from this State/ We did not ensure the certainty of remunerated endurance”). The verbose appeals of the political bloc that he had joined from early on now seem suspect to him; likewise, he is suspicious of the crowds of the once committed followers who are now beginning to clamorously hibernate along with all the rest, ignoring the deafening sound of death that is persecuting the poet: “Absorbed by the deadened smells that prize the lips half-open . . . ”
At this point it is easy to observe not only the first rupture within the communist bloc but also the poet’s nascent criticism towards the other agents of his time and era. It is a criticism that is still not temporally disassociated but is born out of a state of despair about the crippled social and personal life, doubting nevertheless its own righteousness.
A bit later – Seasons 3 (1949-1950) – life will turn into an endless nightmare; its shortcomings will begin to weigh more than death itself. Manolis Anagnostakis intensifies his criticism against the deserters and all those who feign to remember from a safe distance. He does not deign to accommodate them in the slightest: “No, I won’t hold your hand. You will not steal the shape of my hand”. Experiences are no longer random or temporary; they begin to inhabit his skin; they become a wall and a structural fixture of life. Even his final obsession (the human geography of the dead) cannot presume to demand justice for there is none to be had.
It was chiefly in the last Seasons that we began to see incipient seeds of internal criticism against the Left – the political body that housed but also rejected Manolis Anagnostakis, shaping his painful poetic selfhood. The first Continuance (1953-1954) marks a fundamental turning point: the poet abandons the political dread of the Right and the historic fetters it had imposed on his conscience and existence so that he may turn his mind to his own home affairs of the Left. In the meantime, shortly before his trial in 1949, he is expelled from the Greek Communist Party. What follows is a period of “enforced idleness” (1950-1960), as D.M. Maronitis has put it.
The poet openly questions the ordained party truth, mocks its defences and its false security (which inevitably bring about the true defeat of the leftist movement), and asserts his doubts: “Only this fool of mine will I keep/ For he can move only towards one colour/ Striding sides/ Laughing at your wealth of armours/ Suddenly infiltrating your lines/ Upsetting the solid arrays”.
This attitude will lead him to a suicidal withdrawal into himself – Continuance 2 (1955) – at the same time that the entire camp of the Left follows the disastrous complacency of the party and succumbs to the mercy of its adversaries. He himself does not have access to any political forum to voice his views and is expelled. (A few years later, in 1959, Manolis Anagnostakis takes a step in that direction: he publishes and edits the heretical theoretical review Critique until 1961.)
In the meantime, the rest of society beyond the Left bloc, witnesses all the characteristics of the post-war period as they come into being and develop: a consumeristic model of violent industrialisation, new social groups, modern competitive attitudes. History is dislocated; the struggle of the individual is reduced to individualism. And the poet spins in a vertigo: “Private adventures are overwhelming us/ The immaculate face of History is turning turbid”. Manolis Anagnostakis endeavours at all costs to resist the historic and social onslaught of time by using his experiences during the Occupation as a permanent spring-board.
In Continuance 3 (1963), the poet elevates criticism to become the predominant spearhead of his verses, whilst divesting it of any mournful elements: the Communist Party is receding, his comrades are finding cosy social and political niches, social lies are continuously multiplying. Manolis Anagnostakis’ poetry is becoming wholly political, at a time when he as a person is isolated and disarmed – that being the reason for the shift in his poetry. More importantly: Anagnostakis is contracting into a minimal, microscopic, vulnerable sphere, on whose outer layer post-war Greek society weaves a new mythological teaching of how to unite the bleeding opposites of the Right and the Left; this new mythology overwhelms anyone who dares to keep their eyes open, turning them into lifeless, neutral bodies: “Irreconcilable, unapproachable, always ready/ Unable to bear fruit/ Unable to decompose”. Needless to say, history – its primary wish – remains very far from all this.
The coming of the dictatorship lights up the various facets of things: the shortcomings of an entire score of years, the petty transactions and indistinguishable mess are revealed. Manolis Anagnostakis makes a comeback – The Goal (1971) – to the engaged poetry of the Occupation and War era: “Like nails must you hammer words/ So that the wind may leave them intact”.
If the poet’s work may be categorised in the manner we have described so far, his poetic language follows suit easily. Manolis Anagnostakis sets out from an emotionally reversed lyrical excitement that is brimming with exclamatory methods and varieties. This laxity in form is related to the laxity of the times, as Alexandros Argyriou points out. As the poet moves on, however, into his Continuances, he perceives – and begins to use – language as a unit of distilled words. The degree of desalination is so great that the sounds of words are like the clear drumming of fingers on a table; they are repeated and accelerated until they develop into a major sentence; and then they shrink into a fissure. In the gaps between the lexical connections, a drowned lyricism (only its odour but not its body) is still latent. This culminates in The Goal.
For Manolis Anagnostakis, poetic language is the critical codification of diffuse – yet constant – social attitudes. By playing between the irony of standard linguistic and social rules and the tragic reference of names of friends, streets and places, he accomplishes what he strives for: a constant emotional secretion.
Manolis Anagnostakis’ poems traverse a painful course between the individual and the collective, whilst scrupulously maintaining their functional fusion. Their author became personal when he had to be highly political, and holistic when it was imperative to obliterate the personal in favour of the political. Today he remains silent. This is not only because his accomplished work is more than enough to speak for itself for a long time into the future, but also because the poet has distanced himself from poetry without abandoning it. As he himself says, “Deed and silence are two equally drastic forms of expression”.
On the occasion of the re-issue of Manolis Anagnostakis’ complete poems, The Poems (1941-1971), Vangelis Hadjivassiliou considers the poet’s various collections within the larger whole of his entire oeuvre. “Manolis Anagnostakis’ poems traverse a painful course between the individual and the collective, whilst scrupulously maintaining their functional fusion.”
The fact that a poet who has for a long time now dwelt at the boundaries of silence is now making a comeback on the publishing scene with the very same oeuvre which marked his withdrawal fourteen years ago allows us to confirm that the cycle has closed and the basic requirements – at least as far as the author is concerned – have been met. From now on, even in the case of any additional appearance, the poet’s work can be presented as a consummate unit that seems to demand a genuine perusal and not merely tentative or indicative examinations.It is such thoughts that spring to mind on the occasion of the recent re-edition of Manolis Anagnostakis’ poetic collections, under the general title The Poems (1941-1971) (already known to us from the previous edition). The subtitles – Seasons, Continuances and The Goal – enable us to divide the oeuvre into three main territories which, as we will come to see, follow its core orientations.
Seasons is comprised of three collections that bear the same title (the only difference being their numbering), covering a period between 1941 and 1950. The starting point of the first collection (1941-1944) is the internally inert time of the German Occupation, though the soft glow of certain pale moments is allowed to shine through. It is an undifferentiated time, bereft of any events that might intimate anything; it is a time full of ambivalent perspectives, carrying suggestions about abandonment and the impossibility of love, the denial of gentleness and the lack of any escape. Youth suffocates in its very first cellular blossoming, and faith is circumscribed by ceiling prices.
From very early on, Manolis Anagnostakis will reveal his scepticism: rejection of life and, at the same time, rejection of any escape from it. Although the verbal tense that dominates the poems is the past – thus the function of memory is in full throttle – the object of memory is almost totally absent; memory itself is dead. The past is already imprisoned, and only in its less discernible depths does the succulent core of vision slowly move, gradually dying away in the very process of being recalled. The coup de grace was dealt a long time ago: “We two remain defeated, with faithless, futile attitudes”.
From the point of view of the events themselves, the poet’s experience encapsulates the naked horror of the war, of the murders and deaths. The poet utilises his experience as his key source, and prepares his reader for his overall method and stance, which will be fully revealed in Continuances. In other words, he believes, just like Schiller, that what poetry chiefly does is to organise the past, reshaping it and constantly re-projecting it; even the liberation after the German Occupation is not capable of assuaging the weight of experience, which remains there as a ceaselessly expanding blot on the present, shaping the future: “Back then, do you remember telling me: The war is over!/ But the War is not over yet./ For no war is ever over!”
Nevertheless, the poet does feel the need for a historic and political struggle deep inside him; not as a pompous urge or an unconscious, animal-like engagement, but as a letter of invitation to the dead, a letter that adumbrates the rubescent moon of escape: “I too dream of a day when, standing on my dead verses I may accentuate my new song with big red letters (victorious trumpets)”.
Soon, however – Seasons 2 (1946-1948) – the sense of defeat becomes absolute; loss, absence, the disintegration of identity, alienation from other people are all intensified; love and escape are but myths; even the difficult and confused vision itself comes into question (“We did not ask for any sure transaction from this State/ We did not ensure the certainty of remunerated endurance”). The verbose appeals of the political bloc that he had joined from early on now seem suspect to him; likewise, he is suspicious of the crowds of the once committed followers who are now beginning to clamorously hibernate along with all the rest, ignoring the deafening sound of death that is persecuting the poet: “Absorbed by the deadened smells that prize the lips half-open . . . ”
At this point it is easy to observe not only the first rupture within the communist bloc but also the poet’s nascent criticism towards the other agents of his time and era. It is a criticism that is still not temporally disassociated but is born out of a state of despair about the crippled social and personal life, doubting nevertheless its own righteousness.
A bit later – Seasons 3 (1949-1950) – life will turn into an endless nightmare; its shortcomings will begin to weigh more than death itself. Manolis Anagnostakis intensifies his criticism against the deserters and all those who feign to remember from a safe distance. He does not deign to accommodate them in the slightest: “No, I won’t hold your hand. You will not steal the shape of my hand”. Experiences are no longer random or temporary; they begin to inhabit his skin; they become a wall and a structural fixture of life. Even his final obsession (the human geography of the dead) cannot presume to demand justice for there is none to be had.
It was chiefly in the last Seasons that we began to see incipient seeds of internal criticism against the Left – the political body that housed but also rejected Manolis Anagnostakis, shaping his painful poetic selfhood. The first Continuance (1953-1954) marks a fundamental turning point: the poet abandons the political dread of the Right and the historic fetters it had imposed on his conscience and existence so that he may turn his mind to his own home affairs of the Left. In the meantime, shortly before his trial in 1949, he is expelled from the Greek Communist Party. What follows is a period of “enforced idleness” (1950-1960), as D.M. Maronitis has put it.
The poet openly questions the ordained party truth, mocks its defences and its false security (which inevitably bring about the true defeat of the leftist movement), and asserts his doubts: “Only this fool of mine will I keep/ For he can move only towards one colour/ Striding sides/ Laughing at your wealth of armours/ Suddenly infiltrating your lines/ Upsetting the solid arrays”.
This attitude will lead him to a suicidal withdrawal into himself – Continuance 2 (1955) – at the same time that the entire camp of the Left follows the disastrous complacency of the party and succumbs to the mercy of its adversaries. He himself does not have access to any political forum to voice his views and is expelled. (A few years later, in 1959, Manolis Anagnostakis takes a step in that direction: he publishes and edits the heretical theoretical review Critique until 1961.)
In the meantime, the rest of society beyond the Left bloc, witnesses all the characteristics of the post-war period as they come into being and develop: a consumeristic model of violent industrialisation, new social groups, modern competitive attitudes. History is dislocated; the struggle of the individual is reduced to individualism. And the poet spins in a vertigo: “Private adventures are overwhelming us/ The immaculate face of History is turning turbid”. Manolis Anagnostakis endeavours at all costs to resist the historic and social onslaught of time by using his experiences during the Occupation as a permanent spring-board.
In Continuance 3 (1963), the poet elevates criticism to become the predominant spearhead of his verses, whilst divesting it of any mournful elements: the Communist Party is receding, his comrades are finding cosy social and political niches, social lies are continuously multiplying. Manolis Anagnostakis’ poetry is becoming wholly political, at a time when he as a person is isolated and disarmed – that being the reason for the shift in his poetry. More importantly: Anagnostakis is contracting into a minimal, microscopic, vulnerable sphere, on whose outer layer post-war Greek society weaves a new mythological teaching of how to unite the bleeding opposites of the Right and the Left; this new mythology overwhelms anyone who dares to keep their eyes open, turning them into lifeless, neutral bodies: “Irreconcilable, unapproachable, always ready/ Unable to bear fruit/ Unable to decompose”. Needless to say, history – its primary wish – remains very far from all this.
The coming of the dictatorship lights up the various facets of things: the shortcomings of an entire score of years, the petty transactions and indistinguishable mess are revealed. Manolis Anagnostakis makes a comeback – The Goal (1971) – to the engaged poetry of the Occupation and War era: “Like nails must you hammer words/ So that the wind may leave them intact”.
If the poet’s work may be categorised in the manner we have described so far, his poetic language follows suit easily. Manolis Anagnostakis sets out from an emotionally reversed lyrical excitement that is brimming with exclamatory methods and varieties. This laxity in form is related to the laxity of the times, as Alexandros Argyriou points out. As the poet moves on, however, into his Continuances, he perceives – and begins to use – language as a unit of distilled words. The degree of desalination is so great that the sounds of words are like the clear drumming of fingers on a table; they are repeated and accelerated until they develop into a major sentence; and then they shrink into a fissure. In the gaps between the lexical connections, a drowned lyricism (only its odour but not its body) is still latent. This culminates in The Goal.
For Manolis Anagnostakis, poetic language is the critical codification of diffuse – yet constant – social attitudes. By playing between the irony of standard linguistic and social rules and the tragic reference of names of friends, streets and places, he accomplishes what he strives for: a constant emotional secretion.
Manolis Anagnostakis’ poems traverse a painful course between the individual and the collective, whilst scrupulously maintaining their functional fusion. Their author became personal when he had to be highly political, and holistic when it was imperative to obliterate the personal in favour of the political. Today he remains silent. This is not only because his accomplished work is more than enough to speak for itself for a long time into the future, but also because the poet has distanced himself from poetry without abandoning it. As he himself says, “Deed and silence are two equally drastic forms of expression”.
© Vangelis Hadjivassiliou
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