Orthokostá (3 page)

Keeping both the content and its organization constantly before the mind's eye is a balancing act few readers of the prose classics, be they by Montaigne or Tolstoy, manage to maintain.
Orthokostá'
s irresistible human representations, its numerous dramatis personae coming slowly and rather mysteriously into focus, have tended to attract more vocal and more articulate responses than the book's structure and its semi-transparent message. The terror that spread throughout the Greek countryside during the fratricidal period, roughly between 1943 and 1946, the appalling suffering it caused, as well as the survivors' stories, would be hard to ignore. The book, however, communicates not long after its curtain raisers that it is as much about the many tortured tales men and women tell as it is about the drama of the disembodied voice-over experiences in its interviews and its surprising shorter but cryptic interjections. The latter, refrain-like sections—without which the book would hardly make sense—serve to reorient the reader away, momentarily, from the chronicles of the direct rightist or leftist depositions and toward a more meditative mode, in effect, toward the enigma of the aesthetic composition of the book as a whole. Shifting between elegy and anecdote, exorcism and self-exculpatory soliloquy, tableau and interview, novella and epiphany,
Orthokostá
exhibits virtuoso syncopation on the one hand and the infinite drama of the themes of the classical canon on the other.

The book raised a furor when it first appeared in 1994 for presumably favoring one side of the conflict it portrayed over the other. Is it possible that so many of its critics read past the material in any single account (or the ironies inherent in the succession of any two) in an attempt to mine their subject matter for evidence of the author's—Mr. Thanassis Valtinos of Main Street's—own predilections? Was the medium of the many narratives so transparent and apparently without texture that they took it for raw, uninflected content? The numerous speaking sections of
Orthokostá
were easily construed as the evidentiary grail so many cultural historians are typically in search of. Even the possibility that the
Rashomon
effect might hint at the problematical nature of the novel, a text in the process of serial riddling, took second place to the quest for the oral histories covering the specific three terrible years that preceded the outbreak of the equally terrible Civil War in 1947. The knee-jerk reception of these critics to
Orthokostá
, personal penchants aside, might be explained in part by one legal technicality. Greece was probably the last anti-Axis country in Europe to pass legislation acknowledging that there had been resistance against the World War II Occupation powers. When the belated law was passed in 1984, both conservatives and leftists vehemently denied the other any right to claim participation in the Resistance. All this a full forty years after the withdrawal of the last German troops from Greece and only ten years before the appearance of
Orthokostá
, with its provocative polyphony.

There have indeed been the exceptional readers who sensed an “impersonal” air to the book. They recognized Valtinos's attraction to the slice-of-life, unsentimental folk forms that had informed a large number of his earlier works and to the unself-conscious, unschooled speech patterns of the man in the village coffeehouse, whether in Lesbos (
You Will Find My Bones Under Rain
, 1992) or in the Kastri epicenter of
Orthokostá
. Valtinos's often nameless speakers parallel his own rather oblique presence in the larger story. Starting out as the primary listener to and transcriber of the numerous reminiscences, he comes across at first as the anthropologist's participant observer and only gradually as the native interrogator's amanuensis.
The writer's intermittent visibility in many of the narratives is but the self-ghosting of “Valtinos” the virtual editor who leaves no trace of his hand behind, no hint that he determined the order or form in which the book would greet or confront its readers. As the protagonists' sex and political persuasions become progressively clearer, however, the novel appears to be concerned less with the characters' existential predicaments, and lesser still with Greece's role in the geo-ideological theater of the Balkans in the 1940s. Far from conflating the conventional in art with the historical,
Orthokostá
does not miss a chance to foreground the musicality of its linguistic medium and the logic of its structure. In doing so it appeals on almost every page to the range of its readers' relationships to the craft of literature in general and the concision of poetry in particular.

Gradations of timbre abound. Some sections read like officers' reports to headquarters, others like legal treatises. They are the sections that make use of the purist, katharevousa, idiom by the speakers, who range from schoolteachers to lawyers to Party cadres. Other sections feature the reluctant responses to questions by an unidentified interlocutor. The philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Nikolai Leskov, observed that survivors of the carnage of World War I, contrary to expectations, were less not more talkative. The chronicler in
Orthokostá
, several times, gives way to the rhapsode, like the unidentified narrator (Homer?) in the
Odyssey
who, at some point, asks his fictional hero, “What did you do next, Odysseus?” The mix of the individual and the supra-individual in the novel suggests that its core of insight and sympathy lies not in the individual stories but rather in their seemingly unedited transcription as oral accounts that somehow reached the domain of the page in the form of an affidavit. Convention and invention are so tightly intertwined in the structure of the book readers may forget to shift from the substance of each first-person point of view to the page's unacknowledged origin. The Aristotelian unities of action, place, and time have been replaced in the novel by a roaming ear that captures inflections and idiosyncratic expressions about incidents beyond count that each chapter introduces with dreadful timing.

The periodic cross-fading of personalities in their relationship to time and the landscape of the Peloponnese underscores Valtinos's implied insistence that he is dealing in uncoached random reports. Somehow, magically, Valtinos's wildly variegated statements exhibit an interconnectedness and relevance to one another reminiscent of wind-blown
papiers trouvés
. Cervantes' hero Don Quixote at some point in the novel that bears his name expresses an irrepressible desire to read every torn piece of paper littering the streets of the city. In practical terms, Valtinos has often acknowledged the same urge. His novel
Data from the Decade of the Sixties
(1989) exhibited a gargantuan appetite for the discarded and found scraps Cervantes writes about. Newspaper clippings, illiterate application forms scavenged from office wastebaskets, and letters of the lovelorn to a Greek Miss Lonelyhearts make up the
Data
“novel.” The transitionless linking together of so many sections of
Orthokostá
leaves no doubt that this novel is erected on a more elevated plane and in more closely figured themes than the docu-fantasies of his other books. The apparently unmediated orality in
Orthokostá
exhibits the stark ethopoeia of Aeschylus's
Persians
and Thucydides' unapologetic speeches in the genocidal Melian expedition. Both, like
Orthokostá
, make for fractured readings in times of fractured collectivity.

Once past the prefatory utopia Valtinos sets the tone for the kind of communication that has neither Bishop Isaakios's euphuism nor the detachment of its modernist retraction in the finale. The page-long first chapter contains a woman's recollection of the summer wind carrying cinders from houses burning in neighboring villages. She cites the urgency of men's messages to their families to pick up everything and make themselves scarce because bad things are coming their way. The sense of approaching danger, the rumors of violence spreading facelessly like a contagion, is so gripping that one forgets that this is happening in Arcadia, where such things are not supposed to happen. The unthinkable is becoming real. A local can tell that the
smoke is not coming from burning vegetation. Houses that had not been bombed by Germans or blown up by Italians are now being torched, one after the other, with the help of a broomstick set afire by a fellow Greek's flint lighter. This man, mentioned by name, even exchanges a quip or two with the members of the committee that was carrying out orders as directed by the Party chapter chairwoman.

Like Hawthorne's “Custom-House” overture to
The Scarlet Letter
, Valtinos's audible hovering in portions of
Orthokostá
ensures, primarily, that its realist frontage does not falter, that its linguistic cast will give pleasure, and that its
apport
to the imagination will be to so conceal art that it will come across as artless. And what better masking of the conventions of the techne in any art than the apparent artlessness in direct voice transcriptions? Valtinos's lifelong contributions to Greek cinema, including widely known collaborations with Theodoros Angelopoulos, may go a long way toward explaining his method: no genre does a better job of obscuring the seams of editing, the splicing and shuffling of “takes,” than the documentary. The framing mode of the audio-to-paper transfer is made explicit in other books by Valtinos. A cassette recorder is mentioned in
Deep Blue Almost Black
(1985), and
The Life and Times of Andreas Kordopatis
(1964) is an oral account partially based on an emigrant's journal. Regarding
Orthokostá
, it matters little whether the published material is lifted from “live” recordings or simply “hearsay.” Even if Valtinos had done “the police in different voices” (T. S. Eliot's original title for
The Waste Land
) in the forty-nine chapters of
Orthokostá
, this in itself would be no mean feat. Neither Bishop Isaakios's “blurb” on the land around Orthokostá nor the Triple A–like epilogue would lie beyond Valtinos's inventive abilities. In the end both are fictions that serve, each in its own way, to distance the reader from the gore and suffering associated with Orthokostá.

Speakers in the book are either warned, typically by another speaker, not to mention any names, or they suddenly turn silent with an expression that comes close to a gruff, but ambiguous “I'm done talking.” The concluding reference to much that is unspeakable in Valtinos often assumes the gravity of historical closure (“The rebel
insurrection was over. . . . It was over for good,” the Greek verb in this context being a derivative of
catharsis
). Occasionally the account progresses towards a note of exorcism. The parting shots of most of the recorded stories often end with a laconic one-liner (“that bloodshed still hounds him”). The beginnings, on the other hand, tend to be almost always teasers that, by dint of repetition, could as easily apply to the captive audience as to the speaker: “We were arrested when . . .” Once the captivity narrative gets under way, however, the contents are surprising in their immediacy. Both captors and captives, in the hundreds, are ill-equipped for the mountainous terrain, both are chronically undernourished, few attempt to escape their pre-ordained ranks, and both stoically accept the long marches that serve to maintain a supply of men and women hostages to be culled for summary retaliatory executions whenever the captors are attacked.

The oft-intuited dilemma in
Orthokostá
, “damned if you do, damned if you don't,” sounds painfully familiar from the ancient historians' accounts of cities destroyed for not choosing neutrality and then destroyed, a second time, for having chosen it. Like all complex epics
Orthokostá
is rich in war paradoxes. Glaucus's meeting with Diomedes in the sixth book of the
Iliad
manages to tinge the action of the entire poem with the possibility of somber ironies (“Go find yourself other Greeks to kill . . .”) where one would least expect to find them. In one sense there is little that is peculiarly Peloponnesian in the list of the
Orthokostá
atrocities. The ancient lyricists such as Tyrtaeus and Callinus testify to the opposite. And so do Homer and Sophocles when it comes to orders that the executed not be buried. Were it not for the gods' daily intervention Achilles' punishment of the dead Hector's body in the
Iliad
would have resulted in the same kind of posthumous disfigurement a man in
Orthokostá
suffers at the hands of his torturers. “Mémos's Fields” refers to a spot named for a local official and torture victim who was shot during a march he could not keep up with because of the beatings he had received on the soles of his feet. As with the heroes of antiquity, place names are given to commemorate a victim's tragic death. Walter Benjamin's eighteenth thesis on the art of the storyteller—once again from his essay on Nikolai
Leskov—sums up the etiological presentation as one that allows the “voice of nature” to speak, including the dark work of hatred. An anonymous initiative in itself, the naming of Mémos's Fields does not monumentalize the circumstance of victimization, nor is it triumphalist. One corner of the countryside that had been repeatedly crisscrossed by forced marches of hundreds and hundreds of civilian “enemies of the people” now has a voice and a face.