Gaol and Supplication
Examining the philosophical ideas behind Karouzos’ poetry, Tassos Goudelis finds that the concept of ‘existence’ lies at the bottom of them all. “This elemental word, shattered or rather proteanly transformable in Karouzos’ verses, offers magical flights, diverse hues and an unfathomable depth that simply astounds.”
“I suckle divinity / it suckles me”
For a reader like myself who (fortunately) still has not managed, in so many years, to find an answer as to why he places two of Nikos Karouzos’ poems (‘Solomos in My Dream’, and ‘The Meek Ways of Barbarossa’) amongst the crowning moments of modern Greek literature, it is highly unlikely that I may begin to believe in the effectiveness of literary interpretation. My first observation entitles me to the right of flatly stating, from the very start, that, in my opinion, Nikos Karousos has already become a classic of our letters . . .
It is in honour of Nikos Karouzos that this introductory and somewhat precipitate view is so brazenly expressed in stark antithesis to the ‘coolheadedness’ that the in vitro researcher of aesthetic phenomena ought to display, so that he or she might gradually reach a conclusion (?) when appraising and not recklessly jump to any . . .
I should also point out that the “Karouzos phenomenon” in the past few years has been dealt with by competent critics to an asphyxiating degree, although the debt owed by university specialists with regard to the critique of Karouzos’ work is still immense. The ensuing result has been that the frame and the origins of the philosophical or other concepts that Karouzos has focused on have already been pointed out.
By this I am not insinuating that research has exhausted all the ideas that permeate the body of poetry of the creator behind Doe of Stars. Quite the contrary, since the substratum of philosophical concepts that Karouzos has been allured by is extremely rich. I merely wanted to draw attention to the fact that at a primary level, the range of concepts that Karouzos has obsessively ministered to is limited. And as I have already explained, a lot of significant essayists have already dealt with these numerous ideas, so much so that you get the impression of repetitiveness when you attempt to approach Karouzos’ poetry in your own way. I am trying to say that you are compelled to regurgitate words like ‘existence’, ‘language’, ‘time, ‘appearances’, ‘being’, ‘ontology’, etc.
Having said that, once you go beyond the obstacle of the ‘limiting’ terms that form the constituting parts of the philosophical identity of Karouzian poetry, you get to see an inexhaustible area of continuous mirages of a certain motif that encapsulates all the previous concepts: it is none other but the word existence.
This concept may very well have never been used by any other poet the world over with so much intensity, anguish, lyricism and wry humour. This elemental word, shattered or rather proteanly transformable in Karouzos’ verses, offers magical flights, diverse hues and an unfathomable depth that simply astounds. In the hands of Karouzos, all the previous ‘obvious’ and fundamental concepts were invariably stripped, scrutinised and observed as they took the form of monsters or angels, lost their weight or crushed him under, limiting him to their inner core sometimes as a prisoner and sometimes as a supplicant.
“– I see you are not well today. What’s wrong? – Existence is wrong”
A famous verse about which a great deal has been said. For Karouzos, existence as a concept carried the meaning, I believe, of a paradoxical reflexivity or idiopathy: in medicine idiopathy is a state occasioned in and of itself, whilst in grammar, reflexive is “a person whose action returns back to him or herself”.
Karouzos felt that existence as a word contained something which, in reality, contained him. That is to say, he lived in that well-known antinomy, although he did not want to accept it; his ‘action’ seemed to begin and end in himself, whereas at the same time this whole process was controlled by an external force. This was because, he thought very simply, “things in which I find myself and which I consume (and supposedly also deplete) are not mine”.
His dualistic theory, which originated from his quasi split between materialism and metaphysics, was a source of uninterrupted torment, often leading him to becoming painfully aware of the tragicomic element. The ‘cosmocomic’ (a coinage that Karouzos, as well as Calvino may well have used when speaking about the issue of creation), imposed a presence of irony and sarcasm on his verses – as well as a kind of insane and ingenious braying to the universe.
For Karouzos, the world, things in general, are creations of language and time: these two concepts fuse with their creations and may become ‘apparent’ like lightning exclusively through the medium of great poetry. At this point, it is easy to understand the dimension that the poet ascribed to the word ‘create’ – which in Greek is the etymological root of poetry (poio).
Therefore, when Karouzos spoke of an “ontological fusion of words and things” (in “Awe of Writing”, a text about Dionisios Solomos), he was referring to the phenomenon of life itself, which, he added, may well be magical but we are able to perceive its magic exclusively through the gift of poetry: “If such a fusion is at work in poetic expression (as in Solomos), then we have language, and poetry becomes life, it does not fade, it does not lose its bio-psychomental dynamics and the gift of magic – on the contrary, it wins over time for good . . . ”
Karouzos believed in language (in its core and sounds) but not in logos, which he considered to be a commentary (prolixity) on reality and not part of it. Conversely, he maintained that charismatic poetry served language (or the reverse, it did not matter, since he spoke of a fusion between the two) and that through some kind of miracle an “apparition of language” takes place in great work. That is why he wrote very little prose, since he was adoringly devoted to poetry and the “awe of writing” it.
One of the most appealing formal assets of Karouzos’s poetry is its imagery. A lot of people have compared the structure of Karouzian language to that of film. I do not know whether the creator of Sleeping-bag was inspired by motion pictures, at a level of their art in linking or their pictorial power. Surely, however, he was influenced by painting; this observation is useful so that I may draw my comment to a close by reminding the readers of a symbolic image-painting whose meaning haunted Karouzos, from ‘Solomos in My Dream’: Solomos, a paradigm of anguish about language, who “erects light and falls shattered”, stands in the foreground wearing his white gloves and bearing a worm upon his palm, whilst behind him the Epiphany is taking place . . .
This essay was published in a special issue of Vivliothiki (a book-review section of the national newspaper Eleftherotypia) dedicated to Karouzos, September 25, 1998.
© Tassos Goudelis
