Dimitris Dimitriadis/ Michael Marmarinos: Dying as a Country

Dimitris Dimitriadis/ Michael Marmarinos: Dying as a Country Kyriaki Frantzi Macquarie University, NSW, Australia . The aim of this paper is to discuss selected aspects of Michael Marmarinos’ 2007 staging of the Greek novel Dying as a country, written by Dimitris Dimitriadis in 1978. In the process of the analysis, apart from presenting the novel and the performance in brief, I firstly reflect briefly on contemporary theatrical adaptations of literary works in Greece and elsewhere; and secondly I focus on the representation of the theme of displacement in this particular play, in situated time and space, and through the employment of creative means, mainly external to the literary prototype. Overall, the performance is approached as a composition of chronotopes, in which various forms of displacement tackled in the novel are both grounded and further contextualized.

Introduction

Adaptation of literary works is a very common practice in modern experimental theatre and cinema. Although objections to unsuccessful adaptations raise issues of betrayal and infidelity to the aesthetics and message of the original works, the more convincing ones claim that they bring the novel ‘to life’, ‘lend voice’ to the mute characters or transform it in an alchemical process. A variety of terms that could apply in dramatization of literature have been used, often starting with the prefixes trans- and re-, such as rereading, rewriting, translation, transmutation, recreation, transvocalisation, to name but a few. Theory of adaptation leads inevitably to literary criticism and the discussions of genres. For the purpose of this paper, apart from drawing from studies on the theory and practice of cinematic adaptation (Stam & Raengo, 2004), I take into account the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope as well as Genet’s types of transtextuality, such as intertextuality (the co-presence of two or more texts), paratextuality (ancillary messages and commentaries on the text), metatextuality (critical rereading of the text) and contextualization (the representation

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of the historical and social context in which the text was created). I also draw on theatre anthropology studies for two reasons. The first is that that both the novel and the performance that I am discussing tackle issues of collective concern such as migrations/ displacement and deconstruction of national identities, not only in the Balkans and the Mediterranean but worldwide. The second is because the making of both the performance and the original text resonate with the principles of preexpressivity that in theater anthropology has been defined as the scenic behaviors which lie at the base of various collective traditions, genres and artistic practices (Barba, 1995; Malekin & Yallow, 1997).

Dying as a country is considered a classical literary work in Greece today, written by an author who is also a poet, a playwright, an essayist and a translator of – among others – Homer, Euripides, Aeschylus, Genet, Blanchot, Balzac, Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. It refers to a country in a prolonged period of decline and occupation, which no longer has a name, in which language has ceased to be spoken deliberately, and where the people, sunk in depravity, feel a deep contempt for the idea of patriotism and an indifference to the survival of their nation (Dimitriadis, 1978). The novel is an abstract grand narrative, fragmented and extremely violent. Its sentences are overly elongated, echoing many layers and stages of the Greek history and language, ranging from contemporary everyday expressions to quotes from religious and ancient sources such as Thucydides’ description of the famine that during the Peloponnesian civil war plagued classical Athens. It ends with a first person “shout of hatred” against a country crushed by the weight of the church and a worn out army, a parallel with the colonels’ dictatorship in Greece which fell four years before the novel was published (Dimitriadis, 1997). According to the writer (To Vima, 2007) it is a draft novel written after his return from France to serve in the army and refers to evil powers, some external but mainly internal, that besiege the country diachronically like an ancient curse, eating up people from the inside and poisoning their creative potential. However, as Marmarinos notes, “the great virtue of the text is that, in transcribing/ transliterating the modern Greek drama, it raises collective experience up to the level of a biblical narrative” (Eleftherotypia, 2007). It is extended beyond Greek space and time, since the radical death of national and human values that characterizes the age is a situation with which many people around the globe can identify. 2

Performing literature in contemporary Athens

Dramatization of literary works has become an increasingly common practice in Greek innovative theater and dance the last two decades. To mention some more groundbreaking endeavors, Dimitris Papaioannou, the artistic manager of the Athens Olympic Games in 2004 launched his career as an avant-garde choreographer of Sappho, Euripides and Mallarmé poetry in the early 1990s; actress and director Anna Kokkinos performed authentic monologues of various characters drawn from a late nineteenth century novel by the charismatic yet long forgotten author George Vizyinos; and many short stories and novels by Alexandros Papadiamantis have been staged in Athens during the last decade despite the archaic language of the literary prototype. In today’s Athens, where theatre constitutes one of the most flourishing and productive aspects of the city’s cultural life, 24 out of 76 performances promoted by a popular entertainment guide this season (Lifo, March 2010) were based on literary works by locals and foreigners such as Buchner, James, Dyras, Orwell, Laclos and the Afghan novelist Atic Rahimi. These included a multilingual adaptation of a Kazantzakis novel; Ritsos’ poetry (dramatized twice); Shakespearian and fairytale characters conversing on stage with their authors, or stepping out of the text to walk the city streets and into bars; and the tragic heroine Iphigenia changing faces and genders, from that of the sacrificed Isaac to that of a Guantanamo prisoner, to end up as an immigrant prostitute in Euripidou Street in the centre of Athens. Nevertheless, it should not be thought that the hybrid mixing of various artistic genres is something totally new in Greek culture. It can be dated back to the 1960s when prolific composers such as Theodorakis and Hadjidakis set high quality poetry, ancient and modern, to music, producing a significant corpus of work which, aided by the emerging local media industry, became very popular locally and worldwide. Director Michael Marmarinos, who staged the novel Dying as a country in 2007, has played a mentoring role in this creative experimentation by staging, for instance, ancient Greek drama in unfamiliar spaces (Ioannidou, 2008), researching Müller, Kafka and Shakespeare on stage in ways that depart from the original extensively, and incorporating interviews with ordinary city people to discuss the theme of National Anthem on stage (Marmarinos, 2001). He has also experimented with alternative chronotopes by transferring his performances to other countries (Italy, France, Korea,

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Georgia, Poland, Belgium, and Austria), utilizing local resources (settings, symbols, props) and employing local actors.

Bakhtin (1981) has defined the chronotope as the spatiotemporal matrix that includes the protagonists and the plot in all narratives. Literary chronotopes represent particular world constructions and tend to be similar in works generated at the same historical period. In their context, space is charged and time takes on flesh and becomes visible. On the other hand, it has been claimed that literary work puts on paper the rhythmical pulsation of silence and activity, basic to all experience, in a controlled coherence that enhances readers’ creativity (Malekin & Yallow, 1997). Taking these ideas further I would add that theatre, due to its ephemeral nature, does the same to a spectacular extent, and indeed must do so. When literature is turned into performance two chronotopes, world views and rhythms are intertwining, conversing or clashing on stage, that of the original literary resource and that of the actual play, generating a third entity that can be seen as a composite.

The performance as a container and shared ground

The opening scene of Marmarinos’ performance is not found in the original Dimitriadis text. A long queue of more than two hundred Athenians, volunteer participants in the play, moves in like a snake from Piraeus Street and its surrounding area and crosses the stage, the interior of an old factory, whilst parts of the procession are continuously projected on a huge screen that faces the audience, featuring a variety of faces, races, details (Theseum, DVD, 2009). At the front of the stage a young and beautiful immigrant woman with an Eastern European accent delivers an awkwardly repeated monologue in front of a microphone, a confession of love to an invisible Greek partner that reveals her wish to experience something deeper and lasting in the relationship. Her speech and body posture struggle to create unity and meaning. Fragments of popular love songs of the 1960s – the era of the first mass post-war Greek migration – that can still heard in the disreputable neighbourhoods of the industrial centre of Athens today provide occasional backing for her disconcerted declaration. The words of the songs clash with the content of the monologue – the former is about loss and abandonment, the latter about hope and faith. When the

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monologue pauses, the queue comes to a halt and sings Sweet Marata, a nostalgic urban song of the 1940s. When the monologue stops, the crowd starts moving again, its pace regulated by the sound of an invisible factory machine or airport bag checking system. An older woman breaks loose from the crowd, stands in front of the microphone, puts her suitcase carefully down and recites the first lines of Dimitriadis’ text: “In that year no woman conceived. This continued during the following years until a whole generation was completed without any new generation to break into the world”. When she returns to the queue, the mechanical sound starts again, continuing metronomically through several parts of the theatrical narration that follow.

It is already obvious that Marmarinos is creating a commentary or metanarrative situated in multicultural 2007 Athens to draw the audience back into the complexities of a work created 30 years earlier. He introduces new characters where the original contains barely any individual characters. Throughout the play, these characters are mainly actors who read the text; foreigners who bring to it their own language; a massive chorus of Athenians serving as silent witnesses to the recited narrative, occasionally stepping out of it to sing and shout verbatim extracts as well as slogans, anecdotes, songs, everyday obscenities mixed with psalms; and finally the writer himself, who crosses the stage fleetingly and walks away. Despite these extra-literary innovations the universal and archetypal elements of the prototype, its form as a

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mostly third person account and its power and fierceness remain intact. The actors, messengers of the tragedy like the mad newscasters mentioned in the novel, stand in front of the microphone, deliver their part and disappear in the crowd. The breath of the performance – acting / elongated pauses marked by the machines in the passages to the other world – move at a parallel framework with the tempo of the written word – sentences/paragraphs/repeated signs of suspension//rare fullstops – on both a structural and a symbolic level. The main idea is life and death revolving in a never ending cycle. In the performance the literary text is both contained and grounded.

Dying as a country, for instance, ends with a fiery monologue the feeling of which could be distilled in the phrase “I hate this country”. The narrator abandons his omniscient third person position maintained through the majority of the novel to address an imaginary partner – the reader – with a first person confession which simultaneously hurls at the country a torrent of deprecatory adjectives bordering on obscenity. The word “country” (χώρα), like the words “woman” (γυναίκα) and “homeland” (πατρίδα), is feminine in the Greek language. As the last part of the novel unfolds towards a suspended catharsis, the narrator’s gender changes to feminine and in the very last sentence she and the country, the subject and object of the hatred, are merging in one entity. The story teller embodies the country. Ah, ah, I hate you, I hate, I hate you, I hate you I’ll die, monster, and I shall go on hating you yes, the hatred is boiling inside me I want to write anthems the reverse of those that have been written for her till now word by word to shoot her and to bury her like a dog with my own hands I am no longer a woman … you are no longer a man either she has taken away everything from us… but what will be left of her without us?... Her ground has taken my shape My body already has her dimensions… I have her fate inside me I am dying like a country… (Dimitriadis, 1978)

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It is interesting to note here that Marmarinos invited Beba Blans, a grand dame of popular music, an old beauty now in her sixties whose song backed the immigrant woman’s monologue in the opening scene, to deliver this final message on stage. This woman, like what Dimitriadis’ name /surname signifies, has not left the country, and, unlike the ancient earth goddess Demeter from which his names draw their origin, acts out her rage albeit somehow calmly and flatly. It is equally interesting that the performance is contained between a person who strives to belong and a person who fights the very place to which she is belonging. They both personify two different aspects of displacement in the modern world which are, in fact, parts of the same cycle.

A multifaceted displacement and the displaced artist

In both psychology and sociology displacement is defined as an unconscious defence mechanism whereby the psychic intensity belonging to ideas or emotions that are perceived as intimidating and harmful are transferred from their true source to something that is perceived as safer (Payne, 1997). Freud in his analysis of dreams notes that the more confused a dream appears to be, the more the process of displacement has had a hand in its construction (Freud, 1900).

Displacement in the form of migration, forced exile or self-exile due to political or financial reasons is a very familiar situation in Greek post-war society. After World War II and until the overthrow of the dictatorship (1944-1974) many people, because of their participation in the resistance against the Axis or in the Civil War, were

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temporarily or permanently displaced, murdered or forced to censorship and silence. With the exception of short periods of democratization, Greek politics were dominated by the army, paramilitary circles, the church and western great powers, whilst education and official cultural life were characterised by a fixation on outdated institutions and ideals. The junta collapsed after the part it played in the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (which is considered Greek territory), launching a period of incessant contestation of Greek territorial waters and airspace in the Aegean Sea that continues to trigger crises to this day.The first years after the restitution of the democracy and despite the trials of the colonels, the abolition of the monarchy, the newly promoted orientation towards Europe and the emergence of new political power bases, the structure of state authority remained intact; key figures of the dictatorship maintained their instrumental positions, the political parties functioned in the shadow of authoritarian personalities or influential families, whilst paramilitaries and right extremists continued threatening to impose a new dictatorial regime to save the country from communism and insanity.

Dimitriadis’ novel refers to accumulated instances of displacement undergone as a form of self preservation in circumstances of siege and occupation that have become part of the national unconscious. It spans centuries, generates hallucinations, confusion and despair in the public psyche; undermines resistance against evil powers, turns brother against brother, and climaxes in acts of explosive violence, resignation and self destruction. There are abstract yet recognisable references to historical events before, during and after the dictatorship, such as conspiracies in the higher reaches of government; bribery of politicians to defect en masse to their opponents; fanatical nationalists who squirrel their assets away abroad; a fevered succession of fatally flawed governments; frenzied supporters of dead politicians who demand the restoration of their corpses to active political life and copulate with amputated statues, execution squads shooting their compatriots in the name of territorial integrity, national independence and racial purity; and a long list of names of people who have executed each other. Even worse, the worn-out inhabitants eventually surrender to the enemy willingly. They accept the eradication of everything in an atmosphere of cheerfulness and exultation. They pass laughing from one historical cycle to the next. At the very end of the chronicle of the Great Defeat, the Platonic dialogues disappear from the libraries, in the novels only dialogues remain, 8

the words obtain an astonishing intensity, and deceit and narrow-mindedness reign. The cities are ruined and rebuilt from scratch and the utilisation of the earth and its resources passes into other hands. There is a constant displacement of everything to somewhere or something else, at the level either of material environment or of feelings, ideas, thoughts or languages. At the very end of the third person narrative there is an image of displacement of the entire country (Dimitriadis, 1978).

Marmarinos’ performance 30 years after Dimitriadis’ work was published takes over with crosscutting imagery that comments on, complements and expands the written narrative, pointing to displacement as a phenomenon that has been universalised. In the intervening years, Greece and surrounding countries were shaken by sweeping changes in politics, economy and society: the collapse of the bipolar system of international relations; the establishment and later the contestation of the US as sole superpower; disintegration of borders and national identities across central and western Europe, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean following the fall of “eastern block socialism”; the Yugoslavian wars and the intensification of moves towards European unification. Immigration to Greece, which is considered the open eastern gate of the EU, had been transformed into a massive, uncontrollable phenomenon with legal immigrants and refugees amounting to 10 percent of the population in 2001, a level that is also found more or less in Spain, Italy, France, Russia, Germany and Ukraine today. The quest for sovereignty and a Greece belonging to Greeks that dominated in the 1980s, as well as the procedures for modernisation/ secularisation of the state’s functions, were repeatedly challenged by irritants such as the conflict with Skopje over the name Macedonia, the intervention of the West in the Balkans, aggravated relations with Turkey and a polarised social debate over the consequences of the European and global reorientation of the country. The displacement of millions of people by both the Yugoslavia and Iraq wars had a shocking impact on Greek society.

Although it would take 30 years to be acknowledged as a text of deep insight and to reach the stage (twice in France and twice at home), Dimitriadis’ novel foresaw these changes at a period when they were lurking in the darkness. Today’s world accords more with the nightmarish message of this prototype. The landscape has been transformed irreversibly through the arrival of foreign tribes which, like the 9

immigrant woman at the performance opening scene, claim their share in history, economy, language and everyday life. As in the words of the novel, violence has been generalised and after the collapse of the Eastern, South and Western fronts, the Northern one is about to collapse too, leaving people who considered it an ultimate refuge in a chaotic state of unrest and embarrassment. Concurrently, it is more than ever before apparent that the prolonged inner and outer pressures are leading the country’s signature to disappear and amalgamate with the broader cosmogram that covers the planet (Dimitriadis, 1978). A planet in which displacement has become almost a state of being: internalised, nationalised and globalised.

Epilogue

What is the way to break this cycle? We can only guess, because the novel – due to the holographic way in which it touches history – resists attempts to being conventionally historicized. A first answer is suggested in the way the author created the novel. Departing, going away and coming back to express honestly and with a fresh eye what one sees, including the pain, the conflict and the hatred. Interview material referring to the early reception of his work in Greece points to the images of the former immigrant and the displaced artist – displaced because his work was incomprehensible to his compatriots on one hand, and generated from the conflict between two cultures on the other. “Whoever has lived abroad, not as a tourist,” he said, “becomes an outsider and a hermit in his own country. … Upon his return he experiences a conflict that is a clash between two worlds, which is a matter of mentality, unity, culture” (To Vima, 2007). Back in the late 1970s, he portrayed a country crushed by the weight of an illusory past identity that robs people of their creative power: “A mask that needs to be turned inside out” (Odeon theatre URL, 2009/10). At a time when Greece was emerging with euphoria from 40 years of darkness, this writing act has been read as disturbing –through the binoculars of linear thought, it can still be perceived as a sacrilege.

But, was it really an act of disrespect towards a country that in his eyes has become a ‘necrophile’, a ‘gerontophile’, a ‘bawd’ and a ‘murderess’? Both in history and the old myths, not to mention the great tragedies, “there is a time when, in response to a 10

serious offence, one has to release a rage that shakes the skies” (Estes, 1996). There is a time when, like Saint George who kills the dragon mentioned in the novel, “one has to perform the forbidden and unsanctioned act to redeem life”. To paraphrase Carl Jung in the aftermath of WWll, no woman, or man, no nation, or collective will be ever able to know themselves without facing, accepting and integrating their darkness (Jung, 1983).

Marmarinos’ staging of the novel in 2007 completed a cycle of theatrical study on the national psyche that was launched with National Hymn in 2000. If the latter constituted an affirmative creative act generated from scratch, Dying as a country drew on a Modern Greek classic for delving into and building on what is hidden in national darkness. In retrospect, it closed a cycle in Greek history that started with the restitution of democracy and ended just before the breaking out of a huge global and local financial crisis. Further, it provided a constructive answer to the question of displaced voices and writing. Creating space for displacement to be seen; allowing time to contemplate its connections to people’s individual and collective lives; and most importantly containing the silenced rage and giving it permission to be expressed in the open, in protected contexts and at the right time. In this respect, the composite chronotope of the performance was not merely an aesthetically orchestrated forum for various encounters; in the areas of intracultural conflict and cross-cultural interaction it served as a meditative and finally as a healing agency for discussing on stage some of the most burning issues of our time.

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University of Texas Press. Barba, E. (1995). The Paper Canoe. A Guide to Theatre Anthropology. Transl. by Fowler, R. London, New York: Routledge. ∆ηµητριάδης, ∆. (1980/1978). Πεθαίνω σαν χώρα. Dimitriadis, D. I'm Dying Like a Country. Athens: Agra. Dimitriadis, D. (1997). Je Meurs comme un pays: Project pour un roman (Confluences). Transl. by Volcovitch, M. Athens: Kauffmann.

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Estes, C. P. (1992/1996). Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine. Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Macmillan. Ioannidou, E. (2008). ‘Monumental Texts in Ruins. Greek tragedy in Greece and Michael Marmarinos’s Postmodern Stagings’. New Voices in Classical Reception, 3:14. Jung, C. (1983). ‘The Philosophical Tree’. Alchemical Studies. New York: Princeton University Press, pp.251-349. Malekin, P. & Yallow, R. (1997). Consciousness Literature and Theatre Theory and beyond (Studies in Literature and Religion). New York: St Martin Press. Μαρµαρινός, M.(2001). Eθνικός Ύµνος. National Hymn according to Michael Marmarinos. Η σκηνοθεσία ως δραµατουργία. Directing as play-writing. Ένα θεώρηµα για την οµαδικότητα. Αthens: Koan. Mazower, M. (1995), ‘The Cold War and the Appropriation of Memory: Greece after Liberation’. East European Politics & Societies 9(2): 272‐294. Stam, R. and Raengo, A. (eds) (2005). Literature and Film: a Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Odeon de l’Europe Theatre (2009/10). Dimitris Dimitriadis. The season, 2009-10 shows. Available at http://www.theatre-odeon.fr/en/the_season/2009_10_shows/accueil-f-324.htm [2 February 2010] Payne, M. (ed.) (1997). ‘Displacement’. Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. Blackwell Publishing. Theseum (2009). Dying as a country. Athens: Theseum Ensemble (DVD)

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