Orthokostá (4 page)

Valtinos's speakers come from or go through places that are inseparable from their own and their families' identities. The metaphor, a synecdoche really, is saying, “If you're looking for ‘art' it's out there,” in a territory of narrowly topical and date-bound, often warring, site-specific states. Allusions to places of birth, mixed in with the speakers' relatives and acquaintances, make
Orthokostá
appear at first to be just another demographic dump of the Greek Civil War and its participants. To the untrained ear they are as superficially unattractive as the four-hundred-line catalogue of ships in the
Iliad
—a 1955 translation omitted them as of no interest to the modern reader!—which enumerates both the European and the Asian expeditionary contingents that participated in the siege of Troy. It is true that the illusionism of the main action in the
Iliad
is momentarily suspended. In its place, and behind the euphony of locations like Sparta, Epidaurus, Mycenae, Euboea, Ithaca—to Valtinos's “Parnon” “Karatoula,” “Tripolis,” and “Argos”—one notices that Homer's catalogue is also about the families the troops leave behind, the attributes of the locales they come from, the miniature epics of still other alliances and hatreds: in other words of countless other Troys embedded in the framework of the main epos. In
Orthokostá
whole neighborhoods, individual plots of land, and even stone fences are known by their founders' or builders' names. Trajectories of movement through fields or towns are marked by itemized ownerships. The naming rituals of older titles, the degrees of belonging to a family network, or the rituals of christening and mourning that fill the book all build up to the
chora
—a term
adopted by the theoretician Jacques Derrida from Plato's
Timaeus
for the matrix of villages that, in this case, mysteriously engender language and social relations. The unfailing rootedness to conditions on the ground of any entries in Valtinos's lists, long or short, adduced by the narrators seems to be saying insistently that whoever touches a man touches a place, cherished or haunted.

Chora can be alarmingly literal as well. In one of the shortest chapters of the book the speaker describes a team of mules loaded with sacks of chestnuts traveling by night. When the animals suddenly freeze in their tracks the muleteer wonders whether they had sensed the macabre past under their hooves. Washington Irving and Balaam's Ass from the book of Numbers converge upon the reader's novelized interviewee, who wonders whether it was “the devil playing tricks, or . . . the smell of blood—three years since Fotiás was killed there.” The reader has long sensed that the indirection by which so much information is conveyed to the page is intentional and that possibly the blurry contours and the discontinuous nature of its interludes are so many nudges toward the participatory cast of this fiction, the active connecting of lines of thought and the juxtaposing of the varying gradients of truthfulness (or posing) between the book's two covers. The reader's co-authoring of
Orthokostá
is of the same critical order as that called for by Laurence Sterne's refracted fabulations in
Tristram Shandy
or by Julio Cortázar's Escherian
Hopscotch
.

Valtinos does not divulge the information as to how the first-person reports in the novel came into his possession, or the process by which they lined themselves up for the readable, published version. The documents fascinate from the start by their alternating emphases and changing points of view. Some are prodding investigations while others are tableau-like miniatures of pathos. Even bathos. Take the execution of an emaciated old woman who refuses to betray her son's whereabouts and is killed on the spot. Others read like Norse sagas.
Burnt Njall
is an apt analogue as the wind blows in cinders from burning homes in the vicinity. Homer's retelling of the siege of Meleager's home in the
Iliad
is clearly reenacted here. Meleager dies when his external soul, a log that was saved by his mother
from the hearth when he was born, is thrown back into the fire by his mother.
Orthokostá
-like—paralleled by a notorious female rebel leader who stridently demands that her own father and brothers be put to death—Meleager and his household are doomed to die at the hands of none other than his mother's brothers. The opposing sides in the novel burn each other's homes down while also holding separate “courts” in the mountains to judge and hang their rivals. A sizable part of the population is made to choose between forced conscription and summary execution while another beleaguered group prefers volunteering for camps in Germany to being held hostage in the place of relatives who had taken refuge in Athens.

The persona of the non-omniscient narrator whom, for convenience' sake, we can call Valtinos, reappears in later chapters of the book in order to close an epic ring composition and to pose questions that mark him as another local, on intimate terms with various families' histories and, frequently, an acquaintance of the speakers. There are moments when the questions resemble Socrates' maieutic method of facilitating the birthing of a story or Homer's questioning of his hero. The working assumption in
Orthokostá
seems to have been that the integrity of every testimony would be preserved at all stylistic costs and that all “data,” commented on or not, would be respected as delivered and as recorded. More narrowly, “style” for Valtinos is the projection of the vividness of the medium he salvaged from the mouths of the protagonists of the novel with as little manipulation as possible. The initially choppy, fragmented phrasing of any one of his speakers occurring anywhere in a section may go on for some time, until a particular idiom explodes that cancels out all the inarticulate fumblings leading up to it and brings with it an unforgettable, often surprising turn of thought. The Greek that the obscure villagers of
Orthokostá
speak, be they in or out of uniform, be they victims or victimizers, communicates an expressive vigor that even under the duress of recollecting the troubled times is nothing short of astounding. The array of the narratives of the novel seems to be saying, Let the people at the receiving end of history talk as they will and two things will emerge simultaneously: on the one hand the
kind of local knowledge that the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chronicles of the Morea—another name for the Peloponnese—or Cyprus, for example, are famous for, and on the other the torrents of live eloquence one associates with Froissart and Xenophon.

The chapters are subtly intertwined, and so are the interludes. The withholding, for instance, of a specific detail for hundreds of pages until its significance is made clear in a new, still shifting context affects the reader's sense of time and disbelief. And it affirms Valtinos's sense of the dignity of what would have otherwise been trivial facets of the essentially subjective nature of human experience. Valtinos is so fastidious about not overstating a particular mood he often concludes with aphoristic brevity or by the mere restating of his speakers' last words.

This book may help explain the attraction Valtinos's dry, laconic style holds for his readers. The “intermittency” of the Civil War material with the shorter prose poems, besides serving to return the reader to the life of the senses, reveals a Valtinos constantly on the lookout for the other kinds of life going on even among the ruins. Indeed, there are rich doses of Bakhtinian “novelizing” in
Orthokostá
. Squabbles erupt over a stolen watch. The killing of two ravenous dogs ends in reconciliation. Neighboring villagers who fear a poor citrus fruit crop for that year resign themselves to planting onions. These “gratuitous” minor incidents could be considered as contrastive textures that are inserted in an otherwise torrential series. It is through variations of this kind that Valtinos communicates textual complexity. For lack of a better term they might be called
pauses plastiques
. They appear as a thematic punctuation in the flow of the longer stories. And they also prevent facile symmetries. Cameo-like, they are breathers permitting the continuous exposition to assume the tones of poetry. Predictability is broken up by the subtle associations afforded by the inserts. Beginning with
chapter 3
, and ending on the last page of the last chapter of the book, these snapshots are the
space in which the unnamed participant observer intrudes the least and sometimes even vanishes altogether. From a literary-historical point of view, alternating the modes of a single composition is part of a tradition that reaches back to the Attic playwrights' polyrhythms, the Roman prosimetra, and the Christian liturgy. From Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi's
Dove's Neck Ring About Love
of the tenth century and Rigas Feraeos's
Mismayés
of the eighteenth there is but a short step to
Orthokostá
. The contrapuntal, collagistic
Orthokostá
could not adequately convey a sense of suffering humanity in the round if the uneven chords it struck did not resonate with its readership's familiarity with other more traditional and more modern projects in music, architecture, and the visual arts. Meaning, in the novel, emerges to a far greater extent from its reading than from its writing.

As the short chapters are mounted in the midst of the longer ones they tend to be emblematic of circumstances as well as of states of mind. In a barely four-line section a woman is asked if she remembered the incident of concealing someone inside a storage trunk: “She started to cry. Poor thing, she's an old lady now, all shriveled up.” The souls, even of the bravest, as in many of Homer's martial encounters, depart with a whimper. Valtinos's snapshots function much like the linguist Roman Jakobson's continuators, both phatic and evocatory.

Whatever else makes up the chapters of the book is suddenly pushed into the background by the awareness that in the midst of untold calamities a young woman can still be romanced and proposed to by a rebel captain passing through, while another can be coveted by a rightist hothead who can find no other way to be near her except by arresting and re-arresting her; trains are somehow still connecting small townships to county seats; while a handful of naked German soldiers take a dip in a stream of mountainous Arcadia. It is these short, compressed tableaus, in the final analysis, that carry the day. When the agonizing of relatives and friends finally subsides, the last image the last chapter leaves the reader with is of a villager's speculating over a source of fresh water: if his price is not met, the water will be left to lie in its underground resting place. The site of
anguish and fear for the reader is relieved by the hint of an element of life ready to gush forth if only the agency of man would not interfere with it. Even the novelist and critic Edward Dahlberg heard, in his essay “Melanctha” from
Can These Bones Live
, the clamor and convulsions of the age for “blood, for human offal,” as “a cry for dim and fetal beginnings.”

The cross-layering of human motivations in
Orthokostá
fast acquires the status of written objects—military operations transparencies, parchment, blotting paper—all in different hands and in different inks rousing the gamut of response from rage and nostalgia to reverie. To the rest of the world the mind of a southeastern Peloponnesian in the early 1940s might well be an enigma. The two pre-forties Greek-American interludes in
Orthokostá
appear, superficially, to have no relation to the burning issues of the Occupation and the ensuing Civil War. But they do offer glimpses of normalcy (and comic relief) in a society where marriages are arranged for some successful emigrants, while other less disciplined returnees lose their entire life earnings to the fiats of crazed nationalists and ideologues in high places. The women also report on their looted households and the shunting from shelter to shelter of clothing, dowry items, and precious sewing machines, the signifiers of feminine dignity, scattered to the four winds by armed bullies who see no contradiction between their actions and their credos.