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ARISTEION EUROPEAN LITERARY PRIZES 1999

 


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HISTORY AND CONSCIENCE IN CROSSROADS

BY NIKOS BAKOLAS

(English translation by Caroline Harbouri, Kedros 1997)

A prose-writer concerned entirely with politics and history, Nikos Bakolas in Crossroads shows in vitro how he perceives the network of relationships between the novel and its social context. Three elements stand out in Crossroads: history, era and generation. There is, above all, the history, both "major" and "minor": the "major" political events (from the Asia-minor Disaster and World War II to the Occupation, the Resistance and the Civil War) and the "minor" personal events which display the beehive-type world of their individuals on the unfurled flag of the universe. And in addition, there is the era and the consciences. Bakolas fashions his protagonists as well as his extras with a solid average mind that understands history through lowly and "unhistorical", or everyday experience. None of the heroes in the book is called upon to embody some ideology or undertake some mission. The collective event enters into the lives of the narrative characters as a kind of diversion or "disturbance", which upsets their regular or established rhythm, at the same time, however, determining their behaviour and placing them, willingly or not, in the game of the larger wager. And finally, there is the author's generation and the generations of his protagonists: the mothers of Asia-minor, the young men of the inter-war years and the adolescents of the Occupation and the Civil War haunt the novel from cover to cover. And the author, who belongs to the latter category, draws his actual material, as might be expected, not just from what he's heard or from his childhood images and acquaintances, but also from his personal, well-honed and variously tested, experience.

Bakolas' narrator in Crossroads always speaks in the third person, just as the traditional, omniscient narrator. Nevertheless, the omni-present God of traditional narration is transformed in this instance into another kind of omniscient narrator: into one who identifies himself with the inner world of each protagonist individually, passing successively from one to the other, until he finally fashions the complete canvass of its human geography. The reverse order, the lengthy period, the unfulfilled, the inter-shifting of images and the co-existence of different realities at the same instant, the associations and fragments of memory, which might refer to things, feelings or impressions from the recent (a moment ago) or distant (decades ago) past, delirium and delusion, though also devices more strange and dark, which rise to the surface out of the subconscious, constitute the material that shapes Bakolas' language, in order to gradually relate it to everyday codes of expression and to transform it in short into a consummate language: a language which, as we saw above, belongs to many generations, one era and one (single and at the same time fragmented) history.

Vangelis Hatzivasileiou

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