|
|
HISTORY AND CONSCIENCE IN CROSSROADS
(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 |
|
|
HISTORY AND CONSCIENCE IN CROSSROADS
(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