Who could paint the eyes of Medusa?
Talks with George M. Chatzistergiou (2016)
His books “Do you have any wealth left?”, “The Earth trembles; people and structures in a changing world”, “Exodus” and “Masquerade Ball” came out in Greece between 2008 and 2016. The books were presented at events at the National Research Foundation, the garden of the Numismatic Museum, the Amalia Hotel in Athens, the City Hall of Trikala and the Hellenic Centre in London. After a first period of dissemination of the books and various comments by readers, the author codifies here the constructive exchange of views. To some extent he structures this around the questions posed by Erifyli Maroniti at the National Research Foundation, although the responsibility for the final, overall format (2016) lies with him.
In order to better understand myself and the world around me.
You won’t go far if you don’t step out of your nest. You only understand yourself through the relations with others.
In my birthplace, the city of Trikala, Thessaly, ever since I can remember or even in my father’s time, in the evenings the people, no matter where they lived or worked, would take a stroll and meet one another in Asklipiou St, a long pedestrian zone in the city centre. That was where the activities of the day were assimilated and the tensions died down; that was where people discussed their concerns about the local or distant affairs that affected them… Not everything about this was ideal, but there was a therapeutic sense of community which helped life to move forward…
I am very interested in keeping alive this idea of a latter-day, abstract yet essentially so real Asklipiou Street, no longer confined in a single city but at the centre of the “global village”. In this sense, my books are simply the matters I want to submit to this broad gathering for discussion, along with other matters which will help us entertain ourselves and broaden our perception of things…
I come from Greece. In terms of my books this has a significance, since today my country is, as it has been so often throughout its history, at the front line of the huge upheavals that gestate the transition to a new era.
This is the Orwellian way of putting it. I mean the regime of a stifled economy, the abolition of the free market, the annihilation of society’s reserve, the destruction of the country’s productive base, the enforced stagnation…
Happily, yes. It’s much more, just like the concept of Europe or humanity is “much more”. It is this “more” that sustains my thinking and writing…
The Engineering aspect
It is not so unusual. Novalis, that great figure of the delicate German romanticism of the 19th century, was a mining engineer. Indeed, his work was about the mine galleries where the dwarves in the Grimm Brothers’ Snow-white were supposed to work. In this multifaceted world of ours, everything is linked in some way.
In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the Italian writer Italo Calvino demonstrates the multifaceted quality in engineers’ literary works, focusing on the Milanese writer Carlo Emilio Gadda and on Robert Musil, author of The Man Without Qualities. I appreciate all too well how this can be true, in the sense that the nature of engineers’ work brings them in all kinds of contact with the external world. Whether they like it or not, they know that human experience is not confined to the sentiments in a closed room. There is a vibrant world out there, and they cannot but attempt to include it in their writings!
Being involved in the process of a technical project, from restoring a medieval monastery or repairing the earthquake damages in a school building to making a special roof for a huge stadium or designing a motorway network, an engineer is necessarily in touch with the mechanism of developments in the political, social and technological meaning of the term.
Technical engineering is closely related to social engineering.
Clearly yes. There was a characteristic comment by a professor of the Technical University of Athens about Do you have any wealth left?:“This is literature, certainly, but it could only have been written by a civil engineer!” This is an ambiguous remark: it can be a good thing or a bad thing.
It is a risky experiment which can fail as much as it can succeed. This innovation, this unusual cocktail, is a challenge that opens up a new, special potential. Too large a dose can kill literature or make it more strange than necessary.
A professor of philosophy from Valencia University talked to me about Juan Benet, a famous Spanish writer who was a civil engineer. Interestingly, his work was late in becoming appreciated, and the initial reception was disappointing. I think that the unusual often alienates people, who prefer the beaten path. Yet if there is some merit in there, it will come out sooner or later.
I respect all tastes, but personally I am fascinated by the idea of mixture, of osmosis, with all the risks it entails. Isn’t it said that such unions produce the most beautiful offspring?
The works of the crisis
It is a novel that was published in Greece in 2008, one year before the country went into “controlled economy” mode with the austerity programme. In the book the Greeks, concerned about the heavy clouds that threatened the economy, decide to raze to the ground Athens and other cities and make money by rebuilding them anew, as was the case after WWII! Foreign oligopolies are eager to undertake the huge project in a country with beautiful nature, a favourable climate and a long history of civilisation, but in a rare outburst of patriotism the prime minister ousts them when he realises that their plans leave no place for the indigenous people in the new cities. Upon his orders, the Hellenic Air Force bombs Athens and then the rest of the country, after which people rush out to rebuild it, as they had learnt in the 1960s, the 1970s or even in the 1980s, the time of consumerism and affluence for the ‘man in the street’.
When they were done, the entire country had been covered with buildings, almost to the point where there was no room left for roads. Still, they had made the money they wanted…
Isn’t it often like that with modern-day uprisings in Europe? It’s their own buildings and cars they burn, not the Bastille! Authority today is not visible so that it can be attacked. The book could be read in this way, too.
Indeed, “Do you have any wealth left?” could be seen as an eccentric anthropological chronicle of the bourgeois, presented in a literary manner. It may be about Greece, but it is essentially a parable about the social and systemic characteristics shared by all post-war Europe, West and East alike, irrespective of regimes.
Yes. This is a typical attempt at creating a middle class as we saw it in Europe after WWII. Yet in the case of China this is taking place today, under globalisation, so its nature is somewhat different: too fragile, and with poor prospects of sustainability in the medium run. In the film, the Chinese mayor is transferred by the Party to another city to apply the same policy, leaving his original town with huge debts to the banks. In a way, farmers are turned into a debt-ridden, potential middle class (if the city does attract tourist interest!).
No one can deny all this, especially now that more and more of us are in danger of ending up at the social dump. We owe much to the “warm nest” of the post-war era’s system, but not everything that shines is gold. The system had its shadows, and its all-too-specific limits. And I am not talking just about the current phase when this system is moribund.
For some time now a very powerful machine is running with the purpose of destroying the middle class as we knew it, and its attendant regime. The critique you mentioned is part of that machine’s operation. It is not a scientific evaluation but an excerpt from the machine’s operation manual.
If we wish to understand that era as a whole in order to approach the future more constructively, it is important to focus on its critique in the time of affluence, not now. This is how “Do you have any wealth left?” was read by Manolis Glezos, the fighter who took down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis during the Occupation. He saw it as a chronicle of the establishment of this lifestyle—its beginning, not its end. This groundbreaking approach comes to join the criticism of “middle-class capitalism” by the Situationists in 1950s and 1960s France, by an entire generation of French thinkers, by the Frankfurt School in Germany or by certain theorists in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Precisely. In the book the people, fearful of ending up in the dump, attempt a desperate turn back, with pitiful results. The answer is not there.
In order to begin to trace a solution, we need first to appreciate the specific characteristics of the situation. And this is where literature gives way to the essay, to theory.
Literature enables us to penetrate and tour areas which otherwise would be inaccessible to our mind and our soul. But if we want to settle in those areas, we need the systematic knowledge that only theory and the essay can provide.
Honoré de Balzac writes in his novel The Quest of the Absolute: “The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their public monuments”.
Buildings have a specific dimension: they are real, tangible, they are “flesh and bones” —stone, reinforced concrete, bricks, and so on— and they stand fixed to the ground. In today’s wondrous world of virtual reality, of digital money and the “second” or “third life” one can have on the internet through the well-known interactive games, the tangibility of buildings constitutes a special, positive, almost alternative element in the attempt to understand reality. “The stones have voices and speak!”, wrote Dionysios Solomos, the poet of Greece’s national anthem.
There is also the broader urban dimension: the way in which whole human settlements are built reflects with great accuracy the structure of the society that inhabits them as well as the trend of future development. “Cities tend to be built with reference to an imminent war or to a war in which they are involved already” writes the famous French thinker Paul Virilio in a very graphic way.
Four threads. The first is Destruction: buildings and cities threatened either by warfare or by natural disasters. In any case, extreme situations such as destructions are by definition revelatory of a system’s functional characteristics. “You learn more about your car when you crash it than when you merely drive around the city”, says Paul Virilio.
The intensive rebuilding that took place after WWII and until today all over Europe — north and south, east and west. Consumerism in the area of construction. This thread is also about the decline of much of this post-war buildings, only a few decades after they were built. The symbolic collapse of the informal social contract of the post-war era. In this sense, from a social and economic point of view the second part of the book is also about the post-war emergence —throughout Europe, albeit with major local variations— of a huge middle class which created, inhabited and worked in these buildings, and about their drastic decline as it is taking place today.
This is the subject of the third part of the book. Creative life, in a broader sense, the ancient Greeks’ “έργο του Διονύσου” or the vis vita of the Renaissance, constitute peaks of human civilisation; they are not just “oddities” open to condescension or even derision in the name of some one-track economism.
In this sense, any crushing of creativity, when it happens, is a symptom of serious dysfunction in the system of society. We shouldn’t be interested in such a crowded life. We must examine any new system proposed to us from this angle, too.
The Earth trembles!, as all my other books, is exploratory rather than conclusive; it poses questions, does not answer them. It’s a contribution to an effort which can only be collective and on many levels, aimed at helping us see the flow of events so that, ideally, we can step in effectively.
Yes, with a London-based Greek man in his forties who is incredulously experiencing the effects on his personal life of this end-of-an-era, of Europe’s social and financial collapse. While trying desperately to keep his head out of the water, he realizes that the problem is not merely his own… it unfolds between London, Athens and Lesbos. Lesbos was the island that hit the headlines five years after the publication of the book, due to the unprecedented refugee crisis.
The thread that runs through these three books is the so-called “crisis”, this brutal social, political and economic process that has been in full swing for some years now in Europe and beyond, turning everything around us into something we had never seen or imagined before.
First of all, this is the “crisis” that hit us, not any other. It is this crisis that affects our lives, so it is this that we must deal with. Moreover, this one has some features that are unprecedented and extremely alarming, and have to do with the fact that the magnitude of our potential for destructiveness has multiplied. Compared to today’s means of destruction, the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem primitive.
The means of production and destruction are closely linked. They are two sides of the same coin. The adverts for luxury American cars in the 1950s boasted that their engines were adapted from those made by the same company for the planes that bombed enemy cities so successfully.
This intensive production changes the nature of things. In the past, a typical fisherman in the Mediterranean would go out fishing with the thought “let’s make it through this day, and God will provide for tomorrow”; as he saw it, his son and his grandson could do the same to make a living when the time came. But now that fishing means scraping the bottom of the sea, there may be no fish at all for the next generation… Our age is truly without precedent!
All this huge intensity of productivity and destructiveness combines with a hyper-concentration of power. The potential for a total ascendancy of totalitarianism has never been as high as it is now…
It is just a diagnosis of the situation. Yet what appears to be the ultimate advantage for those who have arranged things like that may be a disadvantage if you see it from another angle. This hyper-concentration of power may well be its Achilles’ heel, too. Could this be the Bastille we were looking for, offered to us on a plate? That’s the spirit of the heroes in the last part of Exodus.
Who’s persecuting us?
Suffocation, the stifling feeling of being surrounded, of having nowhere to hide, the huge difficulty of achieving completion, fullness — these are key attributes of a world in crisis.
Amidst all this, the characters in my books —individually, as groups or even as entire societies— are struggling to save themselves, to find somewhere to stand and build upon. Essentially, this is also the motive for my writing.
Exodus, for instance, could be read as a contemporary fairytale for grownups. As in the stories of the Brothers Grimm, the world may seem like a dark and savage forest, but the heroes won’t surrender to destiny: they are trying to get to a clearing…
To my taste, a great and obsessive emphasis on brutality and its details is as vulgar as a porn film. More than that, it is inhumane and immoral. Imagine a Museum of Atrocities. Even if its aim was to avoid repetition by showcasing these acts, in practice it could work as a permanent perverted exhibition that exalts torture.
Who could paint the eyes of Medusa? In order to cut off her head, Perseus needed a trick; he used his polished shield as a mirror through which to follow her moves without turning to stone. It is as such a mirror that literature should work, ideally — not as a photograph.
Yes, because apart from the question of portraying violence or terror there is a broader, crucial political issue. Trying to understand the mechanisms of power is both permissible and necessary. Yet if you stop at that, you’ll make the boat list on one side. This way you will only scare and discourage yourself and the others. I mean, even if your intentions are noble, if you do that you end up reconciling your readers with what is coming so that they will bow their heads and accept it. Essentially, you become an unwilling propagandist of evil, or at least of the interests of others.
Yet History teaches us that things don’t work this way. In each case the outcome —a new system, a new social condition— results from an action/reaction dipole. Similarly, in literature the “reaction” is about showcasing man’s deeper, essential desires against the action of the mechanisms of authority. In theory, this is ideally associated with an emphasis on our collective potential to change the ship’s course to the benefit of society.
The body is the only tangible reality that remains under our own control. This is also why it attracts the attention of all kinds of authority, and why it is where all primordial and savage desires are projected. Everyone can suffer from this, but women are the easiest target.
Still, the key characters in Exodus are the women, with their deep understanding of the nature of things, decisive, resourceful, with a sense of purpose.
In any case the situation in the world is savage, you cannot avoid touching on that; it would be like holding a polite, civilised conversation while all hell has broken loose next to you! It is part of the dynamic of the situation, and you cannot fail to acknowledge it. Imagine a fairytale without an evil witch or a dragon... Still, the aim of my books is a tender one. One of the axes could be the note from his old lover that the hero in Exodus carries all the time: "It’s snowing out there, but here it’s warm and cosy. I want to get under the bedcovers and spend all day and all night in bed. But I won’t do it unless I have a warm body next to mine, and unless that body is yours…"
The writing
Comic strips, the cinema, photographic essays, zapping on television, readings such as A thousand and one nights — all this and much more. Interestingly, for instance, it has been said of Do you have any wealth left?? that it has certain cyberpunk elements, with people’s lives in parallel digital universes, and so on...
I am open to all genres and creative combinations. Literature needs them if it is to remain strong and attractive, not to decline into a second-class, provincial art.
If we compared the book with a building, I don’t like buildings with no internal partitions... those with a single, open-plan space where everything takes place: cooking, eating, watching television, playing the piano, telephoning, sleeping…
I like houses with walls and separate rooms, each with its own autonomy and atmosphere… This is how I attempt to lay out my books, like a synthesis of separate rooms. This is not to say that my works are without a general structure, an overall meaning with a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't like it loose — after all, I am a civil engineer and it’s my job to ensure the functionality and sufficiency of structures!
It enables me to emphasise the detail, to make it stronger and fuller, perhaps more authentic; closer to the essence of things.
The real world is falling apart, it’s not me who is doing that… I am simply pointing this out — I can’t pretend that harmony reigns everywhere…
The thing is that I approach this world like a child that inspects a broken toy, in the hope of understanding its mechanism so that I can get it to work again…
Here in Greece we have an eclectic affinity with ruins. When I was a child we used to spend our summer holidays on the mountains of Pindos, where one branch of the family came from, and the walks with my father or the games with the other children among the ruins of the houses —our own and others, burnt by the German occupation army in World War II— was an experience that marked me forever. They inspired in me a sense of continuity (we don't come from nowhere, and somehow we’ll get on) as well as a sense of collectivity: we suffered all together, and all together we’ll make it. This spirit informs my books.
What you describe —the intertextuality, as it is known in literary criticism— has to do with my more general belief that literature cannot be compartmentalised and cannot aim at a sterilise originality free of influences; on the contrary, when necessary it must draw upon the creative oceans of our common, universal cultural heritage.
In my books, which are of the “end-of-an-era” kind, intertextuality has a strong symbolic significance as well. There have been other worlds besides the one that’s coming now as a sole option. And we are interested in keeping from those worlds what is really of value — and so many things are…
The way I see it, writing aims by definition at a fundamental collectivity, otherwise what would be the sense in publishing a book? An author would be content to read his own writings alone.
In this sense, intertextuality is a key symbol of collectivity. We are not on our own, and we don’t come from nowhere.
I witnessed a telling scene on a public bus in the early days of the crisis. A rather pitiable man came aboard and began to beg, saying he was unemployed… One woman crossed herself and turned her gaze away, trying to exorcise the evil. Another picked up her child from the seat next to her and took him in her lap, as if the beggar’s predicament was contagious. One or two passengers gave him some coins but rather grudgingly, only to assuage their conscience.
So my feeling is that this is the atmosphere in the Europe I know, and which I otherwise love and esteem… What dominates is confusion, surprise before the unknown, a general feeling that “it will pass” and things will soon go “back to normal”; A passivity, an adherence to the old, even while everything shows that the old is incurably undermined…
Of course, there is also concern, reaction, only they have not been channelled in a constructive direction, in a positive, proactive spirit combined with commensurate developments in the field of reality. Nevertheless, nothing goes to waste. Humanity acts like a long-distance runner. Things do change with time; we only need to take action to precipitate this change.
Masquerade Ball
It cannot help having some relation to the previous ones, but this book does mark a turning point in my writing. Let’s just say there is greater emphasis on the personal rather than the social sphere. “A story about love, but not a soppy one”, I’ve had it described to me.
Yet to me it is in many ways a watershed. It wasn't written exclusively in the solitude of a room, but was talked about with other people and thus shaped into its final form. Just like the musicians of old, who tried out their songs on a circle of friends before recording them.
I owe this approach to the experience of the presentation of Exodus in London. Before, during and after the event I had some rich, creative and profound discussions. That’s where I realised all too clearly that a book can function ideally as a stopover rather than a destination; it is not necessarily the end product in itself. This was a revelation for me, so I used this technique to write Masquerade Ball.
Well, we’ve been through that, haven’t we? At the end of the day, my tendency, my standard inclination is to go back to Asklipiou St…