Books in ashes and scattered writings: Fictive archive destruction in fin-de-siècle Modern Greek literature

In: Journal of Greek media & culture, Band 8, Heft 1, S. 43-58

Abstract

In Greece's most well-known thesaurus of neologisms from the late nineteenth century, two compelling terms are detected: syllogomania ('collection frenzy') and bibliomania ('book frenzy'). Both very vividly illustrate the cultural landscape of fin-de-siècle Greece. The institutionalization of archives and the consolidation of the book culture were important aspects of the new-born state's cultural politics and poetics. It is in this context that instances of literary discourse thematizing archival destruction appeared, taking the form of symbolic resistance against the canonization and institutionalization of memory. In the two texts discussed in the article, 'Kostakis's Manuscripts' by Alexandra Papadopoulou (1896) and 'Old Papers' by Mikhail Mitsakis (1884), the laws of order, accumulation and preservation are opposed by a desire for disorder and dispersion. In the former, the manuscripts of a dead author are burnt to ashes by his girlfriend, who wishes to save them from being published. In the latter, a man scatters his writings in the wind, as a way of reactivating his memory. Both texts enact the cultural ambivalences of fin-de-siècle modernity by narrating the constant tension between, on one hand, canon and archive; and, on the other, waste and destruction. Through the destruction of fictional archives, the possibility of a counter-memory is claimed. Papadopoulou's and Mitsakis's claim of an overturning of the dynamics between cultural memory and oblivion can be considered as a call for questioning the laws that govern cultural memory's circulation and for repositioning their auctorial figures in the history of Modern Greek literature.