ELENI KEFALA

HYBRID MODERNISMS IN GREECE AND ARGENTINA: 

THE CASE OF CAVAFY, BORGES, KALOKYRIS, AND KYRIAKIDIS

THOUGH GEOGRAPHICALLY REMOTE from each other, Greece and Argentina have followed parallel political, socio-economic, and cultural trajectories in the last two centuries.  In both, the notions of culture and nation are virtually inseparable, while literature frequently undertakes the task to define, defend, or contest national identities such as “ελληνικovτητα” (“Greekness”) and “argentinidad” (“Argentineness”). Furthermore, in the literature of these countries, the discourse of nationalism is blended with Western modernist, avant-gardist, and postmodernist aesthetics, thus producing highly hybridized and syncretic narratives, which mix up heterogeneous, multitemporal, and quite often contradictory discourses and traditions. I use the terms syncretism and hybridity interchangeably in order to provide a bridge between what is a standard (or even orthodox) epistemological framework in Latin American studies (hybridity) and one that is more frequent in Modern Greek studies (syncretism).

In the first part of this article, I provide a brief overview of the modernist movements in Argentina and Greece in the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, movements that have had a profound and long-lasting impact on the literature of the two countries. This is necessary for two reasons: on the one hand, to highlight the hybrid nature of Argentine and Greek modernisms and, on the other, to understand their attempts to define national cultural identity—ironically, often in terms of purity and authenticity. This will allow us to contextualize the various syncretist aesthetics of the four writers under consideration, aesthetics that embrace cultural hybridity.

In 1845, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento published his famous essay Facundo: civilización y barbarie (Civilization and Barbarism), a fundamental text in the fierce debate over the duality of “Argentineness.” As a child of the Enlightenment, Sarmiento identified a tension between the “European” values and the local “criollo” culture of the Pampean cowboys, between the “urban” (Buenos Aires) and the “rural” (the countryside of the Pampa), as a struggle between “civilization” and “barbarism,” a struggle that ever since has become to be considered the inherent logic of “Argentineness.” In the years 1880-1920, a period of great social and economic prosperity in Argentina, hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived, mainly from Europe. In response, the intellectuals of the so-called Centenario, which came to prominence around 1910 when Argentina celebrated the centenary of  its independence from the Spanish Crown, introduced into Argentine literature the notion of the dominant work that would give racial, cultural, and linguistic unity to the Argentineans at a time when “Argentineness” was being threatened by the arrival of immigrants. The first book that was canonized as such was José Hernández’s gauchesque epic Martín Fierro (1879), which celebrates the free-spirited “criollo gaucho” (“Creole cowboy”) of the Pampa and, according to a major representative of Centenario, Leopoldo Lugones, offers a true image of “Argentineness” in an age when Pampean rural life is being replaced by modernization and rapidly expanding urban areas.

Beginning in the 1920s, however, a new massive influx of European immigrants created “a climate of social and linguistic ferment in which the old structures and the old discourses, dominated by an agrarian élite, were no longer adequate to the mediation of popular aspirations.”  On the one hand, one of the major principles of the mainstream Argentine avant-garde was to free literature from any socio-political confines by seeking aesthetic renovation through the introduction of European avant-gardist principles. They attacked both the Centenario for their nationalistic aspirations and the left-leaning Boedo group for their use of contaminated language (lunfardo) and commercialization of art. In one of the magazines of the time, Borges, who was part of the avant-garde, claimed quite playfully: “Hablar de arte social es como hablar de geometría vegetariana o de repostería endecasílaba” (“To speak of social art is like speaking of vegetarian geometry or of hendecasyllabic confectionery.”  On the other hand, however, the avant-garde aimed to reinterpret Argentine tradition by revising its cultural genealogy.

The name of the most important avant-gardist magazine, Martín Fierro, is indicative of both the avant-garde’s engagement with tradition and their desire (through the spectrum of the European avant-garde movements) for aesthetic renovation. No matter how radical it tried to be, the Argentine avant-garde in reality could not avoid the debate about “lo argentino” (“the Argentine”). The “Martinfierristas,” as the called themselves, as well as the Argentine avant-garde in general, were inevitably engaged with the discourse on national culture and cultural continuity. Like every other avant-garde, in order to establish itself as the “new,” it had to overthrow the “old” and displace its dogmas about “Argentineness.” But to displace those dogmas, the intellectuals and literati of the avant-garde needed to develop a new understanding of Argentine culture.  In the words one of their manifestoes: “We, the young writers, support only the ‘new’ and we will not permit other sectors of society to set the standards of our work.”  This idea of the “new” was precisely what offered the intellectuals of the avant-garde cohesion (despite belonging to vastly different ideological camps). The “Martinfierristas” thus debated poetic and aesthetic matters with such established figures as Lugones and placed at the center of their system poets—Macedonio Fernández and Evaristo Carriego, for example—who were considered marginal by the intellectual élite of the previous generation. Similarly, in his essays on gauchesque poetry and Hernández’s poem Martín Fierro, Borges suggests that the latter must be freed from the nationalistic weight attributed to it by Lugones and his fellows and valued for its novelistic elements rather than its projection of any patriotic ideals.