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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένων ὁ κάλλιστος κόσμος. The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings. Heraclitus D.124
This article examines the ways in which the perennial philosophy of Heraclitus becomes a site where the battle between modernist and postmodernist poetics unfolds. Seferis and Elytis exploit the Heraclitean doctrines of change, unity of opposites and the all-permeating logos in a manner that allows them to conceptualize and present what Lyotard calls the ‘modernist sublime’. Fostieris mobilizes the very same doctrines within his poetry, flouting the logical law of contradiction as Heraclitus did. By using and abusing the very concepts he challenges, Fostieris interrogates the modernist quest for master narratives and universal consensus, bringing forward the illusory character of such endeavours.
1 Guthrie, W. K. C., A History of Greek Philosophy, I (Cambridge 1962) 414 Google Scholar, 438.
2 Axelos, K., О Ηράκλειτος και η φιλοσοφία (Athens 1986) 267 Google Scholar.
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5 Hussey and Stubbs, ‘Tempête’, 156. Breton, together with Aragon, discovered Heraclitus through Hegel in the twenties.
6 Ibid., 163.
7 For the multiple meanings of λόγος see Khan, C. H., ‘A new look at Heraclitus’, American Philosophical Quarterly 1:3 (1964) 191-3Google Scholar.
8 The original texts and translations of Heraclitus’ fragments are taken from Kahn, C. H., The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge 1981)Google Scholar but in the Diels-Kranz numbering system.
9 For an overview of the relation between Heraclitus and Christian or other systems of thought see Axelos, , О Ηράκλειτος, and West, M. L., Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford 1971)Google Scholar.
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11 See also Volkovitch’s introduction to his French translation of Fostieris: Fostieris, A., La Pensée appartient au deuil, trans. Volkovitch, M. (Paris 1998) 110 Google Scholar.
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17 Waugh, ‘Heraclitus’, 609.
18 See D.55: ‘whatever comes from sight, hearing, learning from experience: thisl prefer’, but also ‘eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls do not understand the language’ (D.107). The inconsistency with D.lOla: ‘eyes are surer witnesses than ears’ can be explained in the context of the oral culture of which Heraclitus was still a part: ears can deceive those who simply rely on hearsay.
19 Danielson, D. R., The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking (Cambridge, MA 2000) 16 Google Scholar. Contemporary thinkers acknowledge Heraclitus as the first to grasp the truth in the becoming of nature. Prigogine, I., The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (New York 1996) 10–11 Google Scholar.
20 The epithets ‘the Riddler’ and ‘the Dark One’ were already bestowed upon him in antiquity. Guthrie, A History, 410-15.
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23 Heidegger, M., Early Greek Thinking (New York 1975) 14 Google Scholar. See also Havelock, E., ‘Preliteracy and the Presocratics’, University of London Institute of Classical Studies Bulletin 13 (1966) 44–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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26 ‘The Dry Salvages’ I, 1-6.
27 ‘Ούκ έμοΰ άλλά τοΰ λόγου άκούσαντας όμολογεΐν σοφον εστιν εν πάντα εΐναι’ (‘It is wise listening not to me but to the report, to agree that all things are one’] (D.50).
28 Guthrie, A History, 440.
29 Ibid., 460.
30 Rorty (Contingency, 7) calls ‘final vocabulary’ the words we use to give a coherent, justified narrative of our lives and beliefs.
31 Seferis, G., Δοκιμές, II (Athens 1984) 159-60Google Scholar.
32 Ibid., 54. Translations of excerpts in prose are my own unless otherwise stated.
33 Ibid., 55.
34 Cited by Beaton, R., ‘From Mythos to Logos: The poetics of George Seferis’, journal of Modern Greek Studies 5:2 (1987) 135-52: 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Beaton, R., George Seferis, Waiting for the Angel: A Biography (London 2003) 403 Google Scholar.
36 For the way the two poems complement each other see Williams, C., ‘Readings in Eliot: ‘Allusion as a technique in the poetry of George Seferis’, unpublished PhD thesis, King’s College London, 1997, 214 Google Scholar.
37 For the ways in which Heraclitus is evoked in a manner that brings Solomos and Sikelianos together in ‘Μνήμη, β” in order to prophesy the rebirth of ‘Higher Greece’ see Vayenas, N., О ποιητης και о χορευτής (Athens 1979) 207 Google Scholar. For its relation to ‘Little Gidding’ II, see Williams, ‘Readings’, 209-15.
38 Vayenas (O ποιητής, 207), interprets the allusion to D.2 as an artistic necessity to connect with tradition and the extinction of personality. For Seferis’ mistranslation of the fragment in ‘Θερινό ηλιοστάσι’, В’ and his later abandonment of the ‘extinction of personality’ cliché see Beaton ‘From Mythos’, 144 and Williams ‘Readings’, 275-6.
39 Beaton ‘From Mythos’, 144.
40 Seferis, Ποιήματα, 245-6.
41 Hölscher, U., ‘Paradox, simile, and gnomic utterance in Heraclitus’, in Mourelatos, A. P. D. (ed.), The Pre-Socratics (Princeton 1993) 229-38: 234Google Scholar.
42 Kahn, The Art, 215.
43 Williams, ‘Readings’, 215.
44 Eliot, Collected Poems, 180.
45 Gardner, H., The Art of T.S. Eliot (New York 1959) 168 Google Scholar.
46 As Kahn remarks (The Art, 298) there is a striking parallel between D.26 and the Brhadaranyaka Upa-nishad 4:3: ‘When both sun and moon have set [...] what is the light of man then? The self becomes his light then [...] For, having fallen asleep, he transcends this world’.
47 Kahn, The Art, 272: ‘But in D.66 the scope of justice is universal: it will catch up with all things.’
48 Kirk, G. S., Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge 1962) 349 Google Scholar.
49 On the basis of the title Τρία κρυφά ποιήματα and the numerical structure of the text, Beaton, ‘From Mythos’, 144, contends that the unifying principle of the whole work is derived from the Book of Revelation. On the basis of the title and the poem’s dependence upon the seasonal change, Williams, ‘Readings’, 271, sees Four Quartets as a parent text of structural importance.
50 Kahn, The Art, 15. Heraclitus’ political conservatism is evident in D.33: ‘It is law also to obey the counsel of one’, or D.104: ‘What wit or understanding do they have? They believe the poets of the people and take the mob as their master, not knowing that “the many are worthless”, good men are few.’
51 Ibid.
52 Kennedy, I., ‘The solution of the enigma of the universe: J. F. Fourier on Heraclitus’, International Review of Scottish Studies 31 (2008) 69–87: 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Matthiessen, F. O., ‘Eliot’s Quartets’, The Kenyon Review 5:2 (1943) 161-78: 178Google Scholar.
54 See ‘Little Gidding’, V. Also Mother Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London 1987) 33-4Google Scholar: ‘A person may consider that some actions are good and others are evil, but that is not how the Lord sees it.’
55 Guthrie (A History, 459) cites D.30 as proof that Heraclitus didn’t believe in ecpyrosis. The ‘ever-living fire’, which is ‘kindled in measures’ and ‘extinguished in measures’ is a verbal paradox that describes ‘the cosmos in its present state’. Also Kirk, Heraclitus, 336.
56 Beaton (George Seferis, 388) remarks how Seferis’ view here is closer to that of the Stoics, for whom the universe was ‘periodically consumed by fire out of which a new universe is born’.
57 A paraphrase of Eliot on Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘It [i.e. Joyce’s mythical method] is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’ Eliot, T. S., Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (New York 1975) 177 Google Scholar.
58 Elytis, O., Ποίηση (Athens 2002) 182 Google Scholar, 213.
59 Kopidakis, M., ‘Οι φιλοσοφικές καταβολές του ελυτικού στίχου’, Cogito 3 (2005) 22-5Google Scholar.
60 Elytis, Ποίηση, 576.
61 Ibid., 418.
62 Ibid., 386.
63 Ibid., 400.
64 Ibid., 446.
65 Ibid., 448.
66 Elytis, O., ΑνοιχτάΧαρπά (Athens 1987) 118 Google Scholar. For Elytis’ metaphysical perspective and Platonist view of art see also Koutrianou, E., Με άξογα το φως (Athens 2002) 151-5Google Scholar.
67 Guthrie, A History, 468: ‘Aristotle, as we know, represented Plato’s doctrine of immutable forms as having been an outcome of, among other things, “the Heraclitean opinions that all sensible things are continually flowing and there is no knowledge of them”. Impressed by this, but unwilling to accept the impossibility of knowledge, Plato posited a permanent reality outside the physical world’.
68 Elytis, O., Ev Λευκώ (Athens 1993) 59 Google Scholar.
69 As Guthrie (A History, 435) shows, the Pythagorean harmonia is the reverse of the Heraclitean, since it results from a mixture of opposites.
70 Guthrie, A History, 437. Kahn, The Art, 273: ‘it is precisely by means of polar opposition that wisdom orders the universe.’
71 Koutrianou (Me άξονα, 151) discusses the poem as an instance of the function of solar metaphysics in Elytis, but not to the full extent of its relation to the Heraclitean philosophy per se.
72 Compare with ‘μή φοβοΰ’ in the Book of Revelation 1:17, 2:10.
73 Hence the reference to the kingfisher. According to a medieval myth the halcyon used to be grey, but she flew so high in the sky that her back took the colour of the sky and her chest became orange because it was scorched by the sun.
74 Bernstein, J. E., ‘Parataxis in Heraclitus, Hölderlin, Mayakovsky’, unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, 1999, 26 Google Scholar.
75 H. Fränkel, ‘A thought pattern in Heraclitus’, in Mourelatos (ed.) The Pre-Socratics, 214–28.
76 Fränkel, ‘A thought pattern’, 217.
77 Ibid., 215.
78 By contrast, it would be inconceivable, indeed meaningless, for Heraclitus to suggest that man appears godlike before the ape.
79 Kahn, The Art, 130: ‘A logos so profound and limitless can scarcely be distinct from the universal logos, according to which all things come to pass’.
80 Ibid., 21.
81 Matthew 17:1-9, Mark 9:2-8, Luke 9:28-36.
82 John 1:1: Έν άρχή ήν ό λόγος καΐ ό λόγος ήν προς τον Θεον, καί ©εος ήν ò λόγος.
83 Guthrie, A History, 472: ‘When Heraclitus spoke of “god” or the “divine”, he clearly had in mind the Logos-fire.’
84 For a discussion see Loulakaki, I., ‘Odysseus Elytis’ use of Romanos the Melodist: a case of “modernization and distortion”?’, Dialogos 8 (2001) 56–77 Google Scholar.
85 Fränkel, ‘A thought pattern’, 218.
86 Fostieris, A., Ποίηση 1979-2005 (Athens 2008) 200 Google Scholar. Dates in parentheses refer to the year of publication.
87 Ibid., 237.
88 Ibid., 203.
89 Ibid., 44.
90 Ibid., 111.
91 Ibid., 231.
92 Ibid., 220.
93 First published in Ακτή 60 (2006), this poem, together with hitherto unpublished ‘Heraclitean’ poems, now forms part of Fostieris’ collection Τοπία του τίποτα (Athens 2013) 56-7.
94 See note 57.
95 Fränkel ‘A thought pattern’, 218.
96 Eburne, ‘The obscure object’, 184.
97 Hence the reference to the ‘Delian swimmer’. Socrates believed that it takes a ‘Delian diver’ to get to the bottom of Heraclitus’ riddles. Kahn, The Art, 95.
98 Waugh, ‘Heraclitus’, 608: ‘Heraclitus meant, and tried to show that he meant, several things at once.’
99 One of the features of postmodern poetics is depthlessness or an effacement of the poetic ego that creates ‘a fake flatness’. I. Hassan, ‘Pluralism in postmodern perspective’, in Jencks, The Post-Modem, 196. Georgousopoulos, K. (‘H φορμόλη της νοσταλγίας’, Εντευκτήριο 91 (2010) 66-8)Google Scholar speaks of this feature when he notes that Fostieris’ wisdom descends from ‘the village coffeehouse, the shift of the gas station and the stroll of prisoners in the courtyard’. See also Angelaki-Rooke, K., ‘To σκοτάδι του Αντώνη Φωστιέρη’, Εντευκτήριο 73 (2006) 55-7Google Scholar.
100 J. F. Lyotard, ‘Answering the question: What is Postmodernism?’, in Jencks, The Post-Modern, 146: ‘Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the “lack of reality”, together with the invention of other realities.’
101 Cited in Beaton, ‘From Mythos’, 148.
102 Fostieris, Ποίηση, 208.
103 L. Hutcheon, ‘Theorising the postmodern: Towards a poetics’, in Jencks, The Post-Modern, 76-93.
104 Goodman, N., Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis 1978), x Google Scholar.