INTERVIEW
Christos Chryssopoulos: Literature is an endurance race
S
ince the publication of his very first book, The Parthenon
Bomber , Christos Chryssopoulos attracted the attention of critics. Nevertheless, it was Shunyata and his subsequent book The Manicurist that confirmed the critics' original
opinion of this young author: namely that he is an accomplished stylist, a writer whose language is carefully wrought, whose atmospheres are powerful, fraught with secrets and hints, and whose settings are international although in no way cosmopolitan. At the age of thirty-four Chryssopoulos has already produced five books, with a sixth ready for publication - another novel, entitled
Theatre of Voices , which is eagerly awaited.
by ELIAS MAGLINIS
18 単 ITHACA
YOU ARE THIRTY-FOUR YEARS OLD AND HAVE ALREADY PUBLISHED FIVE BOOKS. ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT THE RISK OF REPETITION OR SATURATION?
I'D LIKE YOU TO TELL ME A BIT ABOUT THE INFLUENCE FOREIGN WRITERS, PAST OR PRESENT, HAVE HAD ON YOU.
Literature is the connective tissue of all my activities. In recent years I have deliberately lived in a "literature laboratory" of the mind. Thus I am not concerned with managing some authorial image or career but with submitting myself to an inner rhythm of writing. The frequency with which my books are published follows the same rhythm. I see the publication of one of my works as a stage, of its taking shape and not as its final destination. Besides, I continue to be surrounded by emotions from all my books, and my earlier books find ways of communicating with what I am writing at any given moment. Each work dictates its own rhythms, requires a different incubation period, competes with the obligations of everyday life and becomes the object of a publisher. And I myself change from year to year. Literature is an endurance race and I may very well abandon it at some point in the course. Then I shall cease to be a runner and shall become once more a spectator.
That's a particularly welcome question. I'm glad to speak of other writers. I depend on other writers in order to be able to find my own voice and protect myself from the vanity that lays siege to me. To start with, there's a group of writers whose number is steadily growing: this is the group whose work I see as a solid literary proposition to
found in Saragosa by Jan Pototski, the Pillow Book by Sei Sonagon, and above all The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. When I write, I choose the books that I read with extreme care and see this reading as a source of borrowings and inspiration. All the above authors and books could form a small reading list that I recommend, along with Don Quixote, Beowulf and the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga.
which I return repeatedly. I approach these writers' work as if it were a single book: Borges, Kafka, Hrabal, Bulgakov, Brecht, Hawthorne, De Quincey, Lewis Carroll, Guy de Maupassant, Poe, Lovecraft, Pavic, Pere, Daniil Kharms. Also the poets Blake, Byron, Wordsworth, Marlowe. Among writers of non-fiction I should include Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Sir Thomas Browne. Another category includes single books which I'd like to refer to with respect, such as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, The Manuscript
When I write I'm not engaging in dialogue with the public. Anyway, I don't know who the public are. When I write I am engaged in a dialogue with the texts that guide me as I investigate the human condition and dissect it using literature as my instrument. My starting point is entirely personal. Thus when my books leave my hand, they are not targeted at any reader but –of necessity– remain inert. I want them to be the steps at the entrance leading to a world of thought. In this sense, my books are for those who will approach them like open doors. Ultimately they lead (through a Czech city or via America) to the fundamental questions: death, love, the interweaving of dream and reality, art, deity. The places in my books are archetypal places. Constructions, non-
© D. NEUMAIER
My places are places built of books, and I approach reality as a narrative open to infinite interpretations.
SHUNYATA TAKES PLACE IN A SMALL AMERICAN TOWN AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 1950S, THE MANICURIST IN CONTEMPORARY PRAGUE. DOES THE FACT THAT YOUR TWO LAST BOOKS ARE SET ABROAD AND THAT THEIR HEROES ARE NOT GREEK MEAN SOMETHING? IS IT THE RESULT OF A DELIBERATE CHOICE, IN OTHER WORDS ARE YOU AIMING AT A "GLOBAL" PUBLIC, OR IS IT A CONSEQUENCE OF YOUR TRAVELS ABROAD AND YOUR ASSOCIATION WITH FOREIGN WRITERS AND ARTISTS?
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places. A city that is sister to Prague. An imaginary small town in America. My places are places built of books, and I approach reality as a narrative open to infinite interpretations.
© J. BIALLAS
ONE OF YOUR BOOKS, THE BLACK DRESS, WAS NOT PUBLISHED IN GREECE BUT IN AMERICA IN 2000, IN A BILINGUAL EDITION. HOW DID ITS PUBLICATION IN AMERICA AND ITS TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH COME ABOUT?
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Christos Chryssopoulos was born in Athens in 1968. His first book, The Parthenon Bomber, was published in 1996 by Anatolikos Editions. He has subsequently published The Recipes of Napoleon Delastos (Odysseas, 1997), Shunyata (Odysseas, 1999), The Black Dress (bilingual English-Greek edition, RCIPP Editions, New Jersey, 2000). He translates from English. He has been invited to writers' centres in Sweden, the Czech Republic, the U.S.A. and Iceland.
20 ñ ITHACA
The Black Dress is a book of its own kind. It belongs to the category of Artists' Books. It is a book-object which should be approached as a work of art and not solely as a book-transmitter of its linguistic and visual content. The Black Dress is the result of my collaboration with the American photographer and book artist, Diane Neumaier. In this book a text of mine (the imagined diary of a lonely elderly woman) is juxtaposed with photographs by Neumaier (street shots of pedestrians in some anonymous city). The text was written in Greek and translated into English by me, whilst at the same time Diane Neumaier was compiling the visual component for the project. We both worked with the specific aim that text and image should coexist in a nonmessage-bearing relationship. In The Black Dress the photographs don't illustrate the text, and the text in turn doesn't elucidate the visual component. What we aimed at, through this contiguity of word and image, was to give rise to associative, unexpected stimuli. The book was designed in collaboration with the printer Eileen Foti. In form it is related to the constructivist books of the Russian avant-garde (Lissitzky, Rodchenko and so on) and to the tradition of American book artists like Sol Le Witt, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and others. The Black Dress can be taken as a comment on what a book could be and indirectly calls in question the mainstream notions of 'bookness'. At the same time, the process by which it was created was an interesting attempt to combine different artistic practices.
The book was printed in a limited collectors' edition of 65 copies and was created during a long writer's residency at the Printmaking Workshop of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printing in New Jersey, USA. SOMEWHERE IN THE MANICURIST YOU WRITE THAT ITS MAIN HERO, FILIPPOS, IS "SWEPT AWAY INTO HIS VISIONARY WORLD". BUT WE COULD SAY THE SAME OF THE MYSTIC FLANEUR AND THE LITTLE GIRL IN SHUNYATA. IN GENERAL YOUR CHARACTERS ARE ORDINARY PEOPLE, YET AT THE SAME TIME THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT THEM THAT IS OUTSIDE REALITY. WOULD YOU SAY THAT CRIME AND DEVIATION OF ALL KINDS IS CENTRAL TO YOUR PREOCCUPATIONS?
Your question makes me realise that I don’t perceive reality in any clear terms. I myself live as an observer. At the age of thirty-four I don't drive, I'm always walking through Athens on foot, like a wanderer, I haven't got a steady job or a secure income, I don't own a house and I haven't created a family. I live reality as a performance, like a story or a film. This choice isn't a value judgment. I perceive a life that is based on all the things that define reality for us (work, home, family, etc) in the same way. Thus deviation and crime constitute exaggerations or endpoints or differentiations of everyday behaviour. They are not exceptions to the regular state of affairs. All the same, they interest me only as instances that reveal deeper, basic motives, contradictions and convictions. My characters take nothing for granted. They face life as a subjective choice, and the moral questions that arise are set within it in a dialectic manner. YOUR BOOKS ARE CHARACTERISED BY A PERMEATING SECRETIVENESS. THEIRS IS A WORLD OF SILENCES, OF ABSENCE BUT ALSO OF INNER TENSION. DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING PARTICULAR IN MIND WHEN YOU ORGANISE YOUR MATERIAL, OR DOES THIS ELEMENT APPEAR BY ITSELF?
Both. My books are expressions of who I am. In them are included extended confessional texts as well as a host of matters referring to myself. If this is not immediately apparent, it is because they undergo a series of successive disguises. This, I think, is both a personal need of mine and an aesthetic choice. There is indeed secre-
tiveness and caginess. Deliberate mechanisms of concealment and instinctive suppressions. This may arise from my conviction that we can never know things in their entirety. I don't believe in the existence of all-embracing examples. Nature and mankind conceal themselves. They frequently do not know their own entirety, which anyway is continually taking shape. In my work, every consciousness is imperfect and single. This truth is often perceived as secretiveness or isolation. THE FACTUAL ELEMENTS IN YOUR NOVELS HAVE THEIR OWN IMPORTANCE. IS RESEARCH, THE COLLECTING OF INFORMATION AND THE CHECKING OF FACTS, PART OF A WRITER'S WORK? HOW IMPORTANT IS WHAT IS COMMONLY CALLED "THE WRITING LABORATORY" TO AN AUTHOR? HOW IMPORTANT IS IT IN YOUR OWN WORK?
What you call "the writing laboratory" is of primary importance to me and constitutes the heart of my method of writing. I could define my personal method as a collection of habits, decisions and tasks. It includes the careful choice of what I read when I'm writing, the management of everyday time, the amassing of notes or chance findings, the location of the factual material, the revisions, etc. I could say that I set up an idea-processing factory. It's a strictly defined process to the extent that it rules out choices such as associative writing, brainstorming or confessional writing. And it remains a negotiation since it differs every time I sit down to work, depending on the stage the book has reached, my mood, the questions that I'm dealing with. What's more, everyday life often subverts or influences my way of working. In conclusion, I'd like to stress two points. First, I feel that the existence of a "writing laboratory" shouldn't constitute an unbreakable commitment for the creative writer. The writer's aim is to invent realities which serve his literary purposes, even if they subvert historical experience. Second, the existence of a personal method isn't a deliberate choice on my part but rather a rule of thumb which took shape
over time. It's a combination of my weaknesses, my obsessions, my skills, my laziness, and I hope it's a sign of maturity. CRITICS HAVE CALLED YOU AN "ACCOMPLISHED STYLIST". WOULD YOU AGREE WITH THIS DESCRIPTION? IS AN EMPHASIS ON STYLE REALLY ONE OF YOUR PRIORITIES AS A WRITER?
You're touching here on a question that concerns me a lot, because I'm interested
I'm glad to speak of other writers. I depend on other writers in order to be able to find my own voice and protect myself from the vanity that lays siege to me.
in the classification of literary work by genre. The relation between form and content is of primary importance in the way I perceive literature. I place great weight on form (in both structure and style) and I can't separate it from the other elements of the narrative, as for example plot, underlying ideas or themes. I approach all these things together, as parts of a whole. And the whole, which is the finished work, is something greater than simply the sum of its parts. A successful work leaves room for multiple synergies between these elements. I believe that the cultivation of style is what all artistic creators are concerned with, and in the case of literature it is expressed through the language. YOU HAVE LIVED AND TRAVELLED A LOT IN BOTH EUROPE AND AMERICA. MOST OF YOUR BOOKS WERE COMPLETED AT SPECIAL WRITERS' CENTRES IN ICELAND, SWEDEN, PRAGUE AND ELSEWHERE. TELL US ABOUT THE WORKING CONDITIONS IN THESE CENTRES. HOW DOES A YOUNG GREEK WRITER FEEL IN THAT SORT OF ATMOSPHERE AND HOW DO HIS COLLEAGUES AND FELLOW-INHABITANTS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES RE-
SPOND TO HIM, AND BY EXTENSION TO GREEK LITERATURE GENERALLY?
In no way do I regard staying at a writers' centre abroad as an essential condition for writing my books. I don't need to leave Greece in order to be able to write. On the contrary, all my books were written in Athens. What staying at one of these institutions affords me is the luxury of isolation and the free time to complete the detailed and demanding work of the final editing. At the same time, associating with writers of different ages and nationalities gives me the opportunity to exchange ideas and information with colleagues whose creative work is carried out under conditions utterly different from those in Greece, and who consequently have a completely different way of seeing all the usual questions that preoccupy people involved with literature: earning a living, securing the time to write, infrastructure for research, critics' reviews, relations with publishers, etc. The living conditions in these centres vary. Usually the writer is provided with bed and board and a space in which to work, while it is left to the individual to decide how he uses his time and to what extent he takes part in common activities with other writers or chooses to work alone in his own space. My own personal experience is that these centres have a particularly welcoming attitude to a Greek writer. Naturally, it is up to each one to make his own contribution, according to the knowledge, experiences and skills which he has amassed. As regards Greek literature, it is rather a terra incognita for those outside the walls and for that reason I think it is very important that the National Book Centre continues to support Greek writers in traveling abroad. 単 WORKS 1 THE PARTHENON BOMBER, ATHENS, ANATOLIKOS, 1996. 64 PP. 2 THE RECIPES OF NAPOLEON DELASTOS, ATHENS, ODYSSEAS, 1997. 155 PP. ISBN: 960-210294-2 3 SHUNYATA, ATHENS, ODYSSEAS, 1999. 157 PP.ISBN: 960-210-315-9 4 THE MANICURIST, ATHENS, ODYSSEAS, 2000. 128 PP. ISBN: 960-210-388-4 5 THE BLACK DRESS, DIARY, RCIPP EDITIONS, NEW JERSEY, USA, 2000
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