Reading Games in the Greek Novel

Eleni Papargyriou

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781906540838
• eBook ISBN: 9781351193450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"How is play constituent in the formation of the Greek modernist novel? Reflecting competition with European and North American models as well as internal antagonism with more established literary genres in Greece, the novel after the 1930s employed playfulness as a means to demonstrate or even perform its novelty. Innovations unexpectedly came from the Greek periphery rather than Athens, and the Greek novel swiftly exchanged a passively understood realism for communicative patterns that actively involve the reader and educate him into bringing scraps of plot into a meaningful synthesis. Featuring key Greek authors such as Yannis Skarimbas, Stratis Tsirkas and Nikos Kachtitsis, this is a comprehensive and innovative study of Greek modernist prose fiction and the first of its kind to appear in English. Eleni Papargyriou is Lecturer in Modern Greek Literature at Kings College London."

CHAPTER 1
Beyond Textual Aesthetics: Modalities of Play in Fiction

Games appeal to modern literary sensibilities. They also pertain to modernist concerns that explore, question and challenge the very idea of fiction. Realism deals with games on a thematic rather than a formal level to describe what characters do or how societies are laid out. The presentation of gambling at the roulette table, say, in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler (1866) provides valuable insights into the characters’ psychology or the conundrums of compulsive playing, but does not have any impact on the narrative form itself. Equally, the study of such as game is more illuminating for the history of the game or for the social habits of people playing it rather than for the literature where it is depicted. Dostoevsky presents a mural of morals that revolve around different attitudes to money, both earning and spending it. There is variety in individual behaviour regarding that, but ultimately Dostoevsky concerns himself with national attitudes. Compulsive gambling fits the Russian character, eager to wager everything at any time: in the novel it is Russians, such as Aleksey Ivanovich and Baboulinka, an elderly Russian aristocrat, who win and lose fortunes overnight. In the last scene Aleksey tellingly confronts an Englishman, Mr Astley, the prudent partner in the ‘well-known sugar-refining company Lovell & Co’, who does not gamble, but has seen enough Russians in German spas ruin themselves and those around them to ascertain that roulette is a Russian game.¹

The notion of literary games perhaps originates in the emphasis that modern theories of play attach to the concept of fictionality, the idea that play creates an alternative reality, subject to its own rules and regulations. Modern theories of play have taken meticulous care to make play and reality visibly distinct. That play should amount to the transformation of reality into a different, perhaps altogether richer strand is very similar to the idea that fiction is an autonomous system, separate from the real world. Johan Huizinga’s pioneering study Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (first published in 1938), which alerted readers to the vastness and depth of the subject, considers play to be a totality, an irreducible category that defies a definition. The essential features he identifies designate the autonomy of play as an act separate from reality:

[...] we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.²

Huizinga considers play to be a fundamental premise for human civilization and links it to sacred rites, which in terms of their representational nature can be put on a par with the modernist concept of myth. He maintains that representation of religious events is methectic rather than mimetic, in other words, it involves an essential transformation of the recipients rather than a mere imitation of an original event.³ Huizinga identifies the primary form of playing in noble contest. Contest and ritual are interlinked, in that both are prescribed performances, which participants follow faithfully. The link between competition and ritual is consistently followed in Huizinga’s examination of play in different aspects of culture, such as law, science, philosophy and art. The agonistic element manifests itself in all facets of civilization as a contest for knowledge and intellectual superiority; it challenges individuals to solve riddles and engage in artistic activities such as poetry, or becomes a contest for power, which engages them in war. Perhaps without realizing it, by emphasizing contest in the field of knowledge Huizinga alludes to the competitive aspect of fiction: communicative patterns between author and reader, or text and reader are robustly founded on such descriptions.

Roger Caillois based his own work Man, Play and Games (published in French in 1958) on a revision of Huizinga’s essential standpoints,⁴ questioning the preponderance of competition in Huizinga’s theory and underlining the element of chance.⁵ Caillois’s own description of play is heavily indebted to Huizinga’s, repeating its main features with the addition of the element of uncertainty, which serves to include games of chance overlooked by Huizinga, and more importantly for our purposes, that of make-believe, which points to an alternative reality. The concept of make-believe surpasses mimicry, as it implies a performance.⁶ Caillois’s outstanding contribution to the subject is his classification of games into four different categories, agōn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx, according to one prominent feature, namely competition, chance, simulation and vertigo. Agōn contains competitive games, such as sports, chess and draughts, whereas alea (Latin for dice) amounts to games of chance such as roulette and lottery. Mimicry can be identified with adopting an alien identity and transforming into someone else, as happens in games of role-playing. Finally, ilinx (Greek for whirlpool) includes games that intend to bring players into a state of vertigo, such as the see-saw and the roller-coaster. Although Caillois did not intend these categories to represent functions of play, theorists, and literary theorists in particular, after him have used them fruitfully and effectively in such a fashion: agonistics may be visible in the dispensation or retention of plot clues, while make-believe facilitates the understanding of concepts such as realism and literary illusion. Caillois introduced the distinction between paidia, namely the free and improvising aspects of play, and ludus, by which he means the rules and regulations that turn play into a structured act, on a par with Derrida, who identifies freeplay as a separate notion, a non-centred activity, which is contrasted to structured play.⁷

It is worth remarking that Huizinga and Caillois originally wrote in languages (Dutch and French respectively) that do not mark the distinction between the nouns ‘play’ and ‘game’ as the English language does. Perhaps the basic difference between ‘play’ and ‘game’ in English relates to the fact that ‘play’ generally designates an activity, whereas ‘game’ signals a performance of this activity in a specific and rather controlled environment.⁸ This points to the fact that a game is characterized by a structure, regardless of whether it is a solitary game with dolls⁹ or a team game such as football, in the sense that the player or the players always assigns himself or themselves specific tasks.¹⁰ Despite the fact that Dutch and French do not mark this difference, there is still a semantic distinction between the two terms in Huizinga’s and Caillois’s works. I suspect that, when the two theorists use the words ‘Spel’ in Dutch and ‘jeu’ in French respectively, they point to games rather than play, which means that they are mainly concerned with performative aspects rather than play’s nature proper. The primacy of games over play in their studies is suggested by the emphasis their descriptions place on specific conditions such as time and space. This primacy is also confirmed by Huizinga’s obsession with ritual as a form of representation and by Caillois’s interest in classif ication.¹¹ As I suggested earlier, their works do not include definitions of ‘play’; rather, they include an amalgamation of traits identified in the activity. Caillois’s distinction between paidia and ludus perhaps implies an awareness of the difference between ‘play’ and ‘game’ and is an indirect attempt to account for it. In this case, paidia would stand closer to ‘play’, whereas ludus would point to the regulated form of ‘game’.

Perhaps it is because of their failure to directly address this meaningful distinction that their theories have been susceptible to criticism. Jacques Ehrmann, in an altogether perhaps too aphoristic article entitled ‘Homo Ludens Revisited’, attacks Huizinga, Caillois and the similar views of the linguist Emile Benveniste¹² on the grounds that they are based on a much too polarized distinction between reality and non-reality, seriousness and non-seriousness, productiveness and gratuity.¹³ Ehrmann claims the argument put forward by Huizinga, Caillois and Benveniste presupposes we have a clear idea of what reality is, which is in fact impossible. He justly maintains that the three theorists’ claim that play is a non-serious activity that can be rigidly separated from ordinary life and does not produce any material goods implies that the world we live in is a place totally governed by reason and run solely by the ambition of productivity. This rather technocratic view of the world demotes play to the status of a superfluous, useless and unproductive occupation identified with mere levity and frivolity. Ehrmann suggests this is the result of a disjunctive approach to play rather than a conjunctive one, an approach that regards play as a faculty that opposes itself to what we regard to be real, serious and useful.¹⁴

As I said, the problem identified by Ehrmann perhaps originates from the fact that Huizinga’s and Caillois’s theories are mainly preoccupied with games rather than play. Huizinga and Caillois take care to establish the traits of play as a specific performance and of players as a particular group, which is why they ascribe to play notions of separateness and exclusiveness that lead to a rigid dichotomy between play and the ordinary world. This polarization is caused by a circular definition of play as game rather than a definition of play itself. Huizinga and Caillois pinpoint important aspects of play, but do not explain what play intrinsically is and what makes it different from other activities. I believe that in order to examine games we must start by defining play. To do this, we shall follow a different train of thought, going a little further back in time.

What Is Play?

The polarization that emerges in the separation of the real world and the autonomous one created in playing, pertinent in the writings of Huizinga and Caillois, takes us back to earlier accounts, such as Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man (letters XII–XV) (1794),¹⁵ in which he distinguishes between a sensuous drive, which is related to time in the sense of phenomenal existence and to change, and a formal drive that represents absolute existence, which is thought to bring harmony into the diversity of man’s manifestations and annuls both time and change. The sensuous drive is connected to feelings and the specific conditions of our material disposition, whereas the formal drive is linked to reason and moral disposition. Appearances that are connected to the former drive are described as cases, whereas the latter furnishes laws, which exist in absolute validity. Schiller argues that these drives need to exist simultaneously if humans are to live in harmony with themselves and others. However, the reconciliation of these opposite drives is forbidden by the fact of their own disparity. The only way they can be unified is through a third drive, the play-drive, which can bring them into concert. According to Schiller, the play-drive accounts for the aesthetic phenomenon, which cannot be adequately explained in the framework of the other two categories alone, although it obviously shares some of their antithetical features. He locates the object of the sense-drive in life, of the formal-drive in form and of play-drive in living form, ‘a concept serving to designate all the aesthetic qualities of phenomena and, in a word, what in the widest sense of the term we call beauty.’¹⁶ In this sense, the play-drive is not one existing independently of the other two, but a potential one, which is in a position to produce the equilibrium that brings the idea of beauty into existence. Schiller believes that ‘man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.’¹⁷ Self-fulfilment is only possible through the projection of beauty realized as play in human life, and self-fulfilment is essentially an aesthetic phenomenon.

The implementation of the ideal through play is also advocated by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960). Gadamer uses play as an analogy for the aesthetic experience, an analogy that is in line with modernist thinking. For him play is ‘the mode of being of the work of art itself’.¹⁸ The essence of play does not lie in the behaviour and the intention of the playing subject or in the freedom he enjoys in the activity. Gadamer pinpoints the primacy of play over the consciousness of the player; the subjectivity of the player ceases to exist as he merges into the game and, thus, the two agents, subject and object, fuse into one. Similarly to Schiller, Gadamer tackles the ontological question of play in that he observes that it does not exist prior to its implementation; it can only come into existence through the act of playing itself. Play encompasses its own telos and can therefore be regarded as a self-representative act.¹⁹ In Gadamer’s scheme play reconciles two faculties previously thought of as opposite, namely the subjectivity of the players and the object of play. Through this reconciliation emerges something that does not exist prior to it; the fusion of two opposites brings about an elevated level of perception, a better insight into the world, which coincides with the concept of beauty. Both Schiller and Gadamer identify play as a creative force and introduce the idea of something fictional emerging through the act. The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget exploits a similar notion of fictionality occurring through play as a process of reconciled duality, but situates it in a different context as the tension between assimilation and accommodation: ‘If every act of intelligence is an equilibrium between assimilation and accommodation, while imitation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration and Translations
• Introduction
• 1 Beyond Textual Aesthetics: Modalities of Play in Fiction
• 2 No Importance in Being Earnest? Playfulness and Greek Modernism in the 1930s
• 3 Intertextuality as Reading Performance: Playful Citation in Yannis Skarimbas's Mariambas
• 4 The Archaeologies of Reading: From Drosinis's Classical Canon to Pentzikis's Intertextual Games
• 5 Games and Symbolic Order in Aris Alexandrou's The Mission Box
• 6 Replaying the Text in Stratis Tsirkas's Drifting Cities
• 7 The Heart of Lightness: Trivial Colonialism in Nikos Kachtitsis's The Balcony
• Bibliography
• Index