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AN AUTHOR'S OUTLOOK
Greek author Panos Karnezis, writer of Little
Infamies, recently attended a reading group day in Manchester
organised by the reading group magazine NewBooks.mag. On the day
he hosted reading group sessions and also gave a talk about his
view on the images of Greeks in English literature. Below is an
abridged version of his talk.
LITTLE INFAMIES
 Panos
Karnezis's remarkable stories are all set in the same nameless
Greek village. His characters are the people who live there - the
priest, the barber, the whore, the doctor, the seamstress, the mayor
- and the occasional animal: a centaur, a parrot that recites Homer,
a horse called History. Their lives intersect, as lives do in a
small place, and they know each other's secrets - the hidden crimes,
the mysteries, the little infamies that men commit. Karnezis observes
his villagers with a forgiving eye, and creates a world where magic
invariably loses out to harsh reality, a world at once universal,
funny and utterly compelling.
PRAISE FOR LITTLE INFAMIES
'Karnezis has captured the spirit of his people and spoken for them
in a spellbinding, universal voice' The Times
'Karnezis's robust prose, as luminous and flinty as his landscape,
sharpens his focus on captive souls in a lonely place' Independent
'Strikingly original… The stories in Little Infamies are extraordinary
- shocking, colourful and resonant. Panos Karnezis is an entirely
individual writer in full command of his material' Sunday Times
'Unless lightning strikes or the earth opens up beneath him, Karnezis
seems likely to take his place beside the masters of European storytelling.
No image hits the ground, no story fails to fly: the Greek imagination
has found a new, dark, witty avatar.' Independent on Sunday
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
 Panos
Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967. He came to England in 1992
to study engineering, and worked in industry before starting to
write. He was awarded an MA in Creative Writing by the University
of East Anglia. Panos Karnezis lives in Oxford.
THE IMAGE OF GREEKS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
A stereotype is an oversimplified standardised image or idea held
by one person - or group - of another. Stereotypes are the factors
that often shape the way we think. They somehow manage to categorise
some of life's most complex matters into nice distinct sections.
Although classification and organisation seem at first glance to
be useful in distinguishing various aspects of modern life, by instituting
too broad categories and establishing immovable terms these grouping
methods can leave erroneous ideas in the minds of the reader and
influence his or her thinking process. Aside from the obvious 'all
blondes are dumb' or 'all scientists are nerds' stereotypes, there
exist more serious and more difficult to shake off ones. Third World
countries were once grouped together not because of social or economic
similarities but out of convenience. But since then, the industrialised
nations have harboured the stereotype that the Third World is a
land of starving children and savage tribes. Although there may
be a certain amount of truth to a stereotypical statement, the generalisation
is more often than not inaccurate.
For many nineteenth century writers, Greece - both ancient and
modern - could only be a golden world, with a people to whom a western
European owes every excellent, generous and just sentiment. In his
excellent book, In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English
and American Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2002), David
Roessel offers a comprehensive review of this perception. Shelley's
famous statement from the Preface to Hellas, 'We are all Greeks
now,' was only a flamboyant extension of the way many felt on the
subject. From writers who never went there to those who did, Greece
was a place where freedom triumphed or wisdom was taught. Romantic
love of Greece provided its advocates with a set of blinders from
behind which the real Greece could be blanked out with a hope of
restoring the ancient one.
But this image was to change. In the aftermath of World War I,
another war between Greece and Turkey was fought in Asia Minor,
between 1919 and 1922, which the Greeks lost. A horrible destruction
of all the non-Turkish parts of Asia Minor ensued, and an exodus
of a million and a half Greeks from what would from then on be exclusively
Turkish territory. From that moment on it was impossible to go on
writing of Greece in the nineteenth century manner. Greece was beginning
to be portrayed in wholly new ways by such writers as John Dos Passos,
Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and John Fowles to name but a few.
Gradually, Greeks were beginning to be viewed as a race knowing
excess of every kind and Greece as the place where the physical
senses could be enjoyed to the point of annihilation. Two examples
from Lawrence Durrell's Reflections on a Marine Venus demonstrate
this change in the perception of Greece and of Greeks. In the first
example the narrator expresses his views on the Greek character:
'The Greek is a terrible fellow. Mercuric, noisy, voluble and
proud - was there ever such a conjunction of qualities locked
in a human breast? Only the Irishman could match him for intractability,
for rowdy feckless generosity.'
The second example from the same book is a brief dialogue between
the English narrator and a Greek man:
"'You are English.' - says the Greek - 'They never see things
before they happen. The English are very slow.'
'And what about the Greeks?'
'The Greeks are fast… piff… paff… They decide.'
'But each one decides individually.'
'That is individualism.'
'But it leads to chaos.'
'We like chaos.'"
Apart from stereotypes there are also caricatures. A caricature
is a drawing, a description, or performance that exaggerates somebody's
or something's characteristics, like for example physical features,
for humorous or satirical effect. Here is Costas the Greek lover
from Willy Russell's play Shirley Valentine, soon after meeting
the heroine:
'You afraid I make try to foak with you. Of course I like to
foak with you. You are lovely woman. Any man be crazy not to want
to foak with you. But I don't ask to foak. I ask you want to come
my brother's boat - is different thing.'
(With such contemporary notions of Greece and Greeks we might forget
that before the 1930s almost no one went there to find themselves.
In fact, English and Americans in the nineteenth century went for
that kind of experience to Italy, a place which had played a similar
role in the books of E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence).
There is a tendency of people in one group (say, nationality) to
overestimate the similarity of the people of another group (another
nationality). The result is, again, the creation of stereotypes.
In Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Briton Louis de Bernieres yields
to the temptation of having Greek doctor Iannis stereotype his compatriots:
'Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has two Greeks inside. We
even have technical terms for them… We are all hospitable
to strangers, we are all nostalgic for something, our mothers
all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their
mothers as sacred and beat their wives, we all hate solitude…
The Hellene avoids excess, he knows his limits, he represses the
violence within himself, he seeks harmony and cultivates a sense
of proportion… The Romoi are improvisers, they seek power
and money, they aren't rational because they act on intuition
and instinct, so that they make a mess of everything…'
In The Magus John Fowles disagrees with all that. In fact, he goes
on to stereotype the English - but only for the purpose of demonstrating
the feelings of his English narrator who returns to London after
a long stay in Greece:
"I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness,
its termite density after the sparseness of the Aegean. It was
like mud after diamonds, dark undergrowth after sunlit marble;
and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless
suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why
anyone should, or could, ever return of his own will to such a
landscape, such a society, such a climate… And I could hear
people saying 'Lovely day, isn't it?' No Greek is like any other
Greek; and every English face seemed, that day, like every other
English face."
But there are exceptions. In his book My Family and Other Animals,
Gerald Durrell manages wonderfully to avoid stereotypical notions
and to offer as perceptive image of a foreign people as any:
'As the days passed, I came gradually to understand them. What
had at first been a confused babble became a series of recognizable
separate sounds. Then, suddenly, these took on meaning, and slowly
and haltingly I started to use them myself; then I took my newly
acquired words and strung them together into ungrammatical and
stumbling sentences. Our neighbours were delighted, as though
I had conferred some delicate compliment by trying to learn their
language. They would lean over the hedge, their faces screwed
up with concentration, as I groped my way through a greeting or
a simple remark, and when I had successfully concluded they would
beam at me, nodding and smiling, and clap their hands.'
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