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Dialogism and interpretation: reading Papadiamantis’ A Dream Among the Waters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Dimitris Tziovas
Dimitris Tziovas*
Affiliation:
Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham
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Extract

The twentieth century has been the century of interpretation, representing at the same time its celebration and its devaluation. It opens with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Nietzsche’s statement that there are no facts but only interpretations and ends up in the early 1960s with Susan Sontag’s attack on interpretation and her dramatic appeal for an ‘erotics of art’ in place of a hermeneutics. However polemical Sontag’s attitude might seem, she is not the only one who expresses this kind of distrust toward interpretation. Others too talk about the ‘crisis’ of interpretation or its transgression.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 17 , 1993 , pp. 141 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1993

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References

1 See Sontag, Susan, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (N. York 1982) (1 1964).Google Scholar

2 See Levin, Harry, ‘The Crisis of Interpretation’ in Teaching Literature — What Is Needed Now, eds. Engell, James and Perkins, David, 29–47 Google Scholar and McHale, Brian, ‘Against Interpretation, Iconic Grammar, Anxiety of Influence and Poetic Artifice’, Poetics Today, no. 1 (Winter 1982) 141–158 Google Scholar. For a review of the various trends in literary interpretation see Newton, K.M., Interpreting the Text: A Critical Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Literary Interpretation (London 1990).Google Scholar

3 Culler, Jonathan, ‘Beyond Interpretation’ in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London 1981) 5.Google Scholar

4 ‘Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety. Poets’ misinterpretations or poems are more drastic than critics’ misinterpretations or criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry’. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London 1973) 94–5.Google Scholar

5 Iser, Wolfgang, ‘The Interplay Between Creation and Interpretation’, New Literary History, no. 2 (special issue on Interpretation and Creation) (Winter 1984) 387–395.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 395.

7 See Critical Inquiry, no. 1 (September 1982) (Special issue on the Politics of Interpretation) and Jameson, Fredric ‘On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act’ in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London 1981) 17–102 Google Scholar. For the politics of interpretation in a Greek context and particularly as regards Cavafy’s poetry see Jusdanis, G., ‘The Modes of Reading; Or Why Interpret? A search for the Meaning of “Imenos”’ Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, Nos. 1 & 2 (Spring-Summer 1983) 137–148 Google Scholar and Lambropoulos, V., ‘The Violent Power of Knowledge: The Struggle of Critical Discourses for Domination Over Cavafy’s “Young Men of Sidon, A.D. 400V.’”, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, op. cit., 149–166.Google Scholar

8 See Culler, J., On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London 1983) 92–4.Google Scholar

9 Papadiamantis, Alexandros, ‘A Dream among the Waters’ in Tales from a Greek Island, tr. E. Constantinides (Baltimore 1987) 84–94 Google Scholar. Henceforth page numbers will be given in parenthesis after each long quotation.

10 It should be noted here that Papadiamantis mentions Father Sisois earlier in Apanta, 2, ed. Triantaphyllopoulos, N.D. (Athens 1982) 603.Google Scholar

11 See Propp, Vladimir, The Morphology of the Folktale (Austin 1968.Google Scholar

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15 Tracing its arcadianism and exploring its links with the pastoral genre constitutes another approach to the story. In this connection see Kolyvas, I.K., no. 1, Protohronia 1992, 14–31 Google Scholar and Farinou-Malamatari, G. ‘H (Athens 1992) 56–59.Google Scholar

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20 See Alexiou, Margaret, ‘Women in Two Novels of Stratis Myrivilis: Myth, Fantasy and Violence’, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook (1989) 117–141 Google Scholar. And in (The Mermaid Madonna), another novel by Myrivilis, the incident in chapter 38 between Lambis and Smaragdi, who swims carefree and naked in the sea before realising the other’s presence, strongly reminds me of A Dream Among the Waters.

21 Constantinides, Elizabeth, ‘Love and Death: The Sea in the Work of Alexandres Papadiamantis’, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 4 (1988) 99–110.Google Scholar

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25 Young, Robert, ‘Back to Bakhtin’, Cultural Critiques 2 (Winter 1985-86) 80 Google Scholar. Dialogism, however, does not account for the prevalence of one interpretation over the others, probably because, as Robert Young points out, it does not put forward an adequate theory of power and therefore the operation of the struggle between centripetal and centrifugal forces is not fully explained.

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30 See Bakhtin, M.M., The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin 1981)Google Scholar; Holquist, Michael, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bialostosky, Don ‘Dialogic Criticism’, Contemporary Literary Theory, eds. Atkins, G. Douglas & Morrow, Laura (London 1989) 214–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Lodge, D., After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London 1990) 86.Google Scholar