Readers Place

What We Think

Panos Karnezis, author of Little Infamies, on 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.’