Specters of Cavafy

Maria Bolesti's new book, Specters of Cavafy, explores the relevance of C. P. Cavafy's poetry to our present day using the conceptual metaphor of specter. Cavafy is possibly the most renowned Greek poet of the twentieth century today, though in his lifetime he was an obscure outlier. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, where — after having spent the formative years of his adolescence in England, and three years in his maternal grandparents’ home in Constantinople during the Anglo – Egyptian war — he remained all his life. His only foray into mainland Greece occurred when he was thirty. Cavafy published only one slim book in his lifetime, and his complete literary corpus of 154 poems includes unpublished, unfinished, and later-renounced works.Of course, the modernists most revered today had also lived in the periphery of society, legally, sexually, or geographically, as expats — Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Lola Ridge, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Oscar Wilde. Although Bolesti does not contextualize Cavafy within international modernist movements, his works shares many characteristics with his modernist peers, including the peculiarity of the Greek in his poetry.1 Like other poets who have lived during the fall of empires (Ottoman, Habsburg) or during wars and sieges, Cavafy's poetic world is rife with gods and ghosts, spirits and specters of all kinds, and is inhabited by myth and history. Like English-language modernists H.D., Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot, Cavafy welcomes antiquity into the home of the eternal now of his poems, especially as a homosexual poet writing between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But unlike his English language counterparts, Cavafy has, according to Bolesti, often been considered a poet for the future or a prophet.Maria Bolesti's Specters of Cavafy is a response to Cavafy's veneration and an accounting of the terms on which his poetry haunts our present. Her study is based on a central conflict in his writing: “on the one hand, a desire to predict and control the future, articulate historical laws, and close off contexts, and on the other hand, a tendency to break those laws and contexts open, contaminate them, and expose them to contingent forces from elsewhere” (xix). Taking her cue from Jacques Derrida's “Specters of Marx” (1993), as well as Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren's introduction to The Spectralities Reader (2004), Bolesti proposes the specter as a conceptual metaphor for revisiting Cavafy's modernist poetics and his poetry's afterlives today. Following Mieke Bal, Bolesti notes that a conceptual metaphor differs from “an ordinary metaphor” in that it is a figure of thought, even an analytical tool that performs theoretical, moral, and ethical work, and that can enact change and seek justice.Bolesti's double inquiry into the ways Cavafy's writing haunts and is haunted by the past as well as the future is presented in the two parts of the book. Part 1 revisits Cavafy's poetics through the lens of spectrality. Here, Bolesti observes that Cavafy's work is filled with characters who are no longer here, or who have not yet arrived (chapter 1), and that his poetic subjects try to activate the past using techniques of broken promises and conjurations, which Bolesti calls speech acts (chapter 2). These speech acts are central to Cavafy's spectral poetics. Part 2 investigates Cavafy's poetry's bearing on the Western cultural and political imaginary since 1989, particularly in a post – Cold War, post-9/11 world, and specifically in contemporary crisis-ridden Greece. These latter chapters take readers through the afterlives of the poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in which Bolesti explores the conceptions of history and visions of the future that the poem's political uses promote. The poem “In a Large Greek Colony” presents Bolesti with the opportunity to follow Cavafy's specters from colonized Egypt to contemporary Greece.Bolesti astutely opens the investigation with an examination of Cavafy's prose poem “The Ships” (1895 – 96) as an allegory for his poetics. Here the conception of poetry is of a private expression of the artist in tension with the hegemonic powers that regulate it: Ships set forth from the imagination to the harbor of the blank page, and the most precious cargo is fragile and fleeting. Notably, the entire enterprise is haunted by very rare ghost ships, which never arrive because “their cargo is banned or the harbor is not deep enough to receive them,” and they “continue on their way,” soon forgotten by the poet (5). These ships are so rare that they might occur no more than twice or thrice in a lifetime, and are so thoroughly forgotten that we recall them only in fragments, as when we hear a song “in our mind's ear.” Then, “we recall that these strophes were part of the song sung by the sailors — sailors as beautiful as the heroes of The Iliad — when the great ships were passing us by.” To be haunted, Bolesti notes, is to be disquieted and disoriented. Thus, to be a poet is to be haunted by what can never be fully arrested or reconstructed, or re-membered (5).This first chapter is an analysis of Cavafy's strategies for postponing death, finality, or completion, “which allow poetic texts to keep haunting without ever ‘dropping anchor’ ” (6). Bolesti achieves this through an examination of Derrida's hauntology, which eschews history as original. As she puts it, “the (historical) present is at times a battlefield of purposefully conjured specters, which are undercut by the intrusion of other specters that no one had invited, anticipated, or called upon” (9). Quoting Fredric Jameson, Bolesti notes that hauntology “shows that a self-sufficient notion of the present cannot exist” (10). Rather, the present is a transitory instant that already contains the past and the future. Examining “the present” with such granularity allows us to locate the “ghosts of the past” which “occupy, shape, and produce” the present.As corollary of the spectral temporality in Cavafy's poems, Bolesti describes an approach to (re)reading Cavafy's work through its afterlives that she calls “pre-posterous reading,” drawing on Mieke Bal's Quoting Caravaggio (2010). She explains that pre-posterous reading that follows a spectral temporality articulates the relation between a Cavafian poem and its contemporary adaptation determining not only how the poem shapes this later work but also the way the later work “haunts” back by “inviting, provoking, or inspiring new readings of Cavafy's poems from our present” (13). She goes on to assert that a pre-posterous reading “does not bypass the historicity of a text and the context of its creation in favor of a presentist approach. On the contrary, it can open up this context . . . and put it in conversation with other contexts. It can thus expand a poem's historicity by sidestepping a linear temporality whereby a (settled) past can only exert influence on the present” (13). This strategy appears quite similar to the modernist reading strategy outlined by T. S. Eliot (1919) in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” but with greater detail, and applicable to the way we read and understand politics and society, not only literature.Bolesti's study is deeply satisfying, her explications clear and useful when she performs close readings of Cavafy's poetry and story. While the attempts to close read Cavafy's travel diaries seem less relevant (especially the parts that consist of directions to particular shops and services in an age before GPS), Bolesti's fluency in both Greek and English ensure that her readings are accurate and multifaceted. And her focus on spectrality, with its emphasis on openness, suspension of absolutes, consideration of the future, and indefinite delay of gratification, strikes me as a timely field of study, particularly when our world seems to be tilting toward populism and the period of human occupation of the planet appears to be drawing to a close.