I was always fascinated by the lines in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that follow:
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant 209
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
Why is Eugenides so fabulously identified as a Greek and why a Greek from Graecia Magna, Smyrna?
Usually they are glossed in terms of the reference that follows to the Hotel Metropole: this is we are told (or were in the 1970s) a ‘homosexual pick-up venue’ signified by an interpretation based on the contemporary reputation of the London Metropole Hotel. This hardly satisfies.
In 1922, 30,000 Greeks and Armenians from Smyrna were massacred and the city razed to the ground to make way for Turkish Izmir, I read recently as I read Mazower’s wonderful history of Salonica, City of Ghosts[1] It made me think again about how well I knew that poem. I did find an article[2] about post 1st World war politics that showed me I knew it less well than I thought, having felt secure in having been taught it by Stephen Spender at UCL in 1972. What I failed to know about it, although Spender probably did know all that, was that world literature demands knowledge of the world and of world history: a history of commonalities and differences in identity that varied across time, space and other more contingent factors. But these include ejections, migrations, exile and strange ‘homecoming’.
I got that from reading Mazower and I’m feeling that I’m still learning. In part this is because I have just started, whilst finishing Mazower’s gripping history, Mark Haddon’s new novel: The Porpoise. The contact between reading one and the other did, as they say, blow my mind. In fact that particular explosion featured in reading this short paragraph from page 31.
Phillippe owns houses in Sri Lanka, Berlin and Skiathos. … The villa outside Antakya remains empty. He cannot bear the idea of anyone else inhabiting what has always been thought of as the ancestral home. The family has owned the estate for as long as written records exist, so it is said. …Is the story true? Perhaps it matters only that this is a family which has always prided itself as part of a global aristocracy, doggedly secular but with Muslim, Christian and Jewish roots, citizens of the world not in aspiration but in simple fact.
The Porpoise (p.31) – with my omissions (…)
Of course if this says anything it is that there are no ‘simple facts’ in such matters, since even the matter of extant ‘written records’ is still a matter, in the way of this world, of hearsay evidence (‘so it is said‘). The prose knowingly obscures that which it pretends to clarify. Maybe ‘the world’ we know in literature is the ability to react not only to words in context but to resurrect the same ghosts which continually blur the boundaries between ‘Muslim, Christian and Jewish roots’ in Mazkower’s or any other great historical narrative
What we find in Makower is a set of labels for ‘peoples’ whose boundaries shift in time, space and in the acts of retelling (from those in national laws to migrant stories) in which those labels become ‘simple fact’. The Byzantine and Ottoman Empires had similar attitudes to multi-ethnicity in the longue durée, whatever the violence of particular episodes of their histories.
In contrast, twentieth-century history has increasingly demanded simple fact told by the reductive narratives in the law and constitution of ‘nations’, with their dependence of having a knowable (‘simple fact’) grasp of the boundaries between ethnicities and ethnicities and other factors like class and gender. Migration was part of those great Empires and ways of conducting business between communities of difference was recognised in praxis. This stress on communities paradoxically also seemed to support intra-group differences too, although these too flared up sometimes into intolerances momentarily.
Haddon’s Frankish Phillipe lives in a Byzantine or Ottoman world in which Muslim, Christian and Jewish roots have secular commonalities that sometimes too come to take symbolic and ritual (even liturgical) common memes to their heart. These include the virtue of love, interaction and cross-boundary knowing that suspends judgemental evaluation as based on ‘too simple’ facts – often not facts at all. Haddon needs this because his novel is dangerous in contemporary literature, dealing from the start, and validated by Gower’s authority in Confessio Amantis, with a story of incest.
I do not know what will become of the story and its characters but what I already know is that it isn’t productive to approach literature with a set of a-priori norms that I assume to be those of a contemporary ‘world’. Incest has always been a novelist’s means of queering what we thought we knew (we don’t or we would be more aware of the abuse that it sometimes generates – and more often than ‘stranger’-rape). But for me this novel is timely precisely because the narratives of Trump, the wall and the ‘simple fact’ of no-deal Brexit can be explored in the extreme way that Phillip’s inherited and trauma-reinforced attitudes are. Those attitudes lie in one sentence:
“He cannot bear the idea of anyone else inhabiting what has always been thought of as the ancestral home.”
The fear of the stranger violation will I predict become, in part at least, what I love and what is deep about this novel. Other great Mark Haddon novels queer the world (by which I mean make it strange to us) in different ways. It is through these queerings that we come to know the world better. I might report back after getting beyond the first page of the second part – where I am now. But what I suspect is that we will not know the world at all unless we start by knowing that, first of all, that which we think we know is only uncertain. Like Mr Eugenides. That he is ‘unshaven’ will never resolve itself into graspable meaning!
[1] Mazower, D. (2004) Salonica: City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430 – 1950 London, HaperCollins Publishers
[2]Roessel, D. (1989) “Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant,” and Post-War Politics in “The Waste Land” in Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 16, No. 1 (Summer, 1989), pp. 171-176. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831380?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents (Accessed 13/05/19)
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