Greece Still Attracts! Soft Power and the Love/Hate Relationship

It might be an interesting exercise to look at the list of Nobel Prize Literature Laureates, to see how many of them had been influenced by Greece and Greek culture in one way or another.

The most obvious names would be Patrick White, William Golding (who taught himself Ancient Greek) and Albert Camus. Then you would have to include Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, whose work does reflect a degree of influence.

(eg Seamus Heaney, Pylos: "I woke to the world there like Telemachos,/ Young again in the whitewashed light of morning/That flashed on the ceiling like an early warning/From myself to be more myself in the mast-bending/Marine breeze...")

If one broadened the field to include writers once nominated for the Nobel prize, strong contenders like Lawrence Durrell, it would probably make an impressive line-up.

The "soft power", or cultural attraction, of Greece, has always been one of the country's major assets, and Nobel Prize winners like George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis have done more for the enduring high reputation of the country than can ever be forgotten in the heat of the current crisis and negative press coverage.

I've just been re-reading Patrick White's Flaws in the Glass, A Self-Portrait (1981), the section entitled Journeys, which is mostly about journeys that he and his partner Manoly Lascaris made in Greece.


Patrick White talks about that familiar love-hate relationship many people have with Greece (page 201):

"Greece is the greatest love-hate for anybody genuinely hooked...If you are pure, innocent, or noble - qualities I don't lay claim to- perhaps you never develop passionate antipathies. But Greece is one long despairing rage in those who understand her...Greece is mindless enough, unless when it comes to politics, and there confusion abounds."

White lists a number of exasperating aspects, incidents and images of Greece, "incidents and images such as these have helped temper my passion for Greece; they have forged a relationship without which my life would have been sterile indeed".

He has little to say about Salonika (see my earlier posting). What he does say on page 157 is not very nice:

"Obsolescence and fatality loom around each setting forth in Greece".

In Salonika: "Our hotel would have accommodated the more sinister sequences of some cloak-and-dagger 'B' film. During the night, a French letter in the lavatory bowl refused to be flushed by either of us. Then in the morning we had our first glimpse of Olympus through the haze above the curving bay. Any true Grecophile will understand what I say that the unsinkable condom and the smell of shit which precede the moment of illumination make it more rewarding when it happens".

The point is that he, like many other great writers and Nobel Prize-Winners, were (and many still are) loyal and true Grecophiles/Philhellenes, in spite of the confusing politics and occasional inconveniences.

As I say at the conclusion of my essay on "Lord Byron and Ambivalent Philhellenism: The Love/Hate Syndrome" in Corfu Blues (the book; Ars Interpres, Stockholm, 2006):

"It remains a Love/Hate relationship. Perhaps we have Lord Byron to thank for our ambivalence."

"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts", from "Carpe Diem", by Sean McMahon and Mary Murphy (illustration), Belfast, 1995.

To finish, some positive coverage, from The Corfu Blog