Vassiliki Kolocotroni

Orlando, Greece and the impossible landscape

Orlando’s Greek pastoral idyll is a brief but crucial stage of her travels and travails homeward and into the present day. In transit between identities and divested of her title and cultural position, she finds herself the guest of a nomadic tribe who tend but do not own the ancient land which accommodates them. Her passage through Northern Greece is significantly located: setting one of Orlando’s transformative epiphanies against the backdrop of Mount Athos, a site of gender exclusion, Woolf casts Orlando in the role of an unwitting interloper, trespassing on time and tradition, once again, and formatively, out of place. The episode hones Orlando’s poetic disposition but also homes in on the ambivalent effects of one of its tested tropes – on the Greek mountain, Orlando both embodies and deploys the allegorical mode. As a woman (hidden amongst the gypsies and under her ‘light burnous’), she is at once the emblem of an impossibility, a female creature on a sacred, forbidding all-male space, and of the very possibility of trespassing that space, on her way home. At the same time, as a pastoral poet, exercising the license allegory affords, she claims her own patrimony in a vision of renewed ownership, transformed by the passing of time and gender privilege. This essay glosses the effect and provenance of this allegorical trope through a brief account of Woolf’s Harrisonian Hellenism and her own passage through the Greek landscape, considered here in the light of Denis E. Cosgrove’s foundational definition: ‘landscape represents a way of seeing – a way in which some Europeans have represented to themselves and to others the world about them and their relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social relations’.

Minotaur in Manhattan: Nicolas Calas and the Fortunes of Surrealism

Nicolas Calas is at once a major and a minor figure: to the Greek observer, a bright star in the constellation of home-grown but fugitive Surrealist poets, with a decidedly international outlook, doyen of the Trotskyist left and prodigal son of the cultural diaspora; to the student of the twentieth-century avant gardes, Calas is a name from the archive, a cameo act, a distinctive figure in the ‘the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’, as Walter Benjamin termed Surrealism. It is from the latter angle that this essay considers Calas, following his brief ascendancy as spokesperson for the ‘School of Paris’ in 1940s New York, as interlocutor of artists and poets such as William Carlos Williams, and proposes him as a representative of the heterogeneous, fundamentally foreign sensibility of radical modernism.