Poems of Sidon: An Analysis of Cavafy's Historiography

Quick now, here, now, always-
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
-T.S. Eliot

When we say "Time" we mean ourselves. Most abstractions are simply our pseudonyms. It is superfluous to say "Time is scytheless and toothless". We know it. We are time.
-C.P. Cavafy¹

Constantine P. Cavafy worked much of his life as a middle-level bureaucrat, leaving as his legacy some two hundred carefully selected poems without which, quoting George Seferis, "Cavafy does not exist."² He lived a passive existence consisting in routine civil service employment and an aestheticized and eroticized private life, an "existence apparently limited to the routine of office and café, library and low tavern, confined in space to a monotonous itinerary through one city, extraordinarily free in time."³ In the ebb of conventional histories, Cavafy's profile occupies a physical void; as a historical figure, he was insignificant and ahistorical.

Many of Cavafy's poems deal explicitly with historical events; others do not. This paper attempts to show, however, that history is the basis for all of the poems, that Cavafy was both creating and recovering lost history towards a revaluation of conventional historical standards. Through particular emphasis on the four "400 A.D." poems - as indicative of Cavafy's entire collection - three aspects of Cavafy's historiography arise: its foundation within an eternal moment, effected through a poetic genealogical analysis of the erotic, and created through a perpetual dialectic.

This paper is not so much a new reading of Cavafy, as it is a reinterpretation and refocusing of observations made upon his work, and a critique of one particular observation: that Cavafy was an ironist. His superficial objectivity is laden with value-judgments that violently subvert cultural taboos and instate an alternative history. This history is the reality beneath the illusion of accepted historiography; if Cavafy found Dareios's moment of "arrogance and intoxication" only through his imagination, it becomes as real as the moment which is forever lost in historiographic nonexistence. This is another attempt to discuss Cavafy's historical methods. But this attempt differs in that it does not presuppose an ironic resolution in the poems. Each poem, events based either in the present or in an explicit time long past, resolves in the writing of the poem and the continual discourse made upon it. Irony, which spins a single moment around itself, does not posit a sense of time leading to and deriving from that moment. Irony remains an ahistorical poetic device; the moment remains held within itself as a poetic sketch, lacking space or temporality within a larger historical mosaic much as Marguerite Yourcenar described Cavafy's life outside of his poetry.

Reading Cavafy's poems with a dialectical framework in mind, in contrast to the popular ironic readings, provides the most important thrust to locating any conception of history in Cavafy. This historical methodology ultimately accomplishes two tasks: just as it results in a revaluation of conventional notions of history and significance, it recovers the selves of both the poet and the characters in his poems from historical anonymity by creating a historical space within an alternatively privileged history, and it serves through the writing process to create these figures' selves in the process. This argument shows the erotic moment to be the truly historical event: what is conventionally labeled as decadent becomes, instead, eternal.

The four "400 A.D." poems serve as raw material for this analysis: "Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.)" (1920); "Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.)" (1923); "Temethos, Antiochian; 400 A.D." (1925); and "To Antiochos Epiphanis" (1922), to which the 1925 poem refers. These poems, published between June 1920 and January 1925, form a coherent subset of Cavafy's work produced during his poetic maturity, and are indicative of the breadth of approaches taken by his poems. Keeley and Sherrard write that 400 A.D. "probably suggests the imminent irruption of the barbarians into the scene of the ancient world," comments which recall "Waiting for the Barbarians" (1904) chanted near the action of all these poems.⁴ Indeed, this latter poem seems implicit in every analysis of "Cavafy's moment" as the archetypal study of action within this space of imminence. According to Peter Bien, "A.D. 400 was the time when triumphant Christianity was forcing Greek paganism in Sidon, Alexandria, and the rest of the Hellenistic world to breathe its last�Cavafy laments the historical retreat of the pagan way of life (which he continually identifies with 'choice pleasure') before the taboos and respectability of Christianity."⁵ And Cavafy himself voices "his own predicament as a latter-day pagan still in a hostile environment of sexual restriction unknown�to pre-Christian Greeks."

Mere placement of these poems within a historical reference point provides three fundamental premises for this study of Cavafy's historiography: they focus on a single moment in which past and future coalesce - one can read in his poems prophecy of what would come centuries later, as well as memory of the four-century rise of Christianity among Hellenic culture; their subject is the demise and persecution of an idea evidently valued by Cavafy; and the stories told about the past become part of an ongoing creation of history through the construction of the poems and subsequent interpretive discourse - they become something greater than seemingly objective sketches of an insignificant event in the past.

In "Temethos, Antiochian" Cavafy presents an episode in which Temethos writes a poem about Emonidis, "the favorite of Antiochos Epiphanis." "Emonidis" is the outward appearance, the veil for he who Temethos truly writes. Roderick Beaton calls this an "ironic juxtaposition": Temethos has a lover, who he has disguised in his poems as "Emonidis".⁶ But "Temethos" is also a fictitious name, and Cavafy as poet uses "Temethos" much as Temethos uses "Emonidis" - as a mask for his (imaginary) lover. The necessity for Temethos to disguise his lover, remains the same in Cavafy's time. "Temethos, Antiochian" offers a view of the inner world of a poet, that of his love interest, in a way that is veiled multiple times from the initial appearance. The speaker (or even the character of Temethos, for he represents such a poet) is similar to the protagonist "Theater of Sidon" and the young citizen in "Young Men of Sidon". But in each of these three poems, a different side of the Cavafian poet is seen: "Temethos, Antiochian" shows the inner side of the poet; "Theater of Sidon" shows the poet's place within the social spectacle; and in "Young Men of Sidon" a young perfumed citizen, bothered by the reading of Aeschylus's epitaph, rails against the great tragedian (and metaphorically against the actor, who recites only the work of others) for valorizing his experience as a soldier ("to set down for your memorial / merely that as an ordinary soldier, one of the herd, / you too fought against Datis and Artaphernis."⁷) over his sensual art. "Temethos, Antiochian" and "Theater of Sidon" discuss men whose inner desires are kept from society - a society which prepares unknowingly for collapse - while in "To Antiochos Epiphanis" society falls "as expected".⁸ More importantly, the poem displays a sensual freedom which would soon be suppressed by Christianity, and in this Cavafy begs comparison to his personal situation in the twentieth century.

In "To Antiochos Epiphanis" the title figure, the king of Syria (175-163 B.C.) known for persecuting Jews, recalls his assassinated brother and father, Antiochos the Great, who was defeated by the Romans, at the moment just prior to his own army's defeat at Pydna.⁹ Cavafy reveals the king's paranoia ("and said nothing: an eavesdropper / might repeat something they had said."¹⁰) but also his sensitivity, a historical sketch which both displays the king's reluctance to openly express himself and provides insight into the causes of larger historical events - the rise and fall of civilizations.¹¹ In "Temethos, Antiochian" the historical is seen in the human condition which deceives society: society passively reads Temethos's verses as historically motivated, instead of as a direct expression of his love (The unsuspecting Antiochians read simply "Emonidis."); the speaker, however, stands out from society by his ability to deceive his audience into thinking such and in his actual love for someone represented by the name "Temethos" in this poem. "Young Men of Sidon", perhaps more than the rest, "immortalizes the moment at which the predestined disaster or corruption happened," to use Stephen Spender's phrase.¹² This poem distinctly displays two forms of man: the actor and the poet, the passive and the active, the conformist and the creator; in the moment of concern, the active assumes his role-a withdraw to the private in that his passion is unleashed, but also a role which is seen to have impact in the public, at the very least in relation to a small group of others. In "To Antiochos Epiphanis" private withdraw has a definitive effect on public society. This link between private poetry and public acting shows how the activity assumed by his emotions, his sensual passion, has historical implications. The point at which these analyses culminate is a revamping of traditional historical analysis: whereas traditional historicism sought to provide an account of the events in-themselves, and detail the continuous evolution of society,¹³ the historiography practiced by Cavafy focuses on the expression of the human condition within or against societal mores to hint at larger trends of civilzation. Yourcenar concludes that "all of Cavafy's poems are historical poems" based on the release of "a new entity, the self."¹⁴ This concept, this "poet's history", avoids historical currents and historicist explanations in favor of human passion.

Numerous critics have expounded on Cavafy's exploration of the moment.¹⁵ "He is particularly fascinated by the idea of the moment of choice, of misfortune or discrace," writes Stephen Spender. "So his poetry is peculiar about situations that lead, or have led to, ruin. He immortalizes the moment at which the predestined disaster or corruption happened."¹⁶ Moreover, as Yourcenar, among others, has aptly commented, "We have reached a point where we can say that all of Cavafy's poems are historical poems, and the emotion which recreated a young face glimpsed on a street corner in no way differs from the emotion which 'recreates' Kaisarion from a collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions."¹⁷ Taking these interpretations, any historiography in Cavafy's work must be manifest within an isolated, ahistorical moment in the figure of a character who, most often, is himself ahistorical. Cavafy's poetry, occupied "with those who didn't go out on the tide or who were left behind" and with "situations that lead to ruin,"¹⁸ appears decadent and ironic.

The "moment" found in Cavafy envelops the sensual, hedonistic, erotic experience. Some poems assume explicit historical settings, others do not. Seferis believed that Cavafy's poetry must be read as a single manuscript; do these 154 published poems work as a montage, around similar ideas and interconnected through philosophical bonds, ultimately espousing a coherent historical vision? Do they work together to create a single moment in history - infinitely large, covering many specific themes and spanning the breadth of Hellenic history encompassed in the poetry - which tells a story of the erotic being and Hellenic pagan up to and including the time of writing and of interpretation in order to provide a glimpse into the human condition and social mechanisms? Presuming Cavafy did construct some form of history through a revalorization of conventional values and hierarchies, we can attempt to answer this question and delineate from the poems what constituted his conception. Comparison with Eliot's poetry, most notably by Seferis, provides a starting ground for analysis of Cavafy's history. The following is an excerpt from "Burnt Norton":

Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.¹⁹

The moment is timeless, yet within it past and future - memory and hope - are recalled by time itself. History coalesces within the moment. Cavafy did not discuss history as Eliot did, but all of Cavafy's poetry expresses history and even creates it. Eliot says that all is present in the moment, but that future and past are found in the moment. Cavafy's moment, too, is eternal. In fact, his poetry might itself be read as a moment which holds within it the time of each poem's "action," the time of authorship, and the history and future of reading and interpretation on his works.

There are two principle and interrelated ways in which Cavafy's history is expressed: through an inversion of accepted standards, which in turn allows for the drawing of a broader historical picture that shows the genealogical progression of society's response to human autonomy - epitomized, for Cavafy, in the erotic event. Willis Barnstone draws a comparison between Cavafy and the Argentinean writer Luis Borges, in part because their affinity towards intrahistoria, a manner of viewing history as outlined by Miguel de Unamuno.²⁰ According to Barnstone, Unamuno "contends that history (historia) deals with the superficial chronicles of great events. He is interested in the intrahistory (intrahistoria), which is the texture of culture defined by the people, by the history of everyday life and people." The "everyday life" which forms such an integral part in Cavafy, deals with the erotic and sensual moment as a rejection of the societal mechanism of unconscious routine, and assumes the view that human passions account for larger historical moments as seen in "To Antiochos Epiphanes". The poems depict a disparity among a time of continuity and conformity, and through each sketch of erotic nonconformity placed within an antagonistic social context the poems create and recover a lost history. "History becomes 'effective,'" writes Michel Foucault, "to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being - as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself." ²¹

In his poetry, Cavafy examined moments not recounted in historical accounts and focused often on lesser-known figures. When these events have been left unreported, all that remains is memory, imagination, and a knowledge of the power dynamics of social mores to reconstruct, recover, or create the moment afresh. "In them [Borges and Cavafy] the past is alive, redeemed, operating in the present. But the ultimate redemption of the past is in their writing�all the true and imaginary places, events, and personages of the past are a matter of ink on a page�Through their art the past is erased as simple past, yet has not passed away from us. The past is now, on the page."²² Cavafy's past is the past of his race - "I am not Greek�I am a Hellene."²³ ""Cavafy is not burdened by the absence of a tradition," writes Seferis; "On the contrary, what he feels is the dead weight of a tradition which is thousands of years old".²⁴ He created a history of the human condition as he saw it experienced in the moments of his "race": the erotic and epicurean of a certain Hellenic paganism. This, a form of "effective history" and "intrahistory," is immediately subversive to established beliefs.

The historiography of this past assumes the form of a genealogy. Genealogy was important to the young Cavafy. In his early twenties Cavafy set about reconstructing his family lineage through conversations with elder relatives.²⁵ Genealogy involves a recovery of identity, through analysis of the historical progression of society's morals grounded in power relations and suppressing knowledges. According to Foucault, "The role of genealogy is to record its history: of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process."²⁶ History is constantly in the background of Cavafy's work, both in the setting of a particular poem, and in Cavafy himself as he writes the poem so many years later. Cavafy's genealogy accords with the Foucauldian framework in that both seek historical events "in what we tend to feel is without history - in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts."²⁷ But Cavafy's does not fit perfectly in the Foucauldian framework; it represents more of a "poet's genealogy".

If Cavafy's historiography is the history of the human struggle, it is a history which posits the suppressed nature of the human condition found within the erotic as the truly historical event. But the means by which Cavafy achieves this state of erotic-historical poetry suffers from a similar ambiguity as does the reading of his life. Most readings of Cavafy's poetry imply that the erotic becomes historical through ironic inversion, just as superficial historical analyses would not mark Cavafy's life as a "historic" existence. So it is important to begin to familiarize ourselves with the extensive discourse which maintains Cavafy was an ironist. "Seferis's inability to locate exactly the source of emotion in Cavafy's expression," writes Nasos Vayenas, "hinders him from perceiving the full range of Cavafy' irony, with the result that he makes serious misinterpretations."²⁸ In reaction to this, Vayenas discusses his conception of Cavafy's irony:

If one considers that the fundamental feature of irony is a contradiction between what is apparent and what is real, and if one also takes into consideration that the largest and most mature part of Cavafy's work is constructed upon such contradictions, then the problem of his poetry is not beyond solution. Irony drags out emotion by means of a vacuum because it functions through an apparent absence - that is, through the action of thoughts and feelings which are suggested or left incomplete.²⁹

Taking this one step further, Roderick Beaton argues that Cavafy "set up levels of irony - contradictions between what is apparent and what is apparently real."³⁰ Cavafy's irony, he writes, served "to create an autonomous dramatic world" rather than to posit an essentialist world-view or "any ultimate, profound truth."³¹

Beaton's analysis poses one crucial problem: if Cavafy creates an autonomous world constructed upon irony, can it be said that Cavafy did indeed write a history? The relation of the individual to society in Cavafy's work, especially in the concept of individual autonomy, is integral to this question. Maybe Beaton means this by his phrase, "an autonomous dramatic world," but Cavafy's poems most certainly contain implicit and explicit references to the dichotomy between society's privileged morals and the tabooed erotic event. In "Temethos, Antiochian" the poet creates verse directed towards an imaginary figure, in order that the Antiochians remain unaware of his own erotic desires. And again, Cavafy uses Temethos, an imaginary figure as well, as the subject of his poem, to the same end. There is a vital shortcoming of irony: in its "play" irony lacks historical contingency; it is an ahistorical device. As Theodor Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, "We have no power over the philosophy of Being if we reflect it generally, from outside, instead of taking it on in its own structure - turning its own force against it, in line with Hegel's desideratum."³² What Cavafy does do is to redeem history where it has been left out, by creating his own illusion of what took place. Since we have no account of these specific instances, and because they serve as allegories for a specific historical moment, these illusions in turn become new realities.

This paper proposes a dialectic reading as an alternative to the ironic reading, with the aim of legitimating a conception of historiography found amongst Cavafy's poems. Karl Malkoff contends that his creation of "lost moments" "is not really a triumph of reality over illusion, but rather the creation of a new illusion."³³ In this Cavafy overcomes "the original pain of reality," which would seem to be the oppressive routine of society. This results in a subversion (unmasking) of conventional values and inversion (recreation/recovery) of suppressed values: sensual experience over routine; perceived illusion over illusion over reality; insignificant over significant; erotic movement and thought over large-scale history.

But Malkoff insists that "Irony is central to Cavafy's work because illusion is central to his vision of the human condition."³⁴ He goes on to say that "Cavafy's special genius finds in the very process that produces mistrust and alienation the means to repossess what has been lost, and to repossess it in a form more fully realized than its original manifestation."³⁵ Cavafy redeems the human condition despite his temporal and spatial cynicism, according to Malkoff. This framework, however, cannot be ironic; building from Malkoff's work, Cavafy, like Eliot (whom Malkoff also cites), somehow transcends the detachment of "a cynicism towards time, a mistrust of experience" by his belief in history. Through ironic interpretation, detachment would remain cynical and leave the poem temporally stagnant within its ephemeral setting. Cavafy does indeed find in the poetic creation of moments of sensual expression, a way to recover the human condition and assert historical identity.

"Waiting for the Barbarians", though one of Cavafy's earlier poems, serves as an ideal model to problematize the notion of irony in favor of a dialectical reading. In it, Cavafy presents emotionless, faceless characters anticipating with favor the arrival of barbarians, people who will take over culture and end civilization. The ironic interpretation of "Waiting for the Barbarians" essentially concludes, according to Poggioli, in "decadence's disappointment at being ignored and neglected, at being left alone to live, or rather to die, by its own wits."³⁶ "When the hour of decision comes,�the decadent recognizes that he is left no alternative but to play a passive, and yet theatrical, role on history's stage."³⁷ For Poggioli, "Waiting for the Barbarians" fails to resolve the dialectic of decadence; the decadent civilization fails to collapse "merely because no barbarian was around to help with a push."³⁸

The anticipation of imminent barbarian arrival stimulates the people to step from the routine: the politicians "sit there without legislating," the "distinguished orators" do not make speeches. Instead of reading the final line - "They were, those people, a kind of solution." - as a purely ironical and thus satirical statement, these words can be read as an honest plea for the arrival of the barbarians, as a statement of despair in the narrator's honest voice: he laments that the moment of anticipation has gone, for in that moment the people broke from the reins of societal routine and became passionate - they created new tasks for themselves.

Cavafy once said, "For something - a landscape - to be given in many epithets is nothing�Art is to give all that only with substantives, and if an epithet is needed it must be the fit one."³⁹ For Cavafy to dwell on examining the decadent condition of humanity would seem needless. Irony, while present in individual lines of Cavafian verse, leaves the poetry with an existential hopelessness and ambivalence contrary to the quality of history exhibited in the poems. Through a dialectical poetic between the historical and the erotic, Cavafy privileges a history operating through the body of the erotic (of human passion and sensuality) in relation to social hegemonies. Genealogy, to Foucault, "must record the singularity of events outside any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history - in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts."⁴⁰

Cavafy shows the intrahistory, the inner workings of human enchantment. His moment creates and recovers "the history of his race" - or more apt, a lost history of his race. ⁴¹ And through this process, he recovers an identity both for the figures and events that served as subjects and for himself. The private endeavor becomes "significant" in history to the extent that it retains an identity, as does the historical role played by Cavafy. And his work becomes a moment in history, in which past and future meet. Using the genealogical framework Vassilis Lambropoulos presents for the study of modern Greek literature, in which "Young Men of Sidon" is "only an interminable series of interpretations and reinterpretations, some of which acquire enough validity to form temporary constitutions of its knowledge," Cavafy's moment continues to be reinterpreted and re-imagined by people in very different historical contexts than him.⁴² Through reading his poems, we perpetuate the ongoing genealogy of Cavafy's moment and create as well a genealogy of our morals: How and why do we accept his work, and in what way do we valorize his history of the erotic? What historical identity do we grant to the idea of a contemporary Hellenic pagan?