Like Hawthorne’s “Custom-House” overture to The Scarlet Letter, Valtinos’s audible hovering in portions of Orthokostá ensures, primarily, that its realist frontage does not falter, that its linguistic cast will give pleasure, and that its apport to the imagination will be to so conceal art that it will come across as artless. And what better masking of the conventions of the techne in any art than the apparent artlessness in direct voice transcriptions? Valtinos’s lifelong contributions to Greek cinema, including widely known collaborations with Theodoros Angelopoulos, may go a long way toward explaining his method: no genre does a better job of obscuring the seams of editing, the splicing and shuffling of “takes,” than the documentary. The framing mode of the audio-to-paper transfer is made explicit in other books by Valtinos. A cassette recorder is mentioned in Deep Blue Almost Black (1985), and The Life and Times of Andreas Kordopatis (1964) is an oral account partially based on an emigrant’s journal. Regarding Orthokostá, it matters little whether the published material is lifted from “live” recordings or simply “hearsay.” Even if Valtinos had done “the police in different voices” (T. S. Eliot’s original title for The Waste Land) in the forty-nine chapters of Orthokostá, this in itself would be no mean feat. Neither Bishop Isaakios’s “blurb” on the land around Orthokostá nor the Triple A — like epilogue would lie beyond Valtinos’s inventive abilities. In the end both are fictions that serve, each in its own way, to distance the reader from the gore and suffering associated with Orthokostá.
Speakers in the book are either warned, typically by another speaker, not to mention any names, or they suddenly turn silent with an expression that comes close to a gruff, but ambiguous “I’m done talking.” The concluding reference to much that is unspeakable in Valtinos often assumes the gravity of historical closure (“The rebel insurrection was over. . It was over for good,” the Greek verb in this context being a derivative of catharsis). Occasionally the account progresses towards a note of exorcism. The parting shots of most of the recorded stories often end with a laconic one-liner (“that bloodshed still hounds him”). The beginnings, on the other hand, tend to be almost always teasers that, by dint of repetition, could as easily apply to the captive audience as to the speaker: “We were arrested when. .” Once the captivity narrative gets under way, however, the contents are surprising in their immediacy. Both captors and captives, in the hundreds, are ill-equipped for the mountainous terrain, both are chronically undernourished, few attempt to escape their pre-ordained ranks, and both stoically accept the long marches that serve to maintain a supply of men and women hostages to be culled for summary retaliatory executions whenever the captors are attacked.
The oft-intuited dilemma in Orthokostá, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” sounds painfully familiar from the ancient historians’ accounts of cities destroyed for not choosing neutrality and then destroyed, a second time, for having chosen it. Like all complex epics Orthokostá is rich in war paradoxes. Glaucus’s meeting with Diomedes in the sixth book of the Iliad manages to tinge the action of the entire poem with the possibility of somber ironies (“Go find yourself other Greeks to kill. .”) where one would least expect to find them. In one sense there is little that is peculiarly Peloponnesian in the list of the Orthokostá atrocities. The ancient lyricists such as Tyrtaeus and Callinus testify to the opposite. And so do Homer and Sophocles when it comes to orders that the executed not be buried. Were it not for the gods’ daily intervention Achilles’ punishment of the dead Hector’s body in the Iliad would have resulted in the same kind of posthumous disfigurement a man in Orthokostá suffers at the hands of his torturers. “Mémos’s Fields” refers to a spot named for a local official and torture victim who was shot during a march he could not keep up with because of the beatings he had received on the soles of his feet. As with the heroes of antiquity, place names are given to commemorate a victim’s tragic death. Walter Benjamin’s eighteenth thesis on the art of the storyteller — once again from his essay on Nikolai Leskov — sums up the etiological presentation as one that allows the “voice of nature” to speak, including the dark work of hatred. An anonymous initiative in itself, the naming of Mémos’s Fields does not monumentalize the circumstance of victimization, nor is it triumphalist. One corner of the countryside that had been repeatedly crisscrossed by forced marches of hundreds and hundreds of civilian “enemies of the people” now has a voice and a face.
Valtinos’s speakers come from or go through places that are inseparable from their own and their families’ identities. The metaphor, a synecdoche really, is saying, “If you’re looking for ‘art’ it’s out there,” in a territory of narrowly topical and date-bound, often warring, site-specific states. Allusions to places of birth, mixed in with the speakers’ relatives and acquaintances, make Orthokostá appear at first to be just another demographic dump of the Greek Civil War and its participants. To the untrained ear they are as superficially unattractive as the four-hundred-line catalogue of ships in the Iliad—a 1955 translation omitted them as of no interest to the modern reader! — which enumerates both the European and the Asian expeditionary contingents that participated in the siege of Troy. It is true that the illusionism of the main action in the Iliad is momentarily suspended. In its place, and behind the euphony of locations like Sparta, Epidaurus, Mycenae, Euboea, Ithaca — to Valtinos’s “Parnon” “Karatoula,” “Tripolis,” and “Argos”—one notices that Homer’s catalogue is also about the families the troops leave behind, the attributes of the locales they come from, the miniature epics of still other alliances and hatreds: in other words of countless other Troys embedded in the framework of the main epos. In Orthokostá whole neighborhoods, individual plots of land, and even stone fences are known by their founders’ or builders’ names. Trajectories of movement through fields or towns are marked by itemized ownerships. The naming rituals of older titles, the degrees of belonging to a family network, or the rituals of christening and mourning that fill the book all build up to the chora—a term adopted by the theoretician Jacques Derrida from Plato’s Timaeus for the matrix of villages that, in this case, mysteriously engender language and social relations. The unfailing rootedness to conditions on the ground of any entries in Valtinos’s lists, long or short, adduced by the narrators seems to be saying insistently that whoever touches a man touches a place, cherished or haunted.
Chora can be alarmingly literal as well. In one of the shortest chapters of the book the speaker describes a team of mules loaded with sacks of chestnuts traveling by night. When the animals suddenly freeze in their tracks the muleteer wonders whether they had sensed the macabre past under their hooves. Washington Irving and Balaam’s Ass from the book of Numbers converge upon the reader’s novelized interviewee, who wonders whether it was “the devil playing tricks, or. . the smell of blood — three years since Fotiás was killed there.” The reader has long sensed that the indirection by which so much information is conveyed to the page is intentional and that possibly the blurry contours and the discontinuous nature of its interludes are so many nudges toward the participatory cast of this fiction, the active connecting of lines of thought and the juxtaposing of the varying gradients of truthfulness (or posing) between the book’s two covers. The reader’s co-authoring of Orthokostá is of the same critical order as that called for by Laurence Sterne’s refracted fabulations in Tristram Shandy or by Julio Cortázar’s Escherian Hopscotch.