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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2017
Demetrios Capetanakis was one of the first writers to introduce Marcel Proust to the Greek public in the 1930s. His study of Proust's philosophy (hitherto known only in the English and Greek translations of a lecture he delivered in French) survives in manuscript form, both in French and in an earlier German version. An examination of these texts in the context of Proust's early reception allows us to follow Capetanakis’ intellectual trajectory, as well as to sketch his particular joint approach to literature and philosophy, which is largely indebted to the works of Plato and Kierkegaard. Capetanakis seeks Proust's philosophy not in the universal laws put forth in his novel, but in the writer's attempt to conceal behind them the real pain and agony that marked his own life. This leads him to a rather unusual philosophical reading of Proust's novel and, in the process, of Plato's Phaedrus.
1 Proust, M., À la recherche du temps perdu, I (Paris 1954) 531 Google Scholar: ‘Ce qu'on appelle la postérité, c'est la postérité de l’œuvre.’
2 Curtius, E. R., Marcel Proust (Berlin and Frankfurt 1925)Google Scholar; Auerbach, E., ‘Marcel Proust: der Roman der verlorenen Zeit’, Die Neueren Sprachen 35 (1927) 16–22 Google Scholar; Spitzer, L., ‘Zum Stil Marcel Prousts’, Stilstudien, II (Munich 1928) 365–497 Google Scholar; W. Benjamin, ‘Zum Bilde Prousts’, Die literarische Welt (1929); Beckett, S., Proust (London 1931)Google Scholar.
3 Walter Benjamin's essay on Proust might constitute an exception (a fact which accounts for its greater affinity to Capetanakis’ study), although its very title (‘The image of Proust’) and introductory section also suggest the problematics of biographical and autobiographical writings and readings in the post-romantic era. Proust's ‘lifework’ is discussed in terms of the exceptional.
4 Some of these essays were initially published in John Lehmann's periodical publication New Writing and Daylight. All of them are included in Lehmann, J. (ed.), Demetrios Capetanakis: A Greek Poet in England (London 1947)Google Scholar – henceforth GPE.
5 It is worth noting that Nietzsche, whom Capetanakis read from a very early age, is completely absent from his later writings. His influence is mostly felt in Capetanakis’ early study Aπό τoν αγώνα του ψυχικώς μόνου (Athens 1934). This might have something to do with Capetanakis’ tenet that philosophy (or art) is the expression of one's life and not the other way round.
6 I use the word ‘study’ as opposed to ‘essay’ or ‘text’ for reasons that will become apparent.
7 See Lehmann, ‘Introduction’, in GPE 15.
8 Capetanakis’ role in the reception of Modern Greek literature, particularly poetry, among English-speaking audiences was pivotal and has yet to be fully acknowledged.
9 ‘Stefan George’, in GPE 74.
10 See in particular op. cit., 73–4. This is one of the rare instances in Capetanakis’ essays where the first person is used in an autobiographical/confessional context. Accounts of his disillusionment with George are given by both Lehmann (‘Introduction’, in GPE 13) and Κanellopoulos (‘My friend Demetrios Capetanakis’, in GPE 174).
11 The manuscripts of these essays are housed among the Demetrios Capetanakis Papers in the Gennadius Library in Athens.
12 Used by the poet himself in ‘A saint in Piccadilly’, the word describes, I believe, all his English poems, where the allusiveness of the language is combined with a puzzling imagery and structure.
13 The poems ‘Abel’ and ‘The Isles of Greece’ were included in the 5th edition of The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, selected and arranged by Francis Turner Palgrave; with a fifth book selected by John Press (London and Oxford 1964) 523–4.
14 Until the 1980s, the only edition of Capetanakis’ works available to the Greek public was that of Δοκίμια (Essays) in the popular Galaxias series (Athens 1962), which included ‘Μυθολογία του ωραίου’ and ‘Έρως και χρόνος’. Τhe Harvey edition Μυθολογία του ωραίου. Δοκίμια και ποιήματα (Athens and Limni 1988), which is the one available today, includes translations of some of Capetanakis’ English essays and of his English poems. Nevertheless, the title and cover of this edition reinforce the image of Capetanakis as a writer on aesthetics with primarily classical sympathies.
15 See Veinoglou, A., ‘Αναμνήσεις και εντυπώσεις’, Νέα Εστία 39 (1946) 275–9Google Scholar.
16 Lehmann, ‘Introduction’, 14.
17 Capetanakis, D., ‘A lecture on Proust’, trans. J. Lehmann, New Writing and Daylight 6 (1945) 107–17Google Scholar.
18 Op. cit., 107. The note is omitted in GPE.
19 The two manuscripts are: ‘Une lecture sur Proust’, Demetrios Capetanakis Papers, Box 1, Folder 3, Gennadius Library and ‘Das Philosophieren von Marcel Proust’, Lehmann Family Papers, Box 155, Folder 10; Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
20 It was published in two installments in Αρχείον Φιλοσοφίας και Θεωρίας των Επιστημών 8.4 (1938) 433–67 and 9.1 (1939) 25–57 and subsequently as a separate volume (Athens 1939).
21 The other two were Xenophon Lefkoparidis and Nasos Detzortzis. For an account of Proust's early reception in Greece see P. Poulos, ‘Destin d’À la recherche du temps perdu en Grèce’, Revue d’études proustiennes: Traduire À la recherche du temps perdu 1 (Paris 2015) 153–253.
22 See M. Andromida, ‘Η ζωή και το έργο του Δημητρίου Καπετανάκη’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Athens, 1998, 124. Andromida's dissertation, the product of thorough and meticulous work that has resulted in the first systematic cataloguing of the author's publications and the compilation of an exhaustive bibliography on Capetanakis, has been an invaluable guide in my research.
23 The letters exchanged between Seferis and Capetanakis are housed among the Demetrios Capetanakis Papers and the George Seferis Papers in the Gennadius Library. The two men began their correspondence in 1941, though their acquaintance must have dated from several years earlier. Seferis was present at a lecture Capetanakis gave on the poetry of Andreas Kalvos at the Parnassos Literary Society in 1938, the same lecture at which Anna met Angelos Sikelianos. See Sikelianou, A., Η ζωή μου με τον Άγγελο (Athens 1985) 74 Google Scholar.
24 Poulos, ‘Destin d’À la recherche du temps perdu en Grèce’, 162, argues persuasively that in his 1971 essay on Proust that appeared in the Figaro, Seferis makes an implicit reference to Capetanakis as one of the early Greek readers of Proust.
25 This is so because the open nature of literary works – in this case of a novel, in which everything keeps changing (‘in dem alles wird und sich immer weiter bewegt’) – lends itself to more genuine philosophical thinking than does a systematic philosophical treatise. This point is not elaborated further in the German lecture, although Capetanakis draws an interesting parallel with the philosophical practice of Socrates.
26 He cites a well-known passage from Proust's letter to Réné Blum in November 1913 (see M. Proust, Correspondance, ed. P. Kolb, XII (Paris 1984), letter 134) where the French novelist presents the Recherche as a critique of Bergson's philosophy. This letter was included in Léon Pierre-Quint's study of Proust (see below), which might have been Capetanakis’ source.
27 He cites Pierre-Quint, L., Marcel Proust, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris 1925)Google Scholar in his German lecture, Massis, H., Le Drame de Proust (Paris 1927)Google Scholar in his French lecture. In the latter he also incorporates P. Morand, ‘Ode à Marcel Proust’, which Lehmann omits from the English (most likely for lack of an existing translation).
28 For an account of Proust's fortunes in Germany see Fravalo-Tane, P., À la recherche du temps perdu en France et en Allemagne (1913–1958): «Dans une sorte de langue étrangère. . .» (Paris 2008) 161–73Google Scholar, 293–303. Briefly (and without going into the issue of publishers), the work was originally assigned to Rudolf Schottlaender. Following the publication of the first volume (1925), Schottlaender's translation was severely criticized by Ernst Robert Curtius and the work was assigned to Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel. Capetanakis notes that the existing German translations are fragmentary. Although he does not mention Schottlaender by name, he was certainly familiar with his translation of the first volume, since he adopts his titles for both the novel (Auf den Spuren der verlorenen Zeit) and the volume (Der Weg zu Swann). On the contrary, he produces his own translations for the titles of the other volumes of the novel, a fact which suggests that he had not seen the Benjamin-Hessel translations of the second and third volumes (Im Schatten der jungen Mädchen, 1927 and Die Herzogin von Guermantes, 1930).
29 Capetanakis uses the 16-volume NRF edition of Proust. Note that in his scholarly essays his references are always promptly footnoted, a practice which he abandoned in later years, when he became a freelance writer for Lehmann's periodicals.
30 I am referring to the lectures he gave in the years 1936–9 at Askraios, a school of higher education founded in Athens by Ioannis Sykoutris and Julia Terenzio. A good number of the manuscript texts for these lectures are housed in the Lehmann Family Papers.
31 Among Capetanakis’ essays and lectures one can find translations from English to Greek (e.g. Shakespearean sonnets); from Greek to English (e.g. folk songs, Kalvos, Solomos); from German to Greek (e.g. Hölderlin, Goethe, George); from German to English (e.g. George); from French to German (e.g. Proust, La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld); and from German to French (e.g. Goethe).
32 Cf. Poulos, ‘Destin d’À la recherche du temps perdu en Grèce’, 161–2.
33 Capetanakis, ‘A lecture on Proust’, 90. All subsequent page references to this essay are made to the GPE edition and are included parenthetically in the text.
34 See Paul De Man's essay ‘Sign and symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry 8.4 (Summer 1982) 761–5, where the critic uses Proust's memory categories and his narrator's reflections on Giotto's allegories to deconstruct Hegel's aesthetics of symbol, all the while arguing for the incompatibility between poetics and aesthetics, literary experience and literary theory.
35 Capetanakis makes few references to Aristotle throughout his work. The choice here can be explained in view of his attempt to introduce an ethical element in his reading of Proust and, most importantly, of Aristotle's affinity with the philosophy of Existenz. Here as elsewhere, however, Plato remains his main interlocutor.
36 The Greek translation (‘Μια διάλεξη για τον Προυστ’, trans. A. A. S., Νέα Εστία 39.448 (1946) 93) reads: ‘Ας πάρομε τους ποιητές. Ας πάρομε π.χ τον Σαίξπηρ.’
37 See Measure for Measure III.1. I make no references to context in my discussion, for this would take me into a long digression. Briefly, then: In the narrow context, Claudio, who has just received a death sentence, is here echoing the words of the Duke: if life is but a short breath, an on-going process of withering, then death must be preferable to it. Shortly after, however, Claudio finds out from his sister Isabella that the villain Angelo has vowed to save his life in exchange for the ‘treasures of her body’. The meaning of these lines alters dramatically once Claudio is faced with an ethical dilemma. In his new state, he is awakened to the real value of life, which he now has to give up of his own accord.
38 Metaphysics 1028b3–4: ‘καὶ δὴ καὶ τὸ πάλαι τε καὶ νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ ζητούμενον καὶ ἀεὶ ἀπορούμενον, τὶ τὸ ὄν’.
39 All subsequent page references are made to the Greek of the Harvey edition (‘Έρως και Χρόνος’, in Μυθολογία του ωραίου) and are included in the text. The translations are mine.
40 The word ‘ανάγκη’ is used in both subheadings. If I am reading correctly, its meaning shifts from that of the individual's desire or longing (‘Η αιωνιότης σαν ανάγκη στον έρωτα’) to the necessity of physical laws (‘Η παροδικότης σαν ανάγκη στον έρωτα’).
41 See Massis, Le Drame de Proust, 97: ‘Le but de sa vie, de son art, son intention profonde, les voilà. Il semble qu'il cherche – avec quelle dévorante inquiétude! – à se garder une chance: la chance de n’être pas identifié, reconnu, découvert.’ Massis attempts an ethical reading of Proust, according to which the novelist, experiencing a sense of guilt for his moral weakness, seeks in his art a remedy for his life.
42 See Benjamin, W., ‘The Image of Proust’, in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York 1969) 215 Google Scholar: ‘For the second time there rose a scaffold like Michelangelo's on which the artist, his head thrown back, painted the Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the sickbed on which Marcel Proust consecrates the countless pages which he covered with his handwriting, holding them up in the air, to the creation of his microcosm.’
43 It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss Capetanakis’ argument in light of the reception of Phaedrus. I simply note some currents of interpretation, my focus always being on Socrates’ first speech, which has never ceased to be a point of controversy among critics. (The controversy, in turn, springs in part from the disagreement over the main theme of the dialogue. Friedrich Schleiermacher was among the first to argue, in the early 1800s, that the Phaedrus is in fact a dialogue about philosophy – as it relates to rhetoric – and not about eros, a view that has been espoused by many contemporary critics. Capetanakis does not address this issue directly, but his overall approach does not seem to contradict the argument). A line of criticism going back to Grube, G. M. A. (Plato's Thought, London 1935)Google Scholar and Hackforth, R. (Plato's Phaedrus, Cambridge 1952)Google Scholar read the speech quite literally and mostly in light of Socratic intellectualism, stressing its moral content. Others, including Rowe, C. J. (Plato: Phaedrus, Warminster 2000)Google Scholar underline the element of rhetorical strategy, focusing on its incompleteness, and in particular its failing to make the distinction between epithumia (as bestial madness) and eros (as divine madness), as does Socrates’ second speech. They thus view the speech as a link between the themes of eros and rhetoric. Ferrari, G. R. F. (Listening to the Cicadas, Cambridge 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, whose bold interpretation comes quite close to Capetanakis’ argument, reads the speech as one of self-hate (assuming Socrates to be a lover yearning passionately for Phaedrus and covering up his passion with his logos). Equally interesting with respect to Capetanakis’ reading is the claim made by Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge and New York 2001) and espoused by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Phaedrus, Indianapolis and Cambridge 1995) that in the Phaedrus (as opposed to the Symposium) Plato explores more fully the role of non-rational elements in eros, as well as Graeme Nicholson's argument in Plato's Phaedrus: The Philosophy of Love (West Lafayette, 1999) that Socrates sets up a false opposition between epithumia (desire) and doxa (common opinion), linking the latter to prudence, an opposition which he will undo in his second speech.
44 I am using C. J. Rowe's translation with slight modifications.
45 Capetanakis does not actually juxtapose the two passages, but it is clear from his discussion that he does draw this parallel.
46 Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, I, 371.
47 I am referring to the original framing of Socrates’ speech, according to which the words are addressed to a beloved by a man in love (played by Socrates) who wants to hide his true feelings. In his treatment of love as a malady, Socrates goes on to provide hypothetical examples.
48 Socrates’ gesture of covering up his face before he begins his first speech (237a4–6: ‘Ἐγκαλυψάμενος ἐρῶ, ἵν’ ὅτι τάχιστα διαδράμω τὸν λόγον καὶ μὴ βλέπων πρὸς σὲ ὑπ’ αἰσχύνης διαπορῶμαι’) has been interpreted in various ways, which are always in line with the critics’ appraisal of the content, or form (or both) of his speech. It has thus been viewed as a parody of Phaedrus who hides Lysias’ speech, as a contrived symptom of his poetic madness or even in the context of the opposition between rhetoric and dialectic.
49 The issue of self-concealment has recently been addressed with respect to Capetanakis’ own poetry, from the perspective of queer theory (see Papanikolaou, D., ‘Demetrios Capetanakis: a Greek poet (coming out) in England’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 30.2 (2006) 201–23)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I do not follow this line of thought, but limit myself to the philosophical implications of the issue – as does Capetanakis in his essays.
50 The concept of ‘ultimate situations’ is first introduced in Jaspers’ Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919) in a psychological context; it is systematically elaborated in the Philosophie (1932), where ultimate situations (death, suffering, struggle, guilt) are discussed as offering access to the illumination of Existenz.
51 This, I presume, is due to the fact that he is not interested in the Platonic ideal as an abstract concept. In general, I would argue that he downplays the metaphysical substratum of Plato's philosophy in his attempt to introduce an existential strand in his thought. Accepting Plato's Theory of Ideas might create a contradiction in his argument, because then he would be hard-pressed to defend the notion of truth as inextricably linked to individuality. Capetanakis never makes the Platonic move from the human body to the abstract idea of the beautiful or the good – his thought is well grounded in the tangible reality of human bodies.
52 ‘Stefan George’, 81.
53 ‘Charlotte Brontë’, in GPE 148. It is interesting to note that despite Capetanakis’ fascination with biographies, he seems convinced that literary works reveal much more about an author than the former.
54 Capetanakis’ position is that any philosophy is the expression of a living person and not the other way round. One does not fashion oneself through philosophy (a view which would be closer to Nietzsche's position); rather, one expresses one's life in one's philosophy (which might mean that one's philosophy reflects one's life).
55 In the German lecture Capetanakis remarks: ‘Dieses Individuelle [the beauty of an artwork, in this case of Proust's novel] aber ist nur fassbar in dem persönlichen Umgang mit dem Schriftsteller. Und nicht für jedermann. Um einen echten Schöpfer zu verstehen: einen Dichter oder einen echten Philosophen muss man ihn lieben. Nur der Liebende kann das absolut Individuelle des Anderen fassen, augenblicklich fassen, aber nicht besitzen.’
56 Ε. Sitwell, ‘The poetry of Demetrios Capetanakis’, in GPE 35.
57 Ruskin, J., Sésame et les lys: Des trésors des rois. Des jardins des reines, translated, annotated and with a preface by Marcel Proust (Paris 2014 [1906])Google Scholar.
58 M. Proust, ‘Sur la lecture’, 33: ‘Mais par une loi singulière et d'ailleurs providentielle de l'optique des esprits (loi qui signifie peut-être que nous ne pouvons recevoir la vérité de personne, et que nous devons la créer nous-même), ce qui est le terme de leur sagesse ne nous apparaît que comme le commencement de la nôtre [. . .].’