George Cheimonas's 0 Giatros Ineotis and James Joyces's writing
Abstract
Cheimonas's elliptical prose is dense with allegories which dramatize the symbolic function of language. His texts are short narratives written in a mode of free association, deliberately inconsistent, which violates syntax and grammar. Pursuing the revelation of the voice of the body, instinct and senses, this deconstruction aims at exploring the phono-logical and grammatological possibilities of language. Cheimonas's textual ambivalence is comparable to and has been developed in dialogue with, Joyce's U and FW. If Joyce, with his «jocoserious» art of subversion, his comedy of and on aesthetics, his anti-theological derision of Logos, shook the foundations of logocentric tradition, Cheimonas, in dead seriousness and with the detached eye of a scientist-philosopher, moves on the same precarious tightrope. Cheimonas's texts evade any representative and mimetic function and attempt to explore the ossibilities of language in the deepest strata of its origins relating to the body. His writing thematizes language itself and undoes its symbolic function through radical dramatizations which stage the violence of Logos upon the human body and senses. These dramatizations aim at an overall undoing or deciphering of the highly speculative terms employed by recent language theories which have developed their inferences in dialogue with Joyce's work, including those of Lacan, Kristeva and Derrida: Lacaris Other as symbolic order and other as unconscious, Kristeva's concepts of the androgynous artist, language as incest encompassing both the symbolic order (Lacan) relating to the Father and the semiotic activity relating to the body's drives, instinctual excitation, rhythm, intonation, relating to the m(other), this other whose voice has been repressed by the logocentricism of Western metaphysics, and Derrida's phallocentricism and logocentrism, and writing as parricide are all dramatized in Cheimonas's prose. Revealing the bodily substratum of these metaphors Cheimonas lays bare the most wild and noncompromising instinctual impulses of man, hidden behind the ordinariness of normative language.
Article Details
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Βογιατζάκη Ε. (2017). George Cheimonas’s 0 Giatros Ineotis and James Joyces’s writing. Comparison, 13, 226–257. https://doi.org/10.12681/comparison.10131
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