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'Eleni': Hellenizing the subject, westernizing the discourse - Varieties of Ethnic Criticism
MELUS, Summer, 1993 by Yiorgos D. Kalogeras
American immigrant literature whether it begins with the work of Cabeza de Vaca, William Bradford or a number of other texts, begins, nevertheless, with a journal meticulously re-presenting the moment of radical crisis that the text's subject experiences on first encountering the New World.(1) This crisis naturally involves the realization and articulation of the difference between Spanish and American, English and American, Dutch and American; in other words, the essential discontinuity that signals the beginning of the speaking subject's American experience seems to be the main focus of the text. To name the texts of this immigrant discourse of the real as Spanish-American, Anglo-American, Dutch-American and so on, is to recognize the existence of this discontinuity and, moreover, to mark it with a hyphen.(2) The hyphen stands for this discontinuity, this difference, which appears to merge the two constituent parts while at the same time maintaining the separate identity of each.
Given this claim to representation and therefore consistency, the immigrant discourse of the real "abhors" the gap, the obvious lacuna that the hyphen indicates. Furthermore, if any discourse is characterized by an essential incompleteness, which it tries "to mask or conceal in a false and misleading plenitude" (Foucault 1977, 135), then it is inevitable that the immigrant discourse of the real expedites the pre-empting of the discontinuities and gaps that the hyphen indicates in order to create "this false and misleading plenitude." Since the American Revolution, the official foundation of an American State and the sanctioning of an American ideology, immigrant discourse of the real has battled to overcome an ethnic and primarily ideological polysemy by establishing a legitimate origin, a beginning and consequently a genealogy, and thus to bridge or gloss over the existent discursive as well as cultural lacunae.
On the one hand, this pursuit of origin, beginning and genealogy validates the immigrant subject's American identity; on the other, it guarantees her/his "difference" and therefore expedites the subject's cultural and certainly textual survival. Although seemingly contradictory, these two validations are not essentially so; rather they are complementary in constructing the subject of an American immigrant text. In the Greek-American texts considered in this essay, for example, the relationship among Greek, American and Greek-American is not causal or sequential; furthermore, it does not predicate a potentially harmonious integration. The dominant principle is not that of succession. Rather, correlation, complementarity and transformation are given free play here. Moreover, if Greek, American and Greek-American claim a problematic beginning, beyond them lies an essential absence, that of origin. The fabrication of an origin, or rather the fabrication of an "essence" for origin, appears to be a prerequisite for a discourse and a text trying to hide their discontinuities and gaps. In Greek-American immigrant texts an origin, a beginning and a genealogy are established by the appropriation of a cultural tradition and more specifically of culture-bound stories and history that limit and focus the flight of the signifier, in our case the immigrant subject's name. What cannot be emphasized enough at this point is the fact that these culture-bound stories and history belong to the archive -- the general system of formation and transformation of statements -- to use Foucault's enlightening concept, which has come to determine any Western production of text on Greece since the Renaissance (1972, 130). A similar archive has determined and produced "America" since the Renaissance, but primarily since the foundation of the first "modern" state in the eighteenth century as we pointed out earlier. Thereby, the archive mends the rents in the fabric that joins past and present. Moreover, to paraphrase de Certeau, a "meaning" is assured that surmounts the violence and divisions of time; finally, a theatre of references and common values is created which warrants a sense of unity" and a symbolic communicability.(3)
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