Gender, Myth, and Memory, Ethnic Continuity in Greek-American Narrative

The life of the immigrant was that of a man diverted by unexpected pressures away from the established channels of his existence. Separated, he was never capable of acting with the assurance of habit; always in motion, he could never rely upon roots to hold him up. Instead he had ever to toil painfully from crisis to crisis, as an individual alone, make his way past the discontinuous obstacles of a strange world. - Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted Oscar Handlin's forty year old observation of the immigrant reality, a reality of difference, can be applied as well to the literature of immigrants. This study of two little-known novels of the Greek immigrant experience, Harry Mark Petrakis's A Dream of Kings and Katherine Vlassie's Children of Byzantium,(2) examines the necessary reality of immigrant ethnicity, the distinction between the group and the "other," in order to establish some definitional and functional parameters for distinguishing immigrant literature from other "ethnic" literatures. To do so, each immigrant group and each immigrant literature must be considered with reference to the "life experience (such as history, folklore, and religion)" (Wald 29) of both the ethnic and the culture from which the ethnic is distinguished. While most immigrant novels or short stories may share certain characteristic themes and situations - the liminality of the immigrant and the necessity to reinvent an adult identity, for example - specific socio-cultural factors distinguish the life patterns and literary patterns of each group. Like many other European immigrants, the Greeks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries chose displacement in order to materialize their desires. In "The Immigrant Novel as Genre," William Q. Boelhower posits a defining "macroproposition" for the genre: "An immigrant protagonist(s), representing an ethnic world view, comes to America with great expectations, and through a series of trials is led to reconsider them in terms of his final status" (5). Boelhower's proposition about the literary immigrant may be reversed, and one may say that every immigrant is the hero of a novel, in that he or she "expects his (or her) being to be radically changed by the act of possession" (Girard 53). Rene Girard's theory of "imitated desire," in which he sees desire not as a response to something lacking, but as a need to imitate the desire of a valorized individual, is an ideal model for the response of the immigrant to the mythic "Ameriki" that represents both economic and psychic empowerment. Whatever economic, social, or political forces may cause expulsion from the specific territory the group inhabits, the individual makes the choice to seek admission to the United States or, less frequently, Canada. The destination is a mythicized object of desire whose possession involves not only a physical but a metaphysical actualization of the self. Leonidas Matsoukas, the protagonist of A Dream of Kings, comes to the United States "anxious for new experience, and determined to subdue the New World" (11), his determination based on a pre-immigration projection of his identity as the last in a long line of warriors. Such self-definition is also the motivating trigger in the emigration of Eleni, the protagonist of Children of Byzantium. While Matsoukas makes the active choice to come to Ameriki, Eleni chooses only not to choose: "she had always known that one day her parents would choose a husband for her" (11), and with the choice of husband comes the necessity of emigration. Through the decades of her marriage to Costa, until her widowhood, Eleni remains passive and childlike, while Matsoukas persists in his futile battle with Ameriki. For each, the strategy undertaken to approach the object of desire (Boelhower's "expectations") is predicated on the identity formed by the socio-cultural matrix of the country of origin. Thus the crucial first issue for the immigrant, even before language acquisition or physical survival, is the survival of the identity that initially motivated the migration. …