Distancing Disaster: Trauma, Medium, and Form in the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange

Abstract

Recent work in trauma studies has begun to differentiate collective trauma from its individual counterpart: while the latter is a psychosomatic phenomenon, the former is a secondary product, mediated materially, temporally, socially, and linguistically. The collective trauma that emerged from the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange of 1919-1924 serves as an exemplary case in point. Looking in particular to literary production, I assess how the trauma narrative of 1919-1924 was "remediated" in two Greek novels. For much of the twentieth century, the field of Greek prose fiction was dominated by the formal regime of realism, which masked the mediations of textual production and promulgated instead a rhetorical logic of authentic and immediate historicity. Using Elias Venezis's Το νούμερο 31328 (The number 31328) and Kosmas Politis's Στου Χατζηφράγκου (In the Hadjifrangou neighborhood), I trace the formal strategies by which two particular trauma narratives reacted to this realist regime, developing a theory of the self-reflexive medium.

Borders, Belonging, and Refugee Memory since the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange

“…Cultural memory relies on the process of selection and repetition, and thus certain stories, shared and stabilized across different fora, gain prominence over others (Rigney 2004;Assmann 2008;Erll 2009). Mediation hence becomes a crucial vehicle for the transmission of memories, for making them recognizable, and each time memory travels-across carriers, media, contents, practices, and forms-it is not only reinvigorated but also transformed (Erll 2011;Hirsch 2012;Stroebel 2014). The possibilities afforded by cultural media, and the ideologies of their users, come to the fore in this process.…”