Byzantium and the Modernist Subject (2015)

iii Byzantium/Modernism The Byzantine as Method in Modernity Edited by Roland Betancourt Maria Taroutina LEIDEN | BOSTON This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents Contents v Contents Acknowledgments IX Preface XI List of Illustrations XV List of Contributors XIX Explanation of the Cover XXIII Part 1 Byzantium and Modernism Introduction: Byzantium and Modernism Maria Taroutina 1 Section 1 The Avant-Gardes and Their Counter Movements 15 1 Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism Robert S. Nelson 2 Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity 37 Myroslava M. Mudrak Section 2 Modernism’s Precursors 75 3 Arts and Crafts and the ‘Byzantine’: The Greek Connection Dimitra Kotoula 4 Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s Theodora 102 Elena N. Boeck Section 3 Byzantine Tactics, Modernist Strategies in Architectural Discourse 5 Abstraction’s Economy: Hagia Sophia in the Imaginary of Modern Architecture 135 Tulay Atak This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV vi 6 Contents Byzantine Architecture: A Moving Target? Robert Ousterhout 163 Part 2 The Slash as Method Introduction: The Slash as Method 179 Roland Betancourt Section 4 Reading across Time: Modern Subjects, Byzantine Objects 7 Byzantium and the Modernist Subject: The Case of Autobiographical Literature 195 Stratis Papaioannou 8 One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish: Byzantine Visual Structures in the Light of Twentieth-Century Practice and Theory 212 Anthony Cutler Section 5 Byzantine New Media: The Photographic and Filmic Icon 9 Iconicity of the Photographic Image: Theodore of Stoudios and André Bazin 237 Devin Singh 10 Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen Marie-José Mondzain 254 Section 6 Presence, Representation, and the Gaze: The Byzantine at the Ends of Modernity 11 ‘Action-Paradise’ and ‘Readymade Reliquaries’: Eccentric Histories in/ of Recent Russian Art 271 Jane A. Sharp 12 Lacan and Byzantine Art: In the Beginning was the Image 311 Rico Franses This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents 13 v vii Beyond Representation/The Gift of Sight 330 Charles Barber CODA 14 We Have Never been Byzantine: On Analogy 349 Glenn Peers Select Bibliography Index 367 Contents Contents v Acknowledgments ix Preface: A Mosaic Approach xi List of Illustrations xv List of Contributors xix Explanation of the Cover xxiii part 1 xxv Byzantium and Modernism xxv Introduction to Part 1 1 Introduction: Byzantium and Modernism 1 Maria Taroutina 1 Section 1 13 The Avant-Gardes and Their Counter Movements 13 Chapter 1 15 Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 15 Robert S. Nelson 15 Chapter 2 37 Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity 37 Myroslava M. Mudrak 37 Section 2 73 Modernism’s Precursors 73 Chapter 3 75 Arts and Crafts and the ‘Byzantine’: The Greek Connection 75 Dimitra Kotoula 75 Chapter 4 102 Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s Theodora 102 Elena Boeck 102 Section 3 133 Byzantine Tactics, Modernist Strategies in Architectural Discourse 133 Chapter 5 135 Abstraction’s Economy: Hagia Sophia in the Imaginary of Modern Architecture 135 Tulay Atak 135 Chapter 6 163 Byzantine Architecture: A Moving Target? 163 Robert Ousterhout 163 part 2 177 The Slash as Method 177 Introduction: The Slash as Method 179 Roland Betancourt 179 Section 1 193 Reading across Time: Modern Subjects, Byzantine Objects 193 Chapter 7 195 Byzantium and the Modernist Subject: The Case of Autobiographical Literature 195 Stratis Papaioannou 195 Chapter 8 212 One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish: Byzantine Visual Structures in the Light of Twentieth-Century Practice and Theory Anthony Cutler 212 Section 2 235 Byzantine New Media: The Photographic and Filmic Icon 235 Chapter 9 237 Iconicity of the Photographic Image: Theodore of Stoudios and André Bazin 237 Devin Singh 237 Chapter 10 254 Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 254 Marie-José Mondzain 254 Section 3 269 Presence, Representation, and the Gaze: The Byzantine and the Ends of Modernity 269 Chapter 11 271 ‘Аction-Paradise’ and ‘Readymade Reliquaries’: Eccentric Histories in/of Recent Russian Art Jane A. Sharp 271 Chapter 12 311 Lacan and Byzantine Art: In the Beginning was the Image 311 Rico Franses 311 Chapter 13 330 Beyond Representation/The Gift of Sight 330 Charles Barber 330 CODA 347 Chapter 14 349 We Have Never been Byzantine: On Analogy 349 Glenn Peers 349 Select Bibliography 361 Index 367 361 212 271 This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 195 Chapter 7 Byzantium and the Modernist Subject: The Case of Autobiographical Literature Stratis Papaioannou Immer nur ein unter dem besonderen Neigungswinkel seiner Existenz sprechendes Ich Paul Celan ⸪ It is no surprise that the modern reception of Byzantine literature has been limited. Like all other matters Byzantine, this reception has been conditioned by the main trajectory of the culture and society of Byzantium in western European historical consciousness. Bound up in models of universal history, privileging the western European insider, this consciousness has had increasingly little space for the continuation of the Roman Christian empire in the predominantly Greek-speaking East, in its various transformations from the fourth to the fifteenth century—what we have come to call “Byzantium.” The historiographical tradition that addressed the European insider—to borrow a scheme recently explored by Antonis Liakos1—mixed narratives of decline, which were attuned to a biblical, linear, and teleological time frame, with narratives that insisted on revival, cyclical time, and fantasies of utopian progress. The former, driven by messianic expectations, saw the Roman Empire in its medieval continuations, including Byzantium, as the last and inferior stage of a declining humanity. The narrative of progress promoted the image of European modernity as a self-confident renaissance, able to restore and continue the glorious Greco-Roman antiquity, which had been interrupted by the Dark Ages; Byzantium is almost entirely absent from this view. * I would like to thank David Konstan, Kostis Kourelis, Charis Messis, and Jim Porter for their comments on this paper, Ivan Drpić for suggesting the icon of Saint Irene, as well as Annie McDonald for improving the style of the English and providing bibliographical help. 1 Antonis Liakos, Αποκάλυψη, ουτοπία και ιστορία: οι μεταμορφώσεις της ιστορικής συνείδησης (Athens, 2011). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300019_010 This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 196 Papaioannou At a closer look, things are more complex. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the western Christian Crusaders, Byzantium set off a variety of echoes within European modernity, to which no justice can be done in this brief essay.2 There have been, for instance, significant moments of Byzantinism—such as the emergence of Byzantine scholarship in the context of bourgeois ideologies during the nineteenth century,3 or the immediate and organic successor of these ideologies, modernism, to which this volume is devoted.4 Nevertheless, to the extent that they became ossified common sense, the 2 See recent discussions in the following books and collections of essays: Karsten Fledelius, ed., Byzantium: Identity, Image, Influence. Major Papers: XIX International Congress of Byzantine Studies, University of Copenhagen, 18–24 August, 1996; in cooperation with P. Schreiner (Copenhagen, 1996), 220–390; Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys, eds., Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium through British Eyes (Burlington, Vt., 2000); Marie-France Auzépy, ed., Byzance en Europe (Saint-Denis, Fr., 2003); Anthony T. Aftonomos, “The Stream of Time Irresistible: Byzantine Civilization in the Modern Popular Imagination,” PhD thesis, Concordia University, 2005; Jean-Michel Spieser, Présence de Byzance (Gollion, Switz., 2007); Paul Stephenson, ed., The Byzantine World (London and New York, 2010), 429–509; Benjamin Fourlas and Vasiliki Tsamakda, eds., Wege nach Byzanz (Mainz, Ger., 2011); Foteini Kolovou, ed., Byzanzrezeption in Europa: Spurensuche über das Mittelalter und die Renaissance bis in die Gegenwart (Berlin and Boston, 2012); Marina S. Brownlee and Dimitri H. Gondicas, eds., Renaissance Encounters: Greek East and Latin West (Leiden and Boston, 2013); Angeliki Lymberopoulou and Rembrandt Duits, eds., Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe (Farnham, UK, 2013); Ingela Nilsson and Paul Stephenson, eds., Wanted: Byzantium. The Desire for a Lost Empire (Uppsala, 2014). See also the excellent historiographical overview in Dionysios Stathakopoulos, A Short History of the Byzantine Empire (London and New York, 2014), 191–210. 3 For a survey (though with no critical approach) of the main figures: Nikolaos Tomadakes, Κλεὶς τῆς Βυζαντινῆς Φιλολογίας ἤτοι εἰσαγωγὴ εἰς τὴν Βυζαντινὴν Φιλολογίαν 1 (Thessalonike, 1993), 82– 197. Cf. also the bibliography of Byzantine studies in Karl Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur von Justinian bis zum Ende des östromischen Reiches (527–1453). 2nd ed., A. Ehrhard und H. Gelzer, eds. (Munich, 1897), 1068–144 (a treasure for the history of scholarly Byzantinism before the end of the 19th century); and also: Alexander A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324–1453 (Madison, Wis.,1952), 3–41. See further Hans-Georg Beck, “Die byzantinischen Studien in Deutschland vor Karl Krumbacher,” in idem, ed., Chalikes: Festgabe für die Teilnehmer am XI. Internationalen Byzantinistenkongress (München 15.–20. September 1958) (Freising, 1958), 67–118; and D.R. Reinsch, “Ἡ βυζαντινὴ λόγια γραμματεία στὴν Γερμανία τὸν 19ο αἰώνα,” in E. Chrysos, ed., Ἕνας νέος κόσμος γεννιέται: Ἡ εἰκόνα τοῦ ἑληνικοῦ πολιτισμοῦ στὴ γερμανικὴ ἐπιστήμη κατὰ τὸν 19ο αἰώνα (Athens, 1996), 107–28 (on Byzantine studies, specifically, in Germany before Krumbacher); and also various essays in the books listed in the previous note. 4 Cf. Kostis Kourelis, “Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s–1930s,” Hesperia 76 (2007): 391–442; also J.B. Bullen, “Byzantinism and Modernism, 1900–14,” Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 665–75, and Byzantium Rediscovered (London, 2003). For the trajec- This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 197 above early-modern historiographical views determined that, largely speaking, Byzantium would remain a marginal, forgotten, and forgettable world. What made this particular medieval culture especially incongruous to the Western cultural mainstream is that Byzantium has been essentially a society without a modern heir—i.e., an unambiguous modern national heir that was the necessary prerequisite for the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the Middle Ages in modern Europe.5 The Byzantium of western European modernity is thus routinely an abbreviated Byzantium. Even in the exceptional case of modernism, Byzantium is reduced to a visual vocabulary, reconstructed by elements of mosaics, icon painting, and church architecture. In this reading, Byzantium signifies an expression of perhaps exotic or decadent, but also appealing formal otherness, which can simultaneously satisfy a hidden nostalgia for—or indeed provide the premise for fetishization of—religious ritual. It is a tool, in other words, for modernism’s ostensive break from tradition and its simultaneous uncanny yielding to quasi-religious enchantment. tory of Byzantine studies, as reflected in Byzantine International Congresses during this same period, see Maria Nystazopoulou-Pelekidou, “L’histoire des Congrès Internationaux des études byzantines, I,” Byzantina Symmeikta 18 (2008): 11–34; and Sandrine Maufroy, “Les premiers congrès internationaux des études byzantines: Entre nationalisme scientifique et construction internationale d’une discipline,” Revue germanique internationale 12 (2010) = Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn and Wolf Feuerhahn, eds., La fabrique internationale de la science: Les congrès scientifiques de 1865 à 1945 (Paris, 2010), 229–40. 5 Cf. Averil Cameron, “The Absence of Byzantium/Ἡ ἀπουσία τοῦ Βυζαντίου,” Νέα Ἐστία 1807 (2008): 4–59; with, e.g., Tonia Kiousopoulou, “Σκέψεις γιὰ τὴν «ἀπουσία τοῦ Βυζαντίου»,” Νέα Ἐστία 1810 (2008); and several more responses in later issues of Nea Hestia; also Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton, N.J., 2014). The place of Byzantium in the national historical consciousness in eastern and southern Europe is, of course, complex and would require special discussion; on Greece cf., e.g., Hellē Skopetea, Τὸ “Πρότυπο Βασίλειο” καὶ ἡ Μεγάλη Ἰδέα: Ὄψεις τοῦ Ἐθνικοῦ Προβλήματος στὴν Ἑλάδα (1830–1880) (Athens, 1988); Panagiotis Agapitos, “Byzantine Literature and Greek Philologists in the Nineteenth Century,” Classica et Medievalia 43 (1992): 231–60; Fotios Demetrakopoulos, Βυζάντιο και νεοεληνική διανόηση στα μέσα του δεκάτου ενάτου αιώνα (Athens, 1996); Roxane D. Argyropoulos, Les intellectuells grecs à la recherche de Byzance (1860–1912) (Athens, 2001); David Ricks and Paul Magdalino, eds., Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, Kings College Centre for Hellenic Studies 4 (Hampshire, UK, 1998); Paul Stephenson, The Legend of Basil the Bulgar­Slayer (Cambridge, UK, 2003), 97–137; and Despina Christodoulou, “Byzantium in Nineteenth-Century Greek Historiography,” in Stephenson, ed., The Byzantine World (London and New York, 2010), 445–61. On Serbia, see, e.g., Srđan Pirivatrić, “A Case Study in the Emergence of Byzantine Studies: Serbia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Stephenson, The Byzantine World, 481–90 (with further bibliography). See also D. Angelov, “Byzantinism: The Real and Imaginary Influence of a Medieval Civilization on the Modern Balkans,” in D. Keridis, E. Bursac, and N. Yatromanolakis, eds., New Approaches to Balkan Studies (Dulles, Va., 2003), 3–21. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 198 Papaioannou The modern fate of the Byzantine Greek tradition of verbal art accentuates this marginality. Never exactly re-claimed as a national literature6 (with the partial exception of its meager “vernacular” production7), the Byzantine art of discourse has become a phantom for the modern world. This is a literature with no immediately recognizable canon, best authors, or “classic” texts, no generally identifiable geniuses or masterpieces, and indeed no recent advocates to the wider public.8 After all, this is a literature with no modern community of readers to whom it matters (with the exception perhaps of Greek Orthodox churchgoers, who are exposed to some Byzantine texts in their original version—though again, this is an abbreviated Byzantium). Unsurprisingly, in modernist literary, not visual art, Byzantine texts are rarely, if ever, referenced.9 6 7 8 9 Contrary to the confident statements by Krumbacher (Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur von Justinian bis zum Ende des östromischen Reiches [527–1453], Handbuch der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft 9.1 [Munich, 1891], 13; [1897], 20): “Die byzantinische Literatur ist der wichtigste Ausdruck des geistigen Lebens der griechischen Nation und des römischen Staates vom Ausgange des Altertums bis an die Schwelle der neueren Zeit” (my italics). The bibliography is extensive; for an introduction to the principal texts and issues, see the various essays collected in Roderick Beaton, From Byzantium to Modern Greece: Medieval Texts and their Modern Reception (Aldershot, UK, 2008). Despite the valiant efforts of, especially, German historicism in the late 19th century, culminating with Krumbacher (on whom, see Peter Schreiner and Ernst Vogt, eds., Karl Krumbacher: Leben und Werk [Munich, 2011]) and continued in the works of Albrecht Ehrhard (Überlieferung und Bestand der hagiographischen und homiletischen Literatur der griechischen Kirche [Leipzig, 1937–52]), Hans-Georg Beck (Kirche und theologische Literatur im Byzantinischen Reich [Munich, 1959] and Geschichte der byzantinischen Volksliteratur [Munich, 1971]), and Herbert Hunger (Die Hochsprachliche Profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 2 vols [Munich 1978]). In bibliographies written in English, at least, as far as I can tell, there exists no written “defense” of Byzantine literature that addresses an international audience of non-Byzantinists; cf. Robert Nelson, “Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art,” Gesta 35 (1996): 3–11 (on Byzantine art); and Robert Ousterhout, “An Apologia for Byzantine Architecture,” Gesta 35 (1996): 21–33 (Byzantine Architecture). See, nevertheless, Ihor Ševčenko, Three Byzantine Literatures: A Layman’s Guide (Brookline, Mass., 1985). One such example is a poem written in the aftermath, but still within the tradition of modernism: “While the Empire went to pot, / he amused himself / extemporising moral, / highly moral, iambics, / deficient in rhythm,” in W.H. Auden, “Marginalia” (this poem is followed by another brief piece, which notably cites, by name, Michael Psellos, the eleventh-century Constantinopolitan author on whom more below); Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London, 1976), 790–91. Auden’s caricature of a Byzantine “poet,” written in the 1960s, echoes and, simultaneously, reduces a sentiment already present in This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 199 There is certainly more to the unwritten history of the peculiar presence or, rather, absence of the Byzantine literary tradition within European modernity.10 The aim of this short essay is modest. Against the backdrop of these introductory and general observations, I would like to first explore the European reception of a particular aspect of Byzantine literature, namely autobiographical, self-referential discourse, and then offer suggestions for an alternative history of Byzantine discursive subjectivity. Modern Histories of Subjectivity If one were to open any of the very many recent volumes on the history of theories or discursive practices of subjectivity, one would be hard pressed to discover references to Byzantium or Byzantine authors.11 In this respect, the historiographical horizon of subjectivity, literary subjectivity especially, has evidently improved little since the Enlightenment: from its perspective and along the lines described above, by conscious or unconscious omission, the Byzantine world disappears into the realm of the impersonal, a world without sovereign individual subjects. To cite one random example from a modernist context, take the orientalizing gaze of Yeats: “The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books were almost im- 10 11 C.P. Cavafy’s 1921 poem “Βυζαντινὸς Ἄρχων, ἐξόριστος, στιχουργῶν” (“A Byzantine Nobleman, in Exile, Composing Verses”) or a poem, written almost a 100 years earlier, during the heart of the symbolist movement, by Paul Verlaine, his “Languor”: “Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la Décadence, / … En composant des acrostiches indolents / D’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse.…” See, for instance, the interest in Byzantine historiography in the context of, primarily, European imperial ideology (cf. Diether Reinsch, “The History of Editing Byzantine Historiographical Texts,” in Stephenson, The Byzantine World, 434–44; or the importance of the Byzantine heritage for members of the Modern Greek modernist movement (on which see Marinos Pourgouris, Mediterranean Modernisms: The Poetic Metaphysics of Odysseus Elytis [Farnham, UK, 2011]). Three random examples: Alain de Libera, Archéologie du sujet, vol. 1: Naissance du sujet (Paris, 2007) (which, however, does cite Nemesios and the Cappadocian Fathers), Archéologie du sujet, vol. 2: La qûte de l’identité (Paris, 2008), and Archéologie du sujet, vol. 3: La double révolution. L’acte de penser 1 (Paris, 2014) (history of philosophy); Alexander Arweiler and Melanie Möller, eds., Vom Selbst-Verständnis in Antike und Neuzeit (Berlin and New York, 2008) (historical perspectives); Shaun Gallagher, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Self (Oxford, 2011) (historical and theoretical perspectives). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 200 Papaioannou personal, almost without the consciousness of individual design,” Yeats wrote in the autobiographical A Vision, with an idealized Byzantium in mind.12 Outside the frame of this general attitude, one may identify two isolated examples that date to the first half of the twentieth century. Though both instances might seem to confirm intellectual trends recurrent in the period, they are, in their eccentricity, worth examining in some detail. … The year is 1932. The eighteenth volume of Imago, the journal that Sigmund Freud started and directed from 1911, contains a small surprise for the Byzantinist. Henri E. Del Medico (Istanbul 1896–France, sometime after 1965), a Semitist scholar who later worked on the Dead Sea scrolls, presented a 30-page article examining the autobiography of a Byzantine writer.13 Del Medico’s piece was in good company. Until 1937, the eve of the second world war, Imago hosted studies of psychoanalysis applied to historical figures of the past— such as, e.g., the 1923 volume that begins with an article by Freud himself on a case of a seventeenth-century Austrian painter, who suffered from a “Devil’s neurosis.”14 Del Medico provides a close and occasionally insightful reading of Psellos’s funeral oration for his mother, a text in which Psellos, a notorious rhetor/philosopher/courtier of eleventh-century Constantinople, constructed a hagiographical portrait of his mother, engraved with lengthy autobiographical digressions, including a description of some remarkable personal dreams.15 Del Medico acknowledges that the name of Psellos will be unrecognizable to most of the journal’s readers because, “unfortunately, the entire Byzantine culture has been so much neglected,” but hopes to use this forgotten Byzantine 12 13 14 15 W.B. Yeats, A Vision (New York, 1938), 279–80; my italics. Henri Del Medico, “Ein Ödipuskomplex im elften Jahrhundert: Michael Psellos,” Imago 18 (1932): 214–44. On Del Medico’s biography, see D Gershon Lewental, “Del Medico, Henri E.” in Norman A. Stillman, ed., Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Brill Online, 2014). Sigmund Freud, “Eine Teufelsneurose im siebzehnten Jahrhundert,” Imago 9 (1923), 1–34; on the peculiar case of Christoph Haitzmann’s pact with the Devil. The journal’s title, Imago, evoked the notion of mental representation in Freudian vocabulary; an important concept in psychoanalytic understandings of subjectivity. The most recent edition is Ugo Criscuolo, ed. and trans., Michele Psello: Autobiografia. Encomio per la madre (Naples, 1989); English translations include: Jeffrey Walker, “These Things I Have Not Betrayed: Michael Psellos’ Encomium of His Mother as a Defense of Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 22 (2004): 49–101; Anthony Kaldellis, Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters: The Byzantine Family of Michael Psellos. ed. and trans. with contributions by D. Jenkins and S. Papaioannou (Michael Psellos in Translation) 1 (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 201 writer in order to turn the attention of Westerners to the “East,” where they might discover “the key to certain features of the modern Man’s character that primitive people cannot deliver.”16 The article is at once remarkable and disappointing. Remarkable for its willingness to look beyond the boundaries of what is considered the western European tradition for the prehistory of modern sexual subjectivity. (It is worth remembering that the successors of this kind of project were not so willing to do so; Michel Foucault in his celebrated, unfinished History of Sexuality left the medieval Greek tradition entirely outside his purview; and lack of knowledge of Greek could not be an excuse in this case.) Yet the argument of Del Medico’s readings quickly becomes circular. As noted, Psellos reports some extraordinary dreams that deflect the usual dreamscape or depart from the common dream vocabulary of other Byzantine texts. In one of them, Psellos sees himself brought by angels in front of a stony barrier, which he then must pass through on his own by way of a “navel which lay open in the form of an uneven circle.” Psellos indeed passes through, as the stony opening yields to him like “the softest flesh,” and finds himself in a church, in front of an icon of the Virgin. Del Medico reads here a suppressed sexual desire; the momentous entrance signifies a sexual act, which, however, is immediately confronted by a prohibition: “then comes the repression … the icon of the Mother of God.”17 The Byzantine text is made to fit the demands of a universalizing discourse of the Freudian male self—inescapably Psellos suffers from amor matris and timor patris and is diagnosed with “latent homosexuality,” which explains his “enormous narcissism.”18 Psellos is refashioned to fit the anxieties of the male modernist subject.19 … 16 17 18 19 “Leider ist die ganze byzantinische Kultur so sehr vernachlässigt”; “den Schlüssel zu manchen Charaktereigenschaften des modernen Menschen, den die Naturvölker ihm nicht liefern können” (Del Medico, “Ein Ödipuskomplex,” 216; my italics). “Da kommt die Hemmung ... das Bild der Gottesmutter” (ibid., 226). “[L]atente Homosexualität”; “enormer Narzißmus” (ibid., 243–44). Cf. Stratis Papaioannou, “Michael Psellos’s Rhetorical Gender,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 24 (2000): 133–46; with John E. Toews, “Refashioning the Masculine Subject in Early Modernism: Narratives of Self-Dissolution and Self-Construction in Psychoanalysis and Literature, 1900–1914,” Modernism/Modernity 4 (1997): 31–67. For a new reading of Psellos’s text in the psychoanalytic vein, see Catia Galatariotou, “Psychoanalysis and Byzantine Oneirografia,” in Christine Angelidi and George T. Calofonos, eds., Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond (Farnham, UK, Ashgate), 221–32. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 202 Papaioannou In other corners of more or less contemporary German intellectual writing, Byzantine discourse of the first person singular was to find some more refined readings. In 1904, a young man of Jewish descent in his mid-twenties by the name of Georg Misch (April 5, 1878, Berlin–June 10, 1965, Göttingen), presented a three-volume work to the Prussian Academy in Berlin, titled the Geschichte der Autobiographie. Following in the footsteps of his teacher and father-in-law Wilhelm Dilthey, and influenced by a German philosophical tradition that traced its roots back to Goethe, Burckhardt, and Herder, the young Misch devoted each volume to, respectively, Greco-Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity (in two parts: Renaissance to seventeenth century; and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).20 For this work, Misch read closely as many texts as he could identify as autobiographical, which he used as “documents”21 for the history of the gradual and glorious process of “European self-awareness [Selbstbesinnung] and individualization [Individualisierung],”22 apparently Western humanity’s most important achievement. The work, which was concluded at the eve of modernism, ended with an aporia: “Will there be a new autobiographical art-form … where new forms of the creative imagination will develop?” Will there be an art-form, he continued, where “we sense the creative power of the heroic man of modern times?”23 20 21 22 23 First publication (only of the first volume of the original work on Antiquity): Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. 1: Das Altertum (Leipzig, 1907), dedicated to Wilhelm Dilthey. On Misch and the tradition of thought in which he belonged, see especially Michael Jaeger, Autobiographie und Geschichte: Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Misch, Karl Löwith, Gottfried Benn, Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1995), 72–132; cf. Otto Friedrich Bollnow, “Lebensphilosophie und Logik: Georg Misch und der Göttinger Kreis,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 34 (1980): 423–40; and Massimo Mezzanzanica, Georg Misch: Dalla filosofia della vita alla logica ermeneutica (Milan, 2001). See also Michael Weingarten, ed., Eine “andere” Hermeneutik: Georg Misch zum 70. Geburtstag. Festschrift aus dem Jahr 1948 (transcript, Bielefeld, Germ., 2005) (with the complete ergography of and bibliography on Misch: 23–48, by G. Kühne-Bertram). E.g., Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. 4.1: Aus dem Nachlaß hrsg. von Leo Delfoss: part 3, Das Hochmittelalter in der Vollendung (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), 5; cf. Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. 1.1: Das Altertum. Dritte stark vermehrte Auflage (Frankfurt am Main, 1949), 5. Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, 1.1 (1949), vii (from the introduction to the first edition of 1907). Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. 4.2: Von der Renaissance bis zu autobiographischen Hauptwerken des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), 979: “eine neue autobiographische Kunstform … wo neue Formen der schöpferischen Phantasie sich ausbilden … die schöpferische Macht des heroischen Menschen der neuen Zeit.” This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 203 Misch, who lived for another sixty years, through both world wars and the troubling but exciting period between them, did not continue his work in search of an apparent answer to this question. Instead, he spent almost his entire career, while a university professor, then an exiled intellectual in England, and then again a professor in Göttingen, expanding his original work in order to write a comprehensive and thorough history of essentially pre-modern autobiography. This history included not only works in ancient Greek, Latin, and other western European languages, but also Arabic and Byzantine Greek. Starting in 1949, the work was re-issued in a revised and expanded form and is now available in eight massive volumes, some of which were published posthumously, a total of 3,885 pages. The work is monumental in every respect. No one would repeat something even close to this after him; and though modern historians of autobiography are often quick to dismiss it, they nonetheless express their awe at Misch’s achievement. The dismissal derives from a recognition that this history of autobiography or, rather, of universal human selfconsciousness, as Misch saw it, turns out to be a pre-history of the gradual and glorious emergence of a very specific type of subjectivity: modern, secular, European (and, one might add, male) subjectivity. As we might expect, Byzantine writing did not fare very well in Misch’s teleological scheme. Byzantine writers are, one must admit, much more visible than, for instance, in Hegel’s earlier account of Byzantium as a world with no greatness in “thoughts, deeds, and individuals” (a quote from Hegel’s influential Philosophy of History).24 Misch does note the achievements of fourth-century, early Byzantine authors (especially Synesios of Kyrene and Gregory of Nazianzos, whom he regards as precursors to Augustine) and spends about seventy pages on Michael Psellos and several more on a few other late Byzantine authors.25 Yet Misch cannot but complain, for instance, that Synesios does not actually reach “freedom” in his self-expression. Similarly, Misch is almost surprised to discover in Gregory of Nazianzos “expressions … that show that he was 24 25 “ ... nichts grosses an Gedanken, Taten, und Individuen”; Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, hrsg. v. E. Gans (Berlin 1837), 414; my italics. Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. 1.2: Das Altertum. Dritte stark vermehrte Auflage (Frankfurt am Main, 1950), 526–636 (606–11: Synesios; 612–26: Gregory) and Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. 3, Das Mittelalter, part 2: Das Hochmittelalter im Anfang (Frankfurt am Main, 1962), 749–903 (760–830: Psellos). For a few more Byzantine texts in Misch’s account, see Martin Hinterberger, Autobiographische Traditionen in Byzanz, Wiener Byzantinische Studien 22 (Vienna, 1999), 32. Misch cites Krumbacher’s work on several occasions. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 204 Papaioannou conscious of the subjective character of his poetry.”26 As for the later, more properly Byzantine, Psellos, Misch regards him a personality unworthy of the humane in the “humanistic” classical tradition that he revives. Psellos, in Misch’s account, stands apart and at a distance from the “the free man . . who desires truth and clarity: Wahrheit und Klarheit.”27 Though it must be included for the sake of scientific, historicist comprehensiveness, the Byzantine autobiographical self cannot satisfy the linear narrative of the emergence of European subjectivity. Measured against the yardstick of what we might call modern European intellectual morality, i.e., those noble virtues of “freedom,” “truth,” and “clarity,” Byzantine authors and, it is implied, Byzantines in general remain outsiders. We would be mistaken to bypass too swiftly Misch’s painstaking reading of the sources, his pioneering and, whatever its erroneous assumptions, scrupulous examination of autobiographical texts from a variety of linguistic traditions—work that won a relatively small following and exerted little influence. No other modern European writer has spent such time and energy on considering even the possibility that a story worth telling exists regarding the Byzantine discourse in the first-person singular. Compare the work of Misch with Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, a work similarly monumental in its vision, devoted to a history of the representation of reality in literature in the European literary tradition from antiquity to modernity (first published in 1946).28 The similarities between the two works are striking. Like Misch, Auerbach completed his work in exile, in Istanbul during the second world war, and, again like Misch, saw his work as a defense of the values of humanism, so meticulously shattered by the horrors of Nazism. Through the history of mimesis, Auerbach told a brilliant story of the emergence of the secular, free, autonomous, individual subject in European writing. Yet, unlike Misch, Auerbach spent no time on the postclassical Greek tradition. The road from Homer leads rather unidirectionally to western European writing: Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf: a Western canon. But Auerbach may have missed opportunities in adopting this per26 27 28 Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, 1.2:635. Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, 3.2:839. On Auerbach, see Jan Ziolkowski, “Foreword,” in Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1993), ix–xxxix (with further bibliography); see also James I. Porter, “Auerbach, Homer, and the Jews,” in Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia, eds., Classics and National Cultures (Oxford and New York, 2010), 235–57. In the recent anniversary edition of a translation of Mimesis (2003), prefaced by Edward Said, an exemplary modernist painting is, notably, chosen for the book cover: from Max Beckmann’s Departure (Frankfurt 1932, Berlin 1933–35). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 205 spective. He does not mention, for instance, the most comprehensive theoretician of mimesis in the premodern philosophical tradition writing in Greek: Proklos, a Constantinopolitan who led the Platonic philosophical school in Athens in the mid-fifth century CE, and who exerted great influence also in the West through the works of an unlikely student, another Byzantine writer, the Christian theologian known as Dionysios the Areopagite—a thinker quite important for Dante, among others, who was Auerbach’s as well as Misch’s cultural hero in the history of the emergence of subjectivity.29 If only for his devotion to a universal history of autobiography, Misch thus deserves admiration. It is perhaps an irony of history that he never managed to revise the third volume of his original work. Of the eight final volumes, one and a half are devoted to antiquity; six and a half to postclassical and medieval literatures, and only one, the slimmest and never revised, to modernity (republished posthumously in 1969). Misch, who began his career as a fervent advocate of modernity (showing the kind of modern self-confidence from which modernism wished to flee), and who experienced the unforgiving, malicious side of that modernity, in the end became almost unwittingly a medievalist. Here, you have a man who seems to remain deaf to the challenges of modernism, as well as silent about the horrors of modernity. His desire for new forms of self-expression, posed as a question in 1904, was left chillingly unanswered. The clock lingers in the early twentieth century, and he seems to have sought solace only in the close readings of the distant medieval ancestors. Or, is the work of Misch perhaps another instance of modern (indeed modernist) appropriation of medieval, and also Byzantine, aesthetics? Would we, that is, be justified to observe that the attempt to construct a comprehensive view of human history, of the unified human self from the beginning to the present, makes the Geschichte of Misch a kind of universal chronicle (though this time of inner rather than outer history)? Is this the last great contribution (mutatis mutandis) to the premises of a genre first cultivated by Byzantine authors and imitated in a variety of neighboring linguistic traditions? Is medieval universalism the template that, through a long history, may be imagined as lying behind Misch’s own grand vision of the European man’s progressive selfdiscovery? 29 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton, N.J., 2003), 193–94 and 210; notably, on p. 13, Auerbach dismisses (what are essentially Neoplatonic) allegorical hermeneutics without mentioning any names. On Misch and Dante, see Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, 4.1:445ff. Gunter Gebauer and Christof Wulf adopt a similar perspective in Mimesis: Kultur, Kunst, Gesellschaft (Reinbek bei Hamburg, Ger., 1992). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 206 Papaioannou Glimpses of the Byzantine “I” In the aftermath of postmodernist talk, we are in a better position to understand that the notion that “subjectivity” (whatever this might be—though the implicit assumption is that it must be a “good” thing), as invented in this or that period of western European history, is a modern historiographical myth, driven by ideological prerogatives. Neither the consciousness of oneself nor discourses and representations of subjectivity are privileges of this or that society or social group or, in the most reductive form, great inventions available to humanity through the layered achievements of great men (be it Dante or Descartes) over the course of history. A Byzantinist could, for instance, say, without sounding too defensive, that Byzantine philosophers, expanding earlier traditions, developed a sophisticated theoretical language of subjectivity. Take, for instance, the notion of personal hypostasis or personhood, in Gregory of Nazianzos, Gregory of Nyssa, or Maximos the Confessor. This notion, today discussed almost exclusively by patristic scholars and orthodox theologians, is part of an attempt to articulate a subjectivity that accommodates both relationality and autonomy.30 One could continue with similar examples, though this would perhaps be futile—and to some extent a submission to the tacit premise of “great ideas” and “great men.” My concern here is, rather, to point out some of the particularities of Byzantine approaches to discursive subjectivity. One could begin with the example of the notion of hypostasis just mentioned in order to note that Byzantine writers show some reluctance to transfer the vocabulary they create regarding the subjectivity of divine personhood to human subjects. For human selfhood, that is, they continue to employ—though again, with expansions and variations—the philosophical discourse of Plato and Aristotle. They thus continue to conceive of the self as fragmented and layered—from matter and body to soul and mind.31 This disparity in approach has much to do with the fact that Byzantine writing (similarly to, but more pointedly than, Byzantine art) operated with a diverse and often contradictory series of inherited vocabularies and registers of discourse—bodies of language, texts, forms, and 30 31 See Heinrich Dörrie, Hypostasis: Wort- und Bedeutungsgeschichte (Göttingen, 1955) for a survey of the semantic history of hypostasis; the most influential discussion has been John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, N.Y., 1997); cf. Paul M. Collins, Trinitarian Theology, West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers, and John Zizioulas (Oxford and New York, 2001). Christopher Gill, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford and New York, 2006) (on the classical tradition of the fragmented, “structured,” self). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 207 knowledge that originated in the earlier Greco-Roman tradition. Byzantine writers were trained to switch between these registers in almost imperceptible ways that cannot satisfy the double impulse of modern historiography to identify coherent systems of thought and linear histories of form. The Byzantine written tradition is thus a hybrid and, simultaneously, a fragmented tradition. Importantly, it is also a world where tradition and the authority of convention provide a mask for innovation, originality, and, indeed, individuality. Within the culture of Byzantine representation, tradition is the tool for becoming oneself. Perhaps in the exact opposite way to modernism, this is a representational culture that voices convention, while silently creating forms of what may be seen as avant-garde. Byzantine discourse of the first-person singular is no exception.32 For instance, within its rhetorical tradition—which, to some extent, dominated discursive performance and book culture—we encounter authors who place themselves, their lives, and their emotions at the forefront of the text. In this respect, the primary relevant modes of writing, both inherited from antiquity, were two: (a) the speech of self-defense (Socrates’ Apology and Demosthenes’ On the Crown provided the models); and (b) letter writing, which Byzantines defined as the process of “imprinting [typos],” “mirroring,” and “imaging an icon [eikôn]” of the writer’s “soul.” Bound by earlier conventions, the unfailing conservatism of Hellenism (an impulse that had infused Greek writing since its own period of colonial expansion in the four centuries BCE), and medieval Greek, rhetorically trained writers never created a literature of self-examination and confession that, in Latin and then in the western European tradition, found its most eloquent expression in Augustine. For Byzantines, the model of self-representational rhetoric was an author already mentioned and examined by Misch, Gregory of Nazianzos (329/330–c. 390). This canonical figure for Byzantine Christian dogma and knowledge also happened to be one of the most self-referential writers of the Greek tradition. Belonging to the rising new Christian aristocracy of the late Roman world, a professional rhetor who became a bishop, Gregory was in constant need of self-definition. At that, he was a model for some and in direct competition with 32 For a more expanded discussion, with bibliography and further references, see Stratis Papaioannou, “Byzantine Mirrors: Self-Reflection in Medieval Greek Writing,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010): 1–21 (on self-reflection), and Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium (Cambridge and New York, 2013), 20–25 and 131–231 (on discursive subjectivity). On Byzantine autobiographical traditions, see also the survey of Hinterberger, Autobiographische Traditionen. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 208 Papaioannou others; to both groups, he addressed a carefully fashioned self-portrait through letters, poems, and speeches. A very small taste of Gregory’s first-person speech from his Self-Defense, his Apoloĝtikos (Or. 2), may suffice here.33 While defending his devotion to private contemplation as opposed to public action, Gregory writes (Or. 2.7): Οὐδὲν γὰρ ἐδόκει μοι τοιοῦτον οἷον μύσαντα τὰς αἰσθήσεις, ἔξω σαρκὸς καὶ κόσμου γενόμενον, εἰς ἑαυτὸν συστραφέντα … ἑαυτῷ προσλαλοῦντα καὶ τῷ Θεῷ, ζῇν ὑπὲρ τὰ ὁρώμενα, καὶ τὰς θείας ἐμφάσεις ἀεὶ καθαρὰς ἐν ἑαυτῷ φέρειν ἀμιγεῖς τῶν κάτω χαρακτήρων καὶ πλανωμένων, ὄντως ἔσοπτρον ἀκηλίδωτον Θεοῦ καὶ τῶν θείων καὶ ὂν καὶ ἀεὶ γινόμενον. Nothing seemed to me to be comparable to closing off the senses and going beyond flesh and the world, turning in on oneself … conversing with oneself and with God, living beyond the visible, and continually bearing in oneself God’s reflections, pure and unmixed with erring earthly impressions, both being and always becoming truly a spotless mirror of God and divine things. The philosophical notions of subjectivity upon which this miniature self-portrait is predicated are notable in themselves. The combination of “being and becoming,” for instance, is a bold philosophical move, compared with the earlier Greek tradition and its emphasis on essence.34 More relevant to the aims of the present paper are the aesthetics of this rhetorical self-portrait. On a closer look, it becomes evident that these (like too many such Byzantine “I”-statements) are not exactly Gregory’s own words. When he claims to be a “spotless mirror of God” he adopts an Old Testament metaphor that interpreters of the Bible read as expressive of Christ, the “spotless mirror” of the Father.35 Simultaneously, Gregory’s phrase “closing off the senses” is lifted verbatim from an influential essay by the neo-Platonist Plotinos, titled On Beauty (Enneads 1.6), in which Plotinos, writing about a hundred years before Gregory, urges his readers to avoid the deceptive simulacra offered by the senses and the danger33 34 35 Jean Bernardi, ed., Grégoire de Nazianze, Discours 1–3. Introduction, texte critique, traduction et notes, Sources Chrétiennes 247 (Paris, 1978). Cf. Stratis Papaioannou, “Gregory and the Constraint of Sameness,” in Jostein Børtnes and Tomas Hägg, eds., Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections (Copenhagen, 2006), 59–81; see also Anca Vasiliu, Eikôn: l’image dans le discours des trois Cappadociens (Paris, 2010). Cf. Sapientia Salomonis 7.26 with, e.g., Eusebios, Preparation for the Gospel 7.12.7; and Origen, Contra Celsum 3.72. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 209 ous self-mirroring of Narcissus, and to focus instead on the inner self. Without alerting his readers/listeners to the allusions, Gregory assumes the voice of biblical as well as Platonic discourse, which he now fuses as he speaks in the first-person singular. The text, that is, expresses the desire that it then performs: Gregory becomes himself through the ideal models provided by tradition. The rhetoricality (or, in our terms, the literariness) of this self-representational posture should not be forgotten. For though it carries the aura of philosophy, this statement is not part of a philosophical discussion of subjectivity; its main concern is not theoretical clarity within the history of ideas. Rather, Gregory’s statement belongs to an immediate competitive context of (self-) praise and implicit blame. While separating himself from others, Gregory assigns to himself a specific position, that of an exemplary philosopher/priest, within a tight (and for us largely irrecoverable) network of relations. This network links Gregory and his audience (when this text was originally performed) as well as his readers (when the text began to circulate in its revised written version) in mutual exchanges of symbolic and cultural capital. To his listeners and readers, and especially to those whom we might regard as Gregory’s “professional colleagues”—learned aristocrats like him, both Christian and nonChristian—Gregory must display not only a certain ethical morality, but also a discursive morality: the necessary allusions to Plato, Plotinos, the Bible, and its commentators offer proof of his participation in proper learnedness. Apart from the demands of tradition, that is, his self-portrait is defined also by the politics of the moment. As such, the passage exemplifies Byzantine self-representational language. To speak of oneself was often to set oneself in a hierarchical relationship in which the personal “I” merged with the exemplary “I,” to express oneself with and through the normative Other, but also to position oneself in relation to or competition with others. There are visual counterparts to this aesthetics. While we do not have any Byzantine self-portraits in the strict modern sense of the word—a painting by an artist of himself36—there do exist self-portraits in the more flexible sense of portraits where the represented figure must have been involved to some extent in the production of his or her image. I am referring to 36 For a discussion of a few possible examples, see Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, “Painters’ Portraits in Byzantine Art,” Δελτίον της Χριστιανικής Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας 17 (1993–94): 129–42. For the particular case of Eulalios, see Theoni Baseu-Barabas, Zwischen Wort und Bild: Nikolaos Mesarites und seine Beschreibung des Mosaikschmucks der Apostelkirche in Konstantinopel (Ende 12. Jh.) (Vienna, 1992), 208–9. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 210 Papaioannou Figure 7.1 Figure 7.1 Icon of Saint Irene, Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai (8th or 9th century). Photo: By permission of St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt. the so-called “donor portraits.”37 An early icon of Saint Irene, now at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai and dating possibly to the eighth or ninth century, offers an illustrative example (Fig. 7.1).38 The viewer’s gaze is first directed to the large figure in the center: a saint, identified as such by an inscription, bearing a halo and looking directly at the viewer. At the left corner of the 37 38 See Anne Weyl Carr, “Donors in the Frames of Icons: Living in the Borders of Byzantine Art,” Gesta 45 (2006): 189–98 (with the earlier bibliography); cf. Henri Franses, “Symbols, Meaning, Belief: Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art,” PhD diss., University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1992; also Linda Safran, “Deconstructing ‘Donors’ in Medieval Southern Italy,’ in Lioba Theis, Margaret Mullett, and Michael Grünbart, eds., Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond (Vienna, 2014), 135–51 (for the complications of the term “donor”). Kurt Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, the Icons (Princeton, N.J., 1976), n.B. 39. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Byzantium and the Modernist Subject 211 panel, the painter has added another figure that also carries a name (Nikolaos) and is likely the person who commissioned the icon. This is, one might argue, the closest we get to a Byzantine visual self-portrait. Its aesthetics are similar to those of our passage from Gregory. Nikolaos is set in an hierarchical relation to a normative as well as protective larger-thanhuman figure, that both subjects (Nikolaos’s gesture of kneeling and the size of his portrait suggest as much), and subjectifies this ‘small’ patron. In the frame of the icon, Nikolaos is allowed to occupy an exceptional position in the eyes of the viewers: he stands next to, and in contact, with a saint, transcending the boundaries of the human condition. The effect of self-representational aesthetics is thus double. On the one hand, the self retreats, submits, surrenders; on the other, one discovers, creates, performs oneself in the act of submission. … The eleven hundred years or so of Byzantine writing have an intriguing series of similar discursive self-portraits to offer. What I have presented above are only select examples and aspects that display some of the limitations but also possibilities of Byzantine literary self-representation. None of the portraits of this long tradition, if treated as a whole, can easily be either plotted in histories that seek to identify linear narratives of progress or decline or easily recovered in nostalgic gestures of appropriation. For Byzantine authors speak to us from behind a series of disguises (conventions, circumstances, communicative codes) through which they strove, paradoxically, for a genuine, personal idiom. In this, they, too, sought a language with which to utter an “I that speaks under the specific angle of its existence,”39 to use the words of the poet who articulated most eloquently the end of modernity and modernism alike. 39 Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 3:167–68. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV