With the people from the bridge

Poena Damni trilogy, German edition

With the People from the Bridge (Greek: Με τους ανθρώπους από τη γέφυρα, English: With the People from the Bridge) is the second part of the Poena Damni trilogy by the Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos . The book deals with loss and the return of the dead in the context of Christian teleology . The text is encompassed by a post-theatrical ritual drama form based on various philosophical and literary sources as well as ancient and modern Greek folklore. The plot focuses on an Orpheus- like journey by the protagonist LG, who joins his deceased companion in the grave and is then led by her to a border area before the upcoming day of resurrection. The work has been attributed to both modern and postmodern critics. It shows a strong affinity for a variety of canonical texts, such as Homer , Dante , Kafka , Joyce and Beckett .

Summary

With the people from the bridge , the main line of the narrative of Z213 follows: Exit , the first book of the Poena Damni trilogy. The work begins with a first-person report by the narrator of Z213: Exit, who narrates his arrival at a run-down train station called Nichtovo, looking for a place where, as he was told, an improvised performance by a group of social outsiders is staged becomes. The narrator joins the few present and records the scenario as well as the events "on stage" in his diary while the performance begins. A group of four women in the role of a choir and three other protagonists (LG, NCTV, Narrator) make their final preparations in front of a run-down car between machine parts and the sound of a generator. When the lights on the stage are lowered, the performance begins with the choir's opening monologue, followed by the order of the other characters' recitations: the story unfolds during the timeline of a calendar day dedicated to the dead, a kind of All Souls Day, or a Saturday of souls. The plot line comes from the incident in the Bible (Mark 5: 9), after which the Gerasene demon asks Jesus to free him from his torments. In the play, LG takes on the role of the demon and expands his role. He tells of his previous condition and describes how he settled in a cemetery. In a kind of simultaneous narrative, LG tells how he opened the grave of his deceased companion (NCTV), triggered by the voices he heard. He enters, finds her body inside and feels compelled to stay with her, and finally realizes that she is gradually being brought back to life. In the meantime, the choir is preparing for the annual visit of their deceased relatives. LG and NCTV are joining them after being separated from a crowd of vengeful people awakened on the occasion of Soul Saturday. As the day ends, LG and NCTV go out and become part of the crowd again from which they were broken off. Despite trying to hold on to one another, they eventually sunk into an indefinite collective of souls moving forward and crossing "the bridge between the worlds" as a Christian resurrection appears on the horizon. The book ends with the epilogue of the (internal) narrator on stage, narrating the process by which a mob gathered in a cemetery digs up two corpses and ritually "kills" the woman by giving her one Stake drives into the chest, similar to the way in which vampires are disposed of in the Slavic tradition. A final narrative twist is offered by the presence of a tabloid clipping that transports the reader back to a cruel everyday reality.

genre

Mit den Menschen von der Brücke is a cross-genre work that combines prose stories with dramatic monologues in poetry. Verse soliloquia , staging and ritual elements as well as choral invocations and simple descriptions are combined to form a polyvalent text that approximates both poetry and drama. The makeshift stage and the presence of actors give the text its dramatic character, while the action and setting, filtered through the perspective of the viewer, emphasize the dimension of storytelling. The self-reflective theatricality achieved by a clear representation of the division of viewers, actors and director, and that of the unifying voice of an external narrator, leads to the work being classified as meta-theater . In addition, and due to a constellation of elements including broken narratives, fragmented characters, and illusory / imagistic scenarios conveyed in the form of an audience member's personal experience, the work has been classified as a clearly postmodern game. However, given its fidelity and focus on grand narrative rebuilding, it seems a long way from postmodern associations.

style

The book shows a version of postmodern eclecticism that alternates poetry with prose pieces. Despite its postmodern affinities, however, it can be interpreted in line with the tradition of high modernism, leaving aside the postmodern playfulness for a serious approach to subjects. The text develops in a series of intermittent monologues interspersed with biblical excerpts and the first-order narrator's comments. The biblical elements along with vampiric and dystopian images work together to create a feeling of ignorance and inclusion. The language is sparse and fragmentary, leaving enough loopholes for the reader, and without explicitly mentioning the vampire theme, to gradually and minimalistically portray their plot. Short declarative sentences are used to convey immediacy and factuality in depicting a gloomy world. Hints and an abundance of cultural references are conveyed through sparse and seemingly casual monologues that simultaneously take into account the heading of the text in different directions. Occasionally the monologues seem ungrammatical, and in others the characters seem to turn away from their words. There is an effect that is similar to the stream of consciousness. However, the text develops linearly between the overlapping stories of the four protagonists. Ellipsis in the narrative, combined with the simplicity of the stage movement and the framework of a predominantly static performance, indicate both ritual and ritual theater.

structure

The work is structured in the form of an externality of the outer frame by an unreliable narrator of the first order (the narrator of Z213: Exit), who creates the conditions for the development of the inner story. In this master narrative, four hyponarratives of Narrator (internal / second order), Chorus, LG and NCTV contribute fragments of the story from their own point of view. As different narratives become intertwined in the game, new elements come to the fore, but there is also a feeling that each individual narrative overlaps with the others, creating a multi-focus effect. The language of the text is simple and idiomatic, while the syntax is occasionally disturbed by gaps and incomplete sentences. Partial fragmentation, however, is combined with a more conventional (albeit mostly elliptical) use of language in order to advance the narrative character of the work.

title

An earlier version of the text, which is similar in terms of its structure and structure, but differs significantly in content and style, was published in 2001 in Greek and German and in 2005 in English under the title Nyctivoe. The term Nyctivoe, a rare ancient Greek adjective, appears in an incantation of the moon goddess in Magical Papyri, a syncretic compilation of texts from the Hellenistic period that focuses on sorcery and folk religion. In the previous version of the book, Nyctivoe is a proper name attributed to the female character of the story, replaced by NCTV (the order of consonants in Nyctivoe) in the new version.

The current title refers both to the setting in which the events in the book are described and to the bridge that the crowd crossed in the latter part of the book. The bridge as a symbol of the transition from the world of the living to the realm of the dead refers to the Chinvat Bridge in the Zoroastrian religion. The bridge is also a symbol of a non-place, referring to the name of the station (nichtovo) that the narrator of the book remembers. From a social perspective on current events, the title has also been interpreted as referring to the “living bridge” of illegal immigrants who are looking for a promised land of abundance.

Publication history and critical reception

The first edition of With the People from the Bridge had received a number of unanimously positive international reviews by fall 2018. The book has been the subject of numerous scholarly criticism and appears in the teaching content of various university curricula on postmodern fiction. A second revised edition was published in October 2018. The book was first published in German in the form of the first version Nyctivoe by CTL-Presse, Hamburg, in a two-volume Greek-German edition on the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2001. The final complete trilogy edition was published in April 2020 by Klak Verlag.

Individual evidence

1. ^ With the People from the Bridge. A review by Judy Swann. Portage Magazine, 2015, online
2. ↑ With the People from the Bridge by Dimitris Lyacos. Review by John Howard. . In: With the People from the Bridge. Review by John Howard. Wormwood . Issue 26, Spring 2016, Leyburn, North Yorkshire UK. (Print Edition)., September, p. 90.
3. ^ ^{A b} With the People from the Bridge. Review by Toti O'Brien. Sein and Werden Magazine, December 2015, online
4. ↑ Poena Damni Trilogy. Review by Justin Goodman. Cleaver Magazine, December 2015, online
5. ^ A review of Dimitris Lyacos's With the People from the Bridge Katie Bodendorfer Garner. The Packingtown Review, May 2016, Chicago, online
6. ↑ ^{a b} Mallory Smart, http://maudlinhouse.tumblr.com/post/113470405890/review-for-with-the-people-from-the-bridge
7. ↑ ^{a b} Max Goodwin Brown, http://www.versaljournal.org/blog/2015/3/12/with-the-people-from-the-bridge-by-dimitris-lyacos
8. ↑ ^{a b c} Julie Kovacs, http://exercisebowler.com/issue21.htm
9. ^ Judy Swann, http://portagemagazine.org/with-the-people-from-the-bridge-by-dimitris-lyacos/
10. ↑ ^{a b c} Robert Zaller, Eucharist: Dimitris Lyacos's "With the People from the Bridge" The Critical Flame, March 2016, online
11. ^ Exercise Bowler Issue 21 . In: exercisebowler.com .
12. ↑ With The People From The Bridge, by Dimitris Lyacos . In: Versal .
13. ↑ Joseph Labernik. From the Ruins of Europe: Lyacos's Debt Riddled Greece. Tikkun Magazine, August 2015, online
14. ↑ Artemis Michailidou, https://greysparrowpress.sharepoint.com/Pages/Spring2015Review.aspx
15. ↑ Joseph Labernik. From the Ruins of Europe: Lyacos's Debt-Riddled Greece. http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/from-the-ruins-of-europe-lyacoss-debt-riddled-greece
16. ^ A review of Dimitris Lyacos's With the People from the Bridge Katie Bodendorfer Garner. The Packingtown Review, May 2016, Chicago Archived copy ( memento of the original from August 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
17. ↑ Manos Georginis, Z213: Exit (Poena Damni) by Dimitris Lyacos. Verse Wisconsin Magazine, 2011. http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue106/reviews106/lyacos.html
18. ^ Ada Fetters, Review of Dimitris Lyacos's With the People from the Bridge. The Commonline Journal, Seattle Washington, 2015 http://www.commonlinejournal.com/2015/12/review-of-dimitris-lyacoss-with-people.html
19. ↑ Bethany W. Pope, With the people from the bridge, Ofi Press Magazine, October 2015, Mexico City, Mexico. http://www.ofipress.com/lyacosdimitris.htm
20. ↑ because God had translated them: A Review of Dimitris Lyacos' With the people from the bridge. Review by Elisabeth Myhr. https://webdelsolreviewofbooks.wordpress.com/tag/dimitris-lyacos/ . Web del Sol Review of Books, May 2016.
21. ↑ Raquel Thorne, http://cahoodaloodaling.com/with-the-people-from-the-bridge-by-dimitris-lyacos/
22. ↑ ^{a b} Michael O'Sullivan. The Precarious Destitute: A Possible Commentary on the Lives of Unwanted Immigrants, online
23. ↑ Manfred Jahn, http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm
24. ↑ Lyacos, Nyctivoe Libretto 5 . In: ctl-presse.de .
25. ↑ Poena damni: Nyctivoe . In: shoestring-press.com .
26. ↑ https://books.google.de/books?id=leqORQpn4PsC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=νυκτιβόη&source=bl&ots=U82R3jLs6_&sig=tp_2cOgt-r6_Q5pclOsIdJ0mfEc&hl=el&sa=X&ved=0CCsQ6AEwA2oVChMI6eux4baHxgIViFUsCh3mUQAh#v=onepage&q=νυκτιβόη&f=false
27. ^ Institute for the Classical Tradition - Boston University . In: bu.edu .
28. ↑ Chris Duncan, Archived Copy ( Memento of the original from June 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
29. ↑ http://www.lyacos.net/reviews/with-the-people-from-the-bridge
30. ↑ Robert Zaller, A Column of Cloud and a Column of Fire: Dimitris Lyacos' Poena damni. Journal of Poetics Research. Issue 07, Autumn 2017. Sydney, Australia, online
31. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from April 14, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (pp. 187-188) 
32. ↑ http://www.shoestring-press.com/2018/10/with-the-people-from-the-bridge-poena-damni-vol-2/
33. ↑ https://www.klakverlag.de/produkt/poena-damni-trilogie-lyrik/#tab-author