Blue, a Gothic Story is the title of the second narrative of Efterpi Araouzou, which moves, to a large extent, along the footprints of her first narrative (Captive, 1993). Both her books are constructed by strange stories which are narrated or experienced by the dissected parts of the basic story characters, with the intention of contradicting and circumventing the painful reality, exorcising evil, befriending their alienated ego and, finally, recommending an antidote to decay and death.
Despite the reservations one could formulate about the ideological characterization of the text (which is closer to a novel than fiction), this narrative is justifiably categorized as gothic. Let it be noted that such narratives have been written already since the 18th and 19th century by H. Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1765), Mrs. Radcliff (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818), and followed by N. Hawthorne, E.A. Poe and others. What characterizes this category of narrative is the dilution of logic, the emphasis on fantasy and imagination, the coupling of reality with the grotesque and the supernatural, the preference towards scenes of violence and horror usually placed in medieval castles etc. It is no coincidence that the imperialists looked upon these texts fondly, mainly because logic is undermined to release fantasy. A. Breton himself confronted gothic fiction as a result of the great social upheaval that shocked Europe at the end of the 18th century.
As already noted above, the basic axis which runs through both works of E. Araouzou is the element of a split personality. Νarrative characters tell their split egos strange stories, sometimes referring to other, allegorical narrative types with disturbed souls. Schizophrenia is not new to narratives. This motif is a subject in the stories of E.A. Poe The angel of the odd and William Wilson, in the stories The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) of R.L. Stevenson and John Sherman (1891) of W.B. Yeats, in the story of K. Hatzopoulou Clara’s dream (1913), as well as in the novel The Stranger (1944) and shorter stories by N. Vrahimi. More particularly, the loner heroes of Poe and Vrahimis, under the influence of alcohol, discuss with imaginary persons-shadows, which ultimately are versions of their own alienated selves. The rupture with the alter ego is especially intense and catastrophic in Poe’s William Wilson, where the hero, outraged by the oppressive presence of his namesake partner and antagonistic self, challenges him to a fight and stabs him. The fate of Jekyll is similar in the work of Stevenson, who comes into conflict with his possessed self and ends up a murderer and self-killer. Αfter all, Hatzopoulos’ asexual heroine reaches the point of thinking that she is talking to her imaginary lover, who is none other than her divided ego.
The case of Blue presents some similarities to the aforementioned stories but also quite a few peculiarities. A basic question which arises when reading the text is the following: What do the morbid, depressing accounts exchanged between the parts of a split personality, aim to achieve? Are they simply a detour to a painful situation? Or do they ultimately reflect it? Do they maybe mainly function as safety valves which release large doses of emotional anguish from the subconscious? Or do they project, in intense colours, alien scenes of horror and loathing in order to underplay and soften the personal drama and achieve the reconciliation of the alienated person with his own self and death. In this direction, the short note to the last work of E. Araouzou, is particularly eloquent and somewhat “daring” if not unexpected. Here, the author admits the book is based on “desperate letters” she wrote to her alienated self (“I named my one half Minerva and my other half Eva”) to deal with difficult times in her life. In other words, the creator gives her work an autobiographical character and leans towards eliminating the distances between herself and the main character of the story. However, modern literary theory and the text itself do not allow us (nor is it necessary) to attempt a sad biographical approach and identify the creator with her creations.
From the prologue, we still hold onto the reference to Miroland Pavich’s reading theory («Each reader must himself shape his book as a whole”), which the author seems to subscribe to. Indeed, both narratives of E. Araouzou presuppose a creative and suspecting reader, who is called upon to develop her elliptical and dense writing and to connect and correlate the fragmented and seemingly disconnected episodes from which they are constituted and decipher the allegorical stories told to alienated parts of a split personality. Gruesome and exotic tales of ghosts and reincarnations, dreams and fantasies, necrology and monomanias are some of the basic motifs which reappear in the vertebral narrative Blue. A series of inflated stories set in the French region of Aix-en-Provence or Paris of 1600 seem to roughly operate as the known “A thousand and one nights”; as an extension of life and in the case of Blue, as psychotherapy. But the two basic characters of the story, Ambrosios de Laon and Blue, who ultimately seem to be two versions of a split existence, are not simply heteronarrative story tellers, since from one point on they become self-narrative story tellers; they take on a protagonistic role, seeking their other half, to unite with, find their balance and integrate into a single personality. This is exactly where the Platonic myth of the androgynous man, according to which man, from the moment he split into his feminine and masculine parts, seeks his other half, is wrong. Let’s remember that in E. Araouzou’s Captive, the lonesome Erminia captures a man, Rodion, who seems, ultimately, to operate as her alter ego, the captive soul of the heroine seeking escape and fulfillment through the other sex, her other half.
All that we conventionally call “form” is indissolubly connected to the subject, the content. Τhe author subordinates her material to a well-orchestrated narrative universe and manages to leave no trace of writing. Nowhere in the text is the sense of redundancy or effort created. On the contrary the writing is austere and abstract. Τhe twenty-one individual sections and the epilogue of the text are articulated with each other not in a temporal and semantic order and sequence, but with imperceptible and yet artful coherent brushstrokes that often have a retrospective effect. Ιn several cases, elements of pre-preparation are sown and left to work in conjunction with appropriate allusive associations (such as the silk scarf used to strangle some characters, the blue eyes of the priest and the possessed nun, Ambrosios and Blue etc). Let us also refer to the operational use of the abstract design on the cover; the blue colour of the human figure references of course the name of the main heroin but also the multiple use of the colour blue in several points in the text, justifies the title of the book. The author deliberately and effectively chooses to place her gothic stories in quite distant times in the mid 16th century and around 1600 in medieval towns and villages of France. The erotic revolution of the “possessed” nun of the Ursuline Order and the “Satanic priest” with the blue eyes, who were punished by the inquisitors to death by stake, foretells the inglorious end of Blue’s split personality, who mutilates and torches her other self, Ambrosios de Laon. All that remains in both cases floods everything is “a deep blue light”. It is even suggested that both Aix’s thirteen year old girl and middle aged man who died of the plague and the priest and nun who were burned alive were reincarnated into the bisexual but single body of Ambrosios and Blue.
It is however worth observing that in all the strange and gruesome stories which intervene between the above two episodes – which usually refer to the split personality of Ambrosios and Blue, or constitute stories told by the one half to the other – characters reappear who suffocate in their environment and ultimately become destroyed: Both Ambrosios and Blue make futile attempts to get away from their shadows and drown in boredom. The innocent story of shepherdess Alithea Ricordeau resembles the story of the possessed nun; when the evil spirit nests in her soul and she decides to come out, she is strangled by a man (possibly Ambrosios or any Ambrosios). But also young Natalia who deserted the stifling environment of her village to work in a brothel in Paris, dies in the same way, while it is suggested that the killer is one and the same. The gipsy who advises the hero to stay away from the woman with the blue eyes and let go of the unattainable dream of happiness, meets a similar death. The lady on the train with the “greasy ponytail” is none other than Blue herself, who Ambrosios is seeking to find. The latter seeks to find out about her story from ghosts and write a book. He also glimmers in the face of the asexual Ekembolia who becomes conscious of his sex from the moment Blue appears in his life: he kisses her and sucks her blood, repeating a similar behaviour to her father. But also Pier, the father of Ambrosios, evolves into a psychiatric inmate, evidently due to dominant the behaviour of his wife. Generally, the shadow of death, the irrationality of existence and schizophrenia are permanently present in the book.
The inscription prefixed to the last unit of the book (those who seek their other half, love) taken from Plato’s Symposium ties in with the thematic axis of the narrative and functions ironically in relation to the forthcoming end (but also generally), since Blue, who is reconciled with death, exterminates the other (male) half of her existence and allows her spirit to become crystallised in words, into history. In a similar way the heroines of the encapsulated narratives, who dared to rebel against the regime and transcend the limits of their (female) existence, were exterminated. The rest of the prefixes to the sub sections of the book with quotations from Baudelaire, Browning, Defoe and Pavich, also prove to be functional.
In conclusion, one could argue that the strange narrative Blue of Efterpi Araouzou constitutes a remarkable piece of modern prose which departs in theme and style from the multitude of easily-written and easily digestible narratives but also from the claimed prose works of recent years. The author achieves, in my opinion, to raise, the inflated and gruesome accounts with her elliptical and well-settled writing and with the inventive structural constitution of the text, to art.
Lefteris Papaleontiou
Professor of Literature
Cyprus University
