A Lifetime Squared: Of Performativity and Performance in Aris Alexandrou's Mission Box

Abstract

  The politics of confession in Modern Greek literature of the Civil War is a topic that deserves to be explored through the lens of speech-act theory. In Aris Alexandrou's Mission Box, the confessional narrative seems to straddle the lines between performance and performativity. The discourse of performance (already present in the work's prequel, Alexandrou's Antigone) works within a prescribed ideological framework where exchangeability and expendability are the primary signifiers. It is palpable both in the rhetorical tropes/fillings which abound in the narrative as well as in the “squared logic” which the narrator professes to embody. Nevertheless, the latter's attempt to act out the Party syllogism gradually collapses, rhetoric preempting language of its citational/iterable potential. Curiously, it is this lack of iterability that actually turns the performance into a performative, redeeming the confessant if only for his intention to be heard. It is, moreover, to be noted, that in articulating the problematics of ideology, truth and the Civil War, Alexandrou's novel resonates with both his contemporaries and the ancients (including Plato, Sophocles and Thucydides).