Poena Damni (1-3) by Dimitris Lyacos
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Overview: Dimitris Lyacos (b. 1966) is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy. Renowned for its genre-defying form and the avant-garde combination of themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology, Lyacos’s work reexamines grand narratives in the context of some of the enduring motifs of the Western Canon. Poena Damni, is arranged around a cluster of concepts including the scapegoat, the quest, the return of the dead, redemption, physical suffering, and mental illness. Lyacos’s characters are always at a distance from society as fugitives, like the narrator of Z213: Exit, outcasts in a dystopian hinterland like the characters in With the people from the bridge, or marooned, like the protagonist of The First Death whose struggle for survival unfolds on a desertlike island. Classified as postmodern and cross-genre, Poena Damni is referred to as one of the salient examples of the fragmentation technique – despite, however, its postmodern affinities, it is also construed in line with the High Modernist tradition setting aside the postmodern playfulness for a serious and earnest handling of the subject. In 1984, Lyacos set about writing the first installment of what would later become the Poena Damni trilogy. The work, in its current form, developed as a work in progress over the course of thirty years with subsequent editions and excerpts appearing in journals around the world, as well as in dialogue with a diverse range of sister projects it inspired – drama, contemporary dance, video and sculpture installations, photography, opera and contemporary music. The trilogy has been translated into six major languages and is extensively performed across Europe and the United States. In its unique style that conflates poetry with prose and resisting classification, Poena Damni is one of the leading examples of contemporary writing coming from Europe and the most recent Greek literary work that has achieved international reputation.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics > Poetry
Z213: EXIT (Poena Damni #1)
Z213: EXIT is the first installment of the Poena Damni trilogy: a camp, a train, soldiers, a Bible with notes inside, encroaching darkness, the struggle to remember, the struggle of hiding, physical pain. As if waking up in a nightmare an escapee recounts his fleeting experiences in a series of fragmented diary entries in a hide-and-seek game with Death or even God. Written in a unique prose style, at times bordering on poetry and conveying a “pilgrimage of the soul” through a series of increasingly haunting pieces, Z213: EXIT creates the feeling that reader and narrator are led together through an eschatological experience. Horror is created by the scantiest vocabulary craftily combined to form a broken, unstructured syntax, seemingly tight, but leaving enough loopholes through which the reader’s subconscious fears can pop in and out. Although evidently post-modernist, this is a book that does not undermine or shrink the traditional Grand Narrative themes; on the contrary, it thrives on them.
With the People from the Bridge (Poena Damni #2)
Acclaimed by critics worldwide, With the People from the Bridge is a unique distillation of literary genres, an all-in-one densely layered poem, play, postmodern epic, a small-scale wide-scope apocalyptic tragedy. An immersive experience where voices issue from characters in a state of trance, drift crackling out of a TV set or a cassette player and the contours of reality begin to darkle and shift while trains still pass up overhead, audience members get up to leave, performers creep out through back-exits. This is the day and the place for the imminent return of the dead and the reader sees them approaching as he peeks through the gaps of Lyacos’s elliptical storytelling.
Radical in its recasting of content and narrative form this is one of those rare books that unravel visions of wholeness and collective redemption within the darkest aspects of our folk and religious tradition. Perhaps the dead can rise again. Perhaps the world is ending only to begin afresh.
The First Death (Poena Damni #3)
Despite being first in the publication history of the Poena Damni trilogy, Dimitris Lyacos’s The First Death is the latest installment of the narrative sequence. A booklet found by the protagonist of Z213: EXIT during the course of his voyage, The First Death tells the story of a marooned man on a desert island – or has him tell it. In a sequence of fourteen sections the crippled protagonist struggles for his survival. Through an inexhaustible fecundity of imagery and a sense of unquenchable vitality in the midst of denial and despair a relentless fight develops between the character and the elements, as well as his physical and mental disintegration. Lyacos brings to bear a formidable culture in which fragments of ancient Greek are embedded in a supple modern idiom, and a variety of classical and biblical references are seamlessly integrated into the text. The violence and intensity of his vision combined with the headlong energy of his verse reveal a tragic inner landscape. The protagonist here could be a modern Philoctetes or an inverted version of Crusoe; but as the ordeal on the island comes to an end one is not finally sure whether one has encountered simply a wretched stump of humanity or, rather, a proudly self-mutilated god.
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