''With the People from the Bridge'' (Greek: ''Με τους ανθρώπους από τη γέφυρα'') is the second part of the ''

Poena Damni In Greek mythology, Poena or Poine () is the spirit of punishment and the attendant of punishment to Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution. Sometimes mentioned as one being, and sometimes in the plural as Poenai (Ποιναί) and are akin ...

'' trilogy by Greek author

Dimitris Lyacos Dimitris Lyacos ( el, Δημήτρης Λυάκος; born 19 October 1966) is a contemporary Greek poet and playwright. He is the author of the ''Poena Damni'' trilogy. Lyacos's work is characterised by its genre-defying form and the avant-garde ...

. The book deals with the theme of loss and the return of the dead in the context of Christian

teleology Teleology (from and )Partridge, Eric. 1977''Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English'' London: Routledge, p. 4187. or finalityDubray, Charles. 2020 912Teleology" In ''The Catholic Encyclopedia'' 14. New York: Robert Appleton ...

. The text is encased in a post-theatrical

ritual A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized, b ...

drama form, drawing on various philosophical and literary sources as well as ancient and modern

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

folklore Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging ...

. The plot-line centers around an

Orpheus Orpheus (; Ancient Greek: Ὀρφεύς, classical pronunciation: ; french: Orphée) is a Thracian bard, legendary musician and prophet in ancient Greek religion. He was also a renowned poet and, according to the legend, travelled with Jaso ...

-like journey of the protagonist LG who joins his deceased companion in the grave and is subsequently led by her to a liminal realm ahead of the imminent

Resurrection Resurrection or anastasis is the concept of coming back to life after death. In a number of religions, a dying-and-rising god is a deity which dies and is resurrected. Reincarnation is a similar process hypothesized by other religions, which ...

Day. The work has been categorized by critics to belong to both the

Modernist Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, an ...

and the

Post-Modernist Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...

tradition, while at the same time bearing strong affinities to a variety of canonical texts, among others

Homer Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...

Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: '' ...

Kafka Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typi ...

, Joyce and Beckett.

Synopsis

''With the People from the Bridge'' follows the main line of narrative of '' Z213: Exit'', the first book of the

trilogy. The work opens with a first-person account of the

narrator Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the a ...

of ''Z213: Exit'', who recounts his arrival at a derelict train station named Nichtovo in search of a place where he has been told, an improvised performance is being staged by, what appears to be, a band of social outcasts. The

joins the few members of the audience present and goes on to record in his journal the setting as well as the events taking place "on stage" as the performance is about to begin. A group of four women in the role of a

Chorus Chorus may refer to: Music * Chorus (song) or refrain, line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse * Chorus effect, the perception of similar sounds from multiple sources as a single, richer sound * Chorus form, song in which all verse ...

and three other protagonists (LG, NCTV, Narrator) are making their final preparations in front of a dilapidated car among machine parts and the noise of a generator. As the lights "on stage" are lowered the performance sets off with the Chorus's opening monologue followed in turn by the sequence of recitations of the other characters. The story unfolds during the timeline of a calendar day dedicated to the dead, a kind of

All Souls' Day All Souls' Day, also called ''The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed'', is a day of prayer and remembrance for the faithful departed, observed by certain Christian denominations on 2 November. Through prayer, intercessions, alms and ...

Saturday of Souls Saturday of Souls (or Soul Saturday) is a day set aside for the commemoration of the dead within the liturgical year of the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches. Saturday is a traditional day of prayer for the dead, because Christ lay d ...

. The plot line originates in the

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...

incident (

Mark Mark may refer to: Currency * Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina * East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic * Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927 * F ...

, 5:9), according to which the Gerasene demoniac begs Jesus to spare him from his torments. In the play enacted, LG assumes and expands on the role of the demoniac, recounting his past condition and describing how he has ended up taking residence in a cemetery. In a kind of simultaneous narration, LG recounts how he has opened the grave of his deceased companion (NCTV), prompted by voices he has been hearing. He enters, finds her body inside and feels compelled to stay with her, eventually making the realization that she is gradually coming back to life. Meanwhile, the Chorus is making preparations in anticipation of the yearly visit of their deceased kin, and LG and NCTV eventually join them after having broken off from a crowd of revenants aroused on the occasion of the Soul Saturday. As the day comes to an end, LG and NCTV leave and become again part of the crowd they had broken off from. Despite trying to hold on to each other they are finally absorbed in an indefinite collective of souls moving ahead and crossing "the bridge between the worlds" as a Christian-like resurrection appears on the horizon. The book concludes with the epilogue of the on-stage(internal) Narrator recounting the process by which a mob gathered in a cemetery unearths two bodies, ritually "killing" the female by driving a stake in her chest, in a manner akin to handling vampires in the Slavonic tradition. A final narrative twist is offered by the presence of a tabloid clipping which delivers the reader back to a stark and gruesome everyday reality.

Genre

With the people from the bridge is a

cross-genre A hybrid genre is a literary genre that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres. Works in hybrid genres are often referred to as cross-genre, multi-genre, mixed genre, or fusion genre. Hybrid genres are a longstanding element ...

work combining prose narrative with dramatic monologues written in poetry form. Verse soliloquies, elements of staging and ritual as well as choral incantations and simple descriptions are combined to create a polyvalent text approximating both poetry and drama. The makeshift stage as well as the presence of actors give the text its dramatic character, while action and setting, filtered through a spectator's perspective, bring to prominence the dimension of storytelling. Self-reflexive theatricality achieved through a clear-cut presentation of the division of spectators, actors, and director and accounted for by the unifying voice of an external narrator leads to the work's classification as a piece of

metatheatre Metatheatre, and the closely related term metadrama, describes the aspects of a play that draw attention to its nature as drama or theatre, or to the circumstances of its performance. "Breaking the Fourth Wall" is an example of a metatheatrical de ...

. Further, and due to a constellation of elements including broken narrative, fragmented characters, and illusory/imagistic setting, conveyed in the form of a personal experience of an audience member, the work has been categorized as a distinctively postmodern play. However, because of its allegiance and focus on a Grand Narrative reconstruction it seems to stand at a distance from postmodern associations.

Style

The People from the Bridge is fragmentary, hallucinatory, at once firmly rooted in a complex webwork of allusions and drifting free of referentiality, evading attempts to pin it down. It exhibits a version of postmodern eclecticism, alternating poetry with prose parts. Despite its postmodern affinities, it can be construed, however, in line with the High Modernist tradition setting aside the postmodern playfulness for serious and earnest handling of the subject. The text develops in a series of intermittent monologues interspersed with biblical excerpts and the comments of the first-order

. The biblical elements together with vampiric and dystopian images work in tandem, creating a sense of foreboding and entrapment. Language is sparse and fragmentary, leaving enough loopholes to be completed by the reader and making no explicit mention of its vampire-related theme in order to reveal its storyline in a gradual and minimalist manner. Short declarative sentences are used to convey immediacy and facticity in the depiction of a grim world. Allusions and a wealth of cultural references are conveyed through sparse and seemingly casual monologues and which, at the same time, account for the text heading simultaneously at different directions. On occasions, the monologues seems to be ungrammatical and on others, the characters seem to be turning back on their words. There is an effect akin to

stream of consciousness In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. The term was coined by Daniel Oliver (physician), Daniel Ol ...

, the text, however, develops in a linear way among the overlapping stories of the four protagonists.

Ellipsis The ellipsis (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term origin ...

in narrative conjoined with the simplicity of stage movement and the framework of a predominantly static performance, point to

as well as ritualistic theatre.

Structure

The work is structured in the form of an external-frame narrative by a first-order, unreliable

(the narrator of Z213: Exit) who sets the stage for the development of the inside story. Within this master narrative, four hyponarratives by Narrator (internal/second-order), Chorus, LG, and NCTV contribute fragments of the story from their own point of view. As different narratives within the play intertwine, new elements come to the foreground but there is also a sense in which each individual narration overlaps with the others creating an effect of multiple focalizations. The language of the text is simple and idiomatic while the syntax is occasionally disrupted by lacunae as well as incomplete sentences. Partial fragmentation combines, however, with a more conventional (although most of the time elliptical) linguistic use for the purpose of bringing forward the

storytelling Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural pre ...

-like the character of the work.

Title

An earlier version of the text, similar in subject matter and structure but significantly different 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 An incantation, a spell, a charm, an enchantment or a bewitchery, is a magical formula intended to trigger a magical effect on a person or objects. The formula can be spoken, sung or chanted. An incantation can also be performed during ceremo ...

to the goddess of the moon in

Magical Papyri The Greek Magical Papyri (Latin: ''Papyri Graecae Magicae'', abbreviated ''PGM'') is the name given by scholars to a body of papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, written mostly in ancient Greek (but also in Old Coptic, Demotic, etc.), which each con ...

, a syncretic compilation of texts from the

Hellenistic In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...

Period focusing on

sorcery Sorcery may refer to: * Magic (supernatural), the application of beliefs, rituals or actions employed to subdue or manipulate natural or supernatural beings and forces ** Witchcraft, the practice of magical skills and abilities * Magic in fiction, ...

and folk religion. In the previous version of the book, Nyctivoe is a proper name ascribed to the female character of the story, substituted in the new version by NCTV (the sequence of consonants in Nyctivoe). The current title makes reference both to the setting where the events in the book are described to take place as well as to the bridge crossed by the crowd in the final part of the book. The bridge as the symbol of passage from the world of the living to the realm of the dead relates to the

Chinvat bridge The Chinvat Bridge (Avestan: 𐬗𐬌𐬥𐬬𐬀𐬙𐬋 𐬞𐬈𐬭𐬈𐬙𐬏𐬨 ''Cinvatô Peretûm'', "bridge of judgement" or "beam-shaped bridge") or the Bridge of the Requiter in Zoroastrianism is the sifting bridge, which separates t ...

in the

Zoroastrian Zoroastrianism is an Iranian religion and one of the world's oldest organized faiths, based on the teachings of the Iranian-speaking prophet Zoroaster. It has a dualistic cosmology of good and evil within the framework of a monotheistic on ...

religion. Also, the bridge is a symbol of a non-place relating to the name of the station(Nichtovo) the narrator of the book recalls having arrived at. From a perspective of social commentary on contemporary events, the title has been also interpreted to point to the "living bridge" of illegal

immigrants Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and ...

seeking a Promised Land of plenty.

Publication history and critical reception

The People from the Bridge received a number of twenty-five unanimously positive international reviews until spring 2021. Literary critic Aaron Schneider praised the book as an extraordinary reading experience due to the way the poem "articulates alienation, but, also and more importantly, ..the way this alienation is accompanied by a pervasive sense of trauma" and concluding that "in this moment when the world has been so thoroughly de-familiarized and we have all been dislocated from ourselves, With the People from the Bridge is as essential as it is possible for a book to be. The book has been the subject of a considerable amount of scholarly criticism and also appears in the course contents of various university curricula on postmodern fiction. A second revised edition was published in October 2018 ().

References

{{Reflist

External links

An excerpt from the book published in Trafika Europe magazineAn interview with the author in The Writing Disorder Magazine
2014 novels Greek novels Postmodern plays Metafictional novels Self-reflexive plays