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Arcadia, My
Arcadia |
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I feel passionate about the story of Arcadia, My Arcadia. Taking place between the end of World War II and the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and mostly episodic and partly epistolary, it is the tale of a country boy's (Angelos Vlahos') struggle to leave the extreme poverty, misfortune and misrule of his home in Arcadia (Greece) and come to America to work and study.
Arcadia, My Arcadia intends in part to give a vivid picture of life in rural Greece in the middle part of the last century: oppressively poor and unlucky yet tenacious, traditional yet inclining slowly toward modernization, religious yet beleaguered by political and educational corruption. It is a coming-of-age, as well as a coming-to-America period story of a particular sort: it has at its center a self-reliance that, at least in my generation, has often resulted in remarkable success among my fellow Arcadians and other Greek people, many of whom came from nothing and ended, by means of a native persistence and perseverance, as successful businessmen and professionals and, in this country, exemplars of the American Dream.
My narrative is driven by Angelos' courage, persistence and intelligence, by his moral integrity amid corruption, by the straits of his life as the son of struggling farmers and by the hope of a reunion with a girl, already in America, whom he knew in his childhood and with whom he corresponded. (The story finds her rendered fatherless by a corrupt chauvinist police chief in rural Greece who executes him on suspicion of communist sympathies.) Arcadia, My Arcadia is marked by real figures and events throughout, which (in the first place) situate the story historically and (in the second) contrast with the smaller-scale plight of the common boy and his resolve to use his bookish talents as a means for coming to America.
Arcadia, My Arcadia is a reply, as it were, to Virgil and the romantic English poets. As Prof. Vassiliki Rapti (University of Missouri St. Louis, Personal Communication) has noted in her thorough book review, "The author unsettles the myth of Arcadia as a setting for bucolic verse such as known from Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses and romanticized by English poets such as Sidney, Spenser and Keats. In lieu of a sylvan paradise, where Bacchus and the nymphs perform dances to Pan's pipe tunes, Arcadia is depicted as a realistic rocky place, condemned by both God and people, that has witnessed social injustice and the turmoils of WWII and the Civil War, all of which are engraved in Angelos' soul."
Looking back at my characters now, I don't see them in terms of themselves, in terms of their physical and surface characteristics. I think of them, rather, as the ideas and ideas they embody. They are not so much as men and women as they are manifestations of the eternal human spirit, irrepressible and unwilling to give in to misfortune. As Prof. Jason Peters of Augustana College aptly wrote, "This is one of those stories that testify to the indomitable power of the human will."
Preparing this story I agonized giving birth
to my characters. Now, if I am ever very, very happy, it is during the
long nights when I sit with these men and women of my fancy as I would
with real people. I identify with them, with all their experiences and
actions. I vicariously participate in their lives to learn just a
little bit more about what it means to be simply human. I love them,
rejoice with them and grow more mature with them, and at times I even
weep sincere tears over their struggles and misfortunes.
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