396 Maria Boletsi

MARIA BOLETSI

How to Do Things With Poems

Performativity in the Poetry of C.P. Cavafy

The theory of the performative – in its initial version by J.L. Austin and in its poststructuralist revi-
sions – allows us to explore speech acts within C.P. Cavafy’s poem as well as how his poems themselves
can function as performatives. Performativity in these poems functions along four interrelated planes of
performance, all of which are central to Cavafy’s poetry: the erotic, the theatrical/public, the historical,
and the linguistic. Recurring instances of “infelicitous” performatives in Cavafy’s poems, especially unkept
promises, reveal the critical and creative potential of this infelicity. The repeated failures and communi-
cative gaps in the poems nevertheless work towards a notion of a felicitous poetic event, in which failure is
transformed into a critical act and a motivating force for practices of constant revaluation.

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,

they’ve built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind-
because I had so much to do outside.
From “Walls” (T
), 18961
I’ve brought to Art desires and sensations:
things half-glimpsed,
faces or lines, certain indistinct memories
of unfulfilled love affairs.
Let me submit to Art:
Art knows how to shape forms of Beauty,
almost imperceptibly completing life,
blending impressions, blending day with day.
From “I’ve brought to Art” (E

«  T ), 1921
When read next to each other, C.P. Cavafy’s “Walls” and “I’ve brought to Art”
express two states, which, different as they are, seem to be causally related: the
first state, given in “Walls,” involves a frustration generated by the burning
desire to act in the world (“ … I had so much to do outside”) and the violent
suspension of that desire (“they’ve built walls around me …”). The second
state, in “I’ve brought to Art,” is defined by the poet’s act of submitting to

1 For all quotations from Cavafy’s poems in this article I will be using the translations by Edmund
Keeley and Philip Sherrard.
arcadia Band 41 (2006) Heft 2 DOI 10.1515/ARCA.2006.025

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 How to Do Things With Poems 397

Art, which promises to fulfill his desire to act and live, “completing life” in this
way.
These two states marked Cavafy’s life and poetry. “Outside his poems,” to
quote a famous statement by George Seferis, “Cavafy does not exist” (Seferis
362, my translation). Cavafy led a rather passive life, caught up in the dull routine
of a middle-class bureaucrat with a sexually deviant private life, which he had to
hide and, as the years went by, give up and hold on to only as a memory. In the
words of Marguerite Yourcenar, his existence was “limited to the routine of of-
fice and café, library and low tavern, confined in space to a monotonous itiner-
ary through one city, extraordinarily free in time” (Yourcenar 3). Being a Greek
homosexual poet in Alexandria (Egypt) and having spent many years of his
childhood in England and Istanbul, are facts that also marked his complex posi-
tion in-between worlds and the impossibility of fitting completely in any of
them. Between Europe and Africa, between the (upper) middle – class circles
and the lower classes he came in contact with in cafés and infamous taverns, be-
tween conventions and socially forbidden desires, between the private and the
public, appearances and suppressed thoughts, Cavafy was feeling more and more
trapped, as the walls that he describes in his poem were getting thicker and
higher, closing him off from the world. The more the walls were isolating him,
the more he was submitting to Art, an art “almost imperceptibly completing
life,” if not replacing it. His poetry was more than a pastime or a side activity; it
was also more than a way of recording experiences, thoughts and memories or
representing his worldview. In it he wished to find a power greater than that of
representation or description: the power to act and create. As if to make up for
the suspension of action in his life, he turned to poetry and tried to live and act
through it. A poem such as “I’ve brought to Art” suggests the performative
power he wished for his poetry, a power that would transform poetic language
into action and even resurrect or give life to figures of the imagination.
The potential that Cavafy saw in (poetic) language in the beginning of the
20th century, namely to act rather than just describe, state or represent, has pre-
occupied theorists and philosophers, especially since J.L. Austin introduced his
speech act theory (also known as the theory of the performative) in the 1950s.2
In the following, I will read a number of Cavafian poems inspired by the theo-
retical possibilities that this theory has opened up. That Cavafy himself saw a
performative force in poetry provides an additional interest to the critical explo-
ration of his poems through the lense of speech act theory.
In Austin’s terminology, as it is laid out in How to Do Things With Words, a “per-
formative” or “speech act” is an utterance that does what it says, that constitutes

2 Austin introduced his speech act theory in a series of lectures at Harvard in the 1950s, but his
lectures were only posthumously published in 1962 with the title How to Do Things with Words. In
his theory the terms “speech act” and “performative” are being used interchangeably.

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398 Maria Boletsi

an event. Unlike constative (descriptive) utterances, which can be either true or

false, performatives can be successful or unsuccessful – “felicitous” or “infelici-
tous,” in Austin’s terms. The felicity of the speech act largely depends on the
series of conventions (constituting the “felicity conditions”) surrounding every
communicative situation, which, if kept, make sure that the speech act does not
“misfire.”
Austin explicitly expels literary discourse from his theoretical considerations.
By arguing that his analysis only applies to words spoken “seriously,” he relegates
literary performatives, whether they are performed on the theatrical stage, or
read in a poem or novel, to a “non-serious” use of language and thus regards
them as infelicitous performatives. Nevertheless, his theory has been extensively
employed by theorists for the study of literary utterances. To think of speech acts
in literature starts with the simple question of what literary utterances can do
with words, but the question can be answered in different ways. I will here exam-
ine speech acts that appear within a number of Cavafy’s poems (promises, threats,
warnings, orders etc.), and I will also ask how some poems function as per-
formatives themselves, considered in their totality.3 Revisiting Cavafian poetry
through the theory of performativity is not merely a matter of applying a new vo-
cabulary to old readings: I believe that the study of the performative aspects of
Cavafy’s poetry can help cast a different light on some of the most exhaustively
examined themes in the Cavafian corpus, and inspire new readings for a number
of poems. I will make use of Austin’s terms, while at the same time problematize
their initial meaning and theoretical implications in Austin’s theory.4 Although
Austin’s theory will be my starting point, I will draw as well from poststructural-
ist revisions of the performative. I will pay special attention to the way the per-
formative is rethought by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, who both challenge
Austin’s theory and his exclusion of literary utterances, by stressing the impor-
tance of citation and iteration in consolidating the power of the performative.
Throughout Cavafy’s poetry speech acts appear with surprising frequency.
Warnings, threats, orders, judgements, requests, or denials are very often ex-
pressed by characters in the poems or by the poetic voice. No performative,
though, is more recurrent than that of the promise. Promises, implicit or explicit,

3 This double way of studying speech acts in literature is also taken up by J. Hillis Miller (1).
4 It is worth mentioning here that the definition of some of the terms of the speech act theory
does not remain stable throughout Austin’s book. The definition of the performative itself
broadens unexpectedly towards the end of the book, when Austin reaches the conclusion that
constative utterances are also performatives of a certain kind, performing actions of stating,
affirming, describing etc. Austin’s own act of modifying his theory while writing it is a perfect
example of an attitude that views theory not as a sacred object, but as something that needs to be
renewed and informed or even replaced when proven inadequate in practice. This example of
theoretical flexibility and open-mindedness invites readers of Austin’s theory to use it as a tool,
not an end in itself.

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 How to Do Things With Poems 399

are constantly made by poetic characters to others or to themselves, but most of

the times they cannot be kept, because they are either deliberately broken, or the
speaker never intended to keep them in the first place. Looking closer, one can-
not help noticing that infelicitous speech acts in Cavafy outnumber felicitous
ones. Promises are broken, orders are not executed, prayers are not heard, warn-
ings are not taken seriously. Something in the communicative situation sur-
rounding every speech act seems to go wrong; some of the criteria that guarantee
the success of a performative utterance are lacking. The intriguing issue of the
failure of performatives in Cavafy’s poetry, and especially the underlying reasons,
the implications and perlocutionary effects of this failure, will be my main
focus.5
In her analysis of the act of seduction in Don Juan, Shoshana Felman notices
the homological relation of the three basic meanings of the word “act” to the
three connotations of the word “performative” in English: the erotic, the the-
atrical and the linguistic connotation (Felman 15). These three meanings consti-
tute inextricably interrelated axes in Cavafy’s poetry. At the same time, all three
are highly problematic in the Cavafian universe. The erotic act in Cavafy is always
the homosexual act. This act, socially reprehensible, is either cancelled or per-
formed in secret, forcing the poetic subject to lead a double life: a secret/private
and a public life. Mostly generated by a “deviant” sexuality, this split of the self
into a private and a public persona often leads to theatrical performances, which
I here correlate with public performances. Public performances in Cavafy usually
have a theatrical undertone: they are staged and hypocritical6, constituting a
facade for the character’s hidden private life. Moreover, they can be considered
theatrical because the discourse they employ is often hollow, especially in
Cavafy’s historical poems: they conform to social conventions or rituals and are
performed only for the sake of conventionality and formality, without any truth
or meaning beyond the performance itself.
The erotic and the theatrical both come together in the linguistic, for the ob-
vious reason that in Cavafy they form part of a poetic universe and are thus per-
formed in language. Linguistic performance – the way language can (or cannot)
act – is thematized in many of Cavafy’s poems, in which the power but also the
limitations of language are explored. Next to the three kinds of performances
mentioned above, I will add the performance of history, which also forms a vital
part of the performance-nexus in Cavafy. My discussion will thus be structured
along these four strands: the erotic, the theatrical (or the public), the historical,
and the linguistic performance.

5 The term “perlocutionary act” in Austin refers to the production of effects on the interlocutor
(surprising, convincing, misleading, deceiving etc.).
6 Also in the original sense of the word “hypocrisy,” as play-acting.

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400 Maria Boletsi

The study of performativity in Cavafy’s poetry through these four strands will
lead me to the final question of whether and, if so, how the failures and com-
municative gaps in this poetry nevertheless work towards poetic events that are
felicitous. My definition of “felicitous” in this case will be poetry that still has
something to say in the present and can have an effect on contemporary culture;
poetry that turns failure into a critical act and transforms it into a motivating
force for practices of constant revaluation.

Promises and intentions betrayed:

performing the erotic through language

The question of intentionality takes center stage in the theory of the per-
formative. In a certain sense, Austin’s theory seems to break with intention. The
felicity of a speech act is more dependent on social conventions than on the
inner intention of the speaker.7 At the same time, however, Austin’s theory pre-
supposes a pre-determined, willing, intentional subject that is the originating
source of the speech act and is responsible for both the act and its perlocution-
ary effects. Intention remains thus a central axis in Austin’s account. Let us not
forget that literature is excluded from his theory, because literary speech acts are
not “serious,” thus not uttered with the intention of being taken seriously.
In Cavafian poetry the issue of intention cannot be bypassed. In the erotic
poems in particular, there is often a discrepancy between intention and action,
when a character is acting against his intentions. Out of this clash between inten-
tion and action emerges the speech act of promise, usually in the form of a com-
mitment or pledge to oneself. In “He swears” (O
) the character in the
poem pledges to start a better life. His pledge, however, is broken by the seduc-
tive power of another promise: that of the night and of its sensual pleasures:
But when night comes with its own counsel,
its own compromises and prospects –
when night comes with its own power
of a body that needs and demands,
he returns, lost, to the same fatal pleasure.
The word translated by Keeley and Sherrard as “prospects” is the Greek word
for “promises.” The promise of the erotic act, which at the same time appears as
a demand and need of the body, takes over the moral intentions of the mind. In
the poem, the conflict between intention and action is played out on a battlefield
delineated by the split between the mental and the physical, the mind and the
body. The repetitious nature of the pledge (“he swears every now and then to begin

7 Thus, when a person says “I promise” s/he has performed the act, even if s/he did not intend to
keep the promise.

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 How to Do Things With Poems 401

a better life,” my emphasis) intensifies the sense of the character’s inner struggle
and underscores the repeated failure (the infelicity) of his pledge. The first four
verses in the Greek original are cut in two8, with a gap left between them on the
page, which suggests the split of the self between a pledge made in language and
a body that “demands.” The force of the erotic seems stronger than the force of
the linguistic performance. These two are in fact placed here in opposing camps.
In “Of the Jews (A.D. 50)” [T E
 (50 . .)] the voice of an uniden-
tified narrator in the first two verses introduces Ianthis: “Painter and poet,
runner, discus-thrower, / beautiful as Endymion: Ianthis son of Anthony.” Fol-
lowing this typically Hellenic portrait of a man, the third verse, reveals his Jewish
descent: “From a family on close terms with the Synagogue.” After this some-
what contradictory introduction, the narrator quotes a statement made by Ian-
this himself:
“My most valuable days are those
when I give up the pursuit of sensuous beauty,
when I desert the elegant and severe cult of Hellenism
...........................................
and become the man I would want to remain forever:
son of the Jews, the holy Jews.”
His statement is an attempt to (re)define his cultural identity and his sense of be-
longing. At the same time, despite its constative character, it could also be read as
a statement of intention or a promise: a promise to give up Hellenism and the
pursuit of sensual pleasure, and dedicate himself to Judaism. Right afterwards,
the narrator appears again to repeat part of Ianthis’s words. This second citation
of Ianthis’s words encourages a free interpretation of the kind of speech act Ian-
this utters, because the verb of the primary sentence is omitted: “A most fervent
declaration on his part: ‘ … to remain forever / a son of the Jews, the Holy
Jews.’” The reader is thus invited to replace the verb “I would want (to remain)”
with “I promise (to remain).” The next verses come as the confirmation of what
the reader may have suspected, the failure of the promise: “But he didn’t remain
anything of the kind. / The Hedonism and Art of Alexandria / kept him as their
dedicated son.” The illocutionary force of Ianthis’s statement, which would,
as he had hoped, constitute him as a Jew, is neutralized by the narrator’s initial
and closing verses, which emphasize “Hellenism” and “Hedonism” as stronger
forces. Placed at the beginning and the end of the poem, the narrator’s utter-
ances close off and eventually silence the character’s performative. The char-
acter’s inner struggle and the infelicity of his self-declaratory speech act are due
to the incompatibility of two co-existing cultural codes, Judaism and Hellenism,
and the character’s wish to eliminate the one in favor of the other.

8 In Keeley and Sherrard’s translation the gaps are not preserved.

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402 Maria Boletsi

There are more poems where the urge to follow the body’s erotic desire
proves to be stronger than the subject’s resolutions and promises to himself. In
“He had planned to read” (2H




) the intention stated in the title
is very soon given up. The poem, like many others in Cavafy, underscores the in-
compatibility of the act of studying or writing poetry (linguistic acts) with the
(homosexual) erotic act: “He’s completely devoted to books- / but he’s twenty
three, and very good looking” (my emphasis). And thus Eros wins him and the
books stay on the shelves.
Other characters appear determined to combine study with sensual pleasure,
like the character in “Dangerous thoughts” (T


), who is convinced
that he can give in to his erotic desires and at the same time recover at will his
“ascetic spirit as it was before.” However, the title of the poem indicates the nar-
row ground on which the character’s statement rests, and becomes the poet’s
own speech act of warning that such combinations are dangerous and bound to
fail. In “Understanding” (N «) the opposition between poetry and (erotic)
action is correlated with age, with the erotic act being reserved for one’s youth,
and poetry for an old man’s reflection and contemplation. Once more, during
the poetic subject’s days of youth, his intentions and resolutions to refrain from
the erotic act fail here repeatedly: “And my resolutions to hold back, to change, /
lasted two weeks at the most.”9
The suggestion in some of these poems that action and language (language as
study or poetry writing) are incompatible, could lead to the conclusion that Ca-
vafian poetry privileges a constative view of language, limited to description or
representation of “real” action. There are more poems that seem to propagate
such a view. In “Comes to rest” (N


) an erotic vision from the poet’s
youth “comes to rest in this poetry” after twenty-six years. In “When they come
alive” (2O
 


) the poet, in what appears to be a self-address, urges
himself to hold on to his visions: “Try to keep them, poet, / those erotic visions
of yours, / […] put them, half-hidden, in your lines.” Poetry appears to be a stor-
age place for memories, or a net to capture visions that would otherwise escape.
But does the poet merely wish to record these visions and memories? If that is
the case, why is it that the poetic voice is so uncertain and anxious about the suc-
cess of this “recording”? This anxiety is often betrayed by the use of per-
formative instead of constative language: In “When they come alive” the speech
act of urging or ordering is expressed by means of the imperative (“try to keep
them …” my emphasis). The title of the former poem, “Comes to rest,” could
also be translated differently from the Greek original (“N
”), as an order:

9 The repetitive nature of the resolutions (and their failure) is suggested in the Greek original by
the tense of the verb “last” (“


”), indicating a repeated or continuous action in the
past.

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 How to Do Things With Poems 403

“Rest!”10 In “Gray” (

) we find the same performative use of language.
Here the imperative receives the tone of a fervent plea. It is his former lover’s
eyes that the poet begs memory to keep: “Memory, keep them the way they were. /
And memory, whatever you can bring back of that love, / whatever you can, bring
back tonight” (my emphasis).
These orders, urges, requests and pleas suggest the hope the subject invests in
memory through language, but also his fear that language, as a vehicle for visual
memory, may fail to carry out what he asks. Apparently, in poetic language there
is more at stake than a mere recording of images and memories. The poet asks
and expects more of language: to revive his memories, to bring his visions to life
and help him experience them sensually through a different kind of act, but an
act nonetheless: the poetic performative. The descriptions of erotic encounters
and visions in the poems are surrounded and enclosed by performatives, which
transform them from constative utterances into acts that language promises to
perform, now that the body cannot perform anymore. With the erotic act having
been suspended due to old age or missed opportunities, poetry of recollection is
called to serve as the agent for the re-enactment of the sexual performance.
Poetic language, however, does not always keep its promise. There is no guar-
antee that memories and erotic visions will be successfully performed in every
reading of the poems. Their felicity as performatives is not determined by their
creator, because the poet’s intentions do not govern them. The poet is aware that
he has no absolute authority over his poems and that the act of poetry-writing
does not only involve creation or mastery over an object, but submitting and
being shaped by the object as well. No poem enacts this reciprocal relationship
between the poet and his Art better than “I’ve brought to Art.” In the first half
of the poem (verses 1–5 in the translation) the poet reflects on his “contribu-
tion” to Art: “I’ve brought to Art desires and sensations: / things half-glimpsed,
/ faces or lines, certain indistinct memories / of unfulfilled love affairs.” In the
second part the poet willingly suspends his authority and intention; he submits
to poetry, expecting that she will now repay him by giving shape to his desires,
sensations and blurred erotic memories, consequently “completing life.”
The poet expects the poems to act autonomously and their perlocutionary ef-
fects to reach him, just as they reach the readers. He often addresses Poetry, Art,
Memory, Eros, Discretion ( «) and other concepts with a capital letter, as
autonomous, anthropomorphic entities, with will and power of their own to act.

10 The title is repeated in the body of the poem as a secondary sentence “ 
 …” (“came
to stay …”). However, that should not be binding for our interpretation of the title. Therefore, the
title (“N
”) could be a secondary sentence, dependent on the (omitted and implied) verb
“” [“(comes) to stay”], but it could also be an independent, primary sentence, expressing an
urge or order, as in: “I urge/order this vision to rest in this poetry.” According to the first inter-
pretation, we have a constative use of language, and according to the second, a performative use.

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404 Maria Boletsi

The poetic subject in many of Cavafy’s poems wishes to find himself in words, or
to let words shape him. The relation of the poet to his art is not one of subordi-
nation of object to subject, but one of mutual influence.
The performative force that the subject invests in poetic utterances, as well as
his willingness to give in to acts of poetry, work against the assumption that in
the poems a fully formed subject possesses a pre-existing intentional state. The
vulnerable, divided characters, who break their promises almost at the same mo-
ment they utter them, whose speech acts are contrasted with their inner feelings,
and whose public and private performances are so often contradictory, lack clear
intentions. Contrary to Austin’s belief in an intentional subject at the origin of
speech acts, poetic performatives in most of the poems that I have so far exam-
ined are not generated by an already formed, unified subject that has full au-
thority over them, but are part of the process of subject formation. The subject
is both their producer and their effect.

The theatre stage: language and public performance

Austin excluded literature from his theory on the grounds that literary language
is hollow and void, and that literary performatives thus constitute a non-serious
use of language (there is, for example, no serious intention to kill somebody
when an actor threatens to do so on stage).11 But is this hollowness and lack of
seriousness an exclusive attribute of literary language?
In “Alexandrian Kings” (A

 

«) Cleopatra’s children are
being proclaimed kings in front of a huge crowd of Alexandrians. The ceremony
is a big theatrical performance, a “festival” as Cavafy calls it, without seriousness:
only three years before the defeat of Antonius in Actium, the children are being
appointed kings of areas, some of which have not yet been conquered (Bien 29).
The speeches and proclamations during the ceremony are thus fake and hollow,
and Cleopatra’s children, in their luxurious outfits, figure as tragic actors in a
play. It is remarkable that the crowd in Alexandria knows, but still decides to take
part in the celebration, through a willing suspension of disbelief, similar to that
of the reader of a novel or the spectator of a play:
and the Alexandrians thronged to the festival
full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations
in Greek, and Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
charmed by the lovely spectacle –

11 “A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor
on the stage, or introduced in a poem, or spoken in a soliloquy […] Language in such circum-
stances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal
use […] All this we are excluding at present from consideration. Our performative utterances,
felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances” (Austin 22).

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 How to Do Things With Poems 405

though they knew of course what all this was worth,

what empty words they really were, those kingships.

By means of poetic discourse Cavafy manages to show that hollowness, non-

seriousness, what Austin viewed as an attribute of the literary performative, are
in fact common features of social and historical reality. In this poem literary and
public discourse are not fundamentally different (as they are in Austin), because
they are both employed without “serious intentions” and without corresponding
to a material referent (most of the proclamations do not correspond to actual
conquered areas).
In the poem entitled “In a township of Asia Minor” (E  « M«
A 
«) public discourse is also shown to be hollow and pretentious. After the
news about the outcome of the sea-battle in Actium, the people of this town,
who had prepared a proclamation about Antonius’s hoped-for victory, use and
repeat the exact same text they had prepared, with a slight but crucial alteration:
The name of Octavius replaces that of Antonius as the glorious victor. The exact
same laudatory words are now uttered for Octavius,
“who graciously honors Greek customs,
who is beloved in every Greek domain,
who clearly deserves exalted praise,
and whose exploits should be recorded at length
in the Greek language, in both verse and prose,
in the Greek language, the vehicle of fame”
et cetera, et cetera. It all fits brilliantly.

Cavafy stresses the reference to the “Greek language” by virtue of repeating the
phrase, as well as by placing it in italics the second time. The reference to the
Greek language as “the vehicle of fame” sounds somewhat ironic, considering
that its superficiality has just been disclosed to the reader through the switching
of the names of victor and defeated in the same proclamation. Just as the repeti-
tion of the same proclamation but with a different name (Octavius) in the poem
exposes the hollowness and arbitrariness of political discourse, the repetition of
the “Greek language,” the second time characterized as “the vehicle of fame,” in-
cites the reader to act in a way similar to that of the town’s citizens: the reader
thus keeps the same phrase in mind, but is inclined to replace the word “fame”
with a word such as “pretense,” “lies” or “fake.” I would argue that this active
participation of the reader is also encouraged by the words “et cetera, et cetera”
in the end: the reader is thereby invited to fill in the gaps, to take part in an end-
less series of repetitions and alterations in language.
According to Judith Butler, linguistic performatives draw their power from
being repeated in a social context. These repetitions normally consolidate con-
ventions by making them appear natural, the way things have always been. Some-
times, however, repetitions introduce slight alterations, which manage to under-
mine conventions and expose the constructedness of the linguistic system

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406 Maria Boletsi

(Butler, 1–23). This is the case with this poem: by inviting the reader to perform
a critical repetition, which would expose the constructedness and emptiness of
the “Greek language” or of language in general, it ironically comments on – and
thus weakens – the performative that proclaims Octavius as the glorious victor.
The hypocrisy and hollowness of public/political discourse is thematized in
other poems as well. In “Julian in Nicomedia” (O I
«
 N

) Jul-
ian publicly reads passages from the Holy Scriptures in order to conceal his Hel-
lenic ideals and to convince the people of his Christian piety. “From the school
of the renowned philosopher” (A    
  )
has a main character who lacks a stable system of moral beliefs, and considers re-
turning to politics if no other profession works out for him, by invoking “the
traditions of his family, / duty toward the country / and other resonant banalities of
that kind” (my emphasis).
As these poems suggest, public or political discourse is being employed in
order to deceive others and conceal a certain reality. However, regardless of their
actual hollowness, the performatives of this discourse can still be deemed felici-
tous in society when they are convincing and taken seriously in the historical
scene of their utterance. Sometimes they can be considered felicitous even with-
out having to convince others of their seriousness: in “Alexandrian Kings” the
crowd is not deceived, as it is aware of the hollowness of the proclamations made
during the ceremony. Despite this awareness, the performative is still felicitous
in a certain way, because the people choose to go along with the rules of the rit-
ual. The aesthetic part of the public performance is what saves the performatives
of public discourse:
But the day was warm and poetic,
the sky a pale blue,
the Alexandrian Gymnasium
a complete artistic triumph,
the courtiers wonderfully sumptuous,
Kaisarion all grace and beauty
Successful as they might have been when performed in their historical scene of
utterance, public performatives are stripped of their perlocutionary force and
“misfire” when performed as poetic utterances in the poems12, because it is here,
in literary language, that their hollowness is exposed. It is rather ironic that
poetic language, by definition “non-serious” according to Austin, becomes in

12 By referring to performatives as performed in their historical scene of utterance I take the historical not
as an objective account of the past, but as filtered through Cavafy’s imagination and his concep-
tion of history (regardless of whether the scenes are pseudo-historical or refer to actual historical
events). In this case, their felicity depends on the audience and social conventions within the his-
torical universe that the poet has set up. On the other hand, when taken as poetic performatives,
performing within the totality of the poem, their felicity depends on the reader and the socio-cultural
conventions of the here and now of every reading.

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 How to Do Things With Poems 407

Cavafy the vehicle that reveals the non-seriousness and hollowness of political
and public discourse, a discourse based on the presupposition of its seriousness.
In a reversal of Austin’s distinction between serious and non-serious discourse,
poetic language in Cavafy becomes more “serious” than “serious” language use:
it communicates the truth hidden behind public discourse and constitutes a lin-
guistic site more genuine than public, official or political discourse.
In Cavafy the public and the private domain form a strong opposition: what is
public has a taste of fakeness and theatricality, while the private domain is where
the masks are removed and the real face of individuals or the true nature of
things appear. Of course, as I have shown in the previous part, the private is an
inherently unstable site in itself: a battlefield between intention and action, the
mental and the corporeal. However, whenever it is opposed to the public, the
private always appears as a more truthful site, despite its internal contradictions.
At the same time, the instability of both the private and the public is highly in-
terconnected: the deceptive nature and artificiality of the public domain makes it
vulnerable to a constant threat of exposure, while the private, a shelter and a hid-
ing-place for the “vulnerable places”13 of the individual, is always in danger of
being unveiled and “contaminated” by becoming part of the public sphere.
Aimilianos Monai, in the poem bearing his name as its title (A
« M,
A


«, 628–655 ..), wishes to construct “an excellent suit of armor,”
“out of talk, appearance and manners,” the tools for a respectable public per-
formance according to the decorum. This suit will hide and protect the private
places of his soul from those who would wish to penetrate them. In another
poem, “The prince from Western Libya” (H

 !« "«), the cen-
tral figure assumes a fake public image – that of a “man of few words” with a
Greek appearance and manners – in order to hide his triviality and lack of edu-
cation. Having so many words “bottled up inside him,” he suffers greatly under
his disguise, just as so many other Cavafian characters. In “Priest at the Sera-
peion” (I

«  #


), the Christian son of a pagan priest can only
mourn in private for the death of his father, because his father’s religion is con-
demned by dominant Christianity. Moreover, we already saw in many of Cavafy’s
erotic poems how characters are torn by having to keep their homoerotic desires
strictly private, while assuming a different face in public.
The fictionalization and at the same time failure of the performatives of public
discourse, which lose their perlocutionary force vis-à-vis the reader as their
hollowness is exposed through poetic discourse, reveal the critical potential of
the poetic performative. It is due to these failures in the poems that the limits,
the constructedness, even the irrationality of social conventions are exposed.
Through their repetition within a social context, performatives work towards the
consolidation of the dominant ideology, by creating the effect that they are natu-

13 From: “Aimilianos Monai, Alexandrian, A.D. 628–655.”

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408 Maria Boletsi

ral instead of culturally produced (Slinn 69). When these peformatives are fic-
tionalized and then flouted, the conventions and norms that they support are
denaturalized and destabilized as well. Cavafy’s poetry – as well as his life – was
to a great extent nourished by the tragic effects of conventions that restrict the
individual and generate an irreconcilable opposition between the private and the
public. Without this opposition his poetry would not have been the same. But at
the same time, by flouting the performatives of public discourse, his poems
underscore the irrational in this dichotomy and implicitly envision a merging of
the two opposites in a society without masks and pretense.
Many of the poems I have so far examined unveil public and social life as a
theatrical stage, full of performances, for which individuals are often forced
to wear masks. Failing to carry out one’s public performance could actually have
a positive value, since it would require the courage to confront the social with-
out the pretentious protective shield of conventions. In “King Dimitrios”
(O B

« !«), the hero is characterized as “a noble soul,” because
he had the courage to dispose of his royal outfit together with his role as a king
when the “play” was over:
When the Macedonians deserted him
and showed they preferred Pyrrhos,
King Dimitrios (a noble soul) didn’t behave
– so they said –
at all like a king.
He took off his golden robes,
threw away his purple buskins,
and quickly dressing himself
in simple clothes, he slipped out –
just like an actor who,
the play over,
changes his costume and goes away.
His act, viewed by the historian Plutarch (Cavafy’s source for the incident) as an
act of cowardice, is in Cavafy’s poem revaluated and endowed with dignity.14 Fail-
ing, learning how to fail and accepting failure, is in Cavafy more dignified than
succeeding, despite its tragic taste.

The historical stage: imitating/subverting/performing history

The role of history in Cavafy’s poetry has been extensively discussed by critics.
Cavafy’s special relation to history is epitomized in his own statement: “I am a
historical poet; I could never write a novel or a play, but I feel 125 voices in me

14 Cavafy gives a quote from Plutarch at the beginning of the poem: “Not like a king but an actor he
put on a gray cloak instead of his royal one and secretly went away.”

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 How to Do Things With Poems 409

telling me that I could write history” (Cavafy in Maronitis 226, my translation).

He never wrote history in the end, but chose to incorporate his historical vision
into his poetry. The result of merging a poet and a would-be historian in his
poems is a hybrid discourse that manages to challenge traditional historical dis-
course by confronting it with a different view on history and the historical event.
Cavafy’s mixing of historical and fictional characters and events in historical,
semi-historical or pseudo-historical poems15 deprives these of any propositional
claims. They do not record historical events or state what is historically accurate
and what not, because they are not meant to be part of historical discourse. The
embedding of the historical into poetic (fictional) discourse leads once more to
the blurring of the boundaries between “serious” (historical in this case) and
“non-serious” discourse (poetry). The lack of a fundamental difference between
“real life” and literary discourse becomes evident in Cavafy’s historical poems,
where fiction and history appear to be made of the same material.16 There is al-
ways a fictional element in historical discourse, just as there is a certain reality in
fictional language.
Cavafy’s historical poems make a constitutive rather than constative claim,
which makes them pertinent to the theory of the performative. They perform
isolated moments in history, often concentrating on details, minor events and in-
significant people, unlikely to be mentioned in the great books of history. While
traditional historical accounts give superficial chronicles of important events,
Cavafy’s version of history explores “the texture of culture defined by the
people, by the history of everyday life and people” (Barnstone 54). By focusing
on the enactment of specific moments, the poems build up dramatic situations
on a historical stage. A fertile ground is thereby created for speech acts per-
formed in a historical moment’s here and now.
Cavafy’s poems engage with history and make it part of poetic discourse. The
poems incorporate elements of historical discourse: full names of characters,
even genealogical information (names of fathers or ancestors), precise dating
and indications of places are given, in order to convey the impression of histo-
ricity and to enhance the credibility of what is being enacted as an accurate his-
torical event. It is no coincidence that critics have been unable to decide whether
certain characters or incidents in the poems are historical or imaginary.

15 I will be using the term “historical poems” as an inclusive term for all poems that are situated in a
historical past, regardless of their (lack of) correspondence to real historical events or figures.
Pseudo- and semi-historical poems are thus also discussed here under the same category, be-
cause I believe that the distinction into purely historical, pseudo-historical etc. poems, which
many critics follow, imposes artificial distinctions, which obscure the hybridization of discourses
that is a crucial feature of these poems.
16 Needless to say, there are many differences between these discourses, but, as the poems suggest,
not of a fundamental nature.

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410 Maria Boletsi

It could be argued that Cavafy’s poems imitate historical discourse to a certain

extent. But not quite: it is an imitation that selectively takes up certain conventions
of historical discourse and juxtaposes elements from other discourses, in order to
question historiography’s claims to validity and objectivity. This kind of repeti-
tion is comparable to what Homi Bhabha has called “mimicry,” differentiating it
from “mimesis.” Mimicry involves the performative use of a sedimented dis-
course in a way that leads to its mockery and subversion rather than valorization.
“What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of represen-
tation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its
power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable.”
(Bhabha 88)17 By mixing the conventions of historical discourse with other dis-
courses, fiction with fact, the present with the past tenses, the first and second
with the third person in narration, the significant with the trivial, the public with
the private, Cavafy constructs a dynamic, active and polyphonic discourse, which
challenges the rigidity and authoritativeness of traditional historiographic modes.
The alternative history that emerges from the poems exposes the deficiencies
and exclusions of historical discourse. Bhabha argues that “[t]he visibility of
mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction”; that is why mimicry is “a
discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which
though known must be kept concealed; a discourse uttered between the lines and
as such both against the rules and within them” (90). It is at such a site of inter-
diction, between the socially acceptable and the forbidden, the respectable and
the indecent, the exposed and the concealed, that Cavafy’s poetry is situated.
Cavafy’s poetry makes us think of history in terms of action, performance and
active representation, rather than a static representation, which contains historical
subjects without allowing them to act. Of course, the voice and power that Cavafy
gives to individuals in history does not make their operations, linguistic or not,
successful. Cavafy, writes Stephen Spender, is fascinated by “the moment of
choice, of misfortune or disgrace” and by “situations that lead, or have led to,
ruin” (Spender 90). He is captivated by the failure of individuals in history to carry
out their plans and ambitions, to fulfill their (public) roles, to keep their promises,
to see beyond their limited vision and prevent unfortunate events.
Failure and catastrophe are often the result of infelicitous speech acts, which
for different reasons did not have the desired uptake. Such is the recurrent
speech act of warning: In “The ides of March” (M
 E) and “On the
march to Sinopi” (E 

«  #) a warning is given that is in both
cases disregarded, because the arrogance and success of two leaders in their
prime, Caesar and Mithridatis respectively, makes them blind to warnings or

17 Bhabha uses the term in relation to the authority of colonial discourse. The historical discourse
that Cavafy’s language mimics and subverts is also an authoritative discourse, closely connected
to and often dictated by the project of colonialism.

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 How to Do Things With Poems 411

negative omens. The failure to take the warning seriously eventually leads to
Caesar’s and Mithridatis’ assassination.
It is quite ironic that the infelicity of speech acts often becomes a generating
force in history: wars are fought because a promise was not kept, emperors mur-
dered because they ignored a warning. In this way, the poems point to human
suffering, pain and even death as the tragic outcomes of infelicitous speech acts
and, in final analysis, of the inability of people to build a stable intersubjective so-
cial context that can ensure successful communication.
The social context in Cavafy’s poems is hardly ever homogeneous. In fact,
competing, mutually threatening and mutually cancelling social or religious sys-
tems within the same society are often accountable for the infelicity of per-
formatives. In “Kleitos’ illness” (H
 
 K
) the old servant that
brought Kleitos (a Christian) up, resorts to an idol she used to worship in her
youth, in order to pray for Kleitos’ life. However, her prayer is destined to fail,
because – as the narrating voice informs us – “the black demon couldn’t care
less / whether a Christian gets well or not.” This last remark is not really meant
to bring out the foolishness in the old woman; it rather exposes the ludicrous
nature of religious conventions, which are not based on some objective religious
truth or a God that exists beyond these conventions: prayers and rituals are
simply speech acts that are felicitous only within a specific set of conventions,
and invalid outside of this system. In “Julian seeing contempt” King Julian’s
attempts to establish a “new religious system” (a form of paganism) to replace
Christianity are met with strong resistance and contempt by his people. The
speech acts of his new religious law are not effective, because they collide with an
apparently stronger set of religious conventions in that historical moment.
The co-existence of Christian, Jewish and pagan elements in the hybrid so-
cieties of the poems often results in a communicative gap, which makes the fel-
icity of speech acts highly uncertain. Whereas Austin always presupposes that a
stable social context provides a set of conditions for “happy” performatives, Ca-
vafy’s poems show us that in history such stable and homogeneous contexts are
very hard to find.
Communication does not fail only within a single social context (synchroni-
cally), but also when a dialogue is attempted between different historical con-
texts (diachronically). Cavafy stages such encounters in his poems by pulling ut-
terances out of their original context and making them function in another one.
A speech act that is successfully performed in a certain historical moment, is
often blatantly flouted when uttered within another one. Through these “experi-
ments” readers can watch how the perlocutionary force of utterances changes as
they travel through time.
“In the year 200 B.C.” (#
200 . .) is such an experiment. The narrator in
the poem starts by citing Alexander the Great’s inscription on the Persian treas-
ures that he sent to Athens in 334 B.C.: “Alexander, son of Philip, and the Greeks

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412 Maria Boletsi

except the Lacedaimonians …” The narrator then reflects on this quote by first
trying to reconstruct the Lacedaimonians’ point of view:
We can very well imagine
how completely indifferent the Spartans would have been
to this inscription. “Except the Lacedaimonians” –
naturally. The Spartans weren’t to be led
and ordered around
like precious servants. Besides,
they wouldn’t have thought a pan-Hellenic expedition
without a Spartan king in command
was to be taken seriously.
Of course, then, “except the Lacedaimonians.”
That’s certainly one point of view.
Quite understandable. He then goes on in celebrational and glorified tones to
praise Alexander’s conquests and the birth of “the great new Hellenic world,”
which emerged out of these conquests:
And from this marvellous pan-Hellenic expedition,
triumphant, brilliant in every way,
celebrated on all sides, glorified,
incomparable, we emerged:
the great new Hellenic world.
We the Alexandrians, the Antiochians,
the Selefkians, and the countless
other Greeks of Egypt and Syria,
and those in Media and Persia, and all the rest:
with our far-flung supremacy,
our flexible policy of judicious integration,
and our Common Greek Language
which we carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians.
How can one talk about Lacedaimonians now!
At first sight, the poem unravels as a dithyrambic account of a Greek, inspired by
Alexander’s spreading of the Greek culture to the ends of the world. However,
the title with its chronology (200 B.C.) situates the narrator in a particular histo-
rical context, which envelops the whole poem and ends up subverting and un-
dermining its nationalist message. As we read in the notes to the poems added by
George Savvidis, “The title […] situates the point of view of the poem at an op-
timum moment of the decline of Hellenism: some 130 years after Alexander’s
victories and three years before the battle of Cynoscephalae, when Philip V […],
the last of the Macedonian Philips, was crushingly defeated by the Romans” (Ca-
vafy 240).18

18 Savvidis’s notes to the poems, which offer clarifications regarding the historical context, the
characters etc. in the poems, are translated by Keeley and Sherrard and added as an appendix to
the volume of the Collected Poems.

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 How to Do Things With Poems 413

In the omen of the title, an informed reader who is knowledgeable about the
context of 200 B.C. already sees the specter of the imminent future – the decline
and fall of the world that Alexander built – cast upon the Hellenic world in the
year 200 B.C. From a present viewpoint, the title thus ironically turns the nar-
rator’s dithyramb into a hollow and quite ridiculous nationalist sermon. A lament
about the imminent collapse of the Hellenic world would be more in place in this
context. Alexander’s inscription, which is cited in the poem, also loses its force
as it is re-contextualized. The contempt and disgrace that the inscription was
meant to bring to the Spartans, is transferred to the triumphant successors
of Alexander in 200 B.C., who are soon to lose their power. For the reader today,
the narrator’s final exclamation – “How can one talk about Lacedaimonians
now!” – acquires an ironic undertone, as the reader is invited to replace “Lace-
daimonians” with “the great new Hellenic world,” which is soon to be shattered
and eventually forgotten. The title therefore deprives the narrator’s speech of its
perlocutionary force vis-à-vis the reader and turns it into an infelicitous per-
formative. At the same time, it gives the reader an active role, by suggesting that
this poem, and every poem, is not an ahistorical utterance with an eternal, un-
changing value, but a performative, which has a different uptake according to the
context of its utterance.
In “If actually dead” (E




) the first and largest part of the poem is a
contemplation on the possible fate of Apollonios of Tyana (“the Sage” who lived
in the first century A.D.) after his disappearance. The narrator of this part refers
to different rumors about his fate, but focuses more on the assertion that he may
still be alive and that “transfigured, he moves among us / unrecognized.” The
narrator ends by declaring that he believes in the return of the Sage, with a state-
ment that has the certainty of a prophecy: “But he will come again / as he was,
teaching the ways of truth; and then of course / he’ll bring back the worship of
our gods / and our elegant Hellenic rites.” The whole first part is enclosed in
quotation marks, which suggest that it is cited by another narrative agent. The
second part, without quotation marks, situates the first part in a historical con-
text and introduces the speaker who made the statement of the first part: “These
were the musings of one of the few pagans, / one of the very few still left”; It was
the time “when Justin the Elder / reigned in total piety, / and Alexandria, a godly
city, / detested pitiful idolators.” In this context of thriving Christianity, with the
speaker of the first part being one of the “detested pitiful idolators,” readers are
forced to rethink their reading of the first part. The final prophetic statement of
the first part, which could have been credible or convincing in an earlier time,
loses its power. The same words, once they have been situated in time, sound like
the nonsensical ramblings of an eccentric. The performative utterance of the
first part misfires.
In other poems, poetic utterances are not explicitly recontextualized, but it is
left to the reader to perform this act. In “Alexander Jannaios and Alexandra”

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414 Maria Boletsi

(A 
« I

«, 
 A

) there is no indication as to who the
poem’s narrator is. The use of the present tense leads to the assumption that the
person narrating is contemporary to the events he recounts. The speaker uses a
highly optimistic and celebrational tone to talk about the coming to power of
Alexander Jannaios and his wife, Jewish monarchs, whose reign marks a period
of Jewish autonomy. The speaker is clearly content and excited, for now “all sub-
servience to the haughty monarchs / of Antioch is over.” Nothing seems to
threaten the power of these new monarchs, who are about to open a new glori-
ous chapter in Jewish history. However, the notes to the poems by the editor
again inform us otherwise: the period of the Jewish autonomy was merely an in-
terval of 80 years between the periods of the Greek and the Roman domination
(Cavafy 238). The narrator, unaware of the short future of the Jewish autonomy,
ends his utterance full of hope and pride: “The work begun by the great Judas
Maccabaios / and his four celebrated brothers / has indeed been concluded bril-
liantly, / concluded in the most striking way.” The reader, however, knows –
thanks to the editor. The narrator’s utterance, with its tragic irony, has a bitter
taste, when read from the perspective of a learned reader.
There are more poems in which Cavafy plays with contexts and perspectives.
By historicizing utterances and then inciting the reader to position these utter-
ances in different contexts – including the reader’s own – the poems suggest that
utterances, historical, poetic, or of any kind, do not have an inherent, universal
and eternal meaning. The poems thematize the repetitive and citational nature of
utterances, the performative force of which changes in their travels through con-
texts.
This version of performativity is closer to Derrida’s and Butler’s conception
of the performative as based on repetition. Derrida’s version of the performative
stresses not the uniqueness and the here-and-now of an utterance, but its ci-
tational nature. The power of the performative is based on its iterability – on the
fact that it is constantly repeated and consequently standardized and conven-
tionalized. But a repetition is never identical and always involves alteration. Ac-
cording to Butler, the repetition of performatives sustains and consolidates the
system and its discourse, but at the same time opens the possibility for change,
critique and intervention.19
Cavafy’s poems explore the possibilities of critique through repetition, ci-
tation and alteration. According to Anne Hartman, poems that point out their
derivative or citational nature to a greater degree, or expose the constructedness
of the discourses they cite, make us more aware of their “status as performance
or repetition” (283). Cavafy’s poems do not only perform a critique of other dis-
courses (as that of history) by citing and subverting them, but by underscoring

19 These views on performativity are laid out in Derrida’s “Signature, Event, Context” and in
Butler’s “Introduction” to Bodies That Matter.

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 How to Do Things With Poems 415

the iterability and performativity of the poetic utterance, they willingly offer
themselves to a constant revaluation and critique. They subject themselves to
endless performances in new contexts and readings. Even more, by showing that
the same utterance can be felicitous in one context and infelicitous in another,
the poems expose their own vulnerability to failure, a vulnerability that is at the
same time their power. Language is fragile; there is no guarantee for the felicity
of linguistic utterances. They have to perform time and again for many audiences
and when they fail to convince they should leave the stage, like King Dimitrios,
when his role as a king is over. At the same time, utterances that are in a certain
moment obsolete or lacking perlocutionary force, can always be called back on
stage and give a felicitous performance in another context.
Cavafy’s poems, with their self-reflexive performativity, invite a more active
and critical view upon poetry as a dynamic cultural form. The poetic mixing of
discourses and contexts, and the interaction or collision of different social/re-
ligious systems and conventions, and of people from different worlds and eras,
turn his poetry into a testing ground for discourses, norms and conventions.

“Waiting for the Barbarians” and the promise of language

All the performances that we have so far examined – the erotic, the public, the
historical – come together in the language of poetry, which every time promises
to execute these performances. Cavafy’s poetry is instilled with the promise of
language to act and create, thereby providing an antidote to the things that the
poet could not do and experience in real life. At the same time, the frequent fail-
ure of performatives in the poems indicates that language cannot always keep its
promise.
I believe that the failure of language to keep its promise of creation and to
substantiate the linguistic categories that it constructs is vividly manifest in one
of Cavafy’s most famous poems, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (P


« 2
« B
«). The poem is staged in a decadent city, not historically defined
but resembling Rome. It is structured as a dialogue between two interlocutors:
one poses a series of questions and another one answers them. The questions
concern the commotion and preparations that the whole city seems to be mak-
ing, the reason for which the first speaker wishes to know. The answer to all the
questions is the same, repeated again and again: “Because the barbarians are
coming today.” We – and the first speaker – are therefore informed that every-
one (the senators, the emperor, the consuls, the praetors and the orators) is pre-
paring to receive the barbarians, who are coming to take over the city. The rather
paradoxical enthusiasm of the people is followed by utter disappointment, or
even despair, when the barbarians do not come by the end of the day.

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416 Maria Boletsi

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion

(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
There are no barbarians any longer.
The final verses of the poem comprise a final question and a statement made
either by the first speaker or by a third unidentified voice:
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Since we never see any barbarians, we can only reconstruct the referent of the
word “barbarian” in our imagination, based on the image that the people of the
city have created about them. This image is indicated by the kind of preparations
that are made for their arrival. The consuls and praetors are thus dressed in em-
broidered togas, overloaded with dazzling jewellery, because “things like that
dazzle the barbarians.” And the orators are silent, because the barbarians are
“bored by rhetoric and public speaking.” These barbarians seem to fit the non-
Western profile of decadent people, immersed in luxury and excess and opposed
to the Western Logos. The absence of the actual material referent of the notion
of the barbarian makes it impossible for the reader to compare this mental image
to any real object.
The repetition of the word “barbarians” by the second interlocutor empha-
sizes his certainty about their coming. The phrase “because the barbarians are
coming” is repeated in all his five answers and thus almost acquires the illocu-
tionary force of a promise towards his interlocutor, the people of the city and the
readers themselves who are also anticipating the spectacle. The more emphati-
cally the promise is repeated, the more everyone believes in it and thus the bigger
the disappointment becomes when the promise is not met.
The barbarians never arrive and the promise is thus not kept. The failure of
this speech act points to the failure of language itself to bring to life what it has
constructed as its outside. The barbarians remain a signifier without a material
referent, because they have always only existed as part of the discourse of civili-
zation. The poem thus stages the infelicitous speech act of a discourse trying to
play God. Its “let there be barbarians” will not work in this case. The limitations
of the authoritative discourse of civilization and the limitations of language in
general are exposed and the omnipotence of language is irrevocably contested.

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 How to Do Things With Poems 417

A never-ending promise,
or how to make felicitous poems out of infelicitous performatives

Despite the frequent failure of language to keep its promises in the poems of Ca-
vafy, the felicity of Cavafy’s poetry is not dependent on the successful realization
of promises, but on the perpetuation of the promise itself. Cavafian poetry may
be full of infelicitous speech acts, unsuccessful plans, unresolved (discursive)
conflicts, but it is the promise of language – not its success – that becomes its real
driving force. According to one of the most quoted Cavafian poems, “Ithaca,” it
is the journey that matters, not the arrival to our destination. In a similar way,
promises are journeys that may or may not reach their destination by being real-
ized. It is in fact the act of missing (mis-keeping) promises that perpetuates the
act of promising, as the failure of a promise engenders new promises and antici-
pations and prevents closure.
Felman argues that promises are constituted by the act of failing (missing), be-
cause they always miss the present (a promise always refers to a future act) by
leading towards an anticipation of the future: the anticipation of the act of con-
cluding (32). In literary language, I suggest, the perpetuation of promising entails
the perpetuation of two other acts as well: the act of writing literature, because the
poet does not give up striving towards a language that can act and create, but also
the act of reading, because the end of the pleasure of reading that would coincide
with the fulfillment of the promise of language, is constantly deferred to a future
moment. It also perpetuates the act of interpreting by readers or critics, because
meaning is never fully present, as poems anticipate their future interpretations.
In doing so, the poetic language in Cavafy, even when it deals with moments in
the past, is always pointing towards a future moment. It is this move towards the
future through the act of promising that sustains the activity of Cavafy’s poems
against closure. The only promise that his poetry is sure to keep is that it will
continue to promise.
The infelicity of promises and other performatives within the poems does
not entail the failure of Cavafy’s poems as performatives. On the contrary: the
shocking experience of being confronted with failed performatives, broken
promises and communicative gaps has much stronger perlocutionary effects on
the reader than the effects of felicitous acts. Failure is almost always accompa-
nied by a questioning of the conditions that led to it and thus leaves open the
possibility of critique. Nothing is being questioned when everything seems to be
successful. It is only when the reader starts reflecting on the reasons for failures
in the poems that their critical force is revealed. Failure in Cavafy becomes a dy-
namic form of critique, because it unveils situations that would otherwise remain
buried under the cover of success: it exposes the hollowness and constructed-
ness of discourses that would have never been questioned if no (linguistic) fail-
ure or weakness had been involved; it suggests that there is something wrong in

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418 Maria Boletsi

the ways we communicate and act, and manages to place the contexts of failed
communicative acts under scrutiny.
By acting out failure, the poems risk their own felicity as performatives, be-
cause they, too, as cultural objects, are subject to repetition and failure. But at the
same time, this repetition of their performance in the act of reading keeps them
critically active in the present and constantly calls for the reader’s involvement.
Fortunately, with all their failed performatives, Cavafy’s poems still offer a totally
convincing performance today.

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