From Steam to the Horizon
From Steam to the Horizon Body, Memory, and the Future Tense of Narrative in Antonis Nikolis’s Novella Daniel Goes to the Sea Introduction: Memory, Narrative, and Return The ship drops anchor at daybreak, and Michalis, after an absence of almost thirty years, looks from the deck toward the island of his adolescence. The contours of the landscape elude him, the town seems more densely built, the slopes of Mount Dikaios are more guessed at than seen, while a few fixed landmarks—the battlements of the Knights’ castle, the breakwater of the old harbour—persist as certainties in a place that has shifted with time. This first image already contains, in miniature, the entire novella. The man who returns will search for a place and for a self preserved within him with the same uncertain clarity, and the characteristic phrase “I could more readily guess at them than see them” soon exceeds the description of a dawn arrival to foreshadow a narrative in which sight continually encoun...
