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Angela Kastrinaki, University of Crete
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS AND THE TOPOI OF DECLINE
Murders of women appear so obsessively often in Kazantzakis' work that they constitute one of its basic characteristics. If this is not telling of his relationships with women, we shall demonstrate that it definitely does reveal the relationship between the author and art.
As early as his first work, Serpent and Lily (1906), the hero-narrator, a certain artist, experiences crazed carnal passion before killing the object of his desires - and himself - in a room full of flowers. Floral death is no invention of Kazantzakis: Heliogavalos, who was given to killing his guests with rose petals, was one of the favorite heroes of decline literature, brought to Greece in Gryparis' sonnet The Roses of Heliogavalos (1895).
In Serpent and Lily the man is known (to himself) as "Chosen"; a divine flame burns within him and he dreams of returning to a superior native land, which he recalls and yearns for. On the other hand, the woman is weak and her soul originates in "other smaller worlds". Thus the superior male, whose artistic activity has been held in limbo on account of the women, plans and carries out their mutual execution, while she tries in vain to resist.
This is the first case of women murdering in Kazantzakis' work, though it is accompanied by suicide. Yet soon we shall find the author killing his heroines alone, freed of the obligation to kill the man. (Here we should note that in his early pre-Nietzsche period Kazanzakis was a feminist). Thus in the 1910 play The Master Builder - a theatrical version of the folk song "The Bridge of Arta", the man urges the woman he loves to sacrifice herself - by allowing herself to be built into the bridge - because he realizes that he will not be able to create the great oeuvre with her at his side.
Both with regard to their themes and modes of expression, the above two works are true examples of aestheticism. This artistic movement does indeed justify the sacrifice of a human being to the good of the oeuvre. There is Poe's Oval Portrait, in which the artist creates the perfect female portrait, while his model wastes away and dies. Then there is the atrocious killing of a slave in Pierre Louys' L'Homme de pourpre, carried out so as to provide a realistic depiction of human pain; aestheticism promotes the idea that human life is of little significance when compared to the grandeur of art.
So in Kazantzakis' early, plainly aestheticist texts, the killing of women is subject to the following reasoning: the man, who is made so as to create, murders the obstruction to his higher destiny or lets her be murdered. Yet murders of women are far from absent in the author's later work. The killing of the widow in Zorba is a typical case, and yet more typical is the killing of Emine Hanoum in Freedom or Death.
As we know, Kapetan Michalis stabs Emine, the woman he lusted after, so as to free himself of base carnal thoughts and devote himself to the liberation of Crete. But the liberation of Crete is nothing other than a new interpretation of the sublime oeuvre. In this case the oeuvre dies not lie in artistic creation, as in genuine aestheticist texts, but in a sublime idea alien to women. Yet the motive does of course remain the same: man sacrifices woman in an act which liberates him from his baser inclinations and renders him fit to carry out the oeuvre.
Kazantzakis shares this obsession with Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Italian celebrated at the turn of the century as a representative of the Decline. The violent killing of women is a standard and recurrent motive in the work of the Italian author. In Il Trifono della Morte (1894), the intellectual hero kills the femme fatale because she is an obstruction to his intellectual welfare. Embracing her tightly, he drags her off a high cliff into the sea. In this case the death is at least a shared one, although the woman does struggle against it, as in Serpent and Lily. But in other works D'Annunzio depicts murders of women which act simply to free the male heroes from violent desires.
The Italian aestheticist's work also abounds in killings of women not by the men who desire them, but at the hands of a mob - killings which the author appears to indulge in with especial pleasure. In the bucolic tragedy La Figlia di Iorio (1904), one of his heroines named Mila is burnt alive as a witch by a mob invoking the divine - she is an innocent girl, an outsider rather than a local, who suffers from the misfortune of attracting men in the extreme, and thus becomes the focus of other women's hatred. All of this is reminiscent of the execution of the widow in Zorba the Greek: there we have the same type of attractive and persecuted woman, the same village scenario, the frenzied mob of men who lust after her and women whose hatred arises from jealousy and superstition, the same ritual death.
Thus from his early works to his later ones, Kazantzakis murders women, while essentially sacrificing them on the altar of aestheticism. What is of interest is that in his last works, which are said not to belong to aestheticism, the author goes further than in the early texts. In Serpent and Lily the murder of the women brings on the death of the man; in The Master Builder the woman sacrifices herself of her own free will, so that male society is not blemished with her murder. But in his late works Kazantzakis causes women to be murdered with ever decreasing inhibition: in Freedom and Death the woman is killed in her sleep by the very man who lusts after her, this time without any guilt.
Apart from the murder of women, in Kazantzakis' later works sex with them also bears all the hallmarks of aestheticism. The supposedly autobiographical episode with the Irish girl in Report to Greco is a typical example of aestheticism under a veneer of realism. This is the chapter in which Kazantzakis recounts the relationship he had as an eighteen-year-old with an English teacher, an Irish girl mature as a "honeyed fig". He says he set out with this girl to climb Mount Ida; in a church on the summit the young couple entwine themselves in full view of Christ and the Virgin Mary.
As Kazantzakis relates, the experience with the Irish girl haunts him as a young man and spurs him to write Serpent and Lily. Yet the "sex in the church" scene is not an altogether original concept; it may not have occurred frequently at the time Report to Greco was being written, but it does correspond with at least two texts by authors moulded in the same movement as Kazantzakis, in turn of the century aestheticism. In his 1909 work The Purple Rose, Platon Rodokanakis depicts a couple making love in a ruined monastery chapel, as does Kosmas Politis twenty-one years later in The Lemon Forest.
But such scenes are not as common in Greece as they are in Europe, where the combination of the sensual with the divine and the desecration of a holy place constitute a topos in art, above all in Romanticism. Moreover, Catholic tradition boasts a plethora of descriptions in which the divine is united with the sensual. In the 16th century, Bernini's Saint Theresa is struck by the arrow of divine love while in an ecstasy all of this earth, while Maurice Barres - one of Kazantzakis' mentors - defined "neo-Catholicism" in 1893 as "a way of mingling sensuality with religion".
In Serpent and Lily - the work supposedly inspired by the Irish girl - Kazantzakis himself links the divine with the sensual, in a somewhat sacrilegious combination.
"I want the communion of Your body tonight. I yearn for the Holy of Holies and the Sanctuary of your flesh. As a minister of the True God I will offer a sacrifice tonight and your body will be the temple, our delirium will be hymns and after sensual pleasure will be religious and celestial ecstasy, etc, "
The greatest sensual pleasure derives from offending God. One of the first teachers of this appears to have been the Marquis de Sade, who issues the following exhortation while Philosophising in the Boudoire: "Deliver all your senses freely to sensual pleasure, Eugenia, it is the only god of your existence; it is to this that a young woman must sacrifice, nothing must be as holy in her eyes as sensual pleasure." But another of the Marquis' teachings comes even closer to Kazantzakis' turn of phrase, according to which there are various parts of the female body - in addition to the usual one - which can provide the male member with "yet other altars on which to burn its incense"
Thus even if the story of the Irish girl is fictional - at the time Kazantzakis was involved in his passionate yet non-sexual relationship with Galatea Alexiou - it does reveal the author's deeper tendencies, those which possess him from the first work to the last, rendering him a true scion of the Decline.
on 18/30** February in Iraklion, Crete, then still part of the Ottoman Empire.
with his father and sisters
