Why Read Kazantzakis in the Twenty-first Century?

Peter Bien

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Supplement to Volume 28, Number1, May 2010, pp. 1-6 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mgs.0.0078

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Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 1–6 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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IntroductionWhy Read Kazantzakis

in the Twenty-first Century?Peter Bien, Guest Editor

Nikos Kazantzakis died in 1957 and 50 years later his achievements were celebrated world-wide. When George Stassinakis, president of The Inter-national Society of Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis, based in Geneva, urged me to set up a celebration in the United States, I was able to do this at New York University thanks to the splendid cooperation of Katherine Fleming, the Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization there, who offered a venue plus lunch, dinner, and secretarial assistance. Financial help came as well from Katy Myrivili in Athens, who was able to secure reimbursement for our symposiasts’ travel expenses. Professor Nikos Metallinos of the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, a specialist in Kazantzakis and music, served with vigor as vice-chairman of the event. Our chief sponsor was the Hellenic Foundation for Culture, Athens; co-sponsors were the Inter-national Society of the Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis, the National Book Center (EKEBI) in Athens, the Greek Embassy in Washington, and New York City’s Greek Consulate, whose consul-general made a courteous appearance. We are grateful to all the individuals and organizations who helped make this conference a success. And we are particularly grateful to the Greek Embassy for generously providing funds to subsidize the publication of these papers here.

The symposium was held at New York University in March of 2007, entitled, “Why Should We Read Kazantzakis in the Twenty-first Century?” to honor Kazantzakis on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. We met for a very long day on 3 March 2007 from 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at NYU’s Jurow Hall, finishing with a performance by Lina Orfanos and Spiros Exaras of songs from Theodorakis’s Zorba ballet, and then a lovely, leisurely supper. Also, as a welcome diversion in mid-afternoon, the symposiasts enjoyed a stirring dramatic reading by Yannis Simonides from Kazantzakis’s play Kapodistrias.

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Thirteen papers were delivered by scholars ranging from retired senior professors to a schoolteacher and a current graduate student, folks who came from as far away as Greece, Texas, Florida, Michigan, California, and from as close as Broadway and 116th Street. Expanded versions of 11 of the original 13 presentations are printed herein, all of them edited by Katherine Fleming and myself; in addition, we include studies by Michael Paschalis and Ben Petre that were not delivered at the symposium. All address, in one way or another, the title question of the symposium: Why should we read Kazantzakis in the twenty-first century?

I opened the proceedings with a short introductory talk on Kazant-zakis’s future reputation—whether he would still be read 100 years from now. It is very hard to tell. I attempted to examine causes of his initial popularity and then to predict some reasons that might account for his renewed popularity in the future. Sometimes a popular author falls into relative obscurity and is then revived, Joseph Conrad being a good example. Kazantzakis, too, all the rage in the 1960s, failed to catch on afterwards. But his star seems to be rising again as the twenty-first century progresses. I surmised that he may be valued in the future primarily as a sort of cosmological visionary teaching us, through literary means, to love transience because it’s all there is, and we are part of it.

If Kazantzakis is read 100 years in the future, it may be as a very interesting religious thinker. A favorite religious philosopher of mine, Don Cupitt, formulates the possible reasons as follows:

. . . [L]ike Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Unamuno—[Kazantzakis] is one of those representative figures who has struggled on our behalf to make sense out of the many conflicting strands in modern Western culture. . . . He is highly aware of the contrast between the compassionate religious humanism of the New Testament . . . and the heroic humanism of Homer: Jesus versus Odysseus. And Kazantzakis is just as vividly aware of the con-flict between the timeless . . . idea of truth taught by Plato and the Greek Church, and the historically evolving picture of reality that underlies all modern culture since Hegel.

. . . [P]riest-theologians tend to look down on lay religious thinkers, mere literary types such as Kazantzakis. [But] their work is much less inter-esting to the general public . . . than the work of figures like Kazantzakis. Fifty years ago, we tended to refer to such people as “religious existential-ists.” Do you remember, for example, Berdyaev, Marcel, Weil? Today, sadly, there are few such figures.

. . . [R]eligion is nowadays chiefly discussed not as an intellectually and morally vital subject for everyone but as a rather crazed militant quasi-political ideology. . . . Today, religion is almost nowhere a blessing, and almost everywhere a curse.

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Figure 1. Nikos Kazantzakis with fellow students in Athens, 1905. Photo courtesy of the Society of Cretan Historical Studies, Historical Museum of Crete, Nikos Kazantzakis files, www .historical-museum.gr/kazantzakis.

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. . . I hope that . . . many people [will] take up again the kind of seri-ous lay thinking about religion, morality, and worldview that so consumed Nikos Kazantzakis. (2005:ix–x)

The possibility that Kazantzakis’s religious concerns will continue to be alive and unresolved in the next 100 years is certainly a factor. But let us remember that he was an artist, not a professional philosopher or theologian. His teachings are conveyed through the normal artistic means of plot, characterization, and style. For example, in the Odyssey, Zorba, Christ Recrucified, The Last Temptation, and Saint Francis (but not, I would venture, in Kapetan Mihalis), he examines a central problem of current and future times: how to deal with failure, how to live as though immortal in a Darwinian modern world with no afterlife, and how to give eternal significance to a life that lacks any realistically eternal dimension.

Cupitt helps me be more specific. Expository passages from his splendid book Emptiness and Brightness evoke precisely what Kazantzakis does via non-expository means:

Religious truth is . . . obvious . . . . To say a wholehearted Yes to life in full acknowledgement of its gratuitousness, its contingency, its transience, and even its nothingness . . . [precisely what Zorba does and what he teaches the Boss to do]

. . . we may gradually give up the traditionalist idea that the Cosmos was created and completely finished all at once by God long ago and instead gradually come to think of our vision of the world as an imaginative product that we ourselves have collectively evolved . . . [exactly what Kazantzakis shows in the Odyssey]

. . . our chief religious task is to love this world and this life and to make the most of them that we possibly can. [beautifully evoked in Report to Greco]

We need to learn to love transience, because it’s all there is, and we are part of it. Heraclitus has turned out to have been right: everything flows . . . . Mortal ourselves, we can learn a divine love for everything else that is just as mortal as we are. (2001:23, 60, 112, 120)

These statements may seem self-evident to many of us. But they are not yet established truths in a twenty-first century that—amazingly—still resists the great lessons of Darwinism and Heraclitus about the ceaseless flux of life. Kazantzakis, a thoroughgoing Darwinian if ever there was one, is still needed to help fight the good fight. Just as Joseph Conrad was reinvented for the twentieth century owing to the Second World War, so Kazantzakis is now being reinvented for the twenty-first century owing to the continuing conflict between traditional views and scientific truth. It would be nice, in a way, if he were passé because he is no lon-

5Introduction

Figure 2. The funeral procession for Nikos Kazantzakis in Heraklion, 1957. Photo courtesy of the Society of Cretan Historical Studies, Historical Museum of Crete, Nikos Kazantzakis files, www.historical-museum.gr/kazantzakis.

ger needed. But the lessons we learn from Zorba about the futility of nationalism and war, from Fotis about endurance despite defeat, from Jesus in The Last Temptation about how spiritual life needs to evolve like everything else, from Odysseus about the possibility of moving from an aesthetic life to an ethical life and finally to a religious/artistic life

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increasingly attached to Nothingness, from Askitikí about the need every so often for a silence that acts like a bomb to blow up all the meaning-less busyness that preceded, from Saint Francis about how to endure the replacement of vision by practicality, and from every character in the novels and plays about the omnipresence of Darwinian evolution—all this, alas, is still very much needed in what Kazantzakis would call our “transitional age.” He predicted that it would last 200 years. Thus, perhaps he will still be needed and read in the twenty-second century as well as the twenty-first.

Dartmouth college

REFERENCES CITED

Cupitt, Don2001 Emptiness & Brightness. Santa Rosa, California: Polebridge Press.2005 “Foreword.” In Scandalizing Jesus: Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”

Fifty Years On, edited by Darren J. N. Middleton, ix–x. New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group.