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Dialogic Openness in Nikos Kazantzakis

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Dialogic Openness in Nikos Kazantzakis Dialogic Openness in Nikos Kazantzakis Dialogic Openness in Nikos Kazantzakis By Charitini Christodoulou Dialogic Openness in Nikos Kazantzakis, by Charitini Christodoulou This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Charitini Christodoulou All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4108-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4108-5 To my children, Stelios and Emily and my husband, Yiannos: they are everything I hold sacred in my life Also, to my parents, Michael and Militsa, my core TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One............................................................................................... 11 Reception and Contextualisation of The Last Temptation Chapter Two.............................................................................................. 43 Kazantzakis, Religion and the Process of Writing the Scriptures in The Last Temptation Chapter Three............................................................................................ 65 Characterisation and Dialogism in The Last Temptation Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 91 Aspects of the Carnivalesque and the Grotesque in The Last Temptation Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 113 Semiotic, Symbolic and Melancholia in The Last Temptation Chapter Six.............................................................................................. 137 Dreams in The Last Temptation: Semiotic Chora, Abjection and Nostalgia Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 159 Henri Bergson’s élan vital and Jesus in The Last Temptation Conclusion............................................................................................... 181 Bibliography............................................................................................ 185 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Prof. Dimitris Tziovas, who has been my major source of inspiration. I am forever grateful to him for all his support and for believing in me. Prof. Darren Middleton of Texas Christian University is acknowledged for his valuable feedback and sincere willingness to help whenever I asked him to. Prof. Maria Margaroni of the University of Cyprus is also acknowledged for the fruitful discussions I had with her. After all, my admiration for her as a literary theory teacher was the major reason for my choice of studies. I would also like to thank Prof. Roderick Beaton and Dr. Dimitirs Papanikolaou for their feedback. Many people have contributed in my life, directly or indirectly, helping me to reach this stage. Last but not least, I would like to thank an old but never forgotten friend who was there for me, during the period of writing this book and my friend Ellada Evangelou who pushed me to go after this adventure. INTRODUCTION Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation (1955) 1 is undoubtedly a much debated novel whose treatment of the biblical story has been thoroughly discussed. However, a careful consideration of its reception leads to the realisation that it has not been adequately and fairly treated as a literary work. Most academics and literary critics have studied his work in the light of religious writing and studies and when some of them did study the novel as a literary work, almost none managed to escape from a comparison to the Biblical story, trying to find what kind of semantic closure Kazantzakis gave to his personal perception of it, an approach that I find restricting in relation to the dynamic of Kazantzakis narrative. Therefore, in this book I have decided to focus on the narrative and explore the different forms of tension that exist in the novel in the light of some key-concepts of literary and psychoanalytic theory, in order to argue that a certain perception of “openness” that I call dialogic permeates the novel. The term “openness” is usually associated with Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (The Open Work) (1989), originally published in 1962, in which Eco used examples from avant-garde music, literature and painting to theorise the concept of openness. Trying to define openness, Eco addresses the element of multiplicity, plurality, or polysemy in art, as well as the importance of the role of the reader in literary interpretation and response, which he perceives as an interactive process between reader and text. At 1 For the year of first publication of Nikos Kazantzakis’ work I have relied on Peter A. Bien’s Kazantzakis, Politics of the Spirit (1989), where there is a chronological chart with the main works of the author that includes the year the works were written and the year of their first publication. I have also used a list of Kazantzakis’ main works that the director of the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum in Varvari, Crete, kindly sent to me, which has been used in a CD-ROM that the Museum prepared, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the author’s death, entitled “Nikos Kazantzakis: His Life and Work”. The two sources however, do not agree as regards to the year of publication of some of Kazantzakis’ works. As regards The Last Temptation itself, I will be using the English version, published in 1975. As Bien states, in the Greek translation, there have not been any additions or corrections, because the basic information about Kazantzakis provided in the original English publication is still valid. 2 Introduction the end of the chapter entitled “The poetics of the open work” (Eco 1989: 1-23), Eco defines openness as “an open situation, in movement. A work in progress”, which he understands as “the possibility of numerous different personal interventions” (ibid: 19), that are, however, guided by the intentions of the author. The interpreter or the performer participates in completing an unfinished work: “the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed” (ibid). Eco’s definition of openness could be considered problematic, because he does not clarify whether openness lies in the material form (i.e. structure) of a work or in its semantic content (i.e. the ideas conveyed in it and how these are put forward), even though the openness of a work is mostly presented by him as a field of relations with specific structural limits and formal tendencies. Robey (1989: x) addresses this omission on Eco’s part by arguing that whether it is the material form that is open or the semantic content is of no significance to Eco, since for him the reader is in the same position of moving freely “amid a multiplicity of different interpretations”. At this point I would like to distinguish my perception of openness in relation to Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation from Eco’s definition. Although Eco defines the open work as a work in movement and in progress, his emphasis, to my understanding, is on the addressee’s perception of the work and, in particular, the possibility of choice between different interpretations that the author intentionally inserts in the work. As pointed out by Robey (1989: xii): “the interpretation of the modern open work [according to Eco] is far from entirely free; a formative intention is manifest in every work, and this intention must be a determining factor in the interpretive process. For all its openness, the work nonetheless directs the public’s response”. This, in my view, renders the reader a ‘reader in movement, in progress’ and not the work, because he/she is the one who is caught in between different interpretations that are only seemingly created out of his/her perception of the work, since they are actually guided by the intentions of the author. Thus, I perceive of Eco’s notion of “openness” as unclear and problematic as regards the object and the nature of “openness”, that is, what can be characterised as “open” and in what ways. As far as this particular novel by Kazantzakis is concerned, the reader is not, in my opinion, faced with multiple interpretations of Jesus’ story that are intended by the author. Instead, in Kazantzakis’ novel, the reader is faced with an exploration of the multiple levels of ideas that can be extrapolated by a human portrayal of Jesus’ story, as well as with the various forms of tension that are created during the process of formation of Dialogic Openness in Nikos Kazantzakis 3 subjectivity and identity, as seen in the narration of Jesus’ effort to acquire an identity. The different aspects of identity formation unfold before the eyes of the reader, who becomes a witness to Jesus’ process of becoming. What is at stake in the novel is not choosing a single interpretation or point of view among others and thus, it is not this which constitutes the openness in the novel. Openness in The Last Temptation is associated with the tensions that are interlinked with the process of identity formation that is in progress within Jesus till the
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