-
Roderick Beaton, King's College, London
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS: CHRIST RECRUCIFIED
Set in a Greek village in the interior of Anatolia shortly before the Greek defeat of 1922, the novel tells of the arrival of a group of refugees from the fighting, while the younger people of the village are preparing themselves to act their parts in the village Passion play the following Easter. Under pressure of these events, the principal characters among the villagers become more and more identified with, or even taken over by, the roles of the Gospel characters they are to represent. This goes even beyond the "realistic" motivations of the coming Passion play and extends to all the characters; the village elders unconsciously come to act the role of the Pharisees; Grigoris, the village priest, is imperceptibly edged by circumstances and temperament into the role of Caiaphas; the role of Pilate is unwittingly played to perfection, and with great humour on Kazantzakis' part, by the local Turkish aga, a good-natured easy-going pederast who ends by being driven to distraction by the incomprehensible antics of the Greeks around him, who, he says, "would put horseshoes onto fleas". The novel ends with Manolios, the Christ-figure, put to death in church at midnight on Christmas morning, as news arrives that Turkish troops are on the way to the village: it is the eve of the Asia Minor disaster and the expulsion of the Greek population from Anatolia.
The overall mythical structure of Christ Recrucified is plain to see. But Kazantzakis has achieved something much subtler, and given a more far-reaching interpretative and metaphorical dimension to the subject matter of his novel, than at first sight appears. First of all, there is an important inversion: Manolios is appointed to play the part of Christ, that is, is born as Christ, at Easter; and he is ritually murdered in church on Christmas day, when according to the myth the birth of Christ should be celebrated. This inversion signifies both the distortion of Christianity as practiced in a present-day Christian community, but more important the novel's questioning, or indeed inversion, of the central element of the Gospel story, namely the Resurrection, for which the repetition of endless and purposeless reenactment is substituted.
The other important complexity that Kazantzakis introduces into his parallel use of the Gospel story with present-day, ostensibly "realistic" narrative, concerns the relation of myth to history. The Gospel story itself partakes of both history and myth, since the story of Jesus takes place against a historically verifiable background. Kazantzakis plays on both the mythical and historical dimensions in his novel. The story of Jesus in the Bible is set against the aspirations of the Jews at that time for independence from the Roman Empire, aspirations which ended disastrously in AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem. By setting his novel in Asia Minor shortly before the catastrophe of 1922 Kazantzakis is able to imply the historically similar fates of the Jews in antiquity and the Greeks in the twentieth century, and so to imply equally for both a causal link with the "betrayal" of Christ.
But there is a further historical dimension to Christ Recrucified. There are many references to bolshevism in the novel, and the refugees encamped outside the village, who apply in vain to the villagers for help and finally, when none is forthcoming, take up the offensive, are branded by both villagers and Turks as bolsheviks. The clash between communism and the established order is realistically intelligible, since the novel is set shortly after the Russian Revolution; but actually has far more to do with the conflict which was in its final stages while Kazantzakis was writing the novel: the Greek civil war. The struggle between the haves of Lycovrissi and the have-nots encamped on the mountain outside is not only a parable of Christian hypocrisy and Christian fanaticism respectively, but at the same time of the real, and contemporary, conflict between Greeks and Greeks; between the haves settled in the towns, and the revolutionaries, the andartes, in the mountains. So Manolios, the Christ-figure, becomes not just a saint but also a social revolutionary, and the leader of the refugees, the gunpowder priest Fotis, combines the characteristics, and some of the beliefs, of the traditional Orthodox ascetic with those of the fiery revolutionary leader.
In Christ Recrucified explicit allusion to myth does not only provide a structure for the novel's plot, but also by metaphorical reflection back into the world of events, links in parallel three separate historical epochs - Judaea at the time of the Passion, the Greeks in Asia Minor on the eve of their mass expulsion in 1922-3, and the Greek civil war of 1944-9, aligning them respectively with three ideologies or systems of belief: Christianity, the nationalism of the Megali Idea that lay at the root of the 1922 disaster, and Communism. In this way, when the Christ-figure is killed and Turkish soldiers are due to arrive in the village: 1) Christianity is defeated in the modern world by the forces of self-interest, greed and fear, 2) the Greek ideal of the early years of the twentieth century is defeated as the Greek army is beaten in Anatolia and the Greeks of Asia Minor are about to become refugees like the Jews of antiquity; 3) Communism is defeated in the final stages of the Greek civil war, contemporary with the writing of the novel: the rebels from the mountain with their passionate and desperate conviction of the brotherhood of man are driven to attack their well-fed compatriots down in the village and are routed. The adoption of a recurrent structure linking different myths, both received and in the making, enables the death of Manolios/Christ to stand as a symbol for all three defeats, as it also hints at an underlying identity among three distinct of even irreconcilable ideologies: Christianity, nationalist irredentism, and Communism.(c) Roderick Beaton, 1985
on 18/30** February in Iraklion, Crete, then still part of the Ottoman Empire.
with his father and sisters
