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Stamatis N. Philippides, University of Crete
FOLK TYPE ELEMENTS IN THE NOVELS OF KAZANTZAKIS
Kazantzakis incorporates or imitates elements of folk discourse within his novels. These include proverbs or proverbial phrases; folk songs ( chiefly mantinades); obscene jokes or witticisms; paratactic speech, cumulative phrases, mainly using asyndeton and conversational language in general; soubriquets and animal epithets applied to people; folk tales and anecdotes; paratactic and contrasting organisation of narrative units. Folk type narration is characteristic of the texts of many Modern Greek prose writers; what is particular to Kazantzakis' novels is that they succeed in combining in an apparently paradoxical manner a thematics of sublime topics (God and man, the spirit and the flesh, justice and love, freedom and slavery) with folk material which is ironic, sagacious or even vulgar. I shall examine all the above elements by brief reference to the texts. The one narrative device I shall concentrate on to some extent is the paratactic structure of narrative units, of embedded stories, for they form a striking characteristic of Kazantzakis' narrative technique [...].
The fictional characters give rise to the development of embedded stories, not only when they are first introduced, but also at subsequent points in the text. In Christ Recrucified there are approximately forty characters, and the short narratives on them are of the folk type: there is stingy old Ladas, who calculates the wedding expenses he has been spared after the death of his sick daughter, or who only wears his best shoes at Easter. There is the wife of peddler Yiannakos, who burst from eating too many chickpeas. Then there is the "yarn" told by the old man from the Mount Athos, who tells of how blind people in a remote village described an elephant by groping it. The priest murderer who later becomes Father Fotis, and the would-be bishop who ended up as a verger because he met the devil in the form of his future wife. There is the teacher who reconstructs the battle of Marathon with the chairs in the kafeneion, and the "parable" told by the Aga of Lykovrisis grandfather of how Allah made Greeks out of fire and dung.
The text of Kapetan Mikhalis (or Freedom or Death) often resembles a patchwork of inlaid folk stories relating to fictional characters. Here we have the story of the consumptive French primadonna, wife of doctor Kasapakis, who would plaster herself in makeup so as to hide her illness. We have Barbayiannis, who is a salep seller and a midwife, ridiculed by all whenever he passes by the bootmakers shops, but the personification of Christianity when he speaks to the Pasha. There is Kapetan Elias, veteran of the 1821 revolution, who puts his glass eye in a glass of water on formal occasions, and Harilaos Liontarakis, who sucks an egg every morning, in the hope of having his way with the servant girl he meets at night. There is the story of Kollivas the grave digger, who strips the corpses to clothe his family. Or the old rabbi, left all alone in the world, who argues loudly with Jehovah in his deserted house. We have Manousakas, who put a donkey in the mosque, and Kapetan Mikhalis, who entered the Turkish kafeneion on horseback. In short, the one hundred and ten or so characters each give rise to one or more short narratives. [...]
Various factors contribute to Kazantzakis' decision to incorporate or recast folk elements in his novels. From very early on Kazantzakis had become involved in the struggle for demoticism and worked with the Teachers' Association (Ekpedeftikos Omilos) from 1909-1919. The struggle for and love of the popular language were at the same time to provoke respect for and love of other expressions of popular culture, traditions, rituals and so on.
Furthermore, Kazantzakis' Weltanschauung, being based on vitalistic theories and a contrastive, dialectic train of thought, prescribed the development of primitive fictional characters and a simple, almost epic linear plot structure. The latter develops either paratactically or contrastively. His thought further prescribed a simplificatory, contrastive ideological content in his novels. Thus the contrast between the sublime and the crude turns out to be functional and explainable within an ideological cosmos of this type: what is crude is the other side of what is sublime and vice-versa.
The view held by some critics that Kapetan Mikhalis contains a mixture of heterogeneous elements of either folk or anecdotal origin, which obscures "the immediate projection of what is essential" or creates disharmony, is based on a misapprehension. In actual fact we are here dealing with a technique used from one book to another, and which in this novel in particular succeeds in transforming the historical past in a way reminiscent ' mutatis mutandis ' of the contemporary "magic realism" of Gabriel Marcia Marquez. What James Higgins writes in describing Marquez' 1962 short story Los funerales de la Mama Grande (a short story which is a Central American equivalent to the Modern Greek The Death of the Grandfather, written in 1947 as a short story and chapter of Kapetan Mikhalis) seems almost to have been written about Kazantzakis' novel:
The story, in effect, has the character of popular oral narrative, privileging the legendary and depicting the world in larger than life terms, but at the same time its "magic realism" is counterbalanced by an ironic, irreverent tone which subverts the very legend it is propagating.
Kazantzakis' novels should not so much be of interest for their ideological didactics, their "heroic nihilism", as for the infinite number of embedded stories. As these accumulate within the wider framework, they radiate out and connect the reader with the primary narrative nuclei of myths." Translated by Ben Petre"
Stamatis N. Philippides, 1997