Savitri

VII

    KAZANTZAKIS 'MODEL SEQUEL'

Sri Aurobindo was an Indian who mastered classical Greek and so completely entered into the spirit of Homer's poetry that he attempted, as we saw in the previous chapter, a 'sequel' to the Iliad in English hexameters. Nikos Kazantzakis was a Cretan Greek who became a European and a man of the world and tried to cram into his life and work divers realms and modes of experience. He knew (like Sri Aurobindo) many languages, he wrote fiction and poetry, he translated the epics of Homer, the Commedia and Faust into modern Greek, and (in 1945) he was for a time Minister of Education. Having come under Bergson's influence as a pupil, Kazantzakis was intrigued by the problem of evolution, and his life veered between action and introspection, and he tried mask after mask, pursued shadow after shadow. After following in vain various roads to happiness—love, scientific inquiry, philosophy, social action and literary creation—he resolutely turned back at last and sought asylum in Athos, a region untrodden by women and dedicated to the contemplative life. Here he had what must be called a mystical experience which may be given in his own words:

I began a new Struggle. First of all I exercised my body in

obedience to the spirit.. .Then I turned to the spirit; sunk in painful

concentration, I sought to conquer within me the minor passions,

 the easy virtues, the cheap spiritual joys, the convenient hopes.

Finally one night 1 started up in great joy, for I had seen the

red ribbon left behind him in his ascent—within us and in all

the universe—by a certain Combatant; I clearly saw his bloody

footprints ascending from inorganic matter into life and from

life into spirit.

Then suddenly a great light was born within me: the transmutation

of matter into spirit. Here was the great secret, the red ribbon

followed by the Combatant.. .I now clearly saw the progress of

the Invisible, and suddenly I knew what my duty was to be: to

work in harmony together with that Combatant; to transmute,

even I, in my own small capacity, matter into spirit, for only

then might I try to reach the highest endeavour of man—

a harmony with the universe.⁶⁰

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Kazantzakis was now an emancipated man, and he was free to collaborate with the 'Combatant'; being redeemed himself, he was free to participate in the movement for the redemption of the race. The Combatant is also God, he is the Life Force of Bernard Shaw, he is Bergson's élan -vital, "the onrushing force through all of creation which strives for purer and more rarefied freedom."⁶¹ God is a perpetual Becoming. One after another, the peaks have to be reached and passed, the veils of illusion torn and cast aside. Mind and heart are milestones on the path. The ego, the race, mankind itself, the circumambient universe, these too are but advancing exercises in identification, no sooner successfully accomplished than left behind and forgotten. Onward, forever onward,

      To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,

      Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.⁶²

These and other ideas, mainly derived from his mystic experience on the Holy Mountain of Athos, were woven by Kazantzakis—no doubt with an admixture of strands of thought from Bergson and Nietzsche, and perhaps also Oswald Spengler—into a philosophical memoir in a poetical style entitled Spiritual Exercises: Salvatores Dei, which in the Kazantzakis canon perhaps corresponds to The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine in the Sri Aurobindo canon. The tradition of retirement from the world for peace and meditation was already a long established one in India at the time of the Buddha, and it is an unbroken tradition to this day.⁶³ The surprising thing is that such an idea should have occurred to a modern Greek writer, and that such a retreat should have filled him with creative purpose for the rest of his life. One result, and indeed for us the chief result, of Kazantzakis' mystic experience is this stupendous 'Modern Sequel' to the Odyssey.

      Like its Homeric model, Kazantzakis' poem too is an epic narrative in XXIV Books, but being 33,333 lines long, thrice as voluminous as the original. The metrical pattern too is his own, not a mere mimicry of the Homeric hexameter, but a verse oF seventeen

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syllables with eight stresses, while Kimon Friar's English rendering is in lines of six iambic feet with the usual permissible variations. Whichever way one looks at the poem, whether the original or the translation, the experience (mystical and otherwise) that went into its making or the energy of the art that has made it what it is, this modern Odyssey should be adjudged a remarkable performance; "for its size and splendour and ambition alone",⁶⁴ it should claim and secure a place among the indubitable poetic triumphs of our time, taking a seat near Savitri and the Cantos.

      Odysseus—who is at once Homer's hero, Kazantzakis' alter-ego, and the human spearhead of the evolutionary adventure—is the hero; his wanderings, his visions, his musings and his ravings, his successes and his failures including the ultimate holocaust of his death, form the mountainous thematic heap of the poem; and its philosophic base is provided by a Dionysian-Nietzschean-Bergsonian worldview that at its clearest and most perceptive moments becomes the 'Cretan glance', which is really no more than a new name for the Sophoclean capacity to see life steadily and see it whole, or even the old Stoic capacity for patient determined sufferance. Perhaps the 'Cretan glance' includes more of the joy of life than the Stoic or the Sophoclean, though quite as much of its clarity and strength and integrality.

      Kazantzakis imagines (like Tennyson) that Odysseus, on his homecoming to Ithaca, neither pleases nor is pleased himself, and so sets out again on his wanderings with a few picked rugged companions. His first hop is at Sparta, and there he finds Menelaus' smugness repulsive. He abducts a not unwilling Helen, who is as beautiful as ever, but not because he desires her carnally but rather because he thinks that she too deserves release from the barred cage of false domesticity. The party arrives in Crete, where fertility rites are in progress. Odysseus actively helps the conspiracy against the decadent king, Knossos is now destroyed, and leaving one of his companions, Hardihood, behind to rule over Crete, he leaves with the others for Egypt. It is a singular irony that Helen should find real happiness at

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last in the arms of a barbarian, and that Crete's new king should be a ruffian like Hardihood.

      In the meantime, Odysseus finds that the depraved Egyptian Empire too is in the throes of a rebellion, and gets quickly involved in it. But he is presently reduced to discomfiture and travels through darkest Africa to track the sources of the Nile. He and his companions reach at last the lake that is really Nile's source, and leaving them to rest for a while, Odysseus makes an ascent to a mountain-cave where for seven days he communes with himself and his God and whatever gods may be. An irresistible creative urge wells up in Odysseus, and he and his companions put forth sustained labours to build an Ideal City which, however, is destroyed by a sudden earthquake. One more illusion shattered, Odysseus turns an ascetic ("a figure more like an Indian Yogi", says W.B. Stanford), goes into a trance, and after resisting the assault of fresh temptations, he surrenders to a Dionysian dance of acceptance of everything. He wanders on towards the Cape, life idly or agitatedly passes him by, he encounters Tempters and Messiahs (including Prince Motherth and the gentle Fisher-Lad, who typify the Buddha and the Christ respectively), sets out towards the South Pole, and with a final supreme gesture of acceptance and affirmation he soars high and achieves the ultimate release.

      Readers of poetry who petulantly complain that the Cantos tell no consecutive story, that Pound's is an epic without a plot, or that Savitri is an unconscionable inflation of a simple legend into the vast proportions of an epic, that it is a mass of obscurity, would find Kazantzakis' poem full of 'matter', full of the rugged manifoldness of life, peopled with a Dostoevskian variety of characters, full of the excitement of revolution, full of moving incidents, sudden transitions, and even audacious canters of thought. But the differences notwithstanding, all three contemporary epic creations share— though each in its own unique way and to the extent of the particular inspiration sustaining it—a high seriousness of purpose, a more or less total vision of man and Nature and the cosmos, and a profound anxiety about the futureiiestiny of man. There is a down-to-the-earth realism, an uninhibited violence and downrightness, in Kazantzakis' poem which are in marked contrast to the zig-zag vagaries, exotic patterns and general obscurity of the Cantos or the occult distance and dreamy otherworldliness of large tracts of Savitri. But of any one of these three great poems (great, undoubtedly, though not all equally great) it may be said what one critic has said of one of them that its real effect is, "to bring forward (and with what unbelievable fullness!) the incalculable value of a total response to experience."⁶⁵

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