Woman as Symbol in Kazantzakis's Writings

Abstract

Nikos Kazantzakis's ambivalent and often negative representation of women can best be explained if seen as part of his aesthetics, especially the "new art" he discovered in image and cinema that, through logos, enables the art of symbolization. Woman's multiform and controversial nature lends itself to symbolization since it provides vital analogies and antinomies that the poet can exploit. The author's quest for a renewed spiritual world and a relief to his existential anxiety is thus answered by creative life and art—the transformation of the visual image into symbol through the senses and outside logocratic enslavement. Kazantzakis's philosophy becomes, at the same time, the purpose and means of his aesthetics, as abstractions such as the Bergsonian struggle, Nietzschean freedom, and the Buddistic mask turn into tangible life through the intuitions of duration that Henri Bergson has called durée réelle (real time). This is Kazantzakis's time of praxis in which our heightened experience of life's force equates with a moment of immortality.