Nomadic and correspondent discourses: the voyage to Orient in Nikos Kazantzakis‘s travel letters and literary work

Abstract

This article examines the relation of an author’s travel letters with his literary work. Travel letters are proposed as a prioritized example for the study of the formation of an “open circuit” with an author’s other oeuvres, beyond the traditional “laboratory” approach of his correspondence, according to which letters come before or after the literary work. The research is focused on Nikos Kazantzakis’s travel letters from China and Japan, written during his travel experience as a press correspondent (1935). These letters addressed to his wife have also fuelled his travel articles for the daily press Acropolis and afterwards his travelogue entitled Japan - China. A Journal of Two Voyages to the Far East and his novel entitled Rock Garden. To this corpus we could also add works in which the travel experience is treated in a rather philosophical manner, such as his piece The Saviors of God: Spiritual exercises and his epic poem The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. In the first part through the exploitation of concepts deriving from Jacques Derrida (1987) and Gilles Deleuze (1972, 1980), the nomadism of the travel letter is examined. In this manner, a study of Kazantzakis’s travel letters and of all these texts–either originating or influenced by his travels to Asia and his interest in the Orient, is advanced as an “open circuit,” beyond any temporal and generic restrictions. In the second part, the various literary and cultural intertextual relations in his work are examined as organizing his encounters with Japanese and Chinese women in his specifically Asiatic travel experience through the archetypical “woman as Temptress” example (J. Campbell, 1949). It has been proven that a “nomadic thought” not enclosed in genres is circulated through all forms of his auctorial activity and the various correspondent forms can alternatively function as rather dynamic assemblages of his oriental travel experience.