(Un)Doing the Anatolian Smile: War and Redemption in Elia Kazan’s Fiction

• Main Author: Anastasia Stefanidou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 2018-12-01
• Series: Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media
• Online Access: http://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/ExCentric/article/view/6728

Elia Kazan’s stage and film work is primarily related to American society while his novels mostly deal with cultures and histories with which many American critics and readers are not familiar. Kazan often felt at war with the Anatolian culture he was raised in, but was just as critical of the American practices and ideologies he had to interact with. The lack of critical interest in Kazan’s fictional work does a disservice to his overall creative achievement. The essay discusses Kazan’s novels America America (1961), The Anatolian (1982), and Beyond the Aegean (1994), which draw on Kazan’s family history of subservience and persecution under the Ottoman rule in Asia Minor and their subsequent psychological and cultural traumas in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. With the complex view of both participant and observer, I argue that, in these novels, Kazan questions the unlimited opportunities that the dream of America offers and envisions new spaces of sociocultural resistance and alternative forms of happiness, which, however, usually come with the inevitable loss of one’s personal integrity and free will, and which leave the individual stranded within a world where redemption and belonging seem to be always postponed.