Category: European Literature

Jon Fosse – A Shining

If a story is going to create a mystery without a single answer, it should at least aim at the creation of the potential for the reader to find an answer. The alternative is simply frustration. For instance, Kafka’s brilliance lies in the way that we can find a solution to his works’ problems, just never a conclusive one. We all know why Gregor Samsa becomes a bug – only our views inevitably conflict with one another. The text, nevertheless, provides clues for all of us. It prompts endless exploration. Whereas I am not sure Jon Fosse’s A Shining does.

I had high hopes for A Shining. After all, Jon Fosse has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I spent weeks going around bookshops, trying to find Septology. Perhaps this effort meant that I demanded more (when I finally found a book of Fosse’s in stock) than the writing could give me. A Shining is about fifty pages long. It’s so thin that it bends the wrong way if I carry it in a breast pocket. But plenty of stories have managed much in fewer pages.

The plot is very simple. A man drives into a forest. He has been driving aimlessly, out of boredom. In the forest his car gets stuck. He gets out of the car and tries to find help. It starts snowing and he gets cold. He sees a mysterious “shining” that approaches and talks to him. Then the shining goes inside him. He then sees an old couple that he recognises, not immediately, as his parents. Then he sees a man in a suit. Then they all float away, the narrator included.

The narrator asks :

“What’s happening here in the middle of the forest, in the black darkness of the trees, where there’s white snow on the branches and on the ground between the trees[?]”

What, indeed.

I propose to start with the narrator, whose consciousness we inhabit. Often narrators are the way into a story like this.

He shows signs of depression: “Boredom had taken hold of me—usually I was never bored but now I had fallen prey to it. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do.” He hasn’t eaten a proper meal in days, and he experiences a kind of emptiness and anxiety that worsens as the story progresses. He is lonely. What else? As so often in these kinds of stream-of-consciousness books, he has a lack of self-knowledge that can easily grate: “And what was I doing on this forest road?”

Does he want to end his life? Perhaps – “And maybe that is exactly why I walked into the forest, because I wanted to freeze to death.” Perhaps not – he then immediately decides this is not the case. We don’t know his job, his life before the story, except for hints that are insufficient to form a view – “You might almost consider me a thinker.” In other words, our man is a blank slate, albeit likely a prideful one. Even when his “parents” arrive upon the scene, the dialogue between the three is very limited and focused on his trying to find a way out of the forest. There is insufficient evidence there for even the most ardent Freudian to make an essay from. 

Let’s go back to Kafka. Gregor Samsa was a travelling salesman. This made him a bug in the eyes of others. He had a family whose interactions with him give plenty to think over. Like the narrator of A Shining, he seems oblivious to certain things – in Gregor’s case, for example, that being a bug might make it hard for him to do his job. But unlike the narrator of Fosse’s story, his outward existence as an individual is sufficient to give us something to keep in our minds as we try to make sense of things. Both have personalities, but only Gregor seems to have had a life.

We might say that A Shining is about meaning, as if this is an excuse. Certainly, one real part of the work is the way that we try to find order and meaning in the world. The narrator’s hope for rescue leads him to ascribe meaning to the ground itself: “and that was probably a path leading into the forest, and it has to lead somewhere, doesn’t it, and there must be people there.” He finds a stone that just seems to have been shaped for sitting on. There is a human desperation for everything to make sense that he clings to.

Philosophically, this comes across in questions of determinism. On the very first page, the narrator notes: “All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a forest. And there was another way of talking, according to which something, something or another, led, whatever that might mean, to something else, yes, something else.” (We might note here that our narrator, who thinks he is a “thinker”, refuses to state outright the simple name for this idea). If everything is determined by something else, then that suggests an ordering of the universe. That is a comforting thought.

Against that thought, there is reality and the random. The snow of the forest that obliterates any path that might be there,  that the car gets stuck to begin with. The narrator walking in circles as he tries to get out. The way that his parents, rather than helping him escape, argue with one another sadly and admit that they do not know the way out either.

We might look to parts of the story as symbols to guide us, to things as echoes of others. Dante’s Divine Comedy begins:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

This is our narrator’s problem, through and through. After the uncertainty of the forest, Dante meets his guide. Our narrator in A Shining also meets guides – the shining, the parents, and so on. He also remembers seeing a cabin beyond the forest – a symbol, clearly, of the order and meaning he can achieve if he can work through the muddle of snow and trees. Back on the road, there was an abandoned farmhouse, showing that the world he left behind cannot be returned to. This all sounds good to me, reasonable interpretations of things. But it does make things look quite simple.

The Shining

Now it’s really as dark as it can get and there in front of me I see the outline of something that looks like a person. A shining outline, getting clearer and clearer. Yes, a white outline there in the dark, right in front of me. Is it far away or is it nearby. I can’t say for sure. It’s impossible, yes, impossible to say whether it’s close or far away. But it’s there. A white outline. Shining. And I think it’s walking toward me. Or coming toward me.

With the shining itself, it’s perhaps not necessary to demonstrate the parallels, except that I am increasingly aware that the extent to which I was exposed to Christianity as a child through my schooling is completely unrepresentative of the general distance many now have from the common stories of the Bible, regardless of belief. It could be an “angel”. Certainly, it brings comfort to the narrator, warming him up. At one point he thinks of it as a voice of “love.” The shining form enters the narrator and occasionally talks to him –

I say: who are you. The presence says: I am who I am—and I think that I’ve heard that answer before, but I can’t remember where I heard it, or maybe I read it somewhere or another.

So at least the book is aware that people’s connection to God is not what it used to be, and makes it obvious. Although the narrator suggests it might be some dark angel, it is fairly conclusive from the context that it is a positive spirit, trying to help him. “I’ll leave that for other people to decide,” he thinks, about whether it is the voice of God. But the book does not leave much room for an alternative.

Next, we have the parents, once the shining has gone quiet and entered the narrator. Their portrayal is touching, because of its vulnerability. We expect his parents to help, but they seem just as lost in the forest as the narrator:

She says: you don’t know the way—and he says no and she says she was sure he knew where the way was, he always knew the way, she couldn’t remember a single time when he hadn’t known the way, she was sure he knew the way, she would never have imagined anything else, she says and she’s stopped, and she’s let go of my father’s arm and now she’s looking up at him, and she says, and her voice sounds scared: you don’t know the way, you can’t find the way back home—and my father shakes his head. She says: so why did we walk so far into the forest—and my father doesn’t answer, he just stands there stiffly. She says: answer me. He says: but we came here together. She says: no, it was you who dragged me into the forest. He says: but you wanted to find him.

But at this point, we can say that the parents are sent by some higher power, clearly not to help the narrator escape, but to help him understand something about the world. “Wasn’t he always his own person,” his mother says to his father. Perhaps the lesson has something to do with selfishness and pride.

The final person is a man in a black suit. He has no face and perhaps is God, or the man the narrator could become. It’s impossible to say.

No, I don’t understand this. It’s not something that can be understood either, it’s something else, maybe it’s something that’s only experienced, that’s not actually happening. But is it possible to only experience something and not have it be happening? Everything you experience, yes, is real in a way, yes, and you probably understand it too, in a way. But it doesn’t matter either way.

He does not talk, but he and the narrator and all the others float off into the distance and the story ends, essentially bathed in light.

Conclusion

Now, either the narrator dies, or he is saved. It’s fairly immaterial. We can go for an atheistic interpretation that the whole thing was the delusion brought on by freezing to death, his parents, and the rest of it all just one of those near-death-experience oddities. Or we can say that in the forest he found some higher truth that is incommunicable, except as a strange second-hand experience for us readers. But it’s hard to see any other interpretation. It’s essentially a mystery that is not mysterious because there isn’t an answer here. We just need to accept the truth of it, which works with religion but seems fairly annoying with fiction.

A Shining isn’t actually bad as a religious tale. Its air of mystery is effectively created and it feels like a modern-day allegory. But it then suffers from not knowing what it is by trying half-heartedly to add ambiguity. Either it’s a story about a sad man who finds God/Meaning/Truth, in which case it should take itself still more seriously, or it’s an ironic tale that might just be a man freezing to death after taking a drive – at which point it could give us more to work with as we try to reach our own satisfactory interpretation of things. Either more ambiguity or more Truth, in other words.

Still, the funny thing is that I can see myself reading A Shining again. It’s not often that you have something that’s really trying to convey a mystical feeling – and partly succeeding. But on the other hand, I can’t see myself turning to the seven hundred or so pages of Septology too soon.

A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen

I knew that Joyce had rated Ibsen (he even wrote him fan mail), but it has taken a long time for me to read him. A Doll’s House is the first in the book, and so I began with that. I was expecting less than I should have, especially given Joyce’s praise. I thought the work would merely be one of those dramas of the 19th century where women are miserable and men narrow or cruel, and the meaning of life is all contained in a house of one’s own and a respectable personal income. I expected, in short, something a little like the works of my favourite German writer of the period, Theodor Fontane, without considering that the reason I like Fontane is precisely that he goes beyond the limits of that world to tell us things that are truly significant.

The setting is the apartment (I made my typical note in the margin that all action for women has to be domestic in the 19th century) of a former lawyer, just then promoted to bank manager, Torvald Helmer. He lives with his wife, Nora, and their three small children. There’s a maid and a nursemaid, and a regular guest in the consumption-stricken Dr Rank. A friend from the past, Kristine Linde, comes to see Nora. And there is also the figure of Nils Krogstad, who works at Torvald’s bank but has other reasons to come by too. A small cast of characters for what I assumed to be a kind of simple, domestic tragedy.

Act One

At first, the play did little to encourage me. The first act’s portrayal of Nora and Torvald’s relationship is just as unpleasant as all the other unhappy marriages of that period which I have read, even though Nora seems happy enough. Her husband controls her access to money, he controls what she eats (no macaroons!), and rather than refer to her as his wife or even by her name Torvald much prefers to call her a bird or squirrel or pet: “My little pet is very sweet, but it runs away with an awful lot of money. It’s incredible how expensive it is for a man to keep such a pet.”

Torvald does not come across well to the modern reader. He seems quite comfortable embodying all the least attractive elements of 19th century bourgeois society. “Oh, what a glorious feeling it is, knowing you’ve got a nice, safe job, and a good fat income.” He does not approve of borrowing money or any kind of concealment or deceit. The household which he lords over is his heart and rock. Krogstad, who managed to avoid a criminal conviction for forgery by lying, comes in for particular scrutiny in Torvald’s eyes: “A fog of lies like that in a household, and it spreads disease and infection to every part of it. Every breath the children take in that kind of house is reeking with evil germs.” Torvald here speaks the language of medicine and sanitation, just as later he will speak the language of heredity to explain criminality. His language is authoritative; his knowledge, however, doubtful.  

Nora’s life within the household seems happy, notwithstanding her husband’s dreadful choice of pet names. She is able to play with the children and to sneak a macaroon every now and then. We can assume that this is enough – she certainly thinks it is, at least at that moment. “Oh yes! When you’re happy, life is a wonderful thing!”

When her friend Mrs Linde arrives Nora seems shocked by just a certain lack of respectability in her friend compared to herself. Mrs Linde’s husband died without even giving his wife a reason to mourn him, which is shocking to Nora, who knows, as a good girl should, that marriage is all about love. But Mrs Linde was forced into a marriage of necessity to a richer man, so that she could help save her younger brothers and mother from destitution. She has not had the luck, for that’s all it is, that her former schoolmate Nora has had. Mrs Linde has come to see Nora in search of work. Her life now, with her brothers old enough to fend for themselves and her mother passed away, is “unutterably empty.” Mrs Linde had found her life’s meaning in living for others, and without the others, things have become terribly hard and sad.

Fortunately, Torvald can set Mrs Linde up at the bank, based on her experience. The only catch is that it will require Krogstad to lose his job. This is no bother at all, Torvald declares. There is but one snag, of which he is entirely unaware. Some years ago, when her husband had worked himself nearly to death, Nora had borrowed an extraordinary sum from Krogstad in order to take herself and Torvald to the South of Europe for some rest and recuperation. Nora had pretended that the money came from her own father, who had died recently, to avoid suspicions, while paying down the debt secretly through odd jobs and scrimping and saving on her allowance.

The problem is that Krogstad wants his job at the bank, and he can reveal not just the truth concerning where the money was found, but also that Nora is guilty of a forgery in signing for her father even after he died. Such a truth, he remarks, would ruin Nora in the eyes of her husband and the law. And Krogstad, who has only just begun to recover his own social standing after his earlier transgression, has no desire to be thrown back down into unemployment and disrepute. Nora cannot believe that she could face prison for forgery, should the truth come out, but she is not wise in such things:

Krogstad: The law takes no account of motives.

Nora: Then they must be very bad laws.

Alas, Nora is naïve. As her discussion with Mrs Linde shows, she has a good idea of how the world should be. Luckily for her, the world has not yet proved itself to be otherwise. But things soon begin to change on that front.

Act Two

The action of A Doll’s House takes place around Christmas, so there are plenty of excuses for guests to pop round and merriment to be had. In the play’s second act Nora tries to get Torvald to reverse the decision to replace Krogstad with Mrs Linde. She begs and she pleads, but there can be no luck. “If it ever got around that the new manager had been talked over by his wife…”, as Torvald charmingly remarks, it would be the end of him. He fears the embarrassment and any sense that his integrity – that highest of virtues for a respectable citizen – might be compromised.

Nora, convinced that she would receive the IOU note and be able to destroy it if she simply paid off the money as soon as possible, also turns down an opportunity to get the funds when old Dr Rank confesses that he is not long for this world and has secretly been in love with Nora. Not unexpectedly, she takes it badly, rather than using the position Rank has placed himself in to get the money.

Krogstad also returns, albeit secretly, to pressure Nora. Their talk turns to suicide, and here I began to see what I thought would be the shape of the play, with Nora ending her life rather than facing the shame and collapse of the family that the note would bring out. “Krogstad: Most of us think of that, to begin with. I did, too; but I didn’t have the courage.” Krogstad says he has a letter for her husband, detailing the truth of the matter, which he leaves in the letterbox and which only Torvald has the key to.

Nora manages to keep her husband from looking at his post until after they have gone to a dance, which takes place in act three, but act two ends, all the same, without much cause for optimism:

“Nora: Five. Seven hours to midnight. Then twenty-four hours till the next midnight. Then the tarantella will be over. Twenty-four and seven? Thirty-one hours to live.”

Act Three

Nora enlists Mrs Linde’s help to try to convince Krogstad to change course. She leaves him a note during the second act, and act three begins with them meeting while the Helmers are upstairs at their dance. Here, we discover that these two knew each other long ago. And that the love Mrs Linde lacked in her marriage she had once felt for this man, who thus far has seemed the villain of the play. Mrs Linde had married for others, at a time when Krogstad had few prospects. The poison he is alleged to have brought into his own household – he has children and is a widower – appears not hereditary, as claims Torvald, but rather perhaps to have come from these disappointments of youth. “When I lost you, it was just as if the ground had slipped away from under my feet. Look at me now: a broken man clinging to the wreck of his life.”

Now that she and Krogstad have seen their loveless marriages end, Mrs Linde suggests they may be together at last. Krogstad immediately agrees to try to secure the return of his letter, unopened. But then Mrs Linde changes her mind, and suggests that the right thing to do is let the letter be read after all. “Those two must have the whole thing out between them. All this secrecy and deception, it just can’t go on.” For those awaiting a tragic conclusion, these words, designed to bring good, seem unintentionally fatal. These two leave, and now Nora and Torvald, newly returned and a little drunk, have the flat to themselves until Dr Rank shows up briefly to say his goodbyes.

Torvald is in a good mood and seems determined to seduce his wife. Those phrases about his “most treasured possession” and his rights “Am I not your husband…?” redouble now, though his wife resists, knowing as she does that he will soon see the letter. Rank’s arrival saves her, but he does not stay long. Torvald discovers the visiting card that Rank left, marked with a black cross to indicate his oncoming death, but his mourning lasts half a paragraph before the man, who had visited every day during his healthy life, is forgotten. Torvald instead returns to his passion, declaring how he sometimes wished his wife were in terribly danger so he could save her. When he finally reads Krogstad’s letter it does not take long for him to have just such an opportunity.

He bungles it, completely, of course. He insults her family and her poor breeding, “no religion, no morals, no sense of duty…”, her intelligence, and even insults her suggestion that she will shortly end her life: “Oh stop pretending!” In short, Torvald reveals to her just what an awful creature he is. “From now on, there can be no question of happiness. All we can do is save the bits and pieces from the wreck, preserve appearances…” This is not a resolution worth having. But the play does not end here, nor with Nora’s flight to end her life. Suddenly, a letter comes from Krogstad for her. Her husband opens it and finds the IOU and an apology. “I am saved!” he shouts, forgetting for a moment that perhaps his wife may need some salvation too. Everything can go back to normal. “I’ve forgiven you,” he declares magnanimously. Ever the gentleman.

Ending

So things are back to normal, the family is protected, the values of honesty and integrity reaffirmed. It’s like the conservatism of the marriage plot that ends works like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Fontane’s On Tangled Paths, despite their otherwise liberal tendencies. What a lucky man Torvald is. “Here I shall hold you like a hunted dove I have rescued unscathed from the cruel talons of the hawk, and calm your poor beating heart.” Readers or audiences can pat themselves on the backs and take away that message we always seem to from works of the 19th century, namely that society could do with some improvements, especially in how it treats women, but that in general it’s better than chaos and formlessness, and that family and proper values should always come first.

Only, that’s not how the play ends. Only the alternative German ending, which Ibsen was literally forced to write, is like this. The true ending is so much more awesome. It was here that I understood what Joyce found in Ibsen, the link I had not anticipated between that incomparably great novella “The Dead” and the works of this magnificent Norwegian. Just as Gabriel in Joyce’s novella, on learning of his wife’s more real and authentic romance to a young man in the countryside before she met him, cannot continue living the same way as before, so too can Nora not merely shrug her shoulders and go back to playing with the children and stealing quick bites of macaroons as if nothing had happened. No, Nora rebels.

“You don’t understand me. And I have never understood you, either – until tonight.”

“We have now been married eight years. Hasn’t it struck you this is the first time you and I, man and wife, have had a serious talk together?” Ironically, in a work that is all about paper – paper that condemns (the IOU and Krogstad’s letter), paper that provides work (the files from the bank Torvald constantly carries around), paper that saves (Krogstad’s final note) – there is very little real communication. Nora turns on her husband and her father, the two men who had shaped her life, as she realises what a life it was they had shaped for her:

“You two never loved me. You only thought how nice it was to be in love with me.”

“He used to call me his baby doll, and he played with me as I used to play with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house….”

It comes out. That Nora’s life has not been a life at all, but an object of other’s play. Not work, which would be serious, but just a toy to have around. And suddenly she sees a different image of herself, one that could never have existed in this kind of world: “It’s your fault that I’ve never made anything of my life.” And so she decides on a course of action. Not suicide in the woods, but still a departure into the night. “There’s another problem needs solving first. I must take steps to educate myself. You are not the man to help me there. That’s something I must do on my own. That’s why I’m leaving you.”

Torvald’s attempts to rebut her are so pathetic they are almost not worth quoting. “Helmer: Oh you blind, inexperienced. / Nora: I must set about getting experience, Torvald.” He tries appealing to her duty, her “most sacred duty” to her family. But she is wiser now. “I have another duty equally sacred… My duty to myself.” She wants to discover herself, her own truth, not society’s. She wants, above all, to live, not to be a doll in someone’s house. Torvald is shocked. There can be only one explanation possible: “You don’t love me any more.” To which Nora gives the hilarious response, the one Torvald was definitely least expecting: “Exactly.”

And so she goes.

Oh how exciting! How brilliant! Readers, if I may at times strike you as being a little too much from the 19th century, which is certainly a fault, at least it gave me one advantage in reading A Doll’s House: I was not at all expecting this. I was expecting suicide, I was expecting Nora to be cast out of the house like poor Effi in Effi Briest. I was expecting God to Punish the Sinner for mistreating His Sacred Values. What I was not expecting was this heroism. How awesome Ibsen is for writing such a work. I think I must have been burned by Chekhov, whose brilliant plays always end with nothing changing, or everything somehow getting worse. Here we have a positive ending which doesn’t involve marriage, but involves something much more important – truth, personal truth, pursued. I am not saying that it is always right to abandon one’s family in pursuit of truth – after all, we know what happens to Anna Karenina. But it is surely right here.

And so I was delighted that at last I turned to Ibsen. This will not be the last work of his that I read – that much is for certain. 

Nikos Kazantzakis – The Last Temptation

Why rewrite the Gospels? Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation is the second attempt at it that I’ve met this year, after Tolstoy’s The Life of Jesus: The Gospel in Brief. Christians have four official versions of Jesus, and as many apocryphal ones as they like – why ask for more!? As Dustin Condren notes in the introduction to his translation of the Tolstoy, in Tolstoy’s case he wanted “to find the practical, pure teaching of Jesus Christ, to free it from the linguistic patina of ritual and scripture, removing both the dogmatic and the supernatural”. Tolstoy sought to reshape Christianity into a practical guide, removing it from the clutches of the orthodox (he uses the same exact term for the Bible’s pharisees, just to make it clear to his readers who the enemy is and always has been).

Tolstoy’s goal was noble enough – a better Christianity to make a better people. His tortuous life indicates how serious he was about finding this truth. The problem was that he went so far from the original text in places that even allies of the aging sage thought he had gone overboard. But taken as a whole, his project is interesting. In creating a synthesis of the four gospels into one narrative written in a more earthy idiom, Tolstoy makes us reflect on what the gospels and Jesus actually say. In reflection, we might turn back to the originals, or we might stick with Tolstoy. But either way, he makes us think. Another miserable soul with a deep distrust of organised Christianity was Soren Kierkegaard, and he too tried to make readers and listeners go back to the texts themselves by pressure washing them of the encrusted dogmatism, as he did in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.

I got the impression that Nikos Kazantzakis was less interested in all that. As P.A. Bien notes in his translator’s note, Kazantzakis spent his whole life shifting from idol to idol, experimenting with heroes ranging from Christ to Nietzsche, to Buddha and then Lenin, before finally reaching Odysseus and then going back to where he started. His Christianity was not like either Kierkegaard or Tolstoy’s in that it does not seek to proselytise. Instead, in recounting a new version of Christ’s life what he really does is try to combine elements from many of his intellectual experiences into a new synthesis, one very much influenced by Nietzsche in particular. Here were have, to go by Kazantzakis’s own prologue, a model, “a supreme model to the man who struggles”, because “every moment of Christ’s life is a conflict and a victory”.

This, then, is the Christ we meet in The Last Temptation: a man in conflict with himself. The Last Temptation contains an awful lot of temptations. When we first meet Jesus he is the carpenter who makes crosses for others’ crucifixions, and he is engaged in a battle with God to avoid answering His call. “Till I die!” he shouts, in answer to the question of how long he will continue resisting God. Jesus here goes in attitude from a stroppy teenager, to a love-preaching ingenue, to a fire-breathing prophet, over the course of the book, as key moments from his life – his stay in the wilderness and John the Baptist’s death, a visit to a desert monastery – come to affect him. We meet Mary Magdalene, Mary his mother, and many other characters from the Bible.

But Jesus and Judas are the most interesting. They always are. Even to a non-Christian, Jesus has to be a most curious god, because he is at least part-human. In his struggles and confusions and his like-us-ness he serves as an entry point into the world of Christianity. To those who are Christians, he becomes a human companion within one’s soul, who is more understanding of our pains and sufferings than the immaterial being he also is, might be. Judas, meanwhile, is fascinating as a betrayer. He and his fate are the yardstick for measuring God’s kindness and forgiveness – does He allow Judas to go to Hell, given Judas was predetermined to betray his master? Kazantzakis avoids all this by having Judas betray Jesus at Jesus’s own instigation. There is no other way, Jesus says, for the Kingdom of Heaven to come.

Familiar stories and parables are also played out in The Last Temptation. Like Tolstoy, Kazantzakis takes a slightly sceptical stance towards miracles, relegating many of them to dreams (such as the walking on water). Nevertheless, perhaps the most egregious (to traditionalists) thing he does is “fix” certain parables. We may remember the Parable of the Ten Virgins, in which the virgins are asked to remain awake for the coming bridegroom. Some have brought enough oil, while others have not. Those who have are present when the bridegroom comes, while the others have had to run off to get more. Upon their return, they find the doorway locked and are refused entry. Here’s Matthew’s version of the ending: “Lord, Lord, open to us.” But he answered, “Most certainly I tell you, I don’t know you.”

Here is Kazantzakis’s addition to the ending: ““This is a wedding,” [the bridegroom] cried. “Let everyone eat, drink and be merry. Open the door for the foolish virgins and wash and refresh their feet, for they have run much.””

Where the Bible is at times exclusionary and absolutist in its demands, Kazantzakis’s Jesus is a big fan of forgiveness. His alterations to what we know not only make Jesus more human, but also make his teaching more humanly possible as well. Nobody ends up in hell, nobody goes without forgiveness who truly desires it. It is even more a religion for the small and lowly than Christianity already is.

The problem with writing about Jesus is we all know what happens to him at the end of his time on earth. Many of us also know a good deal about what he gets up to, while on earth. The Last Temptation, therefore, needs to engage us emotionally, rather than grip us through its plot. This it generally achieves on the back of Kazantzakis’s language, which is earthy and often beautiful. We learn that Andrew “made friends with laughter and food”. Jesus’s early blessing by God is described thus: “he had felt a light, prolonged tingling on the top of his head, very tender, like a caress”. We find a lovely comment on the relationship between body and soul: “the body is the camel on which the soul mounts in order to traverse the desert”. Finally, souls are described as “sparks of God.” Nice stuff.

Yet there is a certain tension in this novel as well. The more serious Jesus and his message is within its pages, the more tragically ridiculous he becomes to us. All the talk of a new temple and a new world lose their power when we look around ourselves and see only signs of Jesus’s failure to achieve his stated goals. Alas, it’s hard for us to remove the ironic glasses we all wear, but we must do so to enjoy The Last Temptation to its fullest. Although, this is a charge we could level at any religious work these days…

The temptations that Jesus encounters sometimes work, and sometimes don’t. Jesus is a cowardly, fearful man who is uncertain of his destiny, at least in Kazantzakis’s rendering of him. But when, for example, he tries to convince us that this Jesus might be tempted by worldly power, it simply does not chime with the Jesus we have accompanied thus far. At least in the Bible there is sufficient economy of expression that we might, with extreme imaginative effort, allow ourselves the thought that Jesus might be tempted by such things – here, at six hundred pages of him, we cannot see it.

Still, the clue is in the title. We are here for the last temptation, the big one. For Kazantzakis, this is when Jesus has successfully made his way to the cross and been crucified. At this point he falls into a dream state, and in this state he dreams an alternate life. This life has two components. First, it has erotic fulfilment, as Jesus and Mary Magdalene finally consummate their affection for one another; then, it has domestic happiness, as Jesus lives and has a lot of children with the sisters Mary and Martha, while Magdalene disappears from view. In all this, Jesus is accompanied by a green-winged angel, who we can tell quite quickly is not all he seems.

After all of his struggles, now Jesus finds a kind of peace. “Harmony between the earth and the heart, Jesus of Nazareth: that is the kingdom of heaven,” says his new friend. Rather than his duty as Messiah, Jesus finds his paradise in the accumulation of small, day-to-day joys: food, wine, labour, sex. And through his many offspring he finds he has conquered death.

Readers at this point may be somewhat confused. Presuming none of us is a Messiah ourselves, isn’t all this not happiness? Little joys and gratitudes, a dampening of one’s anxieties about death? Yes, it is. But we also have to answer the question of whether this is enough, because if this isn’t enough, then we need something else, and that something else inevitably ends up being God or some other higher purpose. When Jesus realises that this is all he’ll get, he doesn’t renounce his new domestic life, but he does begin to doubt it.

Things fall apart when he meets his disciples and Paul. Paul, we remember, was once Saul, but a conversion on the road to Damascus led him to a new life and a new name in fulfilling God’s wishes. He arrives at Jesus’s home only to find the Messiah is not the one he had gone about praising to others. But Paul is mighty, and not to be dissuaded by Jesus’s failure to correspond to his own youthful teachings: “Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts us a man’s height above the earth – that is true. Whatever clips off man’s wings – that is false.” Paul creates a new Jesus, ignoring the one before him, because he acknowledges that people need Jesus. Not domestic dandy Jesus, but a comforter and hopebringer. The reality, ultimately, is not altogether important.

Then the disciples arrive, old and broken. They find Jesus after their own efforts in life have failed, and he tries to justify himself to them: “In my youth I set out, like a youth, to save the world. Afterward, when my mind had matured, I stepped into line—the line of men. I went to work: ploughed the land, dug wells, planted vines and olives. I took the body of woman into my arms and created men—I conquered death. Isn’t that what I always said I would do? Well, I kept my word: I conquered death!” Jesus’s family happiness in the dream does not come from nowhere. Characters from his own mother all the way to the earthy, rich, Zebedee, say repeatedly that happiness comes from losing one’s illusions and settling down with a wife. This is exactly what dream-Jesus has done.

But the disciples do not accept his betrayal. In fact, the book reaches the peak of its emotional power as they reject him, crying “Coward! Deserter! Traitor!” again and again. He has not conquered death, only hidden it from himself. He has certainly not honoured God either.

The Last Temptation ends as Jesus awakes, still on the cross. Seeing this, he realises that he made the right choice after all, and has nothing to regret. In discovering the alternative path through the dream, we and he see what the good path means by comparison. Like Jesus, we can feel relieved in the knowledge that “everything has begun.”

But what on earth are we to do with a novel like this? It takes our understanding of what a good life is and tramples it into the ground, instead favouring a life of constant struggle with temptation and doubt. What a pain, to find the world more complicated than we might wish… Here, in this love of struggle, is Nietzsche’s influence most clearly felt. Here too is Kazantzakis’s own life. His father helped the Cretan people revolt against their Ottoman rulers, providing one example of heroism; later the boy was sent to be taught by monks, providing a much more spiritual set of heroic ideals. The Last Temptation is in some way a dramatization of these conflicting images of goodness. One that sees harmonising the spirit with God as the greatest good, and the other that sees harmonising the body with earth as it.

The problem is that struggling is not the key to happiness; it is the key to growth. And providing we can keep ourselves from struggling too much, or in the pursuit of unattainable goals, we can find in a bit of struggle a source of joy. Jesus’s struggle is not “a bit of a struggle”. It is a merciless, exhausting, brutal conflict, a war against his own body and his own soul. But Jesus was the Son of God, so he was supposed to struggle like this. When we choose to live our lives in small joys and kindnesses, it’s much less clear what greater journey and duty we are missing out on. But if we look inside ourselves, perhaps we can find it. And then, and only then, Kazantzakis’s Jesus might be closer to a model worthy of emulation.

It is always a bit funny to take Jesus and rework him. But unlike the Koran, we can say that the Bible was written by people who may have been fallible. Given this interpretative layer, which The Last Temptation acknowledges by having Jesus get angry at Matthew (“I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else!”), there is more leeway to reinvent Christ. Tolstoy wanted a Christ who would be happy toiling on the fields alongside him, while Kazantzakis wanted a Christ who could be a paradigm for spiritual growth for us in the modern age, no matter how much we may find the directions of his growth somewhat strange or irrelevant to our own lives.

Ultimately, what seems certain is that Jesus will continue to provide fascination for people in the years to come, even as Christianity falls further and further out of view. This man who combines God and human, when we add his doubts and anxieties (and even the Bible dramatizes these), comes to be remarkably close to us humans now, living in a world where people throw around words like “transhumanism” and “posthuman”, “cyborg” and all the rest with reckless abandon. As our command of the world becomes more godlike, our command over ourselves and our destinies remains riven with the old uncertainties. It makes sense to see Jesus as someone who might have some kind of answers. This Jesus, Kazantzakis’s Jesus, may do.

For more Kazantzakis, I’ve read and reviewed Zorba the Greek and his biography, Report to Greco. For more Last Temptation, I’ve heard Scorsese made a film.