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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.

An Autobiography of the Spirit – Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco

Report to Greco was pretty much the last thing the great Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, and though it is complete in and of itself, it was only really a first draft. It is an autobiography, but not of the sort that most of us are used to. In spite of a fascinating life full of adventure and travels, in Report to Greco the focus is very much on the internal adventures of the mind. Kazantzakis explores the spiritual discoveries, challenges, and epiphanies that made him who he was as a person and, equally importantly, as a writer. It is a beautifully written book, challenging and rewarding in equal measure, and easy to recommend to one tormented by those accursed questions: what must we believe, and what must we do?

I loved it. For the truth is, except for the pressures of reading lists and friends’ recommendations, I read for the same reasons I live – to find a justification for my life, and a way of looking at the world that redeems it and all its suffering. In this journey many writers have helped me – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Whitman, and Rilke come to mind – but no author of fiction, in a single book, has been so determined to find answers as Nikos Kazantzakis in Report to Greco.

“My life’s greatest benefactors have been journeys and dreams. Very few people, living or dead, have aided my struggle.”

At times the dominant force is Nietzsche, at times Homer or Bergson or Buddha or Lenin. To go through Report to Greco trying to plot the exact nature of Kazantzakis’ growth is a fool’s errand. He contradicts himself, forgets himself, and repeats himself. As we ourselves do, in our own development through life. To read this book is to be bourn along a river whose current and banks are ever-changing. The journey is more important than the specifics precisely because it is Kazantzakis’ attitude that is most memorable here. In Report to Greco he demonstrates how life can truly be lived according to the injunction memorably stated by the dying Tolstoy “Search, always keep on searching”.

A photograph of Kazantzakis's gravestone — Kazantzakis’s grave in Crete. Photo by Frente (CC BY-SA 3.0)

It is not enough to know that Kazantzakis had engraved on his gravestone: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free”. It is not even enough to know his intellectual forebears. It is necessary to know the attitude that could guide a man’s life such that at the end of his days he truly could believe in those words and rest. That story of a life is Report to Greco’s gift to us.

The Structure and Messages

Report to Greco is not really an autobiography, and trying to read it as one is a little foolish. Comparing it even to Kazantzakis’s Wikipedia page is going to lead to a lot of confusion. In spite of the book’s length and variety, it seems that there remained a huge amount of Kazantzakis that he nonetheless conceals, or else thinks is not worth writing about – “rinds they were. You tossed them into the garbage of the abyss and I did the same”. The book’s introduction by Kazantzakis’s widow, Helen, explains that as Kazantzakis lay dying he was nonetheless remembering still more events, still more travels, which would have made it into a second draft. These passed away with him. But so much is here that we have little to complain about.

Report to Greco begins in Kazantzakis’ home in Crete. It talks of his quiet mother and warlike father, and of ancestors on both sides. The teachers who influenced him, the schoolfellows who first accompanied him, and later disappointed him, are all described lavishly. I have not been to Crete or even Greece, but after Report to Greco and Zorba the Greek I feel like I need to go soon. Still, Kazantzakis doesn’t stay long in his homeland. Soon he begins the travels that make up the majority of the book. To Italy, to France, to Germany, Austria, Russia, the Caucasus, Jerusalem… the list is almost endless. And certainly, if Kazantzakis had lived longer, no doubt it would have been. His companions are monks and priests and poets and thinkers. Their conversations range widely, but always reflect Kazantzakis’s occupation with the big questions. What must we do, and what must we believe?

From everyone he gets a different answer. From the monks on Mt Athos he gets one, from the monks on Mt Sinai another. The revolutionaries of Russia give him faith in humankind – at other moments it disappears. At times God exists, at times a void. And when we reach the end of the book I’m not sure we’re all the wiser as to what Kazantzakis actually believes, except for in those big ideas that would seem cheap without the whole of Report to Greco to serve as their explanation and justification.

Of freedom he writes:

“love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul’s enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosanct of the old moulds when they are unable to contain you any longer”

And then of his own life there is this cryptic message:

“I was becoming a sea, an endless voyage full of distant adventures, a proud despairing poem sailing with black and red sails over the abyss.”

God is not important, because “the very act of ascending, for us, was happiness, salvation, and paradise.” But God, perhaps, lurks at the end. The achievement of Report to Greco is to make God irrelevant by showing how much of His creation can be enjoyed and savoured by us while we are still among the living. Affirmation requires a creator, but it doesn’t require a Beyond at all.

Travel and the Language of Affirmation

Report to Greco is a journey of the body as well as of the spirit. In some way, the journey of the latter needs the journey of the former. Through different people, and through different books, Kazantzakis comes to flourish. But as I reader I loved the places too, and though this is not a travel book, Report to Greco still has a lot to say about the locations Kazantzakis passed through during his life. We get the sense that places were inhabited by their ideas and beliefs just as much as they were by people. As he heads towards Mt Sinai Kazantzakis writes of the place: “This arid, treeless, inhuman ravine we were traversing had been Jehovah’s fearsome sheath. Through here He had passed, bellowing.” I too have had the experience, in the Himalayas and the desolate Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, of feeling a spirit passing in the wind.

Kazantzakis’ language also contributes to the feeling in Report to Greco of being closer to these big questions. His prose is always straightforward, and his images are influenced by his upbringing on Crete and his love of the Classics. These images reflect the rawness of his passion in searching for answers, and drag us after him. Our own images are often cliched and soulless and keep listeners and readers from truly feeling the truth of our own feelings, our own spiritual upheavals.

Meanwhile, who can read something like this without feeling its power, even if you do not believe it? – “Away, away! To the wilderness! There God blows like a scorching wind; I shall undress and have Him burn me.” Or his words on a statue: “Just as a hawk when it hesitates at the zenith of its flight, its wings beat and yet to us it appears immobile, so in the same way the ancient statue moves imperceptibly and lives”. I myself can scarcely differentiate a hawk from any other such bird, or the trees in the forest. I lack that knowledge, that experience.

On his own style Kazantzakis writes “In vain I toiled to find a simple idiom without a patchwork of adornments, the idiom which would not overload my emotion with riches and deform it.” Kazantzakis’s regular use of such natural images is part, I think, of the whole thread of affirmation in Report to Greco. He lives in this world more closely than I do, and by using the world in his images he shows the value he finds in it. The riches are in the world, not in the virtuosity of the language he uses to describe it. As a result, the language is breath-taking because it’s the product both of love and of experience. Few modern writers have both, at least where nature is concerned.

A Few Complaints

There are problems here, and things that are out of date. The contradictions and repetitions in Kazantzakis’s spiritual development would probably be cut by a harsher editor, even though they likely reflect what he actually experienced. The fact is, a repeated epiphany loses much of its value to a reader. Still, I like the way that the current structure demonstrates just how we can reach the same conclusions from many different circumstances. In some way that reinforces what I feel to be one of the book’s underlying messages: it is the attitude we take to things rather than the specific experiences we have that count for becoming who we are.

Less easily looked past are the instances of old-school sexism, which is really just a little boring. (“Women are simply ornaments for men, and more often a sickness than a necessity”) This is a man’s spiritual journey, and it often feels like women are excluded from the peak Kazantzakis is climbing towards. All the same, the sexism here isn’t as bad as it is in Zorba. Much worse, however, is the tacit defence of Stalin. Report to Greco was written in the years immediately after Stalin’s death so there’s really no reason for Kazantzakis to be so silent on Stalin’s atrocities – in the Soviet Union Khrushchev hadn’t exactly kept quiet himself. I also cannot believe that Kazantzakis wasn’t aware of them either, since he travelled so widely in the Soviet Union. All he has to say, however, is these words, given to his female companion at the time.

“Lenin is the light, Trotsky the flame, but Stalin is the soil, the heavy Russian soil. He received the seed, a grain of wheat. Now, no matter what happens, no matter how much it rains or snows, no matter how much it fails to rain or snow, he will hold that seed, will not abandon it, until finally he turns it into an ear of wheat.”

Well, this, and a little story about Stalin’s bravery while he was a revolutionary in Tbilisi. Isn’t that great? The irony, probably not deliberate, is that Stalin might have had a much easier time growing his seed if he didn’t actively cause huge famines in modern-day Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Genocide doesn’t grow fruits, and I’m disappointed Kazantzakis leaves any dark from his portrayal of Stalin. It would be better not to mention him at all if this bad taste in the mouth is all we’re offered. Kazantzakis’ love of the Revolution’s ideals is perfectly understandable – the chapter taking place in Russia has a particularly memorable moment where Kazantzakis witnesses a large parade and feels a great unity with his fellows. But it’s a real shame he didn’t think Stalin could be separated from his revolutionary origins.

Conclusion

There are many reasons to read Report to Greco, but enjoying it demands an open mind. The book rewards those who are willing to let themselves be bourn across time and space through Kazantzakis’s life. If we ourselves are not searching for answers, Kazantzakis’s desire to find them will no doubt seem somewhat foolish. But if we are, then even if we don’t agree with his conclusions – and why should we? – we will appreciate the spirit that drove him to reach them. Kazantzakis’s attitude towards life is what inspires me most of all. The German-language poet Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet that we must “live the questions for now”; Kazantzakis shows what such a life can look like. This is the great gift of Report to Greco. The task now, for all of us searchers, is to go out filled with the same faith that animated him and find our own.

And then perhaps, we may come to have upon our headstones the same words that lie on his. “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free”.

Have you read Report for Greco? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments below.

For more Kazantzakis, look at Zorba the Greek here. For more affirmation of human existence, look at Platonov, Shalamov, and Rasputin. If you want more old school beauty and simple living, look at Satta’s Day of Judgement.

Zorba the Greek and the Ambiguities of Affirmation

Introduction: Kazantzakis and his novel’s Reputation

Zorba the Greek was the novel of Nikos Kazantzakis that I least wanted to read. I had come across its author in a round about way as I rambled through Wikipedia page after Wikipedia page, probably procrastinating something, until at last I stumbled upon a reference to his novel Christ Recrucified. With a title like that there was no leaving that link blue, and I soon discovered to my horror that one of my dearest ideas for a novella of my own had already found expression in the work of a Greek man, Nikos Kazantzakis. It soon became obvious that my idea-making was not in vain, and that actually our stories were only superficially similar. This led me to the man himself who – this much I could tell already – was an author whose thematic concerns were similar to my own. Something of a literary friendship, or at the very least an alliance, could be salvaged from the wreckage.

A picture of Nikos Kazantzakis
from the Μουσείο N. Καζαντζάκη / Kazantzakis Museum.
Used under CC 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en — Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)

Nikos Kazantzakis had an extremely rich life. Born in 1883 in Heraklion on the island Crete while it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1907 he began his travelling. By the end of his life he had visited France, Germany, Italy, The Soviet Union, Spain, the Near and Far East, and much of north Africa, working in various jobs including being a journalist and translator. He met Mussolini, admired Lenin, despised Stalin and at one time or another seemed to have had every view in every shade that was popular in his turbulent times, before dying in 1957. But most importantly of his views, he had a profound interest in trying to find something he could believe in, which is evident from the title and beyond of every single thing he wrote.

Zorba the Greek has a reputation for being “one of the great life-affirming novels of our time” – so says the blurb of my edition. This naturally put me off the book before I’d even bought it, as being made happy is very low on my list of priorities when it comes to deciding what to read next. However, it was the only work by Kazantzakis that was in either of the big bookstores in Cambridge, so I didn’t have much choice. And as it turned out, the thing that struck me as the book drew to a close and that continues to bother me now is just how much more ambiguous its contents seem than the blurb’s cheeriness would indicate. This is no mere exercise in standing naked on the top of hills.

The Plot

What happens is simple. The whole book is really a series of largely unconnected events which happen to the narrator, an intellectual who is trying to become more experienced in the workings of the world itself, and the titular Zorba. While waiting for a boat to Crete to start a mining operation there the unnamed narrator meets an old man, Zorba, who offers his services to him, having been a miner himself. The narrator accepts, and the two of them begin their adventures. They meet the locals of a small village including Madame Hortense, an old French lady, the widow, an alluring woman, and uncle Anagnosti, the village elder. The two of the men, alongside workers from the village, build their mine, and in the evenings Zorba relates stories of his life, and his now-famous worldview. But eventually there are money problems which even Zorba’s hairbrained schemes are unable to solve, and finally the two are forced to leave the village and each other. On the material side of things, that’s all there is – a collection of escapades and affairs. But there is another level of plot – the mental. Here, the book describes the narrator’s internal conflicts over the organisation of his own life and his beliefs. A tentative Buddhist at first, he soon finds his book-learning challenged by Zorba’s own way of life.

Zorba and his Way of Life

And what is Zorba’s way of life? Life-affirmation is a good starting point. At a few points he describes himself as being filled with “demons”. He lives according to his whims, eternally on the move and doing different jobs and meeting new and different people. Food, and music, and women, are what he lives for. Or rather, he doesn’t live for anything at all – early on he shouts “Can’t a man do anything without a why?”. It is the day-to-day pleasures of life that attract him, with questions of meaning of the sort that trouble the narrator and plenty of other people in our own world not even coming into his head. He has his views on religion, but they are inevitably blasphemous, simple, and conducive to letting him avoid worrying about them. Several times he announces that God and the devil are one and the same. At others he claims that he lives as though he expects to die in the very next minute. He resembles Nietzsche at his cheeriest, but with added innocence, and also Walt Whitman, whose words “I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing” could just as readily have come from this Greek’s mouth.

Picture of Cretan Beach
Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)] — The island of Crete where the action takes place. The sea is a prominent image

Zorba’s worldview is also intimately connected to the language and style of the book. Kazantzakis was one of the first major Greek authors to use Demotic Greek – the language of the common people – instead of Katharevousa – a conservative and prestigious literary form of Greek which was designed to bridge Ancient Greek and its Demotic variant. The language of the book is, as a result, as simple as Zorba himself, even in translation. Sentences are short and images are generally natural or associated with manual labour – that is, they are human rather than bookish. The lush descriptions of the sea and rural life on Crete also help encourage the reader to reflect on their interaction with the natural world, mediated as it so often is nowadays through windows and electronic screens. Zorba himself also often speaks in stories that have something of the parable about them, such as when he retells the history of Zeus’s infidelities as a continuous list of incidences of pity sex.

Women: the Dark Side of Affirmation

And this is where the problems for the modern reader start. A casual look at the top reviews on Goodreads paints a conflicted picture of the book, and pretty much all of the complaints centre on the work’s treatment of its female characters, or at least Zorba’s view of them. For Zorba, like Nietzsche, believed that women were not capable of the life-affirmation and strength that a man is. To the Greek they are stupid, pitiable, wild beasts just waiting for a man to show a sexual interest in them – pity, rather than hate, seems the main emotion here. At one point he declares that all you need to do to get into bed with a woman is to grab her by the breast. Zorba, in relating his travels, mentions several past wives, several other chance encounters each lasting a few months, several abandoned or deceased children. For him this is all positive. The way he describes the women, it sounds like they had a good time too. But within the story proper the Frenchwoman, Madame Hortense, falls in love with him and expects him to marry her after he and she spend time together, forcing the narrator to make all sorts of excuses when Zorba goes off to another village for two weeks and writes about his relationship with a new girl over there. When he gets back, Zorba is frustrated by his need to play along and marry the girl. Eventually they do marry, but only as Hortense is dying of an illness, saving himself the problem of being tied down. In his interaction with women a dark and deceitful side of Zorba’s character is made clear.

Unchallenged Misogyny?

Zorba’s life affirmation is obviously good for his own life and confidence. And in the world of the book his views on women bring him plenty of adventures in bedchambers. But to me it is frustrating, because it denigrates women and hardly seems fair that he should, like a vampire, gain his strength from the mistreatment of others. Kazantzakis doesn’t openly criticise this side of Zorba, but I would at least like to argue that the book itself is not wholly supportive of the message of misogyny, at least if you exercise a little empathy. There are two female characters who are important here – the mysterious widow, and Madame Hortense. Hortense is the one first introduced. She is a Frenchwoman who has ended up on Crete after a life of adventure, visiting many of the cities of the Orient, conducting illicit affairs with many varieties of Ottoman officialdom. On Crete itself she met and bedded members of the great powers of Europe, who had convened to discuss the Cretan revolt against Ottoman rule, but now her looks are gone, and she lives alone, dreaming of a legitimate sexual encounter through marriage.

Hortense has done what Zorba has done – worked and travelled the world. But her work and travel have become intricately linked to her sexual attractiveness, and once she has aged, she has become worthless in the eyes of society. Zorba, meanwhile, is sixty-five by his own reckoning, and still virile and hard-working. The similarities between Zorba and Hortense may seem superficial, but they are enough to show the frustrating situation for women who wanted to live like Zorba in those days. She is pitiable, because she has decided to believe that her self-worth comes only from her beauty, and now finds herself rejected by society. It seems to me that the book is critical of the way in which women cannot live like Zorba, even as it allows him to preach and ramble unimpeded.

The critical attitude goes to even greater heights in the character of the widow. Unnamed, she becomes her status as a once-married woman. Widows have traditionally been seen as sexually pernicious precisely because they no longer possess the sexual naivety of the unmarried ingenue, and are also no longer restrained in their desires by the figure of their husbands – and it is this view of widowhood that informs her portrayal here. Lusted after by the whole village, she eventually sleeps with the narrator in a moment when his own self-control lapses. But shortly afterwards she is attacked in broad daylight because of her refusal to be with another Greek and decapitated in what is surely the book’s most horrible moment. The narrator is horrified at this barbarity. As with Hortense but even more explicitly, rural Cretan society is revealed to be monstrous towards women. And it is unlikely that a reader of any time would see this without demanding some kind of change.

The Narrator and the Other Revolt

Actually though, the narrator is who I first thought of when I began to challenge the simple affirmations of the book’s blurb. He is, unlike Zorba, a young man and an educated and successful one at that: early on he mentions carrying around a copy of Dante, and he also corresponds with two friends, both of whom are living in accordance with a more educated worldview – the first man has gone to the Caucasus to try to rescue the ethnic Greek population that then lived there, while the second is in charge of a colonial venture in part of British Africa. The narrator, however, has abandoned his book learning temporarily to try out a capitalist mining venture on Crete. He knows little about mining and Zorba is entirely in charge of that operation for him. What he himself does is think, and think, and think. He is attracted by Buddhism, which in its portrayal here means a rejection of all desires and a cultivation of the spiritual life – all of this is the complete opposite of Zorba, and the two world views regularly clash. The narrator is trying to write a manuscript on Buddhism, and as he moves ever closer to Zorba’s views he begins to see the completion of the work as a sort of exorcism of that side of himself. At times he says he is happy, most often in the contemplation of nature, but at others he falls into a deep melancholy. He seems happier to philosophise than to live himself: “I was happy and said to myself: this is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them.” It is typical that the very next paragraph begins like this: “The days were passing by. I tried to put a brave face on it, I shouted and played the fool, but in my heart of hearts I knew I was sad.”

Villanueva [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] — A santuri – one such instrument is Zorba’s pride and joy. In Nietzschean terms Zorba is very much a Dionysian character – primal, musical, and unbridled – in contrast to the narrator’s education, literariness and self-restraint.

In much the same way, he claims that Zorba has changed him, and yet nothing changes. An intellectual, he entertains the new ideas, but puts into practice nothing. The one moment when desire gets the better of him and he submits to the widow’s attentions, her death only reinforces his reluctance to do anything. He listens to Zorba, and talks in his turn, but that is all. His great decision to actually try to run a mine leads to failure, while in Georgia and Africa his two friends pursue lives of action with much more success. The adventurer in the Caucasus is driven by a profound nationalism and love of his people, while the one in Africa is driven by a hatred for society and a desire to live apart from it. But both of them have put their beliefs into practice, while the narrator does nothing of the sort. Zorba, after their separation, tries to persuade him to come and see a marvellous green stone he has found – a useless object but the perfect example of the pure excitement and love for the natural world he has – in vain. The narrator doesn’t go, and later receives information of Zorba’s death.

Conclusion: the Ambiguities of Affirmation

The narrator decides to write down all that Zorba said or did, a sort of hagiographical record, once he hears of his friend’s demise – the book itself. The final note of the novel is the news from the family that he died with that Zorba has left the narrator his santuri, the stringed instrument that Zorba derives much of his musical power and essence from. It is absolutely a positive and uplifting ending – I wrote a smiley face next to the paragraph in my copy. But at the same time, I’m not sure what to make of it. The narrator hasn’t changed, really. All he has achieved is the recording of another, happier, stronger man. Both Zorba and the friend in the Caucasus have died, leaving the mopey Buddhist alone with beliefs he cannot even rely on anymore. What does all that say about us? Most of the people reading Kazantzakis nowadays, at least outside of Greece, are likely to be closer to the narrator than to Zorba – educated and ineffectual like me. No doubt what Zorba says is motivational and exciting, but how much affirmation are we supposed to get out of a book that suggests that if we can’t find ourselves a real Zorba, there’s little chance we’ll be able to grow one within us?

In any case, the book is fun, easy to read, and in its own blasphemous way profound. Zorba is an inspirational character and his travels and world views certainly motivate me to do more, even as I am left uncomfortable by his misogyny. But like the narrator, in practice I probably won’t do anything different. Though I absolutely intend to read more Kazantzakis in the future, for anybody who might come to this in search for a simple and unqualified message of affirmation for all life, women included, I might have to point them towards dear old Whitman instead.

For some gloom to go with your affirmation and to make it easier to appreciate how lucky we all really are, I have a piece on Varlam Shalamov’s time in the Gulag system here. For more Kazantzakis, I have a piece on Report to Greco here.

Picture of Kazantzakis by Μουσείο N. Καζαντζάκη / Kazantzakis Museum. Used under CC 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Picture of Crete by Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)],

Picture of santuri by Villanueva [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]