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.

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.

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.”

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)]