Zorba the Greek (Kazantzakis)

The main body of fiction I’ve been reading on my own recently seems tinged with a statement that I recall vaguely from Camus: ‘we seek in our art to portray not characters, but situations.’ Cormac McCarthy and Milan Kundera would agree, to a large extent, with Camus’ statement, but Nikos Kazantzakis would not. Both Fratricides and Zorba the Greek are driven by fascinating characters in the line of Sancho Panza, Jack Falstaff, and the Wife of Bath; or, to use a more recent parallel, Henderson the Rain King. Indeed, not since Henderson last summer has a character jumped out of the book the way Zorba did.

Zorba the Greek details a scholar’s introduction to the world as seen through Alexis Zorba’s eyes. The bookworm narrator turns from the otherworldly, dusty chrysalis of the library to an eminently quotidian business in Crete. The efficient cause of the transformation is Zorba, whom the narrator meets on the ship to Crete. Zorba has just been released for beating up his last boss. Why?, asks the narrator. Zorba answers, “‘Well, you know the tale of the miller’s wife don’t you? Well, you don’t expect to learn spelling from her backside, do you? The backside of the miller’s wife, that’s human reason.’ I had read many definitions of human reason. This one seemed to me the most astounding of all, and I liked it” (11). So too did I. The book’s imagery is very simple, by which I mean persistently repetitive, but reading the book, I was never bored by the literariness of everything, because Kazantzakis, like Zorba, has the ability to see the world with fresh eyes every day. What makes the book brilliant are the stories woven into the theme of rebirth. Old wives’ tales of religion, tales of brave deeds, parabolic tales, tales of conquest in love and war, all come together in a dance of friendship between two men, friendship that is a concrete portrayal of C. S. Lewis’ agape.

I have spent a great deal of effort trying to convince my sophomore writing class that the morals at the end of Aesop’s fables are not necessary to the delight of the story itself; I stress here that the following is not some ‘moral’ that wraps up the novel neatly; it definitely isn’t even representative of most of Zorba’s stories throughout the book; but, it is an important thing to remember.

Hussein Aga said, “Alexis, I’m going to tell you a secret. Listen, little one: neither the seven stories of heaven nor the seven stories of earth are enough to contain God; but a man’s heart can contain him. Do be careful, Alexis–and may my blessing go with you–never to wound a man’s heart!” (278).

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