Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis

Evan Karp

If one were to try to turn Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy into a novel, chances
are he would fail. The text is as saturated with dense musings as it is with revelations that
are nearly impossible to convey any way but through their original sentence structures.
But Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel Zorba the Greek could be said to contain the vital
dichotomy inherent in The Birth of Tragedy. And, it is far more than that.
The basic thread of Nietzsche’s first book is the question: Why did the art form of
tragedy emerge from what is even now considered to be the strongest and most life-
affirming people in the history of mankind? He concludes that what appears to be
pessimism was actually a “healing salve” and necessity for Greek culture at the time;
tragedy fulfilled their urgent need to deal with a superabundance of life when the old
system of gods had failed. This is the holy function of all art to Nietzsche – that it provide
us with a justification of life when all seems meaningless.
He uses an image: a storm raging all around a sailor at sea. What can he do but
trust in his own frail bark? So the individual, amidst the chaos all around him, trusts in
individuality. This rational impulse dominated Greek culture until the clamoring of
orgiastic celebrations from around the world got closer and became too loud to be
ignored. A new wisdom provoked them to shed subjectivity through dance and find
themselves in harmony with the people around them. The diametric opposite to the
rational (Apollinian) impulse is that of passion (Dionysian). It is the Dionysian belief that
individuality is just an illusion to make life livable. Think of the sailor. Dionysian
wisdom urges him to Jump! This terrifies the sailor because to do so he must disregard
everything on which he’s based his life: his family, sense of self, hopes, plans, will; but
the same action can be sheer ecstasy: no worries or fears, just life!
The Greeks realized that beneath their constructions of identity there existed
something primal and wilder – that their identities were in fact created in order to harness
this chaos – and a new, tragic insight filled them with nausea and despair. The illusion
with which they’d made life bearable had been shattered. They must have questioned the
point of rebuilding anything if it would only be a different illusion; from this insight came
the birth of tragedy, which flourished because it provided the culture with a deeper
affirmation of existence; it offered each spectator Life, not as a mortal human individual
but as part of the eternal, unchanging core of existence – unaffected by the ‘history’ of
the world and all changes in appearance.
In Zorba, Kazantzakis deals with this dichotomy through the two main
characters, the narrator (“the boss”) and Zorba. The first is an intellectual who is trying to
escape the life of Buddha and to rid himself of all metaphysical cares; it is his goal to
“make firm and direct contact with man.” So he sets off on a fairly arbitrary journey to
reopen a closed-down lignite mine in pursuit of adventure and new experience. As the
narrator reads Dante, who is to be his travel companion, in a bar, a white-haired man
enters expressly because he sees the narrator through the window. Their first exchange is
as follows:
“Traveling?” he asked. “Where to? Trusting to providence?”
“I’m making for Crete. Why do you ask?”
“Taking me with you?”
 When the narrator asks Zorba why he should do this Zorba responds: “Why!
Why! … Can’t a man do anything without a why? Just like that, because he wants to?”
As the narrator considers this Zorba asks: “You weigh everything to the nearest gramme,
don’t you? Come on, friend, make up your mind. Take the plunge!” Thus begins the tug
of war between reason and passion, Apollo and Dionysus.
From the outset, the narrator faces the possibility of being “stifled by reason” and
rejoices (silently, of course) that he “still feels ready to set out on Quixotic expeditions.”
It was originally his dream to “retire into solitude, alone, without companions, without
joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream.” Although his
decision to take Zorba with him is a strong step in the right direction, he often disappoints
his wise old friend by refusing to follow him, and most specifically to court a certain
beautiful widow. It is the boss’ intention to do away with metaphysics through words,
and he often stays inside to work on his Buddha manuscript.
He feels compelled to maintain a lifelong goal, a dream without end that requires
single-minded devotion to a divine order that must, at any and all costs, be carried out to
sustain any meaning he as an individual might have. It’s as though he asks: ‘Where will I
be without my dream?!’ In school, he and his closest friends started a society in which
each member swore an oath to fight injustice for the entirety of their lives, to find “a
synthesis in which the irreducible opposites would fraternize.” This devotion to equalize
polar extremes, he finally realizes, even if achieved, would only yield “a perfectly clear
distilled water without any bacteria, but also without any nutritive substances. Without
life.” At one point the boss tells Zorba he doesn’t want any trouble, and Zorba’s response
is “You don’t want any trouble? … And pray, what do you want then? To live – do you
know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!” And although Zorba
certainly meant this literally, I think we can assume he meant more broadly to “let
yourself go.”
Early in the book the boss reflects that Zorba sees everything every day as if for
the first time. As if he is not preoccupied with metaphysical concerns or contradictions.
When Zorba speaks the boss feels “the world is recovering its pristine freshness.” Despite
the fact that Zorba “has had all manner of experiences” he has not lost “one ounce of his
primitive boldness. All the problems which we find so complicated or insoluble he cuts
through as if with a sword, like Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot.” He later
clarifies what he means by primitive: A man “who simply cracks life’s shell – logic,
morality, honesty – and goes straight to its very substance.”
Zorba seems to advise the boss to let go of himself and pick up the knot or nut of
life. It is impossible to solve the mystery of personality; individuality is not real but
something we should try to overcome. We should take the plunge again and again, daily,
even against our own wishes. Sometimes we should go grumblingly up and down the
mountain to rid ourselves of anger or disgust, to deal with our over-brimming emotions,
as Zorba does when the widow is senselessly murdered.
But the boss fears this loss of self. He wants to experience something intensely
and truly but will not know what to do afterward. He muses: “Sometimes I feel I should
like to make a bargain: to live one brief minute and give the rest of my life in exchange.”
Remember: he used to long for retirement and isolation. But as Zorba tells him, “God
changes his appearance every instant. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his
disguises. At one moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next your son bouncing on your
knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk.” It is necessary to
continually see the world anew in order to see this “god” of which he speaks. Zorba does
not worry about what will happen to him – everyone dies, and no matter what he does he
will “end up the same.” So he invites the boss – and the reader – to “scorch along!”
So he does. As he told the boss in a much earlier letter: “It makes no difference to
me whether I have a woman or whether I don’t, whether I’m a pasha or a street-porter.
The only thing that makes any difference is whether I’m alive or dead.” It is this
exhilaration with life that has Zorba constantly recreating himself. Toward the end of the
book the boss receives sporadic letters from Zorba and each one is signed differently:
“holy-anchorite,” “sewer-rat,” “ex-widower.” He does not believe in God or the devil
because “then things get all complicated;” all he believes in is Zorba: “I believe in Zorba
because he’s the only being I have in my power.” Perhaps our understanding of primitive
might now include the addendum without belief. Instead of trying to cancel out
contradictions or simplify himself Zorba soars “to the heights where fiction and truth
mingle and resemble each other, like sisters,” and changes into the most appropriate
understanding of himself necessary to maintain his exhilaration.
This is what Nietzsche means when he says that art should serve as a justification
of life. It makes no sense to understand ourselves a certain way, without compromise or
recreation, and bring about our own deaths that way. Zorba “doesn’t rejoice over the
good and doesn’t despair over the bad.” He tells the boss repeatedly that god and the
devil are the same thing, and “the sooner we baptize our devils the better.” He calls his
harboring of all forces Zorba, and in so doing provides us with a new cure for tragic
insight. When I think of Zorba now I imagine a Walt Whitman who never penned a
single poem but still managed to communicate all he had to say. Zorba talks a lot about
not being able to communicate any way but through dancing. It is possible, and
sometimes necessary, to legitimize things (emotions, thoughts) that we are unable to
communicate with words.
To affirm this existence, Zorba tells us, we must contain everything and play with
it. The new cure to our tragic insight is to come from a loosening of the ties, all ties. The
new art is to be full, full even through times of nausea, disgust, self-hatred, loathing,
jealousy, revenge; full to the point of love, leaping, laughter, intoxication. The new man
must be prepared to harbor great extremes. He must leap until his body nearly rejects
what is inside of it. He must marry a woman to keep her from being depressed. We may
not know to what end we strive, but as Zorba says: “true happiness [is] to have no
ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition.” We do not need a
reason; man must do much without a why.
The boss makes serious progress: “In the hard, somber labyrinth of necessity I had
discovered liberty herself playing happily in a corner. And I played with her.” Compare
this to Zorba’s statement: “I think only people who want to be free are human beings.”
We must set out to do what our bodies compel us; in the process we should not resist
liberty. “The old world is tangible, solid, we live in it and are struggling with it every
moment – it exists. The world of the future is not yet born, it is elusive, fluid, made of the
light from which dreams are woven; it is a cloud buffeted by violent winds – love, hate,
imagination, luck, God … the greatest prophet on earth can give men no more than a
watchword, and the vaguer the watchword the greater the prophet.”
We might be lead to say Zorba’s lesson is to be yourself and do whatever you
want and to deal with the consequences. But it’s not quite that simple. Zorba follows his
own set of principles – they’re called feelings. The most a man can do is make the world
new again, to breathe into it a freshness that allows us to breathe unrestricted; to wipe
away what we know and to make us rejoice, to refill us. Man should strive to be like a
symbol that sticks with other men, a watchword. “Zorba casts a larger shadow on the
world than the world does on him.” All he had to do was be Zorba. His last words?
“Men like me ought to live a thousand years. Good night!”
May he live far beyond 2946!