The Classic Proportions of Kazantzakis

Report to Greco is an indestructible vision. It is the kind of book which no one has been writing because it is the kind of vision which no one has been living.

Report to Greco details the major events of Nikos Kazantzakis's life: his childhood on a farm in a Cretan village and at a school run by Franciscan monks, his years at the University of Athens, his journey to the monasteries on Mt. Athos in Macetonia. But the book concentrates on his intellectual and spiritual pilgrimages. For, as Kazantzakis emphasizes in his introduction:

My Report to Greco is not an autobiography ... Therefore, reader, in these pages you will find the red track made by drops of my blood, the track which marks my journey among men, passions, and ideas.

Kazantzakis discusses the growth of his earliest and deepest passions, the urge for freedom and the urge for sancity. He analyzes his successive commitments to the contradictory philosophies of Christ, Buddha, Lenin, and Nietzsche. And, in some of his most sonorous passages, Kazantzakis chronicles a battle of the soul that has echoes through works from the Bible to Herzog--the duel between flesh and spirit. Characteristically, Kazantzakis writes of this battle in the most expansive terms:

Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: It is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation...God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.

In dramatizing this spiritual warfare, Kazantzakis retells Biblical stories, creates dialogues between his soul and spirits, and relates the dreams and visions which influenced him as much as any events in the "real world." And he links his spiritual adventures with the day-to-day events and people which inspired them--his father's command that he kiss the bloody corpses of the heroes who died for the liberty of Crete, the Irish girl to whom in a cold stone church, he first made love.

Scaling a Vision

Kazantzakis experienced his spiritual growth in great, poetic conflicts, the same attitude with which he recollects his first childhood memory:

Now I not only looked, I actually saw the world for the very first time. And what an astonishing sight that was! Our little courtyard seemed without limits. There was buzzing from the sands of invisible bees, an intoxicating aroma, a warm sun as thick as honey. The air flashed as though armed with swords, and, between the swords, erect, angle-like incidents with colorful motionless wings advanced straight for me.

"The air flashed as though armed with swords." Kazantzakis lived a life of cosmic oppositions, of pressing and encompassing dualities. One is hardly surprised to find Kazantzakis posing problems like the battle of spirit and flesh in this way--but he extends the approach to many other battles. He explains that he views his life as a battle for spiritual ascent--and the reader of Report to Greco becomes overwhelmed by the extent to which he lived and wrote about life in these terms.

One of the commonplaces of modern sociology is that "the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity." Descriptions of spiritual battles, when written at all, often feature the melancholy field of action "where ignorant armies clash by night." And it is another commonplace that the classic hero simply does not and cannot exist any more. The above comparison with Herzog was applicable in this sense: the anti-heroes of books like Herzog and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano are characterized by their in-ability to live nobly. The armies cannot be clearly defined; the heroes achieve their peculiar grandeur by their half-futile attempts to avoid the degradation of being a member of a degraded society. They are "healthy" because they are sickened by a sick society.

How does Kazantzakis, so obviously and self-consciously a "modern man," avoid the numbing dilemma of men like Matthew Arnold and fictional figures like Herzog? For one thing, he achieves nobility by immersing himself in a noble tradition. The Consul in Under the Volcano, for example, may be one of the many examples of a man "alienated" from society but the hero of Report to Greco is a descendant of generations of proud Cretans and a son of the ancient island of Crete. It is no accident that the author begins the prologue with Cretan soil in his hand and ends it by addressing his grand-father:

...if I never turned my back to the enemy:

Give me your blessing!

On the next page he begins his first chapter, called "Ancestors," and he describes the proud warriors and gentle peasants from whom he is descended.

Fire and soil. How could I harmonize these two militant ancestors inside me?

I felt this was my duty, my sole duty: to reconcile the irreconcilables, to draw the thick ancestral darkness out of my joins and transform it, to the best of my ability, into light.

The final lines of the book are its author's proud greeting to his grand-father:

Full of wounds, all in the breast. I did what I could, grandfather. More than I could, just as you directed. Now that the battle is over, I come to recline at your side, to become dust at your side, that the two of us may await the Final Judgment together...Grandfather, hello!

Pride of Nativity

As a son of the island of Crete, Kazantzakis, explains the book's title:

I...place myself soldier-like before the general, and make Report to Greco. For Greco is kneaded from the same Cretan soil as 1, and is able to understand me better than all the strivers of past and present.

The struggles which the island underwent in his lifetime, the "freedom or death" atmosphere which he describes in the book of that name, seem to have given him the faith that ours is a cosmic age. How different from the men "wandering between two worlds, one dead/And the other powerless to be born":

As faithfully and intensely as I could, I attempted to experience the important age in which I happened to be born.

Kazantzakis was, then, born of a race and land which encouraged him to live on a cosmic scale. And he eagerly accepted this scale, as his introduction to Report to Greco shows. Once one understands this, one can accept seeming pompousness which would otherwise be intolerable. Kazantzakis can use phrases like "my soul began to tremble" because Kazantzakis lived in these terms.

The reader experiences mixed feelings toward the contradictions which run throughout the book. The author speaks of reconciling the blood of his ancestors as his sole duty; later passages deny this. Such faults are partially excused by the fact that Kazantzakis did not have time to revise his book before his death. More important, however, is the fact that Kazantzakis habitually thought in emphatic, definite images--which he was forever changing and contradicting.

Kazantzakis's imagery and symbolism have frequently been criticized for being overdone and obvious. Kazantzakis paints gigantic, swollen passion-flowers--and he often paints them in black-and-white. He tends to write philosophy, not literature. It is certainly justifiable to censure him on these grounds, but if one does so one must also reject the world-view from which the passion-flowers spring. If one must accept the world-view, or at least offer a "willing suspension of disbelief" to Kazantzakis's peculiar world, in order to accept the style. Kazantzakis himself raises this problem in Report to Greco:

I know that what I write will never be artistically consummate, because I intentionally struggle to surpass the boundaries of art and thus harmony, the essence of beauty, is distorted... I wanted to be delivered from my own inner darkness and to turn it into light, from the terrible bellowing ancestors in me and to turn them into human beings. That was why I invoked great figures who had successfully undergone the most elevated and difficult of ordeals: I wanted to gain courage by seeing the human soul's ability to triumph over everything.

Report to Greco clarifies all of Kazantzakis's writing in quite a different way. One realizes how much of the material in his early novels was autobiographical, particularly if one extends the term "autobiographical" to the life of the spirit.

Report to Greco repeats some of the incidents from these books almost verbatim. In particular, it illuminates Zorba the Greek. Now, the movie version to the contrary, Zorba does not merely discuss flesh (Good) and spirit (Bad). Rather, it exalts the impulsive, the "valiant preposterous act" (Report to Greco) over the Buddha-like espousal of the peace with which becomes the Nothing. Report to Greco shows just how much of Zorba's joie de vivre was in Nikos Kazantzakis.

"I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability." Kazantzakis did not see life steadily, but, perhaps more than any other figures of our era, he saw it whole