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PARTISAN REVIEW
for then he, too, may sprout ears, eyes, to match his- growth,
but God
is
clay in my ten fingers, and I !mold him!
* *
*
For God is not a phantom formed by fear or hope
but the heart's only child, born of 'despair and /Courage."
If
there has been any "progress" between these two passages it is simply
in the eradication of doubt, and possibly in the infusion of a stoic
bravado.
It
was inevitable that
The Odyssey
should have been compared to
Joyce's
Ulysses,
but the resemblance stops short at the title. There is
one prose work, however, to which Kazantzakis's poem bears a remark–
able resemblance- I mean Herman Melville's
Mardi.
Kazantzakis was
probably unaware of the book, but a brief comparison is worth making
because it illuminates the character of the poem, and helps to focus
the nineteenth-century quality I am insisting on in terms of the struc–
tural allegory and the philosophical solemnity. Melville missed a great
chance in not naming his hero Ulysses instead of Taji, as he could
have done easily by some minor adjustments in the supporting frame–
work. Our taste being what it is, I have no doubt that
Mardi
would
then have ranked much higher in the Melville canon than it does today.
Both heroes start out on related quests for spiritual self-realization. When
Taji, on the last page, cries out, "Now, I am my own soul's emperor;
and my first act is abdication! Hail! realm of shades!" and disappears
in his shallop "over an endless sea," pursued by his Furies, the only
end he can have is that heroic, stoic acceptance of the Abyss that
Odysseus finally achieves while clinging to an iceberg at the South Pole
in the concluding books of
The Odyssey.
Taji is in pursuit of a mystic albino maiden who represents the
ideal of perfect fulfillment, and whom he never finds. The islands he
visits in his search provide commentaries on certain aspects of society
and states of soul whose radical imperfection is heralded by the maiden's
absence. A similar framework is devised in
The Odyssey
when Odysseus,
visiting Crete, buys a statuette of a god with seven heads. These heads,
beginning with the lowest, which represents brute animality, represent
successively, war, lust, sensuality, intellectual aspiration, the tragic vision
of life, spirituality, and finally (the seventh head, which has no fea–
tures) the dissolving of the soul into nothingness. From this point on,
Odysseus is frequently described, a little grotesquely, as "the seven–
souled man," "the seven-headed-man," and so on, and his journey to-
