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wards the South Pole becomes an exploration of these seven states until
he fades into nothingness at last.
Structural similarities abound throughout the two books.
Both
heroes travel with a group of rather tedious, talkative friends who, cer–
tainly in Taji's case, and with qualifications in Odysseus's, are meant
to reflect aspects of the character of the principal protagonist. Both dis–
cussion groups are very earnest about the nature of sensual experience,
of love, of moral reality, of God, man's destiny, and so on- so earnest,
in fact, that they seldom grow tired of repeating themselves. Their
various dilemmas and problems are more or less illustrated in appro–
priate action as they move along their respective itineraries through
fantastically exotic landscapes and censurable societies. The character
of these problems is stated in terms that, as I have already said, sound
hardly less mid-nineteenth century in Kazantzakis than in Melville. For
example, he is much troubled by that old conflict between the Head
and the Heart that troubled the Victorians so much. He sounds per–
emptorily Victorian on the high ideal of stoic duty:
re•••
I was born in a roofless house:
the more a soul mounts towards its peak, so much the more
does a cruel, joyless, unbearable duty bind it."
Not since Tennyson wrote
In M emoriam
has a poet been as explicitly
concerned with the survival of the fittest. And no Victorian rationalist
was ever more prone to preach than this Odysseus. When, in Book
Nine, he and his friends have rifled Akhenaton's tomb of gold and
jewels (this is an unusually shady Odysseus) and are happily sailing
down the Nile, it occurs to him that his act has not been in accord with
that terrible grandeur of soul associated with him, so he throws the
loot overboard, and then addresses his companions:
"Brothers, you know not how much I, too, hate poverty,
and yet today I suddenly felt our souls weighted down
with gold, unable to walk lightly, and I thought:
'Riches are good and they can buy the entire world,
but best
is
that prou.d hand that flings them to the winds':
and that, my lads, is why I threw fny hands above the river!"
Action is usually the prelude to a short sermon.
The problems and doubts of the Victorians legitimately continue
to trouble men, but in
The Odyssey
they are staged in a way that re–
calls that first great age of geological discovery, Higher Biblical Criti–
cism, and stoic morality rather too insistently. One could spend an
