Christ Recrucified as a Novelistic Sequence to Alexis Zorbas

Abstract

There is a tendency among critics to emphasize discontinuity between Kazantzakis’ first and second novel of the 1940s, respectively Life and Adventures of Alexis Zorbas and Christ Recrucified. This paper argues that the two novels share common themes, like the following ones: function and significance of food and eating; the topic of Greek refugees from the East, which occurs also in other works of Kazantzakis’ and each time is approached from a different viewpoint with a varying degree of emphasis on its constituent parts; the allusive association of the refugees and their journey with the Israelites, the exodus from Egypt and their journey towards the Promised Land; the spatiotemporal background event of the annual celebration of the passion of Christ; the antithesis between immobility and change, etc. As regards common elements in characters, the paper discusses links between Zorbas and Papa-Fotis and especially between the narrator and Stavridakis in Alexis Zorbas and Manolios in Christ Recrucified. Another issue examined is the widespread, if not unanimous, view that Kazantzakis’ novels constitute straightforward applications of ideas found in The Saviors of God, among them the programmatic concept of the “two streams of life”: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death. This paper argues that, while ascent and descent play a role in both novels, their fictional “value” is hardly uniform but has undergone major conceptual adaptations and indeed radical inversions.