Spanish Journal

Nikos Kazantzakis's travel journal resembles the Spanish landscape he describes--usually colorful and dramatic, but marred by an occasional foggy stretch.

The book is divided into two sections. In the first Kazantzakis sketches the regions and principal cities of pre-Civil War Spain; at the end of this section, the description of a bull-fight provides a broader view of the Spanish national character. A few years after this trip, the author returned to find Spain torn by civil war, to discover "Madrid, once a charming, carefree, voluptuous princess...in flames." The part recording his second journey is more narrative than descriptive, more concerned with national events than with regional characteristics; nonetheless, Kazantzakis movingly paints the changes in the areas he had previously toured.

The travel journal proves an ideal form for Kazantzakis's vividly descriptive style; his followers will be pleased to find the same sensual imagery which characterizes his other works. The first section conveys the energy of Spain through small details (leaves "glistened on the damp earth like freshly minted gold florins") and longer passages ("the light limped from rock to rock on its way like a wounded bird on its way upward. For a moment, it rested on the peak of the opposite mountain, seemed to pirouette upward, then disappeared. The mute murmur of evening, like the tigress's melody, enveloped the monastery"). Naturally, Kazantzakis chooses more brutal images in the second section, as when Madrid's "divine, sun-washed body was dissolving" during a bombing.

The poem "Don Quixote," which separates the two parts of the journal, best reveals the author's descriptive ability. Combining simple statements and rolling Biblical tones, he paints that "great and gaunt ascetic" as a symbol of his country.

Despite his usual craftsmanship, Kazantzakis's style sometimes becomes very hackneyed. Take the passage where he mentions a nightingale and concludes with the wish that "all souls of Spain could find a similar harmony, like this nightingale."

Philosophical Analyses

Kazantzakis often follows his descriptive and narrative passages with philosophical analyses. In fact, he be gins his journal with "Spain has two faces. Its one profile, the elongated fiery visage of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance; and its other, the practical, square head of Sancho." Kazantzakis develops this view of the Spanish national character throughout the book; for instance, he writes that Saint Theresa "fruitfully and perfectly fused within herself Don Quixote and Sancho," and calls Unanumo's humor "sanchoesque."

Sometimes the author inserts a single, striking philosophic insight into a narrative passage. Writing of his love for foreign cities, he asks "and how came it that pleasure is so intertwined, so at home with Necessity?" Describing a mosque, he "sensed with deep joy the fusion of two great qualities: ecstasy and precision... For all this decoration is the dream of a master mathematician. As the line progresses and unwinds, it becomes the abstract expression--the distillation of all plants, all animals, and all thoughts."

But most philosophical passages prove far less convincing than these. Often Kazantzakis tantalizingly suggests an idea--for instance, he defines God as "Necessity and Coincidence"--without further developing it. Further, some of his philosophy seems almost meaningless. For example, when describing the "Breath," the vital energy of life, he suggests that "Whatever was once a movement or an impulse upward in the forward foregoing generation--whatever was once Spirit--becomes, in the subsequent generation, motionless, stifled, heavy and in time reacts just like substance."

Kazantzakis's personal philosophy of life dominates the book. His prologue explains that he is writing a "travel journey of my soul": he hopes that "I shall be able to help shorten the agony of other kindred spirits who have set out along the same path." Sometimes his despair or joy seems as vague and unexplained as many of the philosophical passages.

By and large, however, the portrait of an energetic excited man certainly foreshadowed by personas like Zorba the Greek emerges clearly. Praising change, Kazantzakis cries out "What a joy I feel that life is eager to leave me behind; ...is leaping toward other, young people; is attracted by other dark heads! But I am not defeated or left behind, because I am not angry." This kind of optimism lightens even the most horrifying war descriptions.

Although a sanchoesque realism dominates some of his descriptions, Kazantzakis himself seems to share the goal his poem attributes to Don Quixote:

Out of our tangled entrails' darkest woods

let's bring to light all justice, kindness, joy,

all those wild birds that built their far nests there,

and though they never appear, may that hot kiln

of the inner earth burn on unceasingly!