The following is an attempt to explore Adorno’s idea of ahistoricity through the lens of the novel Zorba the Greek. Neither a deep knowledge of Adorno nor familiarity with the novel should be necessary in understanding the main point.
What is Zorba the Greek about?
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, written in 1946, concerns the relationship between a sheltered young bookworm (the narrator) and a wild older man called Zorba. The novel stages Nietzsche’s conflict between the Apollonian and Dionsyan, the rational/intellectual and the romantic/natural. The narrator exists in the world of concepts to which he appeals for guidance. Zorba, by contrast, is guided by whim, intuition, and drive.
So, we’re presented with the age-old thought vs flesh divide. And Kazantzakis effectively shows that the appeal to reason can result in a narcissistic reduction of everything to a symbolic world whose only purpose is to provide relief to the one trapped in it.
This is where Kazantzakis succeeds. He shows that neither the narrator nor Zorba has the “answer”. The narrator uses concepts to keep life at a distance, views it as a kind of purely external drama to be interrogated, the purpose of which is his personal edification and enlightenment (literally, in fact, through his fascination with the Buddha). Zorba, for his part, views life as something he is continuous with and ought not interrogate from a distance, thereby absolving himself of true responsibility for his actions. Zorba’s self-proclaimed singular responsibility is to be Zorba. And his rhetorical questioning of the narrator about life is merely a means to entrench his own view that God and the Devil are the same, and that, whatever he does, he’s right in that he serves one or both in serving himself.
But I want to examine here where I believe Kazantzakis fails, and to use Adorno’s idea of ahistoricity as the theoretical lens in so doing. I’ll first introduce Adorno’s criticism of ahistoricity from negative dialectics (via a brief introduction of the project of that book) and then try to show how the novel, specifically by falling into the type of trap Adorno describes, enacts the type of ideological functionalization that Adorno’s negative dialectics aims to be a corrective to.
Negative Dialectics
Adorno’s project in negative dialectics is to combat a reductive identity thinking whereby the concept is taken to fully represent or exhaust its object. He wants us to recognize the limits of philosophy in order to expand them. That is, we get closer to the object by respecting its non-identity with conceptual thought.
This helps explain why he employs the term “dialectic”. He recognizes a tug of war between the attempt to establish meaning through language (conceptualization) and what resists the establishment of meaning through language (the object to which conceptualization is applied). But the dialectic does not resolve itself in this tug of war into full understanding; rather, it shows that to presume full understanding means to come down on one side, i.e. conceptualization. But this is to falsely eliminate a necessary tension between concept and object. That is, ro fail to do justice to the negative result of dialectical thinking, which insists that there is no resolution. There is always an excess that is missed. The concept can never become the object, only approach it.
Ahistoricity
Adorno then wants to grant the objects of conceptualisation their full complexity and ultimate inaccessibility, so he sets out to oppose the kind of reductive philosophy, in whatever form such thinking presents itself, that denies them this..
Ahistoricity is one form of this denial. That is, imagining concepts to be ideologically neutral rather than inscribed by the progression of the social forces through which they have become legible to interrogation in the first place. Moreover, since this interrogation inevitably involves a mediation of the thinking subject and its object, and the subject is always suborned to a large degree by the social context in which it itself developed, there is no pure ideological space in which objects can reveal themselves to subjects.
Of course, philosophy would like to posit such a space because it seeks knowledge to the limit of fullness. And Adorno, in combating this tendency, takes aim, for example, at Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, which tries to establish a purified immediacy in its “bracketing” process. To Adorno, this is an impossible goal—there is no neutral bracketing that can reveal a pure object of conceptualization. Rather, the attempt does violence to the concept by denying it an irreducible mode of its being, its historicity.
No doubt this can be considered arguable, but instead of attempting to further justify Adorno’s conclusion, I’ll move on to analyse how Zorba the Greek performatively exhibits this violence—more specifically, how its structural failure exposes a problem the text cannot deal with on its own terms due to that failure.
The Treatment of Women in Zorba the Greek
What initially alerted me to this problematic in Zorba the Greek is the treatment of women. Women are universally passive in the novel, objects of fascination, lust, and violence. It’s not simply that the two main characters, the narrator and Zorba, treat women like chattels, even debating whether they are human or not, but women are given no agency of their own in the book to question these terms. Zorba and the narrator dramatize the primary conceptual conflict. The female figures symbolize sub-concepts that these primary figures consume and refigure in order to try to properly subjectivize themselves. The narrator, in particular, constantly tries to find himself through processing ideas. Women become reduced to objects that are fully exhausted in this effort.
The Link to Ahistoricity
Why? What is the underlying dynamic at play here? My argument is that Kazantzakis’ failure to acknowledge his own ideological embeddedness results in him not seeing a violent exclusion, that of women, in his work. His dramatic binary of thought vs the flesh functionalizes everything outside itself. Particularly, women as the third term—the male perspective being exhausted in the symbolic mapping of the binary onto two male characters. And this third term which is denied a voice through the text’s structure—a structure which allows no place from which it can speak—can be given theoretical expression through Adorno’s non-identical excess.
It’s worth noting that this does not amount to a simple accusation of sexism against the author; it is not a case of criticising Kazantzaki’s intentions or beliefs, but examining what the text does. Besides which, such a move would leave us open to the complementary charge that we are falling into the very same trap of ideological embeddedness we are accusing Kazantzakis of. So, while we acknowledge that we can’t lay claim to the final word here, we can, at least, explicitly lay claim to a limitation that the text we are examining functions to obscure.
A Textual Example
There are lots of examples of the effacement of woman in the text, I’ll take just one:
One of the characters in the book is a widow who inhabits the village the narrator and Zorba have come to in pursuit of a project to extract lignite from the surrounding mountains. Zorba is convinced the widow wants to sleep with the narrator and attacks his ascetic friend for not taking advantage of this opportunity.
The widow is then portrayed, in purely physically terms, as a temptation to the narrator—she passes with swinging hips, voluptuous breasts etc, tormenting him. Eventually he gives in to his growing urges and arrives at her house demanding to be let in. She gratefully demurs. The narrator does the deed and returns to be congratulated by Zorba. He then contemplates the increased and fuller happiness this bow to the sensual has afforded him.
His bliss is soon interrupted by news that a member of the village has killed themselves, a young man who had loved the widow. The villagers blame the widow for the young man’s death and pursue her with the aim of killing her. Zorba finds out and rushes to intervene, assailing and overcoming the woman’s first attacker. However, another villager finishes the job, cutting off the widow’s head.
The narrator watches helplessly and he and Zorba retreat. However, the initial assailant, feeling humiliated by Zorba’s intervention, appears again later—to demand a fight with the older man. Zorba agrees. The narrator, however, is present and, this time, does intervene. In order to dissolve the conflict, he demands the two men shake hands and that they all go and feast together. This they do.
The widow, who the man attempted to murder is forgotten in this mass reconciliation. First, an object of lust, then an object of violence, and finally an object for the furtherance of male bonding; having no perspective of her own, she is swallowed up fully in her role as narrative device to the point where replacing her with a domestic pet, or a treasured material possession could easily be achieved and maintain precisely the same structure (e.g. the villagers try to destroy the narrator’s favourite hat; Zorba intervenes to stop one of them stepping on it; another steps on it anyway; the narrator eventually patches it all up and they all go and have a drink).
This to my mind is the clearest example of the process outlined in the thesis, but typical of the indifference of the text to the excluded perspective. In fact, conceptual reconciliation works in the novel through this kind of sacrifice.
Anyhow, this is already long enough to provoke interest from anyone who is interested. So, I’ll leave it at that for now in the hope that any ensuing discussion can help fill in the inevitable gaps.
EDIT: Just to reiterate, I’m not simply saying the book is sexist because the times were sexist, but that the book portrays a universe that is conceptually exhausted by a historically conditioned patriarchal dichotomy, which is violently exclusionary and which the work’s own structural terms prevent it from addressing.
