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Below please find the announcement concerning your finale paper due May 18

Sociology

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Below please find the announcement concerning your finale paper due May 18. We will discuss it further in class.

FINAL PAPER TOPIC

In a three-page, double-spaced, paper please define and analyze the representation of Ithaca from Homer to modernity along the lines discussed in class. Why has it meant so much to ancient and modern authors? And what does it mean to you after reading all related material?

In order to fully respond to this topic, it’s imperative you have completed reading critically:

-the Odyssey (Introductions and Chapters 1-24)

-the Power Point “The Allure of Ithaca” posted on BB

-Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca”

-My lecture/notes on Cavafy posted on BB

-Edith Hall's chapter "Exile from Ithaca" from the Return of Ulysses.

-Dante Inferno, Canto 26

-The final three readings/poems by Whitman, Baudelaire and Walcott

Your task in this comparative paper is to evaluate at least two of these references and examine how the idea of Ithaca has been interpreted by other authors and artists than Homer. One of them, for example, is the modern poet Constantine Cavafy whose poem “Ithaca” is crucial to the modern understanding of it. If you are also going to discuss a film, please make sure you watch it and you don’t rely on online notes of the film without ever seeing it.

Please cite specific examples from some of the above texts to demonstrate knowledge of theme and elucidate your points. In addition, you might need to look up a few things related to your topic on your own to respond insightfully and have a better understanding of the influence of the symbolic Ithaca on modernity.

This assignment should not be about the geography of Ithaca, it should be MAINLY about Ithaca as a literary milestone. In other words, how has Homeric Ithaca inspired literature and art of subsequent generations? In my power point and in your readings there are several references to literature and art (Cavafy’s “Ithaca,” Walt Whitman’s “Had I the Choice,” Derek Walcott “The Sea is History,” or films like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind), that have interpreted and reinterpreted the idea of Ithaca and what it means to modernity.

The final paper is due Tuesday, May 18 by 12 noon

Please email the final paper to me on May 18 by 12 noon attached as a Word doc at

In anticipation of your final paper please observe all the following rules we have discussed extensively:

-Have a title that best captures your topic and the spirit of your paper

-Remember to put main titles in italics

-Insert page numbers

-Do not jump from tense to tense, stick with one tense

-Make sure your third-person verb forms are correct

-Have transitions (paragraphs)

-Do not ever address the reader as YOU -instead use ONE or WE: "As one/we may argue..."

-Be aware of rules of punctuation

-Know not only the forms of figurative language, but also how to use them

-Introduce quotes properly: "according to...", or "as the author states/claims/argues/maintains/declares/ponders..." (a while ago I posted a link to a guideline of proper introduction of quotes)

-Use specific examples in the form of quotes from the texts to illustrate your points

-DRAW AN OUTLINE before you write the assignment

-Have a clear thesis and personal perspective on the topic

-Do not oversimplify or generalize and AVOID clichés. Be specific and think small

-Use synonyms; never repeat the same word more than twice in a short paper.

Please do not write in the comment’s column. Save in Word and attach as Box doc.

the return of ulysses ‘Only Edith Hall could have written this richly engaging and distinctive book. She covers a breathtaking range of material, from the highest of high culture to the camp, cartoonish, and frankly weird; from Europe to the USA to Africa and the Far East; and from literature to ?lm and opera. Throughout this tour of the huge variety of responses that there have been to the Odyssey, a powerful argument emerges about the appeal and longevity of the text which reveals all the critical and political ?air that we have come to expect of this author. It is all conveyed with the infectious excitement and clarity of a brilliant performer. The Return of Ulysses represents a major contribution to how we assess the continuing in?uence of Homer in modern culture.’ — Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge ‘Edith Hall has written a book many have long been waiting for, a smart, sophisticated, and hugely entertaining cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey spanning nearly three millennia of its reception and in?uence within world culture. A marvel of collection, association, and analysis, the book yields new discoveries on every page. In no other treatment of the enduring ?gure of Odysseus does Dante rub shoulders with Dr Who, Adorno and Bakhtin with John Ford and Clint Eastwood. Hall is superb at digging into the depths of the Odyssean character to ?nd what makes the polytropic Greek so internationally indestructible. A great delight to read, the book is lucid, appealingly written, fast, funny, and full of enlightening details. It is at once a serious investigation of a cultural phenomenon, an extended education in the humanities, and an invitation to a lifetime of trailing its seafaring hero.’ — Richard P. Martin, Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics, Stanford University ‘Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses undertakes the formidable task of surveying the cultural reception of the Odyssey from late antiquity to the present. By tracing echoes of the poem in literature, painting and music, noting its impact upon discourses of race, class, gender, and colonization, and identifying re?ections of the myth in modern systems of philosophical and psychological thought, the author shows that it is arguably the founding text of Western civilization. Today, the Odyssey has lost none of its cultural power or resonance. Having found a new home in popular culture and contemporary media, it speaks with especial urgency to non-Western émigrés in a culturally fragmented world. Hall’s rich appraisal will be greeted as the de?nitive investigation of a fascinating and many sided phenomenon.’ — Marilyn B. Skinner, Professor of Classics, University of Arizona ‘In The Return of Ulysses, Edith Hall has given us a brilliant, cultured, and far-reaching tool for interpreting the Odyssey, and for reading, watching, and listening to the words, images and music that have come into being in the refracted light of the Homeric poem. Taking us from Virgil to Cavafy, Circe to Dorothy – the ?rst female quester – and Polyphemus to Batman, Hall’s work ranges in masterful ways among the times, places, ideologies, and theoretical frameworks that constitute the reception world of the epic to which all later epics are generically most connected. The book is written in a lively, witty, and hip style, wearing with impressive ease its enormous learning and cultural breadth. Edith Hall points the way, sometimes with elaboration, often with suggestive brevity, to the many pathways leading from and back to this familiar but always changing poem. The Return of Ulysses does not disappoint, and has much to o?er that will both teach and delight.’ — Richard F. Thomas, Professor of Greek and Latin, Harvard University – edith hall – The Return of Ulysses a cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey Published in 2008 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU ?75 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY ?00?0 www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2008 Edith Hall The right of Edith Hall to be identi?ed as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act ?988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 ? 845?? 575 3 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by A. & D. Worthington, Newmarket, Su?olk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bath Press contents Acknowledgements PART I: GENERIC MUTATIONS ?. Embarkation 3. Shape-Shifting 2. 4. 5. 6. ?7 Telling Tales 45 Singing Songs PART II: WORLD AND SOCIETY Facing Frontiers Colonial Con?ict 9. Women’s Work ?0. 75 89 Class Consciousness ?3? ?3. Blood Bath ?5. 59 ?0? Brain Power ?4. 3? Rites of Man ??. ?2. 3 Turning Phrases 7. 8. vii PART III: MIND AND PSYCHE Exile from Ithaca Sex and Sexuality Dialogue with Death Notes Bibliography Index ??5 ?47 ?6? ?75 ?89 203 2?7 243 28? acknowledgements T he idea for this book was suggested to me by Alex Wright at I.B.Tauris, who had heard me discussing the topic on Melvyn Bragg’s BBC radio programme, In Our Time, and developed while I taught BA and MA modules on the cultural impact of the Odyssey at the University of Durham in the academic year 2005–6. I would like to thank all the students who enrolled, for their enthusiasm and inexhaustible energy in seeking out new examples of the Odyssey’s cultural presence, especially Phil Lofthouse and Joe Platnauer. My doctoral students Charlie MacDougall, Justine McConnell and Rosie Wyles have also helped in all kinds of ways. Others to whom I am grateful include Jennifer Ingleheart, Fiona Macintosh, Margaret Malamud, Luke Pitcher, Richard Poynder, Peggy Reynolds, David Roselli, Polly Weddle, and Richard Williams. Sarah and Georgie Poynder provided trenchant comments on most of the ?lms and all the children’s books. Special thanks go to David and Alison Worthington for their copy-editing and proof-reading of the text. This is the ?rst book to be published under the aegis of the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway, which was o?cially opened on ?7 December 2007. vii part i generic mutations ? embarkation I Muse, sing for me about that versatile man, who sacked the sacred city of Troy and then wandered far and wide (Odyssey ?.?–2). n the late Bronze Age, a king from the western islands of Greece was delayed sailing home after a war in Asia, but did eventually return to recover his wife, son and throne. His story was told by bards, and in about 750 BCE one of them – the Greeks said he was blind and named Homer – put the ?nishing touches to the epic poem called the Odyssey, which opens with the invocation above. This story stays fresh nearly three millennia later – but why? The recent editor of an anthology of texts inspired by the plays of Shakespeare admits that Homer, and only Homer, has proved an equally powerful source of inspiration for later authors.? Another scholar has argued that it can be di?cult even to identify ‘spino?s’ from the Odyssey, so deeply has it shaped our imagination and cultural values.2 My book explores the reasons for the enormity of this poem’s cultural presence. This is a foolhardy quest. The vastness of the terrain should discourage all but optimistic travellers. Another deterrent should be the quality of the previous explorations. In Stanford’s The Ulysses Theme, the ?rst edition of which was published more than half a century ago (?954), the reasons for Odysseus’ survival in the literature of later centuries was subjected to a brilliant analysis. The material that Stanford had collected still arouses awe in any wannabe successor, even one equipped with online library catalogues. Stanford’s book has already inspired ?ne epigones, notably the accessible An Odyssey round Odysseus by Beaty Rubens and Oliver Taplin (?989), and Piero Boitani’s heavyweight study The Shadow of Ulysses (?994). Several useful collections of essays have also been published.3 Yet it seems to me that a new investigation is timely. Even in his second edition of ?968, and the more popular The Quest for Ulysses that he published with 3 4 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES J.V. Luce in ?974, Stanford was writing in a world that had not adjusted to feminism, let alone post-colonialism, and in which few movies had engaged with the Odyssey. This book takes a di?erent trajectory from most of its predecessors. It is a study of the in?uence of the Odyssey rather than the ?gure of Odysseus/Ulysses. It does not discuss textual matters such as the ‘authenticity’ of the ?nal book of the Odyssey, where the hero is ?nally reunited with his father.4 Indeed, Laertes supports my argument that one reason for the poem’s enduring popularity must be that its personnel is so varied that every ancient or modern listener, of any age, sex or status, seaman or servant, will have found someone with whom to identify. There has been a tendency to see the Iliad as a young man’s poem, and the Odyssey as a poem of old age; the ancient critic Longinus saw its ethical focus as a sign of its author’s advancing years: ‘great minds in their declination stagger into Fabling’, as John Hall of Consett translated it in ?652.5 But youths relate to Telemachus, and the strength of the entire cast means that it has been possible to rewrite the Odyssey from the perspective of old men, of teenage girls, of Elpenor, of Circe’s swine, and even of Polyphemus.6 Several recent writers have identi?ed themselves with Homer, above all Jorge Luis Borges, who as his own sight began to fail, in his semiautobiographical El Hacedor (?960), spoke of divining the ‘murmur of glory and hexameters … of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle’.7 But my book does not contribute to the controversy about the identity of ‘Homer’, who was alleged in antiquity variously to have been a lover taken by Penelope, a blind resident of Chios, a descendant of the mystic Orpheus, or a native of Smyrna (Izmir) named Melisigenes.8 My favourite conjecture is not that the author of the Odyssey was a woman (see Chapter 9), but that both Homeric epics were created by Odysseus himself. That nobody else was an eyewitness of both the Trojan War and the voyage of Odysseus was pointed out in all seriousness decades before Herman Melville in Moby-Dick (?85?) made Ishmael, the sole survivor of another ill-fated voyage, narrate his tale.9 The Odyssey is attractive simply on account of its great age. The great storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien commented, in connection with H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (?895), on the perennial human desire to ‘survey’ tracts of time. Tolkien’s inhabitants of Middle-earth, in the late Third Age, recall the olden days that preceded them.?0 Yet my book is not arranged chronologically, nor does it follow the temporal order of events as presented in the poem. Instead its route travels via responses to the poem grouped according to genres, media, and sociological or psychological topics. But EMBARKATION 5 even thematically based discussions have a temporal dimension. Certain aspects of the Odyssey have been culturally prominent or recessive at certain times: the Renaissance, seeing it as a charter text of colonial expansion, emphasized the maritime wanderings; the eighteenth century found the teachable Telemachus more appealing than his father; Modernists were obsessed with the trip to the Underworld, and ‘made it new’ a thousand times. The cultural manifestations of the Odyssey are not here comprehensively covered, and their selection, if not arbitrary, has been personal. There is more discussion of ?ction, poetry, theatre and ?lm than of painting and sculpture because I am more at home with texts than images. For a similar reason there is little said about danced versions of the Odyssey, for example the Czech ballet company Latérna Magika’s epoch-making Odysseus, which has been revived repeatedly since ?987. Nor is there much on the many ‘crank’ theories about the Odyssey arguing, for example, that it contains secret instructions for sailing to Iceland across the Atlantic, via Circe in the Hebrides and the Cimmerians in Ulster.?? Others have suggested that it contains prophecies of later technological developments – for example, that Alcinous’ gold and silver guard-dogs (7.9?–4) are ancestors of the cyborg.?2 Some, although more scienti?cally based, fail to see that the epic is not primarily concerned with empirical reality, for example the view that the Sirens were monk seals.?3 Although such readings have an entertainment value, I have not dwelt upon them. Labels have been attached to our dialogue with the ancient Greeks ever since the Renaissance (the authors whom Bernard Knox, in response to claims that classical culture has been hijacked by Western imperialism, has ironically called ODWEMS, the Oldest Dead White European Males).?4 A late antique rhetorician liked the image of Homer ‘sowing the seeds of art’.?5 The old notion of the Classical Tradition or the Classical Heritage takes the idea of a legacy, passed passively down the generations like the family teaspoons.?6 Judith Kazantzis says that Homer’s epic of the high seas ‘is perennially open to plunder itself and I am a pirate’.?7 The theatre director Peter Sellars sees each classic text as an antique house that can be redecorated in the style of any era, while remaining essentially the same.?8 Taplin proposes the more volatile image of Greek Fire, a substance used as a weapon that burns under water. Greek culture, according to this analogy, is still present in invisible yet incendiary forms.?9 For the Prussian scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendor?, the metaphor of necromancy came from the scene before Odysseus enters the world of the dead: ‘We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; 6 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts.’ 20 More ambivalent is Walcott’s description, repeated in poems including Omeros, of ‘All that Greek manure under the green bananas’ 2? – the Greek legacy is excrement, but has also fertilized his Caribbean imagination. This beautifully captures the paradoxical nature of ancient Mediterranean discourses to peoples colonized by Western powers. Various explanations have been proposed for the trans-historical appeal of a few ancient texts.22 Kristeva suggests that since every text is a ‘mosaic of quotations’, we must think in terms of intertextuality.23 According to Genette’s terminology, the Odyssey is a ‘hypotext’ that has been ‘transvaluated’ into derivative ‘hypertexts’ such as the Aeneid and Joyce’s Ulysses, although the hypertexts can subsequently become hypotexts themselves.24 More satisfying from an explanatory perspective is Vidal-Naquet’s argument that ancient literature transcends history because of an unusual susceptibility to diverse interpretations.25 Raymond Williams would have suggested that this was in turn made possible by the ideological complexity of the original epic, according to his notion that any moment in time contains three strands of ideology: old-fashioned ideas on their way out, dominant ideas that the majority of people hold, and emergent ideas developed only by avant-garde segments of the population and which may not become mainstream for centuries.26 On this argument there are things in the archaic Odyssey – for example, Penelope’s intelligence – that represented emergent ideology that might not become dominant for millennia. ‘Emergent’ ideology corresponds with the Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion that literature holds ‘pre?gurative’ meanings that can only be released by reassessments lying far away in what he calls ‘great time’ in the future.27 Another way of putting this is Erich Auerbach’s concept of ‘?gura’ or ‘umbra’, which draws on medieval allegorists to develop a metaphor of ‘pre?guration’ or ‘foreshadowing’. According to this argument, an element in an ancient text (e.g. Odysseus’ wanderings) can in a mysterious but profound manner pre?gure things that happen later (Columbus’s voyages of exploration).28 Vernant further proposes that important artworks actively condition the shapes taken by future artworks, whether the conditioning takes the form of emulation, modi?cation or rejection.29 Yet none of these models accounts for the two-way nature of the relationship. Every new response to a classic text alters the total picture of its in?uence. When a great artwork like the Odyssey stimulates the production of others, such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (?640) and Joyce’s Ulysses (?922), cultural history changes irrevo- EMBARKATION 7 cably. According to T.S. Eliot, collectively such ‘existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves’. But this ideal order will always be ‘modi?ed by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.’ 30 Thus Eliot would have seen Walcott’s new reaction to the Homeric epic in Omeros as a?ecting the totality of the cultural order and changing forever how we see its precursors: ‘for in order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered’.3? That ‘existing order’ of cultural history has, moreover, now become international. The Odyssey is the intellectual property of the global village. This great quest epic has sometimes shaped the ways in which people in Africa or Mongolia come to understand their own living traditions of epic. This is likely in the case of the Sundiata (an African epic narrating the foundation in the thirteenth century CE of the Mali Empire in the western Sudan), which is still evolving in performance by singers called griots.32 Although the Sudanese give the name Mamoudou Kouyate to the epic’s originator, it never became canonized in any single version, and the longstanding French presence makes contact with the Odyssey not unlikely. In the global village, in any case, it has become impossible not to be reminded of Proteus in the Odyssey when reading about Sumanguru, the shape-shifting sorcerer, or of the scenes in Sparta and Phaeacia when appreciating the hospitality which the exiled Sundiata received at the courts of the kings of Tabon and Ghana.33 The two Homeric epics formed the basis of the education of everyone in ancient Mediterranean society from at least the seventh century BCE; that curriculum was in turn adopted by Western humanists. John Ruskin stressed that it does not matter whether or not Homer is actually read, since ‘All Greek gentlemen were educated under Homer. All Roman gentlemen, by Greek literature. All Italian, and French, and English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and by its principles.’ 34 Hegel had foreshadowed part of Ruskin’s diagnosis in saying that ‘Homer is that element in which the Greek world lived, as a human lives in the air’,35 but even from pre-Roman days it was not only the Greek world. We do not know what mother tongue was spoken by the schoolchildren in Olbia in the northern Black Sea in the ?fth century BCE, who painstakingly copied out a line in Odyssey 9 where Odysseus speaks of the land of the Ciconians, but they felt it had a local geographical reference.36 For a thousand years countless schoolboys living under the Macedonian or Roman Empires, whose ?rst languages were Syrian, Nubian or Gallic, learned their alphabet through the ?rst letters of Homeric heroes’ names, developed their handwriting by 8 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES copying out Homeric verses, and the art of précis by summarizing individual books of the Odyssey.37 They also committed swathes of Homeric hexameters to memory (in Xenophon’s Symposium 3.5 Niceratus says that his upper-class father required him to learn all of Homer by heart), and studied them in early manhood when they were learning to be statesmen, soldiers, lawyers, historians, philosophers, biographers, poets, dramatists, novelists, painters or sculptors. All the genres and media these men produced were formed in response to the great Ur-works in the Greek language. Sometimes they adapted them, and sometimes they quoted them.38 But the subterranean impact on the ancient psyche is more important. In the case of the Odyssey, no later author could ever again make a fresh start when shaping a narrative or a visual representation of a voyage, a metamorphosis, a run-in with savages, an encounter with anyone dead, a father–son relationship, a recognition token, or a reunion between husband and wife. ‘If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded,’ said Mircea Eliade,39 and the Odyssey was early identi?ed as a ‘foundational’ text. In one sense, this status is misleading. The poem represents a late stage in the evolution of ancient Near Eastern mythical narrative poetry in cultures that had reached peaks of sophistication millennia earlier, above all the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Although it also shares material with the biblical story of Noah and the ?ood, elements in Gilgamesh are related to both the Iliad and the Odyssey: like Achilles, Gilgamesh has a beloved comrade-in-arms whose death he can scarcely abide. But the parallels with the Odyssey are more pervasive. Gilgamesh embarks on a perilous quest which involves the favour of the Sun God, cutting down trees, building a raft, sexual advances from a goddess, sacrilegiously killing the sacred bull of heaven, sailing across the Waters of Death, and an o?er of immortality.40 The Odyssey is also aware of its Greek tradition of bardic performances (see Fig. ?.?), and its language was spoken as early as the sixteenth century BCE. But if tales of heroic escapades that foreshadow the Odyssey were written down in the alphabets used by those Minoan Greeks, no records have survived. The Homeric poems began to be charter texts at the moment when, in about 750 BCE, they were inscribed in phonetic script. Their importance as the possession of Greek-speakers everywhere was identi?ed immediately; knowledge of them became a passport into a psychological community spread over countless coasts and islands. Knowledge of Homer also spread amongst non-Greeks; Dio Chrysostom said that even primitive barbarians know Homer’s name (Oration 53.6), and Homer is the only Greek author mentioned by name in the Talmud.4? The in?uence EMBARKATION 9 of the Odyssey can be seen on the Book of Tobit, the scriptural tale of the righteous Jew of Nineveh, probably written in Aramaic during the second century BCE.42 To allude to the Odyssey is to invoke an authority of talismanic psychological power. Certainly composers of epic from Apollonius in Greek Egypt in the third century BCE to Virgil, Tasso, Milton and Walcott have always (if inaccurately) viewed Homer as primary ancestor. So have lyric poets and the playwrights discussed in Chapter 3. But advocates of the superiority of the Iliad can only envy the cultural penetration achieved by the Odyssey: it is also an ancestral text for cartographers, geographers, navigators, explorers, historians, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, occult magicians, novelists, science-?ction writers, biographers, autobiographers, movie directors and composers of opera. The Odyssey has generated other texts with foundational status. Creative people inaugurating a new trend have repeatedly found the Odyssey a suitable text on which to rest the burden of their manifestos. The best example is Joyce’s Ulysses, a founding text of Modernist ?ction. Any aspiring novelist since Joyce has had to deal with the Odyssey simply because of the magnitude of Ulysses in the emergence of contemporary ?ction. Ulysses has itself been translated into numerous languages, including Malayan and Arabic, and in ?994 become a surprise bestseller in China, which had previously banned it as too obscene.43 But the list of ‘inaugural’ responses to the Odyssey can be in?nitely extended. In the special e?ects in early cinema, in the early nineteenth-century emergence of children’s literature, in the post-colonial revision of the Western canon, the Odyssey is invariably to be found in the cultural cauldron when anything interesting is cooking. Its formulaic type-scenes (hospitality, confrontation, seduction by Sirenic females) have even been analysed as an antecedent of Dallas, the cult American TV soap opera of the ?970s and ?980s.44 This situation becomes self-perpetuating. The more that in?uential thinkers and artists direct their audience’s attention to the Odyssey, the more likely it becomes that interest in the poem will multiply. People become interested in the Odyssey because they are interested in Modernist ?ction, Venetian opera or science ?ction. Thinking about the relationship of narrative modes to reality inevitably involves Erich Auerbach’s seminal comparison, in Mimesis (?945), of the recognition of Odysseus by his scar in Odyssey ?9 and Genesis 22.?. But it is the relationship with reality in the Odyssey itself that avant-garde ?ction writers have found inspirational. The poem juxtaposes time levels through dialogues with the dead, prophecies and simultaneous actions in ?0 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES both real, known places and supernatural ones. This complex presentation of time has made the Odyssey the basis of the ‘fantastic odyssey taking place in the modern literature of Latin America’ 45 since the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinthine The Garden of Forking Paths (?94?). This literature involves journeys, deriving ultimately from the Odyssey, ‘whose destinations do not involve exterior coordinates in time and space’, and simultaneity in contrast with linearity. It is often at odds with Western conceptions of cause, e?ect and sequence.46 Borges understood the debt that his unorthodox treatments of time owed to the Odyssey, and expressed it in The Immortal (?947), when the tribune Flaminius Rufus drinks the waters of immortality and realizes that ‘in an in?nite period of time, all things happen to all men … if we postulate an in?nite period of time, with in?nite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.’ Moreover, ‘I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be One, like Ulysses.’ 47 There is realism in the Odyssey, but it is combined cohesively with supernatural elements – the morphing Proteus and the ?2-footed, sixheaded aquatic monster Scylla. This alone explains the poem’s attraction to cinema directors, whose medium more than any other can e?ect visual magic; since George Méliès and his L’Île de Calypso: Ulysse et le géant Polyphème (?905), a copy of which can be consulted in the Library of Congress, directors have found the Odyssey an ideal text for inspiring special e?ects. Moreover, the Odyssey is often cited as the founding text of ‘magical realism’, a term which originated in the ?920s but is most often associated with Gabriel García Márquez and the Latin American ?ction that began in the ?960s. Theorists require that it contains fantastic elements, never explained ‘rationally’; it may often exhibit detailed sensory richness and elements of folklore or myth; it enjoys mirroring events within and between its non-realistic and realist planes, and often leaves the reader uncertain in which to ‘believe’.48 This catalogue also exactly describes the contents and narrative strategies of the Odyssey, composed 2,700 years before Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The epic’s synthesis of the empirically plausible and the fantastic accounts for its cultural elasticity. The Iliad, despite the epiphanies of gods and one episode involving talking horses, refuses to allow its listener o? the painful hook of war.49 As a deadly serious account of a brutal con?ict, it can be transplanted to other situations involving siege or imperialism, but its consistently realist tenor is not open to the multiplicity of meanings that can be found in the non-realist, magical and symbolic ?gures of the Odyssey’s travelogue. As Northrop Frye put EMBARKATION ?? it, ‘of all ?ctions, the marvelous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted’. 50 The Odyssey o?ers an astonishing variety of sensory experience. Both Homeric epics create strong visual worlds: Cicero remarked on the paradox whereby in the case of a poet who was blind ‘it is nevertheless his painting not his poetry that we see’ (Tusculan Disputations 5.39.??4).5? But in the Odyssey the interest in the texture, taste, smell and sound of everyday life is connected with its greater diversity of discourses than its more military sister epic.52 The Troy poem contains little description of landscape or physical environment comparable to several passages in the Odyssey, beginning with Hermes’ appreciation of Calypso’s cave (5.59–73): There was a big ?re blazing on the hearth, and through the whole island wafted the scent of burning spliced cedar wood and juniper … A luxuriant wood sprang up around her cave – alder and poplar and sweet-smelling cypress. Long-winged birds nested there, horned owls and hawks and cormorants with their long tongues, whose sphere of operation is the ocean. Over the arching cavern there spread a ?ourishing cultivated vine, with abundant grapes. There was a row of four adjacent springs, with gleaming water, their streams running o? in di?erent directions, surrounded by soft meadows that bloomed with violet and parsley. This is the ?rst locus amoenus in the Western tradition, and the visual brilliance of the Odyssey has inspired not only novels and poems but visual artworks, such as ‘A Fantastic Cave Landscape with Odysseus and Calypso’, painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick de Clerck: Odysseus and Calypso sit amidst a precise and lush evocation of the paradisiacal vegetation of Ogygia.53 Some Odyssey paintings have themselves become so famous that, like Joyce’s Ulysses, they develop a dependent literature of their own. Turner’s painting of Polyphemus deriding Ulysses (?829), for example, amazed one poet: Turner had allowed him to gaze upon the Achaian prows gliding by, Odysseus in his burnished galleon, Nereides that sang him swiftly on And ba?ed Cyclops fading in the sky.54 The poem is, in addition, a writer’s joy because of its auditory appeal, conveyed in details such as the clanging of the metal bowl in which Eurycleia is washing Odysseus’ leg at the moment when she recognizes the scar and drops his foot (?9.469). But the poem also stimulates the senses most di?cult to replicate in aural or visual art: taste and smell. Much food preparation and eating is described, including the touching scene where Odysseus delights Demodocus by passing him a chunk of roast pork ‘with ?2 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES plenty of fat’, sliced from the sumptuous joint (8.475–6). And what stronger evocation of smell can be imagined than Menelaus’ description of the disgusting odour of the seals amongst whom he and his men had to hide from Proteus, the Egyptian sea-divinity? Proteus’ daughter Eidothea was fortunately on hand to help (4.435–45): She, meanwhile, dived down under the broad surface of the sea, and brought up four sealskins from the depths, all of them freshly skinned … Then she dug out hollows in the seaside sand for us to sleep in … and put a sealskin on top of each of us. That would have been a truly dreadful place to launch an ambush from, for the ?shy stench of the brine-bred seals was really disgusting, if the goddess had not herself saved us by devising the remedy of putting ambrosia under the nostrils of each one of us, and its delicious fragrance did away with the sea-beast’s odour. ‘The ?shy stench of the brine-bred seals’ puts the reader of the Odyssey into immediate sensory contact with the seagoing life lived by Homer’s ancient audience. When Hermes ?ies to Calypso, he swoops down to the sea, ‘skimming the waves like a cormorant that hunts down ?sh across the deadly spaces of the barren ocean, dipping its thick feathery wings in the brine’ (5.5?–3, see Fig. ?.2). An ancient epigram memorializes some damage done by immersion in the sea to a painting of Odysseus, but re?ects that the sea can never really destroy Odysseus, because ‘in Homer’s verses the image of him is painted on imperishable pages’ (Palatine Anthology ?6.?25).55 This poet understood intuitively how the sea explains the Odyssey’s cultural immortality. It has been scrutinized by historians of navigation, and has been described as the ancestor ‘of the port-books and pilot-books of later ages’.56 The whole fourth line of the poem is dedicated to the ‘many painful things experiences at sea that caused him heartbreak’ (?.4); by the end of the second book the ?rst thrilling embarkation takes place, when Telemachus’ ship leaves the Ithacan shore (2.42?–8): Owl-eyed Athene sent them a following wind, strong and from the West, that whistled out across the wine-dark sea … They lifted the pine-wood mast, set it upright in its socket, and secured it with forestays; with ropes of twisted ox-hide they then hauled up the white sails. The wind ?lled out the mainsail, and the purple wave roared out noisily as the front end of the keel sliced through it as the ship pressed on. The tactile evocation of the tackle, the contrast between the ‘wine-dark sea’ (oinopa ponton) and the white sails, the sound of the wind and the roar of the waves have inspired musical pieces, such as Debussy’s orchestral poem La mer, Ravel’s piano fantasy Une barque sur l’océan (both ?905), and EMBARKATION ?3 the Homeric tone poem Oceanides (?9?4) by Sibelius. When ancient artists personi?ed the Odyssey, she stood with one foot on a ship, ready to embark, or held a rudder, wearing the conical hat associated with sailors.57 A relief sculpture from Priene, now housed in the British Museum and known as the Apotheosis of Homer, shows the poet ?anked by feminine personi?cations of the Iliad with a sword and the Odyssey with a steering oar.58 Joyce was responding to the Odyssey’s focus on the sea in the ?rst chapter of Ulysses when Buck Mulligan says to Stephen Dedalus: ‘Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks.’ 59 The poem presents the sea in di?erent moods, but it dominates Book 5, which includes Odysseus’ heroic swimming feat. When the storm smashes his raft and engulfs him in a mighty wave (5.43?–44): He emerged from the breaker, which disintegrated as it crashed loudly against the coastline, and swam along outside it, looking at the land and trying to identify some shelving beach that could o?er a safe haven from the sea. When, as he swam, he encountered a mouth of a ?owing river, where he thought he could best reach dry land because it was clear of rocks and sheltered from the wind, he acknowledged the divine presence of the outgoing stream and prayed to it in his heart. When he reaches land after a three-day ordeal, his physical state is described vividly: ‘Both his knees and strong arms buckled beneath him … His whole body was swollen up, and sea-water streamed from his mouth and nostrils. Unable either to breathe or speak, he just lay there, semi-conscious, so total was his exhaustion’ (5.453–7).60 This archetypal narrative moment of shipwreck on a faraway island is one of the greatest gifts that the Odyssey has given to the world, often mediated through Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (?7?9); an expert on nineteenth-century boys’ ?ction has proposed that the island was a crucial site in narratives for maturing boys, since it could serve as ‘an appropriately diminutive world in which dangers can be experienced within safe boundaries’.6? For J.M. Barrie, an avid reader of the nineteenth-century ‘island’ adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson, shipwreck on an island was even a metaphor for sudden arrival into human existence: ‘To be born is to be wrecked on an island.’ 62 Borges once remarked that verse should touch us physically ‘as the presence of the sea does’.63 This sense that all poetry has a relationship with the sea helps explain the cultural centrality of the Odyssey, which lies behind all sea-voyage poems, however remotely, including Coleridge’s ?4 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES Rime of the Ancient Mariner (?798): The fair breeze blew, the white foam ?ew, The furrow followed free: We were the ?rst that ever burst Into that silent sea. One detail that connects Coleridge’s Mariner with Odysseus is that they are both borne sleeping back to their homeland, their ship manned by others.64 Indeed, when Coleridge wanted to convey the e?ect of the Homeric hexameter, he exempli?ed it in two lines that imply that it is like a sea-voyage itself: Slowly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows, Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.65 Poets have always associated the poem’s maritime content with the rolling e?ect of its broad-sweeping hexameter verse. Robert Fitzgerald said that his translation was improved by being written ‘on Homer’s sea in houses that were … shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below’.66 The sea imagery pervades Homeric reception. Quintilian, a Roman professor of oratory, said that Homer was himself the cultural equivalent of the ocean, ‘the source of every stream and river; for he has given us a model and an inspiration for every department of eloquence’ (?0.?.4). It is in the same tradition that the Restoration poet John Oldham was working when in his ode The Praise of Homer he likens the poem to ‘the unexhausted Ocean’.67 How did the Odyssey travel from Quintilian’s world to Oldham’s? It survived from antiquity in many manuscripts, since the scholars of Byzantium had guarded the Homeric texts carefully ever since the Emperor Constantine had in about 330 CE established his Greek-speaking Roman capital at Byzantium on the Bosporus, renaming it Constantinople. Homer continued to form the basis of education there until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in ?453. Although the earliest manuscript of Homer actually dates from the tenth century CE, there are a dozen from the twelfth. Greek studies started to be exported to Western Europe well before Constantinople was sacked. In the late Middle Ages scholars came west from the Greek-speaking world, bringing their cultural treasures with them. Florence and subsequently Venice were popular destinations, since the aristocratic houses that ruled them followed intellectual pursuits, including the study of Greek.68 The hero in the story of the arrival of the Odyssey as a cultural presence in the West is the fourteenth-century humanist Francesco Petrarch. Like others at the time, he could read an idiosyncratic EMBARKATION ?5 summary of the Odyssey in Book 6 of the medieval Latin prose text Journal of the Trojan War, which derives from an original of the ?rst century CE. It is written from the perspective of its narrator, Dictys of Crete, who claims to have fought at Troy and to have known Ulysses.69 But Petrarch’s favourite Latin poet was Virgil, and it was probably this Roman epic that made Petrarch determined to lay his hands on a text of its Greek models. Through a contact working as an envoy in Constantinople, he ?nally acquired them. Petrarch and his friend Boccacio both struggled to read the Greek texts, and in the end commissioned their Greek teacher Leontius Pilatus to translate their codex of Homer into Latin, a task he completed in ?369.70 The die was cast; the Iliad and Odyssey were ?nally being read by Western Europeans. It took more than a century before the ?rst printing of the Homeric text in its original form, edited in Florence by the Athenian Demetrius Chalcondylas and printed there by another Greek, the Cretan Antonios Damilas, in two volumes (?488). This precious book unleashed a ?ood of translations into Latin and modern languages. The Renaissance odyssey of the Odyssey had begun. 2 turning phrases A t the climax of the Odyssey, the beggar poised the bow in his hands, and as easily as a skilled lyre player and singer stretches a string tight on a new peg, when he has made fast the twisted sheep-gut at both ends, with just as little e?ort did Odysseus bend the great bow, taking it in his right hand to test the bow-string, which gave out a sound like lovely swallow-song (2?.406–??). Thus, at the moment when Odysseus is about to reclaim his identity, he is compared with a bard whose performances brought the man who he was to life. To string the bow is to string the lyre; to let the arrow ?y is here compared with turning thought into poetry.? One explanation of the name Homeros is that it means a ‘joiner’, a man who turned phrases on his lathe, before ?xing the poem together.2 But to ‘turn’ a poem can also have the Latin sense of vertere – to convert it into another language. The Odyssey’s many thousand hexameter lines roll forward mesmerically, each arranged around six rhythmical pulses, vocalized in two clusters or asymmetrical half-lines. Hexameters have a measurable physiological impact: medical research has shown that patients’ heart and respiratory rates slow down when they read them.3 Within this rhythmic frame the poem’s characters all speak the same dialect of archaic Greek, yet are aware of other languages. Athena, disguised as Mentes, speaks of a foreign port ‘where the people speak another tongue’ (?.?83). The people who produced the Odyssey were, from its inception, in contact with other ethnic groups. Alexander the Great’s Macedonian soldiers must have paraphrased the poem to far-?ung communities on campaign: Dio Chrysostom claimed that Homer’s poetry ‘is sung even in India, where they have translated it into their own speech and song’ (Oration 53.6–7). But evidence for the translation of Homer into other ancient languages is rare, because anybody educated enough to want to read Homer would usually have learnt Greek. ?7 ?8 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES There was one attempt to translate the Odyssey into Latin in the third century BCE, by Livius Andronicus, a bilingual poet from the Greekspeaking area of southern Italy. Only a few fragments survive, in a Latin Saturnian metre rather than the hexameter, but they suggest a translation rather than an adaptation.4 When the Homeric poems arrived in Petrarch’s Italy, it was once again into Latin, then the universal language of scholarship, that they were translated. But after they were printed in ?488, they became central to the Humanists’ curriculum, indeed the texts from which students learned ancient Greek. It was therefore inevitable that translations began to appear in languages including Modern Greek, German, Spanish, Castilian and Dutch.5 The Odyssey ?rst saw an English translation with the appearance in ?6?6 of George Chapman’s vigorous version in a ten-syllable metre, a few years after his imposing Iliad. There have subsequently been hundreds of translations, into dozens of languages, many of which are catalogued in Young’s encyclopaedic The Printed Homer (2003). The Odyssey could be read in Russian and Danish by the end of the nineteenth century, and soon afterwards in Polish (?904), Hungarian (?905), Provençal (?907), Swedish (?908), Slovenian (?9??), Icelandic (?9?5), Serbo-Croat (?9?5) and Finnish (?9?6). A few major non-European languages have had to wait longer – the ?rst Korean Odyssey was published in ?99? – but few people in the world today do not know a language in which the epic is available. Homer has always been central to the theory of translation, whether during the querelle between the ancients and the moderns,6 or in Joseph Spence’s essay on Pope’s Odyssey (?726–27). Individual traditions of Homeric translation, for example in seventeenth-century France, have been discussed well.7 The debate in England is illustrated by the collection Homer in English, edited by George Steiner (?996). Translating Homer became a Victorian national pastime, sparking a controversy between Matthew Arnold and F.W. Newman.8 Arnold identi?ed four qualities inherent in Homeric poetry: it is rapid, uses plain and direct syntax and language, expresses plain and direct ideas, and is ‘eminently noble’. Few translations have even today reproduced these undeniable qualities. Indeed, there have been few remarkable translations of the whole Odyssey, although the good ones have been reprinted and studied closely.9 Into this category fall such hardy perennials as Chapman’s version, Alexander Pope’s Odyssey (?725),?0 Dacier’s Odyssey in France during the same period, Johann Heinrich Voss’s German hexameter version of ?78?, and E.V. Rieu’s, worldwide, after the Second World War. TURNING PHRASES ?9 The quandaries faced by the Homeric translator di?er from those posed by the Aeneid, because Homeric epic originated orally. Poetry produced and passed around other bards from memory, without the aid of writing, has distinctive features, such as the typical scene that recurs with minor modi?cations (guests arriving, sacri?ce, divine epiphany). Oral poetry is marked by ring composition, similes, catalogues, doublets and digressions, as well as the feature most obvious in translation – repeated epithets and formulaic phrases recurring in the same metrical positions.?? Walcott opened his stage version of the Odyssey (?992) with a loose hexameter blues rendition of the opening lines, performed by blind Billy Blue. His ?fth line is a transliteration of Homer’s opening hexameter, with its e?ect – which combines the poem’s interests in sailing and weaving – explained afterwards: andra moi ennepe mousa polutropon hos mala polla … The shuttle of the sea moves back and forth on this line, All night, like the surf, she shuttles and doesn’t fall Asleep, then her rosy ?ngers at dawn unstitch the design.?2 The challenge facing any Odyssey translator can be illustrated with the epithet that appears, programmatically, in that ?rst line – the word polútropos, describing Odysseus. Polútropos means something like ‘muchturning’, but the ‘many turns’ could be connected with Odysseus’ many journeys, his many tricks, or his command of every branch of rhetoric.?3 In ?6?6, Chapman opted for periphrasis and alliteration with the letter ‘w’: The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way Wound with his wisdom… Ogilby (?665) kept complications to a minimum with ‘prudent’; the pragmatist Hobbes (?686) simply left it out! Pope picked up on the idea of wisdom in ?725–26, proposing ‘The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d’. But Cowper in ?79? branched out with the much more daring opening, Muse make the man they theme, for shrewdness famed And genius versatile … ‘Shrewd and ‘versatile’ have subsequently become translations of choice amongst the unadventurous. But there have been more noteworthy ‘turnings’ of polútropos meanwhile: Butcher and Lang’s proto-boy-scout of an Odysseus is ‘so ready at need’ (?879); the ingenious Butler’s ?n-de-siècle hero is ‘ingenious’ (?900); A.T. Murray’s pedestrian Loeb (?9?9) o?ered ‘the man of many devices’, before Caul?eld’s attempted hexameter Odyssey touched a new psychological chord with ‘Sing me the restless man, O 20 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES Muse …’ in ?923. Rieu’s wartime sea captain is ‘resourceful’; T.E. Lawrence (?932) and Lattimore (?965) sat on a fence with ‘the various-minded man’ and ‘the man of many ways’ respectively, improved by the reliably poetic Fagles as ‘the man of twists and turns’ (?996), while Shewring (?980) proposed the vague ‘man of wide-ranging spirit’. But there is a new intuition in Walcott’s version, as sung by Billy Blue, that polútropos refers to the multiplicity of tales surrounding Odysseus: Gone sing ’bout that man because his stories please us.?4 That no canonical term has emerged for rendering polútropos suggests that no o?ering has been entirely satisfactory, unlike the oft-repeated Greek formulae within the poem itself. Some are so superb that the bards ceased to improve upon them. ‘When rosy-?ngered dawn, the early born, appeared …’ occurs 20 times in the Odyssey, and the phrase ‘rosy-?ngered dawn’ on an additional ?ve occasions. But even in translation from the beautiful assonance of rhododaktulos ??s, it is di?cult to see how any image could better capture the e?ect of a dawn morning than pink streaks fanning across the horizon like a woman’s ?ngers (Fig. 2.?). The oral genesis of the Homeric poems has provoked consistent interest. Cognitive psychologists and even computer programmers have examined how memory functions by systematic analysis of mnemonic processes in Homeric epic; visual images within narrative are symbols that prompt the use of whole clusters of related phrases, speeches and actions.?5 The appeal of the Homeric epics as oral poems is well conveyed in Marvin Bell’s poem Typesetting the Odyssey, where a typesetter fails to transfer poetic magic into print.?6 Typesetting itself has become obsolete since the advent of electronic word-processing and digital literature. Indeed, because the link-structure in hypertext novels allows for stories without any sequential order, as well as creative input from the ‘audient’, the notion of the oral epic text has found an unexpected new fan base. There are similarities between the bards’ production of their lays and the open-ended nature of digital storytelling, not least the absence of an authoritative printed text with a predetermined conclusion.?7 The breakthrough in the understanding of Homer’s orality came in ?930 and ?932, with publications by the American classicist Milman Parry, inspired by the work of a Slovenian philologist named Matija Murko. Murko collected oral epics in what was then called Yugoslavia. Parry then travelled to Europe to research the South Slavic epic tradition, with the assistance of Albert Lord and a performer of epics – a guslar – named Nikola Vujnovi?. Their collection of recordings, now housed at Harvard University, showed that illiterate singers could improvise massive poems TURNING PHRASES 2? from a repertoire of formulaic language structurally similar to Homer’s.?8 This discovery, by knocking Homer o? the pedestal he had occupied as a ‘consummate literary artist’ of the Western tradition, raised the status of traditions of oral epic everywhere, especially in Third World countries. An intense sequence in Walcott’s Omeros involves its hero, Achille, in a visionary return to his ancestral African home. He listens in his tribe’s council hut to the village singer and soothsayer – griot – sing the epic of the African tribes’ enslavement and Atlantic crossing; the griot is comparable with Homer and Dante. Just as Walcott uses the content of the Greek Odyssey and the form of Dante’s rhyming tercets to recreate an African spiritual ancestry, so the Greek Hephaestus, the Christian deity and the African Ogun are all evoked at the Caribbean island’s volcano.?9 Even prior to Parry, Homer’s reputation helped to preserve oral performance traditions in developing countries. One tradition, studied by Russian anthropologists in the mid-nineteenth century, was the folk poetry sung by the Kyrgyz people, whose Manas, a poem longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined, describes the heroism of the Kyrgyz past. Storytellers called Manaschi improvise during emotionally vibrant performances of set pieces at public events such as race meets. The respect which the Manas has encountered is related to its perceived a?nities with the Homeric epics. On the other hand, there is a price to be paid here, because the term epic, which is Western and literary, has a?ected what type of indigenous oral performances have been recorded; when it comes to African culture, as many oral performances are lost as have been preserved because they are performed with dance, or by women, or do not narrate narrowly de?ned heroic actions.20 Yet the oral genesis of the Odyssey certainly helps to explain its signi?cance for black writers. Henry Louis Gates has noticed the importance of Parry’s research to the mid-twentieth-century renaissance of black literature, with its oral origins.2? Ralph Ellison’s black American Odysseus in Invisible Man (?952) owes his success to his ability as extempore public speaker. Ellison believed in the sophistication of African-American oral traditions and jazz (he initially trained as a musician); in an introduction he wrote to Invisible Man in ?98?, he spoke of the importance of improvisational forms in its genesis – the rich culture of the folk tales told in barber shops, and the ‘wild starburst of metamorphosis’ to which a jazz musician could subject a melody.22 The jazz French horn player David Amram says, ‘Homer was the ?rst great jazz poet or scatter or rapper … he did the Iliad with no notes because he couldn’t see. Someone wrote it down later.’ 23 The improvisational 22 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES medium of Rap Music, along with the Hip-Hop culture to which it is allied, has parallels with Greek oral epic. They both depend on a distinct rhythm and dialect featuring conventional formulaic phrases. There are also recognized ‘sub-genres’ of Rap, involving speech acts like boasting or invective that resemble speech types in Homer. Improvised raps assume a formalized relationship with audience or rival and a particular performance context: the ‘Concept Rap’ tells a story; the ‘Freestyle Rap’ is improvised in rivalry with that of another rapper; the ‘Battle Rap’ relates such a competition, and, like it, includes formulaic elements such as insult, self-glori?cation and violent metaphors. There are also ‘bragging’ raps, where the performer boasts about sexual conquests. Rap also has a?nities with Homeric epic in terms of its representation of heroes and villains. Rap artists develop an identity that transcends the role of poet: ‘they are cultural icons after the fashion of ancient mythic characters’;24 Gangsta Rap and Political Rap music communicate an idealized masculine behaviour. The Odyssey is more interested than the Iliad in poetry.25 From the emotional reaction to Phemius’ performance in Book ?, the poem discusses the emotive and aesthetic qualities of enchanting, spell-binding, shapely, honey-sweet song, and o?ers metaphorical analogies to the art of putting a poem together – weaving and bow-stringing, travelling down pathways, and pleas to the Muse for inspiration. Its terminology informed ancient poetics and aesthetics.26 All the more self-conscious poets, such as Pindar, Callimachus and Horace, formulated their theories in response to Homer, and the discussions of Poetry in Plato, Aristotle’s Poetics, Longinus’ On the Sublime and Horace’s Ars Poetica all use parameters laid down in the Odyssey.27 These treatises became in turn the foundation texts of aesthetic theory; even now all debates in literary criticism, such as discussion of the impersonal poetic voice which produced the postmodern Death of the Author,28 build themselves a family tree leading back to Homer. Artists in prose have been no less mesmerized than poets. Indeed, in the mid-twentieth century the Odyssey was felt to be better suited to translation in prose, especially after this was said by T.E. Lawrence, sometimes known as ‘Odysseus of Arabia’.29 Lawrence’s own experience of the First World War encouraged him to read Homeric epic as a genre akin to biography.30 He found that the war in Arabia lived up to epic expectations of battle fostered by his late Victorian classical education.3? But his guilt at his role in the Arab revolt, as he describes it in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (?922), led to a post-war crisis of identity that found a re?ection in Odysseus, the hero who sees the fallout of the siege of Troy and the deaths of his TURNING PHRASES 23 comrades. Lawrence certainly stressed to his printer that his experience of the eastern Mediterranean uniquely quali?ed him to translate the Odyssey: For years we were doing up a city of roughly the Odysseus period. I have handled the weapons, armour, utensils of those times, explored their houses, planned their cities. I have hunted wild boars and watched lions, sailed the Aegean in sailed ships, bent bows, lived with pastoral peoples, woven textiles, built boats and killed many men.32 His ‘dazzling mechanical genius’, which allowed him latterly to make a living out of speedboat design, fostered a camaraderie with the raftbuilding Odysseus.33 His a?nity with the master narrator who conceals and distorts the truth at will can be seen in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which ‘vacillates between a historical and personal expression’.34 Yet the strongest feature of Lawrence’s translation is his characterizations. He reacted to the characters in the poem personally (he referred to Menelaus as ‘a master-prig’ and to Odysseus as ‘?sh-smelly’),35 and put ?nely nuanced phrases into their mouths in the manner of a dramatist. Aspiring verse translators of the Odyssey were also discouraged by E.V. Rieu’s Penguin novelistic translation, published just after the Second World War, which became a global bestseller. The founding volume of the Penguin Classics series, costing just one shilling and sixpence, Rieu’s Odyssey had by ?964 sold over a staggering 2 million copies. Until the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Rieu’s Odyssey was the bestselling UK paperback.36 The irony is that Penguin was initially concerned about the ?nancial viability of the project, and later its editor-in-chief, William Emrys Williams, downplayed Homer’s role by observing that Rieu had ‘made a good book better’!37 The one notable poetic English translation at this time was by Robert Fitzgerald. Educated at Harvard, where he had performed the title role of Sophocles’ Philoctetes under the direction of Milman Parry, Fitzgerald worked with dictionaries in order to analyse every resonance before translating the words, as he insisted, into another poem altogether. His ?exible blank verse was unafraid of weighty epithets (‘Hermes the Way?nder’) and unexpected word order (Odysseus ‘racked his own heart groaning’).38 No higher tribute to his work could be made than Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘In memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald’, which uses the ?ight of the arrow from Odysseus’ bowstring, as it ‘sang a swallow’s note’, to evoke the lasting impact of Fitzgerald’s translation: The great test over, while the gut’s still humming, This time it travels out of all knowing 24 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES Perfectly aimed towards the vacant centre.39 The ancient Greeks had also already seen the potential o?ered by the Odyssey to poets in smaller-scale genres,40 and it has since resurfaced in every conceivable genre – epigram, satire, elegy, ballad, lyric, poetic monologue, haiku, sonnets, prose poems – some examples of which will be encountered later in this volume. It is a favourite with enthusiasts of the limerick, who are now publishing their versions of the Odyssey online, as in the contributions by one Chris Doyle in the Omni?cent English Dictionary in Limerick Form: Here’s Aeaea, the Island of Dawn, Where Odysseus brandished his brawn In a battle with Circe. Removing her curse, he Turned swine back to men and was gone.4? Yet the genre in which the presence of the Odyssey has been most fully investigated is the European tradition of epic, from Apollonius to Walcott, via Virgil, Tasso, Dante, Milton and Kazantzakis. The voyages conducted by Apollonius’ Jason and his four-book Argonautica, written in the third century BCE, revisit some of the places where Odysseus travelled, including the island of Circe. The ?rst six books of Virgil’s Roman epic the Aeneid, especially the wanderings that Aeneas narrates at the court of the Carthaginian queen Dido in Book III, are a brilliantly conceived response to the Odyssey; the premise is that the Trojan survivor (Aeneas) and the Greek survivor (Odysseus) are simultaneously sailing around the Mediterranean in frustrated quests for their respective destinations. The unseen presence of Odysseus is felt particularly in the rewriting of the Cyclops episode. Virgil gave this story to a new narrator, an eyewitness to the bloody confrontation, the Ithacan Achaemenides. He had been left behind in the Cyclops’ den when Ulysses had hurried to escape (3.6?3–54). In Ovid’s miniature version of the Odyssey, incorporated in Book ?4 of his epic Metamorphoses, he capped the eyewitness account of the Cyclopes by telling the story of Circe from the perspective of Macareus, a member of Odysseus’ crew, who had been changed into a pig: ‘I began to bristle with hair, unable to speak now, giving out hoarse grunts instead of words … I felt my mouth sti?ening into a long snout, my neck swelling with brawn’ (?4.277–84). But even epic traditions where in?uence is less easy to prove show obvious parallels with the Odyssey, such as the Chanson de Roland and other chansons de geste, in particular the dangerous sea-voyage undergone by the hero of the thirteenth-century Huon de Bordeaux. Specialists in TURNING PHRASES 25 French epic have pointed out the importance of the Odyssey in the creation of a more ‘romantic’ hero than was supplied by the Iliad.42 The presence of the Homeric poems has certainly led to the production of other kinds of epic in European history, especially since the mid-eighteenth century when the ‘discovery’ of old ‘druidical’ ballads began to be linked to rising national identities. Welsh harp players were likened to Homeric bards (see Fig. 2.2), and in Scotland James Macpherson published The Poems of Ossian (?760–93), supposedly by a third-century Gaelic songster.43 Although mostly Macpherson’s own invention, these poems in?amed some of the best minds across eighteenth-century Europe,44 thus spurring on poets to record their own people’s ancient songs and to look afresh at Homer in their attempts to create a national literature. One result can be seen in The Old Soldier Gorev by Pavel Katenin (?835), an architect of Russian literature. His Achilles and Homer (?826) is in a Russian hexameter, but his long Odyssey poem uses a demotic pentameter more acceptable to the Russian ear. Moreover, the poem transfers the story of the Odyssey to a real, Russian contemporary community. The peasant Makar Gorev leaves his wife and son, and sets out for the Napoleonic wars. He is taken prisoner and is the last to return home, after ten years of wandering. On home-coming Gorev is taken for a beggar, and becomes a guest in his own house. Stylistically, Katenin adapts to his Russian form many Homeric features, including similes, formulae, epithets and direct speech. But he also replaces gods with Russian peasants, and Homer’s wily Odysseus with the credulous Gorev. His self-seeking ‘Penelope’ can identify a suitable new husband, and his competent ‘Telemachus’ takes over his father’s estate and impedes his return. This is a truly Russian Odyssey, both in form and content.45 The Odyssey has also inspired translations that have themselves in turn inspired new poetic creativity. Keats penned a famous sonnet after ?rst looking into Chapman’s translation of Homer (see Chapter 6). Yet the palm here must surely go to Ezra Pound’s ?rst Canto (?930), the introductory poem in his A Draft of XXX Cantos, which translates the ?rst 65 lines of Book ?? of the Odyssey (the description of the journey from Circe to the land of the dead), and compresses the subsequent 90. But Pound’s project is more than a Modernist plunge into the abyss of myth: he is creating his own version of the poet’s traditional homage to the Odyssey as the very text that he rightly believed constitutes the source of the Western poetic subject.46 Pound’s father’s ?rst name was Homer, and from an early stage his guiding myth was that of Odysseus; his attraction to Mussolini’s politics 26 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES was based on his idea that the Italian leader was rebuilding a lost Ithaca in his homeland.47 Canto I translates the passage in which Odysseus travels to the Underworld to speak with Tiresias. Like Odysseus, Pound seeks knowledge in the minds of men long dead. He cannot speak to them directly, as Odysseus does, but their ghosts linger in old books. In Paris he had picked up a Renaissance Latin translation of the Odyssey by Andreas Divus, published in ?538, and it is this version that he himself translated in Canto I. However, in translating it, he used poetic conventions derived from Old English verse. Pound knew that the shape of Odysseus’ quest has survived through millennia, but he also knew that the means for its survival have been all the many metamorphoses it has undergone into the particular words of new places and new times. If we want to see ancient visions, we must seek them wherever they have reappeared in successive cultures, and in Canto I Pound reveals the complex ?lter of language and altering culture which is his only way to view the past. Hugh Kenner’s book The Pound Era documents the encounter with the epic undergone simultaneously by the other Modernists Eliot and Joyce. Long before Ulysses (also ?922), Frank in The Dubliners, in his yachting cap, reveals Joyce wrestling with the Odyssean hero.48 But Joyce’s attraction to the Odyssey raises the question of children’s versions, because it was through one such book, Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (?808), that Joyce ?rst experienced the epic.49 Indeed, a reason why the Odyssey has achieved such cultural penetration is because it has been regarded as suitable material for children’s books, and latterly children’s theatre, cartoons and videos. Many people have had their imaginations ?red by the Odyssey in childhood, and the tradition of children’s versions leads back to the one that inspired Joyce, which was reprinted many times.50 Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses was the idea of William Godwin and his new wife Mary Jane, who had together established a publishing house; these impoverished Godwins, whose combined household contained ?ve children, had experience in storytelling for the young. After Lamb’s retelling of stories from Shakespeare for children in ?807, it was the turn of the Odyssey. In his preface Lamb admitted his debt to Chapman’s translation and Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus (see pp 000). This is to frame the Odyssey as a moral tale for the education of boys. Lamb compressed the story of Telemachus, cut much dialogue and changed the order in which the episodes are told by reverting to chronological linearity. Lamb’s Ulysses appreciates beautiful goddesses, but does not sleep with them, nor even with Penelope, because this retelling stops just short of Ithacan bedtime. This is a gentler person than the Homeric Odysseus. But the TURNING PHRASES 27 book, if morally sanitized, is beautifully written and calculated to appeal to children. At this time Charles was drawing strength from his unorthodox religious convictions in order to keep control both of his own drinking and his sister Mary’s sanity; after stabbing their mother (who had neglected her as a child) to death in ?796, Mary had only been allowed out of the asylum because her brother had promised to oversee her. Mary’s input into Charles’s writing during these years was immense; much of the ?rst children’s version of the Odyssey may have been written by a childless manic depressive who had murdered her own mother. There are now many ingenious versions of the Odyssey for children. Odysseus in the Serpent Maze imagines Odysseus’ boyhood adventures, involving Penelope and Helen as children, pirates, a satyr and the inventor Daedalus. Waiting for Odysseus tells Odysseus’ story through the eyes of Penelope, Circe, Athena and ‘his old nanny Eurycleia’; The Pig Scrolls, by Gryllus the Pig is told from the perspective of one of the crewmen turned into a pig.5? Other children’s versions include Marcia Williams’s touching comic-strip cartoon (?996), and Rosemary Sutcli?’s The Wanderings of Odysseus (?995), which preserves the melancholy tone and brutality of the original, although she does censor the relationships with Calypso and Circe. Also related to the Lamb tradition are the numerous stage versions of the Odyssey for children that have been performed recently. These include Tom Smith’s hilarious The Odyssey (Polyphemus is a myopic schoolgirl),52 and John Murrell’s exciting Canadian version of the travelogue, performed in June 2005 at the Ottawa International Children’s Festival. Children’s versions of the Odyssey have included TV serializations, comic-strips such as Classics Illustrated no. 8? (?95?),53 and animated cartoons, most recently the reductive 47-minute Odyssey: Written by Homer released by Burbank Films in 2004. These emerge from the traditional relationship, dating from the early twentieth century, between the Odyssey and cinema, in which ‘translation’ has taken on new meanings alongside new technologies by which epic may be transferred to (audio)visual media. Paradoxically, the movie of the Odyssey that has reached the widest audience exists only in snippets. It is a ?lm being made within the frame plot of a movie integral to French New Wave Cinema – Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt, ?963). The director of the art-house version of the Odyssey under construction is Fritz Lang, acted by himself. There is one scene where the rushes are scrutinized, and they include dazzling white statues of the gods against azure skies, who seem to be coming to life. Penelope stands against a bright yellow wall, adorned with heavy make- 28 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES up suggesting Mycenaean frescoes; there are shots of sea-nymphs and Odysseus swimming towards a rocky outcrop. The ?lm was adapted from Albert Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo (?954, usually translated as A Ghost at Noon), but stressed the triangular tension between Odysseus, Penelope and the vindictive sea-god Poseidon, and their real-life counterparts, the French screenwriter Paul Javal (acted by Michel Piccoli), his wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and the cynical American ?lm producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). In the ?950s Moravia, after repudiating the use of third-person narrative, was experimenting with the ?rst person, and his Odysseus-?gure narrates the novel. The ?lm, however, consistently adopts the wife’s perspective. The marriage of Paul and Camille breaks up, just as the Lang movie collapses because of tensions between artistic and commercial motivations. But Le Mépris explores the process of translation itself – not only between languages and historical periods, but between media. As Godard has himself insisted, written discourse ‘automatically’ changes when it is turned into ?lm.54 During the rushes sequence, the discussion turns to European poetry in di?erent languages – Dante and Hölderlin. Indeed, Godard’s alterations to the Moravia novel heighten the focus on translation. In the novel, the producer believes that while the Anglo-Saxon countries have the Bible, the Mediterranean has the Odyssey.55 But in the ?lm, the Odyssey ?lm is to be made by a German director (because Schliemann discovered Troy), shot in Italy and produced by a North American. Godard’s Odyssey is far more international; his Odysseus has travelled further than Homer’s.56 Godard himself wrote that Le Mépris could actually have been entitled In Search of Homer;57 the Odyssey itself is irrecoverable, fragmented into an ever increasing number of di?erent retellings. Yet Le Mépris itself retells some of the themes in the Odyssey, at least as Godard interpreted it. Paul assaults a neoclassical statue of a woman during his quarrel with Camille; in their apartment, just as in the world of Odysseus, ‘one must be careful not to anger the gods’.58 Moreover, Camille reads a book arguing that it solves nothing to murder a sexual rival, which brings to mind not only her husband’s jealousy of Prokosch, but the carnage in Odyssey 22. Later, Paul and Camille themselves rewrite, despite their estrangement and Camille’s sudden death, the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope. Just one year after Alberto Moravia published Il Disprezzo, his compatriot Mario Camerini, a renowned director of thrillers, achieved what the ?lmmakers in Moravia’s novel fail to create: a coherent ?lm of the Odys- TURNING PHRASES 29 sey. This achievement has rarely been equalled (except by another Italian, Franco Rossi, who in ?968 directed an admired eight-part Italian TV serialization entitled Odissea, now almost impossible for anyone outside the charmed circle of Italian media historians to access). Ulisse has an almost all-Italian cast except for Kirk Douglas (pre-Spartacus) as the hero, and Anthony Quinn as a horrid Antinous. Silvia Mangano plays both a digni?ed Penelope and a sinister Circe. The movie, with its unexpected ethnical complexity, has stood the test of time. The psychological struggle of Ulisse was avant-garde in its time and stills works. Douglas intelligently portrays a man torn between his family and adventure – a con?ict brilliantly evoked during the Sirens episode. They are never shown, but are given the seductive voices of Ulisse’s wife and son as the camera o?ers a long dolly-in on his face. An authority on epic cinema has written that Camerini’s version works because it combines a level of persuasive authenticity (the impression is passably Mycenaean) with a sense of the supernatural power surrounding Odysseus; the colourful special e?ects by Eugen Schü?tan, moreover, helped the ?lm (which preserves the chronology and sequential ?ashbacks of the original) to develop its story ‘in an intelligent, notably urgent style’. 59 There has been one ?lm realization of the Odyssey subsequently, Konchalovsky’s version (?997), discussed in Chapters 8 and ?4. But the Odyssey has a more complicated relationship with cinema than this implies. It has held a special place in aspiring screenwriters’ lore since Christopher Vogler’s bestselling handbook The Writer’s Journey (?992). The formula for a successful screenplay that Vogler advises is structured around quotations and archetypal ?gures that he traces to the Odyssey – the wise elder ?gure (Mentor or Obi Wan Kenobi in George Lucas’s ?977 Star Wars), the Herald ?gure (Hermes or the telegraph clerk in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (?952)), the Shape-shifter (Proteus and countless morphing superheroes and their adversaries), and so on. Another analysis of Hollywood plot structure emphasizes the importance of the ‘classical storytelling technique’ that involves two parallel protagonists who pursue, simultaneously, di?erent courses of action although they end up working together towards a shared goal. This formula is exempli?ed in Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon (?987), but it could have been lifted straight from the Odyssey, with its separated father and son’s parallel travels and eventual reunion.60 The perceived a?nities between ?lm and epic-heroic narrative have, however, produced regular allegations that there were parallels being consciously drawn by screenwriters of movies that may super?cially bear little relation to the Odyssey. Examples I have encountered include the 30 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES ?gure of the nerdish Seymour in both the original ?960 ?lm Little Shop of Horrors and its ?986 remake,6? Watership Down (?978), Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (200?, an adaptation of Louis de Bernières’ novel, directed by John Madden), Waterworld (?995), Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003), and the maritime adventures in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004), which include one-eyed foes and an angry sea god. The important point is no longer whether any particular screenwriters have drawn on the Odyssey, or indeed ever read it, but that they would almost all self-consciously cite the Odyssey as a key text in the history of adventure narrative. This epic’s status, at least in Hollywood, has once again – and in a new sense – become a matter of legend. 3 shape-shifting I n Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3, Richard boasts, ‘I can add colours to the cameleon,/Change shapes with Proteus, for advantages’ (Act 3, Scene 2), and of all the words that the Odyssey has given us, the term ‘protean’ is one of the most familiar.? It stems from Menelaus’ account of his meeting with the sea-divinity Proteus, who slept on a beach on an island named Pharos, north of the mouth of the Nile. Proteus is the archetypal shape-shifter; his labile nature is related to his identi?cation with the mutable element of the sea. It is also re?ected in the colony of seals of whom he is the herdsman, and with whom he is so intimate that he sleeps amidst them on the sand. Experts in shamanic lore know that the seal, as a mammal similar to humans in voice, size and ability to cry real tears, holds a special place in the metamorphosis tales of many cultures; in Celtic myth, enchanted seals turn into irresistibly handsome male visitors who sexually comfort the widows of men lost at sea.2 Proteus’ own repertoire of physical presentations, his daughter Eidothea tells Menelaus, includes water and ?re as well as every beast on the earth; when Menelaus and his men did ?nally apprehend this slippery old being, he responded by turning into a lion, a snake, a panther, a giant boar, running water and a huge leafy tree (4.4?7–?8, 455–9). There were other shape-shifters in this league to be found in early Greek epic poetry, such as Periclymenus (the son of another sea-divinity, Nereus), and the females Nemesis and Mestra.3 But the Odyssey provides the only extended account of serial metamorphosis in archaic Greek literature, which explains why Proteus achieved his archetypal status. Most shape-changing beings in Greek myth do not have full membership of the immortal pantheon, but are intermediate ?gures, inimical to both gods and heroes.4 Proteus’ gift for changing shape is in his own power; he uses it at will and to his own advantage. But ultimately he is worsted and must give Menelaus something as a result of the contest; his gift is special knowledge. There are parallels with the biblical story 3? 32 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES of Jacob wrestling all night with a mysterious being – whether a man (according to Genesis 32:24) or ‘the angel’ (according to Hosea ?2:4) – and winning thereby knowledge of the parts of animals that can be eaten by Jews. Menelaus acquires instead god-like omniscience, for Proteus shares with him the secrets of past, present and future. The knowledge brings him both grief and joy. He hears the fates that befell the other Achaeans after Troy – the drowning of his comrade Ajax, and the murder of his brother Agamemnon. He learns that Odysseus has survived, but is stranded on Calypso’s island. Menelaus is taught the ritual sacri?ces to Zeus and the other gods that he must himself perform in order to win safe passage back home from Egypt. But ?nally, Proteus gives him the knowledge denied almost all men – the circumstances of his own death and the nature of the afterlife that he will enjoy: he will not die at home in Argos, but be taken by the gods to the Elysian plain at the end of the earth. This blissful place knows only fair weather and soft winds, and o?ers men an easier life than anywhere else in the world. The reason Proteus supplies for Menelaus’ immortality is that he was married to Helen, daughter of the immortal Zeus. But the story as it is told implies that the supernatural knowledge and the immortality are somehow prizes for beating Proteus in the contest of strength – for remaining unchanged in the face of the very principle of change itself – just as Jacob was rewarded with special insights into God’s will because he subdued the mysterious all-night wrestler. Menelaus, like Jacob, has faced and known ‘the reservoir of change from which all futures ?ow’.5 The theme of metamorphosis, however ancient, chimes with much more recent challenges to the unitary, Western notion of a changeless, secure identity. Emerson wrote of Man in his Essay on History: The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of form, makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus?6 As Marina Warner puts it, the principle of physical change as manifestation of organic vitality and the pulse in the body or art not only ‘lies at the heart’ of classical myth, but also, not coincidentally, ‘runs counter to notions of unique, individual integrity of identity in the Judaeo-Christian tradition’.7 Moreover, it has become easier for people to take delight in the idea of transformation – witness the interest in shape-shifting powers in recent children’s cinema – now that raising ontological questions no longer ?ies in the face of Christian suspicion of the supernatural, and terror of the pagan concept of metamorphosis.8 Yet the zoomorphic SHAPE-SHIFTING 33 (animal-form) transformations of the Odyssey pose questions about the nature of the subject, of consciousness and its relationship to the body and time. In what sense is Proteus still Proteus if he has become an animal, let alone an element? The men whom Circe transforms, we are told, still retain the same minds – yet surely a ‘self ’ cannot withstand such material alteration?9 The same question is asked, in poetic form, by the member of Odysseus’ crew who wakens in Thom Gunn’s ‘Moly’ to a Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake. I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take??0 On Circe’s island, Odysseus’ lieutenant Eurylochus takes an advance party of 22 men to her palace, where she wines and dines them. But Eurylochus himself stays outside, hidden, to observe what happens and report back to Odysseus. The wine is drugged, and makes the crewmen forget their homes; when Circe uses her magic wand on her dazed victims, they instantly acquire the body, bristles and voices of pigs (?0.239–43), while retaining their human consciousness (see Fig. 3.?). They can only be restored when Circe applies a di?erent drug, in the form of an ointment, to their porcine forms, whereupon they lose their bristles and become the same humans again – only even better looking than before (?0.388–99). Circe – the maga famosissima, ‘most famous sorceress’, as St Augustine called her (City of God ?8.?7) – is probably the most famous ?gure in the Odyssey besides its hero, Penelope and Polyphemus. Part of the power of the Circe story is that changing a man into a pig has a resonance particular to the attributes of the animal, especially in a peasant society like ancient Greece where humans lived in physical proximity to their farm animals. Pigs are symbolic of dirt and animal appetites, but they are also often perceived as having a rather sinister ‘dead-alive look’, and their mouth takes on the same position whether they yawn or squeal. Either way, they can look to humans as if they are laughing.?? Transformation into animal form is a motif attested in the mythologies of every world culture, and in the code of pre-literate societies it has much to say about primeval patterns of belief.?2 Anthropologists would include hunting and sacri?ce rituals entailing homeopathic or sympathetic magic, initiation rites involving ritual enactments of animal identities, totemism, shamanism and reincarnation. But in the Western tradition, it is Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’ crew into pigs that is the ancestor of all our countless tales of forcible human–animal metamorphosis from ancient Greece via Ovid and Apuleius to Kafka and recent ?ction.?3 Skulsky has classi?ed the meanings of the fantasy of transformation in major literature. In the Odyssey, he argues, metamorphosis is a way of 34 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES talking about enchantment. Odysseus’ men are pigs because they forget their own pasts and are enchanted by Circe, losing the human power of intelligent autonomous agency. It is crucial to this story that Odysseus himself can use his brain and resist the enchantment (see Fig. 3.2); this is with the help of Hermes’ gift of the plant moly which acts as an antidote to Circe’s power, alongside tactical advice to respond to her magic with violence.?4 This story contrasts with Ovid’s Latin epic Metamorphoses, where human–animal transformations are just one type amongst several (human–plant, human–constellation, god–animal). Moreover, they express a more wide-ranging ontological and metaphysical anxiety about the instability of the self and the beloved, the self and the universe, matter and mind, empirical reality and the world beyond, and therefore about the boundaries that demarcate all these categories from each other. The transformation of Lucius into an ass in Apuleius’ Latin novel The Golden Ass has, according to Skulsky, a di?erent literary purpose: it becomes a satirical tool used to attack superstitious belief in the form of an entertaining ?ction that yet, in a curious manner, ends up a?rming religion. But nearly two millennia later, when Kafka turns Gregor Samsa into a beetle, he is o?ering a metaphor for ‘alienation without grace’ – an almost Absurdist expression of the futility and bleakness of the human condition. In a wonderful satirical dialogue entitled On the Rationality of Animals, Plutarch staged a debate between Odysseus and Gryllus, or ‘Grunter’, one of Circe’s pigs who refuses to turn back into a man. The relative virtue practised by humans and beasts is examined in pseudo-philosophical style, with the beasts getting the better of the argument. Because Plutarch elsewhere protested against excessive cruelty to animals, and o?ered arguments in support of vegetarianism, this ancient response to the Circe episode in the Odyssey became in the early seventeenth century a foundation text in the history of animal rights.?5 But Warner has pointed out that the dialogue, which is really a joke against people, ‘is an inspired early satire in the great fabric of the literature of folly’, and that Gryllus became the emblem of a certain kind of refusal, from Machiavelli to Pieter Breughel, ‘of a laughter that mocks self-righteousness’. Such refuseniks were called grylli because they used wit to point out human shortcomings.?6 Perhaps the most famous pig-humans of them all, where the metaphor has a transparently political rather than generically satirical purpose, are those featured in George Orwell’s picture of totalitarian tyranny in Animal Farm (?945). But the technique he used, strictly speaking, was not animal metamorphosis but zoomorphism (also used in a rather di?erent SHAPE-SHIFTING 35 way by Anna Sewell in Black Beauty (?877), written from the perspective of a real horse). Napoleon, Snowball and Squealer may be thinly disguised humans, but they have always been pigs, and always will be. True metamorphosis does occur, however, in the case of Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales (Truismes (?995), subtitled in English A Novel of Lust and Transformation). The female narrator is a sex-industry worker who turns into a sow. She has a relationship, as the subject of metamorphosis, with Ovid’s sexploited heroines, but a more speci?c one with the Lucius of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, a foundation text in the history of the Western novel (on which topic Darrieussecq used to lecture at the University of Lille). The relationships between Homer’s Circe, Apuleius’ ass-hero and Darrieussecq’s pig-heroine have excited less attention than her more oblique references to individuals in Kafka and Orwell, but they are revealed in several features.?7 This female writer (an avowed feminist) makes her point about male treatment of women’s bodies through transformation into a pig, thus inscribing her own subjectivity on both the Odyssey and Apuleius’ novel, two of the paramount foundation texts of subjectivity in ?ction. Proteus is emblematic of the whole Odyssey because of the central position it gives to transformation and disguise – indeed acting of parts: it is signi?cant that for post-Renaissance theorists of theatre, Proteus became an enduring metaphor for the actor’s pliability.?8 Odysseus himself has always been an accomplished actor: Helen remembers how, long ago at Troy, Odysseus had entered the city on a reconnaissance mission; he had disguised himself as a household slave by in?icting blows on his own body and wearing rags (4.244–8). He was to revive this role a decade later on the Ithacan stage. He lived in a world in which it was half-expected that visitors might turn out to be gods play-acting, a possibility of which the other suitors try to warn Antinous (?7.483–7). And the prize for best actor in the Odyssey must indeed go to Athena, from the moment that she appears on the very threshold of the Ithacan court disguised as a ‘leader of the Taphian people’ (?.?03–5). When she assumes her second disguise, as the sensible senior Ithacan Mentor, ‘she seemed identical to him both in looks and in voice’ (?.268). She is not only a great actress en travesti (even Odysseus is not required to perform transvestite parts), but her roles include the youthful Telemachus (whom she impersonates at 2.383), can be sustained at length (she keeps up her Mentor disguise throughout the voyage to Pylos and the ?rst part of Telemachus’ encounter with Nestor), can deceive even best friends (in the case of Nausicaa, 6.22), and include several avian forms (?.320; a vulture at 3.37?–2). At the poem’s close she again wears the form and voice of Mentor, in order to create peace between the families of the 36 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES suitors and of Odysseus (24.548). Indeed, the concluding formula of the entire poem is ‘having likened herself in form and body [to Mentor]’.?9 Even the stage actor’s power to a?ect his audience psychologically seems pre-empted by the way that such appearances are connected with the Odyssey’s interest in emotional change. The ?rst visit of the disguised Athena to Telemachus leaves him ‘full of spirit and courage’, a change that astonishes him because he can feel it in his heart (?.320–3). The ageing actor’s ability, in a mask, to impersonate a beautiful young person also seems strangely foreshadowed by the de-ageing makeover that Athena o?ers Odysseus whenever he needs to maximize the impact of his looks and virility. On Phaeacia, Athena ‘made him look taller and stronger, and made his locks hang in curls from his head, like Hyacinth petals’. As a craftsman inlays gold on silverware, she ‘poured pleasing grace on his head and shoulders’ (6.229–35). With such divine assistance in his toilet, it is scarcely surprising that Nausicaa conveniently helps him because he seems to o?er promising husband material. The Odyssey’s fascination with transformations and disguises is undeniably greater than that of the Iliad, which contains no serial shape-shifter like Proteus and no humans turned into animals at all. Indeed, the only surviving rival of either Proteus or Circe in archaic literature is the god Dionysus, one of whose own so-called Homeric Hymns (7.38–53) relates the myth of his escape from pirates who had abducted him in his true shape – that of a handsome youth. Dionysus ?rst made the ship sprout vines and ivy, and then himself changed into a lion and a bear before turning his adversaries into dolphins. It is no coincidence that this shape-shifting god, once theatre was invented at Athens in the sixth century BCE, became its tutelary deity and the patron of the acting profession. Nor is it any coincidence that theatre was invented in Athens at the same time that it was ?rst enjoying regular, formal recitals of the Homeric epics at public festivals. In this historical context, the Odyssey looks heavily pregnant with the art of theatre, a condition brought to ful?lment by the innumerable dramatic works that it has subsequently inspired. The Odyssey was adapted into all three genres of drama – tragedy, satyr play and comedy – invented in Athens; under the Roman Empire, itinerant troupes of actors included in their repertoires the enactment of scenes of bloodshed ‘drawn from Homer’, perhaps including the Ithacan showdown.20 Odysseus’ catalogue of dead women in Hades (??.225–332), who include Tyro, Oedipus’ wife and mother Epicaste (later known as Jocasta), Leda, Phaedra, Ariadne and Eriphyle, not only magni?es Odysseus’ status as the only man who has been in contact with all departed human- SHAPE-SHIFTING 37 ity, but reveals another facet of the Odyssey’s relationship with theatre: these women are included because their genealogies and marriages were distinguished and their fates memorable – the features that subsequently made them so attractive to tragic poets, even if only the ancient Greek plays about Phaedra and Jocasta happen to have survived.2? Yet in antiquity the Odyssey itself does not seem to have been felt suitable for tragedy. Odysseus of course does make important appearances in tragedy, since he was identi?ed by the ?fth-century tragedians as the type of ruthlessly e?ective public man, driven by motives of expedience, whose actions necessarily cause tragedy in the lives of others (Ajax, Philoctetes, Iphigenia, Hecuba, Polyxena). The way he was con?gured in Athenian tragedy had much to do with the fact that he was not an Athenian hero. Moreover, he was a supporter of the Peloponnesians at Troy, and it was the Peloponnesian Spartans against whom the classical Athenians waged their longest war in the ?fth century. Odysseus plays a signi?cant role in three surviving tragedies, Euripides’ Hecuba and Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes. All use his reputation for brilliant rhetoric (indeed, he becomes the symbol of the master-sophist/demagogue) and his ability to think up cunning strategies in order to achieve his goals. His political instinct and genius are played up far more than in the Odyssey, where he is not shown operating in contexts such as the assembly or the management of open war. An exponent of callous realpolitik and force majeure, the tragic Odysseus always argues that the more powerful party must win and that resisting this inevitable outcome is a futile, sentimental waste of time. In every single case he proves e?ective. Odysseus always gets what he wants, while creating the tragedies for other people to su?er. This is Odysseus inspected from the point of view of the ?fth-century democratic citizen – what role does a man with his particular ‘skillset’ play in a democratic polis where the good of the group is placed higher on the agenda than the good of the individual aristocrat? In Hecuba (as later in Iphigenia in Aulis, where he does not physically appear, but operates as a terrifying unseen presence), two new features appear: ruthlessness in the face of the su?ering of the completely innocent, and a disregard for personal loyalties previously acquired. In Ajax he is both humane and cynical, the winner who can a?ord to be charitable; in Philoctetes his role is complicated. He behaves appallingly in any human, moral sense, and yet there is a level on which he is right: getting the war over and done with has become a priority for the entire Greek community, and it would be irrational to allow Philoctetes’ personal pride and grudge against the Greeks to jeopardize the greater good. In this play Sophocles uses Odysseus to examine both 38 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES (?) the Utilitarian argument that society needs to aim at achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number (which inevitably means the unhappiness of dissenting minorities), and (2) the ethical conundrum of whether moral ends can justify immoral means. But why did Odysseus not o?er the prototype of a convincing tragic protagonist himself? One reason is that he is neither kin-killer nor committer of incest, and is destined to die peacefully in old age. Moreover, his pragmatism, self-discipline, unerring intelligence, and above all his invariable achievement of successful outcomes in all forms of con?ict, have always militated against the development of plot lines that o?er theatre spectators tragedies entailing either fall or error. His biggest mistake in the Odyssey is his unnecessary, boastful revelation of his name to the blinded Polyphemus, a tactical error that results in the deaths of many of his comrades. Yet the nature of the Cyclops as supernatural giant, and the childlike tenor of much of the way that the story is told (see Chapter 7) made it di?cult to present Polyphemus’ tale in a tragic mode, although there were satyr plays on the theme (including Euripides’ Cyclops) and several comedies.22 Of Aeschylus’ lost Odyssey plays, his Penelope and Ostologoi (‘BoneCollectors’) may have been satyr dramas, and his Psychag?goi (‘Ghost-raisers’), which had something to do with the nekuia, is deeply controversial.23 On the other hand, Sophocles’ lost Odysseus Acanthoplex (‘Odysseus Spine-Struck’), adapted by the Roman Pacuvius in his Niptra, dealt with adventures after the end of the Odyssey, and o?ered the tragic poet the opportunity for his characters to retell famous episodes from the epic, including the descent to the ...