#from 1999-2015 in canon but w/e | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

perennialessays · 3 years

Text

Week 2

From Origins to the Future: The Hero and the Epic Quest.

This week and the next we shall engage in one of the traditional approaches to comparative practice, following various re-appearances of a myth / hero / genre through successive literary periods and in different countries. The example we shall use is the figure of Odysseus / Ulysses in epic writing and film from Homer to the turn of the 21st century. We shall consider how this figure has changed, and focus on specific episodes of Homer’s original epic poem.

Homer, The Odyssey (read in particular Book 1 and the episode of the Cyclops (in Book 9);

Dante, Inferno (read canto 26, Ulysses);

James Joyce, Ulysses (read the ‘Cyclops’ episode (the 12th, pp. 280-330 in Johnson))

Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (Film: Please watch this in advance of the seminar)

Some secondary reading on Homer’s Odyssey & the figure of Odysseus/Ulysses

Boitani, Piero, The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth, tr. Anita West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). [Has an excellent chapter on Dante's Ulysses]

Doherty, Lillian E., "The Snares of the Odyssey: A Feminist Narratological Reading", in Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature, ed. by S. J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 117-133. Foley, John M. (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)

Fowler, Robert (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004).

Graziosi, Barbara, end Emily Greenwood (eds.), Homer in the Twentieth-Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Jong, Irene de, A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001)

Hall, Edith, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008).

Lane Fox, Robin, Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer (London: Allen Lane, 2008)

Manguel, Alberto, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey A Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2007).

Murnaghan, Sheila, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

Stanford, W. B. The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963).

Some secondary reading on Kubrick

Bizony, Piers, 2001: Filming the Future (London: Aurum, 1994)

Chion, Michel, Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey. Trans. Claudia Gorbman (London: BFI, 2001)

Ciment, Michel, Kubrick. Trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983)

Cocks, Geoffrey, James Diedrick, and Glenn Perusek (eds.), Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film and the Uses of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

Falsetto, Mario, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport, Conn; London: Praeger, 1994)

Falsetto, Mario (ed.), Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: G.K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall, 1996)

Herr, Michael, Kubrick (New York: Grove Press, 2000)

Kolker, Robert (ed.), Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Nelson, Thomas Allen, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)

Naremore, James, On Kubrick (London: British Film Institute, 2007)

Rasmussen, Randy, Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed (London: McFarland, 2001)

Wheat, Leonard F., Kubrick's 2001: A Triple Allegory (Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 2000)

Some secondary reading on the epic

Bates, Catherine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Beissinger, Margaret, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford (eds.) Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)

Clarke, M. J., B. G. F. Currie, and R. O. A. M. Lyne (eds.), Epic Interactions: Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Danow, David K., Transformation as the Principle of Literary Creation from the Homeric Epic to the Joycean Novel (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004)

Elley, Derek, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)

Foley, John Miles (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

Hardie, Philip, The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Hainsworth, J. B., The Idea of Epic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

Hurst, Isobel, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)

King, Katherine Callen, Ancient Epic (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009)

Konstan, David and Kurt A. Raaflaub, eds., Epic and History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

Merchant, Paul: The Epic (London: Methuen, 1971)

Miller, Dean A., The Epic Hero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)

Johns-Putta, Adeline, The History of the Epic (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Newman, John Kevin, The Classical Epic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)

Quint, David, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Roisman, Hanna M., and Joseph Roisman (eds.), Essays on Homeric Epic (Waterville, ME: Colby College, 2002)

Toohey, Peter, Reading Epic: An Introduction to the Ancient Narratives (London : Routledge, 1992)

Tucker, Herbert F., Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Winnifrith, Tom, Penelope Murray and K.W. Gransden, eds., Aspects of the Epic (London: Macmillan, 1983)

Some secondary reading on Ulysses

Guidebooks: (These classic ‘guidebooks’ can supplement the annotations in your edition of Ulysses.)

Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968) Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book (London: Routledge, 1996)

Some suggested criticism on Ulysses

(This is a small selection of Joycean criticism, from useful collections of essays (Attridge, Latham, Hart and Hayman), to critics who read language and narrative very closely (Kenner, Senn), to works on the Homeric in Ulysses (Flack, Kenner, Seidel), to a few examples of studies which read Joyce through theoretical, historical, comparative, and postcolonial approaches.)

Derek Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) — ed., James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Scarlett Baron, ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Frank Budgen, James Joyce and The Making of ‘Ulysses’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961) Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Leah Culligan Flack, Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Clive Hart and David Hayman, eds., James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: Critical Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978) — ‘Ulysses’ (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980) Sean Latham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses’ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, eds., Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013) Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Michael Seidel, Epic Geography: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Princeton and Guilford: Princeton University Press, 1976) Fritz Senn, Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, ed. Christine O’Neill (Dublin: Lilliput, 1995) — Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)

Online searchable concordance of Ulysses (e.g. if you can’t remember where the renowned Irish hero ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’ is mentioned, type it into a ‘string search’ and untick ‘whole word’) http://joyceconcordance.andreamoro.net/

Ulysses Synopsis

Ulysses: A Synopsis “Telemachia” 1 - “Telemachus” (Oxford World’s Classics, ed. J. Johnson, pp. 3-23 / Penguin, ed. D. Kiberd, pp. 1-28)- The chapter opens with Buck Mulligan celebrating a parodic mass in which Stephen Dedalus becomes an acolyte in spite of himself. Stephen is a melancholy artist obsessed with guilt since the death of his mother; his taciturn nature is contrasted with Mulligan’s clownish joviality. The Englishman Haines, their guest in the Martello Tower, combines seriousness with an enthusiasm for Gaelic culture; the three characters illustrate three possible positions in relation to Ireland, which is symbolised by the old peasant woman who brings in the milk: the dispossessed Son (Stephen), the treacherous usurper (Mulligan); the representant of English imperialism (Haines) who - through his dream of the panther, traditionally a symbol of Christ - is also associated by Stephen with the imperialism of the Roman Catholic Church. Stephen chooses errancy and exile: he gives over his key and will not come back. 2- “Nestor” (OWC 24-36 / Penguin 28-45)- Stephen teaches history and English Literature to a class of well-off schoolchildren who are disconcerted by his caustic humour and riddles. He confronts Mr Deasy (Nestor in Homer’s Odyssey) on Irish history and economics. The old headmaster cherishes his inaccurate reminiscences and promotes thrift, whereas Stephen squanders away the little money he has. Stephen views history as a nightmare. Despite the antagonism, Stephen agrees to help Mr Deasy is his fight against the foot and mouth disease which affects Irish cattle by helping him to publish a letter in the press. 3 - “Proteus” (37-50/45-64)- Stephen’s philosophical and aesthetic meditations lead him to question the reality of the outside world. Through a complex philosophical argument which hesitates between Aristotle and Berkeley, he redefines for himself the nature of visual and auditory perception. His literary recollections blend with the painful evocation of his past, especially the unsuccessful exile in Paris from which a telegram announcing his mother’s death recalled him. The sterility of Stephen’s “creations” in this chapter (which include urinating and depositing a snot on a ledge of rock [cf. Bloom’s own excremental “creation” in “Calypso”]) is pitted against the remarkable metamorphic poetic prose of the narrative and of Stephen’s stream of consciousness. Odyssey 4 - “Calypso” (53-67/64-85)- Leopold Bloom, who will increasingly become the major protagonist, is introduced in his home at 7 Eccles Street and is first seen preparing breakfast for himself and his wife Molly, who is still in bed. He goes out in search of a pork kidney at a Jewish butcher’s, where he picks up a leaflet advertising plantations in Palestine (inaugurating the theme of the lost, promised land, and of the “recall”). He brings Molly her mail, which includes a letter from Boylan, her future lover later in the day, announcing his visit. He explains to Molly the meaning of metempsychosis; the chapter ends with his defecation in the outhouse, mingled with his remarks on cheap literature. 5 - “The Lotus Eaters”(68-83/85-107) - Bloom has left his house for what will become the epic wanderings of an untypical literary hero, on an ordinary Dublin day - 16 June 1904. He first goes to fetch the reply, sent post restante, from his unknown penfriend Martha Clifford, to whom he sends amorous letters signed “Henry Flower”. He runs into several acquaintances on the way, unwittingly “throws away” a tip for the horse races (the source of a later misunderstanding), and eventually goes to the public baths. Throughout the chapter, drugs of all kinds (perfumes, tobacco, medicine, eroticism, religion, etc.) express a voluptuous narcissistic abandonment to the world of the senses. 6 - “Hades” (84-111/107-147)- Bloom goes to Paddy Dignam’s funeral together with Simon Dedalus (Stephen’s father) and other characters already seen in Dubliners. The conversation soon takes on a malevolent anti-Semitic tone which puts Bloom ill at ease. He thinks of death, remembering both his father’s suicide and the death of his son when he was only eleven days old. Bloom catches his first sign of Stephen (who does not see him). 7 - “Aeolus” (112-143/147-189)- Broken down into a series of newspaper articles complete with headings, this episode brings together, in different scenes and locations of the newspaper office, Bloom, Stephen, various “windbags” including Myles Crawford, the king of windy and hollow journalistic rhetoric. The orators outdo one another in eloquence and the parable of the captive Jews provides the Irish with a mythical model. Stephen narrates a story illustrative of the paralysis of his fellow Dubliners which nobody pays attention to, while Bloom the ad canvasser gets severely ticked off by Myles Crawford. 8 - “Lestrygonians” (144-175/190-234)- The “food chapter”: Bloom is obsessed with food (it is between 1pm and 2pm) and alimentary thoughts, and tastes and smells of all kinds percolate through into the language and style of the episode (the rhythm of the chapter is dictated by the “peristaltic” [digestive] movement of the organism). Put off by the monstrous devouring mouths in the restaurant and obsessed by the impending encounter between Molly and Boylan, he finally orders a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy wine at Davy Byrne’s pub. 9 - “Scylla and Charybdis” (176-209/235-280)- In the National Library, Stephen spins out his Aristotelian theory of artistic creation which boils down to a sublimated autobiography; his paradoxes on Shakespeare’s life and works fail to convince his Platonist audience. In the complex reasoning of the young artist, Shakespeare becomes like a god who begets himself through his works. Bloom puts in an appearance; Mulligan meets up with Stephen and offers a more burlesque conclusion to the philological / theological debate. 10 - “Wandering Rocks” (210-244/280-328)- This chapter is a pause in the narrative of Stephen’s and Bloom’s day, and it has no precise correspondence in Homer’s Odyssey. This central and “pedestrian” chapter is made up of 19 episodes which offer vignettes and snapshots of the various characters and cross-sections of the Irish capital and society, including Church (Father Conmee) and State (the Viceroy’s cavalcade); the chapter breaks down the so far focalised point of view. Stephen and Bloom appear only briefly and are not mentioned among the witnesses of the Viceroy’s cavalcade through the city. 11 - “Sirens” (245-279/328-376)- The language of this chapter aspires to the condition of music and forges linguistic equivalents to trills, staccatos, counterpoints, etc. The venue is the Ormond Bar, run by two flashy barmaids or “sirens”; while the tenors are busy competing against each other in a virile singing contest, Bloom listens and replies to Martha. Having eluded the seductive snares of music, he exits, leaving behind an ironic fart. 12 - “Cyclops” (280-330/376-449)- A satire against the bellicose patriotism and anti-Semitism of the Citizen, the “Cyclops” who eventually attacks Bloom physically, the chapter oscillates between the Citizen’s rhetorical bombast and sarcastic deflations which leave unscathed neither the British Empire nor Irish nationalism, while the anonymous narrator - a sardonic barfly and debt collector - offers a brilliant instance of Dubliners’ garrulity. The narrative is periodically interrupted by parodic asides in other voices and styles. Bloom the wandering Jew, who had come to Barney Kiernan’s pub to arrange to offer some money to Paddy Dignam’s widow, finds himself involved in an argument about nationalism and attempts to expound his conception of humanity, love and homeland. At the end, his escape from the Citizen’s assault is turned into a grandiloquent apotheosis. 13 - “Nausicaa” (331-365/449-499)- Bloom rests on the Sandymount rocks (Stephen in “Proteus” had also walked along Sandymount beach) and gazes at young girls in their bloom. One of them, Gerty MacDowell, teases him into an erection by an increasingly daring exhibitionistic pose; the distant eroticism ends with Bloom’s masturbation, climaxing with fireworks. The narrating voice is that of a writer of the romantic pulp fiction then fed to women - the kind of books read by Gerty, who accordingly sees in Bloom a mysterious “dark stranger”. When the point of view shifts to Bloom, we see Gerty depart limping; Bloom dozes off in postmasturbatory gratitude. The accelerated crescendo of the first “tumescent” part is followed by the exhausted sobriety of the second, “detumescent” half. 14 - “Oxen of the Sun” (366-407/499-561)- Bloom’s and Stephen’s paths cross once more in the lying-in hospital, amidst roistering medics. The chapter takes us through a roughly chronologised pastiche of the different styles of the English language until the turn of the century, deceptively mimicking the evolution of the foetus until its birth. The painful delivery of Mina Purefoy takes on a universal value and, although the talk ominously focuses on sterility and contraception, a thunderclap and a rain shower at the moment of birth symbolise the triumph of fertility. 15 - “Circe” (408-565/561-703)- Blooms monitors from a distance Stephen’s drunken escapade to the red-light district, and follows him into the hallucinatory atmosphere of Bella Cohen’s brothel (Circe’s den in the Homeric parallel). The characters experience metamorphoses in a wild oneiric dramatisation of their fantasies, obsessions and senses of guilt. Stephen gets involved in a broil with two English soldiers and is knocked out cold; Bloom rescues him and transforms him into the ambiguous vision of his dead son Rudy. “Nostos” [=homecoming] 16 - “Eumaeus” (569-618/704-766)- Bloom leads Stephen to the cabman’s shelter, and the shared physical exhaustion (it is past midnight) and the unreliable narrator turn the chapter into an amusing, if often tedious, collection of deliberately jaded linguistic stereotypes, full of misunderstandings and approximations. 17 - “Ithaca” (619-689/766-871)- This impersonal catechism narrates the last actions of the novel: Bloom takes Stephen to 7 Eccles Street and offers him hot chocolate, they exchange views of Irish and Jewish culture, Stephen refuses Bloom’s offer of a bed for the night, they urinate together under the stars, and Stephen finally departs into the night. Bloom, back in the house, finds traces of Molly’s visitor earlier in the day, goes to bed, where he finds other traces of the visitor’s earlier presence, gives Molly an expurgated account of his day, and finally falls asleep, his head to her feet. The dialogic play between questions and answers universalises all the themes, sorts out human knowledge into vast catalogues, and finally transform the couple in bed into astral bodies. 18 - “Penelope” (690-732/871-933)- Molly’s thoughts flow freely along eight unpunctuated, meandering sentences. She begins with a reaction to Bloom’s request that she make breakfast in the morning, continuous with a celebration of her afternoon with Boylan, proceeds to review her marriage, her girlhood on Gibraltar, her infatuations and dreams of future romances, and finally returns to Bloom, seemingly reinstated into her imaginary life; this is one of the meanings of her numerous final “yesses”, also an affirmation of life itself.

Additional suggestions on Joyce's Ulysses/ Odysseus

Some of the texts through which Joyce reads and receives the figure of Odysseus/ Ulysses

Bérard, Victor, Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée [originally published in 1902-03, there are no English translations that I know of; but you can find a lot about it, and Joyce's use of it in the book by Seidel, listed below; Bérard held the view that the Odyssey was "written" by a Greek poet, but recorded the travels of Phoenician sailors - the Phoenicians were a semitic people, which is relevant when you think that Leopold Bloom (Joyce's Ulysses figure) is a Jew]

Butler, Samuel, The Authoress of the Odyssey: Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands [originally published in 1897; Butler also transalted the Iliad and the Odyssey. There are various editions, including a cheap Kindle version; and it is in the library. Butler suggests that the Odyssey takes place in the island of Sicily, around the port city of Trapani, and that it is narrated by princess Nausicaa. The relevance to Joyce's book, which set on an island in and around the port city of Dublin, and whose final words are narrated by a woman, is evident.]

Lamb, Charles, The Adventures of Ulysses [originally published in 1808, there are various editions in print, and a free Kindle version. The book really is about the adventures and was meant as a book for boys, not as a full tranlation or account of the entire Odyssey. Joyce read this as child and wrote an essay at school about it!]