As you may remember, gentle readers, a little over a year ago when this blog began, I had just received a slew of rejection letters from full time MFA programs, and I was processing my disappointment. These days, though, I’m in a bit of a different position.

Along about January of this year, I found myself once again pining for a community of writers and some structured feedback on my stories. I had kept my eye on low-residency programs for a couple of years, so on a whim I did a quick double-check of my options, chose the one I liked, and submitted my application in a flurry of deadline-defying activity. Lo and behold I was accepted at Spalding University.

So far preparing for the first semester, which begins this week, has been busy but satisfying. I’ve already polished up a short story that lay languishing in my home storage vault and sent it in for workshop #1. I’ve read the orientation materials and have begun thinking about my semester study plan. I’ve applied for and received a small scholarship. By all measures, things are going quite well.

And yet, even from the other side of the acceptance boundary, I still feel some ambivalence about writing programs in general. Will I be forced into a mold that makes me just like other writers? Will I be convinced that the way to success is to write fiction that is competent but bland?

Last year, I worked through some of my mixed feelings by pondering statistics connected to writing programs. Statistics like how the number of MFA programs in creative writing has skyrocketed in the last 30 years, from 79 in 1975 to 854 (!) today. And how the number of applicants last year alone was up 25-150%. I wondered, and still do, how many Masters of the Fine Arts this world actually needs. I mean, as a teacher of literature, I’ll be the first to admit that we need some new writers – but do we really need thousands per year?

To move forward with my own projects in the midst of such overwhelming numbers, I found it oddly necessary to hold two rather sticky positions: 1) much of what those other people write is crap, and 2) I can do better. (Neither of these, you understand, has been demonstrated by the scientific method. It’s simply that I found them necessary in order to not lose heart.)

Nay sayings

Yet, just as I was starting to feel comfortable with my sticky positions and carry contentedly on with the MFA prep, I ran across a couple of essays by Jenna Crispin, founder of Bookslut.com. She was like a voice crying in the back of my mind: ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ And ‘Prepare ye the paths of writing ruination.’

In a column called Central Booking, for example, she laments the many writers’ handbooks – and MFA students – that focus on marketing over writing, think of fellow writers as “contacts” rather than colleagues, and use more self-help buzzwords than literary terms. She clearly deplores a soulless, market-driven approach to writing. I do agree with her, but the tone of the piece seems to imply that all MFA programs are like this, and that has caused some unease.

In A Sea of Words, she argues that a deluge of self-published books and how-to writing manuals have flooded the market and created an environment in which new books – even good ones – are met with silence, simply because there are so many other voices competing for attention. Granted, she makes her living as a writer and reviewer, and she’s sent nearly 30 books a week by new, self-published writers, so I don’t blame her for feeling overwhelmed and even a little annoyed. “I feel bad for these writers,” she says, “and the years of effort and money they spent on a writing education, and all of that boundless optimism that had to be required to get to this point. I do not, however, feel bad enough to read their books.”

One of the things I like about this article, I think, is that Crispin reminds me so much of my dearly departed grandfather. He missed the golden days before everyone and their children had an automobile, and he hated dealing with traffic. “Why don’t some of you people just go home?” he would say.

Remnants of a hundred billion bottles

I admit to having the same feeling now, in a different context, when I think about the publishing field. In fact, I often feel like the singer in that old Police song, Message in a Bottle. He’s a lonely guy, “an island lost at sea,” reaching out to stave off despair. He sends his “S.O.S. to the world,” hoping someone will hear him – then a year later a hundred billion bottles, full of other people’s notes, wash up on his beach. “Seems I’m not alone in being alone,” he says. A bit of an understatement, perhaps, but not at all inaccurate.

To me, at least, it seems that writing these days is very much like that.  So many people are writing – and self-publishing – that it’s not even possible to keep up with everything that’s there. Perhaps it never was, but it does seem that social media, ereaders, and blogs (yes, like this one) make it even more challenging.

But back to Jenna Crispin for a moment. She suggests that writing programs exist (or believe they exist) in order to rescue new writers and help them cut through the din. “Storytelling may be instinctive,” she says, “but book writing — whether novel or memoir — is not, and because everyone is now invited to be a writer, we have an industry built up to teach writing to the masses.” And yet, she is not optimistic about their intentions. Notice that she calls the network of programs an “industry”; in the next sentence she calls it “predatory.”

Crispin says: An MFA costs tens of thousands of dollars (true), it’s impractical (there’s certainly no guarantee of book deal or job), and it hurts the quality of American letters (but don’t Dan Brown and Glenn Beck do the same, without the MFA scapegoat?) Crispin gets in an unmistakable dig against predatory programs toward the end: “Those taking [MFA students'] money aren’t going to do much to question their motives, or clue them in to all the other ways to go about things.” Ouch.

If I may mix Crispin’s metaphor with mine, an MFA program is like a rescue boat that demands your bank account number before lifting your bottle out of the water, floating it along ten yards, then flinging it onto the shore where another hundred billion lie hot and useless in the sun.

Much to my chagrin (and oddly, somehow, to my delight), there are plenty of people who agree with her. Elif Batuman, for example, had an intriguing piece in the London Review of Books called Get a real degree, itself a review of a nearly 500-page (and award-winning) book on the rise of writing programs. She deplores the fact that work produced in creative writing programs, which she calls “programme fiction,” is hopelessly disconnected from literary tradition. At best, this writing is bland; at worst, it’s actively harmful to English-language letters and intellectual life.

And remember, Flannery O’Connor expressed the same sentiment quite well, years ago, before the ballooning of programs: “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

Keeping calm and carrying on

And yet, in spite of the legitimate dangers, there are good reasons for me to do this program.

I’m in it, obviously, to learn more about writing as craft. There’s the chance that something someone says in a lecture or workshop will change the way I think about writing – or, more likely, about one particular story – so completely that other knotty details will simply fall into place.

I’m in it to see my bad habits more clearly, to annoy some readers now so I can learn how not to be annoying later in my writing life. For any writer, specific feedback on specific pieces, paragraphs, sentences – even if the feedback is negative – is often far more useful than a brilliant lecture, and specificity is what the MFA is set up to provide.

I’m in it to meet other writers, to make connections with people who do their thinking with a pen in hand. Although I’ve met many writers, including a handful interesting, talented ones, since I’ve been in Birmingham, none of the connections have been strong enough for me to apply the word “community” – and community is exactly what I’m looking for. Because, although writing is in one mode a solitary activity, all texts seek to build bridges between minds. A text with no one to read it is, truly, a bridge to nowhere.

So I’m in it, frankly, for an audience – because, even though what I’ll be doing will technically be homework, somebody will be asking to see my stories, asking for my feedback and ideas. Something bigger than me will be getting done and, in my mind at least, that’s powerful motivation.

I’m not expecting to spend four semesters in the MFA pipeline and magically come out the other side with a superagent, a book deal, a million dollars, or a National Book Award. Those things would be nice, of course, but I don’t expect Spalding to hand them over with my diploma.

In fact, if things were to happen too quickly, I would probably feel like I did traveling cross-country with my dad, when I would wake up to find him standing over my bed at 7 am, already full of his second pot of coffee, keys in hand, asking if I was ready to go yet.

Stone pinecone with vines, at home of artist Andy Goldsworthy.

I’m more apt to work in what I would call the “slow art” movement. Like Rilke said, “It means everything to carry for the full time and then bring forth.” So what if my best work isn’t ready until I’m 50? I want to know I got it right, and that I said something worth hearing.

This MFA thing is just the next step. And, somehow, I’m in the same place I was last year, dealing with those rejection letters. Remedy for rejection: keep writing. Remedy for success: keep writing.

So thanks for the warnings, Jenna Crispin. I’ll do all in my power to learn what I can, to practice what I can, without being absorbed into an MFA-hive mind. I’ll plan to drink their whiskey without drinking their Kool-Aid.  And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to write my own happy ending.

Interest in Homer’s torch, as I call it, was slim in the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, but the 19th and 20th centuries found new ways to tap into the stories of Odysseus and Achilles.

Tennyson’s “Ulysses”

Odysseus (Latin name Ulysses) appears in an 1833 poem by that most Victorian of poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. For the first time in several hundred years, a poet took up Homer’s torch and re-interpreted one of his characters. In Tennyson’s poem, titled simply “Ulysses,” the poet focuses on the king of Ithaca, but he offers a more internalized perspective than that provided by the Odyssey. Whereas Homer described Odysseus’ actions with only occasional reference to his emotions, Tennyson goes deeply into Odysseus’ thoughts, extending the plot of Homer’s epic and imagining how Odysseus might have felt after being home safe on Ithaca for several years.

In Tennyson’s version, Odysseus pines for the excitement of battle and exploration, and he longs for the gleam of the “untravelled world” that he remembers from his youth. “How dull it is to pause,” Odysseus thinks, “to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” Even though he and his mariners are old men, he invites them to take to the sea once again, where they can “follow knowledge like a sinking star.” He asks them to sail with him so they can continue to explore until they die, whether they meet happy or violent deaths. Come what may, he is “strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, by J.M.W. Turner.

In the poem, Tennyson continues the story of Odysseus in much the same way Virgil continued Homer and Dante continued Virgil. And just as Virgil’s poem provides insight into the cultural priorities of Rome, and Dante’s sheds light on the late-medieval Italian, Tennyson’s poem reveals a particularly Victorian mindset.

Specifically, the poem reflects the nineteenth century’s concerns with individual thought and feeling; it is more concerned with Ulysses’ emotions than with his role in the arc of history. Additionally, whereas Virgil and Dante used the glorious past to legitimize the even more glorious present, Tennyson’s poem is more wistful and nostalgic. Tennyson seems to long for simpler days of gods and heroes, magic and adventure, just as Ulysses longs for his own youth. This appreciation of a classical subject is doubtless a close cousin to the Medievalism that prompted Tennyson to write so tenderly about King Arthur and his court in Idylls of the King.

Joyce’s Ulysses

Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses, completed in the early 1920s, also conveys a sense of wandering and disorientation, if not the precise cast of characters of the Odyssey. The novel is set in Dublin during a day in the life of Stephen Dedalus, the “artist” of another well-known Joyce novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (You may also remember that Daedalus was the man in Greek mythology who constructed wings of feathers and wax so he and his son, Icarus, could escape from Crete. Icarus flew too close to the sun, melted the wax on his wings, and plunged into the sea.)

The narration of Ulysses weaves in and out of the thoughts of Stephen and a handful of other men and women, introducing to the literary world the “stream of consciousness” technique, which attempts to convey internal patterns of thought rather than relying on an external, predictable narrative structure. The chapters of Ulysses, although they tell the stories of Irish characters and society, are titled after events and characters of Homer’s Odyssey. Part 1, for example, which focuses on Stephen, is called the Telemachiad, the story of Telemachus, associating Stephen with the son of Odysseus. Other chapter titles include “Calypso,” “Hades,” “Ithaca,” and “Penelope.”

Just as Tennyson’s poem reflected the artistic sensibility and nostalgia of the Victorians, Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique reflects the Modernist distrust of language. For many Modernists, all experience is fractured and other people are essentially unknowable – and any attempt to use language to bridge those gaps is likely to result in failure. The story of a Modern Telemachus, then, could only be told as in a shattered glass.

Auden’s Achilles

Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden’s 1952 “The Shield of Achilles” also reflects the concerns of a particular historical moment. The subject of Auden’s poem is borrowed from a famous passage in the Iliad, which describes the armor forged for Achilles by Hephaestus, the blacksmith god. Using a technique called ekphrasis, Homer describes the elaborate decoration in great detail. The round shield is covered with scenes from human life: a wedding, a legal judgment, a siege, an ambush, plowing, harvesting, herding cattle. Though the shield is an implement of battle, it depicts scenes of peace as well as war, and it is bounded around the edge by the river Ocean, signaling that the images are meant to encompass the whole of human experience.

Auden’s poem also describes Achilles’ shield, but the picture of human life is very different. Rather than showing times of both war and peace, the shield shows only war. Though Thetis, Achilles’s mother, looks for peaceful scenes, there are no vineyards or harvest time, only vacant fields and empty sky. Millions of people march in lock-step to some ideology, and there are allusions to concentration camps, unresponsive masses, and a boy who has “never lived in a world where promises are kept.” Though the poem claims this is the world desired by “iron-hearted man-killing Achilles,” Auden’s Achilles clearly has 20th century sensibilities. The poem channels the anxieties of nuclear war, Fascism and Holocaust.

Various others

The story of Odysseus was taken up on a lighter note in 2000, in O Brother, Where Art Thou? an American movie written and directed by the Coen brothers. The Internet Movie Database describes the film as “Homer’s Odyssey set in the Deep South in the 1930s.” George Clooney’s character Ulysses Everett T. McGill, the film’s Odysseus, encounters sirens washing clothes by a river, tries to outwit a cyclops who also sells Bibles, and is washed away in a flood when a river is dammed, all in his quest to return home and regain the love of his wife Penelope. Homer even gets a writer’s credit.

And some of the same themes and patterns of epic poetry appear in Lost. (As well you know, faithful readers. For those of you unfortunately new to this fascinating discussion, see posts here and here.)

If I’ve left anyone or anybook out, especially from the Renaissance or Enlightenment eras, please expand my knowledge in the comments section below.

Continuing, torch to torch

I grant that my little “books continue each other” theory is close to what scholars mean by intertext, which refers to the way one text is present in another, or the way one text influences how another is interpreted. It’s also similar to allusion, in which a writer references a person or event in history or literature as a way to add layers of meaning to the text at hand.

But, though I am a lowly instructor of English, unlicensed to practice theory, I would claim that the idea of books continuing each other refers to something more specific than mere presence or influence.

When one writer continues another as Virgil continued Homer or Dante continued Virgil – or Tennyson continued Homer – it is as if the newer writer has lit his torch from the still-burning flame of the older writer’s story. The new light glows with a unique color and intensity of flame, but it is born of the same energy.

Or, to use a different metaphor, each writer in this series of posts has hit on some essential element of the same story, taken some core idea, and re-set it in his own context, like placing an old gem in a new ring. Each text, granted, also had influences from other quadrants, but there is a clear channeling of the older stories.

Call this deliberate continuance, if you will. Chain-torching. Big stealing for the greater good.

Using the same basic range of characters, each writer has emphasized what was important to his historical moment: Homer stresses the flexibility, grace and oratory skills important to the Greeks. Virgil stresses the fact that Aeneas is “duty-bound” and puts his loyalty to (the future of) Rome above all other concerns. Dante, as much as he admires and appreciates Virgil, uses him to underpin his Christian theology. Tennyson imagines Ulysses would share his wistfulness for the adventurous past, Joyce uses stand-ins for the Odyssey’s characters to demonstrate that language is unreliable, and Auden imagines Achilles’ shield crafted under the threat of nuclear war.

Doubtless, as the world and literature carry on, other writers will take up the same torch – and others – and will re-set them again in ways we can’t yet imagine.

he reads me,                                                                                                                                     but not like a book.

books levy their                                                                                                                              slow tax on time:                                                                                                                            exacting                                                                                                                                                a split second per word,                                                                                                                     a half minute for half a page,                                                                                                             a quarter hour to sketch city spires or heathered moor,                                                          ten hours, ten days, ten weeks, all withholding the revelation of why

but he sees me                                                                                                                                     all at once,                                                                                                                                         like a surgeon reading an x-ray –                                                                                             bright nerves sprawled across a dark field,                                                                         swollen, wounded parts                                                                                                                   my translucent hands                                                                                                                        try to hide,                                                                                                                                       the cracks, wispy as cobwebs,                                                                                               filigreed through my bones

or like a man in a watchtower                                                                                                      who knows precisely                                                                                                                        the location of the fleeing prisoner                                                                                               and snaps on the circle of searchlight                                                                                           the moment the lock is about to give way                                                                                  and escape seems inevitable

in times when I am patient or prisoner,                                                                                   when I am weeping or hungry or exhausted,                                                                        unable to control the masks                                                                                                         that present me to the world,                                                                                                         he sees what is broken                                                                                                                  and will not look away.

there is some small pain in being seen,                                                                                          in being looked so thoroughly through –                                                                                      the faintest echo of formulated Prufrock,                                                                          wriggling and pinned to the wall

yet some slow, persistent grace                                                                                           preserves me from despair;                                                                                                 whispers the lesson                                                                                                                            so hard to learn                                                                                                                                but necessary as breath                                                                                                                   in a body of two:

that seeing is also shaping,                                                                                                      lighting is also loving, and –                                                                                                            surely he knows –                                                                                                                         love may indeed bare all things,                                                                                                     as we suffer ourselves                                                                                                                      to be seen

I’ve been working out these ideas for four years or so in my world lit classes, and this is the first time I’ve gotten to string them together in a more or less coherent fashion. If you’ll indulge me, I promise that later I’ll tell you a funnier story. Perhaps one involving a Bad Ass Missionary.

If you haven’t tuned in for a while, you might want to see this post to find out what the Homer’s torch idea is all about. If it’s really been a while, see this one, where I talk about my anti-theory about how books continue each other.

When last we left the discussion, we were talking about how the torch of Homer’s ideas in the Odyssey and the Iliad was taken up by the Roman poet Virgil for his epic, the Aeneid. I suggested that a later writer from Florence, Italy, one Dante Alighieri, then took up the same torch from Virgil.

Ready? Here we go:

Although he had previously written lyric poems and essays, Dante’s most important work is The Divine Comedy. The epithet “divine” was added by later generations of appreciative readers, but Dante himself had titled his long, theology-heavy poem The Comedy, or Comedia in Italian, not because it’s funny, but because it has a happy ending: Dante receives a vision of God. (In literary genre terms, comedy is the opposite of tragedy.)

In the poem, a slightly fictionalized persona of the author, whom scholars call “Dante the Pilgrim” to distinguish him from Dante the Author, wanders from the straight path in life and is menaced by three mysterious beasts in a dark wood. The beasts prevent him from taking the straight road to Paradise, which he can see somewhere ahead of and above him.

In order to escape, Dante must descend into the realm of the dead, much as Odysseus and Aeneas did, making a three-day journey through Hell and Purgatory to reach Paradise. The journey through each area of the underworld is relayed in one large section, or canticle, of the overall poem: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.

Dante meets Virgil. Engravings by Gustav Dore, 1890.

To help his persona Dante the Pilgrim make the journey, Dante the author enlists the help of a guide whom he considers an expert in human nature and one of the world’s greatest poets: Virgil. It is Virgil, in fact, who informs Dante the Pilgrim that, to paraphrase Steve Miller, he’s got to go through Hell before he gets to Heaven. When Dante and Virgil first meet, there is a rather embarrassing scene in which Dante gushes that he is Virgil’s biggest fan and that he learned from Virgil the style that had already begun to make him famous in Italy. (The Comedia is written in a dialect of Italian, but Dante’s earlier work had been done in Latin, the language of the Aeneid.)

Interestingly, Dante the Pilgrim tells Virgil that he is not worthy to make the journey into the realms of the dead because, in his words, “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.” Aeneas, remember, the hero of Virgil’s own epic, had journeyed alive to the land of the dead to receive a prophecy about his future. The Paul that Dante mentions is the Christian apostle Paul who, in a rather cryptic passage in Corinthians, mentions how he knew a man who was “caught up to the third heaven,” “whether in the body or the spirit, I do not know.” Some theologians after Paul settled the ambiguity in his statement and claimed that Paul himself had been the man and that he had, indeed, been taken bodily into heaven and returned alive. This is the tradition Dante seems to be referencing in his comment to Virgil.

This passage is a complex move for Dante the author: in one short sentence, he has linked Virgil’s hero to one of Christianity’s most influential apostles, given the fictionalized version of himself permission to journey alive into the land of the dead, and made sure that he himself seems appropriately humble by appearing to demur.

Harpies torment damned souls in the Forest of Suicides

The conjunction of Christian and Greco-Roman elements continues throughout Dante’s journey with Virgil, especially in the Inferno. Many figures from Greco-Roman mythology perform regulatory tasks in Hell: Cerberus, the three-headed dog, guards the sinners punished for gluttony; Harpies, half-woman and half-bird, torment the sinners transformed into trees in the Forest of Suicides; the Furies refuse Dante and Virgil entrance to Dis, one of Hell’s cities, and threaten them from the top of the walls.

Dante and Virgil with the Virtuous Pagans

Other human figures, both historical and fictional, are also present. Virgil resides in the first circle of the Inferno, the area reserved for “virtuous pagans,” Greco-Roman heroes who lived good lives but were not Christians (since they lived and died before Jesus was born). They do not suffer any of Hell’s torments, but they will never ascend to Paradise. Virgil’s eternal companions include other writers such as Homer, Horace, Ovid, Socrates and Plato, as well as literary characters such as Hector and Aeneas, the Trojan princes, and Lavinia, Aeneas’s Latin wife and the mother of the ancient Roman line.

Odysseus, or “Ulysses” in Latin, also makes an appearance in the Inferno, but he is in a lower level, being punished as a deceiver. Dante, apparently, did not approve of his wily ways.

A celestial messenger scatters devils and opens the gate for Virgil and Dante

However, even though Greco-Roman figures are part of the landscape, so to speak, of the Inferno, Christian theology remains the structuring principle. In the scene where the Furies menace Dante and Virgil from the top of the walls of Dis, Virgil asks for help from an angel who strides lightly through the Inferno and flings back the gate easily, scattering the Furies.

Reminders of the doctrine of the Trinity are everywhere: in the three-fold structure of the realm of the dead, in the nine levels of the Inferno (nine is, of course, the square of three), and even in the terza rima poetic structure, in which rhymes occur in three-line, interlocking units. There are even eleven syllables in each line, giving each tercet, or three-line unit, a total of thirty three syllables.

Classical references are drastically less pronounced in the story after the travelers leave the Inferno with its unredeemed and unredeemable sinners. Virgil himself must eventually be left behind as well, as he is not allowed to ascend higher (closer to God) than the top of Mount Purgatory. The role of guide through Paradise is then taken over by Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, who had sent Virgil to help Dante in the first place.

Other writers at the tail end of the Middle Ages also wrote allegories about the afterlife, though none, I would argue, quite so well as Dante. During the Renaissance, interest in taking up the torch that lit Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and which had been carried further by Virgil and Dante, seems to have waned. Painters and sculptors often took up classical subjects, or Biblical subjects in a classical style, but, to my knowledge, there is no direct literary continuation of the stories of Odysseus, Achilles, Aeneas or Dante.

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. A Renaissance-era painting of a character in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, to be sure, but not a direct taking up of Homer's torch.

In the Enlightenment period, spanning roughly the mid-17th to the end of the 18th century, writers and artists seemed more focused on moving forward than looking back. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they concentrated on form and structure, adapting each to their needs and generating afresh each work’s “inner light.” There are certainly classical allusions to be found in the Enlightenment period, and there are even some works in a classical style – but these seem intended as ironic and humorous rather than serious and magnificent.

Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, for instance, uses the conventions of epic poetry to tell the story of a rather silly young woman filled with the rage of Achilles because a lock of her hair has been stolen. Apparently, Pope intended to poke fun at the highly formalized manners of the genteel. Even though Pope used epic conventions, however, he did not quite take up Homer’s torch.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, however, interest in Homer’s stories revived and his torch really started getting around.

As you may remember, gentle readers, I’ve been working my way through some thoughts on how books continue each other. I use the word “books” in the loosest possible sense, because my little anti-theory has broad application. The term “books” can apply to poems of the epic, lyrical and narrative varieties; to songs both ancient and contemporary; to novels historical, serious, and farcical; to films, though generally only the good ones; to television of the edifying sort; and quite possibly to some genres I have not yet considered directly.

In the first post on the subject, I also tried to clarify what I mean by “continue.” Literary history, I suggest, can be seen as a kind of footrace, of the type that passes the Olympic torch. Each writer possesses a torch with a certain color and intensity of flame and, once that writer has reached the end of his particular race, someone else may come along and carry the same torch a bit further, adapting the qualities of the flame to suit the needs of his own time and personality. The quality of the flame – the cadence and language of the work – may change, but the light is essentially the same.

Here, I offered a buffet of brief examples of continuance, but now I invite you to sit down for a full meal. I propose to look at the ways one story and ensemble of characters, one “book,” if you will, has been continued in various forms, languages, and countries for over 3,000 years.

The Iliad, The Odyssey

I’ll begin with two of the oldest written works in Western literature: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These epic poems were written down in ancient Greek around the eighth century BC, but their stories and characters had been remembered in oral tradition for at least three hundred years. Even then, it seems, Homer was intensifying the light and passing the torch.

Achilles, angry over the death of his companion Patroclus, slays Hector, the Trojans' prince and strongest warrior.

The Iliad, of course, is the story of the turning of the tide in the Trojan War, told with Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior, as the pivot and hero. The telling begins right in the middle of the action, in year nine of the Greek siege on the city of Troy, and Homer takes as his theme something particular about Achilles: his rage. Achilles is furious that his commander has taken away his “prize,” a girl he won in battle, and this anger causes him to withdraw from the war and let the Trojans gain the upper hand, so the Greeks will be forced to admit they can not win without him.

The epic contains many battle scenes, war counsels between Greek leaders, tender moments between the members of the Trojan royal family, and insight into the conversations of the gods on Mount Olympus. Achilles does eventually return to the fighting after his mother, a sea nymph named Thetis, asks Hephaestus, the gods’ blacksmith, to make him a new set of armor. His rage finally abates in the last section of the poem, when he agrees to let Priam, the king of Troy, ransom the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles had killed without mercy.

The Odyssey, on the other hand, is the story of Odysseus, a Greek king and warrior, and his ten-year quest to return home after the ten-year war. On his long journey, he is “blown time and again off course,” and he and his men encounter many cultures and peoples that seem strange to them. Odysseus angers some gods and pleases others, loses men and saves men, defeats monsters like the cyclops, avoids monsters like the sirens, has a brief liaison with a witch named Circe, and earns the love of a sea nymph, Calypso, who keeps him captive for several years, desiring him as a husband. Odysseus even makes a journey to the Land of the Dead in order to get information about how to return home. Eventually, though, Odysseus does reclaim his throne, reunite with his wife Penelope, and secure the kingdom of Ithaca for his son Telemachus.

This 1983 Greek postage stamp is a reproduction of a much older image of Odysseus encountering the Sirens.

Homer’s poems were beloved – and continue to be beloved – by the Greeks for many hundreds of years, and they were familiar through the time democracy was at work in Athens and a warrior culture made Sparta strong. They continued to be popular through the reign of Alexander the Great, when Hellenic culture spread through the Mediterranean basin.

Roman Virgil takes up the torch

After Alexander, however, Greek power waned. The Latin city of Rome gained strength and soon took over much of the territory that Alexander had once controlled. Rome went through hundreds of years of republican government, and then Julius Caesar became emperor in the first century BC. After Julius was assassinated, and after years of civil war, his nephew and heir Augustus came to power and ushered in a period known as the Pax Romana, the “Roman peace.” (This, by the way, is the same Augustus Caesar who declared the census that sent Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem to register, assuring that Jesus would be born in the “city of David.”)

The Romans, those great administrators of the ancient world, were not nearly as creative as they were organized. They adapted the Greek religious system of the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus, changing the names but leaving the system essentially unchanged, borrowed and adapted Hellenic architectural styles, and took on Greek literature wholesale. In fact, one of the earliest pieces of “Roman” literature was a Latin translation of Homer made by a Greek-speaking slave.

A poet living under Augustus decided to glorify the empire by telling Rome’s genesis story, tracing the ancient origins of Rome’s extensive power. Publius Virgilius, more commonly known simply as Virgil, wrote Rome’s greatest epic poem, The Aeneid, in which he reached back to Homer and the Trojan War. Just as the Iliad and the Odyssey had their heroes in Achilles and Odysseus, Virgil’s hero was Aeneas, a Trojan warrior mentioned in passing in the Iliad, but famous in Rome as one of its ancient founders.

Aeneas, a Trojan prince and ancient founder of Rome

According to legend, Aeneas survived the fall of Troy and escaped with a band of refugees, arriving eventually on the Italian peninsula and founding the dynasty that included Romulus and Remus, the twin brothers who established the city of Rome. From Virgil’s perspective, then, the commitment of Aeneas to his people was the seed that eventually flowered into the reign of Augustus and the Pax Romana.

Although the Aeneid is unabashedly Roman in its sensibilities, its component parts are drawn heavily from the Iliad and Odyssey.

In the first half of Virgil’s poem, Aeneas and his people are shipwrecked, like Odysseus and his men in Homer’s. Aeneas’s people are given shelter by the queen of Carthage, Dido, and Aeneas tells the story of their wanderings at a banquet, just as Odysseus told his story to the king and queen who had sheltered him after he washed up on their shores. As Odysseus has liaisons with the witch Circe and the nymph Calypso, Aeneas has an affair with Dido. Both men leave their lovers because they anticipate a better future: Odysseus wants to return to his wife and family, and Aeneas has to think of “future history’s glories.” His destiny is to found the “high walls of Rome,” to establish the dynasty that will later build the city and the empire. Aeneas, like Odysseus, makes a journey to the Land of the Dead to receive instruction for his future.

Aeneas, though, is as much a fighter as a lover, and the second half of the Aeneid is written in the spirit of the Iliad rather than of the Odyssey. Once he has made it to Italy with the people most loyal to him, Aeneas has to fight to establish the kingdom promised by the gods. He makes an alliance with Latinus, king of the Latins, and marries his daughter Lavinia. However, he must engage an enemy named Turnus for control of the region in a conflict almost as bloody as the Trojan War. Like Achilles, Aeneas is given a new set of armor forged for him by Vulcan (the Roman name for Hephaestus, the blacksmith god). Eventually, Aeneas defeats his enemy with as much force as Achilles defeated Hector.

One of the Aeneid's most iconic images: Aeneas flees the fall of Troy.

Although the poem follows closely in Homer’s footsteps, though, it is a particularly Roman work. Whereas Odysseus is wily, quick-thinking, and adaptable, traits valued by the Greeks, Aeneas is marked by his unbending fidelity to his destiny and his people, both the Trojans in his past and the Romans in his future.

The Aeneid‘s most emblematic image, in fact, is of Aeneas escaping the fall of Troy carrying his aged father Anchises on his back and leading his young son Iulus by the hand; he is called to save both the past and the future. Aeneas is meant to be a shining example of Roman rationality and stoicism, and Romans are reminded through him to let destiny, rather than emotion, guide them.

Later, the Pax Romana ended, and Rome itself eventually fell to bands of invaders – Goths, Visigoths and Vandals – from North and Eastern Europe, though not before the official capital of the empire had been moved East, to Constantinople. Without Rome in the West, Europe was plunged into the “dark ages,” a period of decentralized political power, waning literacy, and other unpleasantries, like the Black Death. Around 1300, though, the various cities and principalities on the Italian Peninsula were beginning to get back on their feet. In Florence, a poet named Dante Alighieri took up Virgil’s torch, adapting the story and underpinning it with Christian theology.

Coming Soon: Homer’s torch 2, or Dante goes through Hell to get to Heaven

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed–

I, too, am America.

I have not believed in you for many years, so please forgive the hurried and inexpert tone of this letter. I am, let’s say, over 29 years old and I have been relatively good this year, if you’ll agree that the occasional swear word in traffic is not that big of a deal. I’m hoping to get back in the Christmas spirit this year and maybe even start believing in you again, especially if you can help me get this really big present that I can’t get for myself.

Yes, I know I missed the December 24 deadline, and I’m very sorry about that. But I have just a little bit of education, and I know that, because of the Orthodox Church calendar, Russia and Ukraine and a chunk of Eastern Europe don’t celebrate Christmas until January 7, so I figure you’ll be making another trip anyway. I really hope you’ll read and respond to my letter because I, a humble American Protestant, am experiencing a time of need.

You see, Santa, I have this job. It’s a college teaching job, and I’m truly grateful to have it.  But, at work, I have this office that, I’m sad to say, is probably no bigger than the cockpit of your sleigh. The paint is dingy and the furniture is old and the air tends to stale a little, but I’m not complaining about any of those things. The worst part, Santa, is that I have no window.

The office, sans window. Even with four lamps, three mirrors, and a variety of artwork, there's insufficient light.

I know that for a lot of people, this wouldn’t be a big deal. People like miners and gamers and postal clerks – not to mention dwarves, gnomes, and cave trolls – do just fine without daylight. But I’m like a plant, Santa. A leafy green plant with Seasonal Affective Disorder, and I need light. I need light in order to metabolize all those student essays and emails, all that Western literature. You might call my process “photo productiveness.” Without the photo, I am not productive.

Sadly, my school is a little strapped for cash at the moment, and they won’t be making facilities improvements any time soon. And it’s true that all the offices in my building are pretty much the same and I’m not any worse off than my peers. That’s why I’m asking you, Santa. Because if you make this happen for me, no one’s budget will be unbalanced, and no one will have room to complain that they didn’t get one, too. I mean, who beyond the age of 4 has the nerve to whine about what someone else got from Santa Claus? I think you’ll agree with me that this is the best way.

So, since I know this request is last minute, and I don’t know what you’ll have room for in your sleigh, I thought I’d give you some options.

This would be my first choice:

A skylight and blue sky

Granted, this one could take some time, since you’d have to cut a hole in the roof and build  a little vaulted ceiling. But what’s the good of having elves if you’re not going to put them to work, right? If they need a little incentive, tell them they can sign their names on the wall or take one of the desk copies of our composition textbook. (Sorry, I forgot to leave cookies.)

But, if a tiny little remodeling job is too much to ask, I could live with 4-5 of these:

Chic light box, especially calibrated for people with SAD

You could have the elves install them at various points around the walls. Or, actually, since there’s not a lot of wall space, they could put them up further toward the ceiling. At an angle, in fact, where the wall and ceiling meet. That way, all the light boxes would simulate a sky light. Oh, and I’ll probably need some extension cords. (Again, the elves should feel free to take a textbook – or there are some paper clips in the center drawer, and rubber bands for the reindeer.)

I have to admit that I’ve heard, though, that light boxes can get pretty heavy. So, if options 1 and 2 won’t work, I would take some (a dozen, perhaps) of these:

Daylight bulb - like trapping a little piece of the sky in your lamp!

Now, I do already have one of these, and it gives me a good feeling to let its light wash over my face, so I know daylight bulbs would be an improvement over the hot, plain bulbs I’ve got in my lamps now. Those things are nearly as harsh on the eyes as the fluorescents overhead (which I try not to use, as their barely perceptible flickering makes me anxious).The only thing about the daylight bulbs is: they need to be bright and powerful enough that I can actually see to read.

Of course, with these bulbs, I realize I’m running the risk of turning my office into a giant terrarium. But, if that happens, I figure I can just get a couple of turtles that students can feed whenever they drop by. I’ll pretend I lit it up that way on purpose, for the turtles.

If you don’t like the daylight bulbs idea, Santa, you could get me some artwork like this:

If lit from behind, this picture could simulate the outdoors

Hm. Well, now that I look at it, this seems very much like those pictures they sometimes sell in gas station parking lots. You know, the ones for Cool cigarettes or something where the water appears to move. It’s supposed to suggest refreshment, but it just looks like something electrical is about to short out.

Plus, if I put up this picture, it would just look like a stream was flowing into my office, and that would remind me that I’m often swamped by work, constantly under the murky water of five-paragraph essays. And, well, let’s just say I would probably spend more time than usual going down the hall to the bathroom.

So, maybe this, then?

The latest in tanning technology

I know, I know, Santa. This would totally weigh down your sleigh and might even keep you from getting to those Orthodox children on time. But think of the benefits. I would get the daylight I’m so desperate for – or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. And with this in my office, I would get so many visits from my female students. We could even have special “tan and topic sentences” meetings, when we can discuss their papers while we all soak up some rays. Heck, I might even be able to charge them a dollar or two – and then I’d be able to pay you back!

If none of these things are even remotely plausible, though, Santa, this might be a solution:

A periscope

Sure, this, too, would involve the tiniest bit of remodeling. But the elves wouldn’t have to do anything more complicated than make a hole in the ceiling. Well, and in the roof of the building. If they’ll install the periscope right above my desk, I can just look through it whenever I need a splash of daylight.

Do me one favor, though, please – make sure the periscope has a view of the campus and the hills, not just the building roof. Nothing would put me in a worse mood than seeing a pile of pigeon droppings when I was hoping for the sky.

I guess I can imagine something like this in my office

In conclusion, Santa, I hope that you’ll find it in your heart to provide one of these gifts. If you could get me some daylight – real, artificial, whatever – you might just restore my faith in you. And, if that happens, I promise I’ll have cookies next year.

To begin, I must confess that I likely overstated my case in the previous post, when I claimed the idea that books continue each other is somehow an “anti-theory.” Though I think the idea is valid and intriguing, it’s not exactly ground-breaking or revelatory. It’s certainly not radical enough to take down the house(s) that literary theory has built.

It’s probably more accurate to say that this comment, which Virginia Woolf made seemingly in passing in A Room of One’s Own, simply struck me as fascinating – so, in my own reading, I’ve kept one mental eye open, looking for ways that books and ideas continue each other. And, lo, I discovered that many books are in conversation with other books, and many writers continue others’ ideas.

I suppose that whole first post was simply an attempt to get this idea a place at the table with other theories. Or, to avoid mixing my metaphors, I should say I was attempting to get the idea its own house in the theory neighborhood. To say that “books continue each other” is, after all, simply providing another lens through which to view literature as a whole.

(And in the interest of full disclosure, I remind you, dear reader, that I teach survey of Western Literature courses at a community college, where a practical, what-can-this-mean-for-me approach is by far the most effective. I may not reside in the Ivory Tower of academe, but I can boast I reside in a more or less comfy RV at its base.)

A handful of short examples

If ever you see a post here with the tag “books continue each other,” then, you’ll know that I’m exploring how one creative mind has borrowed from and adapted the ideas of another. To start us off, here are some short examples: 

Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 Jane Eyre is the story of, you guessed it, Jane Eyre, a perky but plain orphan girl who finds herself a governess in a large, mysterious mansion where the master, a grim man named Rochester, eventually falls in love and wants to marry her despite her humble origins. Jane is reluctant at first, not least because she senses Rochester has a secret – a secret she guesses is somehow connected to the ghostly noises coming from the attic at night. As it turns out, the noises and Rochester’s closed nature are both caused by the fact that his first wife, Bertha, has gone mad and, yes, been locked in the attic.

Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea, written and published over 100 years later in 1966, tells the heartbreaking story of how Bertha, who was born “Antoinette,” came to marry Rochester at her home in the West Indies, and how she slowly went mad when he brought her to England. Rhys’s novel ends with a retelling of the famous house fire scene in Jane Eyre. In the Wide Sargasso Sea version, Antoinette escapes the attic and sets the fire deliberately, to affect her liberation.

Things Fall Apart, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel about the Igbo people and the impact of the arrival of white missionaries, takes its title from a line in W. B. Yeats’ 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” Yeats’ poem was written in the aftermath of the first World War and is an enigmatic and disturbing vision of apocalypse. Lines in the first stanza seem to describe a breakdown of reasonable society: “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” In Achebe’s novel, the things that fall apart are the traditions of the Igbo people and the life of the main character, Okonkwo, a powerful man in his village who loses his influence and, eventually, his life.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, a series of novels about the quest of a knight / gunslinger named Roland, were inspired by the title – and apparently the ominous mood – of Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” (A “childe” is a knight on a quest.)

Alice Randall’s book The Wind Done Gone caused quite a stir by re-imagining the events of Gone With the Wind from the perspective of Scarlett’s half-sister Cynara, a mulatto slave.

Note that a continuation can even cross genres: from poem to novel, novel to poem, book to film or television.

Continuations can be serious, as with Wide Sargasso Sea and Things Fall Apart, or a bit silly, as with the un-dead version of Elizabeth and Darcy’s courtship, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Or continuations can be a bit of both, as with Pride and Prometheus, which weaves together the life of Mary Bennet, a little sister from Pride and Prejudice, with the quest of one Dr. Viktor Frankenstein. (The subtitle of Shelley’s Frankenstein is “a modern Prometheus.”)

Continuation vs. common theme

Allow me to clarify that continuation is not just a matter of similarity in the thematic contents of two books. Take, for example, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and John Grisham’s The Firm. These are books that contain similar themes, but they don’t exactly continue each other.

To Kill a Mockingbird is partly about race and racial prejudice as Atticus Finch, that prototypical Southern lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a black man, against charges of sexual assault brought by a white woman. The story is told through the voice of Scout, Atticus’s young daughter, and so the novel is also a kind of coming-of-age tale about Scout’s growth and expanding knowledge of the world outside her family.

Beloved also deals powerfully with questions of race and racial prejudice – but Morrison’s novel is told from such a different perspective (a family of escaped and freed slaves) and uses such different literary devices (including the possibility that Beloved is the ghost of a murdered baby) that it could not really be said to “continue” Lee’s. Though the themes are similar, no characters or plot points are repeated.

By the same token, The Firm has thematic threads similar to those in To Kill a Mockingbird – it is set in the South, and the protagonist is an attorney attempting to preserve his integrity – but the book does not exactly pick up where To Kill a Mockingbird left off. Mitch McDeere is no Atticus Finch, and the book is far more concerned with the intricacies of the law than with the culture of the South.

Continuation vs. adaptation

Looked at from a slightly different angle, continuation is also different from adaptation. The film versions of the three novels above, for example, all adjust and adapt to make the transition from one medium to another, but they don’t extend and expand the way a continuation does. The film version of Gone With the Wind is an adaptation – but The Wind Done Gone is a continuation.

To say that a book “continues” another book, then, is to say that one writer has borrowed directly from another, but done a bit of necessary re-invention, lovingly pillaged the original piece to suit her own needs, taken up the torch of the original work and kept running with it.

Coming Soon (Lord willing)

Books continuing each other – isn’t that plagiarism?                                                                The anxiety and the ecstasy of “influence”                                                                     Mash-ups and continuation across different media                                                                     All your meme are belong to us

– Emily Dickinson, quoted in The Sun