This post, gentle readers, will wrap up my theoretical anti-theory discussion about how books continue each other. In this previous post, I looked at how in the 1st century BC Roman poet Virgil continued the stories that Homer told in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here, I looked at how Dante in the 14th century AD continued Virgil.
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.
The Catbird Seat 