Joyce wanted to do more than enter it: he wished to rebuild it from scratch, on Irish ground and with Irish materials. William Butler Yeats, in an essay written in 1905, which Joyce had with him in Trieste, had suggested that the time was ripe for a new writer to revisit the ancient world of the Odyssey. ‘I think that we will learn again,’ he said with visionary wisdom, ‘how to describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands, his return home at last, his slowly gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all these so different things… become… the signature or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination.’5 In Yeats’ rallying call, and in Vico, Joyce found confirmation of his intuition. Philological synchronicities bolstered his confidence. The Odyssey begins with Ulysses on Calypso’s island, Ogygia. Joyce discovered that Ogygia was the name that Plutarch had long ago given to Ireland.6 Although Joyce had told Vladimir Nabokov in 1937 that basing his Ulysses on Homer’s poem was ‘a whim’ and that his collaboration with Stuart Gilbert in preparing a Homeric correspondence to Ulysses was ‘a terrible mistake’7 (Joyce deleted the Homeric titles of his chapters before Ulysses was published in book form), Homer’s presence is very obviously noticeable throughout the novel. Nabokov suggested that a mysterious character who keeps appearing in Ulysses, described only as ‘the man in the brown macintosh’ and never clearly identified, might be Joyce himself lurking in his own pages.8 It might just as well be Homer, come to supervise the renovation of his works.
Following Joyce’s dismissal of his inspiration, Nabokov argued that the relationship between the Odyssey and Ulysses was nothing but fodder for critics. And yet it would be absurd not to recognize the deliberate parallels and hommages, quotations and borrowings from Homer in the novel, some with direct reference to his poems, others via Dante and Virgil. In the process of association, however, they all become Joycean, as in the beautiful use of Homeric epithets in Joyce’s description of the Citizen Cyclops:
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero.9
Joyce manages to be funny and respectful of Homer at the same time, not falling into the kind of parodic imitation that amused A. E. Housman:
O suitably attired in leather boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?10
Joyce told Budgen that he was writing a book based on the Odyssey and that it would deal with eighteen hours in the life of an ‘all-round character ’.11 He contended that no such person had ever been described. Christ, Hamlet, Faust, all lacked the complete experience of life. He dismissed Christ as a bachelor who had never lived with a woman, Hamlet as being only a son, and neither husband nor father, and Faust as someone neither young nor old, without home or family, cumbered with Mephistopheles ‘always hanging round him at his side or heels’. There was one, however, whom, he thought, might fill the bill. Ulysses was ‘son to Laertes… father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms to the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but wisdom and courage came through them all.’12 Furthermore, Joyce reminded Budgen that while Ulysses was a brave soldier on the battlefield, determined to see the battle to the end, he had also been a war dodger who had tried to escape from military service by pretending to be mad and ploughing his field with an ass and an ox yoked together. (He was trapped by the recruiting sergeant who laid the baby Telemachus in front of the plough – a counterpoint to the story in which Achilles’ mother hides him among the women to prevent him from joining the army, and he is recognized by Ulysses when the transvestite hero chooses, from a number of gifts, a shield and spear instead of jewellery.)13
Ulysses is indeed one of the most complex characters in Homer’s poems. In the Iliad, he is a cautious, reasonable warrior. He is also an able diplomat capable of taking Agamemnon’s offer of reconciliation to Achilles, and a master of rhetoric who knows how to play dumb in order to better surprise his audience. Priam’s old counsellor, Antenor, describes Ulysses speaking in public, standing at first stiff and still with his eyes on the ground and then bursting into speech.
You’d think him a sullen fellow or just plain fool.
But when he let loose that great voice from his chest
and the words came piling on like a driving winter blizzard –
then no man alive could rival Odysseus!14
Quoting Antenor’s description, the Mexican critic Alfonso Reyes argued that Ulysses’ intellectual dexterity rendered him dangerous in the eyes of authority, like a certain South American diplomat who told Reyes that whenever he returned to his country, he imagined the dictator-in-office thinking to himself: ‘I must distrust this man, he knows his grammar.’15
In the Odyssey, Ulysses has become a crafty hero surviving by his wits, somewhat similar to the trickster figure in folktales. But he is never maliciously deceitful: his mocking of the Cyclops in Book IX, for instance, when he says that his name is Nobody, is fully justified by the monstrous behaviour of the creature. Nor is he ever willingly unfaithful: his true love is Penelope, and if he becomes the lover of Circe and Calypso it is explicitly in spite of himself, because as a mortal he cannot resist the advances of a goddess. However, when Princess Nausicaa shows that she is attracted to him, he politely turns her down.
But once the stories of Ulysses travelled to Rome, the nature of the hero changed. There had been Greek antecedants of this other Ulysses as far back as 415 when Euripides depicted him in The Trojan Women as a violent, bullying military man. He became an unscrupulous, vainglorious character, associated in the Roman mind with the clever Levantine Greeks against whom the Romans had a deep-rooted prejudice.16 Virgil depicted him as a heartless plunderer, a sort of Greek Moriarty, ‘that master-craftsman of crime’.17 It is in the guise of this third personality that Ulysses enters the literature of Europe. Dante condemns Ulysses, together with his comrade Diomedes, to the eighth Circle of Hell in which the Counsellors of Fraud, spiritual thieves who advise others to thieve, writhe enveloped in everlasting flames: the rapacious ardour that consumed them from inside now consumes them from the outside, and if in life they used their tongues to make others burn with greed, now the tongues (of fire) burn them. And it is here that Dante intuitively has Ulysses fulfil Tiresias’s prophecy, which Dante, ignorant of Homer, can never have known. In the Underworld, the soothsayer Tiresias announces not what will be but what may be: the possibilities of the foreseeable future are always more than one and the outcome depends on the hero’s choice. Tiresias tells Ulysses that if he fulfils certain conditions he will reach Ithaca and kill his wife’s suitors, but that staying at home may not be his lot. Ulysses, Tiresias says, will feel the urge to ‘go forth once more’18 and undertake one last, fatal journey. The description that Dante gives Ulysses of his final adventure is among the most beautiful verses Dante ever wrote and no English translation does it proper justice.19
More than six centuries later, Alfred, Lord Tennyson imagined a vigorous, moving version that is not at all unfaithful to Dante’s achievement and which ends:
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
> Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.20
Tennyson, steeped in the classics at Cambridge, takes Dante’s condemned king back to his Homeric source. Ulysses, who ‘cannot rest from travel’, must relinquish his role as the rogue too-clever-for-his-own-good and again assume the identity of a hero. ‘I am become a name’, he says, summing up his long journey from the soldier-survivor who called himself ‘Nobody’, to the returned king anxious to sail once more. ‘Among the many things that Ulysses has been,’ wrote the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘there is one constant in Western literature: the fascination with human beings that do away with limits, who, instead of bowing to the servitude of what is possible, endeavour, against all logic, to seek the impossible.21
In a long poetic version of the Odyssey by the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, Ulysses becomes a bleaker version of his Tennysonian counterpart. He is a wanderer in search of self-knowledge, a chameleon figure who is (the line is Tennyson’s) ‘a part of all that I have met’. He is a king, a soldier, a lover, the unhappy founder of a utopian community in Africa, but he is never successful in his enterprises. And yet, for this Ulysses, failure is less important than experience. Like that other man of many parts, Frankenstein’s monster, who ends his days in the icy waste of the Arctic, Kazantzakis’s Ulysses is washed up on the icy waste of Antarctica, and his last words echo Dante’s in the Commedia:
Then flesh dissolved, glances congealed, the heart’s pulse stopped,
and the great mind leapt to the peak of its holy freedom,
fluttered with empty wings, then upright through the air
soared high and freed itself from its last cage, its freedom.
All things like frail mist scattered till but one brave cry
for a brief moment hung in the calm benighted waters:
‘Forward, my lads, sail on, for Death’s breeze blows in a fair wind!’22
A South American contemporary of Tennyson, the Argentinian José Hernández composed in 1872 an epic poem whose hero, Martín Fierro, is a Ulyssean gaucho, an army dodger like Ulysses had tried to be. Fierro is accompanied in his adventures by Sergeant Cruz who, like Ulysses’ friend Diomedes when faced with the brave Glaucus in the Iliad,23 refuses to fight Fierro and becomes his intimate friend. Fierro’s morals are less those of the Homeric king than that of the scoundrel in Virgil or the sinner in Dante. Fierro’s world is ruled by cunning and violence, as proclaimed in the lessons taught by a cynical old gaucho, El Viejo Vizcacha (‘Old Badger ’, a sort of South American Nestor). For example:
Become a friend of the judge
Don’t give him reason to complain,
And when he decides to be mad
You should meekly bow your head,
Because it’s always good to have
A post against which to scratch your back.24
Joyce’s version of the king of Ithaca, the Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom, occupies a middle ground, neither that of the Tennyson hero nor that of the Dante adventurer. Being a Jew, he is endemically an exile, both inside and outside the Irish fold, a condition Joyce himself, as an Irish artist, experienced. But Bloom’s Jewishness brings him close to another Ulysses, the Wandering Jew of medieval legend. Between 1902 and 1903, Victor Bérard, one of the most original of French classicists, published two massive volumes of scholarship, The Phoenicians and the Odyssey,25 suggesting that Homer’s poem had Semitic roots and that all its geographical names were actual places that could be revealed by finding an equivalent Hebrew word. For instance, Homer calls Circe’s island both Nesos Kirkes and Aiaia. Aiaia means nothing in Greek but in Hebrew it means ‘Island of the She-Hawk’, which in Greek translates as Nesos Kirkes.26 For Bérard, Homer was Greek, but since the Phoenicians were the best sailors of the ancient world, he made his seafaring Ulysses a Phoenician, that is to say, Semitic. Without distinguishing between the various Semitic people, Joyce helped himself to Bérard’s theory to justify his conception of Ulysses-Bloom as a milder version of the Wandering Jew (as Buck Mulligan calls him in the novel),27 whose name in the Middle Ages is Cartaphilus or Ahasuerus. Joyce had read Eugène Sue’s potboiler version, Le juif errant, before leaving Ireland in 1904 and was familiar with the story. According to the legend, as Christ paused by his door carrying the Cross to Calvary, Ahasuerus (or Cartaphilus) cried out to him, ‘Walk faster!’ To which Christ replied: ‘I will go, but you will walk until I come again!’28 The curse echoes that of Poseidon who condemns Ulysses to wander ‘time and again off course’.29
Joyce’s Ulysses is not an interpretation of Homer, neither is it a retelling, even less a pastiche. Dr Johnson, writing in 1765, argued that ‘The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new-name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments. The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.’30 Joyce did other than acknowledge Homer’s position: he re-imagined the story of the primordial journey undertaken by every man in every age. His coupling was less between Ulysses and Bloom than between Homer and Joyce himself, less between the creations than between the creators. Other writers made Homer theirs through translation, transposition, projection. Joyce did it by starting again.
CHAPTER 20
Homer Through the Looking-Glass
No ancient poem is on the subject of soap-bubbles.
Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic, 1895
Every age re-imagines the classics in its own proper idiom. In 1954, the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia noted that, in the post-war world, Homer was conceived as ‘pure popular spectacle’ which, in contemporary terms, meant film. In his novel Il Disprezzo (Contempt) the narrator translates various episodes of the Odyssey into the cinematographic versions he has seen: Ulysses spying on Nausicaa in the water becomes the peepshow ‘Beauties in the Bath’, the Cyclops is King Kong, Circe is Antinéa in Wilhelm Pabst’s 1932 film, The Mistress of Atlantis.
In the years preceding the Second World War, ‘pure popular spectacle’ was the theatre and Homer’s poems served as explicit, even dangerous cautionary fables for the plots. Jean Giraudoux – the official spokesman for French culture in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a darling of the Fascist periodical Je suis partout and a lover of German language and literature – made frequent use of Homer’s stories in his dramas. During the war his political position was ambiguous, but after the war he was regarded as a patriot, and his work was included, for instance, in an anthology of Resistance literature, La Patrie se fait tous les jours of 1947.1 His two-act play La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (‘The Trojan War Will Not Take Place’, sometimes translated as Tiger at the Gates) is one of the best-known French dramas of the twentieth century. It was written in 1935, the year Hitler promulgated the antiJewish laws in Nuremberg and the Fascist ‘Croix de Feu’ organization was founded in France. It was not the author’s favourite. Giraudoux had conceived it as a prelude to the Iliad, set in a remote age ‘when the characters have not yet entered the realm of legend’,2 and for a specific audience (that of Louis Jouvet’s Théâtre
de l’Athénée in Paris) who supposedly knew its classics.
‘The Trojan War will not take place,’ says Andromache to Cassandra as the curtain rises. Hector has convinced Paris that Helen should be returned to her husband. But King Priam and the old poet Demokos argue that this ‘incarnation of beauty’ must be kept in Troy. The Greek embassy arrives, led by Ulysses and Oiax, and Hector attempts to negotiate Helen’s return. But an insulting remark by Oiax serves as an excuse for Demokos to incite the populace to attack the Greeks. Furious, Hector kills the old poet who, before dying, accuses Oiax of the deed. Oiax is then murdered by the populace. Cassandra’s last words are: ‘The Trojan poet is dead… Now the Greek poet can begin.’3 Demokos leaves the stage to Homer. Giraudoux stops where the Iliad starts.
‘I wanted to write a tragedy,’ said Giraudoux. ‘Most of the characters, we know, are destined to be killed, not in my play but in the course of history, and therefore a sort of shadow hovers over them.’4 The menacing shadow is incarnated in the constant presence on stage of Cassandra, aware of the inevitable catastrophe. Giraudoux’s characters are not Homer’s. Priam and Hecuba are not the united couple of the Iliad but hold opposing views on the imminent crisis. Hecuba is a sharp-tongued, level-headed crone, dead set against the war; Priam, a proud and senile warmonger, dazzled by Helen, his son Paris’s prize catch. Helen is a complex figure in whom certain critics5 saw an image of the absurdity of fate, and whose indefinable beauty arouses the lust of the Council of Elders, a crowd of arrogant, greedy old men that includes Demokos. Paris is a young prig, Ajax (renamed Oiax) a bullying fool. Giraudoux had conceived Ulysses as a diplomat with evil intentions, a smooth talker, someone much more dangerous than the pompous Demokos: early audiences, surprisingly, saw him as a philosopher-warrior, a man of measured words and good will. Hector is among the most humane of the play’s characters, torn between hatred of the war and a taste for violence, darkly aware that his own fate is part of a greater design which he is incapable of conceiving.
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