CLassICAL MemORIES/MODERN IDENTITIes Paul Allen Miller and Richard H. Armstrong, Series Editors Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures The Journey Home Edited by Hunter Gardner and Sheila Murnaghan THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov Cover design by Mary Ann Smith Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To our husbands, Sean and Hugh—the ones we come home to Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction Nostos: Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures SHEila MURnagHAN and HUNTER GARDNER 1 PART I Gender Roles, Reversed and Fragmented Chapter 1 Mulan Comes Home from the War: The Meaning of Homecoming in Late Imperial Chinese Literature JIE Guo 19 Chapter 2 “Go Back to Your Loom Dad”: Weaving Nostos in the Twenty-First Century CORINNE PacHE 44 Chapter 3 Absent Fathers and Faithful Wives: Penelope-Figures in the Novels of Charlotte Yonge CLEMENCE SCHultzE 64 PART II War, Nostos, and Personal Identity Chapter 4 A Penelopean Return: Desire, Recognition, and Nostos in the Poems of Yannis Ritsos and Gail Holst-Warhaft VictoRIA REUTER 89 viii • Contents Chapter 5 The Misadventure of Staying Home: Thwarted Nostos in De Chirico and Rebecca West SHEila MURnagHan 112 Chapter 6 1922’s “UnUlyssean” Ulysses: Modernist Visions and Revisions of the Homeric Nostos LEAH CULLIGAN FlacK 133 PART III Nostos and the New World Chapter 7 Penelope in Bronzeville: The Theme of Nostos in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad” WEndy WHElan-STEwaRt 153 Chapter 8 Ambiguous Homecomings: Cold Mountain and the Odyssey JonatHAN BURGEss 173 Chapter 9 “One equal temper of heroic hearts”: Nostos, Home, and Identity in the Odyssey and Mad Men BARBARA WEIDEN Boyd 192 PART IV Post-Modern Returns to the Self Chapter 10 Sleeping Outside in Homer’s Odyssey and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants ALEX PURVEs 213 Chapter 11 Modernist Revisions of Return: Home and Domesticity in Yiorgos Seferis and Yiannis Ritsos EFROSSINI SPEntzou 240 Chapter 12 Dislodging Home and Self in Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey ZINA Giannopoulou 262 Chapter 13 Homecomings and Housekeepings: Homer’s Odyssey and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping CAROL DOUGHERty 281 Works Cited 303 List of Contributors 324 Index 327 Illustrations Figure 5.1 Giorgio de Chirico, “The Return of Ulysses” 115 Figure 5.2 Giorgio de Chirico, “Ariadne” 117 Figure 10.1 “Have gone to Ithaca.” The Emigrants,p. 103 215 Figure 10.2 Body of Johannes Naegeli discovered in the Alps. The Emigrants, p. 22 220 Figure 10.3 Max Ferber’s father. The Emigrants,p. 186 224 Figure 10.4 The Alps. The Emigrants,p. 14 225 Figure 10.5 Nabokov. The Emigrants,p. 16 226 Figure 10.6 Robert Walser found dead in the snow. Police photograph. December 1956 227 Figure 10.7 The narrator. The Emigrantsp. 89 229 Figure 10.8 Paul Bereyter and Helen Hollaender. The Emigrants,p. 48 230 Figure 10.9 Site of Paul Bereyter’s suicide. The Emigrants,p. 27 230 ix Acknowledgments his volume, with its emphasis on the nuances of “homecoming” in T modernity, developed from a conference held at the University of South Carolina on the broader theme of Nostos: War, the Odyssey and Nar­ ratives of Return (March 2011). We are grateful to the University for hosting the event and to the conference organizers, Mark Beck, Alexander Bee croft, Cathy Brookshire, Amy Lehman, Paul Allen Miller, Heike Sefrin-Weis, and Catharina Wuetig. A very special thanks goes to Jill Frank. Her organiza- tion of a campus-wide interdisciplinary network, Classics in Contemporary Perspectives, provided the impetus for the conference and her enthusiasm saw the event through to a successful conclusion. At various stages of its development this collection has benefited greatly from the advice of our editor, Eugene O’Connor, and the anonymous read- ers at The Ohio State University Press. We would like to thank the series editors, Richard Armstrong and Paul Allen Miller, for their support and encouragement. We are especially grateful to Rebecca Vandewalle, who invested much time and effort in proofing, formatting, and collating the manuscript, and to our skillful copy-editor, Marian Rogers. The University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences provided generous financial support. Perhaps most importantly, we would like to recognize a remarkable group of contributors. Their insights, efficiency, and intellectual rigor have made editing this volume a truly rewarding experience. xi xii • Acknowledgments “Ariadne” and “The Return of Ulysses,” by Giorgio de Chirico, are repro- duced by permission of the Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Images from The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, English translation copyright 1996 by W. G. Sebald and Michael Hulse. Originally published as Die Ausgewanderten, copyright 1992 by W. G. Sebald, are used by permis- sion of The Wylie Agency LLC. Introduction Nostos Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures SHEILA MurNAGHAN AND HUNTER GarDNer eaders of Homer’s Odyssey are often surprised to discover how lit- R tle of the poem is devoted to Odysseus’ famous adventures on the high seas. Those adventures are narrated in a flashback that occupies just four of the Odyssey’s twenty-four books. Over half of the poem is set in Odysseus’ home on Ithaca and focuses on the problems caused there by Odysseus’ absence and on the artful, clandestine negotiations through which the returning hero gradually picks up the threads of his previous life. The Odyssey’s plot structure makes it clear that Odysseus’ homecom- ing is not secured simply by setting foot on the shore of Ithaca and shifts our attention to the challenges met, and the virtues displayed, by char- acters who must act at home rather than abroad, including Odysseus’ maturing son, Telemachus, and his loyal wife, Penelope, as well as a rather different version of Odysseus himself, who must take on the disguise of an old beggar. Penelope’s suitors may be the most immediate obstacle to Odysseus’ return, but his nostos is still not complete when he has defeated them. Only when he has been accepted by Penelope as her long-gone husband is Odysseus truly home. The decisive role of Odysseus’ marriage is expressed in the bed that serves as a token of mutual recognition between husband and wife. Built by Odysseus himself with a living tree as one of its posts, and never shared by Penelope with anyone else, the bed symbolizes stability 1 2 • Introduction in the face of time and fortune, Odysseus’ irrefutable claim to his home and to the identity that is rooted there, and Penelope’s fidelity. The reunion secured by the bed’s secret is crowned by a simile that equates Penelope’s struggles on Ithaca with Odysseus’ adventures at sea: . he wept as he held the wife he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last. Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel when they catch sight of land–Poseidon has struck their well-rigged ship on the open sea with gale winds and crushing walls of waves, and only a few escape, swimming, struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shore, their bodies crusted with salt but buoyed up with joy as they plant their feet on solid ground again, spared a deadly fate. So joyous now to her the sight of her husband . (Od. 23.232–39, trans. Fagles) This passage exemplifies many of the qualities that can make the Odys­ sey seem surprisingly modern: the granting of heroic status to people who lead uneventful lives, a pronounced interest in the unseen powers and inner lives of women, and attention to subjectivity as an important arena of experience. Not surprisingly, this simile was a frequent point of reference for speakers at the conference on Nostos held at the University of South Carolina in March 2011, especially those who responded to the Odyssey’s invitation to consider homecoming as a domestic experience that raises questions about the definition of home and its role in creating identity and that transcends gender divisions, pertaining to women as well as to men and depending on the efforts of both sexes. The essays that follow are a selection of the papers delivered on that occasion, chosen from those which focused on the ongoing impact of the Odyssey’s nostos themes in modern culture. Modern culture is here represented predominantly by English, Ameri- can, and Greek writers, male and female, of the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, working largely in the modern genres of the novel and the personal lyric. One essay looks at a traditional Chinese legend that became widely known in the West in the twentieth century through a mem- oir and a Disney cartoon. Others consider versions of nostos in a paint- ing, a play, and a television series. The works discussed vary in the degree of their relationship to the Odyssey: some are close reworkings of Homer’s epic; others invoke Homer more loosely as a precursor in a broad tradition Murnaghan and Gardner, “Nostos” • 3 of homecoming narratives; some pursue the perennial issues of homecom- ing without any reference to Homer or his characters. But all engage with aspects of nostos that, in the Western tradition, are given their first and most influential expression in the Odyssey. All of them are informed by awareness of a homecoming like Odysseus’ as a compelling goal of human striving and a satisfying end to a narrative, whether that goal is met, as it is in the Odyssey, or whether—as is more often the case—it remains elusive.