The Return of Ulysses ‘Only Edith Hall Could Have Written This Richly Engaging and Distinctive Book

the return of ulysses ‘Only Edith Hall could have written this richly engaging and distinctive book. She covers a breathtaking range of material, from the highest of high culture to the camp, cartoonish, and frankly weird; from Europe to the USA to Africa and the Far East; and from literature to film and opera. Throughout this tour of the huge variety of responses that there have been to the Odyssey, a powerful argument emerges about the appeal and longevity of the text which reveals all the critical and political flair that we have come to expect of this author. It is all conveyed with the infectious excitement and clarity of a brilliant performer. The Return of Ulysses represents a major contribution to how we assess the continuing influence of Homer in modern culture.’ — Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge ‘Edith Hall has written a book many have long been waiting for, a smart, sophisticated, and hugely entertaining cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey spanning nearly three millennia of its reception and influence within world culture. A marvel of collection, association, and analysis, the book yields new discoveries on every page. In no other treatment of the enduring figure of Odysseus does Dante rub shoulders with Dr Who, Adorno and Bakhtin with John Ford and Clint Eastwood. Hall is superb at digging into the depths of the Odyssean character to find what makes the polytropic Greek so internationally indestructible. A great delight to read, the book is lucid, appealingly written, fast, funny, and full of enlightening details. It is at once a serious investigation of a cultural phenomenon, an extended education in the humanities, and an invitation to a lifetime of trailing its seafaring hero.’ — Richard P. Martin, Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics, Stanford University ‘Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses undertakes the formidable task of surveying the cultural reception of the Odyssey from late antiquity to the present. By tracing echoes of the poem in literature, painting and music, noting its impact upon discourses of race, class, gender, and colonization, and identifying reflections of the myth in modern systems of philosophical and psychological thought, the author shows that it is arguably the founding text of Western civi- lization. Today, the Odyssey has lost none of its cultural power or resonance. Having found a new home in popular culture and contemporary media, it speaks with especial urgency to non-Western émigrés in a culturally fragmented world. Hall’s rich appraisal will be greeted as the definitive investigation of a fascinating and many sided phenomenon.’ — Marilyn B. Skinner, Professor of Classics, University of Arizona ‘In The Return of Ulysses, Edith Hall has given us a brilliant, cultured, and far-reaching tool for interpreting the Odyssey, and for reading, watching, and listening to the words, images and music that have come into being in the refracted light of the Homeric poem. Taking us from Virgil to Cavafy, Circe to Dorothy – the first female quester – and Polyphemus to Batman, Hall’s work ranges in masterful ways among the times, places, ideologies, and theo- retical frameworks that constitute the reception world of the epic to which all later epics are generically most connected. The book is written in a lively, witty, and hip style, wearing with impressive ease its enormous learning and cultural breadth. Edith Hall points the way, some- times with elaboration, often with suggestive brevity, to the many pathways leading from and back to this familiar but always changing poem. The Return of Ulysses does not disappoint, and has much to offer that will both teach and delight.’ — Richard F. Thomas, Professor of Greek and Latin, Harvard University – edith hall – The Return of Ulysses a cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey Published in 2008 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 75 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 000 www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2008 Edith Hall The right of Edith Hall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 845 575 3 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by A. & D. Worthington, Newmarket, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bath Press contents Acknowledgements vii PART I: GENERIC MUTATIONS . Embarkation 3 2. Turning Phrases 7 3. Shape-Shifting 3 4. Telling Tales 45 5. Singing Songs 59 PART II: WORLD AND SOCIETY 6. Facing Frontiers 75 7. Colonial Conflict 89 8. Rites of Man 0 9. Women’s Work 5 0. Class Consciousness 3 PART III: MIND AND PSYCHE . Brain Power 47 2. Exile from Ithaca 6 3. Blood Bath 75 4. Sex and Sexuality 89 5. Dialogue with Death 203 Notes 27 Bibliography 243 Index 28 acknowledgements he idea for this book was suggested to me by Alex Wright at I.B.Tauris, who had heard me discussing the topic on Melvyn Bragg’s BBC radio programme, In Our Time, and developed while TI taught BA and MA modules on the cultural impact of the Odyssey at the University of Durham in the academic year 2005–6. I would like to thank all the students who enrolled, for their enthusiasm and inexhaust- ible energy in seeking out new examples of the Odyssey’s cultural presence, especially Phil Lofthouse and Joe Platnauer. My doctoral students Charlie MacDougall, Justine McConnell and Rosie Wyles have also helped in all kinds of ways. Others to whom I am grateful include Jennifer Ingleheart, Fiona Macintosh, Margaret Malamud, Luke Pitcher, Richard Poynder, Peggy Reynolds, David Roselli, Polly Weddle, and Richard Williams. Sarah and Georgie Poynder provided trenchant comments on most of the films and all the children’s books. Special thanks go to David and Alison Worthington for their copy-editing and proof-reading of the text. This is the first book to be published under the aegis of the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway, which was officially opened on 7 December 2007. vii part i generic mutations embarkation Muse, sing for me about that versatile man, who sacked the sacred city of Troy and then wandered far and wide (Odyssey .–2). n the late Bronze Age, a king from the western islands of Greece was delayed sailing home after a war in Asia, but did eventually return to recover his wife, son and throne. His story was told by bards, and Iin about 750 BCE one of them – the Greeks said he was blind and named Homer – put the finishing touches to the epic poem called the Odys- sey, which opens with the invocation above. This story stays fresh nearly three millennia later – but why? The recent editor of an anthology of texts inspired by the plays of Shakespeare admits that Homer, and only Homer, has proved an equally powerful source of inspiration for later authors. Another scholar has argued that it can be difficult even to identify ‘spin- offs’ from the Odyssey, so deeply has it shaped our imagination and cultural values.2 My book explores the reasons for the enormity of this poem’s cultural presence. This is a foolhardy quest. The vastness of the terrain should discourage all but optimistic travellers. Another deterrent should be the quality of the previous explorations. In Stanford’s The Ulysses Theme, the first edition of which was published more than half a century ago (954), the reasons for Odysseus’ survival in the literature of later centuries was subjected to a brilliant analysis. The material that Stanford had collected still arouses awe in any wannabe successor, even one equipped with online library catalogues. Stanford’s book has already inspired fine epigones, notably the accessible An Odyssey round Odysseus by Beaty Rubens and Oliver Taplin (989), and Piero Boitani’s heavyweight study The Shadow of Ulysses (994). Several useful collections of essays have also been published.3 Yet it seems to me that a new investigation is timely. Even in his second edition of 968, and the more popular The Quest for Ulysses that he published with 3 4 THE RETURN OF ULYSSES J.V. Luce in 974, Stanford was writing in a world that had not adjusted to feminism, let alone post-colonialism, and in which few movies had engaged with the Odyssey. This book takes a different trajectory from most of its predecessors. It is a study of the influence of the Odyssey rather than the figure of Odys- seus/Ulysses. It does not discuss textual matters such as the ‘authenticity’ of the final book of the Odyssey, where the hero is finally reunited with his father.4 Indeed, Laertes supports my argument that one reason for the poem’s enduring popularity must be that its personnel is so varied that every ancient or modern listener, of any age, sex or status, seaman or servant, will have found someone with whom to identify. There has been a tendency to see the Iliad as a young man’s poem, and the Odyssey as a poem of old age; the ancient critic Longinus saw its ethical focus as a sign of its author’s advancing years: ‘great minds in their declination stagger into Fabling’, as John Hall of Consett translated it in 652.5 But youths relate to Telemachus,

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