Tales for All Time: The Role of Emotions in Modern Receptions of Homeric Epic Karen Anne Possingham January 2021 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University © Copyright by Karen Anne Possingham 2021 All Rights Reserved 1 This thesis is the original work of the author. Word count: 98,683. 2 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to acknowledge that this research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. My primary supervisor, Elizabeth Minchin, the Best of the Homerists, whose inspiration, support, and dedication helped bring out the best in my work. My secondary supervisors Greta Hawes and Lucy Neave for their sound advice, scholarship and kind encouragement. To my children Nick and Alex, their partners Steph and Tiah, colleagues at ANU and friends for seeing the world through Homer with me for the last four and a half years. Finally, my husband Hugh for his continued patronage of the Arts and for his pithy and witty remarks on the content and progress of this thesis. 3 Abstract The poet we call Homer stands at the intersection of a long oral tradition and the emergence of literacy. The poems associated with his name have exercised a continuing appeal, across time; and yet they can also be unsettling, challenging our ideas of Ancient Greek values and expectations. This has had an impact on the reception of the poems from antiquity to the present day. I have argued in this thesis that, in the cases I have studied, Lorna Hardwick’s idea of ‘faultlines’ in Homeric epic can be adapted to examine the powerful, often contradictory, emotions portrayed in the Iliad and the Odyssey: namely personal and place attachment, grief, and the anger that can lead to acts of retribution or to acts of mercy that rely on the emotion of pity. These emotions are often inter-connected and may be present at the same time. In this thesis I examine selected works of literature by the Anglophone writers James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, David Malouf, Alice Oswald and Derek Walcott which offer us some 20th and 21st century responses to the problematic and often confronting emotions that we observe in the Homeric poems. I propose that the expression of what have been described since antiquity as strong or ‘vehement’ emotions act as hooks for these writers, encouraging them to explore emotional tensions in their own societies, using the characters and relationships found in the Homeric poems. In doing so they reveal the similarities and the differences in emotional expression between the ancient and modern worlds, demonstrating that the display rules of emotions are shaped by cultural conventions of their own time. I show how modern writers, in adapting and re-working the Homeric epics through the lens of emotion, reflect on their own present through the past and thereby re-interpret the poems to forge new sources of meaning and connection. 4 Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. 3 Abstract .................................................................................................................................... 4 Notes on spelling, names, and translations............................................................................... 6 Chapter One -- Introduction and Literature Review..................................................................7 Chapter Two -- Lifting the Veil: Sexual Desire and Personal Attachment in Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses...................................................................................................... 37 Chapter Three -- Fighting for Control: Anger and Retribution in Homer’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad....................................................................................... 78 Chapter Four -- Suffering with Humanity: Pity and Reconciliation in Homer’s Iliad and David Malouf’s Ransom........................................................................................................ 122 Chapter Five -- Remembering the Dead: Grief and Mourning in Homer’s Iliad and Alice Oswald’s Memorial............................................................................................................... 162 Chapter Six -- Longing for Home: Separation and Return in Homer’s Epics and Derek Walcott’s Omeros.................................................................................................................. 204 Chapter Seven -- Conclusion…………………………......................................................... 247 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 254 5 Notes on spelling, names, and translations I have attempted to be consistent with spelling of Greek names; thus, very common names remain in their more familiar form, hence Achilles rather than Achilleus, and Alcinous rather than Alkinoos. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. All ancient references are cited as per The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.). 6 Chapter One Introduction The poet we call Homer stands at the intersection of a long oral tradition and the emergence of literacy.1 The poems associated with his name have exercised a continuing appeal across time, and yet they can also be unsettling, challenging our ideas of Ancient Greek values and expectations. The reception of the poems from antiquity to the present day has manifested in terms of how the poems have been analysed and interpreted by scholars. More significantly for this thesis, the Homeric poems have been repeatedly rewritten and re-imagined by authors over time. These adaptations, transformations and translations of Homeric poems have an impact on how the original poems are received, and also on how Homeric narratives are interpreted and re-examined in contemporary culture.2 An important component of the reception and re-writing of Homeric poems pertains to how emotions are represented in contemporary literary texts. In this thesis, I identify a number of prominent emotions that are displayed in the Iliad and the Odyssey and evaluate some examples of modern audience responses to them, in the form of fiction and poetry. In order to examine the evocation of Homeric emotions in the original text and in contemporary re-imaginations of Homeric narratives, I will expand Lorna Hardwick’s concept of ‘faultlines’. She suggests that 20th century receptions of Homer respond to faultlines within the poems, which are ‘the underlying cracks and fissures that from time to time become more prominent and mark the impact of powerful shifts in power, practices, and paradigms’.3 She argues that the contradictions and ambivalences in the aristocratic world view of the poems,4 which may have resulted from political or social changes at the time of the composition of the Homeric epics, provide fertile ground for modern writers to explore political and cultural faultlines in their own societies that may have occurred as a result of the 1 Throughout this thesis I generally refer to ‘the Homeric poet’ instead of to ‘Homer’ to reflect our complete lack of knowledge about the composer of either of the poems which have, nevertheless, long been associated with the name Homer. For some examples of Homeric reception from the ancient world to the modern world see Richardson 1980: 270-272; Clarke 1981; Lamberton & Keaney 1992: xxi-xxiii; Graziosi & Haubold 2005; Dickey 2007: 18; Graziosi & Greenwood 2007. 3 Hardwick 2007: 50. 4 The stories of the race of heroes and their interactions with the gods appear to be targeted at an ideal audience consisting primarily of noblemen and their sons. Evidence for this presumed audience is found within the Odyssey on the island of Scheria in Book 11.330-370. 7 impacts of colonisation or feminism, for example. 5 Although this argument provides an insightful explanation of the continued appeal of the poems, I will argue that Hardwick’s conception of faultlines needs to be expanded to include the profound impact of the portrayal of emotion on audiences. I propose that the at times contradictory emotions expressed by the characters in the poems as we have them today, particularly negative emotions such as anger and grief, are evidence of an emotional faultline in the world of Homer, the unresolved nature of which may more convincingly explain their lasting appeal.6 The expression of what has been described since antiquity as strong or ‘vehement’ emotions acts as a hook for modern Anglophone writers such as James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, David Malouf, Alice Oswald and Derek Walcott, encouraging them to explore emotional tensions in their own societies, using the characters and relationships found in the Homeric poems.7 In the process the similarities and the differences in emotional expression between the ancient and modern worlds are revealed, demonstrating that the display rules of emotions are shaped by cultural conventions that may change over time.8 By ‘display rules’, I mean the kind of emotional expression that societies consider ‘normal’ or appropriate in individuals.9 To demonstrate the continued resonance of the poems in our own time, I focus particularly on selected works of the above-mentioned writers in the 20th and 21st centuries to test Hardwick's claims about faultlines. These works have adapted and re-shaped the poems to suit contemporary audiences, even as they reflect on the human condition more