Responses to Homeric Epic in Contemporary Literature
Openness and Flexibility in Ancient Texts
Ancient texts possess moments of openness and flexibility.
Interpreters in the centuries in between may have misconstrued, missed entirely, or interpreted according to their own time's moral and cultural standards.
Contemporary versions leave a record of the preoccupations of early 20th-century classicists, poets, and dramatists.
Notable trends include:
Giving a voice to the silenced women of ancient epic.
Examining Homer's representation of the trauma of war in light of studies relating to PTSD.
Reckoning with the depiction of slavery in ancient texts.
Using the Odyssey to inspire autobiographical stories of identity and homecoming amongst groups of refugees.
Epic as a Test of Poetic Genius
Epic has been seen as the ultimate test of poetic genius since antiquity.
Any poet attempting this challenge faces a daunting prospect.
Rivaling Virgil or Homer involves complex considerations of form, theme, and history.
The genre is associated with:
Heroism and masculine strengths.
Mythology and the shaping of national identity.
Religion and war.
The poet's desire to compete with and surpass predecessors.
Contemporary Responses to Homeric Epic
Modern creative responses to Homeric epic (last 25-30 years) take many forms:
Live storytelling.
Simultaneous recitals of epic poems in multiple countries.
Radio poems.
Dramas.
Burlesques.
Operas.
Musicals.
Performance poetry.
Rap.
Podcasts.
Video games.
Immersive theater.
Films.
Puppetry.
Concept albums.
Rhapsodic theater.
Focus is on translations, creative writing, and the intersection between critical and creative writing.
Many writers convey sophisticated critical perspectives through their creative writing.
Reworkings of Classical Texts
Reworkings of classical texts may:
Rework a familiar story in a different genre.
Allude to a classical text but diverge significantly.
Challenge the interpretation and value attached to a particular classical text.
Ask previously unasked or forgotten questions.
Give voice to a character who is silent or speaks rarely in the ancient text.
Highlight moments of openness and flexibility in ancient texts.
Many recent retellings of Homer employ person narrative, giving voices to characters, often women, who are largely silent in ancient texts.
Looking at the Trojan War from the perspective of female captives has been a strong trend in recent reworkings of the Iliad.
Bringing the voices of female characters from Homer to life in new texts is common.
Emily Hauser's For the Most Beautiful
Origins in classical education: Hauser studied classics at Cambridge and her undergraduate dissertation focused on the women of Troy.
She began writing the book as a response to a postgraduate course at Yale, studying the invention of the classics, leading up to Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad.
Hauser then worked on her PhD on contemporary women writers' receptions of the classical world.
She reimagines the Iliad from a woman's point of view.
The tale of Briseis and Criseis sets the whole plot in motion.
Hauser retells the story in a novelistic mode, focusing on the emotions and interiority of the characters.
Revival of Ancient Mythology in Novels
Valerius Bacciante describes it as the biggest revival of ancient mythology in novels written in English.
Novels constitute a cohesive trend characterized by a close adherence to the ancient storylines, but with a switch in perspective from the male heroes to the marginal female characters, whose psychology and inner life are analyzed.
Earlier Examples of Homeric Reception (Verse)
Develop themes and techniques explored in novels, such as concern with psychology and the inner life.
The human cost of war is already present in the Iliad, explicitly addressed in scenes such as the meeting of Hector and Andromache.
This scene in book six is a moment of domesticity, pathos, and tenderness, foreshadowing the suffering ahead for Hector's wife and child.
Michael Longley's Homeric Poems
The Northern Irish poet Michael Longley picks up this scene in a variety of Homeric poems from his collection, The Ghost Orchid of 1995.
These poems appear on the same page opposite a poem called Ceasefire, about Priam supplicating Achilles for the return of Hector's body.
Ceasefire appeared on the front page of the Irish Times around the time of the IRA ceasefire in 1994.
Longley describes the psychological aspect of Priam's visit to Achilles as feeling fairly modern.
Power shifts from the mighty general to the old king, who reminds Achilles of his own father, awakening suppressed emotions of tenderness.
Longley wanted to compress this scene's 200 lines into a short lyric and make his minuscule contribution to the peace process.
Longley's "The Helmet"
Deals with the scene when Hector and Andromache see each other for the last time.
The wane squirmed and buried his head beneath between the nurse's breasts and howled terrorized by his father by flashing bronze and the nightmarish nodding of his horse hair crest.
The laughter is the affectionate laughter of parents amused by an infant's unexpected reaction.
The homeliness of the Ulster dialect, recasting the epic hero as daddy and Andromache as mammy, helps bring the scene into a more domestic sphere.
(\text{baby} = \text{babby})
(\text{child} = \text{wane})
The intimacy of the scene makes it more chilling when Hector's hopes for his son doom him to participate in the violence and revenge culture.
Longley is drawing a parallel with the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Longley's "The Parting"
He, leave it to the big boys, Andromache.
Hector, my darling husband.
Peter MacDonald described the parting as Longley's most extreme short poem because he has compressed the whole episode of Hector's farewell to Andromache into a couplet.
Longley describes it as formally extreme, but rather tender.
There's a six syllable off rhyme, My little Muldoonian moment referring to poor Muldoon. The good luck that licensed the risk of risk of sentimentality the good luck of that sorry. Licensed the risk of sentimentality in, know, the way we say that in Ulster with a sense of aura, sorrow and impatience, so many tones.
MacDonald sees the poem as almost violent in its relation to the original.
Andromache is annoyed by the assertion that she should stay away from the manly business of war, but she doesn't rebel against it.
The use of colloquial language punctures the seriousness of the scene.
Hector's claim that war is the business of the big boys already squashes potential claims to epic decorum, and Andromache's response further deflates his self importance.
Florence Impense on Longley
Sums up the ways in which Longley exploits the pauses in the narrative, which allow for reflection on human emotions.
Rewriting little moments, the campfires, the helmet, the parting, and ceasefire are remarkable for their delicate handling of the original epic, which under the guise of translation, they radically transform into a lyrical pacifist poem.
Longley discards the battle scenes so frequent in Homer to select pauses in the narrative.
Homeric characters are no longer the great warriors they are in the original, but individuals presented in a private setting defined not by their belonging to one or either one of two antagonistic communities, but by their family ties.
They are fathers, husbands, sons.
Reception of The Odyssey
Many examples of epic reception draw on The Odyssey because the text models the telling and retelling of stories, embellishing or concealing details to suit a particular occasion.
It offers opportunities for teasing out previously untold tales and supplementing the canonical narrative with the perspectives of previously silent characters.
These reimaginings of characters have precedents going back many centuries, notably of his heroides.
Alfred Tennyson's classical dramatic monologues, especially Ulysses, written in 1833 are also precedents.
Tennyson's Ulysses
Tennyson pays tribute to Homer and Dante and claims his own place in the epic tradition.
Tennyson creates a new and distinctive voice for the hero.
In place of the active and devious adventurer, Tennyson presents an older, dissatisfied king who finds Ithaca remote and uncivilized, and his wife and son too dull to hold his interest.
Set against the world weariness of Ulysses' condemnation of his home is his desire to embark on a new voyage.
His skill in speaking of his heroic past and his compulsion to keep testing the limits of human achievement have made the poem a touchstone.
The closing lines of the poem have been appropriated to praise ambition and endurance.
Modern Poets and the Dramatic Monologue
Modern poets have favored the dramatic monologue as a form which allows them to enter into dialogue with a revered canonical text, often in an irreverent or subversive manner.
This form is still used to revise, rework, or interrogate aspects of canonical texts.
It enables a combination of criticism and creativity.
It continues to be a useful way of engaging with classical texts and scholarship and extending their appeal in a concise and pleasurable poetic form.
By choosing a speaker from an existing myth or literary text, the poet can assume that traditional characters are already known to the reader.
Any digressions from familiar narratives can draw attention to the poet's inventiveness and skill.
Homer's Characters Speaking in Their Own Voices
Elizabeth Minchin comments on the frequency with which Homer's characters speak in their own voices, the sustained nature of their speaking terms, and the liveliness of their presentation.
Those speeches can be seen as offering a way into the poem, inviting a creative response to the brevity of what is disclosed.
Retelling stories is authorized by the poem because the Odyssey presents versions of Odysseus' journey to Ithaca, told by the hero, told by witnesses of the Trojan War, by court bards.
Characters such as Menelaus, Nestor, and Helen tell stories of the Trojan War and the journey home.
Odysseus also tells stories of his adventures, embellishing or concealing details to suit the occasion with such great proficiency that his voice supplants that of the narrator for four books of the poem.
Homer has a selective and episodic approach to narrative, so there are many opportunities for appropriation of episodes in subsequent texts.
Many recent retellings of Homer employ person narration, a convention which suits the idea that the authors are giving voices to characters, often women, who were largely silent in the ancient texts.
Penelope has been reinterpreted by feminist poets and scholars as a complex and indeterminate character whose epithet circumspect conceals a subtle type of heroism that is as essential to the preservation of Odysseus' kingdom as his more spectacular feats.
Skepticism and Creative Response to Homer's Account of Penelope
Skepticism about the official narrative is an attitude which drives the critical rereading and the creative response.
Ovid's Heroides shows her as lonely and cynical about the likelihood of Ulysses' fidelity to her.
Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad challenges the Odyssey as a collection of misogynistic myths, scandalous gossip, and edifying legends, which use her life story as a stick to beat other women with.
Odysseus' journey home and his behavior are rendered from the jaded and skeptical perspective of a Penelope who has spent centuries in the underworld.
Atwood uses a variety of prose and verse forms and different speakers.
The chorus of maids performs parodies of Odysseus' adventures.
Penelope's person narratives dominate the text with a sardonic, knowing, and sometimes bitter voice.
Feminist Rewritings of Homer
Atwood was returning to a mode of classical reception in a feminist vein.
Speaking through Penelope offered women a way of expressing the frustration of adapting to the gendered experience of adulthood.
Linda Pasterdun writes about coming to identify with Penelope after previously having wanted to be Odysseus.
Pasterne's Challenge to the Focus on Penelope
In a poem called "The Sun", she reimagines the whole of the Odyssey as an extended lesson, which is showing Telemachus how to grow up.
Sheila Moynihan points out that a creative response to Homer allows for a kind of assessment that would be impossible within the conventions of literary criticism.
Pastan makes moves that are prohibited for a critic.
She projects Telemachus out of the text.
She makes him its intended audience speculating that perhaps the odyssey was meant for Telemachus, a kind of primer, imagining the poem as having been composed for the purpose of educating Telemachus.
Beyond that, she does not stick to the text as we have it, but invents new episodes to support her reading.
More subtly, she retells the episodes that are in the poem, but adds a new perspective, evoking a subjectivity that is absent from the original.
Pastan's "Rereading the Odyssey in Middle Age"
Supplies the stories that no one bothers to tell from speakers such as Circe, Euriclaire, and an anonymous suitor.
There is always a story that no one bothers to tell.
The younger son of a younger son, hardly a suitor at all, sits at the sharp end of the table, among the boisterous men, not hungry except for a glimpse of Penelope.
Although this is not a dramatic monologue, Pastan does use the dramatic monologue form for many of her poems.
The form allows for the expression of internal conflict and anxiety, rage, or doubt.
The dramatic monologue is spoken by an eye who is explicitly identified as someone other than the poet.
This enables the poet to avoid confessional subjectivity, to avoid other constraints, such as gender, history, or species.
Pastan gives a voice to Odysseus' loyal dog, Argos, who claims for himself the reputation of faithfulness.
Unease with Reinterpretations of the Odyssey
A teacher complained that contemporary writers seem to feel obliged to besmirch the Odyssey with cynical reinterpretations.
The teacher seems to be uneasy with the reinterpretations of the Odyssey because they are not sufficiently respectful towards the poem.
Judith Kazantis and Impertinent Retellings
Kazantis states women poets brought me to poetry, and women poets taught me to value what I wrote, to be a gadfly poet against injustice, often obliquely by myths satirically retold.
Note, the words she uses gadfly, injustice, satirically told, and impertinence.
These terms could apply to many of the rewritings that I'm looking at.
The gadfly approach is not always welcome to readers, especially those who are invested in a particular reading of the Homeric poems or more generally resistant to reinterpretations of the canon.
Circe in Modern Retellings
Circe is a figure who attracts new versions of her story. She features prominently as the sorceress who turns Odysseus' men into pigs, an episode which is particularly useful for cutting down epic pretension.
Carol Ann Duffy's Penelope and Circe appear in her collection of dramatic monologues, The World's Wife from 1999.
Other poems dispute established versions of literature and history from the disenchanted or furious perspective of women who are commonly ignored in favor of their husband's stories.
Her poem, Circe, is a provocative and grotesque parody of domesticity.
Circe addresses a group of Nureads and nymphs, regaling them with her familiarity with the pigs under her care, who were also implicitly men who were transformed by her magic, before she briskly instructs the nymphs with some tongue in cheek recipes for pork dishes.
The graceful insubstantiality of the nymphs contrasts with the fleshiness of the animals they chop into pieces of meat.
Duffy focuses on the sight, sound, and smell, firstly of the pigs, with the bristling, salty skin of their backs, their yobby, porky colognes, and their percussion of oinks and grunts, their squeals.
Circe has twisted the domestic art of cookery, into vengeance against men, but she is also self consciously jocular when she says, but I want to begin with a recipe from abroad, which uses the cheek and the tongue in cheek at that.
The juxtaposition of human characteristics and features with ingredients lends a sinister air to the proceedings.
The feast that Circe and her nymphs are preparing begins to resemble the cannibalism that is a marker of Odysseus' most brutal enemies.
The men's lack of attention to women's voices is the reason that the sorceress gives for her ruthless enjoyment of the chopping and cooking.
Duffy's version of Circe can be compared with other poems by women writers, feminist reappropriations of mythology and fairy tales.
Such poems often represent Odysseus himself in an unflattering light.
In Judith Kazansis, the Odysseus poems, it's not magic, but the way of life on Circe's island that makes Odysseus piggish and ridiculously unfit for heroic combat.
He is weakened and undermined by his own self indulgence.
Sometimes the emphasis is less on Circe's magic than on the revelation of truth.
Truth, Fiction, and Lies in the Odyssey
The idea that transformation into an animal is less a magic trick and more a revelation of the true character of the person who is transformed is not new.
In the context of the Odyssey, truth, fiction, and lies are constantly up for reassessment.
Readers, writers, and critics question whether Odysseus is a reliable narrator.
Louise Brick represents Cersei and Cersei's power as a radical truth teller.
Louise Glick's Meadowlands
Juxtaposes a modern couple with Penelope and Odysseus, preventing the reader from sympathizing too readily with any one person.
Glick had no wish to write a lacerating book about divorce but rather wanted to write a genial, forgiving, tolerant book of adult love.
The book ended up by being a double narrative in which the dissolution of a contemporary marriage, which is elaborated in a series of petulant comic conversations and private bickerings, alternates with, is threaded through with the story of Odysseus and Penelope.
Elizabeth Dodd classes this as personal classicism, which she talks about as a poetic mode rooted in the century and developing through the century.
Poetry is founded on emotion, particularly sexual and familial love, often based on the writer's own experience in which the expression of universality is achieved through the particular.
The emotion in such poems is controlled, Dodds suggests, by using distancing techniques, such as the use of personae or illusion.
Glick's Writing Process
In her book of essays, Proof and Theories, Glick describes her writing process for essays and poems as her education.
I wrote from what I know trying to undermine the known with intelligent questions.
She didn't attend college as a full time student, but enrolled in a poetry workshop at Columbia at 18 before study studying with Stanley Kunitz for some years.
Having taught creative writing at the college level for forty years, she engages with scholars but emphasizes that the academic world is not her home.
The Role of Telemachus in Meadowlands
Glick consulted a classicist to determine what's missing.
She added a sequence of poems interspersed throughout the volume, which address Telemachus' perspective.
His contributions to the volume are a bemused yet trenchant interpretation of his parents' fundamentally incompatible personalities and the influence of their different ways of being absent on his own development.
Informed by Glick's experience of psychotherapy, this disparaging voice offers comic and perceptive reflections on living in an unhappy family and on the distorting effects of fame.
Like Penelope or Circe, Telemachus is a figure who can offer wry and cynical reimaginings of Odysseus as a hero, knowing that he is also selfish and unreliable.
Contemporary writers attempt to understand the psychology of the characters in the Homeric poems and to explore themes of growing up, themes of adultery, themes of of power and themes of war in ways that the the more recent versions of the of responses to the Iliad and the Odyssey also also examine.