Revisioning Homer in the New World

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Revisioning Homer in the New World
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What in Homer appeals to contemporary authors?

• The Iliad and The Odyssey are cornerstones of
  Western literary traditions
• "The Iliad and The Odyssey have been read by such
  a vast diversity of men because they are unitary
  works of art and deal with universal experience
  with unsurpassed depth, breadth, and intensity."
  (Kenneth Rexroth)
• The Iliad the horrors of war and dangers of rage
• The Odyssey the longing for home and necessity
  for resocialization

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The Iliad

• Reveals how making heroic valor a cultures
  prime value is fundamentally destructive to
  social order and humane community
• The first word in the poem is menin rage
• The rage of Achilles
• Rage as the hero and subject of the poem
• Rage that transforms Achilles into a killing
  machine and Hector into a corpse

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A War among 3 Cultures

• The Achaeans The Greeks
• The Trojans
• The Olympian Gods

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Olympians

• Portrayed by Homer as an imperial court
• Meddle in the affairs of humanity
• Function as conceptual forces of nature and the
  psyche
• Aphrodite lust
• Ares war rage
• Athena cunning strategy

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The Trojans

• Bronze Age, pre-Greek city state, conceive of
  themselves as members of the family of Troy
• Although they disapprove of Paris, they unite in
  familial responsibility and assume his guilt in
  an act of collective family responsibility --
  "our lot is best, to fight for our country --
  doomed

David, Helen and Paris, 1788
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The Trojan Family

• King Priam and Queen Hecuba
• Hector and Andromache
• Paris and Helen
• Cassandra

Priam and Hecuba plead with Achilles for the
body of Hector
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Hector and Andromache

• Hector is the greatest hero in and primary
  protector of Troy
• With their son Astyanax, Hector and Andromache
  represent Troys future

Giorgio de Chirico. Hector and Andromache. 1917.
Oil on canvas. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna,
Rome, Italy
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Helen seductress or rape victim?

• daughter of Zeus and Leda the wife of Tyndareus,
  co-King of Sparta
• Abducted by Thesesus, King of Athens
• Married to Menelaus, King of Sparta
• Abducted by the Trojan prince Paris
• "the face that launched a thousand ships."

Helen of Troy by Evelyn de Morgan, 1898
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H. D. Hilda Doolittle Helen  All Greece
hatesthe still eyes in the white face,the
lustre as of oliveswhere she stands,and the
white hands.  All Greece revilesthe wan face
when she smiles,hating it deeper stillwhen it
grows wan and white,remembering past
enchantmentsand past ills.  Greece sees
unmoved,God's daughter, born of love,the beauty
of cool feetand slenderest knees,could love
indeed the maid,only if she were laid,white ash
amid funereal cypresses.
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The Achaeans -- Greeks

• Historically piratical
• Barbaric chieftains whose prized values of
  nobility, pride, power, glamour, and strength
  thrive only among violence
• Each hero is out for himself -- failure provokes
  shame rather than assumption of responsibility --
  leads to disorder and tragedy
• Allied together against Trojans only because of
  pact made with the wooing of Helen

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The Heroes

• Agamemnon monarch of men
• Achilles fleet-footed Achilles
• Odysseus wily Odysseus

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OdysseusKing of IthacaMajor
StrategistConceived the Trojan HorseHusband
to Penelope
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THE ODYSSEY
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A hero, drunk on hubris, cannot find his way home
until he confronts his mortality and acknowledges
the feminine.
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The females of The Odyssey

• Athena, goddess of wisdom, Odysseus protector
• Calypso, sea nymph who captivated him for 7
  years
• Nausicaa, Phaecian princess, daughter of King
  Alcinous and Queen Arete
• Circe, sorceress
• The Sirens, fatal allure
• Anticleia, Odysseus mother whom he visits in the
  Underworld
• Eurycleia, Odysseus nurse
• Penelope, Odysseus wife

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Circe

• Sorceress who wields power equal to Odysseus
• Legend has that she bore 1-3 sons to Odysseus
• Advised him to visit the Underworld and how to
  avoid Sirens trap

Circe, Alessandro AlloriFresco, 1580
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Atwoods earlier interest in Homer

• Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
• My mother was raped by a holy
  swan.You believe that? You can take me
  out to dinner. That's what we tell all the
  husbands.There sure are a lot of
  dangerous birds around.

• Circe Mud Poems
• One day you simply appeared in your stupid boat,
• your killers hand, your disjointed body, jagged
  as a shipwreck,
• skinny-ribbed, blue-eyed, scorched, thirsty, the
  usual,
• pretending to be what? a survivor?
• 
  1974

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The Penelopiad (2005)

• Now that Im dead, I know everything
• Dont follow my example!
• Is she a reliable narrator?

Penelope brooding over her loom by Max Klinger.
1895 Colour etching and aquatint. Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco
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Penelope

• Daughter of Icarius, co-king of Sparta and a
  naiad
• Helens cousin
• Mothers advice
• Water does not resist. Water flows. When you
  plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a
  caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not
  stop you. But water always goes where it wants
  to go, and nothing, in the end can stand against
  it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away
  a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you
  are half water. If you cant go through an
  obstacle, go around it. Water does.

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Mother-Son tensions
Penelope and Telemachos. Attic red figure, c. 450
BC
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The Fate of Penelopes 12 maids

• Voices act as a chorus to punctuate Penelopes
  narration
• Variety of formats
• nursery rhyme
• popular song
• sea shanty
• ballad
• drama
• lecture
• trial
• love song

Telemachos executes the maidservants, 1973, Dame
Elizabeth Frink (1930 - 1993), Tate Gallery
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• we are the maids
• the ones you killed
• the ones you failed
• we danced in air
• our bare feet twitched
• it was not fair
• with every goddess, queen and bitch
• from there to here
• you scratched your itch
• we did much less
• than what you did
• you judged us bad .
• we danced on air
• the ones you failed
• the ones you killed

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Cold Mountain (1997)The last days of the Civil
War

• The Union emerging industrialists
• The Confederacy plantation slave-holders
• Scots descendants independent farmers

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Cold Mountain the film (1997)adapted and
directed by Anthony Minghella. Starred Jude Law,
Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger
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• Inman
• Ada Monroe ministers daughter
• Ruby Thewes maiden-of-all trades
• Stobrod Thewes her father
• Teague leader of Confederate Home Guard
• Sally Swanger wise old neighbor
• Maddy goat woman, healer

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Joel and Ethan Coen
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The Soggy Bottom Boys
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Penny, Ulysses Everetts wife and mother of his
six (soon-to-be seven daughters)
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Omeros by Derek Walcott (1990)

• Nobel Prize for Literature 1992
• The first post-colonial epic
• Written in 3 line stanzas of iambic hexameter
  reminiscent of both Homer and Dante
• Omeros is both The Iliad and The Odyssey of the
  West Indies, but also of the Americas.
• It is a book of memory the Odysseus-like
  narrator seeks to come home to the West
  Indian/American culture bred from a history of
• conquest and empire
• freedom and slavery
• emigration and forced removal (the Trail of
  Tears)
• imagination and passion
• birth and death

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St. LuciaThe Antilles
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Conflict and Negotiation among 3 cultures

• Indigenous tribes
• Europeans
• St. Lucians -- Afro-Caribbean

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Indigenous Tribes

• Arawaks the gods and tribes of the trees
  language of the Taino people who first
  encountered Columbus
• Caribs reputed to be the fierce and aggressive
  tribes raided the Tainos
• skilled boatbuilders and sailors
• survived colonialism in Dominica, St. Vincent,
  St. Lucia and Trinidad
• source of the word for cannibal
• Plains Indians Ghost Dance

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Arawaks Fishermen

• These were their pillars that fell, leaving a
  blue space
• For a single God where the old gods stood before.
• The first god was a gommier.
• The bearded elders endured the decimation
• Of their tribe with uttering a syllable
• Of that language they had uttered as one nation,
• The speech taught their saplings from the
  towering babble
• Of the cedar to green vowels on bois-campêche.
• The gods were down at last.
• Like pygmies they hacked the trunks of wrinkled
  giants
• For paddles and oars. The were working with the
  same
• Concentration as an army of fire ants.

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The Europeans

• Dennis Plunkett, retired English Major, WWII
  veteran, pig farmer, history buff
• Maud Plunkett, his wife, stitcher of a quilt with
  the birds of the island
• Midshipman Plunkett, participant in the Battle
  of the Saints between France in England in the
  18th c.
• James Joyce, author of Ulysses
• Catherine Weldon, witness to the Ghost Dance at
  Wounded Knee

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O-MER-OSO the sound blown through a conchmer
the seamere -- mother
Cove at Sunsrise, 1998
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St. Lucians

• The Narrator

• Hector
• Achille
• Helen
• Ma Kilman
• Seven Seas

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Helen(under French control, St. Lucia was
Known as Helena)
Derek Walcott, 1998 Ideal Head Helen/Omeros
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Achille, the fisherman abandoned by Helen,
sails far out to sea and undergoes a visionary
odyssey to his ancestral African homeland
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Hector,gives up fishing to drive a taxi
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T.S. Eliot what happens when a new work of art
is created is something that happens
simltaneously to all the works of art which
preceded it. The existing monuments form an
ideal order among themselves, which modified by
the introduction of the new (the really new) work
of art among them.