Binding into form

Last night I tried, and failed, to read Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s one sprawling, associative list of every conceivable adaptation ever made of The Odyssey, thinly disguised as a book. There’s no argument whatsoever, except for the multiplicity and malleability of the narrative—but who wasn’t aware of that already? I find it a characteristically 21^st century volume in this regard: we all now have instant access to oceans of information (there’s even a subgenre of books about this overload, with titles like Too Big to Know and Too Much to Know), so there’s nothing particularly novel anymore about accumulating endless variations on a theme. The trick—really, the laborious, necessary task of judgment and evaluation—is to select and shape a mass of information into a coherent, persuasive argument. 

Hall does attempt to cluster her library of Babel into thematic islands:

Turning Phrases

Shape-Shifting

Telling Tales

Singing Songs

Frontiers

Colonial Conflict

Rites of Man

Women's Work

Class Consciousness

Brain Power

Exile from Ithaca

Blood Bath

Sex and Sexuality

Dialogue with Death

Yet within each cluster is a ceaseless litany of versions, with Hall rarely devoting more than a few sentences to each iteration. In the space of a few paragraphs, the reader is frogmarched through a 17th century Italian opera, which recalls for her a late Roman poem, which reminds her of a recent film, which in turn resembles a stage adaptation she once saw, whose plot surprisingly echoes an earlier French translation, which happens to have been published the same year that a German painting was produced . . . I don’t quite get the point of this frenetic cataloging. As noted previously, it should be encouraging for our children to be reminded that versions of this narrative have always been retold across three millennia. But it's genuinely wearying for a reader to try to wade through such a magpie hodgepodge of cultural flotsam. 

Giulio Bonasone, 1555, "Menelaus Binding Proteus"

Moreover, the book seems to abdicate a crucial, even Homeric task, namely, the shaping that any intellectual endeavor demands. All of these hundreds of artists who crafted their own versions of The Odyssey undoubtedly wrestled with their predecessors, yet they each ultimately produced something that they found most true for their respective moments. It's not unlike Menelaus wrestling Proteus into a single form, in order to get that elusive god to reveal something at last. Hall, to the contrary, seems reluctant to make her book binding.

The following poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay identifies Chaos rather than Proteus as the artist's antagonist. But I think the point about creative struggle still holds, in perhaps the best sonnet written about sonnets:

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

And keep him there; and let him thence escape

If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs

Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines.

Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,

His arrogance, our awful servitude:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less

Than something simple yet not understood;

I shall not even force him to confess;

Or answer. I will only make him good.

Creators of Cyclopses!

Greetings all!

I hope everyone is enjoying this adventure as much as I am! We are only into the second week, and we are already starting to take on the ways of the ancient Greeks. Who knew that a peplos could be so fashionable? (See photos in the previous posts) Feta and olives also seem to be quite popular with the group.

I wanted to share some dialogue between the kids and me this past Wednesday. When asked "tell me about your cyclops you are working on", they had some great responses:

"It's a big foot cyclops. All of those holes inside the foot are the eyes and they can see from the inside to the outside" -E

"It's a snowman cyclops with a baby cyclops." -N

"It's all gooey and dirty. It's going to have tiny arms. Now I'm trying to make the hair. Now I'm smoothing it out with the knife." -V

"These are the overalls and arms. I'm making the neck. It will look very fun. It will have big overalls and a small body." -MG

"I think it's going to be Polyphemus. I might make a baby Polyphemus. He has a very giant eye." -C

"This bowl is for the wine that Odysseus gives to the cyclops." -R

Curious to see what all of these cyclopses look like? They'll be ready for their journey home once we put on the final touches!

Riding the wave

Who knew that we were launching an avant-garde project here in Memphis? This just in: England's "Paper Cinema" is producing an "instant silent movie" version of the epic tale, live animation where


cinematic projection and cunning tricks transform a suitcase full of cut-out paper puppets into an array of living characters and striking landscapes. A silent film is created before your eyes, set to a captivating live score from exceptional musicians.


One-minute preview here.

One eye in the middle of his forehead

Day two: a nice sojourn in a cave. And say, what are these giant rolls of cheese doing here? And barrels of milk? Let's hang out here for a while and snack on these deliciou----WHOOOOAAAAHH!

Elizabeth read the Polyphemus story to the crew (augmented to a Scylla-worthy six by a new arrival) before they worked with clay to craft bowls, jugs, and giant cyclopses.

 

For a snack, pita was rolled out from scratch, consumed with Greek hummus and feta.

Then, back to drawing.

Finally, peploses!

Some of the crew expressed sympathy for blinded Polyphemus -- after all, Odysseus and his crew had intruded upon his cave and eaten his food. And don't forget the touching tale, recounted in Ovid and elsewhere, of Polyphemus falling for the sea nymph Galatea, inviting her to "come live with me and be my love."

She spurns his entreaty, and in rage he kills her lover Acis, the stuff of opera.

The uncommon lyre

Laertes and Odysseus, Theodor van Thulden (1606-1669)

R. and I just finished the Padraic Colum adaptation of Homer, which we had been reading intermittently over the last few months. He insets a great deal of The Iliad into Helen's account to Telemachus, giving us one epic enfolded within the other. R. wept at the reunion of Laertes and Odysseus, an event most illustrated children's versions omit—they tend to conclude rather with Penelope's recognition of Odysseus. Yet there's a good deal more ground to cover after that (not the least of which involves placating the families of the slain suitors! thanks, Athena, for one last intervention).


I found compelling a detail I had forgotten since I first read The Odyssey in full some twenty years (!) ago. Penelope has declared that she will marry the suitor who can string the bow of her supposedly absent husband. Of course everyone tries, everyone fails, and Odysseus prevails. But in the midst of the prevailing, we are given an extraordinarily lovely detail, a prolonged hesitation between the stringing of the bow and the vengeful launching of the arrows. Colum's version reads: "For long Odysseus stood with the bow in his hands, handling it as a minstrel handles a lyre when he stretches a cord or tightens a peg. Then he bent the great bow; he bent it without an effort, and at his touch the bow-string made a sound that was like the cry of a swallow." 


Here's how George Chapman's translation (c. 1615) lingers further with this same pause:


But when the wise Ulysses once had laid

His fingers on it, and to proof survey’d

The still sound plight [pliability] it held—as one of skill

In song and of the harp, doth at his will,

In tuning of his instrument, extend

A string out with his pin, touch all, and lend

To ev’ry well-wreath’d string his perfect sound,

Struck all together—with such ease drew round

The king the bow. Then twang’d he up the string,

That—as a swallow in the air doth sing

With no continu’d tune, but, pausing still,

Twinks out her scatter’d voice in accents shrill—

So sharp the string sung when he gave it touch,

Once having bent and drawn it.

Listen to how Chapman stretches these lines beyond their endings—"extend / A string out with his pin," "drew round / The king the bow." Those two extended similes likewise draw out the tension before the conclusive outburst of violence.

Apollo with lyre and arrows

The great philologist Erich Auerbach famously opens his study Mimesis with a comparison between Homeric style and the Genesis account of the sacrifice of Isaac. Auerbach insists upon the "externalization" of phenomena in Homer, characterizing the narrative as concentrating on "foreground" instead of being "fraught with background": "the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless." Perhaps true on the whole, but I'm not so certain that's the case here in this felicitous conflation of warrior and artist. The poem itself was likely sung to the accompaniment of a lyre—savvily, Elizabeth brought an autoharp to our first session, so that our crew could strum along while she recited. The epic is lyrical. What a wonderfully self-conscious moment, then, to say that Odysseus re-familiarizing himself with his bow is somehow akin to a singer tuning a harp (and to say this via lyrics themselves performed with a lyre). As Shakespeare's Ulysses puts it, when discussing "degree" (order and hierarchy), "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows." Odysseus' kingdom is a mess; it's out of tune. It's time to re-pair it. And the power compressed in the singular stringing of that bow chimes with the power compressed within the poet's lyre. Pluck it, and the string sings. 

(p.s. an enigmatic line from the later Greek philosopher Heraclitus (who thought Homer should be flogged) also fixes upon this productive tautness: "that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre" and elsewhere: "the name of the bow is life, but its work is death.")

Teller of Tales

The voyage begins . . . Elizabeth read two different versions of the opening of The Odyssey (although we debated over a snack: where does it all really begin? with the fall of Troy? all the way back to Peleus and Thetis' marriage?), the crew discussed future possible projects (proposals include a performance, costumes, and a scratch-and-sniff Zeus ["he smells like blood"]) and undertook a series of art projects to enliven the basement space (consensus: it's underwater, hence many fishes). Everyone selected books from our collective library to dip into between now and our next gathering.

Kirk Doulysses

You'd think that The Odyssey would be ripe material for a terrific Hollywood film -- just imagine of all the opportunities for special effects, violent encounters, and culturally justified partial nudity. We haven't yet seen the 1997 television miniseries by Andrei Konchalovsky, which has a marquee cast: Armand Assante as Odysseus, Greta Scacchi as Penelope, Isabella Rossellini as Athena, and Bernadette Peters as Circe.

We started, instead, by viewing an Italian production from 1954, starring a pre-Spartacus Kirk Douglas. It's predictably forgettable -- bad dubbing, wooden dialogue, low-budget sets, and lots of dubious plot modifications. As the New York Times review snarkily observed upon its release, "Franco Interlenghi is vapid as the son Telemachus, and Anthony Quinn is virtually a nobody as one of the suitors who hang around. Rossana Podesta is pretty as the Phaeacian princess whom Ulysses almost weds, but her personality and performance are on a par with those of the Goldwyn girls."

One innovation by the screenwriters (including Ben Hecht!) was to conflate the roles of Circe and Calypso. This seductive sorceress, played by Silvana Mangano (Dino de Laurentiis' wife), was also double cast as Ulysses' long-enduring Penelope. Here's their first encounter. Don't know whether that resemblance between these women makes Ulysses more or less culpable for his long sojourn with divine paramours before returning to Ithaca.

Rewriting the Odyssey's episodes

From Scott: 

What I think is most promising about taking the Odyssey as our point of departure is that this story has been retold and reshaped across three millenia, whether in later translations, adaptations or spin-offs. To cite only a few examples from the last century: Sarah just read a Margaret Atwood novel written from the perspective of Penelope; James Joyce's  "Ulysses" is a modern transposition of the narrative into 1904 Dublin; "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" loosely follows the Odyssey's episodic structure. And it's this very episodic quality that I think makes it particularly open to revision: discrete plots (Telemachus' journey; the sojourns with Circe and Calypso; the encounters with various monsters and gods) each have their own internal coherence.

To what extent Homer was an individual figure remains a matter for scholarly debate. It's arguable that the composition of the epic itself was crafted in bits and assembled over time by various poets, who in retrospect came to be known as a composite "Homer" -- as Vico put it, "the Greek people were themselves 'Homer.'" One suggestive take on this topic looks at some medieval fragments of the poem, and speculates that "the poems were performed and recorded with a considerable amount of fluidity in antiquity. . . . In such a tradition no poem is ever composed, performed, or recorded in exactly the same way twice. In the earliest stages of the Iliad and Odyssey, each performance would have resulted in an entirely new composition."

In many respects, our children undertaking this Odyssey will be continuing a tradition of recreation that goes back to the compositional origins of the epic itself, recreating their own versions of the story in art and song and performance.

We can't wait for this week's first gathering of the crew!

An Odyssey odyssey

In the fall of 2011, R. became very interested in Odysseus. We read many different versions of the story and she was taken by the many characters—gods and goddesses, mortals, and monsters alike—and their adventures: love, war, disguises, trials and escapes from danger.

At the same time, we found Elizabeth—our new childcare provider extraordinaire. Elizabeth has a background in art, and is in the process of getting her teaching certificate. She gets along splendidly with R., and their time together has been much more than just baby-sitting.

It clicked that Elizabeth would be the perfect guide for an odyssey of our own.

A little background: A number of years ago, Scott and I were completely enthralled as our friend Helen told us about her experience teaching The Odyssey to small children in her classroom in Iowa City. The type of approach she used seemed a great way for kids to fully explore classic literature. (Thanks Helen!) Last year, in a very Reggio Emilio inspired way, R. formed a deep and lasting relationship with A Midsummer Night's Dream. We read many versions and adaptations of the play, did art, saw dance and theatre performances, and made costumes. When her interest shifted to Odysseus, we thought: Why not take her interest to the next level and create a child-led learning experience with other children?

So off we go!

We've invited a number of other children to join in. Next Wednesday kicks off the Odyssey odyssey. We will be posting weekly, so that when we are lost in our journey at sea, we can look back to see from where we've come.