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.