As readers of Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses will quickly become aware (if they are not already), there is a bursting two and a half millennia tradition of commenting upon, translating, and re-creating Homer’s great epic, the Odyssey. As readers will also learn, the reception of this great work has not been limited merely to scholars and intellectuals, to monographs and academic journals. Far from it. The Odyssey has inspired and prompted reactions from artists and thinkers in virtually every creative field, and in virtually every medium. Indeed Homer’s poem — which is centered around nostos — contains a seemingly unlimited well of ideas, sentiments, and issues from which all of us can draw upon as we analyze our own separate lives as well the broader world in which those lives take place.
Published in 2008, there are surely hundreds of more examples which could now be added to the large number of works mentioned in Hall’s book. Earlier this year, the acclaimed novelist Madeline Miller’s Circe gave to readers a new and fascinating spin on one of the Odyssey’s most well-known characters. In the previous year, the scholar Emily Wilson translated the Odyssey — the first woman, ever, to produce an English translation of the work.
Interaction with Homer’s epic, then, shows no signs of slowing down. And in an age where myriad hot-button issues dominate headlines and media virtually everyday — consider multiculturalism, gender equality, and immigration — the Odyssey has just as much to say to us now as perhaps it ever has. This is all the more true if robust dialogue about the Odyssey’s central themes and issues are able to take place.
Hall’s book, for all of these reasons, is an important and highly useful one. Its aims are primarily twofold: to highlight some of the artists (and their creative works) who have found inspiration in the Odyssey; and to survey the many and varied strands of thought — social, cultural, psychological, political — which the Odyssey has, for millennia, generated through its subject matter.
Often, of course, the two things mentioned above go hand in hand. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man — a work which receives much attention in Hall’s book — was not only a supremely creative act, but it trenchantly addressed some of the problems and dilemmas faced by the African American man in modern America. There are many others examples of this kind in Hall’s book — examples, that is, where Homer has provided an artist with an outline and set of ideas with which to work, and which are then creatively transformed by the artist in order to tackle his or her own social, political, personal, or creative interests. As all of the chapters in Hall’s book evince, the permutations on the Odyssey’s content are virtually endless.
Indeed Hall, throughout the book, gives readers a taste of the vast smorgasbord of art and opinion that have resulted from engagement with Homer’s epic. Each of the book’s fifteen chapters is titled with a theme — e.g., “Facing Frontiers” and “Women’s Work” — and then proceeds to dilate on some of the many ways Homer’s poem has served as a conduit in which to think about such seminal issues. Many readers will be glad to discover that Hall gives attention to both high and low art, to the recent as well the distant past, and to views both mainstream and fringe.
But there is a downside to tackling such a large amount of material; indeed the book’s biggest weakness, by far, is its organization and tempo. Because there are so many references, so many partially summarized works, so many strands of thought taking place immediately one after the other, it can sometimes be difficult to meaningfully digest the material. At its most extreme, such information overload results not in an elucidating picture of the cultural history of the Odyssey, but rather a disjointed and jarring one. Hall has given us a great deal in this book — there is no doubt about that — but at a cost which seems steep in terms of a cogent reading experience.
To be sure, there times when Hall slows down and expounds for half a page or more on a specific work, scholarly strand of opinion, or particular way in which the Odyssey has influenced a certain time and place. In the chapter “Blood Bath,” for example, Hall offers an engrossing discussion on the parallels between Odysseus’s return to Ithaca and the experience of returning combat soldiers — those coming back from Vietnam, for instance. In the same chapter, she also shows how Book 22 of the Odyssey — its most violent book — has been tempered in recent artistic portrayals, reflecting a trend which shies away from showing such high levels of vengeance.
Readers will find other honed and insightful discussions, though they will have to wade through some mired and insubstantial ones as well. That said, no reader will close this book without having obtained an acute sense for just how much the Odyssey has meant for Western civilization.
Spectatio 