On the Traces of Ulysses, in 20th Century Literature

Cuentan que Ulises, harto de prodigios,/ Lloró de amor al divisar su Itaca/ Verde y humilde. El arte es esa Itaca/ De verde eternidad, no de prodigios (Jorge Luis Borges, in Arte Poética, 1960).

Ithaca and Utopia

Already in antiquity, an allegorical interpretation of Ulysses’ voyage was given, of course with reference to Homer’s epic Odyssey; in particular, by the Greek Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus in the Enneads, 1.6.8 16-21: ?How truly might someone exhort us, “Let us, then, fly to our dear country.” What therefore is this flight, and how shall we escape, like Odysseus in the story, from the enchantments of Circe and Calypso? There it tells symbolically how he remained unsatisfied although pleasant spectacles met his eyes and he was surrounded with all the beauty of sense. Our Fatherland is that country whence we came, and there our Father dwells. What, then, are the means for our escape thither? Our feet will not take us there, for all they can do is to carry us from one part of the earth to another. Nor will it avail to make ready horses for a chariot or ships on the sea: all these things we must let go. We must not even look, but with our eyes all but closed we must exchange our earthly vision for another, and awaken that, a vision which all possess but few use? (translated by the Editors of The Shrine of Wisdom: Surrey, England, 1955).

No wonder, if even in 20th century literature there are relevant metaphorical interpretations, not always so idealistic as we have read in Plotinus’ chapter on “Beauty.” First of all, the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, in his famous Ithaca (1910-11): “As you set out for Ithaca/ hope that your journey is a long one,/ full of adventure, full of discovery./ Laistrygonians and Cyclops,/ angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them:/ you’ll never find things like that on your way/ as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,/ as long as a rare sensation/ touches your spirit and your body./ Laistrygonians and Cyclops,/ wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them/ unless you bring them along inside your soul,/ unless your soul sets them up in front of you./ […]/ Keep Ithaca always in your mind./ Arriving there is what you’re destined for./ But don’t hurry the journey at all./ Better if it lasts for years,/ so that you’re old by the time you reach the island,/ wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,/ not expecting Ithaca to make you rich./ Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey./ Without her you would have not set out./ She has nothing left to give you now” (in Collected Poems, trans. E. Keeley and P. Sherrard: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Indeed, some Platonism is still present in Cavafy’s verse. Rather than abstract idealism, that’s nostalgic idealization, though. A kind of it, which we might call nostalgia for the future; or, better, for a full present. If Plotinus’ horizon was a metaphysical one – and later, with Thomas More, it will grow an utopian one –, Cavafy’s horizon is here and now, perceived no longer in a transcendental but mainly in an existential way. Moreover, it has not only a temporal but also a spatial dimension. So much, that its poetical expression may sound in syntony with an aphorism by the German Romantic poet Novalis: “Philosophy is authentic homesickness, an instinct driving to be at home everywhere” (Miscellaneous Fragments n. 45, 1798). In this paradoxical sense, the last lines of Cavafy’s poem should be read: “And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you./ Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,/ you will have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.”

Searching for Ulysses

No doubt, for Cavafy, who lived at Alexandria of Egypt, that archetypal dimension was Mediterranean, such as we can read else evoked in Introduction à la poétique Arabe, collection of critical essays by the Syro-Lebanese ?Ali Ahmad Sa?id Isbir “Adonis”. For him, the most important living Arabic poet, we deal with a sort of collective and cultural unconscious, like that psychoanalyzed by Carl G. Jung: “After the Mediterranean tradition, life is a broad field, for human knowledge. This fertile field contains all the seeds of progression, such as we may discern expressed in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in Homer’s Odyssey (yet, really is Sindbad so different from the Sumerian Gilgamesh, or from a Greek Ulysses re-narrated in Arabic?) […] This civilization is that, which was born in the Mediterranean East” (Paris and Arles: éditions Sindbad-Actes Sud, 1985; my translation).

In his later volume of essays entitled The Black Ocean (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2005; in Arabic), Adonis will be far less optimistic, especially for well known historical and political reasons. Nevertheless, here we feel more interested in him as a contemporary poet, and in his literary revisitations of the ancient character of Ulysses/Odysseus. In his early collection Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, published at Beirut in 1961, two short poems at least were dedicated to the Homeric hero. The enigmatic title of one of them is “A Land of No Return”: “Even if you return, o, Odysseus;/ even if spaces close around you,/ and the guide is burnt to ashes/ in your bereaved face/ or your friendly terror,/ you will remain a history of wandering,/ you will remain in a land of no promise,/ you will remain in a land of no return./ Even if you return,/ o, Odysseus” (translated from Arabic by Kamal Abu-Deeb).

Adonis’ Ulysses may be an exile abroad, but also exiled in his own homeland. As an intellectual outsider, he can never actually return, nor can escape his wandering destiny, be it real or virtual. And, in the poem titled “Odysseus”, he himself declares to be a new Ulysses and a minor Homer at once: “My name is Odysseus./ I come from a land with no bounds,/ carried on people’s backs./ I was lost here, was lost there,/ with my verse./ And here I am, in the terror and withering,/ knowing neither how to stay/ nor how to return” (trans. K. Abu-Deeb). Nonetheless elsewhere, in the poem “In Search of Ulysses”, the mythic personage recovers something of an emblematic and mystical halo: “Wandering in sulphur caves,/ I catch sparks/ and come by mysteries in clouds of incense/ and under the nails of spirits.// I look for Ulysses:/ perhaps he will raise his days for me/ like a ladder./ Perhaps he will speak to me/ and will say what the waves don’t know” (translation by Piero Boitani).

Labyrinth and Navigation

The Alexandria of Cavafy, the Beirut of Adonis... Now, it’s the time of another Mediterranean seaport: then, the cosmopolitan and polyglot Trieste. There, the Italian poet Umberto Saba was born and from 1919 became owner of an antiquarian bookstore, in the same street and next door to where his Irish friend James Joyce had long lived and worked, teaching English. As a Jew, his life under the Fascist dictatorship wasn’t easy at all, but after the World War II Saba could publish the almost complete collection of his poems, entitled Canzoniere. Composed in 1946, the lyric “Ulysses” was added as its conclusion. Even if the author lived and wrote eleven years more, this verse can be considered a farewell to a troubled existence, as well as a full immersion into the memories of his young age.

“In my youth I sailed/ the Dalmatian coast. Tiny islands/ rose from the surface of the waves, covered/ with algae, slippery, beautiful as emeralds in the sun,/ where an occasional bird paused searching for prey./ When the high tide and night submerged them,/ sails under wind dispersed offshore/ to escape the peril. Today my kingdom/ is that no man‘s land. The port/ lights its lamps for others; still driving me on/ to the open sea, my unbroken spirit/ and the aching love of life”: this is an English translation of Saba’s “Ulysses”, published by G. Hochfield and L. Nathan in Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. 493). Although the projection of Ulysses by Cavafy, all the more those by Adonis and Saba, possess personal distinctive features, what we may notice is a shared one: all those authors – the emigrant Cavafy, the exile Adonis, the persecuted Saba – were outsiders, with respect to their original society and mentality.

In part, their cosmopolitanism is an individual choice; at the starting point of their not only mental itinerary, that had been also the outcome of a social conditioning and cultural necessity. What can introduce a short treatment of the writer, who is most usually associated with the Ulyssean archetype, by literary critics and historians. Obviously enough, we are speaking of Joyce, the author who above all in his novel Ulysses called such a prototype out of too easy classicistic stereotypes. Yet, we should consider how the metaphor of a conscientious navigation isn’t unique, in Joyce’s complex poetics. His previous one, specifically in the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is that of an existential labyrinth, within which the rebel Stephen Dedalus is looking for his way to the deconstruction-reconstruction of a non-conformist subject. There, he already denounces which the main obstacles may be, for a virtual sailor like him: “You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to flight by those nets. [...] I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.”

History, Like a Nightmare

Alter ego of the author, Stephen Dedalus reappears as one of the protagonists, in the novel Ulysses. Despite all appearances, we might seriously wonder if this isn’t the most political narrative in 20th century fiction, for instance when he pronounces a cryptic, highly debated phrase: “History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (second chapter). Athough the 24 hours story is set in the seaport of Dublin, in 1904, Joyce wrote his work later, published soon after the World War I. So, there are few doubts that the above sentence indirectly alludes to modern or contemporary history. It reflects a harsh disillusion, concerning European and Western history, formerly perceived as a rational project or proposed as a progressive utopia. Worse than a crisis, now it seemed to be a failure.

That’s one of the possible reasons, why Joyce’s Ithaca is reconstructed in his memory of his native town, but this time with no idealism nor idealization. Not so differently from Cavafy, Adonis and Saba, he spent most of his life as an expatriate. Trieste, Paris and Zurich, are the places where he lived longer abroad. Probably, Trieste is the city he loved most, for somehow it could remind him of Dublin, almost a Mediterranean version of the latter. It’s also true, even more than with Ulysses, who gave the title to his major work, he liked to identify himself with Daedalus, mythic builder of the Labyrinth, who later got imprisoned in and had to escape from it, flying over the blue waves by his artificial wings.

In Joyce’s novel, Ulysses is symbolically impersonated by Leopold Bloom. He is an anti-hero, the other protagonist of an every and one day anti-story. As a Jewish petty bourgeois, he was an outsider too in that society and mentality, anyway. Partly, his figure may have been inspired by that of Joyce’s best friend in Trieste, the Italian and Jewish novelist Aron Hector Schmitz/Italo Svevo (author of Zeno’s Conscience). Furthermore, this memorial and fictional story seems to work as a way, for awakening from the “nightmare of history”, in a perspective of improbable redemption. At those times, the Ulysses occurred to be charged with obscenity. Indeed, if we glimpse back into the 20th century, our impression might be that nothing so obscene as its history has ever been acted on the world stage.

Romantic Hero, or “Gerund Merchant”?

Daedalus is not only the name of the architect of the fabulous but original Labyrinth. In Italian, a tongue which Joyce knew very well, sometimes the term dedalo is used to designate a labyrinth or maze in itself. Likewise, Odysseus is not only himself as a Mediterranean archetype. He is the whole Odyssey, with all its various and troubled navigation. Otherwise, Joyce’s Ulysses is Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom at the same time. Daedalus and Odysseus respectively, they are two half portraits of the author as a young and a ripe man, who go on dialoguing in his mature literary production. Dedalus the romantic artist, who opposes his art to history, and Bloom a realistic merchant or – better to say, if referred to Joyce – the “gerund merchant”, according to a witty but sharp definition which his old friend Italo Svevo gave of him in a famed lecture held at Milan in 1927.

What the Triestine writer meant is that Joyce/Dedalus was perhaps successful in his “flight by those nets” as nationality and religion, but not really as language. After all, Hector Schmitz himself had similar problems, in his conversion from German to Italian, as writing language, and a clue to this may be read in his pen name: Italo Svevo, meaning Italian-German. As to the Irish Joyce and his conflictual relationship with languages, once paradoxically one of the most important English writers in the latest century – as he was – ironically wrote in a letter to Fanny Guillermet: “Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives” (Zurich, 5 September 1918).

Unfortunately, Joyce/Dedalus wasn’t ready to appreciate irony by others, even presumed “alter egos”. In particular, he didn’t like that of Svevo/Bloom about him. So much, that he wrote in the most ambiguous and disconcerting of his letters, to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 20 September 1928, from Paris: “Poor Italo Svevo was killed on Thursday last in a motor accident. I have no details yet only a line from my brother and so I am waiting before I write to his widow. Somehow in the case of Jews I always suspect suicide though there was no reason in his case especially since he came into fame, unless his health had taken a very bad turn. I was very sorry to hear of it but I think his last five or six years were fairly happy.” Like the Ulysses of Dante or Tennyson, James didn’t die in his Ithaca/Dublin, but at Zurich in 1941, while the new nightmare of World War II was raging all around him.

Penelope’s Nightmare

With the exceptions of Plotinus’ disdainful mentions of Circe and Calypso, or those of the novelist Fanny Guillermet and the feminist Harriet Shaw Weaver, to whom Joyce addressed his letters, the above popularizing survey is lacking in female figures. Thus, we had better look for someone, who strove to interpret a relevant female feeling or gaze at least. In 20th century literature, reliably that’s the case of the Greek Yiannis Ritsos, in his 1968 poem “Penelope’s Despair”. Yet, this title itself may announce how the poet’s view is a disenchanted, nearly tragic one. His Penelope appears very different from that created by Homer; even from Molly Bloom, analogous character in Joyce’s Ulysses. Better to say, she sounds such, for Ritsos’ verse is a quasi-monologue by Penelope herself, after her husband’s return to Ithaca and that the romantic hero has revealed to be a blood-thirsty veteran:

?It wasn’t that she didn’t recognise him in the light from the hearth: it wasn’t/ the beggar’s rags, the disguise – no. The signs were clear:/ the scar on his knee, the pluck, the cunning in his eye. Frightened,/ her back against the wall, she searched for an excuse,/ a little time, so she wouldn’t have to answer,/ give herself away. Was it for him, then, that she’d used up twenty years,/ twenty years of waiting and dreaming, for this miserable/ blood-soaked, white-bearded man? She collapsed voiceless into a chair,/ slowly studied the slaughtered suitors on the floor as though seeing/ her own desires dead there. And she said “Welcome,”/ hearing her voice sound foreign, distant. In the corner, her loom/ covered the ceiling with a trellis of shadows; and all the birds she’d woven/ with bright red thread in green foliage, now,/ on this night of the return, suddenly turned ashen and black,/ flying low on the flat sky of her final enduring? (trans. Edmund Keeley, in The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).

Evidently, Ulysses portrayed by Ritsos, imagined to be seen through Penelope’s eyes, is a sum of contradictions which can be attributed to a heroic male subject, in the mainstream of Western – not only Western, indeed – literary tradition. In her 1974 Circe: Mud Poems, Margaret Atwood will be even more severe with Ulysses, seen through Circe’s eyes. Yet, here, let’s limit ourselves to comment Ritsos’ poetical criticism. May a generous, idealized and wandering hero, get transformed into the most conformist and cruel of sedentary monsters, once back at his beloved home, be it called fatherland or motherland? Was his vengeance a legitimate reaction, or mostly an arbitrary violence? Unluckily, already the last books of Homer’s Odyssey could give Ritsos some suggestions in the latter sense. And this is a moral reason, why Ulysses can’t yet rest. According with The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, 1938 epic by the Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis, Odysseus’ return to Ithaca is but the next departure for a further trip of discovery, this time in quest of his truer self.

Calypso’s Gift

In Homer’s narration, during seven years Ulysses was kept by Calypso’s love to him. Eventually, not even her promise of the gift of immortality could detain him any longer. Such is the subject matter in the tale “The Island”, which the Italian writer Cesare Pavese imagined set in the isle of Ogygia (in his Dialogues with Leuco, 1947). Prior to the departure of the mariner from there, the goddess tries to convince him to remain: “Since you arrived, you brought another island in you. [...] What do you care, if the isle is not that, you were searching for? Here anything never happens. Just a piece of earth and a horizon. Yet, this is where you can live for ever.” Ulysses doesn’t change his will. Then, Calypso resorts to an ironical argument: “The past can’t return. Nothing resists the lapsing of time. You have seen the ocean, the monsters, the Elysium. After all that, are you sure to succeed in recognizing your house?” And Ulysses replies: “You have said it, I carry my island inside of me.” At last, the nymph in love formulates a premonition, sounding like a curse: “You will find it so changed, as to appear lost and mute. Just a sound of sea among the rocks, or a thread of smoke. None will be able to share this with you. Your house will look like the face of an old guy, since your words have got a sense, which is other than theirs. Then you will feel alone, worse than in the midst of sea. [...] What did, till now, your disquiet wandering mean?” And Ulysses, the cunning sophist: “If I knew that, I already stopped and stayed.”

The goddess knows, the mortal hero has learnt, that isle he carries in mind as an image of destination has no name. His homesickness is nostalgia in itself or, we might say, nostalgia for nostalgia. Despite this awareness, he must go on, there is no other plausible way. Even a disillusion in Ithaca would be better, than the illusion of Ogygia. As an experienced man, he possesses a lot of good and bad qualities, but the presumption to feel godlike. As an exceptional one, rather he is an antagonist to gods (such as Pavese’s “Odysseus” is, in some Nietzschean sense). And, as prospected by Calypso at least, immortality is a parody of men’s predisposition to transcend their limits, which in Ulysses is exalted to a high degree. Anyhow, his nostalgia for its own sake makes him not only a “transcendental” but also a transgressive figure (as Dante, in his Inferno, had guessed long before). That’s development and fulfilment of a sapiential precept: “Know yourself.”

Once, the Pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus had hermetically written: “Nature loves to hide.” What’s also a secret of its power of seduction, originating every production or reproduction on earth. In the Hellenistic Egypt, the goddess Isis was represented fully veiled, as symbolic of a mysterical knowledge. This veiling and unveiling is an archetypal dynamism, rooted in the Mediterranean and Hellenic culture. In the Odyssey, the deity Calypso wasn’t only a character, but also the personification of a subliminal conceit. In Greek her name means the “concealer”, or she who veils and hides, as well as kálymma was the female veil then used in Greece. Likely, her magic faculty to veil and unveil has something to do with the gift of immortality, refused by a “human, all too human” Ulysses. And her kálypsis, “concealment”, was functional to an apokálypsis, ultimate “revelation”.