Extra-Textual Stories: The Odyssey

A couple times in the past year or two, I remembered my Extra-Textual Stories project, for which I've done only one book so far (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby).  The idea behind the project is to appreciate the story of a book as a physical object, aside from the story contained in the text on the pages.  Since 10 March is to-morrow, I felt I should restart this project with The Odyssey (for reasons that will become clear later on).

I'm pretty sure I got my copy of The Odyssey (or, I should say, my first copy of The Odyssey) at a Half Price Books in southern Iowa sometime in the early 2000s (I think 2002 or 2003).  I'd heard of The Odyssey, but I didn't really know anything about it, so essentially I got it because I felt I should have been familiar with it but wasn't (although it would still be something like ten years before I actually read it).

I don't remember how much it cost, but I do remember that it was in the Penguin Classics section, which was incentive enough to get it because the Penguin Classics always lookt really impressive lined up on a shelf.

I first read this in college (during the spring 2013 semester, I believe), but I didn't really read it for college.  I was taking a class on James Joyce's Ulysses, in which there are references to The Odyssey, but since I hadn't read The Odyssey, I didn't understand a lot of them.  So I read the book in order to understand the allusions to it.

By this time, I'd also acquired a second copy of The Odyssey (Chapman's verse translation, which I decided to get completely based on Keats' recommendation of it in his "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer").  I decided to read this Penguins Classics edition because it was a prose translation (by E.V. Rieu), which I felt would be easier to understand than a verse translation.

Apparently, I have the 1978 printing.

When I started reading it, I noticed an inscription in the front cover:

March 10th, 1979
Happy Birthday, Ken!
Love, Cynthia + Scott

I'd been oblivious to this for as long as I'd owned the book.  The prices on the back cover (with the odd exception of the cost in the U.K.) had been scratched out (after an apparently unsuccessful attempt to obscure them with blue pen), which should have been some indication that this was a gift.

So now when it's 10 March, I sometimes think of the Ken to whom my copy of The Odyssey is inscribed and wonder whatever happened to him (and what sort of person he was to sell a book that was given to him as a birthday present with a lovely inscription in the front cover).

Odyssean Parallels in "The Robber and His Sons" from Grimm's Fairy Tales

I recently read Grimm's Fairy Tales, and in one of them - "The Robber and His Sons" - I found a lot of Odyssean parallels.  The titular robber's sons have been thrown in jail after stealing the Queen's horse, and the robber (who's reformed and had been against his sons' plot) tells the Queen three stories of his past life as a robber in order to free them.

The robber's first story is about his attempt to steal "an immense treasure of many thousand pieces of gold and silver" from a giant.  With his men, he goes to plunder the treasure, but the giant returns and catches them.  The robber and his hundred men are divided among ten of the giants so that there are groups of ten robbers for each giant.  The giant from whom they were trying to steal takes the robber and nine other men to a cave where he eats one a day.  The robber - as the thinnest of the ten - is left for last.  The robber notices that the giant has bad eyes, so he starts scheming.  He claims he is a physician and can help the giant.  Then he "put[s] oil in a vessel and mixed in with sulphur, pitch, salt, arsenic, and other destructive ingredients, and then I put it over the fire, as if I were preparing a plaster for his eyes."  The giant loses his sight from the robber's treatment and storms around his cave, striking the floor with a club.  The robber, however, is still trapped, as "the cave was everywhere surrounded with high walls, and the doors were closed with iron bolts."  The robber disguises himself as a ram among the giant's sheep, which works for awhile, but then the giant picks the fattest of his flock (the robber in disguise) to eat.  The robber jumps out of the giant's hand and eventually escapes, "shout[ing] in a mocking tone to him that I had escaped him in spite of all."

There are more than a few similarities between the robber's story and Odysseus' experience with the Cyclops in Book IX of The Odyssey.  [The following quotes are from E.V. Rieu's translation.]

While Odysseus and his men don't have the intention to steal from the Cyclops (Odysseus even prevents his men from taking the Cyclop's cheeses:  "I was not to be persuaded.  I wished to see the owner of the cave and had hopes of some friendly gifts from my host."), they do take "some cheeses just for ourselves" and eat them while waiting for the Cyclops to return from tending his flock.

When the Cyclops returns, he seals the cave with a stone.  "It was a mighty slab, such as you couldn't have budged from the ground, not with a score of heavy four-wheeled waggons to help you."  The Cyclops doesn't show hospitality to Odysseus and his men, rather he

seized a couple [of the men] and dashed their heads against the floor as though they had been puppies.  Their brains ran out of the ground and soaked the earth.  Limb by limb he tore them to pieces to make his meal, which he devoured like a mountain lion, never pausing till entrails and flesh, marrow and bones, where all consumed.

The next day, the Cyclops "once more seized upon two of us and prepared his supper."  But meanwhile, Odysseus has been scheming.  With his men, he's sharpened a piece of timber, "poked it into the blazing fire to make it hard," and plans to "lift the pole and twist it in the Cyclops' eye when he was sound asleep."  Odysseus encourages the Cyclops to drink some wine and tells him that his name is Nobody, to which the Cyclops replies, "Of all his company I will eat Nobody last, and the rest before him.  That shall be your gift."

Odysseus' plan works, and they skewer the Cyclops' eye.  "The fiery smoke from the blazing eyeball singed his lids and brow all round, and the very roots of his eye crackled in the heat."  After complaining to his friends that "Nobody's treachery... is doing me to death," the Cyclops opens the cave and plans to catch Odysseus and company as they run out.  Odysseus ties each of his men beneath three sheep, but he hides himself under a single ram.  The Cyclops doesn't notice the men beneath the sheep, but he becomes suspicious about the ram, asking "Why are you the last of the flock to pass out of the cave, you who have never lagged behind the sheep?"  Eventually, he lets the ram go, and Odysseus frees himself and his men from their sheepy bonds.

Odysseus has to taunt the Cyclops though, even after his crew warn him not to.  While still in range of the Cyclops' hearing, Odysseus shouts back at him:  "Cyclops, if anyone ever asks you how you came by your unsightly blindness, tell him your eye was put out by Odysseus, Sacker of Cities, the son of Laertes, who lives in Ithaca."

Both stories involve an attempt at robbery, a giant, an almost-inescapable cave, the daily eating of the narrator's men (with the narrator saved for last), the putting out of an eye, hiding under a ram amid a flock of sheep, and a final taunting.  After each final taunting, the narrator is almost caught a second time.  In "The Robber and His Sons," the robber is given a ring that causes him to repeatedly say, "Here I am!" and in The Odyssey, Odysseus' shout gives the Cyclops a target to throw a rock at.

I think it's pretty clear that the story in "The Robber and His Sons" took at least a few elements from The Odyssey.

The Hobbit or The Odyssey

I recently re-read The Hobbit.  The first time I read it (in fall 2012), I hadn't read The Odyssey.  But now that I'm somewhat familiar with The Odyssey after reading it in spring 2013, I found a lot of elements in The Hobbit that resemble The Odyssey.  (It's been over a year since I last read The Odyssey, so I might be a bit vague in describing some of these connections.)

There's the obvious connection between Bilbo's journey and Odysseus' (although the same could be said for any number of adventure stories).  After all, the subtitle to The Hobbit is There and Back Again.  So, in the same way that Odysseus travels from Ithaca to the Trojan War and the back again, Bilbo travels from Bag End to the Lonely Mountain and then back again.  However, Thorin also bears some resemblance to Odysseus in that he's a king trying to regain his former position.  Additionally, both Thorin and Odysseus are trying to regain their treasure - Thorin's treasure in the actual definition, and Odysseus' more figuratively, as he's trying to get back to his wife Penelope.

Thorin is also cast in the rôle of Odysseus when he stabs one of the trolls in the eye in Chapter II.  "He caught up a big branch all on fire at one end; and Bert got that end in his eye before he could step aside."  In The Odyssey, Odysseus (with the help of his men) stabs Polyphemus in the eye with a flaming stick.

There's also a slight connection between the Lotus Eaters and the river that Bombur falls into in Chapter VIII.  After falling in, he "slept on with a smile on his fat face, as if he no longer cared for all the trouble that vexed them."  Later, in Chapter XVI, it's noted that "ever since the adventure in the forest he was always trying to recapture the beautiful dreams he had."  In The Odyssey, those who ate the lotus no longer cared about returning home.  It's not exactly the same in The Hobbit, but there is a certain similarity.

It's not surprising that Tolkien used various elements from The Odyssey in writing The Hobbit because not only was he trying to write an adventure but he was also interested in those old adventures and myths (I also have his The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún, which is based on mythology).  Naturally, parts of them would make their way into his own writing.

Lunar Weaving

James Joyce's Ulysses doesn't have very much in the way of plot, but it's certainly full of allusions.  When I read it, I think I placed more importance on figuring out the allusions than figuring out what was happening.  While writing my final paper for the class I had on it, I discovered something else interesting.

In the penultimate chapter, Molly is compared to the moon.  Among other things, the narrator mentions "her satellitic dependence:  her luminary reflection:  her constancy under all her phrases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning."  Molly is set up to be a figure who - in some respects - controls time.

Molly's parallel in The Odyssey - Penelope - also controls time in a way.  She delays her suitors by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus' father Laertes.  They agree to wait until she's finished, but she unweaves her work at the end of the day, which extends the completion for a few years.

So both Molly and Penelope are presented as figures who aren't under the strict progression of time.  Penelope is able to delay the inevitable by unweaving her shroud, and Molly is described as constant "under all her phases."  Furthermore, in the section from her perspective, specific times are not seen.  Things are relative or vaguely described.  Where both Bloom and Stephen would probably be very specific about times, Molly just says "it was 1/4 after 3."

But the connexions between Molly and Penelope do not end there.  Also significant is that they are women, which means that they can weave.  The weaving is seen literally in the case of Penelope's weaving the shroud, but the weaving is also a metaphor for creating and sustaining life.  "As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.  ...  the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time."

Molly resembles Penelope through her distance from time and her ability as a woman to metaphorically weave and create life.

Recursive and Allusive Fathers and Sons

I finally started re-reading Hamlet this week.  I've been meaning to get to it for a couple of months since Hamlet plays a big rôle in a chapter of Ulysses, which I just had a class on.  I had a notion of reading both The Odyssey and Hamlet so that it would be easier to understand what was going on in Ulysses (allusion-wise), but I made it through only The Odyssey.  So now since school's over, I decided to re-read Hamlet.  The last time I read the whole thing (which was also the first time I read the whole thing) was the summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school, which was about five years ago.  (I was supposed to have read the whole thing in my introductory English class during my freshman year of university, but I got the act and scene numbers mixed up and didn't read as much as I should have, and I never felt bad enough to go back and finish it.)

Before I actually got to start the play, I read all of the introductory material in the front of the book.  That's where I learned that Hamnet Shakespeare - Shakespeare's son whose death in some way inspired Hamlet - was born on 2 February.  Things clicked to-gether in my brain, and I actually had to stop reading because I got so excited about this.

James Joyce's birthday is 2 February.  Supposedly, so is Stephen Dedalus' - one of the main characters in Ulysses.  But what was really interesting about learning this was the whole author/book and father/son relationship combining.

In the Hamlet-centric chapter of Ulysses, Mr Best makes a pun about Hamlet and Shakespeare in French.  Hamlet is "un pièce du Shakespeare."  The play is a piece of Shakespeare in the same way that Hamnet is a piece of Shakespeare.  This involves the ideas of consubstantiality between father and son and metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls) that are central to Ulysses.  (And which I wrote my final paper about.)  Different father/son relationships are constituted by a variety of means:

• Leopold Bloom and Rudy (actual father and son) - like Hamnet, Rudy died
• Simon Dedalus and Stephen (actual father and son) - a big deal is made of their eyes' being the same, which is one of the main examples of father/son consubstantiality
• Bloom and Stephen - Bloom sort of adopts Stephen as a replacement son for Rudy; they are also described in the same way by a cabman; and Ulysses incorporates their rôles as Odysseus (Bloom) and Telemachus (Stephen) - a relationship which also resembles King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet in terms of heredity and royalty
• Paddy Dignam and Paddy Dignam (actual father and son) - this also plays with the Hamlet paradigm as both father and son have the same name and the elder of the pair dies shortly before the main action

In the paper I wrote for my class, I had intended to tie all of this father/son, consubstantiality, and metempsychosis stuff back to literature itself, but it got confusing and I never attempted it.  But from the relationship among Shakespeare, Hamnet, and Hamlet, one can see that literature acts as either a substitute or a continuation of father/son relationships.  This same type of idea is presented in The Divine Comedy, which Ulysses has many allusions to.  Virgil the poet acts as a guide to Dante.  Depending on how one looks at it, Dante could be guided by an actual person - a mentor - or he could be guided by literature itself.  Ulysses has that same idea:  people and literature can play similar rôles.

But learning that Joyce's birthday was the same as Hamnet's takes this all a step further.  Shakespeare's creation of Hamlet to - in a way - replace Hamnet is mirrored by Joyce's creation of Ulysses.  Shakespeare creates his progeny in literature because his real son has died, and then Joyce - who shares Hamnet's birthday - writes about father/son relationships and their replacement in literature.

This is the type of recursive and allusive paradigm that makes Ulysses both great fun to read and really frustrating.