Search Results

This chapter analyzes various characters from Greek myth who illustrate the dynamics of satirical interaction. It examines in particular the complicated tradition that pits Odysseus and the Cyclops Polyphemus against each other. The versions found in Homer, Theocritus (6 and 11), Euripides' and Philoxenus' Cyclops are discussed. The argument here develops some of the principles articulated in Chapter 3, that an audience's perception of what constitutes satire will depend on the ways in which poets manipulate narratological perspective and moral pretenses of their characters.

This chapter examines Joyce’s inscription of Roger Casement in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. In particular, it argues that Joyce figures through Casement both a complex critique of British imperialism that avoids the pitfalls of reactionary nationalism and a progressive model of national affiliation and belonging. The chapter suggests that Casement’s homoerotic writings and his “Speech from the Dock” are important, if oblique, references for Joyce, who glimpses in them a progressive worldview.

This chapter warns of possible errors in the future. Fukushima is the apocalypse to what was Hiroshima. By using atomic power, it becomes possible to dissuade confrontation, and hail this as a strategy toward achieving peace, toward balancing and stopping terror. But this weapon of dissuasion begets in others also the desire to own and possess such weapons. This use of atomic weapons does not enhance relationships because there is no kind of relationship that exists to speak when everything is confronted with nuclear weapons as deterrents. It is not like David and Goliath, nor Ulysses and the Cyclops. This kind of balance destroys any and all relationships as there is no longer confrontation, as it is already so much dependent on human will to command. A little mistake or the proverbial mad scientist can end it all. This situation is therefore beyond anything calculable as the effects of the decision itself would be immense.

This chapter analyses the encounter between Odysseus and the Cyclops Polyphemus in Book 9 of the Odyssey, in terms of the pair’s linguistic capabilities. It states that the discussion of this episode points to several recurring themes in the book: the opposing views of society as either deteriorating from a golden age of long ago or progressing from primitive beginnings, the importance of society and technical skills for linguistic development, the relation between language and diet, speech as a unique human capacity, and the meaning of names. It demonstrates how that many implicit assumptions about language and civilisation held by the Greeks are already found in this passage of Homer.

The colourful career of the Cyclops in literary history strikingly exemplifies the complexities of Homeric reception. This chapter illustrates the value of narratological strategies, which have made such a vast contribution to the understanding of classical literature. It also suggests the value of extending narratology, and integrating it further with other types of criticism.

“Ulysses” in Progress treats James Joyce's novel as a monument. Not unusually for a manuscript study from 1977, this work was researched and written in ignorance of anything that might be called “theory,” and its facts were gathered and presented as part of an argument that took for granted the unity of the published Ulysses and the secondary position of the prepublication documents in relation to the finished book. In arguing that Joyce wrote Ulysses in three stages—early, middle, and last—”Ulysses” in Progress adopted a resolutely teleological model of Joyce's writing. The Ulysses avant-texte, and especially that of the “Cyclops” episode, offers a gold mine of material for these purposes.

Revisiting the manuscripts acquired a new urgency and excitement in 2002 when the National Library of Ireland announced its acquisition of previously unavailable documents, including an early draft of part of “Cyclops” as well as several new gatherings of notes. Before the National Library acquired its manuscripts, notes for Ulysses were extant mainly in the notesheets at the British Library and in two notebooks at Buffalo, as well as in a few other documents. To these gatherings can be added four more notebooks. The first of these is earlier than the other three. Joyce labeled its pages by topic—Simon, Leopold, Stephen, Jesus, Theosophy, Irish, Jews, Weininger, Words, and others—rather than by Ulysses episode, as was his practice in the other three and also the British Library notesheets and a Buffalo notebook from late in his work on Ulysses.

Ulysses is among the most open-ended and naturalistic of novels, but it is striking how frequently James Joyce resorted to the theater — and to the melodramatic idiom in particular — to create moments of intensity and smaller climaxes that offer local and intermittent drama even if Ulysses as a whole does not. This chapter discusses the literary intertexts of Ulysses and explores how James Joyce adopts not just the structural elements but also the ethos and affective characteristics of nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama. Drawing on the work of Robert Heilman, it argues that melodrama tends to be monopathic, that is, to insist upon intense but unmixed emotion, and also to give precedence to politics and action within the world. Heilman's attachment of melodrama to politics, social action, and right and wrong gives us considerable purchase on the melodramatic qualities of “Cyclops.” The chapter provocatively speculates that Joyce may have gravitated toward melodrama in the later episodes of Ulysses, especially “Cyclops” and “Circe,” as a reaction against the now hampering constraints of the modernist aesthetic.

This chapter presents a study on the effects of total monocular loss, compared with only partial loss brought about by cataract, strabismus, etc. It also emphasizes the psychophysical and oculomotor characteristics of the patients and the consequences of one-eyed vision. Psychophysical measures of form, motion, and depth perception, and the optokinetic eye movements of the patients are also presented, together with information on the egocenter.

Introducing the volume’s examination of anticolonial and postcolonial responses to the Homeric Odyssey, the chapter considers why the epic has been of such interest to artists of the African diaspora. Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Haitian Revolution is seen as a precursor to these modern works, just as the Trojan War is the precursor to the Odyssey. The place of Martin Bernal’s influential Black Athena is assessed, and the reasons for the centrality of Cyclops to postcolonial responses to the Odyssey are examined. The oppression enacted by the imposition of the colonizer’s language is discussed, and the resistance against this is considered, not least by the contemporary writer Junot Díaz who himself engages with Césaire and Ellison, as well as with Homer.

Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) is a landmark poem for anticolonialism, spearheaded by the Négritude movement of which he was a founder. It is also one of the first works to bring explicit anticolonial issues of race and oppression to its response to the Odyssey. Trained in classics, Césaire both appropriates and subverts the Odyssey, not least in his response to the Homeric Cyclops and katabasis. He redefines the roles and moral perspective of the Cyclops incident, and throughout the poem demonstrates the internal struggle of those torn between assimilation and breaking free from the yoke of colonialism.

Harris’s novel The Mask of the Beggar appropriates and reinterprets Homer’s Odyssey. This chapter engages with Harris’s underlying philosophy developed throughout his long literary career, paying particular attention to his emphasis on building cross-cultural bridges between peoples. The role performed by Wilson’s trope of the beggar’s mask within the novel is considered, relating it to Odysseus’s humble disguise on Ithaca. His complex use of a Cyclopean motif is explicated, and the way in which his work engages with and contests Bakhtin’s theories of polyphony and the novel, is considered. In addition, an early, little-known drama of Harris’s is seen to have had a direct influence on Derek Walcott when he came to write Omeros.

Chapter two reconfigures the opposition between modernism’s aesthetic individualism and postcolonialism’s political collectivism by analyzing what I call, borrowing from Walter Benjamin, Joyce’s mediated solidarity with the Irish people. Mediated solidarity entails a critique but not an outright rejection of solidarity, both national and international, particularly when expressions of solidarity rely on rather than contest practices of self-deception. Joyce treated the self-deceptions of individual desire and collective national fantasies as chimeras with the potential to deflate the grandiose comparative claims of Irish revivalism. In a rejoinder to revivalism’s politically specious comparisons, Joyce developed his own techniques of international comparison in his fiction – techniques this chapter gathers under the heading “alternating asymmetry.” Its claim is that Joyce developed strategies of uneven and disproportionate comparison in order to explore the psychological and material effects of colonialism on ordinary Irish people and, further, to propose that the reassurances of collective solidarity do not always constitute an adequate solution to the challenges facing structurally underdeveloped communities. Eschewing narratives of progress and social acceptance for those of unlit pathways, failed unions, and betrayed friendships, Joyce brings attention to the residual inequalities and exclusions haunting nationalist and transnationalist projects of political unification from postcolonial Ireland to the continental fellowship of Europe.

Chapter 4 takes as its point of departure one single line from the “Cyclops” section of Ulysses about an elephant called Jumbo. It follows Jumbo the elephant through a thicket of cultural history in the 1880s to discover the elephant as a symbol of imperial ambition, of the carnivalesque and the tragic, of a Victorian age. The approach to Jumbo the Elephant reveals a way in to Joyce through exhumation, through the recovery of a world that has been lost, just as Ulysses is a recovery of a pre-war world.

Chapter 1 is about ideas: it shows their importance, neglected by the literature as well as by Kant himself at various stages of his thought, and their difference from concepts. This chapter focuses on the relation between ideas and limits and shows the importance of the latter, which is often misunderstood as simply negative. It shows a tension between two images of reason to be found in the Architectonic: reason as a seed from which an organism grows internally as a systematically articulated unity, and reason as an architect who plans the edifice of reason’s laws. This tension reflects the two mirror sides of ideas. They are both a totalizing drive based on reason’s need to project a whole as a unitary scope for its objects and a necessary guide for reason’s activities. Chapter 1 shows the necessity of a comprehensive gaze that only the philosopher can aspire to. Failing this we are (in an image used by Kant) like Cyclopes.

Odysseus’ blinding of the Cyclops by a combination of μῆτις‎ and βίη‎ continues the debate on the qualities needed for success initiated in the songs of Demodocus. The uncultivated Cyclopes reflect a reversed image of their relatives, the super-civilized Phaeacians. The mirror of the Cyclopeia simultaneously reflects the suitors (Model A) and Odysseus himself (Model B). In Model A, the suitors parallel the Cyclops as Odysseus’ adversary. No One is the false name by which Odysseus tricks the Cyclops: the suitors fear no one. Their consumption of Odysseus’ flocks and herds corresponds to the Cyclops’ consumption of Odysseus’ companions. Both they and the Cyclops are killed while under the influence of wine. In Model B, Odysseus returns, like the Cyclops, to find intruders consuming his resources. Odysseus confronts the suitors from the doorway of his hall in a near theophany parodied by the blinded Cyclops in his cave doorway.

This chapter is concerned with a strand of imagery in Greek literature which conjures up open-air scenarios as settings for the symposion. It takes as its point of departure that other, better-known, imaginative scenario, the symposion at sea, and discusses examples of this trope in sympotic poetry (especially Alcaeus) as well as in other genres (especially Choerilus). It then goes on to argue that the symposion en plein air acted as a similar conceit by tracing its use in later sources which play on the sympotic tradition (Lucian, Plato, Aristophanes, Euripides) before offering a detailed discussion of its use by Alcaeus.

This chapter examines the interrelationship between one general and one specific feature of Greek myth. The general feature concerns mythical homonyms. The specific feature concerns the landscapes within which ancient narrators located the Cyclopes. Attempts have often been made to differentiate between types of Cyclopes: the builders, the blacksmiths, and the pastoral ogres. As notable as the differences, however, are the overlaps. In particular, one constellation of symbols is shared by the blacksmiths and the ogres: this characterizes Etna as a place where fire and liquid coalesce. For the blacksmiths, such a coalescing is what forging metal implies. For the ogres, from Euripides and Theocritus to Virgil and Ovid, Etna’s streams of fire come increasingly to serve as a symbolically significant landscape. Consideration of this question also raises interesting issues about the place of Sicily as a whole in the Greek imaginaire.

This chapter examines the figure of Odysseus and argues that he came from ancient tradition but was at first a trickster, celebrated for ingenuity and guile. As the saga of the Trojan War developed, taking in heroes from other legendary contexts, Odysseus became attached to it as the man who devised the Wooden Horse and so brought about the final victory. He was also made the hero of two folk-tale narratives that came to Greece from abroad: the stories of the Blinded Cyclops and of the Returning Husband. The attachment of the latter story to Odysseus laid the basis for the first Odyssey, a generation or two before the one we have.

Chapter 3 begins, by way of introduction, with an outline of the historical context of the Homeric poems. An account is given of the scholarly debates about their authorship and historicity. The chapter interprets key episodes of the Odyssey: Kalypso, the Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops, the Underworld, and the Sirens. It discusses the Greek warrior ethic and tries to determine the nature of Odysseus as a model hero. It is shown that in the different stories it is possible to discern the Greek view of civilization in contrast to nature. For example, the Cyclops Polyphemus, who represents nature, has, for example, no agriculture or shipbuilding. Although physically much larger and stronger than Odysseus and his men, he is overcome by Odysseus’ knowledge that comes from civilized life in a community. Similarly, the satisfied yet bovine life of the Lotus-Eaters and the victims of the Sirens is rejected in favor of the life of struggle and hardship, which constitutes the true human lot and gives human existence its meaning.