και φτερά: Ο μύθος της Οδύσσειας στη λογοτεχνία και στον κινηματογράφο του μοντερνισμού by Maria Oikonomou (review)

I spurred my comrades with this brief addressto meet the journey with such eagernessthat I could hardly, then, have held them back;

and having turned our stern toward morning, wemade wings out of our oars in a wild flight

—Dante, Inferno, 26: 121–125 (Mandelbaum 1980)

In Maria Oikonomou's Κουπιά και φτερά, oars and wings are more than a titular reference to Dante's Ulysses; they are the central metonymic devices from which her study springs. Oars suggest the modern reader's attempt to navigate the protean slipperiness of myth and its meanings, while wings mark the lines of flight from early versions of the Odyssey. Using postmodern theories of intertextuality and semiotics, Oikonomou's book is one of few works that aims to influence the way we study the reception of classics. Indebted to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, her rhizomatic approach structures the book into two definable segments: genealogies of Odyssean myth and their modernist remakings. Oikonomou's theoretical and methodological approaches will challenge the reader; yet scholars of myth, modernism, and postmodern theory will find it multifaceted and stimulating.

The first section begins with the prelude "Oars & Wings," which broadly defines modernism as an exercise in freedom, a breaking away from contemporary and past realities. The following 50 pages meticulously survey definitions of myth by Niklas Luhmann, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Hans Blumenberg, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, among others, while the latter half follows distinct genealogies of the Odysseus myth. «Το οδυσσειακό μυθικό πεδίο» (The field of Odyssey mythology) maps out the myth's many incarnations in eight subchapters from «Εικόνα πρώτη: Ανθομηρική και αντι-οδυσσειακή» (Image one: Anti-Homeric and anti-Odyssean) to «Εικόνα όγδοη: Η σχολή του Δάντε (και η αγωνία της επίδρασης)» (Image eight: The Dante school [and the anxiety of influence]). With incredible focus and brevity, Oikonomou covers the immoral Odysseus-as-liar (in the traditions of Ovid, du Bellay, and Goethe), as well as allegorical renderings, including an excellent section on Dante's φυγόκεντρη (centrifugal) Odysseus, which is juxtaposed with the νόστος (homecoming) obsessed hero. The seventh subchapter nods to English translations of the Odyssey (Chapman, Pope) and their roles in shaping the hero's iconography as an exemplary, likable champion. Oikonomou also catalogues several instances of theme-clusters in other language traditions, such as Nausicaa in German (Goethe).

The introduction to the book's second section, «Ρήξεις και ανατροπές» (Ruptures and reversals), contextualizes anxieties around the field of reception. It introduces her argument: these modernist renderings of the Odyssey myth (James Joyce, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick) create a radical poetics. They do not dismantle or imitate classical myth but redefine modes of expression through the creation of new forms both literary (Joyce) and cinematographic (Godard, Kubrick).

In the first and longest of these three author studies, Oikonomou approaches Joyce's Ulysses as a hypertext that sends the reader elsewhere, constantly offering other lines of inquiry. Oikonomou revisits extant theories on Joyce's narrative technique, such as parallax and the subjective, often dissonant narratives of the novel's protagonists (Molly Bloom). She draws the reader's attention to the parallel constructions and dialogues between Joyce's novel and developments in theory (Ferdinand de Saussure and Friedrich Nietzsche), as well as literature and technology (Jacques Derrida and the gramophone). The chapter also offers close readings of particular episodes and symbols in Ulysses, devoting sections to Proteus, Aeolus, the Wandering Rocks, the Sirens, and Penelope.

Transitioning from literature to film, Oikonomou argues that—like Joyce's Ulysses—Godard's film Le mépris (Contempt) severs the umbilical cord between myth and mimesis. For the uninitiated, Oikonomou presents an excellent overview of Godard's place as an innovator of modernist film (including montage, contradiction, interruption, synecdoche) and draws connections to theories and potential modes of interpretation: Derrida (interstitial), Foucault (heterotopia), Mikhail Bakhtin (polyglossia). She argues that Godard makes synecdotal use of myth through multiple series of images and color (reminiscent of Paul Cézanne's A Modern Olympia [1873–1874]) to create a visual poetics. The end of the film, the blank screen, is not (only) the blank page, the abyss, but...