Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures ed. by Hunter Gardner and Sheila Murnaghan (review)

While Homer’s Odyssey has never lost its popularity, its orientation toward experiences of exile and return has inspired a wealth of modern creative adaptations just as its status as an oral epic has opened the door to wide critical discussion of its relation to the oral traditions of the ancient Near East, medieval Japan, and modern Africa. Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures, edited by Hunter Gardner and Sheila Murnaghan, the latter a prominent Homer scholar, contributes to this discussion through essays focused particularly on homecoming, or nostos. The “modern cultures” of its title refers mainly to English, American, and Greek writers of the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries working within the genres of lyric poetry and the novel. All of the essays in the volume reinforce the new critical attunement to the ironies and instability of homecoming, which are already at work in the ancient epic itself.

Jie Guo engages shifting gender paradigms in Imperial-age China, a time when legends of the female warrior Mulan, though reaffirming traditional notions of domestic space as properly female, were also opening the way for a less restrictive view of women’s travel, especially in service of the country. Melissa Gibson’s play Current Nobody (2007), studied by Corinne Pache, explicitly engages the Odyssey in gender reversal by featuring a stay-at-home dad (Od), a career woman whose job as war photographer has kept her away for twenty years (Pel), and their son (Tel). Homecoming in Gibson’s play is less a reunion than a meeting that exposes the hollowness and anxiety of home. Clemence Schultze studies absent fathers and faithful lives in the novels of Charlotte Yonge with reference to two different models of homecoming—odyssean nostos and the biblical story of the prodigal son—both of them harboring the possibility of a return that is problematic because home itself has changed. These three leading essays in Part I, while interesting, are not the most critically rigorous of the volume.

More compelling are those in Part II focused on nostos, war, and Penelopelike figures left behind. Focusing on the poetry of Yannis Ritsos and Gail Holst-Warhaft, Victoria Reuter shows how revisionist treatments of the Odyssey tease out the problems of nostos from the perspective of the wife left behind whose enigmatic interiority becomes a creative prompt and whose spousal reunion is not unambiguously happy. The texts studied by Sheila Murnaghan—de Chirico’s painting “The Return of Odysseus” and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier—reveal incipient pathologies in nostos by presenting us, respectively, with an interiorized odyssey in which the man of many wiles, rowing in a living room, appears never to have departed from home and a returned soldier’s traumatic amnesia that makes home into a scene of therapy conducted by women who have themselves been damaged by a war. Leah Culligen Flack takes a similar approach by reading Joyce’s Ulysses as a pacifist text that parodies nostos by extending the journey to include the journey of the text itself through multiple styles and movements and who reads Jacob’s Room as an experimental, anti-nostos story that Virginia Woolf fragments into the multiple perceptions of women on the home front who do not heroize the Great War.

Part III offers readings of American odysseys, beginning with Wendy Whelan-Stewart’s “Penelope in Bronzeville,” which reveals the complex racial and gender dynamics at work in a poem of Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Anniad.” Using a high classical form, Brooks tracks the literary aspirations of an African-American Penelope-persona (Annie), trapped by social restrictions and her own commitment to a wandering, philandering Odysseus (Tan Man) who has been traumatized by war and whose return is also his death. Jonathan Burgess extends Stewart’s critical focus on failed nostos into a different interpretive register by studying Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain as a travel narrative shaped by socio-economic passage through livelihoods that condition the sense...