Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound by Leah Culligan Flack (review)

Leah Culligan Flack divides Modernism and Homer into two sections. The first focuses on "the high modernist period of literary innovation in the years surrounding World War I," with chapters on Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Osip Mandelstam (18). The second section identifies a shift in attitudes during late modernism and features another chapter on Pound and one on Hilda Doolittle's later works Helen in Egypt and "Winter Love."¹ The first section links the work of Pound, Joyce, and Mandelstam through their separate uses of Homer's voyaging tropes to legitimize their own geographical and cultural cosmopolitanism. Each author viewed Homer as a vehicle for artistic freedom, as well as a source of optimism for the renewal of interwar twentieth-century culture. Flack writes that "Homer looms in the early twentieth-century imagination as a site of contestation about the purpose and value of literature at a moment of global violence" and that these authors "engage the Homeric epics to fabricate the imaginative and cultural conditions that would make homecoming, healing, and recovery possible for modern citizens" (2). In the final two chapters, Flack analyzes how Pound and H.D., both of whom already had a sizeable body of work engaging with the Greek tradition, extend and alter their earlier visions of the Homeric texts. Flack connects this final section with the previous chapters in her conclusion, closing with a convincing, and at times inspiring, appreciation of the modernist revival of Homer that she uses as an example of advocacy for cultural traditions to remedy the "current crisis in the humanities" (19). She argues that these modernist authors, through their use of Homer, "were deeply committed to a living, evolving classical tradition that they viewed as essential to modern life," and, indeed, her own book's nuanced and well-researched argument serves as an additional reminder of the vital role literary texts can have in contemporary culture (19).

Chapter 1, entitled "'To have gathered from the air a live tradition': Pound, Homer, Modernism," traces the development of Pound's experimental versions of the Cantos into what became the final versions and demonstrates how Odysseus's voyages served as a model for Pound's own poetic journey.² Flack anchors this analysis in a razor-sharp reading of the first canto's evolution, from ur-Canto III into Pound's heavily filtered version of the "Nekuia" passage from the Odyssey,³ at once tying together his use of ancient texts, his views on the decline in quality of translations, and his ambitions to write a modernist epic. The chapter closes with a look forward, from Pound's early use of Homer as a model for artistic universality toward his disillusionment after World War I as he became increasingly critical of exploitative institutions and economics, views that led to his Fascist sympathies and anti-Semitism.

Flack's chapter on the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses features a wealth of fresh insights for Joyce scholars interested in the role the Odyssey had in the novel's composition and its public reception. According to Flack, the figure of the Cyclops came to represent the various institutions and sensibilities that obstructed the publication of Ulysses. In addition to these more direct interpretations of Homeric elements, the episode's radical stylistic experimentation—particularly the parody of heroes and heroic actions—repudiates the masculinist and sentimental hero worship in the Homeric, Celtic, and larger western tradition. Joyce wages this war against the various avatars of the Cyclops on several fronts to carry out an "assault on authoritative discourses of various kinds (including those of imperial England, the Irish nationalism, social purism, and Catholicism)" (106). Thus, in a brilliant and methodical reading of the episode on several levels simultaneously, Flack connects the scene in the bar in which Leopold Bloom is derided, the voice of the unnamed narrator, the...