Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature

2. Birth of a Hero: The Poetics and Politics of Ulysses in Classical Literature

Ulysses, who marks Western literature from Homer’s Odyssey to James Joyce’s novels, is emblematic of an endlessly adaptable heroic identity. For the classical scholar W. B. Stanford, Ulysses was perhaps the single most influential literary hero born in ancient times. In The Ulysses Theme, Stanford traces Ulysses from his pre-Homeric possibilities (as a folkloric trickster figure) to his visitation in the twentieth-century works of James Joyce and Nikos Kazantzakis.1 The Ulysses Theme offers some insight into why Western authors have time and again returned to the character whose name varies from Odysseus to Ulysses, another clue to his sociocultural range.2 It is perhaps natural (and not at all counterintuitive) that black authors in America have also been in a long-standing dialog with Ulysses, and not only the character per se but also the classicism of which he is a part. The discourse of black classicism touches on the nature of heroism and the cultural context in which the hero acts. 37  2  Birth of a Hero The Poetics and Politics of Ulysses in Classical Literature The archetypal Ulysses . . . offered a wider foundation for later development than any other figure of Greek mythology, thanks to Homer’s far-reaching conception of his character and exploits. —w. b. stanford, The Ulysses Theme I knew the trickster Ulysses just as early as I knew the wily rabbit of Negro American lore, and I could easily imagine myself a pint-sized Ulysses but hardly a rabbit, no matter how human and resourceful or Negro. —ralph ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Shadow and Act The aim of this chapter is to unearth some of the root qualities of classical literature that might have timeless appeal to writers—and, in this context , black writers specifically. In the first place, Homer initiates an autopsy of the emotions fundamental to subsequent representations of the self. While I do not discuss one of Homer’s finest psychological profiles here, namely that of Achilles, even in Odysseus we find a character of significant human scope, a range present in his longing for home, his acquisitiveness, and his adaptability—his own ability to learn from his experiences. (As we see in ancient Egyptian writings on justice, humanistic values certainly existed prior to the arrival of the Greeks, so we must see an important contribution in Homer’s ability to encapsulate these qualities in transportable , literary characters.) As I show later, black authors (such as Morrison and Ellison), who write particularly in an increasingly capitalistic setting, a homeland that often denied their citizenship—denied that they belonged—made correlations in Odysseus. In addition, later writers encountered models for social and political discussion. The classical authors who adapted Homer’s characters were writing under one regime or other: a religious order in which man is subject to capricious gods; an autocratic regime; or even an ostensibly egalitarian, democratic rule that denies the humanity of a foreign woman. The counter-hegemonic discourse of the fifth-century tragedians included resistance to power on multiple fronts: resistance to the authoritative power of the gods that we find, to some extent, in Aeschylus or Sophocles, or an opposition to a political hegemony that we find in Euripides. While I use Ulysses as a metaphor throughout Ulysses in Black, in this chapter I present works in which Ulysses is an actual character, beginning with Homer. The Homeric conversation on the nature of the hero and how she or he acts within a particular social context constitutes a literary conspiracy, a tacit agreement between readers and writers that renders the classics eternally relevant. As we will see in chapter 4, even where black authors reject aspects of classical heroism, such as is the case with the black Ulysses that is Toni Morrison’s Milkman, we concede a necessary encounter (even by way of rejection) with a broader Western esthetic. Moving from Homer’s Odyssey to Euripides’ Hecuba, I offer the counterhegemonic —rather than Eurocentric or European-supremacist—strand in Greek thought as a foundation for later writers. (Later, I explore the political implications of the seemingly esoteric, seemingly apolitical literary process by which the Roman author Lucius Annaeus Seneca, in his 38 From Eurocentrism to Black Classicism Trojan Women, presents variations of Ulysses’ heroic, or antiheroic, core.) It should become apparent by the end of this chapter that, despite the...