The Odyssey (5): Books 9 – 10

Where the sea winds blow

It is only now, urged by Alcinous, that Odysseus reveals his identity and to tell of the trials and tribulations that befell him and his men upon leaving Troy to find their way back home – of the complicated journey befitting a complicated man – and as willed by Zeus. With Book 9 begins the Apologoi – the story within a story.

Book 9: A pirate in a Shepherd’s Cave

pp. 240-258

So Odysseus tells his Phaeacian hosts, and still not without some pride, of his deeds of piracy, of the brutal sacking of the land of the Circones and the men he lost (through his own recklessness), of storms at sea and a land of seductive lotus fruit tempting his men from their mission of “getting home”.

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein‘s 1802 head and shoulders portrait of the giant, 1896.

And then the land of the Cyclops! And Polyphemus – a radical shepherd if ever there was one; a man-eater who tends his flock with care. The cunning Odysseus out tricks this giant, one-eyed son of Poseidon, but only after Polyphemus has feasted on some of his crew, and with the help of wine and sheep and a play with words. Not satisfied with the clever escape he manoeuvres, Odysseus can not leave well enough alone, and taunts the vanquished Polyphemus. Does he know not that he risks the further ire of Poseidon? A little bit too clever for his own good is our hero.

Book 10: The Winds and the witch

pp. 259-278

Odysseus continues his tale of woe upon the high seas – next stop the island of Aeolus and his incestuous familial troupe! But they treat the visiting humans well for one month, and send them on their way with a gift of winds – to be used wisely. Odysseus though neglects to share the secret with his crew who, after the affair with the Cyclops, are becoming more and more suspicious of their leader, and prying open the bag they let free all the winds; hurtling again their ships off course and then back to whence they had begun. Aeolus is impressed not at all and drove them away from the island, leaving them to their fate. For now that fate is Laestrygonia – a land of cannibalistic giants who slaughter then feast upon many, and only Odysseus’ ship can escape.

Giovanni Battista Trotti‘s fresco of Circe returning Ulysses’ followers to human form (c. 1610)

And the winds blew, and they came to rest in Aeaea, the home of the goddess Circe. With potions and wand she weaves her dark magic and one half of the crew become “pigs in a pen”! But Hermes to the rescue! His intervention save Odysseus and his men, and they spend a year in an uneasy truce with the goddess and her promise to help them find their way home. But, as ever on this odyssey, nothing is ever as easy as it seems and the book ends with Odysseus’ telling of Circe’s instruction that they first must go down to Hades to consult with the spirit of Tiresias; but their descent is preceded by that of the youngest of them, Elpenor; falling as he does to a most untimely (and prophetic) death.

An old pupil writes…

Reading and writing a little in my continuous Virginia Woolf project (s), this 1920 diary entry had me looking about for more information on the classicist Janet Case, and led me to an academic journal article from 1982 which I liked so much that I include the JSTOR link here. (Alley, Henry M. “A Rediscovered Eulogy: Virginia Woolf’s ‘Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher.’” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 28, no. 3, 1982, pp. 290–301. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/441180. Accessed 23 May 2020.) Henry M. Alley’s piece written following the discovery of Woolf’s 1937 eulogy, says multitudes about both women; the conflicts between generations, the choices made, the hurdles surmounted and sometimes not.

Miss J.E. Case as Athena
in *Aeschylus’ Eumenides* (Cambridge 1885)

An anomaly, by virtue of her sex, at Cambridge at the end of the 19th century, the extraordinary young classics scholar, found her way into The Cambridge Greek Play (mentioned by Woolf in her eulogy), and that I can’t help but notice was first presented in 1882, the year of Virginia Woolf’s birth. And, one doesn’t have to go back to the Antique or Renaissance for evidence of the possessive hand men still held upon theatre and the classics, for her appearance seems to have been an exception – or at least a misunderstanding!

…in the Eumenides of 1885, the part of Athena was played by a woman, Miss J.E. Case, who had made her mark as Electra in an enterprising production of Sophocles’ play a the new Girton College in November 1883 […] despite her acclaimed success no woman featured again until 1950 …
The History of the Cambridge Greek Play

Janet Elizabeth Case became Virginia Woolf’s (or more precisely Virginia Stephen’s) Greek tutor in 1902, and over time her role evolved beyond that of intellectual mentor and into one as confidante and friend. Case entered the young Virginia’s life at a chaotic time; when her mental state was fragile, and into a dysfunctional familial and domestic situation, fraught by grief and power struggles. Obviously Case’s learnedness and intellectual rigour would have impressed, and her lessons would have offered some structure and discipline to her pupil’s often tortured days, but she may also have exemplified for Virginia an alternative life model of what a woman could be – a notion that was taking form in the stifling atmosphere of her Father’s house, and which was to become an essential component of her work and how she lived her life.

As the years passed, the relationship between the two women became complicated variously by age, tradition, expectation and circumstance, but in The London Times 22 July 1937 obituary (reprinted at the end of Alley’s article), the respectful tribute Woolf pens to her old tutor and friend, could be no finer, no more generous in spirit. For the older Woolf had long ceased craving the approval of her old teacher (or just about anyone else for that matter!), was confident enough in her fame and the literary route chosen, and was no longer tormented by petty irritations and jealousies. And she knew then what the younger had not, of the burden of intractability brought on simply by the years lived – of being ‘set in one’s ways’ – for they now were upon her. What remained for Woolf were the ideas sown and lessons learnt long ago, that were essential to the writer she became – and an appreciation for their giver. So, then, was the profound personal loss she felt for Miss Janet Case – the tutor who showed her the way to the Greeks – and without the grammar!

“On rereading…

such and such, …” – how often I have started a sentence so; inconsistently placing a hyphen, as in ‘re-reading’, or sometimes not – how then delighted I am by reading this essay written by Larry McMurtry in The New York Review of Books in 2005. (The NYRB is showing a great kindness of late by heavily digging into their archives, but available for only a limited period I would suggest.)

Referring to Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, McMurtry says:

[…Woolf…] records that his widowed mother, Marie Woolf, got herself a copy of Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, kept it by her bedside, and reread it “dozens of times.” …As one who has so far failed to make it through Rasselas even once, I consider Marie Woolf’s devotion to the book a matter worth pondering. […Should what WooIf said be true …]—Marie Woolf was probably the world’s biggest fan of Rasselas, […as I…] might claim to be the world’s biggest fan of Slowly Down the Ganges, a wonderful travel book by Eric Newby, which I have been rereading more or less continuously since 1965.
On Rereading, Larry McMurtry, NYRB JULY 14, 2005 ISSUE

And does then go on to ponder whether rereaders generally have the “one book fetish” he shares with Marie Woolf, or are more inclined to reread over a greater range. Anthony Powell and Shakespeare, but a thing for The Sun also Rises (humanising him, says McMurtry). Kenneth Clark and Ruskin, but Clark takes a shortcut and edits a collection (presumably including his favourites), always to keep near. And Edmund Wilson and Cyril Connolly ? Rereading was par the course inherent to their work, but one must think also an abiding pleasure. Did they have a “talisman”? McMurtry seems not to know. One could though go asearchin’ in the University of Tulsa repositories for clues. (By the way, okay Wilson is a renowned American literary figure, but I always wonder why the papers of others – like the aforesaid, and very British, Connolly – end up in universities in the middle of the US! Yes I know the answer I suppose – $$$!)

A monster and his maker

In the last days, I have savoured the theatrical treat (via YouTube livestream) of Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating as Victor Frankenstein and his monster creation (a tour de force by both as both in my opinion!) in Danny Boyle’s 2011 National Theatre (UK) adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Here is Michael Billington’s original Guardian review.) Without this pest that is upon us, would such a privilege be granted? Perhaps not. You see, I do look for things positive [sic] to take from this crisis.

Firstly, as I have previously stated, I am interested in the process of adaptation from one medium to another, and in this instance it works very well indeed; perhaps, because the reduced plot form (for instance, the omission of the framed narrative) and character tableau does not mitigate the precepts of rationalist thought and the limitations of science being explored in the original work, nor the questions posed of the conflict between the enlightened individual and a humane social order. As with the novel, this stage version can be best appreciated as a composite – as a philosophical treatise masquerading as an entertainment in a gothic tradition.

Illustration by Theodor von Holst frontispiece 1831 edition

On reflection, I must also say that Shelley’s classic tale first published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (the Prometheus additive being particularly telling), captivates still, and when considering a range of Lektüre for these daunting days, it is one, with its relativisation of our place in the greater natural order of things, that is well worth returning to. Not to mention, it being just a wonderfully well told story!

We are all Mrs. Dalloway

“We are all Mrs. Dalloway now.” says Evan Kindley in The New Yorker. Well, it may well be that many of us can’t afford to be – she is, after all, a lady of means, of a certain class. But I do get the point – the simple pleasures, the granted freedoms; of a walk in the streets, buying flowers, having a party – for us now laden with the aura of nostalgia and even adventure.

And, at the very least, we crave some moments, however fleeting, like those shrouding Clarissa Dalloway on that beautiful June morning in 1923 London; tempering her disquiet and apprehensions in the aftermath of war and illness, and allowing her instead to revel for a time in the bustle of city life.

Reading in the “Time of C_____”


Not wanting to say it out loud,
and shout it I surely will not.
Neither in a state of denial,
nor pretending to be.
And denying not the fear -
that refuses to be felt.
As an aside instead,
here then said:


To be imagined now:
this grimace not feigned.
Forced disaffection;
barely - or not even - 
restrained.

Days - each one,
and to follow fast,
to Weeks turn, to more thereof-
to this date at the very least.

Distress so rarely exposed
is creeping now near,
nearer to Fate shared.
 
Not the cholera, no love here -
no, not in this time -
not with this pest.

(This plague upon all our houses.)

Hovering, menacing -
dictating our existence now
to that which may not come.

-Anne Dromache, April 25, 2020.

Some solace: words written and lost along the way or never found, searched for or come upon by chance, may find their time again and the readers they were waiting for.

The Great Plague of London in 1665. The last major outbreak of the bubonic plague in England.

Everyone it seems has a recommended reading relevant to this time. For me, one come’s immediately to mind: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera – I loved this book years ago, but will not read it again now. My hefty flirtation with Latin American magic realism was a long time ago, and has life associations that I’d rather not disturb but confine to memory … I’ve been to Aracataca, I’ve not lived a hundred years…A fatalist would find confirmation and the inevitability of it all in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many have mentioned Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year, which is freely available in many corners of the Internet – NO copyright! Hardly surprising given it was written in 1722 about the 1665 Great Plague of London! And then there is Samual Pepys’ diary version of the same plague – here is a collection of relevant extracts. Pepys is fun to dive into I must admit – in a very bawdy sort of Renaissance way, though just how much fun I’m up to in this regard at the moment I’m not at all sure. A book that I know of and for other reasons has been on my reading list for quite some time (and that I haven’t heard mentioned of late) is Year of Wonders (2001) by Geraldine Brooks, again set during 1665-66.

Thirty years of heresy, persecution, hunger, pestilence ….

Oh, and war!…Just a few of the words that come to mind of a much darker time four hundred odd years ago (1618-1648) that puts this year of ours into perspective. One could add: torture, execution, butchery, disease…You surely get the picture.

The prankster Till Eulenspiegel, depicted with *owl* and *mirror* (title page of the Strasbourg edition of 1515)

Well I do…having finished reading Daniel Kehlmann’s latest work, Tyll, (mentioned here upon its recent publication in English, though I read in German so I can not speak on the translation) which powerfully describes the devastation visited upon a continent and its peoples – brutalised as they were through all the above said … I can’t think that it would have occurred to Kehlmann just how prescient his novel would be. Not in that the grotesqueness of a pre-modern era (and the literary form chosen) is so relatable, rather that the grotesqueness told as it is with a picaresque slant and the mocking gaze of Tyll Eulenspiegel reflected through a contemporary lens portends of the potential consequences of social disharmony.

From page to stage (II)

Continuing with a topic I have recently been thinking about, I have come upon an interesting essay; inspired by a stage version of Mrs. Dalloway, it is a couple of years old but makes pertinent observations just the same, and not necessarily specific to Virginia Woolf. It reminds me of just how often I wonder at the fortitude or foolhardiness of some theatrical or cinematic adaptations from the literary moderne of a century ago, and whether some forms are just better left as they were intended. The conservative in me speaks.

Considering the 2018 experimental production at the Arcola Theater in London, Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” and its film adaptation, Jo Glanville ponders, with reference to renowned Woolf biographer Hermione Lee, how adequate any adaptation of Woolf’s work can ever be, and especially here Mrs. Dalloway, composed as it is of a fragmentary flow of imagination and memory – unordered, even chaotic.

… Woolf evokes the very experience of being alive through a ceaseless poetic chain of thoughts, responses and memories as the narrative shifts between the world within and the world outside. In an essay on the novel, Hermione Lee quotes from Woolf’s correspondence with the painter Jacques Raverat while she was writing Mrs Dalloway. Raverat wrote that it was not possible to represent the way our minds respond to an idea or experience in a linear narrative. Woolf responded that it’s the job of a writer to go beyond ‘the formal railway line of sentence’ and to show how people ‘feel or think or dream […] all over the place’. How can an adaptation recreate that effect?…
Boundless, Unbound.com

Glanville doesn’t exactly answer the question she poses, and appears as sceptical as I tend to be, but nevertheless clearly admires the bravura in having a go, for better or worse, at transforming all the fleeting moments, shadings of emotions, muddled thoughts that make Mrs. Dalloway such a splendid work of literature, into a “real time” experience of sorts. When it’s all said and done, any attempt to capture the haunted past and let it mingle amongst the crowded present is very much in the spirit of Virginia Woolf. Perhaps an adequate enough reason after all. Bring them on – the reworkings, the inspired appropriations! The radical now raises her voice.