during a critical moment odysseyCirce sends Odysseus to the kingdom of the dead to find a prophet who can instruct him on how to return home after more than a dozen years. But to travel to the kingdom of the dead, our “complex” (the most appropriate Homeric adjective, introduced only a few years earlier in Emily Wilson’s translation) hero must cross the boundary of the world in the form of the Stream of Oceanos and the Cimmerian city, where mortals live in complete darkness. Here, the dead speak the truth, but only if you first feed them the blood of the living. How’s that for a metaphor?
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in its heart, odyssey There is a quest narrative. An adventure story. The hero must leave home – although was it really necessary to slaughter so many people in a distant town? – And, after trials and tribulations, the return changed.
Back home, his wife Penelope wonders: Is Odysseus alive? Will he ever come back? We the readers know the answer because we are allowed to wander across the text and into the ancient Greek world, but she is stuck in Ithaca, with no cell phones and no internet.
While re-reading the story recently, I began to wonder: Does Penelope even want him to come back?
Penelope at first resists believing that the man who has returned is actually her husband, and perhaps this resistance points to the real tragedy: not how long it takes for him to return but the fact that he does so.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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In addition to the entire line of discovery, odyssey Connects multiple characters in multiple locations and creates nested stories that move back and forth in time. It begins, famously, in media race (As Horace advises we should all do). The story spools and unspools. The son, Telemachus, sets out in search of his father while at the same time Odysseus attempts to return. Penelope tells the suitors, who party all day and night and eat all her food, that she will marry when she has finished weaving her father-in-law’s shroud, but she unwraps it again each night. There are gods and battles and danger and magic and romance – that’s it in a word, epic. This is also the story of a man who is trying to go home.
But odyssey pays more attention than the woman Iliad, Certainly, and more so than most ancient texts, such that some early scholars theorized that it was actually written by a woman: the narrative begins with Penelope, not Odysseus; Lovers are said to admire her for her intelligence and wit; The central deity of the text is the goddess Athena rather than Zeus.
I did not intend to include a recap of this odyssey in my second novel Mudlark. I sank back odyssey When Emily Wilson’s translation came out in 2017 – of more than 60 translations into English, hers is the first by a woman – and then wherever I looked, I couldn’t unsee it. a Midsummer Night’s Dream To Mad Max: Fury Road. We also live in a literary world rich with retellings of Homer (just look at Margaret Atwood). penelopiadMadeline Miller’s sassyClaire North’s penelope songs).
Emily Wilson claims that Penelope’s key characteristic in the poem is her “ambiguity”, how little we actually know about her mind or desires. What if what awaits Penelope is her own aggression, a way to hold on to space for as long as possible, one that doesn’t involve her own attempts at men and power? Penelope at first resists believing that the man who has returned is actually her husband, and perhaps this resistance points to the real tragedy: not how long it takes for him to return but the fact that he does so.
In this way, odyssey It is suitable for us to project our thoughts on it. with MudlarkI imagined my own discovery story. Like Odysseus, my character Neko is also looking for answers that can only come from beyond The Veil, and like him, she is looking for a lost home. Her mother, Jenny Sweet, a middle-aged indie rock musician, works on a solo album inspired by odyssey, As she thinks about it, a kind of inauthentic retelling from the female perspective.
odyssey It survives not because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about us, here today.
Does anyone remember that Scylla and Charybdis are not monsters but goddesses? In her album, Jenny Sweet portrays them as mothers who are angry at how humans have heated their waters, turning them into lobsters boiled alive in pots due to climate change. The sirens are “chatters” telling any boat that passes how they need babysitting and health care. They want equal pay for equal work. Each age sees in these ancient texts allegories for its own struggles.
I’m not the first person to retell this story from a woman’s perspective, and I’m sure I’ll be far from the last. We are like Penelope, paraphrasing Homer’s story for our own purposes.
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Jenny Sweet’s album is called debrisAnd developing his character also made me think about how rock musicians can be the epic poets of our age. while we know odyssey Written between the end of the eighth and seventh centuries BC, we also know that it was part of the oral tradition for hundreds of years before that. Repetition and formulaic expressions (pink-fingered morning, wine-deep sea) are like the chorus of our pop songs, and dactylic hexameter is like the melody. A band comes together to write collectively, and then other bands cover and reframe those same songs. it is also like this odyssey Have traveled through time. It was not composed by any one person but by many voices together.
Like all the best stories, odyssey It survives not because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about us, here, today. Like Penelope’s shroud, it is woven and woven, always becoming, never complete. Perhaps this is another way of postponing the end of our own story. Another way to feed the dead with the blood of the living. Maybe that’s all or maybe that’s all.
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Mudlark by Mary Helen Specht is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
