Well, to be absurdly brief, Joyce's Ulysses is the most famous of all the retellings of the Odyssey. I'm pretty sure I read this before going off to college, though I certainly wouldn't have understood it at the time. While I have come to enjoy it a fair bit and find it quite profound, I think it helps a great deal to be in a class or a reading group to help walk you through it the first time. I actually studied it in my senior year. Fast forward a couple of years, and I read it right before starting graduate school in English lit. at the University of Toronto. That was still a young man's reading of Ulysses, however. I think I'll wait until I'm 50, then tackle it again.
Ok, while it isn't a scene by scene re-enactment, I definitely think Kroetsch's Studhorse Man draws heavily on the Odyssey and his wanderings. Also, there is a Penelope figure. And Kroetsch doesn't shy away from the fact that Hazard Lepage (like Odysseus) had plenty of "action" while away on the road, but it would have been unacceptable and practically unthinkable for Penelope to have been unfaithful.
A few years back, Zachary Mason published The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which I finally checked out of the library. This falls somewhere between Einstein's Dreams (by Alan Lightman) and Calvino's Invisible Cities, in that Mason picks up on certain elements of the Odyssey and magnified them, and comes up with alternative versions of Odysseus's journey home. For instance, in an early episode, he comes home to find that Penelope has remarried, but just before he erupts in rage (and presumably kills everyone in the household) he decides this is just an illusion cast by a sorceress, and he heads back out to find the real Ithaca. It seems quite clever, but I haven't finished it yet. I am not sure how much Telemachus figures into this work (he is reasonably important in Atwood's Penelopiad), and Louise Glück has a short poem about him. I'd assume he'll turn up soon enough in Mason's many-layered work.
At this point, I am just going to defer to a true expert. Edith Hall, a professor of classics at the University of London. A few years back she wrote The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. And then she recorded a podcast where she discusses the cultural impact of this legend. The book looks pretty interesting in that it also delves into theatre, movies, and even popular song, like Susan Vega's Calypso. While I wouldn't say this is light bedtime reading, I will probably try to check it out one of these days, particularly if I do tackle Joyce's Ulysses in the next 5-6 years.
To go along with the theme that sometimes it is good learning from others (and that there is no shame in not coming up with every great idea yourself), I remember learning in college that quite a number of Southern writers explicitly started comparing their society with ancient Greece. Greece was viewed as kind of a largely agrarian paradise and slavery was just naturally a part of this. What is particularly odd is that this cultural move persists after the end of the Civil War, although it is no longer an uncritical longing for a lost arcadia but a more complex, knowing look at the past.
Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples from 1949 contains allusions to the race between Atalanta and Hippomenes, but also to Zeus in "The Golden Shower." Other mythical figures appear in the other stories. While I am quite sure I have the complete stories of Flannery O'Connor somewhere, and I have the Library of America edition of Katherine Anne Porter's stories (and her Ship of Fools separately), I simply can't recall which version I have of Eudora Welty's stories. After the move and the Great Unpacking, I will try to figure this out. I may go with the two volume Library of America edition. Anyway, these were very good stories, from what I can recall.
Faulkner admitted being influenced by Greek tragedy (as well as by the Old Testament, Dostoevsky, Melville, and Conrad), though one sort of sees it in the general shape of a tragedy spanning generations (Aeschylus's Oresteia influencing the Snopes Trilogy for instance) rather than him picking up specific Greek legends.
To go back to the Greek myths in their broader context, Orpheus and Eurydice are very influential, perhaps moreso for poets than novelists. Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus is certainly the most famous and extended meditation on the myth. But we have Milton, Auden, Jorie Graham, Czesław Miłosz and even John Ashbery have tackled Orpheus. Apparently, Thomas Pynchon can't get the whole going down to the underground theme out of his head and has used it both in Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day. Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet contains a magical musician drawn from Orpheus. Finally, Samuel Delany's The Einstein Intersection is a SF retelling of the myth (I don't remember if I actually read this or not, but I did own it at one point).
There is just such richness in these myths. Louise Glück has a poetry collection titled The Triumph of Achilles, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg (a more obscure poet) has a volume called The Throne of Labdacus -- appropriately enough a much more obscure figure. However, this volume also contains poems that explore the myth of Oedipus. (I'll be honest. I'm not going to touch on Oedipus (or even Electra), as I could be here all day.) Sometimes the slightly more obscure mythic figures are best, as the poet or novelist can really make them her or his own. At any rate, the Greek myths continue to inspire writers and artists of all stripes. To give some very recent examples, I've just encountered a couple of poems riffing on Persephone in the last couple of months. "As Persephone" by Carmelita McGrath in Escape Velocity and "Pomegranate" by Michael Crummey in Salvage.
And who can forget Daedalus and his son, Icarus, whose wax wings melt when he gets too close to the sun. Daedalus is interesting, as so many novelists are interested in mazes and maze makers, and Icarus is an intriguing morality lesson on the limits of human ambition. To restrain myself to just a single example, in "Musée des Beaux Arts," Auden reflects on a painting (Breughel's Icarus): "the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure..." But if I started talking about the use of Greek mythology in painting, I could be here all day.
As this is spiraling out of control, I will wrap up with one of the more intriguing figures: Theseus who had to get into and out of the maze (with Ariadne's help), killing the Minotaur along the way. Armchair psychologists have had a field day with this ever since. I have no intention of reading them, but apparently The Hunger Games is all drawn directly from the set-up of the Theseus myth (7 girls and 7 boys offered up as an annual sacrifice to the Minotaur).
But what if the Minotaur didn't die? Picasso was deeply obsessed with the Minotaur figure and came up with some great etchings in his Vollard Suite.
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| Picasso, Scène bacchique au Minotaure from the Vollard Suite, 1933 |
It seems the Minotaur truly is immortal, though he must have been rescued from apparent death by one of the gods. He has migrated to North Carolina and has taken a job as cook in a rundown restaurant. He has a speech impediment, naturally, and is generally mistreated by the other inhabitants of the trailer park where he lives. It is a big come-down for a mythological beast. Still, a very interesting novel. If this post does nothing else, hopefully it will inspire you to check out Sherrill's overlooked novel.
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