There’s always an Ulysses to help us get through life

Currently isolated in a small village in the Dolomites, I must admit that I have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Nevertheless, I found the controversies over its lack of fidelity to Homer’s text to be rather parochial. After all, the text is the product of historical and archaeological fiction. As if anyone could really believe in a decade-long war caused by Helen’s golden hair. Or as if the Achaeans’ bronze weapons had not been replaced by iron ones by the time the poem was composed, when the civilisation of the polis was taking hold. The Anglo-American director, as I understand it, alters the plots, narrative strands and character profiles – and often even the names – of the characters. Where is the scandal? Many others have done so before him, in cinema and literature, opting for Manzoni’s ‘plausibility’. After all, as Piero Boitani, an eminent scholar of the Homeric epics, has observed, Odysseus is one of the few classical heroes who has never faded from the collective imagination of Western culture: he has traversed – changing and adapting his guise – the flourishing of Athens, Alexandria, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism and Modernism (Il grande racconto di Ulisse, il Mulino, 2016). There is, in fact, something utterly compelling about his character: his fantastic adventures, his prudence, his cunning, his deceptions, his ‘nostos’ (return home) after twenty years; or, as Dante put it, his final journey.

A multifaceted character, then, portrayed in all sorts of ways, often in stark contrast to one another. This is the case with Sophocles, who in "Philoctetes" (409 BC) presents Odysseus as a cunning and cruel deceiver, whilst in "Ajax" (445 BC) he depicts him as full of human compassion. Virgil in the Aeneid (29–19 BC) and Ovid in the Metamorphoses (2–8 AD) describe him as an unscrupulous swindler. By contrast, he is regarded as an unsurpassed example of virtue and wisdom by Cicero, Horace, Seneca and Plotinus. Hardly any thinker of late antiquity—and few even amongst the Church Fathers themselves—escaped offering an interpretation of Ulysses: his name is on the lips of Stoic, Cynic, Pythagorean, Neoplatonic and Gnostic philosophers. The Roman emperors Tiberius, Nero and Hadrian extol his exploits. In short, the memory of Ulysses never fades, even when the Homeric poems are no longer read due to a lack of knowledge of Greek.

It is highly likely that not even Dante had read them, though it is to him that we owe a decisive turning point in the construction of the myth of Ulysses, celebrated as a tenacious and intrepid navigator of the unknown. Although his story is not without intense conflict and a tragic conclusion, because the Christian God – referred to only as ‘another’ – intervenes directly by orchestrating the shipwreck of a pagan hero, before condemning him to the eighth circle of Hell, where deceitful counsellors are punished. Now, whilst the Odysseus of Dante and of the tradition to which he belongs tends to break through every boundary, be it the Pillars of Hercules or death itself—given that ‘at this very brief vigil’ he still wishes to experience the ‘world without people’— Homer’s Odysseus, on the other hand, is well aware of the threshold beyond which he must not cross if he is to survive: when Tiresias warns him not to touch the cattle sacred to the Sun if he wishes to return home, Odysseus is careful not to do so, whilst his companions, who slaughter them for food, do not return to Ithaca alive.

It is, however, certain that, following the tercets of the Divine Comedy, the myth of Ulysses will never be the same again; and that Homer’s original will be constantly accompanied – if not distorted or discarded – by Alighieri’s version. Even his earliest interpreters, from his sons right through to Boccaccio, appear troubled by Canto XXVI of Inferno, sparking a controversy that continues to this day. Thus Petrarch, who himself takes on the role of Odysseus in the Familiares (1351–1366), condemns him in the Trionfi (1351–1374). Meanwhile, with the dawn of the Renaissance, in Morgante (1478) Luigi Pulci has the demon Astaroth praise Odysseus, ‘who journeyed to the other world to see’. From the late fifteenth century onwards, Dante’s Ulysses has been interpreted by commentators and writers as a shadow, a poetic foreshadowing of the navigator and discoverer of new worlds: a sort of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci before their time.

The Renaissance interpretation of Ulysses would leave a lasting mark on Western culture: it would be drawn upon not only by Italian writers such as Parini, Leopardi, Pascoli, D’Annunzio and Gozzano, but also, sometimes indirectly, great foreign authors such as Alfred Tennyson (Ulysses, 1842), Herman Melville (Captain Ahab, 1851), Charles Baudelaire (Le Voyage, 1861), Jules Verne (Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) is a clear descendant of Ulysses), Walt Whitman (the ‘pioneer’ celebrated in Leaves of Grass, 1855), and Nikos Kazantzakis (The Odyssey, 1938). The image of Ulysses as a discoverer of new worlds would resurface at the beginning of the 20th century in connection with Roald Amundsen’s crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the Antarctic expeditions of Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton.

In each of these countless versions, Homer’s or Dante’s Ulysses is, of course, shaped by the authors’ aesthetic tastes and linguistic and cultural choices. Victorian English writers present him as the noble ancestor of the colonial conqueror. For Joseph Conrad, in "The Mirror of the Sea" (1906), he is a shadow of himself as a seafarer and writer. Ezra Pound opens his The Cantos (1915–1962) by translating his journey to Hades. Franz Kafka writes a famous parable on The Silence of the Sirens (published posthumously in 1931), an emblem of the victory of technology (of Ulysses) over poetry. In the first version of The Waste Land (1922), T.S. Eliot devotes an entire section (the fourth, ‘Death by Water’) to the adventures of a sailor who is, as the explicit quotations from Tennyson, Conrad, Poe and Coleridge show, the descendant of Ulysses.

It was precisely in 1922 that the Odyssey was reincarnated in the modern Ulysses par excellence, as James Joyce’s famous novel is titled. In its penultimate section (“Ithaca”), Leopold Bloom, the Irish Jew who embodies the Homeric hero, has finally returned home from his long wanderings through Dublin and is about to be reunited with his wife Molly in their marriage bed. Bloom thinks with horror of the old age now drawing near and decides, instead, to set off. He then embarks on a mental journey that takes him across the globe, with visits to Jerusalem, the Strait of Gibraltar (the Pillars of Hercules crossed by Dante’s Ulysses), the Parthenon, Wall Street and the places he associates with the ‘finis vitae’: Tibet, Naples and the Dead Sea. He then ventures even further, to ‘the farthest reaches of space’. Until he awakens in his own home as ‘an alienated avenger, a sombre crusader, with financial resources surpassing even those of Rothschild’.

Of course, Bloom doesn’t set off at all: it is night-time, the journey would be dangerous and, above all, there is an ‘occupied bed’ right there beside him. Yet, through his evocative pilgrimage, Joyce has crafted a new myth. He superimposes the desire for escape and knowledge of Ulysses, immortalised by Dante, upon Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), with its perpetual wandering ‘from land to land’. Bloom’s journey is, in fact, a circumnavigation of the key sites of our civilisation, past and present (Athens, Jerusalem, Wall Street); a biblical exodus; a mystical passage ‘among the peoples, within the events’. In a single page, Joyce retraces all the shadows of Ulysses that literature has cast over the course of three millennia.

Almost half a century later, it was Stanley Kubrick who revisited them in a masterpiece of science fiction cinema: “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). Ulysses travels through infinite space and time. Kubrick’s hero realises Bloom’s dream. The appearance of the black monolith at the beginning of the film, as the notes of Strauss’s *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* resound, marks the transformation of the ape into man. The stone – a silent emblem of human destiny – reappears on the Moon to propel the astronaut to the far reaches of the solar system: ‘behind the sun, into the world without people’. In 2001, however, the vortex does not hold back the successor to Dante’s Ulysses. Instead, it launches him on a mad flight beyond Jupiter, into the mysteries of the universe. At the end of the journey, the protagonist returns home, like Odysseus: an old child and yet a new man, another step in evolution; perhaps the superman heralded by the Nietzschean music at the beginning. Could this be the resurrection that awaits us in the not-too-distant future? Or is the Ulysses of 2001, challenged by the ‘human, all too human’ computer Hal, already amongst us, hidden within the platforms of artificial intelligence? And furthermore: what genetic mutations or manipulations does the foetus—the old child who appears at the end of ‘2001’—foretell? Only time will tell.

We do, however, know what transpired within European societies and in the very fabric of Europe itself during the last century. It is precisely here that, almost as if staging a new Bloom, ‘Athens meets, or clashes with, Jerusalem’ (Boitani). Many of the leading thinkers and writers of the ‘Ulysses’ era in the first half of the twentieth century – from Mark Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to Kafka and Elias Canetti – came from the Jewish diaspora of Central and Eastern Europe. So much so that the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas goes so far as to argue that the entire trajectory of Western thought ‘remains that of Ulysses, whose adventure in the world was nothing but a return to his native island’. Yet he sets the myth of Ulysses’ return against the story of Abraham: ‘Ulysses sets out. Abraham sets out. A journey and an exile. One with the hope of returning, the other towards another land, a foreign land that will become his own. One returns, the other never ceases to walk. One to his home, the other elsewhere. One towards the familiar surroundings of his native island, the other towards the unknown of a country of which he is not a native. Both are certainly transformed by the road, the dust, the trials and the encounters. Yet can their journeys be identical? The first experiences a return to the same things, whilst the second experiences an infinite otherness which, in the end, is not so much that of the destination as that of God” (Con o senza biglietto di ritorno, in Umanesimo dell’altro uomo, Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2005). In reality, whilst using contrasting images, Dante and Lévinas arrive at very similar conclusions. The former condemns the entire civilisation of his time to Hell—a civilisation inconceivable without the impulse to discover the unknown that is characteristic of Ulysses. The latter burns, along with Homer’s ‘nostos’, a large part of twentieth-century European barbarism.

Barely a year and a half after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, German Jews feared the loss, if not of their lives, then of their property and their jobs. Among them was Victor Klemperer, Professor of Philology at the University of Dresden. Many of his Jewish colleagues had already been forced into early retirement or to resign. On 8 October 1934, he noted in his diary: ‘I feel like Odysseus in the cave of Polyphemus’ (Testimoniare fino all’ultimo, Mondadori, 2000). For him, the comparison between his personal situation and that of Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave became a veritable obsession. He repeated the comparison several times. The last instance was on 13 February 1945, when he was summoned by the SS command for deportation. The following night, Allied bombs destroyed Dresden, and Odysseus-Klemperer managed, by throwing away the yellow star, to escape the monstrous son of Poseidon.

And so the shadow of Ulysses once again entered history. As is well known, the encounter was tragic, transforming Dante’s flame into a crematorium. But in the Nazi concentration camp at Buna Monowitz, near Auschwitz, an extraordinary Italian lesson took place in 1944, using the Canto d’Ulisse as a teaching tool. Primo Levi, the prisoner (‘häftling’) whose name is a number, a witness to and participant in a vast operation to annihilate – both morally and physically – those who were once human beings, attempted to teach his own language to a French deportee: and he chose as his text his fragmentary school memories of that passage from Dante. Relived in the concentration camp, the story of Ulysses takes on new meanings: the prohibition and the mad desire to overcome it are tragically real experiences; the ‘open sea’ and the ‘mountain, dark with distance’ evoke distant memories; but the triplet on human dignity is ‘like a trumpet blast, like the voice of God. For a moment, I forgot who I am and where I am’. Above all, the teacher-prisoner pauses, shaken, at the phrase ‘as others pleased’, desperately trying – ‘before it is too late; tomorrow he or I may be dead, or may never see each other again’ – to make the other person understand ‘something colossal that I myself have only just seen, in a fleeting intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today […]’. Human dignity and the mystery of God and His will penetrate, through this unusual path—via the pagan Ulysses, the Christian Dante, and the Jew Levi—into the workings of an absurd and inhuman machine.

Perhaps it is true that literature, cinema and art help us to survive.