Homer’s was a world of violence; but if the Iliad was his epic of war, the Odyssey was his epic of empire. This is most apparent in book nine of the latter poem, where Odysseus recounts to a captivated audience an encounter with the mythical Cyclopes. His description of their island combines an ethnographer’s judgment on the lack of political organization among the indigenous peoples with what Edith Hall calls “the discerning eye of the colonist,” foreseeing the potential bounty of the land. According to Odysseus, the Cyclopes are “lawless brutes” who “have no meeting place for council, no laws either … each a law to himself, ruling his wives and children, not a care in the world for any neighbor.” Their island is “no mean spot, it could bear you any crop you like in season …. The land’s clear for plowing. Harvest on harvest, a man could reap a healthy stand of gain—the subsoil’s dark and rich.”
These two books take Homer’s Odyssey as their starting point to explore how twentieth-century authors from among the colonizers and the colonized used different facets of the Homeric text to meditate on their experiences. David Adams’s Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (2000) focuses mainly on English novels at the turn of the twentieth century; it explores works by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf, suggesting that these authors all loosely deploy the topos of an “odyssey” to draw attention to the distant journeying that characterized the European colonial project. Adams argues that these journeys instantiate the concept of “reoccupation” that he takes from the literary criticism of Hans Blumenberg, defined as “the attempt to answer theological questions with secular ideas, to fill the god-shaped hole with human constructs” (4). In the aftermath of the death of God and in the context of the weakening grip of Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century, Adams’s authors use the Odyssey to explore how and why they continue to exist.
In Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013) McConnell traces the lines of influence and appropriation that join Homer’s ancient Greek epic to black authors including Aimé Césaire, Ralph Ellison, Derek Walcott, and Wilson Harris. Their adaptations display an interest in fashioning shared identities and homelands in the face of an empire’s ravages. McConnell is a classicist by training, and her study has a strong Homeric spine: she explicitly asserts that the texts she discusses “each include a response to that ancient epic” (13). Following the spirit, if not the letter, of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena project, McConnell uses the fact that black authors engaged with the Odyssey in the twentieth century as evidence of the fact that ancient Greek and Roman texts have become detached from white Western narratives of cultural pre-eminence and have started to circulate freshly in global intellectual networks.
The modes of analysis on show differ greatly: while Adams is theoretical, grounding his study in the search for a unifying mythological theory that explains the attractiveness of the “odyssey” topos to his chosen authors, McConnell is much more biographical, seeking to demonstrate that each of her authors turned to the Odyssey according to individual preferences. Their conclusions are similarly of very different orders. Adams wants to find an example of a response to the death of God that does not require the construction of new hegemonic discourses: for this, he turns in his final chapter to Virginia Woolf (the only female author explored in detail in either book). Adams suggests that Woolf developed a doctrine of “wholeness without totality” (204) in her later writings, particularly in the character of Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse; this allowed her to, in a combination of Woolf’s and Adams’s words, “ ‘express that emptiness there’ without filling it in” (218). Here, rapacious takeovers of empty space, be they geographical or ideological, are replaced with a more serene respect for these gaps at the border of the colonial imagination. That is, according to Woolf, Odysseus should respect the lack of human structures on the Cyclopes’ island and not see it as an invitation for colonization.
In a different move, McConnell turns to the Cyclops Polyphemus as a symbol of resistance. We see this in the chapter on Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal, a founding document of the anticolonial movement of négritude. The poem’s narrator recounts the shame he feels at having once, while on a Paris tram, laughed at a fellow black man who had lost an eye to poverty. McConnell suggests that this encounter between a latter-day Odysseus and Polyphemus is “emblematic of the aesthetic responses of black writers to the problems of identification with imperial powers” (49); this comment poses further questions about whether the turn to European antiquity on the part of the writers she discusses was always empowering, or if it encouraged a harmful identification with the viewpoint of the colonizer. Césaire’s Odysseus realizes his complicity in the dehumanizing ideologies of empire only when he recognizes that Polyphemus is not his Other but another version of his Self.
In the Homeric text, Polyphemus traps Odysseus and his companions and begins to eat them; the surviving Greeks escape only when they brutally blind their captor and flee his cave. But as their ships hastily sail from the island, Odysseus starts to abuse Polyphemus, who in turn invokes Poseidon, the god of the sea and his own father, to demand that the hero either “never reaches home” or that, if he does, “let him come home late and come a broken man—all shipmates lost, alone in a stranger’s ship—and let him find a world of pain at home.” In Homer’s telling this prophecy comes true; but the texts assembled by Adams and McConnell take us beyond such ancient accounts of escalating violence and help us to appreciate the potential for these responses to Greek antiquity to inspire respect for the gaps in our knowledge of the world, and for our shared humanity.
