INSPIRED BY THE ODYSSEY

The Odyssey, now more than 3,000 years old, has been retold many times and continues to inspire storytellers. The Romans reappro priated Greek mythology freely, and the great poet Virgil used the Odyssey as the basis of his Aeneid, an epic that chronicles the adventures of Aeneas, second-ranking commander of the Trojan army, on his fated journey to become the founder of Rome. The first six books—which follow Aeneas’s wanderings from the ravaged and burning city of Troy to the Libyan coast, where he meets the widow Dido—closely resemble the Odyssey; the latter six books describe Aeneas’s triumphant war against the Rutuli tribe and follow the style of Homer’s Iliad. Virgil not only appropriated specific passages from Homer, but he often translated some of Homer’s original language into Latin.

Arguably the most innovative adaptation of the Odyssey is James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Published in 1922, Ulysses also mirrors the Homeric epic in structure, yet all of the action transpires in Dublin during a single day, June 16, 1904. (The playwright Tom Stoppard made Joyce and Ulysses the subject of his play Travesties, in which he comments that the only two sources from which the novel draws are the Odyssey and the Irish telephone directory.) Joyce finds his Ulysses, or Odysseus, figure in Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser who spends the day wandering dispassionately around Dublin. Joyce’s correlation between this antiheroic character and Odysseus becomes decidedly ironic. Bloom’s wife, Molly, is a concert singer and is also ironically different from her Homeric equivalent, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. While Penelope demonstrates her fidelity by convincing suitors she will accept their overtures only when she has completed a funeral pall that she weaves every day and cunningly unravels every night, Molly is an indulgent adulteress. Joyce gives the role of Telemachus to the youthfully pedantic Stephen Dedalus, who in a slightly different incarnation was also the hero of the author’s earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

While the Romans may have been guilty of the rote renaming of Homeric characters, Joyce’s treatment of the epic is playfully inventive. Joyce employs techniques such as interior monologue, a form of stream-of-consciousness narrative, to lend epic qualities to his storytelling. As a result, Ulysses simultaneously depicts modernity as a pathetically unheroic age while translating the quotidian into the grandiose. Now considered to be one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Ulysses was banned in the United States until 1933 and in Britain until 1937.