Imperial Odysseus

In a rapid survey (TLS May 26) of the cultural uses of the Odysseus-Cyclops encounter that ranges from Kant’s “Cyclopean thinking” to Charles Lamb’s version of the Odyssey to Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, and the X-Men Edith Hall includes these intriguing tidbits:

“Lamb was taking his cue from an ancient intuition that Odysseus’ travels somehow symbolised colonial expansion. Odysseus’ sons by Circe traditionally founded important cities in Central Italy, and the Etruscans painted scenes from Odysseus’ wanderings on the walls of their tombs, as if to assert a cultural ancestry leading back to Greece.”

And this, closer to our time: “the major assault on Odyssean heroism came in 1944 with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklarung, which traced the genealogy of the dark underbelly of Western science and reason to the Odyssey. They argued that Odyssean rationality, already bound to identity, inevitably tramples on singularity and difference. Their Cyclops, in his ideal pastoral existence, becomes the model for the evolving line of stupid adversaries of the Christian era leading to Shylock and Mephistopheles. They recognize that Odysseus abuses his intellectual powers with Polyphemus – that the trespasses with all the arrogance of a colonial master, thus creating a situation that can only result in bloodshed. The ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ means that Odysseus cannot assert his superiority without dialectically beginning to behave even worse than his supposed inferior.”