Recluse Deuces: Salinger and Pynchon, Two Modern Literary Outliers, Part II – TR Pynchon Jr

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Comparative politics, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Politics, Popular Culture

The second in our brace of reclusive authors of American fiction is Thomas Pynchon (see preceding blog on his the similarly publicity-shy JD Salinger). Long Island-born Pynchon came to the full-time vocation of fiction-writing via short stints in the navy and for Boeing as a technical aide. By the time Pynchon writes his first novel, V. in 1963, he is domiciled in México City, and the persona of Pynchon as an “Invisible Man of Letters” has already started to take root. 

PYNCHON

If there were slim pickings for inquisitive fans of JD Salinger wanting more biographical information about their ‘fave’ reclusive writer, then comparatively there’s an absolute famine when it comes to the lack of ‘goss’ on Thomas Ruggles Pynchon! Pynchon has managed to weave an airtight web of mystery around his personal life – no interviews, no attendance of literary prize awards, no memoirs, no hobnobbing with fellow celebrities at ‘A’ list gatherings, no teaching post in academia. In Pynchon’s (loosely) historically-based novel Mason & Dixon one of the characters is castigated for “the least tolerable of Offences … the Crime they styl’d ‘Anonymity’” – the very state of existence that Pynchon craves. The reclusive and ubër-private New Yorker differs from the equally reclusive Salinger in not having had to suffer the ignominy of family ‘betrayal’ as Salinger was subjected to. Pynchon’s family (agent/wife, son, brother and sister) and friends have all closed ranks, drawing down the cone of silence on the subject of the famous recluse＊.

‘Mason & Dixon’

Pynchon very much belongs to the “why make it simple, when you can make it complicated” school of literary communication. His books, popularly subsumed under the labels ‘postmodern’ and metafiction are typically characterised by over-elaborate and often open-ended plots, dense and hard to follow, labyrinthine sentences (Mason & Dixon meanders a full 122 words before it reaches its first full stop on page 2!) Pynchon offers up a mixed grill of cultural references to sex, drug culture, science and tech stuff, historical info and comic-book fantasy (with a raft of quirky and zany characters), etc. Beginning with The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the first of Pynchon’s “Californian trilogy” novels, the author turns a critical eye on the counterculture…although Pynchon evinces a consonance with its core values and communitarian ideals he voices a concern that the American counterculture may be an accessory of the dominant culture rather than a genuine reaction to it [‘American Modernity and Counterculture’, (The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon), www.litcharts .org]. In ‘Lot 49’ protagonist Oedipa Maas accidentally stumbles into Trystero, a shadowy world of convoluted conspiracies, unearthing a centuries-old conflict between rival mail distribution companies.

Political Pynchon?
A central motif that comes through in Pynchon’s novels is a distrust bordering on paranoia of government agencies and private corporations. In Gravity’s Rainbow he expresses deep suspicions about the motives of the military/industrial complex. But Pynchon seems also to distrust the established political left in its empirical authoritarian form. Instead, his natural orientation and sympathies seem to be towards the anarchists and the preterites (ie, those controlled by the elite). One scholar notes that anarchists or allusions to them are present in all of the Pynchon books … anarchism, Pynchon seems to suggest, might be the best non-authoritarian and non-hierarchical social configuration for the future [‘Riding the Interface: An Anarchist Reading of Gravity’s Rainbow’, (Graham Benton), www.pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org]. Politics also run through Pynchon’s next, Vineland (1990), a novel which some dismissively dispatched as “Pynchon-Lite”. Vineland is an absurdist fable— punctuated with numerous references to drugs, 1960s music and TV pop culture, especially Star Wars—through which Pynchon provides a commentary on several key issues of the Eighties (the culture war debates, reading, television and mass communications). Set against the backdrop of the Republican Party’s re-election in 1984, Pynchon also takes a hefty swipe at American politics in the age of Reaganomics with a warning to America about “encroaching fascism” [Meinel, Tobias. “A Deculturated Pynchon? Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” and Reading in the Age of Television.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 58, no. 3 (2013): 451-64. Accessed November 26, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43485900].

❝ Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it—dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—I don’t like the way it came out … someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus.❞

~ Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

Guesting on ‘The Simpsons’

While resolutely keeping his guard up Pynchon maintains control of his world by choosing when and what of himself he gives up to the world at large. Famously Pynchon has appeared (in animated form) on two episodes of The Simpsons (a clear sign that the couch-surfing literary hermit is up on mainstream pop culture※), having dictated the terms of his guest spot. Obviously the idea of the Simpsons gig tickled his humerus wildly, as he is shown(sic) wearing a paper bag on his head and gets to say that he loves Marge Simpson’s book “almost as much as he loves cameras”.

Navy Tom

The “no selfies” author  
Tom Pynchon has been incredibly successful over many decades—especially living in a metropolis of over eight million people—in scrupulously avoiding the lenses of the ubiquitous paparazzi. Until fairly recently there was virtually no new photos of the reclusive writer floating round⍟. Media outlets when running a story on Pynchon almost invariably fall back on the one or two photos taken during his navy days (when Pynchon was aged around 19 or 20!). Pynchon’s legendary antipathy to having his photo taken has been explained away as  self-consciousness about his protruding buck teeth (something that a sequence of sessions in the dentist’s chair early on could surely have fixed). Whether this explanation holds water or not is of course, like everything else, a topic Pynchon is deafeningly silent on. On the issue of Pynchon hermetically sealing himself off from the world, a more plausible speculation is that it may be a reflection of Pynchon’s disapproval of the modern trend of writers embracing, even rejoicing, in the role of being celebrities, eg, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote et al [‘Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He’s Always Been’, (J.K. Trotter), The Atlantic, 17-Jun-2013, www.theatlantic.com].

A method in the madness?  
The lengths Pynchon will go to avoid being photographed have a paranoia-like tinge to them, and some are legendary. Once in México during the Early Sixties V. period, when surprised by a random photographer, Pynchon apparently jumped straight out of his apartment window to escape being snapped [‘Hiding in Plain Sight: On the unobservable Thomas Pynchon’, (Alex Gilvarry), Topic, Issue No. 04, October 2027, www.topic.com]. The failure to pin down the identity of a famous but reclusive novelist contributes to the creation of myths … the enigma of an “invisible literary man” exudes more intrigue. Pynchon would understand that having a mystique about him, another layer of interest for his ‘gonzo’ fan base to engage with, would have a bonus marketable spin-off for the author’s sales [‘Meet Your Neighbor, Thomas Pynchon’, (Nancy Jo Sales), New York, 27-Jun-2008, www.nymag.com].

Zoyd, Frenesi, Prairie, etc

Pynchon Inc personnel: the ministry of silly names  
Pynchon novels are typically peopled by a vast array of (usually odd) characters. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pychon rolls out no fewer than 400 named characters in 760 pages (most with fleeting walk-on, walk-off parts). Pynchon also revels in preposterous nomenclature, inventing lots of outrageous puns like Joaquin Stick, Benny Profane and the Marquis de Sod (a Californian lawn-care specialist!), and an inexhaustible supply of downright silly names – including McClintic Sphere, Tyrone Slothrop, Rachel Owlglass, Weed Atman, Yashmeen Halfcourt, Mike Fallopian, Scarsdale Vipe, Doc Sportello, Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke and Pig Bodine. Needless to say from the jokey nature of this Pynchon nomen-sampler that fleshing out a character’s multi-layered depths is not really the New Yorker’s bag [‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

An orgy of exegesis: Conspiracy la-la land
As someone with a lofty literary profile in the US and beyond (regularly scores a mention in the mix of annual Nobel Prize contenders), the utter paucity of biographical information on Pynchon has given rise to some pretty wild speculation about who he really is? Outré theories abound on the internet about the novelist’s identity, one of the most persistent is that Thomas Pynchon is really JD Salinger! Presumably the germ of this notion was the commonalities between the two, both perceived as hermits with a pathological allergy to attention, and each shared a fierce insistence on their personal privacy. But what gave added weight to the imaginative coupling in people’s minds was Salinger’s early removal from the public gaze and the supposed drying up of his literary output as evidenced by the complete cessation of his published work post-1965. This baseless ‘theory’ holds that Salinger invented “Thomas Pynchon” as an “elaborate authorial personality” to hide behind (Trotter). Even more ludicrous was the allegation that Pynchon was in fact the Unabomber! Another speculation has him as an airline pilot in real life (motivated by Howard Hughes adulation perhaps?). Other theories, rather predictably, conclude that Pynchon has to be a drug smuggler or a CIA agent (“its all there in the stories!”) [‘Authors reveal their Thomas Pynchon conspiracy theories’, Bookish, 03-Oct-2013, www.usatoday.com]. And so it goes, with more and even crazier notions. There’s something very apt that so many loopy conspiracy theories circulate about the identity of an author whose fiction is littered with accounts of loopy conspiracy theories✫.

Footnote: Lost in Pynchon  
Given my own often bewildered reaction to much of the fiction of Pynchon, and the palpable frustration that I see exhibited by others seeking despairingly to decode Tom Pynchon’s idiosyncratically personal brand of hieroglyphics◪, I often wonder why so many of us punters keep making the self-flagellating effort…I’m reminded of the cynic’s definition of a classic book, “something that everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read” (Mark Twain, who else?). Echoing this is one critic’s pithy summation of Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s most praised book, as the “least-read-must-read” book in American history (Sales). For the marginalised multitude denied enlightenment there is some comfort in mockery. The title of the 2009 “Po-Mo” take on TRP’s ‘gumshoe’ novel, Inherent Vice⍉, offers a pyrrhic get-square (‘Incoherent Vice’) [‘Incoherent Vice’, (Sam Anderson), New York, 31-Jul-2009, www.nymag.com]. 

PostScript: Absurdist and Fabulist?
Pynchon is a black belt when it comes to telling the “shaggy-dog” story. Early critics described his novels V. and Gravity’s Rainbow as “high-caliber shaggy dog stories, full of digressions and possibly pointless details converging to a climax that revolves little” [‘Thomas Pynchon: A Primer’, (Jack Joslin), 25-Apr-2012, www.litreactor.com]. This description also applies to the later Mason & Dixon, a long rambling tale full of rollicking in taverns and absurdly inconsequential humour. Pynchon concocts a mixture of fact and fiction, the actual historical personages of Mason and Dixon blended into the “obvious lies, rumours and outright fantasies of their travels” while surveying the boundaries of colonial North America [Thomas Pynchon: Novels & Concept.” Study.com, 25 June 2013, study.com/academy/lesson/thomas-pynchon-novels-lesson-quiz.html]. This shaggy dog, picturesque style of Pynchon brings to mind Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but more contemporaneously it reminds me of Peter Carey (especially Illywhacker) and John Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy) who both write in a Fabulist/Magic Realism vein.

＊ the scarcity of biographical material on Pynchon doesn’t stop the “Pynchon-curious” from trawling through the texts to turn up whatever “auto-fiction” they can find…the protagonist of V., Benny Profane, “a schlemihi and human yo-yo” is ex-navy, just like his creator

※ Pynchon, and for that matter, JD Salinger in his time, would undoubtedly have no trouble writing a treatise on daytime television had either wished to do so

 ⍟ even the photos supposed taken of the septuagenarian/octogenarian Pynchon out shopping can’t be confirmed as being genuinely of him

✫ Pynchon once famously said “every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength” 

◪ one reviewer likened Pynchon’s cryptic first novel V. to a Hieronymus Bosch triptych  

⍉  thus far the only Thomas Pynchon novel to make it to the silver screen

Recluse Deuces: Salinger and Pynchon, Two Modern Literary Outliers, Part I – JD Salinger

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture

In the contemporary world of fiction-writing and publishing, maximising one’s media exposure in such a highly competitive market is considered essential for commercial success in the industry. A regime of TV talk shows, book tour circuits, getting your face out there, meeting and greeting the fans, is what authors do, its their bread and butter.

Two American novelists whose careers have followed an altogether different trajectory are JD Salinger and Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Junior. As modern writers of fiction, what Salinger and Pynchon have in common are a seemingly reclusive nature, or at the very least a pronounced aversion to publicity, or if you prefer to look at the obverse side, a fanatical even pathological commitment to guarding one’s own privacy from prying eyes.

SALINGER

❛What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.❜※

~ JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

 ꧁꧂  ꧁꧂  ꧁꧂

The ‘Catcher’: the unbearable heaviness of fame
JD (Jerome David, but went by the name of Jerry) Salinger had a remarkably slim output for a literary career that spanned over half a century. Between 1965 and his death in 2010 Salinger published nothing at all, although he continued to write in this time, prolifically it seems⚀. 1951 was the seminal year for Salinger with the dazzling success of his debut novel, Catcher in the Rye…the story of teenager Holden Caulfield struck a profound chord with American adolescence, articulating a sense of angst and alienation from adult (mainstream) society. The ensuing torrent of fame, the intense media and fan preoccupation with the book and in its author, drove Salinger to ground, relocating for good to a rural retreat in Cornish, New Hampshire.

Salinger, in the words of the New York Times, “elevating privacy to an art form”, bunkered down, refused interviews, and clammed up about his personal life and past – leaving the press and other interested parties to try to piece together the autobiographical parts of the novelist’s existence. Some observers have speculated that Salinger experienced some sort of identity crisis or nervous breakdown after ‘Catcher’, that triggered his publicity-shyness. As a result of Catcher in the Rye’s impact Salinger thereafter set a determined course to studiously avoid future publication, including no follow-up novel to capitalise on the success✧. Eventually a handful of shorter works were published, the most significance of which was his 1961 novella/short story collection Franny and Zooey (adventures of the Glass family). On the dust jacket of that book Salinger wrote, “a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years”… elsewhere he has spoken of “the joys of not publishing” [‘Salinger, Pynchon & Co.: When writers are recluses’, (Scott Timberg), LA Times, 02-Sep-2007, www.latimes.com].

Salinger troppo bizarro
While Salinger kept schtum over the years, striving vigilantly to fend off unwanted attention, others within the author’s family and associates provided personal insights to whet the biography-starved appetites of the public. Both Salinger’s former live-in lover Joyce Maynard (who at 18 shacked up with the 50-something literary recluse in the New Hampshire hideaway) and the author’s own daughter Margaret wrote their own “tell-all”, unfavourable memoirs of Salinger (eg, “a scowling martinet who drank his own urine and clung to outmoded racial stereotypes drawn from old Hollywood movies”)¤ [Robert Schnakenberg, Secret Lives of Great Authors, (2008)]. Margaret’s hatchet-job on Dad provoked a sibling feud as Salinger’s son Matt (an occasional actor) rushed to his defence dissing Margaret’s memoir, Dream Catcher, as mere “gothic tales of our supposed childhood” [‘The odd life of Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger’, (Martin Chilton), Independent, 01-Jan-2019, www.independent.co.uk].

A young Salinger (photo: AP)

Catcher in the Rye has consistently charted as a best-seller✪, but its critical reception has been controversial and reviews mixed. Some critics of the novel, taking a highbrow view (Joan Didion, George Steiner) have deemed it too pessimistic in its message, too obscene, sincere admittedly, but nonetheless mawkish. Other readers, more low-key in their response, have wondered what all the fuss was about [‘J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly’, (Jonathan Yardley), The Washington Post, 19-Oct-2004, www.washingtonpost.com]. The ever-acerbic Gore Vidal questioned whether “Salinger’s enigmatic exile lent his work a seriousness it didn’t deserve” (Chilton). Salinger biographers Shields and Salerno saw ‘Catcher’ less as a coming-of-age story than allegorically as a “disguised war novel”◘ [‘Book Introduction to Salinger’, American Masters, 24-Dec-2013, www.pbs.org/].

A manifesto for the criminally unhinged
A notorious side-effect of the public’s (or sections of it’s) infatuation with Catcher in the Rye is that it has been the motivational vade mecum of choice for some assassins (or would-be assassins) of celebrities. The novel had an inspirational role in the (separate) shootings of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Mark David Chapman (who murdered Lennon) and John Hinckley Jr (who shot Reagan) both over-identified with Holden Caulfield to the point of being delusional and both were found to be in possession of a copy of ‘Catcher’ at the times of their crime.

PostScript: How reclusive are these literary hermits?
Salinger and Pynchon et al have been described as “recursively reclusive”, and this seems to be the majority opinion among fervent Salinger and Pynchon-watchers [‘The People Behind the Pen – T. Pynchon, J.D. Salinger and J.R.R. Tolkien’, Cision, 25-Sep-2015, www.prweb.com/]. But this view has been challenged – in Thomas Pynchon’s case, by himself! In 1997 Pynchon told CNN (by phone) that he believed that ‘recluse’ was “a code word generated by journalists … meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters’” – the “media-shy recluse as an invention of the media” [“The endangered literary ‘recluse’”, (Brian Joseph Davis), The Globe and Mail, 07-Aug-2009, www.theglobeandmail.com]. But if Pynchon—dubbed by the US media as the “Invisible Man”—is a recluse and a hermit, he’s one who is hiding in plain sight, having lived for about 30 years in the same apartment (the precise address can be openly accessed by a simple online search) in the dense metropolis of New York City!

In regard to Salinger, Shields and Salerno contend that he was never actually a recluse – their evidence? While in Cornish, NH, he travelled, he had friends, family, relationships, he consumed the popular culture of his day, he expressed political opinions (not necessarily positive ones…Reagan was “the outgoing dummy” and George HW Bush was “the incoming dummy”)(Chilton). Another biographer, Paul Alexander, asserts that Salinger played up the role of loner, that he was originally quite a keen socialiser when he lived in NYC…and in “another life” in his youthful pre-literary career, ‘Jerry’ had been “entertainment director” for a cruise liner, making the fun happen for 1,500 passengers on MS Kungsholm! As has been noted, Salinger and Pynchon (and Harper Lee and others) are “not recluses in the true sense of the word … they simply have different ways of being public figures” (Davis).

※ Salinger’s words proved incredibly prescient in light of his own literary career

⚀ in 2019 Salinger’s son indicated that the family will release much of his father’s large body of unpublished work

✧  from the 1950s on Salinger also refused all offers to sell the film rights to ‘Catcher’, backing it up with a ready willingness to sue in any instance of unauthorised use of his creations

¤ other allegations of ‘oddball’ behaviour directed at Salinger include his practice of glossolalia, his use of an orgasmatron, his dabbling in Scientology (and Vedantaism) and embrace of extreme homeopathy (Schnakenberg)

✪ to date the novel has sold somewhere in the vicinity of 70 million copies worldwide

◘ Salinger was a WWII veteran (active in D-Day, Dachau), had PTSD; postwar he was “perpetually in search of a spiritual cure for his damaged psyche” (Shields & Salerno)

Odysseus Beyond Antiquity: Myth, Hero and Anti-Hero, a Literary Archetype for Contemporary Story-Telling

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts

For scholar and layperson alike, the dawn of story-telling in the West if not the earliest literary text, coincides with Homer and his two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dating very roughly from somewhere around 700 BCE, Homer (traditionally thought to be a blind Ionian poet – see PostScript) composed his two (very) long poems in hexameter form to be read aloud at festivals and such public events. The Homeric epics were spread throughout the Greek world and beyond by professional reciters of poetry called rhapsodes (sort of travelling bards) [Beaty Rubens & Oliver Taplin, An Odyssey Round Odysseus: The Man and His Story Traced Through Time and Place, (1989)]. 

Epic of Gilgamesh

Homer’s works are generally considered the foundation point of what is commonly referred to as the Western canon※, though the Iliad and the Odyssey are predated by other foundation texts emanating from the earlier Sumerian civilisation, particularly the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca 2,100 BCE), comprising poems and tales, the first known work of fiction [‘What is the oldest known piece of literature?’, (Evan Andrews), History, 22-Aug-2018,  www.history.com]. 

Cattle of the Sun

The second of the epic poems, the Odyssey, deals with the perilous and action-packed 10-year journey of its eponymous hero Odysseus back to his home in Ithaca after the Trojan War (the Iliad). In 2018 a poll by the BBC of over 100 international authors, academics, journalists and critics chose the Odyssey as the most influential work in Western literature. Some of the reasons given for making the Odyssey primus inter pares in such a vast array of august literary texts include: it is “one of the great foundation myths of Western culture…asking what it means to be a hero”; it is “properly epic”; it has “great female characters”; it “forces us to question the assumptions we might have about quests, war, and what it means to return home” (repatriation); it endorses a “streak of individualism”, etc [Homer’s Odyssey is Officially the World’s Most Influential Story’, (Tasso Kokkinidis), Greece. Greek Reporter,(2018), www.greece.greekreporter.com✪.

That the Odyssey has been massively influential in the arts ever since it first emerged in the rocky hillsides of Ionian Greece is indisputable. Other ancient Greek playwrights and poets who followed Homer, like Sophocles, produced their own versions of the iconic tale (and their own take on the elusive character of Odysseus). It has been suggested that the character of Jesus in the Gospel of Markspan class=”s2″ style=”font-size: 19.73px”> draws from Odysseus and his adventures, eg, the “feeding of the 500”, Jesus was a carpenter like Odysseus, who was the builder of the “Wooden Horse” [‘The Odyssey : An Overview, No Sweat Shakespeare,  www.nosweatshakespeare.com].

⍐ 2nd century AD Tunisian mosaic of the Sirens (Book 12)

The Bard’s debt to Homer

It’s widely known that Shakespeare borrowed freely from many sources – plots, devices and imagery from the Bible, Plutarch, Seneca, Chaucer, from Holinshed’s Chronicles, from Boccaccio’s Decameron, etc. [‘Shakespeare’s Source Material’, (J.M. Pressley), Shakespeare’s Resource Center, www.bardnet.net/]. Like any educated Tudor man of the day Shakespeare voraciously absorbed the classics and Homeric influences are discernible in his plays – Odyssean themes like the phenomena of homecoming (Shakespeare’s Romances); the recognition theme from Odysseus’ reappearance in disguise in Ithaca (King Lear); the renewal theme (The Winter’s Tale) (No Sweat Shakespeare)⦿.

The Odysseus-Hamlet connexion

The Odyssey’s imprint on Shakespeare is most noticeable in the Bard’s most famous tragedy Hamlet. Several patterns emerge. Both literary opuses share a preoccupation with a troubled father-son relationship (Odysseus/Telemachus, King Hamlet/Prince Hamlet). Moreover, the Odyssey and Hamlet possess striking thematic similarities. Prince Hamlet and King Odysseus both employ deception to their advantage—the former dissembling madness and the latter physical disguises—to exact retribution against those who have wronged them. Both protagonists reveal a fatal flaw (hamartia)⊞ in the course of their trials and tribulations [‘Hamlet v. Odyssey’, (William Sheng), 12-Apr-2012,  http://docs.google.com/].

⍐ Odyssey-lite Homer (Simpson)

Retelling the Odysseus myth anew

The influence of the Odyssey on various media has been recurring and pervasive, including on novels (Don Quixote: Quixote, like Odysseus, embarks on a ‘epic’ journey and inflates (or distorts) his tales of heroism and survival) or The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood’s feminist remaking of the myth as told from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’ long-suffering wife); on television animation (The Simpsons “Tales from the Public Domain” episode – a satirical travesty of the Odyssey, Homer (Simpson) as Odysseus on a decidedly unheroic journey [‘8 Novels Inspired by the Odyssey’, (Jessica Ferri), Early Bird Books,  www.earlybirdbooks.com ; Economou Green, Mary. “The Odyssey and Its Odyssey in Contemporary Texts: Re-visions in Star Trek, The Time Traveler’s Wife,and The Penelopiad.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 1.1 (2014). Web.]; in poetry (Tennyson’s Ulysses (the Latinised form of ‘Odysseus’) is a kind of pessimistic postscript to the Odyssey with the aged hero unhappily stuck in his island kingdom lamenting the loss of his life of travel and adventure). 

Odysseus by the River Liffey

Easily the most famous literary reinterpretation of the Odyssey is James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness✠ novel Ulysses, a work which tore up the handbook for writing novels in the modern age. T S Eliot summarised the revolutionary impact of Ulysses’ thus: “(Joyce) has made the novel obsolete by replacing the narrative method with the mythical method” [quoted in ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses: Remixing the Homeric Myth’, (James AW Heffernan), The Great Courses Daily, 02-Apr-2017,www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com].Joyce adapts the framework of Homer’s classic to 1904 Dublin, condensing the original’s 10-year journey into a single day, in which the protagonist, the “mock-heroic” and cod-ordinary Leopold Bloom, wanders around his various haunts in the city. In every chapter of Ulysses Joyce matches or parallels the actions of his characters with that of the Odyssey but presents them as banal and mundane. The scene in Homer where a lovely princess Nausikaa assists the shipwrecked Odysseus on the island of Scheria is reworked by Joyce to show the married cuckold Bloom as voyeur, spying on an attractive girl at Sandymount Strand while relieving his frustrations by masturbating [David Norris & Carl Flint, Joyce For Beginners, (1994)]. 

the 1967 film version of ‘Ulysses‘

Sci-Fi Odysseus: Trekking with Homer

Science-Fiction depictions on the screen, big and small, have mined an abundant seam of inspiration from the Odyssey. Kubrick’s and Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey repositions the story in the Solar System with a supercomputer named HAL-9000 filling the role of the Cyclops imperilling the life of Odysseus/Dave Bowman. Another cult classic that owes inestimably to Homer’s Odyssey is the long-running Star Trek TV series. The Odyssey parallels are more than translucent  – Star Trek is replete with alien locations and weird and unworldly characters. Captain Kirk is “an intelligent, strong and charismatic leader, struggling to keep his crew together as they sail through the depths of space” [‘Greek Myth and Science Fiction’,  www.greekmythandscifi.wordpress.com]. Kirk & Co leave the known world (Earth) to journey into the unknown (the Galaxy)❂, they “go beyond”, they problem-solve, they vanish aliens and monsters and “re-emerge into the world victorious in quest purpose and with knowledge to better the plight of humankind” (Economou Green).

Odysseus as anti-hero precursor?

Odysseus exhibits qualities that make him seem to our eyes very modern (or even post-modern). He heroically and valiantly combats the monstrous creatures which block his path, but there is another, deeply problematic side to his personality. Odysseus, the personification of guile and cunning (polumetis in the Greek), routinely acts in both the Iliad and the Odyssey without honour or noble intention – a trickster, a dissembler and “con man”, a cheat, a liar, Among his many misdeeds, he sleeps with Circe; he murders innocent maids; he displays arrogance such as in his encounter with Polyphemus (the Cyclops); he misappropriates the armour of the dead Achilles (causing Ajax to take his own life); he fails to protect his crew on the voyage home resulting in them all perishing. You can discern in the ‘complicated’ and ‘ambiguous’◪ character of Odysseus a model for the ascendency of the anti-hero in modern cinema since the 1960s (Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, etc) [Cook, E. (1999). “Active” and “Passive” Heroics in the “Odyssey”.  The Classical World, 93(2), 149-167. doi: 10.2307/4352390].

Footnote: Odyssey, the prototype road movie

Homer’s classic is of course one of if not the principal fount of all subsequent travel/road stories in Western culture. This has proved nowhere more fecund than in modern cinema in films such as Easy Rider, Mad Max and countless others. Other road movies have been even more overt in referencing their debt to Odyssey and Homer – Paris, Texas, where the Odyssean protagonist charts a hazardous course which takes him from ruin and desperation to redemption [‘Wander Forever Between The Wind: A Tribute To PARIS, TEXAS’, (Priscilla Page), Birth, Movies, Death, 23-Sep-2017, www.birthmoviesdeath.com]. The Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou is unequivocally transparent in its pilferings from the Odyssey…the movie is variously peopled by a “Ulysses/Everett”, a “Penny”, a figurative “Cyclops”, “Lotus Eaters”, “Trojans/Ku Klux Klan”, a “Cattle of the Sun God”, “Sirens/laundry ladies”, a “Poseidon/county sheriff” and assorted other Homeric entities – all transposed to a 1930s Great Depression, Deep South setting.

PostScript: Authorship issue

Some scholars over the years have sought to debunk the custom of attributing the Iliad and the Odyssey to someone called ‘Homer’, about who there is virtually zero factual information, no biography to recount. Rather than a knowable or identifiable author this view attributes authorship to the whole Hellenic culture, tracing its genesis in fragments created before the supposed dates that ‘Homer’ flourished [‘Author Says a Whole Culture—Not a Single ‘Homer’—Wrote ‘Iliad,’ ‘Odyssey’’, (Simon Worrall), National Geographic, 03-Jan-2015,  www.nationalgeographic.com].

ღ დ ღ დ ღ

＊＊ the books, films, etc referred to above are only a selection of the total works—literary, the arts, music, cinema—informed and influenced by the Odyssey

𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪

※ ‘classic’ works of literature, philosophy, music and art elevated into a band of select ‘membership’ in the firmament of high culture

✪ the claim of ‘official’ recognition should be tempered by the fact that if a different set of experts were asked, they might not necessarily agree with the choice

⊞ in Hamlet it is prevarication and indecision, failing to act when he should, in Odysseus it is hubris, by which Odysseus offends Poseidon with “god-like” arrogance  

⦿ Shakespeare’s borrowings from the Iliad are more overt in Troilus and Cressida, he is indebted to Homer’s tale of Troy for the storyline and the entire Dramatis personae

✠ a method of narration in a literary work that describes happenings in the flow of thoughts in the minds of the characters [www.literarydevices.net/]

❂ cf. Odysseus – the Underworld

◪ Emily Wilson/Erwin Cook

 ≡ ≡  ≡

Sifting the Devil from the Dragon: Dracula versus Vlad Ţepeş

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Biographical, Cinema, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Regional History

(Image: Lonely Planet)

Romanians, especially those from the region of Transylvania, must view Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula with at best mixed feelings. On the one hand, the immense popularity of Stoker’s imaginative work of fiction helped put Transylvania on the international tourist map…on the other hand, its dark and ghoulish tale of chilling evil with its genesis in the mountains and forests of trans-silvae (“the land beyond the forest”), projects a negative and deceptively gloomy picture of the country. The association of one of the greatest heroes in Romanian history and a defender of Christianity, the Medieval ruler Vlad Ţepeş III, with the fictional Dracula, would be displeasing to many patriotic Romanians.

Dracula’s transformation into a classic of the Gothic horror genre captured the imagination of film-makers, inspiring numerous silver-screen interpretations of Dracula – from the silent German feature Nosferatu to countless Western film versions which made actors such as Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee famous – and typecast. The Dracula character’s pervasion of especially American popular culture has seen the trope extend to parody cartoon versions on TV (Duckula), to female teen “vampire-slayers” (Buffy) and even to “blaxploitation” movies asserting the emergence of a self-conscious black culture in the US (eg, Blacula).

Vlad’s signature punishment
In some screen interpretations of the novel, like the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the identities of Dracula and Vlad Ţepeş are presented as if they are one and the same person! (see also PostScript). Entirely fanciful of course but Stoker’s character did draw inspiration from the real-life Vlad Ţepeş III (or Vlad Împalatul). Vlad was the voivode✱ of Wallachia in the mid-15th century, infamous for impaling victims such as his own troublesome boyars or foreigners captured in conflicts (Ottomans, Bulgarians, Saxons, Hungarians▣). Such an horrific torture technique earned him the nickname “the Impaler”.

⇩ 1499 woodcut, Vlad the Impaler

Vlad Ţepeş, voivode and resident of Wallachia, not Transylvania
Stoker did get the name ‘Dracula’ from the Medieval Romanian prince, or at least from his family. Vlad’s father—Wallachian voivode before him—was Vlad II, also known as Vlad Drâcul…Drâcul (or Drâc) was a word for ‘dragon’ in the 15th century※, today in Modern Romanian it means “the devil” – something noted by Stoker in his research for the book as an apt descriptor for his fictional arch-nemesis. There is however a great deal of the character of Count Dracula that Stoker didn’t derive from the circumstance of Vlad Ţepeş. The Impaler had nothing to do with vampires or any supernatural beings and his associations with Transylvania were largely peripheral and tenuous. Vlad was supposedly born within Transylvania in Sighişoara although there are some doubts about this (an alternative view has his birthplace in Wallachia). Bran Castle, a Transylvanian tourist attraction identified with Stoker’s Dracula, has no connection with Vlad at all [Florin Curta, referenced in ‘The Real Dracula: Vlad the Impaler’, (Marc Lallanilla), Live Science, (2017), www.livescience.com].

⇩ Bran Castle (Photo: Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty Images)

Constructing the Ur-vampire
Transylvania, being to outsiders, “a mysterious land of vampires and other supernatural things”, handed down a long tradition of folklore and legends, it’s not surprising that Stoker drew on this source for inspire and inform his vampire story. Superstitions and beliefs of Romanian peasants in Stoker’s time fuelled a plentiful supply of tales about vampiri (vampires), vârcolaci (werewolves) and other supernatural monstri. Stoker’s library research would also have acquainted him with the strigol, a Romanian figure of legend—“a reckless spirit that returns to suck the lifeblood from his relatives”—the type of vampirish “undead souls” that would find a place in Stoker’s horror novel [‘The Use of History in Dracula Tourism in Romania’, (Tuomas Hovi), www.folklore.ee].

⇧ Whitby, England (Image credit: www.visitwhitby.com)

Non-Romanian influences on Dracula
In the Dracula novel the undead Count travels to Britain in search of more victims, journeying to Whitby in Yorkshire. This echoes Stoker’s own earlier visit to Whitby in which the author was reportedly quite taken with the town, its colony of bats circling round the churches, its whole creepy atmosphere, all of which he would have found good material for a Gothic novel [‘How Dracula Came to Whitby’, English Heritage, www.english-heritage.org.uk]. Stoker apparently found more inspiration in Port Erroll (these days, Cruden Bay) in Aberdeenshire – Slains Castle with its “fang-like rocks” is thought to have also inspired the Transylvanian Dracula castle home in the book [‘Slains Castle’, www.visitabdn.com].

Vampires: not the exclusive preserve of Transylvania⦿
Bram Stoker was Irish and never visited Romania in his lifetime, prompting some to speculate that the Dracula story may equally have been influenced by the author’s own experiences growing up in Ireland. Stoker would have been exposed to homegrown myths of the supernatural (such as those involving the sidhe, the fairy people of Irish folklore), as well as to the nightmarish ordeal of living through a cholera epidemic [‘How Bram Stoker creates Dracula with the aid of Irish Folklore’, (Leonie O’Hara), Irish Central, 04-Oct-2020, www.irishcentral.com].

PostScript: Vampire tourism
Vampire tourism in Transylvania has not been waylaid by coronavirus, tourist operators in Romania are still offering up a raft of tour packages—with titles like “7-Day Dracula Highlights Tour” and “Fun With Fangs: Vampire Tours in Romania”—to lure the “vampire-curious”. The tours, tend to wallow in all the predictable cliches and stereotypes, milking the prevailing craze for all things vampire, staying in Dracula-themed hotels, etc. Vampire tourism is an intriguing admixture of history, tradition and fiction…taking a leaf from Hollywood some of the tours indulge in considerable conflating of the historic Vlad Ţepeş with the fictional Count Dracula (Hovi).

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✱ ruler, a sort of military governor of a region

▣ Prince Vlad’s political fortunes generally hovered in the vacuum between the two regional powerhouses Hungary and the Ottomans, who he fought both with and against at different times

※ Drâculeşti is the patronymic – Vlad Ţepeş was also known as Drâculea, “son of the dragon”

☒ descendants of Saxon (German) merchants and craftsmen who migrated to Romania, commencing in the 12th century

⦿ though the tradition is a strong one in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, eg, Greece vrykolakas, Albania shtriga