ages his companions to sail outside of civilization to the open West and faraway lands where they are shipwrecked and swallowed by the sea. Sufferings lead to different narratives but what is at stake here, again, is the comparison of Dante’s Ulysses to his ancient counterpart. Sufferings, ingenuity, the cunning art of lying and doing fraudulent tricks, endurance, or navigating power are common grounds for the variations of the literary figure Odysseus. They are turned into narratives, though, in which new meanings, new circumstances, new contexts are ascribed to the hero’s suffering, his ingenuity, and his homecoming. With Dante, for exam-ple, Ulysses is suffering as a result of his ingenuity (and his burning restlessness:
“l’ardore”),27he is a sinner punished for hissuperbiabut he is also offering a new experience of exploring the world. Up until today, Dante’s Ulysses is a much-dis-puted ambivalent counter-hero: a Christianexemplumof deadly pride and a self-portrait of the author who is travelling through hell and paradise.28
Adaptations of literary figures display the main dynamics of comparative practices: They decontextualize one element, onecomparatum(here: the figure of Odysseus), and start to recontextualize it in a new environment, a new fictional setting that redescribes the themes of theOdyssey. Adaptations, allusions, and citations are not restricted to fiction, of course; but they reveal one of the powers of literary narratives: redescribing our experience through comparative practices.
Fables, fictions, and narratives, for Paul Ricœur, are “privileged means whereby we reconfigure our confused, unformed and at the limit mute experience.”29
Fahrten—Passagen—Wanderun-Redescribing reality in this way also implies a social significance and sociological meaning of literature, because these comparisons—an odyssey, an Odysseus in a new textual environment—also point to hitherto unseen, even unfelt experiences of the social world: of conflicts, contradictions, inconsistencies, constraints, in-justices, and pathologies. Therefore, to give one significant famous example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in theirDialectic of Enlightenment(1947), do not use the figure of Odysseus for the purpose of illustration as a simple example of a capitalist and bourgeois type of character—a method that could easily be crit-icized (and has been critcrit-icized) as a crude neglect of historicity. With theOdyssey as the main narrative, an “allegory”31(as Horkheimer and Adorno themselves call it),The Dialectic of Enlightenmentrecontextualizes a literary form to convey a new description of contemporary society.
Actually, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s narrative puts the figure of Odysseus into new historical contexts by a series of comparative transactions. The hero moves through infinite but clearly geographical space; as a “trembling shipwrecked” he nevertheless anticipates “the work of the compass” (p. 53). He triumphs over myth-ical powers by behaving “like an actor” changing his roles and performances; he thinks in “equivalent terms” (p. 56) like a modern business-man; and his strategies already contain the “scheme of modern mathematics” and the philosophical tricks of “formalism” (p. 68). He already is—like Robinson Crusoe—a “homo oeconomi-cus” (p. 69), and he betrays the gods of nature “like the civilized traveler once has done” with the “natives” trading “glass beads for ivory” (p. 55). Odysseus—in the episode with the Sirens—is like a “landlord who lets others work for him” (p. 40);
he is chained and passive while listening to the sirens, motionless “like, in later times, the concertgoers” (p. 40).
The rhetoric of comparison constantly moves the figure of Odysseus into con-texts of modernity—from the age of discoveries to modern landlords, from robin-sonades to businessmen and analytic philosophers, from early imperialism to bour-geois concert halls. Horkheimer and Adorno call theOdysseya “founding text of European civilization” (p. 52), not because everything that is in capitalism and in the “dialectic of enlightenment” is already to be found in Homer, but because the ancient epos provides a formula for unforeseen adaptations and continuities made
gen, München 2003, 102–118; Günter Häntzschel, Odysseus in der deutschen Literatur vor und nach 1945, in: Walter Erhart/Sigrid Nieberle (eds.),Odysseen 2001. Fahrten—Passagen—Wan-derungen, München 2003, 119-131; Bernd Seidensticker, Aufbruch zu neuen Ufern. Transfor-mationen der Odysseusgestalt in der literarischen Moderne, in: Bernd Seidensticker/Martin Vöhler (eds.),Urgeschichten der Moderne. Die Antike im 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart/Weimar 2001, 249–270.
31 Max Horkheimer/Theodor W. Adorno,Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, [1947], Frankfurt a. M. 2002, 41 [in the following, page numbers are given within the text with my translations].
out of comparisons. To equate Odysseus and modern man, ancient Greek and cap-italism, would be a crude sociological statement or a false historiographic argu-ment; what makes theDialectic of Enlightenmenta literary text, though, is the trans-position of Odysseus into a new narrative containing different scenes of civiliza-tion while embodying ethnographic encounters, economics, science, and art. Every one of these images tells a different story, not the Odyssey again or an illustrated Marxist world history, but new ways of experiencing modernity—“suffering” and
“ingenuity” retold.
The double aspect of theOdysseyas a suffering and a successful homecoming, as a figuration of “suffering that leads to success”32(Hans Blumenberg), marks the ambiguity of the history of civilization. As a hero who finally triumphs over mythical and natural powers but also—because of this—suffers and has to make sacrifices, he is easily adapted to Critical Theory’s dark tales about instrumental reason. When Homer und Odysseus describe the home of the cyclops as self-con-tained, without work, without law, there is, in this comparative view of the epos and modernity’s history, a “guilty plea” on behalf of “civilization” (p. 72). Odysseus’s skills and smartness lead to rationality and power, but they also produce isolation (for the homo oeconomicus as well as for the art connoisseur); his wanderings are legible as an experience of suffering, endurance, and loss put forth precisely by the domination of nature and rationality. Odysseus, after all, may be theexemplum of a hero prone to adaptations, renewals, and these kinds of comparative prac-tices because, in Homer as well as in European literature, he inhabits a threshold between an old mythical and a new, self-reflexive, and restless figure: “simultane-ously ancient and modern” already in classical times, “an ideal observation point from which to measure the similarities and differences between the ‘alterity’ of the past and the ‘modernity’ of the present.”33
Like numerous other literary adaptations of the Odyssey, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s redescriptions of modernity do not possess theoretical value or historical truth in themselves but, as Axel Honneth has claimed, are literary comparisons that serve to defamiliarize the everyday world, to distance the self-evidence of our social practices, and to make us aware of something we have not registered before.34Horkheimer and Adorno read theOdysseyas an allegory, a metaphora continuain rhetorical terms: They create a series of metaphors and comparisons (with the particle “like”) to put modernity’s experience in a new light, to let it be experienced in another way.
32 [My translation]. Blumenberg,Arbeit am Mythos, 87.
33 Piero Boitani,The Shadows of Ulysses. Figures of a Myth, Oxford 1994, 2.
34 Cf. Axel Honneth, Über die Möglichkeit einer erschließenden Kritik. Die “Dialektik der Aufk-lärung” im Horizont gegenwärtiger Debatten über Sozialkritik, in: Axel Honneth,Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Aufsätze zur praktischen Philosophie, Frankfurt a. M. 2000, 70–87.