Kishkan’s decision to write an Irish Odyssey can only have been undertaken with a degree of trepidation. As W. B. Stanford wrote in 1954:
. . . no author in ancient or modern times has attempted to rival the comprehensiveness of Homer’s account until the present century, when an Irish novelist and a Greek poet have produced two contemporary interpretations of the much enduring hero: James Joyce in his Ulysses (1922) and Nikos Kazantzakis in his Odyssey (1938). 14
Like O’Malley, Joyce had used Butcher and Lang’s translation as his source; and there is much of Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom, in Declan O’Malley – in his defence of ‘otherness’ and natural justice in his support of both the Aboriginal peoples and women’s equality; also in his love of music. Kishkan’s reworking of the
Nausicaa episode, especially the second time the parallel is invoked when O’Malley awakes from his snooze in his coffi n- canoe and espies the pre- pubescent, naked twelve- year old Rose on the beach below (141ff .), gestures, knowingly or not, towards the hugely controversial parallel scene in Ulysses when Bloom masturbates on the beach as he pruriently looks up Gerty MacDowell’s skirt. 15 O’Malley recognizes his sin, which given his lust for a twelve- year-old, is clearly more culpable than Bloom’s lust for the seventeen- year-old Gerty. When Rose’s father banishes O’Malley for teaching his daughter to read and write without his permission, O’Malley knows that, like Actaeon, he in fact deserves punishment for voyeurism (160–161).
Like many of her predecessors, notably Derek Walcott in Omeros , Kishkan cannot help but include – consciously or otherwise – Joyce’s epic novel as intertext. But unlike many Irish predecessors, she has opted to do so in prose rather than in poetry. Indeed all other Irish Odyssey s aft er Joyce have been in verse in line with the general trend in Anglophone receptions of Homer in the twentieth century. 16 Th is ‘lyricizing’/‘miniaturizing’ of epic is evident in, say, the arch and whimsical poem, ‘A Siren’, by the expatriate and notoriously adulterous Derek Mahon, and in his moving and apologetically masculinist ‘Calypso’. 17 It is also demonstrated by the feminist re- readings of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, notably in her collection Th e Second Voyage (1977) . But perhaps, the most extensive and consistent lyrical engagement with the Odyssey more recently has been in the beautifully craft ed poetic renderings by Michael Longley (in, say, his ‘Laertes’, and his ‘Anticlea’ poems), which have enabled the poet, as in O’Malley’s case, to say things about himself that the raw material of his own life cannot yield publicly. 18
So why has Kishkan chosen the novel form, when she is herself a poet? One reason is that her Odyssey requires space – across time, across place and across the generations of history. As O’Malley realizes, rootedness is always linked to death, to history; his landlady Mrs Neil would never easily leave World’s End, where she has buried the child she lost:
Th at was a thing to anchor a woman to a place, he supposed. A woman would want to nurture a child, even aft er its death, remember its birthday, croon a lullaby to the seeding grasses. He’d read of tribes who buried dead children around their cooking fi res so they wouldn’t get cold. A woman would understand that, he thought, even if she might not do it herself.
(133) Similarly refl ecting upon the devastating eff ects of the Great Famine in Ireland, O’Malley comments on the importance of what literally lies beneath one’s feet:
Th ere had been families living in folds of the earth, tucked into ravines, who were gone with hardly a trace: a wisp in an aging memory, rituals carved in the bark of a tree, a placement of stones to assist one’s footing on a steep ridge.
(54) Just as his mother had passed the memories of the dead from the Famine onto him, so had O’Malley made his pupils realize that stepping stones can also be hallowed markers of our own mortality.
Th e fi rst part of the novel runs from the spring to the fall of 1922, the same year as the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses (written between 1914–1920 and published initially in parts in the Literary Review 1918–1920). Of course, the events of Ulysses take place on 16 June 1904 but the prominence granted to the year 1922 in the section headings is signifi cant here, not least because of its association with Joyce’s monumental Odyssey . But there are further historical reasons for the choice of date: Kishkan’s novel is not only cut in half by its geographical shift ; its second part is made possible purely by a seismic historical shift – the signing of the Anglo–
Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921 that had granted dominion status, as with Canada, to Ireland. Without the declaration of the Free State, as an outlaw O’Malley would not have been able to return to his country of birth without arrest; and the novel, in turn, would have been denied the nostos . By the middle of the second part of the novel, from June 1922 onwards, the civil war between those who supported the Free State as a fi rst step towards full independence of the Crown and those who rejected it altogether was fully underway. If the burning of Troy that leads to the ten- year nostos of the Odyssey is replaced here by the burning of Ireland by the Black and Tans, the settling of scores against the suitors on Odysseus’ return is now rewritten in the bloody acts of revenge carried out on both sides in the civil war.
Part One focuses mostly on O’Malley’s relations with women – with Mrs Neil and Rose, his Arete and his Nausicaa (although it should be noted that Mrs Neil, in particular, is a composite fi gure – by the end of Part One, at least, she is Calypso as much as Arete). Th is Odysseus, furthermore, does not have a son, only two dead daughters. O’Malley is increasingly struck by his similarities to Odysseus, but also painfully aware of his diff erences:
Declan had journeyed a long way by sea but alone. And the biggest diff erence between them? Odysseus was struggling homeward to a wife and son. Declan had no one.
(88) But on his return, it is still his Penelope, or rather her living surrogates, who provides the focus of Part Two.
Th e only surviving object of the fi re that O’Malley can salvage is the harp belonging to his daughter Grainne; and he learns with the help of two women how to bring it back to life. Assistance comes fi rst from Una, whose grandfather had owned the Big House and who now resides in the groundskeeper’s cabin, the only remnant of the fi re. It is her cabin that provides a warm enough environment for the harp’s wood to breathe. Second, Grainne’s former teacher, Bernadette Feeny, teaches O’Malley how to string the instrument. Th e harp, like O’Malley himself, had survived at great personal cost; but such self- sacrifi ce, it is suggested, is what guaranteed its ultimate survival:
Perhaps it had been a blessing that the strings had broken and melted as they might otherwise have caused the harp to pull itself apart from the tension.
(237) Clearly the harp is not simply Grainne’s powerful legacy to her father; it represents, as in popular iconography, the symbol of Erin, Romantic nationalism’s allegorical fi gure of Ireland. 19
Whilst Ireland ‘pull[s] itself apart from the tension of civil war’, O’Malley the nationalist, but strictly non- violent, proto- republican, joins forces with Una, the daughter of the Protestant Ascendancy now turned feminist activist in the women’s republican movement, Cumman na mBan. 20 In a world in which O’Malley is bequeathed a skiff by a relative of one who had died in France in the First World War, fi ghting on the same side as the Black and Tans who had denied him both his livelihood and his loved ones (61), reconciliation and reunion take on wide political signifi cance. Before the destruction of the Big House, connections – aff ection almost – had existed between O’Malley and Una’s houses:
. . . despite their class and religious and diff erences, the two families had been friendly. Th e woman of the desmesne had consulted Eilis [O’Malley’s wife] about her arthritis, sharing the aches and pains of aging over a cup of tea in sunlight by the cabin door, roses wreathed above the entrance, while the woman’s horse waited, tethered to a bit of gate. Th e mister brought cartons of children’s books to the school for the young scholars, and their daughters, Grainne and Maeve, loved the same music, played the same instrument. It made no sense.
(90) As Una and O’Malley now share knowledge – of botany and ancient Greek respectively, and of their respective losses of family homes and of loved ones – they signal the possibility of a new Ireland, for Protestant and Catholic, male and female, the individual and the community. When Una arrives back, carrying a
puppy in her arms that reminds O’Malley of his dog Argos in Canada, she tells him of the child that they are expecting together.
Longley’s poem ‘Ceasefi re’, published in Th e Irish Times on the eve of the Good Friday Agreement, turned to Homer’s Iliad to delineate the delicate balance of the peace process. Figuring Ireland as a composite country, with multiple voices, multiple agendas and decidedly without violence, was a no less urgent and necessary undertaking at the start of the new millennium in the wake of the series of Belfast Agreements 1998–1999. Kishkan’s Odyssey , for this reason alone, still merits attention today. A Man in a Distant Field may be a tamed – and occasionally cloyingly sentimental – Odyssey compared to Homer’s, and very defi nitely compared to Joyce’s; but it too is expansive, warm-hearted, oft en hard- headed and intelligent, and worthy of scrutiny.
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Victor Pelevin’s Th e Helmet of Horror ( Shlem uzhasa ) was fi rst published in Russian in 2005, with the English translation appearing in 2006 as part of the Canongate Myth series, an international publishing project with a self- consciously global scope, initiated by the independent Scottish publishing house Canongate Books. It was one of seventeen short novels based on myths from all over the world chosen by the authors, an international team from countries including Israel, Japan, China and Brazil as well as Europe, Canada and Australia. All the writers were well established already, but had made their names in diff erent genres of the novel, ranging from detective to historical fi ction. Th e novels included, for example, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of the Odyssey as Th e Penelopiad (2005) and A. S. Byatt’s adaptation of episodes from the Norse Edda in Ragnarök (2011).
Pelevin’s Helmet of Horror , which is a response to the ancient Greek myth of the Minotaur, fi rst appeared as an audiobook in Russian, then as a conventional book in printed form, and shortly aft erwards as an interactive play entitled Shlem.com , with ‘ shlem ’ meaning ‘helmet’ in Russian. Th e work is experimental; it was written in the form of an internet chat, so that communication through advanced technology and an ancient myth are combined; however innovative, this approach is not so surprising when we consider that we still record and store narratives just as the ancient Greeks did, although we use electronic disks to preserve them rather than inscribing them on wax tablets with styluses.
In this chapter I argue that Pelevin is using ancient Greek myth to think about the nature of the new community created by the internet. Th is process involves briefl y considering some of the cultural, aesthetic and philosophical infl uences on Pelevin’s novel, including some earlier ‘receptions’ of the Minotaur myth in fi ction and cinema, while analyzing some of the new story’s key features: its topos (the virtual space in which the ‘action’ takes place); its dematerialized characters;