Preface 2

Ulysses

To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour. — William Blake, from “Auguries of Innocence”

✏️

The exam is at 8 AM and it’s now 2 AM. The fingers of my right hand are twitching just thinking about it. English 440: The Foundations of Western Literature. The course was taught by Dr. Virgil Kennedy Rexroth. Old Rex. A dinosaur if ever there was one. The Foundations of Western Literature. It’s one of those topics that sounds manageable at first. Solid, with pillars like the Parthenon or Solomon’s Temple.

But is there enough ink in my pen to cover such a topic? Where does it even start, and where on earth does it end? You find a container to fit it in, and it spills over the brim. You find a cement wall and then you find out that there are things beyond that wall.

Old Rex says that Western Literature starts with the rise of the epic in Greece and ends with its fall in England. This jives with his course, which started with the Golden Age of Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey and ended with the dark shades of Eliot’s Prufrock and Joyce’s Ulysses.

Yet did the epic really start in Greece? A thousand years before Homer, the Mesopotamians circulated various versions of Gilgamesh, an epic story which contains the qualities we associate with the Western epic: the struggles of a great hero; the themes of love, friendship, justice, and war; the quest for meaning; a journey to the afterlife; the intervention of gods; and two of the foundations of literature itself: 1. the world’s first script (cuneiform) and 2. the world’s first coherent and sustained narrative. Old Rex tells us that Western Literature starts in Greece, but doesn’t it start between the Tigris and Euphrates?

Old Rex’s fall of the epic is also unconvincing. According to him, it goes like this: the cracks appear in the 18th century mock epic; the abyss opens up in Byron’s Don Juan; and the epic falls to its lowest point in Joyce’s Ulysses. Yet isn’t this precisely the time when a new agnostic mode of meaning is forged? Isn’t this when the old Graeco-Christian epic dies and the new secular epic comes into being? I’d go so far as to liken Byron to the great Hindu god Shiva: he is at once a destroyer and a creator. The resurrection of this god can be seen in Joyce’s epic of modern life, Ulysses. Joyce’s novel isn’t an epic masterpiece despite its strange irreverent form, but because of it.

The reason it’s impossible to find clear beginnings and endings is that we have legs that turn corners and walk down new streets, eyes that see beyond our immediate surroundings, and minds that imagine what’s beyond. We see a cement wall on the horizon, but then we walk all the way to the horizon and find that the wall isn’t as sturdy as it seemed. We see on the other side of that wall more walls and open fields, more forests and valleys, more rivers and beaches and oceans.

Western literature and philosophy take us to the edges of infinity, which dissolve as we approach them. From the Greek epics to the French existentialists, we search out the limits of our own understanding, and figure out ways to go further. This isn’t some confining, angst-inducing conclusion, closing everything down and locking the gates. Rather, it’s an expansive opening. It’s less like Ulysses settling down with his wife on Ithaca and more like Ulysses setting off to discover new adventures.

In Tennyson’s 1942 poem “Ulysses” the Greek hero says,

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

It’s hard to agree with Old Rex when he gives specific dates to Western Civilization. It’s hard to see how time (the 4th dimension based on 3-D space) can escape the unbounded flow of what’s before and what’s next. It’s even harder to give specific values to time periods, depicting some ages as golden or silver, while others are labelled iron or plastic.

In the last weeks of the course, Old Rex painted French existentialism in the darkest hues, with stretch-lines of angst and time-induced depressions. Yet in doing this, he identified the problem but left out the solution. Sartre may well be right when in his 1938 novel Nausea he says our problem is the nausea induced by our own limitations. Our repeated patterns of thought lead to alienation and feelings of confinement, depression, and sickness. Yet Sartre also offers solutions. He encourages an authentic engagement with reality, not an escapist one. He encourages a perpetual creation of meaning. A perpetual journey.

One might say that the existential problem is nausea and its solution is Nausicaa, the beautiful princess of Phaeacia. The solution is to enter into the narrative of human existence, after having faced the worst that the angry sea-god Neptune can throw at us. Like Ulysses, we may be washed up on the beach of history, half-dead, face down in the sand. Yet even in our half-conscious beaten-down existential state, we see the wet sandal and the flowing white dress of the Greek maiden on the sands:

We talk with her shy friends, who refresh us with wine and oil. We tell our story to the villagers. In our remembrance and recounting of time past — the face that launched a thousand ships, the burning towers of Ilium — we recuperate our internal resources and start to feel strong enough to face the present. We look around us, seeing more clearly the beauty of the civilized life that can be so fragile, as we found out after having played our part in the Trojan War. For it was we who came up with the sacrilegious deception of the Trojan Horse. It was we who slaughtered the citizens and burned the elevated, cultured city to the ground.

We see the preciousness of this life, and this gives us the strength to continue our journey back to our own civilized home on Ithaca. Back to our wife Penelope, who spends her nights unravelling all the tangled mess the world gets her into during the day.

Now, after all the slaughter and the reconciliation, we’re at last back home with our wife. We think this is the end of the story. We haven’t been paying attention. And we haven’t read Hesiod’s Theogony, which makes it clear that even the gods live, reign, and are replaced.

We look around us, at the same walls we knew decades ago. At the same old crags and coves. At the same old wife:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. 

The epic spirit is stronger than hearth and routine. It can be bent and broken — as Byron and Joyce have shown us — but it remains stronger than ever. At every stage, from Darwin’s finches to Heisenberg’s electrons, we realize the extension of the space beyond our ken. We’re like Keats reading “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” in 1816. Keats is amazed by the power of Homer’s epic, and he likens his feeling to what an astronomer must feel when he sees a new planet, and to what Cortes must have felt when he saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific — and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Today we read about existential alienation and meaningless materialism. Sartre tells us that we are doomed to freedom. Yet we still yearn to set sail on the open sea.

Life is too short to let ourselves die slowly. It’s too fleeting not to rage against the dying of the light. This isn’t the death of the epic, but its resurgence:

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
T’is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

✏️

Next: Preface 3: ✏️ The Great Fall

Back to Top

Contents - Characters - Glossary: A-F∙G-Z - Maps - Storylines