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Ulysses

The Epic - Resurrection - Horizons

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The Epic

On the previous page I noted that agnosticism is close to literature: neither have magical origins, metaphysical doctrines, or tight definitions, yet both manage flights of emotion, speculation, mysticism, and fantasy. Both agnosticism and literature explore topics and scenarios without insisting on particular aims or interpretations. Both either ✴︎ sideline integrated systems of theology and philosophy or ✴︎ present so many versions of these systems that it becomes difficult to insist on any one particular version.

The parallel between agnosticism and literature isn’t a chance or momentary one, but cuts across millennia. Indeed, agnosticism has literary roots that are as old and deep as civilization itself. This is particularly clear when we see the agnostic threads in the world’s earliest epic heroes, the Sumerian Gilgamesh and the Greek Odysseus.

The epics named after these heroes are two of the oldest pieces of major literature in the world: Sin-leqi-unninni’s version of Gilgamesh appears in the late 2nd millennium BC, although versions of the Sumerian king’s life circulated centuries earlier; the Odyssey, along with the Iliad, are often attributed to Homer in the 8th century BC, although the legendary Trojan War that’s central to both supposedly took place centuries earlier. The reason these works are called epics is that they have a number of similar qualities, namely, ☑︎ they focus on the extraordinary exploits and struggles of a hero, ☑︎ they contain journeys to faraway places and to an afterlife realm, ☑︎ they explore a diverse range of culture and psychology, and ☑︎ they give artistic unity to the diversity of the scenarios they depict.

The next three major epics in Europe derive from Homer’s epics, but they’re different in a key way: they insist on particular political and theological frameworks. Virgil’s Aeneid (1st C. BC) is like the Odyssey in that it explores the aftermath of the Trojan War, yet Virgil’s epic does this from a politically motivated pro-Trojan, anti-Greek, and above all pro-Roman perspective. Virgil funnels the epic’s wide scope into the reasons why the Trojan Aeneas must found the city of Rome.

The next two epics — Dante’s Divine Comedy (14th C.) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (17th C.) — funnel the reader into a particular theological channel: Christianity. While the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost contain epic struggles and journeys to the afterlife, and while they give a specific Christian unity to the diversity of life they explore, Gilgamesh and the Odyssey put more emphasis on narrative and common human psychology than on an integrated intellectual or metaphysical superstructure. For instance, in Gilgamesh and the Odyssey the gods are like kings and power systems: they struggle against each other for power, yet no one’s clearly in charge — except maybe Fate or Destiny, perhaps the most capricious of indeterminate Powers.

In the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost the entire universe is already fully controlled by God, and the meanings of human activity are circumscribed by this clear and omnipresent power. In the icy lake of the Inferno Satan lies trapped, and on the barren plains of Milton’s Hell Satan gives a fiery speech and schemes to overcome the tyranny of Heaven. In either case, the poets make it clear that God’s Plan is there to reassure the obedient believer and to punish and frustrate those who rebel against Heaven. Dante is the most meticulous about what happens to those who don’t believe, assigning particular layers of Purgatory or Inferno to those who doubt, sin, or disbelieve.

Gilgamesh and the Odyssey on the other hand downplay the most powerful superstructure that religion has in its arsenal — the afterlife, with its motivation for good behaviour (Heaven) and its punishment for disbelief (Hell). When Odysseus travels to the afterlife realm, the famous warrior Achilles (hero of the Iliad) tells Odysseus that he’d rather be a slave in the world of the living than a numbed soul in the dreary world of the dead. It must be noted here that the early Greeks, like the early Mesopotamians and Hebrews, had a vague, dismal, and sometimes obliterative vision of the afterlife.

Unlike all the epic heroes after him, Gilgamesh is told repeatedly that there is no afterlife. The gods live forever, humans not so much. The best possibilities for an afterlife mentioned in Gilgamesh are ↘︎ scrabbling around on the dusty floor of the underworld or ↘︎ boarding “the boat of Magilum,” which drifts out into the Euphrates and sinks. Even if you paid the ferryman a thousand silver shekels, he couldn’t take you to the other side. The other ferryman in the story conducts Gilgamesh to the only man who survived the Flood, Utnapishtim (the Bible’s Noah). Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the story of the Flood, how he built an ark, sent out a bird, etc., and confirms to Gilgamesh that only he and his wife are granted an afterlife in a heavenly garden. Everybody else gets a seat on the boat of Magilum…

Gilgamesh and the Odyssey differ from the epics of Dante and Milton, and they also differ in general from systematized versions of philosophy and religion. This is because their epic quests are more about the search for human meaning and connection than about unveiling a logical, consistent, all-encompassing system of thought. They don’t aim to organize knowledge or theology, but rather to explore how human beings live out their lives in relation to circumstance, expectation, culture, religion, family, love, war, death, meaning, etc.

The lack of systematization in literature is especially striking when we look at the figure of Odysseus (a.k.a. the Roman Ulysses), who crops up in various incarnations throughout the history of Western literature. Odysseus’ stellar reputation among the Greeks takes a sharp turn in Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BC), where Homer’s clever star becomes a deceitful enemy. One must remember here that it’s Odysseus who helps defeat the Trojans: it’s Odysseus who comes up with the idea of the Trojan Horse, a trick which Romans see as deceitful and sacrilegious. Odysseus’ lethal trick is particularly egregious to the Romans since their founding hero Aeneas was a Trojan, and since Romans trace their lineage from Troy to Rome, a journey which lies at the core of Virgil’s Latin epic.

Dante condemns Ulysses for the same treachery in his Inferno (1321). After returning to Ithaca, Ulysses and his men sail out from the Mediterranean in quest of new experiences. They eventually reach the Island of Purgatory (which Dante places on the other side of the earth), their ship capsizes in a storm, and Ulysses ends up in the 8th bulge of the 8th circle of Dante’s Hell.

Yet here is where the fate of Odysseus takes several turns. The Victorian poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson picks up Dante’s notion of the ever-adventurous hero in his short poem “Ulysses”(1833), yet instead of condemning Ulysses, Tennyson presents him as a noble archetype of adventure. Ninety years later Ulysses undergoes his most extreme transformation in James Joyce’s unorthodox novel Ulysses (1922), where the Greek hero becomes a drunken philosopher and a libidinous anti-hero.

I don’t mean to say that agnostics are like Ulysses because they are cultural icons, because they could defeat one-eyed giants, or because they could consume as much absinthe as a drunken Irish philosopher. Rather, I mean that they display a combination of realism and curiosity that doesn’t lead to a fixed end or a conclusive interpretation about the meaning of life. Physically and psychologically, they’re open to all forms of exploration — from hearing the song of the sirens to talking to the souls of the dead.

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Resurrection

One might argue that the epic tradition is dead, killed off by the irreverence of Byron at the beginning of the 19th century and the playful sacrilege of Joyce at the beginning of the 20th. One might observe that Ulysses and his epic travels are superseded by the status of movie stars and the ubiquity of jet planes. Agnostics would beg to differ.

The argument that the epic is dead goes something like this: the epic encompasses what civilization has to offer; it provides us with a unity of art and idea that serves as an anchor in the tempest of our lives; as a result of globalism and science and the fracturing of this unified epic vision of the world, the anchor slips and the ship starts to drift away; our little boat drifts out, into the deep currents of the ocean (or into the Euphrates on the HMS Magilum…). According to this timeline, the epic ▸ starts with the Golden Age of Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey, ▸ continues with the Greek/Roman fusion of Virgil’s Aeneid and the Classical/Christian fusion of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and ▸ ends with the mockery of Byron’s Don Juan, the uncertainty of Eliot’ Prufrock, and the blasphemy of Joyce’s Ulysses. In brief, the epic rises in Greece and falls in England.

I’d question this schema from start to finish. In terms of cultural history, I’d extend the beginnings of the epic, and refuse its conclusion.

To start with, did the epic really start in Greece? A thousand years before Homer, the Mesopotamians circulated various versions of Gilgamesh, a long narrative that 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; and the intervention of gods. Gilgamesh also presents a double foundation of literature itself: 1. the world’s first script (cuneiform) and 2. the world’s first coherent and sustained narrative.

The demise of the epic — and the epic spirit of adventure — is also unconvincing. The old line goes like this: cracks appear in the 18th century mock epic, an abyss opens up in Byron’s Don Juan, and the epic falls to its death in Joyce’s Ulysses. Yet the 19th and 20th centuries are also when a new agnostic mode of elastic meaning is established. I’d argue that as a result of this new mode of thinking, a new secular epic comes into being.

At the beginning of Don Juan Byron promises his reader he’ll write 12 books, just like Virgil in the Aeneid and Milton in Paradise Lost. Yet Byron goes on to write 13, 14, 15, 16 cantos, and dies somewhere in the middle of the 17th. He dies in Greece, fighting for independence from the Ottoman Empire. I’m tempted to see in his death a symbolic struggle for freedom — political, philosophic, and artistic, all of which are essential for agnostics, who require freedom of choice if they’re to freely explore the diversity of life. In Don Juan Byron argues vehemently for such freedom:

And I will war, at least in words (and—should
    My chance so happen—deeds), with all who war
With Thought;—and of Thought’s foes by far most rude,
    Tyrants and sycophants have been and are.
I know not who may conquer: if I could
    Have such a prescience, it should be no bar
To this my plain, sworn, downright detestation
Of every despotism in every nation. (Canto 9)

I’d go so far as to liken Byron to the Hindu god Shiva, at once a destroyer and a creator. Playfully and seriously, coyly and bluntly, Byron takes apart the fixed nature of art and philosophy, and replaces this fixity with something just as artistic yet more completely human. Gone are the gods and the Fate drifting somewhere in the wind; still present are the meanings of love, the beauties of nature, the need for connection, and the inevitability of exploration. A century later, the complete and secular resurrection of the epic can be seen in Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which isn’t an epic masterpiece despite its strange irreverent form, but because of it.

The writers of epics felt constrained to follow certain conventions in the past, yet after Byron and Joyce they felt free to write whatever they wanted. Joyce may have turned Homer’s heart-warming scene with Nausicaa into a dirty parody about masturbation, yet in doing this, in following through with this sacrilege, he opened the door of art. He even did what Whitman said to do: he took the door off its jamb. 

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Horizons

The reason it’s impossible to fit the epic into a strict form, place, or time is that the epic is about the range of life, and life changes all the time — at least according to agnostics. Clear beginnings and endings don’t make sense because we have legs that turn corners and walk down new streets. We have 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 or impregnable as it seemed. We see on the other side 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 gate. Rather, it’s a wide door opening. Or it’s a window, a highway, or an open sea. It’s less like Ulysses settling down with his wife on Ithaca and more like Ulysses setting off to discover new adventures.

Among all the versions of Ulysses, agnostics are perhaps closest to that of Tennyson. To begin with, Tennyson’s Ulysses doesn’t deny where he comes from. Tennyson gets at this succinctly when his Ulysses says, “I am a part of all that I have met.” Agnostics accept their connection to their families, friends, partners, family, tribe, culture, etc. Yet they also have a great deal of curiosity about what lies beyond their personal world, as well as a strong desire for meaning, regardless of where they come from. They must come to terms with this desire, because they also find that it’s very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to define the meaning of life. This is particularly difficult since they’re forever in the process of exploring it:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

In lines 18 to 21 of Tennyson’s poem, 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.

Given the eternally receding horizons of Time — receding backward as well as forward — it’s hard to give specific dates to the epic. While epics may be exemplars of culture and civilization, it’s hard to see how specific epics can escape the unbounded flow of what’s before and what’s next. It’s equally difficult to give fixed values to time periods, depicting some ages as Golden or Silver, while others are labelled Iron or Plastic.

For instance, many depict French existentialism in the darkest hues. Lamenting the loss of faith and anchored meanings explored by Sartre and Camus, they depict existentialism as if it had stretch-lines of angst and time-induced depressions, black slithering doubt and abysses of meaninglessness. In painting this grim picture, they identify the problem but leave out the solution. In his 1938 essay “Noces à Tipasa,” Camus makes it clear that the gods of yesteryear still haunt us today, yet not in abstract theological ways of control or Fate. Rather, in concrete ways of sun and emotional warmth: Les absinthes nous prennent à la gorge. / The absinth takes us by the throat. In his 1938 novel Nausea Sartre gets at the sickness induced by our own limitations, at the repeating patterns of thought that lead to feelings of alienation, confinement, and depression. 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 that Ulysses meets in his travels. The solution to ennui and meaninglessness 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 — how a face launched a thousand ships and how we burned the topless 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 all too 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 great city to the ground.

We see the preciousness of this life — the absinth takes us by the throat — 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. We forgot to read Hesiod’s Theogony, which makes it clear that even the gods live, reign, and are replaced by the next generation of gods.

We look around us, at the same walls we knew decades ago. At the same old beaches and coves. At the same old wife. Tennyson begins “Ulysses” with these lines:

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. He likens this feeling of discovery to what an astronomer feels when he sees a new planet, and to what Cortes 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. Camus shows us the route, even when we least expect it:

Au bout de quelques pas, les absinthes nous prennent à la gorge. Leur laine grise couvre les ruines à perte de vue. Leur essence fermente sous la chaleur, et de la terre au soleil monte sur toute l'étendue du monde un alcool généreux qui fait vaciller le ciel. Nous marchons à la rencontre de l'amour et du désir. Nous ne cherchons pas de leçons, ni l'amère philosophie qu'on demande à la grandeur.

After several steps the absinthe takes us by the throat. Its grey wool covers the ruins from view. Its essence ferments under the heat, and from the earth to the sun, and into the whole stretch of the world, rises a generous alcohol that makes the sky wobble. We walk toward an encounter with love and desire. We don’t look for lessons, nor for the bitter philosophy that we ask of greatness.

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 resurrection. Tennyson ends “Ulysses” with these lines::

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.

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