Ulysses and Faust

Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the Present

Harry Redner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351111096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ulysses and Faust: Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the Present examines the most important authors of Western literature: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Marlowe, Goethe, Joyce, Eliot, Mann, Bulgakov and Pasternak, who based their works on one or other of the two key myths of the West, Ulysses and Faust. This volume provides a synoptic view of Western literature, as a foundation text for literary studies at all levels and as a way of encouraging people to once more engage with the major authors of our literary heritage. Ulysses and Faust considers the artistic revolution known as Modernism at the start of the twentieth century and the subsequent events in Europe, such as the World Wars and the totalitarian regimes, which led to a major break in Western civilization reflected in its literature. Consequently, these detailed critical studies illuminate their authors' Weltanschauung, their view of life as it was lived in their time.

Part I
Tradition

1 The Hellenic and Hebraic Traditions

Section I – The Historical Background of Ulysses and Faust

As Europe entered its time of troubles in the twentieth century and as Western civilisation began to disintegrate, its major writers turned repeatedly to the two leading myths of Western literature, those featuring the figures of Ulysses and Faust. Each of the writers who took up either of these themes sought to convey the current historical tragedy through a recapitulation of the one or the other mythical hero in our literary tradition, for both figures go back deep into the past, to the very origins of Western literature. Ulysses derives from Homer, and though Faust arose at a much later date, his precursors are already there in the New Testament: his inseparable companion, Mephistopheles, as Satan, is to be found even earlier in the Old Testament.

Western literature has its twin roots in Homer and the Bible, as historians and critics have long recognised. Already some time ago, Erich Auerbach began his book on literary history by comparing a passage from the Odyssey with one from Genesis dealing with Abraham.¹ He focused his attention on the two antithetical styles, the Greek and Hebraic, which would later in history enter into the varied confrontations and combinations with each other that constitute European literature. And a century before Auerbach, the even more renowned poet and critic Matthew Arnold saw the fundamental temperament of the West as compounded of the Hellenic and the Hebraic. The former, he held, was disinterested and flexible, “full of sweetness and light”; the latter was practical, disciplined and dogmatic.² He believed that English culture had gone too far in the direction of the Bible and the Protestant ethic and needed to counterbalance this with some aesthetic lightness drawn from Hellenic enlightenment, just as the Germans during the age of Goethe had sought to recapture with their renewed interest in Greece.

Frequently this fundamental opposition is seen as one of Aesthetics and Ethics. This is, of course, only a simplifying generalisation for not all art and aesthetics comes from the Greeks and not all ethics and law from the Hebrews or even Christians. There is a distinct form of Greek ethics based on the idea of civic virtue, and there is a strong aesthetic dimension to biblical literature, as, indeed, Auerbach’s work demonstrates. Nevertheless, there is some truth to the generalisation, for the Classical tradition, both Greek and Roman, is the dominant one in Western art in general, but the Moral tradition, which endows its literature with its depth and seriousness, comes from the Jews and Christians. The two intersect and interact to constitute European literature, as Eliot, himself one of its last great representatives, puts it:

It is because of our common background, in the literatures of Greece, Rome and Israel that we can speak of “European literature” at all: and the survival of European literature, I may mention in passing, depends on our continued veneration of our ancestors.³

Our two key mythical ancestors are Ulysses and Faust. The former stands at the head of a Classical humanist tradition and the latter of a Judeo-Christian religious tradition that some, such as Goethe and Hegel, called Romantic. The Classical-Romantic dichotomy is not one that appeals to us now as much as it did to the Dichter and Denker of the early nineteenth century; nevertheless, there is something to be said for what it is intended to express. As we will show, Ulysses offers a humanist, if not necessarily a secularist, approach to life; by contrast, Faust presents an attitude to life that is cast in religious terms of sin and salvation, featuring a pact with the Devil – though these terms can be interpreted in a purely secular sense in keeping with the Enlightenment, as Goethe did and later exponents of the myth were to follow.

Right from the start in Homer, there is a humanist outlook inherent in the Odyssey. Odysseus eschews immortality, the highest blessing the gods can bestow, for the sake of a human life. He accepts death, so long as it will bring him together with his nearest and dearest, his beloved wife and longed-for son, his native isle, Ithaca, and all of his past that it contains. Thus, he rejects Calypso’s offer to make him her husband and a deathless god like herself. Death is the ineluctable part of the human lot that Odysseus chooses. And this, indeed, is the essence of humanism – an acceptance of all that is human; or as Terence later put it, “nihil humanum alienum puto”. “La condition humaine”, as Montaigne called it, was the condition of human earthly life that rejects any kind of transcendence or hope for anything beyond itself.

Homer, of course, did not create humanism; it was already an established Greek attitude to death. Nor did he invent Odysseus, who was an accepted figure in Greek mythology, one of the heroes connected to the epic cycle of the Trojan War. Numerous legends and folk tales circulated around a character called Odysseus even before Homer, or some other Greek by that name, as the joke goes, first began to recite the epic. They came from the dim distant reaches of the Dark Ages before the start of Classical civilisation proper. Homer incorporated some of these features into the character Odysseus he presents in the Iliad. Another Homer, one who had read the Iliad, used the portrayal of Odysseus presented there as well as other tales to devise the character Odysseus who emerges from the Odyssey. It is now generally accepted by scholars that the one man did not compose both epics. It has even been mooted that the Odyssey was the work of a woman, some courtly Greek Lady Murasaki, and there is some point to this idea even if it were false, for Odysseus is also a ladies’ man like Genji, as we shall see.

Ever since Homer, the figure of Odysseus, under this or another name, has always appealed to writers.⁴ He is the man of many turns, the indefatigable plotter and schemer, the prime exponent of metis or practical cunning. He is often lacking in honesty and moral probity in general, for which moralists like Plato have denounced him together with Homer; but for writers, he more than makes up for these failings by his wit and inventiveness, for he tells lies and spins tales that are so indistinguishable from the truth, they even seem truer than the truth. He is an artist, in other words, a poet himself. All his life, Joyce was enamoured of Odysseus and wrote of him in these glowing terms:

The most beautiful all-embracing theme is that of the Odyssey. It is greater more human than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust. The rejuvenation of old Faust has an unpleasant effect upon me. Dante tires one quickly; it is like looking into the sun. The most beautiful, most human traits are contained in the Odyssey… Why was I always returning to this theme? Now in mezzo del cammin I find the subject of Ulysses the most human in world literature… After Troy there is no further talk of Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon. Only one man is not done with; his heroic career has hardly begun: Ulysses.⁵

Joyce is wrong about Faust, as we shall soon find out, and he seems to have momentarily forgotten that Agamemnon met his end after Troy. Don Quixote, as we shall show, is closely related to Ulysses, a kind of comic younger brother in the guise of a chivalric knight errant. Hamlet is, of course, utterly different.

Joyce does not mention Aeneas for he seems not to have noticed that Aeneas is also a kind of Ulysses, though one of a very different character, yet serving a similar function in Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid. As if to mark the difference, Ulysses also features early in the Aeneid in order to point the contrast between the two: Aeneas is pious and truthful, whereas Ulysses is harsh and deceitful; his Trojan horse stratagem is the victory of cunning over valour. Virgil adopts the Roman point of view towards the Greeks, one that identifies with the defeated Trojans, whose descendants Romans claim to be. And besides this, there are other fundamental oppositions between the two epics. Aeneas is a survivor of the fall of Troy desperately seeking for a new home far across the seas in Italy; Ulysses is the conqueror of Troy vainly striving for many years to return to his old home in Ithaka. The Aeneid is meant to provide the mythical justification for the universal Roman Empire that Augustus had founded, not to celebrate the restoration of the traditional values of the oikos as in the Odyssey.

Nevertheless, there are also striking structural analogies between the epics. Virgil has modelled the first half of the Aeneid on the Odyssey and the second half on the Iliad. As in the Odyssey, the hero goes through a series of adventures by sea before arriving at his destination. In both cases, it is a woman who tempts him and almost deflects him from his goal: Ulysses lingers longer than he might have had to with Circe and must have been tempted by Calypso’s offer of immortality; Aeneas has to be ordered by a higher power to tear himself away from Dido and is, nevertheless, conscience-stricken by this betrayal. There are many more such parallels to be drawn, which shows that, despite all the differences in characterisation, Aeneas is also a kind of Ulysses figure.

Another type of Ulysses appears in Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. Dante and Virgil together encounter him in the Christian hell being punished as one of the corrupt advisers in tandem with Diomedes. He has a tale to tell that has no Classical precedents, and is clearly of Dante’s own devising, of how he could not abide returning to Ithaka but together with his crew set out again to explore the unknown ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Somewhere in the South Seas their ship was wrecked on Mount Purgatory and he and his men met their end. The story embodies both the Christian values of the Middle Ages as well as the nascent winds of Classical renewal blowing towards the Renaissance. It dramatises a conflict that we will discuss in the next chapter under the heading of Christian tragedy.

Dante’s Ulysses lay dormant for many centuries until Tennyson revived him in his poem by that name. This is Ulysses seen as a Victorian-era explorer, intrepid and adventurous, declaring himself to be committed to continual restless activity, almost like Goethe’s Faust. He has a successor in Eliot’s nameless fisherman, though that figure is much closer to Dante’s original and suffers the same fate, but on ice in the polar region. Unfortunately, this whole Ulysses episode was excised from The Waste Land and has only recently been published in the restored original version of the whole poem before Pound attacked it with his shears.

Eliot’s poem, as we shall show, was strongly influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses, which contains many variants of Ulysses drawn from the whole tradition going back to Homer. Mary Reynolds identifies versions of Ulysses in its two main characters:

In general Dedalus-Telemachus represents the centrifugal, rebellious, destructive home-abandoning element in the homo uluxeanus… Like Dante’s Ulysses, he will be deterred by no love of family or home from travelling into the unknown world to find new knowledge and experiences. Bloom, on the other hand, like the Ulysses of Homer, Shakespeare and Giraudoux, represents the centripetal, conservative and constructive element in society. Dedalus rejects and struggles to overthrow: Bloom accepts and tries to improve. Dedalus denies: Bloom affirms… In this way Dedalus marks the negative pole of the Ulyssean character, Bloom the positive. Between them they encompass the whole cosmos of tradition.⁶

The key central figure between Dante and Joyce that she mentions is Shakespeare’s Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. This is not one of Shakespeare’s major plays and Ulysses is not a heroic character in it. Nevertheless, it is an extraordinary Renaissance-Reformation rendering of Ulysses drawn from the Iliad and embodying the Realpolitik aspects of Elizabethan politicking. We shall deal with it together with its near-contemporary figure of Don Quixote, the hero of Cervantes’s masterpieces, and also, as we shall show, a variant of Ulysses.

The inclusion of Don Quixote in a work on Ulysses and Faust requires perhaps more justification than we can offer in this introductory chapter, but, as we shall see later in Chapter 3, Marthe Robert, an outstanding French critic, reads Don Quixote as a modern Odyssey and shows in great detail how the two works are structurally homologous.⁷ And if that is not enough, it will be shown from internal evidence in the text that Cervantes took himself to be writing an epic in prose and saw himself as the modern, that is to say, Christian, successor of Homer and Virgil. Dante’s Ulysses he did not seem to know or appreciate, though he was extremely well-versed in the Italian epic tradition of Ariosto and Tasso.

In setting himself to write an epic in prose, Cervantes was, unbeknownst to himself, founding a new literary genre, that of the modern novel, one that would in time displace the po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PART I Tradition
• PART II Modernism
• Bibliography
• Index