Introduction

The Introduction situates the myth of the descent to the underworld (catabasis) in a broad historical context beginning with Ancient Near East traditions, including the Sumerian poem preserved in cuneiform, “The Descent of Inanna,” and extending to medieval treatments such as “The Visions of the Knight Tondal”, and those of the early modern period. It includes a survey of other scholarly treatments of the underworld theme in recent literature. A brief overview of the volume explains how it fills a gap in the scholarship by focusing on the adaptation of the theme of a visit to Hades in postmodern, feminist, and postcolonial fiction.

Epilogue

Gathering together common themes from works by Barth, Gaiman, Byatt, Selick, Ferrante, Morrison, Bloom, Rushdie, and Patchett, a brief Conclusion reflects on the ubiquity of the descent motif and its status as a literary space in the context of postmodernism’s critiques of the canon. Underworld mythology lends itself to postmodern interrogations of authenticity, history, and authorial proprietorship. Further uses of the underworld tradition include artist Anish Kapoor’s “Descent into Limbo,” Oliver Sacks’ memoir Awakenings, Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less, and Louise Glück’s Averno. The Other Worlds imagined in catabatic fiction contribute to these themes with implied correspondences between dreams and ghosts.

Engendering the Haunted Text

Chapter 3 explores how two feminist, postmodern novelists, A.S. Byatt and Elena Ferrante, revise a convention in which only male heroes return from Hades as storytellers. Byatt’s Angels and Insects rewrites the Odyssean Nekyia in a Victorian context, as a children’s fable in one novella and a séance in the other, both of which highlight the role of the female storyteller. Set between the analyses of Byatt’s and Ferrante’s novels is a discussion of Gaiman’s children’s novella, Coraline, as a filmic adaptation by Henry Selick, to develop the question of why girls but not women can take trips to the underworld, and to explore the role of the female creator, the Other Mother. The chapter concludes with the work of Elena Ferrante to consider how she incorporates the chthonic female demon and the Persephone myth in the context of female authorship.

The Ghost of the Father

Chapter 2 looks at the underworld theme in two postmodern works of fiction: John Barth’s 1968 Lost in the Funhouse, which adapts Homer’s Odyssey, and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic series (1989–93), which features a version of Orpheus’ descent. Both authors tap into the tradition of Hades as an intertextual archive and confront the canon by writing fiction that symbolically stages a conflict between fathers and sons. The mythical descent story becomes a metafictional device that pays homage to literary tradition while also critiquing literary forefathers, Milton and James Joyce. The polemical stances of Barth and Gaiman epitomize postmodern literary practices by setting the heroic paradigm in culturally marginal contexts or by using media not conventionally associated with high culture.

The Wanderer’s Descent

Chapter 4 outlines how a descent to the underworld can symbolize experiences of diasporic populations, including refugees, enslaved peoples, exiles, and immigrants. An African-American man in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon experiences an Odyssean Nekyia, and connects with his family’s past. Amy Bloom’s Away makes parallels between the story of a Jewish refugee to America and the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet features Orpheus as a rock star whose descent is structured as a passage from India to America. Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder refers to the Orpheus story to address issues of deracination, but also suggests deeper intertexts that invite a critique of corporate plundering of the Amazon. With deliberate citations of ancient texts, these authors exploit the dialectic between home and the underworld to explore issues of diaspora, immigration, exile, assimilation, and nostalgia.

Source Texts

Chapter 1 provides an overview of ancient Greek and Roman descent tales, and a synthesis of themes that they share with each other and contemporary adaptations. The focus is on the Odyssean Nekyia; the history of the tradition of Heracles’ descent, reenacted by the god Dionysus in Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs (405 BCE); the catabasis of Aeneas in book 6 of Vergil’s Aeneid; two versions (from Vergil’s Fourth Georgic and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) of Orpheus’ trip to Hades to retrieve Eurydice; and finally the myth of Persephone in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Spanning a period of roughly eight centuries, these ancient tales convey a sense of the underworld as a literary space or intertextual archive that can be accessed and adapted by successive generations of storytellers. The chapter ends with a list of elements shared by ancient and contemporary descent narratives.