“More like Odysseus”

This chapter offers a reading of Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel The English Patient in which four characters take refuge in an abandoned Italian Villa outside Florence in the final year of World War II trying to put themselves and their stories back together again. While Odysseus, too, takes up temporary residence with Calypso, Circe, and the Phaeacians as he makes his way home, the Odyssey doesn’t choose to dwell on or in these homes on the road for long, focusing instead on its hero’s return to Ithaca, and so reading the Odyssey together with The English Patient suggests that the comforts of home might be complemented by the possibilities of travel as much as they are put in tension with movement. A recurrent theme in Michael Ondaatje’s fiction is a fascination with “people who are tentative about where they belong,” and The English Patient appropriates a sense of the complications of and complementarities between travel and return that are already at play in Homer’s Odyssey and elaborates their potential in a contemporary postcolonial, postwar context. Not only can you take your home with you wherever you go, you can make your home wherever you go, as well, his novel suggests.

Conclusion

The Conclusion returns to the beginning of the book, bringing it full circle. The Introduction focused on the way that Odysseus introduces himself to King Alcinous as an improviser, a man of metis, to raise the possibility that we, too, as critics, might embrace the productive capacity of the unexpected literary encounter. The readings offered in the individual chapters demonstrate the ways in which the rich and complicated dynamic between coming home and keeping house already at work in the Odyssey can be seen to shift and develop in new ways, just as our appreciation of contemporary fiction dealing with these themes has expanded from its unexpected association with Homer’s Odyssey. In particular, nostalgia emerges as offering an apt interpretive framework and mode of critical analysis, striking a balance between engagement with the past and looking to the present or future. If improvisation offers a framework for the unexpected literary encounter, for finding ourselves as readers and critics in a place unknown, reading unexpected texts together, nostalgia provides us with a way to return home to Homer.

“Come brother. Let’s go home”

This chapter offers a reading of Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home, telling the story of a Korean War veteran’s return to the USA and his attempts to find his way in the racially segregated America of the 1950s. Discharged from the army and suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic shock syndrome, Frank Money reluctantly heads to Atlanta to find his sister and bring her home with him to Georgia—in this way, Home not only reverses the northward journey of the Great Migration, but it re-routes Odysseus’ itinerary in interesting ways. Homer’s Odyssey ends rather abruptly, and our delight at the romantic reunion of Odysseus and Penelope distracts us from the poem’s less than satisfactory way of dealing with the violence of war and the challenges of bringing that violence home. Where The Return of the Soldier focuses on the disorientation that follows from its protagonist’s inability to negotiate a successful return home from war, Morrison’s novel draws upon the restorative powers of nostalgia to reconstruct Lotus at the novel’s conclusion as a new and better home than the one Frank left behind, conjuring an image of return that is not defined as the romantic reunion of husband and wife but one that looks instead to the brother–sister family bond to attend to the themes of violence and redemption at the individual, familial, and collective levels.

“This house is different”

This chapter offers a reading of Rebecca West’s 1918 debut novel The Return of the Soldier, which tells the story of a British soldier whose head injury on the battlefields of World War I sends him back to a home he does not recognize. The novel is one of the first to engage directly with the effects of World War I, and yet its focus is not the horrors of the battlefield but rather the effects of war upon the home front, unsettling some of the romantic notions of homecoming that the Homeric epic celebrates and prompting an exploration of the complicated relationship of memory and its loss within narratives of return. Read together with West’s novel, the Odyssey emerges as a poem equally interested in the complicated emotions of homecoming—the pleasure and pain that surround absence and return, remembering and forgetting.

“It’s okay”

This chapter offers a reading of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road—the story of a father and son traveling together in a world that has suffered an apocalypse of devastating magnitude. The novel puts father and son on the road together—in ways that the Odyssey may gesture at but never actually achieves—in order to consider a way for men to keep house on the road, in contrast to the way in which Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping tries to imagine a way for women to keep house that also allows them to travel. The male version of housekeeping it articulates differs from that of Penelope, who famously stays by her son, and has more in common with the wayfaring of Odysseus—it is a provisional kind of housekeeping, with father and son pushing their cart, carrying the fire, hoping to find some other good guys down the road: keeping going and making do.

“An end to housekeeping”

This chapter offers a reading of Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping—the story of a transient woman, Sylvie, who returns home to take care of her recently orphaned nieces, Ruth and Lucille, and the novel raises important questions not just about life on the road, but also about the house and home that is left behind. Whereas the Odyssey maintains a perpetually idealized notion of Penelope and Odysseus as emblems of a like-minded merger of travel and home by deferring indefinitely the moment when the two actually live (or travel) together, in Housekeeping there is always an attempt to blur the divide between people who stay and people who go, one that is most clearly embodied in the character of Sylvie. Like Odysseus, who will one day leave home again and whose travels are also always returns, Sylvie’s travels keep taking her home; yet like Penelope as well, she keeps her family by her side. In particular, by taking men out of the picture, Robinson radically reorients the traditionally gendered relationship of travel to home that Homer’s Odyssey represents, and the novel prompts us to ask how women can reconcile family responsibilities with travel. Can the possibilities, rather than the constraints, of mobility help redefine what makes a house a home?

Introduction

This book is an experiment in improvisatory criticism, and the introduction lays out a new interpretive rationale for reading Homer’s Odyssey together with a series of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels that share that poem’s interest in travel and return. Philosophers and musicians alike highlight the productive nature of improvisation—we gain new understanding of ourselves through improvised encounters with others in an inherently experimental and even deceptive process of self-enactment. Odysseus is famous for his metis, exactly the kind of experimental or practical reasoning upon which improvisation depends, and close readings of his encounters abroad with the Cyclops and at home with Eumaeus, Telemachus, Penelope, and Laertes show that Odysseus’ lies and acts of deception do not temporarily disguise his true identity but rather enable him to construct himself and his world in new ways. Read in this improvisatory context, the Odyssey is shown to focus on the creative instability of what it means to be Odysseus and these insights about the creative potential of the improvisatory encounter extend to my goals for the book overall. By putting the Odyssey in contact with other texts, we as readers are participating in a kind of improvisatory interpretive experiment—each text emerges from these literary encounters in a new light, and spaces are opened up for new readings. Rather than remain a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it unchanged, the Odyssey, together with the texts with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.