reveries - homer

13.17. Book #6 2013

Some of my students have a hard time with the playfulness of post-modernist literature--especially with its tendency toward deconstruction. We read this immediately after reading Homer, and some of them have a hard time having the rug pulled out from under their notions about Odysseus and Penelope. But Atwood is only doing what "Homer" did a long time ago. She does a little "story-making" with mythic characters.

I try to tell them that this kind of intertextual gamesmanship is pretty much how all literature works. There's only one real "author." The rest of us sub-creators simply take what has been given us, rearrange, rewrite, and retell.

There's only one story. Infinite variations, though.

Some of them think this is primarily Penelope's story. But Atwood allows the chorus of maids to subvert and maybe trump Penelope's narrative at every step along the way. In the end, theirs is the final word--at least in this novel.

→ 12:37 PM, Feb 17

13.13. Book #5 2013

A re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-read.

And it gets better every time.

→ 8:27 PM, Feb 1

86. Freaking Awesome Passage

By now Penelope, Icarius' wise daughter,
Had set her chair across from the suitors
And heard the words of each man in the hall.
During all their laughter they had been busy
Preparing their dinner, a tasty meal
For which they had slaughtered many animals.
But no meal could be more graceless than the one
A goddess and a hero would serve to them soon.
After all, they started the whole ugly business.

(Odyssey, 20.422-30, Lombardo trans.)

There's a lot of eating in the Odyssey. And there's a right way to do it when you're a guest in someone else's house. The suitors have violated the unwritten code of xenia badly, and thus, their final "meal" they will be "graceless" and "ugly." What a freaking awesome final sentence.

→ 8:24 PM, Oct 1