In this rewarding book Carol Dougherty brings improvisatory studies (the way human beings, inveterate role-players that we are, adjust our personae and, ultimately, our very characters to cope with new and unexpected circumstances) to bear upon the Odyssey and its reception. Given that Odysseus himself is a master of improvisation, and that Homeric poetic technique has improvisation in its DNA, Dougherty argues that her model works particularly well with the Odyssey (while being generalizable). She distinguishes her approach both from ‘classical tradition’ and ‘reception’ studies, though admitting that there is a substantial amount of simplification in her characterization: the former ‘explores the uses of and responses to classical texts … focusing on the ways that ancient texts have influenced those that followed’, whereas the latter focuses ‘on the ways that a contemporary text reworks or rejuvenates its ancient model, asking, for example, how Virgil rewrites Homer or what new insights to the Odyssey we gain from Walcott’s Caribbean epic’ (13–14). The temporal direction of movement in the first is from the original text forward, whereas in the second it is from the receiving text backward. Dougherty pleads instead for ‘“simultaneous” readings that participate in an Einsteinian rather than a strict chronological notion of time’, following, among others, Walcott himself, who is quoted as saying that chronological thinking will inevitably patronize one or other of the people under consideration, but that ‘if you think of art as a simultaneity that is inevitable in terms of certain people, then Joyce is a contemporary of Homer (which Joyce knew)’ (15). Iam not sure this is radically new. T.S. Eliot had already written in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London 1920), that tradition depends on an historical sense involving ‘a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’, which ‘compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’. Famously, he asserted that when a new work is added to the tradition, the whole existing order is slightly altered, the past as well as the present. This insight is developed by Charles Martindale in Redeeming the Text (Cambridge 1993) and other reception theorists. Furthermore, Eliot points out that the historical sense is one of timelessness and the temporal together, and is ‘what makes a writer traditional’; this seems to me borne out by Dougherty’s discussions, which cannot (and need not) always dispense with a sense of time.
The second key plank in her platform is that, in contrast with both classical tradition and reception approaches, she deliberately chooses ‘texts that do not claim an explicit relationship to Homer’s Odyssey’ in the hope that ‘some new and surprising conversations will emerge from the serial unpredictability of reading these texts together’ (15–16). We learn most from unexpected encounters, which oblige us, precisely, to improvise our response. My discreditable thought going in was that, nonetheless, there had to be some kind of intertextual relationship to make any comment meaningful. After all, anything can be made to look like anything if you work hard enough. But Isoon discarded this philistine opinion. The intertextual reach of the Odyssey in world literature is hard to limit, of course, but more to the point, juxtaposing two unconnected texts (people, objects) can make one see qualities in either that one overlooked before. Dougherty does this repeatedly. One still needs to show, Ithink, that what you see really is in the text; otherwise, what you are talking about is some third object extrinsic to both texts suggested by your free association, and this is something other than criticism, however congenial the thought in question may be. But though Iwas not always persuaded by Dougherty’s readings (for instance, the suggestion that Penelope was on some level disappointed at Odysseus’ return, 128), others might be (‘showing that something is in the text’ is a periphrasis for ‘persuading at least one other person’), and on any reading the book offers many (appropriately) surprising insights.
The texts Dougherty chooses for discussion all explore themes of travel, home, return, nostalgia, identity and family: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient; Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier; Toni Morrison, Home. If, like me, you know some of these but not all, Dougherty’s book will send you scurrying off to read them. Keep the Odyssey in mind as you do so, and be prepared to make it up as you go along.
