TLS: No man's lands

Modern myths of the Cyclops
by Edith Hall

For two centuries the Odyssey has played a vital role in introducing children to the Greek and Roman classics, through the numerous retellings that have appeared since Charles Lamb's The Adventures of Ulysses (1808). It was in Lamb's version, read by countless Victorian schoolboys, that James Joyce first encountered the hero destined to underlie Ulysses (1922), the paradigmatic Modernist novel. But Lamb had altered the structure of the Odyssey so as to upgrade the incident with Polyphemus the Cyclops, making it the centrepiece of his first chapter. Lamb seems instinctively to have recognized how appealing children would find the tale of a clever little man telling a man-eating giant that his name is "Nobody", getting him drunk, poking out his single eye with a red-hot pole, hitching a ride on the underbelly of a sheep, and evading the boulders the giant hurls angrily after his ship. Lamb's vivid adaptation partly explains the robust cultural presence Polyphemus has enjoyed ever since, from Shelley's 1819 version of Euripides' Cyclops (a dramatization, with added satyrs, of the Homeric narrative) to the popular computer game God of War. In One Hundred Great Books in Haiku (2005), David Bader has recently condensed the Odyssey into just these seventeen syllables: "Aegean forecast / -storms, chance of one-eyed giants, / delays expected".
Indeed, Lamb described the Cyclops much more pejoratively than Homer had, as an "uncouth monster", with a "brutal body", and "a brutish mind"; he also dictated the story's meaning for his juvenile readership by adding that it provided "manifest proof how far manly wisdom excels brutish force". Lamb was taking his cue from an ancient intuition that Odysseus' travels somehow symbolized colonial expansion. Odysseus' sons by Circe traditionally founded important cities in Central Italy, and the Etruscans painted scenes from Odysseus' wanderings on the walls of their tombs, as if to assert a cultural ancestry leading back to Greece.
Whoever paid for the spectacular marine picnic resort in the entrance to a cave at Sperlonga, where the blinding of the Cyclops was reconstructed on a monumental scale, was buying into the myth of Odysseus' role as colonizer of the west of Italy, emblematic of the Roman domination of the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian Seas. By 1400, Dante's Ulysses could recall how his ships passed through the very Pillars of Hercules, where like a prefigurative Columbus he exhorted his crew onwards across the Atlantic; at the same time, rumours spread of the deformed giants that peopled the new worlds, informed by medieval versions of the compendium of monstrous cannibalistic races, including Cyclopes, in Pliny's Natural History.
Once the Odyssey became associated with the era of European imperialism, and Odysseus identified as the archetypal Western colonist, the Cyclops' future in the antiracist and postcolonial discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries became unavoidable; furthermore, the battle between Odysseus and Polyphemus can be read as a metaphor for the contemporary debate over the desirability of allowing the Greek and Latin classics, which so long provided the ideological justifications for now obsolete empires, to retain their high status in the literary canon at all. For, as W. Arens controversially demonstrated in The Man-Eating Myth (1979), reports of cannibalism the world over have been greatly exaggerated. Allegations of human flesh-eating are a standard trope in the xenophobic polemic of nearly every culture and era: the missionaries in Africa may have feared that they might end up in an indigenous casserole, but some natives were equally convinced that the white invader wanted to eat them. Columbus's first letter had discussed reports of the man-eating Caribbean people of Caniba, who were to prove so important in the invention of Shakespeare's Caliban in The Tempest, the New World savage just ripe for subjugation. Columbus also noted how native peoples could not handle alcohol, a key element in the presentation of the Cyclops in the Odyssey and the literature of colonial encounters between Europeans and their subjects everywhere.
By the time that John Locke wrote the second of his Two Treatises of Government
(1689), the mercantile West needed examples of situations in which disrespect of political authority is legitimate: Locke selected Ulysses' defiance of the Cyclops' right to govern his own island. In the Beagle diaries, Darwin recalled Captain Cook's description of the Cyclopes-like New Zealand natives who throw stones at approaching ships, shouting "come on shore and we will kill you and eat you all!". And, by the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the myth of Odysseus' subjugation of the Cyclops was deemed essential reading for everyone living under Britannia's Rule. In the Royal Readers, six standard schoolbooks read all over the Empire, the exemplary tales included accounts of the Vikings, Napoleon, the Roman Empire, the Conquest of Ireland, and Odysseus outwitting the Cyclops.
Yet Immanuel Kant had at least opened up a new possibility of redefining the monocularity of the Cyclops as narrow-mindedness. Kant captured this distinction in his contrast between "Cyclopean thinking" -views that are only formed through narrow experience -and common or public sense. For Kant, it was possible to be an erudite Cyclops who knew a good deal about philology or mathematics. But without the enlarged public perspective produced by engagement with other viewpoints, the learned Cyclops fails to think philosophically, as a member of a living community.
Closely related to the narrow cognition of the Kantian Cyclops is the widespread association of the one-eyed giant with the Orwellian Big Brother and his sinister, electronic Eye of surveillance: the most familiar example is Stanley Kubrick's intelligent computer HAL in his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). But there had long before been self-appointed surveillance agents of the most sinister kind: the leaders of local Ku Klux Klan groups have always been entitled "Grand" or "Exalted Cyclopses". The twelfth chapter of Joyce's Ulysses is perhaps the first text to be critical in its identification of Cyclopean monocularity with ethnic tunnel vision: in Barney Kiernan's Dublin pub the belligerent Cyclops, an obsessive Fenian anti-Semite, baits the Jewish hero Leopold Bloom mercilessly.
Likewise, in the classic Odyssey-inspired novel of Black America, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), the autocratic white leader of the tyrannical "brotherhood" (a disguise for the post-war Communist Party of the USA), has only one functioning eye. In Derek Walcott's stage version of the Odyssey, the Cyclops is another totalitarian tyrant who will brook neither dissent nor laughter in his grey police state. The Cyclops' monocular, racist vision actually sees "nobody" at all.
During the aftermath of 9/11, with its masterminds still at large, Salman Rushdie, in the New York Times, memorably compared the USA to a "blind giant, flailing uselessly about: like, in fact, the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus of Homeric myth, who was only one-eyed to begin with, who had that eye put out by Ulysses and his fugitive companions, and who was reduced to roaring in impotent rage and hurling boulders in the general direction of Ulysses' taunting voice".
Rushdie contemplates how the episode might reflect Osama bin Laden's own fantasy construction of the global order: "Polyphemus, after all, is a sort of evil superpower, a stupid creature of great, brute force who respects no laws or gods and devours human flesh, whereas Ulysses is crafty, devious, slippery, uncatchable and dangerous". The USA, as run by George W. Bush, thus risks presenting itself to the rest of the world as the stupid, hideous, blundering giant outwitted by a smaller, clever hero.
(It must be borne in mind that the North American press has countered this image by pointing out that Bin Laden's notorious lieutenant Mullah Mohammed Omar is one-eyed and currently resides in a cave -"the Cyclops of al-Qaeda".) The Cyclops has become not only a totemic but a contested figure, as Penelope in the Odyssey has become for feminists. Postcolonial theorists read Polyphemus once again as the colonized subject, but now it is as a victim, the earliest and most influential example of the analytic categories that swayed the minds of Columbus and his successors. The Stupid Monster who became Big Brother has now turned into a Victim of Racist Oppression.
This was partly a result of the post-Freudian reappraisal of Odysseus. He first became a problematic, repressive and violent figure when the Polish dramatist Stanislaw Wyspianski wrote his tragedy Return of Odysseus (Powrot Odysa) in 1907.
In philosophy, the major assault on Odyssean heroism came in 1944 with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialektik der Aufklarung, which traced the genealogy of the dark underbelly of Western science and reason to the Odyssey.
They argued that Odyssean rationality, already bound to identity, inevitably tramples on singularity and difference. Their Cyclops, in his ideal pastoral existence, becomes the model for the evolving line of stupid adversaries of the Christian era leading to Shylock and Mephistopheles. They recognize that Odysseus abuses his intellectual powers with Polyphemus -that he trespasses with all the arrogance of a colonial master, thus creating a situation which can only result in bloodshed.
The "Dialectic of Enlightenment" means that Odysseus cannot assert his superiority without dialectically beginning to behave even worse than his supposed inferior.
Closely allied with the Frankfurt School reading is the proposition that the Cyclops' single eye is a marker of radical difference. This argument, which owes much to anticolonial readings of Polyphemus' close relation Caliban in The Tempest, has been taken furthest by Sylvia Wynter, Professor Emerita at Stanford University.
Wynter suggests that the Cyclops defines racial Otherness, within the repertoire of images encoded in Western culture, on the level of magical realism. She offers a counter-mythology to lineages previously proposed by other black writers. These include Orlando Patterson in The Children of Sisyphus (1964), in which the notion of being condemned to rolling stones uphill symbolizes the experience of extreme poverty in Jamaica; Wole Soyinka, who has pitted the African "Herculean" burden-carrying archetype against the Odyssean Dr Livingstone archetype; and the numerous writers who have followed Ralph Ellison in defining black experiences through Odyssean questnarratives.
Wynter claims that it is impossible to square the contradiction between, on the one hand, Odysseus' relationship with white colonization and, on the other, black writers' desire to identify their own quest for freedom with Odysseus' pursuit of his goals. For Wynter, if you side with Odysseus against the Cyclops, you inevitably end up conspiring in the binary oppositions that have figured people of African descent as Other.
There have been attempts to address this contradiction. Historians of popular culture have suggested that the mutant X-Men, invented by Marvel Comics in
1963, were a covert or unconscious response to the Civil Rights crisis, since their physical alterity leads them to face state-sponsored prejudice and lynchings.
Their leader, Scott Summers, is known as "Cyclops" on account of the visor he must wear to protect his powerful eyes. Cyclops' parents are enslaved; the mutants' patron, Professor X, has been identified with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In Sea Grapes (1976), Derek Walcott grappled with the contradiction by suggesting that the Cyclops was actually involved in creating the epic Odyssey.
The feature of the Cyclops which is here given primacy is the blindness he shares with Homer: "the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough / from whose groundswell the great hexameters come / to the conclusion of exhausted surf".
In Walcott's Omeros, too, Odysseus is fleetingly linked with the clever European persecutor of the black children of the Caribbean, themselves associated with the Cyclops' flock, in stories "we recited as children lifted with the rock / of Polyphemus".
But the anti-racist Cyclops can be traced back much further, to a passage in Aime Cesaire's prose poem Return to My Native Land (1939). A Martiniquan intellectual, Cesaire trained as a teacher of Latin and Greek at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and the poem relates his quest for identity in Paris and back home. In one episode the author-narrator, a black man who has become an Odyssean victor-figure in Paris, encounters on a tram another, enormous black man, whose eye socket has been hollowed out by Poverty.
The Cyclops, as part of classical culture, may originally have become popular because he provided, on the level of fantasy, a justification of empire. But in the twentieth century, he began to flourish because of something quite antithetical -the liberation of colonized, oppressed, exploited and threatened peoples. Polyphemus and his struggle with Odysseus have had such wholly conflicting reverberations in recent times that they can be read as a symbolic paradigm of the struggle over the classical canon. Their showdown metaphorically represents both the conflicting views about the contents of the canon suitable for a postcolonial age, and the ways in which those contents should be read: it is still not even clear to all members of the Classics academy that contemplating the widest and most up-to-date range of responses to the ancient Greek and Roman classical authors is the surest method of ensuring their continued vigour in the third millennium. Both in and beyond Classics, there are still defenders of elite culture who insist that the Odyssey, as an ancient Greek masterpiece, is somehow as inherently superior to most non- European literature as Odysseus was to his monstrous victims; on the other hand, some black critics see no possibility that Odysseus, as proto-colonizer, robber, and assailant of Polyphemus, can be recuperated as a hero by anyone sensitive to the history of racism. Is there any way through this impasse? How can enjoying the "Western Classics" be compatible with opposition to Western imperialism and cultural or racial oppression?
More than twenty years ago, Norman Austin published an article showing how both Odysseus and Polyphemus are peculiarly irresponsible and childlike: Odysseus wants lots of gifts like a child in the Christmas holidays; Polyphemus is a playground bully asserting the rights of the king of the castle; they bicker and brag. Unlike most of Odysseus' adventures, this one offers no grown-up erotic interest or even palace coup: two men-boys slug it out to the point of death and mutilation over a few dairy products. Austin's Kleinian analysis proposes that the Cyclops' cavernous dairy symbolizes the womb and the breast, and that this episode encodes extreme regression and infantile sibling rivalry.
In the postcolonial global village, the notion of squabbles between brothers under the skin can perhaps help the survival of all cultures, indigenous, Western, pre-Christian pagan, and non-Western alike. The myths represented in the Odyssey belong to everyone and no one. Narrow-mindedness, childishness and sibling rivalry know no ethnic boundaries.
A second possible answer to the problem presented to the global village by the colonial values that have previously been attached to the classical canon is to look at other myth systems. The Cyclops-like ancient Armenian hero Turk'Angeleay who has forebears as early as Mesopotamian myth, was celebrated precisely because he fought off aggressive brigands and looters who sailed too close to his country's coastline by tossing huge boulders at them. He represents, it has been argued, an Anatolian mirror-image of Greek heroism.
Moreover, the Odyssey represents just a single cultural expression -however influential it has been -of a far more ancient set of stories shared by cultures wherever Homo sapiens has travelled. The type of the Cyclops figure is manifested in a wide range of myths and folk tales that have been recorded the world over. One etymological explanation of Polyphemus' name is that it means "speaking many languages" or "spoken of in many languages": mythical large shepherds have always transcended cultures quite as much as mythical clever travellers. Yet the single most important response to the problem faced by the modern world as it attempts to disentangle the Western classics from the terrible legacy of empire must come from the new strategies being developed in the work of contemporary "transcultural" writers.
The Cyclops story certainly appeals to Wilson Harris, born in Guyana (then called British Guiana) in 1921. His parents combined Amerindian, African and European blood, and he refuses both to be ethnically categorized and to be forced into a choice between rejecting and embracing the values that literary traditions of any kind have historically embodied. In a recent visionary novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), Harris fuses the Odyssey with the pre-Columbian Aztec figure of Quetzalcoatl in order to ask whether humans can find spiritual ways to transcend their tragic history of mutual barbarism through stressing the threads that connect, rather than divide, their imaginative lives. For Harris, the labile figure of the Cyclops sometimes represents the innocence of the peoples massacred by the conquistadors, but at others the blindness of societies that are still today imprisoned by what should have become long outdated hostilities.
Similarly, the Maori poet Robert Sullivan draws his ancestry both from the very Nga Puhi people of New Zealand's North Island of whom Darwin was so terrified, but also from Galway in western Ireland. Sullivan has imbued with intense Odyssean resonances a collection of poems about Maori seafaring, Star Waka
(1999; a "waka" is a canoe). These offer the reader a jumble of voices that explore the contradictions within the indigenous New Zealanders' relationship with the Western canon. One voice is able to acknowledge the bravery of the poor European settlers who sailed to New Zealand "over the edge of the world / into Hades / the infernal Greek and Latin-ness of many headed creatures".
Another angrily derides Odysseus for depriving him of his rightful place in the poem and subjecting the Maoris to the curious stare of anthropologists instead of respecting the brilliance of Maori stellar cosmogony. And yet, to be heard within this complicated polyphony is another calmer, more reflective voice offering a message about culture and its now inevitable globalization that seems both resigned and yet more hopeful and forward-looking:
Do not mind the settler.
I observe the rules of this mythology (see how he did not place a star or ocean or a waka in his pageantry). I am Odysseus, summoned to these pages by extraordinary claims of the narrator. I run through all narratives.
This is an adapted version of a lecture given as one of the Darwin College lecture series (2006), which will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year as Survival, edited by Emily Shuckburgh.