Monday
I won’t take credit for this but Washington Post’s Molly Roberts recently penned a very Better-Living-with Beowulf type column where she contrasted two Democratic presidential candidates by examining which version of the Odysseus/Ulysses story they prefer. Her piece gives me an excuse to apply other versions of the story to various 2020 contenders.
Roberts explains that Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg is currently besting Texas’ Beto O’Rourke because Joyce is more in tune with our historical moment than Homer. While O’Rourke sees himself in Homer’s mythic mode, Buttigieg is presenting himself as a Leopold Bloom-type everyman:
O’Rourke, a former representative from Texas, has said several times that not only has he read and reread “The Odyssey,” but he even named his first-born son Ulysses — because, as O’Rourke declared in perhaps the most eye-rollingly masculine statement made on the stump so far, he “didn’t have the balls to name him Odysseus.”
Buttigieg, on the other hand, doesn’t have any kids with his husband, Chasten. If he did, though, Ulysses might be his top pick, “balls” be damned. The Harvard grad, Rhodes scholar and Navy veteran (it’s impossible to weigh in on Buttigieg, it turns out, without reproducing his résumé) has told interviewers that James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece is “the basis” for his politics.
A fan of Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, O’Rourke sees himself on a hero’s quest. That’s why he spent several months journeying around America deciding whether to run for the presidency. In Odyssey, Odysseus must decide whether he wants to spend the rest of his life on a quiet island or venture out onto rough seas that could kill him. He chooses the latter option after getting a summons from Zeus to do his duty. Interpreting the scene psychologically, Odysseus sees his kingly mission as more important than personal comfort.
Along these lines, Roberts quotes O’Rourke as saying (when running against Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race), “Every word was pulled out of me. Like, by some greater force.”
Buttigieg lays claim to Joyce’s ironic anti-hero Bloom, who becomes (at least for a day) the father figure for whom Stephen Daedalus has always longed. Bloom, as Roberts puts it,
is more or less a loser in the way all of us are more or less losers, and a hero in the way all of us are heroes. The novel aims to capture the fullness of humanity not in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary.
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For all of O’Rourke’s jumping up on table tops, Roberts remarks that both men are attempting to be heroes in Joyce’s more down-to-earth way:
Buttigieg claims that this interest in the everyday is at the core of his politics, too. He wants Democrats to be “talking in terms that are nearer to the ground, really explaining what we mean in terms of everyday lived experience. . . . And that’s how good political narrative works.” There’s that word: narrative. This time, though, the stereotypical heroism is left out of it. O’Rourke live-streamed himself getting his teeth cleaned. Buttigieg live-streamed himself filling in a South Bend pothole.
Roberts ‘s article concludes by asking whether we want a heroic quester who promises to shake up the establishment in a major way or someone who is not “larger than life,” but more “regular sized.” Do we want our candidates to promise us the special elixir that will save society, as Obama once claimed for his program of hope and change? Or do we want to focus on issues that are up close and personal. While Joyce’s Ulysses is big and bold, Roberts observes,
it’s also a pastiche of centuries of English literature. It’s a riff, in other words, on what we’ve done before. The orientation to everyday detail that seems to define Buttigieg could be as radical as Joyce, or it could tend to perpetuate the status quo that the insurgency on the left and those blue-collar voters alike want to leave behind. His desire to reclaim faith and community for the left could be a foray into the future, or it could end up calling Americans back to the past. Until we really see his policy positions — and we haven’t, yet — it’s impossible to know for sure.
In sum, these two candidates who are competing for the charismatic young white male slot pit grand epic against ironic epic, and it’s not clear which the country prefers. Alluding to the climactic “yes” passage that concludes Joyce’s novel, Roberts concludes,
The question about O’Rourke is whether his personal questing is too much. The question about Buttigieg is whether the everyday version of the epic is enough to get voters to say “yes.”
There are other takes on Odysseus/Ulysses that give us insight into candidates who don’t quote them. Donald Trump, for instance, is the heartless Ulysses of Sophocles, Euripides, and Virgil, the word spinner who corrupts and deceives. Like the Odysseus in Sophocles’s Philoctetes, he lures others away from their morals on the grounds of pure expediency. Check out his interchange with the son of Achilles when he wants to deceive the great and suffering archer Philoctetes in order to placate the gods. It’s a version of “I love winning”:
Odysseus: I know, my boy, I know that this sort of thing is not in your character. You don’t like uttering such lying language nor do you like plotting against people but you must also know what a delight it is to gain a victory after a struggle.
Neoptolemos: Distressing words make for distressing deeds, Odysseus, son of Laertius and it is not in my nature, nor was it in my father’s nature to do treacherous things.
With grudging admiration, Virgil attributes the Trojan horse ploy to Odysseus, and it must be said that Trump has pulled off one of the great Trojan horse stunts of American political history in his hostile takeover of the Republican Party.
I conclude by comparing Joe Biden, if he chooses to run, to Tennyson’s Ulysses. Many people want “Uncle Joe” to call it quits and bask in the respect he has built up amongst Democrats. Ulysses, however, finds such a life deadening and wants to venture out one last time, even if it kills him:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life!
And further on:
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Readers debate whether Tennyson’s Ulysses is heroic or self-absorbed. Maybe the answer is both/and, and not only with Biden.
Note:If all this seems relentlessly male, I apologize. At the moment, I’m not actively looking for candidate literature stories but feel I must report on those that jump out at me. Come the June debates, I will go in search of literature that helps define the many fine female candidates. So far I’ve only encountered and written about one story, about Stacey Abrams’s childhood appreciation of Silas Marner.
Further thought: If you know Joyce at all, you may appreciate Alexandra Petri’s Washington Post piece about Buttigieg’s assessment that campaigning reminds him of Joyce’s Ulysses. Petri applies the moocow passage from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to campaigning in Iowa; spouse speeches to Molly Bloom’s concluding “yes” passage in Ulysses; and (in a real tour de force) all campaigns to the verbal chaos of Finnegans Wake.
