Going Home Again to Troy and Ithaca by Richard Seltzer

Posted on Medium December 9, 2024

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Article published 12/9/2024 in: Fantastic antiquities and where to find them. Ancient worlds in (post-)modern novels Vol. 19 (2024). Published by Thersites: Journal for Transcultural Presences and diachronic Identities from Antiquity to Date https://thersites-journal.de/index.php/thr/article/view/257

Abstract

As the author of three novels inspired by the Homeric epics, I reflect on the challenge of writing such books. Reception novels can make familiar stories new and engaging by presenting characters in the immediacy of decisive moments and looking at familiar situations from different perspectives. I also examine the fictive as opposed to the historical location of Troy, how Troy and Ithaca became my imaginative home, and my process for writing such books. It concludes with an excerpt that illustrates the points made. The novels discussed are: Breeze (2021), We First Met in Ithaca or Was It Eden? (2023), and Let the Women Have Their Say (2024). Another book, Trojan Tales (2024), consists of excerpts from these three.

Bridges vs. Reception

When I first ventured into the narrative world of The Iliad, I assumed that I needed a bridge to introduce readers to that other world, so they could empathize with the characters and understand their aspirations and motivations. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be transported from here-and-now to there-and-then, like in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, to be limited by the physical and social structures of that time but with knowledge and memories from the present.

The device I used in my novel Breeze was “soul transference.” This is not reincarnation — rebirth after death. Rather the consciousness of an individual moves from one body into another in a different place and time.

The novel consists for three parts. In part one, a college-age woman goes into a coma, unexpectedly and without known cause. Her boyfriend scrambles to get her medical care and to cope with her absence. In part two, this woman, Breeze, finds herself on the shores of Troy, in the body of Achilles’ Briseis. She has to quickly figure out what is going on and learn to speak and act so as not to reveal the strangeness of what has happened to her, for fear others would think she was mad or possessed. As she adjusts to her new circumstances, the reader learns as well, gradually coming to understand the challenges and risks of that world, like Claire Fraser in Outlander adjusting to 18th century Scotland, and Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap. There is no language barrier. Breeze as Briseis can understand and be understood as if she wee hearing and speaking English. She figures out that she is not in historical Troy, but rather the fictive version of it. Since she knows what must happen next in the Homeric story, she also knows where she has the freedom to improvise. What actually happens need not be the same as the accepted story, so long as that story is still believed to be true. In part three, she finds herself at Delphi in 350 AD, the time of Julian the Apostate. Once again she needs to adjust, but this time she learns to control the soul transfer mechanism, so she can swap bodies at will with other people in the same time and place.

An additional challenge was for me to write from the perspective of a woman. Much of the pleasure of writing and reading comes from viewing the world from inside the skin of characters very different from ourselves.

When writing my next Homeric-themed novel, We Met in Ithaca or Was It Eden?, I still felt the need for a bridge, but I used a different mechanism. Two strangers meet and fall in love. Both are obsessed with ancient Greece, and they flirt by making up stories which are variants of Homeric tales. Without understanding why, they begin to experience those invented stories, first as witnesses, then as participants. They begin to lose control over the stories as they recount them. They wonder if they have met before in previous lives, as Odysseus and Penelope, or as Eumaeus and Ktimene (Odysseus’ sister).

Writing my third Trojan novel, Let the Women Have Their Say, I realized that, for many readers, the popularity of recent reception novels based on Homer’s works means that a bridge is no longer necessary. Nearly a dozen novels with such a setting have become best sellers over the last decade. Many fans of those books are familiar with the stories despite never having read The Iliad or The Odyssey. Today, stories are available in many different forms — not just in traditional printed books, but also in ebooks, comic books, graphic novels, movies, TV series, and videogames. A popular story spawns sequels and becomes a franchise. Fans immerse themselves in the same fictive world in multiple ways. They vicariously enjoy taking on the roles of characters from Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Avengers, and Jane Austen in newly imagined adventures. The recent popularity of Trojan War novels is part of that phenomenon.

My ideal readers already know what is going to happen, at least in broad outline. They have preconceptions about the personalities and motivations of the main characters. That enables me to surprise and delight them with new variants while remaining true to the traditional tales.

Playing in the Narrative Space of Greek Legend and Myth

Historical and myth- or legend-based novels invite readers to vicariously experience live through not just the stories told, but, by extension, the era in which they occur. They present events in the making, when multiple possibilities loom large, not filtered through the hindsight of history, with its focus on actual outcomes. Moreover, an event as experienced from inside differs from that same event seen from afar. The actors believe that many outcomes are possible and that they are somewhat responsible for what happens. Living in the immediate moment is fraught with risk and drama, with a sense of one’s agency and accountability.

The event as lived depends human choice and ignorance, competence and incompetence. It is subjective, dependent on your unique perspective in the moment. You need to understand, decide, and act on the fly. The event seen from afar is determined, predictable, and ordinary. It is over and done with.

Both views are valid. Free will and determinism are both true at once.

Narrative ranges from the subjectivity of Tristram Shandy to the objective chronicling of facts. Subjective novels invite the reader to explore the reality of others, at moments that are rich in possibilities. Characters who “come alive” in that way give readers opportunities to experience and understand the events of the story as if they were actors and eye witnesses. Novels of reception can play subjectively within the objective framework of previously written stories and/or history. Innovation and creativity can take place in what the original left unsaid. I strive to give the reader a subjective experience through the consciousness of the characters. The elements of the traditional story which are inviolable (without outraging the audience) serve as “fate.”

Reception novels can also take advantage of multiple perspectives. The same events seen in different ways, perhaps from the viewpoint of a minor character in the original, can generate a very different story, while remaining faithful to the original framework. Because the audience is already familiar with framework, the author is freed from the burden of lengthy exposition and can focus on developing the characters and making the events flow naturally from one to the next.

Where Was Troy?

As I imagined the story of the Trojan War for Let the Women Have Their Say from the perspectives of the participants, I soon realized that the generally accepted location of Troy needed to be corrected for my retelling to make sense. This was not a question of archaeology and history, but rather narrative integrity. There may have been an historical city named Troy at the site now known as Hisarlik. But the fictional story of The Iliad has a setting very different from that. The location matters because of its connection with the perspectives, motivations, and strategies of the parties and the individual characters. Picking a location that does not correspond well with the dynamics of the original story can muddy our understanding and appreciation of the text and lead to the creation of reception fiction that does not ring true.

As I explain in the Preface to that novel, since the days of the flamboyant amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann 150 years ago, experts have located Homer’s Troy at Hisarlik in the northwest corner of what is now Turkey, in the Troad region, near the beginning of the Dardanelles (Hellespont), the waterway leading from the Aegean to the Black Sea. Based on that location, historians and novelists have presumed that the war was fought for control of that strategic sea passage.

But in The Iliad, Troy has no port — just a beach — and has no fleet, no ships at all, not even fishing boats. When Paris wants to sail to Sparta seeking Helen, ships need to be built for the occasion, and not by a shipwright, but by a carpenter (tektonos, smith, maker, builder, Book V, 59–63). Troy’s has nothing to do with the sea. Its trade and its allies are land-based.

In addition, in The Iliad, the city of Troy, also called Ilion, was founded in the recent past by Ilus, son of Tros and grandfather of Priam, who was the king during the Trojan War. In contrast, the archaeological site at Hisarlik had already been occupied for hundreds of years, one city built on the ruins of another. The level identified as Homer’s Troy was sandwiched in the middle (layer 6A).

Those anomalies lead me to believe that the city of Troy portrayed in The Iliad was on the south rather than the west coast of the Troad, in a location without strategic significance, where it could thrive as the hub of land-based trade and alliances. I imagine it 20–30 miles from Hisarlik, on the Edremit Gulf, across from the island of Lesbos and near Mount Ida.

Perhaps the ruins at Hisarlik belong to another city, such as Dardania, an ally of Troy, whose inhabitants were members of the same Trojan tribe. Perhaps Dardania, too, was destroyed during the Trojan War.

With that adjustment of perspective, I was able to reimagine the Trojan War and the hopes, fears, and motivations of the people involved.

Switching Perspective and Giving Minor Characters Stories of Their Own

In Breeze the traditional story of the Trojan War functions as fate. It cannot be changed, no matter what anyone might do. But people are free to act in the gaps of the story. So long as the general public inside the story believes that events unfold as in the traditional framework, anything can happen.

For example, to save Iphigenia, Achilles surreptitiously deflowers her the night before she is scheduled for sacrifice. In principle, if she isn’t a virgin she won’t be an acceptable victim. But that makes no difference to Agamemnon and Calchas. The ceremony goes ahead as planned.

Also, Achilles’ death is staged with another body in his armor. Everyone believes he died, but in fact, at the end of the novel, he rides off to the land of the Amazons with Briseis/Breeze, who becomes an Amazon warrior. He will be her house-husband.

My favorites among the many stories told in We First Met in Ithaca or Was It Eden? deal with Polyphemus, Calypso, Eumaeus, and Ktimene.

Polyphemus, the Cyclops blinded by Odysseus, hooks up with Enyo, with one of the Gracae, the three sisters who share a single eye. She steals the eye from her sisters and shares it with the Polyphemus. They live happily ever after.

Calypso loves Odysseus, but they can’t truly connect because one is mortal, the other divine. She pleads with Zeus to make him immortal, but, instead, Zeus makes her mortal. Odysseus doesn’t believe her story. Since she no longer has divine powers, she can’t keep stop him from leaving. She pines for him and dies.

Eumaeus and Ktimene (the sister of Odysseus) were childhood friends, until her parents married her to someone from the nearby island of Same. In The Odyssey, XV. 361–79, Eumaeus claims they were raised together and mentions the enormity of her bride price. In my version, Odysseus needs that wealth so he could afford to buy the hand of Penelope, and Ktimene’s husband is Eurylochus, who accompanies Odysseus to Troy, leaving Ktimene behind. When she believes that her husband died on the return trip, she flees from her in-laws, fearing they will marry her off to someone else. Arriving in Ithaca in disguise, afraid to reveal herself to her parents who would send her back to Same, she becomes the friend and assistant of Eumaeus, now the royal swineherd. Their delicate, unexpressed love for one another grows for years, until Odysseus returns, sees they are a perfect match, and has them marry, without knowing who she is.

“As a wedding gift, Odysseus gives them ownership of their farm, and they continue to live there, despite an invitation to move to the castle. But they visit the castle often because Eumaeus loves an audience, and now he can tell tales about the adventures of Odysseus and his reunion with Penelope, including a first-hand account of the battle with the suitors. Traveling bards go out of their way to hear his version, which he elaborates with each telling. They use his scenes and descriptions in the versions they sing. In gratitude to him, in their performances, they address him and only him directly, like an old friend — ‘You, Eumaeus, loyal swineherd.’ A year later Ktimene and Eumaeus have a son. They name him Homer. When he grows up he becomes a bard and tells that tale better than anyone else.” (p. 183)

In Let the Women Have Their Say, I reimagine major characters of the Trojan War story, such as Helen, Polyxena, Cassandra, Andromache, Paris, and Achilles, telling how and why the events unfold as they do, with them growing and learning and one episode flowing naturally into the next.

For example, the goddess Thetis hid her son Achilles on the island of Scyros and had him dress as a woman and live with women to prevent him from going to war and dying on the battlefield, as foretold. At Troy, he enjoys dressing as a woman and at sometimes performs as a drag queen for the entertainment of the troops.

The Trojans arrange for Achilles to meet with Polyxena, in hopes that to win her he will make a separate peace and withdraw from the war. He wants to see her as she is, without pretense and ceremony. So he disguises himself as a woman, who is seeking a job as her handmaid. She has been tipped off to expect that, but doesn’t know that this woman is he.

Also, Iphigenia is only three years old when she is to be betrothed to Achilles. (Clytemnestra and Helen are twins, and Helen is too young to have an adult daughter at the time of her elopement). Agamemnon loves Iphigenia. He doesn’t intend to sacrifice her. The ceremony is staged to impress the troops, to show them his total commitment to the cause. He would go through the motions, only to be stopped at the last moment, like Abraham with Isaac. Iffie knows that a deer will be be sacrificed. She asks to hold the knife and is told that it was so sharp that it won’t hurt the deer and that dying is just changing one body for another, like changing clothes. She playfully slits her own throat.

Rereading Classic Texts as a Form of Recursion

Recursion involves the repeated application of a process, where the result of each iteration is used as input for the next. Seriously reading a great work of literature changes you, giving you complex and rich new paths of association, and you change as well from your life experiences and everything else you have read and learned. Each time you return to the work, you experience it differently because your knowledge of it is different, and also because you are a different person.

As an amateur, not a scholar, with only rudimentary acquaintance with ancient Greek, I have depended on translations. I first read The Iliad in Pope’s translation, with heroic couplets, when I was in the fifth grade. Later I read it in the prose translations of Butler, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, and Fagles. Not just the recursive effects, but also the major differences among the translations made each reading a new experience.

For example, Lattimore religiously keeps the lines of his translation parallel with the line numbers of the original, but in so doing he often distorts the meaning, settling for awkward and sometimes inaccurate phraseology. His use of non-traditional spellings of personal names is also jarring. Fagles is very readable, but he sometimes uses creative turns of phrase that are vivid but stray from the original, and his lines numbers don’t match, which is problematic for finding referenced passages.

Recursion was also a structural element in We First Met in Ithaca or Was it Eden? As the two narrators tell stories to one another, they start to experience those stories as if they were participants in them. The stories they tell change them and change their relationship with one another. Perhaps they have lived before and met before and fallen in love before. And the book as a whole ends with a fresh beginning for all mankind, with this couple having become a Adam and Eve in a new Eden — history repeating itself, but recursively rather than circularly, with new awareness that could lead to new outcomes.

The Odyssey can be viewed as a metaphor for recursion. Odysseus returns home as a different person and, once there goes through life-changing events, with the expectation that he will leave again, change again, and return again.

Also, writing my first reception novel made me aware of the challenges and the possible tactics, which changed my approach to the second, which in turn changed my approach to the third. And the writing of this paper is making me more conscious of my process, which will, no doubt, change it yet again.

How Troy and Ithaca Became My Home

In We First Met in Ithaca, the narrators are Oz (short from Oswald), a classics professor, and Elle whose personal imaginative landscape was shaped by the Homeric epics since early childhood.

“Oz asked, “How do you know so much about The Odyssey? I studied it and taught it for decades, but you talk about it as if you inhabited that world.”

“That story was my childhood obsession,” she explained. “My parents named me Penelope, so I asked them repeatedly, and also read widely, eager to know who Penelope was and where and when she lived. Ithaca became my make-believe home. Sometimes I was Penelope, sometimes Odysseus, sometimes Calypso or another character, seeing the story from different angles.”

“It’s as if you and I met in Ithaca,” Oz concluded.

“Yes. We both have that world in our minds.” (p. 48)

Like her, Greek mythology and legend resonated in my imagination as a child. I discovered the Trojan War in the fifth grade in the pages of Olivia Coolidge’s book of that title, which extends beyond The Iliad to tell the related stories in chronological sequence. That same year I saw the movie Helen of Troy and read the related comic book. The characters soon populated my personal imaginative world. Like my classmates, I used to play with plastic cowboy and Indian figures, reimagining clashes in the Wild West. Now, I started reenacting the Trojan War with bottle caps, each cap representing a warrior. With the cork side up, they were alive. Flipped over they were dead. Beer caps with aluminum on top of the cork were Trojans. Soda bottle caps with just the cork were Greeks. Ginger Ale with shiny white on top of cork were captains of the Greeks. Caps with the cork removed were major characters. I glued a small strip of paper with the name of each of those to the bare metal. Sometimes I controlled the action, deciding which to flip and when. Sometimes I shook the rug underneath them and removed the dead from the battlefield. Troy was my imaginative home. I was an only child. This was a personal game that I played alone.

In the fifth and sixth grades I put together Trojan War costumes for Halloween with the help of my father, who made the sword, shield and helmet. I was Achilles. My friends had no idea who Achilles was, aside from what I told them.

Back then, my parents belonged to the Book of the Month Club and the Heritage Book Club, and curiosity prompted me to check out their selections. The Gold of Troy by Robert Payne recounted the adventures of Heinrich Schliemann, the brilliant amateur who, with Iliad in hand, found the site of ancient Troy. When The Odyssey a Modern Sequel by Kazantzakis arrived, I couldn’t make sense of it, but I was intrigued by it, which prompted me want to read Homer. Fortuitously, The Iliad, translated by Alexander Pope was soon a Heritage selection. Despite the rhyming couplets, I read it with pleasure and was soon writing a sequel, also rhymed — doggerel that’s painful and embarrassing to read today.

For an independent project in the seventh grade, I wrote an essay about how world history would have been changed if the Trojans had won the war. (Aeneas would never have fled to Italy, and Rome wouldn’t have been founded by his descendants).

My senior year at Yale I wrote a play called Amythos or Without a Myth, in which mythical characters are forced to live a story not of their choosing, or to be suspended alone in nowhere, conscious but unable to do anything. Their story was their fate.

In graduate school (Yale, Comparative Literature), I wrote paper exploring a recurrent theme in Greek mythology. In the legends of Mycenae, Thebes, and Sparta, there is an alternating pattern of succession. If the king inherits from his father, whoever marries the king’s eldest daughter succeeds, immediately, not having to wait for the king to die. Then in the next generation, a king who secured the throne by marriage is succeeded on his death by his oldest son. This alternating pattern leads to dramatic situations in which a young woman plays a key role as symbol of the right to rule.

For instance, Menelaus becomes king as soon as he marries Helen, the eldest daughter of the king of Sparta. Then his right to rule is thrown into question when she goes off with Paris.

Iphigenia, the eldest daughter of Agamemnon, is expected to marry Achilles, but if she were to do so, by this pattern of succession, the right to rule in Mycenae would pass to him. Sacrificing her or having becoming a priestess with a vow of virginity, eliminates that possibility and thereby solidifies Agamemnon’s right to rule.

Oedipus has a double right to rule Thebes, both as the son of the father he kills and as the husband of his mother. That throws the succession pattern into disarray. Who should rule in the next generation? When the sons of Oedipus and Jocasta die fighting one another. Jocasta’s brother, Creon, fills the gap, without the sanction of tradition. Whoever marries Antigone, Oedipus’ eldest daughter would normally rule, and Creon’s son Haemon wants to marry her. But Creon doesn’t want her to marry anyone. He exiles his son which leads to his son’s death. Antigone stays unmarried, and Creon keeps the crown.

After grad school, I got married, had four children, and worked as an employee communications editor and then as an Internet evangelist for Digital Equipment, the minicomputer company. After that, I was an independent Internet marketing consultant and a publisher of public domain books on CDs, DVDs, and through online ebook stores. For forty years of my life, time was tight and my writing was on the back burner.

My wife died ten years ago. My kids are off on their own. At 78, I now have no responsibilities other than reading and writing and engaging in creative dialogue with my partner, Nancy Felson, a renowned Homeric scholar.

I finished Breeze two years ago. Then I wrote and rewrote We First Met in Ithaca over the course of a year, and Let the Women Have Their Say in six months. I was dealing with familiar characters and situations. I was returning to my imaginative home and seeing it with new eyes, enjoying the many different ways the familiar elements could fit together.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are now part of who I am and how I think. Characters and scenes come alive in my sleep. I often wake up in the middle of the night and write notes for chapters as if I were listening to characters speaking to one another and I was taking dictation. I am often surprised and delighted when I’m suddenly able to see scenes from the perspectives of my characters and hear dialogue among them.

In Let the Women Have Their Say, much of the story is revealed through dialogue. What matters is not just what happens, but what the characters think about it and how that affects their hopes and fears. Readers witness as characters make discoveries about themselves and others, as the drama unfolds.

Often what characters know and don’t know in a particular scene influences their perception of what is going on and hence affects their motivation. I learned this recursive technique in reading The Odyssey. Rather than recount Odysseus’ adventures in chronological order, Homer has Odysseus tell the stories of the fall of Troy and the voyage home to a royal audience in Phaeacia. He encourages the reader to consider this speech in a dramatic context, an element moving the present narrative forward. And at the same time this account is a revelation of how well Odysseus can spin stories — both true and false.

The events that Odysseus is talking about changed him. He was a different person before they happened than after. And the act of retelling them from the perspective of the new person he has become, changes him yet again.

Homer reveals Odysseus’ past as part of the dramatic present. And in the subsequent events — the return to Ithaca and the slaughter of the suitors — we witness yet another transformation of Odysseus. In this way, Homer compactly displays many recursive versions of Odysseus — the many-sided, many-faced hero.

A devious man, who excels at disguise and at inventing false backstories for himself, finally tells the truth. Or is it the truth? Truth is, at best, relative. But having a problematic relationship with truth is part of Odysseus’ identity, so even when he lies, he partially reveals his character to the literary audience who knows more about him than the audience inside the story, and has learned not to take him at his word. And what the audience knows affects their experience of what they hear or read. So each time we return to this multi-layered work, it is different to us. Both the book and its hero are recursive.
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