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Golding's Odyssey
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12478 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1987 |
2,156 Words |
| Author
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Roger Lewis
Roger Lewis is a fellow of Wolfson College and a lecturer
at Mogdalen College, Oxford University, and writes
regularly for Punch. |
In the beginning was the sea - Homer's Greeks, in the Iliad, setting out across the wine-dark Aegean to recapture Helen from Troy, an event remembered at the commencement of Ezra Pound's Cantos, several thousand years later ("And then went down to the ship"). Next there's the Odyssey, concerning the king of Ithaca's protracted attempts to return home: "On stormy seas," translated Alexander Pope, "unnumber'd toils he bore" - the toils becoming a pattern for the plight of Leopold Bloom, who in James Joyce's Ulysses sails about the city of Dublin on a summer's day in 1904.
We might label this a heroic tradition (mock-heroic in Joyce's case): the ship as a man-made ingenious engine, the men who construct and command it superendowed and epic, the sea itself an oblivion to be conquered, wild nature to be challenged.
Beowulf, English literature's official advent, officially an epic, suggests a quite other maritime heritage. The poem starts with a Viking funeral and a burning boat. Scyld Scefing's body is placed in state upon a hringedstefna, a ring-prowed ship. Packed with treasures and mementos, the vessel is cast adrift. Men ne cunnon...hwa paem hlaeste onfeng. No man could say who received that cargo.
The ship as catafalque, the sea a realm of endless night: we might label such melancholy moods a romantic tradition.
Heroic and romantic, then, briny goings-on percolate the imagination. Some instances: The Ancient Mariner and The Flying Dutchman represent doomed sailor folk, solitaries waiting to be redeemed. Their spooky galleons, with rotting
... (1996 of 12889 Characters)
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