Let your hair down! It’s fun to let your imagination run wild sometimes.
Hylander indirectly raises the good and useful question of whether archetypal readings add to our appreciation of the text. I’ll do my best to make the case for them.
I find these readings often get misinterpreted as an attempt to find a key to symbols in the text, turning it into a roman-à-clef where Arete=Athena/Persephone and Odysseus=Orpheus so we can transfer the attributes from one to the other and then Aha! we finally understand the text. If it was ever the intention of the Odyssey poet to write a roman-à-clef the ‘clef’ itself is long gone, so such analysis is worthless. The fact that a child with no knowledge of revolutionary Russia can read and enjoy Animal Farm shows how such keys are a dispensable layer of meaning in the text.
Instead, it’s better to treat archetypal readings as an attempt to explore the larger ‘plate tectonics’ of the plot, the deep currents, to create answers to the question ‘why is the narrative constructed this way, and what effect does it have on the reader?’. Then, importantly, ‘what can we learn by comparing it with other stories using similar motifs?’.
Archetypal readings don’t try to uncover secret codes, but to put a name to and describe common features of stories or characters which have a particular effect. Lots of people don’t know the term ‘middle eight’ in pop music, even if they’ve heard thousands of them, but know the exact feeling created by this departure from the rest of the song when it’s pointed out to them. I’ve read interviews with songwriters who admit they don’t know what a middle eight is, but include one because it ‘feels right’. Archetypal readings look for what ‘feels right’ in a text and ask why.
To take a modern(ish) example most people will know - A Christmas Carol can be also be read as a (Jungian) ‘rebirth’ narrative. A miser is reborn as a generous and kind man after meeting three (well, four) ghosts. There’s an allegorical layer to the text which we’re most used to dealing with - love of one’s fellow man is more important than money - but this allegory could be (and has been) represented in countless different ways.
Dickens could have used a single event to convince Scrooge to become a good man, so why bother with three ghosts? Because Scrooge is beyond simple redemption. It will take an extraordinary spiritual journey to show him the error of his ways. Whether you want to call it this or not, Scrooge must be ‘reborn’, to have a complete moral overhaul, and it requires supernatural intervention to get him there. We would ‘feel’ it was inadequate if he didn’t make this journey.
Indeed, one of the first things he says after he returns to his own bed is
’I don’t know how long I have been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby.
Not because Dickens wants us to think ‘Aha! A Jungian Rebirth!’ but because it plays into the underlying idea of regeneration whatever label you wish to put on it. I.e. it makes no difference to the effect of an archetype whether we recognise it consciously.
Question is - do we gain anything by consciously considering this as a ‘rebirth’ rather than just plot development? I think we do. It invites the questions ‘why does the character need to be reborn’, ‘how are they reborn’ and ‘what change has occurred after rebirth’, which in turn encourages us to compare different texts and narratives.
After he falls asleep, Scrooge, like Peer Gynt or Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, must travel to a spiritual realm/enchanted alternate reality where he goes on a journey of moral self-realisation. The story of his own life is recounted in the process and at the end of it he sees his own death. He supplicates the spirit of death (Christmas Yet to Come), falling to his knees:
‘Am I that man who lay upon the bed?’ he cried upon his knees
…
‘Good Spirit,’ he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it, ‘your nature intercedes for me, and pities me’
…
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed
The spirit returns him to his own bed when he promises “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”
To come back to Odysseus (finally!), I find it profitable to take Scrooge’s rebirth and compare it to Odysseus’ journey. Odysseus travels to an enchanted realm (Scheria, magical orchard &c.) where characters are ‘close to the gods’ and, near death, he falls asleep, is washed and made beautiful, supplicates the queen, recounts the story of his journey, regains his strength and is magically transported home. What connects Newton, Edmonds and Frame is that they afford Arete a supernatural status which gives her the power to effect Odysseus’ rebirth.
What separates the Odyssey most clearly from modern narratives is that Odysseus doesn’t undergo a (Christian) moral transformation. He doesn’t realise he has done something wrong and needs to change his ways. Instead, he supplicates the great-granddaughter of Poseidon, whom he has wronged by blinding Polyphemus, and later his slate is wiped clean and he is allowed to continue his life. I think this speaks to an important difference between Greek and Christian/post-Christian conceptions of moral resolution, which I find enhances my appreciation of the text. Why is Odysseus’ offence against Poseidon so bad that he needs this extraordinary intervention? Something I would like to continue exploring.
I appreciate that such readings are not to everyone’s taste and have become quite unfashionable. Newton, Edmonds and Frame do themselves no favours by taking the thinking much too far and treating it too literally (as did their predecessors Frazer and Jung, let alone the Dan Browns of the world), but I agree with their common finding that Arete occupies a semi-divine status which is important in effecting Odysseus’ nostos. Treating these things as accidental or interchangeable features of the plot diminishes the power of the text for me - it would not ‘feel right’ (to me) if Athens replaced Scheria and Arete was just a normal mortal queen giving him a lift, in the same way that Scrooge talking to three blokes in the street wouldn’t have the same effect as three ghosts.
Tl;dr - all I’m saying is give archetypes a chance.
