An Odyssey in Fractals?

Like its predecessor the Iliad, the Odyssey contains any number of proto-novelistic elements: its rich description of seemingly trivial phenomena (for example, the description of  Odysseus’ scar along with the backstory as to how he sustained that scar in Book XIX); narrative presented through dialogue; and of course intimations of the psychological state of various characters through understated actions. It is a delicious slip of the tongue when even professional readers of text refer to the narrative as “a novel” or its indiscrete books as “chapters.” To some literary critics these malapropisms are a natural result of the genre of the novel’s fully-formed birth from the thigh of the epic. Nevertheless, as we will see this semester, generic distinctions are much more porous than theorists might like them to be, and this seems especially true when one engages with the psychological sophistication of a familial epic like the Odyssey.        

In her essay “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents” (2006), Wai Chee Dimock uniquely problematizes the critical tendency of proclaiming rather rigid generic definitions. In response, Dimock offers a nuancing solution to that problem. Beginning by summarizing some of the more compelling views on generic construction since Plato, Dimock notes that this rigidity does a disservice to generic messiness. She summarizes Benedetto Croce’s view that the problem of genre is in its desire to  “only want to label it [i.e. a text]” and not, in Croce’s words ask “before a work of art if it be expressive and what it expresses” (86). Dimock seeks different “lines of differentiation” (86) and offers a few approaches toward avoiding genre’s fault of pigeonholing a text and consequently diminishing it. Drawing on Derrida’s view that generic law is in essence only honored in its breach, Dimock seeks to “invoke genre less as a law, a rigid taxonomic landscape, and more as a self-obsoleting system, a provisional set that will always be bent and pulled and stretched by its many subsets” (86). 

For Dimock, classification becomes more about “interconnection” or “kinship” than affinity. She explains this as  “a remote spectrum of affinities, interesting when seen in conjunction, but not themselves organically linked” (86). Although this may seem like a moot point, what it suggests for the literary critic and genre theorist is that, real or not, the supposed linearity of genre is less interesting than the overlapping twists and turns of generic conventions. Borrowing metaphors from fractal geometry and Wittgenstein’s idea of kinship (first applied to the commonalities of games) Dimock offers a less rigid definition of what genre might be that in fact thickens the web of interconnection that might be viewed between Dante’s Commedia and Gilgamesh--beyond the mere assertion that each text is an example of "epic."

Dimock’s point is easily applicable to a text like the Odyssey in its relation to other narratives in the western canon, as well as the many rewritings and subsequent iterations of the Odysseus narrative in world literature. What is the relationship between the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Fitzgerald’s translation of the epic poem that we have been reading in class? Sure, they are examples of different media but is there an illocutionary level that unites the two? When asked about the film in various interviews, the Coen Brothers have replied that they did not in fact seek to rewrite the Odyssey in their telling the story of Ulysses Everett Mcgill, but as the parallels serendipitously became more and more pronounced in making the film, they played those parallels up as best they could. (Of course, strikingly absent from the film is Telemachus, an important “co-star” in the Odyssey’s narrative, if not the equally central protagonist.)

How might you apply some of Dimock’s ideas to the Odyssey itself or that narrative’s relationship to other texts and narratives? How might Dimock’s unique employment of the  concept of a “fractal” to literature and genre theory be applied to the rewriting of such narratives? The questions posed by Dimock's essay will be particularly important when we begin to turn our focus to the "contamination" found in medieval epic and the related romance.

(Dimock, Wai Chee. “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents.” Narrative 14.1 (2006): 85-101. Print. )