Byron and Joyce Through Homer: Don Juan and Ulysses

By Hermione de Almeida

Columbia University Press, New York, and The Macmillan Press, London, 1981

Reviews of Byron and Joyce Through Homer

“Hermione de Almeida is…not strictly a Joycean…so much as a broad humanist critic. Her book is written with considerable verve (the very first word is ‘Flayed’); she has a healthy disrespect for scholarly pigeon-holing and the dissection of textual minutiae; and she pursues a rollicking, garrulous and commonsensical, though still intelligent and informed argument. Her central contention is that Byron and Joyce share a fundamentally similar response to Homer and that Don Juan and Ulysses provide for a later age what Homer’s epic gave to his contemporaries in Greece…she is able to convey the courage and éclat that are part of the angst of both modern transformations of the epic….Her book offers to refresh our orientation toward Joyce in particular, in accordance with her enthusiastic humanist perspective—an attempt that will be warmly welcomed.”—Richard Brown, University of Leeds, Times Literary Supplement

“The slender threads of Homeric story, characters, and mythic tradition have been used skillfully here to bind together the two most unusual and iconoclastic literary productions of the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries….The author has marshaled a vast array of seemingly conflicting and complex evidence to support not a preconceived thesis so much as a flexible analysis of the points at which Byron and Joyce in their respective eras broke new ground and created their own epical myths of common life….De Almeida has shown how much both writers owe to the mock-heroic and tradition-breaking influences of free spirits in previous centuries from Rabelais, Cervantes, and Montaigne through Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett—to their rollicking mockery and their underlying devotion to truth to life….Parallels abound, not forced but obvious once they are pointed out by the ever perceptive critic….The concluding chapter, in tying threads together, brings us back to the Homeric germ, the epic myth which was the starting point of both poem and novel. But by now we are not greatly concerned with it, and certainly no more than the writers themselves were—for we have been served a rare and stimulating array of thoughtful, wise, and always sharply penetrating and well-phrased observations that give new and vibrant meaning to two unique literary landmarks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”—Leslie A. Marchand, Editor, Byron’s Letters and Journals, in Keats-Shelley Journal

“The most recent book-length study, Hermione de Almeida’s Byron and Joyce through Homer: Don Juan and Ulysses (1981), provides further evidence that Don Juan still speaks to us directly in the twentieth century….De Almeida regards Ulysses and Don Juan as ‘epic equivalents, each functioning for the post-Kantian era in much the same way as Homer’s epics did for early Greek civilization.’ She has densely written chapters on their relationship to the Odyssey, myth and tradition, the hero, society, and styles. A final chapter reiterates her argument that the two modern works belong ‘conclusively in one literary era.’…even the skeptical will find enlightening her juxtaposition of Byron and Joyce. Every chapter, at once a close argument with critics and firmly independent in judgment, succeeds in the juxtaposition of its two primary texts. And like that of Byron and Joyce, de Almeida’s own style, aphoristic and self-aware, even gives forth an occasional exotic bloom….Don Juan and Ulysses, almost exactly a hundred years apart, may both be post-Kantian, but they are also much more…her juxtaposition succeeds brilliantly in its primary aim. No one can look at either writers in quite the same way again.”—John Clubbe, University of Kentucky, in The English Romantic Poets (Modern Language Association, 1985)

“Not only is Dr. de Almeida’s learning a wonder and a joy to behold, but she applies it pertinently….She also demonstrates great critical intelligence. Building on a wide range of literature, scholarship, and criticism, she develops a personal synthesis that illuminates both Don Juan and Ulysses and the relationships of these masterpieces to the ages they represent.”—Donald H. Reiman, Carl H. Pforzheimer Library

“The author constructs a compelling argument for reading Don Juan and Ulysses as modern counter-epics, responsive as much to Homeric tradition as to the problems of writing epic in modern times.”—Vincent D. Balitas, College Literature

“De Almeida has written a learned book in beautiful prose. This surprising, intriquing study shows what a brilliant mind can do with an unlikely topic; it should convince those few remaining skeptics that Homer and Byron but sailed in Joyce’s wake.”—Philip Herring, University of Wisconsin

“Not very much has been written about Byron and the moderns. In an interesting recent book Hermione de Almeida has paid careful attention to the Homeric parallels in Don Juan and Ulysses. …earlier studies [of the modernists’ debt to Romanticism]…find very little to say about Byron.”—Hazard Adams, University of Washington, Studies in Romanticism

“In essence, Byron and Joyce through Homer is about the shared Greekness of Don Juan and Ulysses, their authors’ common attempt to use the Odyssey as a touchstone for understanding the modern world and its culture….the most salient points de Almeida finds in the juxtaposition of Byron and Joyce with Homer are of contrast, or at least of reevaluation….The story here is not only of rejection, adaptation, and debunking, though. Rather, the most perceptive level of de Almeida’s argument examines the qualities of Homer’s epic Byron and Joyce chose to retain. While the Greek vision did have to be changed, there was much about it that speaks directly to the modern world….To reword slightly the premise of Byron and Joyce through Homer (as de Almeida in fact does in the rich details of her argument): we are all romantic Greeks, revisionists of our Western cultural heritage who have yet to find a better modern viewpoint than that provided, in unison over the span of a century, by Byron and Joyce.”—Frederick W. Shilstone, Clemson University, South Atlantic Review

Additional Information on Byron and Joyce though Homer

Description

At first glance, Byron’s Don Juan and Joyce’s Ulysses might seem to have little in common. One is steeped in the Romantic energy and ethos of its era, the other helped to shape the definition of modernism by making a conscious break with the conventions of, among other eras, the very same Romantic past. Yet despite clear antipathies between Byron and Joyce, marked parallels between the two works suggest an affinity in the writers’ intentions and effects, an affinity ultimately revealed by each works relation to Homer’s Odyssey.

In Byron and Joyce through Homer, Hermione de Almeida constructs a compelling argument for reading Don Juan and Ulysses as modern counter-epics, responsive as much to Homeric tradition as to the problems of writing epic in modern times. Consciously patterned after the Odyssey, Don Juan and Ulysses declare their intention to be epic-equivalents for their own times. Poems and novel assume other mythic patterns in addition to Homeric myth: they absorb elements from the literary mutations of epic tradition; they attempt to distinguish heroism or personal distinction in a egalitarian age; they reflect on the societies they witness in Europe or Dublin, and on the lapses since that ideal Aegean community; they parody all the major literary styles and, through a parallactic perspective, form their individual media of expression.

By demonstrating how Don Juan and Ulysses parody all the major literary styles while reflecting the cultural and literary variations that have occurred since Homer’s time—thus, mirroring the entire Western tradition—de Almeida’s book proves to be much more than just a comparative study of two literary works. A broad, speculative work on such topics as epic, epic-mutants, mythic structures, serio-comic art, narrative encyclopedias, literary exegesis, and cultural history, Byron and Joyce through Homer poses large questions that defy easy, conclusive answers and promote further debate.

· Hardcover: 233 pages

· Publisher: Columbia University Press (October 1, 1981)

· ISBN-10: 0231050925

· ISBN-13: 978-0231050920

· Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.3 x 1 inches