Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War

Kathleen Riley, Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Benjamin Jasnow, William Jewell College, jasnowb@william.jewell.edu.

Kathleen Riley has written a richly ornamented appraisal of nostalgia in works of literature, film, theater, and television since the end of World War I. Riley situates each modern work within its social, historical, and cultural context, so that each brief essay provides a window into the world of the work and its author. Although Odyssean nostalgia lies in the background and provides Riley with the archetypes of nostalgic yearning, from Ithaca itself to the various different types of longing exemplified by Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, or Laertes, this book does not often aim to illuminate the Odyssey or Odyssean longing for return as portrayed by Homer, except in broad terms. Nor does the book seek to engage much with classical scholarship or theoretical approaches to nostalgia. Instead, Riley offers a wonderful array of examples of nostalgia in action, a close look at dynamics of longing for an inaccessible “Ithaca” in a series of mostly very affecting texts. Riley’s insightful analysis of the works and their contexts is a pleasure to read.

Riley’s Introduction provides a moving and characteristically detailed look at the way that British soldiers during World War I conceived of combat and the longing for home in Homeric terms (1–8). The Introduction goes on to evaluate the coining of the word nostalgia in 1688 by the Basel medical student Johannes Hofer, its subsequent use as a medical diagnosis, its subsequent demedicalization, and its 20th century meaning of longing for a lost home, but also a lost time, an imagined future, or a vanishing present. Despite the modern roots of the term nostalgia, Riley joins Kundera in claiming Homer as the original epic poet of nostalgia (10). Homer’s depiction of Odysseus’s longing for home, Riley notes, at times seems similar to the modern notion of homesickness (11–12). But elsewhere, Odysseus’s ‘nostalgia,’ argues Riley, building on the argument of David Gross,“is presented as more deeply existential.” In other words, Odysseus’s longing for Ithaca is a longing for the place and context most fundamental to his identity (12). This existential nostalgia is present in modern English literature, as Riley demonstrates in her discussion of Rupert Brooke’s “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (15). Riley goes on to evaluate the political and intellectual dangers of nostalgia. After all, it is not a far leap from Brooke’s mournful idealization of his present to the politicized golden-age thinking of the Brexit movement (16–18) or Trump’s concoction of a longed for but illusory past in his Make America Great Again slogan (18). But Riley also offers hope that a nostalgia or even mourning for the past could coexist with a hope for a better future. “Such a nostalgia,” says Riley, “is fundamentally Odyssean–complex and hazardous, but looking always ahead to an Ithacan shore” (21). 

Riley goes on to note that the Odyssey will provide the backdrop of the nineteen modern and contemporary studies. “This book, whose overarching theme is the contemplation of Home from a distance, accepts Kundera’s claim that the Odyssey is the founding epic of nostalgia…the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers” (21). Given the importance of the Odyssey to Riley’s own book, a more thorough analysis of this urtext of nostalgia would have been welcome. Although Riley’s claim of Odyssean influence on subsequent literature of nostalgia seems more than reasonable, it also raises questions that go unaddressed in the absence of a discussion of nostos in the Odyssey itself. For example, does Homer’s portrait of Odyssean identity–where the shared knowledge of the olive tree bedstead can restore Odysseus and Penelope to themselves–provide a kind of magic continuum from one’s past self to one’s present and future self, blunting nostalgia’s edge? The Odyssey gives us plenty more to think with: Odysseus’s initial failure to recognize Ithaca on his arrival home; his preliminary return home in disguise; his recognition by Eurycleia; etc. Each of these scenes may have something to say about the difficulty or possibility of returning home. Although Riley does address themes similar to the above in passing throughout the work, a centralized and detailed exploration of Homeric nostalgia in the Introduction would have provided a useful foundation for the other studies and allowed for deeper comparisons to the Odyssey.

Riley’s discussion of works since World War I is divided into six parts. The subject of Part I, “Like strangers in those landscapes of our youth,” is revealed by its subtitle: “War and impossible nostos.” Chapters 1 and 3 evaluate not only the difficulty of return for Odyssean soldiers, but also a “Penelope figure to whom he returns, and their joint estrangement from a pre-war world” (23). Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, the subject of Chapter 1, depicts the soldier’s impossible return from various Penelopes’ points of view (34), as they watch their shell-shocked Odysseus struggle with amnesia, forget his Ithaca, and long instead for an Ogygia (38). Riley suggests that West “has appropriated key elements of Odysseus’s nostos and either rearranged or inverted them” (34). William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) details the return of three WWII vets to the home front, and their relationships to their respective Penelopes (Ch. 3). Although the men make it back home, they all have trouble reintegrating into society, and so they suffer from a homesickness that home itself cannot cure (58–60). Chapter 2 explains how the soldiers Remarque’s WWI novel All Quiet on the Western Front depicts the destruction of the possibility of nostos for the very young protagonists. Not only can the pull of home be dangerous at the front, but, barely more than boys, they lack the bonds to home available to older soldiers, like family and professional life. These young men “have lost their nostalgic connection to home and, in the process, they have lost themselves” (47). Chapter 4 discusses David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, which touchingly depicts the struggle of a soldier to maintain a connection to the landscape of his Australian home amid the horrors of the Western Front. An avid naturalist and birder at home, the soldier holds fast to the image of migratory birds, which helps him maintain an image of himself and his home. After he is fatally wounded, he has a vision of his body parts returning in his stead. 

As will be true throughout this book, the chapters of Part I provide a satisfying analysis not only of the work, but of its larger cultural context. For example, Riley begins Chapter 2 by noting Bob Dylan’s juxtaposition of the Odyssey to All Quiet on the Western Front (43–44), since both are concerned with nostos and, as Riley reconstructs Dylan’s view, both depict the disillusionment that comes with age. The Odyssey is frequently invoked for its various paradigms related to nostos (Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Ithaca). Although thematic connections are clear elsewhere, the allusions in Chapter 3 are the most explicit. The poem upon which Wyler based The Best Years of Our Lives aspired to be “a modern Odyssey,” and one of the main characters was named Homer (56). Riley compares a scene of mutual understanding between a husband and wife in a hard-fought marriage to the homophrosyne of Odysseus and Penelope following the olive tree episode (60–61). 

Part II, “‘A deep yearning for a return to the source’: Rewriting Homer,” draws more overt connections between the Odyssey and the modern works. These are John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (Ch. 5), Njabulu Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (Ch. 6), and Tamar Yellin’s “Return to Zion” (Ch. 7). In this section, Riley investigates what it means to return to the Odyssey as an inspiration. Although Riley casts doubt as to whether Ford intentionally reworked the Odyssey (82), contemporary critics did make connections (79–80). The Long Voyage Home, in Riley’s view, is an ironic reconfiguration of the Odyssey, with most of the central figures, merchant sailors compelled to unceasing voyage, trapped in a realm of perpetual travel and thus yearning for nostos. Chapter 6 offers a more intentional reworking of the Odyssey. The Cry of Winnie Mandela channels Homer by depicting four latter day South African Penelopes, who suffer various plights as they await their largely disappointing Odysseuses. Magically, these women with divergent stories all have a discussion group, to which is admitted, magically and in absentia, another Penelope figure, Winne Mandella, about whom they monologue. Winnie Mandella, magically again, hears their monologues, and then somehow joins the women for a road trip. They pick up a hitchhiker–who turns out to be Penelope herself! She has been on a 2,000 year long journey to warn women to avoid her own “exemplary faithfulness” (96). Yellin’s “Return to Zion” foists a surreally literal rewriting of the Odyssey onto a Jewish family in the English suburbs. The father is named Odysseus, the mother Penelope, the son Telemachus. They live in a semi-detached house, called Ithaca. Odysseus wants to travel, but never leaves. He is obsessed with drawing up all manner of outlandish plans of return to Zion, but he never follows through. Odysseus even builds a boat, but he burns it in the potting shed where he’s been hatching his plans all these years. As Odysseus lies in his deathbed, his son sings to him of the Babyloniaian captivity. Riley relates this plot to Yellin’s own feeling of simultaneous rootedness and homesickness as a Jewish person in England: “I belong in two places at once, which sometimes feels like I belong nowhere” (103).

Part III, “‘One is always at home in one’s past’: The nostalgia of exile,” takes up three works by or about political exiles. For Nabokov, whose Speak, Memory is the subject of Chapter 8, “[e]xile became…an aesthetic choice” (113). Wary of physical return to an unrecognizable homeland, which would disturb his nostalgic and artistically productive “facility for elegizing the present moment” (111), Nobokov instead creates a nostos away from home (113). Doris Lessing (Ch. 9, focused on Going Home and Under My Skin) finds herself a political exile from the Rhodesia that she loves but which she also believes should be returned to its native population. Lessing’s is an ambivalent nostalgia, attracted to the Rhodesia of her childhood, but also yearning for escape. Riley argues that Lessing makes a return to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, by proxy, when she bequeaths 3,000 books to the library in Harare. Chapter 10 takes up Alan Bennett’s The Old Country and An Englishman Abroad. Both portray English traitors who have made new homes in the USSR, and who long for an idealized England that they perceive to have vanished. The protagonists of both works live among the artifacts of their English pasts and find more nostos in their longing for this vanished, idealized homeland than in the England from which they are exiled or the Soviet surroundings of their present.

Part IV is called “‘Across a strange country to their homeland’: Nostos and the displaced spirit.” Chapters 11–13 investigate “atavistic longing” (26), that is, the longing for a spiritual home, which may be at a great remove from daily life. Carson McCullers’s “Look Homeward, Americans” (1940) suggests that Americans will need to turn away from their homesick longing for return to Europe, which has now been cut off by World War II. Instead, McCullers suggests, according Riley’s Odyssean paradigm, that “the nation’s Telemachan wanderers…grow up, to embrace a nostalgia that is still fixed on the future but necessarily turned inward,” towards their own country (152). Chapter 12 offers a moving discussion of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. This book details the abduction of three Aboriginal girls, one of whom was Pilkington Garimara’s own mother, Molly, from their native Australian lands, their removal to a school for the purpose of instruction in ‘white’ society, and their subsequent escape. “Like Odysseus, Molly is sustained and propelled by her longing for an Ithaca inseparable from her sense of self, for a home that is embedded in her soul” and she must use her metis to escape her pursuers (157). Colonization has fundamentally altered the spiritual landscape of Australia, such that Aboriginals may feel divorced from the very land on which they live. Horrifically, Molly’s own children are seized from her in turn, one of whom, Annabelle, she never meets again. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (Ch. 13) discusses the perils and pleasures of nostalgia. Gil, the protagonist, is dissatisfied with his own present, but is magically transported to an age and landscape he idealizes, Paris of the roaring ‘20s, filled with his literary and artistic heroes (he is a struggling writer himself). After some amorous adventures, Gil returns to his own age and negotiates the dislocating dangers of nostalgia to create meaning in his own present. 

Part V is titled, “‘In the place called Adulthood there’s precious few golden afternoons’: Returning to the place called Childhood.” As the title suggests, Chapters 14–16 evaluate nostalgia for childhood. The protagonist of George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (Ch. 14) is a WWI veteran named George Bowling who, in the runup to WWII, longs for the nostalgic image of his hometown. But when Bowling returns, his fishing pond has been drained and turned into a rubbish heap, and the town seems like an ersatz version of itself, falsely picturesque (190). Bowling may not achieve nostos, but he learns that the “Ithacan pursuit of an authentic feeling, rather than a putative golden age, is one worth emulating” (194). Chapter 15 analyzes John Van Druten’s The Widening Circle (1957). Van Druten, takes any opportunity he can to search out the West Hempstead of his youth, no longer bucolic, but “a city of ghosts” (202). The theme of “essential” nostalgia is important here, since Van Druten’s search for tokens of his childhood is a search for identity (203). Chapter 16 discusses John Logan’s Peter and Alice, a 2013 play inspired by a real 1932 coincidence: Peter and Alice, the namesakes of Peter Pan and Alice, of Wonderland fame, both attended the same opening of a Lewis Carroll exhibition. The play imagines a dialogue between Peter and Alice, which “invents for them…an extended nostos, a return…to their childhoods” (208). Alice, 80, can take some measure of comfort from her memories of the “golden afternoons” of her childhood (209), despite the trauma of losing children to WWI. But “Peter, in his thirties and a veteran of the Great War, is haunted, marked by and for tragedy…” (209). For Logan, Peter is isolated and detached from the present, like a lotus-eater, but he also fears the memories of his youth, which have been usurped by a fictional character (214). Horrifically, the real Peter later threw himself under a train (217). 

Finally, Part VI is about works that depict the search for a lost father figure: “‘All sons are Telemachus figures’: Voyages round the father.” Chapter 17 focuses on British ex-MP Michael Portillo’s pursuit of traces of his late father, Luis Portillo, a poet and exile of the Spanish Civil War. This touching discussion, about the younger Portillo’s TV documentary Great Railway Journeys: Granada to Salamanca, offers a rich contextualization of the poetry of Luis Portillo, Michael’s father, whose Spain was stolen from him by the war, so that father and son will make multiple journeys in an effort to understand their displacement. “Luis’s reverence for the Salamanca of his halcyon student days and his abiding bitterness towards the regime…fuelled an unappeasable sense of loss and impossible nostos” (236). Chapter 18 evaluates Seamus Heaney’s association between nostos and katabasis in three collections: Seeing Things, District and Circle, and Human Chain. Here we find the poet obsessed with digging up the ghosts of his own past but also of his literary forebears, with Odysseus and especially Aeneas as his psychopomps. This discussion is more firmly rooted in demonstrable classical allusion than many of the other chapters, since it is very clear that Heaney himself is thinking of Homeric and Virgilian katabases. Touchingly, Heany’s final published poem is a posthumous translation of Aeneid 6, which, as Riley notes, “is nothing short of a nostos” (266), not only from the world of the dead to the world of the living, but to a theme and work which had preoccupied him for his entire literary life. The final chapter is about Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. As Riley notes, Mendelsohn’s entire book is a Telemachy of sorts, but his “quest is undertaken largely in his father’s presence” (270). An Odyssey is about a semester during which Mendelsohn’s father, Jay, attends his undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey at Bard, and a subsequent cruise that father and son take together, from Troy to various locations associated with Odysseus’s fantastic journeys. But the journey is also about Mendelsohn’s attempt to understand his father, who dislikes Odysseus for his dishonesty, but also turns out to have, paradoxically, elements of his own Odyssean slipperiness. Mendelsohn’s Telemachy continues even after his father’s death, and will accompany him on his own future Odysseys (277–78).

An Afterword, written in the continuing aftermath of the Pandemic, evokes the longing that many feel for a return pre-Covid conditions, briefly engages with some social-scientific approaches to nostalgia, delves into the strange emergence of nostalgia for the spirit of endurance that accompanied the Blitz, discusses the desperate need of holocaust survivors like Primo Levi to cling to tokens and memories of identity in the most desperate and horrific of moments, and meditates on the possibility of a forward-looking yearning, which could bring us “home” to a place of deeper knowledge or reclaimed identity. “At its core, this book is a tribute to the faithful heart and the redemptive imagination, to the myriad ways we have of keeping Ithaca in mind through the darkest of hours–Ithaca, that most redolent expression of hopeful nostalgia as bequeathed to us by Homer” (285).

In sum, although Classicists will not find in Imagining Ithaca a detailed study of longing for home in the Odyssey itself, Riley amply demonstrates the ongoing relevance of the Odyssey’s paradigms of nostos, whether through direct influence or thematic resonance. Riley’s literary sensibilities, her knack for hitting on the most touching and interesting details, and her ability to interweave so much evocative context into her main arguments make this insightful book thoroughly enjoyable and informative. 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Home from Homer (1–30)
Part I: ‘Like strangers in those landscapes of our youth’: War and impossible nostos
1. Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) (33–42)
2. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) (43–52)
3. William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1945) (53–63)
4. David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter (1982) (64–75)
Part II: ‘A deep yearning for a return to the source’: Rewriting Homer
5. John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940) (79–88)
6. Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) (89–98)
7. Tamar Yellin’s ‘Return to Zion’ (2006) (99–103)
Part III: ‘One is always at home in one’s past’: The nostalgia of exile
8. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) (107–17)
9. Doris Lessing’s Going Home (1957) and Under My Skin (1994) (118–29)
10. Alan Bennett’s The Old Country (1977) and An Englishman Abroad (1983) (130–41)
Part IV: ‘Across a strange country to their homeland’: Nostos and the displaced spirit
11. Carson McCullers’s, ‘Look Homeward, Americans’ (1940) (145–54)
12. Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) (155–65)
13. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) (166–80)
Part V: ‘In the place called Adulthood there’s precious few golden afternoons’: Returning to the place called Childhood
14. George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939) (183–94)
15. John Van Druten’s The Widening Circle (1957) (195–205)
16. John Logan’s Peter and Alice (2013) (206–17)
Part VI: ‘All sons are Telemachus figures’: Voyages round the father
17. Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys: Granada to Salamanca (1999) (221–51)
18. Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things (1991), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010) (252–67)
19. Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017) (268–78)
Afterword (279–85)