Fictional archaeologies of text and homeric reception in Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Abstract

‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ‘Time present and time past/are both perhaps present in time future,/and time future contained in time past. […] Time past and time future/what might have been and what has been/point to one end, which is always present.’ T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’ ‘There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits … At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meaning, but … as the dialogue moves forward, they will return to memory and live in renewed form. […] Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth.’ Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Principle One of Homer’s epithets for Odysseus, polytropos (literally ‘of many turnings’), can be applied to Zachary Mason’s debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, an audacious compendium of forty-six (first edition, 2007) or forty-four (second edition, 2010) stories, which won its author the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was hailed by Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times as ‘an ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive’ (Kakutani 2010). To date, this is the latest entry of a novel into the equally ‘polytropic’ Nachleben of the Odyssey, which includes such disparate works as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? The stories of The Lost Books range in size between one and fifteen pages and offer ‘a fragmented, smoky, shimmering version of the Odyssey’ (Goldhill 2010). That the whole they comprise is a novel and not a miscellany, as the plural ‘Books’ of the title might suggest, is mostly to do with its disclosure of perspectives on various Homeric characters, especially Odysseus.1 The stories are first- and third-person narratives and form a kind of anti-Odyssey, an alternative version of the epic that explores its elisions and exploits its imaginative leaps. As Mason avers, his aim is ‘less to advance a plot than to take one image or theme and, paring away all that is inessential, present it with the greatest possible concision and clarity’ (2007: xiii). In some respects, this is an odd piece of fiction that flaunts its oddity: not only have two ‘Books’ vanished from the second edition — another ‘loss’ and a playful allusion to the title’s ‘Lost Books’ — but also the novel in both editions has a strikingly academic flair: the first edition contains a long mock-scholarly introduction, an appendix, and several footnotes, and the second edition features a one-page introduction, no appendix, and fewer footnotes. In both editions, Mason assumes the roles of author and reader, creator and commentator of his work.