Introduction

Abstract

This book is an experiment in improvisatory criticism, and the introduction lays out a new interpretive rationale for reading Homer’s Odyssey together with a series of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels that share that poem’s interest in travel and return. Philosophers and musicians alike highlight the productive nature of improvisation—we gain new understanding of ourselves through improvised encounters with others in an inherently experimental and even deceptive process of self-enactment. Odysseus is famous for his metis, exactly the kind of experimental or practical reasoning upon which improvisation depends, and close readings of his encounters abroad with the Cyclops and at home with Eumaeus, Telemachus, Penelope, and Laertes show that Odysseus’ lies and acts of deception do not temporarily disguise his true identity but rather enable him to construct himself and his world in new ways. Read in this improvisatory context, the Odyssey is shown to focus on the creative instability of what it means to be Odysseus and these insights about the creative potential of the improvisatory encounter extend to my goals for the book overall. By putting the Odyssey in contact with other texts, we as readers are participating in a kind of improvisatory interpretive experiment—each text emerges from these literary encounters in a new light, and spaces are opened up for new readings. Rather than remain a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it unchanged, the Odyssey, together with the texts with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.