The ritual of bedtime stories, whisper by whisper, year after year, has transformed your child. Also to you. Since the stories began at the edge of the bed, the nights are another story. You have become a gleaner of tongue twisters, rhymes, jokes, lullabies, riddles, stories of fear and mystery, love and horror, stories guided by the whims of fate or fairies. Two magic words open the windows of the imagination and air the room where ideas are born: what if… Fictions are born there, taking a divergent path from stubborn reality. And if. And if the wonderful thing happened every day. And if common questions needed strange answers. And if some of our certainties were just inherited conventions.
At the end of the 19th century, the writer and philologist Samuel Butler launched an unprecedented hypothesis: what if the author of the Odyssey would it have been a young woman? It was not the idea of a feminist intellectual, but of a Victorian iconoclast, joker, Voltairean and enjoyer—of art, of landscape, of textual desire—who published a book in 1897 defending that scandalous thesis. The first suspicion assailed him when translating the episode of Circe, the sorceress. Although she lives alone in an isolated house in the woods, Circe does not have the features of the immemorial witch of the forest. She is a fascinating and strong figure, the hero’s lover for a year. When Odysseus decides to leave, she lets him go, without spite: “Do not remain in my palace against your will.” What’s more, she helps him with her advice and revelations, saving his life. As her ship sets sail, she sends it a favorable wind that fills her sails. Thus a feminine archetype was born that united wisdom, eroticism, power and independence in an unusual way.
A great abyss separates the gaze from the Iliad and of the Odyssey. In the first, anger, the appetite for honor, and battle reign. The second is a story of travel, desire, longing for home and hospitality towards foreigners. Not all the characters are warriors, beggars, swineherds and nurses also appear in their verses. With these and other indications, Samuel Butler concluded that there is not only one Homer, but that his epics have different authorship. In his opinion, the creator of the Odyssey It had to be a woman: a Sicilian girl who portrayed herself in the character of Nausicaa, the hero’s savior when he is shipwrecked on his island naked. The very idea of putting Odysseus in such a predicament seems to him like an adolescent prank. “The poem is such a tour de force that no one but a single, stubborn, young and enthusiastic girl, used to getting her way, would have attempted it and completed it so brilliantly.” This hypothesis inspired Robert Graves to write a novel, titled Homer’s daughterand Miyazaki the manga and the subsequent film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Homer remains a ghost today, a name without biography in the fog of the past. However, we do know who invented the literary self by signing, for the first time, a text with his own name. More than 4,000 years ago, in modern-day Iraq, Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon, poet and priestess, wrote a set of hymns that she proudly signed on clay tablets. She stated: “What I have done, no one has done before.” Her poetry bequeathed us a beautiful metaphor of creation as an erotic and, at the same time, maternal experience, but her name still remains silent. In this “what if” yet to be told, two great pioneers would have illuminated the birth of written literature with their voices.
We will never know if a stubborn, single young woman plotted the Odyssey, nor if Butler himself really believed it. It is said that not even his friends knew how to distinguish when he was joking or being serious. Your book The author of the ‘Odyssey’ It was audacity and a challenge. Perhaps she simply intended to irritate the academics, as Joyce would also do in his Ulises. Even so, anticipating Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase—anonymous is a woman—she demonstrated that the classics contain revolutionary readings for all times. And, incidentally, playfully, she proved that laughter has reasons that reason ignores.
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