Return to Ithaca (novel)

Contemporary

The book was published in the late autumn of 1946. It was greeted with some hostility by homerologists, who objected to the amount of modern naturalistic scene description, and the anti-heroic presentation.^[5] On the other hand, it was warmly received by Sweden's leading critics. Sten Selander in Svenska Dagbladet wrote that "Nowhere has Eyvind Johnson's storytelling gift been given freer rein than here; and never before has he given more convincing proof that he is the only genius among the prose writers of his generation."^[6] Anders Österling in Stockholms-Tidningen spoke of "a significant work, without any question one of the boldest approaches in our new art of storytelling".^[6] Karl Vennberg in Aftontidningen [sv] found that the author had set out and almost succeeded in a paradoxical task: "The elevated must remain elevated but still be lowered to an everyday plane; the supernatural must be connected to a chain of cause and effect without ceasing to be impenetrable and marvellous; the timeless must be coloured by the present without losing its character of timelessness."^[6] Vennberg also praised the style, the joy of storytelling, the portrayal of people and above all the moral exploration.^[6]

Outside Sweden, Philip Burnham in The New York Times wrote that "If Homer makes the Trojan Expedition the greatest and most heroic war of history, Eyvind Johnson makes the decade following, when Odysseus was wandering home, an almost proportionate post-war depression."^[7]

Retrospective

In 1981, Merete Mazzarella's book Myt och verklighet. Berättandets problem i Eyvind Johnsons roman 'Strändernas svall' examined in detail Johnson's treatment of the homeric myth of Odysseus. She explores Johnson's recurring theme of escape and return home, seeking to demonstrate how the fictional narrator has to escape from subjective experience using myth, so as to share his vision with his readers. What is lived is never the same as what is evoked; Mazzarella describes this as a tension between the described reality and the escaped. To make the case for this "dynamic tension", she analyses the importance of the Odysseus myth to Johnson's writing; Johnson's own statements about myth and reality in his writing; and twentieth century views of myth by writers such as the folklorist James George Frazer, the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the novelist Thomas Mann, all of whom influenced Johnson. Johnson's Odysseus is presented as Frazer's mythical archetype of the fated hero, but also a self-consciously Freudian figure full of memories, dreams, and reflections. In Monica Setterwall's view, the core of Mazzarella's thesis is the way the narrators - both the explicit narrator, and Odysseus himself as he tells his tale to the Phaeacians - help to unpick the issue of violence, ending with Odysseus's killing of Penelope's suitors. Odysseus makes his experiences into a myth, while the narrator breaks up the myth, necessarily making Odysseus an anti-hero, to discover the ancient reality that applies in modern times. Among the ironies and the illusions of heroism are that Odysseus went to war to protect Ithaca, but that he comes home bringing violence to re-establish peace and order. Mazzarella links this to Johnson's post-Second World War Sweden, and suggests a humanistic resolution as Telemachos reacts to Nestor's cup, a symbol of both grief and longing.^[8][5]

More recently, Elisabeth Nordgren, writing in Lysmasken, describes the book as setting the Odysseus figure into modern time, its subtitle "A novel about present time" emphasising its contemporary focus. She states that Johnson takes off Odysseus's heroic halo and lets him be a reflective person who feels divided and unsure. Published just after the Second World War, Johnson has made Odysseus a tired warrior who just wants to go home and live in peace. Nordgren writes that the novel describes Odysseus's dizzying, wandering, adventurous homeward journey, meeting nymphs and monsters, and his wife Penelope's long wait on Ithaca. She calls the novel's structure interesting, with its simultaneous and parallel events in somewhat mythic style, a "metafiction" and a narrative in Johnson's own time. As such it is a rewarding book, and an excellent way in, in Nordgren's opinion, to Johnson's novels.^[9]

Cyrille François, in Revue de Littérature Comparée, examines Johnson's treatment of Odysseus's deceitfulness, comparing it with Jean Giono's 1930 Naissance de l'Odyssée [fr] on the same subject;^[10] Giono and his copy of the Odyssey had survived the horrors of the First World War trenches.^[11] François writes that both Johnson and Giono were self-taught but not quite part of their countries' proletarian movements; and both enter into a dialogue with Homer's text, and an intertextual dialogue with earlier criticisms of Homer. Giono's retelling is in his view a "deheroization" of the tale, making Odysseus a liar. In contrast, the Odyssey was not a key text in Swedish literature before Johnson; instead, Johnson read in other languages, including James Joyce's Ulysses. Johnson's Odysseus, François writes, is not a liar but a disenchanted hero who sees that the Trojan War was pointless. Where Giono's Odysseus speaks easily, with no effort to create a story, Johnson's protagonist feels forced to speak, and has to try to make the tale credible and interesting to his listeners (first Calypso, who almost psychoanalyses him, then the Phaeacians), without making it too painful for himself. Both Giono and Johnson question the Odyssey: Giono to rebut Homer and show how an ordinary man can creatively weave a myth of his own heroism; Johnson to show an introspective Odysseus disguising and embellishing the truth, caught between remembering and forgetting.^[10]

The classicist Scott D. Richardson calls the book an "excellent novel", writing that "Johnson's fascinating alterations and embellishments actually draw out features in Homer’s portrayal that can shed rich insight into the characters and plotlines of the epic."^[12] In his view, the book offers "a fresh and penetrating exploration of the principal characters compatible with both the ancient epic and the post-WWII world."^[12] He notes that other authors have usually covered just one part of Odysseus's life, sometimes outside the Odyssey. Like Margaret Atwood, in her Penelopiad (which takes Penelope's viewpoint from Ithaca), Johnson covers "the same ground as Homer". But unlike Atwood, Johnson stays true, in Richardson's view, to the original characters and tone, illuminating rather than overriding Homer. He comments that Johnson is gloomier than Homer, working from hints in the original that some readers might ignore, and matching the 20th century situation.^[12]