1.10
Odysseus and Kalypso – at Home

Peter Wilson

As Vladimir Nabakov once wrote, it is not the conclusion of the story but how we get there that interests us. In the case of Ulysses, the saga of his wanderings, a monumentally frustrated return from Troy to Ithaca, took 20 years. It is a journey that functions as a sort of twelfth-century BC ur-journey template for all subsequent journeying, dictated by the blind rhapsode, to ‘alphabet adaptors’ in the eighth-century BC. It marks a transition, a phase change from oral (bardic) to written narrative – ur-text as well as ur-journey. As topographical description of the unknown coasts and peninsulas of the western Mediterranean, The Odyssey can be read as a preliminary exploration, preceding the seventh-century Greek colonisation of southern Italy: Ulysses as Captain Cook in felt cap (Pilos, his tag).

Homer’s Odyssey also served as the navigational chart for James Joyce’s 24-hour journey across Dublin. Joyce’s 1922 text is Ulyssean through its corporeal signifier, Bloom, who opens up the world: he blooms, in a commodious unfolding of alternative words and worlds.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 classic Le mépris (Contempt), a colour-coded film noir, also unfolds around the Odyssey narrative. It was shot in the heroic setting of Curzio Malaparte’s Capri villa, as backdrop protagonist (Figure 1.10.1). Appropriately, the actual Siren Rocks, the Galli, are visible from the mythological stage of the villa’s deck-like roof. As the film unfolds, characters slip in and out of various Homeric guises: Brigitte Bardot turns from Kalypso into Penelope, from black wig to blond bombshell, as she traverses her marital quarters, asking ‘where is the man I married’. Ultimately, she also becomes a siren as she swims off, naked, in the direction of the Galli. The German cultural theorist Friedrich Kittler has suggested that, in our media age, that of Hollywood, sirens no longer sing: instead, they abandon their bikinis. Michel Picoli, Bardot’s scriptwriter husband is, like Ulysses, held captive by the nymph Kalypso’s spell, but, in a cathartic homecoming, he reverts to the role of author (Homer). Fritz Lang plays himself, the famous film director, role-jumping at one point into the persona of the Emperor Tiberius, questioning, from the cliffs of Capri, the abandoned Penelope’s fidelity. In the final scene, Godard himself appears on camera, calls for silence and, with Lang, assumes joint command of the set, of the deck of the Villa Malaparte and its wide horizon.

The media status of the Capri villa is both catalyst and locus of transition for symbolic transfers; Curzio Malaparte himself metamorphosed from his original name, Kurt Sickert, to his pseudonym and enlarged status as author of what he referred to as ‘A house like me’.

This was taken up as the title of Michael McDonough’s 1999 book, which builds on the Villa Malaparte myth with an anthology of echoes: ‘A house like me . . . and me . . . and me . . . and me’.1 The list of mimetic Malaparte egos, all professing a strong associative yearning for the Capri cliff-hugger, includes Bruce Chatwin, Karl Lagerfeld, Tom Wolfe, Philippe Starck, Robert Venturi, John Hejduk, Steven Holl, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Mario Botta, Ettore Sottsass and Arata Isozaki. The last offers us a transcultural interpretation of the name Malaparte, reading it as ‘bad part’, a counter-figure to a healthier Bonaparte and analogous to the Japanese mythological figure of Onamaru – Ogre Boy.

Figure 1.10.1 The Malaparte Villa, Capri, perched on its cliff above the Mediterranean, used as the setting for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Le mépris

Source: Photograph by Russell Light

Alberto Moravia, Capri resident and author of the original Le mépris storyline, said of Malaparte, ‘I never believed a word he said, even when he was telling the truth’. Ulysses, the guileful trickster, also scraped through with mimicry, cunning and storytelling. There is academic controversy about how much influence the architect Adalberto Libera really exerted on the design of the Malaparte villa: he obtained the building permit certainly, but, when General Rommel passed by on his way to the African Front and enquired if the house was built or bought, Malaparte answered, ‘the severe cliffs of the Matromania, the giant rocks of the Faraglioni, Penisola Sorentina, the blue Amalfi Beach, the shores of Paestum shining behind it, all these scenes are what I designed’.

The Ulysses role, of journeyman, suffering hero, adaptive trickster, may provide an analogous role model for today’s ‘star architect’ – journeying to the end of the world, to the underworld even, to Troy to construct a horse, to China to construct a new city, a stadium, a TV station. What did Ulysses construct along the way: a horse, a raft and a bed? From these three modest products we could assume that, like Daedalus or Hephaestus, he was adept in ‘techne’ – the act of making wondrous objects to overcome the disorder of the world, objects embodying ‘metis’, the inanimate becoming magically alive, not representing but reproducing life.

The Malaparte villa has no clear counterpart in the Odyssey narrative, except perhaps the deck of Ulysses’s ship, which he lost soon after negotiating the Siren Islands and surviviving the Maelstrom. The next 7 years he spent on the island of Ogygia (Gozo), captive under the spell of the immortal nymph Kalypso, Atlas’s daughter – a sex slave in today’s media jargon. We see them both depicted in Arnold Böcklin’s painting Odysseus und Kalypso of 1882 (Figure 1.10.2). Ulysses scans the horizon, suffering, homesick, wrapped in a dark cape, his back turned to the naked seductress, who sprawls daringly across a sensuous red cloth thrown over barren rocks. The same soulful figure we find again in De Chirico’s painting The Enigma of the Oracle of 1910, a symbolist homage (Figure 1.10.3), a silhouette migration to a high balcony overlooking a distant Aegean city. Perhaps this is also Ulysses, now back in Greece, where De Chirico spent his childhood. De Chirico is paying homage to his mentor Böcklin and to Nietzsche, who wrote, ‘we suffer to provide the poet with his material’ (‘wir leiden (um) der dichter Stoff zu liefern’). The critic Beatriz Colomina once wrote that the function of building architects is to provide objects (subjects) for the critic to dissect (an echo of Nietzsche). Feasting in the Hall of King Alkínoös, Ulysses sheds tears on hearing the blind rhapsode Demódokos sing of his Trojan feats (The Iliad). The Odyssey reports that:

Figure 1.10.2 Arnold Böcklin’s 1882 painting Odysseus und Kalypso, redrawn by Peter Wilson after the original in the Kunst Museum, Basel

Figure 1.10.3 Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Enigma of the Oracle, 1910, redrawn by Peter Wilson

Figure 1.10.4 Ulysses stranded on the rocky shore, drawn after Le mépris, by Peter Wilson

Böcklin presents a psycho-gram of strained relations. His setting of Odysseus and Kalypso is more like ‘a sea cave where nymphs had chairs of rock and sanded floors’ (Homer’s description of Thresias)3 than Kalypso’s actual domestic arrangements. These were somewhat more commodious than Böcklin’s version, as observed by Hermes arriving with Zeus’s command for the soft-braided nymph to release her captive: