El episodio homérico de Calipso y su tradición literaria

Abstract

The present thesis offers a systematic study of the literary tradition of the Homeric Calypso episode from Greco-Roman Antiquity to contemporary times. We examine the account of the Calypso adventure in the Odyssey and its treatment in numerous revisitations of its reception, in order to establish which variations the theme underwent throughout Western literature in its adaptation in different historic and cultural contexts, to diverse genres and by various authors. The methodology used is eclectic: it merges the philological method, based on a meticulous analysis of the texts, supported also by the concepts of structuralist narratology, with the procedures of comparative literature, referring mainly to the works by G. Genette. This study is arranged in a diachronic manner, divided according to the great periods of the history of literature, as means to show the changes the reworking of the episode went through throughout its literary evolution. In addition, the most extensive treatments have been analysed around the same four aspects, which facilitates their comparison: position and significance of the episode, structure and compositional elements, themes and motifs, and portrayal of characters. Therefore, after a thorough analysis of the episode in the Odyssey, we examine its reception in Greco-Roman literature up until the VI century AD. In this era, the view of Calypso as a victim of amorous abandonment predominated, from the echoes of the adventure in the configuration of the episodes of Hypsipyle in the Argonautica by Apollonius and, specially, of Dido in the Aeneid by Vergil. The alignment with Dido contributed to the later perception of the Homeric nymph as a deserted woman. The abandonment of Calypso is also the focus of the renditions in Roman love elegy by Propertius and Ovid, and in A True Story by Lucian. During the medieval period, being heir to the anti-Homeric tradition, Calypso was blended with Circe in a moralistic interpretation of the erotic experience as a temptation of the flesh to the hero’s virtue; thus in Benoît de Sainte-Maure or Guido delle Colonne. For its part, Renaissance meant a resumption of the Greco-Roman understanding of the episode, that influenced the new Renaissance epics as a formal model, and, above all, the main revisitation of this age, Les paroles que dist Calypson by Ronsard, which owns as much to the Homeric nymph as to Dido and the Roman idea of Calypso as puella relicta. Both erotic views of the episode, the scorned woman and the treacherous seductress, are combined in the great rendition of modern times, the Télémaque by Fénelon. The contemporary era addressed the episode from another perspective, as means to a reflection upon the sense of human existence, regarding the meaning of the offering of immortality as denial of a fulfilling life—thus in A perfeição by Eça de Queiroz, the Odyssey by Kazantzakis, L’isola by Pavese and the Lettera de Calipso by Tabucchi—, and around the continuation of Odysseus’s adventures, like Gebhart or Pascoli. The contemporary period also provided more totalizing reworkings of the episode, as the Ulysses by Joyce or Cold Mountain by Frazier. Consequently, the duality of the Calypso character in the Homeric epic, as lover and obstacle to Odysseus’s return, was reworked in her literary tradition in a polarised way, as a woman who suffers the abandonment of her love or as an evil seductress who draws the hero to his moral corruption, never again achieving the reintegration of her complex nature in the Odyssey. Accordingly, Odysseus is alternatively shown as a freed prisoner, as an unfaithful lover, or as a victor over temptation.