'Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one', said Charles
Dickens, 'stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to,
in strongest conjuration.' The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning
homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish
philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as 'a teeming word... a
haunted word... a word to conjure with'. The most celebrated and
culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer's Odysseus who spent
ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back
involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures
and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm
of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his
memories of Ithaca ('His native home deep imag'd in his soul', as
Pope's translation has it). From Virgil's Aeneid to James Joyce's
Ulysses, from MGM's The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers' O
Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott's Omeros to
Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and
nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers
and filmmakers. At the same time, 'Ithaca' has proved to be an
evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about
possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision of Arcadia or a
haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, 'a sleep
and a forgetting'. In essence it is about seeking what is absent.
Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant
pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from
Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier and Remarque's All Quiet
on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the
time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney's
Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael
Portillo's Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca. This
kaleidoscopic exploration spans the end of the Great War, when the
world at large was experiencing the complexities of homecoming, to
the era of Brexit and COVID-19 which has put the notion of
nostalgia firmly under the microscope.
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