Deleuze's crystal images in Homer's Odyssey

Abstract

By reading Homer’s Odyssey through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s theories on cinema (Cinema I and II), this dissertation offers a new appreciation for the complexity of the temporal poetics contained within the Odyssey. Adopting the Deleuzian principle of thinking with cinema (and not about cinema), the thesis conducts in-depth case-studies across three separate books – Odyssey 8, 11 and 19 – and places them alongside the cinema of Alain Resnais, Theo Angelopoulos and Francis Ford Coppola. Chapter 1 introduces us to Deleuze’s “crystal image” and utilises its “two faces” to explore, with the assistance of Resnais’ 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, the epistemological complexities associated with representing the past as portrayed in Demodokos’ performances before the Phaiakians in Odyssey Book 8. Chapter 2 further applies the notion of the “crystal image”, this time using Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, to explore the co-existence of the present and the past associated with poetic expressions of trauma, as detected in the meeting between Penelope and Odysseus in Book 19, the centre of which embodies trauma itself with the revelation and provenance of Odysseus’ scar. Finally, Chapter 3 extends the investigation of a temporal poetics to the world of the dead visited by Odysseus in Book 11, and uses both Angelopoulos’ 1995 film Ulysses Gaze and Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now to help think through the poetic complexities associated with representing the dead to the living. It is the aim of this thesis to convince the reader of the value of this approach, and one that, if adopted more broadly, could be applied meaningfully to the rest of the Odyssey, to Homer’s Iliad as well, and to the field of classics as a whole.