Word: telemachus
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Where's the famous child? the helicopters want to know. Where's John-John, who became, in time, the Kennedys' hunk Telemachus, next in the family's line of dreamboats and (in the tabloid version) satyrs and--can it be?--latest to fall before some mystery of bad karma on a dynastic scale...
Joyce later relented, and so the world learned that Ulysses was, among many other things, a modern retelling of Homer's Odyssey, with Bloom as the wandering hero, Stephen as Telemachus and Molly as a Penelope decidedly less faithful than the original. T.S. Eliot, who recognized the novel's underpinnings, wrote that Joyce's use of classical myth as a method of ordering modern experience had "the importance of a scientific discovery...
...ultimate destruction of Troy--the subject matter of the Iliad--have long since returned to their homes except Odysseus, the King of Ithaca. There, 10 years after the fall of Troy, his faithful wife Penelope fends off a riotous band of suitors for her hand in marriage; his son Telemachus, an infant when his father went off to war, cannot repel the suitors or claim the throne without sure knowledge that Odysseus will never return. Where in the world...
...resists modern notions of suspense. The question is not what will happen next but how thoroughly the bard recounts the particulars of every scene. Fagles' translation captures this peculiar quality perfectly. Late in the story Odysseus is back in Ithaca; he has revealed his identity to Telemachus and two loyal servants and challenged the hundred or so of Penelope's suitors to a fight to the death. All hell is about to break loose, and yet Homer pauses to follow one of the suitors' accomplices in search of weapons in Odysseus' storeroom. Melanthius emerges "one hand clutching a crested helmet...
...result of all this is that private collectors are driving museums out of the market. Even in the midst of the lunacy, some deals seem more rational than others: the Getty Museum, for instance, got a relative bargain when it bought its great David, The Farewell of Telemachus to Eucharis, for some $4 million earlier this year. But no museum in the world can compete with the private sector for paintings like Sunflowers...