When Are We Ever At Home? Reflections on the Journeys Home in Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
22-9-2017 11:00 AM
Description
Homer’s Odyssey is the story of a man who, having fought for ten years at Troy, struggles for another ten years to return home to Ithaca, enduring multiple hardships along the way. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village relates the tale of Mohammed, a Berber (properly an Amazigh) from postcolonial Morocco who spends forty years toiling in an auto-manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Paris before returning in retirement to his native village. Virgil’s Aeneid gives us Aeneas, a Trojan hero defeated by the Greeks, who leaves the embers of a destroyed Troy, with his father on his back and leading his son by the hand, and embarks on a prolonged search for a new homeland. Odysseus’s return home to Ithaca is bloody, triumphant, and temporary; Mohammed’s is filled with disappointment and dissolution which he must endure before he can go to his reward. Aeneas’s return isn’t a return in the usual sense, but a grounding in a new land, Latium, and a new language, Latin. He himself will die before this new “home” for his people is realized. Around these three stories, and others which I’ll mention more briefly, I hope to offer reflections on what one critic has called “the deep ambivalence of the journey home,” a journey taken by each of us in her or his own way along the arc from birth to death, at least if we are reflective human beings and consider our own paths with thoughtfulness.
Recommended Citation
Paine, John, "When Are We Ever At Home? Reflections on the Journeys Home in Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village" (2017). Humanities Symposium. 9.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2017/2017/9
When Are We Ever At Home? Reflections on the Journeys Home in Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Homer’s Odyssey is the story of a man who, having fought for ten years at Troy, struggles for another ten years to return home to Ithaca, enduring multiple hardships along the way. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village relates the tale of Mohammed, a Berber (properly an Amazigh) from postcolonial Morocco who spends forty years toiling in an auto-manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Paris before returning in retirement to his native village. Virgil’s Aeneid gives us Aeneas, a Trojan hero defeated by the Greeks, who leaves the embers of a destroyed Troy, with his father on his back and leading his son by the hand, and embarks on a prolonged search for a new homeland. Odysseus’s return home to Ithaca is bloody, triumphant, and temporary; Mohammed’s is filled with disappointment and dissolution which he must endure before he can go to his reward. Aeneas’s return isn’t a return in the usual sense, but a grounding in a new land, Latium, and a new language, Latin. He himself will die before this new “home” for his people is realized. Around these three stories, and others which I’ll mention more briefly, I hope to offer reflections on what one critic has called “the deep ambivalence of the journey home,” a journey taken by each of us in her or his own way along the arc from birth to death, at least if we are reflective human beings and consider our own paths with thoughtfulness.
Comments
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts and Sciences