Return to Ithaca
by Eyvind Johnson
Summary
Eyvind Johnson retells the last stretch of Odysseus's nineteen year absence from Ithaca, and strips away nearly everything heroic about it. Odysseus has already spent ten years at Troy and seven more delayed by the nymph Calypso, and Johnson's version of him arrives at the story tired, wary and openly reluctant to fight again, a middle aged veteran who wants his farm back more than he wants glory. On Ithaca, Penelope holds off her suitors with the trick that has outlasted every retelling of this story: she claims she must finish weaving a burial cloth for her aging father in law before she can remarry, and each night secretly unpicks most of what she wove that day. Their son Telemachus sets out to learn whether his father is even alive. When the god Hermes finally orders Odysseus home, Johnson gives the divine command itself a faint, unmistakable air of propaganda, an order issued from above with no real interest in what it will cost the man who has to obey it.
Shipwrecked on the coast of King Alkinoos's land, Odysseus meets the princess Nausikaa, is taken in at court, and tells his hosts the whole story of his wanderings before finally sailing on to Ithaca. He lands in disguise, an old beggar rather than a returning king, and finds the swineherd Eumaios, who does not recognize him but tells him plainly what any returning master of the house would have to do: deal with the suitors crowding his wife and his hall, and kill them. Johnson follows him through that slaughter, but he writes it as the old story's demand rather than its climax, a tired man carrying out one more act of violence because it is expected of him before he can rest, and taking no joy in it.
Reading it means watching a two thousand year old story get reread through the exhaustion of a man who has already fought one war too many, and it rewards a reader who already knows the Odyssey well enough to notice everything Johnson has quietly taken out of it: the triumph, mainly, and the certainty that any of this was worth it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Eyvind Johnson the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature for a narrative art, farseeing in lands and ages, in the service of freedom, sharing the award that year with Harry Martinson. Return to Ithaca, published in Swedish in 1946 as Strändernas svall, is the novel most closely tied to that citation, and its account of a tired veteran forced back toward violence draws directly on Johnson's own experience writing through the Second World War: his allegorical trilogy Krilon, published between 1941 and 1943, had already criticized Nazi occupation and Swedish neutrality under cover of fiction.
The 1974 prize proved controversial for a reason that had nothing to do with either book. Johnson had served as a member of the Swedish Academy since 1957 and sat on its Nobel Committee for Literature until 1972; Martinson was also a sitting Academy member. The choice drew sustained criticism in the Swedish press for exactly that reason, the Academy rewarding two of its own. Johnson died in Stockholm in 1976, two years after the prize.